As most of you know, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett from MST3K have launched a new project called “The Film Crew”, continuing the MST bad-film-riffing tradition. Their first release is an early '60s sexploitation film called Hollywood After Dark starring a young (sort of) Rue McClanahan. I watched it a few days ago and would like to share my impressions as well as solicit yours.
The film itself is as bad as anything Coleman Francis ever foist upon us, except at a lower budget (!). I thought the whole first scene in the junkyard, riff-wise, was as good as anything they’d ever done. Unfortunately, the humor seemed to drop off a bit as the film went on, but it was still great to hear the old voices again.
My biggest complaint are the sketches. They just don’t seem as funny without the robots. Crow and Tom made the dumb jokes work. Without them, the sketches play like just three guys doing dumb stuff.
Still, I did enjoy it and will be ordering Killers From Space soon.
I’ll give them a chance to work on the sketches. The movie commentary is great, so I’ll put up with weak spots.
I do miss the bots though. In the last MST3K, we see the bots and Mike in a shabby apartment watching crap movies. It would have been cool if they’d just continued with that premise, but oh well.
I like this better than the rifftrax idea. Funny stuff, but a hassle to keep synced, especially if a rental dvd has unexpectedly pauses from scratches and wear.