Warning! Readers' Advisory/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: The Bard’s interpretation of Bella Swann as suffering from crippling clinical depression.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: SUDDEN RANDOM SPACE DISCO in the middle of a chase scene in SF Shinseiki Lensman.
    • One could argue that there are several such scenes in that anime.
    • The entire plot of Fable: Teeth of Beasts.
  • Bile Fascination / Snark Bait: Vampires In Their Own Words.
  • Complete Monster:
    • The people Toxie beats up in The Toxic Avenger.
    • The bad guys in Cloak & Dagger, who are totally okay with attempting to kill a child. In broad daylight. In public.
  • Designated Protagonist Syndrome: Both of the main characters in Monsters. The random Latino non-actors and the CGI monsters are all far more interesting.
  • Ear Worm: The Toxic Crusaders theme song.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • His theories about Cassie Palmer’s vampire friends all being crazy.
    • Also: His theory about James Bond being a wizard and thus able to make physics his bitch.
    • The Bard has a theory that David from Cloak & Dagger grows up to be Robbie from Mazes and Monsters.
  • Fight Scene Failure: Another of Fable: Teeth of Beasts' many sins.
    • As well as The Edison Death Machine.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of Operator 5, there's a letter from the editor explaining that Nazi Germany is only a threat because they were pawns of Mussolini and that Germany will never take over Europe again. This letter was from 1936.
  • Idiot Plot: Monsters. Everything could be solved so simply if the characters didn't keep making dumb, reckless decisions...
  • Nightmare Fuel: D'Compose and his zombies from Inhumanoids. The Bard used to have nightmares about them as a child. Also, Nightcrawler, from the same series.
  • The Scrappy: Needle from Conan: The Adventurer.
  • Serial Numbers Filed Off: The astronauts from "Ain't NASA-carily So" ARE the cast of Star Trek.
    • The monster from that episode is also a Shoggoth. They don't say so, but it obviously is.
  • So Bad It's Good: License to Kill. The books he normally reviews, however...
    • The Edison Death Machine
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • In License to Kill: "Why hello, conspicuously animatronic shark! What are you doing so far from Amity Island?"
    • Generation X's poorly-portrayed mutant powers.
    • The entirety of Fable: Teeth of Beasts.
    • The entirety of The Edison Death Machine.
    • The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes.
    • All of the effects and props in Princess of Mars... but especially the masks of the Tharks, which no one even bothered to tuck in. There are long stretches where you can clearly and obviously see the bottom of the mask dangling in the open air.
  • Squick:
    • Certain points in Necroscope, including the necrophilia and the vampire tentacle bukkake.
      • "Oh yeah! This book is classy!"
    • Towards Skin's apparently being okay with being a psychic rapist.
    • John Carter eating the giant maggot yogurt and drinking yellow Thark sweat... at least, we hope it's sweat...
  • Unfortunate Implications:
    • A lot of this gets thrown around in Generation X, mostly involving Skin—a walking negative Mexican stereotype.
    • In Conan: The Adventurer, Zula makes Conan his blood-brother and next in line to rule the tribe. "So, um, the big-muscled white ubermensch, is, um, is gonna be in charge of the black people... :/ Moving on!"
    • A great deal of Monsters, especially in regards to the movie's view of Mexico.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: The Shadow.
  • What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Tim Curry and Ian Mc Kellan are sort of wasted in their roles in The Shadow and saddled with clunky dialogue.