Film is Pwn

Breaking news! The Sci-Fi Channel, bastion of bad movie delight and my own personal playground (where else does one find movies like Anaconda 4?), is scheduled to be branded “Syfy” so that the network can copyright their own name.  You see, “sci-fi” is a generic term for a genre, but “Syfy” is a goofy word that means nothing.  Read the Cnet.com article here, if you don’t believe me.

This really strikes me as silly; how much more money are you going to make and is it worth the mockery of people like me, who will henceforth pronounce the Sci-Fi Channel as the “sif-ee” channel?  And that tagline, “Imagine Greater,” is dangerous – you thrive on couch potatoes, “Syfy” – if people imagine greater they will probably do something with their lives or read a book, which will likely inspire them to watch a lot less Star Trek: Enterprise reruns and posting on message boards how Captain Archer is way cooler than Captain Kirk. (To salvage my dignity, allow me the disclaimer that I had to go to imdb.com to learn the captain on Star Trek: Enterprise was named “Archer.” Never saw the show myself.)

Anyhoo, will new viewers have a clue what “Syfy” is supposed to mean?  Do you look at the four letters and instantly attach any significance: “SYFY.”  It looks like the kind of thing someone would randomly select in a Scrabble game and attempt to convince the other players its a real world, at which point he would be remanded back to the custody of his grammar teacher.

But what I really wanted to write about regarding the Syfy channel (that just doesn’t sound right) is a recurring theme of my blogs here have been low-budget knock-offs to high profile films, such as The Day the Earth Stopped coming out the same time as The Day the Earth Stood Still in 2008, or, my personal favorite, Transmorphers mimicking Transformers in Summer 2007.  For those who have yet to witness one of these remarkable cinematic copycats, I would like to humbly bring your attention to this week’s Syfy Channel Saturday night movie, I AM OMEGA.

I AM OMEGA was released in the shadows of Will Smith’s big budget, pretty good blockbuster I Am Legend in 2007.  If you think substituting “Omega” for “Legend” smacks of mild originality, let me bring your attention to the fact that the novel version of I Am Legend was made into a film in 1971 called “The Omega Man,” starring the late great Charlton Heston.  So, join me, if you will, for a guaranteed cinematic abomination, this Saturday night!  For those interested, here are the trailers for all three aforementioned films:

First, the knock-off, which is I warn you on the violent side as far as trailers go, but it’s rather cheesy, no-budget violence:

Then the Will Smith original . . . well, as original as you can get when you’re based on a novel that’s been adapted into a movie twice before:

And behold the 1971 film featuring a shirtless Charlton Heston, ladies!

As an added bonus, here lies the first adaptation of the I Am Legend novel, dubbed The Last Man on Earth, and featuring Vincent Price, which poses the immortal question: “Can a zombie woman’s hunger for love repopulate the Earth?”