SFC is run by lying, thieving bastards!

[John]

 Ok, the topic of SFC buying the rights to a movie and promoting it as a Sci-Fi Channel original has been touched on briefly here, but this time they've gone too far!

 Back in June they started showing a cancelled Fox series called Night Visions, a Twilight Zone type show with two 30 minute stories in each episode. Fox only made 13 episodes and officially cancelled it before any of them had aired. They played 10 episodes (I missed taping the third one) before Sept. 11th happened and every network's schedule went in the crapper. They never played the remaining three episodes. When SFC announced it, I figured that I'd finally be able to complete my collection. They aired them out of order and were about to air the first one I needed when they took it off to show repeats of The Dead Zone, a show USA airs at least 4-5 times a week.

 I figured that since they bought the rights to Night Visions, they'd air them eventually. Tonight, while watching their newest 'original', Shadow Realm, I decided to check the posting on SFC's discussion board and see if anyone had any new info. Strangely there was a post about Shadow Realm.

 Seems that Shadow Realm isn't really a movie, it's two of the unaired Night Visions episodes with the intros stripped off and new titles proclaiming the SFC to be the creator added on.

 In other words, they took a series that they didn't think was worth airing more than 3 episodes of, hacked up two of the episodes, slapped their name on it and lied through their teeth about it being an SFC original. Of course this means that even if they do air the other episodes, they'll never air those two episodes because it would show them to be the lying thieves they are!

 This really p**ses me off, because I can't even enjoy watching those stories now. All I can think of is how the bastards gypped the viewers out of seeing the proper introductions to each story. Not that the intros were all that important, but I wanted to see them the way they were intended. Like The Twilight Zone having Rod Serling's intro removed.

 Now I know why I couldn't find it listed in the IMDB.

 I now officially *HATE* the SFC!

[Steven Millan]

                   Yeah,John,reading all of this makes me fully appreciate how much I no longer have this horrible cable channel to fully suffer through(remembering that one horrible series,"The Anti-Gravity Room", they used to play on Saturday mornings,with those two annoying guys,and that partially seen(in one of the seasons)sexy young Indian chick Shashi(whatever happened to her,if you do,let me know so that I can hook up with her,okay?!),was extremely terrible enough to endure.

[J.R.]

Oh, sweet Jesus! It's as if the sci-fi honchos get together and create new ways to be even crappier and drive away anyone that isn't braindead. Check out the Cinescape issue from 2000 with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine on the cover to read a letter of mine they printed that shows my hatred for SFC. It sounded like such a cool idea and when I first got it there were a lot of great shows on, and then it all went down the pooper fast.

[Goon]

                 This might be more appropriate in the thread on censorship, but I remember very late one night I flipped over to the sci-fi channel and they were showing one of the films called "Breeders", one of the many "science fiction" films created for the sole and base purpose of showing off a whole lot of skin.  They weren't trying to pass it off as a "sci-fi original" but they had censored out all the nudity by bluring over the film.  This meant that during half the scenes in the movie, sometimes most of the screen was blured over.  I don't really have a problem with censoring that sort of thing when it only makes up one or two scenes, but what is the point of running a film like "Breeders" if your going to censor out almost the entire movie?  You might as well just run something else, even if it is just late night filler.  (who did they think they were going to offend that late anyhow?)
             Are the executives just stupid or are they trying to annoy people?
----------------ooo-'U'-ooo-------Kilroy was here.

[John]

>partially seen(in one of the seasons)sexy young Indian chick Shashi(whatever
>happened to her,if you do,let me know so that I can hook up with her,okay?!)

 She was the only reason I ever watched it too. She left to be an actress, but so far she's only guest starred on a single episode each of Seinfeld & Friends and had a small part in Leaving Las Vegas as a hooker. I remember going to the Antigravity Room web site and looking for pics of her. They had pages for the two dufuses, but her page came up with a file not found error. I wrote to the webmaster and he promised to look into it, but the next time I went to the site, there was a notice about how she'd left the show.

>Oh, sweet Jesus! It's as if the sci-fi honchos get together and create new ways to
>be even crappier and drive away anyone that isn't braindead. Check out the

 Yup!

>such a cool idea and when I first got it there were a lot of great shows on, and
>then it all went down the pooper fast.

 I feel the same way. When we first got it, I watched The Invaders, The Magician, The Immortal and a bunch of others, many of which I'd never even heard of before. I had hopes that they'd add other obscure shows like Beyond Westworld, but they never did. Now they suck.

[Andrew]

Actually, it depends which "Breeders" they were showing.  If it was the original, (1986 ), then they did cut out nudity.  If it was the remake (1998), then they had very little cutting to do.  Odd thing, the remake might have been a more entertaining film.

[yaddo42]

It was the 1986 version, and they did LOTS of blurring to get that cheesy skinfest on TV. The second BREEDERS would certainly be more entertaining than those "escaped prisoner in space" SCIFI originals, C. Thomas Howell trying to act like Gary Oldman flicks, or one more airing of LASERHAWK.

SCIFI was showing stuff like BREEDERS and BLOOD DINER late at night on weekends a few months back. Nudity was blurred out 9with the occassional snip), foul language was badly muted, and most of the violence was left more intact than I would have figured. Although the nude cheerleader video massacre was cut out, which made an already stupid movie confusing unless you had already seen it. They also snipped the couple in the caverns getting naked, but left in the girl beating up the bad guys (although blurred) and getting a stalagtite (stalagmite?) to the head. Strange.

[J.R.]

Sci-Fi and its sister USA show edited skin flicks all the time. I once watched Psycho Cop 2 on USA Up All Night. It was about a bunch of pencil pushers who called up hookers and the titular cop who murders them for slacking off. The hookers scene, which makes up a good 1/3 of the overall movie, was so blurred I could barely tell what was going on. Most of the murder scenes were cut as well so I didn't know who was alive or dead. Why do they even bother? A movie like that is made for the sole purpose of showing nudity and gore and cutting it out leaves nothing.