Movie: (1989) The crew members of an undersea laboratory weren’t expecting an attack from the inhabitants of an undiscovered world.
Opening: Jonah is in Moon 13, working on the containment vessel. The boneheads are chasing the Crow and Tom around. Jonah is scooped up and deposited on the SOL.
Invention exchange: J&tB unveil the hand dryer air hockey table. The Mads have invented motion-capture drone probes.
Segment 1: Crow and Tom have invented a goop that causes Jonah to relive shameful memories.
Segment 2: Tom and Crow settle a dispute through rhyme. Meanwhile, Kinga and Max tease a post-movie segment
Closing: After some discussion of the movie by J&tB, we switch to Moon 13, where we meet Donna St. Phibes of the Habitat for B-Movie Monsters. She has brought along a Lord of the Deep.
Stinger: The alien gets friendly.
(21 votes, average: 3.81 out of 5)
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Thoughts:
• J&tB have a fanboy conversation about “Dr. Who.”
• The “Trippy Blob” song (which I very much liked) was written by Paul and Storm.
• I believe this is first time in the history of the show that an episode has opened with the host and the bots on the same set as the Mads.
• The Boneheads were played by Tim Ryder, Zach Thompson and Deanna Rooney.
• Yet another self-reference.
• Callback: Buh-boom (Atlantic Rim).
• Cast and crew roundup: In front of the camera: Bradford Dillman did voice work on “The Atomic Brain.” Behind the scenes, writer Howard R. Cohen also wrote “Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell.” Cinematographer Austin McKiney was also cinematographer on “The Skydivers,” production manager on “The Incredibly Stranger Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies” and editor/assistant director/production supervisor on “The Beast of Yucca Flats” and executive producer Roger Corman, well, you know. Quite a few of the crew on this film also worked on “Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II,” including production designer Kathleen B. Cooper, art director Roy Meyers, set decorator Ildiko Toth, assistant director Jonathan Winfrey and prop maker Peter Flynn.
• An interesting sidenote: this ripoff of “The Abyss” feature a few crew members who worked on “The Abyss,” including special effects makeup artist Roy Knyrim, model maker Steve Cotroneo and prop maker Crit Killen.
• Is it me or were there a lot of Seinfeld references in this one?
• Fave riff: “I like my oxygen fat.” Honorable mention: “The ‘excuse me while I get my phone and go into the bathroom for like 10 minutes.’”
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Lords of the Deep passes the Bechdel Test. Barbara and Claire talk about the goop found inside Chadwick’s suit. While Jonah does make a valid point about the potential ambiguity of the subject matter, it was rendered moot by the revelation that the goop was never Chadwick in the first place.
Yet another instance where a scheme of the Mads backfires on them in a predictable fashion (see also the voodoo dolls in Zombie Nightmare and Remote Control Bobo in Track of the Moon Beast).
I don’t remember slap bracelets. Does anyone else?
HS 1 has a definite Mike era vibe to it.
James Earl Jones was born on January 17, so he would be a Capricorn.
Favorite riffs
Oh floating, translucent blob, you’re my only friend.
If it weren’t for these blinds, it’d be curtains for me.
Jim Henson’s Hunt for Red October Babies.
Told you we shouldn’t have let Ringo drive.
“Take your samples.”
But they won’t bring you true happiness.
“I’m suiting up and entering the sub.”
And probably dying, if the music is any indication.
How much is that demon in the window?
This X-Files reboot has really lost its magic.
“A rat!”
There goes our Michelin star.
My mail order sonic screwdriver doesn’t seem to be working.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Dryer Cycle.
Your presence is requested by the King of Pimpletown!
“They want us to survive.”
So they can eat us.
This scene brought to you by Movie Filler. When your feature isn’t quite feature length, try Movie Filler.
I’d like to think that the Lords of the Deep were inside us the whole time.
Slap bracelets were a late ‘80s to early ‘90s trend. A lot of times the plastic covering would wear along the edges, exposing the thin metal band inside.
Anyway, as with the others, I’ve only seen the episode once. The movie was rather boring, but it was cool to see the third roommate from second replacement for Chrissy on Three’s Company.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one except, “Blech.” A few months after The Gauntlet came out I was going over the season in my head. Wait a minute, I can only think of five movies I’ve seen. What happened to the sixth? I had to go look it up. Lords of the Deep? I don’t remember seeing that. Evidence indicated that I had seen it, but it had been wiped from my memory. So I had to watch it again yesterday. It had just gotten blended in with every other deep sea movie. Did Priscilla Barnes ever learn to act? I see she has a long list of performance credits, right up to this year, so she keeps getting cast. Maybe she has other unique talents. And Goose or Beefcheese, or whatever his name was. I see he’s also listed as a writer. They probably only had to pay him for one of those jobs.
I will give this movie credit for the most shockingly realistic sex scene ever filmed. Very bold.
Actually, compared to “Atlantic Rim”, I didn’t think this movie was all that bad. Yes, it’s a rip-off of a rip-off, and it’s cheap-looking, and all the male characters who aren’t played by Bradford Dillman are basically the same, and the script is cliched and predictable, and the editing for the episode made it tougher to follow, but I still didn’t really mind it. I was able to just go along with the story. Weird, huh?
The riffing was very good, though I was really surprised they didn’t recognize and comment on Roger Corman as the corporate bigwig. On the other hand, the Christopher Eccleston comment was nice; sometimes it seems like the BBC just forgets about him. The host segments were OK, and I liked the appearance by Dr. St. Phibes (nice name, by the way). And I agree that Segment 1 did have a Mike era vibe.
One more thing: when I first saw a still of the marionettes/drones, without knowing the context, I thought, “Great! Their doing another Supermarionation movie!” Oh, well. Maybe next season.
Oh, and at times it seemed like Bradford Dillman actually went past Shatner and was going for an Adam West delivery. Did anyone else get that impression?
GIFs
https://mst3kgifs.tumblr.com/search/lords+of+the+deep
For some reason there were a bunch of movies released in 1989 about people encountering strange creatures underwater: The Abyss, Deepstar Six, Leviathan, and more.
I was surprised that they didn’t mention Roger Corman’s appearance as the executive. He’s been involved with tons of MST3K movies but this was the first time he ever appeared on screen.
When the two women were talking about the man who’d apparently turned into a blob, I actually wondered if that passed the Bechdel Test, and then Jonah wondered the same thing. Blew my mind.
A couple of facts you probably know but could be added to the guide:
Janusz Kami?ski was director of photography of the second unit but he was taken off supposedly because his footage looked too good and didn’t match up well with the rest. Kami?ski of course became famous as the DP for Cool as Ice, then he started working regularly with some director or another.
Famed effects artists Robert and Dennis Skotak worked on the movie just because they just wanted to experience a Corman production. Both also worked on The Abyss. (And Robert worked on City Limits.)
Something from the trailer for The Gauntlet which comes to mind here. The first two theater scenes shown were of Mac from Mac and Me, quickly followed by a scene from Lords of the Deep where Claire and Mustache Guy are getting all snuggly. In the Mac and Me scene, Tom riffs, “Have mercy!” However, the change happened quickly enough that I thought the riff was for the Lords of the Deep scene. Especially since it worked so well for the scene.
If you watch interviews with him on the subject, it’s plain that he doesn’t have much enthusiasm for the role. Like Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, for him it was just another acting job, cuz the rent don’t pay itself.
So we round out the trifecta of “Worst Movies in the History of the Universe” Season 12 eps. I didn’t hate Lords of the Deep nearly as much as I did Mac & Me and Atlantic Rim: there’s actually the kernel of an interesting story here, the cynicism does quite poke you in both eyes (not ever seeing the movie they’re ripping off probably helped here), and I don’t recall any blatant product placements. But the characters are so flat, the plot is encrusted with ancient cliches (oh, here’s something new: a govt. technocrat who wants to destroy an idyllic wonderland but is opposed by a hot, plucky lady scientist), and I found the whole thing just . . . inert: it’s like there’s no there there, no energy, no tension, people are emoting but you don’t believe them. The animate blob is kind of cute, though. But yet again, this is a pretty good MST3K episode: good riffing, fun host segments (I like the invention exchanges a lot in S12), and a fun new character (saw Dr. St. Phibes at the live show in Portland). The reboot is a worthy successor to the original–they still have some stuff to iron out, but S12 is an improvement over S11. I hope there’s a S13, but, damn, I also hope they can find bad movies that are actually fun to watch on their own . . .
Lords of the Deep
Release dates
June 2, 1989 (USA)
May 2, 1993 (Japanese TV premiere)
Birthdays/deaths
Writer Howard R. Cohen, born Aug. 12, 1942, died April 3, 1999
Actor Bradford Dillman, born April 14, 1930, died Jan. 16, 2018
Actress Priscilla Barnes, born Dec. 7, 1954
Actor Eb Lottimer, born June 21, 1951
Actor Richard Young, born Dec. 17, 1955
MST3K connections
Writer Howard R. Cohen also wrote Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell.
Writer/actor Daryl Haney, born June 21, 1963
Actor Bradford Dillman did voice work on Monstrosity/The Atomic Brain
Actor/executive producer Roger Corman has been involved with too many MST3K films to list.
Cinematographer Austin McKiney was also cinematographer on The Skydivers, production manager on The Incredibly Stranger Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and editor/assistant director/production supervisor on The Beast of Yucca Flats
Production designer was also production designer on Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II
Art director Roy Meyers was also set decorator on Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II
Set decorator Ildiko Toth was set dresser on Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II
Assistant director Jonathan Winfrey was second assistant director on Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II
Propmaker Peter Flynn was also prop maker for Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II
Visual effects coordinator Ray Greer was special effects assistant on The Brain, which was riffed on the MST3K Live Tour
Visual effects artist Robert Stotak also worked on the documentary “This Island Earth: 2 1/2 Years in the Making,” about the film riffed in MST3K: The Movie, and did special makeup for the new footage for the 1979 special edition of Rocketship X-M.
Not an MST3K connection, but special effects makeup artist Roy Knyrim also did visual effects for The Abyss, which came out the same year as Lords of the Deep and had a very similar plot/theme. For some other minor MST3K connections, Knyrim made the Octopus in the biopic Ed Wood and was the creature costume creator for The Aquabats! Super Show!
Also, model maker Steve Cotroneo was also a model maker on The Abyss
Propmaker Crit Killen also did special effects on The Abyss
I will confess: This is about as far as I got on “the Gauntlet challenge”. I remember staying up until midnight the night before Thanksgiving to binge watch the whole season, but something about Lords of the Deep made me very sleepy around 4am. As a result, I barely even remember this one. Something about a deep sea creature?
Of course, I finished the rest of “The Gauntlet” over that holiday weekend, but I remember feeling like a failure because I took the challenge and I only made it halfway through the season.
Specifically he was the creepy narrator.
That is a fantastic summation.
It doesn’t help that the whole thing feels like it starts at Act 2. Some lab we know nothing about has somehow found something, and the coverup is already underway. Even in retrospect when we know the aliens are trying to save the people, none of their actions make any sense. And then the end is just so weird. Everyone in the alien ship(?) is acting so strange I half expected some weird twist.
The host stuff is fun. Apparently Tom screaming at Jonah about the urinal cake was Baron just improving (and Tom’s puppeteer beautifully going along with it), was hilarious.
Deanna Rooney (Jonah’s wife, btw) seemed like some if not all her Dr. Phibes dialogue was ADR. Anyone else feel that way or know anything about that? Loved that segment though. Hmmm… I think people screaming for comedic purposes tickles me.
You could list them, it’s just that it would be tedious. :P
Did the Failure Song from The Day the Earth Froze play in your head?
That’s too bad. Of course Jon Pertwee is THE Doctor. Eccleston, though, was the only successor to actually bring a new spin to the role. His incarnation was around for just the right amount of time to set the concept back on its way. After that it was time to move on. But it’s too bad he doesn’t have happy memories of that part of his career.
“A Flickle original…Now airing on Sprightly.”
We’re starting to get into some of the movies where there’s not enough to riff on, and the guys’ own material, spontaneous or not, starts to take over–When the CC or Netflix crew start to find their own running jokes funnier than the movie, there’s a difference between a Widdle Baby and a Brick Hardcheese: The funny ones come when you sense it’s caught something among the riffers, and they’re seeing if they can top each other with something silly (like the Robert Ludlum books from “Being From Another Planet”), while the forced ones, like the Doug McMitchell jokes in “At the Earth’s Core”, just clang like lead.
With the increasingly sillier “Streaming original channels” joke, they’re obviously picking on the Netflix hands that feed them, and the obnoxious boom-market plague of minor wannabes all trying to make their own Original Series. (I don’t mind “Cobra Kai”, but…”A YouTube Original Series”? Seriously??) It just feels on target with the new channel names getting obnoxiously sillier and cutesier.
Although I don’t know how to take the implied love-hate relationship, with on one hand the guys picking on the streaming boom, and on the other, Producer Joel saying “Here’s a whole season for you to binge, you trendy binging streaming kids!” because he doesn’t know how to handle a series that’s not on 90’s cable anymore.
Between ’87’-’89, The Abyss was dominating entertainment headlines as “James Cameron’s NEXT BIG-BUDGET PROJECT after Aliens!!”, and, like certain, ahem, other Cameron films, took forever to get around to finish filming. With three years to beat him to the punch, every fan and every wannabe producer made the same dopey knee-jerk assumption of “The ‘Aliens’ director underwater?…Underwater aliens!”, and came up with screenplays of icky monsters attacking crewmembers in claustrophobic
spacedeep-water stations.Boy, were WE in for a surprise when Cameron delivered his “Abyss”: Okay, I’ll admit it, we were not expecting that…I still don’t know WTH exactly we got, but that certainly wasn’t on our list of guesses. So, actually, Max may have gotten it wrong–Lords of the Deep actually IS the closest ripoff of whatever-the-new-age-mumbo-jumbo-hell was going on with Cameron’s ethereal Abyss aliens, where Leviathan and Deepstar Six were just getting it wrong like the rest of us. Gotta admit, when Corman rips off, he doesn’t mess around. (Right down to the main antagonist being not the aliens, but the paranoid crew member who snaps and goes nutty.)
I did it for one of the films he produced last season, and realized he’s connected to a crazy number of MST3K movies.
This movie, along with the Ator flick at the end, was my favorite of S12. Corman’s appearance gave me a flashback to his appearance on Silence of the Lambs (“Hey, that’s Roger Corman!”). I think one thing MST3K has taught us (well, me) is that movies made with the “We’re gonna get this movie MADE, dammit!” mentality (Manos, Robot Monster, Ed Wood’s movies) have a certain charm that the “E.T./The Abyss/Aliens is the hot movie of the summer! Let’s slap a movie together in two weeks to capitalize on that craze!” films severely lack (Mac and Me was really bad in this regard, and The Day Time Ended was even worse). I realize Lords of the Deep probably falls in the latter category, but it feels like the former, probably thanks to that old Corman magic.
I can’t say this was a favorite. I know it’s about the riffing and not the movie, but I couldn’t figure out who the good guys were and who were the bad guys. This was set in the future, right. Were the blobs alien or a terrestrial intelligent life form? Why did they care about the humans trying to kill them? Were they individuals or a collective? It felt like the producers may have started without an ending and told everyone to trust them, they would come up with something – until the money ran out.
And how did the blob thing know about the earthquakes? You know, I think in reality they just didn’t care.
Jonah is a nice guy and I like the nice guy approach – but come on. These people deserved a good skewering.
Which is exactly why I like the edge in a lot of the S5-10 eps: they give those movies exactly what they deserve! I would love to see that edge in the new crew precisely with movies as bad as the first three in S12. (BTW, Jonah is my favorite part of the reboot!)
Yes, these cynical cash-grab movies deserve a good roasting.
I’d say the same goes for a lot of the corporate, design-by-committee big-budget schlock like the Transformers movies.
At least guys like Ed Wood, or even Hal Warren, were giving it all they had.
Then use a harpoon. It always worked for Jason.
If you haven’t been an audience, or have only known cineplexes or home video, then yes, Mike of the S5-7 and SciFi’s is your mighty Captain Ahab, and from hell’s heart, he stabs at the leviathanJoe Don Baker, to spill its black blood…
But if you have been in an audience, it IS about being a nice guy–Or at least about not being angry enough to manage to still be funny and spontaneous, still love the movie experience even when (especially when?) it is bad, and have half the jokes not be about how much of our comic’s personal time the movie is wasting.
And that’s the problem with the recent movies that Joel’s been picking, partly out of reputation, partly out of Corman-package availability, and partly because he’s afraid those new Netflix Binging Kids aren’t going to watch old movies that don’t fill up the screen–Mac&Me had the advantage that it DID play theaters, and thought, or certainly hoped, that it was going to be the big hit of the summer, and heck, even Killer Fish thought it was going to get a quick drive-in weekend. Back then, all bad movies had to play theaters, and innocently knew they had to go all out trying to please an audience, but an Asylum or a Roger Corman doesn’t care, because it knows it doesn’t have to care–Toss ’em out onto a Blockbuster shelf, and grind out the next one.
Which brings us back to the audience, the ones that the older films were trying to get. When a whole audience goes “…What??” at a crazy moment at the exact same time, you can’t capture that in a bottle, but you can at least show us three of them having that reaction and the rest of us get the general idea.
But, of course, if impaling will make you personally feel better, for the personal CRIME that some unknown movie director has personally inflicted upon two valuable hours of your life…
As usual, you just don’t get it, and insist on twisting it into something else.
I think this is a pretty good episode. Strong riffing. And the movie, while awful by nearly any metric and very forgettable, does not sit on my head and crush it like the two previous movies. Even being a rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off… it still felt like the people on the ground were trying to do something with what little they had to work with, where Atlantic Rim just hit you in the face with a big metal sign that says in angry red letters, “We Don’t Care”.
This movie also thankfully lacked protagonists so ugly that I viscerally don’t like looking at them like Mac and his family in Mac and Me. I have a very high tolerance for visual ugliness. I love the Hellraiser movies and George Romero films. So the fact that I really dislike seeing Mac and family says something. I’m not sure what, but something.
Of all the late 80’s deep sea movies I seem to recall liking the one with Peter Weller the best. I think it was Deep Star Six but I’m not sure and I don’t care enough to look it up.
Bizarre entry. Though made in the 80’s, I loved the 60’s vibe and J & TB sitar riffing. Like many MST movies, the message of the movie is muddled.
I think it was “Laviathan”. “Deep Star Six” was the one with Greg Evigan and Miguel Ferrer.
If he were someone who listened to what other people have to say, one could point out that there have always been two general approaches to satire: there’s “Horatian” satire (named after the Roman poet Horace) which pokes gentle fun at humankind’s lesser foibles, and “Juvenalian” satire (after another Roman poet Juvenal) which is angry and wants to punish people for . Think Alexander Pope’s frothy “Rape of the Lock”, which makes light-hearted fun of high-society mores vs. Jonathan Swift who has the sweet-tempered king of the giant Brobdingnagians tell Gulliver in reference to the human race: “… I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious little, odious reptiles that nature ever suffer’d to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” You could then point out that MST3K has always offered both kinds of satire, more of one than the other at different times, but always both, and that both approaches work quite well in the context when they take care to match type of satire to particular movie. That’s what I was saying here, more or less: for the cynical, cash-grab, We-Don’t-Care type of film, it is very gratifying to have ’em go full Juvenalian. And if this were someone who could recognize that other people can have different opinions about the same thing, I would add that in my own personal experience of movie-riffing in a crowd, people are often more than eager to ridicule–and precisely because they love movies but don’t have the time to view them frequently and are outraged that they have to waste this precious opportunity on something that is not worthy of this love.
Damn, I never finished this sentence! “… which is angry and wants to punish people for their stupidity and foolishness.”
Knowing the backstory of how Rick Sloane wanted M&tB to do Hobgoblins made their Juvenalian satire of the Rat-Droppings-Brained director so much more funny when it was personal, because we knew for a fact that he had it coming personally.
But when that becomes the ONLY default approach in humor to the show, and every director “has it coming personally”, for the crime of even presuming to waste our time with a movie, it starts bringing up a few more psychological issues, and the kids that love them, today on Donahue. Those of the right age to be angry at the world, at their school, at authority, and at James Dean’s proverbial Whadda Ya Got?, and have found their Messiah of Anger, leading them in their Big Brother rally against Creeping Coleman-Francisim.
Yep, old all-nighter story time: One year, back in the college-town festivals, they showed Mario Bava’s “Planet of the Vampires” at 2am, when everyone by that point was either ready for it or sleeping through it. Not a bad movie, and arguably a B-classic, although some of the fans of it had noticed that, thanks to dodgy Italian translations, nobody in the movie refers to Barry Sullivan’s spaceship captain as “Captain”–For the whole two hours, the crew not only refers to him by name, but in every single line of dialogue where they address him: We don’t get “Captain, what’s our heading?”, we get “Mark, what’s our heading?”, “Mark, there’s something out there”, “Mark, I’m getting a strange reading…”
If you think there isn’t a good Joel-written Jonah-era host segment there, you weren’t in that audience: An entire audience of spiritually-synch’ed strangers quickly picked up on the implied drinking-game of shouting out a running “MARK!” count every time Sullivan was addressed in the movie. Think we got to 127, although I might have nodded off.
Naturally, there’s a difference between that and “Aw, man, Bava had it coming for that cheap POC! Jonah shouldn’t have been so nice, why weren’t they invading the director’s home in animal masks, tying up his family with piano wire, and forcing him to dig his own grave at gunpoint before beheading him with the shovel?”
(…BRING back the Edit button!!)
Producer Joel currently seems to put more energy into the live tours than into S12, so he may be seeing some fatigue on keeping the (ex-)cable series going, and more on a series of tours that his standup background is used to–Like Cinematic Titanic, only with the brand/royalties restored.
I’m hoping there’s a S13 too, since we get none-too-subtle hints by the end of the season arc that Joel may be hoping to turn it into a season of live-concert videos instead, and it’d be a lot more fun seeing an entire audience provide their own laughtrack to “The Brain”, than trying to get whatever Cannon Pictures were now MGM public-domain.
Both the Trippy Blob Song, and the host segments with the Rhyme Game (“And expecting a disaster/Miss Clavel ran fast and faster”) and with Jonah’s embarrassing Blob-Trip flashbacks are perfect examples of Joel’s handle of the show taking minor WTF? moments the movie thought it was taking absolutely seriously, and just making them…silly. And Jonah manages to fall perfectly into deadpan groove with it.
Although I wasn’t quite sure whether the Trippy Blob Song was deliberately trying to channel the Beatles’ “Within You/Without You”, or the Rutles’ “Nevertheless”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tawq1Nklrzo
Thanks for the primer on satire mando3b. It was interesting, informative, and relevant.
I’m not being a mean, rude jerk, it’s just satire!
This was my favorite episode of Season 12 after Mac and Me. I have to wonder, though… how much did that sorry excuse for puppetry (when the alien “fed” oxygen to the heroine) hurt the cast of the show, who actually know a thing or two about puppetry? No wonder they featured it in the stinger.
And how about that alien? Everything about its appearance was ridiculous. It took me out of the moment every time it was on-screen, because it looked like a child’s plushie doll. I felt sorry for the poor actors who had to pretend that it was a strange alien creature. It’s not an alien, IT’S A DOLL! It probably still has the tag on it!
Great episode, though. Lots of fun, and lots of great riffs.
Yeah, Leviathan had Weller, plus Ernie Hudson and Daniel Stern. Deepstar Six was made quickly to be the first underwater creature movie out of the gate, and it did come out in January 1989. Another 1989 underwater monster movie that hasn’t been mentioned yet is The Evil Below, and Juan Piquer Simón of Pod People fame was a little late to the party with his 1990 movie The Rift.
There’s also two general approaches to life. You can be a jerk or a decent human. I don’t like jerks in comedy. Life is hard enough. I take no pleasure in “skewering.”
“This movie wasted two hours of my life, let’s dogpile on it!” how about take a step back, realize it’s not going to be entertaining to you, and don’t watch it.
MST3K movies are our companions, not enemies. It’s not a roast, it’s a riff.
I feel like EricJ is punishing us for not being at his little film festivals 30 odd years ago.
So to boil it down, Mike = Jerk and Joel, Jonah = Decent People, right? Good, Got It!
To be fair you are not alone in thinking that Mike riffing is “mean”. I do feel you all are a bit too sensitive about it, though.
I never said any names
Yeah but we can do the math.
You’ve got me all wrong. Every riffer can get a little harsh sometimes. I just prefer them not to. It comes off as callous, cold and quite frankly, lazy writing. We all have bad days, though ;)
Please check out Bill Corbett’s podcast:
https://billcorbettsfunhouse.libsyn.com/ep-14-pee-sea
On this particular episode, Bill laments some of the insensitive riffs of days past. He does have regrets, but he’s apologized. I love the guy, myself. We’re all human.
But seriously, he does a great pod, give it a listen.
As far as this episode goes, Lords of the Deep: It’s another very average episode of MST3K, like all of Season 12. Just kinda there, neither amazing or dull. And where are the movie’s end credits? Those were some of the best routines of days past.
Bring back the middle host segment! :)
Jason Voorhees doesn’t use harpoons. The very concept strikes me as absurd.
It baffles me that one of the Boneheads is played by Tim Ryder and yet they do not have him as a cousin to Space Mutiny’s Dave Ryder.
Fair enough, Johnny! Of course, I respect your opinion and your right to disagree with mine. That has always been my point when I get involved in this horse hockey: there’s a lot to choose from in MST and more than one way to skin a cat or riff a cheesy movie and you can pick or choose. My problem has always been that occasionally personal preferences get presented as if they were the only correct choice in the eternal battle between good and evil. I love Bill Corbett and think most of his work in Seasons 8-10 is great, but he is the one I associate with the harsher tone in those seasons: I remember reading his comment that he wanted to make Crow “edgier” and I immediately thought, “Oh-oh, that can only mean typical contemporary comic–cynical and full of sarcasm”. I am not an expert in the history of comedy, but Trace always seems to be “out of left field”–goofy voices, bursting into song, unpredictable, his wonderful manic giggle. IMO, Bill makes Crow more mainstream contemporary, for better or worse. I still love a lot of these episodes, he still makes me laugh a lot, but for me the best SOL crew will always include Mike, Kevin & Trace. (One thing that has always fascinated me about MST is the fact that you can watch Crow and Servo grow before your eyes: with Joel, they’re little kids; with Mike on CC they’re bratty pre-teens picking on their older brother, and in the Sci-Fi years they’re snarky early-teens with an attitude; now with Jonah, they’re older, calmer–in their early college years, maybe.)
All that being said, I still stand by my comments about how going full Juvenal on some of these movies is fully justified. They really do “deserve it”. I take it, in fact, as a sign of the Brains’ love of cinema: I read it as outrage at how a beloved art form is being so cynically debased. But MST works best when they modulate their approach to the specific film: they could not do what they do to Hobgoblins to, say, The Girl in Lovers Lane; and one of my points at the start of all this is that a lighter touch feels insufficient for movies as awful as the first three in S12. (The only time, though, I think the riffing has completely capsized what was on screen was their treatment of Alphabet Antics: as I mentioned a while back, that reduced my wife to tears because she thought the short was actually kind of sweet and did not deserve to be mocked.)
Satire has in fact always been viewed as a powerful weapon. In medieval Ireland, it was considered a magical force and governed by laws. (No need to point out that being a satirist is a dangerous occupation in a dictatorship.)
If anyone noticed my absence (it’s a remote possibility, I know) I have been camped in the Davis Mountains close to McDonald Observatory. It is a light and radio restricted area so no cell signal, etc.
Now, from southwest New Mexico (Hello Dark Grandma of Death!) my views on this episode are colored by a youthful infatuation with undersea flicks. Going back to VOYAGE TO SEE WHAT’S ON THE BOTTOM, I mean VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA if it’s got submarines or scuba gear or mermaids (that’s a slightly different story) then I am for it.
I have to agree with the above comments that the movie was a bit muddled, but it did have scuba gear and bubbles. Lots of bubbles.
I think this is the second movie on MST3K after The Space Children that featured a holy blob.
Time for another viewing of Friday The 13th Part 3.
Oh Space Mutiny, there you go again rearing your ugly head lol
And The Final Chapter. And Part VIII. Jason got a lot of work out of those harpoons.
See, this is what I don’t get: so, it’s okay to gleefully watch multiple times really bad, exploitative movies about psychopathic killers wiping out whole populations of teenagers, parts one-two-three … -47, get down all the ephemera and trivia about each bloody, violent, pointless death; but it’s Space Mutiny that “rears its ugly head” and MST3K Seasons 8-10 that are mean and bullying and hateful!?! … I mean, I get it, to each their own, but: THAT’S THE WHOLE BLOODY POINT, ID’NT IT? I wouldn’t be caught dead (sic) watching ANY slasher movie, but I really enjoy a lot of the Sci-Fi episodes and like it when MST gets medieval on awful movies that really deserve it. I patiently read posts from you folks who are the exact opposite and maybe roll my eyes some times and bite my tongue, but I would never dream of suggesting that I get a gold star on my eternal report card and you don’t. Watch what you like, ignore what you don’t, and let other people do the same.
Did I say I liked slasher movies? I just mentioned a trivia factoid about one lol
Jason used a harpoon, someone said he didn’t. I figured I’d let him know.