SPOILER DISCUSSION: Episode 1312, The Bubble. (PLEASE NOTE: This thread is NOT the Open Thread Discussion for tonight’s livestream premiere)

I’d agree with that.

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As far as I can tell, they really built up Muchie cause going by the Q&A it’s a trifecta of things everyone on the writing team loathe, Horrifyingly designed puppets, Dom Deluise & bizarrely dated comedies.

I was kinda suprised about Dom Deluise part, but I’ve only ever heard him as Jeremy in The Secret of NIMH, I remember liking that character back in the day. Anything else Deluise’s done, I’ve not been aware of till RLM’ Skateboard Kid video, and now the grotesque Munchie, lol!

As I said in the unspoiled thread (because < surprised face >): This one’s a stinkbomb, all right. I can’t believe this is the version after they edited out the worst of the gratuitous-if-not-downright-unpleasant lingering 3D. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse for having the germ of a good idea for a story at its center.

I loved getting to hear Joel as Ardy drop his whole “another day, another bad movie” zen and indulge in a true rant. The best joke was “…Fine, he sucks” but I’ll always turn up for a Jay Sherman “BUY MY BOOK!” so it gets an honorable mention.

Still no duds in Season 13!

ETA - And I do love the escape plan as a plot point! Though I am of course rooting against its ultimate success. #TeamForrester

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With a lot of bad movies, you can sorta guess what the filmmakers are trying to do with a limited budget, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what those “last-minute” matte shots are supposed to be going for. The ones that depict people and things get sucked upwards by the shadow. The clearly visble cut-out, the entirely blank surrounding matte, it’s just such a bizarre choice. Each of those shots looks equally unfinished, or trying to disguise or censor something, and none look convincing whatsoever.
They’re the kind of shots that make you want bonus features so you can try to get some explanation of what was being attempted.

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Yeah this one definitely needs some behind the scenes stuff

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I don’t rank this among the worst riffed movies ever.

But it WAS pretty bad, mainly because of having no ending. It started out as a Serling-esque “weird” mystery but then apparently decided to morph into a meditation on life priorities, or human resilience or some damn thing and hey man, the ending isn’t important! It’s the decisions that people make!

They were dead and in Purgatory the whole time!

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Also, my thoughts as posted from another thread…

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Last week, I got the flu. At this point last week, I was besieged with fever. Sleep was fitful and filled with confusing, disturbing images.

THAT was more coherent than this movie. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode of MST3K that made me say, “Wait, WHAT” like the ending of that movie did. I had to check the time and make sure they weren’t cutting to another sketch.

While I won’t say it’s the worst, The Bubble might be the most confounding film they’ve ever shown.

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(Combining some thoughts from the Open Thread)

So the movie itself:

I can certainly see what Arch Oboler’s strengths are as a radio playwright, and how bad that translates to movies. Awkward overlong dialogue that’s describes rather than shows. Broad performances (that might be as much be Deborah Walley overcompensating for what she’s given). In “The Theatre of the Mind” It probably would have been better than the Don Post Halloween Masks and 3-D sequences we’re saddled with.

Is it as bad as Manos? No.

Manos has the core of a downright nihilistic horror movie that is completely undone by top-to-bottom incompetence.

The Bubble is a handful of interesting ideas undone by a director unfamiliar with how to have actors perform for the movie camera, an aimless go-nowhere plot, budgetary limitations and ill-conceived an executed 3-D & Special Effects sequences.

Both have that grubby ugly look that a certain kind of 60s film stock has, especially with both having actors in environments where they can’t help but look sweaty, unwashed and dusty.

I have no idea what’s up with that non-ending though.

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That was a reference to the town whose residents fell under Wanda Maximoff’s mind control in WandaVision.

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Tim made a good point about how there are different kinds of bad. I don’t think the Bubble is as amateurishly bad as Manos or the Francis films are, it’s got an eerie tone to it, the way the people act like zombies, and the how the towns this amalgam of all these times and places.

And I think my less than negative response might be that I’m used to and enjoy movies that are just experiences, a happening, as they mentioned in the Livestream, “No plot, just vibes”

So maybe I can forgive the plot holes and unanswered questions… but I can’t give it a pass for the way it meanders, and is repetitive.

Anyhoo, second viewing was even funnier than the first. I had a great time.

Thanks… and geez, I saw and enjoyed that miniseries… guess the name of the town didn’t stick with me.

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You know, until they brought it up, I hadn’t noticed that it does seem like the gimmicky 3d effects do seem frontloaded in the movie.

Not sure where they were placed, but there was more of those gimmick shots - it sounds like they cut out a lot of that when they edited and reissued the movie in the 70s (they shaved off about 20 minutes of film)

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The Bubble, for most of it, is a poorly edited, bizarrely written mess, the triple-whammy near the end of bringing up “killing the baby” if they can’t get out, followed not too long after with a cheesy speech that you’d hear at the beginning of a third act, followed again by the movie just stopping with rainfall and laughing, it’s all basically no ending whatsoever. There was no sense of time, no build-up, just things happening, increasingly distressing things~ alright bye now~ leave the drive-in.

On that level, it really is worse than Manos. It’s a bottom of the barrel scraping, maybe even below, but at least there was an attempt building stakes, and giving a “twist bad ending” of the genre in Manos. And I’ll say it again, the clipshow credits featuring the song Forgetting You is a genuinely alright way to wrap up that slog, it’s a good song.
I like to consider credits part of the expreience, and when something nice is done with them to keep you watching, it’s cool.

The Bubble has nothing, The Bubble just stops. The Bubble forever remains in your mind as an unfinished dour cloud.

I suppose it depends how much an ending matters to someone, and I’m not saying an ending need to feature an explanation, but it should at least wrap up some of the main ideas of a movie, give it a spin, or re-contextualize the experience, or just something beyond “Okay the movie’s done now. Why are you paying attention? Go away!Especially after trying to load the script with a lot of “thoughtful ruminations” on modern life you’re supposed to pay attention to.
Manos had no big ideas, it was just aping horror cliches poorly. The Bubble was attempting to be both a pretentious thinker and mindless shlock, and fails on most every level.

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They didn’t explain this very well, reason the Bubble disappeared at the end is that Elon Musk bought it and drove it into the ground.

Anyway, my review is up:

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The Bubble is definitely one of those movies that just kind of happened. The popcorn invention was interesting, the Radio Waverly bit was wonderful, and I love that Joel’s plan is “let Pearl think she came up with this terrible idea!” …I still think the “Mads can’t hear the rhyming” schtick is a bit dumb, even by the standards of this show, though.

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OK, my three cents…
the movie was made to feature this new “cool” 3-D method, but they forgot to make even a passable movie. This was, as someone said, an unfinished Night Gallery movie stretched out to 90 minutes (half showing the 3-D effect being used poorly). We didn’t even know if aliens did turn the town into a movie set with people acting as if they’re broken Hall of Presidents figures. Would have been better if they were possessed, with the occasional kidnapping and entering into the “feeding hole”, and a couple of the people were the aliens who set up the bubble. More details, less floating beer trays, guys.

Loved Waverly and Growler’s bit, showing how pompous Kinga has become (not including her intro of the movie).

Now about the escape plan…they’re forgetting the bots, right? That means they’ll ruin the whole thing. Kinga sentences Jonah, Joel and Emily to death, and drafts the Synthias and Max as her new victims. There’s a massive fight, a big explosion (elsewhere)…
THEN it’ll end with everyone going back to the beginning, even if the plot exposes Kabahl as a fraud. He’ll stop everything because he’s really with Gizmonic, and now he’s in charge. It’s an improvement, and we get something new for the future.

What do you think, sirs?

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They should make the Waverly thing a running gag next season… every time he gets bumped on the head he delivers a random DJ intro, voiced by a backer.

Did this movie not have any credits at all, or did they just get cut from the riffed version?

If you asked Arch Oboler’s ghost about this movie, he would probably tell you that the aliens and the Bubble (embedded dome, actually) weren’t important… they were just tools to reveal how people react in this situation. If Mark’s Theory is correct (it’s his theory which is his, and what it is too), then the aliens were probably kids studying bugs under a glass, and kids just get bored with things and move on… the whole experiment was nothing important enough for the aliens to follow up on, just some Q Continuum brats passing the time.

But yeah, I think the “they ran out of their allowed time on the lot” explanation is more credible.

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You may not have gotten that info months in advance in the past, but the Mads would certainly let you know in episode if a real stink bomb was being queued up. If we are going to be having live streams with the cast and asking them about the process of putting these episodes together, we probably should not be surprised that they are going to drop info like this. It doesn’t bother me that much, as long as there are no real spoilers dropped.

I don’t think this movie was anywhere near as bad as Manos, nor worse than any of the other movies mentioned in the live stream, although my pick for worst movie they have riffed would be The Starfighters. While The Bubble does remind me quite a bit of The Starfighters, with the mind-numbing incessant dialogue, there is actually something going on in The Bubble, even if we don’t know what that something is. It may not be enough to form a coherent plot, but it is more than refueling jets.

This is really just a Twilight Zone episode padded out into a feature length movie. Serling did several episodes very much like this movie, and you can’t convince me that Arch Oboler was not directly ripping off one of those episodes, while trying to make it “better”. My sense of the scenes where people/vehicles are removed from the dome, is that they wanted to have something 3D (possibly a giant hand) coming down and picking them up, but could not get it to come out right, so they just left in the blocking mattes, which in some cases likely blocked out cranes, to make them somewhat consistent.

The ending, however, makes your typical M. Night Shyamalan twist ending look inspired. After all that pontificating in the script, they just want us to come up with our own ending? At least have Mark come up with one of his loony theories to explain why the dome went away, or have him turn to the camera and spout some kind of platitude to wrap everything up like this:
phantom-planet-you-lost-me
Instead, we get rain (which actually makes sense) and laughing (makes no sense at all).

Since Arch Obler, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to let each one of us come up with their own ending, here is my ending for The Bubble

As our couple walks away from the town in the rain, we see the towns-people slowly begin to follow after them, as if they are taking Mark up on his offer to leave with them. Their pace picks up, and the towns-people begin to pick up debris like boards, stones, and road signs. Mark looks back, beginning to get worried, and starts to hurry Katherine along. The towns-people, break into a trot, Mark and Katherine break into a run. The towns people start brandishing their makeshift weapons and charge as we fade to black, and Katherine screams.

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LOL. The last thing we hear are screams of “Food… food!” (If you want this movie to really be a meditation on human nature.)

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