Let’s get one thing straight first off, o my readership–just so you know going in, I HATE the Sci-Fi Channel. I hate it with a vengeance. I resent its very existence and believe that only serious and dramatic intervention from common sense or quality can elevate this network out of the dung heap in which it has found itself.

I hate that they’re pretty much the only game in town when it comes to getting horror films on television. Leave aside that ridiculous new “Chiller” network for a moment or those HD choices on the various dishes you can only get if you shell out preposterous sums for a new TV.

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Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s well-known as the one of the most ineptly made movies of all time, and holds the dubious distinction of never having been featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The show basically existed to make fun of movies exactly like Plan 9, but the creators have explained many times that they just don’t want to touch the legend. It’s so perfectly, deliciously bad. They couldn’t possibly add to it.

Everyone knows the stories behind it. How poor Bela Lugosi died during filming, and had to be replaced by Mrs. Wood’s chiropractor (who resembled him from the eyes up, but was unfortunately several feet taller). You’d have to be legally blind and sitting several hundred feet away from a twelve-inch screen not to notice that it was a different guy. The way he oh-so-inconspicuously covers his face THE ENTIRE TIME he’s stalking around, terrorizing suburbia, doesn’t help.

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- The new Street Fighter IV character is Harry Knowles. Just look at him and tell me he isn’t.

- The official Resident Evil 5 site is up, along with a brand new trailer. Sackcloth chainsaw guy is back, in a somewhat more svelte form. It also looks like these are going to be Resident Evil 4-style parasite zombies. If they’re not controlled by Las Plagas, it’s at least something very like it.

Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, the game is no longer set in Haiti, the birthplace of zombism, but rather Africa. RE5 initially caught a lot of flack for its alleged racist overtones, what with the handsome white guy mowing down waves and waves of tattered-looking black guys. From the trailer, it seems perhaps this is a move to racial parity by letting us shoot some zombified Afrikaners.

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It may surprise you to know that the mortgage meltdown / housing crisis was not limited solely to us poor schlubs, but also encompassed major Hollywood figures like Batman Begins’ Christian Bale.

Indeed, despite starring roles in Reign of Fire and American Psycho, Bale says he wasn’t earning enough money to support his family. In fact, it apparently got so bad that his house was repossessed–and in somewhere around 2003, he accepted a role he refuses to talk about, simply to generate cash.

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Here’s one to mull over: an American actor who became famous playing a British character on American T.V. is about to star as an American hero in a British T.V. movie.

Confused? Let’s put some names to it. James Marsters, most famously the rogueish vamp Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is about to trade in his Cockney accent and sail across the pond to play Buzz Aldrin. The movie, Moonshot, will debut in July of 2009 to honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11’s landing.

Moonshot has no entries on Wikipedia or IMDB, so we only know what we are told. Buffy fans on the website Whedonesque are excited:

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NASA has extended its deadline for developers to submit game design proposals for a massively-multiplayer online game. A game about SPACE!

“The developer gets to make money on the game… some of which (negotiable) goes to NASA” explained MMO Evolution author Robert Rice. “This isn’t any different than making a game based on a Hollywood license, except the developer will get better terms, more creative control, and probably some sweet technology out of the deal.”

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It seems that the “lady prison” genre is being suddenly, unexpectedly legitimized. It used to be the kind of thing that was relegated to Cinemax and interspersed with plenty of soft-lens nudity to keep people interested. But now, three separate and distinct female prison shows are being developed. All at the same time.

One series, Women in Chains, is pure exploitation. It will be directed by Robert Rodriguez, and starring - naturally enough - his muse Rose McGowan.

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GameSetWatch has an article up on designing for WiiWare, using the new game LostWinds as its case study.

WiiWare is Nintendo’s entry into the direct download market, a space already occupied by Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network. You could already purchase classic games on the Wii’s Virtual Console, but like its competitors, WiiWare features brand new games.

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Now I’m just getting scared. Harvey Korman, whom you’ll remember from The Carol Burnett Show as well as the comically devious Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, is dead. The news was released right around three hours ago, so you know you’re getting it hot and fresh.

The word out of UCLA Medical Center is that Korman died after “suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago.” He had apparently gone through several major operations–aneurysms can do that sort of thing; they’re downright scary in their destructive force–and it all just finally caught up with him. Small wonder considering the man was eighty-one when he died, but it’s a testament not only to his comic genius but also to his sheer strength of will that he could keep going through that.

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Five years ago, could we, as a society, possibly conceive of a “MySpace star?” While a social networking site sounds like a good niche advertising technique, MySpace doesn’t seem like the place where a star is born. But Tila Tequila overcame those odds to become…something.

Every article on Tila calls her a “MySpace and reality T.V. star.” They don’t really know how to describe her, because “reality T.V. star” would imply that she won Survivor or something. “MySpace star” is just baffling, especially for the generation that doesn’t realize iPod is a brand name.

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