Rifftrax Live: The Return of the Swamp Thing

New review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: The Return of Swamp Thing  (B-).  I think this was the only live show that the Rifftrax guys did in 2022, and I didn’t see it live; I just watched it on DVD.  It was decent but not one of the best Rifftrax performances ever.  The movie is really amazingly bad, a 1989 stinker starring the undeniably cute Heather Locklear (The Perfect Man).  She’s a California florist who for some reason decides to go see her sinister stepfather in his creepy mansion somewhere deep in the swamps of Louisiana.  And there’s a swamp thing (Dick Durock, Stand by Me), who is a slimy, green, plant guy who was apparently a normal human who got transformed into a hideous mutant while working on scientific experiments with the aforementioned stepfather. Very goofy and, with the riffing, decently entertaining.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XXXIV

DVD reviews from The Movie Snob.

Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent  (B). This is a solid episode. It starts with a funny short film “The Home Economics Story,” which is Iowa State College’s 1951 exposé of college life in the exciting field of home economics. The main feature is a 1957 film directed by schlockmeister Roger Corman (She Gods of Shark Reef) in which a bunch of Viking gals sail the ocean blue in search of their missing menfolk. Eventually they wash up on the shore of some barbaric land where, coincidentally, their missing men have previously been enslaved. I got a kick out of it. There are two bonus features—a tiny special introduction by Frank Conniff that adds nothing to the experience and a whopping 90-minute documentary about A.I.P., a company that made tons of cheapie movies like Viking Women back in the 1950s (I think; I didn’t watch it all).

War of the Colossal Beast  (C). This mediocre episode features the 1958 sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man.  Although Glenn Manning, the 60-foot giant, was believed to have died at the end of the previous movie, he crops up in Mexico where he is terrorizing grocery-truck drivers and stealing their cargo.  The riffing is decent but nothing special.  This episode is probably better known for the short that precedes it, “Mr. B Natural,” in which an unbearably perky woman portrays the spirit of music who inspires an awkward teen to join the school band.  And, for some reason, she is referred to as a man, the titular Mr. B Natural.  The disc also features a brief, new introduction by Frank Conniff, but it doesn’t really add much entertainment value.

The Undead  (B+).  This entertaining episode features a 1956 film directed by the aforementioned schlockmeister Roger Corman in which a couple of “scientists” hypnotize a woman and send her back to the Middle Ages, when in a previous life she was a woman about to be executed for witchcraft. From there, we bounce confusingly back and forth between the boring science guys and Jolly, Leprous Olde England. There’s an annoying gravedigger and a comely witch who has her eyes on the stalwart knight who loves the accused heroine. The only extra on the disc is the theatrical trailer.

The She-Creature  (B). This is a cheesy 1956 monster movie that bears some resemblance to The Undead. A greasy hypnotist mesmerizes his lovely assistant Andrea and sends her back in time to past lives, but also somehow causes her to regress into a murderous sea monster that looks a little like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Another scientist guy falls in love with Andrea and, with as little emotion as is humanly possible, tries to break the greasy guy’s spell on her. Pretty funny episode. No extras except the theatrical trailer.

Rifftrax: Planet of Dinosaurs

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Planet of Dinosaurs  (B).  I don’t know when I picked this DVD up, but I’m surprised to see on the internets that the Rifftrax boys issued it way back in 2009.  Anyhoo, the movie itself is a dull 1977 release featuring a bunch of hirsute yet hapless space travelers that get marooned on a prehistoric planet full of stop-motion dinosaurs.  The movie is padded out with endless scenes of the polyester-clad astronauts hiking through some rocky, arid wilderness, punctuated with the occasional dinosaur or large-spider attack.  The riffing is good, with lots of fun being poked at the facial hair, costumes, and general 1970s aesthetic of the film. The disc also features the original version of the movie without the comedic commentary, but I cannot imagine why anyone would watch it.  I certainly didn’t!

Rifftrax: Suburban Sasquatch

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Suburban Sasquatch  (B).  This is another DVD release from some of the creative forces behind Mystery Science Theater: 3000.  (See, e.g., Missile to the Moon.)  The film being riffed is a 2004 do-it-yourself, straight-to-video project about a homicidal Sasquatch that goes on a murder spree somewhere in “north eastern America.”  At first, I didn’t think the riffing was all that funny, but the ludicrousness of the film (did I mention that this Bigfoot can teleport? or how much terrible CGI “blood” geysers out of his victims?) held my interest.  And eventually the riffing kicked into gear and had me howling with laughter.  One weird thing—the movie does have some profanity, which the Rifftrax folks left in, but when the riffers themselves used profanity they bleeped it out.  Strange.  There’s also a short bonus feature called “Talkin’ Rifftrax” that is best skipped.

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon  (B-).  This is a DVD from early in the history of Rifftrax, the main successor to Mystery Science Theater: 3000.  It’s not a bad way to spend 77 minutes.  The film being riffed is a cheapie from 1958 in which five Earthlings travel to the Moon (in a missile). There we learn that weird rock monsters stalk the surface and a small society composed entirely of women inhabits some air-filled caves.  It’s a lame film, but the riffing is pretty good. Tommy Cook, who played a young crook in Teen-age Crime Wave, plays a young crook in this film too.  No bonus features, which is a real time-saver!

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXIII

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXIII.

Daddy-O  (B).  This episode starts with a lackluster short called “Alphabet Antics,” but the main event is pretty funny. Our hero, who goes by “Daddy-O,” is a young (?) fellow who sings pre-rock-and-roll-style tunes in night clubs and who loses his driver’s license after losing a street race to a sassy bleached-blond gal. Things turn serious (?) after Daddy-O’s best friend dies in a suspicious car crash, and our hero gets mixed up with some drug runners while trying to play detective. Surely the most remarkable thing about this low-budget dud is the fact that it is the first movie scored by composer John Williams of Star Wars fame. Extras include a competent short feature about the company that made Daddy-O and the opening and closing host segments when the episode aired on “The Mystery Science Theater Hour.”

Earth vs. the Spider  (C+). This episode starts with a better-than-average short called “Speech: Using Your Voice,” in which some old geezer lectures us about improving the way we speak. Funny riffing—and probably not entirely bad advice to boot! The main event is a 1958 creature feature in which a giant tarantula terrorizes a small town. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly hilarious either. The making-of bonus feature isn’t bad. Interestingly, the director actually got permission to shoot the movie in Carlsbad Caverns, but they wouldn’t let him bring any extra lighting inside, so he had to shoot some footage of the Caverns and then somehow paste his actors into the scenes.

Teen-Age Crime Wave  (C). This is a so-so episode featuring a 1955 film about juvenile delinquency—not that the “teens” involved in this crime spree look particularly young or anything. Anyhoo, a good girl gets mixed up with trigger-happy hoodlum Mike and his moll Terry, and most of the movie is the three of them hiding out in a farmhouse trying to avoid a police dragnet after Mike shoots a police officer. I actually got sort of curious about how the movie would turn out, which doesn’t often happen with MST3K! Also, the actress who plays Terry (Molly McCart, A Kiss Before Dying) is kind of cute. The disc is packed with three extras: the movie’s original trailer, a short documentary about producer Sam Katzman (who has 239 producer credits on imdb.com!) that was pretty interesting, and a short interview with the movie’s star, Tommy Cook (The Vicious Years), that really wasn’t all that interesting.

Agent for h.a.r.m.  (C).  So, I gather that this was made as a pilot for a hoped-for TV series about spies. And then when it didn’t pan out, Universal bought it and released in 1966 as a movie, hoping to ride the wave of James Bond’s popularity.  Well, no such luck, I guess.  The movie is terrible, and the riffing is only so-so.  The female lead, Barbara Bouchet (Casino Royale (1967)), is a bright spot as the beautiful femme fatale.  Here’s something funny—I watched the whole movie thinking that the actor playing the James Bond wannabe had appeared as a guest star in the original Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth.”  But when I researched it on the internet, I learned that the “Assignment: Earth” guy was someone else—but Barbara Bouchet guest-starred in the original Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name.”  How about that?  The only extra on the disc is a short interview with male lead Peter Mark Richman—who did appear once as a guest star on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  So I wasn’t entirely off base!

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXII

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXII.

Radar Secret Service (D). Alas, this fifth-season episode just doesn’t cut it. The opening short is an educational video about safe driving, especially at railroad crossings.  The main feature is a 1950 dud about espionage and uranium theft in which nothing happens and lots of serious-looking men in suits stand around yammering a lot.  Mike and the robots just can’t make this turkey entertaining.  There are also two unexceptional bonus features—an introduction to the film by Frank Conniff and a little documentary about when Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu were invited guests at a sci-fi convention in London back in 2014, I think.

Hercules (B). This is a solid episode in which the fellas riff a 1958 Italian film loosely based on Greek myths. Steve Reeves (The Last Days of Pompeii), an American body-builder and former Mr. Universe, amiably takes on the title role, and the attractive Sylva Koscina (The Last Roman) plays the princess who wins Herc’s big heart. And there’s lots of stuff about Jason and the Argonauts too, but no cool stop-animation skeletons. A fun movie and good riffing add up to a good time. Frank Conniff contributed a new introduction to the film, and there’s also an interesting extra featurette about Joseph Levine, who brought the movie to America and made a mint.

San Francisco International (B). I think this was the pilot for a very short-lived 1970s TV series about the good men and women who work at the San Francisco International Airport. Pernell Roberts (TV’s Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D.) stars as the airport’s maverick chief of security who has to foil a clever plot to steal $3 million from an incoming flight. And there’s a subplot about a boy who’s sad that his parents are divorcing, so he steals some guy’s tiny plane. I got a kick out of it, although maybe it helped that I had a Coors Light at the beginning of the show. The disk contains a short extra feature about some guy who ran a fan club website for MST3K, but I had never even heard of it before.

Space Travelers (C). This movie apparently has the distinction of being the only MST3K victim that actually won an Academy Award© (visual effects). As Frank Conniff explains in a new introduction, this film was originally released in 1969 under the title “Marooned,” but the studio sold it off, and the purchaser slapped a new title on it and rereleased it in like 1991. It’s about three astronauts who get stranded in space because of a mechanical malfunction, and it actually has legitimate movie stars in it, like Gregory Peck (The Gunfighter) and Gene Hackman (The French Connection). Unfortunately it moves at a glacial speed and is, in a word, boring. The riffing isn’t bad, but it isn’t top-shelf either. There’s an additional bonus feature about how “Marooned” turned into “Space Travelers,” which is fine.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXI

New DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXI (The Turkey Day Collection).

Jungle Goddess (C). This episode starts with an episode of a Bela Lugosi serial called The Phantom Creeps, in which Lugosi plays a mad scientist.  It’s pretty average. So is the main feature, Jungle Goddess, which is a 1948 “adventure” movie that is only 62 minutes long. Two roughnecks with a plane decide to go looking for a missing heiress, whose plane crashed in the African jungle six years earlier. They discover, as the title suggests, that the natives worship her as a goddess.  I got a few laughs out of the riffing, but it was a pretty average episode. The extras are about some MST3K Thanksgiving marathons that I never saw, so they didn’t mean that much to me.

The Painted Hills (C).  They riffed a Lassie movie?  Yes, they did!  Except that Lassie is called “Shep” in the movie, for some reason.  The movie features two grizzled old guys with very impressive hair, an annoying boy named Tommy, and a villain whose lust for gold ultimately turns him into a murderer.  But don’t worry!  Lassie, I mean Shep, is on the case!  It’s not that great an episode (unless you dig jokes about snausages), but I admit I did get a couple of belly laughs out of it.  The opening short, called “Body Care & Grooming,” is also OK.

Squirm (B+).  This is a funny episode in which the guys riff a 1970s horror flick about man-eating earthworms.  It’s set in a tiny Georgia town, and the riffers gets lots of mileage out of the over-the-top Southern-ness of it all.  But it does features lots of scenes of massive numbers of worms, so if you’re squeamish about worms this is probably not for you.  The lead actor was a good sport and sat down for an interview about the movie, also featured on the disc.  (The interview is cut with some other extra-gross movie scenes that were cut for the MST version.) The opening short, “Spring Fever,” is OK.

The Screaming Skull (B).  This is a solid episode featuring a lame 1950s horror flick that is more or less a cross between Rebecca and Gaslight.  A newlywed couple moves into a creepy old house owned by the husband, whose previous wife died under mysterious circumstances.  There’s a creepy gardener creeping around the place, and soon the new wife is getting terrorized by weird sights and sounds.  The riffing had me chuckling steadily throughout.  There’s an opening short featuring Gumby, which is OK.  The disc also contains a bonus feature about the creator of Gumby and a bonus feature about The Screaming Skull in which the lead actress appears and gives her two cents’ worth.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXX

New DVD review from The Movie Snob

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXX

Outlaw of Gor (B).  This is a cheesy swords-and-sandals movie from the 1980s.  Strongly reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars, this movie features a bland blond fellow named Tarl Cabot who is mysteriously whisked off to another planet called Gor.  He’s in love with a Gorean princess, but an evil queen throws him into a dungeon while a bemused Jack Palance (Shane) wears some odd headgear as an evil priest named Xenos.  Pretty funny episode, although it flags a little towards the end (probably because the movie itself grinds to an almost complete halt in the last act). There are three bonus short features: an interview with the director, who seems amused to recall the experience, a feature about the producer (unfortunately the presenter is foreign and seemed to have a jaw condition, so I couldn’t understand much of what he said), and a feature about the schlocky sci-fi book series that Outlaw of Gor was based on.

The Black Scorpion (B). Although this episode is from MST’s uneven first season, it is pretty darned funny. The film is a 1957 black-and-white creature feature set in Mexico, where a volcanic eruption has unleashed a plague of giant scorpions large enough to pluck a hapless guy from the top of a telephone pole. Our heroes are a couple of geologists, one of whom takes occasional breaks from scorpion-studying to pitch woo at the attractive owner of a nearby cattle ranch. The stop-motion-scorpion scenes are actually not bad, but the repeated close-ups of the same drooling scorpion “face” get a little old. Anyway, the riffing is good, so check it out.

The Projected Man (A-). This 1966 film uses pretty much the same premise as The Fly. A scientist is on the verge of perfecting a device that will teleport matter from one place to another, but something goes horribly wrong when he uses himself as the test subject. Mike and the bots get a lot of mileage out of the Britishness of all involved, and I found that shtick very funny. The riffers make at least a few references to the earlier MST3K episode Devil Doll because the same guy (Bryant Haliday) starts in both movies, so I suggest watching Devil Doll first. (It’s in Volume XIX of the MST3K boxed sets, which I reviewed here.) There’s a very short bonus feature about the making of The Projected Man, but it is nothing special.

It Lives By Night (B-). Not as good as the rest of this boxed set, this season 10 episode still delivered a few big laughs.  The film is a 1974 flick in which a bland couple’s honeymoon is rudely interrupted when the husband is bitten by a bat and contracts lycanthropy. His poor wife, who reminded me of Dana Delaney, has no idea what is happening to him or why a sleazy sheriff suspects her husband of a burgeoning murder spree. It’s very similar to the movie Werewolf, which MST3K spoofed during a classic episode in season 9 (and which gets a shout-out in the early going of this one). Werewolf can be found in the MST3K 20th anniversary boxed set, which I reviewed here.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live: The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour (B).  The principal creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel Hodgson, is on the road doing live shows in venues around the country.  I think I heard this is supposedly going to be Hodgson’s last road show.  Anyhoo, my sister and I caught the show last weekend in Dallas’s fancy opera house.  The show is basically a live recreation of an episode of the MST3K TV show, with Joel and his two robot sidekicks (Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo) riffing on a terrible movie and occasionally taking little breaks to do (allegedly) comical skits.  The terrible movie for our show was a cheesy 1986 Karate Kid rip-off called No Retreat, No Surrender (featuring a young and villainous Jean-Claude Van Damme, Timecop), and the riffing was very amusing.  I’d probably give the show a B+ or an A- based on the riffing, but the skits were unfortunately unentertaining (just like they usually were during MST3K’s TV run).  Note that Joel is the only person from the original show involved in this production; the robots are voiced by two new guys, and two new actresses participated in the skits.  I think it was a pretty clean show, too, if you’re thinking about taking the kids.  Definitely worth catching if they come to a town near you.  Looks like they’re about to do a bunch of shows in Florida if you’re down that way!

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXIX

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXIX

Untamed Youth (B).  This delightful youth-exploitation film from 1957 stars blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren (Girls Town) as a would-be rock-and-roll singer.  Unfortunately she and her sister are arrested in some backwater burg, and the crooked judge sentences them to be slave labor on a farm run by the judge’s co-conspirator.  Entertaining episode, and the disc features a short interview with Mamie as a bonus feature.

Hercules and the Captive Women  (C).  This is a cheesy European Hercules flick from 1961.  The title is inapt because there are no captive women in evidence.  Sure, the evil queen of Atlantis is trying to sacrifice her daughter to the gods throughout the whole movie, but that’s just one woman.  (Apparently the movie was sometimes called Hercules Conquers Atlantis.)  Anyway, this is a pretty average outing for Joel and the robots, and the extras on the disc are also unremarkable.

The Thing That Couldn’t Die  (A-).  Now we’re getting somewhere!  Mike and the bots have a great time skewering this 1958 horror cheapie.  A cute-ish blond girl is doing a little water-witching around her aunt’s dude ranch when she discovers an old chest containing the 400-year-old head of some evil guy who got himself executed by Sir Frances Drake.  The head can hypnotize people into doing its evil bidding, and of course its top priority is getting the water witch to find his long-lost body!  The riffing is great, and even a couple of the host segments are funny as Mike encounters the supposedly super-intelligent Observers.

The Pumaman  (B+).  Another fan favorite, this is a super-cheesy 1980 superhero movie about a guy who supposedly has the powers of a puma and who must use them to fight evil forces led by the great Donald (Halloween) Pleasence (whose name is misspelled Pleasance in the credits).  The guy is more Greatest American Hero than Superman, and his Aztec mentor constantly has to bail him out of trouble.  The extras on the disc are a bit unusual.  One is a complete and unriffed version of The Pumaman; why anyone would want to watch it, I can’t imagine.  The other is a lengthy interview with the actor who played the Pumaman.  He was a New York City lawyer who tried acting for about ten years and then went back to lawyering.  He was a good sport to be interviewed for the disc because he really didn’t appreciate the MST3K guys making fun of this movie!

Rifftrax Live: The Giant Spider Invasion

The Movie Snob takes in another Fathomevents event.

Rifftrax Live: The Giant Spider Invasion  (A-).  This is the last Rifftrax Live event of the year, and it’s a good one.  The opening short clip is fairly meh; it’s a bizarre explanation of how the nation’s telephone system worked back in the days of party lines and rotary phones.  Did I mention it involves lots and lots of creepy marionettes?  But the main event more than makes up for the lackluster appetizer.  The Giant Spider Invasion is a uniquely terrible 1975 monster movie starring Alan Hale (Skipper on TV’s Gilligan’s Island) as the sheriff of a small town that’s getting invaded by some extraterrestrial tarantulas and one truly giant spider that will eat you if you cooperate by climbing up into its mouth.  They riffed this movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it was one of the all-time great MST3K episodes.  This all-new riffing experience from the Rifftrax guys was just as funny.  If you can’t catch it at the theater (there’s an encore performance tomorrow night), it’ll be worth downloading from the Rifftrax website.  Warmly recommended . . . unless you have arachnophobia.

Rifftrax Live: Star Raiders

A new review from the Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine  (B).  The movie riffers were at it again recently, and, although you can’t see it in the theater like I did, you can download this treasure directly from the Rifftrax website if you so choose.  The show opens with a short about telling the truth (although the real lesson seems to be “don’t throw rocks at a towel hanging on a clothesline right in front of a window”).  It’s fine.  The feature is a low-budget sci-fi movie that I have to assume went straight to video.  Casper Van Dien of Starship Troopers fame stars as Han Solo Saber Raine, a roguish mercenary/spaceship pilot who gets hired to help rescue a prince and princess who have been captured by some bad guy in a mask.  Yes, it is a cheesy Star Wars rip-off in the vein of Krull or Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, but somehow it got made in 2017.  The riffing was average, but the fact that it was ripping off a beloved 40-year-old movie from my childhood made the movie strangely endearing to me.  And Casper’s blond sidekick was kind of cute.

Rifftrax: Octaman

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Octaman (B-).  I caught the latest Rifftrax live show last night, and if you are so inclined you can catch a rebroadcast at your local theater on April 24.  As you call tell from my grade, I’m not going to insist that you go.  It’s OK, but it’s not one of the gang’s greatest hits.  The appetizer is a short featuring McGruff the Crime Dog in an anti-drug screed.  It’s fine.  The main event is a monster movie that resembles a lamer version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  (No surprise, since writer-director Harry Essex also wrote the screenplay for . . . Creature from the Black Lagoon.)  The riffing was fine, but it never reaches giddy heights.  Octaman is only 80 minutes long, so the whole show was only about an hour and thirty-five minutes long.  One of the funniest bits was the song the guys sang at the very end of the show recapitulating the whole movie in three short verses.  Let’s see if the next Rifftrax live show, Star Raiders on June 6, is better.

Mystery Science Theater: 25th Anniversary Edition

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

I have more time on my hands these days, so I’m digging into my large collection of unwatched Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVDs.  This collection, which would be Volume XXVIII but for the 25th Anniversary Edition tag, contains six episodes rather than the usual four.  I think the last two episodes described below had already been released on DVD as standalone episodes.  Anyway, let’s get to this solid but not spectacular collection….

Mystery Science Theater 3000: 25^th Anniversary Edition (Volume XXXVIII).

Moon Zero Two  (B-).  This first-season offering features a 1969 production from Hammer, the famed low-budget British horror studio.  The movie is a cheesy “western in space” set on the moon in the early 21^st century.  A charisma-free space jockey is recruited for two seemingly independent jobs—help a nefarious plutocrat crash a sapphire-laden asteroid into the far side of the moon and help a beautiful woman find out what happened to her missing brother, a mining prospector on . . . the far side of the moon.  Although the movie is generally terrible, the core ideas aren’t awful, some of the special effects seem pretty okay for the era, and female lead Catherine Schell really is gorgeous.  (She would go on to appear in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and TV’s Space: 1999, and she kept acting regularly into the 1990s.)  Anyway, the riffing started out pretty strong in this one, but it petered out as the movie went along.  Hence, the lukewarm grade.

The Day the Earth Froze (B).   This is a decent episode.  It starts with a short about a trip to the circus.  The main course is a weird old Finnish-Soviet movie based on a Finnish fairy tale.  A witch kidnaps a fair maiden to coerce her brother, a famed blacksmith, into building the witch a gadget called a “sampo” that can apparently make whatever you want it to.  Then the fair maiden’s boyfriend tries to steal the sampo, leading the witch to steal the sun, thereby threatening to freeze all the nice villagers.  Solid riffing, solid episode.  The real prize on the disc, though, is a short documentary featuring interviews with the original cast members about how MST3K first got started on a local cable channel in Minneapolis-St. Paul.  It really was interesting.

The Leech Woman  (C).  The riffing is only average on this weak 1960 horror movie about a woman who gets hooked on a potion that temporarily restores youth—but unfortunately requires an ingredient that can be obtained only by means of murder!  Extras on the disc include a decent documentary about many (or all?) of the people who acted or provided voice work on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and a short interview with Mary Jo Pehl about her life post MST3K.

Gorgo (B).  Next up is a cheesy 1961 Godzilla ripoff set in Ireland and London.  Decent riffing makes for an above-average episode.  One of the movie’s stars, William Sylvester, actually went on to have a major role in 2001: A Space Odyssey as Dr. Heywood Floyd. And Leonard Maltin makes a special guest appearance on MST!

Mitchell (B).  This was the last MST episode featuring Joel Hodgson as its host.  Joe Don Baker (Mud) stars as Mitchell, a disheveled slob of a cop who plays by his own rules, bucks the police chief, and makes it his mission to nail some sleazy guy for murdering another sleazy guy who was burglarizing the first sleazy guy’s house.  Pretty good riffing, plus Linda Evans (TV’s Dynasty) co-stars in the movie and has to endure a sex scene with the unappealing Baker.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (B-).  This was the first MST episode to feature Mike Nelson, who had been a writer for the show for a while, as the host.  The film is a 1962 horror movie about a doctor who has been dabbling in unorthodox experiments.  His love for weird science pays off when his fiancée is decapitated in a car crash; he puts her head in a lasagna pan and keeps it alive in his laboratory while he creepily trolls various nightclubs for a suitable replacement body.  Amusingly, the final title card at the end of the movie changes its name to “The Head That Wouldn’t Die.”  The disc contains a short feature about Joel Hodgson’s leaving MST and a short interview with an actress who appeared (very briefly) in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Rifftrax: Space Mutiny

The Movie Snob is back.

Rifftrax: Space Mutiny  (B+).  Ahoy, gentle readers!  I have not blogged in a while, owing to various family-related issues that have kept me out of the theaters.  But my sister was in town last week, and we managed to hit the multiplex for the latest Rifftrax live show.  You can catch a re-broadcast of it this coming Tuesday, June 19, and I give this one a hearty thumbs-up.  The opening short was pretty lackluster, something about a boy and his dad visiting a mysterious magic shop that may actually be magical!  But the main event is Space Mutiny, a 1988 sci-fi cheesefest that was actually riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in 1997.  The riffers did a fine job, but the movie alone would have provided plenty of laughs.  The plot is largely incomprehensible, but it’s something about a mutiny aboard a giant spaceship that happens to look exactly like the 1978-79 era Battlestar Galactica.  Don’t miss it!

Rifftrax Live: Summer Shorts Beach Party

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: Summer Shorts Beach Party  (B).  Last night Fathom Events delivered another live show by the Rifftrax usuals (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett) and a slew of guest stars (Mary Jo Pehl, Bridget Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and a fellow who was new to me named Paul F. Tompkins).  I assume that by now you know what these shows are–comedians who specialize in riffing on bad movies and other video material.  This time around they aren’t riffing a full-length movie, but rather a bunch of “educational” shorts from I don’t know when–roughly the 50s through the 70s.  Although this wasn’t one of the riffers’ greatest performances ever, I did think it was a solid outing with plenty of decent laughs.  I would say the funniest shorts were (i) an old black-and-white number about a woman who graduates from secretarial school and works her way up in some bland office job, (ii) another black-and-white film about a surly high-school boy whose conscience is trying to get him to stop griping about everything, and (iii) a p.e. film featuring a bunch of dejected elementary-school kids being forced to roll and bounce big rubber balls around for no apparent reason.  I know they sound terrible, but they’re pretty funny when the riffers make wisecracks about them throughout!  The show will be rebroadcast on June 20, so head on over to fathomevents.com if you want more information.

Rifftrax Live – Samurai Cop

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: Samurai Cop.  (B+)  This is a solid effort by the riffers at Rifftrax.  (I saw the live show last night, but you can catch a rebroadcast next Tuesday night if you like!)  They started with an amusing short, an old black-and-white educational film in which a surly student learns about good manners from a preachy chalk drawing come to life.  Samurai Cop itself is a terrible 1991 knock-off of Lethal Weapon and other buddy-cop movies.  A Japanese gang with almost no Japanese members is getting into the L.A. drug scene, and a muscle-bound samurai cop with long, flowing hair and no discernible martial-arts skills comes up from San Diego to help out.  He and his African-American sidekick mostly drive around shooting people, but the samurai cop occasionally takes a time out to awkwardly hit on or make out with various women who are unfortunate enough to cross his path.  The riffing was very funny, and the movie was amusingly inept in its own right, so I give it a solid thumbs-up.

Be aware, however, that the Rifftrax show is rated R.  I was surprised to see that on my ticket, and it turned out to be because the movie has a lot of profanity in it–also some clumsy sexual banter, and some scenes in which the hero and heroine make out while wearing very small swimsuits.  (According to IMDB there is nudity in the original movie, but the Rifftrax folks deleted that out.)

To my surprise, the red-headed gal who runs with the bad guys in this movie was Gates McFadden’s stand-in on Star Trek: The Next Generation and actually had small parts herself in no fewer than 43 STTNG episodes!  How about that?

Rifftrax Live: Time Chasers

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: Time Chasers  (B-).  Well, I didn’t actually see this 2016 show live; I just recently saw it on DVD.  But I was really, really looking forward to it because the guys riffed Time Chasers back in their Mystery Science Theater glory days, and in my mind it was one of the funniest MST episodes of all time.  Time Chasers itself is a hilariously low-budget 1994 time-travel movie about Nick Miller, a nerdy physics professor in Vermont who turns his little single-propeller airplane into a time machine with what looks like a Commodore 64.  Unfortunately Nick’s physics prowess far exceeds his common sense, and he rashly sells his invention to an evil corporation called GenCorp, embodied by its tangibly evil CEO J.K. Robertson.  The scene in which Nick visits the CEO in his “office” – a stairway landing in what I’ve read is the opera house in Rutland, Vermont – is one of the all-time greats.  So, Nick has to do more time traveling to try to stop himself from selling the time machine to GenCorp in the first place.

Unfortunately, the riffers just don’t do as good a job shredding Time Chasers as they did on Mystery Science Theater so many years ago.  While watching the movie, I often remembered the wisecracks from the MST version, and the new jokes just weren’t as good.  Don’t get me wrong—it was still an entertaining experience, if only because the movie itself is such a target-rich environment.  I just thought the Rifftrax version didn’t live up to the MST original.  There’s also a short about a chimpanzee that becomes a fireman, but it was nothing in particular to write home about either.

Mystery Science Theater: Volume XXVII

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXVII.

The Slime People (D).  This first-season offering just isn’t very good.  The movie is horrendous, about a handful of humans trying to survive an attack on Los Angeles by subterranean slime people.  Tedious in the extreme, and the riffing isn’t all that great either.  The highlight of the disc is actually a short interview with a woman who was in the movie, reminiscing about the experience and how horrified she was when she first saw the finished product because it was so bad.

Rocket Attack U.S.A. (C).  This second-season effort is not great but at least it’s better than The Slime People.  The 1961 film is a Cold War relic mainly about a spy sent to Moscow to figure out if the Soviets are planning to launch a nuclear attack.  Answer: Yes.  The first half of the movie features some pretty funny riffing by Joel and the robots, but they seem to lose steam towards the end.

Village of the Giants (C).  This okay episode features an old movie starring a young Beau Bridges (The Fabulous Baker Boys), a very young Ron Howard (TV’s Happy Days), and a timeless Toni Basil (the 1982 hit song “Mickey”).  Howard is a brainiac kid in the little town of Hainesville.  He accidentally invents a substance that, when eaten, makes the consumer grow to enormous size.  Unfortunately, Beau and his gang of unpleasant punk teenagers get a hold of the growth formula and proceed to terrorize the town.  Expect lots of unconvincing special effects and lots of whining from Beau’s gang about how adults are always pushing young people around with their rules and such.

The Deadly Mantis  (B).  My grade may be slightly inflated because of the weakness of the other movies in this collection.  This is a 1957 creature feature about a giant praying mantis that was frozen in arctic ice millions of years ago.  Somehow it gets defrosted and runs amok killing people.  There is very little plot beyond finding and killing the mantis, which seems to take an unduly long time.  The riffing is pretty good.  The two extras are an introduction by Mary Jo Pehl and a short documentary about Mantis producer William Alland, neither of which is of any special interest.

Mystery Science Theater: Volume XXVI

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXVI.

The Magic Sword.  (C).  I don’t know, somehow this one just should have been funnier.  It’s a lame 1962 swords-and-sorcery flick in which Sir George (Gary Lockwood, 2001:A Space Odyssey) has to defeat an evil wizard (Basil Rathbone, The Hound of the Baskervilles) and rescue a beautiful princess (Anne Helm, Follow That Dream).  There’s so much material to work with, like George’s six assistant knights who get killed faster than bugs in a Raid commercial, and his inept sorceress foster mother, I don’t know why it wasn’t funnier.  The really amazing thing is that director Bert I. Gordon, whose movies were regularly skewered on MST3K, agreed to sit down for a documentary short about his career.  What a good sport!

Alien From L.A.  (D).  Yes, this is the 1988 cheesefest starring Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Kathy Ireland (Necessary Roughness).  She plays a clueless loser named Wanda who, through a series of ridiculous events, finds herself playing Indiana Jones in the lost city of Atlantis, far below the earth’s surface.  I think the director made her inhale helium before she read every line, because her voice was impossibly squeaky.  Unfortunately, the MST guys couldn’t do much with this one.  It just wasn’t very funny.

The Mole People.  (B).  This is a pretty good episode.  Some archaeologists (including Hugh Beaumont of Leave It To Beaver fame) find their way into a subterranean world inhabited by an ancient race of albino Sumerians.  The top archaeologist, a square-jawed John-Wayne soundalike, subdues the entire race with his trusty flashlight and courts a comely non-albino lass who happens to be among the mole people.  Pretty entertaining, with some laugh-out-loud riffs.  A decent short documentary about the film also appears on the disc.

Danger!! Death Ray.  (B).  Another pretty good episode.  The movie is a terrible 1967 rip-off of the James Bond movies.  Our “hero” is a pretty-boy spy with the unlikely name of Bart Fargo.  As one of the riffers comments, there is absolutely no tension or suspense at any point during the movie.  But the riffing is the point, and it’s pretty good.  The disc includes a short, choppily edited interview with Mike Nelson as a bonus, but it doesn’t really add much value.

Rifftrax Live: Mothra

The Movie Snob riffs on the riffers.

Rifftrax Live: Mothra  (C).  I thought this was a mediocre effort by the fellows at Rifftrax.  They started with an okay short in which a little boy learns lessons about personal hygiene from a bizarre nighttime apparition called “Mr. Soapy.”  The main feature was the Japanese monster movie Mothra, about a giant moth who destroys a bunch of Hot Wheels cars and styrofoam buildings after two tiny (like Barbie-doll sized) women get kidnapped from Mothra’s tropical island.  The movie was, of course, quite ridiculous, but I didn’t think the riffing was particularly great.  Part of the problem was that the movie was so incessantly loud it was occasionally hard to hear the jokes.  Also, I thought the riffers used a little more off-color humor than they usually do, and I didn’t think it was very funny.  So it was a bit of a let down, on the whole.

MST3K: Volume XXV

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXV.

Robot Holocaust (B).  Even though it was an episode from the first season of MST, which was a bit spotty, I enjoyed this one.  Actually, I’m pretty sure I would have thought this movie was funny even without any riffing at all.  It’s an 80s-era sci-fi movie that’s sort of a mash-up of Star Wars and Mad Max, and it is hilariously bad.  The budget must have been nonexistent.  Some highlights are some monstrous “sewer worms” that are obviously nothing more than sock puppets, and the monstrous spider of which we are allowed to see only one leg.  Also fabulous is the female henchman of “the Dark One.”  She’s kind of pretty, but she can’t act to save her life, and she adopted (or actually had) a bizarre accent that sounded like a speech impediment.  Well worth watching.

Kitten with a Whip (B).  This is a pretty entertaining episode.  The movie being riffed is a 1964 flick starring Ann-Margret (Viva Las Vegas) as a troubled juvenile delinquent and John Forsythe (TV’s Dynasty) as the unlucky fellow whose house she decides to hide out in after escaping from juvie.  Ms. Margret overacts terribly, but she is nicely counterbalanced by Forsythe’s remarkably bland performance.  Definitely worth seeing.

Revenge of the Creature (B+).  This sequel to The Creature From the Black Lagoon isn’t all that terrible—it’s just kind of dull.  But the riffing is quite good, and occasionally hilarious.  Watch closely, and you’ll see a very young Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven) in an uncredited role.  (Actually, the MST guys point him out, so I guess you don’t have to watch all that closely.)  The disc contains a few extras, including a reasonably interesting documentary short about director Jack Arnold, who directed several other movies of greater note, including It Came From Outer Space, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Operation Double 007  (C+).  That’s right, this 1967 movie is called Operation Double 007 in the credits, but for some reason it’s labeled Operation Kid Brother on the DVD box.  It’s a shameless rip-off of James Bond movies, right down to starring Sean Connery’s younger brother Neal as a spy.  Well, he’s not really a spy; he’s a plastic surgeon and hypnotist who gets recruited into being a spy.  It also features some of the minor players from the Bond movies, including Miss Moneypenny herself, Lois Maxwell (Moonraker).  The riffing is decent, but this episode is the weak link in this collection.  An introduction by Joel Hodgson doesn’t really add anything either.

Rifftrax: Sharknado 2

From The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Sharknado 2  (C).  The guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 are at it again.  This past Thursday, they did a live riffing show on Sharknado 2: The Second One, and it will be repeated this coming Thursday.  This time, sharknados (that is, tornadoes stuffed with sharks) are bearing down on New York City, and once again it is up to Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering, Sharknado) to save the day.  And it is up to Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett to make fun of the movie the whole way.  As I recall, their commentary on the original Sharknado was very funny, but something just seemed a little off this time around.  There were moments of hilarity here and there–many of which involved co-star Tara Reid (The Big Lebowski) and her fondness for plastic surgery–but overall, it was a pretty mediocre outing for the Rifftrax trio.  I hate to say it, but I recommend skipping this one and waiting for the next installment of Rifftrax live in October — some sort of rock and roll and kung fu movie called Miami Connection.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXIV

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXIV.

Fugitive Alien (B+).  I got several big laughs out of this “movie” that was cobbled together from a Japanese TV series.  The “movie” is about a human-looking alien named Ken(!) who accidentally kills a fellow alien, becomes a fugitive from his own species, and joins a crew of human space travelers for some space-going adventures.  Oh, and because Ken killed her brother, Ken’s former lover is legally obliged to track him down, kill him, and take his head back to their home world.  Good riffing from Joel and the robots make this episode a treat.

Star Force: Fugitive Alien II (C-).  For some reason, this sequel to Fugitive Alien never really takes off.  The “movie” is just as bad as the first one, but the riffing never really gets going.  The really shocking thing is that Sandy Frank, the man responsible for importing these Japanese creations (and others, like Gamera) to America, actually agreed to be interviewed for this disc!  He comes off as a real wheeler-dealer kind of guy, and he has very little to say about his treatment at the hands of MST3K.

The Sword and the Dragon (B).  In this episode the guys riff on a 1956 Russian movie about a medieval peasant hero who rises up to help his prince defeat invading Mongol hordes and their three-headed dragon.  It’s a pretty good episode.  As extras, they’ve bundled onto the disc two MST3K shorts that weren’t originally associated with this episode, “Snow Thrills” and the truly hilarious “A Date With Your Family.”

Samson Versus the Vampire Women  (B).  This Mexican import is truly bizarre.  For about half the movie, it’s a standard, if lame, vampire yarn.  Some lady vampires need to abduct a specific young woman and turn her into their vampire queen, while the woman’s professor father, her fiancé, and the local police ineffectually try to protect her from the sinister but attractive vampiresses.  Halfway through the movie, a masked wrestler (complete with tight pants, cape, and no shirt) named Samson just shows up in the professor’s study and makes it his mission to defeat the vampires.  And nobody seems to think it is odd. The riffing is not bad, but the oddness of the movie alone is enough to make it worthwhile.