MST3K Month: A Touch of Satan

So I apologize that MST3K Month has been kind of a bust. I guess you could call it "my eyes were bigger than my stomach" cause frankly I just kinda lost track of time and I'm surprised it' already the 21st. Even though there's 9 days left in the month, and I could squeak out a few more reviews, I wouldn't have accomplished all that I wanted to. With that said...I did watch "A Touch of Satan" last night.

I can't even imagine what the filmmakers were going for when they made this movie. I watched this episode on Youtube (I do have it on VHS and it is on Instant Watch but I didn't feel like messing with any of that) and reading the comments I saw someone compare this to "Twilight" and oddly enough, it fits.

You have some guy named Jody driving cross country cause he "wants to be independent" from his father, who stops in a small town that keeps a secret! OOH!! There's been a bunch of killings in this town but no one seems to know who did it. Jody goes "alright then" and keeps on truckin' (it's a '70s film). He passes by a field and decides to stop there and eat lunch. There, he meets Melissa. She's sorta hot in a way that's hard to describe. I guess I can describe it this way: she's the only girl under 50 in this movie. So in that aspect, she's the hottest thing you'll see in this movie.

Anyway, what makes this movie memorable is.......the.......long.......pauses......between......conversations. Holy hell, did the director realize he only had enough material for a 30 minute movie and told them to talk slowly?

Anyway, Melissa invites Jody to her house to meet her parents. They get nervous for some reason, and get more nervous when Melissa makes Jody stay the night. Jody meets the great-grandmother, who's face is horribly burned and looks to be roughly 500 years old.

So what's going on? Basically, Melissa is a witch who, a long ass time ago (like 1850 or something) she and her family were attacked by the local townspeople who wanted to "burn the witch"! They started with Melissa's sister, who is the burned great-grandmother. Melissa saved her by selling her soul to Satan. And I guess this caused her to never age? It was never explained.

Jody doesn't believe any of this, even after watching sister/great-grandmother kill a cop in front of him. Melissa gets tired of her sister's shit and decides to kill her herself. The next day, Melissa and Jody fuck, which freed Melissa, I guess, and causes her to finally look her age. Jody claims he's in love with her and doesn't want her to die, so HE sells HIS soul to Satan to save her.

Man. I've said I been in love with my ex-girlfriends and thought I'd be with them forever. Glad I didn't do that.

Anyway, check out the MST3K episode if you haven't, there's a part where one of them time the pause and it gets to 8 seconds. It's ridiculous.


-Jason

The Soto List: My Top Ten Favorite Joel Episodes

This being MST3K month here at Invasion of the B Movies, I figured I should list off some of my favorite episodes, but seeing how the show can be divided by who likes which host better, I decided to split them and count down ten of my favorite Joel episodes and ten of my favorite Mike episodes. Naturally, we start off with Joel.

10. Attack of The The Eye Creatures-I just recently rewatched this and I never realized how much fun they had while doing this episode. The movie certainly doesn't deserve to be taken seriously and it's only fitting they don't.

9. The Slime People-A very early episode. They hadn't found their footing yet but this episode is one of my favorite Season 1 episodes. The riffing is good, considering, and if you want a good snapshot on what Season 1 was like, this would be a good episode to watch.

8. Rocket Attack, USA-I was surprised on how much I liked this episode. The movie is very boring but all the riffs had me laughing. This is also a landmark episode: it's the first time they used what's called a "stinger", a short clip featuring a really weird, goofy, or plain funny scene from the movie.



7. Operation Double 007-This is a weird premise for a movie. James Bond's brother, played by Sean Connery's brother in real life, is sent out on a spy mission. I'm only putting this movie on the list cause of this segment:



6. Warrior of the Lost World-DO YOU HAVE ANY FRUIT TO DECLARE?!?

5. The Pod People-Out of all the "E.T" rip-off's, this is probably the dumbest. Featuring an ALF-like alien named Trumpy, a very annoying kid, and a group of rock stars, this is the PERFECT MST3K episode.

4. Santa Claus Conquers The Martians-One of two Christmas MST3K episodes I watch every year (The other coming up in a future post), this is a wacky film but I excuse it cause it's really geared towards kids.

3. Manos: The Hands of Fate-Calling this a favorite is like calling the Yadda, Yadda, Yadda episode of "Seinfeld" a favorite but you have to give it up to them, they had to watch this movie 7 or 8 times. I could only stomach it once without the riffing.

2. Mitchell-Joel's last episode. He made sure to go out with a bang and considering this film stars Joe Don Baker, what a bang.

1. Teenagers From Outer Space-This episode makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. Especially when they have characters singing classic rock songs. It's a great episode and a perfect movie for them.

So those are my favorite Joel episodes. A Mike one will be coming sometime next week. And yes, I promise I'll get to my reviews of "The Green Slime" and "Laserblast" before the month is over. Promise.
-Jason

MST3K: Werewolf

"Werewolf" came out in 1996, and the MST3K episode came out in 1998, which made this movie the NEWEST movie they've riffed. Some speculated that the filmmakers made the movie bad on purpose to be put on MST3K, which back in 1996 was around it's 7th season. Unless the director Tony Zarindast emails me telling me the truth, we may never know.

But (ir)regardless, "Werewolf". I swear the worse things to happen to movies is the direct to video market. It's like people don't even try anymore and say "Well, if this doesn't get a theatrical release, this can go direct to video. YAY!!" Because out of all the shitty werewolf films I've seen ("Twilight" included), this is probably the shittiest.

A group of...people? I refuse to call them archaeologists cause they just stand around, drink beer, and fight. So these people are in the desert digging around when they come across a skeleton that looks like a human with a wolf head. The local Indians think it's a werewolf and freak out. Joe Estevez is there to calm everybody down. And...

HOLY FUCK RICHARD LYNCH IS IN THIS MOVIE?!? I FORGOT RICHARD LYNCH IS IN THIS MOVIE!



Ok, I'm calm. So Richard Lynch takes the werewolf bones back to his office where he and a chick named Natalie try to figure out what it is exactly. There's a guy named Yuri who's fuckin' hysterical because every scene in this movie, he has different colored hair and even different hairstyles. I can't figure out what the hell that was about. Maybe he was bald and wanted to try out different wigs? I mean, what the fuck?

Anyway, Yuri takes the role of "I want to exploit this" the best I can. Meanwhile, some Indian who got attacked by the werewolf skeleton is now turning into a werewolf. When Yuri finds out and realizes the bones have essence of werewolf, he decides to turn people left and right into werewolves!

Then we meet Paul. He's a writer from New York who moved here to Arizona (I guess, they call the city Flagstaff) and he meets Natalie and instantly they fall in love. Paul meet his own hilarious character of Sam, the caretaker of the house Paul is renting. I have no idea how to describe Sam so here's a picture:



Anyway, Paul and Natalie have a small romance, so she takes him to show the werewolf bones, when Yuri is there. He uses the bones to attack Paul (so Yuri loves these bones but he uses them as weapons? The fuck?), which gives Paul a huge gash on his back.

Surprise surprise surprise! Paul is a werewolf! Yuri discovers this and wants to cage him, but Paul escapes and roams around Arizona and attacks random people. Natalie, when she's not hustling people at the pool tables, is out looking for were-Paul. Did I mention Natalie looks like this?



Butter-face?

Ok so Yuri is looking for Paul, Paul kills Yuri, and because Paul had sex with Natalie, Natalie turns into a werewolf and the movie simply ends. And if you watch the MST3K episode, you get this awesomeness!



The movie sucks, plain and simple. I don't get what the fuck Yuri's problem was, between fighting everybody and having 200 different hairstyles. The acting is terrible. I'm sure the chick playing Natalie is a porn star. It's all very...weird. And Richard Lynch is sorely underused in this movie. Cause lord knows we need more Richard Lynch.


-Jason

MST3K Month: Attack of The (The) Eye Creatres

Now here's a great example of not only how NOT to make a movie, but the perfect "Mystery Science Theater 3000" movie. It's horrible but fun, features scenes and situations you need to see to believe, and feature laughable monsters. But I need to address something that you probably noticed right away: The title.

The film was originally titled "The Eye Creatures" but sometime later it went through a weird re-distribution process where someone decided to retitle the movie "Attack of The Eye Creatures". The problem was they weren't paying attention and ended up adding "Attack of The" before the title card. Good job, Gomer.

Anyway, the movie itself. During the credit sequence, some military guy is locked up in a classroom and he's showing a film to some other military guy. The film is suppose to be PROOF that aliens have arrived! The film (narrated by Peter Graves) just shows a toy on a string flying over a plant. This is suppose to represent a UFO landing in a town.

Then we meet the most loathsome characters I've ever seen in my life, and I just recently seen "A Serbian Film". They're two military guys sitting in some room watching some top secret satellite camera thing, which they have aimed at a bunch of teenagers making out. The two guys just make jokes, and mugs at the camera about watching this. It's pretty weird.

We finally meet our central characters. First up is Carl and Mike. They're friends who drifted into town a month ago and they're trying to find jobs and/or women to hook up with. Well, Carl is anyway. Mike just wants to go home and sleep. Killjoy.

Then we meet Stan and Susan. They are young lovers who plan on running away and eloping. Susan's father, who is some bigwig in this small town, doesn't like Stan a whole hell of a lot. But you know how that goes. And finally, we meet the best character in this movie: Old Man Bailey.

Old Man Bailey literally spends his days and nights standing on his porch with a loaded shotgun, chasing "damn smoochers off his property!" That's all he does throughout the whole movie, stand there, yell about smoochers, and shoots a shotgun. And speaking of day and night, the main flaw this movie has (out of a billion other flaws) is the day-to-night shots. Everybody says that it's too dark outside or it's nighttime, but it's clearly 1 PM. They didn't even try to hide this fact by tinting the film, or having people stand in shadows, or anything. Just bam! It's "night".

Ok so in the forest, the aliens, the Eye Creatures, are roaming around. Stan and Susan are driving when they hit one, killing it. Killing it caused the alien's hand to break off (I don't know) and the hand tears a hole in the tire. They walk to Old Man Bailey's house to call the police, but because they're "kids", the cops don't listen to them.

Then here comes Carl. He spots the dead monster, rushes to a phone (I think it was Old Man Bailey's phone as well) and calls Mike, telling him they're gonna be rich! Mike doesn't believe him either and just wants to go back to sleep. Carl goes back to the body to put it in his car when another alien shows up and kills Carl.

The police show up (because Old Man Bailey told them to cause of all the people coming in and out of his house) and spot Carl's body. The cops think it's what Stan and Susan hit and arrest them for manslaughter. They prove their innocence by saying they hit an alien, but no one will listen. Then it turns into "The Fugitive".

Stan and Susan are left alone in the police station by a unlocked door, so of course they run out, steal a car, and go to Mike's house. They think if they get Mike on their side, the cops will listen to them. Mike at first doesn't believe them, but once he learns about Carl's death, he slowly gives in.

All three drive back to the first, where they spot the disembodied hand locked in a car. Mike sees it, believes them finally, and goes to take a picture of it. The flash from the bulb causes the hand to blow up. Armed with this knowledge, they now know how to kill the aliens: by shining bright lights on them. So they're the original "Gremlins"?

Like I said, this is a really bad monster movie but it's a lot of fun. It's so bad and cheesy that you'll find plenty to laugh about. Especially when we see Mike and his choice of sleepwear. Even if you watch this movie without the guys of MST3K, I think you'll enjoy the experience. Just don't take it seriously, lord knows the people who made it didn't.


-Jason

Dude! It's MST3K Month!

I forgot to formally announce that all of November will be (here at Invasion of the B Movies) MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 MONTH!!!



YAY!!!!

....what do you mean "what does that mean?" I mean...gah! It's....Mystery Science Theater 3000....month.

Oh alright fine.

All throughout November, I will be watching MST3K episodes and reviewing movies featured on MST3K! This includes:
-A video review of "The Green Slime", the movie watched in the pilot episode of "MST3K"
-A Site review of "Laserblast", which Leonard Maltin actually kinda liked
-And a bunch of other stuff in between!

This won't tie-in to the Lair, but that's fine. We did enough tributes to it last year. So with that said...



To Infinity! And...Other Stuff!
-Jason