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10 Movies I Want To See On MST3k
🕑 Added 2021-08-12 06:23:36 +0000 UTCIt’s been one of the oldest clichés of movie-viewers for multiple generations at this point: “Oh man, that movie was so bad, it ought to be on Mystery Science Theater 3000!” Even among people who’ve never actually watched MST3k, most fans of trashy genre film at least know what that jumble of letters and a number means when it’s brought up. This movie’s so bad, it deserves to have people make fun of it. There’s more to it that that, of course. Any gang of dumb kids who thought some random movie was goofy and decided they were hilarious enough to do a live riff of it will quickly discover… well, the FIRST thing they discover is that they aren’t as funny as they thought. But the SECOND thing they discover is just how many movies out there aren’t well suited to a comedic commentary track. Obviously, some movies aren’t really BAD, they’re just kinda weird. Sometimes that can still lend itself to an hour and a half of constant jokes, but other times talking over it just turns out to be distracting. Other times, a movie IS bad, but it’s so drearily depressingly bad that they overpower ant attempts to throw comedy at it. Conversely, some movies are just so densely packed with dialog or action or STUFF going on that riffers can’t get a word in edgewise. There’s a fine art to figuring out what movies are just bad enough to be funny and just spacious enough to permit good riffing, and that’s BEFORE you have to sit down and actually write some good jokes. In a post-YouTuber world, where young audiences have had a chance to get used to the ability to edit out boring bits and pause everything while the personality delivers the joke, there’s probably more people than ever who don’t realize what a challenge it is to do a full-length commentary and do it well.
Do I think I’ve mastered that strange, mystic art of discerning riffable movies? Nope, not even close. Anyone who follows my convention comics knows I don’t even consider myself a good panel host, let alone a stand up comic. But this is The Internet, where I don't HAVE to know how to do something myself to demand that others do it for me! And hey, I certainly have seen a lot of weird, bad, seemingly-riffable movies in my time. Why NOT recommend a few? I’ll admit that a few of these do rub up against some of those “probably not that riffable” problems I just mentioned above, not to mention a few other reasons why the MST3k crew in particular probably wouldn’t pick them. Still, from my standpoint as an untrained observer, I think these would at least be worth trying. If nothing else, YOU could try one or two of them at your next Bad Movie Night and tell me how it goes.
And just to cover my own butt on this, I’m not in anyway positive that every single movie here has actually never been riffed by any incarnation of MST3k or its offshoots. I’m PRETTY sure they haven’t, but my memory about Netflix-era MST3k is hazy, and and there’s vast swaths of Rifftrax I don’t know about. So if you’ve got the urge to point out that Cinematic Titanic actually did one of these movies at some live show or something like that, fine. I preemptively concede. You rule and I drool. The point is, I’VE never seen a quality riff of any of these movies, even though I’d like to. Okay? Good. Let’s get going:
10. The Brain Machine
Right away, I need to specify that this is the 1977 movie called “The Brain Machine,” not the 1955 one. In many ways, The Brain Machine is of a piece with many of the other ‘70s drive in schlock MST3k lampooned over the years, although without a guy in a monster suit lumbering around a la Track of the Moon Beast or the like. If anything, this paranoid conspiracy thriller about top secret mind control experiments has a very similar mood to Parts: The Clonus Horror, only even more clunky and low budget. Not only does The Brain Machine have a thick, sweaty layer of ‘70s kitsch all over everything to inspire some quality Boomer jokes, but it’s also a total downer. Like, the good kind of downer, from a riffing sense. The kind that allows the audience to get mat at the movie. Now, it’s not exactly action-packed, but I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of dreary that kills off the comedy brain cells. Quite the opposite, actually. Again, I’d say The Brain Machine is the kind of movie that seems hell bent of ticking off its own audience, and a nice combative attitude between viewer and movie almost always breeds good riffing. Just ask Sandy Frank or Coleman Francis!
9. Terror Beneath The Sea
There’s no way I could make a list of movies that deserve the MST3k treatment and NOT mention some ‘60s-era Japanese movies. I mean, come on! Terror Beneath the Sea has all the classic Japanese scifi movie tropes too, short of a giant monster knocking over some buildings. No, in this case the titular Terror is a bunch of fishmen who desperately wish they were in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The important thing is that, regardless of size, there are cheesy, unconvincing monster costumes. This is always riffing gold. As choice as the effects in Terror Beneath the Sea are, though, the most riffable part has got to be the acting. Everyone loves to pick on the Japanese cast getting horribly dubbed over by English actors, but Terror Beneath the Sea is a tour de force of the FAR funnier flipside of that process: white people who were clearly only cast because they “looked American” trying and failing to act. The overacting of the token Westerners in this movie is truly a sight to behold, and it says something when a movie boasts gun-wielding gillmen AREN’T the thing I remember the most.
8. Rat Pfink a Boo Boo
It’s the movie by Ray Dennis Steckler, of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies infamy. That alone makes it worth at least a glance from MST3k. But while that previous connection could also apply to several other Steckler movies (Hey, Wild Guitar also has Arch Hall Jr. from Eegah!), I think Rat Pfink a Boo Boo is the one that would best stand up to a good riffing, if only for the bugnut insane final act. To spoil the big twist (even though it’s the only reason anybody ever talks about the movie), Rat Pfink a Boo Boo started filming as a serious crime thriller about a murderous gang that kidnaps a rock star’s girlfriend. But then, halfway through production, Steckler decided that was boring and turned the climax into a campy Batman spoof. It’s one of the most disorienting, misguided, bewildering tonal shifts I’ve EVER seen in a movie. …well, okay, I guess something like Audition has Rat Pfink beat, but that’s the kind of heavy hitter it takes to make a more drastic hard left than this film. A team of qualified riffers could have a LOT of fun playing up how disorienting the shift is. Admittedly, the roughness of the early scenes might rub the MST3k crew the wrong way, seeing as how they drastically edited Sidehackers to remove the same kind of content. But then, they still did an episode on Sidehackers anyway, so I think they could make Rat Pfink a Boo Boo work.
7. The Werewolf of Washington
Speaking of movies that recklessly change what they’re about without warning, Werewolf of Washington is what happens when you can’t decide if you want to make a modern day werewolf horror movie or a Nixon-inspired political satire, so you just do both. Oh, and you also throw the little person from Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks in as a mad scientist for a few minutes, despite the movie in no way being science fiction. Yeah, it’s that kind of hodge podge of a movie, as inconsistent tonally as it is thematically, frantically grabbing at a million different genre tropes without actually managing to nail any of them. Oh, and it stars Dean Stockwell as the titular werewolf, so there’s also a million Quantum Leap jokes just waiting to be told as well! Full disclosure: this is the one movie on this list that I’ve actually seen other people do a full riff of already, but that just makes me want to see the grand masters of the craft have a shot at it. It’s the perfect election year special!
6. Prophecies of Nostradamus
More crazy Japanese scifi, and in this case I have to acknowledge there’s one very serious Real World reason why MST3k will probably never touch it: it’s a Toho movie. After that whole debacle with those Godzilla movies, I can’t imagine they’ll ever try to tangle with Toho again, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Toho THEMSELVES have largely swept the film under the rug over accusations in insensitivity… which is too bad, because Prophecies of Nostradamus is so INSANE that it really deserves to be seen. An apocalyptic disaster movie that’s only a step or two behind Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster in terms of trippy strangeness, this film that was probably already an incomprehensible mess of stock footage from previous movies BEFORE the English dub started editing things. In it’s final form, this is one of those movies where a good team of riffers could have a lot of fun just getting more and more confused. Like, starting off mildly confused at the beginning, increasingly resentful and belligerent through the middle, and just babbling defeated nonsense by the end. Several of the best MST3k movies are as much a backdrop for the cast’s own performance as they are novelties on their own (two words: “sand storm”), and I think Prophecies of Nostradamus could be both those things.
5. Winterbeast
The most recent movie on my little list, and even then Winterbeast only came out in 1991. Yeah, no Asylum mockbusters HERE, thank you very much. Winterbeast is also another film with considerable “wait, WHAT?” potential, though for very different reasons. Winterbeast is ostensibly a tale of ancient Indian burial grounds spawning monsters, but it’s REALLY the tale of a bunch of amateur filmmakers trying to make their own Evil Dead and failing in ever conceivable way. As bad as the works of professional filmmakers can get, there’s just something truly magical about a bunch of eager, enthusiastic beginners with no money but all heart setting out to fulfill their dreams of making a real movie… AND COMPLETELY HUMILIATING THEMSELVES. Winterbeast is a film where the biggest “stars” are some props leftover from a Dokken music video, which tells you just about everything you need to know about this production. This is the kind of movie Don Dohler would watch to feel better about the quality of his own films.
4. Invasion From Inner Earth
Okay, one more “WHAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!?” movie, and possibly one of the most incomprehensible things I’ve ever seen… and that’s saying a lot, because I watch a lot of absolute nonsense. Invasion From Inner Earth is Bill Rebane’s first completed feature, released a year before Giant Spider Invasion, and the fact that the movie about Volkswagens dressed up like large bugs counts as an IMPROVEMENT tells you a lot about how bad this one is. Basically, Earth is overwhelmed by… SOMETHING that the film can’t afford to show, so instead it spends 90 minutes watching a group of randos hide in a cabin in the woods and talk about stuff we never see. The movie thinks it’s doing some kind of Night of the Living Dead type thing, but the result is actually just dreary, confusing pretentiousness. Honestly, this would be one of the harder films to riff since so little actually happens on-screen, but that’s half the reason I want to watch some top level professionals try it. If nothing else, the final few scenes that go full on Art Film would provide some great bewildering reactions. I can't even attempt to describe how this movie ends, but I'd LOVE to watch somebody else try.
3. Inframan
And now, the exact opposite of the previous movie. If Invasion from Inner Earth has too little happening, Inframan has ALL OF THE THINGS HAPPENING. A blatant rippoff of Ultraman hailing from Hong Kong, Inframan is surprisingly good at replicating the sheer weirdness of classic tokusatsu action, then cranks it up even HARDER by infusing it with Kung Fu movie energy. The biggest challenge of trying to riff Inframan is just that it throws so much lunacy at the viewer that there’s barely time to catch one’s breath before the next bit of craziness. And here’s the biggest thing: THEY’VE ALREADY REFERENCED INFRAMAN IN MST3K!!! You know those henchmen Kinga has in the Netflix seasons, alternatively known as “The Skeleton Crew” or “The Boneheads?” They’re blatantly patterned after the villain’s mooks in Inframan. There's no WAY it's a coincidence. They know! How has this not let to an episode already? (I mean, I’m sure the real answer is copyright-related, but still)
2. Latitude Zero
Back to Toho Land for this one, meaning it’s another movie we almost certainly will never ever actually see on MST3k, but a man can dream. Unlike the previously mentioned Prophecies of Nostradamus, which is largely hilarious for how disjointed and nihilistic it is, this one is a laugh riot for how obliviously old-fashioned it is. Latitude Zero was actually one of Toho’s last, best hopes at creating movies for mainstream release in The West… and the fact that they tried to win over late ’60s audiences with an adaptation of a radio drama from the ‘40s tells you how well that would work out. Still, on top of all the usual wacky sets and models and monster suits, Latitude Zero also boasts a much higher number of Token White People than usual, to the point of actually recording English dialog live on set, even from the Japanese cast. Remember what I said about the White Folk in Terror Beneath The Sea? Imagine that in reverse, and you’ve got the sad spectacle of Akira Takarada and Akihiko Hirata trying to look like they understand the lines they’re phonetically reciting. On the flip side is lead bad guy Caesar Romero, who is only a splash of facepaint away from being as over the top here as he was as The Joker. Between the campy scifi design and the mad science supervillainy, even a rank amateur riffer would be able to have fun with Latitude Zero.
1. The World’s Greatest Sinner
And now, my top pick, and possibly the most obscure film on this list. As I write this in mid-2021, I’m sure if this 1962 film has ever been released in an official capacity. I mean, I know it’s been legally screened, I saw it on TCM Underground, yet I still don’t think it’s ever been legitimately released on home video. That’s a true crime, because The World’s Greatest Sinner is an anti-masterpiece of Ed Wood proportions. A vanity projects for actor/writer/director/producer Timothy Carey (aka “that creepy guy in Paths of Glory”), anyone who gets flashback of The Room from reading a credit like that is absolutely on the money. Heck, this movie shares cast members with films by both Coleman Francis and the afore mentioned Ray Dennis Steckler. This legitimately insane story about an insurance salesman who declares himself God and becomes a rock star absolutely deserves to rank right up there as one of the all-time great Bad Movies, and the only justifiable reason it’s not is because of how hard it is to find. That reason alone is enough justification for some high-profile riffers to bring the film to the attention of a wider audience. Nobody knew what Manos was before MST3k, work that magic again for The World’s Greatest Sinner! Timothy Carey deserves to be enshrined right next to Tommy Wiseau in the halls of film history! Make it happen!
…so there you have it! Those are far from the only bad movies I’ve ever seen, of course, and I could easily fill several more blogs with flicks of comparable riffability. But of course, there’s only one way I could possibly end this blog. Say it with me now: “WHAT MOVIES WOULD YYYOOOOOUUUUU LIKE TO SEE ON MST3K? POST YOUR ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!”
