MST3K #322: Master Ninja I

And now, #322. It's got a white ninja, a mediocre TV hero, and a few minutes of Demi Moore.

Here's another "movie" that never saw theaters. The TV show was chunked and formed into seven different movieloaves, and I'm going to watch two of them. The first one has guest spots from Demi, Claude Akins, Clu Gulagher, and Deliverance's Bill McKinney as a corrupt cop. (The DVD bonus has an interview with him, and he seems to have enjoyed watching this one. I'll see him again in Final Justice).

Lee Van Cleef is an aging ninja, looking for an apprentice, since all the Asian ninja he instructed have turned evil. Luckily, there's another American (a Van Patten, even) who wants to learn the tricks of the trade, and help out some oppressed folks in the bargain. Lee Van Cleef and Timothy Van Patten, driving around in a van. It's a triple-van show.

Sidebar: Why did the TV of the 70's and 80's have so many traveling heroes? Just this week, I watched Claude Akins in an episode of his 1972 trucker action show, Movin' On, since it was partially filmed at Six Flags Over Georgia. In that episode, Claude gives up a lucrative Bible-hauling contract to help an old man in his foolish dream to launch his redneck hot-air-balloon into a race.

And speaking of old men, the second episode... um, half of the movie... features an old hoofer. Charlie Collins hadn't acted in 30 years, and they show us a clip from his best-known movie, The Dancing Pirate (which I've seen before, since I watch more pirate movies than any reasonable person should). Then, Collins does a short dance in the current day. I'm not sure exactly how or why he shows up here. (Was he friends with the director?)

One more note: during the climactic tightrope sequence, who the hell carries the briefcase full of money across? It's not in anyone's hand. Are we supposed to just ignore it? Tim's clearly carrying it just seconds later.

And I like the riffing here, a lot. ("I've got a bad feeling about that knick-knack shelf.") There are a few then-zeitgeisty jokes about Japanese folks buying everything, and Crow affects a pretty offensive accent for a few minutes, but they mostly steer clear of that trap. For no good reason, there's a run of dark jokes about actresses (Isadora Duncan's scarf, Edie Sedgwick's cigarettes, even a really tasteless one about Katherine Hepburn). There's a huge slam on Stephen J. Cannell out of nowhere, and even a random line from a Thurl Ravenscroft Disney TV theme song. Tom impersonates Jack Perkins (well) and Barry White (not so well).

This is my first (and second) Prince joke, and an early mention of Dream On!, before it shut out MST at the Cable ACE awards. It's also the first time I've heard something other than "Mighty Science Theater" over the closing credits. This is my second episode in a row to reference: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Planet of the Apes, and The New Monkees. This is the third episode in a row to mention: Jerry Lewis, Dairy Queen, and "Hikeeba!"

A joke I had to look up: "Looks like Clarence Thomas's wife."
A joke that didn't age well: "You know, these Robert Bly weekends are getting more and more intense."
My favorite joke: I really love how game Frank is to play along during the middle host segment. He's gotten all dressed up, and doesn't even get to finish the word "showtime" before Dr. F. shuts him down. Poor Frank.

Up next, #324, Master Ninja II.

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.