Review of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996) by Scratch M — 04 Oct 2008

MST3K is a show I?ve come across on a number of occasions. I was never a huge fan of the T.V. series, but I always thought it was? cute. It had a fun DIY aesthetic and it was also an opportunity to watch some really bad movies in a presentation which made them tolerable. I?ve always thought it was helpful to get a glimpse of just how bad cinema can get, it helps to put the average Hollywood bomb into perspective. I?ve always been impressed by how good the producers are at finding so many truly incompetent films. The movies they dig up are awful on Ed Wood proportions.

However, as cute as I find the show, the standards of a feature film and free television show are very different things. I?m frankly rather perplexed as to why this thing exists. T.V. shows get adapted to movies for a number of reasons, some want to expand a story to a feature length, some want to work without censorship, some want to work on a bigger budget, and some just want a reunion after the show?s been on for a while. In this case, the 73 minute movie is actually shorter than an average two hour episode (90 minutes without ads), so it wasn?t a running time issue. The budget doesn?t look any bigger than the show and they don?t really stretch the censorship boundaries much. Also the movie was made right in the middle of the shows run, so it wasn?t like the viewers were lacking recent MST3K material.

Simply put, there?s nothing in the movie that audiences couldn?t have gotten for free on the show, it seems like kind of a rip-off, and given the higher standards of a feature film the shows flaws stand out a lot more. Firstly, Mike Nelson isn?t much of an actor. He can make wisecracks with the best of them, but in the framing narrative his work falls flat. When this was a throw away series this didn?t matter much, but again, when you?re charging people money for something the standards are different. The framing story seems particularly uninspired here; it?s been a very long time since I watched the show, but I remember liking this filler a lot more, here it just seems like a waste.

The actual ?make fun of a movie? section fare a bit better. The movie they?re riffing ?This Island Earth,? really seems a little better than most of the crap they make fun of; it feels a little more dated than incompetent. There?s a very funny moment early on in the movie where a science experiment goes wrong, and the commentators compare it to a waffle burning. That bit had me cracking up, but it was kind of downhill from there. Basically, making this a feature film is kind of a rip-off.