Mystery Science Theater 3000

[mfunk9786]

Awesome news! Judging by the HD stream on Netflix, this film is capable of looking very, very good.

[matrixschmatrix]

Oh, that's awesome, the one MST that blu actually makes any damn sense for. Though it will bump up from 'buy when it's cheap' to 'must buy' if there's an uncut HD This Island Earth on there.

[matrixschmatrix]

MST Vol. XXIV announced. Titles are

310- FUGITIVE ALIEN
318- STAR FORCE – FUGITIVE ALIEN II
617- THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON
624- SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN

[knives]

I kind of wish they would put on as an extra the none riffed versions of the movies.

[matrixschmatrix]

They did on a few of the early Rhino release. I think they stopped because it turned out they could get separate licensing deals to put out the episodes without having access to the movies themselves, and the studios started sitting on the movies pretty hard during the DVD boom.

[knives]

That sucks, but is understandable.

[manicsounds]

MediumRare Entertainment have announced the UK home entertainment release of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie on 11 June 2012. The big screen version of the comedy sci-fi TV series comes to DVD and Blu-ray with extras including a making-of, trailer and stills gallery.

Volume XXIV specs:
-Fugitive Alien
-Star Force: Fugitive Alien II
-The Sword And The Dragon
-Samson Vs. The Vampire Women

Introductions by Japanese cinema historian August Ragone
You Asked For It: Sandy Frank Speaks!
MST Hour Wraps
Life After MST3K: Frank Conniff
MST3K Shorts: Snow Thrills & A Date With Your Family
Lucha Gringo: K. Gordon Murray Meets Santo
Four exclusive Mini-Posters by artist Steve Vance

[manicsounds]

dvdactive review of the movie on Blu-ray

[matrixschmatrix]

Episodes for set XXV announced.

110- ROBOT HOLOCAUST with short: COMMANDO CODY PT 9 (partial)
508- OPERATION KID BROTHER (aka OPERATION DOUBLE 007; they couldn’t get the rights under the other name)
615- KITTEN WITH A WHIP
801- REVENGE OF THE CREATURE

Solid one- that's probably the best episode of the first season, and all four are good episodes. Looking forward to the features, though.

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

This set is amazing because it features films licensed from both MGM and Universal (not only that, one of Universal's most recognizable properties!). Clearly almost anything is game for release at this point, which was unthinkable just 5 years ago.

Still waiting for my namesake to make its way to dvd, though...

[tarpilot]

I've said before that I take no great pleasure in watching a bad film and deriving amusement from mockery of its perceived awfulness (one of the reasons I co-sign with Rosenbaum's unpopular anti-MST3K position)

Was going through the thread again and saw this, which I generally agree with, so I thought I'd post Chris Fujiwara's wonderful polemic on the subject (it's nowhere online anymore; I had to track it down in an old 4chan archive where it was apparently a meme to attribute it to Paul Thomas Anderson!):

One sign of the death of the cinema is the zombie-like persistence of the "bad film" cult that rose to public-nuisance status in the late Seventies, feasting noisily on things like the Ed Wood films. From the start, this was just an especially obnoxious manifestation of a general intolerance for films that try to free themselves from the dominant mode of cinematic realism.Thus it's but a short step from sneering at the budgetary deficiencies of Plan 9 from Outer Space to scoffing at, e.g.:

1. Any non-state-of-the-art special effects and visions of the future, even though these things date themselves anyway from period to period, and future generations may find Independence Day less "realistic" (whatever that will mean) than the 1956 aliens-smash-the-state programmer of which it is an unacknowledged remake, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers;

2. Overtly non-realistic visual and acting style used for expressive purposes, as in Soviet master S. M. Eisenstein's outrageous Ivan the Terrible, which uses actors' bodies as components of a delirious architecture;

3. "Implausible" plots like Vertigo—as if we're supposed to ignore the holes in the stories Hollywood tells now just because men don't wear ties to walk around the block and no shot lasts longer than 1.4 seconds—and "banal" ones like the potboiler-like thriller stories from which Orson Welles made his superb Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil—as if Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes working together could have come up with an original story or cared less about it;

4. Mythic dialogue and situations like those in Rebel Without a Cause and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, whose emotional power intimidates audiences lulled by the rituals of appeasement enacted in nighttime soap operas.

The irrelevant yocks that frequently greet the films just mentioned when they show at a revival house or a college auditorium are the voice of a viewing public paralyzed by fear, desperate for any externalization of a comforting "distance" to protect them from recognizing their own anxieties writ large in the image unspooling from the past not dead enough to suit them.

Such a distance is abundantly provided by the robots on the cable (now also broadcast-syndicated) show Mystery Science Theater 3000, devoted to stomping on "the worst movies ever made." The big gimmick (the "plot" behind which isn't worth explaining) is that these robots are sitting in a mockup of a theater and we the lucky TV audience are watching the films from over their shoulders and ostensibly being entertained by their scornful running commentary. The numbing, irritating effect thus achieved is not unlike watching a Josef vos Sternberg film in the eighth row of the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square the week after midterms. What is most amazing about MST3K (the acronyum preferred by the show's adherents) is that the robots can blather on for an hour without saying anything witty or interesting—and people can't get enough of them! (As of this writing, MST3K, which has been in hiatus, is due to be "revived" in new episodes [it was—ed]; meanwhile, the repeats are still shown contantly on Comedy Central.)

(A similar dead-end sensation can be found by watching what is supposed to pass for heady, unsettling stuff in recent cinema. I refer to the ubiquitous superficial irony that has become the stock-in-trade of Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers, and many less skillful directors, the maddening profusion of brain-eating detail in one of Terry Gilliam's nasty conceits, and the pompous theatricalized events of Peter Greenaway.)

I'd like one of the misties (in-group code for the shows devotees) to explain to me (a letter in care of the editor of this magazine will do, thanks) why if these mechanical creeps are such Oscar Wildes don't they take on something just a bit juicier, a tad more worthy of their withering satire than The Beasts of Yucca Flats. What about, say, Fellini's La Dolce Vita? There's a film that has everything the robots love to disdain: pretentious dialogue, long dull stretches, and people with funny clothes and big asses. Obviously, the contempt for cinema, history, and the audience that fuels the whole robot insanity can be applied to low-budget horror and exploitation filmmaking.

MST3K isn't really about "bad movies" anyway. This is proved by the choice of 1955's This Island Earth as the film basted in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, the recent theatrical spinoff from the show. In a kinder, gentler era of genre film appreciation (whose tone was set by Forrest J. Ackerman, the benevolent editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland), This Island Earth was regarded as a classic. Whatever you think about the film, to rank it one of "the worst movies ever made" is clearly absurd. Of the 30,000 features released in the United States from 1915 to 1960, This Island Earth is probably in the top 3,000-4,000. Considering that countless films have been made since (most of them bad in ways that could scarcely have been imagined in 1955), I would guess that This Island Earth is sitting comfortably in the top five percent of all films.

(That's right, I'm saying that 19 out of every 20 films are worse than This Island Earth. Prove me wrong.) Why pick on This Island Earth? To raise the intellectual stakes a little ? Probably not—it's doubtful that many members of the intended audience of MST3K:TM had ever heard of This Island Earth or could distinguish it from Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Anyway, the level of humor in MST3K:TM is preposterously low: roughly a third of the robots' remarks are alarmed, sniggering references to homosexuality, putdowns of the hero's sidekick's virility, and other manifestations of male adolescent sex-role anxiety. (Another third are mostly farting and toilet jokes, which possibly belong to the same category.) In its treatment of Faith Domergue's sexy scientist, This Island Earth may betray what we now recognize as the sexism of the Fifties, but what are we to make of the fact that the woman aboard the MST3K spacceship is a maternal vacuum cleaner with no arms? MST3K is obsessed with sexuality and afraid of it. The absence of women highlights the show's treehouse psychology.

MST3K's use of robots for heroes is no accident. MST3K's sarcasm at the expense of the past is techno-elitism at its most self-congratulatory, asserting mastery through acts of cultural misrecognition. Perhaps the reason the MST3K people despise so much that they choose to mount an attack on it in the nation's theaters is that they're disturbed by the way the film reduces the unimaginable future of interplanetary communication to the level of an erector set. MST3K's creators, who resemble science nerds using their first grant as an excuse to lord it over their former peers, would probably be thrilled to be drafted for a totalitarian planet's nuclear program (the fate of the protagonists of This Island Earth).

The robots on the bottom of the MST3K screen are scotomas that indicate a more fundamental visual disturbance, the inability to see anything in films except the same things over and over again: hot women, men who match masculine stereotypes either too well or not enough, and supposed defects of representation (too slow, too cheap-looking, not realistic enough, etc.).

Then there's The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. Just as MST3K represents a depressing low in "golden turkey" television, TMST3KACEG marks a stupefying new milestone in "golden turkey" film books by having no information about any film, apart from short, inaccurate plot summaries. Instead, the book recounts supposed highlights of the robots' parasitic interventions and explains how the robots behind the robots "strived to make [the films] funny." Readers are thus treated to 172 large-format, haute-design pages filled with pointless descriptions of robot skits and unreadable writing-room anecdotes ("I recall this episode as being the first time we decided to write sketches having nothing to do with the movie..." —from the section on Monster a-Go-Go). Nauseatingly self-important, TMST3KACEG leaves wide open the door I wish had remained shut; I expect to see a new wave of film books that focus on the writers' bus rides home.

The book exposes the cluelessness behind the smug sensibility evident on the show. MST3K writer Kevin Murphy proclaims reverence for Frank Zappa (and in real goo-talk yet: "When all his tapes are played and his music is studied, I'm guessing he'll go down as one of the finest composers and performers of the century," p. 109) but makes fun of an angry viewer for wanting to hear Eddie Cochran in Untamed Youth without robots talking (p.16). It makes sense that someone who thinks it's cool to put robots in front of The Killer Shrews would have no problem revealing in print that he thinks the composer of "Don't Eat Yellow Snow" and "St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast" is a greater artist than the man who recorded "Something Else" and "Nervous Breakdown."

There's nothing new about MST3K—it's just a tasteless crossbreeding of the tradition of the TV horror host (Zacherle, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, Elvira) and the "Golden Turkey" way of misreading films that was codified by inane right-wing reviewer Michael Medved and his equally vapid brother, Harry. All this comes indirectly from the surrealists, but the MST3K robots, following their idols the Medveds rather than André Breton and Ado Kyrou, deny and trivialize the power of strange films to disturb, confuse, and give hope.

It's time the "bad movies" movement died a quiet death. This goes not just for MST3K-style vendettas against low-budget films but also for the would-be more sophisticated "camp" onslaught against glossy major productions like "Valley of the Dolls" and the Delmer Daves-Troy Donahue cycle (A Summer Place, Susan Slade, etc.). Of the many possible ways of enjoying a film that deviates from standard criteria of adequacy, the least interesting is to treat it as a source of unintentional humor. Robot Monster, The Sinister Urge, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Hercules and the Captive Women, It Conquered the World, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Aleksandr Ptushko's fantasy films—"bad" as some of these films may be (although many of them are, in fact, "good"), all of them will be admired long after their potential for robot humor has been exhausted (i.e., starting right now) for the unique aesthetic experiences , strange personal visions, and precious cultural documentation they offer.

Someone should invent MST3K glasses with the robots printed on the bottoms of the lenses for people to wear to movies, except that it would be unnecessary, since the robots are already built into the cognitive and aesthetic faculties of an entire culture. MST3K assumes its audienes are so impotent that they can't enjoy even "bad" films first hand but can derive pleasure from them only over the shoulders of robots.

[domino harvey]

I see the applauding smilie is no longer with us, but that justifies a resurrection. What a great find from a great mind, thanks so much for sharing!

[knives]

Yeah, even in the places where I disagree with him (and that disagreement seems limited to the worth of certain artists) I find his points to be extremely correct and a lesson that many people should learn. Though I bet most of the people that are cuddled in such a way as outlined in the essay are too deliberately stupid to take its actual message correctly.

[matrixschmatrix]

That's because its actual message is couched in an alarmingly false premise, viz that the joy people derive from MST derives from a hatred of the movies they're watching. Any number of people who love movies, particularly stylized, low budget, or otherwise weird ones, come to it out of a place of love for MST, because the show instills a fraternal good will for the rhythms and attitudes of old, low budget, sometimes kind of dumb movies- and the vast majority of them would never be seen by the vast majority of people were it not for the show.

It also seems shockingly obtuse to ignore (and, indeed, mock) the low budget nature of the show itself in assuming that the people and fans of the show are genuinely contemptuous of all but the slickest of Hollywood product: everything in it is hand made on the cheap, just like the movies we're watching, because that's fun and it's an indicator that it doesn't take itself all that seriously. Likewise, the jokes about the movies are rarely all that nasty, because a lot of the movies are a pretty good time- and MST fans are generally the ones who seek out unriffed versions of otherwise forgotten movies like Zaat! (known as The Blood Waters of Dr. Z on the show) and Manos. The actors from the movies would show up at the cons and be treated like real celebrities, often for the first time in their lives, without a hint of irony or disdain. It's a show that developed a community because it comes very much from a place of love and affection.

The point that they never mocked high tone movies like La Dolce Vita seems intentionally obtuse as well- the show was severely limited by the catalog it had available. The iteration that isn't, Rifftrax, focuses heavily on big Hollywood product, and part of why it loses something for me is that it's perfectly obvious that the affection that was part of the earlier project often isn't part of Rifftrax, as they often riff movies that are impossible to feel any affection for. They also riffed movies that both they and their audience almost universally think to be great- not only Casablanca, but the entire Star Wars series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Nolan Batman movies, etc. Because it was never particularly about mocking a movie for being bad, it was about watching it with friends.

I also really don't understand why both Rosenbaum and Fujiwara accuse MST the Movie of making a lot of homophobic jokes, because I seriously can't recall any and I've watched that thing like half a dozen times- unless one is assuming that any joke about relationships between men are automatically homophobic, which seems unjustifiable. I also don't really understand why these two film critics should so hate the idea of movies that are watched in a specifically critical mode, with a distance cultivated between the viewer and the fiction of the film- the same effect that any commentary has, incidentally. I think for many MST fans, the show becomes a way of seeing the building blocks of movies, the stuff they're made out of, in a way that a lifetime of watching more mainstream cinema (where the cracks never show, and one often doesn't get a moment to step back from what one is watching) never invites- which was actually a conscious project on the part of Kevin Murphy, who is a pretty serious filmgoer himself.

I also don't really understand how the attacks on Frank Zappa, Terry Gilliam, and others further the point of the piece at all, particularly in a piece that seems to be about how cruel it is to attack outsiders and little guys. I think it's worth pointing out that David Kalat, a critic whom I think of as being an enormous defender and promoter of outsiders and little guys, is an enormous MST fan- so obviously, it doesn't turn automatically on any kind of disdain for the material.

[knives]

You and I may not enjoy MST3K for those reasons, but most of the people I know who take part in this 'irony' do so in the exact way that he outlines. I don't think his target is necessarily MST3K though he clearly has problems with the humour of the show. His issue seems to stand from the perversion of camp values into some sort of hetero-normative jock fraternity. The sort of people who would (and I've met such people) look at Vertigo and dismiss the whole because of an odd plot thread coming loose or the like. To give a very real example some years ago I met someone who said that Citizen Kane was a horrible movie because no one was in the room to hear rosebud. That's insane and comes from the same place as the worst of the MST3K followers who label films with the otherer of 'bad' and brutalize said film for not conforming to what they expect out of a film. Mike Nelson who was always one of the biggest creative forces on the show has shown time and again to not really understand film as an art and is serious in why he does this. I see no affection from him (though there are other members who I do see intelligence and affection from). So the point is not necessarily that MST3K is bad, but that the segment of its audience, which is a majority, who take the most exclusive stance when watching is bad.

[swo17]

I mentioned to a friend the other day that I enjoy many of these "bad movies" on their own terms, and why doesn't MST3K tackle more serious-minded films, which I would think in many cases would offer even more fertile ground for mockery, and he said that's what RiffTrax is for. (Presumably this is a new development since Fujiwara's write-up? In any event, I understand that the reason MST3K focused on low-budget films was that that was all they could afford to license.) But then he proceeded to show me some of the opening scenes from MST3K's take on Manos: The Hands of Fate, providing some of his own commentary: "What a terribly framed shot." "Just more scenes of driving--what were these guys thinking?" And that sort of approach to taking in a film of any caliber just doesn't appeal to me at all.

My question is: On what level should we appreciate films that are objectively poorly made? For example, I love something like Robot Monster to death, in great part for the very qualities that prompt ridicule of it (and not really for its insight into Phil Tucker's worldview), but I don't find anything particularly noteworthy about MST3K's skewering of it, and if you watch it with me and see fit to make fun of it from a place of superiority, or with scorn for it, I'm going to smack you across the face. I guess when I watch the film, it's not all that different from when the MST3K robots do it, except that instead of cracking jokes all the way through, I'm laughing my head off. And I guess I don't relate much to their viewing of the film when they don't seem capable of even breaking a smile, or at least admitting "Alright, that was pretty funny."

[knives]

Couldn't have said it better myself. I try to watch films with the utmost sincerity, but when a film invites to laugh I'm going to laugh. From some one wrongfully insulted like Ed Wood to a rightful critical darling like Paul Morrissey there are elements which seem rather revolutionary or at least fascinatingly odd (Wood must have really love The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), but at the same time the films seem to accidentally or purposefully play up a sort of humour and it can be hard not to laugh (for another Wood example I refuse to believe he wasn't chuckling when he curtailed his anti-war speech for the stupid one in Plan 9, an act of comedy which I believe puts the film ahead of The Day the Earth Stood Still). So being honest to your emotional response should never be seen as a negative, but thinking that emotional response makes a film 'bad' or worth ridiculing seems against the entire purpose of art.

[HerrSchreck]

I have pretty strong feelings on this subject .... And I guess they could be summed up by the following statistic:

Many of the films that MSTk3000 makes fun of have been watched by me countless numbers of times. And I haven't been able to get through a single episode of MSTk 3000.

[matrixschmatrix]

I can certainly understand how annoying the kneejerk anything-different-is-lame superior attitude some people get is, and there are few things more infuriating than a dismissal that comes from a place of bad faith and poor understanding (which, ironically, is why I found this article so irritating)- and obviously, the fact that I think MST is a good show doesn't mean it has to be everyone's cup of tea, nor that there aren't fans who are dicks.

I found the piece Kalat wrote about it, which I think assumes the purpose of the show, apart from being entertaining in itself, is to serve as an way to get viewers to be comfortable with different kinds of movies, a set of cinematic training wheels. I think it does more than that, but I do think it's a point well made, and possibly a reason that people who got into movies through other sources don't always respond as well.

Oh, and also, obviously there's a difference between a show people come to specifically for jokes made over a movie and people just blurting things out in a movie theater, which is annoying as hell.

[swo17]

Blurting out bon mots during a movie is a fine art, which should only be attempted maybe once or twice over the course of any given feature-length film, and only in familiar company. I like to think I'm pretty good at it.

[domino harvey]

Talking during a movie should be done never

[Murdoch]

This discussion immediately brought to mind George Costanza's "That's gotta hurt!" line at Blimp: The Hindenburg Story being upstaged by the guy with a laser pointer.

To me it seems as if criticizing MST for having some sort of contempt for what the hosts watched is a case of taking it at face value, when really there was a great appreciation. I recall one extra on a set where the cast of one of the films was brought in to discuss the production and there was a genuine interest in the creation of the film shown by the inclusion of this interview as the subjects recollected their experiences. I've never been one to judge something based on the audience it holds, and I think doing that with MST is to turn it into some vindictive thing which it wasn't.

I hate the general attitude of contempt so many viewers nowadays have for the old, still I don't hold films as anything other than entertainment to be exalted or criticized as the viewer sees fit so I've never really understood why MST rubs so many cinephiles the wrong way.

[HerrSchreck]

For me the primary distaste is this:

When I watch and fully engage with a film, I become immersed and totally lose sight of my surroundings. A show like MSTK, which runs two planes of completely dislocated threads of activity and narrative one on the other , winds up breaking the spell of both, leaving me unable to enjoy either the film or the robot chatter.

That said, there are self reflexive vehicles that aim to deliberately evict you from that kind of immersion, to wake you up and jar you from what is perceived to be an unenlightened disposition.

I don't take the matter so seriously where I rage over MSTK or something, but I really have always gotten a lot of pleasure out of the films they roast... and even though I see the fun in having a time mimicking the weirdness in say ROBOT MONSTER, that's something I delight in afterwards, as for example David and I have done for years here. I just don't like folks talking over a film I'm watching.

[mfunk9786]

It does tend to work better for me with uniquely ill-conceived and awful films than classic-ish sci-fi. If you were feeling generous enough to give the show another try, Schreck, an episode like Werewolf, Time Chasers, or especially Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders might be more up your alley than something like Robot Monster, where you may have some built-in affection for the film or the era. And their riffing on educational shorts is always wonderful.

[knives]

I actually dislike the educational short riffing especially for a lot of the reasons Shreck outlined. There's no reason to tease an underrated fellow like Herk Harvey. Also I supremely doubt that even with the modern films the reaction would be much different. It certainly isn't for me.