What is the most ill-thought-out plan a villain/hero has come up with on MST3K?
Obviously, we can’t include any of Mike’s numerous attempts to escape the SOL. Also, this pre-supposes that the villain(s) of the film actually have a plan that doesn’t involve lumbering around, randomly killing people until they get shot/electrocuted/disappear for no reason.
My personal favorite is Q from Mighty Jack, with his evil torture box that can blind you… unless you keep your eyes closed.
I’m going to go with Bela’s plot in episode 105- THE CORPSE VANISHES. As Servo (I think) notes in a host segment, abducting a bride on her wedding day is, you know, bound to get noticed.
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Yuri’s plans in WEREWOLF are indeed incomprehensible. Okay, he’s found a means to synthetically create werewolves. He proves this by secretly dosing a security guard with his formula so he turns into a werewolf while driving and crashes his car. Great. So why does he need Paul? He’s got the formula, he can just use it again. Was there something cut out?
And really, I love ol’ Bela Lugosi, but his evil plots aren’t always the best thought-out. I’m trying to remember the name of that serial where he invents, a) A big robot with a Tiki-God face; b) A belt that turns people invisible; and c) Exploding spiders. Okay, why these specific things? Did he just happen to have this stuff on hand when he decided to take over the world? “Yes! This is all I need! It will work!”
Satori’s plan to rule the world in The Final Sacrifice was pretty bad. He needed the map to find the idol which he then had to destroy. It took him 7 years to find the map. You’d think that just by driving around in the general vicinity they could’ve found the idol long before then. Of course, there were probably a lot of hockey games and beer stops, so that may have stretched it out.
I can think of a hundred reasons why the Wild Rebels’ plan should not have worked (Having Tony Alaimo as one of their henchmen being the largest flaw in the plan). Yet it did!
And thinking of “Gorgo:” What is it about these promoters that makes them want to take these huge, dangerous monsters and stick them in the middle of a major city in cheap restraints while thousands of peole antagonize them? They deserve all the Dorkin’ they get as a result!
Actually, I’m going to defend the plan in ‘The Rebel Set’. It would have worked, if Mr. T hadn’t gone around double-crossing everyone, and it’s really kind of clever–use a cross-country train as your getaway car. By the time the robbery is reported, you’ll be in another state.
My big winner is the bad guy in “Devil Doll”. “Yes, I’ve completely enslaved this absolutely gorgeous, rich young woman so that she’ll do my bidding and marry me! Then I’m going to…kill her off and stick her soul in the body of a dummy.” Can anyone else say ‘missed opportunity’? :)
How about Aram Fingle’s plan to reprogram the HX-368 by reversing the code in “Overdrawn At The Memory Bank”? Because… you know… it, um… it let him, um… well… you see, by reprogramming the HX-368, he… uh… hmm… became interfaced?
Or to quote Servo:
“Yaaay! Why I’m cheering, I don’t know, but YAAAAY!”
Kalgan takes the cake in my opinion, but Dr. Z’s staggeringly ineffective and slowly paced plan is right behind. Also, the female villain from Gunslinger who’s name I can’t remember never really got much done after the openning kill.
I can’t belive no one’s mentioned Illia Murometz’s plan in The Sword and the Dragon. It seemed incredibly convoluted. Was he just stalling for time till his own army could arrive? It seemed to rely on dumb luck.
And speaking of armies, would an invisible army, a la The Amazing Transparent Man, be all that better?
Oh no, the enemy is transparent!
Just aim for the floating guns.
It’s been said before but bears repeating: Wild Wild World of Batwoman is THE dumbest villain plot, EVER. A guy arranges to steal an atomic HEARING AID from HIMSELF! How long did that take to think up? Minus three seconds? Of all the things on Earth a villain could desire, a hearing aid, atomic or otherwise, has to be LAST ON THE LIST.
Randy
Future Wars- Scene is at the Big Guy Half Way house in LR and room size TyeRex tosses one big aside Our Heros, Sister Street and the Skinny Ninny, run away leaving big guys and annoying kid alone with the Rex. I love how, in the next scene, they trot to a leisurely stroll to get to know each other better.
AmazingColossalMan@#22 – That was the first one I thought of too, but let’s not let Buzz take all the credit. After all, it was the trustee’s “asexual reproduction while taking out the trash” which allowed Buzz to “sneak into” jail in the first place… :-)
How about in ‘King Dinosaur’ when the emotional scientists blew up the island of dinosaurs. You know? The one they all escaped from and were no longer in danger of yet they nuked it anyway. Killing all irreplaceable dinosaur life and radiating the area for centuries? Good plan guys.
Well, Dr. Leopold’s plan from Blood Waters has already been mentioned a few times, so looking to the heroic front, how about Apalonia’s plan from “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”? Fringle is confused and disoriented, and needs to be controlled immediately, so let me appear as his long dear mother and offer him soup! *facepalm* Besides, the intense questioning from the Psychist already established he had a mommy issue…. :roll:
How about MSTed shorts?
The narrator’s hellbent insistence on the Knee Test in “Speech: Platform Posture and Appearance” is only going to backfire on the poor schmucks who put their unwavering faith in that test.
LOL, these are all great ideas.
There are many things that I don’t understand about “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” but one of them is Fingal’s (initial) refusal to return to his own body. Even though the Chairman offers him a chance to escape, with no strings attached, Fingal insists on staying inside the computer and hacking his way out. Yes, he’s a genius and all, but his odds of doing that were 10,000 to 1. And I wouldn’t take those odds when the consequences were a “body with an empty soul,” like the scenario with the sobbing technician.
But hey – it worked out for him in the end!
I would have to go with the already mentioned Red Zone Cuba…every move our bungling “heroes” make is beyond stupid–better to say absurdist. It’s as if the three stooges entered into a Dali/Bunel film. An Andalusian Coleman…
Runners up not yet mentioned…what was up with that whole bee plot in b movie Deadly Bees?
And the Projected Man seemed to have a vague plot…because, ya know, he was so full of anger.
Werewolf, Dr. Z, Devil Fish and Space Mutiny have some of the worst plans, but since they’ve all been talked about I’ll throw in Horror at Party Beach. They find out the monsters’ weakness by the middle of the movie and then let them go on another month killing young women: great plan :!:
Flying Saucers Over Oz (#51): “I’m trying to remember the name of that serial where he invents, a) A big robot with a Tiki-God face; b) A belt that turns people invisible; and c) Exploding spiders.”
That’s “The Phantom Creeps.” (BTW, it basically took until I watched the whole serial for me to realize that the “creeps” in the title was a verb and not a noun.) And having watched the whole serial, I’m still not sure what his plan was. By the last episode, it seems to have boiled down to “drop bombs on stuff at random until they shoot him down.” In that episode, the filmmakers use footage of the Hindenburg disaster as one of his random targets, which, only two years after the event, seems (a) in terribly bad taste, and (b) counterproductive, since it can hardly have been possible for anyone seeing the footage not to recognize it for what it was, and therefore kill their willing suspension of disbelief stone dead.
Dumb, or reasonable? That is the question I have to ask myself about Kalgan’s plan in the movie Space Mutiny. While he does conspire only to satisfy his own needs, his plot does involve landing the Southern Sun on a planet. At the start of the movie, the narrator tells us that the purpose of the Southern Sun was to take the people of an over-populated planet to a new world. I think Kalgan’s execution of his plan was dumb, the idea is not.
Ooh! Another one! In ‘The Thing That Wouldn’t Die’, the English explorers behead the evil guy and then allow for the possibilty of his head and his body to be reattached. Couldn’t they have buried his head and body much further apart or thrown one or the other into the deepest part of the ocean? Hell, why didn’t they just use that holy amulet to destroy him in the first place? It worked okay at the end.
#70, heck, real Puritans wouldn’t have even used a holy amulet. They would have considered it too idolatrous to go near.
In Hercules and the Captive Women , Androcles decision to attack Atlantis with one boat manned by the dregs of the dockyard is dubious even to the Herc. “and THESE are your warriors?” “I thought you were the king of Thebes?”
How about the scheme in Swamp Diamonds? That didn’t work out too well. Let’s bust three violent lifers out of prison in hopes of recovering some bling! Sure, they killed a couple of people and held some rich guy captive for a while but, in the end, the diamonds were returned to their wealthy owner(s). I’m sure the friends and family of the dead would be happy to know they lost their loved ones to such a worthy cause.
We can count some of the Mads’ schemes here, right? Dressing up as 70’s releif pitchers, turning folks into the cast of Renegade, (although I think Johnny Longtorso would be a hit at ComiCon).
Most of the silly movie schemes are on the list already, but let’s see:
CAVE DWELLERS – Ator’s hang glider bomber seems just a touch labor intesive…
HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN (I think) – You’d think the old guy would’ve known about that booby trap…
SWAMP DIAMONDS – A date in swamp? Really?
EEGAH! – Encourage your daughter to, errr, distract the caveman…
WILD WORLD OF BATWOMAN – Been mentioned already, but bears repeating: AN ATOMIC HEARING AID! And the soup scheme was pretty dumb, too.
ANGEL’S REVENGE – Seven vigilante babes against a whole drug cartel – yeah! Why not? The white supremist compound was lacking a little direction, too.
And not MST3K, but if anyone watches Phineas and Ferb:
“Come on! I just insulted the maccaroni and cheese recipe of a whale! What part of that is not evil?”
There is a mind numbing array of ill conceived plans and plots
here, but one that has always bothered me was what was with the
atomic rugs in Operation Double 007?
And why did the guy from Thunderball have to wear that vinyl suit?
I was going to comment on Warrior Of The Lost World, then realized I still have no idea what the hell is going on in that movie. It’d be easier to single out plots that AREN’T dumb.
@John M. Hanna: “Oh! One more. The cops in ‘Wild Rebels’. “Lets allow a bunch of kill happy bikers to rape and pillage at their leisure until we spring our clever trap on them. If a bunch of innocent civilians and policeman get murdered along the way…eh, acceptable losses.””
I don’t blame the cops for that one – I blame Steve Alaimo, who gets my vote for the most useless hero in MST3K’s rich history. It would have been so easy to simply let the bank robbery happen – the gang would have gone home and drunk themselves unconscious, and the cops could have swooped in at their leisure to disarm and arrest them and recover the loot. But no – Steve has to signal a couple cops DURING the robbery, guaranteeing at least half a dozen needless deaths. Idiot!
On the villains’ side, I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned The Violent Years. So the Soviet Union plotted to undermine the United States by secretly funding… petty vandalism in high schools?
Speaking of Warrior of the Lost World…
How about Donald’s ploy of sending out Megaweapon (Yea!)
without any armor bottom protection or accompanying
infantry support. As a WWII veteran (you know The Great Escape :o )
– and come to think of it, as Himmler in The Eagle Has Landed-
Doanld P. Should have known tanks require support to
prevent molotov cocktail ttpe attacks by enemy forces.
How about Beverly Garland’s plans in The Gunslinger to just shoot everybody without a trial and let God sort them out. Also Beverly’s plan in It Conquered the World to confront the giant pickle without backup, or even knowing exactly where it is. Then there is her plan in Swamp Diamonds to kill her competition by climbing a tree (increasing her visibility) and leaving the hunk on the ground. Love you, Beverly, but your plans are really dumb.;
Seymour Mednick says:
“On the villains’ side, I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned The Violent Years. So the Soviet Union plotted to undermine the United States by secretly funding… petty vandalism in high schools?”
Of course. It’s low cost and causes unrest in American communities. Heck, the USSR might not have gone bankrupt if they really did that instead spending money on nuclear missiles and nuclear wessels.
Satan in The Touch of Satan. There’s gotta be an easier way to get souls.
John Saxon’s brilliant idea involving Mitchell.
Then there’s always Hamlet’s plan of killing his uncle, which if he’d just gotten on with it without a) vacillating about it and b) needling the King about it, would have happened without leaving the bodies of Polonius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and ultimately himself in its wake. You know you’re not very good at this sort of thing when your father’s ghost has to remind you (granted, in the play and not the film as it appeared on MST3K) to stop bothering your mother and keep on task.
Amazing Colossal Man cure-Two part process; First, inject a 60′ giant with a 6′ syringe full of no grow juice to stop his growth. (I can get with this , makes sense sort of). Second, in order to shrink him from 60′ to 6′, just slow done his metabolism! They proved it to by shrinking an elephant and a camel. What a great idea, now I have a way to fit into some skinny jeans!
“Satan in The Touch of Satan. There’s gotta be an easier way to get souls.”
In the same vein I’d have to nominate God or Dude or whatever in Soultaker. Got to be a better way to get souls.
Dr. Z had the most stupid evil plan. Isn’t turning yourself into a fish a personal indulgence that should be pursued after the world has been conquered and your foes vanquished? Wouldn’t it have been easier to kill people and rule the world without being a fish?
The scientist in Danger Death Ray had perhaps the worst good guy plan. Build a death ray for peacefull purposes. What could go wrong?
Finally, it wasn’t a plan so much as a decision, but when the girls were caught vandalizing the school and they opened fire on the police. Way to escalate misdemeanor vandalism into first degree homicide of a law officer for no reason. If they wanted to avoid being arrested why didn’t they run?
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. An unconventional surgeon starts off with a fairly good idea to save a patient and then hatches a plot to attach his fiancee’s head to the body of another woman.
Of course, Rommel’s attempt to “get” J.C. by hocking his spare tire and tools in order to hire Big Jake and the other clowns is pretty lame. Especially when you consider they had a rule about “no guns”. That didn’t work out too good.
Fart Bargo (#82): “Amazing Colossal Man cure-Two part process; First, inject a 60? giant with a 6? syringe full of no grow juice to stop his growth. (I can get with this , makes sense sort of). Second, in order to shrink him from 60? to 6?, just slow done his metabolism!”
My favorite part is that they made the syringe as a scaled-up version of a regular syringe, complete with huge finger-holes. Were they counting on finding an Amazing Colossal Nurse to administer the shot?
The atomic hearing aid in “Wild Wild World Of Batwoman” is ridiculous, but it’s a movie that’s trying to be thoroughly ridiculous so criticizing it for being ridiculous is … well, you see where that’s getting in loops.
Can I put in a nomination for dumb plans by movie makers? “Invasion U.S.A.” has as its mission statement that the only way to stop the menace of Communism is … to have the government immediately take direct control over every business in the nation and draft the entire workforce to produce on command and without dissent exactly what the government decides it needs, with particular attention to the armed forces and materiel that will be necessary for the forthcoming World War. Way to prove your thesis, guys.
I’ve always been fond of Ator’s idea in Cave Dwellers to cut down trees, kill some animals, tan the hides, make a hang glider, go for a scenic flight over mountains nowhere near the castle, drop a couple of bombs, and then stab anyone who came near him.
I know this is an obvious question, but I haven’t heard anyone actually ask it.
If you’re going to build a death ray for peaceful purposes, what could those peaceful purposes be?
Mentioned earlier, but “The Projected Man” did have a certain foolishness. The teleportation idea was pretty clever and worth pursuing. However, at the point that Paul decides to use it on himself, it had a track record of killing the test subject every single time but once. And the one time it did work, it was across an unobstructed room for a total of about 10 feet distance. So he decides to shoot himself across an entire city, through intervening buildings and such while the system is under the control of the receptionist (who’s never even seen much less operated the system before). What could go wrong?
I watched “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” last night and thought of this topic: Why didn’t Boyd the greasy ranchhand just take Flavia’s purse instead of loudly tearing it open which could have easily woken her up from her Mike Douglas dream?
#71: Heck, real Puritans wouldn’t have even used a holy amulet. They would have considered it too idolatrous to go near.
They weren’t necessarily Puritans. I believe it was specified that it was one of Drake’s expeditions. So it’s most likely that they were adherents to the Church of England.
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank plot summary:
“This is how much pure cocaine you would need to enjoy this movie.”
Why was Rommel so hung up on not using guns. Is a vendetta more ethical if you kill your target with a knife or club? And why did they wait till dawn when J.C. would be just hungover instead of drunk into a stupor?
Doesn’t anyone else think the dad in Eegah! could have come up with a better plan? Who would be dumb enough to walk around in the desert with nothing but a purse for protection?!
And he tells the helicopter pilot to come back in a day to get him? Here’s an idea, genius, have him HELP YOU! Did he really think he’d have that whole mountain covered in one day? “Well, I walked all the way over there and back, the giant couldn’t possibly be anywhere else!”
He takes a picture of the still-burning fire… aside from the obvious (what does this prove?), he totally let his guard down when one would expect more than ever to actually see the giant!
Then he relies on Arch Hall, Jr. to have his back… hmm, possibly the worst move he could have made (maybe he could have asked Ray Dennis Steckler to help while he was at it?)…
at least he watched out for snakes…
@96 I would like to add to your rant about Egahs Dad;
…and in a rugged rocky/desert terrain he wears wing tips and black sox for crying out loud. Oh and what does one put in the ‘survival’ purse to survive a remote, desert enviorment for 36 hours? Not food, not water but your shaving kit and asprins. Good luck swallowing those aprins. Don’t even get me started on on his behavior with his daughter and his lewd suggestions to her about Egahs attentions. Last but not least, why is there a wall oven in his living room? It’s not like he’s a chef or anything!
I feel a lot better now thanks!
Well I’m way late as usual, but I can never seem to give these discusion threads the proper attention until Monday.
Anyway, just wanted to offer a few comments:
1. “I Accuse My Parents”: It’s pretty ludicrous that the three main characters thinking they could keep their “secret” relationships from each other, particularly when they were the triangle- Kitty working for and being her boss’s lover, and going out on him with Jimmy; Jimmy working for Mr. Blake and being Kitty’s “boyfriend”, but keeping his employment from Kitty and his relationship with Kitty from Mr. Blake; and Mr. Blake’s “under-the-table” employment of Jimmy, that he kept secret from Kitty. Speaking (unfortunately) as a person who engaged in some two- and three-timing in his sordid past, one of them would have slipped up a lot sooner than happened in the movie.
2. “The Dead Talk Back”: For the killer to be drawn out by that stupid paranormal show put on by Trasker was just, well, stupid.
3. “The Leech Woman”: When Garvey convinces “young” Mala to let him go retrieve a “valuable gold necklace” (I think) as a present for Mala- not very shrewd on her part. Also, June being so co-dependent (and liquored up) to believe her husband had anything but the most misogynistic plans for her and the rejuvenation “substance”, was not a very good plan on her part.
Thanks for reading.
Well at first I was going to say in Monster A Go Go, the scientist’s plan to hold the monster in the closet while he experiments with an injection for Douglas is kind of stupid, since it seems like he wasn’t held in any restraints. But then again, there was no monster.
Creeping Terror. Many stupid plans. The monster eating people. How many people does it need to eat to send back data? Why a backup monster? Also Sheriff KD Lange’s search operation which involves spending most of his time making out with the wife. Also the army’s plan to kill the monster by having the soldiers huddle next to each other. They finally using Renee?
The Starfighters. The director’s plan to have nothing happen for 90+ minutes. It was stupid, it was effective!!
Oh, there was a plan in The Starfighters. It was to say how much cooler fighter jet were when compared with heavy bombers that deliver atom bombs. So it was really an anti-nuclear arms movie.
#56:
It’s admittedly hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure “reversing the code” just means inputting the password backwards, at which point Fingal will have access to whatever he wants. The reason it bothers the guys so much (I think) is that it means the people working in IT security at Novicorp are thundering morons. This is a computer that has massive quantities of important, confidential data stored on it and can control weather throughout the world, and someone’s idea of a good password for it is to advance each character in the name of the computer by one? Really? Those people oughta be fired and summarily executed, not necessarily in that order. And then, because of all the trouble Fingal causes, they change it… to something equally stupid. Maybe they were disgruntled and wanted the corp destroyed, I don’t know.