Science Fiction Sunday 41

Someone lent me a couple of the RiffTrax versions of Missile To The Moon and Carnival of Souls. These are dvd's that have the RiffTrax commentary on the same disc as the movie. You can watch the movie with Mike Nelson and crew yakkin' or watch the movie with it's original audio. That's a nice option.  Mike Nelson, whom some of you might know from Mystery Science Theater 3000, is joined by his old MST3K partners Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. He played Mike Nelson, the human, not one of the robots. Kevin and Bill were the robots. They appear on a lot of the RiffTrax episodes and also appeared with Mike as The Film Crew. They made 4 of that series on dvd and then they stopped. I found them at Half Price Books for $7.50 each, unopened, obviously clearanced. From the Wikipedia article it looks like the guys are doing RiffTrax now and The Film Crew is dead. RiffTrax dvd's are 10 bucks. I don't know that I would buy any myself, maybe if they got cheaper. Same with the audio only stuff they do. It's 4 bucks a movie and you still have to have a copy of the movie to play along with the audio. Not that cheap, when they have a lot of titles, although just today I noticed some of their older tracks have been marked down.

I watched Missile To The Moon first with the guys riffing on the movie. They don't lower the movies soundtrack enough when they're riffing. Occasionally the audio streams collide and it gets hard to hear what was said. I've seen this movie three or four times. It's not great but it's goofy kind of fun. Some punk guys on the lam from john law hide away in a rocket. A science guy pulls a gun on them and forces them into being his crew. Turns out he's a moon man who was sent to earth long ago. He was checking that moon people could live here on earth. He's finally got a rocket so he can report back. He dies when a box falls on his head. Yep, a box sitting on a shelf in a spaceship. It's that level of stupid. The acting is mostly pretty poor and the sets are a laugh. So you see there is quite a bit of stuff to make fun of, and the guys take advantage of that crap. There's some great rock monsters, a giant puppet spider, and the moon is filled with pretty girls. Not much air, which they can't replace anymore. They need the rocket to get off the moon and go to earth. It doesn't end well for the moon ladies. Oh well.  

Carnival of Souls tries pretty hard to be  some sort of psychological sort of horror movie. A young woman survives a car crash, she walks right out of the river, moves to Utah to play the organ for a church, and has some visions of a weird lookin' guy. There might not be much more than that going on in the movie, which was created in 1962 by a guy who made industrial films in Lawrence Kansas. Herk Harvey played the weird lookin' guy in the girls visions and he wrote and directed the film. It was his only feature film. A lot of people like it, it scores a 7.1 on the IMDb and Criterion put it out in a nice dvd 2 disc special edition. There are a lot of editions of Carnival of Souls on dvd. It's in the public domain, as are many of the RiffTrax dvd's, and the movie turns up from all the cheapy dvd producers. I have three copies of the movie, though I shouldn't count the ep copy I have on the end of a MST3K tape I am keeping. I mostly enjoyed the movie, watching it with the guys commenting does help, but it's really more of a story for a short film. It would make a good Twilight Zone episode. At least it tries to be something different. Good on Herk. The guys are mostly pretty funny, occasionally bombing me with a joke.

Comments

[Sharon E. Dreyer]

Mystery Science Theater 3000 a great commentary on the B movies of the late 1940s and 1950s. The best part of the show was the robots that were made out of household items. I still enjoy watching the show. Check out my first and recently released novel, Long Journey to Rneadal. This exciting tale is a romantic action adventure in space and is more about the characters than the technology.