That’s a big part of it.
No! Well… No!
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“A man’s gotta eat!”
“I eat lumber!”
Classic
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The posts on here had me in stitches! Especially the ones about Mia Farrow! Anyway, this is one of the best of season 11. Carnival Magic is my favorite but this would probably be my second choice. Corman movies always played well on Mst3K, but this one even more so. It’s got a well known cast, and the special effects are okay for 1978. Besides Farrow there’s Rock, and Robert Forster, one of my favorite character actors. I loved him in Jackie Brown and the previously mentioned The Black Hole ( a movie ripe for Mst3k treatment). Overall, with this episode, Mst3K really proved they were back!
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The 1970s has many aesthetic crimes to answer for. One of the more obnoxious misdemeanors is the Disaster Movie. The basic formula was popularized with the inexplicable box office hit Airport, wherein a celebrity-studded cast of characters are trapped in the middle of a disaster, either natural or man-made, as they attempt to survive and work out their personal issues. Though in this case, celebrity was more likely to mean someone who could be a panelist on The Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.
While this isn’t the first Disaster Movie to be featured on MST3K, those instances occurred during the KTMA era and were mostly TV movies to boot. This time we have a theater release production and written riffs to toss at it. Our setting is a newly opened ski resort, and all the expected archetypes are present. We have the hubristic resort owner and his ex-wife, portrayed by a past his prime Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow respectively. We’re expected to believe that they still have dysfunctional yearnings for each other. Truth be told, Hudson had more romantic chemistry with Julie Andrews in Darling Lili, and they had none. Then we have the doomsayer whose warnings about the potential avalanche go unheeded, probably because he’s such a sanctimonious dickweed. There’s also a bunch of other characters whom I’m already starting to forget, except for the skier whose last act on Earth is to proposition a minor. That’s the sort of thing you can’t forget, no matter how hard you try. It’s difficult to tell which part goes on longer than necessary, the set-up before the avalanche or the aftermath. Both are equally tedious.
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Also because he’s a … professional photographer and not an avalanche forecaster? With no known expertise in the areas of geology or meteorology? Not known to have completed an internship with the USGS?
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That too. Though being a sanctimonious dickweed surely doesn’t help.
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C’mon! The classic Disaster Movie of the '70s was great melodrama. Gene Hackman as a priest who thinks God is challenging him in The Poseidon Adventure. (To say nothing of policeman Ernest Borgnine married to ex-hooker Stella Stevens in the same movie.) Marjoe Gortner as the bullied wuss who lets his inner psycho out in Earthquake!
Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset and George Kennedy in Airport, which garnered 10 Oscar nominations, including a win for Helen Hayes.
Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, Jack Albertson, Red Buttons in Poseidon Adventure.
Paul Newman, William Holden, Susan Blakely, Fred Astaire, Robert Vaughn, O.J. Simpson, Richard Chamberlain and Steve McQueen in Towering Inferno
Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Genevieve Bujold, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree and Walter Matthau in Earthquake.
Almost every celebrity ultimately did a disaster movie, but the archetypal one had as many celebrities (not to say actors, O.J. kaff) as possible.
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Except for Sally Field’s character, I actually like this one.
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It’s Just A Show 95. [MST3K 1104. Avalanche]
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“You suck at resorts”
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Something I just noticed while watching tonight –
After the title character makes its appearance, Rock Hudson puts his boozehound mom in an ambulence (she’ll be fine, I’m sure) and then gets into a fire truck. The fire truck is completely white. In snow country! Cuz if there is one thing you want for your emergency response vehicles it’s camouflage so no one can see them coming!
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I got to spend a few days in Durango during the summer, waaay back in the early nineties…
Beautiful.
We were driving to Lake City on the 4th of July, and it started to snow…being from Southern AZ, i was blown away!
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So, Kinga tries to steal Synthia’s Selects, too? I’m starting to think the escape plan will succeed because Kinga, the Synthias and Pearl will be too busy attacking each other to notice.
How about Forrester’s Choices, ladies? Take turns!
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What was the point of this movie?
I mean, I get it. It’s a disaster movie. But… what was the point?
SST Deathflight and City on Fire felt like they had a point. They had some urgency. They had characterization. They had things happening. This is just… “Rock Fails; Everyone Dies - The Movie!”
There’s Rock, who decides to fight everyone to make his dream come true and just tries to force his will on the whole world. (For some reason, his lofty multi-million dollar ambition is to open a ski resort. Go figure.) So of course he needs his comeuppance. I suppose that’s something.
There’s Mia, who… is there.
There’s Rock’s mom, who is drunk and then almost dies and then is rescued and then, just for kicks, the writers kill her. (I do feel like the riffs during her death scene are maybe a Hudson Hawk reference? If so, I approve. I’m going to assume that’s the case.)
There’s… a figure skater? And she’s lost her self-confidence and keeps screwing up and then finally she gets it right and in the glory of that moment she dies.
There’s a womanizing skier who escapes a small avalanche, is crushed under a big avalanche, is rescued, but then dies before they can dig him out. I think.
There’s… uh… some other 70s people, I guess? And mostly they die. Oh, right, and Rock is impatient so he orders some guy to fly over even though the pilot says it’s too dangerous. Because Rock says this has taken a decade to put together and apparently that means he can’t wait a day for the weather to clear. Or something. And so the plane crash is what sets off the avalanche.
Oh yeah. And there’s the nature photographer who is also an avalanche expert. And, unlike Rock, he asks for consent and respects boundaries and seems like a decent guy. So Mia hooks up with him but then for some reason they break up.
Which brings me back to… what is the point? There’s the usual 70s theme of respecting nature rather than cutting it down and profiting off it. And there’s hubris will kill you and everyone around you. And maybe pride, vanity, and lust will also result in your death even though none of those had anything to do with the avalanche and other people died for no other reason than that the fire department in a mountain village forgot to put on snow tires.
Oh well. Riffing is on point. Faster than I’d like, but not so fast it gives you whiplash.
Yeah. That was definitely over the top, and yet played completely seriously. Perfect for us.
My favorite part of the episode. That whole series of riffs was fantastic. And they just keep coming.
I know you didn’t ask me, but personally I loved it. Season 11 was a little too heavy on the cameos for my tastes, but this was my favorite of them. Some of them stuck out like a sore thumb. (Although I must admit that the few minutes of Jerry Seinfeld is the least annoying and grating I’ve ever found him.) But this felt more like a Dr. Horrible reunion, with Felicia and NPH singing to each other about their nigh-romance. Only this time it’s Felicia’s character who has the vlog. And a nice lampshade on them not being in the same room. Plus, Neil hamming it up as a second-rate stage magician (and I don’t just mean the one trick) is delightful.
Hey, baked Alaska is… Well, it’s not great. But it’s not scary. It was a fad, I admit. But if I actually liked meringue, it’d be good. But the whole point of the thing is that once you get past the just slightly burnt meringue shell (that’s also slightly on fire), the ice cream inside is still frozen and as good as ever. It’s not often you get ice cream fresh out of the oven, and that’s kind of neat.
Mia Farrow just does not have luck with men…
Everyone wants in on that sweet “talking to an empty room” goodness! It is fun getting to change things up a bit. But I like Synthia as the mainstay. (And I don’t enjoy seeing her so sad.)
Come to think, though, it’d be kind of funny if Jonah wound up hosting one and even he wasn’t sure how or why.
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You could make the argument that this ridiculous movie was an over-the-top parody of disaster movies, but I honestly don’t think it’s that smart.
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So you’re saying it could have gone over the top, but instead everything came crashing down and it was a disaster?
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If you’re going to make a joke about an ABC program featuring a skiier failing miserably, the proper joke is “Ah, the misery of defeat!”
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Agony. Agony of defeat.
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As some poor skier goes flying over a roof with his skis in the air.
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