Any movies the MST guys did that you want to see un-riffed and uncut?
Because some of those movies are actually pretty good on their own merits, IMO, or because you’re curious about seeing it in its original form or because the guys talked over that one scene and you were dying to know what the movie characters said so you can get closure?
My choices:
Pretty good: “Sword and the Dragon” cause I love wild fantasy films.
Curious: ALL the Sandy Frank films! A chance to see “Mighty Jack” or “Time of the Apes” in their original Japanese, uncut, with proper translated subtitles would be epic and explain A LOT!
Closure: “Being from Another Planet.” I want to know what happened to those poor people who got affected by the fungus (among us) and Joel and the bots talked over one of the scenes explaining that. Did they die? Did that one kid survive only by amputating his arm? I want to know!
I’ve always felt that the SAMPO got short shrift, as it was explained in the movie, but it got riffed over.
What’s your pick?
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but there was no UnMSted movie….
as frightening as it is to possibly get a gratuitous JDB naked butt shot, i would like to see what happened to John Saxon in ‘Mitchell!!’
There are two that I’d like to see: Tormented and Soultaker. I really enjoy the MSTied versions, but I think those movies would be entertaining enough in their own right.
THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE –
It would be really cool to see a good copy of the film with accurate dubbing or even subtitles. It’s actually a beautifully shot movie and an interesting myth with a long history. However, I would not be able to keep myself from thinking about delusions of grandeur during the forging scene.
Well, two that come to mind right away is “Killer Fish” and “Avalanche”. I re-watched the former recently, and I think I’ll need to see it unMSTed in order to figure out all the double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses. As for the latter, maybe seeing more of the set-up might make the pay-off look better. Or not.
I’ve seen many of the MSTed movies uncut and, I agree, some of them are actually good enough to watch that way.
By the way, are there any plans to expand the episode guide to include Season 12?
I’ve already seen a few of the movies I’d wanted to see straight, but there are still others out there. “Escape 2000” was compromised by having to be cropped and both it and “Alien From L.A.” probably looked much better than the muddy video copies the show had access to. I’d also like to see “Angels Revenge” and “Final Justice” straight since they both had some really strange edits that, while they made their episodes funny and memorable, makes me want to see an unedited version.
A lot of Ed Wood’s films are pretty hilarious without the riffing. ‘Bride Of The Monster’ is so funny by itself that it looks like someone’s parody of bad 50s sci-fi.
Pretty Good
Steve Reeves Hercules movies. I found the cinematography was very good. Outdoor scenes and Herc’s lighting made indoor locations lent him god like appearance.
Curious
I was going to say Roger Corman flicks but it has been suggested that the editing room was rarely in use.
Closure
Deadly Bees ending with Derby Dude’s antics accompanied by a light & peppy music. g The movie was very dreary and to cap off the end with this ending must be continued to closure. For me, this is akin an ear wig in a most annoying way.
Squirm. In Don Scardino’s interview he said it was a great ” drive-in” movie. So, I’d like to see it at a drive-in. It’s a fun, goofy, cheesy, killer worm movie. Theres no better medium for it. And they could double bill it with Horror of Party Beach. One of my all time favourites.
ALL the Sandy Frank films! A chance to see “Mighty Jack” or “Time of the Apes” in their original Japanese, uncut, with proper translated subtitles would be epic and explain A LOT!
Or it could just make it even more confounding.
A subtitled version of Jack Frost would be interesting. Also Angels’ Revenge to find out if its really true that the protagonists celebrate their victory by going skinny-dipping in the drug lord’s pool. purely out of curiosity, of course.
I’m not sure if this qualifies, exactly, but I’d love to see ALL the episodes of the short-lived TV series “Gemini Man” (1976), not just the two that were squished together to make “Riding with Death.” Reading the episode synopses at IMDb — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073994/episodes?season=1&ref_=tt_eps_sn_1 — is a 1970s cheese-fest dream come true. My favorite is Episode #4’s which says, “The Invisible Man’s dream assignment: Bodyguard to a women’s swimming team. No, seriously.” I figure I and my grown kids could pretty much riff all these episodes ourselves.
Moon Zero Two.
I agree on Sword and the Dragon, or should I say Ilya Muromets. It looks like a pretty spectacular epic. I also want to see The Making of Ilya Muromets, following the harrowing process of being a film maker in the Soviet Union in the early post-Stalin era.
Yeti of Great Danger,
I’ve seen some of the Gemini Man episodes on Youtube, including the pilot movie (where it sure did spread outward from his body) and the Tripolodine episode among others. You’re absolutely right, they’re a 70’s hoot!
while not a spoiler alert, i WILL say that if you watch the full ‘Devil Doll’ you might want to send the kids out of the room.
Ive actually seen two movies Un-MSTed before I ever saw them MSTed. Outlaw (under it’s full title Outlaw of Gor) and The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t. Ive also seen the UnMSTed Robot Holocaust, but that was after MST3K.
THE WILD (WILD) WORLD OF BATWOMAN –
But only if it was colorized and the dance scenes were CGI enhanced. Oh, and have actual Mandarin Chinese dialog replacing the somebody-dropping-the-silverware gibberish in the seance scene. That would be great. Thanks.
I have seen a lot of these straight: Magic Sword, all Gamera and Godzillas, Hercules and Hercules Unchained, Gorgo, Santa Claus vs. Martians, City Limits, and probably Revenge of the Creature, Beginning of the End, It Conquered the World, Teenage Werewolf and Space Travelers. Possibly also Cave Dwellers, Fu Manchu and Stranded in Space. I’m not proud of this, but it is what it is.
I would like to see all the Russian films and the Undead because I enjoyed them as movies.
I have seen Hobgoblins uncut via Elvira and I would NOT recommend that experience. It somehow manages to be even sleazier and more off-putting without the Brains’ merciful editing.
Given the riffing over things and the sound being softer than the riffing – and in inferior prints – I’ve always wanted to see/hear the ’60s-style rock ‘n’ roll music scenes in some of the ’60s movies unriffed, even in a CD of those songs. The better musical performances and the ones over the credits. I’d also extend that to the music in Untamed Youth (which sounds excellent on the MST3K of it on YouTube).
I’ve even imagined such music, among others, being part of an episode of Little Steven’s Underground Garage on the radio. He does theme shows (even a really cool one on the Wild Wild West TV series, of all things), and makes it clear he’s a fan of B movies. I can see there being a segment on Manos, and Joel being “Freak of the Week” (though Joel’d likely prefer “Nerd of the Week”). Steven being a B movie buff, I couldn’t be sure whether he’d LOVE Mystery Science Theater… or HATE it. Would be cool, though.
Whole movie wise, I can see seeing Tormented that way. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to resist riffing any such MST movie myself.
An uncut, unMSTied version of “Agent For H.A.R.M.” might shed light on what the heck a judo range is! Or why the agency is based out of a string art gallery.
The short “Mr B Natural” is interesting to watch unMSTied as it shows what happens during that jump-cut when Buzz goes up the stairs and when he starts talking to the already present Mr B. It also shows more of the conversation between Buzz and his parents.
I always found “Phase IV” to be interesting sci-fi. I eventually watched it unMSTied, mainly for the better print.
I’ve also gotten a fair number over the years, first Netflix DVDs and lately YouTube or Amazon Prime Video, which has a surprising number. I still have Touch of Satan queued up over there. And of course Rifftrax helped in a couple of cases, thanks! I’ve gotten more curious about the source material lately and enjoyed most of them for what they are. Btw it was great for the first couple of DVD sets to include the uncut originals, that’s the only place i found Hellcats!
Many questions i had were answered (Angels Revenge: who was “Miller”? Mitchell: what happened to John Saxon?). A few were disappointing (Werewolf did not have the nudity that would have been the only explanation for the film), mostly when there was almost nothing removed (Hobgoblins, Hellcats and Catalina Caper come to mind). In the Eurospy category alone, uncut Operation Kid Brother and Secret Agent Super Dragon were much more coherent and enjoyable, while Danger!Death Ray was only missing an inconsequential intro scene. Escape 2000 (and Bronx 1990) were fun. And agreed on Steve Reeve’s Hercules, those were pretty nice productions actually.
At the moment I’d be most interested in seeing Warrior of the Lost World, Hercules and the Captive Women, and Final Sacrifice.
I was counting the ones I saw BEFORE I saw MST3K. I am not counting stuff I saw after, either straight or via Rifftrax/Elvira. I had forgotten the new series: I saw the Land that Time Forgot at the movies as a kid and Earth’s Core on TV. I saw Ator before MST3K or Rifftrax.
Most of these I saw on cable channels on weekday afternoons in the 1980’s. Some in Monster Marathons on TV. Some because my uncle rented weird movies almost every weekend. I saw Megalon in glorious life size at the drive-in.
Ahhh! I put a “saw” for every Saw movie in that last post. Need to learn patience since we don’t have the Edit option anymore.
The late, great Ray Bradbury was reputed to put each literary piece he wrote on a closet shelf for a year before going back to evaluate it with an unbiased eye. What do you bet he still found stuff he wanted to change?
As much as I love MST3K (I have seen almost every episode except a few KTMA ones) they did riff over lines in a movie that I did want to hear and so I tried to find uncut versions of those movies.
For those of you who wanted to see the original version of “Moon Zero Two” don’t bother, that was probably the worst movie Hammer ever made.
The only movie MST3K did that I can’t watch is their version of “Horror of Party Beach”. The editing they did was a butcher job, they cut out the best parts of that one. They cut out all the horror scenes that weren’t really that gory since it was made in 1963.
I, too, have seen a bunch of these movies unriffed. Really liked the first Hercules, and would like to see the others unriffed. (Er, actually NOT The Loves of Hercules . . . ) Would love to see Colossus & the Head Hunters straight, too. Those sword-n-sandal epics just are what they are: if you are at all interested in classical culture, they hold a certain fascination even when you have to roll your eyes at all the cheese. I’ve already written about watching Jack Frost un-MSTied as part of a course I once taught on Russian folklore: the movie so sanitizes the original folk tale and adds so much Disneyesque glitz and tackiness (as well as grafts on two or three unrelated tales to pad the film) that I always needed to watch the MST version again to cleanse the palate, as it were (“That’s right Mike! Give it to ’em! Go, you ‘bots! Let ’em have it! Yeahhh!”). As a kid, I liked The Giant Gila Monster a lot, as much as the MSTied version: there’s a lovable sweetness to that movie that comes through straight or riffed. The unriffed Starfighters, though, was the absolute last thing an 11-yr-old kid wanted to watch after school when promised a “war movie”! Generally, the cheesy b/w monster movies & sci-fi are always a lot of fun to watch in the original, the bad “serious” films not so much. Also, the newer the film and higher the production values, the less I would want to see it unriffed: I can’t imagine being so desperate to watch something that I would ever seek out, say, The Giant Spider Invasion, Future War, or Mac & Me except on MST3K! (As it is, Comet TV does show a lot of MSTied classics unriffed; Comedy Central did, too. Both of them have thought it a fun idea from time to time to show the original of Alien From LA! Well, they thought wrong is all I can say!)
Thanks for that! I figured they were on YT but hadn’t actually looked yet. I see a wasted evening or two or ten in my future. :-D
Comet TV shows a large number of MST3k movies. I guess since many of them are PD or cheap.
But what I would like to see is the original version of The Trollenberg Terror, aka The Crawling Eye. Much like the later Quatermass movies, it was originally 6 part TV show that was remade as a film. I’m hoping that would explain stuff that doesn’t make much sense in the shorter movie, like why the invaders are so eager to kill the psychic girl
Apparently though it’s lost, so
I wouldn’t mind seeing the entirety of Commando Cody, riffed or unriffed, but I’m not going to go through any effort to do so ;)
Well, that sums it up perfectly, doesn’t it? Sometimes I do have this morbid curiosity about what it’s like to watch, say, The Creeping Terror or Manos unriffed . . . but yet I feel that if I never do it probably won’t mean that my life has been somehow lacking.
Mosfilm used to have this on their Youtube page with English subtitles, but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore (ditto for Sadko/Not Sinbad).
Re: THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE, an unusual fact about it is that four separate versions were filmed simultaneously. There were separate Russian and Finnish versions, with separate standard and widescreen versions filmed for each. I don’t think the MST3k version uses one of the ‘scope versions, but who knows whether it was the Russian or Finnish version. The Finnish National Audiovisual Institute performed a 4k restoration on the Finnish Dyaliscope version back in 2014:
https://vimeo.com/94484941
DtEF would be good to see, but it’s not one of the Russian ones–Only cheap PD copies of “Froze” are on disk.
As for “Sadko” (who’s not Sinbad), “Father Frost” or “Ilya Murometz”, think I remember seeing them on an all-region Russian-classics restoration label Ruscico a while back:
https://www.amazon.com/Sadko-Sergei-Stolyarov/dp/B076Q7HSGW/
https://www.amazon.com/Ilya-Muromets-Alexander-Ptushko/dp/B0002HMKV8/
https://www.amazon.com/Father-Frost-Morozko-NTSC-Language/dp/B00PV09F1E/
(And their restorations are pretty darn gorgeous, speaking as one who had a strange unexplainable urge to track down the never-US-released 1976 “Blue Bird”…Don’t ask.)
Speaking of weird-but-colorful foreign kiddy films, I speak for that generation that remembers low-budget public-domain local-theater kiddie-matinees at Christmas for any movie with “Santa Claus” in the title, and was somehow persuaded into seeing Pitch & Lupita on the big screen. Weird, yes, but I don’t recall bad memories of it.
Oh, you mean this one?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEnMsWpkz1U
Right?
There’s a lot of good stuff out there that I haven’t seen yet, and I’ve technically seen these MST movies, so I’m not in a hurry to watch any of them unriffed.
so far, the only MST3K films I’ve seen un-riffed are:
The Magic Sword
“Manos”: The Hands of Fate (HD)
Mr. B Natural
The Horror of Party Beach
maybe a couple others
I wholeheartedly agree with wanting to see the uncut, subtitled, original Japanese TV versions of Mighty Jack and Time of the Apes. They MUST have made more sense, right?
also, Star Wolf (AKA Fugitive Alien)
When I was a kid I saw “Gorgo” a few times on late-night TV and loved it. As a kid, the whole concept of “Oops, this giant monster we captured is just a BABY! Now here comes its mom!” was just too awesome. So I was pretty excited when I found out it would be on MST3K. Of course it couldn’t possibly live up to my awestruck childhood memory of it, but it was still interesting to see what parts held up and what parts didn’t.
If I had not seen it on MST3K, I might have been interested in watching it unriffed just out of curiosity. But now that I’ve seen it on the show I don’t feel any need to see it again sans-riffing.
I think that currently, the only MST3K movie I might be interested in seeing unriffed is “The Day the Earth Froze”. The production quality is fairly high and the story, while goofy, is entertaining.
The movies in the credits for Cave Dwellers, Pod People, and Stranded in Space.
The only non-riffed Hammer film I’ve seen is Captain Kronos — Vampire Hunter.
I’ve seen a few episodes unriffed, Alien from LA, Mac and Me, The Beast of Yucca Flats, Manos, Pumaman, Jack Frost and Squirm… Squirm was actually pretty good, atmospheric and some genuinely gross moments, like Roger becoming da wormface. They have the full version of Jack Frost, as Morozko, in Russian with English subtitles on Youtube, and it is also pretty good.
I’d like to watch The Final Sacrifice unriffed. It seemed like a pretty good movie, especially considering its $1500 budget. I wouldn’t mind seeing any of the other Russo-Finnish movies, either, they also looked quite good.
There was talk that Russian-restoration label Ruscico was going to release the Russian “Sampo” print on all-region DVD around the same time as the ’14 Finnish restoration but….if anything came of it, it’s not on Amazon.
Ruscico’s already released pretty-darn-good-looking studio print restorations of Sadko, Father Frost and Ilya Murometz on all-region DVD, and they look good, but the last time I tried posting the Amazon links, the Mods pulled the post.
Fine. Try to help…Have to do your own searching, guess.
I would want to see Mitchell, but only because the Brains were forced to cut so much out. As for movies I WANT to see unriffed, It Conquered the World is definitely one.
Seeing a good print of Phase 4 is worth it, mostly for Lynn Frederick, but you really need to go to you-tube and look up the “lost” ending. There was supposed to be a 10-15 minute trippy surreal sequence suggesting the role humanity would play in the intelligent ant world. Apparently some dipsh*t editor decided that after two hours of build-up the audience would prefer see the movie run in to a ditch and abandoned with a shrug. The removal of the ending of Phase 4 simultaneously ripped out the movie’s heart and cut off it’s head, leaving what is in many ways a literal cinematic abortion.
Years ago, at the Gateway Convention in St. Louis, we saw the uncut “Mitchell” as part of an open riffing event. The scene where we find out what happened to Deaney is certainly worth watching.
I am a bit surprised that one wouldn’t want to see some of these films unriffed. I know that the Rhino DVDs that had the uncut versions on several of the early releases whetted my appetite. I think Eegah even had a Crow icon that would pop up so you could be clued in on when an unriffed part was coming up if you wanted to pop over to see it.
I know that I just started picking up the unriffed versions out of curiosity more than anything else. I wanted to see the entire Phantom Creeps and Undersea Kingdom serials. I had a hankering to see if Mitchell was more cohesive and then Warner Archive had the film available (In widescreen! Baby oil widescreen!). This Island Earth is a better film uncut, but it is still rather staid overall. Grabbed the Shout Gamera releases because I enjoy Japanese monster movies.
When the chance came to donate to getting Manos on hi-def Blu-ray, I gave wholeheartedly. Same with Monstrosity/Atomic Brain. Finding Zaat/Blood Waters of Dr. Z on Blu-ray was interesting as well. With Shout releasing Mole People and Deadly Mantis and others on Blu-ray, I’ll get those too as the MST episode is usually included as well and the special features are well done.
Is this for every fan? No, I understand. But I know that for me, I always wondered what drew these films to Best Brains in the first place, aside from the obvious reason of easily affordable rights, when applicable.
So yeah, I’m the guy that’ll watch Racket Girls and Teen-Age Strangler uncut (no, thank you, Something Weird Video!) because I’m rubbernecking and cannot look away.
I’d like to see an uncut Pod People. I’m not sure how much was edited, if anything, but it sure feels like something is missing. Maybe a plot?
This is interesting: there are so many different ways to be into film. I get entirely where you’re coming from, and I know that many people on Satellite News agree with you. And I’ve known lots of people in the world at large passionate about the cinema who are obsessed with B-movies. (One of my favorite colleagues where I worked was known as the “B-movie queen” and was very excited to learn about MST from me! One of her obsessions was precisely Mole People, and she loved the MSTied version that I loaned her.) I, on the other hand, am one of those people who LOVES movies of all kinds–good, bad, American, international, at the theater, on TV, on my computer–but has enough other interests (see: my online name!) that I need to be selective. Like Lawgiver, I’ve had to miss so many classics over the years that they now have to take precedence when I’m not watching MST. I am curious to see what Eegah or Racket Girls look like uncut and unriffed–but I already have a good idea what they’re going to be (i.e., bad!), and the addition of scenes edited out for MST probably isn’t going to change that. And yet . . . under the right circumstances, I am going to watch anyway. It’s just that I’m not going to make those circumstances myself!
Moon Zero Two. Like several of they movies they watch this one has a genuinely good plot. Additionally, I think the acting is decent and the effects, especially for the time, are really good. I felt genuine tension several times when watching the movie. A remake could be really good if the same plot is followed.