MST3K #604: Zombie Nightmare

It's #604, with more delinquents and a baseball-bat-wielding zombie.

Our movie this time is a low-budget Canadian rock-teen-horror-baseball-voodoo film (yes, ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE), featuring Adam West and Tia Carrere. A chunky baseball player stops two young punks from raping a young woman, and one of them stabs him to death, right in front of his son. Then, years later, his grown-up son prevents a robbery and gets coincidentally run down in front of the store. The new young punks (one is the son of the second, non-murdering punk from the prologue, and is also a rapist) drive off, leaving the son to die in the street. His mother calls on the young woman from the prologue, who luckily is a voodoo witch (there are lots of those in Montreal, doncha know?) and they revive the son. He's not really himself, though, just a vengeance-bent zombie.

Why you should always call before you dig.

There's a young cop trying to solve all the teen murders, and his boss (Mr. West, there), seems to know an awful lot of the players in this case. Since, as it turns out, he's the stabby rapey punk from the opening, and the old baseball guy gets zombified just long enough to drag him down to hell.

The movie is pretty bad, but it kinda knows it. (Or at least the creators did -- the DVD special feature has several of the stars talking about their reflections on the MST version of their film, and how much they liked the show even before they were on it.) Adam West wasn't quite in full self-parody mode yet, though that time wasn't far off. As a result, his character work and mustache are enacted seriously, even his breakdown during the scene pictured above.

A deleted scene from Batman Vs. Soup.

And since Adam's in the movie, it's only right that Mike and the bots spend a lot of time talking about Batman. Crow's even written a sketch about it, but he threw it out, so Mike's wearing those tiny shorts for no good reason. Besides all the obvious Batman jokes, there are also a decent amount of jokes about the Canadian setting (David Steinberg, Andrea Martin, Bob and Doug McKenzie, and even The Kids In The Hall get called out).

Sidebar: Boy, do I ever wish the Mads didn't wear that makeup for their voodoo phase. Okay, maybe even the makeup would be okay, but the Screamin' Jay Hawkins bone-in-nose getup is just so tasteless.

This is my second episode in a row to mention: The NRA, Peanut Buster Parfaits, Chi-Chi's, Frankenstein, an Orlon sweater, Elvis, and ABBA. It's the third to mention Happy Days (four out of the last five, and now retired). And three out of my last four episodes have mentioned The Dilly Bar (that's it, all Dairy Queen references are retired too).

A (dark) joke I had to look up: "Were they the Tonton Macoutes?"
A joke that didn't age well: "He's doing the Nestea Plunge!"
My favorite joke: "George Romero's Casey At The Bat." (Honorable mention to the garage door closing: "That's a really trivial use of her dark powers.")
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The movie is too dark to see, too noisy to hear. The riffs are on point, but the movie is a tad too serious for me to fully enjoy.

Up next, I'm watching #616, Racket Girls.

MST3K #310: Fugitive Alien

It's #310, with an alien helping Earth (and some other planets) fight his evil former rulers.

This week's movie is ... not a movie. Like a few other MST installments, it's a collection of TV episodes mashed together to form a movie-like product. The movie's alien hero, Ken, accidentally kills his best friend, in an attempt to keep him from killing an innocent earth kid, who's also named Ken. Since they were soldiers, Ken has to escape his evil government, and ends up recruited by Earth to fight his old comrades. (Ken's also on the run from his girlfriend Rita, whose brother was Ken's former best friend/victim - the alien government has ordered her to avenge her brother and kill the traitor.)

Ken works alongside a crew of brave Earth spacemen, led by Captain Joe (a mood-swinging heavy drinker and tragedy magnet) and piloted by hothead Rocky, who would of course try to kill Ken with a forklift. The crew also includes the lone woman, Tammy the "morale officer" (and speculation on her actual job duties gets icky and dark real fast for me) who naturally develops a crush on Ken.

Ken and Cap'n Joe's crew have a couple of random adventures (though this feels more like a movie than the two KTMA compilations I saw), and Rita gets gunned down right before our "To Be Continued" message.

Inspired by the huge success of Star Wars, the TV series used a lot of miniatures and special photo processes to tell universe-spanning stories of spacefighting.  (Does that M.O. sound a lot like Time of The Apes? It does to me, and in fact the two things share a screenwriter.) Sure, the production values aren't great, and Sandy Frank's ham-fisted editing (an omniscient narrator AND interior monologue?) does no favors to the material, but it's quick-moving and always easy to watch.

The DVD special feature is a nice history/contextualization from August Ragone, who seems to be Shout! Factory's go-to on these things. His encyclopedic knowledge and enthusiasm for the original material is fun to watch, and I'm always happy to hear from him.

And speaking of film comment, it's the very first appearance of Mike as Jack Perkins! Jack went on to bigger and better things (and the DVD also features him in the MST Hour wraps), but he's spot-on, right from the start. Also, Joel gets violent in character twice here -- as a bumpkin farmer, he tips over Cow-Gypsy, and as Cap'n Joe he punches Tom and Crow. It's out-of-character, and along with Jack's repeated punishments, this might be the most cartoonishly violent episode I've ever seen.

The riffs, though, are just what they should be. We get a lot of coincidental groupings - an early George of the Jungle joke has nothing to do with the later Rocky and Bullwinkle joke, and the three Monty Python jokes aren't related. There are FOUR Rolling Stones jokes, in four different contexts. This is my second episode in a row to reference Jack Benny, Dairy Queen, "The white zone is for loading and unloading only," 60's TV Batman, and The Deer Hunter. And, it's the third in a row with a callback to Robot Holocaust.

A joke that didn't age well: "He’s in more trouble than Hudson Hawk at the box office!”
My favorite joke: I loved "Monks! In! SPAAAAAACE!" and even "Heckraiser," but they were neatly edged out by Joel's impression of Frank during the hat party.
Overall, I rate this: 9/10. It's not in my ten favorite episodes, but I can't name a single thing wrong with it. The movie is just the right level of silly and cheesy, and the riffs are perfection.

Up next, #318, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II.