What genre of MSTed films do viewers prefer?
Ooh I like that one!
Me, I gotta pick the dumb rocketship movies, i.e. Rocketship XM and Phantom Planet. Second favorite: Giant bug movies such as Beginning of the End and The Deadly Mantis.
What’s yours?
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Weekend Discussion Thread: Favorite MSTed Movie GenreAlert reader Glenn suggests:
119 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Favorite MSTed Movie Genre”Commenting at Satellite News
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Great topic!
I’m not sure ‘goofy’ qualifies as an official genre, but I’m picking it anyway. I love the episodes that feature films so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh out loud at how silly they are. The Russo-Finnish series, of course, Puma Man, both Santa Claus episodes, the later Gamera flicks, etc. The bigger, more colorful, and cheesier, the better.
I also love any of the ’50s educational shorts. They’re so earnest, so badly acted, so dated, and so awesome!
My biggest criterion for a good (well, great; they’re all good) MST3k ep is that the movie should have a celebrity. The MSTers are at their best when they can latch on to Joe Don’s weight or Peter Graves’s suave-ness or David Hartman’s. . . why was David Hartman a celebrity anyway? Anyway, if “mediocre celeb” is a genre, that’s my pick.
I like the shows where it’s a couple of television episodes jammed together or where it seems like a television movie or series pilot.
Next favorite: the greasy biker flicks. I love how the dialogue sounds like it was written by a bunch of squares trying to simulate what they think “hip biker lingo” would sound like.
Third: Just about anything from the greasy, icky 1970s…particularly Mitchell!
:wink:
Godzilla movies, hands down. this includes all his brethren, gamera, zigra, and the like.
I like the movies that are so cheesy you just have to sit there with a “What were they thinking” look on your face. Like “werewolf” and “Laserblast”.
My dad is a fan of the old, b&w sci-fi matinee flicks, cause he used to watched them when he was little and they are terrible….
So many to choose from…
The first three that leap to mind (right after the previously mentioned Russo-Finnish cycle)are:
Sandy Frank films! “YOU’RE STUCK HERE!”
The Francis Coleman Oeuvre! “Flag on the moon. Who put it there?”
Fey Japanese Superheroes! “We like it very much!”
And the list goes on: elderly teenage fearfests (“Puma?”), Ed Wood, Roger Corman quickies, educational shorts (with plenty of lip and tongue action)…
DON’T MAKE ME CHOOSE!
The dubbed Japanese creature features. Actually, all the Sandy Frank Japanese stuff is #1 with me.
@post 6
Yeah, “You’re stuck here!” great tag. Hilarious!
I like some of the James Bond knock-off movies, like Agent for HARM and Danger! Death Ray. (Though what I like most about the latter is the babadadadada soundtrack).
Also, the Japanese superheroes. Considering how remake-happy the Tokusatsu genre is today, maybe they’ll do a new Prince of Space?
I suppose the MST3K crew in their various guises have got tons of material from educational/industrial shorts from the 50s, so I guess this would come high on he list of favourite genres. I guess one branch of actual movies that never fails to entertain is the ‘foreign-language re-dubbed into English’ films- so all the Sandy Frank films, the Godzilla movies, Magical Voyage of Sinbad would all feature on this. What’s so hilarious is that their films (in a lot of cases)are trying to mimick American/Western European films in their mother tongue. There’s something so bizzare about seeing cheaply made rehashes of American films, badly dubbed for the benefit of the US market.
I also like the canceled television shows jammed together to form a “movie”. Riding With Death is my favorite example of the genre thanks to the pitiful ADR that attempts to bridge the two episodes of the original show. “Leonard, I hear you’ve grown quite a mustache on your vacation.”
Films with goofy monsters–Night of the Blood Beast, Track of the Moon Beast, Warwilf, Attack of the the Eye Creatures, Blood Waters of Dr. Z, Future War, Boggy Creek II, Teenagers From Outer Space, The Creeping Terror, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (does Jan-in-the-Pan count as a goofy monster? LOL).
Films with has-been or D-list celebs–San Francisco International, Angels’ Revenge, The Giant Spider Invastion, Final Justice, Deathstalker and the Warriors From Hell, Zombie Nightmare, Warrior of the Lost World, Laserblast, Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
The most bizarre, obscure, bottom-of-the-barrel movies MST3K ever dug up–Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Dead Talk Back, Puma Man, The Final Sacrifice, The Star Fighters, The Touch of Satan, The Wild Wild World of Batwoman, Teenage Strangler, Time Chasers, Space Mutiny.
for sure the black and white educational shorts and my favorite movies are without a doubt the black and white horror movies from the 50’s that take you back to where you are sitting in a movie theater in 1950-something in small town america in a simpler time
any of the bert i gordon films! his movies are so ripe for the riffing. “150 people dont just vanish” no Bert has them eaten by grasshoppers.
amazing colossal man
the magic sword
beginning of the end
war on the colossal beast
tormented
earth vs. the spider
Village of the Giants
king dinosaur
did i forget any of em??
thats 8 episodes right there!
what a legacy for the movie going future.
thank you Bert I.
oh and anything from japan is good riffing fotter.
“what sin could a man commit in a single lifetime to bring this upon himself” “is it true share had some ribs removed?”
I’ll also go with the old b/w sci-fi monster movies as well. The very first glimpse of the cheesy monster in each movie usually brings out the best laugh for me.
I’m partial to what I call “cheesy gaming flicks”; the movies that feel like a really bad RPG session. Stuff like Cave Dwellers, Robot Holocaust, Deathstalker, Outlaw… that kind of thing. They’re usually so awful that there’s plenty to riff on, but also have a certain entertainment value on their own. (Boring movies don’t MST3K well, but these things are rarely boring. Stupid and incomprehensible, yes, but not boring…)
I like anything filmed in the Seventies. They just have a look about it that seems riffable, from the huge cars to the huge lapels. It doesn’t matter what the plot revolves around exactly, you’ll be sure to get some good riffs anyway.
Amen to all that have spoken so far.
My own favorite genre would have to be science fiction films from the 50s (that was some nice aliteration). They make for great riffing fodder. Plus they usually hit us with truly weird science: people expanding and shrinking like balloons, not reversing the aging process just making people younger, carbon dating things and finding they are negative 100 years old.
I blinded me, with science!
I’m sort of a fan of exploitation flicks, and while the Brains watered them down, I love what they did with SWAMP DIAMONDS, THE WILD WILD WORLD OF BATWOMAN, and ANGEL’S REVENGE.
I like biker movies, mostly because it’s just such an inexplicable genre. Even Roger Ebert was stumped as to why so many biker films go made.
I like British horror movies, and in a weird way, I lump MANOS into this genre.
And then there’s spy movies, Conan rip-offs, Star Wars rip-offs….
Oh yeah! And I like 1940’s gangster/morality tale/love story/musicals.
I love bad space movies; cuffed slacks and dress shoes worn on the moon surface, smoking cigarettes in small rockets, one switch that controls everything, old desk chairs with seat belts. However MAD SCIENTISTS are my favorite. In the MST3K reality Bela wins the prize for his many different appearences.
Anything post-apocalyptic!
My wife has noticed that I’m partial to any film where the director’s vision combines mystery or science-fiction with underpants.
I don’t know if this is really a genre or not, but I love films from the ’60’s. Something about bouffs and beehives and cat’s eye glasses just drives me wild.
I also like biker movies (Sidehackers, Hellcats, Girl in Gold Boots), crime movies (The Dead Talk Back, The Indestructible Man, Red Zone Cuba), and any movie with scientists in it! (Monster-a-Go-Go, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Unearthly).
Bonus points if it has Arch Hall, Jr., Cash Flagg, John Agar or John Carradine.
Extra bonus points if it has Alison Hayes! Va-va-va-voom!
Hm. I have to think about this a bit… I love a wide range of the films, but I can boil down two particular favorite vague types…
Let’s explore space! Or, as put in the orignial post, “dumb rocketship movies”, but more specifically the ones where they find alien civilizations (or are in their own space-civilization). I like seeing how the moviemakers envision super-cool space civilizations… and how poorly they work out, through weakness of concept or weakness of filmmaking aptitude. Women of the Prehistoric Planet, First Spaceship on Venus (an episode I really like on a riff level, but agree that the skits chew), 12 to the Moon, the Rocky Jones films, etc.
Spies and cops They’re kinda-sorta the same deal… a super agent fighting crime,though nifty gadegtry or just plain pluck and luck. It immediately places a great big pompous target for the crew to latch onto and poke holes in all day. Be it Niel Connery, Mitchell, Bart Fargo (tee hee), Adam Chance, or the baggy-faced desk-jockeys that inhabit The Sinister Urge… few things are more hilarious that a crimefighter that just doesn’t deliver. (Though this has failed MST… I rewatched Secret Agent Super Dragon last night, and frankly, it couldn’t keep my interest for five minutes… and it’s hard to mess up with a pompous prick liek Superdragon, but… sigh. I don’t think I even want to retackle Fu Manchu.)
Black and White Scifi. Prince of Space, etc..
My top 3 Mike episodes:
1) Revenge of the Creature–Sentimental favorite because it marked the return of MST3K from its cancellation
2) Prince of Space–My all time favorite series of host segments as they go through the wormhole. The bit with the chicken puppet is absolute genius
3) Werewolf—Bad accents, bad wigs, bad effects, bad puns (Servo: Oh, I ate too much; I am a FULL moon.)…The epitome of an MST3K viewing
I think I tend to be fondest of the goofy-bad fantasy films – not just the Russo-Finnish trilogy (of which Jack Frost remains my favorite), but Deathstalker and Outlaw and even Santa Claus. All of these films have produced a lot of my favorite episodes, mostly because the films give them SO MUCH to work with riff-wise.
Count me in as another fan of the educational shorts. The B&W 50s ones are the best, but we can’t forget the later ones, such as Progress Island USA (“A Quinn Martin production!”)
#21 John:
Why do people even go to movies that don’t feature underwear?
I like movies that have a lot of pseudo-science. People in lab coats and giant rubber gloves turning wheels, hitting buttons, and flipping levers. I especially love when they try to give it a real-world explanation.
Hey ‘all! I managed to cram my ass into these shorts! Underwear! Underwear!! Whoah whoah. Stop, sniff your arm sweat….Good.
Wow, I believe every movie MSTied has been covered by the genres listed so far (some of them many times over).
I’d have to say I prefer Scifi/Fantasy, for two reasons.
First, it’s a broad enough genre to include most of the MSTies I love, from the obvious ones like Space Mutiny to the Japanese imports, and the “big monster” movies like The Giant Spider Invasion and The Beginning of the End. Heck, even Riding with Death aspired to Sci-Fi status.
Second, it seems to me that in many of the Scifi/Fantasy movies, there’s a kind of naive enthusiasm that permeates the performances, as if “this is going to be the greatest movie ever!” That’s what, to me, makes a MST truly a pleasure to watch — especially in contrast to, say, Red Zone Cuba or The Beast of Yucca Flats — as bad as the movie is, I feel the lofty goal to which the makers where aspiring. The altruist in me wants to applaud their efforts, and the sadist in me wants to laugh at how short they fall…
I enjoy so many genres they’ve done that it’s probably easier for me to list the ones I don’t like.
With only a couple of notable exceptions (Godzilla vs Megalon, Prince of Space) I hate those Japanese sci-fi and monster movies. The Gamera series was a yawn.
I also find that the darker the material the less funny the episode. As I’ve said before, I don’t blame the Brains, they did their best, but movies where the plot is very dark – High School Big Shot, Sidehackers, Tormented, The Rebel Set, Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Atomic Brain, Teenage Crime Wave – and lacking any kind of goofy quality just doesn’t seem to bring out their best work.
I’m partial to the Japanese films like the giant monster movies, Prince of Space and Fugitive Alien. There seems to be just an overwhelming amount of material to rif on.
My secondary choice is the converted TV series movies. They all have that underlying goofiness to them which is probably why they didn’t last or make it as a series.
I always loved the cheesy spy movies like Agent For H.A.R.M. and especially Danger! Death Ray. Something about the low budget, low intellect spy capers just cracked me up big time.
My favorites are… well, let’s call it “cockeyed exploitation”: films that would just be ordinary cheap-theater fodder if not for some bizarre element—usually the filmmakers’ lack of talent—that steals the show away from the ostensible subject matter.
The films of “anti-auteurs” like Hal Warren, Coleman Francis, and Ed Wood fall into this category. So do others of my favorites: “The Creeping Terror,” the hopeless/hapless “Monster a Go Go,” and (with its hyper-serious, and therefore hilarious, “let’s weigh everything down with meaning by talking really slow” tone) “The Touch of Satan.”
The closer this sort of film gets to being competently made, the more boring it becomes for me (e.g., Roger Corman films). Mel Brooks once joked that his movies “rise below vulgarity.” Well, give me movies that rise below exploitation.
I guess it’s not technically a genre, but black and white movies from the 1950’s… Daddy-O, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider, Teenagers from Outer Space, Manhunt in Space, etc. I tend to not like movies that are from the 1980’s or are bad with no intention of quality from the filmmaker (as Mike once said). Hobgoblins would be the perfect example of this.
I love the Russo-Finnish films like Jack Frost, Sinbad, and The Day the Earth Froze.
I also have a fondness for the greasy biker flicks like Wild Rebels, Hellcats, and Sidehackers.
The Conan ripoffs were pretty good too like Outlaw and Cavedwellers.
I miss you Gamera
Probably any movie with cheesy dubbing, be they Japanese sci-fi, Scandanavian fantasy or Italian spy flicks.
1. TV pilots, or episodes spliced together (Stranded in Space, The Master, Riding with Death)
2.inept spy movies (Double 007, Agent for HARM)
To paraphrase some previous posters, does “Fever Dream” count as a genre?
In reviews of Argento’s ‘Suspiria’, it’s been suggested that what makes it such a great horror movie is that it somehow recaptures the feel that horror movies had when you watched them as a 5-year old. Well for me, late-night movies don’t get any better than the ones so incomprehensible that I have no better luck making sense out of them half asleep than I did any given movie when I was in kindergarten.
Hence, ‘Pod People’ won my undying allegiance to the MST, ‘The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies’ was the highlight of following the show to the end in the SciFi era, and ‘Red Zone Cuba’ will always remain my unchallenged favorite, fooling you in the final reel into thinking you’ve just barely reasoned what must be going on, only to have private Justeen/Nestea/Canteen reappear 5 minutes from the end and sink whatever theory you had going. It makes me believe each time I rewatch it that maybe, just maybe, this time they really will make it to that tungsten mine.
‘Monster A-Go-Go’, ‘Manos’, and the end of ‘Giant Spider Invasion’ are also good examples. A good sign the experiment falls into this category is when the Brains just can’t keep the riffs in the context of the film, like speculation about ‘Manos”s cast party and the theory that the junior volunteeer film squad moved in to end ‘RZC’ by taking out Coleman.
I’m partial to the movies of the 80s/90s, if just because the ability to make a good movie is there, but it misses by that much. Final Sacrifice, Space Mutiny, Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders, Future War, Hobgoblins, Werewolf – man I love ’em. They also remind me of the, ahem, wonderful original movies made by the Sci-Fi Channel…
Oddly enough, my favorite genre would be the 1950’s musical with a crime twist. This would include such titles as:
-Untamed Youth
-Daddy-O
-The Beatniks
-Girls Town
I also like the Russo-Finnish fantasy films, giant critter movies (especially by way of Bert I. Gordon), and super-secret-spy/criminal movies, which would include “Agent for HARM,” “Danger! Death Ray,” “Diabolik,” “Secret Agent Super Dragon,” “Operation Double 007,” and others.
70’s monster/sci-fi films; Laserblast, Clonus, Squirm, the Incredible Melting Man, Track of the Moonbeast, It Lives by Night…in addition to the riffs, the movies themselves are neat, from the weird music to the costumes (which are actually intresting for the most part.)
I gotta go with the kaiju genre. Those giant rogue critters from Japan! Runner-up would be the fantasy (Russo-Finnish or otherwise). I can’t just say the Russo-Finnish films, ’cause I’ve only seen two of those eps (“Day the Earth Froze” and “Jack Frost”), but Deathstalker and Cave Dwellers were hilarious in their own right!
The independent shot-by-Timmy in his backyard genre, i.e. Manso and Red Zone Cuba.
Also, girls in trouble i.e. Girls Town and Girl in Gold Boots. Anything sixtieish and swinging (Operation You’ve Got to be Kidding, Brother, Diabolik etc)
and 50’s giant mutant monster flicks.
Are movies like Brain that Wouldn’t Die, Atomic Brain, and Incredibly STrange Creatures there own genre? They should be and they’re also my fav.
I enjoy the teen/youthful angst genre:
Teen-Age Crime Wave
Teen-Age Strangler
High School Big Shot
I Accuse My Parents
Girls Town
The Beatniks
Daddy-O
Cheating
Russo-Finnish, all the way.
I’ve always been a sucker for the spy movies. They’re so goofy yet there’s something appealing I can’t quite explain.
Also, the bodacious babe movies (i.e. Mamie Van Doren, Ann Margaret, Angels Revenge). Those are fun.
But really they could do any genre well.
I love the 50/60s {usually}b+w horror/monster movies. I include in this everything from Monster A-Go-Go to The Thing That Wouldn’t Die.} Something about these movies which were supposed to be scary being made funny {funnier} works for me.
Side note:
When I saw the topic listed in my RSS reader I thought it was going to be just “What is your favorite MSTed movie” i.e. one you would watch even without MST3K. So I got all set to write about how much I liked The Black Scorpion…..
Hands down, the japanese films. Godzilla, Gamera, Time of the Apes, Fugitive Alien, Mighty Jack…all mighty fine episodes, packed to the brim with goofy music, goofy kids, and awesome riffing. Prince of Space may just be my favorite episode of the whole show. (Invasion of the Neptune men i can’t get into though).
“Awful” is a genre, right? I definitely favor the awful, like Manos, all the Coleman Francis, Batwoman, etc.
I also love the Japanese movies, the 50s propaganda flicks, and the “teen vs monster” pictures (Horror of Party Beach, Giant Spider Invasion).