Anything K. Gordon Murray (especially anything K. Gordon Murray imported from Mexico) is an instant MST3K classic waiting to happen, but the biggest problem is finding them.
Sadly, Mr. Murray got into a teensy bit of trouble with the IRS for failing to pay his taxes, so they seized all 35mm prints of his movies, and then he died of a heart attack before he could complete legal proceedings to get them back.
On one hand, that means that all his stuff is in the public domain… but it also means that searching for his movies is a bit like searching for lost Doctor Who episodes.
Some of his films (like The Golden Goose) exist because 16mm prints were made for distribution and not confiscated when the IRS seized his other assets. But the company that held those prints and released some of them on ultra cheap VHS in the 90’s (which is probably how MST3K acquired Santa Claus) went bankrupt and liquidated all their assets via public auction a few years later, so the only existing “Murray cuts” of these pictures are either low quality VHS dubs from their initial home video release, or much more rarely, an original 16mm print that has been restored and transferred back to 35mm.
I really wish I knew something about audio restoration, because I’ve got a copy of one of his rarer films, Puss in Boots, but the sound does this awful reverse-ducking where any time there’s a quiet spot, the background white noise slowly rises to a roar.
Journey to the Seventh Planet- a 1960’s Danish-American sci-fi. (OK, it’s not a Russo-Finnish epic, but still…) Made on a $75K budget - worth every penny - and stars John Agar.
Oh! Heavenly Dog. For some bizarre reason in 1980, the creators of the family-friendly “Benji” films decided to make a Benji film for adults. Chevy Chase plays a detective in London who gets murdered, goes to Heaven where he’s sent back to Earth in the body of Benji the dog. From then on, he’s teamed with Jane Seymour who doesn’t seem to get that Benji’s in love with her. Even Chase himself has disowned it.
I mentioned it in another similar thread, but I’ll put it here too;
“The killing of satan” (1983). Every few minutes something just bonkers happens. The clip below is one of the few short ones on YouTube. Stick with it for the payoff at the end and you’ll get the drift. (There is an English dub version too).
What the what?? How did I never hear of this? Halliwell has a very short judgement “A total muddle”. Looks like it made it to DVD but not streaming. The world is full of wonders
You can put his mustachioed face and denim jacket right there in the dictionary by the word “everyman.” And yeah, not sure if naming someone “lando” in a 1983 movie is intentional or just lost in translation.
Look, I just have to put in another word for Reb “Big McLargehuge” Brown’s Captain America movie. I mean, the 1990 Matt Salinger Captain America movie was awful. No doubt. Kind of dreary, though? The 1979 movie… pure cheese. This whole clip reel is amazing. But 1:36-1:58…
Guy pulls a knife. Cap throws his clear plastic shield. Everyone gawps. Guy obligingly stands there. The shield very very slowly comes back around. It lightly taps him on the back. And then falls to the ground, and you can hear the little bonk noise it makes on impact.
It’s just… Gobsmackingly cheesy, and yet played completely seriously. That last clip, too. So very Ator. IDK if anyone can get the rights to use this turkey, but it’s hard to imagine more perfect fodder.
(Buckaroo Bonzai, though? I’m sorry, Luckylyn. You can’t riff Buckaroo Bonzai. (a) It’s a classic and perfect as it is. (b) It knows it’s goofy. It’s deliberate self-parody. You can’t riff it when it’s already laughing at its own conceits.)
I’ve mentioned this one before elsewhere here, but having just rewatched The Monolith Monsters, this time on Blu-ray, I have to reiterate what a perfect MST3K movie it is. It’s a B&W Universal monster film, with possibly the strangest monster ever (considering the monster isn’t alive and doesn’t even have some form of autonomous behaviour). The science in the movie is way bad, the romance perfunctory, and the dialog full of arrant nonsense along the lines of “Dave, if it is a meteorite, chances are it’s been hurtling around our universe for a good many centuries. The answer to your question lies buried in those centuries. We’ll just have to dig it out.” It’s even of ideal 80-minute duration. And bonus, it has Les Tremayne in it.
I’ve never heard of this, but that image is worth a thousand words. Seems like quite the stretch of the word “monster” – an immobile chunk of rock that weighs probably thousands of tons. Or does it move somehow?
But I get that it was a different era, and credit to Universal for creative thinking. It looks wonderfully ready for MST3K.
It is a novel concept for a monster movie, and the film conforms in all ways to the classic Universal monster movie tempo. The monoliths spread when exposed to water; this causes them to extract silicon from the ground, grow tall, then topple and shatter. The chunks then repeat the cycle, effectively causing the monoliths to “march” forward in a spreading growth pattern.
The monoliths also turn people to stone, not by growing grains of their substance in the human body (which would make sense), but by counter-intuitively extracting trace amounts of silicon from the body. One character helpfully explains that some doctors believe the trace silicon is what keeps skin flexible, but honestly it makes about as much sense as “the heart is basically one big cell” from The Amazing Colossal Man.
There are some effective moments in the movie nonetheless. The monoliths themselves are beautiful and convincing as they destroy buildings in their growth cycle. The rumble of their march in the background works really well in the town scenes, too.
Here’s one that freaked me out on the local Saturday horror matinee back in the 80s as a kid-Evilspeak (I hate in horror movies where they hurt the dog) I’d like to see it riffed by MST3K or Rifftrax.
I’ve never seen this one you’re referencing, but your description so aptly fits “the magnetic monster” (1953). At no point does a monster ever appear. The whole movie is just people reacting to magnetic phenomena. It’s supremely boring and anticlimactic.
Or does it move somehow?