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).

A Spoopy Month #6: More reposted reviews, repeated for your repleasure

Right. Four more capsule reviews from last year. Here we go!

October 19, 2014:

Here's Madhouse, the final Vincent Price movie in my li'l box set. Not a Corman, not a Poe. BUT, it does have clips in it from a lot of the Corman/Poe/Price films, and even claims to guest-star Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff since they appear in clip form. (And, oh yeah, it reuses the fiery climax of ...House of Usher again.)
What a weird movie -- an aging film star, suspected of murdering his wife, finally revives his most famous horror character but the shoot is marred by further murders. Is the film star responsible? He doesn't THINK so. Full of mid-70s British "contemporary" fashions, and even features Michael Parkinson for some reason.
We'll get into a few better movies, starting tomorrow...

October 20, 2014:

Immediately after they finished filming the original Cat People, but before it was released, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur made I Walked With A Zombie. It's a voodoo picture based, loosely, on Jane Eyre. And it's the best, least exploitative voodoo picture I've ever seen. Voodoo is shown to be merely a tool, one which can be used for good or evil, rather than a soul-sucking weapon used by the evil people of color against the innocent white folks.
This movie is really, really good, and for a movie made exclusively by white folks in 1943, the characterizations of people of color are really well-done: interesting, distinct, and realistic. (Plus, the movie's treatment of the effects of past slavery, while not up to our current standards, are also realistic and as honest as any white capitalist could be in 1943. I think it helps that Tourneur was French and Lewton was Russian -- that is, they hadn't been raised in a country only a few decades out of slavery.)
Like Cat People, this is haunting and perfect. It makes me want to seek out all the other movies Tourneur directed. Tomorrow, another Lewton-produced horror film.

October 21, 2014:

It's got Karloff! It's got Lugosi! It's got thorny ethical questions based on an original story by Robert Louis Stevenson! It's The Body Snatcher! Oh, and it's got some truly questionable accents. (For a movie set in Scotland in the 1830s, there sure were a lot of bit players sounding suspiciously like 1940s Americans...)
So, real-life Britain had a shortage of cadavers for medical study, which led schools to post a no-questions-asked bounty, which started out with grave-robbing and led a few enterprising businessmen to eliminate the middleman and kill their own.
Karloff is menacing as all get-out in this. There's one truly haunting sequence told entirely in the dark, with no dialogue. (The technical spareness of the scene, and the fact that the crime takes place only in our minds, feels as exciting to me as the first time Eisenstein realized he could use editing to tell a story in Potemkin.)
For the record, this is not the alien takeover film The Invasion of The Bodysnatchers (which I've never seen).

October 22, 2014:


So, a short time before he wrote I Walked With A Zombie for Val Lewton, Curt Siodmak made up all the things we think we know about werewolves for The Wolf Man. I'd never seen this movie before, or any sequels, remakes, or even specific parodies, but I knew every beat in this story. I think that tells you a little about how influential this monster movie was. You can read all the trivia about makeup and such on that Wikipedia page there, so let me just say this:
The Universal monster movies (the original ones, at least -- I haven't bothered to watch many of the sequels) are at their best in creating atmosphere. And this movie has tons of it. Graveyards, foggy moonlit Welsh forests, even the dusty old manor house.
Later on, once I've gotten some sleep, I'm planning to draw up a little Venn diagram for the three early 40's movies I saw (these last three) and their intersecting themes and personnel. [Note from 2015 Mark: I never did this. Just note that Bela is in this, and this also shares some interesting brother issues with I Walked With A Zombie -- what was Siodmak's relationship like with his brother, I wonder?]
Final thought: this one's okay. It's no Dracula, and it's no Bride of Frankenstein. But, if it's on TV and you've got two hours to kill, it's much better than that Nightmare on Elm Street installment on the other channel.

Okay, that's another day's worth. The next four capsule reviews include two movies with stop-motion animation, and two no-budget public domain movies, one of which I adored.