This movie is so incredibly stupid that I love the hell out of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79_ljVC5Wk

Anybody else have this sort of paradoxical attachment to REALLY silly SF?

You should try "Plan 9 from Outer Space" a classic megaturkey that has been described as "unwatchable".

Oh, I know of it from the comparatively recent movie Ed Wood; it's on my list of must-dos. I love Green Slime because it tries so damn hard to be serious, but the s/F/X just ain't makin' it; plus, I wanna karaoke the theme song!!!

Anything where you can still see the strings attached to the models! Quality.

Love the cheesy FLASH GORDON movie with the Queen soundtrack... absolute kitsch classic.... a winged Brian Blessed bellowing "Gordon's ALIVE!!!!"; Ornella Muti slinking about in that almost-not-there costume; Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan sticking his hand in that tree trunk and - AAAGGGHHH!!!!

Classic with a capital "Class"

Now were getting to something I truly, religiously, admire...
Ed Wood=A God in the wrong Universe...
Tim Burton's Ed Wood is a MASTERPIECE...an hommage to something so bad that becomes...sacred...Ed Wood...his plan...his Glen...his Bride...Glorious misery...I can't describe it just watch it...one of my life goals is to have all Wood's filmography...and I accept gifts! :-)

EDITED: I can't avoid it...just brilliant!

EDITED...TWICE!: LOL! I tell you...Ed Wood is GOD!

Stu if you've ever seen the ORIGINAL Flash Gordon you'll be astounded how true they were to the remake, right down to the casting and the facial structure of the new actors - especially the villain.

Judging by the trailer, if it had come out in the mid-1950s, it would have been one of the more competent sf-horror flicks of the period; but at the end of the '60s it was quite out of place. It looks like the entire special effects revolution had passed it by.

Plan 9 actually isn't bad, except for a couple of truly boring scenes.. The dialog in most is humorous enough to make it watchable.

I'd say the worst SF film is.. Independence Day? Cliche-ridden and exceedingly dull, yet a huge profit-maker

Best.. That's tough. 2001 is good. Aliens is fun. There aren't all that many sci-fi movies in general, are there

I loved Independence Day when I came out and I still enjoy watching it from time to time.

What - no Blade Runner?

Ditto 2001 being awesome.

And are there any MST3K fans here? Most of their movies could qualify under the worst spot

The particularly painful "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" with Raul Julia would top that list. No, wait - there are too many to choose from!

Some clunkers...

SATURN 3 (Hervey Keitel, shame on you... but very fond memories of seeing Farrah Fawcett Majors in a new, um, light... )

DUNE (oh, what a lost opportunity... not even those magnificent sandworms, or Patrick Stewart as Gurney, could save it from the movie hell it was condemned to for the wooden acting of Kyle Maclachlan and the winged underpants of Sting...)

STAR TREK 5 (just.... just... awful....)

Some faves...

INDEPENDANCE DAY (everytime I watch this I still get caught up in it and mentally cheer when Wil Smith punches the alien and quips "Welcome To Earth!")

LOST IN SPACE (I know, I know, cheesier than a big bag of cheddar chunks, but the effects are awesome, Joey - sorry, Matt LeBlanc is perfect as the pilot, and Gary Oldman has the time of his life playing Smith! A genuine space pantomime - oh yes it is! )

CONTACT (probably my fave sci-fi movie... possibly even my fave movie full stop... worshipped the book, worship the film. Jodie Foster perfect as Ellie, everything just fits. SETI is one of my passions, and faiths, so this movie is always playing in the small private cinema at the back of my mind)

MATRIX RELOADED (haha, gotcha, just kidding... )

Oh come on, no mention of that frankly exquisite early performance by Caroline in the City's Lea Thompson in Space Camp?

Doug

What?

Armageddon, anyone?

My fav bad SciFi movie is the 1950's "This Island Earth",with plotting and scripting that are right out of the Pre-John-Campbell-Astounding pulp era of long winded megalomaniac scientists and clunking robots and everything that Hollywood still thought of as representative SF even in the early 60's. The script could have been written in 1933 or so, it's so bad in style and science. Yet it's a relatively big budget color movie that was FILMED well...

My Fav 1950's Science Fiction movie <not SciFi> is Forbidden Planet, with a script that is a reimagining of Shakespeare's "The Tempest". The literati and movie types consider The Day the Earth Stood Still is the best from the 50's, but Forbidden Planet rules.

Confession time... I know ARMAGEDDON is about as scientifically accurate as an episode of Button Moon, but I love it. It's just FUN! Big, unashamed, good time movie with an eardrum-murdering soundtrack, a growling, evil comet, gung-ho cliche astronauts, international stereotypes and Bruce Willis playing John Mclane in space, what more can you ask?!!

And come on, wouldn't we all love to see a double shuttle launch like that?

And Doug, with you on the Lea Thompson thing, but that robot is so ********** annoying it makes me want to throw one of my meteorites thru the screen every time that movie comes on TV...

Well this looks like interesting discussion.
Here's mine:
Actually I agree with Stu that "Contact" is probably one of the best movies ever...and Matrix is just great movie too..you can't prove that it isn't real can you?
"What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"

Speaking about BAD SF....there are extremely LOTS and LOTS of crap movies and I don't intend to list them here but I can see that lots of you guys confuse real SF with US military wishful thinking whats to become of them in 200-300 years...Star trek etc...
Worst of the really STUPID movies that I have watched recently must be that Astronaut Farmer thing....

Maybe I'm in a minority - but I find, on the whole, most SciFi to be, to be honest, crap.

All the Star Trek stuff - didn't like it. Star Wars - all dreadful. Dr Who, Torchwood, bleurgh. I like Lost - but that's about it. Heroes, Stargate, Firefly. I like Stephen Baxter's Voyage and Titan, and to a lesser extent, Moonseed. I've never read a A.C.Clarke novel - and while I have 2001 A Space odyssey on DVD, I don't think much of it. The thing is, via blogs etc, it seems that just about everyone who like science, likes science fiction.

Oh - and Cloverfield - my comments over at Phil's www.bautforum.com :

"It was pure, unadulterated arse gravy of the sloppiest kind from start to finish. Sorry. The acting was dreadful, the dialogue hideously predictable, the direction was self indulgent and the plot line obvious after the first 30 seconds with what is on screen with the opening credits. The hand-held camera was a gimmick, and a nausea inducing one at that ( I had to look away for a minute or so, on several occasions, to subdue the genuine nausea I was feeling ). This brat's got an amazing HD camera that can survive a virtual apocalypse...and it doesn't have image stabilization?

It was too bad to be any good, and it wasn't set up to be tongue-in-cheek like an episode of Dr Who.

On the upside - it was quite short."

Independence Day is made watchable by two great lead characters - but the St Crispens day Henry V speech ripoff by the US President was grating. Armageddon is made unwatchable by Willis and vulgar over sentimentality and nationalism. Space Cowboys was just dire. Deep Impact was OK.

Doug

I guess I'm the other side of the coin to you Doug, I'll watch just about anything sci-fi! Not saying I love it all, but it's just good entertainment I think. I don't need or even want it to be 100% accurate; sometimes it's just good to switch off the Vulcan part of your brain and have some no-mental-exertion-needed fun. I mean, I recently bought the videos of the 1980s BBC series "STAR COPS", of which I had very fond memories, but watching it back it was dated, shaky-set, cringe-worthy, cliche-ridden rubbish, but still fun in a way. I can watch anything Star Trek related and get quite lost in it, same with Stargate etc. I'm in my "Hoo Ya" element watching an episode of SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND... anyone remember that? ... hell, I can even enjoy ANDROMEDA if it's on. GALACTICA is a class above other sci fi TV, up there with FIREFLY in my book.

I guess I'm just the same space geek I was at junior school who lapped up episodes of UFO, SPACE 1999, THE TOMORROW PEOPLE and the rest, guilty as charged.

As for books... well, Stephen Baxter is god, no doubt about it. I've read VOYAGE universe knows how many times, TITAN too, and all his other books. I'm actually re-reading EVOLUTION now, and enjoying it hugely.

Maybe most sci-fi is crap. But give me a bad episode of BLAKES 7 or TORCHWOOD over an episode of THE BILL or ER any day.

Give me Sky marathons of Mythbusters, Top Gear, A Car/Plane/Bike/Chopper is Born, Anything with Ray Mears. Black Sky - the Discovery documentary on SS1 I could watch all day, every day. Today - feeling a bit lethargic, I watched all of Clarksons 'Inventions that Changed the World' - they were BRILLIANT. His documentary on the Greatest Raid of All Time was just astonishing television.

I used to watch ER when I was a student....and....I confess...a LOT of Caroline in the City, Will and Grace, and Frasier.

Now, if the writers of WEST WING would team up with the creators of GALACTICA they'd make the perfect Stu sci-fi prog...

Maybe we can get some US writers to create a comedy just for you Doug... maybe Lea Thompson as a car-mad survivalist who has a gay best friend and who works for a radio station in her spare time...

Racing a DB9 to Monte Carlo, proving the rocket-car darwin award myth is bull.

Sold.


:0

Oh, yes -- 'West Wing' is, IMHO, one of the best-written shows that has ever graced American television. And as much as I enjoyed it for its story telling, I found it one of the brightest comedies I had ever seen.

I'm completely a combination of Doug and Stu. I enjoy most s.f. TV and film productions (though some truly lame things, like Saturn 3 and Will Smith's I, Robot are just too bad for me to maintain interest). I enjoy Dr. Who and Torchwood, I watch Star Trek and Star Wars with great enjoyment. (I will point out that the writing and production values on both Dr. Who and Torchwood have risen to far greater heights than the kiddie show values you saw on Dr. Who throughout its first couple of decades.)

And yet, given the choice, my TV will be set on Mythbusters, Master Blasters, Top Gear, or some archeology or palentology documentary on one of the docu-networks.

The set of relatively permanently stored programming on my digital video recorder gives you a pretty good idea -- about 12 science/space documentaries (including 'Roving Mars' and 'Mars Rocks: One Year Later'), about 4 other various documentaries, a few sitcoms (Murphy Brown among others), and about 7 unwatched episodes of Star Trek: DS9 and Star Trek: Voyager.

-the other Doug

BEST - Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' and 'Solaris', Nigel Kneal's 'Quatermass'. From the big-budget mainstream: '2001' leads the field for me, with honourable mentions for 'Dune' and the original 'Stargate'. (Really can't handle the space westerns, wars etc.)

I love Stargate until they actually go to the planet Abados, then I can't help losing my sense of wonder. Up until then it's very epic, very tense, very tightly-scripted, then into the Stargate... screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeechhhhhhhhhh... and they land in what is obviously Egypt or Tunisia or somewhere, and it all looks v familiar. Same with the TV series, I love the episodes' build up until they pass through a stargate and arrive on yet another "exotic alien world" that looks suspiciously like a manicured Canadian pine forest...

Well it's not easy to find places that look really alien on Earth. I can think of some, but most of them are well-known and would be recognized immediately (e. g. Monument Valley or Göreme or Mono Lake). Some parts of Odadhahraun on Iceland might work. (Look at this for example: http://www.good-will.ch/pd/images/sc_herdubreid.jpg)

It gets even worse if you want a vegetated scenery. The best I can think of is the dry woodland of southwestern Madagascar and the afroalpine zone on Mount Kenya, but of course anybody who knows anything about botany would recognize them instantly.

War of the Worlds (1953)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Them!
The Thing from Another World (1951)
2001: A Space Odyssey

Hey, thanks for the pleasant flashback, Nigel! I remember Quatermass and the Pit (released in the US as Five Million Years to Earth) being shown from time to time as the CBS late movie when I was a kind....never missed it!

Another UK movie that I really enjoyed (though I don't think it was part of the Quatermass series) was Crack in the World. And, of course, Village of the Damned scared the hell out of all us youngsters...

The one thing I can honestly say about intelligent, well done and logical science fiction movies is that they're a tremendous stimulant for young minds to turn their imaginations towards science & technology; that's an indispensible service to civilization itself. And, the folllowing is probably just another symptom of my increasing geezerhood...but they just don't make 'em like they used to. Understated, even cheesy, special effects force viewers (esp. kids) to fill in the gaps with their minds.

If I had to pick a favorite, I'd say John Carpenter's remake of 'The Thing.'

Yeah, that's a goodie; it really ran with the original premise of the short story (published in the 1930s!!!)

It's also a great weight loss aid; I can't eat a damn thing for several hours after watching it (blecchhh!!!!)...

Don't sit next to a girl with long fingernails while watching it.

Wise words; obviously, the voice of experience!

Quick SF/horror movie anecdote: I was nine or ten, staying up late (everybody else is in bed) to watch Beware the Blob on TV. The Blob has been doing its thing with great gusto (and, apparently, no added seasoning or condiments) and in addition to occassionally cowering underneath a blanket I've visually verified that The Blob has not apparently entered under any of the doors, windowsills, etc. Just as The Blob is preparing to eat an entire bowling alley chock full o' human goodness, the dog--a German Wirehaired Pointer with a deep voice--who has been sound asleep the entire time right behind me begins to howl in her sleep:

"ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....." on a rising note...

After I verified that my adrenal glands did NOT in fact explode, that my eyes would return to their sockets, and that my hair would not resemble boxing promoter Don King's 'do' in perpetuity, I was settled enough to dipose of the anomalously warm brick that had inexplicably appeared on the couch & finish the movie. I also woke up the damn dog.

Now that was one movie that had a big impact on me. I saw it as a youngster on an old B&W television around 1970, and found the grand finale to be terrifying. My father, on the other hand, just rolled his eyes and made a few comments about how ridiculous it was. Of course, the fact that he saw many terrible things (some of which he would never talk about in our presence) during WW2 no doubt had a lot to do with this. I have to think that it would be difficult for any 1960s movie to be all that frightening when you've been through what he went through.

As far as favourite SF TV shows, I have to say that I prefer comedy series, since 'dramatic' television needs to be believable for me to really enjoy, and most SF is just not believable. Comedy, on the other hand, I enjoy whatever its believability, so my two favourite TV series are 'Red Dwarf' and 'Futurama'.

Bill

Mongo, what I really enjoyed about it was the idea was that putative aliens were...uh, like alien, and the idea that entirely different things were happening elsewhere in the distant past.

We used to think that if, say, we found a Solar System 100My younger than ours with an Earth-analog in the third or fourth spot out from the star (of course!), why, then, there be dinosaurs!!! This film made me think "whoa; the evolutionary paths of extraterrestrial life might be completely different then our own!", which was a gift in later life that helped me consider the whole "you-efff-ohh" mythos in its proper context (which is to say absurd given any application at all of critical thinking...)

Picking the worst Sci-Fi film ever made is a tough one.

But I can easily name the film I hated the most: Armageddon.

I started hating it in the first few minutes watching Bruce Willis trying to shoot Ben Afflec. It was a wildly comedic scene with the humor so forced that it only lacked a flashing "laugh" sign at the top of the screen. We then get two hours of being told that only morons can save the planet. I think the biggest morons had to be the guys at NASA that didn't believe they could train some astronauts how to drill a hole, so they had to go get talented experts, and the group they picked was Bruce and company.

As for the best Sci-Fi. Another tough choice.

Bladerunner and Forbidden Planet are my two favorites.

In the almost science fiction catagory I'd say Star Wars Episode IV is about the best.
Perhaps not the most original film ever, but for telling a fairly straight forward mythic quest and adventure I think Star Wars was nearly perfect. Unfortunately I don't think Lucas even fully understand what was so brilliant about that film, and the next five (except perhaps Empire) were all downhill and unnecessary.

Again, not sci-fi, but for fantasy films I would put Lord of the Rings trilogy at the top.

As far as absolutely honest-to-its-roots science fiction on TV, I think the list is shortened to a very few, the outstanding example being the PBS production, in 1980, of Ursula leGuin's 'Lathe of Heaven.' A masterful filming of a very complex and moody book.

-the other Doug

Armageddon. I watched it in a theatre, and was almost ROTFLOL at many parts of the movie, so much so I was getting dirty looks from people around me. It was sooooo bad!

Agree with 'Lathe of Heaven' being a well written, well produced and directed piece.

I'd love to see that. I'm a big leGuin fan but I didn't know that any had been filmed.

On the subject of 'Quatermass and the Pit' in the US - was it the original TV series or the Hammer Films movie version that was shown?

Perhaps the greatest single insult(!) in that movie is a stereotype of drunken russians with typical russian-english accents, living on a space station that's falling apart, yet for some odd reason has loads of rocket fuel.

That movie is so bad it's "not even WRONG!".

Many very good films out there:

Forbidden planet - for the soundtrack and effects (way ahead of their time in 1957) the basic idea, and the fact that the 'beast' is mostly imagined not rendered in latex/teeth/claws etc.

The Incredible shrinking man - multi-dimensional human-interest film, and wonderful effects

Alien - In almost every way a marvellous film

Flash Gordon - (agree with Stu here) for the incomparable Ornella Muti as the delightfully pouty daughter of Ming the Merciless

Pitch Black - A nice idea brilliantly produced and realised, and some fabulous special effects (Vin Diesel is actually reasonably good in this too)

Westworld - Short on budget for effects, but has heavily influenced many inferior later films such as Robocop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall

Honourable mentions: Bladerunner, Demon Seed, The Thing (John Carpenter version), Jurassic Park

Probably more lousy films than good, but here are my least favourites:

I, Robot - eagerly anticipated because of the source novels, but bears a tiny resemblance to Asimov's ideas, which shaped SF in many ways - should have been called 'I, Will Smith'

Independence Day - the actors sometimes look toe-curlingly enmbarassed delivering some of the cheesy lines in this film - really dreadful.

Armageddon - The 'science' was ludicrous, the dialogue laughable. Cinema by numbers. And please no more long shots of the heroes walking towards the camera in slow-mo..

FANTASTIC

Alien, Blade Runner, 2001, Contact : What can I say, masterpieces!
The Quiet Earth : "Last man on Earth" never done better.
12 Monkeys : Fantastic. I hope it never happens
Silent Running : You can't help but hate those dumb *******s when they start blowing up the forests. Nice.
GATTACA : Will he make it? Will he make it? I like the retro-look as well.
The Butterfly Effect (Directors Cut) : Brilliant Time Travel story. Skip the 'happy end'-Theatrical version though.

FUN!

The Fifth Element : Ruby Rhod! It's green!
Galaxy Quest : Best Star Trek spoof ever. It's better than most Trek movies
Short Circuit : Number Five is alive!

CAMP

Earth Girls are easy : Everything that's bad about 80s music/style etc is in this movie. LOL
Ghosts of Mars : Zombies on Mars with knives. Bring it on! Carnage!
Soldier : I know it's a dumb 'commando' ripoff in space, but I like it.

JUST BAD

Space Truckers : Tries to be camp, but fails.
Men In Black 2 : Tries to be funny, but fails. I hate that.
Predator 2 : I don't know what to say. Bleh!!!
Short Circuit 2 : Dumb story. Should've left the original alone!
ASTEROID, THE BIGGEST DISASTER : The title says it all. 2 hours of stupid, boring 'plot' and bad effects.

PBS version - good (if my memories serve me) - SciFi channel version - embarrassing. So much that I couldn't even bother when they did a production of EarthSea. Ouch.

Ditto most of OWW' list, and now I have some things I know I need to rent on Netflix....

Wow, this has got quite serious!

Ok, I'll fire this pair of Good Uns at ya...

DARK STAR (amazed no-one's mentioned it yet!) Best Bouncing Tomato Alien. Ever.

2010: very tense in places, realistic hardware and EVAs. And Helen Mirren as a sultry Russian space commander. I rest my case.


And at the risk of being exiled from the Forum, I feel a need to stick up for ARMAGEDDON. Ok, obviously it's not very scientifically accurate, and the humour is forced, and we were all disappointed when Bruce didn't actally shoot Ben Afleck, but it's a space pantomime! It's not meant to be a documentary! Criticising ARMAGEDDON for being cliched and crass is like criticising a dog for being a dog - that's what it is, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. Everything about the movie is wrong, and I think that's why I love it so much. It's like INDEPENDANCE DAY - a big, loud, ridiculously over the top celebration of corniness. But that's what many people want sometimes, to get away from the darkness of everyday life. It's just honest entertainment. Not every space movie has to be a million percent accurate, with spaceships behaving perfectly, astronauts acting calmly and coolly under pressure, and astronomical objects obeying the laws of physics.

I live astronomy and space, as you all have gathered by now! I spend a lot of what I laughingly call my "free time" educating people about it and telling them what real space exploration is like. When I get home it's a joy to stick ARMAGEDDON or INDEPENDANCE DAY or a STAR TREK movie on the dvd, kick off my shoes, open a can of beer and just lose myself in the entertainment of it.

I think the Dune movie can only be appreciated after reading the book. The Dune miniseries is much better, but those costumes!?! Ughhh.


The first half of Star Trek V is actually not that bad and very true to the Original Series. But yes, the second half is Bad. Looking for God in the center of the galaxy. Oh please....

If you want to see a Really bad movie directed by William Shatner, watch this one:
Groom Lake ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0270393/ )
A saw it a couple of years ago and actually had to turn the TV off after a particularly ridiculous scene. But I continued watching and made it to the End. I'm still quite proud of that!

re Dune: remember how Princess Irulan gave a 5 minute "Idiot's Guide To Spice" at the start of the film, for people who hadn't read the books? Well, when I saw the movie at the cinema, the sound broke down for those crucial 5 minutes. I swear I was the only person in the whole cinema who had a clue what was happening for the next two hours (or was it twelve? It certainly felt like 12!!! )

Totally agree on OWW/jasedm judge.
Don't forget remarkable titles like "Dunes", "Apes planet" or "The cube"... I love also original "Solaris" by A.Tarkowskji and some ironic titles like "Mars attack", "Galaxy Quest" or "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"!
In general, good books generates good films, even though sometimes I was disappointed by long-awaited titles like "AI" or "Minority report"; this is personal opinion, obviously!

My fondest dream is to see all of Heinlein's "juveniles" (Red Planet, Between Planets, Time for the Stars, etc.) made into films, complete with a retro look inspired by the original illustrations of Clifford Geary.

What an awesome set of cable mini-series those would make; you'd really need more than a single 2-hour session to do any of these books the justice & honor they deserve for stimulating the minds of so many youngsters...

Plus, I wanna see Willis, Lummox, Sir Issac Newton, and one of the Old Martians come to life!!!

For truly horrid science fiction, nothing can beat "The Eye of Argon," by Jim Theis. Thankfully, no one has chosen to put this onto film. The writing is beyond description, to wit [and sic]:

"...A tightly rung elliptical circle or torches cast their wavering shafts prancing morbidly over the smooth surface of a rectangular, ridged alter. Expertly chisled forms of grotesque gargoyles graced the oblique rim protruberating the length of the grim orifice of death, staring forever ahead into nothingness in complete ignorance of the bloody rites enacted in their prescence."

What can you expect of a piece whose hero is "Grignr"?

Someone did a wonderful reinterpretation of the story as though it were being watched by Mike and the MST3K bots here.

Count me in on that idea, Nick! 'Have Space Suit, Will Travel' would make a great mini-series! And the nice thing about the format is that if one book needed three or four hour segments, it would get it, while others might only need one or two.

I've long felt that a similar format for Niven's 'Tales of Known Space' could work very, very well on TV. Some short stories would work well in a single hour format, and you could spend six or eight segments on, say, 'Ringworld' or 'Crashlander'...

-the other Doug

Oh, hell yeah, oDoug! I wanna see Nessus, a Kdatlyno, a Grog, and esp. a Bandersnatch!!! And, of course, Louis Wu and Speaker-To-Animals...(Wouldn't mind seeing Pluto burn up, either... )

Dammit, if only I knew someone at the SciFi Channel...'course they might not be the most receptive venue...they seem to be more into space operas/action-adventure stuff, and these wonderful stories might lack enough gore to reproduce faithfully for their tastes.