He does specify “financially” in the opening post, though. But if we’re talking longevity, I’d call it a toss-up between Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and Gorgo, myself. But as mentioned above, only one film took home an Oscar.
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Yes, the opening post specifies financially successful, which I take to mean profit, not just box office. For example, I believe Mac and Me lost money in its theatrical run.
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This is where I wish I had a gif of Bob Hoskins in Hollywoodland, where Diane Lane tells him that George Reeves was in Gone with the Wind, and he just grunts “That picture made money.”
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Kind of reminds me of what Adam Scott said of it’s impact compared to Oscar winners.
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Orion…Orion…is bankrupt…now!
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Robot Monster is an unusual case, because people may not have heard of the movie, but Ro-Man is iconic when it comes to ‘quick visual approximation of bad 50s movie.’
My money’s on The Dead Talk Back. It’s The Dead Talk Back, isn’t it?
I think I was a Teenage Werewolf kicked off a trend of teenage monster movies, so that’s a different kind of success again. The House on Haunted Hill (not a MSTied movie, obvously) is supposed to have inspired Hitchcock to make Psycho, so how many extra stars do we give out for inspired works?
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Now, if we’re delving into RiffTrax movies, the clear winners are Avatar or Avengers: Endgame, for making a crapton of money, or Paranormal Activity, for having one of the most epic budget to box office multipliers you can imagine.
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It’s hard to find a more successful box office take, even when converted to 2023 dollars. How many movies make 1530% profit in their first week?
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We shouldn’t give out too many. Remember, Invasion Of The Neptune Men was a knock-off of Prince Of Space.
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Rifftrax presents an interesting dilemma. Do you count their “Just The Jokes” things for the major blockbusters? That kind of feels like cheating to me, since a lot (most?) of them don’t fall into the “cheesy movies” vibe of MST3K.
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I might be missing something. Do we have home video numbers for Dead Talk Back? Because I’d love to hear them. Everything surrounding that movie is so weird that I can only picture them bringing me joy.
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The Dead Talk Back was found, unreleased, in a warehouse in the 1990s, got a small release through a niche catalog, Sinister Cinema, where it was picked up by MST3K and aired the next year.
It has, as far as I know, never been shown in a theater.
Oh, and I would also love to know more about it, but I am guessing any real information has been lost to time. I would be surprised if even the kids in that movie are still alive.
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There was a bit after the episode when this was a vault pick that had a brief collection of recollections from the actor who played the DJ. I don’t think it answered any of the big mysteries.
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Who I really want to know about is writer/director Merle S. Gould. According to IMDB, he made two other feature films. One about Nostradamus, and the other is this oddity, which I am going to have to track down.
Clearly Merle had a thing about communicating with the dead.
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Pretty much the only relevant thing I can find on Google about The Body is a Shell is this brief New York Times review which, unsurprisingly, says it’s terrible. But it did get distribution.
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I miss Bob Hoskins so much.
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The Crawling Eye scared Stephen King enough as a kid for him to include it in It.
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I saw it at least 6 times when it came out!
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