Synchtube Tropers (Riff on Videos and Movies)

Three people expressed regret at having missed last night's movie. Three people on a Discord server. That's three people we could have gotten to join us that day. Darn.

Oh, HO-OH-HOOOOOoooooooooooooooo...

This Kung Fu Friday, we're rolling out some martial arts short movies and some classic Godfrey Ho highlights as an appetizer.

Then, at the top of the coming hour, Jean-Claude Van Damme's got a shitty mullet, Wilford Brimley's got a tiny horse, Lance Henriksen... does Lance Henricksen-y things... and John Woo brings shows off his pet doves in Hard Target.

JOIN US! http://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

Hey, you guys remember TalkToTransformer, that website that took an input of text and then turned it into a document that almost made sense but not quite?

Well, now a game was made out of it!

AI Dungeon is basically a text adventure, except generated entirely by AI. Set up the story, and react to whatever happens. You type in your action, and it generates what happens next in the story. Like with TalkToTransformer, the stories almost make sense, but play out more like dreams. Like how dreams make sense at the time you're having them, but once you're awake and thinking more logically, you realize they make no sense at all. That's basically what these stories are like. But it's interesting trying to take control of the story and make it do what you want.

So, check it out here and have fun with the game equivalent of lucid dreaming!

Tonight, from the makers of Surviving Edged Weapons comes another feature-length police instructional video, Hostage Officer Survival: How to Escape Your Worst Nightmare Alive. If this is anything like Surviving Edged Weapons, I'm sure it's gonna get pretty intense and may be a little hard to watch at times.

Obviously, as this was probably never intended for public release, there isn't an official trailer to promote this one, and other short clips from the instructional tape are impossible to come by, but I did come across another old video (shot on a potato) on a similar topic of police officer survival training to wet your appetite...

Tonight, we're going to learn some Hostage Officer Survival: How to Escape Your Worst Nightmare Alive.

Come on in! https://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

~lewattoo ~Noaqiyeum ~Finger Puppet ~Colonel Cathcart ~Completely Normal Guy ~TAPETRVE ~Rockonman ~Mystic Eclectic ~Shippudentimes ~Space Wolf ~Maple Samurai ~Tomodachi ~Germi91 ~iflewaway

We got 7 people watching today, and they gave this 🚓🚓 overall. I honestly didn't see it as being all that corny. Yes, the acting wasn't great, but it wasn't laughably bad or anything, imo. Jayelpeve, who gave it a 3, said, "I could see this actually helping officers, but it's still rather silly at points."

It's time to finish what we started and get the awful, awful Atlas Shrugged movie trilogy over and done with once and for all (and never speak of it again). As the first two installments both received    X    ratings, our reception to this one is surely a foregone conclusion.

So prepare yourselves for the bloodthirsty mayhem and unholy carnage of Atlas Shrugged, Part III: Who Is John Galt?

I'm starting us off with some "Florida Man"-themed videos from VICE and another recent upload from cRiT1KaL.

Then, at the top of the coming hour, we got the third chapter and third entirely recast acting ensemble in the concluding installment in the one movie trilogy nobody ever asked for, Atlas Shrugged, Part III: Who Is John Galt? (FUN FACT: This part of the trilogy was funded, in part, by a Kickstarter campaign, which is hilariously ironic considering Rand's entire ethos - or lack thereof - railing against "the moochers, who beg for one's resources with tears")

I'm not a praying man, but... Lord have mercy.

JOIN US! http://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

Tonight, we showcase more Italian flair. Not quite a giallo, but more of a mystery/thriller somewhere along the lines of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity.

An amnesiac tries to piece together his own past when a menacing individual accuses him of betrayal, and he's lured into Italy where he begins to suspect he may be living a double life.

Here's Puzzle...

Amnesia so often is portrayed in fiction as someone losing their memories and getting them back later, with a "oh! That's who I am!" revelation and total understanding, like it all came back.

In real life, supposedly, you never get your memories back. One amnesiac woman, when her family discovered her, said she felt no emotional attachment to them because she didn't remember them. (Which in hindsight is strange. I thought it was found that your brain stores memories, and emotional attachment to people, separately? One person with anterograde amnesia - inability to remember anything past the point of amnesia - would forget who people are, but become warmer and friendlier with them over time.)

In most fictional cases, amnesia is something that happens when a character gets hit on the head really hard and can be cured by simply hitting the same character on the head again. Anyway...

Pre-show begins with another mess of the usual bullshit. Then, at the top of the coming hour, we dive into Italian movie shenanigans with the giallo Puzzle.

(Also, YouTube just erased EverythingIsTerrible's channel from their database, but that's not gonna stop them or anything.)

JOIN US! http://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

A brief reminder about tonight's movie: It's delightfully awful and must-see schlock (easily on par with the work of Ed Wood, Neil Breen, Derek Savage, et. al.); however, the only copy we've ever been able to attain (this is NOT an easy-to-find movie) features an obnoxious watermark stretched diagonally across the entire picture frame. We've had plenty of fun with the sheer badness of the film, but, again, I apologize for the inconspicuous watermark.

This evening, we are revisiting Maradonia and the Shadow Empire (aka Maradonia and the Seven Bridges), the first and only movie "adapted" from the "literary saga" of one Gloria Tesch, a Floridian raised in a life of inexplicable wealth and privilege with enough family resources to convince extended relatives, neighbors, friends, and other close associates to dedicate their time to making a YA Fantasy film with (more or less) the same sophistication as Tommy Wiseau making The Room.

Edited by SeanMurrayI on Jan 21st 2020 at 12:15:30 PM

We'll be easing into things right now with Mitchell & Webb.

Then, at the top of the coming hour, we got the most amazingly bad family pet project that was (at least) four years and one million dollars (really) in the making, Gloria Tesch's Maradonia and the Shadow Empire...

JOIN US! http://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

Maradonia and the Shadow Empire needs a sequel.

hello I used to sometimes watch movies with you guys on my old account. don't add me to the ping list, at least not yet, but I'm interested in joining again sometime because bad movies are fun. remind me how this works? like I mean I get the synchtube bad movie thing, but I'm somewhat confused about how often this is done and stuff

We're running movies most every night beginning around 8:00 PM (US/Eastern), and we begin to gather together starting roughly thirty minutes beforehand. For the most part, all anybody's got to do to participate is simply show up in the chatroom after we kick things off; however, there are a few additional steps that must be undertaken in the event that we run any content hosted on Google Drive.

Anyway, tonight's feature presentation revolves around an ex-cop-turned-novelist who is called out of retirement to help investigate a string of murders. Could it be the work of a serial killer... or the monstrous end-product of an out of control experiment in genetic engineering? Prepare to be Scared to Death!

Edited by SeanMurrayI on Jan 22nd 2020 at 12:08:10 PM

And we're off with our usual pre-show content. Come in and get comfortable.

Then, at the top of the coming hour, we find out whether we'll be Scared to Death or survive to tell the tale.

JOIN US! http://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

A couple months back, we showcased the 1995 sci-fi/horror film Species. Now, get ready for the bigger, badder sequel, aptly titled Species II, with a cast featuring returning actors Michael Madsen, Natasha Henstridge, and Marg Helgenberger... plus new additions James Cromwell and (in much smaller roles) Peter Boyle... and Richard Belzer as the President of the United States.

Species II is tonight. What kind of species? Species of what creature? Let's find out!

Come on in! https://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

~lewattoo ~Noaqiyeum ~Finger Puppet ~Colonel Cathcart ~Completely Normal Guy ~TAPETRVE ~Rockonman ~Mystic Eclectic ~Shippudentimes ~Space Wolf ~Maple Samurai ~Tomodachi ~Germi91 ~iflewaway

So. Many. Close-ups and zoom-ins of people's eyes.

Anyway, it got ★★.

I was trying to make a GIF from the movie (from one of the more ridiculous "zoom-in of eyes" scenes that zoomed in on eyes twice in a row quickly and looked really stupid doing it, at 59:12), but the various GIF-making websites either rejected the video for being too long, or for unknown reasons, or in one case, took forever to make the GIF and apparently got stuck. Anyone know of a good free GIF making program to use for locally saved videos?

Edited by BonsaiForest on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:52:22 AM

Giphy allows you to make gifs from files on your computer, but I would recommend uploading as short/small a section as possible, opposed to attempting to upload an entire movie file. Anyway...

Oh, HO-OH-HOOOOOOooooooooooooo...

This Kung Fu Friday might be playing a little loose with the martial arts but makes up for it with its premise. Here's a warm and gentle story about... 50 women who are individually abducted and forced by their captors to fight each other in brutal bare-knuckle scraps.

This is called Raze, starring Zoe Bell.

The way to upload a small section is to download the video in question, and crop it using Sony Vegas or something. (Is there a good free video editor that's easy to use btw?)

Anyway, tonight we watch 50 women Raze each other to death or something. Well, not all 50 at once.

Before that, the semi-standard Kung Fu Friday pre-show, which includes a scene from a movie and a countdown of 15 great female fighters in movies.

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting in https://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

~lewattoo ~Noaqiyeum ~Finger Puppet ~Colonel Cathcart ~Completely Normal Guy ~TAPETRVE ~Rockonman ~Mystic Eclectic ~Shippudentimes ~Space Wolf ~Maple Samurai ~Tomodachi ~Germi91 ~iflewaway

This movie was certainly brutal. People were commenting that even before the title showed up onscreen. "This is incredibly uncomfortable" one of them said. I was figuring this would be a trashy fun movie, but it seems like it played up its concept for seriousness.

"Analogies for this movie?" "It feels like falling down a flight of stairs and landing in a Trump rally" "It's like incels made Gladiator" "It feels like the Olga character in the Suspira remake"

Its final score? ★. Opinions varied. "I'm giving this a high 1/4. SO MUCH Potential." "Considered giving it an X because I feel like I need a shower" Also got two 2s.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Jan 24th 2020 at 1:05:40 PM

I'm really gonna have to try and catch this one tonight.

It's your basic family fantasy/adventure movie about a scientist's kids who are sucked into a TV screen and wind up in the Stone Age... populated by leather jacket-clad dinosaurs.

Interestingly, this movie came out ~2 years before Jurassic Park, so the movie's chief aim is to draw in kids obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hence the curious tagline, "Long before there were turtles, the world was populated by dinosaurs" (or so I assume).

Get set for Adventures in Dinosaur City...

Yes, let us partake in some Dinosaur City, brother.