We all know the former third home of MST3K for dishing out a bunch of cheapie and quickie B-movies, usually involving outlandish disasters, man-eatin’ beasties on the streets, or both. They were so ubiquitous on the channel that they even devoted time on their 20th anniversary special to self-celebrate their badness. In fact, a proprietor of made-for-TV junk even had a dedicated brand for these types of flicks.
Recently, however, I noticed that outside of the Sharknado franchise and some other fishy films, Syfy hasn’t been putting out much new “original movies” as they used to. In fact, online listings of their notable titles often go up to 2014; after that, their output is rather sporadic. The films that do premier on the channel weren’t tailor-made for it (i.e. The Banana Splits Movie) and I don’t even know if the ones Wikipedia classifies as Syfy Originals even aired on the network at all, let alone in the States.
As a result, making creature features or disaster movies isn’t a huge priority for those same TV production houses now (except for The Asylum, of course) as they’re too busy filling up Hallmark and Lifetime’s schedules with tried-and-true formulaic fluff and stuff. And this has left us with even cheaper B’s on the marketplace if you can believe it.
Maybe that’s just my perspective as I haven’t been up to speed with what Syfy’s doing these days as much as I want to. Is there something I’m missing or has the network moved on from bringing us such wonderful cheese wrecks?
Ah yes, the abominations that are “A Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie”. I saw parts of a few of them, pre-“Syfy”[sic], but could take no more. Watching them actually made me angry that they had ever been made.
Some poor, self-torturing soul at Letterboxd has made a list of these movies going through 2018. (And has apparently watched most or all of them.)
Looked at that list and I’ve only seen 2% of them.
Naturally I had to use the filters to see what those movies were.
The 2 Sharknado’s, and I can blame Rifftrax for those.
Painkiller Jane, Lightspeed and -oh lord- Man-Thing… because I was watching all these comic book movies at the time.
And Dog Soldiers, because I heard it was pretty good, and it actually wasn’t half bad, a little dumb in spots, but if memory serves, I liked it well enough. Was it a syfy? I didn’t know that - I think I rented the disc.
