MST3k Episode #104: Preliminary Reaction

So I saw The Women of the Prehistoric Planet yesterday for the first time.

Anyway, this is a season one episode, so the host segments all suck. Seriously. Joel's invention is toilet paper in a 2 liter plastic bottle, and that's it. One of the mad scientists make a joke about using it for a molotiv cocktail. Joel gets angry, but since the thing only seems to exists for that joke, the whole thing fails. The song about Clay And Lar's Flesh Farm must have looked funny on paper, or when it was made up on the spot just as everybody was getting stoned right before the camera rolled.

The rest of the host segments are about a doomsday device. For some bizarre reason, this leads to a lot of Isaac Asimov jokes instead of Dr. Stranglove jokes. I guess the writers (or The Comedy Channel?) thought since "science" is in the shows title, it needs to be less pop-culturey and have more jokes for SF nerds. I've only read "I, Robot", so Asimov-bashing doesn't work for me. The ridiculous prop that Joel uses to pull the device inside the sattelite is a hoot, though. It's no Manipulator Arms, that's for sure.

The movie is a space movie, which means it's boring. (Sorry, but space movies often dump the spaceship because listening to on board protocol is sleep-inducing.) This movie takes too long to do so. Anyway, I didn't catch what the plot was about because it was the first time I saw the movie and I was waiting for the guys to say something funny. There was a good gag here and there, but it's no Robot Monster.

From what I gathered, there are two spaceships. One spaceship is going to meet another one because of something to do with Centaurians. One of the oddest parts of this movie is the way it treats Centaurians. And when I say Centaurians, I mean Asians. Seriously, what the heck? Anyway, one ship crashes, and the other ship has to go to that planet. There's some scientifical stuff about how going at the speed of light makes the second ship go faster then people on a planet. This at first seems to be a nod to actual science (boring!) but then appears to be more bogus as the plot goes on (sadly, not that less boring.)

Anyway, starship two lands on some prehistoric planet, and we learn that it has no women. There's only three women in the whole movie, and two are useless to the plot. The only major female role is a "Centaurian" who is the daughter of drunken Wendell Corey for some reason. She ends up meeting a crazy survivor of the first ship who is a Centaurian (PHEW!!) and is now acting like a caveman. They have a very juvenile relationship and end up together.

The rest of the movie which is not about boring space sets and an uninteresting "love" story is about a bunch of white guys I can't tell apart. One of them is John Agar, but I couldn't see it was him except for a couple scenes. There's a comedy relief who's probably in his forties and says, "Haikeeba!" before flipping for no reason, but even he seemed forgettable when usually you end up hating such a character. This movie seemed like it was going to set up a lost Amazon tribe scenario, but they completey avoid that. So what's with the title?

The highlight of this movie is one of the lamest action scenes I've ever seen. There's some pool that the generic white guys have to cross, and there's a lone log. The pool has a dry ice effect, so the guys assume it's dangerous. One of them barely makes it across what must be about ten to fifteen feet. They tie a rope over the pool and four of the five guys make it across, while some loser falls in. What makes this so lame is that they could have easily crossed this puddle by walking five feet to their left and cross there. There was absolutely no reason to cross over this thing, except that the movie needed some lame action.

More highlights: Nobody lands a punch. Some guy gets killed by a really goofy spider puppet, and one of the survivors says, "It was the shock that killed him more then the venom." He must be more arachnophobic then me if he dies of shock due to that goofy thing. There's the Eegah-ness of the caveman Tang. Lastly, there's the ending to the movie which tries to be profound, or shocking, or some damn thing, but it only reminds us that the movie cheated us out of a perfectly good lost amazon tribe scenario.

Anyway, bad movie. Bad episode.