Janine McCaw's Blog: SUPERNATURAL CENTRAL - Posts Tagged "syfy"

C'mon. You like to mock them as much as I do. Those classic titles made for America's SyFy channel that usually air here in Canada on Space. Classic titles like END OF THE WORLD, PIRANACONDA, and MEGAPYTHON vs. GATOROID. Movies that give us implausible plots that would never ever happen. Until Friday.


Friday was the day the world's top scientists didn't see the asteroid heading towards earth, crashing through the atmosphere at a mega speed that caused sonic booms to knock out glass in Chelyabinsk injuring somewhere between 250 and 1000 people. I know that's a big difference in casualties but maybe something got lost in the translation. What if SCIENCEGEEK #2 really did have the satellite feed turned to the porn channel on his watch and lo and behold all hell broke loose. Apparently it could happen.
Those events are a SyFy movie waiting to happen. I`m working on a title for the script now. ATTACK OF THE COSMOSPHERE or maybe RETURN OF THE COLD WAR. I mean, that`s what happened to the dinosaurs, right? The giganta rock falls from the sky and then whamo ... total extinction, or at least ninety minutes worth.
Some of the movies are filmed on the West Coast, and you can usually tell those ones because the catastrophic events hit the eastern seaboard of our continent, or South America. We don`t like to kill our own. Every once and a while the funding goes to an eastern prodco and Seattle takes a hit. Unless there are zombies. Zombies to try to head to Canada. I don't know why this is.


Maybe that`s why Canada`s Foreign Minister John Baird stood up in Parliament and announced that zombies were a no-go zone in Canada.
"I rise today to salute the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the province of Quebec for putting in place emergency measures to deal with the possibility of an invasion of zombies," Martin said. "I do not need to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that zombies do not recognize borders and that a zombie invasion in the United States could easily turn into a continent wide pandemic if it is not contained."


He continued: "On behalf of concerned Canadians everywhere, I want to ask the Minister of Foreign Affairs — is he working with his American counterparts to develop an international zombie strategy, so that a zombie invasion does not turn into a zombie apocalypse?"

Yes, he really said that. Just this week. Who says politicians aren't insightful?


I like to think that what our elected official was really trying to say is that we should be prepared in case, you know, a flesh-eating type of disease meets a SARS-like virus that creates an uncontrollable hunger and we`re all really in trouble. But that`s as likely to happen as space debris hitting Russia, right?


Maybe we all had better pay a little more attention to those crazy flicks. Somehow the earth seemed safer last week.

This is an update on my earlier SNARKNADO blog found on SUPERNATURALCENTRAL.Blogspot.CA


SUPERNATURAL CENTRAL NEWS FLASH!! – Congrats to guest Karen Lam (Meet the Scream Queen, June 9'th, 2013) for "THE MEETING" winning BEST FILM at the Viscera Film Festival held in Los Angeles this month. The festival recognizes the very best horror films by women. http://www.viscerafilmfestival.com/

Now on to this week's post…

CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED "SHARKNADO"

Love it or hate it, and lots of people are on both sides, it's unlikely that you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "SHARKNADO". But just in case you've been in a cabin in the woods with no access to t.v., print, radio or the internet, Sharknado is what you get when sharks meet a tornado. It's also a movie that aired in the U.S. on SyFy and in Canada on SPACE,and UPDATE...(drum roll) is about to get a limited THEATRICAL release!

Yes, it's bad. But just the right amount of bad to fit into the type of movies these two stations love to air and their fans love to watch. Are there really bad computer generated sharks falling from the sky and eating people? Of course there are!

And are there a bunch of TV. names—the kind of names you think "whatever became of"— in it? Again, Yes. This time it's Ian "Ion" Zierling (90210), Tara Reid (Scrubs), Julie McCullough (Growing Pains), to name a few. Enough of them to make TV fans tune in the way we used to for "Battle of the Network Stars". This is SyFy's secret. They've found our addiction and lured us in with all those Alice Cooper/Danny Bonaduce movies. It's like cocaine to us. And before you laugh at the celebs for being in these cheesy movies, how much money did YOU make for a few weeks work lately?

Cheesy? Ian's character is name FIN for cryin' out loud.

But something happened to this otherwise channel-changer flick. SOMETHING SO DANGEROUS IT SPUN OUT OF CONTROL! Twitter. That's right. Twitter. Sharknado trended. And kept trending. And I have to admit I'm guilty. I couldn't resist giving it the old #Sharknado to see what the rest of the twitterverse was talking about. I mean even MIA FARROW was talking about it. The real one.

And that's what made the movie #FUN. Herein lies the magic. If it had been believable, if it had been an Oscar contender, it wouldn't have generated such BUZZ. And buzz is big. So big, that the sequel has already been announced, once again being hemmed by The Asylum. The original reportedly cost only a million dollars to make. You know it's going to make it's money back at that budget. And you just know that more stars want to do them.

In the meantime, I'm going to whip up a title for the next one and enter the @SyFy twitter contest. Who knows…maybe I'll get to fly there and be victim number 12. Sharknado's going to destroy New York and you know that's never good.

UPDATE: The winning title was SHARKNADO 2: The Second One.