#mst3knitathon

[emilysidhe]

I have finished the blanket I have been using for the MST3K knitathon.

I forgot to get a picture of it blocked, so I’m going to have to awkwardly text my friend who’s already been given it as a wedding present asking for a photo.

It took me twelve episodes of MST3K from the point where I started marathoning (which was pretty far into the process, actually, main body was almost done at that point), and then I finished off with an audiobook the night before the wedding when it really became crunch time.

But I want to do a quick retrospective of the bottom ten before I write up reviews for the next two.

From now on, I think I will start scheduling recaps to post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and/or Fridays depending on how many episodes I get through in a week instead of just posting several in one day and then nothing until the next marathon.

Already cast on a scarf next, so we’ll see how far I get.

[emilysidhe]

MST3K knitathon

98. Episode 804 The Deadly Mantis

Summary: Bomb tests on an island off Antarctica have caused vibrations in the Earth that wake a prehistoric giant mantis from its frozen hibernation on the other side of the Earth in the Arctic. It attacks several isolated weather stations on the US’s northernmost radar defense defense line before the military brings in a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum (and the tag-along lady reporter who works for the museum’s magazine) to identify the creature. Now it’s up to the civilian ground observation force to watch the skies and track the mantis as it heads south.

MST3K lore or notable moments: This episode is from when the show was on the sci-fi channel, and they did ongoing plot lines in the sketches for those seasons. This is the episode that ends the planet of the apes pastiche, when the super intelligent apes destroy themselves by helping a local bomb-worshiping cult repair their planet-destroying bomb, and the SoL crew, Pearl in her van, and Professor Bobo as a stowaway flee the blast just in time. It resumes the Pearl chasing the SoL in her space van format, and establishes Professor Bobo as a regular character outside his planet. Also, Mike accidentally helps the apes repair the bomb by advising them to use the correct tool, so the bots decide that the planet’s destruction is Mike’s fault. This will become a running gag across several episodes of the sci-fi era.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I love the goofy black and white 50s giant monster movies with a hero scientist and lots of military stock footage, so I would be recommending this one to go higher on the list if not for how badly the second half drags. The sketches are pretty strong for the sci-fi era, though, which is also in the movie’s favor. Probably in about the right place on the list, but with the option to move up when I start encountering episodes that need to move down.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon

87. Episode 704 The Incredible Melting Man

Summary: Three astronauts are doing a fly-by of Saturn’s rings when a solar flare does something to their spacecraft. We cut to the sole survivor being treated for radiation on Earth before he kills a nurse and escapes. His doctor theorizes that the radiation has degraded so much of his mind that he will only have brief flashes of who he is, but he will instinctively be driven to consume human flesh in order to replace the cells that are progressively melting off him. The astronaut terrorizes a small town while experiencing repetitive flashbacks to his mission; the doctor, instructed by the military to keep everything secret even as the death toll mounts, tries to track down his patient alone by trailing him with a Geiger counter.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Crow T Robot’s Earth vs Soup script is finally optioned for a movie! After having just made MST3K The Movie, the writers have fun poking fun at Hollywood.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? I had a lot more fun watching this one than movie number 88 - the riffing is just better on this one. Solidifies my opinion that Escape 2000 should move down, but I’m fine with this one staying where it is.

[emilysidhe]

I did watch one more last night for mst3knitathon:

95. Episode 819 Invasion of the Neptune Men

Content warning: I usually save this to the end, if one applies, but I’m front-loading it this time. In its original run, MST3K was a 90s show made by a group of mostly-white, mostly men who had to come up with 90 minutes worth of funny things to say every single week about movies that weren’t always giving them much to work with. So there’s a certain amount of jokes that aged poorly or that are in very poor taste that you unfortunately have to expect going in and that I’ll usually let pass without comment. Unfortunately, the early 2000s was a peak in insult or outrage comedy, so the number and offensiveness of insensitive jokes actually went up in the later years of MST3K as they approached that era. This episode, and its higher ranked predecessor Prince of Space, contain an unpleasant amount of jokes about how much Japan supposedly sucks, and it’s better to know that going in.

Summary: This is a movie that was stitched together from several episodes of a Japanese sci-fi television series, and dubbed for an American audience. I thought about it, and decided not to look up any information about the original Japanese serial because being somewhat confused about the lore seems to be part of the experience of watching the dubbed American movie version. My impression from both this and the earlier Prince of Space (ranked all the way up at number 15 on this list) is that it did multi-episode arcs like the classic run of Doctor Who, and they would then be cut down to movie length for the American release, hopefully preserving all the important scenes.

The movie follows a space hero who is living on Earth under a mild-mannered human identity ala Clark Kent, but who secretly possesses a bunch of high-tech space technology that he uses in his superhero guise to protect Earth from space invaders. In Prince of Space, his human persona was a humble boot-black who had adopted two orphaned human children and had to keep coming up with reasons for them to be babysat by their neighbors, the local scientist and his family, so that he could go off to do his superheroics without any the wiser. In Invasion of the Neptune Men, he’s progressed to lab assistant to the local scientist and role model to the neighborhood boys, and it’s unclear if the boy he adopted is in that group and the American edit is now cutting around it, or if the serial had moved on from that plot line by this point. (His hero name is also now being translated as “space chief” instead of “prince of space.”)

The kids have used a telescope to track a satellite launched by their own local scientists, and they think they see it land nearby! But when they run to the field it seemed to set down in, they find a Neptunian spacecraft bent on invasion. “Space Chief” shows up to save them, but the children are not believed when they tell the adults. Until the aliens show their superior technology by taking over Earth’s power systems to make trains and clocks run backwards. Luckily, the local scientist has invented some sort of electron shield that can protect all cities from everything! So the Neptunians try to destroy it and - at this point my knitting got complicated and I kind of lost the plot? But there was a lot of stock footage of explosions that seemed to go on for a *very* long time, and judging by the jokes I could hear, the riffers also couldn’t tell what was supposed to be blowing up, so it might not have been the knitting’s fault.

MST3K lore and notable moments: This episode marks a return of Professor Bobo, who had been absent during the Ancient Rome storyline so that Kevin Murphy could play a jovial patrician. There’s also a sketch where the bots affect to be spiritually broken by the badness of the movie and are cheered by a visit from Krankor, the villain from Prince of Space whose watchable goofiness they have a new appreciation for. (Visits by past characters are always notable)

What do I think about its placement on the list? The riffs that are not offensive are pretty strong, this serial has a cool aesthetic and lots of pleasant goofiness, and I love the sketch where the bots start to stage a tribute to kabuki theater only to be sidetracked by humorous confusion when Mike asserts that he prefers Noh theater. (I am always a sucker for a Who’s on First? routine). Still, the offensive riffs and monotonous confusion of the second half drop it down a lot in the rankings. I have no disagreement with this number.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon:

83. Episode 111 Moon Zero Two

Summary: It’s the swinging sixties - on the moon! The credits play over a fun little cartoon (with an equally fun song) in which a tiny US astronaut and a tiny Soviet cosmonaut fight over who gets to plant their flag, but get so distracted that they miss the international community showing up with their own space programs and have to sheepishly petition to join the international moon base (managed by the UN) as just two among many members. Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s how the space race had ended!

In the movie proper, American pilot Bill Kemp used to be an explorer and was the first pilot on Mars, but he quit working for the big companies when they stopped expanding because he refuses to be be a passenger pilot. Now he’s an independent contractor doing mostly space salvage with his Soviet(? - they never say, but I think that’s the accent he’s doing) engineer partner. A young woman from Earth tries to hire him to take her to her brother’s mining claim on the far side of the moon because her brother failed to meet her at the port as planned, but Kemp convinces her to wait at Moon City for the next miners’ convoy to arrive in case the he’s just been delayed. Meanwhile, an eccentric billionaire hires him to do an illegal job: intentionally crash a valuable asteroid into the far side of the moon so that it can be mined without the expense of getting the equipment to and from deep space. Despite misgivings, Kemp takes the job and when he returns, two convoys have come and gone without the young woman’s brother. He takes her to find out what happened, only to find the brother murdered so someone could jump his claim - possibly because an asteroid made of pure sapphire is about to land on it. Can they survive the billionaire’s goons long enough to get justice? Or will this Moon Heist spell Moon Death for our Moon Heroes?

MST3K lore or notable moments: I don’t remember them doing any other movies that start with a fun cartoon? Anyway, here it is:

Also, this episode was re-riffed in 2020 as part of a social distanced riff along live show.

What do I think about its place on the list? Back in season 1, they used to do a bit where Joel would ask the bots to name a good thing and a bad thing about the day’s movie, rewarding them with a ram chip. Crow’s good thing and bad thing are both, “It was groovy.” which really tells you all you need to know about this movie. It’s another one that’s borderline too good for this series - not a classic, but colorful and fun. The costumes in particular look like a precursor to The Fifth Element. But the movie’s a bit too invested in imagining how late 60’s/early 70’s cool living on the moon is going to be, lingering a bit too long over any scene where the actors are pretending to be in zero gravity just because the movie thinks being in zero gravity would be cool. Like Crow said, groovy. In terms of the episode, this is a strong riff for season one (I especially like the bit where the bots affect to believe that the film’s surprising score means that a jazz combo is trapped somewhere in the movie and being imperiled by the gunfire and explosions), and the sketch about putting on a play of the actual moon landing was very cute. Definitely a top 100 episode, but not so much so that I’d argue for higher placement.

[emilysidhe]

You can’t see this because I schedule all the posts now, but it’s been almost a week since I watched the last MST3Knitathon and I was so excited to finally have time to do another one!

84. Episode 213 Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster

Summary: (This will be a long summary because I like this one and want to talk about it) Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, an island is guarded by a giant lobster kaiju. Often accompanied by a supernatural storm, this sea monster sinks any boats that come near its island.

In Japan, a young man sets out on a quest to obtain a boat to search for his missing brother, who was lost in one of these very shipwrecks. Through random happenstance, he picks up two goofy college boys (disqualified contestants in a “win a boat!” dance marathon that he was too late to enter) and a thief (hiding out in the marina after a large take) who get dragged along with him as he steals a yacht and heads towards his brother’s ship’s last known location.

The monster sinks this ship too, but since everyone was wearing life jackets, they survive to wash up on the shore of the island, where they find a mysterious paramilitary compound into which they witness a group of Pacific Islander people being taken at gunpoint. Several men are killed in an escape attempt, but a young woman uses the confusion to sneak into the jungle, where she meets up with our heroes and a Scooby gang is formed.

She is from Infant Island, home of Mothra, the giant moth kaiju who is a regular Godzilla foe (or ally depending on the movie), and who is worshipped as a god by the local people. While Mothra sleeps, the bad guys have been kidnapping the people of the island and forcing them to refine a native fruit into a yellow liquid that can be sprayed on the water to stop the sea monster from attacking their boats. Her people are praying for Mothra to awaken in an elaborate dance ritual that is a genuinely impressive spectacle, but also pretty repetitive as the film keeps cutting back to it.

The Scoobs decide to sneak into the compound and try to rescue the enslaved Islanders, but while the thief excels at getting them through locked doors, they are caught before they do anything but discover evidence of nuclear weapons manufacturing. They use smoke bombs they stole from the lab to escape, but one of the goofy college boys is captured, and in delightfully ludicrous sequence of events, the brother gets his foot caught in a weather balloon rope and is ballooned over to Infant Island to reunite with his brother, who was marooned there in the movie’s first shipwreck. Perfect, no notes, watch this on repeat.

The reunited brothers talk to Mothra’s fairies - different Godzilla movie, but these fairies:

- about the plot for a bit before deciding to row back to the sea monster’s island and try again to free the captives while everyone else continues their “wake up Mothra” dance.

Meanwhile, back on the island, 1) captured college boy is thrown into the slave labor camp and convinces the other captives to make a fake batch of yellow liquid using leaves and no fruit 2) the three remaining free Scoobs come up with an even bolder plan. I didn’t mention it before, but while hiding from the soldiers in caves earlier, they discovered a sleeping Godzilla. Now, they want to jury-rig a lightning rod to wake him up, on the difficult-to-argue with reasoning that if Godzilla’s around, the bad guys will have Bigger Problems than hunting them down in the jungle.

This plan works without a hitch, and there are some fun monster fights before the bad guys decide to evacuate the island, putting it on a two hour nuclear self-destruct. The originally missing brother and the thief rescue the Islanders, who decide to use what’s left of the two hours to build a giant net in case Mothra wakes in time to save them. The sea monster sinks the bad guys’ ship with its fake yellow liquid right before getting killed by Godzilla; with ten minutes to spare, Mothra finally wakes and fights off Godzilla to get to her people, who climb into the giant net so she can easily pick them up and evacuate them; at the humans’ shouted encouragement, Godzilla leaps off a cliff into the water just before the nuclear explosion destroys the island; and the thief announces that he liked saving people so much that when he gets back to civilization, he’s going to go straight. The End!

MST3K lore or notable moments: 1. Final sketch has the results of the “Cool Thing Contest” from Episode 208 Lost Continent, which we will get to at number 56. 2. Because the weird American dub they have of this movie is missing a title screen, the opening credits are shown to an empty theater, with Joel and the bots running in “late” just as the movie starts, and asking each other frequently what this movie is called. Also, Mothra drops by for a chat during the sketches, but as far as I can recall, doesn’t become a recurring character.

What do I think about its place on the list? In one of these other reviews, I’ve mentioned that I first watched MST3K as a kid when my uncle used to visit us and bring over VHS’s of episodes that he’d taped from the TV to watch together. Back then, this was my favorite episode. It had Godzilla, Mothra, and two other kaiju! (I didn’t even mention the bird one that apparently also lives on the island and only shows up for one scene.) Mothra’s fairies, whom I also loved (that same uncle would also bring over unriffed classic Godzilla movies), got a couple of little scenes. It was colorful! There were lots of zany action scenes for the riffers to make fun of! And I still like the running riffs about the fake bush the characters used to sneak up to the compound, and the frequent shots of the sky as “check ins with God.” This episode will always be in my personal top five, but if we manage to look aside it being my childhood favorite, surely it belongs somewhere in the top 10? Or at least it should swap places on the list with the other Godzilla movie they did, Godzilla vs Megalon, voted in at number 19 despite being, in my opinion, not as good as this one!

Fellow MiSTies, what do you think? Was this episode robbed?

[emilysidhe]

Getting worse at writing these up before bed, but I did watch one last night:

94. Episode 1011 Horrors of Spider Island

Content warning: Like I said in the last post, I’ll let a certain amount of unfortunate riffs pass by without any comment, but I’ll try to warn for anything particularly egregious in either frequency or degree of offensiveness, and in this one the anti-trans slur “she-male” is used to mock a cis-female character. (Disclaimer that I won’t always be paying enough attention to catch particularly offensive one-off riffs.)

Summary: A night-club producer and his secretary/girlfriend audition dancers for a troupe to go on international tour. But en route to their first stop in Singapore, their plane goes down over the Pacific and the survivors take the emergency raft to an uninhabited island. There, they find a cabin with the body of a lone geologist strung up in a giant spiderweb, along with his notes about finding uranium on the island and enough stored food to last them about a month. The producer (the sole male survivor) gets bitten by an irradiated spider the size of a small dog the first night and immediately transforms into a spider beast, subtly enough that the filmmakers decide they don’t have to bother with his makeup and prosthetics whenever they’re filming him from behind. Theoretically he spends a month lurking in the jungle and menacing the girls, but after killing the exotic dancer who’d been trying to tempt him into infidelity as a human, he’s barely glimpsed for weeks as the camera focuses on the dancers becoming more (sexily) distraught and their clothes being shredded by island living as the weeks drag on without rescue. But just when the food is running out, the dead geologist’s two research assistants return from the mainland, discover the girls, and announce that a new ship is swinging by in two days to pick up the geologist’s research notes. As the girls sexily compete over the first male attention they’ve seen in weeks, the spider monster finally gets around to attacking people.

MST3K lore or notable moments: None in this episode

What do I think about its placement on the list? I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d rank this one quite a bit higher. This is by far the most overt exploitation film of its kind that they’ve done; enough to make it immediately memorable, which is no small feat. (Eventually all the monster movies and biker films and bad 80s horror episodes start to run together, even when they’re good.) I know from the research of other MiSTies that this softcore exploitation film was more explicit in its original European release, but that the American version had to cut anything truly raunchy. The print MST3K uses is also a bit degraded, so there are also a lot of closeups that you can’t see details of anymore. The way that it’s So Very Much Exactly What It Is but also mostly failing at what it’s trying to do makes for a comedic experience throughout, and the riffing’s pretty solid (aside from the caveat in the content warning). Like the other girly pictures they’ve done, the riffers alternate between commenting on the movie’s sexism and making jokes that are just sexist, but this movie’s giving them so much to work with that they keep getting steered back to the first category. And these episodes often have one riff that particularly resonates with me for one reason or another, and the bit where the women are trying to make a smoke signal to a passing ship that ignores them and Crow quips, “Darn Californian, it never saves anyone!” has had me giggling all day. So in the end, I’m sorry women (including myself, who am a women), but Horrors of Spider Island should be a top 75 MST3K episode.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon has become MST3Klaundryfoldathon

88. Episode 704 Escape 2000

Summary: In this badly dubbed Italian knockoff of Escape from New York, the Bronx has been quarantined due to an unspecified epidemic and an evil megacorp is using this as an excuse to convince the government to schedule the whole borough for demolition so they can build the city of tomorrow in its wake. “Disinfection Squads” are murdering everyone who refuses to leave their homes, and the gangs that used to rule that part of the city have been driven literally underground into the disused subway tunnels. A young biker named Trash fails to convince the gangs (led by a loud, energetic dude whose name sounds enough like Toblerone that the bots rechristen him thusly) to fight to take back the city. Instead, a lady reporter comes up with a plan to take the president of the company hostage in order to negotiate, but that fails also when the company proves to be so evil that they’ll just assassinate their president themselves and claim the gangs did it. Trash gets his gang battle as the hostage plan goes south, they kill the lead Disinfector in a series of explosions, and Trash and his allies (minus reporter lady) live on to fight for the Bronx another day. (Also, btw, while all this is going on, everything is totally normal in Manhattan, which is not supposed to be funny, but is very funny).

MST3K lore or notable moments: None in this episode

What do I think about its placement on the list? 80s futuristic dystopias are my least favorite of all the genres MST3K did, so I’d move this one down to make room for all the ones I said were ranked too low to move up. (Also, I could have done without the riffs about the female lead’s appearance.) That said, I do like that bit at the end where “Toblerone” shows up and Pearl Forrester runs off with him. Mrs. F deserves a nice fling with a loudly laughing “beautiful olive-skinned man,” as she calls him.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon

89. Episode 308 Gamera vs Gaos

Summary: Back-to-Back Gameras! Here we have another transitional film, as we have the return of a child character bonded with Gamera and Gamera being treated as a “good-guy” monster for the first time, but the human plot is still trying to be a serious kaiju movie in the vein of early Godzilla, and has not yet embraced the full zaniness that Gamera would become known for (and some Godzilla movies would eventually copy from them.)

It’s a period of high volcanic activity in Japan, and Gamera has reappeared in the mountains to feed on the resulting heat. Meanwhile, a - corporation? government agency? It’s not fully clear - is trying to build a road through the mountains, but the village headman has convinced all the local farmers to refuse to move in an attempt to get more money for their land (that the new road is to be built on). In the midst of this, a reporter persuades the headman’s grandson, Ichi, to lead him up the mountain to a cave spewing green light that he believes contains Gamera. Actually, it contains Gaos - a new bat-bird kaiju thing that has been awakened by the volcanic activity. Gamera appears in time to save Ichi, but is badly wounded enough that it must retreat to the sea to heal. The humans must fight the monster themselves, helped by Ichi, who has to keep telling the scientists things that he’s just noticed about the kaiju that turn out to be the keys to all their plans. Meanwhile, Gaos’s appearance has frightened off all the local livestock *and* made the road builders consider moving their plans, rendering the farmers’ land worthless. The outsider road planners and the recalcitrant farmers must now work together if they’re going to stave off Gaos long enough for Gamera to return and save the day.

MST3K lore or notable moments: None really in this one either, although it is the first film in which Gamera bleeds. Honestly, the monster fights in Gamera tend to get pretty bloody from here on out, despite the increasingly goofy tone.

What do I think about its place on the list? I enjoy the tension in the early Gamera movies between the absurdity of the monsters and the attempt to have a more serious plot. Last movie, we had a delightful dog-lizard that shot destructive rainbows paired with a heist and betrayal narrative that invokes Japan’s colonial past. Here we have a drama about road building changing a community that’s mostly played straight juxtaposed with a delightfully ridiculous monster-defeating plan that involves a revolving restaurant and a fountain of fake blood. (Not sure if the farmers being portrayed as greedy for wanting the most money possible in exchange for the land that is their livelihood while the road builders come off as beleaguered victims is fully in the original or more a result of the American dub and edit.) I’ll have to wait until I get up to the more zany Gameras to see if I agree that they’re more fun overall, or if I would switch around some positions in the list.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon returns:

90. Episode 304 Gamera vs Barugon

Synopsis: We’ve hit a Gamera! And very early on! Gamera, the Godzilla knock-off that is a giant turtle, became highly associated with MST3K due to the sheer number of Gamera movies they covered. We start with a recap of the events of the first movie, in which it’s revealed that the spaceship Gamera was exiled in at the end of the first movie has crashed back to Earth after being knocked off course by a meteor. Gamera destroys a dam and then takes off. Meanwhile, we follow a pilot involved in a get-rich-quick scheme that goes wrong: he and a small team go to an island in Malaysia in search of a giant opal the pilot’s brother found there during WWII and hid in a cave to be retrieved later. One of the conspirators betrays the others and steals the “opal,” but it hatches into an oddly cute lizard-dog kaiju called Barugon. Barugon turns out to have lots of neat powers, like a battering/ram tongue and a rainbow that can destroy missiles. Meanwhile, the pilot and one of the Pacific Islander women travel back to Japan to use her knowledge of the creature to help the army kill it before it can destroy Osaka. But only after they’ve tried and failed does Gamera finally show up again in the last ten minutes to defeat its rival monster and save Japan.

MST3K lore or notable moments: To a certain extent, all the Gamera episodes are iconic, but there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about this one.

What do I think about its placement on the list? Honestly, MST3K has made enough good episodes that all of the Gamera movies can’t be ranked too high, and if some are going to be ranked markedly lower than the others, this is a fair pull for lowest ranked Gamera episode. Instead, I’m going to talk about its place in the Gamera series. The first Gamera movie (as we’ll see when we get closer to the top of the list) is typified by a kind of tonal dissonance: Gamera is destroying cities and killing many people, but simultaneously seems to have some kind of bond with a sensitive boy named Kenny, and goes out of its way to save that specific kid from its own destructiveness. The later films get increasingly goofy as Gamera becomes more solidly a “good-guy” kaiju and gains the nickname “friend to all children.” Here, we seem to have a transitional movie, where Gamera starts off as a destructive threat, but is then embraced as a hero when it fights off a more dangerous kaiju. It’s also, to my knowledge, the only Gamera film where it doesn’t bond with a child or children. (Plus there’s some stuff going on with Japan reckoning with its own history of colonialism that probably comes across better in the original edit than the American dub).

Content warning: The Pacific Islanders are played by Japanese actors in brown-face makeup.

[emilysidhe]

MST3Knitathon: The Bottom Ten of the Top 100

I’ve been watching the top 100 episodes of MST3K as voted by fans during the 2016 kickstarter from bottom to top while working on various knitting projects.

We’ve reached number 91 on the list, which means we’ve watched the bottom ten (91-100) on the list. I thought it would be appropriate to do a little retrospective of the group - what I thought overall, which episodes are overrated on this list, which are underrated, any that are must-sees for MiSTies, and any that would make good first episodes to show new fans. So without further ado:

91. Tormented - (414)

92. Samson vs. The Vampire Women - (624)

93. Angels' Revenge - (622)

94. Horrors of Spider Island - (1011)

95. Invasion of the Neptune Men - (819)

96. Devil Fish - (911)

97. Master Ninja II - (324)

98. The Deadly Mantis - (804)

99. San Francisco International - (614)

100. Wild Rebels - (207)

Overall thoughts: A lot of good episodes down here at the bottom! There’s nothing too egregious here, and I had a lot of fun watching these. You could interpret that as me simply liking this show and therefore being inclined to like most of the episodes, which is fair! But I think that what’s actually going on is that the “so bad it’s good” phenomenon that MST3K trades on is highly idiosyncratic - what makes a “so bad it’s good” movie vs what is just a bad movie differs from person to person. So down here at the bottom of the top are a bunch of solid but not extraordinary episodes that are just good watching experiences. Whereas the stuff I find borderline unwatchable is going to be up near the top mixed in with my personal favorites because that’s someone else’s so-bad-that-it’s-good catnip.

Overrated episodes: Not too many! I probably wouldn’t put Devil Fish on the list at all, though I don’t know what I’d replace it with, and personally I’d move Angel’s Revenge much closer to the bottom, but it’s not some kind of injustice that either of these is where they are.

Underrated Episodes: There’s quite a few in this group that ought to be moved up! In addition to being a solid episode, Samson Vs The Vampire Women is too important to series history and lore to rank outside the top 50, and Horrors of Spider Island has a uniqueness of tone that should be worthy of a top 75 spot (and is just a fun movie to make fun of). In addition, both Wild Rebels and Tormented are simply too good to be bottom ten, with fun riffs and good sketches.

Must-sees for MiSTies: Samson vs The Vampire Women, for the touching goodbye to TV’s Frank, and I would argue Horrors of Spider Island for the sake of seeing the most exploit-y of the exploitation films they’ve done. It’s a standout.

Good on-boardings for new fans? Wild Rebels hits a good middle ground of a movie that’s bad enough to get the “making fun of bad movies” series premise across without being painful to watch the way some of their more notorious movies are, and Joel’s speech to the bots about how realizing that the movies are bad enough to laugh at can turn watching them from grueling to fun is kind of a series thesis. But there are better “first episode of MST3K” candidates coming up farther up in the list.

[emilysidhe]

Last episode from last night’s MST3Knitathon:

91. Episode 414 Tormented

Summary: A jazz piano player who has moved to an island is visited by his former mistress, who wants to convince him to return to her instead of marrying the local rich girl. Just as she progresses to threatening blackmail, she leans against a faulty railing in the lighthouse they are secretly meeting in, and he chooses not to save her, simply watching as she clings to the rail for several long moments before finally plummeting to her death. Both his guilt and her ghost haunt him in the days leading up to his wedding, with some phenomena that only he can see or hear, and some that is also experienced by others.

MST3K lore or notable moments: None this episode

What do I think about it’s placement on the list? I don’t think I’ve seen this episode since my uncle used to bring taped episodes of MST3K over when he visited when we were kids, so it was like watching it for the first time. I had a blast! It’s one of those episodes where the movie is almost too good to be MiSTed, with decent acting and borderline respectable script and direction, though the frequent focus on the practical effects of the ghost rather than the psychological “torment” that’s supposed to be the point render it silly enough to be improved by riffing. I’m tempted to assign this one to the top 50 as well, though I’m concerned about how many other good episodes there are that I’m not thinking of right now that deserve those 50 slots. It should probably move up by a couple of decades at least. Definitely a new favorite! (Also, it’s interesting how watching in this reverse list order brings in nice little connections - we just saw GPC’s goodbye to Frank where she asserts that he was always nice to them, and in this episode we see Frank fantasizing about Dr. F dying in a horrible accident so that he (Frank) can become best friends with the bots)

Content warning: The fiancée character has an eight year old sister who is blatantly crushing on the main character in a way that the other adults (including the main character himself) actively encourage. This kind of, “Isn’t that cute?” response to a child’s interest in an adult was unremarkable at the time, but feels uncomfortable today in a way that the riffs about it don’t help. There’s no actual abuse or child harm in this movie, though.

[emilysidhe]

Mst3knitathon continues:

96. Episode 911 Devil Fish

Summary: Two sexy marine biologists recruit a sexy paleontologist and a sexy electrician specializing in underwater monitoring equipment to help them track an unknown creature that’s attacking boats, and that they think might be a living prehistoric proto-shark. But the corporate scientists at the nearby genetics lab seem to be hiring local organized crime to keep the creature’s existence undiscovered.

MST3K lore or notable moments: I don’t think there are any? But I imagine some sci-fi-era fans might think the appearance of the dolphin spaceship in a couple of the sketches was noteworthy.

What do I think about its placement on the list? We’ve finally reached an episode that I don’t think belongs on the top 100 list at all. Sure, the monster was pretty nifty looking, and I liked the sketch where Pearl and Bobo put an Italian stereotypes filter over Mike and the bots - it managed to remain making fun of stereotyping instead of veering into making fun of Italians, and I found it charming. But while I’ve definitely seen episodes of the show that were worse than this, Devil Fish still encapsulates a lot of what I don’t always like about the SciFi Channel era of the show: 1) while there are still some good riffs, they rely too much on low-hanging fruit, 2) most of the sketches are kind of meh, and 3) watching Mike and/or the bots try to bully people in the sketches is never actually funny, and I don’t know why they kept going back to that well. I didn’t have a bad time watching it, but it’s not a top-100 episode for me, and it was definitely not as good or fun as any of the episodes ranked lower on the list.

[emilysidhe]

I stayed up late knitting last night and watched one more MST3K movie while I did so, so here’s a morning entry for the knitathon - my attempt to watch my way through as many episodes of the fan-chosen top 100 MST3K episodes as it takes to finish a time sensitive knitting project.

Day 1 being a Sunday that I had off from work, I managed to make it to

97. Episode 324 Master Ninja II

Summary: In the 80s, there was a TV series about an American WWII veteran who studied martial arts in Japan until he became a Master Ninja, and the young apprentice he took on when he returned to the United States. They travel from town to town searching for the old man’s missing daughter and helping people in trouble wherever they find them - and by people in trouble, I mean attractive young women who can be one episode love interests for the apprentice character. Sometimes, two of these episodes were packaged together and released as VHS movies. In the first episode of this “film,” the duo help a spirited young union organizer survive in a factory town where all previous union organizers have mysteriously disappeared by using the master’s ninja ability to exert mental control of his bodily functions to slow his heart rate until the enforcers think he’s dead and take him to the place where all the bodies are buried, gaining them the evidence they need to get the bad guys arrested for all their previous murders. In the second episode, the loved ones of several important diplomats, including a senator’s daughter, have been kidnapped by an international group of vaguely motivated terrorists, and some spies from the Master Ninja’s past first suspect him, then recruit him for a rescue mission.

MST3K lore or notable moments: None for this episode

What do I think about it’s placement on the list? This is not the first or the last multiple-episodes-of-a-tv-series-repackaged-as-a-movie that MST3K would do, and the transition between the separate episodes is always somewhat awkward. Despite this being maybe the most disjointed transition of the movies like this that they do, it actually benefits from the format as nothing really has time to drag. Everything’s over in 40-ish minutes so they can move on to the plot lines in episode number two. Plus, the second episode is whackier and more fun than the first, making this the rare MST3K episode that actually gets better in the second half. In the beginning I thought I was going to object to it being on the top 100 list at all, but as it moved along and stayed a fun watch, I revised my opinion: Fun episode, nothing to write home about, well-placed in the low 90s.

But unless Master Ninja I is significantly better, I expect I’m going to take issue with its much higher placement once I get there.

Content warnings: This is exactly as orientalist as you’d expect it to be from the summary, but I didn’t notice anything more offensive than is typical for this kind of goofy white ninja schlock

[emilysidhe]

MST3K knitathon continues

99. Episode 614 San Francisco International

Summary: This was a TV movie meant to serve as a pilot for a series about the running of a major international airport, in this case San Francisco International. The series did get picked up, but only for a brief 6 episode season before cancellation.

We start with a charter plane filled with the Senate Committee on Aviation experiencing a warning light about their landing gear, making everyone on the flight and on the ground prepare for a possible crash landing. Turns out, this was just the monthly airport emergency drill, but the airport manager arranged for it to happen with the senators’ flight to convince them that airports need to be fully funded to prevent real emergencies. The rest of the film is devoted to an A and B plot to display what kind of stories the show will deal with as a series. In the A plot, a trio of crooks who keep changing in and out of priests’ garb to avoid suspicion/detection hold two women (a pilot’s wife and the airport manager’s secretary) hostage as part of a convoluted heist on a shipment of cash flying in from the federal reserve; in the B plot, a boy who loves planes and is sad about his parents’ upcoming divorce finds a Cesna that someone has left the keys in to sit in sadly while pretending to fly and being sad. When his mother comes to try to get him out of the stranger’s plane, he taxis away from her and accidentally takes off, needing to be talked down.

MST3K lore or notable moments: Three of the sketches involve Mike doing a Steve Urkel impression that cracks everyone on the satellite and Deep 13 up so much that they keep calling more people in to see it, and we’re visited by our favorite characters from past episodes: Jan in the Pan, Santa Claus and Pitch, two I don’t recognize, and finally Torgo, who brings everyone back to their senses by not finding the impression all that funny.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? This one is pretty fairly ranked. The movie itself is *much* more competently made than the last one, with everyone involved, from the solid working actors to the stunt pilot pretending to be a kid just barely controlling an unfamiliar aircraft, proving on every frame that they know exactly what they are doing. (The script/direction are even good enough to effectively communicate the quite convoluted heist plot in a non-confusing way despite the riffers often talking over dialogue, which is tricky to do.) Still, the tone of the whole thing is ponderous and self-serious enough to richly deserve a riffing, and the riffs themselves were very good. But there’s not quite enough spark here to make it super memorable. In the top 100 list (so in the better half of MST3K episodes), but fairly low down on that list is about the right place for this episode to be.

[emilysidhe]

I have a ton of knitting to do if I’m going to finish my friend’s afghan in time for her wedding next weekend, so I’m watching the top 100 MST3K episodes as voted by fans back in 2016 for a kickstarter, going from bottom to top https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/Top_100_Episodes_of_MST3K

I expect to finish my current project by movie 90, or at least the high 80s, but there is always more knitting, so we’ll see how far the project gets.

Tag to block (or follow) is #mst3knitathon

There’ve been over 200 episode of MST3K, so every episode on this list has been voted into the top half, even the stuff at the bottom.

100. Episode 207 Wild Rebels

Summary: A stock car racer dramatically quits the sport after losing everything he’s invested when the car he’s bought to race is destroyed in a flameout. He is almost immediately recruited by a biker gang, who want an expert in cars to be their getaway driver for robberies. He initially turns them down, but is then recruited successfully by the police, who want him to work with the gang as an undercover operative to bring them down.

MST3K lore or notable moments: In the sketches of this episode, we learn that GPC is not, in fact the stupid one of the robots. Instead, it’s that she’s in charge of running the “higher functions of the ship” and that takes up enough of her CPU that it’s difficult for her to talk with what’s leftover. Joel puts the other bots in charge of some of the more vital functions of the ship and holds his breath in order to chat with GPC’s unfettered personality, but it’s not long before she has to resume control so that life support kicks back in and Joel can breathe again. Also, the Mads introduce the hobby-hog as their invention exchange, and that was included in the promotional material for years.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? This was a more fun episode than I remembered! I *love* getting our first look at GPC’s more articulate personality (that she has in the Netflix era and onward), and the movie is one of those ones that’s *instructively* bad because of all the ways that it’s almost good. Sure, it’s still an MST3K flick - the protagonist is a total nothingburger without personality or motivation; the gang leader with pretensions to counter-cultural intellectualism and the hair-triggered violent one are both forgettable stereotypes; and every scene goes on at least twice as long as it needs to. But the final shootout in the lighthouse has some cool shots and good use of space, Linda’s speech about “living for kicks” and her role as the gang’s caser who uses her ability to blend in with square society to gather information make her an interesting female lead, and even the silent fourth gang member has a backstory that a more competent movie could have done something with: he used to be a champion surfer until he suffered a traumatic brain injury when his board hit his head during a wipeout, and now he can no longer speak. But he can still process language, and he participates in a lot of the gangs plans by calling the leader’s attention to information in newspapers or maps and using nonverbal communication to indicate what he means. There’s a lot of cool ideas and fun moments spoiled by bad execution.

I don’t think this ought to be a top-50 episode, but I would rank it higher than the bottom, especially since there are other biker movies that I don’t think were as good higher up on the list.

Content warning: to show that the gang are bad guys, there are swastikas everywhere, which is shocking in a film that doesn’t comment on them at all.