In Celebration of Mystery Science Theatre 3000

MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000 (MST 3000) As a big fan of ‘so bad it’s brilliant’ lousy movies, I was hugely impressed by the MST 3000 series.  In this TV movies series, a man stranded in space, finds himself forced to endure the worst (and very real) films ever made in an effort to drive him insane. He gets through the ordeal with the help of his wise-cracking robot pals, Crow and Tom Servo, who provide their own snappy comical commentary on the films, highlighting the absurdities, to transform the whole experience into a joke. The practice became known as Riffing. This is much as drunken students do in watching some films, but taken to a slick professional script level. Bad cinema has its appreciators, thanks largely to retrospective interest in the life and work of Ed Wood, who’s film Plan 9 From Outer Space is universally regarded as the worst movie ever made. (Worth seeing, as is Tim Burton’s sublime bio-pic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp). There are clearly lots of bad films that are just boring and not worth watching, but a truly awful movie can be as entertaining as Citizen Kane.  There is a difference for example between The Day Of The Dolphin, a mind-numbingly dull George C Scott film I saw at a free screening where the entire audience left within 30 minutes, and Jaws 4 – The Revenge in which a shark systematically hunts down the wife of the hero of the first (genuinely good) Jaws movie, even moving from the Florida coast to the Bahamas to maintain its grudge against her. The Scott film was a terribly earnest drama about a scientist trying to teach dolphins to talk – the other film was a slasher movie with a shark (that actually roars like a lion), as the killer, and a desperate attempt to squeeze more mileage from a dying franchise.   It remains entertaining for all the wrong reasons. The dolphin film was just tedious and forgettable. Jaws 4 were never MST’d, though it deserved to be. The viewers can treat other films that way and throwing your own MST party around awful films is worth trying. To return to the MST series itself, as well as the main film shows, MST 3000 carried sketches and joke routines before the film, during breaks from the main action, and for a few minutes after the films.  Joel Hodgson, & later, Mike Nelson played the stranded hero, suffering through such dreadful films as Phase 4 (ants take over the World), Robot Monster (an alien being a gorilla suited actor in with a glass dome space-helmet), Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, Godzilla V The Smog Monster, The Killer Shrews (giant shrews, clearly played by dogs), The Incredible Melting Man (an astronaut dissolves and falls to bits), Overdrawn At The Memory Bank, (Raul Julia gets trapped in a dream in which he gets involved in a remake of Casablanca with lots of actors doing really bad impersonations of characters in the real Casablanca classic), The Puma Man (bizarre superhero story with a ‘flying’ puma suited hero – notable for him hanging like a dead weight in the harness used to hoist him around while supposedly flying). Puma Man is probably my favourite of the MST treatments of a bad film. Though most of the stories were science fiction, a few films were more mainstream, with a poorly produced version of Hamlet, starring Maximillian Schell, included.  There were also several short films, and cartoons made, intended for adding to the DVD’s and often available now on Youtubes. Though mostly made for TV, MST 3000 did do one cinematic release episode, incorporating the science fiction film, This Island Earth, a brave move given that many fans consider this one to be a good film. Episodes of the series were shown out of their original running order in the early days of the Sci-Fi TV station, but often at hours inaccessible to those not willing to stay up until dawn or in reach of video recording equipment. The silhouetted cut out commentary style was a big influence on DVD audio commentary presentations, usually without the cast being visible, though an audio track added to the first Ghostbusters film has its cast impersonating the MST 3000 style even on-screen. Many of the films shown on MST 3000 are genuinely awful and laughable in their own right. I have seen several even outside the MST series – one, Gorgo, a Godzilla style film set in London, was showing in its ordinary version one night at the same exact time as the MST 3000 version was on TV on a rival station. I still tend to do my own MST treatments in my mind or for visitors when watching some movies to this day.  If you want a good idea for a party, find some lousy movies and throw your own MST 3000 party. Drink beer and collectively heckle the action on screen. It’s great fun. A complete list of MST 3000 film treatments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mystery_Science_Theater_3000_episodes

Arthur Chappell