#AtoZChallenge Zombie-ish Apocalypse

For this final entry, we have zombie movies--sort of.  There weren't really any actual modern-type zombie movies on MST3K back in the day.  At least that I know of.

Night of the Living Dead:  But on Rifftrax they did the granddaddy of all modern zombie movies, the George Romero classic.  There's both a colorized version that looks weird and for the live show they used the classic black-and-white.  Anyway, while it's a classic, that doesn't mean it's a perfect movie.  There's a lot of slow driving, annoying crickets chirping, and most of the actors weren't really very good.  One funny gaffe is the black guy (Ben, I think) tells the catatonic woman (Barbara, I think) that he's secured all the windows and directly behind him is a window that clearly hasn't been secured. The best riff is when Mike as Ben says, "I'm scared too.  I'm the black guy in a horror movie; I might as well go straight to the morgue!"  (Though if you watch the movie, Ben is the last to die.)

Zombie aka I Eat Your Skin:  This is a more recent Rifftrax of a lame 50s movie.  The zombies are not the George Romero type but the traditional kind created by a witch doctor or whatever.  They have a lot of plaster or some shit smeared on their bodies and buggy eyes.  And they don't eat skin from what I could discern.  Anyway, a writer and his manager and his annoying Harley Quinn-sounding wife Coral (which they always seem to pronounce as Carl) go to the aptly named Voodoo Island, though for whatever reason their plane has to make an emergency landing on the beach.  Does that place even have an airport?  A seaplane would have made a lot more sense.  Then there's a lot of colonial imperialism in play as they go to some plantation and meet the overseer and a doctor who's experimenting on natives and his doctor, whom the horny writer is instantly smitten with.  Then there are ritual sacrifices and bad chase scenes that make Benny Hill or Scooby-Doo look like a Bond movie.  Everyone escapes and the horny writer writes a book about it.  Hooray.  Pretty much your standard bad B-movie.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures...:  This 1964 movie is actually called The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and it's really more the old-fashioned kind of zombie or someone who's under the control of a witch doctor.  Or a Gypsy woman in this case.  A rat-faced dude goes to a carnival and is inadvertently put under the Gypsy's spell.  Mayhem ensues.  It's really low-budget and the creepiest part is probably the opening credits where in the background it shows a normal face that slowly turns into a grotesque zombie face.  The film's director and "star" Ray Dennis Steckler was in the even more terrible Eegah and went on to direct a lot of soft-core porn movies under various pseudonyms.  So obviously this movie was a real class act.

Mutant:  In this 1984 Rifftrax movie a company is poisoning the water supply of a small town.  The poisoned water causes everyone to turn into not necessarily zombies but pale monsters with yellow eyes and oozing vaginas on their hands who try to rip people to shreds.  So pretty close.  Wings Hauser and his brother Mike are traveling near the town when they're run off the road by some rednecks, though admittedly they almost ran into the rednecks first by driving blind, so they were kinda asking for it.  Anyway, with the help of drunk deputy Bo Hopkins and a local woman, Wings Hauser survives and the National Guard kills all the monsters.  Hooray!  Our hero.  The most unintentionally hilarious part is when Wings Hauser is looking for his brother in this old lady's house.  At first he's yelling "Mike!" but for whatever reason when he gets to the basement he starts whispering it, "Mike!  Miiiiike!"  It really makes no sense.

Nightmare at Noon:  This Rifftrax movie is the spiritual sequel to Mutant that's sort of the same thing.  As a test an albino dude starts to poison the water of a small town in Utah or New Mexico or somewhere like that.  Wings Hauser is a yuppie asshole lawyer in an RV with his wife.  Bo Hopkins is a drifter they pick up.  They stop in the town as the outbreak begins.  Wings's wife is poisoned and starts to turn.  He, Bo, and a local female deputy whose father George Kennedy is infected and kills himself to blow up a van track down the albino.  Then there's a lengthy, lengthy helicopter chase that involves none of our main characters.  Somehow Wings's wife is saved and everyone leaves town except the female deputy who quits law enforcement, leaving the town to anarchy, I guess.  It's funny in this how cars blow up at pretty much the slightest nudge; if that were like real life we'd have cars exploding all over the damned place!  Every fender bender would turn into a huge fireball.  lol  This was one that used to be on Pluto TV for a while but then they dropped it and it's not on Amazon Prime, so you'd have to pay to rent it.

There you go, another A to Z Challenge completed.

#AtoZChallenge Youth Isn't Served

While it had puppets, Mystery Science Theater 3000 wasn't really a kid's show.  Rifftrax is usually less so since it's unrated.  But there were movies featured that were intended for young people.

Cool as Ice:  In 1991 Universal thought they'd cash in on the Vanilla Ice phenomenon.  Since it's a big studio movie and has the cinematographer who went on to do Schindler's List and most of Spielberg's movies after that the production values are professional quality.  It's just everything else that's terrible.  The thin excuse for a story is that Johnny (Vanilla Ice) and his three black friends end up in a small town when one guy's bike breaks down so they go to the shop of an elderly couple that looks like a reject from PeeWee's Playhouse.  Johnny meets a plain, smart girl whose parents are in witness protection and yet are dumb enough to go on local TV, where a couple of gangsters or whatever see them and hassle them.  They kidnap the girl's brother, but Johnny uses his powers of deduction to find them and stop them, so the girl decides to screw college and follow Johnny around.  The most unintentionally hilarious part is when Johnny and his friends roll into town and everyone stares at them with slack jaws.  I guess they never saw black people before.  And then later Johnny and his friends go to the local hangout to school a band that is playing some undefineable type of music that no real band would ever play.  It's just to make Vanilla look cool.  Really the movie lays it on so thick that they might as well have text at the bottom of screen saying, "Look how cool this guy is!"

Reefer Madness:  There are educational films and then there are propaganda films.  This definitely falls into the latter category.  It starts with a whole bunch of text on the screen to read and follows it with a 5-minute lecture by a stern-faced guy.  Then the story itself is so over-the-top it's ridiculous.  This kid starts smoking pot and blacks out and gets framed for murder.  Only after he's convicted does the girlfriend of the dealer tell the cops what happened.  Then she jumps out a window to her death.  Because death is preferable to a couple of years of probation.  To close the movie they bring back that wonderful stern-faced guy to lecture us again.  The message is clear:  smoke a joint and you'll go to jail or die!  Um, yeah, not really.

To Catch a Yeti:  This could have been in the X entry but it's also a movie intended for kids so it can go in here too.  This isn't quite as bad as Mac & Me but it's not a lot better.  Yetis or Bigfoot have been sought for decades but you know why no one's found one?  Because they're looking for huge monsters instead of tiny, googly eyed puppets with huge feet they can use as skis.  And they didn't look in Ontario the Himalaya Mountains.  While on a super-casual trip to the most dangerous mountains in the world (I mean they don't have oxygen or even wear hats or gloves), a Canadian upstate New York man accidentally takes a tiny, weird-looking "Yeti" home with him.  While the yeti makes friends with the man's young daughter, a big game hunter played by Meat Loaf (the singer, not the food) is after the yeti to sell it to a millionaire's bratty son.  While the yeti looks ridiculous and the plot is completely implausible, I have a soft spot for it because it reminds me of something my dad would have rented for us to watch back in the 80s.  It's cute, goofy fun despite the massive flaws.  And it features one of my favorite riffs when the dad finds out Meat Loaf has gone to his house he picks up the phone and in a stereotypical Canadian accent Bill Corbett says, "Hey buddy, let me tell you aboot my particular set of skills, eh?"  How hilarious would Taken have been if Liam Neeson had been some Canadian hoser?

The Fairy King Ar:  From South African schlock filmmaker Paul H Williams goes this incomprehensible story of fairies that are trapped in a mine.  A family led by Corbin Bersen moves into a house in South Africa England where everyone, especially a caretaker played by Malcolm McDowell, hates them because there was a mine accident like 200 years ago.  Meanwhile the two kids see crappy CGI fairies, one of which can turn into a creepy girl.  The dad gets sick with...something and the kids get trapped in the mine until everyone bands together to save them and the really creepy Fairy King Ar heals the dad.  Or something like that.  The effects are awful, the fairies look terrible, and the story makes no real sense.  The beginning has a grandma telling the kids the legend of the fairies, almost none of which actually comes to play in the story.

The Little Unicorn:  Also from Paul H Williams comes another kid's movie set in South Africa England.  When her beloved horse is dying a little girl wishes a unicorn would save it because of some bullshit story her grandfather (a befuddled David Warner who constantly looks like he's wondering what the hell he's doing there) told her like two minutes ago.  The horse gives birth to a really, really shitty looking CGI unicorn and then the horse dies so the girl hates the unicorn.  But spontaneously the unicorn turns into an adult that's live action and gets into the newspaper.  So then a circus run by Jake of Jake & the Fatman, a magician played by George Hamilton with a muddled English/Australian accent, and a mother-and-daughter horse breeder team all try to steal the unicorn.  The story makes a little more sense than Fairy King of Ar but the effects are still shit and the acting isn't great either.  It's a low bar but I think it's probably the best Paul H Williams movie I've seen--and I've seen like 5 of them.

Merlin: The Return:  Another wonderful Paul H Williams epic. [Eye Roll.]  So somehow Merlin, Mordred, Mordred's mom, Mordred's minions, Guinevere, and Lancelot have been in stuck in some other dimension for hundreds of years.  Meanwhile Arthur and his dumbass knights have been asleep somewhere else, I guess.  But thanks to a scientist played by Tia Carrere and a psychic medium in South Africa England, Mordred is about to escape.  But Merlin escapes first in only his skivvies.  But apparently he's been around a lot in the modern world because a girl and a new boy (the same one in all the other movies) recognize him on sight.  And somehow help him to defeat Mordred.  There's a lot of nonsensical plot logic, hammy acting, cheesy effects, and lame bits like spraying bad guys with hoses and Merlin essentially going down a water slide to escape.  And what's with Guinevere's dreadlocks?  Cultural appropriation much?

The Sorcerer's Apprentice:  Paul H Williams stepped back from directing to produce this but it's pretty much the same sort of movie as the two previous ones.  There's the same boy from those other two movies and Merlin the Return who like Fairy King of Ar moves to South Africa England.  He meets a girl who could pass as a boy and makes enemies of a bully.  And meets his neighbor:  Merlin, only played by a different guy than Merlin the Return.  There's something about a staff and a crystal that Morgana (Kelly LeBrock) and her henchmen, a cat and rat who can take human form, want to steal to take over the world or something.  It mostly makes sense and doesn't have creepy fairies though it doesn't make sense when the kid picks up the staff and suddenly he's a medieval warrior from the beginning of the movie in a forest and then he's back again.

It is funny though that Merlin and the kid have the same relationship as Luke and Rey in The Last Jedi:  I won't teach you!  OK, I'll teach you a little.  You're a natural so...I won't teach you anymore!  Go away!  OK, I've accepted things and reveal myself in all my glory.  And now I disappear.

A Talking Cat!?!:  If James Ngyuen of Birdemic infamy made a Paul H Williams movie, this is what it would look like.  Bad actors, cheap sets (one of which was the setting of a porno movie according to IMDB), music that sounds like a keyboard demo, production values like an early 90s camcorder, and gaffes a-plenty mar this dumb "family" movie.  Though if you show this to your family they probably won't speak to you anymore.  A muffled, boozy Eric Roberts (according to IMDB he literally filmed his lines in his living room in 15 minutes) is the voice of Duffy the cat who's a "human whisperer."  For...reasons he helps two families get together by...telling an old guy who looks like age progressed Patton Oswalt to take a walk in the woods to a woman's house.  And telling the daughter of the woman who lives in the woods to check her laptop.  For...reasons the cat can only talk to humans one time each--and when he does his "mouth" looks faker than the puppets on Robot Chicken.

There's a lot more talk about cheese puffs and burning waffles (after which you have to buy a new waffle iron apparently) and coding a program to catalog clothes than talking cats, just like in Birdemic there's more talk about stock options and solar panels than shock or terror.  So it's really, really bad.  Probably why the director used a pseudonym.  If you watch not all that carefully you can see visible boom mikes, cat food/laser pointers used to get the cat into position, and at one point a woman reaches into a "hot" oven to take out a tray with her bare hands without suffering any burns!  You barely need any riffing on it, but it does make it even funnier.

Rollergator:  This mid-90s "movie" was shot on an old camcorder and stars a purple rubber alligator puppet as the "Rollergator" who is rescued by a bimbo and is pursued by an evil carnival owner played by Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez, a female ninja, and a "karate" instructor whose headband clearly says tae qwon do.  At the same time they hope to reunite the annoying, wisecracking gator with the "Swamp Farmer," because there are tons of swamps in southern California, right?  The whole thing looks worse than a high school AV club could have made.  The saving grace is the soundtrack is so loud that you can barely hear the dialogue.  For the soundtrack the director used Preston Reed's album "Metal" pretty much in its entirety; he probably got it for like $5 on clearance or something.  On Facebook one time I pointed out the similarity between this and The Mandalorian with "Baby Yoda" as it's about someone protecting a talking baby amphibian from harm.  Clearly Jon Favreau ripped the idea off from this. (Not.)

Rescue Me:  In 1991, troubled studio Cannon Films thought it'd be a good idea to cash in on that whole brat pack thing of the mid-80s.  This is probably why they went out of business.  Anyway, Stephen Dorff plays a high school senior with an obsession over the head cheerleader.  He finds out about her meeting with her boyfriend at a lake or something and so decides to stalk her there, but there's some bad guys there making a deal for stamps (not the postage kind, the kind you put on cigarettes and stuff, I guess) and the bad guys kidnap her.  So her stalker springs into action!  He blackmails the guy selling the stamps to help him find the other two guys, which involves driving from "Nebraska" to LA.  But really it's all California, explaining why Nebraska has so many mountains.  In the end the girl outwits her kidnappers, who then kidnap the next-door neighbor to take her place, so at least our "hero" rescues someone.  It's definitely not the worst movie on this list, but it's pretty dumb.  And we're supposed to root for the stalker?  It really needed to develop a counter-love interest more, like having her go with the stalker and the other guy.  This movie was riffed by the B-team of Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Nelson, who both wrote and appeared on MST3K back in the day.  A Fun Fact is that while the movie was shot in 1991 (and really if IMDB had said 1987 or 1988 I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference) it wasn't released until early 1993 in the US and late 1992 in Germany, probably due to Cannon Films's difficulties.  Another Fun Fact is the cheerleader was played by Ami Dolenz, daughter of one of the original Monkees and one of the kidnappers was played by Peter DeLuise, the son of Dom DeLuise, proving that talent is not genetic.

Fun in Balloon Land:  This is a bizarre "movie" that's one part fairy tale madness and one part  a mid-60s Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade.  It starts with a little boy dreaming he's visiting various balloon sets like Old McDonald's Farm and the underwater kingdom of Atlantis where he wears tiny gold shorts that are super creepy.  Then it cuts to a parade where a drunk-sounding woman describes the floats and balloons as weirdly as possible.  For some reason though when marching bands come on the screen there's no narration at all.  It ends with a bizarre "quiz" where the rules keep changing.  I'm not sure who made this or why but it is definitely weird.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:  The director of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny made this equally awful sequel to the Wizard of Oz.  There are really cheap sets, including a bizarre "cow" that can only move its head.  On a farm run by a witch, a little boy named Tip (the director's son in his only acting role--for obvious reasons) uses magic powder to bring a pumpkin-headed man to life.  The witch is going to turn him into a statue so he and Jack the Pumpkinhead run away to the Emerald City (or Green Cardboard City) but along the way they meet an army of spoiled girls in drum major uniforms who take the city from the Scarecrow.  The Scarecrow and Tip flee to the Tin Man's city for his help, which doesn't really help and they have to put together a really weird "bird" to fly away.  They meet Glenda the Good Witch who takes them back to the witch's place and gets her to confess that Tip is really the princess Ozma but the witch made her into a little boy and wiped his memory.  That's not weird at all, right?  I should probably use that for a gender swap story.  lol

Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders:  What if you took a horror anthology like Creepshow and used the framing device of The Princess Bride?  You'd have this mish-mash of a movie.  The framing device is that a grandpa (Ernest Borgnine) tells stories to his grandkid when the power goes out.  The grandpa used to write horror stories for TV or movies or whatever, so he tells the kid two "thrilling" stories that have their own framing device in the eponymous Merlin who along with his chubby wife have decided to open a magic shop in 1990s California.  The first story is of a childless couple who visit the shop.  The wife really wants a kid while the husband is a jerk who has somehow made a living reviewing businesses.  The wife is charmed by Merlin but the husband is skeptical, so Merlin gives him a book of spells.  The husband tries the spells out and discovers they really work.  But as he uses the magic, he gets older and older.  So he uses a spell to restore his youth--and turns himself into a baby.  So his wife finally got a baby.  Hooray?

The other story involves an evil toy monkey.  Every time it crashes its cymbals, someone dies.  The monkey is stolen from Merlin's shop and then sold to a woman who gives it to her nephew, because what would a kid want more than some mangy old toy?  Then the evil monkey starts killing things starting with a plant and moving up to the family dog.  Then it starts trying to kill the boy's father.  He tries to throw it out and then bury it, but it keeps coming back.  In the end Merlin takes the toy back.  The funny thing is that while the rest of the movie takes place in the 1990s, most of this story is from about a decade earlier.  You can tell by the hair, clothes, and that the kid wears a Return of the Jedi shirt and gets 80s Star Wars toys for his birthday.  They splice in some Merlin parts shot in the present day of the movie to tie it together.  Seamless!

This isn't extremely scary and yet the second story especially is probably too scary for little kids.  Yet it's not really scary enough for adults; it's too cutesy and goofy for grown ups.    So it's not really clear who they thought the audience for this was:  tweens maybe?  In the intermission sketches of this MST3K episode, Crow and Tom write reviews of each other; Tom uses a spellbook and accidentally turns Mike into a baby; and Mike and the bots create some other creepy children's books by Ernest Borgnine.

#AtoZChallenge X-Files

I almost always have to do a little fudging on X because there are so few things that really go with X.  But in this case I'm going to use it to cover some of those supernatural movies that are like stuff that would have been on the X-Files--if it were a really, really bad show.

Manos the Hands of Fate:  A "classic" of MST3K and later on Rifftrax.  It was written, directed by, and starred a fertilizer salesman--and it shows!  A bumbling family gets lost in the desert and wind up at the house of "the Master" which is caretaken by a weird guy named Torgo who can barely walk.  A good portion of the movie is just him shambling around with the family's luggage.  Soon the Master and his cult of "wives" awaken and, well, badly shot, incoherent mayhem ensues!  This is really one where you should watch it just to see how terrible it really is because there are no words that can really capture it.  The fertilizer salesman guy really gave Ed Wood a run for his money.

The Curse of Bigfoot:  A really, really cheaply made movie with cheesy papier mache masks and camera work that looks like the Zapruder film.  There are movies within movies as a guy bores a high school class with his tale of a bunch of idiots who stumble across a guy in a bad costume, er, Bigfoot.  One of my favorite riffs is when Bill Corbett screams, "Who directed this, the stool sample of a Golden retriever?!"  A golden retriever's stool probably could have done a better job.

Eegah:  This is one of those "classics" that is consistently ranked with Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of the worst movies ever.  It's not as poorly made as an Ed Wood film, but it's still not very good.  Basically a teenager who looks like a young Donald Trump and his girlfriend encounter a giant caveman called Eegah who's played by Richard Kiel, whom you might remember as Jaws in a couple of Roger Moore 007 movies.  Eegah takes the girlfriend and her father captive and only by distracting him is she able to keep him from raping her, which is kinda creepy.  She and her father are rescued but Eegah tracks them to a pool party, where he's killed.  Hooray!  There's plenty of bad acting and poor plot logic in this "classic" MST3K episode.  (Fun Fact:  Science has shown that cavemen were generally smaller than today's humans, not bigger.)

Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues:  This was a late 90s MST3K episode but I'm pretty sure they never showed the first one.  Whatever that might be.  Anyway, in this early 80s movie a guy who looks sort of like modern Michael Douglas and three dimwit college students attempt to find a Bigfoot-type creature.  They eventually track down some redneck who's captured a baby creature and the mother creature is trying to get it back so they help to rescue it.  The creatures are clearly guys in cheap suits and the acting is not great.  It is better than Curse of Bigfoot, which isn't saying much.  In the intermission skits the evil Pearl Forrester tries to create her own Boggy Creek monster to lure in tourists, complete with a twangy guitar ballad by "Brain Guy."  The "monster" is just her sentient ape henchman Professor Bobo and when a tourist realizes this he is nonplussed.  What's the big deal about a talking gorilla?  Yeah, really.

The Final Sacrifice:  A classic MST3K episode from the late 90s for one reason:  Zap Rowsdower!  Seriously, that's the name of a guy in this late 80s Canadian "horror" movie.  And no he's not a superhero, though he's kind of like Logan in the first X-Men movie--only without the claws, adamantium skeleton, and healing factor.  And like Logan, Rowsdower meets a kid and tries to help, only this kid looks like a cut-rate Wesley Crusher.  He's looking for some ancient city his father was killed trying to find by a cult of guys in black or red executioner masks who have black widow-looking symbols on their arms.  They're led by a dude in a black trench coat who has an inexplicably deep voice.  And so mayhem ensues as Rowsdower and the kid try to find the city with the help of a grizzled prospector who sounds like the guy in the Muppets band with the gold tooth.  As you'd expect from a movie made in southern Alberta in the late 80s, it's pretty cheap-looking and you're not dealing with A-list actors.  In the intermission skits Mike and the bots create their own anti-Canada song and later fight a nasty case of hockey hair.

The Bermuda Triangle:  This is an Italian-made 70s movie about a boat full of idiots who get caught up in the Bermuda Triangle.  A little girl dubbed by a middle-aged woman finds a creepy old doll that seems to be at the heart of the disaster.  One-by-one people keep dying, but then at the end it turns out they had all disappeared years ago so the boat just vanishes.  Great ending!  Besides lame dubbing, acting, and effects, it also features lengthy underwater scenes where they scuba around and kill sharks who aren't bothering them in the slightest.  A preemptive strike, I guess.

Frankenstein Island:  This early 80s movie is pretty bizarre.  Four guys crash their balloons on an island populated by women in leopard bikinis, 300-year-old van Helsing, his wife, the brain of Dr. Frankenstein (who appears in ghostly projections of John Carradine), and eventually a crappy-looking Frankenstein monster himself.  There's bad acting, cheesy effects, a complete lack of plot logic, and Cameron Mitchell, whom you might remember from Deadly Prey, Supersonic Man, and Space Mutiny.  Or probably not.

Soultaker:  This 1990 movie was written by its female star as a vehicle to showcase her talents--such as they are.  It's sort of a precursor to the Final Destination movies as the girl and her friends die in a car crash.  They're pursued by a "Soultaker" played by Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez.  Before he died he was a Confederate officer who had a thing with a girl who looks like this girl so he wants to take her to Purgatory or whatever with him instead of taking her soul, but the girl's boyfriend tries to stop him.  The third act implodes as it doesn't seem to have any consistent rules about how the whole soultaking thing works.  This was an MST3K episode in the last season and was notable because there was a cameo by Joel Hodgson (as Joel, who does some repairs on the ship but doesn't help them escape) and TV's Frank who's become a soultaker.  Unfortunately you can only get this episode used on DVD because of rights issues.  Another Fun Fact is this movie was made in Mobile, Alabama at the same time as two other movies in this Challenge:  Firehead and Future Zone.

Werewolf:  This movie also includes Joe Estevez, though only in about the first third of the film.  This mostly features Eastern European actors who dig up the corpse of a werewolf.  First one of the diggers is cut and becomes a werewolf who's killed pretty quick.  Then an evil archaeologist infects a security guard with crushed werewolf bone and the guy dies while changing into a werewolf while driving.  Then the evil guy hits a writer named Paul with a werewolf bone and he becomes a crappy werewolf who kills some people, including the evil guy, and then infects his girlfriend because like Twilight that's what she wanted.  Hooray?  The werewolf makeup is pretty bad, the accents are inconsistent, and the bad guy's hair keeps changing styles and color from one scene to the next.  Between this, Soultaker, and Rollergator you really have to think Joe Estevez doesn't have the best knack for picking scripts.  The intermission sketches on this MST3K episode feature Mike and bots pretending to be a Grease-type girl group singing about a werewolf boyfriend and Crow infecting Mike, turning him into a were-Crow or basically another Crow T Robot.

Subspecies IV: The Awakening:  Maybe it'd help to watch the three previous cheaply-made shot-in-Eastern-Europe movies.  Probably not.  Basically there's a woman who was turned into a vampire in previous movies and some friends tried to rescue her, but the movie pulls an Alien 3 and kills all of the friends at the beginning--before they could have any lines.  The vampire is taken by a female doctor to an old hospital, where a white, cut-rate Javier Bardem doctor wants her for experiments or junk.  But her ugly master with strangely large hands wants her back, but until someone invites him in, he can't go.  And then a lot of mayhem happens and in the end an old woman who's the caretaker for a cemetery saves the vampire and the female doctor from the vampires by opening a door.  And, um, the end?  This movie is from 1997, but doesn't look too much older than that at least.  Otherwise a lot of hammy acting and overall cheesiness.  Mmmm, ham and cheese.  A Fun Fact is that the director, Tim Nicoteau, worked on a lot of other movies on this list like Oblivion, Tourist Trap, and more, sometimes as a director, but more often as an editor.

Carnival of Souls:  Much of this movie is pretty dull and in one post I already talked about how a big surprise was given away by bad camera work.  But really the story itself is pretty good, like The Sixth Sense or a Twilight Zone episode, where a woman seemingly survives a car accident but later is haunted by white-faced ghouls when she goes to Utah for an organist job.  She's especially drawn to a rundown carnival near the Great Salt Lake.  It just needed a little more drama and some better cinematography to be a decent movie.

The Power:  This Rifftrax is an early 80s "horror" movie that literally makes no sense.  So there's a college professor lecturing on ancient Aztec deities and has a little idol that allows him to give a smart ass student a nosebleed.  Then the tiny idol kills him.  Then for some reason the professor's tubby friend goes to Mexico where some old guy and a kid have the idol.  Or is it a different idol?  The fat guy tries to steal it but it mutilates him.  Then somehow some teenage boy in suburbia has the idol.  He gives it to a reporter who looks like early 80s Paulie Shore.  The idol possesses Paulie Shore-looking guy who kills some people before a girl friend of the teenage boy kills him.  And then she has the idol, which she uses to to kill the fat guy when he tracks her down.  There's no logic to how the idol gets from place to place, so I really have no idea what's going on.

Giant From the Unknown:  This was an old 50s B movie on Rifftrax last year.  The "giant" is not really a giant so much as possibly slightly above average height, though it's hard to tell from the camera work.  And he's hardly from the unknown; two professors and one professor's daughter look for him, already knowing he was a Spanish conquistador from the 16th Century or so.  The pseudoscience is that he was embedded in some rock that somehow preserved him until a lightning strike revives him and he goes on a rather dull rampage.  Being from the 50s you have casual chauvinism and racism in the form of "Indian Joe" who's obviously a white guy; fortunately it's in black-and-white so you can't really see how bad the makeup is.  And as the riffers point out at the end, the plot makes no sense because at the beginning the townspeople talk about something killing cows and some guy...and yet the "giant" isn't revived until the middle of the film.  So who killed the cows and that guy?  They want you to think it's the giant but it couldn't have been.  And yet they never say who it is.  The killer is [puts on sunglasses David Caruso style] Unknown.  Yeeeaaaaah!

#AtoZChallenge Wastelands

Thanks to the Mad Max movies in the early 80s there were plenty of crappy dystopian movies trying to replicate its success.

Warrior of the Lost World:  This 1983 movie was so bad that it was available to MST3K in the early 90s.  Robert Ginty (referred to only as "the Paper Chase Guy") plays the unnamed, eponymous warrior who rides around on a souped-up motorcycle that talks like Siri on helium runs into Persis Khambatta (the bald lady from Star Trek I) who asks him to rescue her father from the evil Prossor (Donald Pleasence reheating his Blofeld).  Paper Chase Guy rescues the father but the daughter is captured instead.  So he winds up raising an army from a nearby freak show to overthrow Prossor.  Besides the motorcycle it features a souped-up dump truck known as "Megaweapon" that Joel and bots take a shine to and even call in one of the intermission skits.  Another skit imagines a young Paper Chase Guy taking a driving test.  Former NFL player Fred Williamson plays a double agent who secretly works for Prossor.  In a big twist at the end it's revealed the Prossor Paper Chase Guy kills is just an android and that the real one is still alive for the nonexistent sequel.

Warriors of the Wasteland:  Also in 1983 was this Italian production featured on Rifftrax.  In 2019 nuclear war has devastated the world.  A roving band of religious nuts with bad 80s hair and souped-up go-carts kill those pockets of humanity left.  But a guy called Scorpion who has a muscle car with a clear plastic bubble glued on the roof and some vacuum hoses attached leads the resistance to them and gets captured and it's implied that he was sexually abused by his captors.  Ironically Fred Williamson is also in this very similar movie, only this time he dresses up in a lot of gold and black and shoots explosive arrows.  Scorpion and Fred Williamson are joined by a little boy who is an expert mechanic.  It's a really cheap ripoff of Mad Max that's hilariously bad.  The guy who plays Scorpion was also in The Last Shark of the T entry but since both movies are dubbed he sounds completely different.

City Limits:  A year later in 1984 came this movie about rival gangs of teenagers with motorbikes who fight each other in the ruins of a city.  A young Kim Cattrall plays a girl who at first is on the bad side but who joins the good guys.  For some reason James Earl Jones also appears in this as a guy living out of the city who helps the good kids with their revenge.  It's pretty cheesy and like Warrior of the Lost World was so bad that MST3K snagged it in the early 90s back when they were mostly showing sci-fi and kaiju movies from the 50s and early 60s.  In one of the intermission skits Crow sings a love song to Kim Cattrall.

Absolution:  The Journey:  Unlike the other three this comes from the late 90s.  It was featured on Rifftrax and starred Mario Lopez as a guy who goes to a military academy in the Arctic or Antarctica or somewhere really cold and snowy after something has happened to the world.  It's not really clear what happened or what state the rest of the world is in.  The academy is led by a brutal sergeant played by Richard Grieco.  Mario Lopez tries to unravel the secrets of the place and rescue his black friend who was put in the brig for some reason.  In the end it's revealed there's some kind of alien invasion thing going on.  Most of the plot doesn't make much sense and the effects aren't great.  But there's plenty of homo-eroticism with mostly naked, buff young guys.  If that's your thing.

The Apple:  Technically it's not really a wasteland, just a really shitty dystopia.  This 1980-ish movie from shlock producers Golan-Globus takes place in "1994" where everything revolves around an American Idol-type show controlled by literally the devil.  This musical features a lot of really annoying songs with hammy acting and ridiculously overly flamboyant costumes even a drag queen might find too much.  Like Warriors of the Wasteland the "futuristic" cars are normal station wagons with crap glued on them.  And to cap it off it ends with a literal deus ex machina.  This was a Rifftrax they showed for a while on Pluto TV but wasn't on Amazon and then mercifully even Pluto TV stopped showing it.  Hooray!

#AtoZChallenge Valentine's Day Massacres

Not all love stories end Happily Ever After.  These are some blood-soaked love stories, mostly from MST3K, though at least one is on Rifftrax.

The Brute Man:  I said about a year ago that I don't think it's really that bad of a movie.  It's from the 50s and is about a guy named Hal who had a promising football career until his face is badly damaged in a chemistry lab accident.  Years later "the Creeper" starts to track down and kill those he feels are responsible.  While fleeing the cops he ducks in the apartment of a blind woman who doesn't fear him because she can't see his damaged face.  To prove his love he murders a jeweler to steal a brooch.  Ultimately his love proves to be his Achilles heel as the cops use the woman as bait to trap him.  Like I said about a year ago if they'd treated this as something other than a B movie it might have been decent.

The Indestructible Man:  The Indestructible Man is actually pretty destructible.  I mean he is killed at the end of the movie so I guess the title was a misnomer.  Lon Chaney is a death row inmate who's revived and goes on a killing spree while trying to recover some money he hid after a robbery.  His Achilles heel is his stripper girlfriend whom a cop pumps for information that leads to the Indestructible Man's destruction.

Tormented:  This is another one I don't think is all that bad so much as it's just old.  It was made back in the 50s and is about a guy who was up in a lighthouse with his mistress when she fell to her death.  Maybe he could have saved her, but he hesitated and so she died.  Later he's engaged to be married and is back near the scene of the crime and like The Telltale Heart he's haunted by her--literally!  This one used to be on Hulu until they got rid of all their MST3K episodes so I didn't see it for a while until they showed it on Pluto TV.  It was made by Bert I Gordon who made a lot of other MST3K fare, mostly shlocky monster movies like Beginning of the End.  He tried to add some film noir to his repertoire and it comes out as weak sauce.  In the hands of a better director it probably would have worked.  The lamest part is that since apparently they couldn't film near any of the thousands of lighthouses in America (many of which I've visited) they just took like a postcard of a lighthouse and put it in the background for scenes of the lighthouse, the same effect Gordon used in his shlocky monster movies.

Ruby:  This is one of those Rifftrax ones that's only sometimes on Amazon Prime so I haven't seen it a lot.  The plot doesn't really make much sense as this woman named Ruby had a boyfriend who was murdered back in the 30s or something.  Like 20 or 30 years later she's running a drive-in movie theater where apparently all the murderers are working.  So she starts murdering them.  Because I guess revenge is a dish best served like 20-30 years later.  If the plot made sense and there were better actors and, basically everything else, it wouldn't be so bad.  So, OK, it's just bad.

Now, can't you feel the love?

#AtoZChallenge Undercover Agents

As I've mentioned before, a successful movie breeds imitators.  When the James Bond movies hit it big in the 60s of course there were imitators.

Secret Agent Superdragon & Danger Death Ray:  These are two imitators that were on MST3K.  They both feature a Sean Connery-type secret agent who harasses woos beautiful women and has some gadgets and travels the world to stop a supervillain.  Superdragon has the Connery lookalike tracking down a guy who used poisoned gum to kill students at a Michigan college and other people.  He enlists the aid of a guy called "Babyface" who works as his Q.  As you'd expect, Danger Death Ray is about a secret agent trying to foil a bad guy with a death ray.  The details of both get mixed up sometimes.  Like the biker movies they're so much alike that it's easy to confuse them.  One intermission skit during Superdragon introduces a little ear worm theme song.  During a sketch for Death Ray, Tom Servo acquires a death ray--for peaceful purposes only--and "accidentally" fries Crow with it.

The Girl From Rio:  This was a fairly recent Rifftrax but the movie is from 1968.  Instead of Sean Connery the Bond guy looks more like Timothy Dalton and instead of a tuxedo he wears a gaudy plaid suit.  He goes to Rio and is accosted by gangsters and then kidnapped by a secret city of scantily clad, armed women who have gold piled up and plan to rule the world...somehow.  It's all really confusing and there's little explanation of who this guy is or why he's doing what he's doing.  And in the end he doesn't even do a lot.  But there are boobs!  So take that Bond.  The Riffers and I were actually on the same wavelength a couple of times where they said something that I'd already thought to myself.  First, if it's in Rio why do they never show that famous Jesus statue?  I mean that's like saying you're in New York but never showing the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building.  Second, the guy goes into what looks like a waiting room and we're told it's an airport.  Ed Wood could have come up with a better airport set.  But still, boobs!

Code Name Diamond Head:  This was a TV movie in the 70s that was maybe supposed to be a pilot for a series.  It's like Magnum PI without the Ferrari, guy with a helicopter, Higgins, or Tom Selleck's mustache and Tigers hat.  There's some former Navy guy in Hawaii who works as a covert agent.  He has to stop a scheme by Ian McShane to steal some valuable secrets or whatever with the help of an Asian madame.  It's pretty cheesy and while it's supposed to be Hawaii they use no glamorous Hawaiian settings; most of it looks like it was filmed in southern California or something.  Anyway, at the time Ian McShane was known for Lovejoy, which Mike and the bots make reference to about a thousand times, though since then he went on to be known for Deadwood, so if there were a Rifftrax they'd probably reference that instead.

Swamp Diamonds:  This MST3K episode features a movie by B-movie king Roger Corman.  In the 50s, a female cop goes undercover as a prisoner.  She escapes jail with three other women to find a treasure in the swamps of Louisiana.  They take a guy named Touch Connors and his girlfriend hostage.  There's less mayhem than just long, boring shots of trekking around the swamp.  It's not really a terrible, terrible movie but it's far from a good movie either.  Like a lot of Corman pictures it's competent but unimpressive.

Wonder Women:  This is an early 70s movie made in the Philippines on the cheap.  It "stars" Ross Hagen of a couple of 60s biker movies as a guy named Mike who goes to the Philippines to investigate the disappearance of a famous jai alai player, which seems like an oxymoron to me.  He uncovers a scheme by a female brain surgeon and her henchwomen to steal the bodies of athletes and the like to put the brains of rich old people in them.  So Jordan Peele totally ripped this off for Get Out.  (Um, no, probably not.)  Anyway, there's a lot of hammy acting, cheesy effects, and a general lack of story logic.  And no Wonder Woman anywhere.  The most hilarious (and gross) part is during a chase through a market the camera shows this weird snake-like thing slithering down the sidewalk.  I have no idea what the hell it was supposed to be or why the hell the cameraman felt the need to put it so prominently in the shot except he was probably trying to get the hell out of its way.  Why wouldn't you edit that out?  Editing, we ain't go no money for some fancy-schmancy editor.  You think we're millionaires?!

Angel's Revenge:  This late 70s shlockfest was a cheesy attempt to cash in on Charlie's Angels.  A teacher whose student is accosted by a drug dealer played by Jack Palance gets together a bunch of sexy women who raid a compound and then Peter Lawford's mansion.  Gilligan's Island stars Alan Hale Jr and Jim Backus appear, the latter in a particularly shameful role as a racist, right wing militia commander.  The whole thing is pretty corny and cheesy, as you'd expect from Greydon Clark, the genius behind Star Games, Dark Future, and Final Justice.  This movie first appeared on MST3K in 1994 but a couple of years ago there was also a Rifftrax version with commentary by Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Nelson.  There's a bit of irony in the MST3K version at the end when it freezes on a picture of the women all together and Crow asks, "Which one is Bruce Jenner?"  And Tom Servo says, "He's the one on the left."  20 years later that really could have been true.

The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman:  Much like Wonder Women doesn't feature Wonder Woman, this doesn't feature any of DC's Bat-people:  Batwoman, Batgirl, Batman, or anyone else.  This is actually a cheap Mexican movie from the mid-60s about someone called Batwoman who has an army of go-go dancing bimbos who try to foil the scheme of a bad guy called Ratfink who's going to take over the world with mind control or something.  Like Wonder Women the plot is mostly an excuse to show scantily-clad girls dancing and flouncing around.  I'd have put it under the Superheroes entry if there were actually any superheroes but since Batwoman just wears a black corset and feather boa with a funny hat and her minions all wear normal clothes and none of them have powers it seems to fit more under this.  The most uncomfortably hilarious part of the movie is when Batwoman holds a seance and whoever she's talking to keeps talking in "Chinese" that's basically the old racist "Ching Chong" noise.  Ugh.  Ratfink also has a lair of monsters taken from another MST3K movie:  The Mole People.  It's a small, horrible world after all.

The Guy From Harlem:  This was an early 70s blaxploitation movie that's also really, really bad.  The titular "guy from Harlem" is a PI named Al who as you'd expect works in Miami.  There's a long, pointless "adventure" of him protecting "the wife of an African president" who as you'd expect has no kind of accent and sounds like she might be from Harlem too.  Al and Donald Trump have one thing in common:  ordering well done steaks from room service.  Finally we get to the crux of the movie, which is Al being hired by a manic-depressive drug dealer to save his daughter from a gangster named "Big Daddy."  The drug dealer steals every scene he's in by being so, so, so awful at acting.  He starts off telling Al's secretary "You got two questions and I got one answer:  none of your damned business!"  Then he tells Al he has TWO REASONS for coming in but just starts babbling. Then he says no one knows what Big Daddy looks like except...he's real big and got lots of muscles with bands on them and curly blonde hair...so you seem to know what he looks like.  Poor acting, badly choreographed fights, awful music, and just terrible 70s fashions in general make this offensive to all the senses.

Missile X The Tehran Neutron Bomb Incident:   What's interesting about this recent Rifftrax title is it was filmed about a year before the revolution in Iran.  Much of it was filmed and takes place in Iran as Peter Graves tries to track down a nuclear missile stolen from the USSR.  A nuclear device that's about as big as a firecracker and that when stolen was left dangling from a helicopter--because that's how you transport potentially world-ending weapons.  In Iran a scientist played by the elderly John Carradine is supposed to turn it into a deadlier weapon.  If you're a fan of elderly people running around Iran, then this is your movie!  At one point Peter Graves and a Russian agent start a riot in a casino.  You'd think this is to create a distraction to escape but Graves just winds up sitting on a broken card table until he's arrested.  Wow, eat your heart out James Bond and Jason Bourne!  I think the market where Peter Graves fights a couple of bad guys was probably the same one they went to in Argo when they were pretending to be a film crew.  If only the people behind this had only been pretending to make a movie.

Radical Jack:  The most recent movie on this list, it's from the turn of the century from our good friends at Edgewood Studios.  It "stars" Miley Cyrus' father Billy Ray "Achy, Breaky Heart" Cyrus as the eponymous Radical Jack.  He infiltrates a Vermont Southern town where some big weapons deal is going down.  So in Mitchell style, he instantly makes an enemy of one of the arms dealers.  And spies on them so conspicuously that he might as well have a neon sign saying he's watching them.  Like all Edgewood movies it's pretty cheap and lame, but this does show where Miley got all that acting talent from. lol

Trucker's Woman:  Trucker movies were a 70s staple, though this has a lot in common with the biker movies from the B entry.  A middle-aged college student's dad dies when his big rig's brakes are cut by a young Larry Drake (who went on to more villainous roles like Robert G Durant in Darkman).  The "college student" then goes "undercover" at the trucking company.  But in Mitchell style almost immediately drives up to the head bad guy's house and pushes him, his henchmen, and his daughter into a pool.  The daughter is I guess the trucker's woman by default; he stalks her in his big rig and later leaves her stranded at a rest stop.  Our hero!  For MST3K/Rifftrax fans a good tagline would be:  it's like Mitchell--with a truck!

#AtoZChallenge Tribulations

I couldn't really come up with another good idea for T so I'm using it for disaster movies.  Trials and tribulations, disasters, whatever.  I already had a D so let's do this.

Sharknado & Sharknado 2:  The Sharknado movies were made by schlock studio The Asylum so they were pretty much intended to be bad.  You almost don't need riffing and yet the two Rifftrax live shows for these are still pretty hilarious nonetheless.  If you don't know the Sharknado movies are about tornadoes full of sharks.  The first one is in LA and the second in New York.  And somehow only retired surfer and bartender Fin, played by 90210's Ian Ziering, and his ex-wife April, played by plastic surgery aficionado Tara Reid, can stop the sharknadoes by throwing bombs into them.  Makes sense, right?  Um, no.  Not at all.

Bad acting, terrible CGI, and a complete lack of logic make these movies so bad they're still bad.  The first one was such a hit that unfortunately they made five more.  The second one, called, wait for it, The Second One, features a lot of celebrity cameos.  The sadly hilarious thing is the live show for the second one was the same week Jared from Subway was arrested so when his cameo comes on it's pretty uncomfortable for everyone.  The Matt Lauer cameo is more uncomfortable in hindsight.

The Last Shark:  Speaking of sharks, this late 70s Italian movie was basically a pale imitation of Jaws.  It's pretty much the same story only the small town that's terrorized by a shark is having a windsurfing race.  Because that's a thing.  Otherwise it's like Jaws without real actors, Spielberg's direction, or the John Williams soundtrack.  You know, everything that made it work.

Grizzly:  It's like Jaws, only with a grizzly bear!  Seriously it's kind of the same thing only there's a bear in a national park that's killing people instead of a shark terrorizing a small town.  And it ends the same, with a guy blowing the grizzly up with a rocket launcher.  That happened in Jaws, right?  It's hilarious how the bear explodes like the Death Star; was its belly full of nitro or something?

Day of the Animals:  Before Grizzly, the director of that made a disaster movie about even more animals terrorizing people.  Basically without the ozone layer all the animals in a town go crazy, from rats on up to bears.  It's gross when a sheriff goes home and all these rats are eating a pie in the dining room and then start jumping on him, because I guess they're like kangaroos or flying squirrels or something.  Ick.  Meanwhile Leslie Nielsen is a total jerk in the movie, constantly calling this one guy "hotshot" until a bear finally kills him.  Hooray, bear!

Rocket Attack USA:  This was made in the 50s around the time of Sputnik.  The filmmakers were apparently really concerned that this would give the USSR an advantage to let it rule the world.  In this cheap movie that's largely file footage, the US sends a secret agent into Russia to obtain its space and nuclear secrets.  But the dumbass dies and the USSR launches nukes to destroy America.  In the end it says, "Don't Let This Happen!"  A real positive, feel-good movie.  The filmmakers were obviously right-wing nuts because a couple of times characters lament that we're spending too much money on social programs and not enough on the military-industrial complex.  Yeah, we're only spending 2/3 of our budget on it--we should spend the whole thing on defense!  This was the only one of these on MST3K, maybe because disaster movies weren't much of a thing until the 70s.

There you go, what a disaster of an entry!

#AtoZChallenge: Super Zeroes

Nowadays superhero movies are the biggest thing around that's not Star Wars.  But long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there were these crappy superhero movies.

First up, Mexican wrestler superhero movies from the 60s!

Superargo:  A former Mexican wrestler who looks like he's wearing a red version of The Phantom's costume battles a mad scientist who's captured athletes and turned them into cyborgs.  This was from the 60s and the cyborgs made me think of what Borg would have looked like if they had been part of the original series. The funniest part is earlier Superargo says his costume is bulletproof yet when he's climbing up the stairs with some escaped prisoners and the bad guy fires a gun, Superargo ducks and lets some poor schlub get killed.  Our hero!

Neutron the Atomic Superman:  No he's not Superman, but he's A superman with the power to...shave his chest and punch people?  He doesn't even have a cool car.  Basically some shirtless guy in a wrestler mask has to foil the plan of a guy with his head wrapped in bandages who has an army of crappy "death robots" led by a midget dressed like a lumberjack.  Since this was made in Mexico it features bad dubbing along with crappy effects and acting.  While there are three guys who could possibly be Neutron, we never find out which one it is.  Or maybe like Scream they take turns.  Though really the cops should just have them take off their shirts and see who has the least chest hair.

Samson the Silver Maskman vs the Vampire Women:  Samson is pretty much like Neutron only he has a cool car.  He has to battle a cult of, wait for it, vampire women.  Who are really done in by their own stupidity.  I mean if you're vampires why would your lair have windows for sun to shine in and kill you?  Duuuuuh.  This was an MST3K episode notable for it's the last episode with Dr. Forrester's henchman TV's Frank.  During one of the intermission skits Torgo from Manos the Hands of Fate (played by host Michael J Nelson) invites Frank to "Second Banana Heaven" with other sidekicks.  One riff I liked is during a wrestling match Crow says, "So this is the sport John Irving wrote about so eloquently."  I wouldn't have got it in 1994 but now I get it.  (If you've followed my blog a while maybe you do too.  Or not.)

With the success of Superman in 1978 there were of course some imitators that were not very good.  These two were made in Italy or maybe one was Spain but either way they were both foreign productions attempting to cash in on another movie's success.

The Pumaman:  Long ago aliens visit the Earth and left some magical mask that would be guarded by the Pumaman.  Years later the mask is stolen by Donald Pleasance.  And thus a new Pumaman needs to be found to stop him.  So this big Aztec guy goes to England to bestow the honor on some whiny, dorky scientist.  Who then gains the power to fly awkwardly with his ass in the air.  And his hands can rip through stuff and somehow he can walk through walls.  Mostly his power is whining.  It's kind of like the Seth Rogen Green Hornet where the ethnic character does most of the actual work while the white hero is a total dumbass, only instead of an Asian guy it's the Aztec guy.  One of the unintentionally hilarious things (besides the effects, especially the "flying") is that most people say "Pooh-ma-man" while Donald Pleasance says "P-You-ma-man."  This was an MST3K episode with skits where the bots get Mike to wear ridiculous clothes to become a hero and then make a mask like in the movie to control singer Roger Whittaker.

Supersonic Man:  This late 70s movie from...Spain?  Italy? Brazil?...whatever is a mockbuster of Superman, though it has more in common with Flash Gordon or that really lame 70s Captain America movie. The Wonder Woman and Incredible Hulk TV shows look like The Dark Knight compared to this cheesy production featuring a superhero whose main power seems to be not being able to lower his arms to his sides.  There's even one of those 50s-era boxy automatons to menace the hero, whose catch phrase is "May the force of the galaxies be with me." Hmmm, I seem to have heard that somewhere before. The bad guy played by Cameron Mitchell looks like he stole William Shatner's toupee and a drum major’s uniform.  On the plus side Supersonic Man is able to at least fly without is ass in the air, so there's that.

Firehead:  This 1990 action movie is filled with head-scratching questions.  Like, why do they call him "Firehead" when he shoots lasers or whatever from his eyes?  What the hell does "bigger than a hog's dick on Sunday" mean? And how did they get legendary actors Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau to appear in it?  The plot is that "Firehead" defects from the USSR to America and starts blowing up factories working on some secret government project. Chris Lemmon (son of Jack) is brought in to investigate and with some female agent they track Firehead down and join with him to overthrow Christopher Plummer and a bunch of guys who dress like extras of The Prisoner.  It's a pretty corny movie with a cornier theme song. Besides the hog's dick line there was also another animal-themed goody: cleaner than a wolves' tooth--that's their wording. I don't know what either of those expressions is supposed to mean.

A cinematic universe of all these heroes would probably make about 50 cents.

#AtoZChallenge Rebels Without a Clue

In the 50s you had James Dean and Marlon Brando and then...you had the rest of the wanna-bes.  These are all MST3K episodes.

The Violent Years:  Written by the great bad filmmaker Ed Wood, this is the overwrought story of four rebellious girls who pull small robberies for kicks.  They hold up a gas station, a couple pulled over to make out, and finally they ransack a school as part of some Communist plan for world domination--or something.  But most of them are killed during this, except the lead girl who somehow got pregnant and dies giving birth in prison.  A judge then lectures her parents for an interminably long time basically telling them it was all their fault.  It's made slightly better than an Ed Wood film, but not by much.

The Beatniks:  The misleading thing about the title is the juvenile delinquents in this movie are not beatniks in any way, shape, or form.  They don't hang out at coffeehouses, they don't read or write poetry, and they don't wear black turtlenecks or berets.  Basically they're just hoodlums who commit petty robberies and hassle adults.  But the ringleader of the gang is overheard singing in a diner by some record scout and so he begins a career singing swing music.  Because all beatniks were into Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin music, right?  Um, no.  Not at all.  This is basically the kind of movie where they probably just came up with a title for the posters and marquees and didn't really care if the actual movie fit it in any way.  Anyway, the ringleader's followers become jealous of him and wind up bringing him down until they kill each other.  Hooray?

The Rebel Set:  The guys in this movie are actually more of Beatniks than the "beatniks" in The Beatniks.  They hang out at a coffeehouse, where an old guy recruits four of them to rob an armored car while on a layover taking a train from New York to California or something.  One of them is a failed actor and another a failed writer and then there are two other guys and the old guy disguised as a priest who all get back on the train with their loot.  As you'd expect, though, someone starts eliminating them to take the loot for himself until only the failed actor is left.  As far as heist movies go it's not terrible but it's not exactly Ocean's 11 either.  The parts in the coffeehouse are kind of goofy and as you'd expect not exactly George Clooney or Brad Pitt type talent.

A funny thing in retrospect is throughout the movie Joel and Crow repeatedly call the old train conductor guy "Merritt Stone," to which Tom Servo keeps screaming, "It's NOT Merritt Stone."  At the end of the movie, Servo dressed as Hercule Poirot deduces that "Merritt Stone" is actually Gene Roth.  The funny thing now is that you can go on IMDB.com and find out in about 30 seconds that Servo is right:  "Merritt Stone" is Gene Roth.  It reminds me of an old Lawrence Block book where to find out an actor's name they wound up calling SAG when now you can just look it up online in seconds.  Progress!

So there you go, some real wild rebels there.

#AtoZChallenge Quests!

As far as MST3K and Rifftrax go there seem to be two popular time periods for fantasy movies:  the 60s and the 80s.  The ones in the early 80s I think you can attribute to the success of the Conan movies, but I'm not sure what brought it about in the early 60s.

The Magic Sword:  This early 60s movie features a guy raised by a witch who gives him a, wait for it, magic sword to go rescue a princess from an evil wizard played by Basil Rathbone.  There are knights of seven nations (Ireland, France, etc) who go with him, though most of them die.  In the end the wizard turns into a dragon.  Since this is from dreck producer Burt I Gordon there are lots of crappy effects and bad acting.  The MST3K episode features an intermission skit where Crow sings a love song dedicated to the middle-aged witch in the movie.

Jack the Giant Killer:  This early 60s movie has an MST3K episode and a Rifftrax--plus a live Rifftrax show.  It's about a, wait for it, guy named Jack who kills a giant.  Then he has to rescue a princess from an evil wizard.  So it's pretty much the same movie as The Magic Sword, only it makes even less sense and has crappier effects and acting.  A guy gets turned into a chimp, another into a dog, and the princess into some evil witch or succubus or something.  And a bunch of crap that doesn't make sense.

Hercules:  Like Godzilla or Gamera, early on in MST3K they showed a lot of Hercules movies.  Hercules and the Captive Women and Hercules Unchained are two they show frequently on Pluto TV.  I think they were made in Italy or Spain or something like that.  They were pretty cheaply made back in the 60s, most featuring Steve Reeves as Hercules, who spent most of his time pushing stuff, throwing stuff, or sleeping.  I really can't tell the movies apart.

They added a third one on Pluto TV:  Hercules and the Moon Men that's pretty much the same as the other two, only it stars Alan Steel as Herc. 

Sons of Hercules:  This Rifftrax is another old 60s movie that's supposed to be about the "sons" (plural) of Hercules.  The theme song tells us about two guys who are "man as man can be" or some damned thing.  And yet the actual movie only deals with one of them who has a nearly invisible blond beard.  He goes to some evil kingdom to rescue a damsel with the help of some whiny, annoying old guy sidekick.  It's pretty funny that as they're going to this place a bear keeps following them by walking on its hind legs.  Pretty obvious that it's a guy in a suit.  And when they're supposed to be fighting on a log it's shot so it's obvious that they're not actually on a log.  Then later it stops to say, "Next time..." and then tells you everything that happens so what would be the point in coming back?  It's all extremely cheap and lame and makes those other Hercules movies look like the Fast & Furious franchise.

Prisoners of the Lost Universe:  Now we get to the 80s portion of this entry.  This mostly takes place in a fantasy universe but like Narnia some of it is in modern times.  Richard Hatch from the original Battlestar Galactica plays a carpenter who gets in a wreck with a female reporter and threatens to spank her with a broken kendo sword before they both accidentally get beamed into another universe during an earthquake in a professor's lab.  This one has giants and weird creatures and John Saxon as an evil warlord who's used the professor to create "magic" like guns.  Besides some hammy acting and not great effects this is one of those movies that keeps shifting tone from cartoon sound effects to John Saxon slapping the female reporter and threatening to rape her.  It's just kind of creepy when you shift tone like that.  What kind of movie are you wanting to make?

The Sword and the Sorcerer:  In this early 80s movie a prince's family is murdered by an evil warlord named Cromwell but he escapes with a cool but useless sword that has three blades that can shoot away from each other, though in the end all he needed was a knife on his wrist.  Cromwell gets power from an evil wizard played by Bull from Night Court and takes over the kingdom.  Meanwhile the prince has become a douchebag mercenary man whose lieutenant is Frank from Murphy Brown, but eventually gets drawn into saving the kingdom when he saves a woman.  Only some other guy becomes the king.  It's pretty lame and there's one gross part where a tunnel fills with rats as it gets lit on fire.  As you'd expect it's not exactly top-notch quality entertainment.  Like Prisoners of the Lost Universe this can't really seem to settle on a tone; case in point a couple of soldiers try to rape a woman and then our hero comes in making dick jokes.

Outlaw of Gor:  Similar to Prisoners of the Lost Universe, this late 80s movie from Cannon Films features a couple of guys who go from the present to some fantasy world.  The world of Gor that's ruled by some evil queen and a wizard played by Jack Palance.  I think this has fewer cartoon sound effects though.  It's pretty funny that the queen dies via a spear thrown from like three hundred feet away that hits her in the midsection.  Was it tipped with poison?  Anyway, like Alien From LA this was on MST3K only a few years after its release thanks to Cannon Films going bankrupt.

Ator the Fighting Eagle:  This one was on Rifftrax about a year before it was also on the second season of the Netflix revival of MST3K.  It's an early 80s movie about a hero who wants to marry his sister but then their village is raided and he has to rescue her from bad guys.  To do that he has to learn to become a great warrior and shit.  As for the eagle thing, there are no eagles in the movie.  As you'd expect there's not great acting or effects and it's just damned creepy he wants to marry his sister.

Cave Dwellers:  The funny thing about this early 90s MST3K episode is it shows the sequel to Ator almost 30 years before they showed the first movie.  The other really funny thing is the opening credits to this movie use footage from some other movie about two guys from modern day who are in some fantasy world.  Which has nothing to do with this.  This is about some evil warlord trying to take over the world.  He wants some MacGuffin so a woman wearing a big gold plate like Flava Flave's clock goes to find Ator and his Asian kung-fu master.  Not watching the first one doesn't really matter since it recaps who Ator is and nothing from that movie really affects this one.  Basically Ator and the woman go back and defeat the bad guy.  The end.  There's less creepy incest stuff but otherwise it's not really an improvement over the first movie.

There you go, a bunch of fantasy movies that still aren't as bad as Willow.

#AtoZChallenge Psycho Killers

Since slasher movies weren't all that popular in the 50s and 60s there's not really many of them on MST3K that I can recall.  But there are a lot of them on Rifftrax, as this entry will prove.

Psycho II:  Let's start with the granddaddy of all psycho killers:  Norman Bates.  In the early 80s, after Sir Alfred Hitchcock had died, the studio decided to cash in with a sequel.  Norman Bates is released from prison back to the old homestead.  The motel has since gone to seed under the management of Dennis Franz, becoming the establishment where you pay by the hour while management watches you through a peephole.

Norman is given a job at a local diner where he meets a waitress named Mary played by Jennifer Tilly's sister Meg.  She claims to have nowhere to stay so he invites her to stay at his creepy ass house, where he makes "toasted cheese" sandwiches for her.  A toasted cheese sandwich is what normal people call a grilled cheese.

Soon Norman starts to get phone calls he thinks are from his mother and someone masquerading as his mother kills a couple of teenagers who sneak into the basement to make out, as well as Norman's doctor, played by Robert Loggia.

In the end it's revealed that Mary and her mother are trying to drive Norman crazy to get him put back in jail, but they die.  He has some help in the lady who runs the diner who claims to be his real mother and the sister of Ma Bates.  When she confesses all of this, Norman hits her over the head with a shovel and then sets her up in his mom's room to resume business.

It's not a terrible movie but not as good as the classic original of course.  Some movies don't really need to be a franchise, but I guess with Halloween and the invention of the super killer franchise, the studio wanted to jump on the bandwagon.  Anyway, this is another of those you can't find on Amazon and it was only sometimes on Pluto TV so you'd really have to find it with the main site.

The Psychotronic Man:  In this short, cheap 70s "thriller" a barber in Chicago goes on a long, long road trip until he has an encounter with a UFO or something.  When he wakes up he finds he has telekinesis.  Which he starts to use to murder people for...reasons.  Then there's a lengthy chase with police before he dies.  During the chase through various alleys sometimes you see rats scurry by and I keep thinking I bet those were real vermin not ones planted.  I mean a movie this cheap probably doesn't have a rat wrangler on set, right?  Anyway, if you want to fall asleep this is a perfect movie for it with all the pointless driving and running and undercharacterization.

The Last Slumber Party:  This early 80s slasher movie is a horror movie in the sense it's very, very horrible.  I'm not sure the writer, if there was one, ever really went to a slumber party because the three girls in this movie don't really do anything.  They watch a little TV, eat a couple of apples, and smoke a joint.  A couple of annoying boys come over and get slashed by one of two slashers.  One slasher is their nerdy classmate "Science" who I guess is a copycat of the real slasher, some mental patient played by the director.

It disregards one of the rules of these movies as the sweet virgin is killed while the annoying slut remains to the end.  Then there's a big twist as it's revealed none of the stuff we saw actually happened!  It was the annoying slut's dream.  But then her and her friend go to the virgin's house and the killer sneaks in.  So I guess it's all going to happen this time, right?

With bad acting, shitty editing, and an awful synth soundtrack this is one of those that's so bad it's still bad, which makes it ripe for riffing.  This used to be on Pluto TV all the time but then they stopped showing it but it's still on Amazon.

Fever Lake:  This mid-90s slasher movie features one of the Coreys (the one who died) as a college student who goes to the eponymous lake with Mario Lopez, another guy, and three girls.  It's funny when the girls go to a local diner everyone stares at them like they're aliens.  Oh no, three white middle-class girls!  They're so out of place!

After a lot of boring non-scares people finally start dying.  Then it's revealed one of the girls is possessed by the spirit of the Corey's dead mother--or something.  This is one of those that makes the mistake of some horror movies--even big-budget ones--in being really boring instead of scary.  But still it's fun to riff on it.

Terror at Tenkiller:  Another slasher movie that's not really very scary or exciting.  Made on the cheap in Oklahoma it features two college girls who go to the eponymous Tenkiller Lake for the summer.  The younger of the two has been stalked by an emotionally abusive boyfriend.  Just her luck, a local named Tor starts to obsess about her.  Tor has already murdered a few other women and soon sets his sights on the older of the girls before he tries to make the other girl his bride or something.

One of the funniest things is the girls work at a local diner and are always talking about how busy it is...and yet we never see anyone else in there.  The music is especially bad; like The Last Slumber Party it uses bad synth music--even on the harmonica Tor plays!  It's funny during the end chase when the riffers start making quacking and beeping noises that perfectly fit the soundtrack.  A goofy soundtrack is really the way to increase tension in your movie.

The House on Sorority Row:  This early 80s horror movie uses sort of the formula from the original Friday the 13th, only in reverse.  In the original Friday the 13th you think it's Jason Voorhees killing the campers but it's really his mother.  In this case you think it's the old lady who runs a sorority house killing the girls after they play a nasty prank on her by throwing her in a pool, but really it's some weird kid of hers who's been locked up in an asylum--except during summers.

This twist doesn't make it better because it's not really clear who this son of hers is.  The kills aren't really that great either.  So it's kind of boring and not all that scary, like those above.

Ice Cream Man:  In this mid-90s movie, an ice cream man played by Clint Howard terrorizes some local kids.  Meanwhile the adults in town are all incredibly stupid because it's so obvious Clint Howard is evil.  I mean, look at him!  And his truck is full of bugs and mice and human body parts.  Doesn't this town have a health inspector?

In an entry about a year ago I talked about a few things that were introduced that didn't really pay off.  Like the kids have rockets on their bikes that never really get any use.  And one girl's mother is foaming at the mouth and talking gibberish at one point, but there's no reason given and it has no significance to the plot.

In the end a kid pushes Clint Howard into a mixer and he dies.  Then the kid goes crazy to repeat the cycle, or something.  It's not all that scary but it is kind of gross, especially when he puts an eyeball in a cop's ice cream cone.  Ick.

Jack Frost:  This is also from the mid-90s and should not be confused with the Michael Keaton movie from around the same time.  This is a bizarrely bad horror movie where some weird science project creates a snowman with the soul of a serial killer.  The snowman then begins murdering people in a small Colorado town.

The dialogue in this is utterly ludicrous.  The snowman speaks in non sequiters, randomly shouting things like, "Made in America!"  Which means...I have no idea.  Along with lame effects, poor acting, and a plot about as logical as the dialogue, this is definitely worse than that other movie with the same name, though a lot funnier.

Terror in the Wax Museum:  This is a recent Rifftrax of a late 60s British TV movie.  It's a pretty tepid murder mystery featuring John Carradine as the owner of a wax museum in 1890s London who's murdered in the first act.  Then some other people are murdered and it seems Jack the Ripper (or his wax version) is killing people.  But really it's the local bartender because he's after John Carradine's buried treasure.  Um, wait, treasure?  There was no mention of treasure before this!  And why would the owner of a shitty wax museum have treasure?  The treasure turns out to be surgical tools made of platinum, I guess.  Because that makes sense, right?  No.  Not at all.

Sisters of Death:  This Rifftrax is a 70s movie about some sorority sisters who 7 years ago "accidentally" killed a pledge sort of in the same way Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow.  They were supposed to fake shoot her with a fake bullet but instead someone swapped it with a real bullet.  So 7 years later they're all brought to the house of dead pledge's father.  And then these dumb sorority girls start to die in boring, non-gory ways.  There aren't even any great boob shots.  So, pretty lame.  A lot of the movie is the girls and two pervy guys trying to figure out how to get past an electrified fence that's only like six feet tall.  I mean they probably could have found some boxes or something to pile up and then jump over the fence.  Maybe throw some pillows or a mattress over the fence to land on.  In the end it's revealed one pledge killed the other for...reasons.  It really would have helped if the opening scene had given us any idea who these characters were.  Kind of ruins the payoff.

Blood Theatre:  This is a pretty nonsensical, non-scary slasher movie.  There's a vague setup about a theater whose owner decided to kill his audience (somehow) instead of convert to movies.  When was this?  It's not really clear.  How did he kill everyone?  Um...gas or something?

Then it skips to the present day (or 1984) to the most unrealistic movie theater in history.  I guess someone like Rick Sloane wouldn't know what an actual movie theater is like; it's not like his movies ever played in one.  I mean this place has intermissions, almost constant loud speaker announcements, movie posters that look like they were hand drawn by Napoleon Dynamite, and a locker room.  A locker room?  Don't the employees just change at home?  I suppose that was just an excuse for gratuitous nudity; in which case it's surprising there wasn't an employee shower.

Anyway, three middle-aged teenagers are transferred to the theater from the beginning of the movie to reopen it.  And then two other annoying girls.  The one is a total bitch who shows her boobs in a theater and assaults a few customers and yet isn't jailed or even fired.  WTF?

The original owner, now an old man, somehow manages to go around murdering people.  There's a slight attempt to set up a plot of the original owner in love with one of the middle-aged teenagers he thinks is some girl who worked at the theater and didn't return his love or some damned thing.  But the girl stabs him and ends the curse or whatever.  For some reason the movie ends with a freeze frame on two cops we've never seen before entering the theater.  Yay?

A total lack of plot logic, annoying characters, awful music (even for 1984), and sound effects that make no sense like whooshing doors, this is an especially bad example of early 80s horror movies.

I'm sure there are more I haven't covered, but this was certainly a lot of them.

#AtoZChallenge Outer Space

As I said in the A entry, there were a lot of crappy sci-fi movies made on the cheap that were easy to obtain for MST3K and later Rifftrax.  In the A entry we dealt with aliens coming to Earth but there were also plenty that remained in, wait for it, outer space.

Oblivion & Oblivion: Backlash:  These were made in the mid-90s in Eastern Europe on the cheap.  They were a sci-fi Western that would be like Firefly if it all took place on one planet and were pretty bad.  The first one involves a lizard alien coming to the world of Oblivion to kill the sheriff and the sheriff's son then avenging his murder.

The town looks like your average Wild West ghost town dressed up with a lot of outdoor ceiling fans for some reason.  Maybe they're supposed to be wind turbines?  In the town there's Miss Kitty--played by Julie Newmar, of course--who runs the bar/whorehouse and likes to act like a cat.  There's also a doctor/inventor played by George Takei who spouts bad Star Trek puns and rambles drunkenly through most of the first movie.  And an attractive widow who runs the general store and becomes a target for the sheriff's son's affections.

The most interesting character is the town mortician played by that really tall guy who was Lurch in the Addams Family movies and Lawxana Troi's servant on Star Trek The Next Generation.  Every time he comes out of his shop people run in terror because he only appears when someone is going to die, though he can't sense exactly who.  Still, it's best not to be around him.  Unlike those other things, in this the guy actually gets some lines other than grunting and growling, so that must have been a nice change of pace for him.

The bad guy in the first movie had a henchwoman called Backlash who carried a whip and dressed in a lot of black leather.  In the second movie she obtains the rights for a mine that has something valuable that could make her a lot of money, but other people want it.  The sheriff and a shapeshifting bounty hunter go after her and Miss Kitty, who holds some secret to the mine.

In a way the second one is better as Julie Newmar tones down the cat act and Backlash does more than just attempt to titillate.  But there's still George Takei spouting annoying puns so it's not that much better.  It's one of those that looks a lot older than it actually is because of the lame effects.

Space Mutiny:  This MST3K episode was referenced in at least one Rifftrax episode so when I saw I could rent it on Amazon I decided to watch it.  I think I'd seen it a couple years earlier on Netflix or Hulu when they still had MST3K.  Anyway, it's a 1988 movie that looks much older because it uses IBM PC computers and old footage from Battlestar Galactica-the original series, obviously.  I'm not sure if they just ripped off the footage of the show or if they bought the models or what but the fighters and main ship are exactly the same.  The plot involves a mutiny of the security forces called "Enforcers" who go about it in the most half-assed way possible because apparently there are no other combat people on the ship except one burly fighter pilot who falls in love with the captain's daughter.  The captain is played by Cameron Mitchell in a bad fake beard.  While the outside of the ship looks like the Galactica, the inside has all sorts of pipes and conduits like a factory.  And they drive around in these pathetic little bumper cars that look more like what janitors use to wax floors.  Meanwhile the bridge uses TVs, IBM PCs, and graphics that look like they're from an Atari 2600.  But the funniest part is a bridge crewwoman is murdered but in the next scene you see her sitting at her station on the bridge!  Either she has an identical twin or she came back to life.  It's even worse than the headlight coming back in Mitchell! 

In the intermission skits the evil Pearl Forrester and her henchmen have to escape from ancient Rome.  There's some irony when they coerce Mike to help them and he struggles to seduce a Roman woman played by his real-life wife.  Another irony is that while this has never aired on Pluto TV they used to use a few seconds of footage during promos advertising which MST3K episode was on currently and coming up next.

In 2018 there was a Rifftrax Live showing of Space Mutiny that was added to Amazon about a year later.  Unlike the MST3K version the Rifftrax Live one is unedited except for a part that shows boobs; they have a digital "gorilla gram" covering the naughty bits.  Even complete the story still makes little sense.  Perhaps the most hilarious part though is at the beginning when Kevin Murphy comes out dressed in a silver robe like Cameron Mitchell's in the movie.

Manhunt in Space & Crash of the Moons:  These are two old 50s sci-fi B movies on MST3K involving the adventures of Rocky Jones, a space ranger or whatever.  He and his annoying sidekick fly around in a cheesy rocket ship on a string.  Manhunt in Space features bad guys trying to steal some kind of ultimate weapon and Rocky having to track them down and stop them.  It's a manhunt--in space.  Get it?

In the sequel Crash of the Moons Rocky has to convince a bad lady from the first movie to evacuate her planet before it crashes into another planet and everyone is killed.  She doesn't trust them and instead tries to kill them until they finally get her to see reason.

These both feature cheap effects, cheaper sets, poorly choreographed fights, wooden acting, and Neil deGrasse Tyson would have a fit over the lack of realism about space and space travel.

First Spaceship on Venus:  This is also an old movie on MST3K about an international crew that receives a signal from Venus.  So they hop in a spaceship and head out to Venus.  But as Ackbar would say, it's a trap!  The planet's population is dead but there are a lot of traps left active that kill a couple of members of the crew before they're able to escape.  At the time this wasn't regarded as a terrible movie, but obviously the effects are bad and the knowledge of space pretty dated.

Missile to the Moon:  One of the earliest Rifftrax on demand movies featured Michael J Nelson and comedian/actor Fred Willard riffing on this 50s movie where a scientist and a couple of petty criminals take a rocket to the moon.  The criminals were taking refuge on the scientist's farm when he finds them and decides they'd make perfect astronauts.  Basically the same night they blast off from a field to the moon, which I guess you could do back then.  They have to escape some rock monsters and then find a whole bunch of hot blue women who mistake the scientist for some guy who had previously been there.  In the end most of them escape back to the rocket and go home.  I bet Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wish they'd found a bunch of blue women--or maybe they did and the government covered it up.  Anyway, a few years later they redid this with the traditional Rifftrax lineup too.

Star Force: Fugitive Alien II:  Another repackaged Japanese turd from American producer Sandy Frank who brought over such MST3K favorites as the Gamera movies, Mighty Jack, and Time of the Apes.  This is actually a sequel to, wait for it, Star Force: Fugitive Alien.  Both of which were just repackaged from Japanese TV serials.  Fortunately it's one of those where they recap the first movie early on so you don't have to worry about keeping up with the highly cerebral story line.  It's basically a Star Wars ripoff with a group of Japanese people in a lame spaceship who go to some planet with a lot of desert and fight a bad guy in a samurai Darth Vader outfit.  On IMDB it says this is from 1987 but the effects make it look like it's from the late 60s.

Moon Zero Two:  This was a first season episode of MST3K so I don't watch it a lot but I do own it because it's part of the 25th Anniversary set.  This 1969 Hammer Films/Warner Bros fiasco features cheesy animated credits, a jazz soundtrack, go-go dancing, and a lot of bad costumes as people on a lunar colony fight over an asteroid with sapphire in it or something.  It's a lot more Adventures of Pluto Nash than 2001.

This Island Earth:  This was the movie used for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.  In a documentary on one DVD the cast talked about why they chose this movie.  It was basically the movie studio wanted them to use a movie in their catalog and so they picked this old sci-fi movie where aliens come to Earth and recruit some guy who's like a prototype of young Sean Connery and a female doctor, but they're too late to save it.  It was sort of like Forbidden Planet, only probably not as well known.

There was some controversy in that a lot of people regarded this as a classic and so didn't appreciate the riffing on it.  And really like some others I've mentioned it's not terrible so much as it's just old.  Like First Spaceship on Venus the effects are bad and the space knowledge is dated but it's from 1955 so what do you expect?  Like one of the cast said they probably should have just redone Manos the Hands of Fate or something really bad like anything by Ed Wood.

The intermission segments featured upgraded production values and sets and showed us other parts of the Satellite of Love like Servo's quarters and the "basement" where Crow causes a hull breech trying to tunnel to freedom.  Like the last season of the show preceding it it featured only Dr. Forrester as the villain.  They even created a new door opening sequence before going into the theater; this sequence was not used in the Sci-Fi episodes so it's really the only time it was used.

#AtoZChallenge Night of the Shorts

A lot of old movies didn't run the 90 minutes or so to fill a full MST3K episode so they would supplement the movie with an old short film.  Some were the old serials like The Phantom Creeps starring Bela Lugosi or Commander Cody.  There were also old episodes of General Hospital and Gumby.

But most of them were the "educational" movies you might have seen in school.  My first job was working in the Instructional Media Center for the Midland Public Schools where they kept films and videos sent to schools when a teacher needed a break from teaching.  The old films I had to rewind and sometimes splice them back together if they broke.  I'm sure a lot of the movies we had in there are the same ones they showed on MST3K and later on Rifftrax.

There are so many that I can't do them all, but here are some of the favorites.

The Norman Cycle:  These are a series of "educational" films that are educational in theory only.  I really have no idea what the point of these was as they're mostly just a lot of bad physical comedy starring a balding middle-aged salesman named Norman Krasner.

The first one was in 1974 and called Krasner, Norman: Beloved Husband of Irma.  According to IMDB it's about Norman attempting to cope with stress.  I haven't really seen this one, though I probably could if I ever bothered to go to the Rifftrax site or use the app.

In 1979 there came Welcome Back Norman.  This was featured on Night of the Shorts, a live show from San Francisco's Sketchfest in 2013, and also the live show of Manos the Hands of Fate.  It's about Norman arriving home from a business trip and trying to leave the airport.  He encounters all sorts of hazards like cars making it hard for him to get into his huge 70s vehicle, leaving his briefcase on top of the car, an old couple at the parking gate who can't find their ticket, and then plain old getting lost.  I kind of wonder if the airport is Metro Airport in Romulus as the plates on the cars look like Michigan ones from back in the day, but I can't be positive.  The educational message of this is...don't park at airports?

In 1984 there was Norman Checks In, which was featured during the live show of Birdemic.  As you might guess, it's about Norman checking into a motel.  There's a big taxidermy convention--which is a thing, I guess--so Norman has to be moved to the improbable room 13X.  And then he has all sorts of troubles like the water going off in mid-shower, the maid cleaning his room while he's in the shower so that he surprises her when he's nude except for a layer of soap, and a malfunctioning vibrating bed.  Plus annoying neighbors and bright neon lights.  The educational message of this is...never go to motels?

Finally in 1989 there was Norman Gives a Speech, where Norman, wait for it, has to make a speech.  But some of his slides are sucked up by a cleaning woman, he drops his notes in the toilet, and on the way to the speech he's knocked down in the hall and winds up on crutches.  Then when he's finally going to make the speech the fire alarm goes off and the sprinklers are set off, drenching him.  The end.  The educational message of this is...don't make speeches?

That was it for Norman and apparently Douglas MacIntosh never acted in anything else until he died in Royal Oak, MI in 2012.  Sad.

Setting Up a Room:  This is exactly what it says:  two women setting up a kindergarten room.  In real time.  It's about 30 minutes of women moving around furniture or talking about moving around furniture.  It is even more boring than it sounds.  Seriously they should force terrorists to watch this to get them to reveal their secrets.  By the second showing they'd have probably revealed everything they know.  This was featured on Night of the Shorts 2015 also from Sketchfest in San Francisco, only it was split into 2 parts to make it slightly more tolerable.  They also show it on Pluto TV all in one go, which is much worse.

A Case of Spring Fever:  This was both on MST3K and in the Rifftrax Live Sharknado show.  A guy who looks like a chubbier, balder Norman is trying to fix a couch when he wishes he'd never see a spring again.  So a cartoon spring called Coily makes all springs in the world disappear.  Apparently springs are in everything from couches to doors to your car seat.  We can't live without them!  Save us Coily!  Thankfully Coily returns the world to normal.  Then the second half is this guy droning on to all his soon-to-be-ex-friends about how awesome springs are.  It really makes you want to go buy a few cases of Slinkies.  I'm not sure this was really necessary.  I mean was there a surplus of springs that required education on their value?  Was there some rival technology like Betamax or HD-DVD that needed stamped out?  There's a similar one on Rifftrax about paper where a talking paper bag makes all paper disappear to show a little boy--and the world--how important paper is.  Then when they're done the boy blows into the bag and pops it; seems like kind of jerk way to dispose of the paper bag, sort of like how Dr. Manhattan explodes Rorschach in Watchmen.  I mean did you have explode it?  You couldn't let it die more peacefully?

Masks of Grass:  There's a company called ACI that made some really weird shorts.  One of them shown before Rifftrax Live Carnival of Souls was called Masks of Grass.  It shows kids how to turn weeds, cardboard, tape, glue, and other crap into really creepy masks.  Why any kid would do this even in the 70s I have no idea.  Maybe for Halloween if you want to freak people out.  Another one, shown during the 2013 Sketchfest was called At Your Fingertips: Cylinders.  It was about using cylinders like paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls, and oatmeal canisters to make shit like cardboard robot "kites."  Again why anyone would do this, I have no idea.

The Dirt Witch:  Also in Rifftrax Live Carnival of Souls was this short called "The Dirt Witch" about, wait for it, a dirty witch.  She decides then that if she's dirty, everyone should be dirty.  So she as a farmer fall down in his pig sty, a house painter get covered in pink paint, and some boys play football in a field that turns to mud.  But then a little girl sees the witch and helps her bathe.  As the riffers say, "Kids, don't just go home with strangers--bathe them!"  Um, yeah, that's just a little creepy.  I don't think GI Joe would do that for one of their PSAs.

Safety Woman:  A couple of Rifftrax shorts introduced one of the lamest superheroes ever:  Safety Woman!  By day she's a mild-mannered freelance architect and crossing guard, but by...also day, she dons a silver jumpsuit, big sunglasses, and a red headband to become Guardiana, the Safety Woman.  She has a wand given to her by helium-voiced aliens that allows her to teleport and stop accidents from befalling children.  Then she harangues them about fire safety, gun safety, ladder safety, boat safety, and so on.  Basically everything can be deadly if you try hard enough.  There are two episodes, one that's shown on Pluto TV as part of a Rifftrax Superheroes special and in a Night of the Shorts.  There's a second one also shown in a Night of the Shorts, though I forget which one.

Measuring Man:  Another lame "superhero" with a short, Measuring Man is a milkman who turns into a skinny Clark Kent wearing a Superman cape and bodysuit.  He abducts a kid to "measuring land" to harangue him about standard units of measurement.  Because you need a superhero for that, not just a math tutor.

Last Clear Chance and X Marks the Spot:  These two safe driving shorts were featured on MST3K.  They aren't as gruesome as the infamous Red Asphalt but they aren't all that pleasant either.  Last Clear Chance was featured before the movie Radar Secret Service, which was on the short side so this one is like 20 minutes long.  It's about a state trooper in Idaho or Iowa or somewhere like that who goes to a farm to harangue the family about safe driving because their youngest son just got his license.  After this lecture, guess what happens?  The older brother and his girlfriend go out and don't look at a railroad crossing to end up splattered right in front of the younger brother.  A train engineer asks, "Why don't they look?"  And then the state trooper vows to pull over anyone driving unsafely.  Hooray?  X Marks the Spot I forget which movie it was shown before.  It starts off with some New Jersey government official making a really stilted, boring speech.  Then it goes to the story of a bad driver who dies and goes to Purgatory or something where his frustrated guardian angel tells a judge how badly the guy drives despite the angel's best efforts.  At the end, the judge leaves it up to us to decide what should happen to the guy.  Burn him!  Burn him!

Hired!:  This was actually two parts on two different MST3K episodes I can't remember right now.  Anyway, in part 1 a new Chevy salesman in 1940 is having a tough time going door-to-door selling cars, which apparently was a thing back then.  In Part 2 his boss laments how these young people today (the "Greatest Generation") are a bunch of lazy slackers and his dad asks him what he's done to help his salesmen to which the boss has no answer so he goes and helps the salesman and everyone lives happily ever after...for about a year until Pearl Harbor.  I noted in a previous blog how ironic it is that the boss's attitude about what came to be the Greatest Generation is the same as Boomers about Millennials.  Anyway, in one of the MST3K episodes they do a musical version of this during one of the intermission sketches.  It's funny if you watch Joel in the background when Gypsy attempts to sing his face is like, "Holy shit, what the fuck is that?!"

What to Do On a Date:  This is one they show in an episode of MST3K but also on its own on Pluto TV.  This is from the 50s and it's about this total dumbass named Nick who can't think of anything to do on a date.  So his friend suggests that he take this girl Kay to the community center to help set up a "scavenger sale" which I guess is like a rummage sale.  And then he looks at the bulletin board and comes up with all sorts of other lame ideas like weenie roasts and bike rides.  Dude, come on, you're supposed to take her for a drive and then "run out of gas," not do charity work.  Haven't you ever watched movies or TV shows?  Well I guess it was the 50s.  Later in the MST3K episode Tom Servo asks Gypsy (the only female) on a date and it does not go well.

Parents, Who Needs Them?:  This short was featured before the Rifftrax Live show of Sharknado 2.  It's from the early 70s and features a creepy clown puppet showing a kid what his parents do.  The kid initially tosses the puppet away so the puppet makes the boy invisible so he can follow his parents around to see all the things he takes for granted.  This being the early 70s the mom stays at home to clean and cook.  Meanwhile the dad works at a slaughterhouse or something like that and then comes home to fix stuff.  Once the kid realizes how much his parents do for him he turns visible again.  The kid is badly dubbed, sounding like Kenny in Gamera.  It's kind of funny for me that the kid's parents look pretty much like how my parents looked in the 70s, especially the dad.  The mom also looks like an older Velma from Scooby-Doo.  Jinkies.

Shorty the Chimp the Fireman:  This was featured before the Rifftrax Live show of Time Chasers.  It's an old one from the 30s or 40s about, wait for it, a chimp named Shorty who goes to work for the local fire department.  He gets to smoke a cigar and rescues a little girl's doll--by rescue I mean he climbs out a window for it and then hurls it to the ground.  I don't think PETA would approve of this one.

The Chicken of Tomorrow:  This is on the MST3K episode called The Brute Man.  That movie was fairly short so this was like the first 20 minutes or so.  It's all about how to grow bigger, better chickens.  And not organically either.  This is pretty much the opposite of that, or how to grow chickens in a way PETA would bitch about.  There was an elaborate science to it from how to build their coops to what to feed them to how productive the hens should be.  It's really, really...boring.

Cheating:  I forget what the full title of this is but it was shown before the MST3K movie The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman.  It's a 50s short about a kid named Johnny who's in the student council and got friends and everything--until he asks his friend Mary to help him cheat on a test.  When he's found out he's voted out of the student council and loses his friends.  So, cheaters never prosper.  Ha.  Throughout the rest of the episode, Crow T Robot cheats off Gypsy's paper for an essay contest and is then shunned by his fellow bots until after a non-apology he's sentenced to eating Hostess Sno-Balls with the others.  Who says cheaters don't prosper? 

What is Nothing?:  Another one of those I think they show in a Rifftrax Live show but also on its own.  Two little kids pontificate on what nothing means.  They pretty much sound like a couple of stoners after a few joints; that's probably how this got written.

Drugs are Like That:  This is probably in a live show but also it's on its own on Pluto TV.  It's a 70s short where some lady keeps saying that drugs are like...anything.  I mean, think of anything and drugs are like that somehow.  Taxidermy, Polish sausage, nuclear war, sweater vests--drugs are like that!  But it does feature some cool Lego building.

Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast?:  This is one shown on Pluto TV with some of the other ones in this entry.  It's about a girl named Cathy in the 70s and the narrator badgers her about why she doesn't eat breakfast.  But guess what?  The film never answers the question!  It remains a mystery; someone call Mulder and Scully!

Shake Hands With Danger:  From the director of Carnival of Souls comes this short about workplace safety.  Mostly construction vehicles and stuff like that.  There's a lot of twangy guitar and this Sam Elliott-sounding guy who says stuff like, "Well, friend, if you don't tie down your load you're shaking hands with danger."  I don't think Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor ever watched this; Home Improvement was like a whole series of Shake Hands With Danger moments.  This was on a Rifftrax Live show at some point but again I don't remember which one.

Flying Stewardess:  This was part of the entertainment before the first Rifftrax Live show, Plan 9 From Outer Space.  It's a 30s or 40s film about becoming a stewardess.  Back then people dressed up to travel and there were sleeping bunks and real meals prepared.  It really shows you that while planes are bigger and more powerful, the actual traveling isn't really better.  Since it's from the 30s or 40s there's also a lot of sexism in that there are no male stewards and goes on about the girls preparing for marriage, though they can't marry pilots because they're all taken already.  Ha, yeah, right.

Progress Island:  This 60s short before the MST3K episode Beast of Yucca Flats really should have been shown to Trump and Republicans after the hurricane devastated Puerto Rico.  It's about Puerto Rico and says controversial stuff like Puerto Rico is a part of America.  It goes into the various industries and cultural attractions it has to offer.  Some people could definitely have used a refresher on this.

There are so many more that are all pretty unintentionally hilarious.