Video Ferox

Given the choice between a pest control product that can’t possibly work and a superfluous sequel that never should have been made, which would you let in your home?

Vin Diesel’s been an inexplicable movie mega-star for enough years that I don’t think The Chronicles of Riddick needs any introduction, but if you’re not a late night TV aficionado you may have missed the commercials for the Riddex pest control product line.  Allow me to fill you in.

As explained on the company’s web site, Riddex Pro is a pest killer like no other.  Why is that?  Because you plug it in your wall.  No, for real.  The product sends “digital pulses” through your house’s wiring that somehow repel everything from rats to cockroaches, yet supposedly cause no harm to humans and pets.  Well, except pet rats.  Those would probably die.  Hedgehogs too.  Choose your pets carefully.

I’ve been doing some crappy research (cresearch?) on this product for a few hours now, and I still have no idea how the hell it’s supposed to work.  It’s something about ultrasonic vibrations or electromagnetic fields or energon cubes or something.  Whatever it is, it’s calibrated just right so as not to scramble your brain.  Or it’s bullshit.  Or it’s not bullshit but it does scramble your brain, and rats and cockroaches are the only ones smart enough to get the hell out of your house before their heads explode.

Given the facts that the Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly fined Riddex for making completely unsubstantiated claims and that used Riddex units sell for like four bucks on eBay, there’s a good chance that it’s bullshit after all.  I still don’t like the idea of spending money on things that might kill me (except for, you know, booze), so I’d prefer to steer clear regardless.  Either way, Riddex loses some serious points against Riddick in our hypothetical little match-up.

Chronicles of Riddick is pretty fucking terrible, though.  In case you didn’t already know, it’s a sequel to Pitch Black, a super-rad sci-fi action movie that was essentially Aliens with a few cool gimmicks and some tasty B-movie grade pulp.  That was made way back in 2000, a slower, less furious time when star Vin Diesel was just some random dude with muscles.  Times changed, however, and Diesel became famous for some reason or another, requiring at least one of his previous movies to have a sequel.  I would have preferred Saving Private Ryan 2, but Hollywood decided to revisit Pitch Black instead.

Oh, and they fucked it up.  Since Pitch Black was such a simple, tight, one-shot premise movie that in no way demanded a sequel whatsoever, the filmmakers of Chronicles decided to use a bloated, LARPer-friendly storyline about space religions and magic mind powers to prop their movie up.  They tried to make this movie high fantasy so hard.  Shit, they even got one of the guys from LOTR to star in it.

But the real offense of Chronicles of Riddick, the thing that makes it such a strong competitor in awfulness to the Riddex pest mindfuck system, is what it did to Pitch Black. All new copies of Pitch Black are now sold as “The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black.” I know it’s just a few words and a colon, but it’s goddamn inhuman to rename an awesome movie after a crappy one.  That aggression will not stand.

So which should you choose?  Which is least terrible?  It pains me to say it, but I’m going with Chronicles of Riddick. I can tolerate a boring series of speeches debating the merits of one imaginary space religion over another, but I can’t tolerate having my head explode when all I wanted to do was get rid of some silverfish.

ADVANTAGE: The Chronicles of Riddick

Tags: commercials, sequels, snake oil, vin diesel

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Sci-Fi, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.