#AtoZChallenge The James Ngyuen & Joe Don Baker Spectacular (FAIL)!

I'm pretty sure James Nguyen and Joe Don Baker have never actually done a movie together, but today I'm going to spotlight two superstars of MST3K & Rifftrax movies because as it happens they have names beginning with J.

Joe Don Baker acted in movies for almost 50 years and he's been in some pretty good ones like The Natural (as the Babe Ruth character); several Bond movies: The Living Daylights as an evil mercenary man and Goldeneye and other Brosnan ones as the CIA operative; Walking Tall (the original); and Mud.  But MST3K and Rifftrax fans know him best for a couple of middling, low-budget action movies:  Mitchell and Final Justice.

As the eponymous Mitchell, Baker was a chunky LA detective who was like a fatter, dumber Columbo in annoying and badgering people until finally solving the case.  An example of his fine police work is that he's assigned to watch a gangster's house and immediately goes up to the house to introduce himself and start hassling the gangster and his "butler" Merlin Olsen.

Meanwhile someone sends a hooker (Linda Evans) to Mitchell's apartment and only after they fuck does he wonder who paid her and why.  And then he runs her in for lighting up a joint.  So fucking him for money was OK but a joint gets you busted?  Mitchell has weird standards.  Our "hero" also gets into a shouting match with an annoying kid and forces an old woman out of a car to walk; I guess the screenwriters (if there were any) thought that would really make him likable.

In the end Mitchell kills all the gangsters and Merlin Olsen.  Hooray!  Most of the fights were pretty lame and one car chase was pretty hilarious because an opposing Mustang's headlight was broken in one shot and back in the next shot!

This MST3K episode was notable because it was the episode where they switched hosts from Joel to Mike.  The setup is that Gypsy overhears the evil scientists plotting to kill Mike, the temp cleaning their lair, and thinks they're going to kill Joel.  With Mike's help she finds and prepares an escape pod that lands Joel in the Outback.  With Joel gone the mad scientists need someone else to put on the ship and Mike is conveniently at hand...

About 5 years later MST3K featured another Joe Don Baker film:  Final Justice.  This time Baker is a chunky Texas deputy Geronimo (Hair-on-emo) whose sheriff is murdered by Italian gangsters who happen to be in town.  Geronimo kills one and arrests the other.  Because Malta was helping to fund the movie, there's the implausible setup that Geronimo has to escort the gangster to Italy when some henchmen sabotage the plane so it lands in Malta.

Geronimo goes to a bar trying to get information, gets in a fight, gets taken to jail, and then is released.  This happens about four times during the movie.  There's also a lengthy foot/boat chase and a lot of milk drinking for Geronimo's heartburn.

The plot itself doesn't make a ton of sense.  I mean there's the military, the CIA, FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service...and the government has some dumbass deputy escorting a prisoner?  Really?  And why the hell does he try to order Maalox and milk in a bar?  The patrons have every right to mock him; it's a bar, not a pharmacy!  What kind of bars do they have in Texas?

There was also a Rifftrax version a couple of years ago but the MST3K version is better for the intermission sketches, especially Crow's rant about the wussiness of Maltese men.  And at the end Mike goes to an "escape pod" that turns out to be a water heater because when you watch a terrible Joe Don Baker movie it means it's time to escape, right?  Not so much.  And the riffs on the end theme song are pretty funny too.  "Meatballs fried in lard!!!"

While Joe Don Baker has been in some decent movies, I'm not sure if James Nguyen has even seen a decent movie.  No one who knows anything about real movies could have been responsible for the cult classic Birdemic and its predecessors Julie & Jack and Replica.

You might ask what's wrong with Birdemic.  Um...everything!  The story makes little sense, the effects are godawful, the acting is worse than a local used car dealer commercial, and it looks like it was shot on a 90s camcorder.  The "story" features a dumb software salesman and a "supermodel" falling in love.  Though he just cashed in stock options for millions and she's a Victoria's Secret cover model, for some reason they go to a cheesy local festival and then stay in a Motel 6 to fuck.

The next morning birds start attacking the town.  For some reason the birds set off explosions like they're full of nitro and both the birds and explosions look like they were made on a Commodore 64 in 1985.  The smart thing to do would probably be just stay in the motel and let professionals handle the threat, but nah our "heroes" hit the road with another couple.  They pick up a couple of kids while the other couple dies--the female half of the couple killed by a bird while she was squatting to take a shit outside!

And then...the birdemic just ends.  Why?  Who knows?  Why did it even start?  The whole thing is just so hilariously bad that it makes riffing on it pretty easy.  I mean the main character can't even pronounce "solar panels."

The scariest thing about the birdemic is that it spawned an even lamer sequel.  As of this writing I haven't seen a Rifftrax of that, though it seems redundant.

The first movie by James Nguyen was almost as bad, though as I admitted about a year ago I actually kind of like the story.  It's just that it needed real actors, sets, and special effects.  Julie & Jack is the tender love story of a computer chip salesman and a woman he meets online.  Julie is secretive about her past so like a good stalker Jack starts to investigate only to find out that Julie is dead!  She was a computer genius who uploaded her consciousness online though so they could meet in virtual reality.  But then for...reasons she has to leave to...somewhere.  This was about 2003 so there wasn't even a "cloud" to load herself to yet.

Like I said the story isn't terrible, but everything else is.  Which makes it rife for riffing.  A lot of the riffing is making references to Birdemic, which is appropriate since it uses some of the same actors and some of the same premise with characters working for a computer company.  Our "auteur" even has a cameo as a professor who has "cup of coffee" with Jack to discuss Julie.

For a couple of years those were the only two Nguyen masterpieces I'd seen Rifftrax of, but late last year our prayers were answered.  Another James Nguyen movie was finally added...and holy shit is it bad.  It's a pretty low bar, but it is the worst Nguyen movie I've seen of the 4 that I've seen.

Replica starts out with a screen full of text that pretty much boils down to, "Did you see The 6th Day with Arnold Schwarzenegger?  Because this is pretty much that, only much, much worse."  The plot of that slightly more competent film was that in the future cloning had been developed for organs and pets but was not to be used on people--but of course it was.

In this far less competent movie, we start out with the Nguyen template of a chip salesman (see Julie & Jack) who's recently had a cloned kidney transplant.  He stalks meets Evelyn, the doctor who did the surgery, who's the least believable doctor since Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough.  They engage in the standard Nguyen Dating Protocol of going to San Francisco landmarks and a beach.  To sweeten the deal, Evelyn's boss buys 50 million chips from Jack Joe for $100 million.  Nice round numbers for the win!  And 50 million computer chips?  Is he planning to give a free computer to everyone in Britain or something?

Then after a night of fully clothed lovemaking, Evelyn gets into her car and pulls slowly into traffic, which is something you see about a hundred times during each Nguyen movie, so no big deal.  Except this time we see shots of a car coming the other way.  Evelyn throws up her hands and...we cut to a graveyard.  Wait, what?  The two cars were going slower than bumper cars at a carnival, we never see the cars crash, and we never hear a scream or metal crunching or anything.  It is literally the worst excuse for a car crash stunt ever.

So somehow Evelyn is dead and chip salesman Joe is bummed.  He's not making his sales quota!  I mean he just sold $100 million a few weeks ago, but if he doesn't sell more, he's fired!  Geez, what have you done for me lately?

Then he stalks meets a brunette who helpfully has her own name "Claudia" tramp-stamped on her.  It should be obvious it's not Evelyn, right?  But that doesn't stop Joe.  Nooope.  He follows her to her hotel and instead of just kicking him in the groin and calling the cops, she starts going out with him.  Rerun the Nguyen Dating Protocol!  The creepy thing is she dyes her hair blonde and even starts dressing like Evelyn just to please Joe.

But then the obvious twist:

Joe and Claudia go to Evelyn's boss for the least convincing showdown in movie history.  During which Evelyn's boss reveals his plan to create a master race of clones...or something.  "We can end racism by making everyone the same race!"  Um...yeah, that's not crazy at all.  Somehow Claudia is killed by a gun that makes no noise and a wound that shows no blood.  But the bad guy is killed by a detective played by the director's brother?  Nephew?  Son?  Someone from the Nguyen family tree--with just as much talent for movies.  The end.  Yay?

The plot might have been able to work (see that Schwarzenegger movie) but with the terrible stunts, lame green screen "sets," actors worse than the robots in Disney's Hall of Presidents, and the creepy stalkery tone to the second act of the script, it is a truly awful movie.  A lot of filmmakers can have a sophomore slump and when you're already really, really bad to start with...yeah, that's pretty bad.  Hall of Fame badness.

So there you go, two legends of MST3K/Rifftrax!

#AtoZChallenges I Believe in Santa Claus

OK, this is kind of weak for the letter requirement, but whatever.

There are lots of holiday movies and that means plenty of terrible ones that aren't on the Hallmark Channel.

I Believe in Santa Claus:  This is a French movie from the 80s also called "Here Comes Santa Claus" where a kid's parents are kidnapped by rebels in Africa so he decides to go find Santa Claus in Finland.  Because that's what you'd do, right?  Fortunately his class takes a field trip to the airport where like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2 he and a friend can just sneak onto a plane.

Santa puts them up at his cabin in the woods while he and a fairy (who was also the kid's teacher in a needless coincidence) go to Africa to rescue the kid's parents.  Santa vs African rebels would be a good premise for Taken 4:  I have a particular set of skills...but they're all associated with making and delivering toys, so not a lot of help.  For...reasons the kids go into the woods and are captured by an ogre despite being expressly told not to go into the woods.  And why aren't the elves watching them?

So yeah even by French film standards this is a pretty bizarre idea.  But it's pretty fun for riffing.  And the teacher/fairy is kinda hot.  I'm just saying.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians:  This is one of those that was first featured on MST3K but later also had a Rifftrax version.  As you'd expect, this is a pretty strange movie.  It's from the 50s when we still thought there were little green men on Mars.  Or men with green motorcycle helmets with TV antennae on them.

Because Martian children seem so unhappy, the head Martian is counseled by the senile wise elder to kidnap Santa from Earth to bring Christmas to Mars.  So they take their crappy ship and even crappier robot to Earth.  They find two little kids who rat Santa out and then are taken with the Martians as they go to the North Pole to kidnap Santa.  They take Santa back to Mars, where with the help of the kids he starts making toys and stuff.  But soon Santa and the kids get homesick so they tap a mentally-challenged Martian to take over.

With the crappy costumes, sets, spaceships, robot, and the "polar bear" that's obviously a guy in a suit it's like if Ed Wood made a holiday movie.  Of the two versions the MST3K one is probably better because it has some funny intermission skits like Crow creating the hit new carol, "A Patrick Swayze Christmas" in honor of that holiday favorite, Roadhouse.

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny:  Like this entry barely meets the A to Z Challenge requirement, this movie barely meets the holiday movie requirement.  The extremely thin premise is that Santa's sleigh crashes on a Florida beach and the reindeer all fly back to the North Pole.  Instead of just walking into a town for help, Santa sits on his ass and somehow calls children to him.  The children try a variety of animals--dog, donkey, sheep, monkey--to try to get it out.  Then they go to the Pirates World theme park to fetch the Ice Cream Bunny--a guy in a bunny suit who doesn't have any ice cream.  And the Ice Cream Bunny gets the sleigh out, right?  Nope.  He just gives Santa a ride on his fire truck.  The end.

In between the madness there's an old low-budget film telling the story of Thumbelina.  It features really crappy-looking sets and creepy puppets and an even creepier story of a witch creating a tiny girl (like six inches tall) for a woman and then the girl being abducted by a frog before she escapes and goes underground to almost marry an elderly mole before she manages to find her own people.  Yeah, that.  What does that have to do with Santa or the Ice Cream Bunny?  Absolutely nothing!

With entertainment like this it's no wonder Pirates World is out of business.

Santa's Summer House:  The creative team behind the awful family movie A Talking Cat!? (you'll hear more about it in the penultimate entry of the challenge) came up with this...equally awful Christmas movie.  A group of people going to "a resort" are in a van that gets lost in "a fog" (fog not shown) and end up at Santa's summer house, which is the same house as A Talking Cat!? and also a house that was used in at least one porno movie.  Bad acting and mumbling ensues as the people learn the true meaning of Christmas thanks to Robert Mitchum's son as a beardless Santa who looks more like a Parrothead and former B-movie martial arts star Cynthia Rothrock, who looks like a retired hooker more than Mrs. Claus.  (There's at least one more Rothrock movie in this challenge.)

A Fun Fact is one of the dopes in this movie is played by the "alien" in Future War.  So this movie connects to 3 other entries in this challenge.  Isn't it a small, terrible world?

Whizzo's Christmas Circus:  This rivals Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny for sheer insanity.  The opening short is this creepy French thing with these XMas trees that have human faces.  Not animated either--real people!  They don't talk; they just make creepy faces as they go from a forest to a tree lot to homes to the garbage and finally to the stars!  Um...what?  Stars are the souls of dead Christmas trees?  That's France for you.

The main event is a 1966 Christmas "special" from this crappy clown show in Kansas City.  I guess Whizzo was like KC's version of Bozo or whatever.  Mostly he's this stammering nut job about as creepy as the murderous clown in IT.  There are all these kids in his "circus" including a depressed girl he completely fails to cheer up and a little girl who has an awful cough like she's got pneumonia or consumption.  So going to the "North Pole" is a really good idea for her, right?

Trying to explain the horror of this is really too hard.  It must be seen to be believed.  Watch it on Amazon or the Rifftrax site--if you dare.

The Magic Christmas Tree:  One of the earliest Rifftrax specials featured a couple of shorts and then this longer short feature, The Magic Christmas Tree.  It's about as fucked up as Whizzo.  A boy goes to an old lady's house and she reveals she's a witch and gives him a pine tree that he plants and on Christmas Eve it beams itself into the house because his family is so dumb they apparently don't buy a tree or gifts before Christmas Eve.  The tree then comes to life and in a sarcastic, effeminate voice gives the boy 3 wishes.  The first he uses to have "power for an hour."  And he does lame things like make the night into day.  Then with the second wish he wishes for Santa Claus and thus on Christmas Eve holds Santa captive.  Because that's what you'd do, right?  And then he somehow runs afoul of an ogre or something who wants to make him a slave...and then it winds up all being a dream and he's really at the old lady's house.  Hooray?  A nonsensical story, bad acting, and lame effects make this another magical holiday special...not.

Santa Claus:  There have probably been a lot of movies with this title, but this particular one is a 60s Mexican film that involves Santa, Satan, Merlin, and tempting a little girl to steal a doll.  Basically Satan and Santa work against each other for the soul of some little girl named Lupita who really wants a dolly for Christmas but because she's poor she probably won't get one unless she steals it.  You'd think an evil deity and a saint would have a lot more to worry about, but no.

Satan enlists a couple of naughty boys to help him in his quest to ruin Christmas while Santa has the help of Merlin.  Yes, that Merlin.  The Celtic wizard.  Obviously he was big into Christmas.

With a nonsensical plot, old-fashioned cultural stereotypes, and sets and effects about as good as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, it's pretty bad.  Hilariously bad.

#AtoZChallenge Haunted Houses

Haunted house stories have been a staple of literature and movies for a long, long time.  And, well, not all of them are very good.  In fact, many of them are probably not very good.  So naturally there are some featured on MST3K and Rifftrax.

Ghosthouse:  This movie is unintentionally hilarious just because the plot is so, so illogical.  A guy in Boston is dicking around with his HAM radio, trying to find out who's more popular in Denver:  Kelly LeBrock or Kim Basinger, when he hears someone screaming for help and then dying.  He and his vaguely European girlfriend trace the signal to an old house in the country.

They find an RV and in the attic is a guy named Jim Daylen with his HAM radio set up.  Jim broke into this abandoned house to set up his radio in the attic.  I mean since he, his sister, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend were tired they might as well stop at this house and break in to do some HAM radioing.  You know, that old story.

Then of course Jim Daylen is killed exactly how it sounds on the broadcast the other guy heard on his radio.  At this point they should really just leave, but no they stay to try to figure out what's going on while they're killed one-by-one by a little girl and her evil clown doll.

The final act they just throw all story logic out the window to throw random scares at you.  Jim Daylen's brother falls through a floor into some white liquid.  Milk?  Cream?  Ranch sauce?  And why the hell is it under the house?  His girlfriend for some reason decides the haunted house where several people have died is the perfect place for taking a shower and then is chased by a dog that turns into a Grim Reaper covered in maggots.  Because...why not?

But ultimately the girl is saved when the guy from Boston destroys the evil girl's grave.  And yet the evil clown doll survives to later have a bus hit him.  So there.  Don't mess with clown dolls.

The bat shit craziness makes this a fun Rifftrax to watch.

Rock n Roll Nightmare:  Almost as bat shit crazy as Ghosthouse, this features a crappy hair metal band going to a country house to work on a new album.  Fortunately for the music world the band starts being killed by crappy claymation puppets that are like rejects from Gumby.

The lead singer is the last one left when the big bad head devil reveals himself.  In an M. Night twist the lead singer then reveals none of the band members were real.  So, um, the one he had sex with wasn't real?  Does that count as masturbating?  There's a really awful fight between the crappy devil puppet and the lead singer wearing only spiky metal underwear.  No matter who wins, we lose.

There is some story logic at least but the "monsters" are so ludicrously lame that it's really not scary in the slightest.

Hillbillys in a Haunted House:  It's like The Beverly Hillbillies meets Scooby-Doo, only in live action.  Three "hillbillys" are driving to a gig or something and stop at an abandoned house.  Or at least they think it's abandoned.  They must be Jim Daylen's parents because they're just as dumb about breaking into an abandoned house and rummaging around in it and stuff.

What they don't know is that the house is being used by evil scientists played by horror movie legends John Carradine, Lon Cheney, and Basil Rathbone.  And kooky mayhem and bad songs ensue.

The House on Haunted Hill:  As I said about a year ago, this one isn't so much bad as it's just old.  Like Hillbillys in a Haunted House it's about as scary as a Scooby-Doo episode.  It stars Vincent Price as a millionaire who for his wife's birthday invites five seemingly random people to a supposedly haunted house.  There are some mild scares about as good as a Paranormal Activity movie as people go around the house.

There are a couple of twists as Vincent Price's wife fakes her death to lure him into a trap, but he fakes his death to trap and kill her instead.  That's some extreme couples therapy!

Like I said a year ago, this is one I actually don't mind watching that much even without the Rifftrax.

The Screaming Skull:  This old 50s movie provides what it promises:  a screaming skull.  A woman moves into a house with her husband and is terrorized by visions of a screaming skull.  At first she suspects the creepy handyman Mickey is setting her up, but then she starts to think she really is crazy.  But it turns out it's been her husband all along.  Basically it's like the 1940s movie Gaslight only without Ingrid Bergman or any other actors of note.

This is one of those that's bad mostly because it's boring.  It might be scary if you're like 7 years old, but most grown ups would probably be more scared going to jury duty.

This was a MST3K episode, but obviously not one of the best.  In one of the skits Crow tries to scare Mike by pretending to be a screaming skull and instead gets beaten with a variety of implements like a baseball and golf club by the terrified Mike.  Maybe the lady in the movie should have tried that--or just about anything.

#AtoZChallenge GI Jokes

It's ironic I suppose that I'm writing this on Memorial Day since this entry is about soldiers who aren't exactly Real American Heroes.  But I guess at least they try.

McBain:  From the title you might think this 1990 action movie is an adaptation of the Schwarzenegger-like character from The Simpsons.  But really it's about a bunch of middle-aged guys who overthrow the government of Colombia.

Back at the end of the Vietnam War Bobby McBain (Christopher Walken) is being tortured in a POW camp.  A US helicopter sees the camp and the soldiers come down to save him and the other POWs.  The head of the soldiers was for some reason a Colombian guy named Santos.  He gives McBain half a $100 bill and says if McBain is ever given the other half it'll mean Santos needs repaid for the favor.

That happens almost 20 years later when Santos tries to overthrow the Colombian government.  But the brutal dictator threatens some civilians so Santos stops the rebellion and then is killed.  His sister goes to New York, where McBain is working as a steelworker.

McBain gathers up his old squad:  a doctor, a bodyguard, a cop, and a rich guy played by Michael Ironside.  They need money to fund their coup so first they attack a drug dealer played by Luis Guzman.  When he doesn't have the millions they need, they shake down a mobster.  And for some reason blow up an airport in Jamaica before stealing a plane to go to Colombia.  Why?  Who knows?

The most unintentionally hilarious part is the dogfight as the guys are heading to Colombia.  They're pursued by a few Colombian F-5 fighters.  First McBain shoots one down by killing the pilot with a handgun.  He shoots the pilot of a jet fighter through the window of a small airplane.  Think how utterly ridiculous that is.  But it gets better!  Michael Ironside calls in some support in the form of a British Hawk trainer jet that's armed with machine guns and rocket pods.  Meanwhile the F-5s are armed with only fuel tanks and machine guns.  Why the hell would they launch fighters carrying almost no weapons to intercept a plane?  I guess the production couldn't get hold of any Sidewinder missiles.  Though somehow one of the F-5s launches missiles at one point.  From where?  It's worse than some movies where they'll just show the same missile launching under a plane's wing like 4 times.

Of course in the end these like 5 American guys and Santos's sister with the support of an armed rabble take down the dictator.  I mean sure that's plausible, right?

Unlike most of the Rifftrax VODs they show on Pluto TV this one isn't available on Amazon.  You can only watch it on Pluto TV or with the Rifftrax site.

The Starfighters:  When I first saw the title I thought it was a Star Wars-type movie but actually it's this incredibly boring movie about a group of F-104 Starfighter pilots in the 60s.  Most of the movie is stock footage of F-104s refueling and flying around.  The plot?  Yeah, there really isn't one.  There's some blather about a young pilot whose Congressman father wants him to fly bombers, but that's pretty much it.

If you like watching F-104 fighters flying to Lawrence Welk music then this is the movie for you!  For the other 7 billion people, not so much.  This was on MST3K back in about 1994 and one of the fun things during the intermission sketches is Crow T Robot's struggles to get on the "information superhighway."  Remember when you had to use a dial-up modem?  You couldn't just turn on your phone and get to the Internet, you had to set up the IP address and everything yourself.  And even then all it was then was like message boards.  Ugh.  That's probably funnier than anything in the movie.

Red Zone Cuba:  Another MST3K episode from about the same time.  It was made around the same time too but it's in black-and-white not color.  And features far less stock footage of planes flying around.  This is about an escaped con and two ex-cons who wind up being part of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.

Made with almost no budget the locations for this really make no sense.  Most of the movie looks like it was shot in west Texas or New Mexico, not an island in the Caribbean.  The three guys get captured but escape from the Cubans in a stolen plane to somehow end up in a location that again looks like New Mexico, not Florida or Louisiana or anywhere you'd expect them to escape to.  So it doesn't really make much sense.

John Carradine "guest stars" as a train conductor in the beginning who supposedly saw the guys but really this contributes nothing.  Though he does sing the theme song, which is pretty cool.  So there's that.

Deadly Prey:  Back to a Rifftrax episode for this late 80s movie about a militia in southern California that abducts random people to hunt them for sport as part of their training.  But when they kidnap a mulleted shirtless guy in tiny shorts they soon realize they've kidnapped the wrong person.  He starts to kill them one-by-one.

Now you might think you know how this ends:  the guy kills all the bad guys and lives Happily Ever After, right?  Nope.  The bad guys kill his girlfriend and he screams with rage.  The end.  Hooray?

Probably the most unintentionally hilarious part of this is our hero has multiple opportunities to take some clothes off the bad guys he kills.  At least take a pair of shoes, right?  Nah, he'd rather go around in only a pair of tiny denim shorts.  I guess that was for the ladies.  Yeah.

#AtoZChallenge Future Cops

Not all dystopian cop movies are about cyborgs; some of them are about flesh-and-blood people! All of these ones are on Rifftrax, not MST3K.

Future Force & Future Zone:  In the "future" of the late 80s and early 90s policing is turned over to scummy-looking guys in sleeveless jean jackets who have the power to instantly kill people based on orders they receive from one of those digital scrolling boards like they used to have at the DMV or some restaurants.  It seems like a much worse system, but I guess it works--somehow.

The late David Carradine stars as John Tucker, a member of COPS--Civilian Operated Police Systems.  In Future Force he get embroiled in a scandal involving the head of COPS and his loyal henchman.  They put a hit out on a reporter but instead Tucker saves her and in the process kills a lot of his coworkers.

The most unintentionally hilarious part of this is after a chase in LA, Tucker pushes a car over a cliff.  A cliff in downtown LA?  What the hell?  Since when did they start strip-mining downtown LA?  Tucker also has this power glove thing that shoots lasers or something and the funny thing is first that he keeps in the trunk of his car most of the time so he never has it when he really needs it and then he has a remote for it that all he has to do is keep pushing the same button and it does whatever he wants.  So as far as story logic, there's not much.

The sequel Future Zone kicks the stupidity up a notch as Tucker's son travels back in time to help him solve a case--and keep him alive.  I guess saving your crusty, beer-swilling dad is a pretty good use of time travel, though there are probably better uses for it.  And really, why does some mesh-shirt wearing schmuck have access to a "time portal?"

And again the power glove remains in the trunk when Tucker really needs it, though this time he doesn't even use the remote until the very end.

Omega Cop:  In this dystopian future the ozone layer depleting has caused society to fall apart.  A bland middle-aged guy who looks like a discount Ben Mendelssohn is the head of a police force of 4 guys who work for Adam West in a bunker.  They go out on a raid to stop some slavers but the three other guys die while bland guy survives.  Adam West won't let him back into the bunker so he stays out in the ruins of civilization to search for the bad guys.  In the process he picks up three women who occasionally help him.

About 11 months ago I talked about how weak the ending of this movie was.  There's no big fight between bland cop and the bad guy.  Nope, bland cop sets off some explosives and then he and the girls go off to Montana where it's not so bad.  Hooray!

As far as bad movies go it's not the worst, but it's pretty lame nonetheless.

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe:  If you need a guardian of the universe, who better than former professional-wrestler-turned-Minnesota-governor Jesse Ventura?  Um, almost anyone?

Jesse Ventura is a space cop from some planet who's lived for tens of thousands of years.  His old partner went bad and then escaped to Earth to impregnate a woman who gives birth to a son who's something called a "comater."  Which is...what?  Damned if I know.

Though Jesse Ventura captured his former partner the first time, he escapes back to Earth like six years later so he can kidnap the kid to...do something.  It's like, Step 1:  impregnate woman to make a comater, Step 2:  kidnap comater, Step 3: ??? and take over the universe or something like that.  The talk of an "antilife equation" seems lifted from Darkseid in DC Comics, but it's never really explained what it is or how it could be used.

Of course Jesse Ventura follows him and hooks up with the kid's mother as he protects them from his former partner.

Besides that the plot makes almost no sense, the action scenes are pretty lame and as you'd expect the acting is pretty bad.  For some reason Jim Belushi has a cameo as a school principal, though in 1990-ish he was still able to be in real Hollywood movies, so maybe he owed the director money or something.  Or maybe he's friends with Jesse Ventura.  Anyway, it's a pretty hilariously bad sci-fi action movie.

A fun fact is that Jesse Ventura and his opponent Sven-Ole Thorsen were both in Schwarzenegger movies like Predator and Running Man.  Even if you never saw those you probably saw Thorsen in Gladiator as the formerly-retired gladiator with the tigers and a golden mask.  So that was a step up.

At the end of the movie Bill Corbett cautions viewers, "For the love of God please take the right to vote seriously."  Unfortunately we didn't listen.

#AtoZChallenge Edgewood Studios

Vermont is known for a lot of things:  Ben & Jerry's ice cream, maple syrup, autumn colors, and Bernie Sanders among other things.  What you probably don't think of it for is making movies.  But starting in the 90s there was a studio there called Edgewood Studios making cheap action and horror movies.

Time Chasers:  This is one of the few movies that has the "honor" of being featured on both MST3K and Rifftrax.  The Rifftrax version was a live show that used a restored version of the film from the director that actually looks a lot better than the MST3K version.

Both versions feature the same ludicrous plot of a mulleted college professor who creates a time machine using his small airplane and a Commodore 64 computer.  He stupidly sells the technology to a big corporation that immediately starts using it for no good and so the professor and a local reporter have to go back in time to put right what once went wrong.

The movie was shot on the cheap and looks it as "the future" doesn't have any flying cars or jetpacks or anything like that; it pretty much looks like the early 90s.  The apocalyptic future they use only a crummy computer drawing to "show" it; they couldn't even afford a matte painting, I guess.  The head of the evil corporation's office is clearly the top of a stairwell in a public library or community center or something.  I mean if you're the CEO of a huge, evil company why would your office have no walls?  And be in the middle of the building?  Geez, you couldn't rent a corner office for a couple of hours?  Or even a motel room?

There is definitely a corny charm about the whole thing though.  Since it was on both MST3K and Rifftrax, which is better?  The movie itself is better on Rifftrax.  The quality is better and they didn't have to edit anything for time.  The MST3K version edits out the best part where the time traveler and the reporter go to the local airport to rescue their time machine and are stopped by this goofy guard who keeps telling them it's a "gubbment installation."  One of the riffers says, "Don't mess with da gubbment" and it's just hilarious.  But the MST3K version does have a funny series of intermission sketches where Crow T Robot goes back in time to convince young Mike not to take the job that ends up with him being stuck in space.  That leads to him becoming a rock star who's killed on stage and so he's replaced on the Satellite of Love by his grumpy, chain-smoking, hard-drinking brother Eddie.  One whole section of the movie then is riffed by Eddie and the bots, which is fun as a change of pace.  So either one is good.

Pressure Point:  This came a few years after Time Chasers.  It features a gubbment agent who is framed for murder and imprisoned.  His old handler helps him escape from the world's most escapable prison that apparently only has one phone.

Then he goes to a small town to track down some arms dealer; one of the guy's henchmen is played by the hero from Time Chasers even!  And then the gubbment agent has to foil a plot to blow up Montpelier Washington DC.  It's not quite as goofy as Time Chasers, but still a pretty cheap action movie.

Icebreaker:  For this 2000 movie Edgewood Studios brought in some B-list talent with Sean Astin playing the hero and a shaved-head Bruce Campbell playing the villain.  Stacy Keach co-stars as Sean Astin's future father-in-law.

The movie starts with a plane carrying stolen radioactive material going down near a ski resort in Vermont.  Bruce Campbell and his crew go to retrieve the stolen material so he can blow shit up because he's dying and thus will have "no more birthdays."

Sean Astin is a ski patrol guy at the resort who stumbles across the plot and has to foil it to save the day.  There's better acting talent, but it's still not much better made than Time Chasers or Pressure Point.  It is funny to think that Sean Astin did this right before all the Lord of the Rings movies; this is clearly what got him the part!  Um, probably not.

There are a couple more Edgewood movies in this challenge to be included on other entries, so stay tuned!

#AtoZChallenge Dark Times

For this one I decided to highlight a few Rifftrax movies that all have "Dark" in the title.

The Dark Power:  This was made by Phil Smoot, the writer/director of Alien Outlaw from the "A" entry.  This actually was made before that and it also "stars" the geriatric hero Lash Larue and takes place in North Carolina.  Only instead of aliens, it involves evil Native American spirits who terrorize a bunch of college kids who have moved into a house that was made on a burial ground or some damned thing.

The four evil spirits are all clearly guys in rubber masks and crappy makeup and the rest of the movie is about that good.  Lash LaRue proves that a whip is a really, really useless weapon.  One of the college girls dispatches three of the bad guys with a holy knife in a couple of minutes while Lash needs like 10 minutes to kill just one bad guy with the stupid whip.

Dark Future:  Made in 1994 in Eastern Europe on the cheap, I described this once as a reverse Westworld as in this humans are being used as workers in a theme park of various time periods to amuse cyborgs.  Why?  I don't know, it's a Greydon Clark film so don't ask.

Anyway, it's also sort of like Children of Men as there haven't been any babies born--until finally a woman gives birth to one.  Then one of the humans working in the park has to protect her and overthrow the cyborgs and their masters:  a bunch of old guys who I guess aren't cyborgs.

Like I said, this was made in the 90s but it looks like an 80s movie.  It's definitely not the worst Greydon Clark movie ever (that's Star Games) but it's not really good either.

The Dark:  In the dark, there's something killing people for...some reason.  Then...whatever it is...kills the daughter of an ex-con played by William Devane who started writing horror novels under an assumed name while in prison.  He teams with a reporter to track down whatever it is, which turns out to be an alien...or something.

How did the alien get there?  Why is it killing people?  Yeah, who knows.  Like one of the riffers says the end is like the screenwriter's little brother wrote it as all the sudden the alien starts shooting lasers in a big shootout with soldiers and cops.

Most of the movie is so murky-looking that you can barely tell what's going on.  This was made in the 70s and you can really tell from the clothes, hairstyles, and cars.  It's pretty corny all around.

#AtoZChallenge Cyborgs

Last entry I talked about how the popularity of some biker movies spawned imitators.  Similarly the popularity of The Terminator and Robocop spawned a lot of imitating cyborg movies.  Most of these are on Rifftrax, not MST3K.

Cyborg Cop 2:  The hilarious thing about this is that it's called "Cyborg Cop" and yet there are no cyborg cops in it.  In actuality the cop named Jack Ryan (like the Tom Clancy character but not) is a flesh-and-blood human who fights against evil cyborgs.  So I guess he polices cyborgs so that's close enough.

The evil cyborgs are led by a former gang leader who was supposed to be executed but instead the government turns him into a cyborg.  He immediately turns on his creators.  And only Jack Ryan and a female agent can stop him.  The effects are not great and like Star Games while it was made in 1994 it looks like something a lot earlier.  And our hero wears a fanny pack through the whole thing.  What more is there to say about how bad it is?

R.O.T.O.R:  One of my favorites.  I actually saw it on local TV years before the Rifftrax version.  Either way it's a hilariously bad movie.  The "plot" doesn't make much sense whatsoever.  A policeman/scientist/rancher designs a killer cyborg to be the cop of the future but in a lengthy conversation with his boss, the product is rushed into production.

The result of this is Robotic Officer Tactical Operations Research or ROTOR.  It makes itself active and immediately murders a speeder.  A speeder in the middle of nowhere when he starts out in the middle of Dallas.  I mean if you're a killer cyborg out to fight crime isn't there plenty of it in Dallas proper?  I mean earlier our hero thwarted a robbery at a convenience store going to get some charcoal so clearly there's crime a plenty.

The speeder's fiance is able to escape because she triggers ROTOR's one weakness:  car horns.  A weakness she forgets repeatedly through the movie.  Meanwhile ROTOR's creator, Captain Coldyron (Cold-iron), chases after them--until he goes to pick up another scientist, a woman named Dr. Steel.  Inexplicably she has to check into a hotel at like 7am so she can change from a dress into a tank top and cargo pants.  This while the speeder's fiance is on the run, leading ROTOR to a lake.  One of the many, many plot holes is that the woman on the run has a CB radio in her car that she never uses until Coldyron calls her on it.  For some reason she pulls over to call the cops when couldn't she have just summoned help with the CB?  And thereby made it harder for ROTOR to catch her?

And to cap it off, after Coldyron stops ROTOR (and Dr. Steel and the speeder's fiance somehow die), his boss shoots him in the back with a shotgun.  Because...why not?  It's not like they'd make a sequel.  I have to admit though the theme song "Hideaway" is OK in an 80s adult contemporary way.  So there's that.

Cyber Tracker:  This was made about the same time as Cyborg Cop 2 above but it does actually feature cyborg cops who are known as cyber trackers.  These things all look the same; they're all some big Mr. Clean looking dude.

The movie stars Don "The Dragon" Wilson (that's how it's listed in the credits) as a senator's bodyguard who foils an assassination attempt and then has to unravel some big conspiracy with the help of a rebel group led by some woman.  This leads to fighting a lot of Cyber Trackers and ultimately revealing the senator the guy was protecting was himself a cyborg!  What a twist!

Much of the movie is shot in overly blue light for some reason.  Sometimes because it's at night and sometimes just because.  While it's supposed to be like 2014 they use technology like big hulking computer monitors.  Though the voice-activated assistants they have are probably better than Alexa or Google Home or whatever.

Future War:  This is the sole MST3K entry on today's list.  It was one of the later episodes.  This is another of those movies that was pretty new yet at the time since it was made in the 90s.  The plot is fairly nonsensical like ROTOR.  An alien escapes from his jailers to crash on Earth and enlists the help of a woman training to be a nun and her friends.

The alien is pursued by a tubby cyborg played by the late Robert Z'Dar who also uses crappy claymation dinosaurs that are like mini T-Rexes or something as his henchmen.  It really doesn't make much sense.  Besides the crappy effects, the fight scenes are pretty badly choreographed and of course there's not much acting "talent" to be had.  Which is what makes it fun!

#AtoZChallenge Bikers

In the 50s and 60s you had a lot of popular movies with motorcycles in them like Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider.  So of course they had a lot of imitators too.  Biker gang movies were popular B-movie fodder around that time, so naturally some of them were on MST3K.

There were at least three of them that I've seen on Pluto TV.  They're pretty much interchangeable in my mind.  I mean I couldn't hardly tell them apart.

Side Hackers:  This one stands out only because it involves this weird "sport" of "side hacking" where people ride motorcycles that have a weird kind of sidecar someone rides on.  They go around a track in a normal dirt bike race style.

Anyway, the movie involves Ross Hagen as some side hacker who gets into a rivalry with some biker gang.  They kill his woman and then he assembles a team to take them down.  In the end he and the bad guy kill each other.  The End.

Hellcats & Wild Rebels:  These are pretty much the same movie.  Some guy goes undercover with some bikers.  One features Ross Hagen (again) only this time he's avenging his brother after he comes home from Vietnam.  The other the cop is the wheelman as the gang robs some crappy little banks.  That ends with a shootout in a lighthouse, which is kind of cool.  But again, which one is which?  I couldn't tell you.

Stone Cold:  Unlike the others, this was from the early 90s.  It's on Rifftrax, not MST3K.  But the plot is similar to Hellcats & Wild Rebels:  an undercover cop infiltrates a biker gang.  In this case the cop is played by former college star and NFL bust Brian "the Boz" Bosworth.  The biker gang leader is played by Lance Henriksen, who tries to kill a judge for some reason.

The movie is pretty funny because of the ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and stuff.  For some reason the Boz has a pet iguana that I guess is supposed to show how bad ass he is.  Or something.  Unfortunately this one isn't on Amazon Prime much and not on Pluto TV so I haven't watched it many times.

1990 Bronx Warriors:  This 1982 movie is basically an Italian ripoff of The Warriors.  In the "future" of 1990 the Bronx has become No Man's Land for...reasons.  If there was some disaster, the rest of the city looks fine.  No one really ever seems to mention what happened or why.  The plot is that a girl in Manhattan flees to the Bronx and is saved by a guy named Trash and his biker gang.  She's so happy to belong to someone (her words) that she sticks with him.  But when her father starts sending people to find her, Trash and company have to make allies with a gang led by former NFL player Fred Williamson, who you'll see again (twice) in an entry near the end of the challenge.  And they fight some other gangs and cops.  Hooray.

The ending is about like Side Hackers, where it doesn't really end Happily Ever After, though at least the "hero" survives.  Anyway, this is a cheesy copy of an already cheesy movie.  So, a lot of cheese.

#AtoZChallenge: Alien Invasions

It's time for the start of the A to Z Challenge!  This year I'm doing it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax episodes.  If you don't know what that is, look it up or read my topic reveal post from March.

As the title of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would imply, there were plenty of sci-fi movies.  A lot of them were from the 50s because those were cheap but especially on Rifftrax there were newer ones from the 80s and 90s.

Alien From LA:  This was one of my favorites from MST3K in the early 90s.  It was also one of the first ones after Michael J Nelson took over the hosting duties.  The movie was actually pretty new, from the late 80s but because it was made by the defunct Cannon Films it was probably pretty cheap to obtain.

Anyway, the movie starred supermodel Kathy Ireland as a waitress who follows her archaeologist father to Egypt after he disappears.  She winds up falling underground into a strange world that's populated by human-ish things like a guy with lashes across his whole eyes or a lady with a hairy eyepatch.  The cleverness of the title is that she's the alien in this world and she's from LA.  Get it?

With the help of a vaguely Australian-sounding guy and some other guy she finds her father and escapes back to the surface world while the evil empire underground tells everyone, "Nothing to see here."  Like most Cannon pictures it's made on the cheap; in a DVD extra the director talked about how they went to Africa to film it because it was cheap.

One of the intermission sketches was pretty hilarious as the robots quizzed Mike on all the expressions of Kathy Ireland.  They were all the same:  dull surprise.  They could probably revise that game for Kristen Stewart in those Twilight movies.

Alien Outlaw:  This was a goofy 80s sci-fi movie featured on Rifftrax.  It involves aliens who crash in North Carolina and hassle a woman who performs gun shows like a modern Annie Oakley and a few locals including the elderly Lash LaRue.  Though most of the movie involves the woman firing her lazy manager at a small motel that for some reason has a bellboy, yokels fishing, and a horse called "Mr. Stud" that runs away to a local gas station.

The aliens look like white trash cousins of the Borg and for some reason they don't have any ray guns or anything like that.  Instead they steal the human woman's guns to use.  One of them is stopped when a fish hook detaches an air hose or something.  It really makes you wonder how the hell they managed to travel across the galaxy.

The grand finale involves the woman shooting a damp piece of dynamite that explodes like a 500-lb bomb, which is pretty improbable.  But then so is the whole movie.  It is pretty fun to watch though.

Galaxy Invader:  It's basically a country cousin of Alien Outlaw.  An alien ship crashes in a Southern town.  Only this is less wacky and more unpleasant.  The alien is found by the patriarch of a family who slaps his daughter, chases her around with a shotgun, and generally acts like an asshole.  Along with his dopey son and a local big shot they plan to sell the alien and/or his ray gun to the highest bidder.  But things don't go as they planned and mayhem ensues.

It's not as much fun as Alien Outlaw but just as cheaply made with no real acting talent or anything and pretty crappy effects.

Star Games:  I talked about this in an entry last year.  It's basically one of the worst movies I've seen.  It's cheaply made and annoying and the plot makes no goddamned sense.  While it was made in the late 90s it features effects like claymation that looks like it's from the 50s and computer effects left over from Tron.  Director Greydon Clarke cast his own kids in the lead roles and it shows as they're both about as talented as their father.  Tony Curtis cashed a paycheck as the grandpa to the one kid who's an alien prince trying to avoid an evil alien who wants to take over the universe or some goddamned thing.

But watching the Rifftrax is pretty fun as this movie is just so, so bad that it lends itself to making fun of just about everything about it.

Starship Invasions:  The same year as Star Wars, Christopher Lee starred in this crappy sci-fi movie where he wore a black body stocking with a snake painted on it and communicated telepathically with his minions.  His planet was dying so he thought he'd take over Earth.  But there's some kind of Federation that is headquartered underwater.  So there are terrible battles in the air and space and then some random robot saves the day.  Hooray?  Instead of an epic story of good vs evil you had sort of a minor skirmish.  Instead of George Lucas ILM effects you had ships on string.  Instead of a John Williams score you had crappy Scooby-Doo music.  Instead of R2D2 and C3PO you had crummy looking junk robots.  Otherwise, exactly the same.

Contamination:  An Italian-German ripoff of Alien, though it never actually leaves Earth and takes place in present day, which was 1980.  A boat comes into New York loaded with green "eggs" that when heated explode goo all over.  The goo then causes people it touches to explode.  I guess that way it wasn't exactly like the famous John Hurt scene in Alien.  A female Defense Department person, a police lieutenant, and an astronaut who went to Mars and reported seeing green eggs, which caused him to become a drunken laughingstock, go to Colombia or somewhere like that to find the source of the eggs.  There's a ridiculous scene in the hotel where the woman is locked in her bathroom with an egg.  Um...since when do bathroom doors lock from the outside?  Or need a key?  It would have made more sense for someone to just put a chair against the door to keep it from opening, but then we couldn't have the drama of the astronaut busting through a cheap motel door.  Anyway, this does beat the Alien franchise in depicting an alien queen laying the eggs, only their alien queen looks more like Mother Brain from Metroid.  In the end the astronaut shoots it in the eye and problem solved--except there's still an egg in New York that explodes, seemingly harmlessly in a pile of garbage.  Anyway, it's pretty cheesy and kind of gross with those pickle egg things.  Which a "scientist" says are not eggs...and then in the next sentence talks about their "yolks" and goes back to calling them eggs.  And why does the queen lay exploding eggs?  What's the point of it?

Attack From Space:  A really low-budget, black-and-white Japanese movie from like 1965.  A bunch of cheap looking aliens send their chunky champion "Starman" to Earth to stop a bunch of space Nazis and their "Death Star."  That looks nothing like the Star Wars one but clearly Lucas ripped it off.  Even by the low standards of sci-fi movies of this era it's pretty bad.

Killers From Space:  This was actually one of the 4 episodes of The Film Crew that features the cast of Rifftrax.  It's from the 50s and stars a young Peter Graves as a scientist who dies when the plane he's in crashes during an atomic bomb test.  Except some aliens revive him and send him back for...reasons.

The aliens are especially goofy-looking as they have these giant eyeballs that are just hilarious.  The alien lair underground also features "giant" creatures that are clearly just normal-sized creatures projected to look larger.

Eventually Peter Graves stops them by overloading the power grid.  One thing noted in the episode is how the camera frequently zooms in really tight on people's faces for no real reason at all.  It's bizarre, though not as bizarre as those alien eyeballs.

Plan 9 From Outer Space:  The granddaddy of bad movies was one of the earliest ones on Rifftrax.  It was also the first live Rifftrax show.

Written, directed, and produced by Ed Wood ("the poor dope wasn't smart enough to spread the blame around!") the plot involves a nonsensical plan by aliens to revive the dead to somehow scare humanity from developing some kind of weapon that could destroy the universe.

The effects are notoriously bad, featuring pie plate UFOs on strings, foam tombstones, and an airplane cockpit even a six-year-old kid could have done better.  It was the last film of Bela Lugosi, who died during the filming, so Ed Wood used a chiropractor to double Lugosi in some scenes--and it shows.  The whole thing is laughably bad, though in context probably not as bad as Star Games.  I'm just saying.