April 22nd marks our 3rd anniversary on the web. It's hard to believe that it has been three years now since I first started this website. To everyone who has been here since the “Realm of Cinematic Oddities and Atrocities” days, thank you very much. There can't be more than two or three of you out there, but many thanks nonetheless.
In the past I've shied away from these yearly recaps, mostly because they strike me as being a little self-indulgent and I didn't really think that anyone would seriously be interested. Also I am a notorious procrastinator (Guess who finished his taxes on April 14th this year...) and this date has slipped by two years in a row now. This year I have decided to record at least some account of our first three years of existence for posterity's sake.
That's right, future generations must know about what I've done here...I told you that these things were a little self-indulgent, didn't I? Ah well, here goes.
Year One (April '05-'06)
In early '05, like in most periods of my life, I was bored out of my mind. After stumbling across sites like Badmovies.org and Jabootu.com (now Jabootu.net) I decided that reviewing bad movies would relieve my boredom. It seemed perfect as I had enjoyed bad movies ever since I was a little kid. Starting my own website, however, was completely out of the question. I had no knowledge of even where to begin, so I reluctantly decided that I would have to write for someone else.
After a couple of failed attempts to get something off of the ground with other like-minded folks who actually knew some HTML, I came across a site that I figured would be perfect. Their reviews were entertaining enough, they had a large number of reviews already posted, and most importantly they were apparently willing to accept reviews from any schmo off of the street. So I quickly picked a movie from their list, slapped together a review, and sent it to them in hopes of being accepted as a guest reviewer. In hindsight I suppose that I should have spent a little more time on my review, as I wasn't accepted. This would have been easy enough for me to take, except for the fact that I wasn't rejected either. The fact is that I never even heard back from them. Not a peep.
Now a reasonable person would have probably sent them an e-mail to see if they had even received the review. I, on the other hand, took their silence as a personal affront and I decided then and there to start my own site. This is really what I wanted to do in the first place, but this provided the perfect excuse. Armed with the two reviews that I had written in anticipation of being accepted somewhere, a case of Mountain Dew, and a chip on my shoulder the size of Tor Johnson, I set about the task of learning HTML. Within about an hour of my decision, I had a site online. That's right, an hour. Look, when I set my mind to something, it's usually gonna happen.
Okay, mission accomplished. I had a site. I'll grant you that it wasn't a very pretty site, but it was functional. Now I had much bigger problems to deal with. Once my righteous indignation wore off, I found that this whole “running a website” thing was a little more trouble than I had initially anticipated. Coding problems, redesigns, server downtime, and a whole slew of stuff that I had never even considered began popping up. Couple that with the fact that I wasn't getting any visitors at all and you would think that I would've been getting a little discouraged. I probably should have been, but I wasn't. I was just stoked to have my own site. Despite the total lack of feedback, I pressed on and at the end of my first year I had posted the following reviews:
In addition to the reviews, I also had the idea to add a separate section for my various ramblings. In the first year I had posted the following in the Nonsensical Ramblings section:
At the end of one year I had posted 11 reviews and 4 articles. Not too bad for the first year, I thought. Unfortunately year two would not go as well as year one.
Year Two (April '06-'07)
Shortly after I posted the review for The Image of Bruce Lee, my host at the time, Freehostdepartment.com, changed servers (and names) without warning its users. In the process, I lost not only my site, but my URL as well. Fortunately I had backups. Unfortunately when I was learning to code HTML I had learned (improperly, I might add) to deeplink specifically to my site. If you don't know HTML, you won't understand how much this sucked. If you do know HTML, you probably just let out a girly squeal of horror. I know I did.
I spent the following month or so on the tedious process of recoding my site and getting reviews back online. As a result, I became a little burnt out and only posted a handful of things in year two:
Year two wasn't all bad, however. I changed the name to The Bad Movie Realm (a move that I'm still not completely sure about), the site started showing up in Google searches for the first time, and we were even mentioned in one of JapanesePod101.com's Japanese language learning podcasts. Of course, in line with everything else that happened in year two, they gave the wrong address when trying to plug us. I can still hear it in my head, “His site is badmovierealm.hostingweb.us...a” Arrghhh!!! It's .US, not .USA!!! Arrghhh!!! Oh well. Their heart was in the right place, I guess...I'm still bitter.
You can listen to that infamous podcast here: Jpod101.com podcast
Year Three (April '07-'08)
After a very slow beginning in which I posted a total of zero reviews, I finally decided to get serious again. I spent the next few months coding things properly for the first time. In January '08 I purchased a domain and moved everything to BadMovieRealm.com. Since the first of the year I have posted 9 reviews and 3 Ramblings.
There have been a lot of changes over the past three years. The biggest being the review format, which has gone from producing ridiculously lengthy snore-fests (my opinion) to producing shorter, and more to the point summaries. They may still be snore-fests, I don't know. Hopefully my writing has improved somewhat over the years. Just in case it hasn't, I've recently started adding video clips to the reviews in addition to the screenshots. So even if my writing still sucks, I've tried to include lots of shiny things to keep you interested anyhow.
At this point I have a few people that I would like to thank for their support. They are Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org; Jordan Garren of The B-movie Film Vault; and Wade Ausitn of Bmovies.com. With their linking to this site, my traffic has gone from a mere trickle to well, a slightly faster trickle. Still, I am greatly appreciative of their kindness and I encourage all of you to visit their respective sites as often as you can.
I would also like to thank my father for all of his words of encouragement about this site. I think that his opinion of my writing is a little more generous than I probably deserve, but what else should I expect from my own father? I should thank my aunt Diane as well for wasting her valuable time at work reading my various nonsense. Thank you, however you still might not want to hold your breath on that “Bad Chick Flick” section. I also need to thank my little brother Zach for keeping my head from getting too big with the occaisional and well deserved, “You suck!” Right back at ya, bro.
Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who is reading this right now. Without you guys it would be a lot less fun to do this. I'd still do it, but it would be a lot less fun.
Three years behind me now and who can say what the future holds for BadMovieRealm.com. After three years I am happy to say that this place is finally starting to feel like an actual website to me. That said, I am still trying to add new things to make it even better. Who knows, maybe I'll even get some guest reviewers down the road. If I do accept guest reviewers in the future, you can be damn sure that I will give a response to your reviews in a timely manner. I certainly wouldn't want you going off and starting your own site as revenge now would I?
-Derek Miller
4/22/08
