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Now Available from RiffTrax…23 Replies to “Now Available from RiffTrax…”Commenting at Satellite News
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IF… Rowsdower had gotten a perm and a tooth whitening session he could have been our been our cover dude. I wonder if there’s beer in the Dark Future?
Although the Rifftrax site describes this film as featuring robots, the IMDB describes it as featuring CYBORGS. Which makes much more sense. Or at least noticeably more sense. :-)
“In the 21st century, most of mankind has been wiped out by a plague. The few remaining people are forced to live in an underground world, serving as prostitutes and slave to cyborgs that now control them. When the first baby in 30 years is born, a bartender leads a revolt against the part-man, part-machine creatures that seek to capture the baby for their own ends.”
So, in a world with no childbirth, there would be no future generations; humanity would consist of everyone who was (you should pardon the expression) presently alive and no one else, ever. People would only be able to sustain civilization (such as it is) by artificially increasing their durability and extending their lifespans, minimizing the chances of accidental death and postponing (if not eradicating) death by old age.
Thus, cyborgs.
This would be expensive and many people would be unable to afford it and would thus become the ultimate have-nots just as the cyborgs become the ultimate haves.
Hence prostitutes and slaves.*
Obviously, if babies start being born again, the cyborgs would ultimately become irrelevant to the survival of humanity and, just as obviously, the cyborgs wouldn’t like that.
Therefore, conflict.
Unless I’m wrong. I read the plot summary but not any of the reviews.
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*Of course, without childbirth, there’d be no future generations of prostitutes and slaves either, so the cyborgs must extend the lives of the have-nots in some other way, one significantly less cool than being cyborgs.
i think that’s Rowzdower’s uppity big shot brother from Winnipeg.
General Rifftrax questions:
Obviously, Rifftrax is only “allowed” to release very few of its riffed films on DVD (a format which I prefer). Is there any obvious way to tell which Riffed films (aside from the big-budget “name” films that the Brains could obviously never acquire full rights to) have at least a chance of future DVD release?
Just as obviously, of the BILLIONS of films that have not been Riffed as of yet, only a small fraction of them could be officially Riffed upon even under the best of circumstances (regardless of whether or not subsequent DVD release would be feasible). is there any way to tell if a given film is at least theoretically available for the Brains’ efforts?
(The second question can also be applied to The Mads, who AFAIK aren’t releasing DVDs as of yet.)
Think about it, won’t you? Thank you.
Even more obviouser, once one knows whether or not a film is open for riffing by either set of Brains, and one comes across such a film and thinks that in addition to being available to receive Riffing, it downright NEEDS to receive Riffing (subjective, of course), one could acquire a[n ideally] very inexpensive copy of said film and send it to a Brain so as to least up its chances of receiving attention from Practically Zero to Ehh, Maybe. :-)
I’m sure any number of suitably unstable people have already tried that, maybe even physically HANDED such a film to a Brain or an extension thereof at a Live Show, but if I ever do anything like that, well, darn it, I want to be SURE. ;-)
We really enjoyed this riff. It’s rare that we make it through a whole rifftrax on a first viewing.
How did Greydon Clark make so many movies? I’m not aware of any that are good.
Other than Live shows and shorts collections, RiffTrax films themselves on DVD are pretty rare. The last one RiffTrax released was Guy From Harlem four years ago.
The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant and The Astro Zombies were both released on blu-ray, but only as extras on the Kino Lorber releases. So at this point it seems like the most likely way a riffed film will get a home video release is if RiffTrax licensed it from Kino Lorber.
I believe every film The Mads have riffed has been public domain, so there probably isn’t anything preventing them from doing so other than funds, time and possible lack of interest.
Last year, during a Q&A session after a Mads show, Trace said they were considering doing a DVD release. He said, if they did, it’d probably be a studio version, rather than a live version, of a riffed movie.
So did P.D. James take Greydon Clark to court for copyright violation, or did she rather prefer to avoid drawing attention to the parallels between this film and The Children of Men?
If you have to read a film’s IMBD page to get basic plot information, it’s not a good movie…
It’s a Greydon Clark movie. we already KNOW it isn’t a good movie. ;-)
At least “Dark Future” evidently delivers: There IS a future and it IS a dark one (I’m guessing it’s not all that well-lit either). That’s two points over its fellow half-baked cyborg film “Future War” right there…
It was the Borg, folks, it was the Borg, I tells ya. They first appeared in 1989 and SF has never been the same. Like it or not.
BTW, in case anyone was wondering — and, really, who wouldn’t be? — “Future War” director Anthony Doublin directed three other films: “Manhater” (1997), Voodoo Dolly” (2005), and “Slaughtered” (2006).
I’m not sure which notion I find more unlikely, that Greydon Clark had any idea who P.D. James was or vice versa. :-)
Think about it, just how well-known would Greydon Clark be without MST3K and Rifftrax? Not nearly as much, I bet.
ADDENDUM:
Wait, upon reflection, where else would be my first stop for basic information on an unfamiliar film? I’ve done that with films that were released as recently as just this month. :-)
IMDB offers but one External Review of Dark Future, from Cold Fusion Video (quite a few obscure SF and horror films can say the same), which has, alas, been defunct lo these many years. Its creator, Nathan Shumate, can be found on Facebook and perhaps elsewhere but I have no idea if any reviews survived whatever cataclysm befell his website and he’s probably put it all behind him anyway. :-|
Other reviews of Dark Future may have been written in the interim, but they’d need to be searched out, and I doubt that anyone’s as interested as all that much. Besides, there are still so many bad SF films that aren’t even as well known as “Dark Future” is.
I think a better phrasing might have been, “If you have to read a film’s IMBD page to get basic plot information after seeing it, it’s not a good movie.”
Oh. Well, that’s not what I was talking about.
ANYWAY…
Two of the Mads’ riffed films — “Walk the Dark Street” and “The Choppers” — aren’t even identified as public domain films on Wikipedia. Which at least proves that they’re digging deeper for films than one might expect. :-) As I’ve noted before, for every “High School Big Shot” and “Racket Girls” and “Teenage Crime Wave,” there are dozens if not hundreds of other generic crime “thrillers” still lost to the general public. And for every “Last of the Wild Horses”…oh, baby…
The Mads’ other riffed films (at least, according to the only list that I’ve found so far) are Plan 9 from Outer Space (“again?“), Glen or Glenda, The Tingler, and The Monolith Monsters.
Did anyone else ever notice that the actual Plan 9 itself — forces from outer space raising the dead — is the central premise of Night of the Living Dead (1968)?
As was nearly forgotten in the Zombie Explosion (almost literally) that followed it, the only potential explanation that the original NOTLD offered for the resurrections was radioactive contamination from Venus (man, if it’s not Mars, it’s almost always Venus, isn’t it? location, location, location…) which was released by an exploded space probe. Thus, y’know, outer space.
Oh, it’s true…
I read somewhere — and it would be so very nice if I could remember where — that Plan 9, ostensibly set in the future comprised of future events that would affect us in the future, was specifically set nine years into the future of 1959, which would of course be 1968. Admittedly, I kind of doubt the veracity of this claim, but I’d still like to know where it came from.
Is our “hero” using a toy ray gun from KayBee?
I think it’s worth noting that this release, along with most of the other feature length releases, include a Burnable DVD Image (4.33 GB) as one of the digital file formats included with the price. You should just be able to use some DVD burning software and a blank disc to burn yourself copies of these instead of waiting for Rifftrax to sell more physical media titles.
I’m mildly surprised that the “original” Eric J. hasn’t posted “Oh, Rifftrax is doing another Greydon Clark film.”
Off topic: Mike’s Twitter account seems to have been deleted. Does anyone here know why?
He has nearly 70,000 followers.
It allegedly has something to do with the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office. (Please don’t believe that).
That isn’t funny.
Mike is smart, funny, and personable. I wonder what’s going on.
Also, at this wonderful website, the only Trumpy discussed is a character from “Pod People.”
BTW, the curly-haired star of the movie is Darby Hinton, aka “Sticks”, the wimpy pusher from “Angels Revenge!”
Oh, well, in the future, they diversified into real ray guns.
As the sterility deal dragged on and there were eventually no children anywhere on the planet, the toy industry went through a severe slump.
“Darby”? As in “O’Gill and the Little People”? Rampant leprechaun jokes, dead ahead…
aka Child star who played Israel Boone in the old Fess Parker TV series “Daniel Boone.” And Darby is a perfectly good Irish name.
addendum
I actually DID have to do that after watching the “Starcrash” episode, though.
What, no “the Dahhk Wun deekaars yew ind yeur daater aw doomet” counter-riffs? Tough room.
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Not really on-topic, regarding the many Mike episodes that one commentator or another has declared to be “Mike’s Manos,” IMHO one should consider what AFAIK no one ever considers:
Was the movie in question the only movie that the director ever made? Is it our sole glimpse into his madness?
If not, well, IMHO no real comparison can exist. Even Coleman Francis gave us THREE big steamy gawks into his soul.
Hal Warren threw everything that he was into Manos (poor dope)…as exemplified by the fact that afterwards he apparently had nothing left. Only another film which was its director’s sole film can rise, or sink, to the level of Manos.
IMHO Rifftrax and/or MST3K Season 12 (if there is one) should be searching for movies like that…
…Which would admittedly be hard to do, because when searching for something which is connected to NOTHING else, where do you start? One hand sardonically slow-clapping…