Movie: (1987) A young boy, alerted by Bigfoot that his forest ranger father is in peril, travels to the woods to save him.
Opening: Gypsy is working on some overhead wiring and is dropping objects on J&tB. Crow tries to catch one and fails.
Invention exchange: Jonah uses a theramin for Thanksgiving music; the Mads have rotating Carvel Ice Cream characters.
Segment 1: The bots are laughing raccoons and Jonah is a laughing dad
Segment 2: Jonah explains how the movie got made
Segment 3: Brain Guy, Bobo and Pearl visit Kinga and Max
Closing: Crow & Tom, wearing a Red Hawk disguise, try to trick Max into giving them the keys to Jonah’s ship.
Stinger: Big game hunter guy chows down.
(59 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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• Jonah explains that he is required to act out the show open each time. I have to say I don’t really get it, but then I don’t really get the whole “liquid video” thing.
• This episode features the first appearance of Rebecca Hanson as Synthia, the clone of Pearl. She was a big hit during the 2017 live tour.
• Interesting riff: “This looks like a state park.” In the ACEG, Mary Jo denigrated this very type of riff. Did Joel and the writing team know that?
• There is a long quiet space of no riffing during Red Hawk’s monolog
• Increasingly obscure riff: “I also have dental practice in Minnesota.”
• Callbacks: “Rowsdower?” (Final Sacrifice), a mention of an interociter (This Island Earth).
• This film shares a writer and several cast members with the 1977 Brigham Young biopic “Brigham.”
• The film was Jay Schlossberg-Cohen’s only full feature. According to his website, he once served as director of the Maryland Film Commission and now works as a fine artist.
• Puppeteer Grant Baciocco shared a story about a connection to Cry Wilderness on the MST3K Discussion Board:
“When we were filming this, I instantly realized that the cinematographer listed in the credits lived upstairs from me in my first apartment. By chance, I saw him walking down the street a couple months ago and told him they’d be riffing this film and he flipped out. He said, “I didn’t think anybody remembered that film.” He said it was the first project he worked on in Hollywood and the whole crew thought that the director was going to be the next Spielberg … until they started filming.
Grant also revealed he was Kevin’s virtual hands in the grooming of Patton.
• Fave riff: “Wikipedia, the print edition, at last.” Honorable mention: “Let’s head out to supercuts, son. I’m buyin.’”
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I see a spinoff from this show that could go something like this :
Sas Quatch ends up developing type II diabetes from a steady diet of Coca Cola and with his general decline in “vigor” Mrs. Quatch leaves him for a younger, hairier dude. Sas wanders the countryside until he ends up in the “bottoms” of southwest Arkansas where he discovers that all the boggy beast bubbas of a certain age are also big, slobby tubs, too. He hooks up with Mama Creature in a local beer joint and is enchanted by the way her Marlboro dangles from her lower lip. They acquire matching bib overalls. Sas dangles his right strap. Momma dangles her left. A romance is born.
It’s gotta be a be a better show than Cry Wilderness because that kid Paul isn’t in it.
Concerning Pearl, Bobo, and Observer’s cameo, I like to think that, at some point after Season 10, they all started to get together on the weekends to head out into the universe in the Windowmaker for wacky misadventures. No reason Pearl can’t still be the dictator of Qatar and Bobo cna’t still live in a zoo.
Captain Howdy gives this episode 4.75 out of 5 planchettes.
Season 11 is DEFINITELY help me cope with the Great Susan Hart Barrier.
This was one of our favorites of the season, but then again our household is already primed to love terrible cryptid-based entertainment (we watch “Finding Bigfoot”). Some of the riffs have faded after a couple of weeks–good excuse to watch it again!–but I remember really liking the introduction of Synthia and her line about “You’re my favorite relation/co-worker.” They can write more with her any old time. (And to whoever said it earlier, yes, it feels incredibly in keeping with Pearl to try ditching her grandkids onto a clone of herself.)
I think the moment that stood out the most for me was the sudden-onset tiger. Like, they hastily patched in some dialogue about an escaped circus animal, but nothing can bring back the audience after that WTF “Hey, look, TIGER!” moment that leaves you completely unmoored from reality. Plus, if there was an escaped tiger in the forest, wouldn’t one of the other characters have mentioned it before then? Still, it did lead to the two adult protagonists walking into opposite ends of a dark tunnel with their guns drawn, which has to be the most hilariously terrible decision ever made by the heroes of an MST3K movie.
Yeah, I really liked that it was so out of nowhere and so plot-betraying that BOTH the riffers (“I’m just as surprised as you I’m in this movie…”, an excellent riff) and Max in the “commercial break” felt the need to comment on it. That’s one of those goofy-ass things that you always hope for with an MST3K movie, to really help separate the garbage you’re watching from an actual movie.
In another thread, I said that Cry Wilderness makes The Final Sacrifice look like Citizen Kane. That’s really not fair to The Final Sacrifice, because I think Tjardus Greidanus was making a serious effort; he just had a very limited budget. (Did he go on to do anything else?) Truth is, Cry Wilderness makes Werewolf, or even MANOS look like Citizen Kane, because even MANOS has a plot that makes *some* sense (idiot protagonist makes idiot decisions and as a consequence becomes Torgo’s replacement). Literally nothing in Cry Wilderness would have happened if that kid had just DONE WHAT HE WAS TOLD.
#104 and #105: Weren’t the characters talking about the escaped tiger toward the beginning of the movie? When they’re yelling about finding the beast and that something killed some deer?
I don’t think they were talking about Big Foot, since no one but Paul and that hunter guy believed he existed.
I’ll have to watch the beginning again to remember what the Sam Scratch they WERE talking about. ^^^^
Well now, to be fair, he did do what he was told when Bigfoot told him to find his father, even if it was one of the dumbest things a 10 year-old kid could do. So I guess the moral of the story is, don’t trust your elders, but do trust Bigfoot.
Right; you’re supposed to think they’re talking about Bigfoot but it turns out later they’re actually talking about an escaped circus tiger.
This is supposed to be a plot twist, but it’s insane; it’s a plot twist that’s just there for the sake of being a plot twist. Nobody mentions a tiger; the word “tiger” is never spoken, and then boom, all of a sudden there’s a freakin’ tiger. That’s the hardest I laughed in the whole episode: tiger out of nowhere. They sacrificed logic, coherence, and basic common sense for the sake of surprising the audience — and I’ll give ’em one thing, they certainly surprised the audience.
It’s never been about being one of the cool kids. It’s about presenting opinion as fact in the most obnoxious way possible and inserting it into every post. It’s okay to like Joel more than Mike or Mike more than Joel. There’s no objectively better host, regardless of your personal preference or even change of heart.
That being said, I agree with I don’t hold this episode in quite as high esteem as everyone else. It’s fun and has some great riffs, but for me it suffers the same issue as most of the other episodes do. The riffers are just too…excited, I guess? The periods of fast riffing aren’t always an issue for me, but the fact that they’re so rarely delivering their lines in the laid back manner I’m used to in all of the older seasons makes it a bit too frenetic for me. Still, I’ve been very entertained by the entire season, and I’ll be happy if they get another season. More MST3K, even if it doesn’t fit my own personal tastes as much as I’d like, is far from a bad thing.
I don’t know about that. Plenty of other MST3K movie characters have shown similarly poor judgment. Jimmy going to confront Mr. Blake at the climax of I Accuse My Parents immediately comes to mind.
but there was no birthdays and deaths today?
Although up to that point for most of the 00’s, THE two biggest defenses of Mike fell into either:
A) “Hey, there’s more of it now! Would you rather they have cancelled it forever? I’m just glad to keep watching!”
or
B) “I never heard about this ‘Joel’ that all the senile old gramps talk about, but I just watched ‘The Room’ on RiffTrax, and ‘Final Sacrifice’ is the funniest thing ever!…’Rowsdower’!”
And, of course, now we don’t have two hosts anymore, now we have THREE. Instead of “We have more of it now”, we have Even More of it now, which pretty much takes away A) as the sole defense. Now you can get More in two different flavors, and it’s pretty much up to you to determine which one you prefer…But that also happens to make it an opinion, which makes it that much harder to defend as official Ape Law of the united masses, unless you can make a decently convincing argument in favor of it.
And as for B), that’s not exactly the show’s fault or credit, is it?
Think both the Mike vs. Joel “war”, AND why the new Jonah fans have latched onto 1102 like the Mike fans unnaturally latched onto Space Mutiny, has to do more with age demographics–
When Joel first came on, there was nothing on cable, and even less on the Comedy Channel. Every other little struggling channel, USA, TBS, was trying to “assemble” their programming from whatever old syndicated packages of reruns and PD or vault movies they had lying around, and this little upgraded Minnesota-station show with an addictive premise just felt like some anarchic attack on the whole image of cheap stations with cheap movies.
But by the time Mike’s SciFi years came on, it was a different channel, cable was pretty much all you WATCHED, and younger kids watching SciFi wouldn’t associate the show with the new Comedy Central of Jimmy Kimmel and Carlos Mencia.
And let’s be honest, when you’re in that age bracket, loyalty to something must be ABSOLUTE: You can’t just like your favorite group, or movie, or prefer DC Comics over Marvel, you must live your loyalty and take it out into the world–It’s better than having some actual individual identity you might not have formed yet by senior year. You have to feel as if you’re a -part- of something, or you’re nobody on your own.
With Pearl and Bobo reduced to just clownish annoyances, the Mike years didn’t suggest that they were “surviving” the movies, so much as ganging up on them, and Mike’s own persona of humor brought the “high school bully” aspect into the humor. The movie was the enemy stood up like a paper target, and here was a way to do all the “virtual bullying” that authority wouldn’t let you do to the geeky kids in the school halls the rest of the week.
Like RT, which also knew how to play the “cult” angle now that they had to keep their own income generated and steady, it was something that offered the kids a lifestyle, and to even dare suggest that Mike Wasn’t Funny, was to pick on the united fans themselves. To Attack One of Us Is To Attack ALL Of Us.
Thanks to Netflix, and an almost twenty-year absence, we have kids watching the show for the first time, latching onto the “lifestyle”, and believe that Jonah the Weirdness of Cry Wilderness will show them the Way (or at least something they just never saw before), just like Captain Santa and Big McLargehuge. That’s not the fault of the show, though; Jonah’s still got the old riffing style, and honcho-Hodgson’s still keeping the tone on track, it’s that if you’re just getting into this now, this might be a good time to look up those other old episodes that Netflix brought back, and build a pedestal with room for more than one statue.
Boy, am I insuff(er)able or what!?
This is why I stay here. Other “fan” sites on the web are a little too cultist for my tastes. Too many rules, and an underlying worship of the Sci-Fi era. (to attack one of us is to attack all of us, you’re right about that EricJ. the attitude elsewhere can be “you must like this too!” sometimes.)
Granted, there’s some Sci-Fi era I really enjoy, but over all, it’s not the greatest. And at least here, we’re allowed to express our opinions without repercussions from the Space Mutiny worshipers. (I’m not reigniting the great flame wars, I’m expressing an opinion. Oh, that opinion is just trolling, they said.)
I really like the direction the new series is taking. Incorporating the best elements from all eras, and leaving the nastiness and anger behind. Why, in four or five more seasons, the Sci-Fi era will stick out like a bitter sore thumb of the past.
Satellite News is still the absolute best fan community out there for MSTies.
That being said (and out of the way), I can’t wait to discuss the rest of season 11. Why, there’s even one upcoming episode that references Battlestar!
“loyalty…” wasn’t that the buzzword that the godfather used? or wasn’t it de niro in “the untouchables” before baseball-batting someone’s brains in? ;) (ever think you’d see a ‘smilycon” after those words? ;0)
personally, i’ve been a-pretty agnostic about you sir EJ; you sure seem to cut some divided surf-lines ’round here… i guess i’m not so easily offended. but, just a “word to the wise”, y’know… zealotry, in any-and-many stripes, is bound to cut you some hard opinions. (i guess i make my own “zealotry” decisions on other lines!)
that being said… i’m not here to tell others, “cut EJ some slack;” nor am i here to say “EJ, chill out”… but -everyone,- choose your battles wisely. some of ’em are so damned inconsequential… if you really truly have that much “vim’n’vigor,” there’s -real- political battlelines out there that could use your help and enthusiasm.
It’s the word Ex-Genius keeps using: If you don’t like M&tB/SciFi/Rifftrax, or even, gasp, take posts of the guy who doesn’t at face value, you’re “not one of the cool kids”. THAT’s high school, and you know, because you were (are?) there; don’t pretend it isn’t, and don’t pretend you weren’t.
Back before Netflix, we would have posters screaming in my face, “You don’t even like Rifftrax, why do you even post here?” That, you see, was because the group must show their loyalty to having New More of It by worshipping RT, and display their loyalty by making the site Rifftrax News.
And anyone who doesn’t, they’re not one of the Cool Kids, and let’s kick them out by dumping their books in the hallway and making them cry.
(As noted by the Copycat Guy, who, if he is one guy, has already started to forget why he did it in the first place–Word to the unwise, ONLY other high-schoolers worry about being upset by high-school pranks. Y’know how characters in Japanese anime shows would always say “You’re twenty years too early to take me on!”–I never could figure out what the heck that was supposed to mean, until I thought something must have been lost in translation, and tried to guess what it was REALLY saying. Here’s a good illustration, and you are.)
But again, how dare we be Nasty Trolls and say that all Mike fans are just frustrated wet-behind-the-ears new-kid high-schoolers enraptured by Mike’s la Vida Bully.
That would be damaging to the civil tone of the group discussion, so let’s all just pants them in the locker room and laugh.
Anime is lame. You’re not some kind of Geek Martyr, EricJ.
Plenty of people have been critical of Rifftrax, Mike Nelson, The Sci Fi Era, etc. Hell, I don’t like Rifftrax. The ones I’ve tried, I just did not like the tone. At the same time, when I post in my other guises, I don’t look for any reason at all to shoehorn a dig at them. You CAN DISLIKE that stuff here, but every post? It gets tiring. I hope you’re not as hateful IN REAL LIFE.
https://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=11583
So many years of this bulls***.
I’ve read the last five posts. I’m a pretty smart guy. Pretty well educated.
But damn if I can’t figure out what point is trying to be made.
I sort of feel like when I happen to come across a television in a public place tuned to Fox News. A mental reaction best described as “Huh?”
On May 3rd., of any given year, nothing happened.
if that is the case, August 7th was an boring night.
Well, just to keep the thread on track, the point started out as, “Why are all these new kids raving over Cry Wilderness out of all the other episodes?…I mean, it doesn’t seem as CLASSIC an episode as Space Mutiny!” ;)
So: There’s yer connection. HTH.
Oh, huh. Well. Seems like an easy enough question to answer – the movie is nuts. Chock full o’ nuts. It’s one of the few all-American movies I’ve seen that I was at first convinced was made by Joe D’Amato’s film production company during that strange time when they were making movies in America with (mostly) American actors using Italian crews. It’s that bizarre. It’s extremely entertaining. It makes for a great episode of MST.
I just reread that entire thread from the long, long ago time, and yep, it’s all the same junk, over and over again.
HOWEVER!
This comment – PondosCP says:
January 5, 2012 at 6:30 pm
I had always hoped that one day Mike would escape and a new person would be sent up to the SOL. And repeat this process every few years. Oh well…..
You (and most everyone else who doesn’t suffer from soul canker) got your wish!
The thread was going fine until EricJ jumped on Mike Kelley’s comment about fan boy love. From there I’m not quite sure what the hell happened. Does he like this episode, does he not? Do the writers try to be like the Sci-Fi Channel episodes too much, not enough?
The only thing I’m sure of is that if you’ve enjoyed a Sci-Fi channel episode, EricJ thinks you’re an idiot. CONSIDER ME AN IDIOT THEN!
(Also, dudes who hate The Mike Era, The Sci-Fi Era and who started watching when Joel was still the host are maverick rebels. #MakeMST3kGreatAgain)
My old handle, PondosCP! I did get my wish! And I’m loving it!
So EricJ cited a conversation from 2011 to prove that he’s been dealing with the utter indignity of other people liking Mike for far too long. But clicking back to that conversation, EricJ isn’t really being picked on for liking Mike, he’s being picked on for being a controntational dick about liking MIke.
So what he’s really proved is that he has, like. No self-awareness.
Ah, the host flame wars again. I think it’s my turn to be a smart alleck and point out that the real, original riffers were Theseus, Duke of Athens and his court in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
So neyah.
Just for a second I misinterpreted this to mean that there were people going by these names on RATMM or Prodigy groups or wherever back in the day and flaming hell out of one another over Mike/Joel. aigidda-aigidda-aigidda.
No, it was…y’see….look, never mind.
Just reminding “other” EricJ’s that you have to change your “Name (required)” back when you make your own posts, otherwise it’ll keep the last name entered, and well, THIS stuff happens. Ask yourself whether it’s really worth it.
#110- Right, and there’s a two-fold problem present that manages to make it worse:
1) The early scenes seem to suggest that they have no idea what the creature they are looking for is;
2) The minute we actually see the tiger on screen, the hunters know exactly where it came from.
This combination serves to further demonstrate how it’s a plot twist for the sake of being a plot twist: either they would have guessed that it was the missing tiger, or they should have been just as bewildered that it was one as we were.
Just to be clear, I’m NOT against Mike as host (I LIKE him as host. A lot). I thought (and still think) that “The Film Crew” was the best continuation of MST3K — better than Cinema Titanic, better than Rifftrax, and, yes, even better than “The Return”. Just not quite as good as the best of the Joel era.
What I’m REALLY missing about The Return (and what started to get absent during the Sci-Fi years) was that sense of having seen the movie for the first time, that kind of jaw-open bewilderment at what they were actually watching. Sure it was an act, sure they have all seen the various movies dozens of times (at least all who are writers) but they represented our surrogates in a way Jonah and the Bots just don’t do anymore.
These guys seem slick, they seem polished, they take a “well, I can fire a quip at this movie faster than the speed of light!” which doesn’t have that sense of naive wonderment at how bad a movie can actually be that MOST of us (old timers, I guess) used to have. It was what Joel did best, and what Mike did for a while (and seemed to recover again for The Film Crew and early Rifftrax) and what is the charm for me that separates MST3K from the snarky wannabes out there.
Because ANYONE can riff (and we all do) but not everyone can have a sense of wonder at the absurdity of it all. That I miss and I’m guessing most millennials would think is uncool. So color me decidedly uncool.
In older posts, EricJ seems to pop up out of nowhere, rocking us like a hurricane. When new fans or new site visitors come in to discussions and see EricJ apparently trolling the others and being iconoclastic, it almost seems like he’s trolling. But when you get to the bottom of things (or he deigns to explain himself), you see where he’s coming. And I will admit, after having done 5 runthroughs of the series in the past 5 years, I can definitely see his point about the direction riffing took.
Greatest thing about the new season is the revitalization of discussion.
What in the ever living hell are you even trying to say? Nobody here cares if someone doesn’t like Mike, or Rifftrax, or Joel, or The Film Crew, or Cinematic Titanic, or whatever. Everyone’s entitled to their preferences. I don’t even care if people hate the new season for whatever reason. The only point that has ever been a problem, which you consistently avoid addressing, is that you feel the compulsive need to bash on absolutely anything and everything remotely related to Mike in nearly every single post you make, regardless of whether it’s even the topic at hand or not, as well as presenting your opinion as fact. There’s no cool kids club, that’s just a dumb, lazy excuse you can use to justify your awful behavior on here. You don’t have to like Space Mutiny/Final Sacrifice/Werewolf, nor does anyone else. But your dislike of Mike episodes doesn’t make them bad, and it doesn’t make everyone who likes them dumb sheep.
And if there are people who think it’s not okay to not embrace every single aspect of MST3K and everything related to it, then they’re jackasses too. But that’s something I haven’t really seen on this site, but maybe I’m just too distracted by your overbearing jackassery to notice it. Reddit, is a different beast though. There’s a cadre of conspiracy theorist idiots over there who seem to be anti-Joel and are basically demanding to know any of the possible behind the scenes drama that might exist. They’re almost as toxic as you, maybe you should all hangout and spit your garbage at each other and let the rest of us enjoy what we want.
Y’know what? Yesterday I turned sixty-five, and it’s not a stretch to say I’ve enjoyed every iteration of our beloved cow-town puppet show since the jump. I like Joel, I like Mike, I like Jonah, I like the whole magilla. To me it’s all side-meat stuffed with a nougat-y center, and speaks to my inner smartass like no show before or since. And if that ruffles anyone’s feathers, let me be the first to invite them to kiss my withered white bum.
So I guess the Observers who lost their brains in season 9 are some if Kinga’s henchmen. Did anyone else think Bobo looked weird as hell?
This is the low point of the season for me, so far. Some great riffs, naturally, and the visit from Pearl & company was nice, but overall just okay. I think this episode is one case where they definitely tried to stuff too many riffs in regardless of quality. Maybe I’ll like it better on a rewatch, after I’ve gotten used to this season’s weird meta and without people talking in the room.
Oh, I’m having a blast!
I believe this is called the Stockholm Syndrome.
But that is such an essential part of the whole feel of the show! (And I can’t say that I ever noticed it not being there in any of the previous seasons.)
If they somehow (why?????) have discarded that, what else have they lost?
I haven’t signed up for netflix yet (FREE TRIAL OFFER! yes, I know). And now I’m inclining toward not.
If I had to guess, the aspect of MST3K that instated the “rules” that riffers must act like they’ve never seen the movies before probably came from Jim Mallon. Now that he’s no longer affiliated with the program, the “rules” seem to be thrown out the window.
But, with those “rules” intact, much of the shadowrama interaction of Season 11 could not happen. It does take some mild getting used to, but I look at it as a necessary exchange in order to push new boundaries. I suspect that in future seasons, this new kink will be smoothed out, and then become beloved. For example, most of Gypsy’s riffs in Season 11 aren’t all that hilarious. But, given time, they will be. We’re kinda back at Season 1 again, in a way.
Perhaps it’s a Mallon change, but I’m more guessing it’s just that kids nowadays (and, as I’m older than anyone else here, you’re ALL kids :>) need to be hip, cool, and never caught offguard. It’s “Us against the movie” rather than “well, we’re all in this together and what do we have here?”
It might be too facile an explanation to say the rule is “the riffers have never seen the movie before” because it goes beyond that. There are MANY times when, as bad and as weird as the movie might have been (and we all know there have been some stinkers) the host and bots STILL had some kind of awe and respect for it. Hard to quantify, but there wasn’t a sense of scorn so much as head-shaking amazement.
And there is an undertone of anger that, again, was more of a kinder sort of disposition. I got the feeling in seasons passed they were actually rooting FOR the movie, rather than railing against it. Almost like they wanted it to succeed and THIS is definitely absent.
I’m sure millennials in particular will like this, so those of you younger than, say, 30, shouldn’t worry at all. Those slighter older have probably accepted the norm, and it may be just us really old farts who won’t like it. And that’s okay — we aren’t the target audience anymore (this bothered me with Rifftrax but I have come to accept that my generation doesn’t matter one whit anymore. And that’s how it should be — youth must be served).
THESEUS
I wonder if the lion be to speak.
DEMETRIUS
No wonder, my lord: one lion may, when many asses do.
…
HIPPOLYTA
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst
are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA
It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
THESEUS
If we imagine no worse of them than they of
themselves, they may pass for excellent men.
No idea what you mean, I found the Sci-Fi era to certainly be more mean spirited than Season 11 in general, basically a more family friendly version of what was to come with Rifftrax.
Perhaps someone is blinded by nostalgia?
Deep cut: “I’m Garth Marenghi, and this is my Darkplace.”
I remember watching that show on Adult Swim. It defies definition. See IMDB for details.
Having watched this again, in better conditions, it holds up with the rest of Season 11 so far. Which is to say, it’s pretty good. Probably still my least favorite, but I like it much better. So I will change my vote from an “Ehh” to a “Thumbs up” on this one.
BANG! Obviously from my shiny new username, I think this episode is hilarious, although the greatest danger I saw was dumb racist kids and bowl cuts.
I warmed up to this one a bit more with my second viewing too. Right in the middle of the road for season 11 in my book. The movie is just so strange it becomes a bit distracting from the riffing. And at this point I still feel the riffing for season 11 didn’t quite have the timing down yet. But there is plenty to enjoy here, I just found about half of the episodes that followed it to be more entertaining. Want a full review, check it out here: http://romansreviews.blogspot.com/2017/05/cry-wilderness-1987-mst3k-review.html