MST3K #413: Manhunt In Space

Well, I caught a cold, and that put me behind schedule at the worst possible time -- the release date for the new season was finally announced. It all drops on April 14. That means I've got just 46 days to finish my pregame binge. And with twenty more episodes to watch, I need to aim for one every two days. Seems like I won't make it, but I'll sure enjoy the attempt.

Anyway, today we're looking at #413, with some soapy clips and some space-spies.

Featuring Nurse Feratu

In an excerpt from the first season of General Hospital, doctors and nurses and patients soap it up, with long expository monologues and melodramatic speeches. The electric organ, as you might expect, is too high in the mix. Afterwards, the bots want to play soap opera, but Joel refuses to go along.

I guess Bill Paxton was just glad he didn't have to work with Helen Hunt in space.

And next, another movie that isn't. It's more TV episodes cut together, though at least this story was conceived as a single piece (take that, Master Ninja!). Rocky Jones is another one of those square-headed, cowboy-style space heroes, who solves every conflict with a fistfight, the old American way. (I'm glad to know that we haven't had anything like that happen on the ISS.)

Space pirates are capturing ships, stealing the cargo, and killing the crews, AND they've infiltrated the base of the heroes. Rocky and his irritating sidekick Winky use their invisible space-technology to find the mole and catch the bad guys. They get captured a LOT (this was originally three TV episodes, and I think the heroes get captured at least four times), and each time they have to punch their way out. In the meantime, the tiresome sidekick brags about his notional love life, and sings a cloying lullaby. I've seen the other MST'd Rocky Jones movie, though I'll be danged if I can remember anything about it. I hope Winky doesn't sing in that one.

Crow isn't a Stratocaster; Tom isn't the Golden Throat.

The riffs are up to the usual standard -- two fairly obscure Star Trek jokes I had to look up, plus mentions of Ted Knight, Mr. Mooney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Bettie Page. I really enjoyed the Mr. Wizard/Police Squad! style joke: "And that's how cattle are inseminated." (Speaking of Police Squad!, how obscure a reference is "Hey, it's the 'Sucker' Brothers"?!?) 

We learn a few trivia facts about our friends in this one: not only is Tom color-blind, but Joel apparently has a sister. (In the SciFi era, we would've seen Mike's sister, and she would've been Mike in a wig. In fact, I'll wager one American dollar that did happen.)

It's rare in this binge for me to watch two consecutive episodes, so I appreciated that Crow calls back the "good-natured brawling" from #412, just a few minutes after the well-aged callback to Fugitive Alien. But since these two aired in order, there aren't many repeated jokes. This is my second episode in a row to reference Captain Crunch, and the third to mention The Flintstones.

A joke that didn't age well: "What is this, Radio AHHS?"
A joke I had to look up: "When in Duluth, visit the Lift Bridge."
My favorite joke: Once again, I enjoyed the variant "Sturgeon! In! Spaaaaaaaace!", but the winner is clearly "It's like a million-to-one shot that we'll ever be seen." "Oh, they're on Comedy Central."
Overall, I rate this episode 9/10. Rocky's a little dull, but otherwise it's perfect.

Up next, it's #505, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.

MST3K #108: The Slime People

Next up, it's #108. After another adventure with pumpkin boy, there are some slimy underground monsters in LA. (Insert cheap shot about, say, Hollywood agents here.)

Commando Cody is still fighting with those dang ol' moon men. This time, the hired earth goons drop an atomic bomb from a tiny single-engine plane. ("The Cessna Skyhawk is usually your best choice for bombardiering missions.") Cody has to run down the goons in some hills and... I'm bored with Cody. I'm just kind of surprised Joel and the fellas (at least in the episodes I've heard) didn't even MENTION "Hot Rod Lincoln." There are enough car chases to inspire it, and they hadn't banned obvious ("state park") jokes quite yet.

Our main picture doesn't make too much sense. We start in the aftermath of some kinda fogpocalypse, though we don't know what happened until our jowly hero finds a convenient TV news compilation (luckily, he's a sportscaster so he's incredibly skilled at using the equipment). The scientist who picks him up from the airport reminds us that there is much we don't know about science, so slime people are just as believable as any other durnfool thing the producers could've come up with.

Sidebar:  Just last week, I was talking about Stephen King's "The Mist" with my friends. As in that story, our plucky survivors hole up in a butcher shop, making a quick excursion out into the low-vis surroundings and nearly getting killed. The Slime People have also built a giant fog-dome over LA, and I can't help but be reminded of Under The Dome. Even all the way through to the struggle to destroy the machine producing the fog-dome, I kept wondering if Stephen King had ever seen this one. (Apparently I'm not alone.)

Did I mention there's a lot of fog in this movie? I skipped to a random part near the end to take this screenshot. Not only is it hard to like this film, it's impossible even to see it. ("Boy, I bet that'd be scary if we could make out what it was.")

Some stray observations: I'll see the newsreel reporter again in The Giant Mantis from Season 8.
I like Joel's midpoint thoughts on the virtue (or at least, honesty) of making a bad movie, and this time I like Tom's followup metajoke about MST.
Who's doing that Pee Wee Herman voice? Is it Josh maybe?
This is the second episode in a row where I've heard "You'll believe a man can fly," or in this instance, "You'll believe a Marine can drive a car." (This is also two in a row where Joel calls Tom "Crow," though it was deliberate this time.)
I like this early run of jokes, the first time (in my binge at least) they clearly wrote multiples for the same setup: "Right in the kidney beans." "Right in the creamed corn." "Right in the liver and onions." "Right in the Salisbury steak."

Bonus feature note: the DVD has a shortish interview with the film's ingenue, Judee Morton, about her memories of the cheapass production and her costars.
Two timely jokes that, as of last year, were relevant again: "Zsa Zsa is guilty." and "Must be that new Hi-C Ecto-Cooler."
My favorite joke: "Yeah, you can usually find a blonde hair in a field of wheat." "At night." "In a fog."

Odds I'll watch this one again: 6/10. The show is so well-oiled by this point that the only thing clearly placing this in season one is Josh as Larry and Tom. (No slight intended, Josh! I love your Tom in so many ways.)
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The monsters are goofy, and the jokes are diverse and largely funny. They haven't quite reached the dizzying heights of absurdism and obscurity I fell in love with, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Up next is #109, Project Moonbase, also featuring my final bout with Commando Cody.

A Spoopy Month #13: The Terror

So what, you're asking yourself, is with all the Roger Corman movies? To be honest, it's just a coincidence. The Poe movies I watched last year were in the $5 bin. The Cormans I'm watching this year were too. Here's the next one, 1963's The Terror.



For all his business savvy, Corman wasn't the sharpest legal guy. He left copyright notices off a lot of his movies, which is why you can watch this and things like his original Little Shop Of Horrors for free, or even sell copies yourself.

This movie is kind of a mess. The script was hammered together by Jack Hill, who ten years later would be the king of a different type of exploitation movie (he directed Coffy and Foxy Brown), and Leo Gordon, who was much better known as a cowboy actor (that same year John Wayne famously punched him in McLintock!). The plot is needlessly complex and twisty (I must admit I kept being surprised by the ambitious plot), but the dialogue is frequently clunky.

It took five directors to film this mess, too, including Corman himself and Jack Nicholson and even one F. F. Coppola. Karloff only had three days to film all his scenes, and quite a few establishing shots reuse footage I saw in one of the Poe films last year. (I also feel like all the sets are leftovers from those films too.)

So here's the plot: Karloff, using his natural British accent, is a German baron hiding from the world in his rotting castle. Nicholson, using his own personal American accent, is an occupying French soldier during the Napoleonic era, who's been separated from his regiment. Karloff is being tormented by a terrible secret from his past, and a neighboring witch is trying to gaslight him into committing suicide, with the unwitting help of a hypnotized girl. (The girl is hypnotized with the same lamp Basil Rathbone used the previous year to hypnotize Vincent Price in the final third of Tales Of Terror, and I assume her gruesome end is achieved the same way as Price's dissolution in that film.) (Oh, and did I mention that the girl, who's presumably German but has an American accent, was Jack's real-life wife at the time?)

Jack Nicholson's character, showing characteristic American French bravery and nobility, tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, foil the witch's evil plans, save the baron, and make out with the girl. While each of his goals is temporarily achieved, he barely escapes with his life, and at the end of the film he's even lost his horse, and still hasn't met up with his regiment.

In the end, this film is long on "spooky" atmosphere and short on, well, most other things. I'm glad I've seen it, though, which I can't always say for these things. (I'm looking directly at you, Masque of the Red Death!)