| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE
Rating: 
USA. 1995.
Director/Producer – Jim Mallon, Screenplay – Jim Mallon, Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Bridget Jones, Kevin Murphy, Michael J. Nelson & Mary Jo Pehl, Based on the tv series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Created by Joel Hodgson, Photography – Jeff Stonehouse, Music – Billy Barber, Hexfield & Interociter Visual Effects – Cinema Research Corporation, Opitcal/Digital Effects – VCE-Peter Kuran (Supervisors – David Emerson & Brian Griffin), Special Effects – PM Effects, Makeup – Glen Griffin & Robert I. Phillips, Production Design – Jef Maynard. Production Company – Gramercy Pictures/Best Brains.
Cast:
Michael J. Nelson (Mike Nelson), Trace Beaulieu (Dr Clayton Forrester/Voice of Crow T. Robot), Kevin Murphy (Voice of Tom Servo), Jim Mallon (Voice of Gypsy), John Brady (Benkitnorf)
Plot: The crazed Dr Clayton Forrester keeps Mike Nelson a prisoner in an orbiting satellite where, as an experiment in driving someone insane, he is forcing Mike to watch bad sf films. Mike and the station robots are now forced to sit and watch ‘This Island Earth’, which they try to cope with by keeping up a running commentary of wisecracks.
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988-99) began as a Z-movie late-night tv show where the hosts would interject at various points throughout the screening to crack one-liners and make derisive jokes about the film. As with the similarly formatted Elvira show, the popularity of the series eventually outgrew the tv screen to spill into movie theatres. The whole making fun of bad movies that the show bases itself on is really an exercise in fashionable sarcasm. And, as with the target made of This Island Earth (1955) here, it is an undiscriminating sarcasm that ignores any virtues or artistic merits a film may have and is founded solely around deriving humour out of the less-sophisticated effects and corniness that dialogue has or may appear to have when isolated out of context.
The sad truth that Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie seems to miss is that This Island Earth is not a bad sf film up there with Robot Monster (1953) or Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). In fact, in what is rather offensive to one’s intelligence, This Island Earth is actually a far better film than Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie is. This film only has a series of mostly lame, occasionally amusing, jokes going for it. It doesn’t have anything appreciable in the way of a plot – merely a slim premise which is only a springboard to allow it to make its gags and which it occasionally, half-heartedly remembers to get back to. For all its laughing at the effects of This Island Earth, the effects that the film offers up here having been made forty years later do not seem any more sophisticated. There really seems something objectionable in the way the whole film is put together – it is a film which uses another entire film as its substance and then spends the entire time deriding it. The effect is not unakin to being forced to sit in a theatre with a loudmouth who insists on talking the entire way through a film.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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