The Conservative Cave
The Bar => The Lounge => Topic started by: movie buff on October 23, 2011, 03:39:01 PM
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Hi, guys!
For tonight, to wrap up my horror comedy theme, I’ll be taking a slightly different approach to this. Rather than reviewing the movie itself, I’ll be reviewing a special take on it: The live theatrical event of the guys from Rifftrax riffing the infamous ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’
Some backup on Rifftrax, for those who don’t know: From 1988 through 1999, there was an awesome show called ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000,’ or ‘MST3K’ for short, which aired first on Comedy Central, then on Sci Fi Channel (And many episodes of it are now on Youtube). The premise was a man (First a guy named Joel, then a guy named Mike) and his two robot friends are stuck in a satellite in space, and the show’s villains forced them to watch crappy B- Movies as a way of studying humans’ reaction to bad cinema, and the man and the ‘Bots would watch the movies and give hilarious commentaries on them. It remains in my opinion one of the funniest shows in television history.
A few years ago, when the show had been off the air for a while, its creators set up a site/ company called Rifftrax which was basically them doing what they’ve been doing, but for money now, and riffing good movies (i.e. the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, ‘The Dark Knight,’ the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy) as often as bad ones. They sell both DVDs of their commentaries on movies or shorts, and audio tracks of their commentaries that viewers can play alongside their own DVDs of the movies in question.
Starting in late summer of 2009, the Rifftrax boys took things in an entirely new direction, and began twice a year doing special one- night ‘Rifftrax Live’ movie events in which the three main guys behind Rifftrax- Mike Nelson (Himself on ‘MST3K’), Kevin Murphy (Voice of the robot Tom Servo on the show), and Bill Corbett (The second of the two actors who was the voice of the robot Crow on the show)- do live riffings that would be broadcast to movie theaters around the country on a certain night. The first one they did, in August of 2009, is the one I’ll be looking at tonight, ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’ Future ones they’ve done include one in which they riff a bunch of Christmas shorts (I’ll probably look at that in my upcoming ’25 Days of Christmas’ marathon), one in which they riff the anti- drug movie ‘Reefer Madness,’ a Halloween special which I’ll be looking at some time next week, and just a couple months ago one on the movie ‘Jack the Giant Killer.’
For this particular one, it starts with them riffing a 50’s short called ‘Flying Stewardess’ that was basically about the things an aspiring airline stewardess must go through, and which provides the guys with plenty of good material. From there, some extra stuff is put in: A couple amusing fake commercials by Rich Kyanka from somethingawful.com, and a few quick musical performances by Jonathan Coulton and the Rifftones (The latter is a singing group formed by the Rifftrax stars, usually singing about whatever movie they were riffing). Then, the movie finally starts. Directed by the dreaded Ed Wood, the plot is basically that a bunch of aliens see that humans are on the verge of discovering a new superweapon that could destroy the universe, so they set out to wipe out the humans with a plan to reanimate their dead into I guess a zombie army, though they start with just three zombies, and a few humans set out to stop them.
The movie itself is ultra- corny, with the cheapest special effects imaginable, poor editing, boring dialogue, and atrocious acting. It was Bela Lugosi’s last performance as he died in the middle of making it, so for the remaining scenes that required Lugosi’s character, Ed Wood replaced him with his wife’s chiropractor, who looks nothing like Lugosi and always does that “Cape over the face†thing that Dracula was sometimes known for. As you can guess, the Rifftrax guys have a LOT of fun with this one. In fact, for a couple scenes (When one of the zombies takes out a cop with kind of a clumsy, two- handed karate chop, and when an alien rants about the humans having “Stupid minds†), it was so stupid that just the scenes themselves were enough to make the audiences- Both the audience that was watching them live from where they were in Nashville, and the audience I was watching it with from a movie theater in Florida- burst out in laughter and applause without the Rifftrax guys needing to say anything!
There is only one real problem with this Rifftrax take on ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’; The stuff included between the ‘Flying Stewardess’ short and the actual movie kind of stretched on and on. When I first saw this in the theater, I got really impatient for them to get to the movie. When Jonathan Coulton was due to perform, I remember thinking, “Geez, now we’ve gotta listen to this loser, I want to watch them riff Plan 9!†Still, that was a minor problem, as the stuff was entertaining enough. Coulton’s performance pleasantly surprised me, as the two songs he did were pretty cool and catchy, I even found myself singing along when he did the “Zombie†song.
Now that that’s out of the way, I loved seeing the guys again for the first time after ‘MST3K,’ as I had never really checked out their Rifftrax stuff from the site. Plus, it was neat for me to finally see what the guys who provided the voices of Servo and Crow really looked like. This movie event was absolutely hilarious. There are a lot of running themes for their jokes (i.e. Jokes about Bela Lugosi and especially about his replacement, jokes about the actor Tor Johnson who played another one of the zombies, both for his horrible acting performance and for how big and fat he was, jokes about how one of the police inspectors has the rather disturbing habit of casually pointing his gun at everyone), yet they stay fresh and funny throughout the feature. Everything from the obvious flaws in the movie to the characters’ actions to various pop culture references are skewered by the guys. I laughed my head off in the theater, and laughed hard again watching the whole thing on DVD.
So, that’s ‘Rifftrax Live- Plan 9 from Outer Space.’ It was an awesome experience, and the DVD’s available from the Rifftrax website or on Amazon.com. That wraps up the horror- comedy theme of my monster- fest; for the next few days, I’ll just be looking at a couple random horror movies before moving into my final theme for the month. See you guys tomorrow!
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Are you going to review regular horror films? I'm a huge horror film fan, and a fan of Kane Hodder and the Friday the 13th series, Jason X was awesome! and the new Jason was really good.
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Are you going to review regular horror films? I'm a huge horror film fan, and a fan of Kane Hodder and the Friday the 13th series, Jason X was awesome! and the new Jason was really good.
I have reviewed some regular horror films (i.e. Nightmare on Elm Street, The Lost Boys, all the classic Universal Monster movies), and will be reviewing more of them before the month is out. However, I don't think any of the Friday the 13th films will make my list, at least not this year. I've just never been as much of a fan of that series as I am of others, though I'd agree that the remake of it they did a couple years ago was pretty good.