Giant Freakin Robot

Some of the greatest feats in cinema , made by the greatest directors Hollywood has had to offer, have been of the science fiction genre. On the flip side, a lot of the worst atrocities to ever make it past the greenlighting stage have also been science fiction movies. To go from Alien to Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, you have to take a big mental step backward. I find you can judge someone based on the distinction of them saying, “I liked The 5th Element” as opposed to, “The 5th Element was a good movie,” both of which are poorly-thought out sentences anyway. But if anyone knows anything about bad sci-fi more than the fans themselves, it’s the guys behind MST3K and Rifftrax, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett.

Rifftrax recently held a “Worst Movies of All Time” online survey, which received over 500,000 votes. People on the Internet pointing out shit they think is terrible? What a crazy idea! You can be damned sure the results revealed a lot about what we already know as people, such as Twilight and its sequels being the Worst Movies of All Time. But you didn’t need a list for that. Just a functioning brain.

But you might not have paused to think that almost a third of the Top 25 films would be sci-fi flicks. Even removing fantastical movies in the superhero genre (Batman and Robin, Catwoman), non-science eco-horrors (The Happening, Birdemic), and moronic video game movies (Super Mario Bros., there are still eight genre films whose obvious errors cemented their laughable fates.

With only seven months until its release, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium is quickly becoming one of the standouts in a year full of interesting science fiction movies. The social allegory involving Matt Damon’s Max trying to find salvation on an orbiting space station while Sharlto Copley’s Kruger is pursuing him has captured the imagination of sci-fi genre fans. Now you can take a first look at Sharlto Copley’s villain character – Kruger – in the image below.

This past week gave us two news stories seemingly culled from the first acts for two dumb-as-shit Syfy movies of the week. From the as-yet-unsolved to the as-yet-uncloned, the lines are blurred between animal and monster, and I wouldn’t want to run into either of these things in my backyard.

Shelby County, KY has seen a number of strange animal attacks at farms in the area. Farmer Kevin Cox has had a goat with one ear bitten completely off, with another barely hanging on. His steer bulls were later found covered in blood with their ears missing. Another farmer in the area had five goats whose injuries were bad enough to warrant being put down. Others have also reported the night attacks, but no one knows what’s causing them.

Luckily, there weren’t any asinine cryptozoology assumptions made involving the beast’s origins being supernatural or something similar. A woman did tell county officials she and her daughter were followed by an animal making an “indescribable” sound, but that’s as wild as it gets. Searches and traps are being utilized to try and identify the ear-loving culprit. Maybe it’s ashamed of its weird noise so it tries taking away the hearing abilities of its prey.

From rural farmland to oceans of the past, Nature‘s Scientific Reports reports with size adjusted accordingly, the long-extinct mega-piranha (Megapiranha paranensis) probably had the deadliest bite of any non-dinosaurs, beating out the
giant Megalodon shark. (No comparisons were made to the Sharktopus, so I guarantee nothing in this column.) The 20-to-30 pound fish lived between 6 million and 10 million years ago in South America before the Andes Mountains were created, thus destroying their natural habitat and diminishing their seafood buffet.

Study co-author Justin Grubich of the American University of Cairo, and his research team, studied the biting power of the modern black piranha, a 2-pound “weakling” whose jaws generate up to 72 pounds-force, around 35 times their weight. Because their jaw muscles extend almost all the way up to their front teeth, this gives the fish the power to bite through flesh and cartilage like people bite through piranha-shaped chocolates. Extrapolating from that data, the researchers concluded the mega-piranha exerted between 279 and 1,067 pounds-force, depending on its size, giving it strength 9 to 50 times its own weight. By extreme comparison, the bite of a Tyrannosaurus Rex ranged from around 7,800 to 12,800 pounds-force, while the human jaws hit from 270-290 pounds-force.

I’m not saying that long dead deadly fish are responsible for biting the ears off of midwestern goats and cows. But I’m not saying it’s impossible. Because that would be stupid.

It’s a slow road to production but casting for Guardians of the Galaxy is just hitting its stride. Last month, the shortlist for casting the character Peter Quill/Star-Lord revealed Joel Edgerton, Jack Huston, Jim Sturgess, Lee Pace, and Eddie Redmayne were up for the role. Now it seems like Marvel has whittled down their selections to Jim Sturgess and a surprise entry not on the shortlist, actor Zachary Levi.

It’s interesting Zachary Levi surfaced as a contender to play the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy because he was once up for the role of Fandral in the movie Thor in 2011. His commitments to his TV series Chuck on NBC proved to be problematic for Levi and Marvel because he was replaced by actor Joshua Dallas. Now that Thor: The Dark World has shown a scheduling conflict for Dallas, Levi was cast to play Fandral in the sequel film. If Levi gets the role of Star-Lord, he would play two different characters in the Marvel universe.