I’d be curious to see what *good* things in cinema MST3K has led people to. For me, it was Akira Kurosawa.
When I was younger, I was vaguely aware of the existence of Kurosawa and his films. I’m quite sure I remember watching Siskel and Ebert review ‘Ran’ on their show, and hearing how much they loved it. But hey–I was about 14 at the time, what did I know about foreign films? And there, it might have ended.
Fast-forward quite a few years, to MST3K and episode 301, ‘Cave Dwellers.’ When the heroes run up against three oriental warriors, Tom says, “Oh, no, they’ve jumped right into the middle of a Kurosawa film.” Joel asks, “So it’ll start making sense?” and Tom replies, “Yep.” Then, a few seconds later, as the camera focuses in on one of the oriental warriors, Tom says, “Yep, Toshiro Mifune, right there.”
‘Cave Dwellers’ is a favorite episode of mine, and every time I watched it on my VCR, I was reminded that hey, Kurosawa films exist, and they’re supposed to be really good. Until finally, a few years later, ‘Ran’ was briefly re-released for a run on big screens. I went to see it, and was blown away. I now own that, and several other Kurosawa films, on DVD, and have many more lined up in my Netflix queue. And I might never have started watching them if it wasn’t for MST3K.
For me, I’d have to say it was the discovery of Hammer Studios movies, which I began to learn about because my riffing group was riffing them when they ran in Turner Classic Movies. They’re not all “good” I suppose, but they’re worth seeing.
What about you?
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A rather trivial one, ewvidence that even spy movies of the ’60s and ’70s weren’t
always successful as spinoffs and/or vehicles for would be stars.
Specifically Sean Connery’s brother in Double Double 007 which in turn
recalls George Lazenby as the second James, James Bond. Which leads to consideration
of successful spoofs of the genre (Our Man Flint and The President’s Analyst—James
Coburn) with less successful ones (Matt Helm—Dean Martin).
Another, how enthusiasm of plucky, young filmmakers also needs talent and some financial
resources. ex. (generally successful) Time Chasers, less so (Hobgoblins and Soultaker—even
these two had some thought and effort but, ah, had some flaws.
For me, MST is the end, and the beginning since I discovered the show. GF and I watch too much TV and too many movies- always pointing out connections to MST. Seems not a day, for that matter, an hour doesn’t go by when we don’t employ some six degrees of separation. That said, I am presently reading Greydon Clark’s biography.
For me it was the discovery of actors rather than movies. MST3K made me a big fan of Bela Lugosi and Beverly Garland. And, in a sense, Greg Snegoff, who did the dubbed voices for Ator (Cave Dwellers), Strike (Escape 2000) and (non-MST’d) Yor, Hunter from the Future along with Rex Reason for their awesome voices.
I also spotted Richard Lynch (Noel from Werewolf) in a Star Trek: The Next Generation 2-parter when watching it the other day (Season 7’s Gambit) and only recognized him because of the voice.
MST, in general led me to watch Planet of the Apes, just so i would understand “get your hands off me you d**n dirty ape!” and it filled in alot of holes for the early season 8 host segments and professor bobo.
On a pseudo related topic note. Though its a stinkburger, upon reading a review about Red Zone Cuba Particularly the line below:
After I read that- it clicked. Its not a great movie, but I respect it more now.
Off the top of my head, it was a morbid fascination with Arch Hall, Jr. inspired by “Eegah” that led me to check out “The Sadist” when it aired on TCM some time back. The film is extremely unpleasant, but you can’t deny the visceral power of Hall’s performance – nor will you soon forget it. Truth is, I always thought Hall was pretty good in “Eegah” too, acting-wise – he just plays a painfully annoying character. Kid might have had a career if he didn’t look like a Cabbage Patch Elvis and have his own Col. Tom Parker for a dad.
During the invention exchange of “Monster a Go-Go”, the mads compete to make the better action figure, and if Joel and the Bots won they’d watch “Local Hero” instead of MAGG. So we decided to check it out and it’s really good, a charming drama with Burt Lancaster and some nice Scottish scenery.
With the exception of Beast of Yucca Flats (Too slow and boring) I actually kinda like the Coleman Francis films. The strange characters, reoccurring themes, sketchy story lines and poor (maybe genius) editing give them a dreamlike quality that makes them seem almost good.
As a older fan I had a better grasp of the riffs made during the series. I, along with other were exposed to a lot of the same movies and TV shows as the writers. I watched tons of TV as youth. I watched everything. News, old movies, talk shows, crime shows, comedies, dramas, biographies, game shows.
A good example of how it is different today is William Conrad. Of course this is reference to the William Conrad fridge alert gag. The actor was a well known voice actor and from his series CANNON. It was a big hit back then. BUT this show has not been played in reruns for decades. You won’t find this on TV anymore or on the shelf in Best Buy. You might find it on youtube if you look. There is a good chance that younger fans might have no idea who he was. So if you don’t go back to older pop culture you will miss what the riffers were trying to invoke.
I feel as #8 does, that being an older fan means I was exposed to more of the alluded-to movies, TV shows, actors, bands, songs, and other pop culture items already. So I can’t really say that MST3K has **led** me to any good cinema discoveries. I did, however, finally “get” the movie “Ed Wood,” which stars Johnny Depp and Martin Landau. When I first saw it, I thought it was funny but too ridiculous to be believable. Then I saw the MST versions of “Bride of the Monster” and “The Violent Years,” and yes, Ed Wood really was that bizarre.
Another interesting revelation came when I saw “The Brute Man.” The Shout Factory DVD has a very good feature on the star, Rondo Hatton. I’d thought he was a guy in a mask, but he was actually so deformed by his incurable acromegaly that that was what he looked like, poor man. At least he was able to turn his affliction into a career, although I was sadly reminded of The Elephant Man.
Great choice for a topic!
As I mentioned in the “Soultaker” thread this week, MST introduced me to a few movies along the way that were intriguing or entertaining enough to make me want to see them on their own. “Soultaker” is one of those movies for me, along with “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, “Phase IV”, “Hangar 18”, and “Humanoid Woman” (the “restored” version, if I can find it, not the choppy Sandy Frank version). I’ll probably add them all to my collection someday, so MST has made an obvious contribution to my cinematic experience in that sense.
More indirectly, though, the Japanese imports by Sandy Frank, along with the historical commentary provided by August Ragone on the MST DVDs and my own subsequent research, lead me to learn a bit more about Japanese culture than I knew before. That’s especially true of the Gamera movies. I still think they’re mind-bogglingly goofy movies, but I now think I can appreciate them a bit more, which only makes the MST treatment more fun to watch.
I suppose that all the references to the Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges gave me more of an appreciation for their comedy as well. I borrowed a Marx Brothers DVD set from my folks, and it was an extra pleasure to see something that hearkened back to MST in some way.
Growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, I was introduced to the horror genre on the local version of Shock Theatre. Thus, I watched many of the Universal classics like Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and the Invisible Man. These films thrilled me as a youth, so when I was a little older and saw some of the Hammer versions at the picture show or drive-in, Hammer’s efforts absolutely disgusted me. I didn’t like Hammer’s make-up, monsters or acting, even though Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would later have distinguished careers.
I’m also a rabid Kurosawa fan, so perhaps the only revelation from MST3K were the existence of the Coleman Francis’s of the world. Although, in their defense, it’s not easy to make any film, and they did manage to do that.
I agree with the Smoothie of Great Power – I’ve always been a fan of those old movies from Hammer and Universal, long before they were MSTiefodder I used to watch a lot of them on our local “Creature Double Feature” Saturday afternoons back in Cambridge Massachusetts. I was already a fan of Lugosi, and in fact all the horror greats, but I’d have never really “caught on” to Beverly Garland as the great, fun actress she was without MST. I have to say, though, I DID kinda become a fan of those old 1050s Juvenile Delinquency movies because of MST! – and the “Sword & Sandal” stuff is something I’d never really paid any attention to before. Now I’m a regular customer on the “Something Weird Video” DVD website.
I’d have to say that it has led me to discover not only some (ahem) interesting movies, but interesting actors and actresses. I’ve become quite a fan of Roger Cormans’ films. Yes they’re cheesy, cheap, and poorly acted. But they’re a helluva lot of fun to watch. I love Alison Hayes, Bev Garland, Yvette Vickers, and all those other “B” movie queens. And let’s not forget my favorite Mst3k’d actor, Bryant Haliday. He’s a damn good actor nobody in the states has ever heard of. He was downright creepy in “Devil Doll” and not too shabby in “The Projected Man” either.
Well, MST made me a major Roger Corman fan. TV Guide did an article once commenting that maybe the reason that the “movie-razzers” of MST3K disliked Corman films was because Dr F never sent them any of Corman’s good films. They do exist. And I better appreciate the z-grade movies that were MST’s bread and butter. Even Ed Wood’s oeuvre has its interesting moments.
And, although MST3K only did one El Santo film, I started checking them out recently, along with a few of the other Mexi-horror movies. They’re actually quite fun to watch (despite the fact that so few of them went through the K Gordon Murray school), and I really wish MST had (and Rifftrax now) done more of them. I bought The Brainiac because of that – goofiest film you ever saw, even without Rifftrax’s roasting.
But I still can’t get through The Room, even with Rifftrax’s generous assistance.
I didn’t know “Moon Zero-Two” was a Hammer film…
@13, 14 – Most of the Roger Corman movies in their local-station package were public domain (Giant Leeches, etc.), so we didn’t get any of the Vincent Price Poe movies on his filmography–
But once I’d started listening to Corman on his DVD commentaries, I could see him trying to put some sly “themes” into some of his movies like “It Conquered the World”, since he was pretty much in charge. (I would never have noticed Corman’s Daisy-Duke-shorts fetish for Beverly Garland as well.)
Thanks to MST3K, I’ve seen the original film that became Jack Frost. I had a bad head cold, it was in Russian without subtitles. The original ending involved some kind of Laugh-In esque puppet booth.
I also have a few of the eps of what Sandy Frank turned into Star Force: Fugitive Alien. I wish some kind fansub group would take pity on us Misties and sub them into English…
I, too, developed an appreciation for Corman. I read one of his autobiographies and watched the documentary about him. I wigged out a little when Jack freaking Nicholson got choked up talking about how Corman was the only person who’d give him a break in the early days. Sure, he’s tight with his money and a bit of a mercenary, but the list of people who went to the “Corman Film School” remains impressive.
I also enjoyed “The Sadist”, and was surprised at the violence and nastiness on display for the time period in which it was made.
And it’s not so much a “cinema discovery”, but the endless references did inspire me to finally watch Star Trek: TOS from start to finish (I’d seem random episodes here and there). Now I understand the whole “I AM KIROK” thing, and I’m better for it.
It pretty much completed my journey to becoming a bad movie/cult cinema fan. Director-wise, another vote for Corman (I really need to read his bio, my friend has a copy), Jeff Leiberman (Squirm), and Ray Dennis Steckler.
Actor wise, it introduced me to Cameron Mitchell, Beverly Garland, Robert Easton, and re-introduced me to Clu Gulagher (who I had seen in Return of the Living Dead as a kid). The Sadist might also count, but I had read by objective sources it was the only genuinely good movie he did.
I also genuinely like Last Chase, Crawling Hand, Godzilla vs the Sea Monster, Tormented, The Rebel Set, Kitten With A Whip, Escape 2000 (and sought out the first one, 1990 Bronx Warriors), The Thing That Couldn’t Die, and Diabolik.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Stones – #301 Cave Dwellers when Tom riffs “if you try sometime…”
“Die Hard 2” – #303 Pod People when Tom riffs “‘Die Hard 2’ this is not.” I wasn’t old enough to partake of “Die Hard 2” when it came out, but I remembered it years later.
Frank Zappa – with an average of one reference per episode, how could I not?
Statue of Iwo Jima – #422 Day the Earth Froze. Again, at a young age, I had no idea what it was, so my dad filled me in. Great story.
A. Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” – #416 “Fire Maidens”
Too many to list. But a few days ago I watched yet another in the Starman series and thought how happy I was that MST3K intro’d me to the awesomeness of “what came before Ultraman” with Prince of Space and Space Chief. All these started with Flash Gordon, I believe. I highly recommend the Something Weird release of the Starman movies. As a lifetime fan of Ultraman, I was thrilled to get my hands on something I’d never seen before.
Since Huggybear @ #13 mentioned Bryant Halliday of Devil Doll and Projected Man fame, I’d like to point out to all the Criterion Collection fans that he co-founded Janus Films back in the 1950s, and pretty much single-handedly introduced the masterpieces of world cinema to American audiences–including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu, to name just a few. Criterion fans will recognize the Janus Films logo in front of many, many of their great releases.
Bela Lugosi is a good one. I knew of him before MST3K, but since then, I’ve tried to collect all of his films that I can. I never thought “The Corpse Vanishes” was all that bad. It had a bizarre bunch of misfit characters and decent gothic atmosphere. let’s see…”Eegah” sort of led me to “The Sadist”, probably Arch Hall Jr’s only good movie. Lots of times though, watching the b movies on MST just leads me to watching similar b movies that never showed up on MST from the same director or with the same cast members. It’s a vicious cycle.
I would have to echo the above posters that said MST introduced them to Roger Corman. That led to reading his autobiography and other books about him. And then the Shout Factory voluminous Corman DVD releases. (Hopefully with more to come?)
Ray Dennis Steckler was another one which led to getting the DVD a few years back which led to an affinity for Joe Bob Briggs and his books and commentary tracks as well. Got into Ed Wood and Del Tenney from MST.
The show introduced me to the whole realm of sci-fi. And mostly the low budget stuff. I started getting stuff from the Wade Williams collection and Something Weird Video. Jumping into more Bela Lugosi movies and the Universal classics and silent German horror movies and Lon Chaney and and and…MST was just a springboard into this genre that I never cared about before beyond King Kong, The Thing From Another World, and Star Wars.
Basically several home video companies now rely on me for income and all because of the worlds that MST opened the door on for me.
While I’m familiar with the phenomenon described, I can’t recall any MST3K movies having such an effect on me. The last time I recall something like that happening to me was a couple of years ago when I followed an anime series called Bodacious Space Pirates, which is what could be called science fiction which harkens the Age of Sail. This encouraged me to try out similar science fiction in the form of David Weber’s Honor Harrington and David Drake’s RCN. My preferred one is RCN due to the smaller scale and the more awesome characters like Hogg, Tovera, and Woetjans.
And regarding the pro-Corman posts, a while back we did a Weekend Discussion regarding his better films.
https://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=15237
They make so many references to Mannix (mainly when somebody jumps over something or jumps on somebody) that when I was flipping through the channels about a year ago and saw a Mannix episode on the Cloo channel, I had to watch it. Mannix did jump around a lot so I got the references but I also got hooked on the show and am now working my way through it on DVD. So thanks MST3K for helping my find another fun TV show.
This is a great question. I consider myself a die-hard Mistie, a completist, a reference hoarder, all of it. I was lucky enough to find MST3K around the time of the first Comedy Channel episode. I was 17, which is a prime time to be influence by something you really enjoy.
Before the show, I was a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, stand-up comedians, Monty Python, Mad Magazine, Star Wars, and the ZAZ movies. I think MST3K turned me from a movie fan into a cinephile. I enjoy movies from all eras and all styles because of the show, it really expanded my horizons. I discovered Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut, and plenty of other foreign films. I don’t know if I would’ve gotten into Citizen Kane. the Marx Brothers, Metropolis, The Twilight Zone, or anything before my generation without the millions of references that piqued my curiosity. It made me realize how big a world it is out there.
Some of my favorite musicians like Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Woody Guthrie, David Bowie, and the Clash, I would say I owe a lot of those discoveries to MST3K. Literary references as well. My tastes have diverged as I’ve gotten older (25 years since the show began? Jeez…), but I would say the best thing MST3K ever did for me was to remind me not to be content with what I already know. There’s always more out there.
After Mitchell, I checked out The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and was very pleasantly surprised that it was a really fun film. I probably would never have even heard of it had it not been for MST3k.
One of the first things I learned from MST3K was that many times the movie makers themselves are at fault when you are having a hard time watching and following along with a movie.
I used to think it was me, that I just wasn’t bright enough or something.
Sometime it is still just me, but I now know to scrutinize the movie makers and can tell better when they are dropping the ball now…Be it the producers, writers, directors or actors, I now have a general grasp of the right ways and the many wrong ways of doing things.
This helped me to just let go and make the best of a bad movie when I have to sit through one. I have actually picked movies to watch just because they are ‘so bad they are fun’. I never would have done that before MST3K.
I want to make a suggestion for a future discussion as well while I’m here. Now that Rifftrax has released close to 200 shorts, how about having a favorite Rifftrax shorts discussion? I find the shorts to be the best things they have produced, and own them all. I’ve watched the hell out of all of them and have really come to love many of the shorts. I’d be interested to know which ones other people like a lot.
I am very partial to ‘Setting up a Room’, by the way.
Also to add to my last line, I love the Rifftrax ‘Setting up a Room preview’ they did, which is easy to find on Youtube. I only saw it long after I had seen the actual short, and it made me love it all the more.
Also to #13 Huggybear, I’m with you all the way on Bryant Haliday.
A lot of interesting responses here as well, and have to agree with many.
I have also looked for and found other films and appearances of Coleman Francis, Bryant Haliday and other actors who I was introduced to by the show.
I’ve been searching for any other appearance of Emby Mellay in anything else besides ‘The Touch of Stan’…there just ISN’T ANYTHING AT ALL.
I thought that the witch in the Rifftrax short ‘Magical Disappearing Money’ could possibly be her, but I have no real evidence of that and doubt it is her. Still I keep looking, for no real reason other than wonder.
Manny Sanguillen:
I would tend to agree that does look like Emby in the short… but i think the time is wrong… there’s a big age differencial in the girls and not a big time differencial in the productions.
again… maybe i’m wrong EVEN in this… but it does seem that the crazy woman worried about other people’s money does bear a striking resemblance to Emby. Wish i could find more stuff with her in it.
Charles B. Pierce is a man responsible for some important low-rent cinema, like The Town That Dreaded Sundown and The Evictors. Although Boggy Creek II is awful, MST3K was my gateway to the man’s filmography.
There are a few movies on MST3K where the biggest sin was reach extending grasp, an issue often exacerbated by inexperience and budget constraints. In a number of cases I have been driven to seek out unedited versions of these films. I am unapologetically grateful that MST3K exposed me to stuff like The Incredibly Strange Creatures, Clonus, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Soultaker, Time Chasers, and This Island Earth. Devil Doll and Screaming Skull are dimestore shockers that nonetheless have some genuine effectivess despite being dull as hell. Squirm, The Touch of Satan and The Deadly Bees are on the upper end of disposable 70s drive-in fare.
MST3K introduced me to a lot of B-movies that I genuinely like to varying degrees, and I credit the show with fanning the flames of my general interest in late-night cheapies that ultimately led me to actively seeking their ilk out and becoming a more knowledgable and rounded lover of cinema in the process. There are so many fascinating failures out there, and even though MST3K used many of them for mockery, they celebrated them on some level too. At any rate, there’s much I’ve discovered and will continue to due to MST3K.
AmazingRando (27) has made me wonder, has there ever been a Weekend Discussion Thread about what *music* discoveries fans owe to MST3K? I think that would be a good one, too.
In general MST3K taught me to become more appreciative of good cinema. They are constantly riffing about the technical aspects of poor film making, and meanwhile teaching me what it takes to make a crappy film.
I think one must be fully aware, and fully exposed, to bad movie making to appreciate the art of doing it well, and knowing the difference when I see it.
I’ve already mentioned this ad nauseum, but I’m eternally grateful to MST3K for doing SANTA CLAUS. I dimly remembered seeing it in a children’s matinee and for years afterward wasn’t sure what the Hell I was remembering. “So Satan has trapped Santa Claus in a tree and if he doesn’t escape before someone sees him he’ll die…?”
I’d already heard of many of the weird films and genres MST3K did but I’m equally eternally grateful they gave me a chance to see movies I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to see otherwise.
I can’t say there is any one thing in particular that my love of MST led me to discover, but it definitely played a HUGE role in furthering my appreciation of film in general. I will watch anything and everything, which has led me to some amazing things that I otherwise probably would have never discovered. A few quick examples off of the top of my head are my absolute adoration of the films of Jacques Tati, and my love of silent films, the latter of which also led me to my love of the films of Guy Maddin. Again nothing in MST led me directly to any of these, but in general my entire vision of film was so effected by MST that I was forever placed on the path to those and many other of my favorite films, directors, genres, etc. I was in middle school when I started watching MST3K, and even though I had always loved watching movies a lot more than the average person, at that time my movie preferences were mostly sci-fi and action movies, and my viewing habits basically just consisted of going to the decidedly non-arthouse local multiplex theaters to see the stuff they would show, watching what I already loved and had on tape, or heading to the local video shop and browsing for things that looked interesting along those sci-fi/action lines. But by the time I was in 12th grade I was so in love with movies in general that I once convinced a group of my friends to ditch the free passes we had to see a preview screening of Johnny Mnemonic (couldn’t have made a better decision there), and instead drive fifteen miles away to a run down but beautiful old single screen theater to see a one night showing of The Graduate (which has become my all time favorite film). That was pretty much the opposite of what the 7th grade me would have done in that situation, and I think that the change in me was in large part because the previous five years of my MST3K obsession had helped turn me into a fearless and boundless lover of film in all it’s forms.
I discovered people via MST more than anything else. As well as several already mentioned, MST introduced me to Gloria Talbott and Brett Halsey, who were often better than the material they had to work with. And – call me kooky – I thought Jean Fontaine – Gloria in ‘The Sinister Urge’ – had sufficient chops to rise above the awful, awful writing and directing of you-know-who. Sadly, she hardly did anything else.