Jesus christ. I’m nominating this. Parts of it are so unbearable, so embarrassing and overwhelmingly kitschy, that I lost faith in Joel and the bots to make any of it entertaining and just skipped ahead. It’s an utter mystery to me how seriously Cy Roth approached the narrative but it really does seem like there was a belief here that gravitas would magically come forth if there were a cardboard play-pen facsimile of historical epics set to Real Classical Music.
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Marooned is a chore, which is weird because it’s their only Oscar winner.
I generally love the movies they feature though. It took me forever to realize that I’m in the Joel camp because he seems to find camp value in old genre movies, where as Mike went the Rifftrax route because he just needs a “bad” movie to play off of, and to him Night of the Blood Beast and Twilight both fit that bill.
Also Mike says we’re all going to hell for watching the Craft.
I remember the starfighters being absolutely unbearable
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This is one I watched recently and kind of didn’t understand why it was featured on the show. It’s boring – just, not boring in the way Fire Maidens of Outer Space is. It’s going for a brand of realism unusual for a 1960s science fiction movie (if you care to call it SF) but the cinematography and dialogue are fairly dull and even though the scenario is hypothetically tense there’s not much tension communicated. You have to stretch to make it comically criticizable.
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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that there is actually a lot of decent (Devil Fish, Escape 2000, Prince of Space) to amazing (DANGER:DIABOLIK was the final episode of this show ((as of writing)), which is a really odd choice, both to riff and to go out on) genre fare that has unfairly been eviscerated by this show. Yet, I still think Mike is funnier than Joel.
On the subject of this thread, West German Hamlet is insufferable.
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Pearl, Bobo, and Brain Guy are the best mads too…
Oh, I adore Gimlet. I mean, Hamlet. It’s so fucking bleak. And I love that MST3K did Shakespeare.
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I absolutely love Escape 2000. All those Italian Bronx Warrior movies are so good.
Did anyone catch that anniversary reunion thing? TV’s Frank kept walking the super dirty line. He and Trace came off as the surprise MVPs.
During his spot the new guy kept bringing up classic lines meme style. I’m not sure if that was just to fit the occasion or if he’s just a boring nerd. His original stuff was pretty good though.
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i always remember seeing reruns for the Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders episode and even as a kid and all through my adult life rewatching all the MST3Ks, i still think of that movie itself being really meh and terrible and i’m even having a hard time remembering it except for the fact it was one of the “newer” bad movies they played.
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I don’t think I’ve ever made it through Racket Girls. And I like wrestling a lot.
This Island Earth was way too good a movie for The Movie. It Conquered The World was pretty ok aside from the monster, too.
I don’t got beef with people who say the Mike eps are funnier, but the Joel shows have such a cozy vibe, and I’ll take that over jokes.
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Wasn’t that the semi-“lost” episode where for some reason (film rights?) Sci-Fi didn’t run it in sequence and only played it much later, after the show had technically ended?
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Joel and Mike are both good hosts with different things to offer in my book but the transition towards trying to have storylines outside of the movie riffing just got more and more painful. The asides aren’t ever funny or worth watching on their own terms; they’re tedious, interminable, and way way too self-serious (you’d think the nature of the show – poking fun at tedious, interminable, way way too self-serious movies – would make these things obvious, but apparently not). Joel just seemed to want to make silly impractical stuff and show it off like you might during show-and-tell in kindergarten or early elementary school, and that’s what the invention exchanges were.
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The wrestling scenes in Racket Girls go on for way too long, but I appreciate that movie because in its day it was a super seedy fetish movie.
I ended up buying the DVD of MST-less Future War. I love any movie that manages to turn an abandoned warehouse into a dystopian future.
The studio where Hired was shot is local and is now a noise venue.
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I started writing up a bunch of words like this, but not as good. Then I deleted it, cuz I feel like Joel vs Mike has to be the “which Final Fantasy is the best” of TV discussion and I didn’t want to be the one who derailed your good thread.
There is no way I would have gotten into the show had I come across it during the Sci-Fi run. It was just way too…nerdy? For want of a better word. I’m old enough that I watched a good chunk of the Joel run as it happened. I am 100% certain I wouldn’t be alive today had I not come across that show as a kid. And a large part of the appeal was that it felt like an extension of shit like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. An embracement of camp without mocking it. Like, Joel seemed like your cool older step-brother who went to the big city and owned some early B-52s records before he left and maybe kissed boys a few times, and when he came back home for Thanksgiving he’d be real chill and wouldn’t bully you, and his whole demeanor was one big hint letting you know there’s a way better life out there if you just don’t die.
Like, when you were watching that show in 199x there was this feeling like maybe you were the only person watching it. This is total truth – I have consulted other people about this. It felt like it was still on public access. It felt they were broadcasting directly at you. It felt like it was yours. Maybe that was the case with the Mike stuff too, but for a different kind of kid. Maybe that’s how all kids/teens feel about the media they consume. But I am pretty sure kid-me in 201x wouldn’t be able to feel snobby about anything since you can see the view counts on all these on-line videos and audios and blogs and whatnot nowadays.
ANYWAY: remember when is the lowest form of conversation. I’m pretty sure I also never watched all of Red Zone Cuba, though maybe it would be more fun now that I’m older and have some awareness of history and the cold war and shit.
The lyrics for HIRED will run through my head at least once a week until the day I die.
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Totally feeling this comment. Right down to the B-52s.
And as much as I love Coleman Francis for Beast of Yucca Flats, my memory of Red Zone Cuba is pretty hazy.
I know a lot of people have new DVDs and streaming sites and whatnot, but for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, I feel like I have to just stick by my giant box of tapes which were all recorded at 5 am. I did find a Roku channel that actually airs episodes–like they’re playing whether you’re tuned in or not–and that feels like a decent compromise.
Yeah, the Joel years were more feel-good. It was a celebration of bad movies, we were glad these things existed! And it was much more innocent, what with the fan mail and everything. Like others have said here, it felt like you were the only one watching it.
The Mike years got too mean spirited and it sucked a lot of the fun and soul out of the show, though the Mike years has more of my favourite movies and skits. I find Bobo insufferable, though.
As for the actual worst movie, uuummmm I guess I’ll cast another vote for Red Zone Cuba.
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Having only been able to cath MST3K occasionally over all these years, all I can say is that of the two broadcast networks now showing reruns of MST3K (though not at times I can really watch because work), one of them which is sci-fi oriented last week showed Robot Holocaust in the morning and the MST3K of it that night which is fantastic. Hopefully they do that kind of thing more.
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I don’t know about meaner; the Mike era is sharper, wittier. I feel like the Joel-era riffs are mostly enthusiastic cries of “Poopie!”
There are some parts that are just nasty, like when they do the thing at the end of hobgoblins, the transphobic segment in space mutiny, and I felt there were a lot more fat shaming gags and the later in the Mike years.