My parents recently retired and moved closer to my siblings and I and they had some of our old stuff. There were some VHS tapes I had recorded of the sci fi channel back in the day and I got a tv/vcr combo at a thrift store to relive when the channel was great.
I do wonder what happened to the channel? Is it just another case of marketing to people who don’t like your product like video games and comic books? It seemed to be a great place for nerds at one point. I even liked their take on wizard of oz and Alice in wonderland, but this was when a twist on a classic could be interesting.
I used to read their website but the last straws for me was a review of fantasy novels where the author started talking about Tolkien, GRRM, and Robert Jordan only to dismiss their work due to them being white males and she went on to hype some current year fantasy written by the usual “the patriarchy is everywhere” type feminists. Then they did a review of Brightburn that talked about white supremacy and I was done.
But my original question... what happened to the channel?
For a little while, they had a great thing going. You could catch Eureka and Warehouse 13 and reruns of Galactica and SG1 late at night. Not everything was great but they had charm if you didn't expect much.
Then Syfy became a thing. Sharknado existed, and the channel decided to chase that same stupid fad crowd that made Snakes on a Plane popular. They thought they could ride that wave into a younger and bigger demographic, but they didn't realize or notice that crowds that follow garbage "so bad it's good" media tend to be fleeting. After a few rounds of diminishing returns, they had alienated their older viewers and lost the attention of the younger ones.
The problem with trying to make something "so bad it's good" is that you can almost never intentionally make that, sharknado excluded.
What makes a movie like The Room, so bad it's good, is that you can tell the directors/writers truly thought they were making something good. You can tell that there's some kind of heart in it and despite inane dialogue or terrible effects there's some charm in them that resonates.
When someone intentionally tries to make a bad film it's irony poisoned from the start. There's no verisimilitude in it. It's all wink wink nudge nudge, hehehe this is so bad, don't you agree it's bad but you'll watch it anyways?
I think Guns Akimbo is a good illustration of this. It's not a good movie, the premise is stupid but has the potential to be entertaining. And if they just played it straight, I would have loved that garbage, but there just kept being scenes that felt like the movie was looking at you and saying "didya see that!? Haha its sooooooo dumb haha"