What are your favorite Rifftrax feature releases? This could help folks who are new to Rifftrax find some fun stuff, or introduce Rifftrax veterans to titles they haven’t tried yet. Here, alphabetically, are my top ten.
Birdemic
Carnival of Souls
Dr. Who and the Daleks
House on Haunted Hill
Icebreaker
Psycho II
Sherlock Holmes: Dressed to Kill
The Amazing Mr. X
The Bermuda Triangle
Warriors of the Wasteland
Honorable mention to The Guy From Harlem, who so very nearly made the list.
Ha, now I wonder if Fun in Balloon Land counts as a feature.
Lets see, it ran 53 minutes, according to Oscar’s rules that qualifies as a feature (shorts run 40 or under) AND I see it did play in 2 theaters in Davenport, Iowa… so -phew- I guess I can count it.
That this got a theatrical release astounds me, right up there with Mitchell. Not that there aren’t talented names in Mitchell, but rather that it feels just so “made for TV”.
I’ve mostly seen the ones that could be seen free on Amazon Prime so my list may be skewed by that. Starting with my top three and the rest in no particular order…
Birdemic
Guy From Harlem
Samurai Cop
Psychotronic Man
Carnival of Souls
Day of the Animals
Rollergator… not because it’s very good… just because you have to see it
Superargo and the Faceless Giants (neither faceless nor giants, discuss amongst yourselves)
Oblivion (it’s almost a good movie!)
Icebreaker (Bruuuuuuce!)
Rock N Roll Nightmare, mostly for the fight scene near the end
Attack of the Puppet People
Retro Puppet Master (oh hai Mark!)
Radical Jack
The only one I ever started but didn’t finish was Cool As Ice. No knock on the guys, but that movie was actually too awful to watch. And I got through Rollergator!
Nice to see Bermuda Triangle on your list, it’s one of my favorites as well. I have a vague, half-disintegrated memory of seeing that in a theater when I was a kid.
The Guy From Harlem definitely makes my favorites list, along with the more recent Velvet Smooth – both cut from the same glorious cloth.
Other favorites are:
The Galaxy Invader Ghosthouse Death Promise Megaforce Attack of the Super Monsters Laser Mission Blood Theatre Planet of Dinosaurs
And these are my picks for advanced users, those who’ve built up necessary antibodies from regular VODs to endure them:
Roller Gator Birdemic / Julie & Jack / Replicant Feeders A Talking Cat?! Suburban Sasquatch
I put Cool as Ice in a subcategory with Battlefield Earth and Stone Cold and a few others … they’re SO over-the-top (“This is a double-elimination tournament.”) and campy that I love them despite everything working against them.
Which is pretty much everything. Literally everything works against those movies.
Birdemic - Live
Death Promise
The Guy From Harlem
Kill and Kill Again
Miami Connection - Live
Reefer Madness - Live
Samurai Cop - Live
Sharknado - Live
Yeah, I like the live shows. Something about an audience just makes it better.
I wanted to include the MST3K Reunion since it’s the band back together, but it’s all clips, not a feature film. Oh, and Setting Up A Room, because it FEELS like a feature film disguised as a short.
Funny, I watched it again last night as well (I’m slowly revisiting their shorts catalog). That’s one of their funniest and I too love how they put themselves into the short.
They also put themselves into the High School USA poster
I was unfamiliar with High School USA until RiffTrax released it, but then it was not much later that I heard Joel talk about how he turned it down. There’s always an MST connection …