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MST Club presents... a riff of a frankly astonishing movie. You may think you know awful CGI. Well, the computer art in this movie makes Birdemic look like a masterpiece. Buildings made out of a few rectangles! Storefronts with names written out in Comic Sans--which is also what the credits are written in! And the titular Bulk combines all the worst aspects of both Playstation and N64 in-engine cutscenes. Sites say it's meant as a spoof, but, oof. It seems a lot like that's just them trying to justify their terrible decisions. Riff from April 2024, movie from 2012.
posted by JHarris on Apr 25, 2024 - 6 comments

MST Club presents a 2024 Rifftrax of a movie from 1996. A karate monk doesn't want to do the karate-monk thing any more and leaves their evil karate sect. They come after in the evil karate sect way. So he transfers his soul into a passed-out hobo, giving him his karate moves. I didn't know it was so easy! Neo's skills in The Matrix don't seem so impressive now. Wait... maybe this is the Matrix, and the robots got their brain files mixed up? Agent Smith is going to have to pull overtime to fix this. You know most of the work the Agents do is going to be dumb gruntwork like that. Anyway, 1996 karate hobo action flick go.
posted by JHarris on Apr 4, 2024 - 0 comments

Next up for MST Club.... this is a fairly recent release, both in movie (2000) and riff (February 2024). Hi-tek hakker kidz, and their dog, are recruited by a government agent to foil the plans of a nefarious video game company to put a mind control weapon on the internet. Think about what it implies to have a movie about hacker kids on the internet in the year 2000. I think a little more kindly of the movie knowing that nowadays the kids would be in their 30s and cursing the name of Elon Musk.
posted by JHarris on Mar 21, 2024 - 1 comment

MST Club presents! We're going back and forth between The Mads and Rifftrax in this phase of our riff watching project. This week Rifftrax is up, with the movie Prisoners of the Lost Universe. You may have seen a bit of it before: when Film Ventures International repurposed Ator the Fighting Eagle into Cave Dwellers, they gave it a generic fantasy scene behind the opening credits: that, it turns out, was from Prisoners of the Lost Universe. IMDB says: "Three people are transported into a parallel reality, where they find they must use modern technology, but medieval weapons, in order to save the citizenry from a murderous warlord." Selective technology, got it. For more on Rifftrax, see inside. This riff was released in 2012. [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Mar 7, 2024 - 2 comments

We conclude our review of the four Film Crew episodes with another peplum, directed by Mario Bava and starring Steve Reeves as the hard-to-say Phillipides. This one's focus is more historical than the usual, with the events shown dating to the Medic Wars instead of the general mish-mash of places and people these movies usually give us. Wikipedia informs us that Bava was forced to reshoot some scenes when extra were spotted on camera smoking cigarettes, proving he's a cut above our usual grade of director. Also, this movie was actually considered to be pretty successful at the time!
posted by JHarris on Nov 30, 2023 - 1 comment

Possibly the most awkward of the four movies Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy riffed as The Film Crew, it's 1959's version of a crazy sex comedy. Mother Nature and Father Time muse on the situation of the island of Wongo, where the menu are ugly and the women are beautiful, and of Goona, where the reverse is true. In the end those of matching levels of comeliness are paired up, and 1959 societal expectations are upheld.
posted by JHarris on Nov 16, 2023 - 7 comments

We're in the final weeks of MST Club's ten-year mostly-weekly run, although we'll probably do other shows from time to time. Tonight's episode is the second Film Crew production (R.I.P. Mike Dodge), about a guy who's killed in a crash, kidnapped by aliens, then forced to aid them in their plans for world domination... which involves irradiated giant lizards. It's like the backstory to a kaiju movie.
posted by JHarris on Nov 9, 2023 - 1 comment