Friday, January 28, 2011

Showing How It Is Done

I have been justly hard on the Syfy network for its saturday movies.  Never has so much been wasted on so little actual entertainment value.  But I know some of you folks out there are fair and wise and might ask, "Well Laz, what would you do."  Fair enough, it's six a.m. here at the moment and I'm going to hammer out a proposal for a film that would be more fun than 99% of what they've been putting out.

Now to be fair, I'll handicap myself with the same problems that plague Sfyf movies.  One, nearly no money, and secondly an over reliance of (bad) computer effects over practical effects.  Ok, the first way to deal with the money problem is to go someplace where you can stretch your dollars.  Canada has been popular because it is close and they speak something close to American.  But that's still probably too much money for syfy so I'll pick Romania.  It's seen a lot of movie work since it fell from communism and it is cheaper than dirt.  Plus there are good locations there.  Now the problem comes when you try to pass of Romania as somewhere else.  Unless you have really genius location and production value it can't be done.  So I won't even bother, the film will be set in Romania, and what the hell we'll try to swing for a castle.

Now the computer effects.  Sigh.  The standards actually differ quite a bit from movie to movie.  Sometimes it so bad as to leave you in mouth dropping wonderment as how it got on the screen, sometimes it's actually fair.  However, there are some qualities one can see in the range of effects Syfy uses.  I would say, sadly, that the effects just generally don't do living things that well.  Living things breath and bleed and a host of other things that there just doesn't seem to have the money to handle.  So, it seems to me that I should plan on creating a creature that isn't biological but rather mechanical. 

Oh my yes!  It just came to me!!  Castle in Romania, and robots.  The movie will be called... (wait for it!)

GUARDGOYLES

Now we are rolling.  I can see how this can all work out.  We have our villain.  It's a bad name but I'm going to call him Vlad Temptest for now.  He's a sillicon valley super billionaire and he has moved his company to the land of his fathers.  Here he has outfitted a castle as his headquarters/home.  He has also outfitted the castle with his new toys, homocidal robots that he has sculpted to look like gargoyles.  One reason he is here is that the easily bribed Romania government allows him the leeway to develop a new super cyber weapon that he intends to use for black mail.  As you can tell Vlad is not very stable.  He cycles between a bond villain and nerd.  He never leaves his castle.

Now for the other side, we have people who got wind of what Vlad is up to and they pay big bucks for a team of thieves to go get the macguffin.  They are also told they can keep any cash they free up as well.  Our thieves are led by Tom Peters who is a master thief with a day job as catholic school teacher.  In fact, most of his crew are former students.  Yes, a band of catholic school girl thieves are going to go to romania, sneak into a castle and fight robotic gargoyles.  Come on, is that not better than "Mega quake?"

What say you?
Syfy you know where to find me, and I'm easily bought.

4 comments:

  1. Way better than Mega Quake. You need to submit it to the network powers!! Get it made, as I'd watch it too!!

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  2. they have been having You help make our movie" at syfy but its just multiple choice of their badd ideas.

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