You know the old expression "it's so bad it's good"? Well, that's not applicable to this pile of crap disguised as a movie.
The acting is awful, the characters are stupid, the costumes are ridiculous, the story sucks, and the effects are horrible. Other than that it was pretty good.
More often than not, I like B-Movies. But this is seriously worthless. I fell asleep trying to watch this. Everything about it was cheap, dumb, and gross. Yes, I know that's usually the point with Roger Corman's movies, but that doesn't automatically make them hip or endearing.
Just when you thought you'd seen it all, Zsa Zsa Gabor as a Batman villainess. This episode was pretty awful. And considering it was the series finale it cut me deep to see it end this way.
This is the episode I rated the lowest throughout the series. I cringed at the incredibly sexist portrayal of the "unusual" notion of "policewomen." Granted, the episodes in this 3rd & final season are notably substandard as the small budget really shows. But this episode was silly for some really wrong reasons.
Great Episode. Batman and Joker surfing. Getting to see Batgirl in a swimsuit. Nice. Two way hot dog radios. Bat copter. Also of note is Batman and Robin both use the word Cowabunga many years before the ninja turtles.
The last 2 episodes of season 6 are duplicated as specials, which is where they were put as part of the pandemic-related shows.
D&D have done it again! (created a disappointment)
While the Tencent adaptation had some flaws, notably very poor pacing and some downright bizarre acting and editing, I think it was an overall better experience. Netflix cut the runtime significantly, which could have been an improvement, but they did it to the point of skipping several important developments in the story. Yet, they found ways to waste precious minutes on scenes that dragged on longer than they should have, some of which didn't add anything to the story. It's only because I watched the Tencent adaptation that I was able to appreciate some of the ideas in the Netflix adaptation, since I knew what they were covering in spite of the skipped story beats. If I hadn't, I'd either feel like I was just watching a series of spoilers, or be confused about the point of it all.
Many positive reviews are downplaying negative ones for being pedantic and expecting a direct adaptation from the books, but this is feels reductionist and disingenuous. I think it's fine to diverge from the source material, but it should be done thoughtfully. In my opinion, the Netflix adaptation fails on its own merits. Some of the changes seem to be done in the interest of simplification, but this introduces plot holes, some of which must have been done against the recommendation of scientific advisors on staff. For example, I don't think the sophon was capable of unfolding itself (Trisolaris spent an unfathomable amount of time and energy building them), yet in this adaptation the sophon does it on a whim just to create a menacing eye in the sky? Why not just starve the planet of sunlight then and finish the story right there? Originally, the eye was observed during a failed Trisolaran unfolding attempt, alluding to a sentient threat gaining access to our universe from another dimension.
Tencent gave the viewer many episodes to theory-craft why "physics doesn't exist", what the motive could be for targeting scientists, who or what could be behind it, the purpose behind the game and so forth. The characters slowly whittled down the possibilities and eventually unveiled the truth. The show drip fed information to the viewer through the eyes of the characters which often became relevant much later, such as the flying blade. It went into philosophical thought experiments that conveyed the existential dread of the situation, like the turkey scientist and the farmer. It also covered several interesting physics concepts in a way that was easy to process and yet showed respect to the viewer.
Netflix? Nah, it's aliens bro, it's right there in the trailer on YouTube. There's no respect for the viewer, so there's no attempt made to even cover concepts like cosmic background radiation. It did cover a few at least, like FTL communication with entangled sophon pairs, the staircase project, etc. Netflix did also foreshadow some concepts that do come later in the books, sometimes with just novel covers shown on screen, some in dialogue, such as the Fermi Paradox and the Wallfacer project.
I believe the Oxford Five were created to be more relatable to the viewer than Wang Miao, but I think this again shows little respect for the viewer. They achieved this in part in the laziest way possible, such as having many of them just curse in every scene. I don't think it's necessary to relate to every character, and it can certainly be done in ways beyond superficial means like gender and race like what was attempted here. The story is about the science of it all, the universe, and this extends beyond the lifespan of a single person who likes to go drinking at a bar with friends. Most of us aren't top-tier scientists, we're not going to think like Oppenheimer or Feynman, this is fine. I found my immersion broken at several points when I saw the protagonists succumbing to irrational ways of thinking. To be a successful academic at such a high level would likely entail some core beliefs about the world and ways of thinking that wouldn't come off as people reading emotional lines off a script.
Is this D&D adaptation as bad as GoT S8? Definitely not. It's several points better, but the bar is pretty low. There were some redeeming moments, a few funny lines in almost every episode, I particularly liked some parts of the last one.
I do think it can still be worth a watch. However, I highly recommend starting with the Tencent adaptation, or reading the books first. Those are more of a journey, whereas this comes off more as a poorly written fan wiki with spoilers. I think this version can really rob you of the awe inspiring ideas in the source material and Chinese adaptation. My hope is that some people will find this version interesting enough to delve into the source material.
I feel terrible not liking this, but...I didn't really like this. The mystery didn't really gel for me: it had all the hallmarks of a Phryne case (helping someone vulnerable, tangled relationships, danger, great wardrobe) but it didn't feel like a Miss Fisher Murder Mystery. There did seem to be a bit of James Bond. The film opens with a chase rather than a murder, unlike the usual formula, which already put it a little off-kilter. They were clearly aiming for bigger, more exotic, more cinematic, and instead got a bit of a boring mess that for some reason had Phyrne switching between London and the Middle East and oh, have a random fencing scene that lasted probably less time than it took to get her in that outfit. Hugh and Dot, Burt and Cec were mere cameos on par with Aunt Prudence --- and worse, when did Dot get to find out Phryne wasn't dead? The first bit with the faked(?) death.... Phryne is bold and reckless but she isn't cruel, but unfortunately that's just what that plot made her out to be. Or at least, incredibly callous, which is still out of character.
What about her romance with Jack, which left off with a dramatic kiss before Phryne flew off to England, her calling to Jack to come after her? All wasted. Months have passed. She's not in Australia. Jack has had his heart broken. Phryne is, again, strangely cavalier. Most of movie starts them right back at the beginning with Jack being prickly, Phryne being flirty, and what sexual tension managed to carry forward was for me wrecked, again, by the stupid subplot at the start of the movie. Why? Why?! And she got married to some random we never meet to help him out, but again, why? Why even go there, except for some stupid regressive angst? I wanted Power Couple-Phrack. Instead I just felt really sad for Jack, and quite frankly was thinking good riddance to Phryne; if he were my friend, I'd have advised him to forget her.
Am I the only one who thought Halle Bailey was great but the movie was bad?
Halle Bailey's magnetic presence is about the only thing this movie has going for it. When she's singing, it's amazing! Aside from her, though, it's pretty bad.
Other thoughts:
> Why is so much of this movie so dark?
> A lot of the CGI looks pretty bad.
> The "Scuttlebutt" song was SO bad.
> I still don't care about Eric.
> And they cut out my favorite scene, where Sebastian is chased by the chef!
I'd recommend rewatching the original instead.
Matthew is a walking red flag. Being a small town boy doesn't excuse you for being an asshole, e.g. leaving the room without a word while the other is talking. He has a list of expectations, but he is not only not prepared to meet the expectations of others, he is not even prepared to answer his own questions himself.
I was warming up to him a bit during the AD session, but then when it was revealed that he said the same exact, quite important thing to another, he became very MEH again. I hope nobody will choose him. Sergio in Love is Blind Sweden could get away with the same behaviour and that was painful to watch, let's not do that again ladies please
Disney’s final black and white cartoon, featuring Mickey, Pluto, and kangaroos. There’s lots of hopping, bopping and punching shenanigans, especially once a baby kangaroo is introduced. It’s not anything special, but it's got one major flaw: Pluto’s thoughts are narrated. It is severely unpleasant. Pluto gets his face close to the screen and makes nasty expressions and the person doing the voice acting makes Pluto sound gruff and mean. It’s awful.
Awww, Norm actually loves Vera. So sweet.
A truly cheesy and predictable Hallmark movie, but with lesbians instead. I LOVE IT!
This is a decent holiday episode even if I prefer the "Santa Claus" episode or the RiffTrax screening of this movie. What makes this episode distinct is the original Xmas song involving the departed Patrick Swayze.
::THUMBS DOWN:: They don't actually sail even once in this movie.
It doesn't make sense near the beginning when the CSI were checking the crime scene (the first time) and said that it could be airborne and need the suits, then shortly after they go to the hospital and walk into the enclosed sealed area without any protection whatsoever before knowing what made them all sick and of course killed a few. Oops! Good thing for the CSI that it was an EMP that did it. Lol
I remember the Pterodactyl Ghost, but not anything else from the episode, not the bootlegging/piracy plot, or the character sounding like Sydney Greenstreet, or the hangliding.
Blue Falcon's Catwoman? Love that she's so old school supervillainous, with a Mae West impression, to boot. And I'd love to go to a supper club where the singer was covering the Jabberjaw theme song.
After the comedic Black Cat-segment in Tales Of Terror, this was kind of inevitable, right? Roger Corman goes full (fantasy-)comedy on this one. This is surely the most campy of his E. A. Poe flicks so far, but it works really well as everybody is in on the joke in this almost self-satire flick. Great interplay between this all-star triangle of Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and the obligatory Vincent Price. We also get to witness a young Jack Nicholson whose performance doesn’t hurt the movie overall, but who also doesn’t pull off anything too impressive here and could’ve easily been replaced by pretty much anybody.
Why are all the episodes with Grady and Donna so extremely weird?
Classic Murder She Wrote - [spoiler]the dramatic zoom-in on the psychic as the victim’s car drove off a cliff[\spoiler] is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever watched
It's fun to see extended family members, especially relations of Shaggy, who all look like him, of course. If they have rich relatives like this, it does make sense that we hardly ever see the gang with jobs. I wonder if they're collecting a lot of reward money.
The ghost design is so familiar, definitely one of the iconic monsters in Scooby-Doo. I think we get the closest to the full, exact phrase here, but it's "We would've gotten away with it, if not for you meddling kids" rather than the singular "I". I definitely didn't remember the end with the wetsuit.
[5.0/10] I scored this as a five out of ten, but the real answer here is that Plan 9 from Outer Space is unratable. It’s like trying to judge a bowl of tomato soup as a contestant in the Westminster Dog Show. The movie is so far out of form that using the same tools and standards we normally use to rank and rate things is all but meaningless.
The movie’s flaws have been well-documented. The acting is variable at best. The plot is a nonsensical hodgepodge. The writing is stilted and silly. The special effects are laughable. And the efforts to cover-up or compensate for all of these shortcomings are woefully inadequate. But no one signs up for Plan 9 these days expecting Kubrickian perfection. The movie effectively delivers what it promises to modern day viewers.
Here’s the dirty little secret though. Much of Plan 9 is undeniably bad, but much of it is also just downright boring. There’s humor in elliptical conversations that go nowhere and communicate nothing. But by the time Random Alien #3 is repeating the same point he made ten minutes ago in slightly different terms, it can be downright exhausting. There’s a strange art to bad movies. Being questionable in quality but rife with entertainment is a rare and special thing. In plenty of stretches, Plan 9 achieves that somewhat ignominious but still noteworthy standard, but in many others, it’s simply the dull kind of “not very good.”
More to the point, many of the things that mark it as a famous terrible film are hard to grok in the same way sixty years later. I like older movies. Plenty of them are as fascinating or profound as anything deliberately crafted to speak to us today. But they also require a certain allowance from the modern viewer for things like pacing, the style of acting, and the quality of the special effects that may differ substantially from what we’re used to.
Some of Plan 9’s performances or dialogue or chintzy effects are self-evidently crummy in any era. But honestly, a lot of it falls within acceptable tolerances for stories and presentations from so long ago. I’m a big fan of Star Trek, and plenty of the cheesier elements in the 1960s series -- whether in terms of acting or storytelling or visuals -- aren’t that far removed from what Plan 9 does here, and The Original Series remains a classic. Speaking only for myself, I’ve seen enough of the cinema from this era to be able to accept the stylistic differences without complaint, but not enough to be able to expertly discern embarrassing stumbles from conventions of the time.
All that said, wide swaths of Plan 9 are close to incoherent. The wants of any given character at any given time are opaque at best. There’s barely any sort of protagonist or central story to latch onto. There’s little in the way of build or progression. Scenes simply crash into one another, held together by the epoxy of voiceover narration that randomly goes away halfway through the movie. True to the film’s monster movie roots, this cinematic outing plays like it was stitched together from other random spare parts and jolted with just enough juice to be technically ambulatory.
And yet, there are themes here, bluntly delivered and didactic though they may be. Buried within all that flotsam is a legitimate point about man’s trajectory in the nuclear age. The movie is riddled with a certain fear, a common one in science fiction of the time, that our technology was outstripping our maturity as a species. The concept of using sunlight as an explosive sounds silly to the modern ear, but it’s not a far stretch from artists who watched scientists turn unseen atoms into weapons of mass destruction. The alien’s overextended, repetitive speech isn’t necessarily the grandest delivery mechanism for this idea. But it’s striking, to say the least, to see this germ of insight and maybe even profundity in a film that fails at so much else.
The problem is that Plan 9 isn’t really about that, outside of that scene. The best you can say is that it posits man as full of hubris and violence, that we are too impulsive and barbarous to become citizens of the universe. The efforts to cover-up the existence of aliens, the militaristic response to their visits, all suggest a version of humanity unready and even dangerous for the responsibilities falling into our laps as advanced technology propels us to the stars and to self-destructive capabilities.
But good lord, why does that mean the aliens need to revive corpses, or control them with ray guns, or give pontificating speeches about all of this? And why does it mean the same three zombies wander around...very slowly menacing people who should be able to get away at a light jog? And why would their extraterrestrial masters have them disintegrate down to their skeletons via the “decomposition ray” for no apparent reason? And why does one of the aliens repeat her compatriot’s name, Eros, fifty times like it’s going to revive him a la clapping for Tinker Bell? Trying to reconstruct this movie’s plot is like trying to build a bookshelf out of jello.
There is, however, one other element of note, which stumbles into potential thematic resonance, albeit accidentally. Paula, the wife of the pilot who first sees the UFO, is one of the only competent and half-intelligent people in the movie. The cops scratch and point with their revolvers. Others just sort of saunter into danger without thought, or act in baffling ways. But Paula seems to readily assess the situation and offer good advice that no one listens to.
It’s notable because there’s an odd, if era-appropriate streak of misogyny here. Characters talk about women being hysterical, and even the quasi-enlightened alien overlords utter jaw-dropping lines about what a woman’s place is. For someone who would sometimes dress as a woman, Ed Wood certainly doesn’t have the most progressive view of them.
The truth, though, is this sexist streak is a minor part of the film. But the same goes for pretty much everything. The struggles behind the scenes of the film’s production are legendary, and the fractured results bear them out. The grab bag of characters and story fragments and ideas bear little relation to one another. Some of them are funny. Some of them are boring, Some of them are even a touch profound.
But Plan 9 from Outer Space is a patchwork quilt made by amateurs by the side of the road, rather than a movie. It doesn’t make sense to judge it as a movie. Instead, the only proper response is to do what others have done: spelunk through the wreckage to find the humanity within and behind it, to understand the love of cinema and its leading lights that spurred it, and to marvel at why and how it was made at all. Therein lies all the intrigue and the glory of this messy little miracle. The film itself, for all its ridiculousness and infamy, is merely the bait.
[7.3/10] I forget how gross Bob’s Burgers could be in its early days. It’s not like the show totally shed that in its later years. There’s an entire episode about Louise pooping down the line. But between the coughs and pukes at the hospital, to all the blood spurting on people, you remember that the series started with more of an Adult Swim sensibility than it would eventually develop. Not a complaint necessarily -- just an observation.
I enjoyed the plot where Linda ferries Bob to the hospital to get the cut in his “finger crotch” stitched up. Bob fainting at the mildest sight of blood is still a good running bit. (We still say “Wobbly Bobbly” in the Bloom household.) And I got a big kick out of Bob’s understandable reluctance to go with the incompetent first-time doctor, Linda’s blithe encouragement of the young lad, and the poor Belcher patriarch waking up with both his arms shaved and a giant wrap around his whole hand.
The B-story of the kids operating an underground casino (that, as noted by Mr. Fischoeder, is literally underground) is a lot of fun too. Tina has the least to do, but her ineffectual attempts to babysit and really committing to the role of waitress are both low-key comic highlights. Gene gradually recreating a fractured version of Dreamgirls with the “Cutie Patooties” is another good series of laughs. (For whatever reason, we’ve also adopted his “Girls Being Girls” song as an amusing reference and refrain for pop music that is, shall we say, slight.)
Louise is the anchor though. Her stepping into the role of wheeling-and-dealing but also menacing casino boss is a ton of fun. (Her threats to Andy and Ollie are scary but hilarious -- scarilarious?) Her meeting her match when Mr. Fischoeder comes to play leads to more lunacy, and I particularly like the way the two plots come together, with Bob breaking his stitches to beat the seemingly unstoppable Fischoeder at rock-paper-scissors.
All-in-all, this one is definitely grosser and shaggier than the show would become once it honed its voice and style a little bit, but there’s still a lot to like in these earlier, rougher outings.
A very good thriller and surprisingly ahead of its time! Dr. Henryk Savaard, a scientist who he believe capable of bringing the dead back to life. His medical student volunteers as a subject to his life-threatening experiment, give his consent to be poisoned to death so he can be revived shortly after. Unfortunately he ends up being arrested and sentenced to hang before he can restore his student' life. So he come up with evil revenge plan before his hanging. Silly sci-fi story but Karloff showed his range and nailed his character incredibly well. The second third is too talky than the rest but never boring. Too bad the film ends with sudden conclusion.
Why is this season here? Its the 3rd season of the scooby doo show not this....
This episode unfortunately felt like it was the last to be produced and they had run out of money. The script had a lot of the characters stating the obvious or saying aloud what we were seeing on the screen. There just didn't seem to be the creativity seen in earlier episodes.
Monster of the episode - Wax Phantom
Mystery Motivation - throw blame on Grisby for embezzlement scheme
Initial Location - television station
Scary Location - Grisby’s house, wax museum
Side Locations -
Clues found - airline ticket, bag of money
Scooby Snacks consumed - handfuls for both SS
Shag and Scoob disguises - scoob as Bonaparte, Shag as Josephine
Weird Food - bubble-ghost stew
Number of chase scenes - 2 (one musical)
Catchphrases used - Zoinks * 4, Scooby-Dooby-Doo * , Scooby-Doo Where Are You? * 1, Scooby-Doo * 1
Shtick performed - daphne falls out the vent
Notable characters - Johnny Sands, Mr. Stevens, Mr. Grisby, Sheriff
Red Herrings - Grisby
Gang splits up - FD go to wax museum, VSS question Grisby, FDV search wax museum, SS eat wax food
Traps set - trap phantom in his own wax
Notable occurrences - scooter stored in back of mm
