Why some people who dislike horror call it stupid?

[Rev. Rye]

Maybe not 90% of the Sci-Fi you read, but bear in mind that generally, there's a lot of stuff that flies under the radar of a lot of readers, that they'll never hear of, let alone, get around to reading it. Maybe in Sturgeon's time, a lot of it would be relegated to the "slush pile" of stuff that publishers are given that they have to hire people to read and see if they're worth the paper they'll be printed on. Now, well, any bugger can go to sites like CreateSpace and potentially turn that crap into published fiction. And most of them will be lucky to find a readership in the triple digits. And most of them will still forget about it.

For a more concrete example, I'm currently working on something I like to call the Deep Hurting Project. It's basically my quest to watch the worst films ever made, and my source for this was TV Tropes' So Bad It's Horrible/Film page. It's a list of hundreds (possibly over a thousand) of films that are so bad, they fail to appeal even to the niche audiences that they were probably made for, the sort of films that are so bad prisoners of war might actually prefer waterboarding to actually watching them. Of those films, guess how many were available at my local library? 78 (58 standalone films, 4 available only in package deals, 13 sequels to better films, and the 3 films of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy). And an additional four eligible films were added to my list later. I don't know how many films made it on the list, but look at the page to get some idea of the scale of how many of these films there are; I strongly suspect that even of these horrible films, only 10% or less were considered notable enough for my library to stock a DVD copy, and two of those original 78 films ended up removed from circulation anyway. Many of the films on the list are not only so obscure that even my local library doesn't have a copy, some of them were never released in the US (where I live) in any format, DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS, or even Theatrically, streaming, or Laserdisc. A few were never even released on home video formats in their own nations (like, for instance Maradonia and the Shadow Empire, which the filmmakers couldn't even afford to release for longer than a single screening at a single Florida theater), and one film called Game Therapy bombed so hard that it only got a DVD release in its native Italy because the production company got a lot of likes on a Facebook page asking if it would be worth it, and most of the commenters explicitly stated they said yes only because they wanted to see MightyPirate, a popular Italian Youtuber, make fun of it.

Moral of the story: don't assume that the stuff you've read in such a broad genre is representative of the general quality of everything that's out there.

And for the record, of those 78 films, only 7 were filed under Sci-Fi/Fantasy, (Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft (OOC), Catwoman, The Last Airbender, Stranded, Highlander 2 (watched), Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and NeverEnding Story 3.)

Also, this week's entry is what I like to call "Soviet Avengers", a film called Guardians. It's a ripoff of the MCU made in Russia a few years ago where the team is basically like the Avengers if they were made by the Soviet Government. And one of them is a bear. If this was made in English, honestly, my library might count it as sci-fi, but my it has all the MCU films as Action/Adventure.