Are there MST3K experiments that you would just sit and laugh at even if there were no riffing?
I don’t mean movies that are painful to watch, but that would make you laugh.
Two come to my mind. SST Death Flight is so campy and awful, with hackneyed plot points and bad acting, that I would find it funny even without Joel and the bots.
The other one I can think of is The Incredibly Strange Creatures - not the whole movie, but the musical production numbers. They’re so outlandish and so poorly done, like the moment in “Shook out of Shape” where the dancers don’t know which way to go, that it cracks me up even without any riffing.
Are there any MSTed movies that you just want to laugh at?
I’d say this mainly overlaps with “what movies would you watch without riffing” category.
Moon Zero Two and Diabolik are both films that I own and have enjoyed unriffed for their late 60’s goofiness. I suspect Agent Double 007/OK Connery/Operation Kid Brother, would probably be another one, if I’d found it on my own before MST3K. (It’s such an earnestly stupid attempt to make a Bond movie for 1/10 the cost, I can’t help but smile at it)
And as others have said, The Magic Sword isn’t actually that bad a movie. As a goofy sword and sorcery kids movie it does pretty much exactly what it sets out to do. The same goes for Jack the Giant Killer over at Rifftrax, several of the Hercules movies, and just about anything else in the Ator/Deathstalker/Wizards of the Lost Kingdom vein, where you know exactly what you’re getting from the moment you pick up the VHS/DVD case.
It seems to me that a lot of the Season 11 movies are ones that I could easily have watched and enjoyed without MST3K. The Time Travelers, the Doug McClure flicks, WotLK (just the first one, mind you!) even, Lord help me, Star Crash.