MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1996 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
What is the worst thing that can happen to you in a movie theater? Sitting next to a group of people who not only talk incessantly back to the screen, but who say nothing but inanities and bathroom humor. Well, welcome to your worst nightmare, MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE.
The movie is based on the increasing unpopular and soon to be discontinued "Mystery Science Theater 3000" TV series on the Comedy Channel. MST3K's format is they take an old science fiction movie and make fun of it with non-stop jabbering. The setup is that there is a mad scientist, Dr. Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), who has Mike Nelson (Michael J. Nelson) and two robots, Tom Servo (voice by Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (voice by Trace Beaulieu), trapped inside a space station called Satellite of Love. They are forced to watch old sci-fi movies, but end up enjoying them. Mike and his two mechanical buddies are shown silhouetted in the bottom of the screen talking back to the movie which occupies the rest of the screen.
In MST3K there are also scenes without benefit of the old movie. The laughs here are rare. The only piece of dialog I like is when Crow tells the others, "I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus doing something very stupid, and I decided to go ahead." Sort of like what producer Jim Mallon did when he decided to make a feature length movie of something people had tired of seeing on television.
The picture Mike and company are forced to watch is THIS ISLAND EARTH (1954) with Jeff Morrow as the alien Exeter, Faith Domergue as Dr. Ruth Adams, and Rex Reason as Dr. Cal Meacham. I have never seen THIS ISLAND EARTH before and the best part of MST3K is getting to see it. The worst part is the non-stop rambling by Mike and the robots.
I guess I must confess my prejudices. I watch little television, and when I have channel surfed past this show in the past on TV, I have not been impressed. The concept is fine, but the implementation, thanks to director Jim Mallon and writers Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy , Mary Jo Pehl, Paul Chaplin, and Bridget Jones is fatally flawed. If you run out of ideas for dialog, admit it and cut back to only the material worth filming. Moreover, the characters do not have to suffer from diarrhea of the mouth. Let the old film speak for itself most of the time, and then a few jabs will prove much funnier.
I can not print MST3K's bathroom humor in this G rated review, but think of the type of tasteless commentary that a 9 year old might come up with as vulgar humor, and you get the idea. In the printable, but typically bad dialog, we have exchanges like that when Dr. Meacham flies into Exeter's hideout in the country. Crow proclaims, "He's flown into a Flemish painting," and Servo tries to one-up him with, "I claim this land for Spain." This is supposed to be funny?
There were a few members of the audience who laughed frequently, but most were like me and just stared at the screen. There are a couple of funny parts. One is when Dr. Adams and Dr. Meacham try to escape from Exeter. Stealthy they are not, and as Crow puts it, "Let's slip away in the dark of the afternoon in the biggest car in the county." The other occurs during the credits when Mike and his robot sidekicks hang around to poke fun at everything from people's names to their titles. If you think about it, some of the titles people get in movie credits are pretty esoteric. Perhaps because they were not interrupting a better movie, I liked most of their jokes during the credits.
If they had taken THIS ISLAND EARTH and perhaps some other films in this 50s sci-fi genre, they would have had the core of a fascinating documentary which would have been much better than MST3K. Alternatively, if they felt they had to stay with this contrived format, the writers should have drastically limited how often Mike and the robots should speak. As it is, I was constantly wanting to scream at them, "shut up!"
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE runs a mercifully short 1:14. It is correctly rated PG-13 for bad language and gross humor. There is no sex, nudity or violence. Given the setup of the film, there is no reason why they did not make a G or at most a PG show. The crudeness of the script detracted dramatically from the quality of the movie. Done right this should have been a show fine for my seven year old. Thank goodness, I did not bring him. I do suspect the film will be okay for most kids over 9 or 10 since by then they are all too familiar with crude humor. I do not recommend the film, although loyal fans of the show will probably enjoy it. I give it * 1/2 solely because I did enjoy seeing parts of THIS ISLAND EARTH.
**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.
REVIEW WRITTEN ON: April 23, 1996
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
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