I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Granted, it was an experimental staging and came off as (at the very least) pretentious, but you’ve got to admit the script was better than anything else they ever showed.
It wasn’t Sir Larry, it was the much cuter and more talented Max Schell.
But I totally agree with you on that one—I am actually no big “Hamlet” fan, but that was a not-bad film of the play and I cannot imagine why it was MST3K’d. It was a hugely unsuccessful and unwatchable show, with everyone making the same stupid “Hamlet” jokes we all made in junior high school.
I could watch Jack Frost even un-MSTified, so that gets my first vote. It’s a silly, fun movie that would probably make more sense if I was a Russo-Finnish fish-eater, and quite entertaining. Diabolik isn’t bad, I’ll admit.
As to the best once they have been MSTified, I have to go with Mitchell over Manos. Mitchell is a big shaggy dog of a movie, annoying but with its good points. Joel and the bots get in a lot of good jokes about Manos, but the movie is so painful and bad that it’s difficult to watch even while I’m laughing. (For shorts, I love “Robot Rumpus,” which has some great bot moments.) I also like Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Werewolf a lot; they’re some of the best of the Mike years, with movies that aren’t too bad but full of parodyable stuff. (Maybe it’s just something about werewolves that clicks with Mike?) Giant Spider Invasion is also very good – in general, I thought Season 8 (the first on Sci-Fi) had a lot of high points, as if they were freed from the gloom of Comedy’s cancellation and got their hands on a bunch of movies they’d wanted to do for a while.
Look at some of the other Season 8 shows I haven’t mentioned yet: Overdrawn At the Memory Bank, Space Mutiny, Prince of Space, Parts: The Clonus Horror and Riding With Death. That’s a great crop of episodes.
(And that was completely off-topic…)
I have to agree with Space Travelers/Marooned. It’s a decent (if incredibly boring) film.
This Island Earth is a pretty bad flick, and I say this as someone who stole his SDMB nom-de-plume from it. The original book by Raymond F. Jones is actually pretty good, and is back in print at long last. But they jettisoned almost all of it (except for the beginning – which they dumbed down) when they wrote the screenplay.
This Island Earth looks impressive – it looks like 1940s and 1950s sf magazine covers brought to life – but it’s brain-dead. Perfect for MST3K skewering.
I think the best movie they roasted that didn’t deserve it was Mitch.
[sub]Ow!. I was just kidding, stop hitting me.[/sub]
There was at least one time when Joel and the bots walked out of the theater at the end and said something to the effect of, “Well, that one wasn’t too bad, was it?” I think that episode was The Magic Sword, which really was one of the better movies they riffed.
I could sit down and watch prince of space without the dialogue, its not good, but its watchable. I actually remember seeing some of the movies they mocked, of course nothing specific occurs to me now.
But the one I would sit and watch is Samson Vs. the Vampire Women. That movie was hilarious, I didn’t anyone to say anything to mock it, the movie did that all on its own. I’m not claiming its good, just funny.
The current playlist is a lot shorter than the total list of films Sci-Fi did, so presumably they’re merely culling the ones that have rights issues and the others can go ahead.
–Cliffy
Personally, I loved the Gameran (sp?) movies.
Gameran is really neat, he is full of turtle meat…
Overdrawn at the memory bank and the violent years have to be my faves.
I see that Joel & the bots spoofed Phase IV while on KTMA. Which is a shame, because Phase IV is easily the 2001 of killer insect movies.