Actually, a number of flicks on MST3K weren’t as bad as you’d think, given the circumstances:
1.) Earth Vs. the Giant Spider – As I get older, I appreciate more and more the ability of cheapo filmmakers like Bert I. Gordon’s ability to make effective films on almost nonexistent budgets. This is an example. I love the way I now notice that he suggests two teenagers are in a cave at one point without even having a cave set – he shoots down on them from a high angle and matted in a pair of stalactites. And he wenmt to al the trouble of making a mannequin of a sheriff’s deputy all wizened after the Spider has sucked all the blood out. The dummy is almso subliminal – it’s onscreen for less than a second, but all the more effective for that brief glimpse.
2.) Hamlet – It stars Maxilian freakin’ Schell! It’s Hamlet, albeit in a foreign language. Pretty classy stuff. This isn’t like James Earl Jones slumming it in City Limits.
3.) Overdrawn at the Memory Bank – I agree it wasn’t very good, but, c’mon, it was PBS’ third big attempt at science fiction, after their popular and well-executed run at Ursula K. leGuin’s Lathe of Heaven and Kurt Vonnegut’s Between Time and Timbuktu. Who knew they’d screw it up as much as this? It’s based on a pretty decent John Varley short story of the same name, and stars the great Raul Julia (!). The problem is that they ludicrously padded it out and got obsessed with working an obsession with Casablanca into it (that’s not in the original story), and some good vs. evil skullduggery that’s not in the original, either.
4.) The Sword and the Dragon – I have a soft spot in my heart (and head) for this Finno-Russian film. I actually paid money to see it as a kid in our downtown cinema. Despite the incredible awful editing and dubbing (It doesn’t help to have the omnipresent Paul Frees doing the leader of the Uigur/Mongol in a voice that sounds like bad Boris Badenov), I could see there was a historical epic hiding under this stuff. The original film Ilya Mourometz retells a popular legend, and at the time in Russia must have been a big deal, what with being in full color, and with a three-headed fire breathing dragon (well before Ghidrah was around). It looks ludicrous today, and in a place where the legend isn’t known (Despite other tellings of the story, this is still the only one I’ve ever encountered).
An early episode was Moon-Zero-Two. It suffers mainly from being so over the top with late 60’s-Early 70’s style. But once you get past that, it has a reasonable plot, good acting, and good actors. It’s very much like an extended version of Space: 1999.
Tormented is sort of a classic haunting story and it’s pretty well done. If you listen, you’ll see that the Brains don’t really make fun of the movie itself. Their jokes are in the context of the movie.
I agree about the B-movies. Many of the effects are dated but still clever in their use. Burt I. Gordon sure had a passion (if not budget) for them. I think that B.I.G. films were better to watch than Cormans because of this. Cormans films felt apathetically cheap. He didn’t care about anything but getting the product out on the screen. Burt may not had a lot of money, but it felt like he was really trying.
Jesus Christ, no. Please tell me you’re kidding. It and Giant Gila Monster are basically my two least favorite episodes, because the movies are worse than Manos.
If they did Gorgo, then that’s the winner (since the excellent Phase IV is off the board). It’s a classic monster movie and unique in the genre because …
Those Russo-Finnish films rocked. Not great cinema, but fun. There were three in the original run of MST3K that I recall: The Day The Earth Froze, The Sword and the Dragon, and The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, which might be why you associate them. They were all good in their way. In the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, the MST3K bunch wrote that they were especially impressed with the “wind demon” special effect from The Day The Earth Froze, which I must say was pretty darn neat.
parts: the clonus horror (yes, all lower case) is a cool concept and decently executed. (And remade as The Island (2005)). It does suffer from having a pretty weak lead actor.
On a side note, there isn’t any correlation between the quality of the film and the hilarity of the riffing. Rifftrax has gotten as many laughs out of great movies as they do out of schlock.
The guys at Best Brains were the first to admit that the Russo-Finnish fairy tale films were among the better ones they’d done. They were cheesy and over-the-top, but their production values were quite good for the time. And the musical scores were excellent.
Jack Frost is probably my favorite. Something rings very familiar about it–maybe it was run on one of the UHF channels during some rainy afternoon when I was a kid?
The Girl in Lovers Lane is not a great movie by any means, but it’s not terrible. It has a recognizable plot and decent acting, and that can go a long way. It’s a hilarious episode of MST3K.
I’ve long been of the opinion that a movie needs to be at least somewhat good to be funny to riff on.
One of the few positive thing Stalin did was to turn his people into cinema addicts. Even under the obvious constraints, they’d be liable to make some good movies. Sadko was MST3K’d in its American-repackaged version The Magic Voyage of Sinbad
One segment has the bearded hero fighting a bear, which Crow reconfigured as an intervention on “Grizzly Adams” Dan Haggerty (whose drug troubles had put him in the news) conducted by his bear sidekick.
I liked Sadko as much as anything else in its era. Here’s a video of the Bird of Happiness sequence. I’ve always been a sucker for “Song of the Indian Guest.”
If it’s mind-numbingly boring, then it can stretch the abilities of the guys. Funnily enough in Torgo it works because they aren’t being interrupted by the actual dialogue as much. And Joel’s monologue near the end is Heeeelarious.
But in Lost Continent I can tell the guys are at the end of their rope. And while its extremely funny to see them start screaming and running around the theatre and saying “Make it stop Joel!!”…there’s just nowhere to go after they resort to that.
That movie has got to be one of the most boring movies ever made relative to the number of recognizable actors. Two guys who appeared on the original Star Trek, The guy on Leave it to Beaver, Caesar Romero, and the guy who was on the Dick Van Dyke show.
I’m watching Stranded in Space (“The Stranger”) right now…which is not the renamed “Marooned” btw…I remember that from the 70’s. It wasn’t really bad at all. Standard made for TV 70’s fare.
Mitchell is mine. I also think that’s deliberate: it was Joel’s last show and they made it disappointing so that Mike would look good by comparison the next week, in order that people accept the change more easily.
Really? Along with being one of the funniest episodes of the series, I thought Mitchell was a halfway watchable cop movie. It’s not good, by any means, but it mostly makes sense and moves along at a decent pace, which is more than anyone can say about 95 percent of MST3K movies.
It’s also been years since I’ve seen it, but I didn’t think I Accuse My Parents was so bad.
I nominate The Thing That Couldn’t Die. Despite an absurdly abrupt and anti-climactic endding, the script isn’t bad and strives to do more with its creative elements (psychic abilities, mind control, Devil worship) than most MST3K fare. All of this plus a mashup of characters straight from Of Mice and Men makes for a surprisingly atmospheric B movie experience.
I’m also going to have to go with Bloodlust. It’s one of the few where I actually still knew what was going on by the end.
It seems I could get exiled from the internet for this, but I vastly prefer Mike to Joel. I feel he’s a better performer in general, and his timing and delivery has always just been funnier to me. I don’t hate Joel, but if I come upon two episodes I haven’t seen, I’ll pick the Mike over the Joel any day.
I watched The Undead last night. As far as Roger Corman films go, it wasn’t too bad. The thing about Corman is that he never let budget get in the way of telling a story.