Primetime television sitcoms, on the other hand, are something I have no problem indulging in. Generally, I expect from TV something intelligent, witty, and thoughtful, and I’m seldom let down. Yet, I gotta say, this new offering disappointed me.

The plot was about as slow as the zombies, and the action scenes were — well, about as scarce as the zombies. Where did THE WALKING DEAD go wrong? I mean, the show started out great. I liked when the guy shot that little girl in the beginning. That got me interested enough to sit through the first set of commercials, and then when the show came back with some full-on, guns blazing misogyny, I was pretty hooked.

But then it was all downhill from there.

Dude wakes up in a hospital. Dude wanders around. Meets some people. Has some dinner. I guess this is more fun than watching the cut scenes on the 28 DAYS LATER DVD, right?

The producers didn’t do much to create a sense of tension. The world is supposed to be a dangerous zombie infested war zone, right? Then why are characters sitting around talking out in the open, in broad daylight, without any concern for what might be creeping up behind them. (Hordes of zombies, maybe?) I mean, do the zombies only come out at night? Are they actually vampires? Are they looking for a guy named Neville?

Also, did one scene show people surviving the zombie apocalypse in a tent? I’m sure a good explanation for that will be revealed later, but right now it does seem a bit odd.

If my memory hasn’t failed me, it isn’t until the end of the episode that we see the zombies actually attack anything. And when they do, it’s a horse. So any horses watching the show really had the zombie threat driven home to them and in a way that we human watchers have to wait for.

Of course, we’re told that the zombies attack and eat humans (which of course anyone who’s ever seen a zombie movie already knew, anyway). I wish this information had been shouted as characters were running from zombies though, instead of calmly discussed over tea in a comfortable dining room.

If I seem a bit disappointed, I suppose it’s okay, since judging by their sponsors, I wasn’t really the kind of person they were pitching their sitcom to anyway. I’m not in the market for a new car or a dependable boner pill.

In all fairness, let’s remember that it’s hard to tell how good a series will be from its first episode. It might explode into something awesome. I mean, the special effects were pretty much what they should be, and it was cool seeing on American television the kind of gore that got cut out of the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake back in the nineties. So even if the story sucks at least we’ll have something bloody to look at. I mean, if gore and story are the bread and circuses of the modern horror tale, then we can certainly survive on bread alone.

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.

I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. I tried it before and I was sore for weeks.

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.

Hey, what 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

Netflix is great, but it does have its problems.  There’s the sometimes sheepish recommendations and the murky process known as throttling.  The worst, however, is searching for a movie that’s unavailable.

I’ve racked up a considerable “saved” queue since I began my membership last summer.  The following list is a mere sample of those unavailable titles that I’m itching to see.  Some of these might just be missing from my local distribution center, while I’m sure others are either out of print or never were in print.  Here’s hoping they make the jump to “very long wait” soon.

Cronos

im in ur mooveez. direktin ur hobits.

I want to write an article called “Guillermo del Toro: Hack or Genius?” but I figure I need to see this (Del Toro’s first feature length film) first.  I never know what to expect with this guy, and Cronos is no exception.  It’s about alchemy and vampires and stuff, so it might be in the vein of Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, but it also has Ron Perlman and… well, vampires and stuff, so it might be closer to Hellboy and Blade II. At any rate, I’d like to see this before The Hobbit comes out.

Sleuth

It’s a mystery movie that pits Laurence Olivier against Michael Caine.  It’s also recommended by my dad.  Now, other people’s dads might just tell them to see Animal House or Stripes, but my dad’s previous picks have included A Boy and His Dog, Omega Man, and other 70s gems he saw working at a movie theatre in high school, so I can safely assume that this movie’s awesome.  Yes, I know there was a remake with Michael Caine in Olivier’s role and Jude Law in Caine’s, but I have about as much enthusiasm for that as I did for the Alfie remake.  I want the real thing.

Blue Gender: Disc Two

Gah, seriously?  So they have Blue Gender, but they’re missing the second disc?  I saw this anime series when Adult Swim ran the dubbed version a few years back, which is why I’m so pissed that the second disc is missing.  See, in the series’ first half (discs one to three), this was a show about survival, courage, and tremendous gore that could best be described as a cross between Aliens and 28 Days Later. However, in its second half (discs four to six) Blue Gender devolved into yet another bland Neon Genesis Evangelion clone about giant robots and teenage melodrama.  Netflix is never gonna replace just one disc, so it looks like I’ll have to buy the whole set, terrible discs included.

PRO TIP: If you do a Google Images search for "no escape" you're gonna find a whole lot of bondage pics.

No Escape

This delightful piece of mid-90s sci-fi action schlock used to make the rounds on cable TV but has since fallen into obscurity.  That’s a shame too, since it’s got Ray Liotta, Lance Henriksen, and the bad guy from Blank Check. (If you’re wondering, the plot concerns an island prison colony divided into good and evil camps, kind of like Lord of the Flies with grownups.)  Also, as a friend points out, it’s one of the few non-gay porno movies out there to feature an all-male cast.  I guess I can’t complain too much about Netflix not having a movie that I only plan on enjoying semi-ironically, but I still hope a copy comes their way.

Nine years later and I'm still waiting.

I spent most of December 31st, 1999 sitting in my room listening to Quartet for the End of Time with the lights turned off, pondering exactly how all existence would cease at the stroke of twelve.  Around ten o’clock my friends convinced me to go out to some New Year’s party, arguing that the apocalypse would be better experienced communally.  We were all gonna die together anyway, so why not hear each others’ screams as the heavens split in twain?

Then the ball dropped.  Dick Clark’s face was not melted off by a hydrogen bomb.  I was fucking pissed.

A little over three years earlier, FOX premiered a greatly hyped, highly anticipated show called Millennium. It featured much of the same creative team as The X-Files (most notably executive producer Chris Carter), but promised to be a darker, grittier show.  (Its tagline was “his curse is your salvation.”  Way cooler than “the truth is out there,” right?)  Millennium almost was the crazy, terrifying super X-Files it aspired to be, but (just like the real millennium) it came up short in the end.

The show followed retired FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen, not the dude from the Pixies) as he hunted down serial killers, cultists and terrorists whose crimes seemed to portend a coming millennial apocalypse.  Millennium aired during the notoriously difficult Friday night spot and suffered on the ratings front from early on.  The show’s creative team tried damn near everything to get people to watch (often with disastrous results), but I think most of the series’ ills can simply be traced to how the show began.  Observe this real, unaltered frame from the title sequence:

Like, WTF?  It’s Friday night.  You have the option of sitting at home alone to watch a serial killer show or going to your local roller rink for some make-out action.  I’m no TV genius, but putting the words “who cares” in there was probably not the best idea.  However, if somehow you resisted the urge to lace up your skates, you would often be treated to a pretty rad show.

The show's filled with shit like this.

The pilot episode, about a prophecy-obsessed killer who passes judgment on prostitutes, strippers and other sinners, remains one of the scariest, coolest things ever shown on TV.  The grimy shots of a seedy, decaying city framed by perpetually rainy exteriors was television for kids raised on Doom, Se7en and Nine Inch Nails.  In it, Frank combines a preternatural profiling ability (he can “see what the killer sees,” though he asserts that he’s not psychic) with old fashioned detective work and a deep knowledge of prophetic hokum to find the killer.  There’s a surprising amount of action and a healthy serving of blood and gore.  It rocks.  But with a tighter budget and faster shooting schedule the series had difficulty sustaining what the pilot had established.  Many episodes struggle to find their voice.

Some of Millennium‘s problems come from the ways it tried to set itself apart from The X-Files. For one thing, there were no funny episodes (in the first season at least), but more dangerously, they gave the main character a life.

Oh wait, that's Roy Scheider.

While all we know about Agent Mulder revolves around porno, Frank Black is a family man with a wife and child.  He even has real, non-phone-sex-related friends.  Friend and family time in Millennium is usually a drag though, and Frank’s conversations with his amazingly supportive wife seem like bland filler compared to Mulder and Scully’s semi-flirty argue-fests.  Frank’s wife was even given her own episode, an emo mope-athon about child molestation that’s easily the worst thing in the first season.

There are still plenty of episodes that managed to translate The X-Files’ monster-of-the-week formula into a non-supernatural killer-of-the-week show.  My favorite is “Broken World,” where Frank teams up with a plucky female veterinarian (who just happens to be a redhead…) to stop a slaughterhouse worker who’s switched from killing horses to people.  Unfortunately, instead of cranking out more episodes like this one, by season’s end the show switched to supernatural storylines and heavy handed, make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythologies.  Millennium was doomed to the same fate as X-Files.

That's him, right? Okay good.

More and more supernatural eschatological bullshit crept into Millennium until the show was unceremoniously dumped at the end of its third season.  The ersatz series finale can be found jammed into a boring, late season X-Files about New Year’s Eve, 1999 where Mulder tracks down Frank for some reason or another.  Whatever.

What makes the apocalypse mythology episodes of Millennium so frustrating (aside from being generally crappy) is that, you know, the apocalypse didn’t happen.  It was all bullshit.  When the Millennium Group (the nerdy Phoenix Foundation sans duct tape to which Frank belongs) talks about fighting the “rising violence in society,” I can’t help but laugh.  Remember World War II?  On average, fewer and fewer people have died per year since that shit ended.  Gah, whatever.  This was still a cool show.  Maybe I’m just still bitter about that New Year’s party.

Before I go, I want to clear up something I may have implied in a previous post.  I love Lance Henriksen.  I love that he stars in a billion damn movies a year.  He was the sole redeeming factor of Alien vs. Predator, and I hope that if they ever make a movie out of Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator they find a way to cram him in it.  I don’t care if he comes back as Bishop, Weyland or Detective Hal Vukovich.  Put him in the damn thing and it will be awesome.

Odds of being the final girl increase with squinting.

Harper’s Island, CBS’s high-concept, imagination-free slasher series premiered tonight.  Now, I don’t mind dumb slashers, but this show was a chore.  After 40 minutes of tedious backstory and bland melodrama, the show managed to squeeze in a measly 2 minutes of cat scares and 30 seconds of actual slashing.  All of this was without any of the gore, nudity or swear words that make real slashers fun.

Maybe things will pick up after the premiere, but Harper’s seems content to follow the Heroes model of constant cliffhangers and abundant schlock.  Luckily, we’ve been promised the show will end after 13 episodes.

This week’s AVQ&A is “What movie/TV show/album/whatever would you like to be able to see/hear again for the first time?” There’s the usual smattering of the slightly pretentious and the heart-warmingly sweet, but no one gave my answer. So I’m going to rectify that.

The X-Files. Stay with me now.

It’s the mid-90s and I’m 14 or 15 years old. I’ve got really long, scraggly hair, big ‘ol round glasses, and the requisite acne. I’m also one of the good kids, who reads a lot, avoids all mentions of sex and sin, is really into science, and implicitly trusts all authority figures. My sister and I are two years apart (she’s the younger one) and we’ve never really gotten along. Until.

Until one weekend my sister stayed with our grandparents because our folks were out of town (I think I was with them, and thus missed out on this experience) and came home talking about this new show she’d seen. We didn’t have cable growing up – my dad still doesn’t. Hi, Dad! – but our grandparents did. So she saw the episode “Excelsis Dei” of some FOX show called The X-Files and was hooked. And she hooked me. She hooked me good.

Our grandmother would tape the episodes for us as they aired and we’d be chomping at the bit to go visit grandma and pick up our tapes every few weeks. But in the meantime, there was the internet to keep us entertained. This was back in the heady days of the 90s personal website extravaganza, when everyone had a Geocities or Anglefire page, joke sites were abundant, and I got caught by my English teacher with a printed copy of that “Pooh Goes Apeshit” story. And so we made a website. It’s still there. Well, bits of it are. [Ok, here --- check out the “Signs You’re In X-Files Withdrawal” list that we made. “Three words: Eat. More. Chicken.” Ha ha! Remember that one, guys? Guys?]

No? Ok, moving on.

So it isn’t just the experience of being new to the show that I would love to go through all over again, but also the sensory overload that came with being new to the internet. I didn’t just stumble onto a new and fascinating television show, I was suddenly a member of a community that wasn’t based on geographical location but instead on a shared experience. There were lots of people watching this show! Men, women, teenagers, and grown-ups. And we could communicate with them! It’s a sense of camaraderie that is taken for granted now – this kinship with people you’ve never met over an issue, event, or subject that is (in your group’s opinion) outside of the mainstream. It’s so Web 2.0. We weren’t weirdos for squealing when Mulder and Scully danced at the end of “Post-Modern Prometheus” – lots of other people did the same thing! And then some of them wrote hair-curlingly bad fan fiction about it.

That isn’t to say that the internet community experience trumps the value of the show in my mind. I most definitely do not want to write terrible PG-rated fan fiction again; but I would like to go back to the show and encounter it with an open, adolescent mind that is wholeheartedly in love with everything it sees. These days, I am — as most of us are — a tough audience to please. I expect not only good writing, but good acting, camera movement that isn’t disorienting, and sets and clothing that aren’t totally distracting. The X-Files only gets these right some of the time. The writing? Sometimes not so good, especially in the last few seasons. The whole thing with baby (super-soldier-hybrid-alien-love-child) William was pretty ridiculous. I wasn’t overly fond of Agent Reyes as a character. Mulder really was kind of a dick, wasn’t he? The Lone Gunmen spin-off was superfluous and just not very good. Scully had some really unfortunate pants suits and hair in the early seasons (tapered legs look good on no one). And the mythology is so convoluted that there’s really nothing left to do but laugh at it.

Hi, I’m Samantha Mulder! You may remember me from such storylines as “Help! I’m an Alien-Human Hybrid Clone!" And "Daddy Smokes Morleys."

That said, there is still a lot to love. I find the Gunmen to still be likable and admirable characters even after that spin-off nonsense. Mulder’s porn habit was somehow endearing and not creepy. Baby William was pretty adorable as far as babies go. Skinner was the best boss anyone could hope for (except when he wasn’t). That basement office was pretty damn cool. The storyline with Scully’s cancer was heartbreaking and felt very real. The weekly bit-parts were consistently well-acted and well-cast. “Small Potatoes,” “Bad Blood,” and “Triangle” all had excellent writing. And the relationship between Moose and Squirrel? Someday I will stop hoping for a relationship like that one, but that day has yet to come.

It's not that I don't love you, honey. It's just that you've never flown to Antarctica to rescue me from a secret government laboratory/spaceship. You understand, right?

This show helped me through high school in the way that D&D, Jesus, and alcohol helped other kids. The X-Files gave me a smart and independent female scientist to idolize – one of the first female television characters I can think of who was intelligent, opinionated, and methodical without being cold and bitchy (although that was the rumor ’round the FBI). It was built on science, pseudo-science, and the things we have yet to learn about our world, which I find to be endearingly optimistic. It questioned, teased, commiserated with, and respected its viewers – at least, until the last season or so. It injected teenage me with a healthy dose of cynicism, for which I will always be grateful. And to top it off, it was really fucking weird. I could write so many reviews for so many episodes just because they are really, very odd. Remember the humanoid tapeworm who lived in sewage? Or the inbred, incestuous family with the dismembered, toothless mother? Good times, all of them.

So here’s to oddity, cynicism, and paranoia. Trust no one. Deny everything. Deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. The truth is out there, guys.

(Fight the Future screen cap from http://www.inadream-moviecaps.com/)

Look, I’m just gonna admit this right now. I know you’re all just gonna give me shit about it later anyway, so we might as well get it out of the way first. I FUCKING LOVE SANDRA BERNHARD. I love her and I wanna fill her with wine and flattery and then make sweet Cambodian monkey love to her until her sexy lesbi-paunch swells with my babies. And it’s all because of this old TV show that USA network used to play late night in the mid 90s. If you didn’t watch it, it was because of one of the following three reasons: 1) you were too young, 2) you were too much of a fucking loser, or 3) you were way too cool to spend your Saturday nights watching edited-for-TV versions of exploitation films from the 30s to the 70s introduced and snarkishly commented upon by the most freakishly sexy host on television.

No offense, dude, but I know you ain’t no number 3 case. So either you’ve seen this show, you’re a youngin’, or you’re a loser. You’s pays your nickel and you’s takes your pick. So, listen up, losers, this article is all about one of the greatest and un(der)sung shows of TV history.

REEL WILD CINEMA

Okay, I’ve said it already, but I’ma say it again. I love Sandra Bernhard. First of all, she’s got a fucking superhero cartoon of herself that plays during the credits.

Super Sandra gonna whoop yo ass, boy!

Name one Hollywood bombshell that has her own kickass superhero cartoon. You can’t fucking do it. And in real, non-cartoon life Sandra’s as smooth as the naked thigh of a freshly Naired nudey cutie.

So, you don’t know what Reel Wild Cinema is? You’ll never be able to make that crack after tonight, baby!

Okay, crushes aside, the premise behind the show was sorta like the old Vampira/Elvira sorta shows, where B-picks and horror flicks are shown late night and you have some host pretending to be spooky, making bad Crypt Keeper-esque puns about the films. The difference between Elvira and Reel Wild Cinema is that you get more movies per hour because their team of editors cut all the boring junk out (ya know, like the “plot“) and give us only the shit we came for: blood, boobs, terrible acting, loin-clothed man-piles, raunchy catfight slut-piles, murder freakouts, chick-killin’ Tony’s, implied and overt racism/sexism, etc. In short: Exploitation!!! Exploitation!!! Sexploitation!!! MONDO AWESOMENESS A GOGO!!! Also Sandra doesn’t need to pretend to be spooky. She’s just fucking cool. She’s cool as a godamn female Fonzy that shoots flames of awesomeness from his brain. She sits there in her retro penthouse, lounging out in a swanky party dress, watching kickass movies, and occasionally chattin’ it up with a celebrity guest or two.

Sandra’s clubhouse: That’s a whole lot of trips to the Goodwill.

Sometimes the interviews are pretty boring, sometimes they’re insightful, and occasionally they’re hilarious. A good case of the latter is the one where Sandra interviews Fred “The Hammer” Williamson for the “Sword and Sandal Extravaganza” episode. Williamson has to admit to a misinformed but indefatigable Sandra that he’s never had anything to do with any Sword and Sandal movies. She does a good job of casually laughing it off, but I always wondered if an assistant producer got canned for that one. As far as interviews go, the cream of the crop is probably the dual interview with Lloyd Kauffman of Troma films and Roger Corman. Kauffman overwhelms the conversation, while a timidly polite Corman waits patiently to put in a few choice words.

So here’s a quick history lesson about how the show got started. Ex-Dead Kennedy’s manager Mike Vraney had started a little VHS distribution company called Something Weird Video. (If you have any sort of decent movie collection you own a Something Weird DVD). He was approached by Marty Sokol, who was apparently at the time just a dude with an idea (or maybe he used to work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon?!), and Jimmy Maslon, who owned QC video (which is apparently a post-production facility in LA) which for some obscure reason had the rights to the entire H.G. Lewis and Doris Wishman collections. Marty’s idea was a show that would showcase all the old exploitation flicks that QC and Something Weird Video had the rights to. The three teamed up, pitched the idea around, and eventually USA gave them a slot on their late night roster.

(Just as an aside, Jimmy Maslon worked on both Blood Diner and Blood Feast 2, which, when you think about it, were pretty much the same movie. Does anybody know if Blood Diner was what was left of the failed 80s attempt to make Blood Feast 2, the soundtrack of which was to feature the eponymously titled Misfits song that ended up on their Earth A.D./Wolf’s Blood album? If so, this would explain why Maslon owned the rights to the H.G. Lewis collection: Lewis made the first Blood Feast movie, and they surely would have needed to acquire the rights to make the sequel. But then why was Blood Diner not released as Blood Feast 2. Anybody know the answers? There’s gotta be a great story about this out there somewhere, one that I hope involves Glenn Danzig letting his flaming hot man-fury explode all over some assholes’s face. And in as homoerotic a way as that sentence suggests.)

So those three stooges, Maslon, Vraney and Sokol, are listed as the creators in the credits, but interestingly neither are associated with the show on their IMDB pages. Or on Reel Wild Cinema’s IMDB page. What’s up with that, IMDB? After RWC was cancelled, Marty Sokol went to Britain to work on a similar show called Exploitica, which was more of a Pop-up Video style show with exploitation flicks instead of music videos. I’ve never seen it, so don’t ask me whether it was any good or not.

What was pretty great about Reel Wild Cinema, and what probably got it cancelled was the producer’s desire not to cut anything that was too scandalous or risqué. Like anything awesome, it was all about freaking the squares. Towards the second season though the USA execs got a bit antsy about all the tits and ass and the lazy censoring job which quite often during the first season was awash in nip and ass slippage. During season two the nip and ass police tightened security quite a bit, but they managed to inject a sense of humor into their job that made up for the offensiveness of modern American prudery and its resulting censorship mania that wants to surround with a black tarp anything that might offend the prudest prude in Prudeville. Their creative covering of the “naughty bits” bordered on an art in itself. Witness the following images:

Starship USA: The flagship of American morals.

Word on the street is this is pretty much what got the show shit-canned by the network. The MAN just started forcing those fucking annoying ratings boxes onto TV shows and screens, and Reel Wild Cinema was just too much of a hassle to rate. I guess USA didn’t want to take responsibility if some impressionable old church lady caught a glimpse of an unexpected blacked-boxed wang when the little ratings box omitted the big W for “Beware of Wang.” If a dude can sue a network for catching a glimpse of Jack Tripper’s nutsack on a TV show that originally aired thirty years ago, then I’d say, sadly, USA had a right to be worried. But it’s still fucking stupid. And it’s a shame that censorship mania and boobies-are-bad propaganda is what axe-murdered one of my favorite TV shows.

I wanna say Sandra’s career was doing fine after RWC went under, but . . . .

If you’d like to learn more about Reel Wild Cinema check out this page, the Save Reel Wild Cinema Headquarters, an Angelfire site long since fallen into disrepair. At the time the page was a noble and quixotic effort to bring back a long lost friend. Today it stands as a crumbling relic of a distant time when the internet wasn’t just a tool for social networking and blog douchbaggery. Though I don’t think anyone had any illusions about some kid’s webpage actually forcing a huge corporate television Network intent on world domination to renew a show that only a handful of demographically-challenged rejects watched, I’ll tell you, back in 96 or 97 or whenever it was, this little page gave me hope that we could stretch that peculiar cultural je ne sais quoi of the mid 90s far into the new millennium. But, alas, the times, they were a-changing’. And, at least for me, it was impossible to hold onto that simpler time when the only hard decision in life was whether to keep watching the movie on Joe Bob Brigg’s Monster Vision on TNT or switch a few channels over to USA to see what schlocky piece of trash Sandra was showcasing now. I miss them days.

So, as I was prepairing for this article, I rewatched all my old tapes of the show. I think the year was 97 or 98, and I knew they weren’t gonna rerun RWC for ever. USA had reshown the first season the year earlier and when they started rerunning the second season (I think at 2 o’clock on a Sunday night/Monday morning) it was pretty clear they weren’t gonna re-cycle it again. So I taped as many episodes as I could in a mad rush to preserve the show for my own self-posterity. But now I’m realizing that these tapes are over a decade old and starting to show the wear and tear of the ages, which kinda makes me sad. I mean, I could copy them to DVR, but that just wouldn’t seem right. Watching the original tapes sorta transports me back to those pre-DVD days.

It’s also a show that deserves to be watched on a vintage Television.

So a quick word to you, readers. I only have the second season on tape. If any of you RWC fans out there wanna send me copies of the first season episodes or of the British sister show Exploitica, contact me. I’d really like someday to write an in depth review of each season. You think somebody’d put this shit on youtube.

Anyway, that’s about all I can say about this show for now. So, as Sandra always said . . .

Good mid’night to ya.

And good mid’night to you, Reel Wild Cinema.

– Jason Hepcat