Robot Holocaust looks a great deal like a bunch of LARPers playing around in a big city park, which is fun at least! A lot of movies that are goofy are also entertaining to watch. I think it was a good move for the MST theme song to mention cheesy movies instead of bad movies.
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I adore I Accuse My Parents. My dad had a soft spot for this movie and made us watch it, often, on Super 8 when I was a kid. When I saw it on MST3K, I loved it all the more, cause it was my favorite group of people pointing out all the ridiculousness I’d become so familiar with over many, many home viewings.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is probably my next favorite, as I had previously seen it on late night television and thought it was great. I even made a Jan’s-head-in-a-tray costume for a theme party I went to! I was thrilled when the SOL took it for a spin.
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Jack Frost is my favourite episode (I wore out my tape when I was a kid) because there’s really nothing bad about the movie but the riffing is still top-tier. I quote the riffs and the actual lines from the film equally often, and I’ve actually found the film to be an aesthetic inspiration for me. It’s OG cottagecore.
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Honestly? I like most of them. It’s easier to tell you which ones I don’t like.
Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. I hate this movie so much. I can’t even sit through it for the riffs any more because the movie is irredeemably awful.
That’s not what this topic is about, though. If I had to pick… I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Corpse Vanishes. And Tormented. And Hobgoblins. And…!
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I’ve always had a weird soft spot for Soultaker, one of the few movies I saw BEFORE seeing it on MST3K!
And I kinda love Beginning of the End. I know they poke fun at the effects of having the bugs crawling over photos, but I still think that was a genuinely creative use of the resources at the time.
I actually, if not exactly like, have a lot of respect for a LOT of the movies they’ve riffed on, at least from a “Aww, I see what you were going for there, and you didn’t pull it off!” kinda way.
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Earth Vs the Spider is close to a perfect 50’s drive in monster movie. It’s well paced, the actors are like able, and it is just fun.
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I actually, if not exactly like, have a lot of respect for a LOT of the movies they’ve riffed on, at least from a “Aww, I see what you were going for there, and you didn’t pull it off!” kinda way.
I think that’s what makes a movie really suitable for riffing. An intentionally bad movie doesn’t really work. There needs to be some level of earnestness. That’s probably why I like so many of the older movies. Some of them might have been cheaply made, or the effects were low quality even for the time, the writing was clunky or the acting was lacking… but they had heart.
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I adore The Magic Sword, riffed or unriffed, and would watch Moon Zero Two for the Don Ellis score alone.
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Glad to see a few already mentioned it but The Black Scorpion is the first one that comes to mind for me. I think the effects are pretty great and I was genuinely invested in what was going to happen next which is more than I can say for most riffed movies.
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The Beast of Hollow Mountain…one of the new ones!
I loved the characters and I felt almost like there was a “brokeback mountain” vibe between the rancher and Felipe. I dug it. The dinosaurs were just icing on the cake!
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The Steve Reeves Hercules movies.
As cheap as the sword-and-sandal genre generally was, Hercules did a decent job of trying to accurately portray some of the stories from Greek myth… which rarely happens in movies based on Greek myth. True, the first movie is really more Jason and the Argonauts and the second one inserts Hercules into the middle of Oedipus Rex (which he wasn’t originally a part of) but there’s a lot of smart jokes for the mythology nerds.
My favorite is Ulysses sending a message to his girlfriend Penelope, telling her he’ll be home soon. If you don’t get why that’s funny, go read the Odyssey, which is all about Ulysses taking 20 years to get home after the Trojan War.
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Bride of the Monster is very entertaining all by its lonesome and Tormented actually seemed like a pretty good movie underneath the riffing.
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Yes, I also would just watch Phase IV for the ants and computer infused nightmares.
Also, most kaiju movies. I want to understand Japanese culture.
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I’ve always loved This Island Earth. I know the story’s not up to much but love the vibe and production design.
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Danger: Diabolik. I actually owned the original on dvd long before I ever saw the episode of it.
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Time Chasers! actually i have a soft spot for all the Edgewood Studios movies. i framed the signed VHS box that came with my Castleton shirt!
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On my first viewing of MST3K, there was only one featured movie that I had seen before, which was Squirm (one of the final features in the original series). That said, I’m a big fan of B movies in general, and the fact that I got to see these movies within the context of MST3K makes me enjoy them all the more.
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There aren’t a lot of movies in the series that I don’t like.
The Russo-Finnish films came to mind first when I saw this thread title, just a joy to watch. And honestly? Tormented is a very watchable and enjoyable movie. Daddy-O is a hoot, as is I Accuse My Parents.
Except for maybe Invasion of the Neptune Men which feels like it goes on and on and on and on, all of Season Eight’s movies would be well worth watching, especially the Universal titles.
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I’ve got a soft spot for Hangar 18. It’s one of two MSTied movies I saw in theaters (Starcrash was the other)
It’s got a lot of late ‘70s post-Watergate paranoia and it’s hard believing Gary Collins and that doughy guy are astronauts but I always kind of liked it.
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YES.
Loved his work on The French Connection.
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