FanFare

MST Club presents! Some years ago Rifftrax piloted a means by which people could record riffs for movies themselves that they'd sell through the site, a program that they called iRiffs. It appears that iRiffs can no longer be found on Rifftrax site searches, but Google can still turn up the pages, and they can still be bought. That is how I purchased this riff of ill-advised Sean Connery vehicle Zardoz, produced by a group known as FilmRoasters. I don't know if FilmRoasters is still active, but they have a Youtube channel, which the address filmroasters.com redirects to. The most recent videos on the Youtube channel are six years old. I don't know how old the Zardoz riff is, but if it's six years old that would put its release at around 1998. FilmRoasters appears to be comprised of Eric Vinyard, Brandon Bates and Wes Allen.
posted by JHarris on Oct 3, 2024 - 3 comments

MST Club Presents! The Rifftrax to a certain Star Wars backstory movie. A nobody smuggler called Han Solo teams up with a walking carpet to carry out a heist. Directed by Ron Howard! The riff was released on December 21, 2018.
posted by JHarris on Sep 5, 2024 - 0 comments

For a change we're doing a "Just The Jokes" riff. The way these work, you use your audio player of choice to play the MP3 of Mike, Kevin and Bill along with the movie of your choice. Follow Mike's directions on when to start the file, then listen for "Disembaudio," their distinctive synthesized voice, to speak a line of dialog at the same time as a character in the movie. If Disembaudio speaks slightly early, pause the audio file for just a moment, and if the movie's early, pause it momentarily instead. Or alternatively, you can use the free Rifftrax app to do the syncing for you on your smartphone. Rifftrax got their start doing Just The Jokes riffs like these 18 years ago as an end run around releasing commentary on movies they didn't have rights to, and while these days they tend to focus on movies that they can legally mix their riffs directly into, they still release new ones from time to time. As for the movie, Ready Player One is a big ol' pandering mess that they managed to get Steven Spielberg to direct. Much of it is set in a virtual world where every 80s and 90s media property owned or licensed by Warner Bros can all interact, making it a special kind of crossover hell. I realize that sounds like Space Jam: A New Legacy, but that was actually three years after this movie. The riff was released October 18, 2018.
posted by JHarris on Aug 15, 2024 - 1 comment

MST Club presents! A riff released in August 2023 of a Japanese movie made in 1967. One of the sillier-looking kaiju of riffdom, the promotional text describes the monster as looking like what the result would be if Gonzo ever sealed the deal with Camilla. The monster is the result of space spores, so beware if you have space allergies, or "spallergies."
posted by JHarris on Jun 13, 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