Have you watched the Cinefix Homemade Movies of the the Death Star Trench Run scene from Star Wars: Episode IV? Trust me, even if you think this idea is dumb, stick with it until about the 2nd minute and the genius of it will slowly be revealed to you.
[embedded video: Homemade Star Wars
If you want to really nerd out, there’s a side-by-side comparison available:
[embedded video: Homemade Star Wars side-by-side comparison]
Via laughing squid.
Earlier today, curator of cool Todd Mason sent a link to the horror list for Richard Littler’s Scarfolk Council, a brilliant, disturbing, hysterically funny blog concerning a fictional town in the UK.
Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. “Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay.” For more information please reread.
It’s apparently quite the cultural phenom but I’ve been living under a rock lately and was unaware of it.
I don’t know if it would have more or less resonance for me if I’d seen it prior to becoming lodged in JunglePete’s childhood memories circa the late 1970s. (I didn’t actually meet JunglePete until we started going to school together in 1982). The last few weeks have started to feel like an elaborate prank. Or an episode of Fringe.
There was that incident with the Siamong in the Wendy’s restaurant I told you about earlier in the week. Then, yesterday, I had a random conversation with a visitor while at my volunteer gig. Although it’s a public place, I don’t feel comfortable repeating conversations I have with visitors so I’m omitting most of the details, but you’ll get the gist from the post I’m lazily copying from my facebook update:
I don’t share much personal info w the public when volunteering in the forensic anthropology lab. Yesterday a retiree from Venice, FL visited & I said I was also from Sarasota. Then I took out an osteomyelitic tibia, like one does. The rest of our lengthy conversation can be summarized as (osteology)(bio archaeology)(osteology)(osteology)(my daughter dated a fellow who lived on a monkey preserve)(osteology)(bio archaeology)(osteology). I said nothing at the time, but when I got home I verified that I am, in fact, trapped in Jungle Pete Corradino’s childhood memories. Please send help. And bananas.
I didn’t offer up that I knew someone who lived in a monkey sanctuary. I don’t know if the story is true or not, although when I asked JunglePete about it he told me some vague story about knowing the family in question that took place in the late 1970s, which is good enough for me.
If you don’t have much patience or don’t understand why poking around the Scarfolk site is so entertaining, I just found a post by David Barnett, who wrote a rather lengthy summary review for Tor.com with some great examples of the images on the site. Barnett concludes:
Scarfolk is a triumph of psychogeography and pretty much what the internet was invented for, as far as I’m concerned. Go visit, by all means, but don’t say you haven’t been warned. And when—if—you leave Scarfolk, I guarantee that there are certain things you won’t look at in the same way ever again. For example… are those children looking at you in a bit of a weird way right now..?
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I need to go finish a conference paper abstract so I can delve back into the Scarfolk archives.
Last month, Husband took a day off and we spent some quality time together.
(With our Tivo, Overlord II).
A series of Florida swamp adventures slowed down my posting schedule, but here at last is what I wrote about the rest of Pop Culture Paleontology Day (low rent edition).
I’m hoping the suspense didn’t kill you after I posted about our warmup flick, lake Placid 3, and then left you hanging when we moved on to 4 truly special dinosaur creature-features: Raptor Island, Pterodactyl, Rise of the Dinosaurs, and Triassic Attack.
(They were special because they were the 4 dinosaur-themed movies we had on our Tivo).
There are spoilers here, but if you’re reading this you probably don’t care.
Before we get to the movies, I wanted to comment on the real-life big news about the Smithsonian getting long-term lone of a super-swank T. rex.
“Tyrannosaurus rex gets long-term lease at Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.”
That the [Army] Corps had a T. rex to lend was news to many of its senior leaders. “They didn’t know we had a dinosaur,” said Sonny Trimble, who oversees curation and management of archaeological collections for the Corps. People transfer, he said. Many retired. So “the chief engineer doesn’t wake up in the morning saying, ‘How’s our dinosaur doing?’”
I’ve been telling you for years that the dinosaur-human supersoldier project is a secret, so of course they didn’t want us to know they own dinosaurs.
I don’t think that counts as a digression because it’s about dinosaurs. And the military.
First up, Raptor Island (2004).
This movie is a classic, in that it was made in 2004 when SyFy was still SciFi.
The movie opens with a plane crash in the distant, grainy, faux-film effects past. Who was on the plane? What was on the plane? Why are you asking stupid questions like that?
The movie jumps ahead 40 years later, to Lorenzo Lamas and his CIA agent lady-friend and his team of Navy Seals hunting a terrorist in a jungle full of vicious dinosaurs.
Lorenzo Lamas, bitches!
As an aside, the raptors in all these movies were slappers, not clappers. See also: Brian Switek: Doing the T. rex Stretch at the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking Blog.
Wait! What the hell? While I was looking up that last link, Lorenzo Lamas – Navy Seal, hair gel aficionado, and now, apparently, a dinosaur expert – informed his CIA lady friend that a plane carrying radioactive waste (or maybe weapons-grade plutonium, it’s not clear) mutated the regular animals that lived on this otherwise benign island in the South China Sea. Into dinosaurs! In only 40 years!
Of course it did!
After that brilliant exposition there was some nonsense with some explosives, a volcano erupted, some other military shit happened, and then the movie ended.
On to Pterodactyl (2005), which stars dinosaurs, a volcano, and Coolio.
Paleontology Professor/heartthrob Michael Lovecraft (Cameron Daddo) and his motley band of grad students pile into a jeep and head off into a forest in Turkey because an earthquake has opened a fissure in a dormant volcano and they plan to look inside! Little do they know, because they ignored the warning at the beginning of the movie, Coolio and his Special Forces team are hunting terrorists in this same forest.
The same forest! What are the odds!?!
Pterodactyl is nothing like Raptor Island.
In Raptor Island some terrorists and some terrorist-hunting military dudes all ran around in the forest (and occasionally in some caves), and they battled dinosaurs, and there was a huge nest of baby dinosaurs, and then a volcano erupted.
In Pterodactyl, some dinosaurs fly around and some terrorists and some terrorist-hunting military dudes run around in the forest (and, occasionally in some cave-like locations), and they battle dinosaurs, and there’s a huge nest of baby pterodactyles. It’s totally different than Raptor Island because in Pterodactyl the volcano erupts before any of the other stuff.
We thought that maybe if we were lucky, some raptors might show up and eat all of the characters.
(We weren’t that lucky).
(During parts of Rise of the Dinosaurs, and definitely through the whole middle section of Triassic Attack, we hoped that some raptors might show up and eat us).
At this point in the festivities we took a break so Husband could make chicken curry for dinner because pop culture paleontology day demands consumption of birds.
(It was hilarious at the time).
After dinner, it was on to…
Rise of the Dinosaurs (aka Jurassic Attack 2010), in which a plane crashed in the jungle and then some military dudes hunt terrorists and battle dinosaurs.
Only kidding!
They’re hunting rebels.
Hey! The military dudes just came upon a nest of dino eggs!
Hey! That was Corin Nemec, co-star of House of Bones
Now they’re battling dinosaurs!
After some “dramatic” action and they escape in a helicopter. Like you do.
As they fly back to civilization, having forgotten that in the beginning of the movie the central conflict was that they were all infected with a bio-weapon that meant they would have to be killed or something and could never go back to civilization, two of the characters have this exchange:
Fine. Whatever. The movie is over? I’ll take it.
Last, but not least: Triassic Attack, which stars Kristy Mitchell, star of Lake Placid 3. When I saw that I was sure that this was meant to be!
(Or, at that point, I’d reached the optimum blood-alcohol to achieve some sort of b-movie equanimity. Who can say, really?)
Triassic Attack has the annoying elements of Movie Archaeology combined with the annoying elements of Pop Culture Paleontology.
When we watched Lake Placid 3 this morning, I was confused because I remembered it as a bit of spoof of Eureka, starring Colin Ferguson.
It wasn’t.
That’s because I was confusing it with Triassic Attack, which is a bit of a spoof of Eureka, directed by Colin Ferguson.
This movie is aggravating on many levels. It confuses archaeology (humans and artifacts) with paleontology (dinosaurs).
In brief: the Chief leading the American Indian repatriation protest at the paleontology museum does a ceremony to re-animate the dinosaur skeletons and your brain rolls over and fakes a coma for 90 minutes and it’s best to just go with it.
Oh, here, let’s just make this super-easy:
[embedded video: Triassic Attack trailer]
If you’re a super-nerd, you might enjoy this Pterodactyl trivia. It’s the kind of thing we cared about before we watched 5 of these movies in one day and broke something in our insides.
I’ll just quote wikipedia because it’s all I can muster at this point:
Many of the characters are named after famous science-fiction and fantasy writers – Burroughs (Edgar Rice Burroughs), Clarke (Sir Arthur C. Clarke), Donaldson (Steven Donaldson), Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein), Herbert (Frank Herbert), Lem (Stanislaw Lem), Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft), Serling (Rod Serling), Yolen (Jane Yolen) and Zelazny (Roger Zelazny).
As I finish editing this draft (6 weeks later), we’re watching Swamp Shark, which includes dramatic dialogue like, “If it breathes, it can be killed!”
Now that’s some quality writing. The acting is even better.
Clearly we don’t ever seem to learn our lesson.
If the new season of Arrested Development overloads Netflix, we’ve got a backup plan.
When I met two new friends today, they were discussing childhood memories of HP Lovecraft-themed sculptures. I asked, much louder & more shrilly than I intended, “Were any of them made of butter?”
After a long silence, one of them replied, as though I should know this, “All of them.”
Perhaps this information was indeed submerged in my brain somewhere. It would explain a recent dream I had so I’m going to pretend that it definitely was, if that’s okay with you.