#mst3

[chantsdemarins]

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the ask box for the last 10 people who liked or reblogged something from you! get to know your mutuals and followers (ू•‧̫•ू⑅)

Thank you so much @theaudacitytowrite for sending this my way! Tumblr ate the first one I did so here I am round 2! 💚💚💚

1. Gamera movies! Especially when narrated by MST3

2. Tom (sigh)

3. Loki (sigh again)

4. Artist Paola Pivi

5. Kermit memes

6. Bonus: nail art

[mixed-alien]

Ana b3d ma shelt el nipple piercing mst3’raba en 3andy nipples mn geld 3ady, ana bda2t at3wed enohom metal!!

[phobos-anomaly-art]

Drew some characters for the SixFanarts meme floating about!

[yourfavedeserveslove]

M Waverly from Mystery Science Theater 3000 deserves love! 💛

[mst3kproject]

403: City Limits

I only have one story about this movie and that’s how a while back I had a dream in which Kim Cattrall and Jennifer Connolly were trying to escape from an evil toy factory owned by Nicholas Cage, and in the dream I was thinking wow, City Limits is different than I remember.  Moving on.

In the non-dream version of the movie, a plague has killed off all the adults except James Earl Jones – I must admit, if you have to keep one he’s a pretty good choice.  He adopts some bland kid named Lee, who grows up, puts on a Cubone costume, and heads off into the ruins of Los Angeles to find other badly-dressed, motorcycle-riding survivors like him.  If he had any sense, he’d have stayed in the middle of nowhere with Horse Girl, since the first bunch he meets try to arrest him and the second just aren’t impressed by his resume.  Lee ends up killing some guy named Dirty Bob, so the various motorcycle gangs that now rule the world decide to subject him to trial by combat, based on something they read in a comic book.  Somehow this results in smashing a couple of dinosaur skeletons and uniting the gangs to take on the federally authorized Sunia Corporation, who shoot anybody who doesn’t want to work for them.  What the hell happened to Horse Girl?

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble following what is going on in this movie.  Most of it takes place in poorly-lit darkness, the characters all look alike and dress like piles of laundry, and nothing anybody does is properly motivated. There’s something almost Ed-Wood-ian about the way scenes in City Limits refuse to add up to a narrative. Reaction shots get dropped in with no explanation of why characters are reacting the way they are, and there’s some bits, like the Beer Santa or what Yogi sees out the window, that I honestly can’t tell whether they’re flashbacks or not.  It’s a good thing the narrating voice of James Earl Jones shows up from time to time to tell us what people are doing, or else I would have no idea.

What does the Sunia company want?  They say they want to provide electricity and food for the world, and if this is just a front for something evil we never hear about it.  Shooting people who won’t work for them is pretty evil, but if there’s a larger Evil Plan at work I couldn’t tell.  What do the Clippers and the DA’s want?  They might have had some kind of system of their own at work before Sunia showed up but all we hear about is the truce between the two.  What was Lee’s plan at the end?  Why bother having people zoom in on armored motorbikes if Albert was right there with the air support?  Why the hell is Carver the main villain when he never even gets out of his fucking chair?

Note To Self: if I ever want to conquer the world, I should avoid saying I am inevitable.  It doesn’t go well for anybody.

Maybe Sunia isn’t the problem, but the government that sponsor them?  Possibly, but we know even less about what passes for ‘the federal government’ in this dystopia than we do about Sunia.  We never meet anybody who represents them.  What kind of government can you have after almost everybody over the age of twelve died of the plague?  This is one of those things that, if the movie hadn’t brought it up, I would never have thought about it – but once they’ve mentioned it, it bugs me.

The impression I’m left with is City Limits is basically a sequence of ideas somebody thought were cool, with minimal effort made to string them together into an actual story.  Skull Helmet?  Cool. Motorcycle race through dinosaur bones? Very cool!  Biker Viking Funeral? Extremely cool!  James Earl Jones blowing shit up with RC kamikaze airplanes?  What could be cooler than that?  And yeah, all this stuff is fun to watch, but unfortunately that’s just not the same as actually caring about it.

Without coherence or character development to get us interested, the audience is left in exactly the spot Space Mutiny managed to avoid: we just don’t see the point.  The only real entertainment value in the film is a few moments of amusing absurdity sprinkled in here and there.  The fake-ass dinosaur skeleton is hilarious – as is the establishing shot of the museum, which looks extremely well-groomed for having been ruled by motorcycle gangs for fifteen years.  The stinger moment of Bolo hollering in panic as the dinky RC plane closes in to blow him up also got a laugh out of me.  Even these would be much improved, though, if we had a better idea what was actually going on.

Because of all this stuff stacked against me giving a shit, I had to watch the movie twice to get anything out of it.  On the second viewing, when I stopped expecting to understand what was happening in the plot, I managed to find a couple of interesting ideas peeking out.  One was how, here and there, City Limits tries to create a culture for these people who were abandoned as children.  Like the film itself, this is based on what a twelve-year-old might think looks cool: the clothes and lairs made out of scavenged bits of 80’s culture.  The party-animal, bike-riding lifestyle.  The use of comic books as a guide to what life was like before the apocalypse.  The weird funeral they hold for Whitey.  There’s a Trashpunk Neverland sort of vibe to the whole thing, as if we really are in a world designed by children who never grew up.  I wonder if that’s brilliant, or just a poor reflection on the maturity of the film-makers.

The other is an apparently earnest attempt to say something about colonialism.  Dr. Wickings (who the hell is giving out doctorates after the end of the world?) argues that the bikers are human beings who are just defending their homeland, and should be treated with compassion.  Her bosses at Sunia reply that the bikers are barbarians who need to be gotten out of the way.  This is the logic of everybody, everywhere, who has ever conquered anybody else. The Romans said it about the Gauls, the Spaniards said it about the Aztecs, the bad guys in Avatar said it about the Na’vi.  In each case, the conquerors who call the conquered ‘barbarians’ use it as an excuse to treat them barbarously.

This is stated explicitly enough in City Limits that it’s clearly intentional, and the analogy continues: Sunia has technology the locals don’t, and that could be of real benefit to everybody – but Sunia aren’t interested in peaceful trade or selfless charity, and the only benefit they want is for themselves (presumably, since like I said, their overall plan is never gone into).  The natives had plenty of problems and enmities of their own before this outside force showed up, but they had a system and it worked before Sunia pitted them against each other for gain (again, presumably).

As a theme, this falls apart in two places, both of which I’ve already mentioned.  First, we don’t care – we don’t know who these characters are and we can’t tell them apart, so we’re not invested in whether they get conquered or not.  I think the laundry-heap costumes are also a major contributor to this.  They tend to make all the characters look alike, jumbles of colour without distinguishable silhouettes.  Costuming can say quite a lot about a character, but if there’s too much going on the details get lost.

Second, we don’t really have a compelling reason to consider Sunia the bad guys.  I swear I know better now than to expect that MST3K cut anything that really mattered, but it was still kind of a surprise to find that there was no missing scene that detailed Sunia’s Evil Master Plan.  A supervillain with no Evil Plan is a pretty lousy supervillain, even if his non-evil plan is to be achieved by evil means, and especially when we don’t care about the victims.  We just don’t know enough about what was going on here before Sunia showed up to be able to say if it was better or worse in any way.  As it stands, Sunia’s offer of food, medicine, electricity, and an end to the gang warfare seems like a pretty good idea to me.

A couple more random notes that didn’t fit anywhere else in the review: since I work in that field myself, I have to say that I’m happy glasses survived the end of civilization.  It must be much easier to rediscover all the other technologies when everybody can see.  Maybe that’s why there’s so much gasoline and electricity in this post-apocalyptic world – people like James Earl Jones and Kim Cattrall with their glasses could see well enough to keep them coming!

Then there’s the fact that everywhere Lee goes, girls kinda smile awkwardly at him and then immediately take his side.  Horse Girl does it, Kim Cattrall does it, Rae Dawn Chong does it… why?  There seem to be lots of boys around, so it’s not like the apocalypse left the world with a shortage of dick.  This is why so-called ‘incels’ go on shooting sprees – because movies like this have told them that dull white boys should have girls all over them just because they showed up.

Seriously, what the hell happened to Horse Girl?  Why was she even in the movie?  She comes and goes before the opening credits are over and has no effect on the plot.  Did she reappear somewhere and I just never noticed?  That’s one of the big rules of storytelling, folks – if you place a horse on the mantlepiece in Act I, you have to use it!

[muvana]

via Giphy

[dailymst3kquote]

I think it's very nice of you to give that dead woman another chance.

Crow T. Robot

[imthehuman]

With every post, a smile, ت

[retroautomaton]

so silly and blue

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Santa Claus vs. the Devil (Cardona, 1959) & Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Webster, 1964)

The opening of Santa Claus, or Santa Claus vs. the Devil as it's sometimes known, shows us all the children of the world under Santa Claus' employ. That's right. Not elves, but children. This is a world where Santa employs child labour. But putting that aside, we're treated to groups of children of different nationalities putting on displays of their respective cultures. The movie uses the broadest possible stereotypes in these depictions, bordering on the offensive (the children of Africa wear bones in their hair and are accompanied by drumbeats, while maracas are shown to be integral to the cultures of multiple Central and South American nations), but by the time the children of England sang "London Bridge is Falling Down" or the children of America sang "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in a brutally off-key rendition, I couldn't help but laugh.

I understand this was the basis of a classic MST3K episode in which the phrase "nightmare fuel" was coined, and while I haven't seen the episode in question, it's easy to see how they came up with it. The movie at a glance has the cheerful veneer of any other children's Christmas entertainment, but the particulars of its vision feel ripped out of the most demented corners of the subconscious. Take Santa's telecommunications apparatuses, a satellite dish with a disembodied ear, and a giant pair of disembodied lips. Take the creepy faceless dolls that taunt one of the children. And take the bright red demon who seeks to antagonize Santa, whose body language feels more akin to the sexualized devil of Haxan than something appropriate for a children's movie, particularly when he hovers above the characters as they sleep in scenes right out of Phantasm. There's something almost form-shattering about the creepiness of these images. The movie is captured in colours that are rich but a little too dark, as if to telegraph its sinister dimensions. (I watched this in a beautiful HD transfer on Tubi, which did justice to its visual pleasures.) And even putting aside the imagery, we get scenes like Santa bickering with Merlin over their relative senility. It's hard to picture this actually being enjoyable viewing for children, especially given the awkward pacing (Santa and the demon rarely interact until the homestretch), but as a non-believer who doesn't actually celebrate the holiday, I can't help but be attracted to the movie's sheer strangeness.

That strangeness also manifests in the movie's weirdly reactionary politics. Santa early on refuses to switch out his reindeer for "Sputniks", despite the fact that the reindeer will turn to dust after sunrise, reminding me of M. Emmett Walsh's character in Red Scorpion, whose hatred for the Soviets overrode consideration for his own safety. A poor family is worried about not getting presents, which despite Santa's existence appears to be a regular feature of this world. Santa does not even acknowledge these economic realities, but comes in at the end to give the child a meager doll, like a tax cut that doesn't actually benefit anyone below a certain income level. The demon seeks to undermine Santa by appealing to "subversive" elements, like women and the poor, and his scheme to defeat Santa involves him getting shot by trigger-happy policemen, relying on a lack of police accountability to defeat his enemy. I would not vote for the demon were he running for office, but must confess he does a better job addressing the issues that really affect voters than Santa and his incumbent contempt.

That being said, I am not completely made of stone, and the resilience of the poor child's moral fibre in the face of hardship did manage to move me a little. And really, despite everything I've said, this really isn't much more deranged or cloying than all of those supposedly normal Christmas where, I dunno, Tim Allen plots to murder his in-laws or whatever normally happens in these things.

I chased Santa Claus vs. the Devil with another movie known for being featured on MST3K, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. In this case, I'd seen the movie previously through the show, but watching it in its original form, I couldn't help but find it endearing. After the other movie's reactionary streak, this one stands out as kindler, gentler, more palatable in its politics. We are presented with differing views among the martians in their warlike mission to kidnap Santa and bring Christmas cheer to their home planet. There are the hardliners who are not above war crimes, like their attempt to jettison Santa and the human children out the airlock. There is the centrist who is attempting to conduct a humane war, not realizing his mission by its very nature is inhumane. And there is the pacifist Dropo, who seems daffy but is perhaps wisest of all, as he seeks to avoid this war outright.

Santa employs a staff of highly skilled (and probably unionized) elves, and decries the martian attempts to automate these jobs out of existence. And Santa ends this war of sorts not through force, but through love, kindness and good cheer, moving the martians with his resiliency under duress. (The rare moment of callousness on his part comes when the martians freeze his wife, and he remarks that this is the longest she's ever gone without talking. Women, amirite?) I am rarely moved by gestures towards the meaning of Christmas, but in this case I will make an exception. And while the movie is obviously frugally budgeted, it is realized in charmingly chintzy production design full of bright colours (which certainly pop on the HD transfer I watched on Tubi), a better approximation of a child's imagination than the horrific imagery seen in Santa Claus vs. the Devil.

[wiseclown91]

[luxurylatte]

Tonight's entertainment... #MST3 #nerd alert (at Emeryville, California)

[rioslays]

rio turn on anonymous asks rn i swear

YOOO follower nice mst3

Hah

No

[classicrocker2000]

So all I wanted to do was to make a dumb joke about how I can never stick to the MST3 mantra of "Repeat to yourself, it's just a show, I should really just relax

First I can't draw myself holding a bat ready to kick the shit out of Bob and Bert. Then, I have to do an obscene amount of resizing both canvas and pictures.

In short? Fuck me

[classy-millionaire]

Mst3’rb ma feh a7d ysbk enti fe alAsk?🤣

Ela but I pretend everyone loves me lol🥲

[sjja-3]

T5ayle eni 7lmt fek elyom wa Ana Ma a3rfk Wa ma gd 7aket m3k kan 7lm 3’areeb Mra Ana Mra mst3’rb glt lazem aje agolk

Meen? Come off