#and she’s an interesting character that I hate to see consistently being designated “romanceable”and unable to engage with the plot at larg

[aplaceforallmystupidshit]

Ok don’t get me wrong i really enjoy Ameri but idk she’s felt a bit stagnant for me for a while? Ever since the arc where she got personality swapped I feel like she hasn’t had much meaningful character progression. Like don’t get me wrong, I love the little highlights here and there! Like for the music festival when she sends Ronovere (sp? idc he’s annoying) around it shows how well she knows her subordinates and what a great leader she is!! But like, with the way Iruma has been power creeping to Rank 5.5 it sucks that Ameri has been stuck at Rank 6 for like the past 2 years. I know she’s still a kid and Rank 6 is super high for a high schooler but still!! I want her to keep growing

ANYWAY my idea for how to incorporate her into the narrative is........make her join demon Border Patrol with her dad! “No doy” I hear you say, “that was always the plan”. Yeah ok I know but like, I want her to rise they the ranks as a hot shot, maybe go up a rank, and then meaningfully be forced to content with the Iruma v Border Patrol conflict thats brewing! I like Ameri and just want her to be a part of the plot godammit!!

[mst3kproject]

207: Wild Rebels

I guess if it's time to tackle the movies I've been trying to avoid, my next review should be a biker flick.  I don't really like the biker episodes, but then, I don't really like biker movies in general, and the fact that MST3K naturally chose bad biker movies doesn't help me enjoy something I didn't enjoy much to begin with.  Now, bad monster movies, on the other hand...

The hero, I guess, of Wild Rebels is racecar driver Rod Tillman.  Other than owning a magical disappearing, reappearing guitar, he is not at all an interesting person.  After wrecking his car, he decides to get out of racing and goes to a bar where he meets a biker gang consisting of leader Jeeter, ultra-violent Banjo, Designated Chick Linda, and mute Fats.  They need a getaway driver for their next robbery, and I guess none of them can drive a stick shift.  Rod wants nothing to do with them, probably because of the Nazi flag in their hideout, but then the police ask him to help them gather evidence against the gang.  With Rod in tow, the bikers rob a gun shop, then a bank – not because they really want the money, but just for kicks!

I hadn't seen this episode for a while, and I'd forgotten Joel's joke about the Nazi-themed bikers having Trump's Art of the Deal on their shelves.  Everything old is new again.

This is one of those movies that it's kind of hard to say anything about.  It's bleak and dull, and in the closing sketch Joel and the bots already went through its low points quite thoroughly.  “The villains were so cliché, they were laughable,” “so the hero was supposed to be unattractive and spineless,” and so forth.  That basically covers Wild Rebels.  It's a series of tropes and symbols standing in for a story, with a 'hero' we're never given any reason to be interested in.

The very first thing we see Rod do in the movie is give up.  He's wrecked his car, so he decides to give up on racing entirely.  He meets a girl in a bar, but when the gang tells her to get lost so they can talk to him, he gives up on her with only a token protest.  This is actually pretty realistic, given that he barely knows her and the bikers are fairly intimidating, but in the context of his abandoning racing, it just seems to cement 'quitter' as his core character trait.

That needn't ruin the movie, of course – maybe Rod's character arc is learning to see things through, or to stand up for himself!  But character arcs just aren't something this movie does, and Rod never seems to change.  His return to racing was a setup to get the gang's attention, not Rod actually trying again.  When Banjo jealously attacks him, it looks like Rod's starting to grow a spine as he successfully defends himself, but it's a false alarm.  At the climax of the film he just cowers at the top of the lighthouse stairs waiting to be shot, rather than doing anything that might be considered heroic.

The gang members are stereotyped thugs, who seem to do what they do just Because It's Evil.  Linda even says as much: they aren't interested in money or cars or high living, they just want the adrenaline rush.  They have no backstories, no explanation of why they are the way they are.  They surround themselves with Nazi symbols, like the swastikas on their jackets or the flag in their hideout, but they don't seem to have any actual ideology.  The fascist imagery serves only to reinforce that they are bad people, which has already been amply estalished by their behaviour.  It's a lazy substitute for proper characterization.

I don't know how old any of these characters are supposed to be. The actors appear to have been in their late twenties to early thirties.  In the serenade scene Linda looks like she's around forty. The slang they use never rings true.  It's like your parents trying to use emojis.

The romance between Rod and Linda is as unmotivated as anything else.  He knows she's one of the murderous thugs he's trying to bring to justice, and while he might pretend to be interested in her as part of his act, he has no reason to develop real feelings for her. She, meanwhile, repeatedly calls him a square and knows that he's an untrustworthy outsider.  She might pretend to be interested in him in order to keep an eye on him, but again, there's no reason for her to actually fall for him.  They have no chemistry and nothing in common.  Why does Linda kill Jeeter to save Rod?  Does shooting a friend who trusted her really give her the kicks she craves?  Or could the writers not think of any other way to end the movie?

The entire dramatis personae feel like they exist only as players in this particular story.  We don't really know what they were doing before the movie began, and we have no idea what Rod is likely to do next.  It doesn't seem like his story is over, because it never really began.  He had no personal stake in any of this – he just drifted into contact with the gang, and seems to decide to become a police informant merely because he doesn't have any better idea what to do with himself.  T-Bird Gang was not a good movie, but Frank had his father's death to avenge and was determined to do it with or without police support.  That's a character motivation.  Rod doesn't have that.

Because the characters have no real personality or motivation, the story cannot really be about anything.  T-Bird Gang was about a quest for justice, and feels unsatisfying because it does not end in the way that theme would seem to demand.  Wild Rebels feels bleak and hollow because it doesn't even have a theme.  Movies like The Violent Years and I Accuse my Parents tried to be about why people turn to crime.  Village of the Giants tried to be about the idea of rebellion.  Wild Rebels isn't trying to be about anything at all.

If the film-makers had a goal beyond 'get the movie in the can and earn a few bucks', I think it was simply to make us feel as bad as possible.  The beginning, in which Rod gives up on racing despite the encouragement of his friends, is depressing.  The bar scene contains cringeworthy bad dancing, almost on a par with The Creeping Terror.  The bikers murder a couple of barflies for no good reason.  The gang's hideout is a ramshackle place full of paraphernalia associated with the most despicable parts of history. There are multiple musical numbers and they're all terrible.  Joel describes the experience of watching Wild Rebels as like 'being dragged through a dark tarry abyss' and that's as accurate as anything else in the ending sketch.  There's nothing fun or exciting in the whole movie.

There are a couple of places where the movie is mildly entertaining, but never in the way it wants to be.  The bit with the syringe in the bank is laughably impractical.  The movie's signage would blend right into Killer Klowns from Outer Space – there's the Swinger's Club sign that looks like it was drawn with Crayola markers, and the Citrusville First National Bank that Tom Servo describes as “printed with electrician's tape on ceiling tile”.  Tires squeal on grass.  The movie ends in the world's artsiest railing kill.  'Citrusville' is where the Man-Thing's swamp is in Marvel comics.  Each of these is a nugget of amusement, but they don't add up to enough to make the movie worth watching even on that level.

Now that I've run out of things to say about the movie, I'm going to do something I don't usually do at any length, and talk about the episode.  The riffing is mostly pretty good, with some golden lines like blessed are the grease monkeys, for they will lube and Ronald McDonald, shaking his McBooty, and the joke about the ventriloquist's dummy trapped in Rod's suitcase.  The host sketches, with Wild Rebels Cereal and Dr. Forrester trying to figure out what ee-yuh-ka-ee! means, are instant classics.  But it's also got some very uncomfortable moments in it, as Joel and the bots make fun of a character's mental handicap.

We are told that Fats suffered a head injury that left him unable to speak.  He seems to otherwise have his wits about him – he can read, as demonstrated by his drawing the others' attention to the newspaper, he can certainly drive his motorcycle competently and he seems to know what's going on.  But when he's on screen, we get lines like blue light special on chromosomes – extra ones! or riffs delivered in 'stupid' voices.  There aren't that many of these, but they're very uncomfortable to hear.  The swastika-wearing characters in the movie actually treat Fats with more respect than the peanut gallery does!

On the other hand, this was also the episode that began some proper characterization for Gypsy. Wild Rebels was when we found out that most of her processing power is occupied with running the Satellite of Love, leaving little room for anything else but occasional thoughts of Richard Basehart.  Later episodes would develop Gypsy further, and she went on to become a rare example of a comedy character who is an outspoken feminist without being a bra-burning, man-hating joke.  Although I have to wonder... if she runs the 'higher functions of the ship', what kept the satellite going before Joel started building robots?  Did he simply take the ship's existing control computer and give her a way to express herself?  Or did Dr. Forrester and Dr. Erhardt send him up to a satellite with no functional life support, so that he had to build some before he ran out of air?

Eh, it's just a show.  I should really just relax.