MST3K #324: Master Ninja II

It's #324, and Grandpa Ninja saves the day again!

It's two more episodes of The Master, a ten-years-late ripoff of Kung Fu, with more obvious stunt doubles and goofier plots. McAllister and his junior partner have two more adventures, and first they help a five-years-late Norma Rae ripoff organize her cannery workplace. Then, they help a twenty-five-years-later Bond ripoff fight terrorists and rescue hostages. Along the way, McAllister gets to play with all his ninja toys ("Oh, he brought his sample case."), and Keller drives a motorcycle and a plane, and kisses two pretty girls.

Did I mention George Lazenby is in this movie? They cast him as a Bondian spy, with a handful of cool gadgets. (His sticky-tracker gun looks bulky to bring into a garden party, but what do I know?) There's also a big part for David McCallum, who was one of the M[e]n from UNCLE. (He's doing well for himself these days as Ducky on NCIS.)

Sidebar: One final note on a guest star... uh, cameo in this FILM. Robert F. Hoy, who plays Masterson in the second episode... uh, half of the film, must be friends with David McCallum. He played three different characters on three episodes of Man From UNCLE, and his last role listed on IMDB is a cameo on NCIS. (He also appeared in bit parts on a LOT of the shows Joel and the Bots mention: Magnum PI, BJ and the Bear, The Rockford Files, Mannix, Mod Squad, Bat Masterson. And, it should be pointed out, he squared the circle by appearing on two episodes of Kung Fu.)

This episode has two so-so host segments, and two that are AMAZING. The "General Timothy Van Patten" one, pictured above, is just perfect. It's got one great joke, and lasts not a second too long. After that, Tom's long explanation, assigning specific pets to fictional detectives, is perfectly skewed, nerdy, and hilarious.

The riffs hit more than miss. I loved "You didn't have to climb into a security-guard warehouse," and also laughed out loud at "Didja ever see Food of the Gods, buddy?" There's even a Stan Freberg deep-cut joke with "John!" "Marsha!" (And I love the nerdiness of Tom's mention of Foucault.)

This one has a lot of repeated jokes. Not counting callbacks to the last episode, this is my second episode in a row to mention: "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," "I'll Be Seeing You," Lech Walesa, "Hooker's a good cop!," Blazing Saddles, The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, Silly String, Gymkata, Prince, "Huzzah!," Knight Rider, "Stranger in Paradise," and "Mendozaaaa!" (That Simpsons joke was really fresh at the time -- that episode aired just two months before this one.)

It's the fourth in a row to mention "Hi-keeba!" and Jerry Lewis. (And the fourth of the last five to recall 1960's TV Batman. I'll stop counting these now, putting them in the same category as Python and Wizard of Oz and Beatles jokes [three in this episode, not counting two solo Paul jokes and the Rick Nelson "Garden Party" line].)

AND the DVD has a nice long bonus: a 2010 Dragon*Con panel about Tom with both Josh and Kevin talking about their history with, and views of, the character. I saw this ages ago on YouTube, and the picture quality still isn't great, but it's an amazing collection of the best Servo stories (and Kevin even pulls out the original hate-banner). It's hosted by superfan Ken Plume, who's posted, like, a dozen hours of interviews with various MST folks over the years on his podcast, A Bit of A Chat.

A joke that didn't age well:"She’s got a Landers sister quality."
A joke I had to look up: "Looks like a Paul Klee painting."
My favorite joke: I liked a LOT in this episode, but my absolute favorite was "Let's see a show of hands." "I lost my hand in a fish-chopper."

Overall, I rate this one 8/10. The movie is goofy and fun, and the riffing is absolutely top-notch. If there were one more great host segment, I'd give this 10/10.

Up next, I watch #412, Hercules And The Captive Women.

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).

Legacy of Frankenstein #7: Young Frankenstein (1974)

Today, we're all about Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks' best movie by far. Sure, Blazing Saddles may be funnier, but this one is stunning to look at, full of heart, and even the score is gorgeous. (Why oh why is the soundtrack out of print? I don't even have my LP copy to listen to anymore.)

200 years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft had a dream about a scientist creating a human, and that led to her invention of science fiction. Some 150 years later, also inspired by a dream, Gene Wilder sat down with a yellow legal pad and wrote a few pages of story about the grandson of Frankenstein. Once the ideas were developed, Mel Brooks brought the story to life (with help from a lot of the same cast and crew from Blazing Saddles).

Sidebar: How weird is it that both those films were released in just ten months? I'd argue that no director has ever had a better year in film history than Mel's 1974. (Okay, Spielberg's 1993 was pretty amazing.)

I've probably seen this one 20 times, so the movie holds no surprises for me anymore (though I was still sad I didn't get a chance to see it during its recent, brief revival on the big screen). While almost all the jokes hold up to repeated viewing, today I was amazed at how emotional the film can still make me. 

Reading obituaries and tributes to Gene Wilder, I kept reading that he made things funny by keeping them real and heartfelt. I hadn't put that together, since I saw most of his best work during my most formative years and wasn't always paying attention to emotions in hilarious comedies. But even with something as early as The Producers, Leo Bloom is hilarious only because we can care about him. This movie takes the time to let us sympathize with the characters (otherwise the frenetic jokes would be less funny, like a Scary Movie-type spoof). The scene with the creature in jail, being tormented by his keepers, has no laughs at all -- it exists just to stir our hearts.

The movie also takes the time to set scenes. Long, moody shots of the village and castle, and plenty of time for us to hear the score, not only ground the jokes, but make the whole conceit funnier as a specific parody of James Whale's movies about Frank. (The funniest scenes, for me, are particular burlesques of scenes from Whale.)

Sidebar #2: Like a few previous entries here, Greg Proops presented this film at his film club, where he recorded a podcast of jokes and commentary. He also relates his memories of Wilder and Marty Feldman. Listen to it here.

2016 has been a brutal year in a lot of ways (no politics talk here, promise). I was upset to lose David Bowie and Prince, but neither of them hurt me as much as the loss of Gene Wilder. He hasn't been doing much lately, but I love him as a person, and his best work stands as some of the best funny movies ever made. (I haven't seen all his work, but I get the impression that a lot of the 80s stuff is, franky, skippable.) There hasn't been a year since I started high school that I haven't seen, and enjoyed, and been cheered up by, a film of his. On hearing of his death, I didn't do a memorial watch of everything, like I did with Harold Ramis, but so much of Gene's work lives in my heart and inspires my sense of both comedy and art.

I'm glad that Mel is still around (and very much in the public eye) to carry the torch for all the departed friends who made this film, and that he still hangs out with Carl Reiner every day. (As if it weren't bad enough that Mel lost Anne Bancroft, Sid Caesar left us this year too.) I haven't yet read his book about this movie, but I definitely intend to.

This movie is indelible for comedy fans and horror fans, and even just for fans of movies in general. I'd argue that it's the best parody film ever, mostly because of its attention to detail and loving tribute to the genre. Also, it's so beloved that, like Universal's Frank franchise (Frank-chise? probably not), it's spawned lots of peripheral products, like toys and stage productions and such. Tomorrow, I'm talking about two of them.

Legacy of Frankenstein #1: The Infinite Monkey Cage

What? No big deal, I'm just blogging again.

We don't really know specific dates, but this summer marked the 200th anniversary of Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) first creating science fiction and horror as we know them, in the form of Frankenstein. The first version of the book was published in subsequent years, and then underwent constant transformation in its text, meaning, and unstoppable adaptation. I'm going to experience a lot of the best Frankenstein-related media ever, and have decided to start the blogging with a quick mention of the show that inspired me to do so.

Professor Brian Cox and Comedian Robin Ince have, for a few years now, hosted a BBC radio show about science. Frequently, they also discuss popular culture. Their penultimate show addresses the Frankenstein anniversary.

I came into this show completely fresh, knowing only basic cultural-osmosis stuff about the story and its creation, so I really appreciated the deep dive into both Godwin's influences and creative process, and the science inherent in the story. I always like it when knowledgeable people discuss their field of inquiry as it appears in art. Hearing a biologist discuss exactly how impossible the reanimation process would be was great fun for me.

The panelists also pointed out that the original text of the book was much more pro-science, so that's the version I'll be reading soon, and presumably blogging about soon thereafter.

Finally, my favorite spooky TV goth, Noel Fielding, had the chance to discuss science, magic, and monsters, and tell a few off-color jokes.

If you have any interest in science or horror at all, the radio show is well worth a listen. The show-specific link up there will (as of this writing, at least -- I can't say how long it will be available) let you listen to the edited radio version, a tight 30 minutes. BUT! They also release an extended podcast, with at least 50% more goodness, and that's what I recommend. You can (as of this writing) get the extended podcast version on iTunes here, or listen at this link.

A Spoopy Month #15: The last of the leftovers, warmed over and with some kinda weird sauce on top. What IS that?

It's time for the last batch of movie reviews from last year, and it's a weird mix indeed.

October 31, 2014:

(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.

Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.

Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.

(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)

October 31, 2014:

The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!

November 1, 2014:

Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.

November 1, 2014:

I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]

Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!

A Spoopy Month #10: Doombuggies Spook Show Podcast!

Hey, there's a new episode of the Doombuggies Spook Show! It's been a while (the last episode was several months ago), but this more than makes up for it.

Doombuggies.com is, as you may know, a model fansite and probably the oldest really, really good Disney fansite. Like a lot of people, I came upon the website at a time when I wasn't a big fan of Disney parks. And like a lot of people, I give at least partial credit for my current Disney Park fandom to Chef Mayhem, the owner and proprietor, for continual enthusiasm and excellence in showing what Disney attractions are capable of. (His similar site for Pirates of the Caribbean is also good, but not nearly as deep or wide-ranging.)

If you like the Haunted Mansion, but aren't familiar with this site, you should of course spend a few hours in its winding passageways, but the first thing you should do before that is buy their audio drama, "Nuptial Doom." It's just a buck, and well worth your time.

So the podcast in question is, in particular, about The Haunted Mansion in all its incarnations around the world. (The fifth episode features an interview with Imagineer Rolly Crump, who helped design huge chunks of the attraction, along with several hundred other important Disney things.)  But in general, it's also about horror and Halloween and other scare attractions too. I feel like the new episode is a good representation of the breadth of the podcast, but there's another reason I've chosen to link you directly to it.

Mr. Mayhem had the opportunity to interview several Disney voice actors, including the second-most-famous Ghost Host Pete Renaday, and managed to talk them into reenacting the fantastic old LP The Story And Song From The Haunted Mansion. I'd heard the raw version of this recording on Mr. Mayhem's other podcast Mousetalgia a while ago, but this version is more tightly edited and adds a lot more atmosphere and sound effects.

If you care about The Haunted Mansion or Disneyplaces in general, this podcast is highly recommended. If you're a general horror or Halloween fan, it's also recommended for you. If you don't care about any of those things, I thank you for reading this far, and kinda wonder if you have too much time on your hands.

A Spoopy Month #2: Pseudopod Podcasts

So I'm writing this immediately after listening to one of the most recent episodes of a great horror fiction podcast, Pseudopod. I've been enjoying (and occasionally, freaking out to) Pseudopod for over two years now, which means I've heard well over 100 horror stories read to me for absolutely free. I first subscribed after hearing a reading of a Joe Lansdale story, "The Pit," which is gut-wrenching, horrible, very disturbing and, like a lot of Lansdale's work, genre-bending.

Through the eerie hand of pure coincidence, this podcast is co-edited by a friend of a friend, which I didn't know until he hosted an episode. "Fishhead," by Irvin S. Cobb, was published in 1913 and is open and honest about the racial politics of the time. The story is, of course, problematic in its treatment of race (though in a different way from the Lansdale story above), but I feel like Alex helps us put the story, and Cobb, into context.

The episode of Pseudopod which has haunted me the most is their 400th, "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree, Jr. I'm mostly self-educated when it comes to horror and all other forms of speculative fiction, so I hadn't heard of Tiptree before. This story laid so many eggs in my head - sexual politics, biological imperatives -- I had to share a link on Facebook with my closest friends, and I immediately reserved a Tiptree collection at the library on the strength of that story. (There's a TV adaptation of this story, which I never bothered to seek out.)

Which brings us to this week (well, a few weeks ago -- due to a vacation, I'm still behind on my podcast listening). Frequently, they publish collections of several shorter stories, and the theme of this episode is great: using proper language to distance oneself from horror. Frequently, the editorial tone of the show as a whole can be very Nightvalian (to coin a term), and the second story especially uses the humor of incongruous language to both mask and deepen the horrors so obliquely described. I'm a comedy guy, and feel like humor can deepen most forms of storytelling. For me, that goes double with horror (which is why I'm such a big Lansdale fan).

This is by no means a complete or even representative overview of the show, just a collection of the episodes I remember liking the most over the last few years. If you have any interest in horror fiction, it's well worth your time to trawl through the archives (their Artemis Rising shows are also astounding) and find something that catches your eye.