It's Saturday, as usual, I'm not doing anything with my weekend except watching TV.
I'd just sat through the original 1971 version of "Shaft", with Richard Roundtree, when the channel surfing began.
If you've read through my other blogs, you'd know of my disdain for modern television. This thought process has led me to my current rambling.
I'm not sure if it's just me or if I'm just overly cynical about television producers, creators, writers, station heads or anything else like that.
It seems that the better technology gets, the more things that can be done with computer graphics, the worse television shows get.
For example: Sheer boredom forced me to stop on the Sci-Fi channel while a lovely little home video called "Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill".
Picture if you will something like the "Resident Evil" movies only taking place wild west ghost town.
The hitch is that the zombies are all lead by a single cowboy zombie.
Enter the fodder for the murderous rampage that predictably ensues. That's right, the young tourist types. You know the story, so I wont bore you any further than I was.
Anyway, there were some pretty neat effects scattered throughout this waste of film. As is the case in most of today's television.
The thing that kicks my ass about all of this though is that the effects probably cost more to do than the whole movie cost to make.
I guess what I'm wondering about is: Were cheesy movies from 20 years ago better because they were blatantly cheesy and made no real effort to hide it, or are the films being made now that try to hide the cheese with computer generated effects and thus becoming more cheesy the better ones? Does the Hollywood machine think that we're all a pack of drooling morons? Is that why they insist upon putting this dreck out?
Or is it that the viewing public generally is a pack of drooling moron?
