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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.