MST3K #205: Rocket Attack U.S.A

It's #205: Bela creeps around some more, and commies attack the USA with rockets.

 

This episode opens with Tom's new head. It wouldn't last long -- just two episodes. In the short, Bela's still mad-sciencing, and this time he's killed his wife and is out for vengeance. He uses the invisibelt to knock some guys out, the giant robot does nothing, and the exploding mechaspider nearly coma-fies Bela's underling. The spunky reporter parachutes into a tree, and everyone -- EVERYONE -- sneaks around.

And our film this week is a red-bashing military propaganda film. Our brave spies attempt to sabotage Russia's long-range nuke, but screw up. While the narrator and the film's military chief bemoan the low budget of the army ("Had we half the money that was appropriated for such worthy programs as cheese price supports, we would have had our ICBM long ago"), Russia fires a missile. It levels New York, and kills three million people. (One single unprompted political fact, and then I'm done: The USDA pays around $20 billion each year in total subsidies, and the military spent 30 times that in 2015. Apparently, some people are still upset about our subsidy programs, by the way.) 

The film's not subtle, in any way, about anything, and its emotional manipulation and condescension to the presumed audience remind me of local news teases. ("Are unseen dangers murdering your children? Tune in at 11 to find out.")

Sidebar: I've seen Hidden Figures this week, which shows us a more peaceful view of the post-Sputnik space race (along with more important things). My wife asked me what this MST was about, and I told her it's a movie that would've scared the nationalist cop who pulls over the film's three heroines.

And on the subject of Sputnik, Mike shows up in the hexfield again, with two robots of his own (though they aren't good for much). I also enjoyed the host segment about the McCarthy hearings -- the Charlie McCarthy hearings. And I loved the obscurity of this episode's Python reference, and the really dark joke about the set of The Conqueror.

This is my second episode in a row to feature jokes about: Dune ("I will KILL him!"), Airport, Roddy McDowall, "Let's get out of here, Scooby!", I Love Lucy, The Little Rascals, John Mellencamp, Zack Norman, and callbacks to Robot Holocaust. It's also the first-ever episode to have a stinger.

Bonus feature alert: The disc has a short interview with Trace, as he tells us about his life after MST3K. I'm still amazed he auditioned for Jar-Jar.

A joke that didn't age particularly well: "Mallory?" "Yes, Alex?"
A joke I had to look up: "It's Wheeler and Woolsey!"
My favorite joke: "It's hard to believe that a group of civilized men could sit around and calmly discuss how to murder five or six million others." "That's why we've got to CRUSH THEM!"
Overall, I rate this 8/10. The original movie is a little dull in spots, but the MSTers have nothing to apologize for.

Next, it's #310, Fugitive Alien.

MST3K #203: Jungle Goddess

It's Episode #203, with a Bela Lugosi serial and a racist, sexist story about white men in Africa.

It's a new season (for me, anyway), and the first chapter of a new serial. Bela plays a mad scientist who's invented a giant robot, an invisibility belt, and an exploding-spider/coma-inducer. Unlike the mad scientist in Mad Monster, he's unpatriotic and will gladly sell his inventions to America's enemies! (It's set in 1939, so I'm pretty sure that means ze Germans. Apparently the spies actually show up in later chapters, so I might know soon if I'm right.)

This serial reuses (to no particular effect) Franz Waxman's iconic, brilliant score from Bride of Frankenstein. Bela makes a great mad scientist, though he doesn't talk about his idea for "a rice of pipples" here.

Sidebar: I'm catching up on my podcasts, and just got around to hearing the Movie Sign With The Mads episode about Ed Wood. It's a discussion podcast, not a performance podcast, but I was still surprised I didn't get to hear Trace do his Bela impression. It's still good fun, though, and I love hearing Trace and Frank (and Carolina! Hi, Carolina!) chew over the great and not-so-great movies.

 

Then, our feature presentation. It's a pretty offensive thing, with Filipino and Mexican actors playing African natives (I guess I should just be glad they didn't black up for their scenes, but that's small comfort). When a Danish heiress crashes into the jungle, she's worshipped as a goddess by the "primitive, childlike" (her words) natives, and she spends at least six years there, befriending the only other woman and being waited on hand and foot. Everything about the representation of the natives is pretty awful, and that makes the whole movie terrible. Sure, it's a similar type of representation as parts of the original King Kong (one bit actor from that plays a bit part here), but the natives appear in nearly this whole movie. That really rubs in just how little Hollywood cared to learn about Africa. Joel and the bots don't particularly call the movie out on this, either, which seems like a bad choice. There are plenty of ways to be funny at the movie's expense about this. (I also get a bad taste in my mouth when Gypsy shows up with a bone in her... flashlight.) The movie is also pretty sexist, and the boy's club that was the MST writer's room at the time doesn't particularly call that out either.

The two white men in the film are Superman and Dick Tracy, though only George Reeves' character is really a hero; Ralph Byrd is a murderous chiseler, ready to abandon his partner at the first chance. (I love the run of jokes about him murdering monkeys and coconuts, etc.) It's a welcome relief when he gets a spear to the back, though I wish Reeve didn't shoot the native who dispatched him. (But then, white men always stick up for each other, even if they were literally fighting each other to the death 30 seconds earlier.)

"Whoa, huge slam on Lucy out of nowhere!"

I enjoy the use of unrelated stock footage of wildlife, and the "binocular" device used to slot it into the film. It wasn't until I saw the host segment making fun of the use of camera gobos that I realized I wasn't watching this episode for the first time. (For those of you keeping track at home, this is only the second episode from my binge that I've seen before, and this might be the first episode I saw as a young person.) This is a perfect reversal of the lecture-type host segments from Season One. It starts out like a lecture, but quickly becomes a breakneck series of jokes.

And, hey, it's TV's Frank! He's arrived, even if Dr. Forrester isn't experimenting on him yet. And Kevin's here too! It's only their third episode, but they already inhabit their roles perfectly. (Plus, I get to hear multi-tracked Kevin sing in the final host sketch.)

This is my second episode in a row to reference (deep breath): The Wisconsin Dells, Dune, Sabu, Adolphe Menjou, GI Joe, Gary Crosby, and even the urban legend of The Hook. It also has two Python references in five minutes, and I got references to Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Muppets to delight my soul.

Bonus feature alert: DVD viewers get a short history of Turkey Day, and an intro Joel did for a recent Turkey Day marathon. Also, before I watched this, I dialed up the first five minutes of #201, just to see the milk-carton farewell to Larry and Frank's introduction.

A reference I had to look up: "Where's Ted Bessell?"
A joke that didn't age well: “Have a drink." "We haven’t got time.” "We don’t fly Northwest."
My favorite joke: "I'd stake my life on it." "That's already in the kitty, Bob."
Overall, I rate this: 7/10. The riffs are on point, and the sketches are nearly at their peak. It'd probably go up to 8/10 if they called the movie out on its racism and sexism.

Up next, #205, Rocket Attack USA (and the second chapter of Phantom Creeps).

MST3K #113: The Black Scorpion

It's #113: The Black Scorpion, with giant clay bugs.

Our movie this time is a 1957 monster movie, with better-than-average scope (thanks to the expansive use of location shoots) and effects (thanks to King Kong genius Willis O'Brien). In fact, apart from its shoddy script, it's not a terrible film.

An Mexican earthquake opens up a new volcano, freeing plenty of subterranean prehistoric giant scorpions, who attack cows and people and trains indiscriminately. The brave scientists venture down into the scorpions' cave, discovering a lot of other giant bug species (like in Kong, and a lot of the designs are either similar or identical to the ones from Skull Island). There's a lukewarm romance plot and ranching and an annoying kid and silly plot complications, to pad out the running time. But, like I said, the film overall is halfway decent.

Well, okay, some of the effects aren't perfect either. But our in-theater friends keep the experience fun and fast-moving. The riffing is thick on the ground, diverse and sharp. (Sadly, the host segments are still not quite as good -- I like the idea of Crow and Tom trying to understand Joel's humanity, but Gypsy turning into a scorpion behind them is less funny to me. Later, the idea of Tom and Crow doing a puppet show of Joel is funny, but it just turns into a lecture about film history.)

There are a lot of repeated jokes in this one. For the second episode in a row, the gang references: M*A*S*H, "Serpentine!", Manuel Noriega, Nick the ...Wonderful Life bartender, Jacques Cousteau, and a "motorman's helper." Only the last is the same identical joke, but with the quantity here, there are bound to be some reuses. Joel also calls back his minigolf obsession from #102, and there's a long run of golf jokes. (Oddly, there's no Python joke.)

This is, sadly, our farewell to Josh. While I prefer TV's Frank to Larry Erhardt (naturally), Josh's Tom is so wonderful. Josh was a fantastic writer and a hilarious performer. One of my favorite things about Cinematic Titanic was that it helped remind us about the greatness of Josh. His farewell here is beyond understated -- the show didn't realize yet that we could get attached to its stars, so Larry just waves goodbye and walks off.

Bonus feature alert: for the first time in my binge, I get one of those great Shout! Factory documentaries about the making of the original film. It's a nice historical overview of the effects and production, and I love having that type of info about the raw material. Also, the traditional Shout! Factory animated menu is done all in stop-motion, and it's great. Stop-motion Tom and Crow, plus an adorable felted scorpion? I'm in.

A joke I had to look up: "Look over there. It says Arne Saknussemm."
A joke that didn't age well: "Wow, Dan Witkowski really puts on a halftime show. When do the Elvis impersonators come out?"
My favorite joke from this show: (as Jacques Cousteau) "Lower and lower we go, past ze matte paintings."

Odds I'll watch this one again: 7/10. It's a perfect encapsulation of season one.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host segments still aren't perfect, but otherwise this is great.

Coming up next, it's #203, Jungle Goddess.

MST3K #112: Untamed Youth

It's Episode #112, with Mamie Van Doren singing rock songs and taking down an evil corrruption scheme!

In our movie this week, Mamie and her sister are arrested for vagrancy and hitchhiking, and sentenced to 30 days labor picking cotton. It's got a lot of teensploitation tropes, and a handful of womens' prison tropes (eg, the cat fight which leads to mutual respect), and like nine songs in 80 minutes (one by Eddie Cochran!). The food is awful (it's actually dog food), the labor is literally deadly, and the judge was in cahoots with the cotton-farmer. 

Sidebar: This one's kinda long, and doesn't have much to do with wisecracking robots, so feel free to jump down below. Sixty years after this film, our for-profit prisons are at least as bad as this movie would suggest, with way too many people jailed way too long for way too flimsy reasons. And it's only gonna get worse. I decided I wasn't going to talk about this in this post, I really wasn't. Until the evil cotton farmer was named "Tropp." 

Sure, he's evil, he harasses the help, and he puts profit above everything else in life. Sure, he makes secret deals to enrich himself, no matter who gets hurt. Sure, he's a duplicitous sociopath who has no respect for women. But Russ Tropp only hurts the people in his town, not the whole damn planet.

And, since it's a Hollywood movie from the 1950s, there aren't many nonwhite people around for Tropp to oppress. How do you make a movie about cotton picking, Warner Brothers, and cast zero African-Americans? (There's one character who's textually Latina, but she's pretty incidental.)

The movie tries to be honest about the realities of life, leading to a scene where Joel has to say "Gee, I'm sorry we even made fun of this movie." But it's just so obviously fakey, like most of the studio teen movies of the time, that I can't take it very seriously. 

And the movie's concept of female empowerment isn't great: the female judge has easily been suckered into the scheme by emotional manipulation. Her overdue enlightenment leads her to do the right thing, but the movie doesn't bother to differentiate how much of that is from her hurt feelings over the betrayal.

The cartoony corruption in this movie is solved easily, and it's hard to believe that about real life. It's hard to hear naive characters say things like "I don't think Mr. Tropp's that kind" without feeling dark about our future.

Right. So, the movie is okay, I guess, as far as teensploitation potboilers of the 50's go. It's got some good songs, thanks to Eddie Cochran (whom I adore!) and the whitebread rock stylings of Les Baxter, early in his film career. (He also scored two of the Corman Poe films I saw a few years ago, though I know him best from his contributions to the exotica music scene.)

It's nice to see Joel and the bots deal with a different type of film. This was their first movie without any horror or sci-fi elements, and I'm sure they questioned if MST3K could work with something like this. (I keep forgetting to pull out my dogeared copy of TACEG to check these things.) The fact it does is testament to the dexterity of movie riffing as an artform, and more specifically to the strengths of the show's format. (I'm also happy to see Gypsy show up in the theater, even if I don't think her run of jokes is particularly strong.) (And speaking of firsts, here's the first reference to Jeff Dunham, long before America loved him for his xenophobic nonsense.)

And how do they deal with the film?  While the host sketches aren't particularly great, the riffing is pretty sharp. The jokes are reaching that rarefied breadth and scope I love most about the show, with plenty that made me laugh out loud. Sure, there are a lot of easy ones about The Wizard of Oz and Andy Griffith, but there's also callouts for Tom Waits and Tobe Hooper and Squeaky Fromme. It's a heady stew, and a lot of us who grew up on the show got a certain percentage of our cultural education from those jokes.

This is my second show in a row to reference Disneyland, Boss Hogg, and Fawlty Towers (instead of Monty Python). They also make a reference back to SPACOM, from my previous movie.

Bonus feature alert: The DVD has an intro from Joel, and an interview about his one-man show, "Riffing Myself." There's also an interview with Mamie, and she's still energetic and active.

A joke I had to look up: "It's Vic Tayback!"
A joke that didn't age well: "Wait, so you’re my grandma, my sister, my mom ... did you marry Bill Wyman?"
My favorite joke: "Hey, it's Blonde Lemon Jefferson."

Odds I'll rewatch this: 4/10. The worst thing about this episode is how I feel about our country right now. I'm pretty sure that my lessened enjoyment of a silly puppet show isn't important, either, so let's move on and someday I'll laugh at this again.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host sketches go nowhere, and I can't wait for better Gypsy material (no pun intended, sorry), but otherwise, it's pretty good.

Up next, we bid farewell to Josh (and Larry), in #113: The Black Scorpion.

MST3K #109: Project Moonbase

It's #109, with twice the Cody, and eight times the sexism!

When Joel and the bots find out they have two chapters with Cody this week, they... react badly, and I don't blame them. He's wearing thin on me, and I only have to watch each one once. And I skipped more than half!

I do like Joel's props in this short, where he holds up Batman-style words like "Biff" and "Pow," during the obligatory fistfight. (For a civilization with advanced radar guns, the moonmen sure do suffer a lot of fistfights.)

And during the second title sequence, they're so sick of writing credit gags they come up with a theme song for Cody, sung vaguely toward the tune of the underscore. This became a MST staple, and the first one is good right off the bat.

(Did I mention how much I love to hear Tom sing?)

And speaking of firsts, this also hears our first mention of "Slowly I turned..."

I'm so glad this is my last taste of Cody for now. (Until, that is, Shout! Factory decides to put out a bonus disc with the complete Commando Cody adventures. No reason not to, since the films are public domain.)

On the other hand, Cody is just dull and silly, and he doesn't make my skin crawl. The movie this week, though, wow. It's supposedly based on a story by Robert Heinlein, back before he thought even a little bit about women and sexism (even his later, more nuanced things aren't particularly great on that front).

I feel all icky after this one, watching a supposedly-professional woman cower at danger (she's a colonel for god's sake!). We also have to see her commanding officer threaten to spank her. Then she's married off to some meathead so America's morals won't be threatened by two grown adults shacking up on the moon. It's all so demeaning, and even the final twist (the president is -- get this! -- a WOMAN!!!!) is more a tasteless joke than forward-thinking futurism.

Let's try to move on. The so-called plot of this one is that dirty commies are trying to destroy America's space station, so they kidnap a scientist, and replace him with a double. The intrigue feels paper-thin, and the plot falls prey almost immediately to that old gag where the spy doesn't care about his "local" baseball team. (In this case, it's the 1970 Brooklyn Dodgers - "Oh, this is the future when they sold the Dodgers back to Brooklyn.")

The movie wants to be a serious, hard-science film. But it spends too much time on silly spy plots and cliche romance, and doesn't even bother to pretend that the models demonstrated early in the film aren't being used for the miniature shots a few minutes later.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Alan Hale Jr. (who died just four days before it aired), who would show up in two later episodes, Angels' Revenge and The Giant Spider Invasion. (I'm not watching either of them this year, but Spider Invasion is the grimiest, ickiest film I'd ever seen on MST until this one.)

Bonus feature alert: There's a nice interview with Jeff Stonehouse, who was the show's DP for 3 seasons and a movie. I'm not sure why that bonus is on this disk (in fact, this box was all Joel eps, and Jeff wasn't there during Joel's years), but it's a nice brief memory of his time on the show. He was there during the great lighting-change in season 7 or so (when all of a sudden, lighting got a lot more important, and a lot more colorful). I've seen and heard a lot of interviews with the cast and crew before, but I don't remember hearing from Jeff before, and it's nice to add his voice to the history.

A reference I just don't get (write in if you know it): "This thing's full of candy! Watch what I can do with it."
A joke that didn't age well: "I see a thousand points of light."
A joke I had to look up: "Ooh, radishes." (Apparently they cause gas, which I did NOT know. Lots of flatulence jokes in this one.)
My favorite bit is the run of model jokes: "Space station," "Or, frisbee."

Odds I'll watch this again: 1/10. I feel bad as a male, a sci-fi fan, and a human being having to watch this one.
Overall, I rate this 3/10. The riffing is pretty fast and solid, but there are oh so many episodes without the ick factor.

Up next is #112, Untamed Youth.

A Spoopy Month #12: More reheated leftover reviews

October 27, 2014:

I don't enjoy poetry. Let me explain: I can understand the technical merits of poetry, and appreciate the artistry in a well-turned verse. I will gladly read poetry, and listen to it read by someone else, but I don't enjoy it. I realized, during my viewing of Nosferatu, that I feel the same way about most silent films. I can recognize that this film is important, and influential, and technically brilliant. I can enjoy a few scenes for what they are, but there's something missing from the equation for me personally to enjoy a 90-minute silent film.
With that said, this is one to watch if you care about horror. It was nearly lost forever, as the producers failed to get proper rights to Stoker's Dracula book, and the version of the film we have now is cobbled together from sources scrounged from hidden vaults and archives all over the world. You've seen a few images from this before, through cultural osmosis, and they're the most haunting parts of the movie. It's in the public domain in this country, so you can find it everywhere online for free, but there's a definitive version on Netflix that's closest to the original presentation, if those things matter to you.

October 28, 2014:

So naturally, after Nosferatu, I had to watch the movie about the making of Nosferatu. And boy, is it fun. It's funny, and gripping, and absolutely gorgeous. (Like Night Tide, this film was directed by an artsy-type guy who just dabbled in genre film, and both movies are wonderfully human and haunting.)
So besides Willem Dafoe as the vampire, the movie stars John Malkovich as a silent-film director, which gives him plenty of opportunities to go Malkovich Mad like no one else can. (Also, Eddie Izzard is hilarious in his minor role. I suppose I should also mention Mr. C. Elwes...) Oh, and this was the first movie ever made by Nicolas Cage's production company, but luckily he doesn't appear in the movie. According to the DVD's special features, he was personally responsible for the casting of Malkovich and Dafoe, so I guess he gets a lot of credit for that at least.
This won all kinds of awards, and rightly so. I kinda wish the director returned to making more mainstream films, so I could watch more movies like this one.

October 30, 2014:

So, I finally saw the Haunted Mansion movie. It came out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and this is the one that fulfilled all the doubts and inferior predictions people made about POTC.
Rather than tell you all the bad or mediocre things about it, here's a list of the things I liked:

• Wallace Shawn is always funny, in everything.
• A lot of the art direction and set design is gorgeous.
• The idea to show a suicide onscreen, and make the dead people really grisly and realistic, while misguided, was at least ambitious.

Also, I couldn't help but notice that, like The Corpse Bride, this movie features a wedding ceremony wherein a dead person marries a live person, and the live person is expected to drink poison wine so the marriage can work.
I can only hope that, one day, Guillermo del Toro will make good on his Mansion movie.

October 20, 2014:

I'll try to keep this short. I'd never read It before last week, or seen the TV adaptation. The book is good, of course, but it's also long. Turning an 1,100 page book into a three hour movie is nearly impossible (the audiobook version I listened to ran nearly two days!), but the adaptation is mostly efficient.
The problem is, Stephen King can be an efficient storyteller, but he's at his best when he's rambling. Some of my favorite parts of It are his long divergent interludes, wherein we find out about the historic evils of the town and Pennywise's past doings, which barely rate a mention in the TV film.
The cast is pretty good, and it's nice to see, for example, Harry Anderson and a young Seth Green play a grown-up and teenage version, respectively, of the same character. Of course, Tim Curry is indelible as Pennywise.
The adaptation's biggest crime, and to me it ranks fairly low on the list of book-to-film adaptation crimes, is that it makes the story much simpler. This focuses our attention on the more mythic, Campbellian parts of the battle between good and evil, while losing so many of the character details which make our seven heroes real to me. The two climactic battles, one in each time-frame, have lost the metaphysical parts of the battle, becoming almost entirely real-world and physical fights.
But, both book and film have enduring, horrifying scares I'll remember pretty much forever, and if I only have three hours to spend on this story, I'd watch the film version again.

In a few more days, we'll see the last batch of these reviews, with another Disney family horror comedy, one of the worst movies I've ever seen, one of the most grueling horror movies I've ever seen, and a fluffy witch comedy.