Red Letter Media

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Favorite recurring character? (Select 4)

  • Jack / AIDSMobdy

    Votes: 257 24.0%
  • Josh / the Wizard

    Votes: 77 7.2%
  • Colin (Canadian #1)

    Votes: 460 42.9%
  • Jim (Canadian #2)

    Votes: 230 21.4%
  • Tim

    Votes: 386 36.0%
  • Len Kabasinski

    Votes: 208 19.4%
  • Freddie Williams

    Votes: 274 25.5%
  • Patton Oswalt

    Votes: 27 2.5%
  • Macaulay Culkin

    Votes: 541 50.4%
  • Max Landis

    Votes: 64 6.0%

  • Total voters
    1,073
I wouldn't say Spielberg movies exactly. I'd say shitty 80s B movie VHS, which is much worse IMO. By B movie standards, VHS 80s B movies were always the trashiest of media, like Uve Boll-tier productions made to take advantage of tax loopholes rather than attempts to create a good movie based on limited budget. That's the reason why the Spaghetti Western is respected now despite its B movie lineage, it's why Film Noir has a dedicated niche audience, or even 50s sci-fi, they were attempts to tell a story no matter how bizarre or silly the premise actually was.

The result is that the movies RLM have made are like the shitty VHS movies and the result is Space Cop. They try to play it off as ironically bad, but it's just painfully bad. Sometimes incompetent on top of it.

EDIT: A person who IS heavily influenced by Spielberg, yet incompetent is Nostalgia Critic.
I'm dreading having to subject myself to Space Cop if its as bad as people say it is. Maybe its just me but you can see the misery and despair in their eyes when they talk about it, specially Jay. Is it because it ended up being another shitty internet movie and not the arthouse "that's so deep" real cinema they had in their minds?
 
I'm dreading having to subject myself to Space Cop if its as bad as people say it is. Maybe its just me but you can see the misery and despair in their eyes when they talk about it, specially Jay. Is it because it ended up being another shitty internet movie and not the arthouse "that's so deep" real cinema they had in their minds?
It doesn't aspire to me deep or arthouse, it aspires to be a shitty movie and does that well without being particullarly funny or entertaining in the way the best shit movies are.
 
I'm dreading having to subject myself to Space Cop if its as bad as people say it is. Maybe its just me but you can see the misery and despair in their eyes when they talk about it, specially Jay. Is it because it ended up being another shitty internet movie and not the arthouse "that's so deep" real cinema they had in their minds?
I think it took a long time to make the movie which caused less videos to be made for the channel and it was just a pain in the ass to make the movie in the first place. It just didn't work out for them like they wanted so that's why they haven't bothered to try to make another movie after Space Cop. You can tell Mike might want to make another movie with him doing a bunch of producer pitches in Re:Views and Half In The Bags. It just ended up being the straw that broke the Camel's back like the AVGN movie was for James Rolfe where they did a product with more ambition and effort only for the project to break them and caused them to not make another movie again.
 
It doesn't aspire to me deep or arthouse, it aspires to be a shitty movie and does that well without being particullarly funny or entertaining in the way the best shit movies are.

I don't think RLM will ever make the movie they want to make, because of the cardinal rule of bad movies:

Unintentionally bad movies can be wildly entertaining, but intentionally bad movies are almost always unbearable.

The weird part is they should know this better than anyone, yet every bit of Space Cop I've seen reeks of "intentionally bad."
 
I'm dreading having to subject myself to Space Cop if its as bad as people say it is. Maybe its just me but you can see the misery and despair in their eyes when they talk about it, specially Jay. Is it because it ended up being another shitty internet movie and not the arthouse "that's so deep" real cinema they had in their minds?
There are two instances in my mind when I outright call it incompetent. There's a running chase scene where the cameraman literally runs after Jay. On foot. The reason why is because they actually filmed on an actual sidewalk so there's no dolly track set up. So instead of jury-rigging a push cart so that they could have the cameraman on wheels and attempt to keep it steady, you get the painful jank of the cameraman's shaking as he's running after Jay. The other is the bar scene, where they film in an actual bar in the daytime. Now, the context of the scene is a seedy dive bar, but because their choice of venue is an actual bar, there is no way the owner is going to let them show his business in a negative light. So, it looks like Jay does his criminal business in Moe's Family Feed Bag.

At its core though, Noir cop is a terrible comedic relief character. Now, it's usually the case that the straight man, Space Cop, has to be paired up with a comic relief character in a comedy. The problem is Noir cop is goofy and not at all like what his character should be. He was cryogenically frozen to begin with, so shouldn't he be a parody of the Noir detective where he's a disgruntled Wally drinking hard liquor and slapping the butts of women? So they couldn't figure out how to make these two characters work right. Really, the only two characters that work is the Police Chief and Space Cop himself.
 
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Sneeding Feeding Frenzy is way better than Space Cop. I was really surprised they managed to regress so much with what seemed like a lot of effort put into it.
 
I remember the last stream a thon Jay did (which thinking about it now would have been in like 2015 or 2016!?) he played Feeding Frenzy and some artsy short film he made and they were shockingly decent. I mean the short film felt derivative of David Lynch but still...

It really makes me think Space Cop was just an awful awful premise.
 
It would have worked for a 30 minute or less short, but they didn’t have enough budget, premise, or talent to stretch it to feature length.
Honestly, I think it only worked as the original trailer.

I'm always going to be baffled why they followed through with it. Maybe there is some explanation on the DVD commentary or something but I've never listened to know.
 
It would have worked for a 30 minute or less short, but they didn’t have enough budget, premise, or talent to stretch it to feature length.
From clips I've seen, I think it could have worked as a series of shorts or random episodes on something like YouTube. Kind of like their Plinkett sketches.
 
From clips I've seen, I think it could have worked as a series of shorts or random episodes on something like YouTube. Kind of like their Plinkett sketches.
That would have been the best thing probably, there were a few scenes and moments that work but as an attempt at a coherent story it didn't.
 
If someone had told Mike his stupid attempt at an old-timey detective accent wasn't funny and they needed actual jokes in the film it would have been a lot better.

Aids Moby did some of the special effects and editing on Space Cop and he made two videos for Previously Recorded of some of the process. It really stands out how unprofessional and how little of a fuck they gave whilst they were filming it: in the first video Jack has to spend an hour doing motion tracking on a parked car because Rich moved around too much in it. He also has to motion track and blur some leaves in the foreground because whoever was filming was too dumb to get a good shot of a parked car directly in front of them:

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I also recall him talking about how he had to spend multiple hours fixing footage that was fucked up by someone stumbling into the tripod whilst drunk and damaged audio caused by people talking behind the camera.
 
If someone had told Mike his stupid attempt at an old-timey detective accent wasn't funny and they needed actual jokes in the film it would have been a lot better.

Aids Moby did some of the special effects and editing on Space Cop and he made two videos for Previously Recorded of some of the process. It really stands out how unprofessional and how little of a fuck they gave whilst they were filming it: in the first video Jack has to spend an hour doing motion tracking on a parked car because Rich moved around too much in it. He also has to motion track and blur some leaves in the foreground because whoever was filming was too dumb to get a good shot of a parked car directly in front of them:

View attachment 4150755

I also recall him talking about how he had to spend multiple hours fixing footage that was fucked up by someone stumbling into the tripod whilst drunk and damaged audio caused by people talking behind the camera.
For all of Jack's faults at least he's a good workhorse.
 
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