The Asylum

As a quick follow on from yesterdays post I’d thought I’d draw your attention towards The Asylum, the studio which was responsible for Mega Shark VS Giant Octopus and a whole pantheon of movies equally worthy of the title worst film ever.

The Asylum is an independent budget studio who has produced bucket-loads of films with an average cost of about £500,000 each, which is actually faintly impressive considering how difficult it is for indie studio and how much movies cost these days. My admiration for Asylum stops there though. What The Asylum specialise in is a genre known affectionately as “Mockbusters” and less so as “blatant rip-offs made to cash in on a Hollywood hits success.”

Their filmography consists of titles like, The Da Vinci Treasure, Alien Vs Hunter, I Am Omega, Pirates of Treasure Island, Snakes on a Train, and Transmorphers. While the films tend not to follow their doppelgangers plots too closely they are almost unwaveringly released a couple of weeks before or after them.

I guess it just gets on my nerves, films are supposed to be works of art, not opportunistic money grabbing ventures.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

Last night I had the misfortune of watching Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. You know the one right? The one with the ridiculous trailer that went viral and looked like it would become Snakes on a Plane all over again? If not it is worth a watch

It looked like it was going to be B-movie heaven. In reality it was…..really, really boring. 90% of the film consists of pointless, dull dialogue, delivered by wooden actors playing characters who were bland and uninteresting. It was amateurish in a manner which wasn’t even funny. I thought there would at least be some moments which would be comically awful, or some impressively over the top action sequences but it was pretty lacking in both. All of the best parts of the film are shown in the trailer and if you’ve watched it there’s almost no need to watch the rest of the film

There are also glaring continuity errors, in one scene a jet is sent to fight the giant octopus and yet every time it cuts back to a shot of the jet it is different. An F-15 one moment, an F-22 the next. I don’t think they did it on purpose either…

Some scenes just don’t make sense; I still don’t know what caused the awkward Mexican stand-off on board the submarine, or even why the submarine crew would need guns. And then there’s the characters introduced near the beginning that are then forgotten for the rest of the film…I should probably stop pointing out its flaws now…I think you’ve probably realised that I don’t recommend it.

The thing is I am a fan of this type of modern pulp cinema. One of my favourite ways to spend the night is on the sofa with a couple of mates, a godawful film and more than a couple of beers. Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus is not worth buying though, it really does suck. lots.

Ahoy again.

Thrilling news all.

First off I haven’t abandoned this blog, I merely had to stick it on hiatus for a while due to a couple of reasons of my own. Secondly it’s getting a full revamp and I’ve just bought myself a domain name and am just in the process of setting up the rest of the site so very soon this blog shall be moving over to Meanderthal.co.uk and changing it’s name to match. Content wise the site should be staying the same for the immediate future although eventually the plan (or perhaps pipedream) is to use it to become a Digital Nomad, travelling and using the funds that I’ll hopefully raise from blogging about my travels to pay for more travels. That’s the plan anyway but I still need to finish uni before I can go travelling again so up until that point it’s just going to the place for general stuff.

So there you go, I’m not dead, and I haven’t given up on blogging. Which is nice.

The Laughter Track

I’ve been working on another blog for the past couple of weeks, It’s for one of the Online units of my Jounalism degree but is also an outlet for my interest in TV Comedy.

Check it out at Laughtertrack.wordpress.com 

It’s full of News, reviews and analysis on all things Comedy on TV.

A Few Reflections

I haven’t posted for a while because of things have been a bit hectic and to be honest I think I lost a bit of steam with keeping this blog going. So as a way of kicking myself back into gear I think it might be a bit useful to take a look at the some of the things that I’ve found useful in developing this blog, and highlight some of the things which might be usful for others trying to grow a fledgling blog.

1. The most important thing I’ve found out is that you need to post regularly. Not necessarily every day, but on a regular basis so that your readers can know when to expect having something to read. Readers will also check back more regularly if they can expect to find something new. It’s something I’ve been guilty of not observing recently and my blog traffic has suffered because of it. A good way of keeping blog ideas coming and being able to post regularly is to make lists of possible ideas of blog posts that you can work on at a later date, rather than having to come up with an idea every day.

2. Social networking is also a really vital way of bringing new readers in. I think Twitter is probably responsible for about half of my new traffic at the moment and facebook was really useful for letting all my friends know about the blog at first, most of whom are now regular readers and have sent links on to their friends. The thing with social networks though is that there’s so many of them and they’re constantly changing so it can be hard to keep up with them and really get to grips with more than a couple of them. However they are well worth using especially if you can use them to join up with other bloggers in a similar vein. I think the trick is to just try all of them and work out which networks are most effective for you. My project for this week is to really get to grips with Digg and work out how to use it to my advantage.

3. Commenting on other blogs is an essential part of blogging. It’s along similar lines to my point about social networking, but no-one is going to to just randomly visit your blog if you don’t tell anyone about it or interact with anyone else. I quite often try to seek out other similar blogs and comment on interesting posts they may have, partly to add something to the conversation, partly in the hope that people will then follow my comment back to my blog (there’s a setting on wordpress that turns your name into a link to your blog). I struggled at first finding similar blogs to mine, because I cover such a range of topics but WordPress’s tag surfer is quite a useful way to do this.