Logjammin'

I think Joel McHale on The Soup was the first one to make the obvious connection between the movies on the Sci-fi Channel and pornography. Even though I can't take credit for this brilliant observation, I will write a whole blog post about it! Joel, try and stop me.

Pornography...and also Bollywood movies, come to think of it...are produced on small budgets and completed within days. The audience for porn wants variety and content but not necessarily quality. Copious amounts of money shots and tits and ass definitely balance out that fact that the story lines in porns are seriously lacking. Also the acting sucks. [ha-ha]

Sci-fi Channel movies are pretty much the same. Sci-fi Channel executives know that these movies are going to be terrible, so they spend a lot of time figuring out how to dress-down their lead actresses and dress up their opening credits. Sci-fi Channel movies cater towards a select group of people and they know their audience. The audience for these movies wants blood, action, weird creatures, B-list actors quipping easily-quotable dialogue and cleavage. (Cleavage is important because you can't show straight nudity on Sci-fi.) Bruce Campbell has made quite a few Sci-fi Channel appearances and recently I watched King Cobra starring none other than Pat Morita of Karate Kid fame.

The movies on Sci-fi usually revolve around some sort of creature whose origins are unknown and whose strengths are great but who can easily be taken down by some backwater sheriff and his deputy/girlfriend/mother-in-law/hand-me-down "lucky" pistol. I'm pretty sure that in the Sci-fi Channel offices there is a giant hat with folded up pieces of paper inside that writers and interns pick from to fill out their Mad-Libs-style script forms. ("noun Jeff Smith wandered into the deserted barn looking for his noun. He had with him his trusty noun, so he knew he would be alright if the angry noun that the locals had spotted turned up and verb-ed him.")

By far, apart from seeing someone like Pat Morita get fanged to death by a gigantic king cobra, the best parts of Sci-fi Channel movies are the titles. Alien Apocalypse, King Cobra, Mammoth, Rock Monster, Basilisk: The Serpent King, Boa vs. Python, Frankenfish, Man With the Screaming Brain, Supergator, Man-Thing. I want to watch them all again and again! A certain type of paradise exists where all the movies follow Sci-fi's formula: mutant creatures from the deep/outer space/pond-behind-your-house, crazy action, zany one-liners, actors I've never heard of, topped off with sweaty boobs and machine guns.

It's not just the adherence to an unwritten code of "ethics" that connects porn and sci-fi movies, it's also the variety that appears on the Sci-fi Channel on any given day. Porn viewers like variety and there's no telling what they'll want to watch next. Sci-fi Channel viewers are the same. Take a look at a cross-section of this coming weekends' fare: Fire Serpent, Pterodactyl, Dragon Wars, Fire and Ice, Chupacabra: Dark Seas, Sasquatch Mountain, Monster Ark, It Waits, King Cobra. This isn't even all of the movies playing this Saturday and Sunday! (Oh, and if you want to see Pat Morita get fanged to death by a gigantic king cobra, set your DVR's for Monday morning at 1am.)

If you have never tuned in to the Sci-fi Channel for some of these movies, then you are definitely missing out. You will get to see things that you normally wouldn't get to see like aliens that look like praying mantises eating off people's heads in one gulp and women getting their clothing torn/licked off by a large serpent. (And when it comes down it, who in the hell wouldn't want to see that?) Sure the movies suck, sure the story lines are hackneyed, sure the acting would've been accomplished to great acclaim by cardboard cutouts instead of actual people, but watching the Sci-fi Channel, wondering what the next crazy movie is going to be, is a fun way to kill a Sunday afternoon. So you can go rent The Devil in Miss Jones 5 or you can watch Decoys wherein a gaggle of sorority girls are taken over by aliens who use their bodies to impregnate men because their alien race is dying out. It doesn't make much difference to your brain. Since your body cannot chemically tell the difference between being in love or eating chocolate, it won't be able to differentiate between a hot scene of DP-DA and a mammoth using its trunk to suck out a person's life force.