FanFare

MST Club presents! Michael Myers tested positive in a routine soul smear for Pure Evil. He killed his sister as a kid, and as an adult has escaped from his institution and is stalking a babysitter. Fortunately psychiatrist Donald "Blofeld" Pleasence is on the case. I know the reputation is that riffing is for bad movies, but Halloween is effective, and it's always great to see Pleasence. The riff was released in 2006, so 90s-style content warnings apply.
posted by JHarris on Oct 30, 2024 - 4 comments

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

MST Club presents! That killer rabbit movie. From Wikipedia: "Widely panned by critics for its silly premise, poor direction, stilted acting and bad special effects, the film's biggest failure is considered to be the inability to make the rabbits seem scary." Of note, the Rifftrax site warns that the movie contains violence against rabbits. I don't know if that's just simulated or actual violence, although if it were the latter I'd imagine people would be rightfully up in arms. Notably contains DeForest Kelly, Star Trek's Dr. McCoy. Riff was released back in February 2014.
posted by JHarris on Aug 22, 2024 - 5 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... and yes, that's the title, Ouija Shark. The site tell us it's from the people who brought us (groan) Jurassic Shark. Riff first released on May 24, 2024.
posted by JHarris on Jul 25, 2024 - 6 comments

MST Club Presents! Oh wow. Cynthia Rothrock plays Kristi Jones, who seeks to avenge her sister's death at the hands of a character I'm just going to call a "crazed martial artist." It was made in 1993, which figures. Here's a Youtube video of the climatic fight, at about three minutes long. Again I say, wow. The riff premiered June 2024, just about two weeks ago.
posted by JHarris on Jul 4, 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.... The Rifftrax people released just a week ago this fantasy movie that looks just like a bunch of LARPers decided to make a motion picture, much like first-season MST favorite Robot Holocaust. This is what Dungeons & Dragons has done to the world and why it can never be forgiven. The riff can be gotten here!
posted by JHarris on May 23, 2024 - 1 comment

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

This revised post (original) describes how to join our weekly MST3K Club showings of Mystery Science Theater 3000, technical details of the show, and some minor related bits of weirdness. tl;dr: Watch the show at https://cytu.be/r/Metafilter_MST3KClub, at 9 P.M. Eastern/6 P.M. Pacific Thursday nights. Other topics covered involve technical details, preshow material, viewer controls and powers, and whimsical lore. [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Jun 1, 2016 - 0 comments

The Bullseye Holiday Special returns for 2014! Music expert Mitchell Kezin talks about his new documentary called Jingle Bell Rocks! It dives into the world of alternative and underground Christmas music. Bill Corbett (the veteran writer and performer from RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000) talks about his new graphic novel called Super-Powered Revenge Christmas. And there’s another exciting Christmas comic out this year:  The Flash Gordon Holiday Special: 2014. Jesse will talk to its authors, The Daily Show writers Elliott Kalan, Dan McCoy and their pal Stuart Wellington. Lastly, Jesse reveals his one true holiday tradition.
posted by ocherdraco on Dec 16, 2014 - 3 comments