Thursday, Jan. 29 2009 @ 5:04AM
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Science has brought us plenty of great things - cell phones, vaccines, easy cheese - but at it most extreme edges things get a little crazy - mad, even. And when science goes mad, bad things happen. While garden variety scientists are busy researching things like disease cures and new synthetic fabrics, their mad brethren are breaking the rules, chasing impossible dreams like making a better monster or even just pursuing noble goals through incredibly flaky means. The results of these mad science endeavors are pretty much always bad, but these are the worst disasters in mad science - the biggest, most dangerous and outright embarrassing results of the pursuit of knowledge, power and human-snake hybrids.
10) Creating Life, Frankenstein
It was Dr. Frankenstein who really started the whole field of mad science, and his work shines on today as a sterling example of the kind of utter clusterfuck that can occur when a bad idea goes predictably wrong in the worst possible way. Frankly, the idea of creating life is pretty much the textbook definition of hubris. After all what could possibly go wrong - besides, of course, everything? Multiply the inherent risks of monsterism by the absolutely half-assed plan of stitching up your creation from various discarded parts and then putting the brain of a defective in to run the whole freakish shebang, and bingo: your basic mad killing machine scenario emerges and the villagers are banging on the walls and brandishing pitchforks and torches.
9) Creating Snake Men Life, Sssss
All too often mad science forgets that man is the top of the food chain - no improvements necessary! When they do attempt to "improve" things, it usually ends badly, like when Dr. Carl Stoner decides to create a king cobra/human hybrid from his unwitting lab assistant. Sure, he ends up with a snake with human intelligence, but then his brilliant plan comes unraveled when the snake gets taken down by a ferret.
8) Making Sharks Smarter, Deep Blue Sea
Sharks are basically nature's perfect killing machine. Up to thirty-five feet of muscle and mouth, equipped with row upon row of razor sharp teeth, never gets sick, eats all the time - luckily, they're dumb as rocks or we'd probably have to abandon the ocean altogether. So then some genius decides to splice some human brain tissue in to take advantage of the beasts' super-efficient healing powers to cure some disease, one thing leads to another, and bingo - all of the sudden nature's killing machines are scheming, planning and working together. How smart are they? Smart enough to understand dramatic irony, as this clip clearly shows.
7) Making a Supercomputer A.I. with Biological Parts, Demon Seed I
If there's one thing science fiction has taught us it's that any artificial intelligence we create will rebel against us and probably try to kill everyone. Using human RNA in the construction turns out to be especially shortsighted when the AI predictably rebels, takes over its creator's computer controlled house and manages to impregnate his estranged wife with some specially modified cells, creating an innocuous human body to house its massive, evil intelligence. Nice work, genius.
6) Improving Piranha Efficiency, Piranha/Piranha II
Piranha are like miniature sharks that live in fresh water and understand the value of teamwork. Step into the water they inhabit and they'll strip you down to the bone in seconds. Luckily, they are relatively fragile, able only to exist in their native warm-water rivers. Leave it to the Army to pump them up a bit, making them hardier, able to live in a wider variety of environments (including salt water) and, yes, smarter - then act all surprised when they escape and take down a camp full of kids downstream from the testing facility (Piranha). Then, unsatisfied with the carnage from the first batch of experiments, they figured adding some wings and the ability to breathe air would be a hot idea (Piranha II). It turned out about as well as you might expect.
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18 comments
Comments
Magical Shrimp said:
Great list. Man, "Demon Seed" - haven't thought about that movie in years. It was pretty good, actually.
AlexB said:
Ahaha, Piranha. That they could make not one, but two movies about killer piranhas makes me happy. And the first movie's being remade, of course.
chad said:
Cool list. though i would have had the fly a little higher on the list. and Demon seed and SSS haven't seen those films in a long time. now will have to track down the DVD of both
Frito said:
The Doomsday device from strangelove was actually a good idea. Any good deterrence requires a credible threat, and the problem of being the second to attack in a nuclear war is you are affectively wiping out the human race. No rational person would make that decision, and therefore the deterrent threat is weakened.
By taking the rational human out of the equation you are putting the choice to end the world on the first actor. Since it is just as irrational for the first person to destroy the world as it was for the second, then he wont act.
But, like Strangelove said, it only works if the other side knows about it.
Mount_Prion said:
I think making giant kittens would be far worse than giant tarantulas. Tarantulas would probably only kill us when they're hungry, whereas giant kittens would kill us for entertainment value out of pure feline sadism.
This is the same kind of "Oh, if it's gotta be giant, it might as well be cute" logic that brought us the Stay Puft Marshmallow man.
Jangles said:
But wait, this is supposed to be a list of the most easily averted. But they didn't avert the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, that was the point.
Now along similar lines, Joshua in Wargames was stopped from launching nukes by a kid playing Tic-Tac-Toe.
Siskoid said:
AlexB: They also made a couple films about Barracudas, oh oh, and Lee Majors in Killer Fish!
Jason said:
What about 23 Days Later and Resident Evil? Making a virus that turns people into flesh craving zombies...What possible good could ever come of zombies? It's not even a viable Bio-Weapon. Saturate the enemy and now instead of being able to shoot you and you shoot them back, they'll swarm and bite you, turning you into one of them, while you unload clips of ammo into them with little to no effect. Brilliant!
Jason said:
Doh....I guess 23 Days Later is the edited version of 28 Days... :P
The Red Queen said:
OMG. I shouldn't have watched the piranha clip. At about the age of 8, my mom thought it would be OK for me to watch both movies. I'm still horribly freaked out by the flying piranhas.
pumpkinguts said:
Actually the idea of a doomsday device was in the works during the cold war by the soviets. It was supposed to be a large ship filled with highly radioactive material and its sole purpose was to explode and poison the earth. Krushchev never let it get passed the development stage. Oh yeah I like titties.
Tom said:
Frito, the doomsday machine would only be effective if you were dealing with two rational opponents. The premise of the movie was the war began because an irrational man started it. So the doomsday device is irrational because it does not take into account the actions of completely irrational people.
Oldfart@play said:
The part of the whole Frankenstein experiment I never understood was why Victor needed to chop up and sew back together bodies to reanimate them. It seems it would be far simpler and less problematic to just reanimate a body that had no damage. But I guess that would reduce the gruesome factor.
As far as a Giant chicken I think they would not do it because the Title Attack of the Killer Giant Chicken would sound as silly as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Besides it would be easy to take them out and feed the world with humongous buffalo wings and tons of mechanically separated chicken food product. Muahahaha!
Arcane said:
Intact dead bodies with a full set of viable organs are tricky to come by in 19th century Europe. Piecemeal is the way to go by necessity. Franky had to grave-rob to get everything he had, it's not like people were donating cadavers to the cause.
Now I gotta go put Demon Seed on my Queue. Another bizarre combination of science and demons is Clive Barker's Prince of Darkness. Scientists try to examine some capsule filled with fallen angel blood, which seems analogous to dead Cthulhu parts. Wackiness ensues, and Alice Cooper plays a possessed hobo.
Arcane said:
And and! Everyone has the same prophetic dreams because future scientists are sending video of the future at FTL speeds at the spot the earth was at in the current point in time and it can only be received by the subconscious brain. WHAT?
Joe said:
There is no animal that should be made giant. Night of the Lepus shows that even fuzzy, vegetarian rabbits will become vicious man eating fuzz tails if you shoot them up with growth hormones. As for giant chickens, take a listen to Arch Oboler's Lights Out play "Chicken Heart" where just the heart of a chicken is enough to consume the planet and everyone on it. Giant people, giant leeches, giant worms, giant bears, giant ants, giant crabs, all of them want to kill us. Best not to make anything giant, ever.
Oh, one that goes along with SSSSSS, is Bug, where a scientist attempts to crossbreed regular household cockroaches with subterranean ones that set his wife on fire. Breeding superintelligent, near indestructible, fire starting cockroaches is the kind of batshit crazy thing you can only expect from a mad scientist.
1-7 said:
You totally missed the point of Jurassic Park. The fact that disaster was predictable and easily avoidable was the point. The scientists grew over-confident and thought they could control life and nature itself to the extent that they brought one of the world's most dangerous predators back to life.
david said:
pirahnas are FISH-EATERS, they don't eat anything warm-blooded. This has been shown on numerous nature programs, with the locals swimming totally unconcerned in pirahna-infested waters. The natives will go fishing for them, using steel wire, and either eat them or stuff them to sell to tourists.
