I watched this a couple weeks ago so it won't be fresh in my mind. Sorry about that.
Anyway, this was one of the more anticipated things to be released this year for MSTies. Sure, we already had rifftrax, but where's our host segments? Not to mention the small annoyance of syncing the movie with the mp3 player. Here we finally have our direct-to-dvd MST3k that we should have had in 2000, except life is unfair. I ordered this from amazon the day before it was officially shipped.
Side note: Amazon delayed my order for more then a week. A few days ago I saw it being sold at a Best Buy. I know where I'm ordering the next The Film Crew movie.
I finally got the dvd on a Tuesday but waited a few days before finally watching the movie. For those who don't know, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett are no longer a guy and two robots in space forced to watch bad movies. Now they are three guys stuck in some room forced to watch bad movies. Everybody got that? Instead of riffing on movies just to keep their sanity intact, they are asked by their boss to provide a commentary because he just believes these poor movies deserve one just like their more fortunate colleagues. The guys never see their boss, so they make fun of the movie.
This episode finally reveals who Bob Honcho is. He's an old white guy who believes in preserving old films. Of course, he's a rich old white guy, so he only talks over a speaker to his employees, but he's a nice, if oblivious, guy. I thought it was Mike doing his Jack Perkins but the credits said it was something else.
Anyway, the dvd starts with a slightly amusing host segments where the guys introduce themselves before chatting with Bob Honcho. The funniest joke is over who would be the most unlikely woman to appear as a stripper in the movie. There's two other host segments, one in the middle of the movie. These are ok if unmemorable, but I have to say that I missed the host segments after listening to the Star Wars rifftrax. Maybe it's my terrible attention span that was begging for several breaks. I would have liked one more host segment, even though the entire thing is ninety minutes long. (It's as long as MST3k: The Movie!)
The guys finally sit down to watch the movie. Unfortunately there's no silhouettes, because they can't rip off everything from MST3k. That and it's a low budget production, of course. (I miss Crow's dimension defying head.) The riffing is a bit less rapid fire than on MST3k. Also, at times the riffing seems to be for a more general audience, as the guys occasionally have small conversations. (Of course, it makes sense given the premise, and thankfully it only happens a few times.)
Hollywood After Dark started slowly for me, but after they got away from the junkyard I started getting into both the movie and the riffing. The movie is a mostly plotless film about stripping, a robbery, and probably some other stuff. When I say I got into it, it was mostly fascination about how little anything happened in the movie. Rue McClanahan plays some woman who chooses to strip after not doing so well as an actress. She meets some guy who's part of a stripping business and they have a boring, depressing relationship. They go to the beach a few times. At some poin, Rue has a relationship with some sleazy guy who probably rapes her. The two guys fight, and if I could remember which one was which it could have been not boring. At some poin during all this, a robbery takes place. It ends the usual pre-1970s way.
What's funny is that given all the talk about how there's stripping in this movie, it's pretty damn boring. It should be the highlight of a no budget, no plot movie like this, but some of the funniest riffing happened as the guys started to wish for anything else to appear on screen. Also, Rue McClanahan wasn't that attractive. Apparently, The Golden Girls lasted several years because the idea of Rue being the sex-crazed one was just sooo funny. Now I know why.
I've already described the rest of the movie. There's not enough there to really go into detail.
The riffing starts off slowly but takes off after the junkyard scene. I still wish it was a bit more fast-paced like MST3k, but it certainly gets the job done. Besides the stripping scenes, other highlights include the focus on Rue and that first guy's depressing relationship. The funniest riffs comes when the guy starts to frolic on the beach, if frolic it the right word. Another memorable gag was the 'pitching the movie' riff cracked halfway through the movie. Good stuff.
Since this is not shown on cable tv, the guys can get away with a couple things they couldn't on SciFi Channel, but it's not as bad as some reviewers make it sound. Probably the most objectional riff was one where they used a crude term for sex early in the movie while the couple was on the beach. As for the movie, the rape is off screen and the stripping is boring, although one stripper has diamond covered nipples, or whatever. It's borderline nudity, I guess. I haven't seen it in a while.
One odd thing is that this was supposedly made in 2005, according to the credits. I guess Shout! Factory held onto it for a couple years. I wasn't expecting these four dvds to become a full length direct-to-dvd season, but I was hoping that the guys would make more if these dvds were successful. They still might, but it seems less likely now. Let's all cross our fingers that these DVDs are a success and Shout! asks the guys to do four more episodes in the future.
Killers In Space is the next DVD and I really recommend getting it from Best Buy. I haven't seen that movie either so it should be a treat.
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