#larry mst3k

[lexsiyette]

Mst3k character tier list (in my opinion)

Thank you very much

[mst3kgifs]

Seven years later...

[whoslaurapalmer]

alas.............no larry csonka this time though

[conventionalwisdomcomic]

And now, a classic Christmas song from that beloved holiday film: The Girl In Gold Boots

[hellbeast-go-walkies]

Favorite running jokes in MST3K

that scream every time there's something creepy or someone's way too close to the camera

[celebrity A] is [celebrity B] in The [celebrity C] Story

It's Jim Henson's ______ Babies.

[when someone's giving a speech] You're not funny!

Paragon Cable!

when their inner theater kids get loose

reading any newspaper headline except the one the movie wanted us to focus on

[every time an annoying character talks] Shut up...

cheering every time an unlikable character gets hurt

He's got a cute shape!

[character A whispers into character B's ear] That's filthy!

It's the NBC Mystery Movie!

Great! Who are you?

No one will be seated during the [boring, unnecessary] scene.

Diarrhea is like a storm raging inside you...

The Maidenform woman: You'll never know where she'll turn up!

We've switched [character's item] with Folger's Crystals. Let's watch...

It's the Land of Dairy Queen!

[anytime a character reaches for something in their pocket] HE'S GOT A GUN!

Shut up, Iris...

And I didn't steal no bike, neither!

[Dr. Forrester and Larry getting called evil] Thank you <3

Wah, wah, wah...

Line? (Rifftrax)

LLLLLLLadies... (Rifftrax)

anytime Jonah sees a gun and yells, "BANG!"

laughing at each other's jokes

[maggie-d]

The last 3 seasons of MST3K have featured previous Mads returning and I like that.

[mst3kproject]

The Naked Witch

According to Wikipedia, this is the movie that launched Larry Buchanan’s career.  Considering that Buchanan is best-known for shitty colour re-makes of black and white monster movies that weren’t very good to begin with, I don’t know if ‘launch’ is the right word.  That kind of thing doesn’t so much ‘launch’ as it does slide into the water and immediately capsize, like the SS Daphne.

A graduate student arrives at a small German village in central Texas, hoping to learn more about the superstitions and religious beliefs these people brought with them from the Old Country.  Nobody really wants to talk to him until he meets a young woman called Kirska, who gives him a book about the town’s history. This tells the tale of a woman who was executed for witchcraft a century earlier.  The student is able to locate the witch’s grave and, for some reason he never shares with the audience, digs her up.  When he removes the stake that was driven through her black heart, she resurrects and sets out to take revenge on the descendants of the people who condemned her, including the beautiful Kirska herself!

You know, I’ve watched a lot of bad movies in my life.  This became my hobby twenty-five years ago, when some friends and I decided to rent a video and ended up with the MST3K movie.  I’ve been through the show’s entire catalogue and quite a few of the Brains’ side projects, not to mention the films I’ve dug up for this blog.  You’d think that by now I would have seen it all… but every so often I still encounter something that absolutely floors me with how awful it is, and The Naked Witch managed it several times.

Right, first question, and the one that would have been foremost in the minds of Tom and Crow: is the witch actually naked?  Technically, the answer is yes… she rises from the grave without clothes, though her hair is nicely curled and she’s got mascara and red lipstick on.  A few minutes later she’s found something to wear, and in the meantime she’s always behind props or only in the shot from the shoulders up or knees down.  Later there’s maybe a few seconds of nipple during a scene when she takes a swim in a pond, but MST3K could have cut that without losing anything.  The title is merely a trap for those hoping to see some titties.

So if no boobs, what do we get to see?  The answer is almost nothing.  The Naked Witch never shows us anything if it can tell us, and it is terrible at telling.  We begin with a punishingly long preamble about the history of witchcraft from some guy with a bad case of 50’s Radio Announcer Voice, over selections from the works of Bruegel and Bosch.  This segment is some eight minutes long in a fifty-nine minute movie and accomplishes nothing except to make us hope we’ll see somebody have sex with Satan in the upcoming film – which we will not.

Then we get another long-ass voiceover, this one from the student who has come to central Texas to study the cultural traditions of German families who immigrated there in the 19th century.  This one provides a little bit of background to what we’ll be seeing but most of it is just filling time and now I’m craving Maultaschen.  By the time we get to the plot we have wasted a fifth of the movie on just listening to these guys talk.

Our supposed protagonist (for want of a better word), the grad student, is a complete nonentity.  He narrates most of the movie without any sign of interest or excitement.  He never even has a name.  He never introduces himself, nobody ever addresses him, and even the credits just call him ‘the student’.  Almost every time something interesting ought to be happening in the movie, what we see is people standing around and talking while he tells us about it.  He narrates running out of gas and walking into town.  He narrates meeting Kirska and her grandfather and great uncle, the last remaining members of their family.

Later, he narrates digging up the dead witch and pulling the stake out of her heart, although he never tells us why he does either of these things… he doesn’t even bother to say something like I don’t know why I did it, I felt weirdly compelled, which would have implied black magic manipulating him. This was an option, since he later says he’s under some kind of spell that prevents him telling anybody who’s responsible for the murders the witch commits.  He narrates the process of finding her new lair and narrates being enchanted by her.  I found myself thinking of The Creeping Terror and wondering if the backstory were similar… maybe they’d somehow lost or broken their sound equipment after only filming a few scenes, and just had to make do.  The Internet has no answers for me.

On the rare occasions when the movie does show us something, it’s not something that’s very interesting to see. We do get to see the student flirt briefly with Kirska, but I don’t know if they’re supposed to have Fallen In Love because their relationship is never developed… the threat to Kirska is what enables him to shake off the witch’s spell, so… maybe?  We get a flashback that shows us the witch in life, condemned by her lover who blames her for his wife’s illness, but this is one scene of the two arguing just before her arrest, in the same bedroom set where the Student is reading his book in the 20th century.  We see the witch rise nude from the grave and steal some clothes.  We see the boring and poorly-shot murders.  And we watch at great length as the witch swims in the pond, casts a spell on the student, and then makes out with him.

All this time could have been spent so much better. How about the student trying to ask various townsfolk questions about their history and being turned away? That would have been far more effective than hearing him talk about it!  How about a torch-and-pitchfork mob coming to tear down the innkeeper’s doors to get at the witch?  This would have cemented the impression we get that he turned her in so as to save his own skin.  What about showing us how Kirska is dealing with the deaths of her family members and the looming knowledge that she, too, is on the witch’s hit list?  How about having her turn to the student for comfort, only to start suspecting he’s responsible… but the spell on him makes him unable to tell her, almost ending their love story before it can begin?  How about giving the main characters some fucking names?!

There’s so much to hate in The Naked Witch, so much they did wrong… but one thing that stood out to me is the way the movie handles the witch herself and the whole idea of witchcraft. The opening narration talks about witches as a real phenomenon, a scourge of medieval Europe that had to be stamped out.  It’s rare to find a fictional interpretation of the age of witch hunting that paints the inquisition as the good guys, even in worlds where witchcraft does exist – think of The Touch of Satan – but here’s one!  When the student tells Kirska about his academic work, however, he explains that witch-hunting is a manifestation of social stress and misogyny.  In times of plague, famine, war, and general upheaval, people need somebody to blame and witches were the scapegoat of choice.

This seems to be upheld by the flashback scene with the witch and her lover.  She wants him to abandon his sick wife and marry her, but he doesn’t want to ruin his reputation or to leave town and start anew.  An epidemic in the area has already got people suspecting witchcraft, so he throws his mistress to the mob and gets out of trouble for cheating on his wife by claiming he was under a spell.

All that makes sense all right… except that it just doesn’t square with the narrated opening, which was all about how witches are totally real and totally evil.  So… what, exactly, gives here?  When all I had was the opening narration versus the student’s opinion, I got worried that the movie was saying sheltered ivory tower academics may handwave it all away but the truth is that women really are evil. Then that was shot down by the scene with the witch and her boyfriend, which seems to tell us pretty plainly (in fact, she literally says it in so many words) that she is not a witch and there are probably no such things.

But… but then the witch actually does come back from the dead, kill people, and enchant the student, just as she promised when she was put to the torch.  I guess she could have been lying when she insisted she wasn’t a witch – she’s not just gonna admit it to the mob who wants to burn her, after all – but the flashback scene went to such trouble to paint her as innocent and her boyfriend as the asshole, it doesn’t seem likely.  Maybe she’s less a witch than she is a zombie, a corpse animated by the need for revenge like Tony from Zombie Nightmare.  But if so, why is she able to cast an actual spell on the student?  Did the writers even know?

They abso-fucking-lutely did not.  At the end of the movie the student observes that he’ll never know if she were actually a witch or just a victim.  There are movies in which this kind of thing would work, but they have to walk a fine line of ambiguity in order to do so.  The Naked Witch fails miserably to strike that balance.  It just shows us (or, more often, tells us) a set of mutually contradictory things and never even imply that they are reconcilable.  So yeah, for Larry Buchanan’s so-called career, The Naked Witch truly was a sign of things to come.  Even at the very beginning, he just didn’t care!

[rhetthammersmithhorror]

Attack of the Eye Creatures | 1965

[isleofrangoon]

This is real. This is happening. And it’s up on early access for our Patreon supporters RIGHT NOW.

By Patron request, we’re riffing on easily one of the best cartoons ever, THE DOVER BOYS AT PIMENTO UNIVERSITY! Hoo doggies!

Support to Isle of Rangoon on Patreon!

[hard-as-cheese-blog]

Super Inconvenience Mart is 78 percent funded via kickstarter with just 3 days left to go! Come check out our amazing rewards, or you can just opt to own the game upon release!

[yourfavisaferalscientist]

Dr. Larry Erhardt from Mystery Scientist Theater 3000 is a feral scientist

Requested by anonymous

[generaltsotters]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIjqHvD_cxA&list=PLYjAy326Dyj4zWJPpY94R9fwPIUMDqJny&index=49

[mst3kgifs]

We have a very important question for you...

[thesmilingfish]

Twitch.tv

Shout Factory

[tardisman14]

My attempt to draw an idea I had where the heroes get zapped in as the crew of the Satellite of Love, with Rippen and Larry getting zapped in as the Mads

A few things:

Because of limited arm mobility, it took a bit for Sashi to check the specs

I went with the blue jumpsuit for Penn ‘cause I felt that of the hosts, he reminds me of Mike the most

I tried giving Crow Boone’s nose size so that it’d be a bit more recognizable

Well I kept skin tones the same, I figured it’d decided to give Rippen and Larry the same hair colors as Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank respectively

Because I’m not really an artist, I was limited to the colored pencils I had in the house (this also explains the actual quality)

The scanner accidentally scanned this twice, which is why the last few pics have parts cut out, or are tilted

[mst3kproject]

Mars Needs Women

This is one of the B-movies that a lot of people have heard of, although I’m not sure how many have actually seen it.  It was written, produced, and directed by Larry “They Just Didn’t Care” Buchanan and stars Tommy Kirk from Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants.  Happy belated birthday to Mr. Kirk, who just turned seventy-nine in December of 2020.  That’s not a bad score for a guy who’s done as many drugs as he has.

The planet Mars is suffering from a genetic problem – their chromosomes are so degraded that one hundred males are born for every one female!  Clearly this is not conducive to the survival of the species, so a group of Martians have come to Earth seeking another solution: they want five female volunteers to return to Mars with them and find out if our genes are compatible!  The army brass (all male, obviously) dismiss the idea out of hand, but the Martians cannot afford to fail.  They will have their way with the Earth Women, with or without the Earth Men’s permission.

We all know that Larry Buchanan couldn’t come up with an idea of his own, so naturally this is a remake of sorts.  Mars Needs Women was inspired by Tommy Kirk’s previous movie Pajama Party, which doesn’t sound like an alien invasion flick, but is.  In it, Kirk plays a Martian named Gogo (yes, really), who comes to Earth as an invasion scout but decides not to take over the planet because he falls in love with Annette Funicello.  Mars Needs Women dispenses with the teen hijinks angle in an attempt to be a straight-up sci-fi thriller, and fails miserably.

We get the normal Larry Buchanan types of suck, such as crummy lighting, appallingly awful day-for-night, a washed-out, colourless print, and copious stock footage.  There’s a long bit where the air force tries to attack the Martian ship and fails, which is entirely stock footage intercut with men in uniforms staring at something next to the camera.  We don’t see the flying saucer itself even once during this sequence, although they do have a model of it that shows up elsewhere and is almost definitely the best effect in the whole movie.  Not a high bar, of course, but seeing as they actually appear to have spent money on this miniature, you’d think it’d get more screen time.

The Martians themselves dress like a sort of noir version of the Chicken Men of Krankor.  Their costumes are black wetsuits decorated with duct tape and silver paint, with stupid antennae on the sides of their heads.  It amuses me that the first thing they do after acquiring some ‘Earth apparel’ is complain about how dumb neckties are.  There’s a mention about how they’ve been trained in ‘Earth slang’, which seems to have happened just so the movie would have no possible sources of humour.  When I think about Attack of the The Eye Creatures, I’m kind of grateful that Mars Needs Women never tries to be funny, but it leaves the whole film relentlessly monotone.

The acting is pretty crummy, even from the main characters.  Yvonne Craig (Batgirl – no, not one of them, the actual Batgirl) does her best with the material but the lines she’s given are such technobabble bullshit there are very few people who could deliver them with any conviction.  Almost everybody else is bland at best.  The women scream and faint, and the military guys tense their jaws and glare.  The only decent acting moment actually goes to Tommy Kirk as he describes the conditions on Mars, the dying planet.  His tone barely changes, and yet you can sense his nostalgia and regret.

Do I even need to ask if this movie objectifies women?  Well, yes, actually, I do, and you’ll see why in a minute.  The answer is a resounding yes and a good bit of run time is spent doing exactly that.  Before the opening credits we see three blondes abducted in broad daylight, dematerialized by the simple means of stopping the camera, removing the actress, and starting it up again. One of these hapless victims is taken from the shower.  We later learn that the beam-ups failed somehow, which I assume means the women died, but that’s apparently not worth more than a throwaway line.

Once the five Martians arrive on Earth, they disperse to go hunting for suitable subjects.  The first one goes directly to a strip bar, perhaps on the assumption that the employees will not be married (he’d be amazed).  We then watch the stripper dance at great length, cutting back to it repeatedly in between other threads of the storyline, which suggests that the Martian sat there for hours staring at her before making his move.  He seems to have been the least choosy of the five, simply taking the first woman he gets a boner for.  The others are a bit more discerning.

None more so than the leader, Fellow One (the Martians are Fellows One through Five, which did save the writers from having to come up with ‘alien names’ that sound like synthetic fabrics).  He decides on Craig’s character, Dr. Marjorie Bolen, an expert in ‘space medicine’ and ‘space genetics’ (this may be 60’s for astrobiology).  Her skills seem to be just what the Martians need.  This character is treated terribly by the movie and almost everybody in it. A news reporter commenting on Dr. Bolen’s arrival describes her as a stunning brunette who found it hard to hide her charm behind her horn-rimmed spectacles, and only then moves on to her qualifications.  She gives a news conference titled Sex and Outer Space, and the reporters who are supposed to be interviewing her have a laugh about the good time the kidnapped women will supposedly be having on Mars.  The prop department can’t even bother to spell her name right – it’s written as ‘Majorie’ on a sign even though the r is clearly audible when people say it out loud.

In contrast to this, Fellow One treats her with some degree of respect.  Their conversations about science are mostly nonsense, but you can tell what the script is going for.  They go on a couple of quick dates, one to a planetarium and one to a museum exhibit on human reproduction (yes, this is weird and icky), and while it is rushed, their little love story is actually important to the plot in ways besides Fellow One deciding to abandon the mission so he can bone her.  The movie considers Dr. Bolen a sex object, but from the beginning Fellow One sees her as more than that.

This brings us, in a sideways kind of way, to the thing I find weirdly fascinating about Mars Needs Women: the alien invaders are curiously considerate.  They steal a car, but they take one from airport parking on the assumption that the owner won’t need it for a while.  They request unattached women, not wanting to break up any happy partnerships. And most of all, they ask for volunteers for abduction!  This makes me wonder what would have happened if they’d broadcast their message to the entire world instead of one group of soldiers.  Humans being the way we are, I’m sure there’re lots of people out there who’d fuck a couple of aliens if it meant a free trip to Mars (or move to Mars if it meant they got to fuck some aliens).

The female characters even seem designed to want a trip to space.  Dr. Bolen might well have helped them willingly in exchange for this unparalleled chance to expand her research, and she does find it very sexy that Fellow One speaks to her as an equal.  Yet somehow, the idea never even comes up.  At the last minute, she becomes the helpless princess who must be saved from peril, and Fellow One simply tells her he loves her and asks her to flee.  Why not invite her along as a guest instead of a captive? It’s got to be worth a try.

The others can be made to fit this pattern, too. The stripper?  Maybe she’s sick of being gawked at like meat and would welcome the chance to be among people who will treat her like a queen.  The flight attendant?  She might feel like she’s been everywhere and seen everything – on Earth, at least.  The artist? A whole new planet to inspire her! The homecoming queen?  She’s a journalism major.  What a scoop if she can report back to Earth about the culture and history of Mars!  I want to see a remake of this movie in which the ladies really are volunteers, who must help the Martians outwit the military so they can start their new lives on another planet.

Sadly, this is not that movie, and its exploitative aspects stand rather awkwardly alongside the embryonic feminism embodied in Dr. Bolen, overwhelming it more often than not.  I do want to give it maybe half a kudo, though, for at least acknowledging that women can have interests and ambitions.  I guess the point of the ending is that Fellow One has realized they need to be allowed to pursue those instead of being forced to breed.

Mars Needs Women is probably Larry Buchanan’s best movie, which is a statement on the same level as saying that The Beast of Yucca Flats is Coleman Francis’ – by any reasonable standard it still really sucks.  While it has many problems, I would say that the one that kills any entertainment value is how the narrative totally lacks the urgency the title implies.  The ending should be a race to stop the Martians taking off with their prisoners, but no, it saunters instead.  If there were only some tension in the film, it could have been the guilty pleasure you’d want from a movie called Mars Needs Women.