Space has some weird deal with movie distributors in that it plays a lot of crappy movies over and over again. I’ve seen, multiple times on Space:

• Wing Commander
• The Hulk
• Daylight (this one isn’t even sci-fi)
• Solaris
• The Astronaut’s Wife

I’m sure I’m missing a couple that I can’t recall at the moment. Anyways, they sandwich these in between “good”, feature movies. They advertise the good movies weeks in advance, over and over again, to a point where I can’t figure out when they’re actually going to show them until they do. They did this with Sphere a few weeks back, the comic-book-movie month they had a year ago (which also included The Hulk), and the X-Men weekends they are having now.

To prevent themselves from repeating the recent, crappy movies (see list above), Space also shows a lot of what seems like 70s or 80s b-movies. This really sucks because I think there are a lot of sci-fi movies that they NEVER play. A.I., Dune, and Star Wars comes to mind (I think they showed Blade Runner at some point), which coincidently have big-name directors associated with them. I guess they are too cheap for the good stuff.

Actually, (and somewhere along the line this blog became a Space cheapness rant,) they do seem to save a lot of budget. They play the same basement-interviews with nerdy collectors between shows and their weekly news feature (Hypaspace) is just MovieTelevision in disguise.

It’s not all bad though. Space has been playing two interesting mini-series lately; Bryan Singer’s (Superman Returns, X-Men) The Triangle and The Lost Room. I also saw two interesting (although late-night) movies on Space recently. Beneath the Bermuda Triangle and Cube 2: Hypercube. Although neither are worth paying to see, they both had plot twists as part of the denouement which are fun. They should make ten-minute movies with only plot twists.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: movies, rant, tv