My pick is Kitten With a Whip, starring Ann-Margret and John Forsyth. It’s not a great movie by any standards, but the acting was decent as these things go, and despite the absolute stupidity of the main character (Forsyth), there was a certain amount of suspense. It seemed like the kind of movie you could watch and enjoy if it turned up on TCM on a Saturday afternoon.
Any others that might be entertaining on their own merits without Mike and the bots to lend a hand?
Wow … I came across Kitten With a Whip one night on AMC, and turned the freakin’ thing off after 10 minutes. Different strokes I guess. (Ha ha.)
I’m gonna risk heresy and say Mitchell. Sure, Joe Don Baker takes the concept of “anti-hero” far past the point of acceptability, but that notwithstanding, it’s perfectly tolerable mid-70s drive-in fare, with an enjoyable performance by Martin Balsam. And the scene with the Adam Rich-alike is almost worth the price of admission by itself.
Kitten With A Whip is actually the one I’d pick, too. And I’ve seen them ALL!
I really like “Alien from LA”.
I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just weird.
The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. Something gets lost in translation, I’m sure it was a fine film by Russo-Finnish standards.
Besides that, it’s just too goofy and fun to be horribly bad.
This Island Earth, which they lampooned for their theatrical release, actually isn’t a half bad piece of 50s Sci-fi. Not great, but far from terrible, and watchable without looking for unintentional humor.
MST3K did Kitten with a Whip? Joe Bob Briggs’ new book, Profoundly Erotic, has a chapter on it – he makes me wish it were out on DVD (or that I hadn’t gotten rid of my VCR). Because I’m not going to watch it for the first time in an MST3K version, or, for that matter, on AMC.
Anyway, I nominate Diabolik, which is by no means a great movie, but it’s kind of enjoyable in a glossy '60s Eurotrash sort of way.
I quite like the Russian/Finnish fairy tales. My Russian SIL recommends them for me, and my kids watch them happily. It’s fun to see these lavish productions of old fairy tales–if you watch them straight and with good subtitles, it’s nice. (Sinbad’s magic voyage, or whatever it was called, was not in fact about Sinbad at all; it was a totally different Russian story, and IIRC they chopped it all up. But I don’t remember very well.)
But then I will happily watch almost any B-movie without the bots. There are plenty of MST selections that I would watch late at night. Especially the giant bug ones.
Marooned. (Aka Space Travelers)
What do I win?
Jack Frost has a good heart, but is just cracked out.
I agree with Ranchouth about Marooned/Space Travellers. It was, as the MST3K crew admitted, the only movie they lampooned to win an Academy Award (for special effects, but still…). It’s based on a good book by Martin Caidin (Test Pilot turned SF writer who also gave us “Cyborg”, which became The Six Million Dollar Man, but I forgive him) that wasn’t as botched up as it could have been when transferred to film.
This Island Earth, although a fond memory as a major 1950s SF film, was bollixed up far worse. Raymond F. Jones’ book was pretty good (I lifted my nom de SDMB from it), but they dumbed it down unforgivably for the flick, which deserved all it got at MST3K’s hands, and more.
I don’t know how bad the version of Hamlet they riffed on was – I never saw it, but it has to be in the running.
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, despite being PBS, deserves the drubbing it got. I’d read the original story, and was really annoyed at what they did to it. Even putting Raul Julia in it didn’t help.
I grew up on The Sword and the Dragon, by the way, the one of the Finno-Russian troika that had Ilya Mouromets and the three-headed dragon and thw wind demon, but I never saw the other two MST3K covered before the show. In fact, I haven’t seen the MST’ed version of TSaTD, and I’d dearly like to. It wasn’t all bad – I have a copy of the original onm videotape.
I don’t care what they say, I think Lawrence of Arabia was a pretty good flic. A little long, but good.
I may even admit to stumbling across it one day on cable when I was young…before it’d been MST’d.
-Joe
The Sword and the Dragon is one of my favorite episodes.
Least bad, least bad…
Magic Sword is not atrocious. I could watch it un-MSTed. Ditto, This Island Earth. Revenge of the Creature - I recall it as very adequate. Marooned/Space Travelers … eh. I’d prefer some of these others, despite the “gravitas” of that one.
I agree that Space Travelers wasn’t that bad, and the two Godzilla movies they showed weren’t the worst of the series either, though I’ve always been a fan of Japanese monster movies and the campiness is par for the course. I’ve happily watched them without MSTing.
I also think Hamlet wasn’t really that bad, considering it was a German made-for-TV production that was cut down to fit the two-hour format (the full play runs on the order of 4 hours). I found that episode seemed to be more an exercise in MSTing Shakespeare.
Gorgo didn’t seem all that bad. Neither did **The Deadly Bees ** or The Projected Man. The riffing was great, but it seemed that they picked these movies more to make fun of the Brits rather than for being truly bad flicks. Was Five Million Years To Earth ever an episode?
Nope.
I like the 1950s giant monster drive-in episodes. King Dinosaur, Earth Vs. the Spider, The Giant Gila Monster, that sort of thing. I would happily watch them un-MST’d if I ran across them one Saturday afternoon.
I got an almost-complete collection of MST for Christmas last year, and I’m working my way through the fourth season now. Those space episodes? For the most part DULL DULL DULL. But the Gamera movies were solid gold.
Me too. I even taped it. Sure I was only something like 9 or 10 at the time but I still liked it.