The Requisite 2nd Anniversary Column
Another year
already. Hm. This one felt more like a year. Frankly, I'm quite
surprised I'm still around; back at the beginning, I swore I'd do
this until it wasn't fun anymore. Sometimes it hasn't been
any fun, but for some reason, I've kept going, like some curmudgeonly
Energizer Bunny, beating loudly on my drum so everybody will look
at me. Taking a two-month vacation while I dredged up the cash for
a new computer when my old one Forbined on me probably helped, a little.
Actually,
it has been more fun than not. In two years, I've only gotten
two letters from what could broadly be called "The Jerks".
The first was early in my career, a letter which stated, "You
suckb a**hole". That one has always puzzled me - although
the comma key is located under the k key, it's still fairly
far away from the b key. This was a case of quite determined
stupidity. The other arrived a few months ago, an enigmatic one-word
message: "arse".
For a record-breaking
three weeks, I was the call-in critic for a Webcast TV show on Cyberradio.
Well, it was winkingly referred to as 'call-in', as I had taped them
earlier. My nocturnal work schedule precluded my rising early to do
the calls live (work hard, play hard, sleep hard). After three reviews,
they decided they need someone live for their VJ to play off, and
that was the end of my tenure. Not wholly unexpected.
In the middle
of a stressful two-week work binge, I blearily checked my e-mail over
my morning coffee ('morning' for me is about noon) and found a surprise:
Bad Movie Night's Bad Movie
Site of the Week Award. This was nice to receive... I'd be lying if
I said I didn't covet at least one of those shiny little graphics
everybody else seemed to have. Well, now I had one. Hooray
for me. Slap it on the index page, upload it, go to work.
Then it got
better. Andrew Borntreger e-mailed me to say that he and his
elite staff had decided to give me the Badmovies.org
Dancing Slime Award. I would hate to choose that day as my Personal
Best of the year (the work part was no fun), but it's in the Top Ten.
I mean, come on - I won the last Dancing Slime to be handed out this
century.*
Peer recognition
is really, really cool, but we also
found out this year that there were a lot of people who knew about
us, and we'd never even met them. On September
20, the venerable Suck.com,
writing about the Woodstock Riots (you damned kids!) and the incipient
youth-bashing, linked to our review of Wild
in the Streets, which garnered more hits that week than the
brand-spanking new review, which became quite bitter and pouty.
Our neighbors
up north (well, St.Paul-Minneapolis, anyway), Pioneer Planet, also gave us a featured link,
saying the following:
It's Friday, you've arrived too late at
the video store to capture the 40th and final copy of the new Julia
Roberts or Don Knotts megamovie, and you're faced with choosing from
a vault of dusty movie titles. Time for ``plan B,'' which in this
case is a B-movie review site called Stomptokyo.com. Hailed and/or
lamented by the New York Times as ``a place to indulge your questionable
cinematic taste,'' the site laughingly puts under the microscope a
litany of forgotten gems including the likes of ``Terror of Mechagodzilla''
and ``Drunken Wu Tang.'' Click on the Bad Movie Report, and then the
``Archives'' link if you have a hankering for an evening of do-it-yourself
Mystery Science Theater 3000. It even rates the offerings according
to how lampoonable they are.
And now Chris
sends me news of a listing on an Italian
page of movie links, which describes us as follows:
THE BAD MOVIE REPORT : sembra un'opera
di pubblica utilità, in realtà cela un irresistibile
amore per le schifezze...
which Babelfish translates as:
THE BAD MOVIE REPORT: it seems a work of
public usefullness, in truth hides a irresistibile love for the schifezze...
Okay, we've
stumped the online dictionaries. Anyone who knows what 'schifezze'
is, let me know. Grazi.
I've made
a few changes since I've gotten back online, and there will likely
be more to come. This week, for instance, I've grown up and finally
gotten rid of the hit counter (okay... so all I did was de-emphasize
it. Breaking up is hard to do), since I stopped paying much attention
to it a while back. Instead of peppering "new" graphics
all over the front page, I'm trying out a Java applet that will tell
you everything you need to know, right at the top, with linkable text.
Let me know if you like it or hate it.
This is probably
as good a time as any to warn you: ads are coming (Oh, stop snivelling).
They're a necessary evil, and they'll be bannered at the top, just
like Stomp Tokyo's, so you can scroll down and ignore them, if you
so desire. Of course, I first have to figure out the proper placement
and implementation of the arcane Javascript formulae that Chris has
sent me - this probably requires the part of my brain that can do
algebra, which I believe to be the part I killed back in the 70's.
But I'm one of the types who learn only by getting their hands dirty,
so it will happen; I just have to grit my teeth and hit it
with a hammer a few times.
Any other
changes? No, not too likely. I get the occasional letter asking why
I don't do more recent movies. That one's easy - lots of people
do those. If I do review something fairly recent, it's as a departure
from my usual stomping grounds, and will continue to be uncommon (I
do have a copy of Dean Koontz' Phantoms standing by, which
I paid $2.00 for - I'm told I overpaid). Some want more giant monster
movies - not my favorite flicks, but we'll still go there now and
then.
Doubtless
I'll still get the odd letter berating me for daring to apply "real
movie" criteria to bad movies, and urging me to "get a life".
I'm getting better at using the delete key on these. For those
of you who are sharpening their keyboards, preparing to send just
such a missive this way, I have the following words: if it is on film
or video, and claims to be entertainment, it is a "real
movie". As for getting a life, you first. I'm not the one badgering
some middle-aged guy in Texas for having a hobby. There. I've saved
both of us (and the reading public) lots of time.
Assuming
I don't hit the delete key on that entire last paragraph, let's end
on a more positive note. Two years ago, I started this site with a
rough list of movies I wanted to review and examine. After two years,
I've barely hit half of those. As you delve ever deeper into the realm
of the crap movie, you find rich veins and abandoned cities in the
jungle you had forgotten even existed. Think it's been a long strange
trip so far? Just look ahead.... into the darkness. <evil laughter,
followed by coughing, and the sound of a rescue inhaler>
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