I remember that the “Amazing Colossal Episode Guide” had a list of things from the movies that really disturbed and stuck with the writers. I think unusually disturbing movie moments or plot content would be a great discussion topic. The thing that I couldn’t get over was the project featured in “Parts: The Clonus Horror.” The concept of clueless people being lobotomized and/or used for live organ harvesting bothers me more than most topics covered in MSTied films.
Oh, I’m going to have to go with the melting man in “The Incredible Melting Man.” Gross.
What’s your pick?
(Keep those topic suggestions coming!)
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#46, Wow. Reb Brown hardly looks like the same person. Cisse, on the other hand, only looks like she’s aged just a LITTLE bit.
There’s something really, really wrong with the kid from “Why Study Industrial Arts?”, and the guys pegged it pretty fast. “These tools are my friends!” indeed.
Plus, the guy with the 90 degree ears looks freaky too.
@Doug #52: Haha, my uncles and grandfather have the same kind of 90 degree freaky looking ears. Somehow, my dad avoided that fate.
The twisted sound byte of the guy who screams “I’m Commmeeeeng!” in Quest of the Delta Knights. Though probably my all-around favorite episode, the guy screaming it is CLEARLY not meant to be read as “I’ll be right there,” because he also says “I theenk I’m Comeeeng!” and let’s face it, no one EVER “thinks” they’ll “be right there.” And someone in ADR thought that was hilarious, so he used it a bunch; and then the director must have gotten a kick out of it too because he left it in; and then the movie was sold (one way or another) to kids, before ending up as an MST3K episode.
And THAT, my friends is creepy and sick.
Really, the whole “Biker Trilogy” of season 2 gives me *severe* problems. Sidehackers is the worst but the rest are no better.
I mean in “Hellcats” no one really talks about that scene where the bikers come across the guy painting the girl out in the field. It’s pretty much implied that they rape that girl. And then they all go party. The guys in Mexico(?) are holding a girl and basically raping her in exchange for feeding her drug habit. The mob guy has his vapid girlfriend killed for no good reason. And at the end of the movie we’re supposed to see the bikers as somewhat heroes because they rode to Ross’s rescue!
“Wild Rebels” is probably some of the least problematic material but the biker gang still pretty brutally whales on that poor schmuck who flirted with the girl. And more cop characters die per capita than just about any other movie I can recall and, again, for no good reason (people seem to rarely mention the fact that the three bikers seem to hit every cop they aim at but the cops can’t hit the bikers worth crap. Worst example of Stormtrooper aim EVER!)
Yes, the uncanny aim of the bad guys in Hellcats is pretty much matched by the good guys aim in Space Mutiny and especially Warrior of the Lost World.
Several of them I haven’t been able to watch fully, or I’ll skip through the disturbing bits. “High School Big Shot” is just so dark, it’s my least favorite episode. “Squirm” is another I just don’t care for, for obvious reasons (worms). “Atomic Brain”, for the reason mentioned earlier in this thread. “Brain That Wouldn’t Die” and the whole “Jan in the Pan” thing. The setting for “The Deadly Bees”. Yes, if I were suffering from a breakdown, I’d wanna stay at an isolated, tumbledown farm with a weird bee-keeping doctor, his crabby wife, and the English neighbour from “The Jeffersons” to recover. *Shudder*
Oh, how could I forget the opening scene in Beast of Yucca Flats? The girl is strangled, and then her corpse is apparently violated. Gah! Thanks so much, Francis!
The scene in “Tormented” where Tom is about to push Sandy off the top of the lighthouse. Tom! How could you?!! As Joel put it, “This is one dark momba-jomba of a movie, guys.”
My first thought was, “nothing in a MST movie could be considered truly disturbing,” and while scrolling through the comments I kept going “really? THAT’s disturbing?” It’s actually interesting to see/read what gets under peoples skin, the worms in SQUIRM, for example (Freud would have a field day with that one, lemmetellya). I guess I have a high tolerance for the weird, the bizarre, the creepy…not that there aren’t somethings that bother me immensely and make me want to advert my eyes…just nothing in a MST movie………
..Then I was reminded of SANTA CLAUS and his weirdo telescope machine with a face and that laughing reindeer….my god….nightmare fuel.
So yeah, all of Santa’s creepy technology would be my answer for this discussion..
Ditto on creepy granny in Atomic Brain and thanks for making my book Item of the Day!
E.
The scene in Incredible Melting Man where they make the kids smoke. I have an extreme neurotic aversion to tabacco so seeing it at all makes me feel icky, but I bet they probably made those kids really do it. All the melty stuff in the movie is pretty gross too, but doesn’t bother me as much as that.
Jan In The Pan asking to be killed actually creeps me out.
And I have never managed to actually watch Phase 4, and avoid squirm. I’m too squeemish.
Anything where they kill off a dog bothers me too. The bee attack in Deadly Bees, and “Chris the dog” in revenge of the creature. The way I see it these are bad enough movies to begin with, and then they kill off their most sympathetic character and best actor. Shoulda let the dog live and let Agar die.
Clonus was really creepy, especially near the end. It was a good idea for a movie and has some cool stuff in it, but was hindered by a crap budget. I did like how the crooked politicians got it in the end tho. ‘Sir, can you please tell us all about Clonus….’ /cue heartbeat
The two Union Pacific shorts. They hands down the two most life un-afirming things I have ever seen. In the horrid universe those films inhabit there is no good or happiness. In fact it seems like happiness exist only to cause death and fates worst than, to those that brave to embrace it.
The first thing that came to mind was cited earlier: The prologue from BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS where a young woman is killed, then raped. In that order. And it has NOTHING to do with the rest of the film. I can only guess Coleman was trying to set a mood.
The attitudes toward women in HOBGOBLINS and BOGGY CREEK II are deeply icky as well, particularly in BOGGY when the director/producer/auteur goes out of his way to present the two females as useless whiners and makes a point of filming close-ups of their asses.
The most upsetting to me on a personal level, however, is probably in THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE when the evil doctor cons the embittered model into coming out of her shell and opening herself up to the world again, just so he can kill her and take her body for her fiance. Yes, fortunately she escapes, but GOD…
By the way, Sampo, thanks again for the discussion thread. When I woke up this morning, I never would have guessed that I would have written the phrase “implied lycanthrope sex.” It just goes to show that you never know what a new day will bring.
In “Ring of Terror,” I was bothered by the real injuries to the cat and snake. “The Unearthly” had a disturbing premise. People hoping to find some rest and convalescense are instead being used for gland experiments with horrifying results.
The ending of The Unearthly in the basement full of cro-mag failed experiments huddled together in their own filth.
“Let’s just forget we saw this. Think of the paperwork!”
Well, I’m late to the party again, but yeah, my picks are predictable. I enjoy a good “downer” ending, but yeesh. Most of everyone’s favorites above don’t affect me at all because of the from-the-get-go inevitability or sheer preposterousness (The Incredible Melting Man never struck me as anything but Rick Baker at work), but the prospect of completely innocent, mentally hindered people being lobotomized and/or killed horribly and hung up in a freezer by such casually coldblooded people makes parts: the clonus horror my top pick in SPITE of the movie’s less-than-good qualities.
It’s disturbing and depressing because it’s easily the most plausible aspect of the entire movie.
The ending of Manos comes in close second, not because The Master is a pedophile, but because Harold P. Warren decided showing us that would be entertainment. There’s an episode in which, following the experiment, the SOL crew simply glares silently at the Mads; that was my reaction to Manos‘ finale.
all the somewhat inapropriate stuff most of it from the clips of the film”the devil’s gift”which were incorporated in what was supposed to be a kid’s film “merlin’s shop of mystical wonders”.ortega and estrella in “the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed up zombies”[what really was their agenda in pouring acid on those guys anyway?]that sleazy ceo from”time chasers”and the “soultaker” disquised as natalie’s mom peeping at her as she undressed[suffering from lilith fiarism apparently] :-D
Hello, everybody, long time reader, first time poster. The thing I find most disturbing is from the movie “The Creeping Terror”. Remember the fat bearded grandpa? (If I remember correctly, Crow said he slid like Ron Santo,) He was played by an actor named Jack King. Anyway, cruising through IMDB.COM one night, I read where Ol’ Jack did some low budget porno movies in the 1970’s. So, we, the Creeping Terror audience, is supposed to think he is some nice old man who takes his grandson, Bobby, fishing. While later in life, he does grindhouse porn. That, my friends, is Puke City, USA.
Gotta say, I have seen a lot of bad movies, and movies that are disturbing and just wrong. While a lot of MST3K movies were tasteless exploitation, or just down right gross outs, I can’t really think of any that really disturbed me.
Guys, all the examples you gave are great, but we are forgetting the horror of horrors: KARL MALDEN’S NOSE!
#32, 69 – Thing about Manos was, not just the disturbing tone, but the fact Warren made the movie JUST to indulge his own sex-fetish fantasies of being slapped.
I don’t claim to understand foot fetishists, rubber fetishists, bondage fans, or anything else that shows up on the porn search engines (ahem, okay, that was too much information…), but to spend thousands of your own business’s dollars to grab a camera and film a paean to it (Manos is the cult of the hand, get it?) just goes wayyy beyond Servo’s “Y’know, I THINK we’re seeing the reason this movie was made.”
I understand it was the 60’s, just after the Bettie Page 50’s, and if you had a kink, you stayed in your underground niche and didn’t go around talking about it, but still: Putting brides-of-Dracula in diaphanous nighties is one thing, but going in with any other agenda is just turning it into the Human Centipede of its day.
I have to go with the rifftrax’s Maniac.
The doped up rape scene between the guy on speed and comatose zombie woman.
The guy attacking the cat, popping out it’s eye, and then consuming the eye. (Finding out later that they used a one eye cat and glass eye doesn’t help much.)
And the weird neighbor who raise cats to sell as meat.
Having to watch Dr. Z strip down to his ill-fitting boxer shorts is pretty sick stuff.
The dad that works at EAT! in Girl in Gold boots is the dampest looking person I’ve ever seen. Also, when I watch him in the episode, I can’t help but imagine the various odors that would surround him.
The unspoken message of the Union Pacific shorts that any workplace injury is always the fault of the worker, and that unsafe working conditions are never, ever the fault of management.
First of all, I think Cisse Cameron got a bum rap in “Space Mutiny,” or more accurately, I think she was the victim of horribly aging hair and makeup in that movie.
But I digress. I’ll have to be totally unoriginal and say that little Debbie becoming one of the Master’s wives in “Manos” was disturbing. Stuff like worms, the crawling hand, and other special effects don’t disturb me because they don’t strike me as “morally/ethically wrong.” Sexism, such as that in “Hobgoblins,” is infuriating but doesn’t disturb me like child abuse.
I dunno, the movies are made to have creepy villains, so we know who to root for. Or correctly, “for whom to root.” The animal scenes: horses, dogs, lizards, bears, et al; don’t really bug me because in all likelihood they are not treated any worse as the the real human actors.
The thing that really creeps me out is the scenes where one male straddles another male and tries to have a heart-to-heart while invading his personal space. As seen in Parts:Clonus (“I feel a stirring in my little clonus”) and also in Pumaman and Space Mutiny. yiiiii.
Plus most of the complaints so far have been mentioned by the Brains in the ACEG. nyeh.
Adding in post MST3K stuff, Legacy of Blood was the most disturbing of anything I’ve seen them do. That one creeped me out for a couple of days afterwards, which I guess is a compliment to the movie makers, in a way. If that is indeed what they were going for. I don’t find that kind of creep out at all enjoyable though. War of the Insects was a tough one too, but not as bad since it had a little bit of that Japanese goofiness going on.
For Rifftrax – Maniac had that disturbing stuff people have already mentioned, but it was tempered by the shock of seeing something like that made in the thirties. The “good lord I can’t believe they did that?” aspect overwhelmed the repulsiveness. Galaxy Invader was just disgusting. Even beyond just the performances, and the writing, I just couldn’t stand to look at those people. Awfulness all around.
Worst of anything though – The rotating kissing scene between paper chase guy and the star trek woman from Warrior of the Lost World. I understand that most of these filmakers are angry little people who want us to feel their pain, but that was just wrong.
I have a hard time watching overt racism (John Saxon’s comments about the thief in Mitchell, the seance in Batwoman, the “progressive” dialogue spoken by Terri in Angels’ Revenge, etc.) and I just fast-forward through those parts.
I also have to shake my head at Joel/Mike and the bots when they make homophobic riffs. The “You’re the expert on that” line from Hobgoblins never fails to make me sad. For a bunch of folks who never hesitated to call movie characters on hatred of women and African Americans, you’d think they’d skip the gay jokes.
The Atomic Brain. Too much creepy brain transferring.
I found the Cold War fear-mongering of “Rocket Attack USA” and “Invasion USA” to be quite odious.
There’s also something horribly bleak about those oppressive 50s shorts that instruct children on how they should behave. Exhibit A: “A Date with Your Family”.
Despite all that, I enjoy watching them all on MST3K. It’s really the genius of the show: to take the unwatchable (or unspeakable) and make it entertaining.
For some reason, Touch of Satan always gets all up in my creepy zone. It may not have been much on dialogue, but it did a great job in mood. Mormo’s speech (which made more sense after I read they ripped it off of a Lovecraft story) and the credits jumping track at the end…I have a hard time watching it at night.
Merlin was also a cavalcade of horrors, not just for the dog, but the roasted cat as well. (Fun fact: in the original “Devil’s Gift,” everyone died except the girlfriend, cuz she was in the hospital after attacking the little boy. Yes, Borgnine and co. actually lightened up this little gem!) I also nominate Zombie Nightmare. It’s not particularly disturbing, but I can’t stand the part where the cops minimize the near-rape victim’s statements.
Honorable mention: Hamlet makes me incredibly sad, knowing the girl who played Ophelia committed suicide on her 23rd birthday. Sigh.
@81 Pirengle. You don’t pass up on gold when it’s handed to you.
Anyway, people are bothered by Catching Trouble, but it’s really just Ross grabbing animals and tossing them into sacks. The one that bothers me is King Dinosaur. Not only is the movie dull, but they made reptiles fight each other for the movie’s cheap action scenes.
The Touch of Satan is a bit disturbing. Something about it’s setting and the ’70s vibe really makes the whole feel authentic. Like it really happened.
#83: Because the Soviet Union never existed…
They’re just movies…bad and dumb ones, for the most part.
You should really just relax.
#87: Of course! That’s part of the game, pretending to be gross out by Japanese boys in shorts or hunters putting animals in sacks.
For me the hands down worst moment is in Soultaker where the “mom” is lustfully watching her “daughter” undress. Yeah, I know it was really the bad guy appearing as Mom but it’s just wrong. And the fact that that was written by the actress playing the daughter makes it even weirder.
You all have given great examples of the nausea inducing effects of the films featured on MST3K. This is to be expected from cheap and sleazy works forced on to the SOL captives, but two episodes that stand out for me as disturbing are “The Fire Maidens of Outer Space” and “Diabolik”.
In the first, our ‘explorers’ display no sense of wonder or awe at all. The only thing that concerns them are “Da Booze an’ da Broads”. How and why did these lowbrow cretins get in to the space program? In the second movie we are told that if you are ‘brazen and beautiful’ you can, and should, commit armed robbery, murder and massive damage to public property with out suffering punishment, and indeed reap reward.
One film is for simpletons who only live to sate their limbic urges; the other is pretentious adolescent fantasy drivel. I’m not sure which is which.
#90: Something tells me you are not the type of person who enjoy things. You would be an excellent movie critic.
I’m going to submit something that requires a bit of a step outside of MST3K.
In Day the Earth Froze, Louhi requests that Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen perform “impossible” tasks to rescue Annikki. However, in the Kalevala, on which Day the Earth Froze is based, both men actually do this several other times, trying not to rescue Annikki, but to win the hearts of several of Louhi’s very beautiful daughters.
Disturbing: They wouldn’t mind Louhi as a mother-in-law!!! :pain:
I did not know that there were so many MSTies that are so easily offended. I guess I don’t understand how anyone could take ANYTHING on an episode of MST3K seriously enough to be offended by it. @#87: Right on!
Even though it was made too long ago to be graphically disturbing, the premise of The Leech Woman always squigged me out, especially when I was younger. The whole thing with the spike to the back of the neck made me wince every time it was shown. It’s easily my least-watched episode of season 8 as a result.
On the other hand, I actively avoided The Incredible Melting Man because I had heard the movie was disgusting, and when I finally saw the episode I didn’t find much to be grossed out by. Sure, it was icky, but it all looked just fake enough to not bother me.
I’ll agree to an extent about Clonus, but rather than being bothered by the premise of the movie, I simply don’t feel it is complimented by the riffing as well as movies that don’t deal with such weighty subject matter. There are other episodes that features movies that I enjoy unriffed, but they still fit the show because at their core they’re still rather vanilla stories (like Gorgo, for example).
I don’t have too many but one that comes to mind are some scenes in Zombie Nightmare in the graveyard. Actually that whole movie just annoys me and gives me an ‘eeww’ feeling more than anything, and causes me to rarely watch it.
Hobgoblins has that effect on me too. It’s actors are too unappealing, and the story too stupid.
Incredible Melting Man I don’t mind so much because of the great riffing, but it IS pretty gooey. But that part aint nearly as bad as the head going over the waterfall with the awful music they play during the scene.
‘Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders’. Everything about it.
93#: The only thing that actually puts me off a movie is child abuse.
#91 Neptune Man, I do rather enjoy MST3K. I just remember to, ‘love the riffing (and the ‘Bots) but hate the movie’. Except “The Painted Hills”; that has Lassie.
Every time you see something disturbing in an MST3K movie, never forget, the Mads are Evil! They have picked these movies in an attempt to crush Joel/Mike and subsequently take over the world. Have you no shame, Dr. Forrester?
I’m going to pick City On Fire as the most disturbing. It starts out funny enough, but once those kids start the fire and the next thing you know we’re seeing CPR performed… It’s really not an appropriate movie to riff on. But it was the early days, before they watched the whole movie first.
#98: I usually love the movies and the riffing too. So I have the best of both worlds. And yes, there people out there who like b-movies. We gathered around cemeteries at midnight to worship Ed Wood, Robert Lippert, Tor Jonson, etc.