I did not know that about Freaks and Geeks. Although I did watch it well after its initial run, but really couldn’t have recognized Trace or Joel at the time.
I think the shame is that Linda Cardellini hasn’t done too much since. She had a floozy of the month role in Mad Men, I think, and she was excellent in Kill the Irishman, among some other things. I was sure she would have been the breakout star.
Tell me one thing, anybody: I always thought the actor who played one of the geeks, Samm Levine, added the extra “m” to the name Sam to distinguish himself from the classic actor Sam Levine, which I since found out was spelled Levene (he was in Siodmak’s version of The Killers and lots of stuff).
So, apparently not.
About other recommendations? I don’t know. Nic Cage movies in general? Bruce Dern movies? A few TV series from the early 1970s (before my time, by a few years). I watch everything, really, unless it’s unwatchable.
There are some insane Finnish movies out there, including a recent series of spoofs of Star Trek movies. I can’t remember the titles. /* edit: I think the last one, from 2005, called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning */
And don’t forget Trail of the Screaming Forehead, a great sendup of higher-budget sci-fi features.
Blamire has also made Johnny Slade’s Greatest Hits (retitled for no good reason I can think of as Meet the Mobsters), which was more or less a vanity project for John Fiore and other alumni of The Sopranos – which has become my favorite mob movie.
Basically, they watch a bad move and then talk about it. They have started doing a mini episode every other week for extra episodes. Last time Elliott explained The Eternals, a not especially popular Marvel comic that’s getting a movie.
If you want riffing, I like Cinema Snob’s and Phelous’ channels on YouTube. The Snob snarkily ‘reviews’ various exploitation, weird, and sometimes even pornographic (heavily edited and censored, of course) movies. Phelous tends to go for slashers and terrible animated films.
Gravity Falls is a great show that may be of tangential interest to MSTies, as there’s a lot of various monsters, many based on folklore, urban legends, etc. and the movies within the show are generally MST-level quality. Oh, and while this is true for many cartoons (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Word Girl, Rick & Morty, We Bare Bears, etc.), Patton Oswalt does a guest voice in an episode.
The Best Show always feels similar to MST3K to me. Especially the Rock, Rot, and Rule album riffing on music with a deliberate lie about Madness inventing ska and Neil Young analysis omitting his 70s work and not forgiving him for having so many albums.
Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is the kind of film I think most MSTies would like. The friend who first showed it to me pitched it to me exactly that way: “This movie was made for MST fans.”
And if you’d like some smaller doses of Blamire check out his Youtube series Tales from the Pub:
It’s been so long…but I remember watching “Mad Movies, with the LA Connection.” I liked watching them back then, before Dr Who came on. Now though…no idea how they aged.
Thank you for posting the Mad Movies. I always wanted to watch that when I was a kid but it was on as filler so the TV Guide would lie about it and something else would be on.
I second that on Red Letter Media. It’s like watching movies with some friends, then discussing them and breaking them down. I’ve laughed till I cried so many times.
If you haven’t seen it, you MUST watch Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace, a parody of bad TV series where a self-important Stephen King-type stars and writes his own TV show and the “episodes” feature some commentary from the stars.
I used to sing along with the theme song lol