Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax

[XYZpdq]

watching Rifftrax's work on Viva Knievel!
the 1977 starring vehicle for motorcycle stunt guy who sabotaged his career by beating a guy with a metal bat mostly to death
nice riffing
very insane movie about how great a guy he is and his stunt adventures and a crime plot that attempts to use him for evil crime, but he really comes off kinda like the sort of guy who might beat a guy with a metal bat over some shit while trying to be a kids' hero with an action figure line

 

[Commander X]

It was in that period when Leslie Nielsen was primarily playing guest-villain of the week on detective shows like Cannon and Barnaby Jones, or villains in films like "Day of the Animals" or "Project: Kill", so his showing up to play a drug dealer who plans to murder a daredevil to smuggle drugs is no surprise.

MIKE NELSON: "I'm just saying maybe our money making schemes should occasionally not be based on killing a very famous daredevil. Just, you know, food for thought."

So many moments for the Rifftrax bunch to chew on, like the "dramatic" scene where Lauren Hutton chews out both Gene Kelly as Evel's mechanic and Evel for simultaneously coldly neglecting his estranged son and showing Gene Kelly's estranged son a good time to overcompensate for the boy being ignored by his father - she tells Evel off for trying to make the boy think life is "one big chocolate malted", I'm sure some scriptwriter thought that was a zinger.

 

[XYZpdq]

some scriptwriter thought that was a zinger.

that whole script was weird, like somebody who was really sure he knew how Americans talked wrote it

 

[Wonderful Id]

MST3K is easily, easily my favorite show of all time and Rifftrax has been fantastic, especially the shorts. One thing I'd love to do someday is go see an actual live Rifftrax, not just live via a movie theater.

Best episode is Horror At Party Beach.

 

[Commander X]

I've been watching the Rifftrax lately, low-budget 1990s action films are a decent target for the cast and so it was with "Bounty Tracker", starring Lorenzo Lamas as a "bounty tracker" which is the film's terminology - his accountant brother and wife are killed by a hit team and he goes on a mission of revenge. Also "Martial Law" starring Steve McQueen's puffy son Chad as a cop who is also a martial artist and Cynthia Rothrock as a cop who is also his lover and David Carradine as an evil businessman who uses a karate school to recruit for his luxury car theft ring. Oh and he knows how to use the "Dim Mak" so he must have ordered a book about it from the back of a dubious martial arts magazine in the late 1970s.

 

[King Dead]

MST3K is easily, easily my favorite show of all time and Rifftrax has been fantastic, especially the shorts. One thing I'd love to do someday is go see an actual live Rifftrax, not just live via a movie theater.

Best episode is Horror At Party Beach.

Someday I hope to do the same. My parents got to see the MST3K reunion show live since they happened to be in Minneapolis at the time, and I'm still a bit jealous.

Speaking of the live shows, you can chalk up yet another delayed event to the Wu Flu. The Hobgoblins show previously scheduled for June 11th has been postponed to August 6th, assuming theaters will be open by then. The Amityville 4 show is still scheduled for October 21st. It's a shame, but considering that no theaters have reopened in my area yet, and it could be a few weeks until they do, it's a logical move.

 

[Commander X]

Score another Rifftrax under my belt - Attack of the Super Monsters, a "movie" compiled from the first few episodes of a Japanese TV series (Dinosaur War Izenborg) where miniatures and models are combined with animation - it's very odd looking. Generic looking lead characters Jim and Gem Starbuck are cybernetically enhanced twins who can combine to form one hero whose main power is flying their machine around and hitting monsters with the built in buzzsaws on the wing.

In one episode part of the movie Jim and Gem get into a full blown argument, and later when they're fighting the latest monsters (giant red rats) they see a friend in the street, running for his life, Gem wants to rescue him, Jim commands her not to run off yet, they argue some more, "Let me go, you may be my brother but I hate you!" and he slaps her across the face.

KEVIN: "Whoa!
BILL: "Holy-"
MIKE: "It's turned into What's Love Got To Do With It!"

 

[XYZpdq]

Score another Rifftrax under my belt - Attack of the Super Monsters, a "movie" compiled from the first few episodes of a Japanese TV series (Dinosaur War Izenborg) where miniatures and models are combined with animation - it's very odd looking. Generic looking lead characters Jim and Gem Starbuck are cybernetically enhanced twins who can combine to form one hero whose main power is flying their machine around and hitting monsters with the built in buzzsaws on the wing.

In one episode part of the movie Jim and Gem get into a full blown argument, and later when they're fighting the latest monsters (giant red rats) they see a friend in the street, running for his life, Gem wants to rescue him, Jim commands her not to run off yet, they argue some more, "Let me go, you may be my brother but I hate you!" and he slaps her across the face.

KEVIN: "Whoa!
BILL: "Holy-"
MIKE: "It's turned into What's Love Got To Do With It!"

Japan is a much more tolerant country about ike-ing some thot's tinas

unrelated I love Dr F's line in the intro for this one

as he's asked about "where's the science" in the recent slate of disaster-ish pics
>the science comes in, in taking a group of grade b actors, sticking them in a overproduced, horribly written made for tv disaster film, which happens to be a vehicle for Barry Newman, and packaging the thing and sending it out to the common man and making millions of dollars off of it, it's kind of like giving cancer to lab rats

 

[Commander X]

Was checking on what the price of a used copy of The Mystery Science Theater 3000: Amazing Colossal Episode Guide is, I see $21 or $48 or so. I used to have a copy and during a period of time when I had little to no access to cable television, and a very limited collection of tapes I would read it and read it and read it even as pages began to come loose.

I remember there was a very short treatment of the seventh season, and eventually entries on each episode in the style of the book were posted to the official fan website. A couple of the cast's observations still stick with me, especially from the last episode of the Comedy Central era. Paul Chaplin:

The main thing I think about when I consider the end of the Comedy Central years is the departure of Trace Beaulieu. Trace is one of the most charming, generous, funny people I've ever known. When the last show was done, when our little endeavor seemed, in fact, to be all over, he gave me a postcard I still have on my fridge. It's a wonderful photo -- from maybe the 1920s -- of a race car driver in one of those old bullet-style cars. He's on an old dirt road, some sparse audience visible in the background; he's looking over to his left, his hair blown back in an image simultaneously of speed and comic surprise; and what he's seeing is his left rear tire, which has just left its axle and is bounding by him on the road.

It's a sublime moment of "Hey, what the --!!!" On the back, Trace wrote that it sure was nice working on the puppet show with me. And it was, too; from my end, doubly. Thank you, Trace.

and Kevin Murphy:

So there we were, eating a cake shaped like the MST logo and drinking as much Summit Pale Ale and Sam Adams as we could put down. This was it. After seven seasons, one hundred twenty-eight shows (correct me if I'm wrong), two live shows, a convention, three agents, four network presidents, two entire network ownership shifts, two major cast changes, endless awards, accolades, press junkets, Penn Gillette, lawsuits, upheavals, pain, agony, joy, heartburn, cigars, alcohol and approximately seven hundred and fifty-three billion occasions for laughter, we were eating logo cake and emptying beer bottles.

It had been the best experience of my life. And I was determined not to tamp it down and head out to LA to become a development whore or sit in a room writing bad comedy for someone else. Living in Silver Lake, throwing pencils at the ceiling with a bunch of goateed Harvard losers and grinding away on the next episode of Monkeyshit Follies was my idea of Hell.

I had already decided to stay, because I have a soul, and souls don't grow "Out There," as William Goldman calls it. I got into television because I loved creating stuff for it, not because the money was good or I thought L.A. was "neat." I'd rather stay here and get a job scraping zebra mussels off the hulls of fishing boats.

So I had already made up my mind that I would remain. I would hold my days at MST among the best of my professional life, and look back fondly while moving forward and beyond. And we still had some work to do and a place to do it. It would be a long dry spell, for sure. But then one day we found out about a lovely man named Barry Schulman who lived in a cable network in midtown Manhattan...

 

[ditto]

I find Kitten With A Whip probably one of the least entertaining movies they did. It's not bad per se, just kind of an okay studio flick. There's no hook to make it funny.

Kitten With A Whip is the most frustrating movie because the protagonist is so rock-stupid. I hope he never won his election, because he would have been eaten alive in Washington.

 

[Starscreams Cape]

Kitten With A Whip is the most frustrating movie because the protagonist is so rock-stupid. I hope he never won his election, because he would have been eaten alive in Washington.

Kitten with whip is a great movie solely because Ann Margaret plays a super hot psycho bitch like she was born for the part. John Forsythe's only problem in the film was not trying to bang her as soon as he could. If it had cost his marriage, his home, his election...it still would have been worth it.

 

[sparklemilhouse]

Japan is a much more tolerant country about ike-ing some thot's tinas

unrelated I love Dr F's line in the intro for this one

as he's asked about "where's the science" in the recent slate of disaster-ish pics
>the science comes in, in taking a group of grade b actors, sticking them in a overproduced, horribly written made for tv disaster film, which happens to be a vehicle for Barry Newman, and packaging the thing and sending it out to the common man and making millions of dollars off of it, it's kind of like giving cancer to lab rats

!! I love city on fire, it’s one of my favorites. I love that there’s a better looking version of it on YouTube.

I’ve been obsessed lately with this “broadcast editions” of mst3k playlist. It starts during the comedy channel days.

also, rip:

 

[XYZpdq]

there’s a better looking version of it on YouTube.

Yeah going from the old DAP copies of the ktma eps to those ones with the station logo at the front is a world of difference, especially Legend of Dinosaurs.
Those broadcast editions are cool, too. Are they just airchecks or are they reassembled from stuff like those Turkey Day DVDs?

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Red Zone Cuba was malaise in film form. I was profoundly depressed after watching it and words failed me as to why.

Red Zone Cuba owns. They just go from setpiece to setpiece and I'm pretty sure the director got bored of filming it halfway through.

 

[Commander X]

Red Zone Cuba was the culmination of Francis' cinematic output. All of the little details come together, but it at least has a little more zip and “action” to it, what with invading Cuba and all ("The Mounds View Junior High School production of The Guns of Navarone." ), compared to Skydivers which is one of the most deadening, depressing, suicide-inducing experiences available in the cinema and Beast of Yucca Flats which is rather short but seems to take much longer. Skydivers also has all of those bit players that are the weirdest bunch of people ever to get screen time. They make Ed Wood's stable performers look like highly sought-after A-listers.

The Coleman Francis movies are bad in special ways beyond the sort of Grade Z films that were just short on budget and production values and journeyman competence that were a lot of MST3K's targets.

I mean, don't get me wrong, MST3K was able to have a lot of fun with movies that were basically mediocre, the sort of made on the cheap quickies that were filmed in a week or two with no greater ambitions than producing something that would help fill in the bill at drive-in theaters. Something made that was someone's vision, and aspired to something else, however odd, and inept made for juicier targets.

 

[sparklemilhouse]

Those broadcast editions are cool, too. Are they just airchecks or are they reassembled from stuff like those Turkey Day DVDs?

they have the commercials from 1990, etc intact.

 

[Commander X]

In Rifftrax areas, finally got around to watching the Riff of "A Talking Cat?!?", Eric Roberts' voiceover sounds like he's doing this after having a five-martini lunch that was more like a two dozen-martini lunch.

"To call this performance phoned in is an insult to modern phone reception." Really, the audio for Roberts' "performance" is qualitatively different the rest of the film's audio in an obvious, distracting way. As if he had literally phoned it in, and it was being recorded on a beat up reel-to-reel tape recorder that had been dusted off after being found in the back of a storage room.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

In Rifftrax areas, finally got around to watching the Riff of "A Talking Cat?‽", Eric Roberts' voiceover sounds like he's doing this after having a five-martini lunch that was more like a two dozen-martini lunch.

I've watched the Rifftrax of A Talking Cat!?! a few times and I still have no idea where the second teenage girl comes from. She just appears halfway through the movie with no explanation.

 

[XYZpdq]

one time I shit on Rifftrax so hard I made Mary Jo say "wow" in the comments

 

[Someone in a Tree]

Red Zone Cuba was the culmination of Francis' cinematic output. All of the little details come together, but it at least has a little more zip and “action” to it, what with invading Cuba and all ("The Mounds View Junior High School production of The Guns of Navarone." ), compared to Skydivers which is one of the most deadening, depressing, suicide-inducing experiences available in the cinema and Beast of Yucca Flats which is rather short but seems to take much longer. Skydivers also has all of those bit players that are the weirdest bunch of people ever to get screen time. They make Ed Wood's stable performers look like highly sought-after A-listers.

The Coleman Francis movies are bad in special ways beyond the sort of Grade Z films that were just short on budget and production values and journeyman competence that were a lot of MST3K's targets.

I mean, don't get me wrong, MST3K was able to have a lot of fun with movies that were basically mediocre, the sort of made on the cheap quickies that were filmed in a week or two with no greater ambitions than producing something that would help fill in the bill at drive-in theaters. Something made that was someone's vision, and aspired to something else, however odd, and inept made for juicier targets.

The Coleman Francis trilogy just has this overwhelmingly despairing tone that is unique among all the other films showcased on MST3K. Were it not for Torgo, Manos might have just as easily been similarly oppressive.