So for the last few years, my Halloween tradition has been to find the goofiest sounding black and white horror movie I can find on Tubi (Tubi is really a gold mine for that sort of thing) and watch it while passing out candy.
This year, it was Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and it really has that certain something that would make for a perfect MST3K episode.
NASA has built its own Frankenstein-style astronaut (Named Frank, because of course he is) to check out Mars and look for signs of life. (It must have taken some creative paperwork to get that project signed off on.) Frank is able to blend in a lot better than his predecessor. The only thing is his brain occasionally locks up. Probably not a problem. On his way out of Earth’s atmosphere, a Martian spaceship mistakes the rocket for a missile and shoots it down. Frank ejects in an escape pod, and the Martians realize their mistake and decide the only thing to do is eliminate the Astronaut and avoid a full-on conflict with Earth. They send some soldiers down to the escape pod landing site and one of them blasts Frank in the face, burning it and sending him into full-on Frankenstein’s Monster mode.
Meanwhile the Scientists who built Frank are trying to figure out whether he survived or not. They conclude that if anything traumatic happened to him when he was escaping his exploding spacecraft, it could maybe send him into a murderous rampage. And I guess they had no contingency for that. And the Martian queen reveals, via exposition dump, that the reason they were at Earth to begin with was because they’d lost all their women in the Comet Wars. (She delivers this information, seemingly unaware that she’s a woman herself.) And it’s about time to start kidnapping Earth’s women so they can repopulate.
Can our scientists find Frank and stop his murderous rampage? Can Frank and the scientists save Earth’s women?
The whole movie is played absolutely seriously. It seems to have no idea how goofy it is. It would fit in perfectly with the MST3K catalog.