Nuclear Hazard

[captainsblog]

I do very little of the Netflix ordering around here, and that's a good thing. For I have an unfortunate tendency to remember films far more fondly than I really should.

One of them's been sitting around here, unwatched,  for close to a week. Something reminded me of it, weeks back, as being one of those films set, famously badly, in a place I knew, and which, I could tell, the cameramen never got within 100 miles of. In this case, the "place" was Ithaca, and although they looked up a couple of street names to put in the script and tossed up a few posters on the walls, there was no way any of it had been filmed there.

"It" is The Manhattan Project, a 1980s "cautionary tale" about how a boy genius with a cute girlfriend can bring the world to the brink of full-blown nukulur disaster with just things found in his own Trapper Keeper.  I've forever confused it with another one of that trope called War Games, and I've just discovered a bizarre connection between the two.

In the latter film (which actually preceded it by a few years), the boy genius is played by Matthew Broderick, now famously married to Sex in the City star Sarah Jessica Parker. 

In this one? The boy genius is played by the longlost Christopher Collet,  but the cute girlfriend is portrayed by one Cynthia Nixon, who, of course, went on to an equally long and annoying career as one of the other stars of Sex in the City.

All of which gives new and dangerous meaning to the girls' constant desire for someone to Drop the Big One on them.

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I decided to spare Eleanor the pain and watch it while she's at work this morning, but it's turned into a one-man MST3king that I have to offer her the chance to contribute to before sending it back.  Between the bad writing, the long and lustful pans of high-tech 80s labor-a-tories and the unfortunate-in-retrospect casting (mainly John Lithgow in the lead, who you can't watch hitting on the boy genius's mother without thinking of him as last year's Special Guest Villain on Dexter), it's marvelously deserving of a full-on rifftraxing.  There are even numerous guest appearances of a primordial 80s lab-bot who I swear was the inspiration for Crowwwwwww!

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The only absurder thing I can end with is the end of this week's Doonesbury arc. Wish we could blow up these Republicans real good:

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Usually it's the Unindicted Co-Conspirator who picks out the real turkeys. The one that has passed into family folklore is Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall in Popeye. My worst was the original Wicker Man with two of my all-time favorite actors, Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. By the end of it, you're cheering for the neo-pagans sacrificing the insufferable prig played by Woodward. And Brit Eklund used a body double besides.