what BAD MST3K movies can be made GOOD?

With a little editing, you could fix just about anything. However, if you only had the tools available to you, i.e. movie only elements, as filmed, and you couldn’t add anything…

What MST3K movies could be made Good with a little tender love and editing?

3 Likes

Maybe Mitchell if one could have the title character be killed in a humorous way in the first few minutes.

I could probably watch that.

6 Likes

Have Enrique Rios crushed by the cows he forced to stampede in Beast of Hollow Mountain, no need for the claymation dinosaur.

5 Likes

Kitten With A Whip was already made good.

Glenn Close GIF

sue lyon hat GIF

8 Likes

I recently saw The Mad’s riff of a newly restored Manos and said at the time that it would make a halfway decent horror short if you just cut out about 85% of the movie. There’s at least 45 minutes of people literally just standing there doing nothing that could be excised. Get that running time under 10 minutes and you’ve got a snappy little tale of terror.

17 Likes

Make it longer and call it gothic.

6 Likes

That and add a couple of different sets. Have a bigger house that looks like a compound.

3 Likes

It Conquered the World would be a decent scifi if you just remove the stupid pickle monster.

7 Likes

The house had a vast underground city already.

1 Like

I always thought the basic concept - family stumbles into and tries to escape a weird, eldritch location and its horrifying denizens - was sound. You just need to turn the overall competence up 200% or so.

5 Likes

Excise some of the goofier, more laughable moments, and Tormented could make for an excellent thriller.

5 Likes

Right, either get a better monster or (more likely, we are talking Corman here) ditch the monster entirely and leave it a mysterious unseen force.

4 Likes

I would argue that Space Children is already pretty good. Punch up the script a little (why in the world do they have Mom lamenting about sand?) and get a much better soundtrack, and it’s really a good movie.

5 Likes

All of them can be made good, apart from Hamlet. Whoever came up with that story clearly had no idea how to write a script. :wink:

8 Likes

Laserblast could be improved with reducing a few of the random scenes like the goofy cops, the whole federal agent plot and some of the random aliens in their spaceship moments.

5 Likes

Mitchell could definitely be saved.

The Unearthly needs a round of stripping/sanding and then maybe… look, Tor, I love you and everything that you do but we gotta let you go if we’re gonna right this ship.

3 Likes

That is like half the movie. Plus there isn’t much of a story without the Federal agent.

3 Likes

Watching Final Justice on the MST3K Twitch channel and even though I’ve seen it a million times I find myself entertained with the movie itself (the riffs are solid too) but it’s good!

Either that or I’ve watched one too many bad movies and by barometer is off

7 Likes

It is a mostly competently made movie and the acting isn’t bad. It does have some odd moments and the protagonist being a worse villain than the actual villain put it into Riffable territory.

4 Likes

Gamera vs. Barugon would be a fantastic action/adventure movie without Gamera in it. I know, I know. But really, the main character learns an important lesson (which he tells us explicitly at the end) and ends up doing everything he can to make up for what he had been willing to do before. His idea for using the mirror to kill Barugon would have worked if it wasn’t for the fact that Gamera had to be the hero. Still, I loved the idea and I think removing Gamera would have made this just a fun movie on its own.

3 Likes