Mystery Science Theater 3000, or "Bad SciFi Movies We Have Known and Loved"
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Mystery Science Theater 3000, or "Bad SciFi Movies We Have Known and Loved"
Ah, I loved this great, quirky little show ever since I first saw it on TV (at that time it was on Comedy Central) during my grad. student days at Michigan in the early 90s. Alas, MST3K is no more, but for diehard fans, MST3K lives on, at least in a small way, via their unofficial official web site.
The Worst MST3K Goof of all Time
Movies we wish MST3K had been around long enough to do a proper razzing for
And from the inflicted-on-us-more-recently bin...
Episode Tidbits & Trivia
The Worst MST3K Goof of all Time:
I'm sure the MST3K folks would agree that it's only right and proper for them to get a well-deserved razzing themselves when warranted. So here it is: in the one and only MST3K Movie (as in the big-screen theatrical-release kind), the movie being razzed is the '50s Sci Fi classic This Island Earth. Briefly, a race of oh-so-superior white-haired, big-foreheaded aliens (OSSWHBFAs, for short) have come to earth (disguised as oh-so-superior white-haired, big-foreheaded humans, or OSSWHBFHs) to kidnap/recruit some of Earth's leading nuclear scientists in an attempt to rescue their dying planet. You see, the OSSWHBFAs have technology vastly superior to our own - they've mastered interstellar faster-than-light travel, for instance - but they just never figured out even the basics of nuclear power. The whole get-some-enriched-uranium-fuel-pellets-and-stick-them-in-a-pile-of-graphite-or-in-a-pool-of-water thing just somehow escaped them; they were probably too busy developing all the other incredibly advanced technologies of theirs, apparently using coal-burning power plants for electricity while doing so. Anyway, their planet is running out of power and they need lowly earth scientists to help them build a reactor. They recruit the scientists by sending them a mysterious device called an interossicalafragalisticifier, in pieces - "some assembly required." If the scientist manages to put the thing together properly, then by golly he's smart enough to be of interest to the OSSWHBFAs, and the interossicalafragalisticifier switches itself on and the scientist gets a live sales pitch from Exeter, the leader of the OSSWHBFAs - that's him on the triangular viewer in this still from the movie:
Movies we wish MST3K had been around long enough to do a proper razzing for (this list will likely be permanently under construction, as I discover further
obscure lost "classics" of the genre and as present-day would-be-auteurs inflict new anti-classics on the world):
The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978), a.k.a. "Star Wars Episode Four-point-Oh-My-God-I-Can't-Believe-This-Ever-Got-Made", a.a.k.a. "The Hollywood Squares Strike Back", a.a.a.k.a. "Wookie of the Year" - It's called "cashing in anyway you can," something George Lucas is among the kings of. Apparently even he admits he went too far with this unutterably awful piece of poo. Unfortunately for him, there are tapes still in circulation. Keep passing 'em around, people...niemals vergessen!
The Queen of Outer Space (1958) (Not to be confused with the MST3Ked Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956))- The three most chauvinistic men on earth are selected as the crew of the first
manned mission to the mysterious planet Venus. (Money was apparently tight in the Venusian exploration program, because the space suits they wear are recycled
from Forbidden Planet). When they get there they are imprisoned by the masked-to-cover-hideous-Darth-Vader-like-facial-disfigurement evil
queen Yllana of Venus, a planet whose men have mysteriously died in a "revolt", which caused Queen Yllana's facial scarring (as a result of which she hates
all men), and left only mini-skirted young lovelies to run things.
We soon find out that wicked, naughty, evil Queen Yllana intends to destroy the earth with a supercalafragilistic beta disintegrator ray her scientists have developed.
Luckily our boys get help from friendly scientist-babe Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor, who at one point explains pithily that "Vimmen vill never be 'appy vizout men..."),
and after much intrigue, running about, a brief appearance by a giant spider-like creature and some explosions, the evil queen gets hers and our lads get plenty
of smooches from the grateful Venusian lovelies. Definitely a camp classic - even watchable without an MST3K-style treatment (but by all means, feel free to do one yourself.)
Cat Women of the Moon (1953) - Another all-girl alien world classic of the 50s, complete with the requisite giant spiders
and chauvinistic-buffoon male astronauts: "You're too smart for me, baby... I like 'em stupid." Meow! Believe it or not, the musical score for this SciFi cheeseball is by none other Elmer Bernstein.
Even harder to fathom, someone apparently liked this one enough to actually do what amounts to a remake, Missile to the Moon (1958).
Devil Girl from Mars (1954) - Lonely Martian Dominatrix seeks Earthmen from the Scottish Highlands for forced-breeding purposes and light housework. Must be willing to relocate.
The Brain From Planet Arous (1957) - Another John-Agar-starring schlock SciFi "masterpiece," sure to give even the most hardy fans of B-grade cheese an extraterrestrial Excedrin-sized headache. Oh, the pain...
Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) (Not to be confused with The Queen of Outer Space or
Fire Maidens from Outer Space) - Tagline: In Space (Outer Space, that is), no one can hear you scream ... for extra-strength antifungal cream. That's why you need - BOOM! - Tough-actin' Tinactin. Watch for one of the actresses from the MST3Ked
The Phantom Planet (1961), the latter being noteworthy in its own right as the first on-screen appearance of giant Detroiter Richard Kiel (unrecognizable in his Solarite costume),
who also features in the MST3Ked caveman anti-classic Eegah! (1962), and who would achieve real cinematic fame 15 years later as the steel-toothed James Bond nemesis Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). How's that for "sick degrees of separation?"
And from the inflicted-on-us-more-recently bin:
One of the manifold joys of watching a really bad SciFi/Action/Adventure/Fantasy/Suspense/Horror movie at home is that you get to rag on it loudly and mercilessly. This past Saturday night featured a "SciFi Channel Original" piece of cheese called "Dragonstorm," co-starring none other than a post-LoTR John Rhys-Davies (as in, "what would Gimli the dwarf do?") as the venal King Fastrod (that character name is pretty cool ... if you're a male porno actor). King Not-so-Fastrod's castle in Carpathia has just been turned into a giant brick oven by dragons who fell to earth in giant oozing pods, so he and a few key aides flee (on foot, no less - apparently the film's low budget didn't permit hiring a few horses) to the neighboring castle of King Wednesbury (located roughly midway between the castles of King Tuesbury and King Thursbury, for you anal-retentive-geographer types), led by a wily hunstman named Silas (Grease 2's Maxwell Caulfield), who is apparently suffering the most spectacular sequence of bad hair days in recorded history. Regular watchers of the SciFi channel will recognize Star Gate SG-1's Tony Amendola in the role of King Fastrod's chief henchman, Theldag (name apparently taken from a Gary Larson Far Side caveman cartoon.)
At Wednesbury castle they encounter King Dubya's lovely crossbow-wielding daughter Medina (the stunning Angel Boris) along with a motley crew of stereotypically colorful I-never-signed-on-to-hunt-dragons-from-outer-space-but-what-the-heck secondary characters, and soon the flames of Medina and Silas' forbidden passion are burning even more brightly than the fiery dragon halitosis all around them ... well, maybe not, but they do engage in a bit of chaste hand-holding by movie's end.
Pretty bad stuff, but one of those that *could* have been not so bad with just a little thought and semi-competent directing. The costumes and props aren't bad for such a low-budget enterprise, the scenery is austere but not fake-looking, the two female leads (the aforementioned Boris and Bulgarian local Iskra Angelova) are easy on the eyes (dare I say angelic?), and the dragons are actually quite well done for low-budget CGI - not as scary as Industrial Light & Magic's creations in the wonderful, underappreciated Dragonslayer, but at least as good as any of the big-budget dragon movies released since. Cheesy, goofy viewing fun - I can definitely think of worse ways to spend a rainy Saturday evening. Several of the reviews at imdb.com are also worth the price of admission - I've copied selected excerpts from a couple of the best below (My annotations are in the form [annotation]). There's also a decent fakes.net review.
Review #1:
So bad, it's delightful, 26 June 2004
Author: artzau from Sacramento, CA
We're talking low budget here. You know that when you see the same people getting killed, burnt and eaten over and over...
...The most romantic part is where the huntsman walks in on the princess when she's nudie-patootie getting ready for a bath and gives her a slug of wine...
Review #2:
[I really like the way Review #2 succinctly summarizes the specific genre of this film. The "stop, drop and roll" bit in the review title refers to the many times hapless characters get lit on fire by dragon's breath in the movie, then run around screaming until they die, rather than just falling and rolling in the plentiful snow all around them to put the flames out.]
Stop, Drop, and Roll anyone?, 2 July 2004
Author: conkeestador from West of the Plains
...what this movie needed (besides some semblance of continuity, a script, and professional editing and direction) was some gratuitous sex and nudity. OK fine, you got to see half of one of the Princess' breasts in one scene but if you really want to be successful in the `dragons-from-outer-space-in-1190-Carpathia' genre you have to have eye candy. I know it had plenty of violence and it was `made for TV' but it's just kind of sad when you can see men being burned alive (the same men over and over in slow motion in this case) but no naked women. This movie could have easily been a 5 or 6 with some full frontal nudity and maybe even a 7 with some hot girl-on-girl action. At least it would have made the story a little more interesting if the Princess' love interest had been the girl with the catapult instead of the rather limp-wristed `huntsman' (did you see the way he held the bow?). What a waste of the budget to hire women like that and then cover them in those hideous costumes...
Review #3:
Should have been called 'Dragon Light Breeze', 30 October 2004 Author: cyclone259 from USA
...Two kingdoms at war? It didn't seem like there was enough people (cast) to work at a sunglass kiosk at a discount mall...
Review #4:
...We have "The Jester-Dressed Far Eastern Dragon Slayer." He chops. He kicks; he gives you true Chinese philosophical wisdoms, and all the while, he never gets a wrinkle in his acetate jester shirt. Not even when wearing his hard leather armor at the dinner table.
We have "Lil Miss You Could Have Knocked" who rubs herself over the heated water barrel and hides her already hidden breasts instead of her nether-regions which AREN'T covered. Way to be coy and discreet, girl. 4 Real. I mean, she's leaning into that barrel, giving it a look that definitely says, "I hate these medieval movies! Where is the SPIN cycle on this thing?!"
We have "Mr. I've Never Heard of a Hairbrush or a BONE to Brush My Hair" Huntsman who looks as if he is wearing a very bad wig, and if he's not, he should watch out for that family of spiders who have obviously nested in his hair...
This is one of those movies you only see because it's a rainy weekend and you're home with flu or bronchitis, and none of the more-serious dramatic DVDs you have in your to-watch list seems appropriate to your weakened semi-delirious state. Dammit, you want some mindless-yet-unintentionally-funny fluff, that is really bad, but still conveys the sense that someone was actually *trying*, even if they did abjectly fail to achieve any kind of greatness.
Here's the insightful review from the SciFi channel website:
"Several young campers on a weekend outing find themselves on the run in a spreading maze of forest fires. As if that weren't bad enough, there's also a homicidal lunatic pursuing them through the blazes -- and possibly setting more fires to cut off their only avenues of escape. This red-hot tale of coldblooded revenge stars Bryan Genesse (Death Train, Cyborg Cop III,) and Melanie Lewis (Gigli, the big-screen version of Starsky & Hutch)."
The SciFi channel blurb alas fails to mention the coolest part of this movie - roughly two-thirds of it involves our fire-prone young campers, in various states of injury, racing their dirtbikes through the woods and leaping through walls of CGI flames, trying to reach safety, only to encounter...another fire set by our mysterious homicidal firebug, who is (until the climax) shown only via his sinister-looking boot tops (You may ask, "can boot tops really look sinister?" Well, these surely do) and red, gasoline-can-laden pickup truck. Luckily our young friends have the assistance of beefy-yet-sensitive, take-charge woodsman-slash-dirtbike-expert Jake (Bryan Genesse), who strips off his leather biker jacket to reveal his sweaty-T-shirted beefiness at regular intervals of about 5 minutes or so. (More frequently when the coldblooded-revenge heats up to red-hottedness, as SciFi.com's writer puts it so eloquently above.) The best part about Jake is that he's also a crack (pun fully intended) amateur orthopedic surgeon - one of the guys' legs is badly broken early on due to a misguided motorbike jump attempt? No worries, let ol' Jakey have a look and ... Crack! - no more risk of a compound fracture there, no splint required, and the set is so good that the victim isn't even limping by the time the climax rolls around. One of the gals' shoulders is dislocated while leaping her bike through a wall of menacing CGI flames? Crack! - back in you go. Interestingly, the sweaty-T-shirted blonde of the bunch who winds up smooching with Jake as the ending credits roll, in the very same ending scene also mentions that she's a paramedic - she kept that secret very well while her friends were getting broken-legged, shoulder-dislocated, cut, singed and burned to a smoking crisp throughout the film. I guess she didn't want to be a showoff... Tom: I think Discovery didn't want to put a man in the break today because they had 2 riders who were likely tired from being in yesterday's big break, and they needed to conserve manpower in order to get Armstrong to the base of the final 2 climbs safely, especially if the other teams decided to attack in the final 20 km or so. While the team title would clearly be a nice bonus, since they already have 2 individual-stage and the TTT wins and a likely white jersey, the team title has to be a lower priority for them than protecting the yellow. Clearly there aren't many scenarios under which one could imagine Armstrong losing the yellow on a stage like today's, all it takes is a mechanical problem or a flat while the peloton is hammering away in the final few kms and without fresh teammates to pace one back, one can hemorrhage time - remember what happened to podium favorite Mayo last year on the cobbles? And Mayo *did* have his team around him...
Nature Unleashed: Tornado (2004)
(I could swear there's some underlying theme going on here in the SciFi movie titles, but for the life of me, I just can't make it out... ;)
The movie opens with a stupid guy chaining himself to a not-so-sturdy backyard appliance so he can make a home-movie doco of a CGI tornado roaring by without getting blown away himself. The winds are clearly blowing his hair sideways, yet he's magically getting pulled straight upwards (clue numero uno that this movie is gonna suck bigtime ... as if it being a "SciFi original" Saturday Nite feature wasn't a big enough tip-off). Suddenly, a shot rang out. The wife screamed. The family dog peed on the rug. And Mr. Tornado Paparrazzo gets his chain yanked and gets sucked into the whirling vortex of suckiness that is this movie.
Next, we cut to a scene in which his now grown-up son is himself a professional photog, covering some completely-out-of-left-field story about Gypsies being victims of discrimination in ... New Jersey. Thus completely sending the What-the-F***-o-Meter off the scale. And unbelievable as it might seem, the "movie" (and I use the term very, very loosely) manages to go downhill from there.
Perhaps the only remotely interesting thing about this bizarre mishmash of the meteorological and Roma-nesque is that it stars Swiss hunk-o-cheese Daniel Bernhardt, who played Agent Johnson in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), but who is much better known to MST3K fans for his brilliant portrayal of The Runaway karate-foo guy in Future War. ("It's not really the Future and we didn't have the budget to do a War, but we did rent a whole bunch of these empty cardboard boxes for Dan to get thrown through during the fight scenes...")
Wow - if I could give this one negative stars (Note to IMDB - we need black holes!) I would.
MST3K Episode Tidbits & Trivia:
Episode 1010: It Lives By Night (1974), a.k.a. The Bat People, a.a.k.a. It's Alive, a.a.a.k.a. Angel of Fear (working title)
Amidst the list of obscure-actor-and-crew credits at the start of the movie, one sees a special-effects credit for a young fella named "Stanley Winston." I'm guessing Stan left this movie off his curriculum vitae in later years, or buried it way down in the small print, somewhere between "Member of Richmond High School Junior Honor Society and Gold Key Club, 1962-1964" and "Wookie of the Year Award for costume work in The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)".
Further episode details (courtesy of the Daddy-O's Drive-In Dirt page at mst3kinfo.com)
Episode 820: Space Mutiny (1988)
Memorable quotes:
(09 Oct 2006 - thanks to Pax Vobiscum for several corrections).
(11 Dec 2006 - thanks to Dave B. for pointing out the missing "Roll Fizzlebeef".)