MST3K #103: Mad Monster

Our next episode is #103. It begins with Chapter Two of Commando Cody, as Tom learns another lesson about serials: "If they had shown him diving out of the way LAST time, I wouldn't have spent the week worrying about him." The short isn't nearly as bad as the movie this time -- the special effects of the cave melting are really pretty decent.

Yeah, so this movie is a slower, boring-er ripoff of Universal's The Wolf Man. It's got a lower budget and a much more generic script. One of the few things I liked about the film is Glenn Strange. He plays the human version of the titular monster like that other Lon Chaney character, the one from Of Mice and Men.

Sidebar: Two years later, Strange would play Frankenstein's monster against Chaney's Wolfman in House of Frankenstein. They played those characters twice more together -- I can't help but wonder if they ever discussed this one. Probably not.

If the movie sounds like something you might watch without Joel and the bots, well, it's in the public domain, and you can do so here. (Same for Commando Cody.)

The riffing is still really loose -- at one point, Joel calls Tom "Crow." This is the second episode to ever offer RAM chips for movie criticism (and the first in my binge). But the biggest first (and hopefully a last) is Joel's mad experiment with switching bot heads.

This is the second episode in a row to have jokes referencing: The Michelin Man, "peas and carrots," Airplane!, and Kellogg's Frosted Miniwheats. I know that's a long list, but I'm glad they didn't fall into a rut. Speaking of, this is the first of my four episodes to not reference Monty Python.

Coming up next, #108, The Slime People!

A joke I had to look up: "Even our name says Merry Christmas!" (Honorable mention to the Smothers Brothers' winery.)
A joke that didn't age well: "You could learn a lot from a dummy."
My favorite joke: It's cliched, but I love Tom romancing the blender. Josh's Tom is already so perfect and fully-formed. ("Nobody drinks from my gal!") Tom even sings for the first time in this one, and I imagine in coming weeks I'll talk some more about how much I love it when Tom sings.

Odds I'll watch this one again: 5/10. I'll almost always watch any episode a second time.
Overall, I rate this one: 5/10. The movie is kinda slow (I had to nap halfway through), but some of the performances are so big that it's goofy fun. And, like with Time of the Apes or Pod People, I love seeing blatant genre ripoffs get the MST treatment.

A Spoopy Month #14: Mad Monster Party?

Well, I made it 13 days before running out of pre-written posts. This post is going up late in the day, not my usual schedule at all, but I've watched a lot of stuff I'm excited to write about, so I hope to get a few more posts in the pipeline today. Here's another Karloff movie, 1967's Mad Monster Party?

As you can see, it's stop-motion, and it's another Rankin-Bass spectacular. What you can't see, and might not guess, is why that word "Mad" is in the title. It was produced by Mad Magazine's publisher, and the characters were mostly designed by Mad artist Jack Davis. The movie was also co-written by Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman. (It's not important to this movie, but pretty important to me, that around the time Kurtzman was working on this movie, he'd just finished several years as Terry Gilliam's boss at Help! Magazine.)

I don't feel like this movie reaches the dizzying absurdist heights of humor that Mad could go to, though there are plenty of familiar touches (the characters are named things like Yetch and Felix Flanken). It's consistently amusing, though most people agree it's too long. (Apparently the producer/distributor wanted it to be 90 minutes, so a handful of extraneous scenes were added and filmed. This would benefit greatly from removal of those scenes, and a general tightening of atmosphere and chase scenes.) And while we're on the subject of the script, my DVD contains a special feature in which Arthur Rankin himself takes credit for my favorite joke in the movie: our hero and his lady are running from the monsters, trying to escape off the island, and she's unable to run any more. She begs the hero to save himself: "Go on, Felix. Just leave me something to read."

Karloff plays Dr. Frankenstein for a change in this one, and Phyllis Diller is immediately recognizable as herself (they even renamed Frankenstein's Monster to "Fang," in honor of her act). Most of the voice duties, though, fall to Allen Swift, who plays Felix as Jimmy Stewart (his job is as a pharmacist's assistant, and frankly I can't NOT think of It's A Wonderful Life in those scenes). Swift also makes The Invisible Man into Sydney Greenstreet and Yetch into Peter Lorre (what, no one could sound like Bogart?).

There are songs, too, which I personally didn't care for at all, since they had almost no jokes in them, though apparently the cult following for this film is at least partly due to the soundtrack. One person's meat, and all that.

You can find this on DVD most anywhere this time of year, and I'm honestly surprised I hadn't ever bothered to watch it before now. I doubt I'll see it every year, but it's a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes and has a handful of really funny monster jokes.

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.

A Spoopy Month #5: What We Do in the Shadows

Here's my first new movie review of the year! First off, watch that trailer there. If you're not interested in a satirical mockumentary about vampires trying to share a small flat and make it in the modern world, you might as well not bother reading the rest of the review.

So back in 2006, Jemaine "Conchord" Clement and his friend and comedy partner Taika Waititi made a short film named "What We Do In The Shadows," which served as the template for this feature-length version. 

Somehow, when this one came out back in February, I managed to read two bad reviews running and decided I didn't need to see it right away. The odds against that seem fairly high, since it's currently sitting at 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Luckily, a good friend (the one who got me watching "Flight of the Conchords" in the first place) gave me a positive review, so I finally got around to it.

I loved an awful lot of things about this. First, I watch a fair amount of mockumentary stuff (have I told you personally yet how much I'm enjoying the new Muppets show?) and I can't imagine a wholly new mockumentary joke that hasn't been done yet. This movie has one I can't remember seeing before, where a character spends nearly a full minute onscreen brushing his shirt and making a huge noise with his clip-on microphone.

Second, this has a great low-budget indie feel to it, and sometimes that genre can be my favorite in the world (I love, for example, Fido with all my heart.) It lets the characters breathe and be, for lack of a more precise term, human.

And of course, it's pretty funny. So, to sum up: vampire mockumentary. Roommate tension, werewolves and humans (and witches and zombies) all trying to coexist. Well worth your time.