Showing posts with label Adam West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam West. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

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.


Thursday, December 4, 2014

25 Days of Christmas #3b: "Mr. Plow"

It's not technically a Christmas episode, but it's on my previously-mentioned DVD of Simpsons holiday shows, so I watched it. It's one of the best-loved episodes, "Mr. Plow." This is from the fourth season, and unlike my previous episode, most things about the show are set in stone (most good things, anyway). This episode has two incongruous cameos from Linda Ronstadt and Adam West.


This is the second episode I saw in a row with a Batman reference, and I seem to remember this was the first burgeoning moment of Adam West's revival as a completely self-deprecating, unaware has-been-cum-celebrity.

As a quick review, Homer cracks up both of the family cars at once, and is bullied into buying a snowplow. He manages to build his plow business into a success, until Barney opens a rival plowing company.


This episode has a lot of memorable moments, and is the only episode I saw which featured my favorite Simpsons actor, Phil Hartman. I was excited to see Troy McClure in the opening moments of this show, since so often Lionel Hutz would appear in each McClure episode too. Sadly, that was not to be.

I have a vague recollection, from the audio commentary, that Matt Groening thinks one of the reasons this episode is so popular is that people never see snow on TV except during Christmas-specific stories.

As a Simpsons episode, I rate this 9/10.
As a Christmas story, I rate this 1/10 -- there's just nothing except snow, snow, snow.

I have at least two more episode reviews to write today, but I'm afraid I have to be at work in 8 hours. We'll get up to speed soon though.