I’m kind of new to all of this but I’ve been keeping my own episode journal and I was just putting down my thoughts for Ep. 314 — Mighty Jack (yeah, I’m behind on my journal) when I found myself commenting that it was a good thing I had seen the KTMA version of this one since that is less cut and the plot is (marginally) followable.
This got me to thinking… “Is it important to be able to follow the plot of a movie to enjoy the riffing overall?”
Sure, individual riffs can kind of stand on their own but when an episode is taken as a whole do people enjoy the finished product more when they also understand what was going on in the film?
I can enjoy episodes I can’t follow — Mighty Jack and Castle of Fu Manchu are good examples. You just sort of need to be able to live in the moment and let the movie FLOW over you, as somebody says in “The Big Chill.” But can those be considered truly classic episodes, or do you need to be drawn in to the movie enough to be following the plot, for the episode to be a true classic?
What do you, the viewer, think?
(By the way, I love the idea of an episode journal.)
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The movies I have trouble with are those that are trying to present a plot, but it’s incoherent. Castle of Fu Manchu is a great example of this. (I know someone detailed the plot upthread, but I still think it’s incoherent.) Red Zone Cuba is another great example.
There are movies like Manos or Starfighters, where there’s no discernible plot, and I’m okay with that. I don’t have to bother trying to follow a plot, because there isn’t one.
Then there are the better movies like The Girl in Lovers Lane, or Tormented, where the movie is made well enough that I can follow the plot. Fine – I can settle back and enjoy the riffing.
It’s the ones inbetween that are the problem for me.
Having many of the MSTied movies in their original forma, I find that watching them gives a better understanding of the edited episodes. In the case of Castle of Fu Manchu, I do not have that movie, but do have a predecessor in the series: Brides of Fu Manchu. Watching it actually helped make sense of Castle. So, knowing the plot does help me enjoy the MST experience better. But there are some movies where knowing the plot detracts from the enjoyment. I specifically cite Sidehackers and Kitten with a Whip. Sidehackers is an enjoyable episode, but mainly for the host segments, which are top notch. But, the movie is forgettable, if not unforgivable. Kitten with a Whip has an obnoxiously stupid protagonist, who wouldn’t know what to do if an ant bit him. Watching the John Forsythe character botch up decision after decision is painful to watch. So, my answer is yes, or no, depending…
Plot, by itself, is not necessary to make a successful MST3K feature. The Wild World of Batwoman and Red Zone Cuba are pretty good examples of films that were just made up as they went along, and still turned out to be grade A riffing material. In fact, plotlessness can occasionally be beneficial… especially if it gives the bots a chance to go off on a rant or drive eachother insane trying to tie the relevant shreds of plotline together.
What does sometimes hurt the movie (and this is more true of Rifftrax than MST3K) is when they cut or talk over bits of expositionary dialogue which explains what is going on, who a character is, or sets up a rifle in the 3rd act. Of course, the most famous examples of this are Sampo! and the disappearance of John Saxon from Mitchell, though both of those instances worked out okay, because the riffers were aware of them.
@ 26 – I think you’ve made a great point that bears repeating: often it’s the characters, or lack thereof, which make or break the movie experience. If there are characters we can relate to, even if they’re thinly-sketched caricatures, it gives us an anchor point in whatever plot is or isn’t going on.
For movies like “Tormented”, or “Pod People”, or even “Hobgoblins”, we can relate to at least some of the main characters – whether it’s asking ourselves how we’d act if we were in their shoes, or comparing them to people we know or grew up with. Even broadly-skecthed and -overacted stereotypes can be amusing, such as in “The Wild Wild World of Batwoman”, where at the very least we can understand that the cackling guy in the mask is the villain, the bald guy with the glasses and bad accent is the scientist working for him, and so on. Or perhaps it’s just fascination with a character’s extremely odd behavior, like Torgo in “Manos”.
All of these can give us a connection to the events of the movie – whether we’re rooting for a character, or against them, or are just fascinated by their bizarre behavior, it helps us care what happens to them as the movie progresses.
Our life experiences will help determine which characters we can or can’t relate to, or which ones we do or don’t have interest in. For example, I have great difficulty relating to anyone in “The Skydivers”, which makes it a tough slog for me to get through. But perhaps people who have gone through marital difficulties can feel a bit more of a connection to what the main characters are going through, and therefore care about what happens to them despite the blandness of the storytelling.
I wasn’t immediately sure how this theory fitted with movies such as “Monster A-Go Go”, which is still an amusing trainwreck to watch despite almost the entire cast being replaced halfway through – that’s where J/M&tB come into play. A large part of the enjoyment in “Monster A-Go Go” comes from the way Joel & the Bots use all that character void in the movie – they create their own characterizations for the events on the screen. Little things like making up extra dialogue for the soldiers gathered around the monitoring equipment, or adding jokey dialogue about how silly those radiation suits look near the end – all of this helps us build a connection with what’s happening on the screen. (This may also be why some people prefer the “laughing with” type humor of earlier years, compared to the “laughing at” humor of later years, as “laughing at” doesn’t build that same kind of connection.)
Anyway, that’s my argument in favor of Blast Hardcheese’s theory – what do you think, sirs?
It depends- is it an enjoyable mess (Ed Wood) or just a tough slog (Coleman Francis)? Sometimes I think an incomprehensible but fun movie can bring out the best in the brains but if the movie is simply tedious it shows in the riffing.
“I always thought a good way to disguise the more obvious edits would have been to simply imply that the movie is still playing in the theater during the host segments.”
@briizilla, I think they do do this. I may be wrong but when they leave the theater without Cambot it’s implied that the movie is still running but when they leave and Cambot is shown retreating through the many doors it is implied that the movie has stopped. Anyone know for sure?
As someone who watched some of these films for fun before MST3K existed…I don’t have to be able to “follow” the film to enjoy it.
I made it through the KTMA of “Phase IV” without wanting to beat my head against the wall. I can make it through (almost*) anything.
* No Adam Sandler films.
Troy #53 – Excellent point! I remember being uber-confused by Mitchell and the whole John Saxon thing. For years I thought the movie just fail to tie up that loose end. It wasn’t until I got my hands on a VHS of Mitchell (I went through a “must see the movie unMstied phase”) that I realized it was a necessary-yet-unfortunate BBI edit. Suddenly, “Mitchell” didn’t suck as bad.
Ah, a topic made for me.
Let’s take an example of a movie like, oh, El Topo or Holy Mountain. I don’t choose those movies because I hate Jodorowsky; quite the opposite, in fact, as Holy Mountain is surely one of the finest, most transcendent movies I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. No, I bring them up because, were they chosen as candidates for riffing, they simply wouldn’t work, period. It’s not that they’re completely plotless, but the plots of those movies are so magic, i.e., not beholden to “reality” or “cinema reality,” that riffing would accomplish nothing.
I think of different “layers” of movies, plot wise. You have the two I’ve mentioned, which I would think are essentially immune to criticism, probably even immune (I hope) to analysis. I submit that there are NO examples of this class of movie riffed on by J/M&tB.
Then you have perfectly conventional movies, with plots so obvious, staid, or conventional that even fans of the transformers movies could follow them. They may not (probably are not) GOOD plots, but fundamentally they present no challenges to the viewer. Plenty of examples of this kind of movie in MST’s dossier – I’m thinking, randomly, of “Robot Holocaust” – just a simple quest movie, like Lord of the Rings or, MUCH better, Krull. The helpful expositionizing robot sets it all up in the beginning, and it just plays out from there (kind of like the helpful expositionizing Gandalf, or even more helpfully expositionizing Ynyr). I would think that, for this kind of movie, the riffing is probably going to make the experience for you. There’s probably not too much in the movie that’s going to do it on its own. There are exceptions, of course. I’d watch “Rocketship X-M” cuz it’s a ’50s rocketship movie, no other incentive needed.
Then there is that wonderful, tempetuousness, fecund area that seems to generate a lot of controversy here on this site – those movies that don’t SEEM to have a conventional plot. Think Starfighters, or Red Zone Cuba, or Monster-A-Go-Go. They DO have plots, actually. In Starfighters, my favorite, it’s a young air force pilot coming to terms with his estrangement from his dad and proving that, yes, he ought to fly jets, damnit, not bombers. What’s great about these movies is that the plot is SO marginal, SO odd, SO inconspicuous, that it feels like the filmmakers were unsure of exactly what they were doing 99% of the time.
Anyway, I think, as Sampo said, you need to be able to let the movie “FLOW over you” to appreciate this rarified class of movie. I think you have to find something that amuses you other than story – for me, I can’t express in words how wonderful that date scene is in Starfighters, with the “dumb Iowa chick” talking about “CORN detasseling” ad nauseum. Their hard, craggy, sunburnt faces, SO not right for a movie… I could go on. For these movies, if you can’t let the FLOW happen, the riffing probably won’t save it for you, I’d think.
For me it’s not whether the movie on the chopping block is in question, but if J&TBs can breathe life into it. Red Zone Cuba, Beast of Yucca Flats and Manos are hilarious because they’re so incomprehensible, and those shows are like confined nightmares, and we’re all in on the game… Flag on the moon, how did it get there?
Castle of Fu Manchu, Gunslinger and Ring of Terror are duds because there’s so little to do with them; there’s almost nothing to pop in those dead Jiffy pans.
:alien:
@ericb: firstly, where’s Rakim? Harder har. But seriously, I never thought of that theory as to why the second host segment goes straight to commercial but Cambot still sitting there does make sense. I guess it’s just so they could sneak in that extra commercial break in the second half of the experiment?
Uh, I meant to say “hardee har”. Damn you autocorrect.
I can miss the simplest of plots because I get so caught up in the narrow focus of many of the jokes (the bad acting, the poor lighting, etc.) and usually attribute what I “don’t get” as the result of bad editing (which Monster A Go-Go seems to have in spades). But after several viewings, I find that some bad movies are at least powered by some good ideas, if nothing else (Parts is a great example of this). Corman movies make sense and MST has increased my appreciation for the wealth of undeniably crappy, albeit halfway interesting things with his name on them. Even Time Chasers has a thin line of logic holding the thing together. It’s the Coleman Francises and the Tony Cardoza’s and the Sandy Franks that tend to leave me in the dust
In Soultaker, I just wasn’t thinking – I thought the girl’s mom was twisted, and when it turned out to be Joe Estevez, I was surprised by it. Must have been the Visine thing with Crow that distracted me.
I don’t really have a definite answer this time. If I had to take sides, I’d probably say that it really isn’t important to follow the film, since J/M&TB obviosly aren’t following the plot. When they riff, it’s usually about something that’s happening on the screen right then. I can only think of one riff where you’d have to know the plot to get it, and that’s from “The Slime People” when Servo says “why would they use guns against the slime people? They KNOW bullets don’t affect them!” (Or something like that; I’m just paraphrasing here.)