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.

A Spoopy Month #9: More rehashed reviews

October 24, 2014:

Whoops, I missed my movie review yesterday. I'll try to squeeze in two today. The good news is, you've at least heard of both of them! In fact, we watched The Corpse Bride at Movie Night ages ago, though I didn't remember much of it. So I rewatched it.
I think I liked it a lot more the second time, though I still won't give Tim Burton any more credit as an original filmmaker, since this one is so incredibly similar to Nightmare Before Christmas.
I can't help but watch this and think of Tim Burton's personal life -- I'm surprised he didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter as the living girl, and Lisa Marie as the title character...

October 25, 2014:

So speaking of stop-motion animation, I next decided to rewatch one of the first stop-motion movies. King Kong wasn't the first (the same effects team worked on a 1925 film of Doyle's The Lost World), but it was the best. And, in many ways, it's still one of the most ground-breaking effects films ever. The team invented several important processes to marry stop-motion to live action film, in several different ways.
You all know I'm a big audio commentary nerd, and this was the very first movie ever to have a running audio commentary, thirty years ago! I haven't seen either of the remakes of this, but I'm strongly considering the 2005 version.
...and ten years later, the same studio, RKO, was still using a lot of the painted jungle backdrops from this movie. At least one appeared in I Walked With A Zombie.

October 25, 2014:

The Atomic Brain (AKA Monstrosity) is currently rated on IMDB as the 98th worst movie of all time. I think that's about right. [This is 2015 Mark breaking in to tell you this is no longer true. It's been upvoted in the last year, and no longer appears on the Bottom 100.] The movie concerns a prototypical mad scientist, who wants to expand the field of human transplantation, so he's been putting animal brains into people. He's got a guy with a dog brain, a lady with a cat brain, and at the end a cat with a lady brain (the physical size of the brain doesn't appear to matter -- he's such a good doctor he can fit a whole human brain into a cat's skull!). His old, rich employer, has hired three unsuspecting young ladies to have her brain implanted into them -- um, to clean her house.
This movie completes my trilogy of films featuring Americans doing horrible British accents -- the lady in this movie appears to forget at times she's supposed to be British. Really, the old lady from this movie was in Mary Poppins the next year, and Dick Van Dyke seems like a master of dialect compared to the actress from The Atomic Brain.
I'm kind of embarrassed, actually. I watched this whole thing without realizing it was on Mystery Science Theater. And that I'd seen the MST3K version. And that I owned it on DVD. And so I rewatched the MST version, and could only remember having seen a few of the host sequences... Anyway, it's in the public domain, so if you wanna watch it, there's a link at the bottom of that Wikipedia page.

October 26, 2015:

Night Tide. He was a sailor; she was a mermaid. Well, maybe she was.
This is the most surprising movie I've watched all month: it's certainly atmospheric, and it has a few "eerie, strange, macabre" scenes (to quote the poster), but it's neither a horror movie nor a monster movie. It's a pretty effective story, methinks, and this is one of the two new-to-me movies from this month I'll gladly watch again (the other is I Walked With A Zombie).
This has a few familiar faces in it: besides a young, fresh-faced Dennis Hopper, the evil old lady from The Atomic Brain plays a really sympathetic (and really accurate) fortuneteller, and Vincent Price's sister from Pit and The Pendulum is a sweet merry-go-round operator and dispenser of endless cups of coffee.
Almost the entirety of the action takes place on the Santa Monica Boardwalk, so this movie acts as a great time capsule of that place and time. Again, this one is in the public domain, and the bottom of that Wikipedia page has a link to watch it. This one's worth it.

Stay tuned, folks: our next capsule reviews include two vampire movies, a dreadful Disney family film, and a killer clown.