A Chuck spin-off, a rubbish title, a mighty vegetable, zombies and more in this week’s spurious awards…
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A day early this week ’cos we’re all in a big meeting tomorrow… enjoy!
MOST DIFFICULT TO PRONOUNCE FILM TITLE OF THE WEEK
And it’s called…
Knights Of Badassdom .
Go on. Admit it. If we’d revealed that in the first line, you’d have skipped straight to the next award. Aside from just being a generally crap title (we assume it’s supposed to be amusing in a Bill And Ted kind of way, but it isn’t) it’s also bloody hard to say out loud. For some reason, sticking “dom” at the end of “badass” takes all the badass-ness out of badass, and makes it sound like a village in the West Country or something you’d say after the punchline of a very poor joke.
POSTER OF THE WEEK/WARNING OF THE WEEK
Somehow, we can’t help wondering if the poster image came before the event it’s advertising in this case, because it is, clearly, a very cool image that was just waiting to happen (if it was good enough for the White House on the Independence Day posters, then it’s good enough for London’s premier domed tourist attraction). The image is advertising a space-themed Close Encounters season at the Royal Albert Hall, which includes film screenings in a posh surrounding ( Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , Alien , Barbarella and ET ), space music concerts and lectures titled things like Craters, Collisions And Catastrophes and Goldilocks And The Three Aliens (no, honestly!). Our favourite event, though, has to be the Make A Crater Workshop, aimed at kids, and advertised with the enticing warning, “this activity session involves the use of flour and chocolate powder”. Sounds brilliant!
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE OF THE WEEK
Various sites round the net gleefully ran with a story this week about a script review of the new Ghost Rider film. Unfortunately, it was originally written in Italian and nobody seemed to know any Italians to translate it. So instead it went through that lexicographical meatgrinder that is the internet translator. The resulting block of nonsensical text was almost like a war of attrition to read; initially amusing, then annoying, then something that could have been employed in Guantanamo Bay. Here are some edited highlights, for your own safety:
“After the success of the first film is not exciting among fans… to revive the character and the franchise some lightening issues that had covered the first film… Johnny Blaze found years after the events of the first film, self-exiled from the world… Blaze is approached by Moreau, a monaco quite unusual part of the monastic order of Michael, the warrior angel… there is on his trail Roarke, who is none other than an old knowledge of our hero (you certainly understand who they are)… The script focuses on the background in this way also “historic” that covers Ghost Rider, explaining in more detail to the viewer and the protagonist that the spirit of Vengeance is appearing more than once, and with different identities over the centuries“ A defect in particular, however, is to underline the main plot of “Mephisto” bad, or to Roarke, of course already seen in myriad other films in one way or another, and perhaps a little degrading, who expected more from this point of view… For the most passionate fans, there's a final twist, but much nerd.”
It was a miracle if your brain hadn’t escaped through your nose by the end of it, and the only sense you can really make from it is a general feeling that the film doesn’t want to be as shite as the first one. Lofty ambitions indeed.
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SPIN-OFF OF THE WEEK
We’re not entirely sure how official this is, so if all you see is a grey box then Warners has forced it to be taken off YouTube. Which would be a shame, because the official site that it’s on isn’t available to view in the UK. So be quick!
VEGETABLE OF THE WEEK
The spirit of That’s Life lives on. “Cyril, I hear you have a carrot shaped exactly like a…” A-ha! But that would be telling. Can you guess which SF character the friends and family of the carrot’s grower, Clive Williams, all reckoned it looked like? On a test in the SFX office we all said The Thing from The Fantastic Four (well, apart from Jordan, who said it was Big Daddy from Bioshock ). Wrong. We think Mr Williams may have Derren Browned his family, with a question like “Which Disney animated character who's a toy spaceman does this remind you of? Buzz when you know the answer.” If you still haven’t got it, check out the shocking truth over on the Metro site …
DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE WEEK
The latest episode of Warehouse 13 didn’t give us much Spurious potential and Haven wasn’t even on, so our two good old Spurious stand-bys let us down this week. Actually there were a few things in Warehouse 13, but they were so majorly spoilerific, we thought we’d better steer clear of ’em. At a push we could give the episode an OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IN HIGH HEELS OF THE WEEK award for the guest star who looked like she could give Usain Bolt a run for his money in a pair of pink court shoes. We did notice, though, that Haven has an episode coming up called “The Trial Of Audrey Parker” which is making the Spurious Panel rub their hands in expectant glee – please, please, please make it a really rubbish clips episode!
