When I first started doing the comparison reviews I like to call “The Big House vs. The Nut House”, where I review big Hollywood movies side-by-side with the low budget knock-off from Asylum productions, I fully intended for every Asylum film to lose hands down. I figured their films would rank somewhere around the drive-in films from the 1960s of Herschell Gordon Lewis (Two Thousand Maniacs, Blood Feast, A Taste of Blood), with really cheap special effects, excessive gore, nonsensical plots, and some fake double-D’s thrown in for good measure. So far what I’ve found have been fairly boring films with special effects that are so mediocre they’re barely worth mentioning. Even the women aren’t too trashy; some are downright pretty. Needless to say, I’ve been a little disappointed with the crop of Asylum films I’ve watched so far, in that they’ve neither exceeded my expectations too much, nor delved into the realm of badness that I thought would make this whole exercise worth exploring.

That is until now…

After my last entry, when I pit Tranformers vs. Transmorphers: Fall of Man, I decided to check out Asylum’s The Terminators with the full intention of comparing it to the classic 80s blockbuster, The Terminator. I wondered if the stop-motion animation of the Cameron original would be able to stand up to the crappy CGI of Asylum’s knock-off. So I got The Terminators from Netflix and decided to pop it into my DVD player last night.

When my DVD player at first refused to accept the DVD, that should have been my first clue as to what lie ahead. It’s like the player was trying to tell me something – “Dude, no. I refuse to take this. No, seriously, man, you don’t want to do this.” It spat the DVD out about four times, before finally relenting and accepting the disc into its gaping maw. Hindsight being 20/20, I now consider my actions akin to rape.

The Terminators begins on a spaceship not unlike the famous space wheel from the Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, except Kubrick’s wheel looked real even though it was created in 1967. The wheel is an orbiting station where cyborg slaves are created for use on Earth. These machines all look the same, apparently all wear the same clothes, and are all controlled by the same space station via a signal sent through the atmosphere. The cyborgs are either called “TR” models or “T5s” depending upon where you are in the movie, so that’s a little confusing right off the bat. For reasons that will become clear later on, I’m going to call them T5s.

Anyhoo, one day all the T5s on the space station go berserk because their signal has been hacked…by someone, we never find out who. So they load up into transports that look like they came right off the Battlestar Galactica set from the 1970s, and fly down to Earth, where they begin bombing major cities. They also, apparently, drop off T5s (I say “apparently”, because we don’t actually see this, we just see a bunch of the same guy running all over the place), whose only mission is to kill anyone they come across.

Click for a better view of these bad ass dudes

The invasion is a mess of modern filmmaking. The scenes of the T5s going on their kill crazy rampage are so disjointed, it’s almost like someone cut out the first 30 seconds of every scene. We just see the T5 guy do his best Arnold impression, walk up to someone, and snap their neck or shoot them with his RoboCop-looking pistol. There’s no build-up, there’s no tension, it’s just random, poorly-made scenes that have no relation to one another, nor contain characters we’ve ever met until we see their demise. And if we’re not seeing random violence, we’re watching scenes begin to develop, go nowhere, cut to a neck snap scene, go to another disconnected scene, come back to the original scene, then someone from the original scene is in a completely different location watching cyborgs pile up dead bodies. I swear, it’s the most confusing series of events I’ve watched in a while.

For example, below is an absolutely baffling screenshot. The strange placement of the two dead bodies amongst the computers and the smiley faces painted on the laptop screens are never explained. Hell, Sheriff walks right past them and doesn’t even glance down. I mean, what the hell is going on here?

Click for a better view of the WTF?

Once the low-rent carnage settles down, we find the Sheriff (there’s always a sheriff in Asylum films, just like there’s always a scientist in 1950s sci-fi films) come upon a group of people at a factory of some kind. Again, we aren’t really told where he is, what he’s doing there, or how he knows these people, but he calls them all by their first names, so there must be some familiarity. The guy just shows up outside a warehouse and then he’s inside leading heavily-armed employees (I guess that’s what they are) away from a T5. Why these people have guns at work, I couldn’t tell you, but one chick actually has a submachine gun. I’d love to know what kind of hoops she had to jump through in order to get a permit to carry a submachine gun in California.

So the random group of people escape with the help of Chloe, arguably the main character of the film, whom we saw walk up to the Sheriff earlier and call him by name. How they know each other is a mystery. But I guess that doesn’t matter, because Chloe is also, apparently, at the same factory that the Sheriff went to, so it works out really well for all involved when she picks them up in a stolen panel van. Oh, and all the employee militia also know Chloe by name. This must be a really small town.

They head to the country where they’re attacked by one of the T5 transport ships, forcing the van to crash. Mysteriously, once the transport has disabled the vehicle, it disappears, never to be heard from or mentioned again. But that doesn’t mean our band of survivors is in the clear yet.

“The hills are alllliiiiiiive…with the sound of muuuuuusiiiiiiiiic…”

Apparently (I’ll be using that word a lot during this review) there are three T5s patrolling the forest because, ya know, if you’re here to wipe out the human race, the first place you want to start is a forest with its dense population of lumberjacks, moonshiners, and unabombers. So the group is cornered by the T5s and is almost gunned down when…out of nowhere…comes the main character from Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, with a raygun, and saves them all. It looks like T.S. Quint has been shacked up in the woods for the last 15 years, though, only coming out of the mountains and into town to pick up boxes of Hostess products, because the boy’s put on about 30 or 40 pounds easy. And he still can’t grow any facial hair.

“Need…Twinkies…”

TS (I’ll be calling him “TS” because I don’t think his characters’ name is ever actually said. Besides, it’s kind of fun to think it’s the same character from Mallrats, isn’t it?) takes the group back to his own Unabomber shack to show them his collection of T5 transports that he keeps hidden…in…a clearing. Huh? He has about four of them, because he used to work for the company that built the T5s (which is where he got the swell raygun, too), but they’re all grounded because he doesn’t have an oxygenate for his the fuel…or something.

While inside the shack, TS and the Sheriff have a brief conversation wherein the Sheriff says he knows TS from somewhere, but TS does his best to deflect this line of questioning. Ooooh…he has a mysterious past. I wonder if that will come into play later?

So the group treks to a refinery (I think) where they find a single oxygen tank, the skank who was screwing Chloe’s now-dead husband, and then a guy gets punched through the head. It’s an eventful trip.

Click for a better view of these groundbreaking special effects!

(The head-punch, by the way, is classic fake-out of low-budget filmmaking. I’ve included a screenshot to see if you can figure out how it’s done. If you ever pretended you were Luke Skywalker and your best friend was Darth Vader and you were having an epic lightsaber battle with a couple of wrapping paper tubes, you should have a good idea of the trickery involved.)

With Skank and tank (sounds like a superhero team, doesn’t it?) in hand, they go to some other generic industrial-type complex where one of TS’ T5 transports is waiting for them. How it got there, I have no effing clue.

The explosion you see here has no reason to exist. No one is fighting the T5 during the scene, shit just starts blowing up because apparently they hadn’t reached their fireball quota yet.

As they head towards the space station controlling the T5s, Sheriff begins speaking in broken tones, imitating the robot voice you used to make when you were a kid (“I. Am. A. Robot.”) because, well, he’s a robot. Turns out Sheriff is the next gen cyborg the mega-corporation that builds T5s is developing and TS has been hired to keep an eye on him…or something. In a scene borrowing heavily from Blade Runner, TS tells the Sheriff how all of his memories are implanted from TS’ own life, so now we understand the foreshadowing of the earlier scene in TS’ shack.

Once they’re inside the space station, TS tries to access the main computer to shut down the T5s, but his password won’t work (probably because he left CAPSLOCK on, even though Windows reminds him not to). So the only way to stop the T5s is to shut them down with, what else? – dun, dun, dunnnnnn – the manual override.

Looks like someone needs to go to microsoft.com and download the latest service pack! (Click it, it really is a Windows error box)

However, as they’re making their way towards the failsafe device, the T5s scattered throughout the ship mysteriously begin to shut down, freezing in place like the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz. It turns out that all of their power is being rerouted to another cyborg – an 8-foot tall, metal monstrosity who in no way resembles a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, no siree.

(By the way, the DVD cover [see below] is a total bait-and-switch. As you can see, it shows an army of Cylon-esque Terminators, but there’s only one in the movie. What a rip-off.)

Lies! Lies, I tell you!

Anyway, the Frankenstein comes alive, kills TS, and then, the Sheriff, in his still-loony state, convinces Chloe to help him lure the beast into the airlock and they dispose of it a la the finale of Alien. Wow, BraveStarr sacrificed himself for the good of mankind. Who’s inhuman now, I ask you? Who’s inhuman now…?

Of course once the big cyborg is floating in space (Is that our sequel setup? I think soooo…), the regular T5s come back to life and go after The Skank who is currently wandering the ship without any kind of adult supervision. As she’s running away, she happens upon the manual override for the T5s and is able to shut it down, thus ending the machines’ reign of terror.

Do you see that screenshot? Yep, THAT is the T5 Main Control switch, in case you’re illiterate (which I’d really like to know, then, how you’re reading this review). What? You were expecting the master control device for an advanced cybernetic race of machines on a friggin space station to be something more high-tech?…complex?…computer-controlled?…maybe voice-recognition, fingerprint scanner, retina scanner…or a padlock? Nope. It’s just an electrical box they bought at Home Depot for $9.99. That’s all the security they need. Who would ever want to shut down the T5s anyway? No one’ll mess with it!

When I saw the “Master Control” switch, I almost fell off the couch due to the convulsions I experienced while laughing my ass off (thankfully a doctor was able to reattach it). I mean, they didn’t even TRY here.

This is the epitome of the film for me. That screenshot tells you everything you need to know about The Terminators. It truly does speak 1,000 words (actually it’s closer to 2,000 words at this point, but who, other than Microsoft Office, is counting?). It’s amazing in its singularity. I just can’t describe to you how the entire 90 minutes preceding is so completely summarized by this single frame of film. If you want to know what The Terminators is all about, this is the frame you look at. This is the film in a nutshell. Some directors go their entire careers without a shot that is so perfect. My God…it’s full of stars.

In case you couldn’t tell, this is a terrible, terrible film. I was so worried that all of these Asylum movies would wind up having a few redeeming qualities and I’d never be able to tear them apart. But, thankfully, they’ve proven to me that they do make some really shitty knock-offs. The Terminators renewed my faith in my Big House vs. The Nut House project to a degree I wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately, because this film is nothing like any of the Terminator films on almost any level, I’m not even going to bother putting it head-to-head with anything else. This one stands on its own, for whatever that’s worth, and is probably one of the worst films I’ve seen in all of my 34 years.

It’s cheap, it’s poorly directed, the special effects are laughable, there’s barely an original thought in the entire thing, the editing is atrocious – I seriously cannot think of any good reason to watch it. There’s nothing even remotely interesting; not even a single shot or sequence like there was in Transmorphers: Fall of Man. It was a total waste of time and I’ll be happy to send it back to Netflix.

I just hope it hasn’t psychologically damaged my DVD player. Maybe I should go watch a few episodes of Arrested Development or The Wire just to help it work through the pain. I wonder if Sarah Palin would make my DVD player pay for the kit if we wanted to make sure it was ok. I’ll have to check into that…

I asked my editor for a number of hits my last mental_floss story received and he was kind enough to reply.

For mental_floss.com, it received just under 310,000 hits! Pretty insane, huh?

He doesn’t have official numbers for CNN.com, but based upon the one time they did give him stats for another story that had hit the top of their Most Popular list, it’s probably somewhere around 200,000 hits.

So grand total, about 510,000 people read my last article.

My story helped mental_floss.com reach it’s highest number of hits in a single month – 20 million+

I’m so thrilled to be a part of such a record-breaking month for this fine publication.

I’m about 100 pages into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and, really, not a whole lot has happened. Well, except for the Earth has been destroyed to make way for an interstellar freeway. But other than that, it’s pretty uneventful.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve started reading “HGG”, I’d have enough to buy a Happy Meal. I always seem to get about 100 pages in and then get distracted by something else. I always swear I’m going to pick it back up, but I don’t, and so there it sits on my bookshelf, mocking me. This history of false starts is precisely why I put it on the 100 Novels Project list – I’m gonna finally get this thing out of my hair.

Why has this book been so hard for me to stick to? Because it reads like your seven year old nephew with ADHD has been drinking espresso all morning. Each sentence seems to be total nonsense, strangely constructed, and impossible to relate to. Did I mention that I’m 100 pages in and not much has happened? In short, this is not an easy book to read. It takes dedication, patience to re-read, and a capacity to say, “I have no clue what’s going on, but I’ll just keep trudging ahead.” That’s not an easy thing to do for everyone, myself included.

There’s another problem with this book that has kept me from reading it until now – its reputation. Much like the similar BBC TV series, Red Dwarf, the genre of spoof sci-fi has been so flooded with entries since Star Wars became part of the cultural zeitgeist in 1977. Granted, HGG is one of the early adopters, being published in 1979, but the funny lines, the nonsensical references, and the general sarcastic tone of the book has been a staple of my life since I got on in the internet in 1993. I almost feel like I don’t need to read it, I know it so well.

Nonetheless, I’m going to soldier on and finish it this time. Hopefully it will eventually click with me and I’ll become one of those rabid fans who quotes it everywhere he goes. Ok, I’ll never be like that, but here’s hoping I at least wind up liking it.

I realize that it might come as a bit of a surprise that I was even reading Starship Troopers for the 100 Novels Project, but that’s because I wasn’t. In putting together the list of novels I was going to read for this project, it came down to two books by Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. I opted for Moon, but now that I’ve gone ahead and read Troopers, I think I’ll just count it as an entry. Sound good? Good.

Anyway, Starship Troopers tells the story of Johnnie Rico, a fresh-faced high school student living in the far-flung future where much of the world has become a sort of fascist state. In order to become a “citizen”, which gives you certain rights (like voting), you must serve a term of duty in the armed forces. Despite everything his non-citizen parents tell him, Johnnie has his heart set on becoming a citizen, so he signs up for the Mobile Infantry (MI) and becomes a soldier.

The rest of the book simply chronicles Johnnie’s journey through boot camp and into his training to become an MI officer. We follow along on a few battles against the Earth’s alien enemies, a psudeo-arachnid race known only as “the Bugs”, but these tales of bravado are saved for the very end of the book when Johnnie commands a mission for the first time.

What’s really strange about this book is the utter lack of story. It reads as more of a diary entry or a nostalgia trip told by Johnnie over a mug of beer in a bar. We learn scant bits of what’s going on in the world, a little background information on our war with the Bugs, but it’s mainly about how this futuristic military prepares men and women for combat. There’s also quite a bit of military hardware porn (for lack of a better term) where we learn details about the MI’s “power armor”, a technology-laden exoskeleton that enables a soldier to have some superhuman abilities, an arsenal of weapons, and an advanced communications and battlefield awareness hub at his fingertips. There’s very little dialog and even it is told in a past tense, again giving us that feeling that this is little more than an old soldier telling his tale. We don’t really see Johnnie grow or change all that much as a person, either. He doesn’t divulge his mixed feelings very often, his doubts, his fears, they’re all pretty much swept under the rug and we’re referred to some inspirational speech given by his professor, a former MI officer.

The book has been accused of being little more than a political mouthpiece for Heinlein and normally I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I actually respect an author who can craft an interesting story, but also has no problem conveying some sort of philosophical stance at the same time. But with this book, I have to say I agree with the accusers. It’s not so much his message that I dislike – to be fair, I don’t agree with all of it, nor do I necessarily disagree with all of it, either – it’s just that the entire thing feels less like a story and more like a propaganda piece.

If the political aspect had been woven into a more intriguing story, I think it could have been a bit less jarring and more effective. But as it is, we are constantly in the middle of the main storyline, only to be whisked away and preached to for ten pages about capital punishment or how only someone who has served in the military should have any right to be a civil leader. All I can say I really learned from reading the book is that I do not want to live in the world of Starship Troopers, because it sounds like its being run by a bunch of fascist a-holes. Honestly, if you hadn’t done any research on Heinlein’s changing political viewpoints during his lifetime, you might wonder if he was writing this book as more of an exaggerated parody of the right-wing than supporting their views.

While I’m glad I read this one, I feel like it’s more a matter of checking it off my “Geek To Do List” than anything else. I don’t really feel the need to revisit it because I never really found it all that interesting, exciting, or memorable. I know this is a bit blasphemous to some folks, but the book just didn’t do much for me. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed the geek herd, but that’s the way it goes.

My mental_floss article that was reprinted by CNN has become quite a hit!

On August 12, 2009, the story began climbing the charts of the Most Popular Stories of the day on the website. I first noticed it while it was at #7, but by mid-afternoon, it was…well, just click here for a little eye candy.

That’s right – #2! It was such a great feeling to get up that high in the ranks. And the hits must have really been coming in for mental_floss, because my editor actually created a special page on the site to welcome new CNN.com readers visiting the site from my story.

Now the CNN version of the story is climbing the ranks on Digg.com. As of right now, it has received over 400 votes, but here’s hoping it can keep on going up and up.

I’m dying to get the final stats from my editor on this story. In an email he sent out Monday, he said that my story being linked on Yahoo! last Friday had contributed to mental_floss receiving 2.5 million hits that Sunday alone.  That was more hits than the site got in the entire month of July and more than they received in 2006 for the entire year.  I’m curious to see what this CNN link has done to the hits now.  And if Digg keeps climbing, who knows how far it could go.

Anyway, not to toot my own horn, but I have to say I’m pretty damn proud of how well this story has been received.  I had a lot of fun writing it, but I sure didn’t expect it to be my biggest story yet.  It’s going to be a tough one to top, but I’m definitely going to try.