Mystery Science Theater 3000: ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE

November 2, 2016 7:01 PM - Season 6, Episode 4

"Her Power Goes Beyond Life.... His Rage Survives Even Death!" A voodoo priestess revives a zombie. Okay forget that. A guy is knifed by thugs. Now forget that too. Years later, his way-too-beefy son thwarts robbers of a convenience store. It's when he exits the store that the movie really begins, as he's hit by a car driven by unruly teens. He's dead! But thanks to Ms. Voodoo, he can live again as a zombie and track down his killers, while three ineffectual policemen trace him, one of them sounding like Jim Baccus with a slow leak, and another being Actual Adam West. Oh, and Motorhead's "Ace of Spaces" is in there. The multiple prologues confused the heck out of me. Servo's Adam West impression sounds more like Shatner to me. YouTube (1h33m) Promo. Premiered November 24, 1994 (Thanksgiving Day).

Episode 604 ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE

Satellite News - MST3K Wikia - Mighty Jack's MST3K Review (He really likes it!) - War of the Colossal Fan Guide (he was less than enthused)

Movie
Daddy-O's Drive-In Dirt - Rotten Tomatoes (Critics N/A, Viewers 14%) - Wikipedia
IMDB (1987, 2.2 stars)
"After a young man is killed by a gang of rampant teenagers, he is resurrected by a voodoo priestess so he can avenge his death."
Directed by Jack Bravman. Written by John Fasano. Starring Adam West, Jon Mikl Thor and Tia Carrere.

Notes:
This movie was first aired as part of a Comedy Central college tour. Its first broadcast airing was during Turkey Day '94. Interesting story about that. Comedy Central had recently changed management and the Brains were on the outs with the network. Word is they wanted the Brains to do bumpers for the '94 Turkey Day marathon for free, to which Best Brains, a production company that has to pay for facilities, writers and performers like any other, said no way. So that year instead of the usual shenanigans they put together some lame trivia question commercial cards and got Adam West himself in on a generic set to host during breaks.

Like Sidehackers, there were substantial cuts for content (gore and an attempted rape) made to this movie for MST3K.

Someone in the Satellite News comments notes that the "Twist & Creme" ice cream shop shown in the movie has terrific Yelp reviews!

posted by JHarris (24 comments total)

MST3K Club is a bunch of us watching one episode a week over the internet! Come join us, won't you? This week's showing is Thursday at 9 PM ET/6 PM PT at https://cytu.be/r/Metafilter_MST3KClub, but we always have weird stuff going on before the movie. In fact we have some very interesting stuff for preroll material this time, including a particular oddity from Adam West's career in the 90s. We hope to see you there!
posted by JHarris at 7:04 PM on November 2, 2016

"Wait a minute, guys. Tia Carrere is in this movie. We may actually have to pay attention."
posted by valkane at 7:26 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Too late for last week's MST3K Club, I discovered this listicle of "13 MST3K Episodes to Watch on Halloween", which includes this week's offering. So put your costumes back on, buy some more candy if you've eaten it all, and enjoy a Second Halloween with me.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:08 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Netflix has a great documentary about Jon Mikl-Thor. Its name escapes me at the moment.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:33 AM on November 3, 2016

"Let's go to Perkins, WOOO!!"
posted by Servo5678 at 6:31 AM on November 3, 2016

"Ace of Spades," not "Ace of Spaces," sheesh.
posted by JHarris at 6:58 AM on November 3, 2016

"Ace of Spaces" is just Ace Frehley, right?
posted by valkane at 9:07 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think Mike and the bots could form the band Ace of Space, with the hit single "I Saw The (Movie) Sign."
posted by ilana at 11:47 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you like to travel, I tell you I'm your man,
You win some, lose some, it's all a trip to me,
The pleasure is to go,
It makes no difference what you know,
I don't share your greed,
The only one I'll be is the
Ace of Spaces!
posted by wittgenstein at 9:10 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Okay....

We're starting to thinking about what we could do for the Christmas showing this year. A complaint last year was that there was too much repeat material. I figure I've got about 9 hours and 30 minutes of MST-related Christmas stuff, give or take.

Here are some ideas for additional stuff:

• Unriffed weird holiday movies. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Santa Claus themselves are both available on YouTube unriffed. They might not be showstoppers but they could be useful in the middle of the night when few are on.
• Last year we put in some animated Christmas stuff, like Opus and Bill's A Wish For Wings That Work and some Rankin-Bass stuff. That might work again this time to give us another couple of hours.

Beyond that, does anyone else have something to suggest? Best of all if it's already on Youtube and can be embedded (which is 95% of stuff really).

I am aiming to fill Christmas Eve and Day with stuff. Once again, the most important aspect of the whole affair is that it be low-stress: something people can nip into, watch either a few minutes or a few hours, at any time from the middle of the day to the middle of the night, and leave whenever. This low stress thing applies to me and others who help maintain the channel too! Fortunately our solution this year, cytube, is less labor intensive than sync-video was, and it should be possible to start up a primary playlist and just let it go the entire time.
posted by JHarris at 7:46 PM on November 4, 2016

Obviously, Star Wars Holiday Special... The Grinch (Chuck Jones animated of course)... Magoo's Christmas Carol... Muppet Christmas Carol... Claymation Christmas... my personal favorite 'Olive the Other Reindeer'... you already mentioned all the Rankin-Bass and the Bill & Opus... in fact, check out this entire list or this one or this one. And as noted here, movies like Gremlins, Die Hard and Home Alone were set on or around Christmas. (And Jingle All the Way is my favorite Schwarzenegger movie)

And maybe some interludes of Christmas and 'Seasonal' music, like the '60s surf band The Avalanches stole their name from. Have fun.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:35 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, has rifftrax done die hard? Or lethal weapon?
posted by valkane at 9:58 PM on November 4, 2016

One more thought: Doctor Who has done several 'Christmas Specials' and a couple of them are rather riff-worthy...
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:25 PM on November 4, 2016

Rifftrax hasn't done any of the "mainstream" holiday movies mentioned above, to my knowledge.

Remember, we already have the Star Wars Holiday Special in there, in one form....

A lot of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's Cthulhu Carols are on YouTube, could also be worth putting in for some yuletide squamousness.

The general rules for inclusion:

1. If it's on YouTube it's best. Cytube supports other video sites though.
2. It's for the best if it's not too copyright infringy. Being posted by someone else to a video site is good though, because we're not the hosts.
3. One gotcha to watch for is, if it's on YouTube, a video can be restricted by region. Fortunately cytube warns when you add a video to a playlist all the territories it can't be shown in. Oh and also the video has to be set to be embed-able for cytube to display it.

One discovery that might be useful to everyone this time out. As we discovered before, cytube saves playlists on a per-user basis, so even if we're all co-ops on the channel, you guys can't load my playlists and I can't load yours. HOWEVER, I've discovered that, if you can get the URL of a YouTube playlist and paste it into the Add Media space, it'll attempt to add all the videos in that list one by one, and you can share YouTube playlists! Of course, this is limited by the fact that you can only put YouTube videos in YouTube playlists.
posted by JHarris at 11:23 PM on November 4, 2016

He-Man and She-Ra christmas special!
posted by hobgadling at 7:59 AM on November 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ooh, that's a good one.

Hey, there's also that Wacky Wallwalker special I showed last year.
posted by JHarris at 9:18 AM on November 5, 2016

Gotta keep Hardware Wars in the mix.
posted by valkane at 2:56 PM on November 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hey, what about the trumpy election night special? Is that gonna be a thing?
posted by valkane at 3:15 PM on November 6, 2016

Been considering it. I've already voted, so I should be available the whole night. Got anything in particular to throw into the playlist?
posted by JHarris at 4:11 PM on November 6, 2016

I've begun constructing the playlist. Remembering the theme, it seems to me that Parts: The Clonus Horror (about bigwig senator people farming clones for replacement body parts), Rocket Attack USA and Invasion USA (classic cold war paranoia) are places to start. Are there any more suggestions of nice, funny, political, but non-infuriating, material?
posted by JHarris at 5:28 PM on November 6, 2016

You might sprinkle some of those joss whedon save the day spots in there. You're not gonna go with foops trumpy movie idea?
posted by valkane at 4:43 AM on November 7, 2016

Also, you might wanna make a post in the metatalk "what are you doing on election day" post to invite folks to watch. Or memail all our mst3k regulars.
posted by valkane at 4:45 AM on November 7, 2016

Trumpy's in, of course, just thought that was obvious. Joss Whedon eh?
posted by JHarris at 12:49 PM on November 7, 2016

Comment from 2021: Reading back over those last posts, made literally hours before Election Day 2016, aka The Day Everything Changed. I am glad Trump is gone, and may he or his ilk never sully the presidency gain.
posted by JHarris at 9:29 PM on May 19, 2021