In light of the “Things You Shouldn’t Say at a viewing of The Passion”, I wonder if there is a movie that you shouldn’t or couldn’t try to give the MST3K treatment to.
When I saw the thread title, the first thing that popped into my head was the Passion. Following the same theme, I would add Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful.
I’m part of an online MiSTing group. We “riffed” the original Of Mice and Men once.
You can do ANYTHING with enough willpower, and a twisted sense of humor.
I think Passion would make one of the funniest MSTs ever. The funniness of everything would be amplified exponentially by the sheer wrongness of making jokes. Or maybe that’s just me.
Schindler’s List is good, though. Monster comes to mind as well.
I remember reading a particularly infuriating review of the MST3K movie by Jonathan Rosenbaum, which rapped BBI on the knuckles for taking the piss out of the worthy This Island Earth, when if they’d had any guts they would’ve done something like … Schindler’s List. Of course, Rosenbaum hates Spielberg to the point of derangement, but still, it did so get under my skin.
While the OP seemed to be wondering if some movies’ subject matter made them too sensitive to ridicule, I think a lot of movies are just too mediocre to make good MST fodder: not really good, not really bad, just sort of laying there on the screen. BBI watched thousands of movies in the course of producing 10 seasons (as many as 10,000, I think I read somewhere); most were spared ridicule just because they weren’t interesting enough. Whereas something like Manos, we can all agree, is extremely interesting.
It’d be hard to do something that’s already a comedy, especially one that makes fun of itself the entire time. I’m thinking of “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” since I just saw the first half again earlier tonight.
If they had gotten the rights to it…hoboy!
I think most stupid comedies would be out. Not because they aren’t worthy of it, but because they’re already comedies, that aren’t taking themselves seriously.
That’s half the fun of it.
Personally, I always wished they could get a hold of some of the employee training videos we used to have to watch at KrapMart. They were practically begging to be MSTied.
I think the MST3K production of Hamlet demonstrated that there are some things that not even the Misties could handle. They got off a few zingers, but the plodding pace and wooden acting left them floundering a lot of the time. There was just too much of it. Now, Robot Monster and Manos Hand of Fate weren’t exactly zippy films with topnotch acting, but they Mistied just fine. But they also had that “just oozed out of the subconscious of somebody naive who has Issues” feel to them, whereas Hamlet is pretty darned mundane in comparison.
Sometimes it’s really surprising as to what films can be MSTied effectively. The funniest episode I ever saw was one in which they gave the full treatment to a couple of 1950s era educational films.
I remember reading in the MST 3K episode guide that the writers, after having viewed a film (Sidehackers) that contained a surprisingly graphic scene of the hero’s girlfriend being raped/murdered, were so stunned by the sequence that writing jokes became almost impossible. BBI did end up completing the episode but only after the scene was cut and the movie rendered even more incoherent. From that experience, I’m guessing that any film, no matter how bad or inept, that contains an intense and brutally realistic scene depicting rape would be too much for the MST 3K treatment. The same is also true for any other movies dealing with such proven comedy-killers like child molestation or (Jonathan Rosenbaum notwithstanding) the Holocaust.
Schindler’s List was an inept, maudlin, mawkish and cartoonish depiction of the holocaust. I think an MST3K treatment would be hilarious.
Seems to me it would be hardest to do with comedies like Blazing Saddles or Airplane! which are already breaking the fourth wall.
Was not. 
Dr. Rieux is right!
Torgo Rieux is right!
Seriously, why couldn’t BBI go ahead and MST3K Shindler’s List or anything else… and then release just the commentary. Boot up your computer, slide the original DVD in the drive, and let it play behind Mike and the 'bots. As far as I can tell, this would be perfectly legal.
I’ve thought about that for a while. *Killer *idea for a web community.
No.
Next question.
You certainly could give the MST 3K treatment to any movie. However, the question of whether the result would be funny is another matter.
:rolleyes:
Whaaa? Record commentary tracks to movies on your computer in .mp3 format, and upload them to the site. Maybe some kind of freeware player to synch them up. Imagine being able to listen to Eve run commentary on silent movies.