As a return to blogging, I'm going to start off with a review of a classic movie. I am a fan of an old TV show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show about some getting shot into space and forced to watch bad movies. It's better than it sounds. In fact, Time has named it one of the best shows of all time. In 1996, it was given a movie adaptation, aptly named Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. So when this low budget cult classic show is given a blockbuster film, is it any good? Let's find out.
Before we start on the movie itself, I'm going to give a brief description of what happened before in the show. The original guy shot into space, Joel Robinson (Joel Hodgson), has escaped the Satellite of Love. When Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and TV's Frank (Frank Conniff) found this out, they sent intern Mike Nelson (Michel J. Nelson) to the satellite. TV's Frank soon left to be assumed into Second Banana Heaven. Dr. Forrester is by himself controlling the movies.
This is where we get into the movie. The movie itself if has the same setup as the TV series. Mike and his robot friends, Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (Trace Beaulieu), watch a movie while poking fun and making jokes about it. The movie Dr. Forrester picked was This Island Earth. It would make since to do a Universal Pictures movie, since they did help distributing Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, but This Island Earth wasn't too bad of a movie considering other movies they have done before. Sure, the movie hasn't aged well, but the acting was pretty good, the story is interesting, and the effects were good for it's time. I was kind of surprised they did a fairly good movie.
Along with the movie, Mystery Science Theater 3000 had host skits throughout the episode, and the movie was no different. This skits in the movie include Crow trying to escape the satellite by pickaxe, Mike trying to fly the satellite, but ending up destroying the Hubble Telescope, and the group trying to use the Interocitor from the movie to try to escape, but fail. The skits are well done and the characters seem right in their element. It's also nice that they featured different places of the satellite in multiple angles, as opposed to the normal episodes that have only a couple of places shown and at only a one or two angles.
What made Mystery Science Theater 3000 famous was the riffing; making jokes at, in this case, movies; and the movie has plenty of it. The riffing was okay, but it wasn't the best. They do have some funny moments, and a lot of references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the smart and obscure jokes were toned down from where they usually are. They also threw a few curse words, which they almost never did normally, but it might have been to give the movie a PG-13 rating. Overall, the jokes and riffs weren't as good as they normally were, but it's to the advantage of the average movie-goer.
All in all, Mystery Science Theater 300: The Movie may not be as good as the average episode, even being shorter than the average episode by 30 minutes, it's still pretty enjoyable and it makes a nice film adaptation. If you want to get it, you can find it on websites like Amazon, and it's also available through Netflix.
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