he official site for Sacramento's popular Trash Film Festival, Trash Film Orgy celebrates bad cinema with relish. Loud, proud and not always in the best of taste, this page is the place to surf to when seeking oddball movie recommendations of the lowbrow kind.
What bottom-of-the-barrel SF movies does TFO recommend? The ever-more-dated Death Race 2000 makes the list, as does a 1959 atomic disaster movie from Japan, The H-Man. Amid howlers like Pumpkinhead and an Alice Cooper flick called Monster Dog, though, a few genuine gems glint atop the garbage heap, like Bubba Ho-Tep and Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. Each movie listing comes with a lengthy and irreverent review by site staffers, along with a shot of the poster and a couple of stills.
As with many cult film sites, TFO's features section is regrettably sparse; its articles are well written and interesting but few in number. Its galleries, on the other hand, have been flooded with hundreds of pictures by festival enthusiasts. Many of these images are self-referential parodies of films like Flash Gordon and The Matrix, photo manipulations that transform their subjects to Trash Gordon and The MaTrash. The site has a links page and runs fan polls—the Shatner haiku contest in the poll archives is a don't-miss—as well as a "Today in Trash Film History" section.
If Trash Film Orgy is lurid, cheesy, definitely not work-safe and utterly inappropriate for kids, it is also sincerely enthusiastic about trash cinema and its history. For anyone who looks at a screamingly bad movie poster and feels a sense of guilty pleasure, a quick visit to this site will provide many ideas for future outings to the video store.
—A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—April 4, 2005
very science-fiction fan has done it at least once: watched a movie and thought, "I wonder if they have a soundtrack for this?" Sci-Fi Film Music answers that question with an exhaustive index of speculative fiction soundtracks for film and television.
The alphabetical index spans decades of science fiction history, including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Alien, Logan's Run, Battlestar
Galactica, Space: 1999, I, Robot, Hellboy, Chronicles of Riddick and hundreds more. The details offered for each entry vary greatly, but all contain track lists. A good number also have liner notes taken from the album, as well as links to online reviews.
The "Specials" section focuses in on soundtracks for science fiction's most popular series, namely Star Trek, Star Wars and Babylon 5, as well as the out-of-genre, but still excellent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These areas attempt to chronicle every track ever released for each series, as well as any variants they may have spawned.
Perhaps the most interesting portion of the site is the "Bootlegs" section, which lists numerous unofficial soundtracks and might prove useful for completists searching for the true soundtrack to a given movie.
—Ken Newquist
Site of the Week—March 28, 2005
t is easy to feel that the days of celebrity scientists like Thomas Edison and Marie Curie are long gone. The plucky solo inventor of history has given way to anonymous teams in sealed laboratories, quietly and collectively producing new gadgets for corporations who then sell them without crediting the minds behind the hardware. That does not mean, however, that there is no way to learn who developed veggie burgers, the remote control or the microprocessor. Celebrating the advance of science and technology by profiling inventions great and small—as well as the people who built them—The Great Idea Finder seeks to inspire the "inventor" in all of us.
A fantastic site for anyone curious about the development of any of the technologies that permeate 21st-century living—blue jeans, microwave ovens, traffic lights, just name it—TGIF provides inventor biographies and invention facts and even debunks myths about how particular innovations came to be. These essays come with book recommendations and Web links for related reading, making further research simple. The archive of articles is huge, covering every imaginable invention-related subject, from how words get into the dictionary to facts about the invention of Kevlar by Stephanie Kwolek.
TGIF also spotlights exciting new technologies (and significant improvements to existing ones) with its Great Idea Award. It offers a trivia quiz and reviews of books on science and technology, and it allows guests to submit their own concepts for dream inventions. Finally, in the Resources section of the site, visitors can find useful Web links, information about invention-related DVDs and TV programs, suggestions for simple experiments and a listing of contests and competitions for young scientists.
Content-rich, well-organized and filled with ideas for writers, students and anyone interested in technology, TGIF is one of those staggeringly useful sites that will draw visitors back again and again.
—A.M. Dellamonica
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