MST3K #505: The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (sic)

And now, #505, as a Russian folk hero pretends to be Sinbad.

Vikings be different from Persians, you see.

A 1953 award-winning film, based on a classic opera. Seems like a perfect film for Roger Corman to buy and adapt, right? Except for one problem -- it's Russian, and we're at the height of the First Cold War. So his screenwriter (some guy named Francis Something-or-Other Coppola) renamed the hero "Sinbad," and changed the setting to Arabia. The original film is fantastic, imaginative, and has great production value. The reworked, commie-free version has bad dubbing and doesn't make a lot of sense. (The message still retains a little anti-capitalist flavor, though in an inoffensive kiddie-movie way.)

Skinbag discovers the snack that smiles back

Sinbad ... um, I mean Sadko, sells his hat to free a slave, catches a golden fish (with some help from Neptune's daughter), kidnaps a horse, beats up a lot of guys, plays human chess, kidnaps a bird-lady, sacrifices himself to Neptune, and fails to find the bluebird of happiness ("It's the Grackle of Weltschmerz"). 

I've seen two of the Russo-Finnish quadrilogy before (I saw The Day The Earth Froze and Jack Frost more or less upon their original airings, and adored them both), and I'm looking forward to The Sword and The Dragon before the end of March. They're always huge, goofy, perfect fodder for our friends to watch. 

Jestering is grueling!

And speaking of winning awards, let's talk host segments. For the first time in this binge, I've really enjoyed every single host segment. We first see Crow and Gypsy presenting a S.O.L.tie award (Tom: "Get Pricewaterhouse on the phone! I demand a recount!"), and then two classic inventions (chinderwear and the Rat Pack chess set). The jestering sketch is followed by a great town council, then Joel's bewildering catfish puppet, and topped off by Dr. F's friend Mr. Fistie.

The riffing is, of course, top-notch too. Besides the obligatory reference to Sinbad, they also mention Brad Garrett, Foster Brooks, Carrot Top, and Gilbert Gottfried. There's a questionable string of unrelated references to "Take Back The Night," the Rodney King jury, and even Stonewall.

This is my second episode in a row to mention: Dean Martin (now retired), I Dream of Jeannie, Jack Nicholson, Arby's, "Don't eat refrozen ice cream," The B-52s, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It's the third of four to mention Captain Crunch, The Marx Brothers, and Indiana Jones. And four of my last five episodes have mentioned: Blazing Saddles and The Flintstones (which join Martin and Lewis, The Wizard of Oz, Python, Beatles and Stones, and 1960s TV Batman in the ranks of references I've stopped counting).

A joke I had to look up: "It's Steve Martin's World of Birds."
A joke that just became relevant again: "They're test-marketing Crystal Pepsi."
My favorite joke: I loved "Man, I never knew Arabia was so Russian!" but I also have a soft spot in my heart for Joel's take on a really obvious model shot: "I've glued you all to the boats and put rods in your limbs for a reason!"
Overall, I rate this episode 10/10. Just flawless in most every respect.

Up next, I'm watching #509: The Girl in Lover's Lane.

A Spoopy Month #3: Some capsule reviews, part one

So this blog really started last October, when I watched 20 horror movies and posted capsule reviews for my close friends on Facebook. I didn't actually start this blog officially till December, but the reviews of Christmas TV were inspired by my enjoyment of reviewing stuff again. So I'm gonna repost those here. These are all short, so I'll post a handful at a time till I run out.


Oct 15, 2014:

I've been watching a lot of horror movies this October. I'll talk about one a day till the end of the month. I finally rewatched The Cabin in the Woods, off my new Bluray of it, and I think the second viewing is just as good as the first. That's a movie that will live in my head forever. Is it a metaphor for our military complex, or just a loving hate-letter to slasher movies? Me, I think it's a metaphor for our stupid lizard brains, the ones that lead us to consistently hurt others, purposely and accidentally, in an attempt to follow our own desires. But for all that, there sure are a lot of huge snakes, evil demons, and bloodgushers.
I'm not a big haunted house guy, but last year this was turned into two different houses: one at Universal Orlando, and one at Thorpe Park, which had branching hallways, so you could choose your own destiny to a point. Damn, I wish I could've seen one of those.

     

Oct 16, 2014:

So the second horror movie I saw this month was Roger Corman's 1961 adaptation of The Pit and The Pendulum. Well, I say "adaptation." Really, it only contains 1) A pit, 2) A pendulum, and 3) An Inquisition-era torture chamber. All the rest is an invention of Richard Matheson, who also published his short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" the same year. It's barely related to Poe, but it's not otherwise bad: production values are pretty good. And, though his acting is far from subtle, this was before Vincent Price had descended into Shatnerian levels of self-parody. If you wanna watch a 1961 movie about torture and psychosexual horror, this isn't a bad choice.

While I don't like the style of the fantasy sequences much, I love that Corman shot them in black and white because he'd read that, at the time, psychologists believed most people dreamed that way.

 

Oct 17, 2014:

Corman's fourth Poe film, Tales of Terror, is a compilation of three short films, each starring Vincent Price. The first, "Morella," is a fairly straightforward retelling of that story, reusing (for at least the second time) the house-consuming fire footage from his first Poe film, Fall of the House of Usher. The second short is the best, entitled "The Black Cat" but much more inspired by "The Cask of Amontillado." It's great fun to watch Price and Peter Lorre have a wine-tasting competition, and you just know Lorre's breakdown at the end of the story is going to be big, big, big. The third, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," has Basil Rathbone as an evil hypnotist, changing the original story into a revenge tale (so all three stories share that theme.) I think this is the best of the three Corman Poe movies I watched this month. The digest format makes sure that things move along at a brisk pace, and there's very little slowness to it.

Oct 18, 2014:

Roger Corman's seventh (!) and penultimate Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death, represented a change in production and style for the series. It was filmed in London (to take advantage of certain tax schemes) and credited a lot of British people who did little work on the actual movie. Like "The Black Cat" from Tales of Terror, Masque... interpolates another Poe story into the action. "Hoptoad" is a Poe story I was completely unfamiliar with until this film, and its inclusion is one of the best aspects of the script. For some unknown reason, the decadent Prince Prospero is a Satanist in this version of the story, and there's a lot of nonsense about worshiping The Dark One and "Your God is dead." The script for this wasn't written by Richard Matheson, but two other TV writers, Charles Beaumont (who wrote a lot of Twilight Zones) and R. Wright Campbell, who mostly worked on Westerns. I wouldn't bother with this, unless you're the most obsessed Poe completist in the world.
One footnote: the sweet, innocent ingenue of the movie is played by a young British model and actor named Jane Asher. The story goes that, during filming in '63, her boyfriend, a musician, was about to play his first London gig and he visited her on set the day prior. Corman met him, declined an invitation to attend the show, and wished him luck. That kid's name was Paul McCartney. So the story goes, but the story comes from Corman, and I suspect he's a bit of a fabulist and self-promoter above all else...

So the next four year-old reviews I'll post include one last Price/Corman film and three early horror films from the 40's. Stay, as they say, tuned!