Probably the ickiest and goriest movie they ever did. Also loaded with typical 70s Jaded Cynicism. It’s a very unique experiment and it’s riffed exceptionally well!
And of course: DOCTOR TED NELSON!!! Such a great, memorable character!
As for the Host Segments: They do seem rather harsher than usual, but I totally understand they were desperate to vent their frustrations in the best way they knew how. And I have this feeling that most, if not all, the dialogue is verbatim from actual incidents.
Finally watched the MST3K riff. What an amazing episode — the movie is absolutely hilarious as well.
I kinda wish we had the “campy version” all the way through. The movie can be legitimately funny at times. Makes me really want to watch the supplements or listen to the commentary track and see where the director butted heads with the producer. Now that I have the VinSyn release in my possession, now’s as good a time as ever.
I laughed out loud at how ridiculous the kitchen scene was. From Ted Nelson’s bitchy “goodbye” to OTCHKA to his twenty minute rant about crackers, I failed to see how this man was any kind of heroic protagonist.
Alas, the dramatic scenes just had to turn him into one. I’ll take OTCHKA Nelson over “heroic” Nelson any day.
I still wonder why no jokes about the character with the last name of “Nelson” not being related to Mike were made. Maybe it was Mike’s decision in the writing room, I dunno.
This episode does also in a way mark a shift in Crow that we would see come about in the Sci-Fi years, even if unintentional. Up to this point, Crow was trying to get narrative movies made. After this in the Sci-Fi years, he switched to documentary style films. Again, may have been unintentional but in universe I could see the stuff he dealt with here giving him that character change (well, that and all the time alone on the S.O.L. between season 7 and season 8).
When RiffTrax did the live show for Mothra, Kevin and Bill got a lot of mileage out of how the villain’s name was Nelson.
Was this ever a slog. A major reason for this is the vomit-inducing design of the title monster. I can’t recall the last time something non-snake related caused me to avert my eyes from the screen the way this movie did. Then there’s the despair-laden narrative that could have only occurred during the 1970s. The murderous rampage of the Melting Man has a certain pointlessness to it, capped off with its final deterioration before being indifferently scooped up and disposed of by a janitor. In its own way, this is even worse than the nihilistic malice found in your typical slasher flick.
Ineffectual chump protagonist Ted Nelson doesn’t help, as he tries to rationalize the Melting Man’s behavior in the least convincing argument since Kenny claimed that Gamera was good as he smashed Tokyo into rubble. To bother all you NASA geeks, there’s the prologue in which a manned mission goes to Saturn and returns to Earth in a brief time frame with 1970s space travel technology. The kindest descriptor that comes to mind is preposterous. All of this is made tolerable by the reasonably competent riffing.
Though it’s a cold comfort, as the host segments are (in my likely unpopular opinion) the worst of the season, which took some doing. The problem is that the Brains are indulging in therapeutic writing over their unhappy experience from making the movie, specifically regarding their toxic relationship with Gramercy Pictures. This sort of thing rarely produces quality entertainment. The fact that such writing is often infused with bile and resentment is even more deadly for comedy, as these are poor ingredients for humor (though I imagine some would disagree with me on that point). The only therapeutic writing I’ve encountered which was enjoyable comes from Robert Holmes, specifically the Doctor Who serials “Terror of the Autons” and “The Sun Makers”.
Bitterness when punching up is no crime in my book, so long as it’s funny. And this is some funny shirt.
“BECCAAA!!!”
P.S. - I think I only noticed about ten minutes ago that Kathy in Laserblast is also Sandra in this movie, but for the life of me I can’t remember any Sandra in this movie. :o
