BSFN 18 - Arctic Blast

Bad science film night 18 took place in a new, much more spacious venue. We even had room for a visiting scientist from far away!

BSFN 17 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes *Field trip!*

• Total number of BSFN-ites: Lots, including an anthropologist, an astrophysicist and someone who moved to San Francisco a month after seeing the movie. Also present, many teenagers who couldn't get into the Inbetweeners movie

BSFN 16 - Tremors

Tremors was a low attendance Bad Science Film, and was notably only attended by women. There are two possible conclusions:
- Boys are not interested in a young Kevin Bacon
- Boys are scared of giant worms. 

Bad Science Film Night 16 - Tremors

• Favourite Tagline:
• Premise: 
• Best death:
• Worst piece of science: 
• Overall review: 
• Total number of BSFN-ites: 4, all women. Boys are clearly scared-y cats, especially when we're watching a film with exceptionally phallic monsters.

Word Cloud

Oooo.. I made a Bad Science Film Night word cloud using the lovely wordle.net !
 

How mid noughties, right? Ironically the word cloud was inspired by my stalking of a Twitter conversation about this article, which is super opposed to word clouds. I am now obsessed and have been wordclouding anything I can think of (twitter feed, blog, thesis, other peoples twitter feeds). Love word clouds! I might word cloud all my future papers.

Here's the word cloud from the @badsciencefilms twitter feed. I choose the colour palette myself....

Shiny, no? By shiny I obviously mean gloriously vulgar.

Once we get semi up-to-date on the blog I'll run another wordle on it. That way the cloud will be less dominated by Rocky Horror, which I love, but is not a typical bad science film night choice. Fundamentally I want some kind of creature feature OR geophysics atrocity to dominate the word cloud.

BSFN 15.5 - The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Poster taken from the fabulous rockyhorror.com,
which has tons of Rocky resources.

This was kind of an accidental Bad Science Film Night, in that a couple of members of "the club"* watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show and felt it qualified as a bad science film, so it gets a write up (well over a month after we watched the movie). We are not exactly an organised association, although I am considering flexing my design muscles and making a logo. Unfortunately my design muscles are not especially Charles Atlas-esque, so you probably shouldn't start shivering with anticipation just yet....

I feel now is a good time to declare that I, Lizzie, have a number of fond Rocky Horror memories, so this is not exactly the usual snarky, anti bad science "review". I have danced the Time Warp in costume in front of my school (teachers and parents included), I have attended a sing-along Rocky Horror (and sang along in costume, obviously), a college film screening (in a different costume) and I also own 5 different Rocky Horror soundtrack related CDs (including the audience participation one). I am not unbiased, I like the Rocky Horror Picture Show quite a lot. Having said that, I hadn't seen it for about 5 years (gah!) and the main reason we decided to watch it was because of the Rocky Horror Glee episode that was on a while ago. I was kind of sad about the things that were censored in the Glee episode (Transsexual Transylvania -> Sensational Transylvania and many, many other changes that kind of diminish some of the point of Rocky Horror - here's an EW article about it).

Brad Majors and Janet Weiss are a young couple who have just got engaged (whilst singing Dammit, Janet) and are traveling on a dark and stormy night to tell their science teacher about the engagement. After encountering car trouble they stop at Frank N Furter's mansion. They arrive in the middle of a birthday party, for Rocky, Frank N Furter's man with blond hair and a tan, who is made from bits of Meat Loaf. Singing, dancing, explorations of sexuality and murder follow. The songs are super catchy.

In terms of bad science, we have the creation of Rocky ticking all the boxes, and also various freeze rays (good for another musical, here's the specific song!), UFOs and both intergalactic AND time travel. But as I said earlier, this isn't a snarky review. I love Rocky Horror but not for the science, I love it for the  AWESOME CATCHY SINGING AND DANCING!

Bad Science Film Night 15.5 - The Rocky Horror Picture Show

• Favourite Tagline: A Different Set Of Jaws (chosen for its bad science / disaster film pedigree)
• Second favourite tagline: Don't Dream it, Be It! (chosen for its upbeat message!)
• Premise: Mad scientist/transvestite from Transexual Transylvania makes a man with blond hair and a tan from bits of Meat Loaf. There is singing, dancing and fishnets.
• Best Song: I might like Hot Patootie best, but they're all good!
• Worst piece of science: The creation of Rocky - "Throw open the switches in the Sonic Oscillator and step up the Reactor Power Input...three..more..POINTS" *rainbow light change* 
• Unresolved questions: Why do I not know anyone who has seen the sequel - Shock Treatment? 
• Overall review: Let's do the Time Warp again! 
• Total number of BSFNight-ites: 2, plenty of space! Also not an official bad science night as such, more a bottle of wine and musical DVD night. 

* Is this a club? If there is a facebook group does that make it a club? Do we need stash?

Bad Science Film Night 15 - Deep Impact

Tonight featured Deep Impact as Bad Science film, together with some of the special features!

(Images courtesy of Wikipedia).

Blog update will follow soon.

BSFN 14 – JULES VERNE’S JOURNEY INTO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

(Images courtesy of Wikipedia).

THIS Bad Science Film Night featured 2 versions of Jules Verne’s Journey into the Centre of the Earth, one from 1959 and one from 2008, with as venue Britain’s best living room J. The old version was watched in great detail with a lot of comments by the landlord, the second was skipped through in 5 minutes as it was actually not interesting at all and will only be mentioned shortly hereafter. Clearly the 1959 version won!

The start of the film is set in Edinburgh, which happens to be the place where our landlord studied and has some opinions about! Professor Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) is given an interesting rock by one of his students (Alec McEwan or Pat Boon) which according to him must have come from Iceland, but more interestingly, has a plumb bob inside with an inscription. It appears to originate from Arne Saknussem, an Icelandic adventurer who had the goal to travel into the centre of the Earth, only 300 years ago. Together, they make the plan to travel the same journey and set off to Iceland. The first difficulties start with a Swedish professor, but they are safed by Hans and Gertrude, the actual hero of this story, even though she is a duck!

They descend into the volcano then, accompanied by Gertrude, Hans and Carla, a professors widow who will amaze everyone by wearing a corset to the centre of the Earth! A brilliant first quote: “We’re not having Pat Boon with an accordion going down the mountain!” and “An Indiana Jones moment; this is where they got it all from in those films!” together with “Let us rest to have a cup of tea”. After all, they are British. They descend into one of Iceland’s volcano’s and travel down, walking all the way (more than 6000 km!). They travel through open cracks with huge crystals, where water flows and trees grow and can still swim at 129 km depth down. There they are in THE LIMESTONE formation, after only 21 days of walking. How they manage to carry all their food for the whole journey remains a miracle! In the meantime, they get sabotaged, people get lost and separated, which makes them use the echo of a bullet to determine the direction where they can find Alec, yeah right. Following this, they travel through luminescent algae and very strong winds. On the 256^th day (how do they get their drinking water?!) they walk through a magic mushroom forest which they use for cooking and eat on porcelain bowls they brought with them!

After a while, they reach a huge ocean, which originates according to them from the fact that a huge earthquake ruptured the surface of the Earth, making fissures through which water flew down to the centre of the Earth. Here they are welcomed by giant reptiles “What the hell has that been eating?!” and they quickly float away on some kind of wooden built thing. They float up to the junction of the south and north pole where metallic objects are levitating and they get into a vortex going down which spits them out on a sunny coastline. Here, they appear to find the hidden city of Atlantis, at the centre of the Earth! After the poor Gertrude is killed by the bad saboteur who they had taken prisoner, they are attacked by more gigantic reptiles and they have to find a way out. There is a vent with a lot of wind, and they use the altar stone made out of asbestos to travel on a rising column of molten magma through the vent to the surface of the Earth as in a flying saucer. Apparently, this conduit leads to Italy as they fly out a volcano and they are in the end welcomed back in Edinburgh as heroes while everyone, including the landlord sing some kind of geology song.

In the 5 minutes we saw of the new version, we could already determine that here Gertrude was replaced by a blue bird, the reptiles by an enormous T-rex, the flying saucer by a T-rex skull but we still have the magic mushrooms. They new film makers have learned from the 1959 film where they said at the end: A scientist that cannot prove what he has discovered has discovered nothing. I'll not embarrass this great university by asking them to take my word for my accomplishments”. Therefore, in the new film, they bring back diamonds of their visit and they seem to be very proud in the new film to get their story published in the excellent earth sciences journal ‘Scientific American’…

• Favourite quote: Hans [in Icelandic, to his duck] My Gotrun, have you been lonely?
• Hero: Gertrude, the duck, which saves the Professor and Alec in the first place and sadly dies at the end, but for a good cause…
• Best save: Gertrude who finds the vent in Atlantis which they use to get back to the surface.
• Best piece of science: Proof for hot spots rising from at least the CMB as the conduit actually goes through to the centre of the Earth!
• Overall review: A great film (the old one) where new filmmakers can learn something from. Good actors, a very realistic story and as best character our duck. Invaluable, mostly in combination with the comments of our landlord!
• Total number of BSFN-ites: 9. Still plenty of room available at this large venue!

BSFN 13 - Sharktopus

Possibly the first bad science film with is own theme song (on iTunes no less!), BSFN 13 was devoted to SHARKTOPUS.

Yep. You read that right.

SHARKTOPUS.

Image from BeyondHollywood.com -

home of an excellent Sharktopus review

The thirteenth bad science film was a SyFy original movie (other SyFy original movies include BSFN11 - Megafault), produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman (of the original Piranha) and was rated by IMDb users as a 3.7/10. Therefore it was clearly an excellent film for the bad science film night-ites to unleash their inner SNARK-TOPUSSES (SNARK-TOPODI? SNARK-TOPI? SNARK-TOPOLLI?) and enjoy the majesty of SHARKTOPUS.

The movie opens with a girl in a bikini swimming off Santa Monica (excitement for people recently returned from visiting prestigious Southern California institutions at the inclusion of a place they had been in a movie - we had similar problems with Volcano). As her friend watches (also scantily clad - obviously), a fin appears in the water - oh no! But *relief* a mysterious half shark, half octopus creature saves the girl by killing the puny shark! Hooray for Sharktopus, which is sensibly made from the front bitey half of a shark and the bottom tentacley half of an octopus! Cut to a lab populated by two scientists (signposted by the fact they are wearing lab coats, despite their position behind a computer and lack of test tubes in the vicinity), Eric Roberts and a military man (uniform)...the military man is happy because Sharktopus is proven to be a successful weapon! Unfortunately, like all military experiments in B-movies, the experiment is pushed too far...and Sharktopus ends up having his control collar knocked off in an unfortunate collision with a boat. 

Now that Sharktopus is free he rampages down the California coast - eating scantily clad women as he goes! Including a girl who is credited as "Bikini Girl with Bum", which is presumably the girl who got eaten whilst a pervy, slightly homeless looking guy was watching. Sharktopus then settles in a particularly beautiful town in Mexico, where he demonstrates his totally ridiculous ability to walk on his tentacles. Because that is a standard octopus skill. I suppose it is not that far from using coconuts for defence. In Sharktopus's rampage many people die, mostly girls with very little clothing. I think it is clear from this summary that Sharktopus as a movie is a perfect example of a Bad Science Film - it has even inspired other craftier fans of bad science films to create sharktopus plushies!

• Favourite Tagline: 50% Shark, 50% Octopus, 100% DEADLY!
• Premise: Reckless scientists (are there any other kind?) make a SHARKTOPUS, which is controlled by a collar. Unfortunately the collar is not boat proof (design oversight, clear indication that too few engineers were employed by project SHARKTOPUS - Oompa Loompas of science are not to be overlooked) and therefore SHARKTOPUS runs amok in beautiful Mexico. The running bit is surprisingly literal for a cross between 2 aquatic creatures.
• Best death: Bungee girl! Serves her right for overcoming her fear of heights so completely. 
• Worst piece of science: Cross a shark (lives in the sea, swims) with an octopus (lives in the sea, swims via tentacular propulsion) and create a swimming, WALKING, ocean AND river bound creature. With the ability to stab people with its spiky tentacles whilst walking around. Naturally.
• Overall review: Well, terrible obviously. But it is called SHARKTOPUS, and is therefore the greatest film of 2011 so far. I don't care that the King's Speech is an Oscar winner - where is the walking, stabbing, biting sea creature?!?!
• Total number of BSFN-ites: 7? Confined space compatible.

BSFN12 - Earthquake

The 1974 film with the unique title ‘Earthquake’ was the topic of Bad Science Film night number 12! With high expectations, we started watching this classic and many saw were disappointed as the film was merely an ‘event’ instead of a story. However, as the film managed to win an Oscar, directed by Mark Robson, and is featuring Charles Heston and Ava Garner, something must be right in this film (although the Oscar was for best sound..)! In addition, in 1975 it was awarded a Golden Globe and a BAFTA film award, ok, again for best sound track and best original score. The IMDB users have voted for it with a 5.6/10, giving it a better score than most BSF.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia).

So what was the film about then? We start with images of a water dam, which is situated just in the hills above Los Angeles. From this moment, all the viewers just knew that dam would get destroyed at some point in this film! The main character, a construction engineer, who is having an affair with a younger woman, with possible even a son, is followed in the film. He is struggling with his wife who tries to convince her dad to use his influence to stop her husband from seeing his mistress. At the same time, there is a stunt man who is going after the sister of his friend, and a grocery shopkeeper who goes mental in the film when he has to join the reserve army. And meanwhile, while this is all going on, basically a major, unimaginable large earthquake strikes Los Angeles. One little PhD student saw it coming and tried to get the mayor to evacuate the city, but without success as his supervisor is jealous and doesn’t believe him.

The remainder of the film sees devastation, people hurt, houses falling, sometimes twice (!), others dropping out of buildings and a great scene in which people are lowered two floors down tied to a desk chair using a fire hose – next to a completely open building as the earthquake has torn off the side wall and part of the staircase. Not the best time to have a heart attack! One of the silliest things in the film was the fact that the emergency hospital was established in the basement of a 20 stories high shopping mall, with 3 floors of parking garage. Of course, an aftershock occurs, which buries all the wounded and doctors in this building, leaving us with Charles Heston to be the hero. Getting underground, he manages to find his loved ones, both his wife and his mistress and he has to choose who to save. But he knows what he is supposed to do for which he pays with his life…

The history of this film is actually quite interesting, and specially its impact on the cinema viewers as well. The film was inspired by the San Fernando Earthquake, which shook Los Angeles in the early morning hours of February 9, 1971, which led the director to create a disaster film that would not be confined to just one area. Special effects were developed especially for the film, including a revolutionary “Shaker Mount” camera system, where the entire camera was moved around. The film set the Hollywood record for the most stunt artists involved in any film production up until then: 141. In some scenes, 6 tons of reinforced concrete was dropped to flatten cars, with stunt men just a few feet away.

Most interestingly, Universal Studios wanted Earthquake to be an “Event film” – which would keep drawing in the public. They came up with a process called Sensurround – a series of large speakers and a 1500 Watt amplifier, that would pump up the infra bass sound waves at 120 dB, (equivalent to a jet airplane at takeoff) giving the viewer the sensation of an earthquake. Upon testing, the system already managed to crack the plaster in the ceiling for which nets where placed to catch any falling debris. However, when the film was released, the system caused quite a few nosebleeds, safety issues in numerous buildings and loss of inventory in nearby shops as the shelves were thrown down during the quake scenes.

• Favourite quote: What’s the point about learning how to predict earthquakes if you don’t do anything once you know how to predict them?! (poor PhD student).
• Hero: The PhD student that tries to convince all the big grown-ups that he can predict an earthquake, but no one listens…
• Best save: Climbing up a fire hose 20 floors above the streets to save the father of your wife who you’re cheating on and who is having a heart attack anyway.  
• Best piece of science: They had three component seismographs! On the other hand though, they think they can predict earthquakes…
• Overall review: The opinions differed greatly. Personally, I thought it was a nice film, but most BSFN-ites disagreed and didn’t like the fact that nothing more than 1 earthquake happened. Definitely not worse than SharktopuS!
• Total number of BSFN-ites: 9? Still confined space compatible.
 (Written by Vulkaantje).

BSFN 11 - Mega Fault

Bad Science Film Night 11 is the straight-to-DVD / TV movie classic - MEGAFAULT. Made by the studio that brought us the legendary bad science film, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, and starring Brittany Murphy, Benton from ER and the nasty man from X2, it had all the making of a classic bad science film....

The story starts with Benton from ER doing some detonating related to mining, but for some reason the explosions start a terrible chain reaction and there is a lot of terrible shaking. Benton from ER, who is called Boomer (ha! because he makes things go BOOM!) has enough time to jump into his car and drive away along a road - but the crack chases him! And keeps chasing him! Oh no!

We then cut to an important meeting of scientists in Washington DC, where seismologist, Dr. Amy Lane (Brittany Murphy) is receiving an award, apparently for being the only seismologist in the whole of the US. She, her husband and five year old daughter were certainly the only people at the meeting of important science people who knew to shelter under a sturdy table in the event of an earthquake. As Dr. Amy is the only scientist who might possibly be able to study this earthquake, she gets helicoptered off to the site of the earthquake, where she rescues Boomer from a hole in the ground and just escapes more earthquake related damage. 

More catastrophic disaster stuff happens, including all the planes in the air being unable to safely fly (and guess who is on a plane when this happens - Dr. Amy's family!!). The earthquake continues to travel across America, like a propagating crack (which is not really how earthquakes are likely to work), and many people are injured. Boomer has to blow up a portaloo, so Dr. Amy can steal a helicopter to save her family, blah blah blah.  But fortunately Dr. Amy then ends up in some underground military base, with control over a secret piece of military hardware.....

Look, look! It's a tectonic weapon!!! (images taken from the Asylum's MegaFault mini site) 

This tectonic weapon was a "phase beam" that made the lithosphere very cold, at which point it reacted with the molten mantle (ARG!!!!!!) and caused an earthquake.... We were excited by the use of proper words like lithosphere but that was really overwhelmed by anger relating to the "molten mantle". 

Fortunately the tectonic weapon should allow the military people to stop the earthquake, or at least divert it, because if the earthquake reaches the west coast it will be an extinction event! Naturally these things don't go to plan, and this means Yellowstone is going to be a super volcano. People around Yellowstone then burst into flames because the ground is so hot, but they don't notice it's warm until they spontaneously combust....

But it's OK - if Boomer blows some things up, or more specifically blows the same thing up on a loop for nearly ten minutes, then Wyoming will be like the Grand Canyon, a place with magical earthquake/crack stopping powers. By this point we just had to bow to the majesty of the relentless bad science. 

Bad Science Film Night 11 - MEGAFAULT

• Favourite Tagline: A crack in the world has started... we have 24 hours to stop it.
• Premise: Irresponsible miners trigger a crack/earthquake, which propagates across the US, causing havoc and threatening the whole world!
• Worst piece of science: The molten mantle!!!! Dude!!!! As a deep Earth seismologist with a particular interest in the mantle this majorly irritates me! The mantle as a whole is not molten, it's is just melty in a few places, and it melts at ridges due to decompression melting!!!!!!!! ARG!!!!!! I suppose the "phase beam" is really bad science too, and the inexplicable barrier nature of the Grand Canyon, but nobody will actually believe those bits of science. Remember, the mantle is a solid, that is why S-waves can travel through it. 
• Best DVD extra: The making of documentary that told us two exciting things; that to get a shot of the helicopter flying the film crew had to hang around a medical rescue heli-pad, and that this whole movie was filmed in 14 days.
• Unresolved questions: Was it Boomer blowing stuff up at the beginning that triggered the MASSIVE earthquake? Or were the bad military testing their tectonic weapon?
• Overall review: So much repeated footage! So few seismologists in the whole world! But the director clearly enjoyed making his film, and we enjoyed yelling at it every 5 minutes. Terrible movie in many ways, but a good bad science film.
• Total number of BSFNight-ites: 8, excellent turnout!

Elevator to the Centre of the Earth

Thanks to an eagle eyed BSFN attendee we can start planning our Bad Science Film Night field trips for 2012 already! Ice Age 4 is out 13th July 2012, so assuming that end of the world panic hasn't left us with a need to make our last 5 months on Earth filled with meaning and not Bad Science Films (see here for why it's all going to be OK), then we had better put it in our diaries. July isn't term time so it can replace the Friday teatime seminar! 

Unfortunately we may have to have an Ice Age film marathon so we're all up to speed with the series so far. My understanding of the storyline is that it deviates quite a bit from real Earth history, so all the geology degrees in the world won't help us to understand what is going on. The physicists amongst us probably won't notice the terrible geological anachronisms though...