To which MST3K episode does the riffing make the most difference? Not necessarily the best episode, but the one where the whole movie experience is most improved by being MST’ed. Host segments and in-theater count.
For me it’s “The Starfighters”. I can enjoy “The Touch of Satan” by itself, but “Starfighters” is a dreadful excuse for a movie made enjoyable all the way from “Cowboy MIke’s Own Original Red Hot Ricochet Barbecue Sauce” down to the last in-air refueling scene where the crew struggles to find a double entendre they haven’t used yet.
I’m going to go with ‘Hamlet.”
You?
) to help our users cope with "trolls" and other commenters whom they find annoying. Go to our
‘the Incredible Melting Man’ without the riffing, my interest is a big puddle of nothing by the 15 minute mark. ‘it lives by night’ is a close second.
Any of the Coleman Francis movies, but especially Skydivers. I’d argue that the other two are funnier episodes, but Skydivers is just so bleak and depressing if not for the riffs. I love the runner about Petey the Plane and the build up to the much-anticipated coffee scene.
That’s interesting, because I came here to say that I can barely make it through Red Zone Cuba WITH the riffs. It’s just so bleak, misanthropic (with a healthy side of misogyny as well), nasty, brutish, and STUPID that I only try to watch it when it comes around on the Epidsode Guide. At least 3 tries, and it’s still a slog.
Whereas Skydivers is one of my Top 20 episodes. Funny, eh?
Monster a Go-Go
but there was no riffing makes the difference.
Definitely The Killer Shrews for me. I’d never watch this bleak, booze-fueled science-gone-wrong movie without the great riffing (“I’ve fallen in with a group of ham radio operators!”). Junior Rodeo Daredevils is a nice bonus, too, and provides one of the best host segments in the episode, with Joel turning into Will Rogers…sort of.
‘Invasion Of The Neptune Men, especially the last part with the unending air battle and stock footage.
I agree with Starfighters. To me, it is a classic episode. I can’t imagine watching it unriffed.
Radar Secret Service is a dreadfully uninspired movie with a dull plot, dull locations, and dull actors – but the riffing is pure gold, especially the running gag of talking about Welcome Back, Kotter instead of the hideously boring movie.
Unfortunately, even the riffing can’t save “The Starfighters” for me; I think it’s that bad. But I agree with bartcow that “Red Zone Cuba” is tolerable with the riffing and completely unbearable without it. Dishonorable mention to “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,” proof that most amateurs should not be handed a movie camera.
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Yeah, that is funny. I actually consider Red Zone Cuba one of my favorite episodes, simply because the movie is so terrible that most of the riffs are just the guys in awe at its awfulness. Such as:
Tom – At this point the movie has thrown up its hands and said, “I just don’t know”.
Crow – I wanna hurt this movie, but I can never hurt it the way it hurt me.
I love those kind of moments in an episode, but, to each his own.
The Screaming Skull –
Filmed in turgid-vision this movie hits a lot of my no thank you buttons. Male preying on female, female acting helpless, meandering who-done-it without much done-it. Then along comes Mike and the Screaming Crow Golf Club sketch. “No! Mike, it’s Crow! It’s CROWWW!!”
Hamlet and definitely the Coleman Francis films. No way I can watch THOSE things without the riffing.
But even the riffing can’t making me sit through The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies. A few years ago, Joe Bob Briggs released his own version on DVD, and I couldn’t even watch THAT version.
While we’re on the subject, however: Hey, Rifftrax? Can we get a riffing of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo? Can’t watch the thing by itself, but still curious.
Soooo…Manos?
Rocketship XM.
Number 1: Mitchell. There’s nothing likable about Mitchell (the character OR the movie). Everything is filmed in that dark brown-grey of bad 70s movies, and every scene just makes you hate the character more, the movie more, and yourself more for watching it. But add a few choice riffs and it’s an instant classic. Just knowing that someone else feels your pain upon the revelation of the baby oil…
Number 2: Pod People. The movie is just insulting: to professional musicians (“It stinks!”), to women (“Deep down he’s crazy about you. Making out with girls is just part of his thing…”), to the audience (Obviously synthesized forest sounds? Really? Couldn’t even stump for a cheap effects record?), to the time-honored tradition of product placement (SPRITE!), to the entire field of cinematography (just watch any random scene, or the “transition” between any two scenes…). But J&TB take each of these in stride, from their impeccable recording of “Idiot Control Now”, to “Be nice to your boyfriend’s girlfriend!”, “They parked next to a data stream!”…
Number 3: Attack of the the Eye Creatures. They just didn’t care — and neither would we, without those cathartic riffs to ease the pain…
Dishonorable mention: The Castle of Fu-Manchu. I’m not sure if they just weren’t feeling it or this movie is just that bad, but even their best effort can’t bring this movie up to the level of being watchable.
I second (or third, I guess; maybe even fourth by now) “Starfighters”. I actually watched it straight once–when I was a kid, a local Chicago station showed it one afternoon on Tuesday, the day they were supposed to show combat movies. Imagine how a 15-yr-old in the mid ‘sixties would feel watching THAT instead of, say, some WW II B-movie about fearless fighter pilots! The lingering trauma was exorcised only by MST3K, and then only the second time I watched the ep all the way through. A handful of other films are, for me, rendered only barely watchable by the Best Brains treatment: “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”, “Incredibly Strange Creatures, etc.”, “Castle of Fu Manchu”, and a few others. Then there are the trainwrecks, the movies that you know are far worse than anything you could otherwise imagine, but which make great fodder for the inspired J or M&TBs: the Coleman Francis turds o’misery, “Manos”, several in Season 11; these are among my all-time faves. Alas, there are those which, verily, not even the riffing can salvage: “Hobgoblins” & “Pod People” among them. When you get right down to it, I think the only ones I could watch without riffing (MST3K’s or my own) are the Japanese monster movies: I wouldn’t even bother watching the James Bond & Star Wars rip-offs, forgotten B-movies, etc., otherwise.
For me it’s The Sword and the Dragon. Those dubbed films seem to attract riffing.
I’ll go with Eegah. The riffing made an otherwise goofy, unwatchable movie on of my favorite episodes (Though nothing can alleviate the pain that is the shaving scene!).
Even the riffing can’t save Hamlet. The movie that should never have been on MST3K.
The Girl in Gold Boots. Every frame of this greasy, slimy, movie would be unbearable without the riffing.
i wonder what Shakespeare would have thought of them riffing Hamlet.
“… the one where the whole movie experience is most improved by being MST’ed.”
ALL OF THEM .
Pretty much This, but only the serious ones–The riffing on “Village of the Giants” is too distracting, since you can’t really goof on a movie that knows it’s goofing itself, and it’s basically just stating the obvious beyond watching it straight and going with it FWIW.
(Unless the experience of the story goofing itself is sheer physical pain, which is why Wild World of Batwoman riffs so well.)
“Over Shakespeare’s grave is an inscription reading ‘Curst be he that moves my bones’….It is possible that (some productions) may have caused Shakespeare to turn over in his grave, but in that case, he will have moved them himself.”
– Richard Armour, Twisted Tales From Shakespeare (a much sillier riffing on Hamlet)
And besides, Shakespeare INVENTED MSTing in “A Midsummer Nights’ Dream”, long before Dickens riffed on Hamlet in “Great Expectations”.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless MSTie.
My wife is a fan of MST’s Wild World of Batwoman, at least to the extent of sitting through it two or three times.
Then I got a copy of the unriffed version.
Even Rolling Rock couldn’t get us past the first visit to Professor G. Octavius Neon’s lab. This was serious–now she’s EXTREMELY wary of watching ANY unriffed version of ANYTHING.
Movies like Mitchell, Pod People and Manos I have enjoyed without riffing. But the one that I watched unriffed that almost spoiled the episode for me was Sidehackers. I really love this episode, and decided to watch it unriffed. It’s not so much the attack scene is so horrible, it’s actually quite tame compared to real messed up movies, it’s the over all tone of the movie after that scene happens. It’s a very dark, bleak and ugly movie. Such a weird pick for MST3K. I can see why they screened the flicks all the way through after this one. But I’m glad they didn’t for this one, or otherwise there would be no Sidehackers episode. For the Brains to take such a bleak movie and make it almost joyful is amazing, and a testament to their comedic skills.
High School Big Shot is probably the darkest movie MST3K riffed, but Season 6 lets the dark shine through in it’s episodes (and I love it). So I’ll go with Sidehackers for my answer as riffing makes the difference.
You can have fun with a bad drama, more so with a horror movie. This thing is trying to scare me, and it just ain’t making it. But a bad comedy? You can’t laugh at it, lest it seem that the humor is connecting. You just sit there with a sick feeling in your stomach from pity for the writers who missed so badly.
Therefore, may I nominate, at least for an honorable mention, “Catalina Caper”? I had my fill of Frankie and Annette movies at bad movie festivals in my younger days. “Catalina Caper” makes “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” seem cerebral. But then Tom belts out “Creepy Girl” and 90 minutes of agony is transformed.
I sometimes wonder if MST3K fans are either sci-fi fans or comedy fans.
Personally, I love B sci-fi /horror/fantasy movies, riffed or unriffed.
He probably would have liked it better than Strange Brew, which was a Canadian version of Hamlet.
Remember, in Shakespeare’s day, theater was really low brow, like watching TV, and things like catcalls and jokes from the audience (and worse) were not uncommon.
As just another Thursday night.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies…….aw, I give up even talking about this one.
yeah, watching it unrifled at home is not the way to go for this one. it was designed to be watched in a packed theater house, complete with people in masks running up and down the aisles. kinda like Rocky Horror with bad music lol
“The Creeping Terror” I love this episode but you can imagine actually seeing this on its own?
I saw that in the late 70s at about 10 yo on a old late night horror show. Will never forget the weirdness, wondering what was going to happen next. I don’t even think the movie is overly predictable, and not just for 10 year olds.
screaming skull comes to mind… a dull dreary bore that is a hilarious episode. Mitchell as well.. ugly, boring, and infuriating film.
runner up has to be Loves of Hercules. I am not a big fan of the Herc episodes and this one is worse than usual. I think it’s Season 11’s best riffing performance and makes it the second best episode of the season and a top 10 of all time for me.
Carnival magic.
Oh, agree. This one hurts A LOT sans riffing.
Given that I’ve never seen one of the MST movies unriffed, this is a little hard to answer. However, I will say that I don’t think many people would watch Sidehackers unriffed.
I think this is a key cultural divide. I love “Manos” in all its original glory. I enjoy “Godzilla vs. Megalon”, “Space Mutiny”, “Robot Holocaust”, “Final Sacrifice” and many, many others. I can’t explain why, but I find their obvious flaws to be endearing. Thus, when I take (how good it is with the MSTreatment) – (how good it is originally), it’s the difference of two fairly high numbers, so it doesn’t produce such a big score.
“Red Zone Cuba” stinks mightily, It’s boring, it’s implausible, it’s rudderless, it’s morally degrading. It leaves such an unpleasant odor that I can’t enjoy it no matter how much it gets roughed up. So it rates as the difference between two small numbers, and also doesn’t produce a very good score for most improved.
People who hate the movies, and love to hate them, see things through a different lens. Jay seems to rate everything the same, which I can only explain by post-riff they all get 100, and pre-riff they’re all a 0, then, well, there’s no way to say which is most improved.
I once caught the original, un-riffed Hercules on the BBC, and it was really….. bizarre.
The first half was the version we know, with the same dubbing.. but the second half, there was a whole different dub involved. It’s like they mixed up the reels between two different versions of the film.
What’s odd is, I’ve seen it once or twice since then while flipping through channels, and it’s also the first dub. Odd.
Gare
The only unriffed, original version of a MSTed movie I’ve seen (and own!) is The Magic Sword, which is also where I took my username.
Now, I may have seen others (my parents are I are big B-movie buffs) but they don’t stand out as much, if at all.
First movie I saw that wound up being MSTed was “Village of the Giants,” which I CAN watch without the riffing, so it doesn’t qualify for this list. Still weird, though.
I remember when Rifftrax did Casablanca, and they had all the “why did you riff on a good movie!” complaints. At the time, I was reminded of a riff during “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”: Never run a good movie in the middle of your crappy one.
Some more thoughts after all this horse hockey:
Completely agree about “Carnival Magic [sic]”: that is probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched all the way through, and I can’t even begin to imagine just watching it on its own. Of all the MSTied wonders, that one would make me just cry.
Among the MST classics I’ve seen unriffed: “Giant Gila Monster”, “Killer Shrews”, “Gamera”, “Starfighters”, “Terror from the Year 5000”, and “Gorgo” (the last-named was the only one I saw in a movie theater). I think maybe “Hercules”, too. [I had this little old white-haired spinster lady as a Latin teacher back in high school, and I remember her telling us with real enthusiasm how great all those Herc movies are! If only she had lived long enough to watch them on MST3K!]
The Bond & Star Wars rip-offs as genres are inherently unwatchable: the cynicism of the plagiarism is just too infuriating. With these movies, the nastier the riffing, the more viscerally satisfying it is.
I will say this; I’ve seen “Gorgo” unriffed, when I was 11 and I liked it. Sure, I was 11, but I’m a monster/Kaiju nerd so I still like it. I remember getting a chill up my back when the realization hit me that Gorgo may be a baby, then a genuine freakout when mama showed up!