The short is a pitch on the benefits of taking a shop class. While there’s nothing wrong with the intent, the way that one shop class student tries to wax poetic about his tools could be regarded as mildly creepy.
As for the feature, it’s the first (second chronologically) movie in the Coleman Francis Trilogy of Despair. This is probably the least incoherent of the bunch, as it has something that resembles a plot. Don’t let that get your hopes up, because it’s spiteful, low end soap opera shenanigans, full of pettiness and infidelity. You get the sense that the characters engage in skydiving to distract themselves from their bleak lives devoid of hope. The acting is uniformly terrible, as everyone speaks in a lifeless monotone. Checking the listings at IMDB, only a few of the people involved had significant acting careers, with several listing The Skydivers as their sole screen credit. Sad, really.
The host segments are a bit front loaded this time around. While the later sketches are perfectly fine, the disruption of Servo’s planetarium show and the swing choir competition are true gutbusting experiences that are hard to top
Well, they had to give the boys something to watch while the girls were stuck watching the Home Economics short (as seen in Viking Women and the Sea Serpent).
But the “acid in the parachute” plot makes no sense and should not have worked.
I kind of like that Coleman Francis wrote in a cameo for himself and his entire family as the clueless people who accidentally arrive to watch the skydivers fall and then don’t know where to look for them.
I feel like Richard Connell would disagree with skydiving being the most dangerous game. Though. … I guess the most dangerous game is man and this is a man who, if the wind was right and he aimed carefully, could smoosh you before you shot him.
He’s a trooper though. He’s there for Coleman in every movie. He’s a stock company of one. Whenever I spy Cardoza’s face I know I’m watching Coleman Francis. Anthony had a quality never properly used in those films.
Not my go-to genre, but yes. Along with the dancing and the ragtag buncha’ misfits involved, it does ease the relentless bleakness of Francisworld. Momentarily. Better sound would’ve helped, too.
I guess this scene is a “thank you” to everyone who sacrificed a day’s lunch money or some plane fuel to help this thing get made. It’s early Kickstarter!!
I find this the most watchable in the trilogy, though I realize that’s not saying much.
Also Crow’s irate observation that beyond coffee, acid and skydiving, the basic plot is “Someone comes to town, touches nobody’s life, then leaves”
That about sums it up.
Oddly, out of the Coleman Francis films, while this lacks the loopy narration of “Beast” and the bleak weirdness of “Red”, I think it’s the closest any of them came to the movie CF wanted to make. Just a gut hunch.
I love the Enjoyably Bad and Cheesy But Good eps, but out of the Just Plain Painful experiments I do feel the BB folk gave it their A effort in creating silken laughs out of a sow’s ear of a flick.
“How does a town with a skydiving based economy thrive, anyway?”
I get the sinking feeling that if CF had his career in the modern era, he’d be the show runner of that really icky super bleak streamer series that no one actually watches but everyone has seen the ads for as it’s on one of the free services.
Skydivers as a movie is cinematic valium. As an MST episode it’s pretty good though … the riffs are excellent and there’s never a point where it seems to drag. Its sort of the spirital cousin - IMO - to Starfighters. Both movies are almost void of anything to speak of as far as plot goes (though Skydivers is better than Starfighters on that front). But there’s so much cheese to work with that its almost impossible to not have fun poking at it. So much is so ridiculously bad that it almost writes the riffs itself.
I genuinely feel the Industrial Arts short is one of their best…strongly implying our deadpan, taciturn protagonist has certain….inclinations the class satisfies.
I noted in the Bert I. Gordon thread that I genuinely feel Coleman Francis had no love for movies. I always got the sense he saw them as just a necessary evil, a platform for his tales of pain, depression, depravity, blandness, loathing, boredom and more pain.
There’s none of the shameless glee of an exploitation director, the precision of the B SF flick creator, not even Ed Wood’s left field, backward stabs at art.
He had a dark story about dark people and he wanted to tell it, how and why never seems to matter.
Sex For Sundries is Fun” 
