I'm sure that's next on their chumbucket list.

You misunderstand. This is DEBORAH Gibson.

What's even funnier is that their effects slaves seem to actually be getting better at what they do (the fighter jet missile launch sequence looked fairly professional), meaning that sooner or later, the only real difference between this and most mainstream FX blockbusters might be how outlandish the premise is.

I'm of two-minds on this. I find the Michael Bay stuff completely tedious, of course, but I also find the totally self-aware Troma-style stuff tedious as well. However, something like Battlefield Earth or, say, Sharknado, I can totally get behind.

I think the difference is a level of sincerity and cynicism. I really like writing fiction/prose, but I'm really bad at it, so it's hard for me to write anything sincerely because I just feel awful about myself. So, the stuff I usually wind up with is things I can turn around and say that it's just something I was trying or it was a joke or whatever. None of my hopes or dreams or beliefs ever wind up on the page. Battlefield Earth, meanwhile, was a sincere effort to translate the book and just went so completely wrong whereas in Transformers 3, nobody involved bothered to put any of their own personal feelings into it. In a Troma film, everyone involved in the production is just hamming up as much as possible, but Asylum films usually have the filmmakers and actors (especially the completely unknown ones) trying to take everything as seriously as possible.

Some self-aware stuff can be really good but it almost never is. There were a couple of Troma movies that were good because they were doing something that hadn't been done in quite that way before, but I can't think of much that they've produced since the mid 80s that I could sit through (not counting things that they distribute but didn't actually make, they've got plenty of great older stuff in their catalog now).


Sontag nailed it:

18. One must distinguish between na�ve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voil�! the Orient! Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny. Camping -- say, the plays of Noel Coward -- does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Barber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.)

20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . . Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one's themes and one's materials - as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest -- the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp -- a movie like Carn�'s Dr�le de Drame; the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show -- even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.

21. So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don't change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin "camping": Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be induced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/sontag-notes oncamp-1964.html

Brown is kind of the Asylum of the Ivy Leagues :)

Believe me I know.