If you haven't seen The Room, you're fortunate. It is not so much a film as it is an experience and it is not a pleasant experience. While not quite as cringe-inducing as The Human Centipedeor its' sequels, The Room is equally uncomfortable to watch. To watch The Room is to stare into the heart of madness itself - a chaotic, Lovecraftian madness that goes by the name of Tommy Wiseau.
Wiseau is a man who - had he not been born - would have to be created by Sacha Baron Cohen. The kindest adjective that might be applied to Wiseau is eccentric. Independently wealthy through mysterious circumstances, Wiseau has been notoriously evasive about his origins since achieving infamy through his film. The Disaster Artist does not make Wiseau's past any clearer but it does explain his motivations somewhat.
Co-written by Greg Sestero, who played Mark in The Room in addition to serving (unwillingly) as the movie's Line Producer, The Disaster Artist alternates between two points-in-time. Told in alternating chapters, half the book is devoted towards the downward spiral that was the making of The Room. The other half is devoted towards detailing Sestero's life as a young actor in Southern California and how he befriended Wiseau.
Cult film fans will doubtlessly be interested in reading about Wiseau's process or lack thereof. There is all manner of trivia regarding the shoot, like how Wiseau constructed a roof-top set with green-screen backgrounds in a parking lot rather than using an actual rooftop. Despite this, the alternating chapters about Wiseau the man and his friendship with Sestero offer far more insight into Wiseau The Artist than anything else.
Sestero and co-author Tom Bissell paint Wiseau as an overgrown man-child - a poor little rich boy who never learned how to make friends and tried to buy the life he wanted. This seems as likely an explanation as any for many scenes in The Room that serve no purpose other than to establish Tommy's character Johnny as a popular, well-respected man - i.e. the sort of man Wiseau wishes he was but is incapable of being due to his crippling insecurities and control issues.
There lies the grand irony of this book. By exposing Wiseau at his most inhuman, Sestero inspires sympathy for the devil. Wiseau's antics on the set inspire pity rather than outrage as one senses he really doesn't know any better. Likewise, Sestero himself manages not to come off as a back-stabbing opportunist even as he lays his relationship with Wiseau bare. He is quick to praise Wiseau for his generosity and notes that Tommy gave him the emotional support Sestero's family didn't as he was trying to make it, thus taking the edge off when he tells tales of Wiseau's legendary miserliness on the set and his numerous breakdowns off of it.
While it's not worth reading more than once, The Disaster Artist is worth picking up at the library. It has a lot to offer whether you're a fan of cult cinema, an aspiring actor interesting in reading about another actor's attempts to make it or the sort of person who slows down to look at the car crashes on the side of the freeway. Aficionados of The Room may be disappointed there is less about the film than there is about the people behind it but they can easily skip half the book if it bothers them that much.
Reading through a recent AV Club article, it occurred to me that despite it being my favorite TV Show of all time, I had never composed a list of my personal picks for the greatest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Further contemplation caused something else to occur to me - I had no idea what movies I'd put on such a list!
"Greatness" is largely subjective, particularly with a show like MST3K which attracts viewers for a variety of reasons. As a famous fictional character I'm rather fond of once noted, everyone has a favorite Woody Allen movie or a favorite superhero that isn't the best of the bunch. Sure, everyone knows Annie Hall and Batman are the best... but that doesn't stop you from liking Radio Days or Green Lantern better. Similarly, everyone agrees "Manos" The Hands of Fate is a great MST3K episode... but damnit, you laugh so much harder at every "HE TRIED TO KILL ME WITH A FORKLIFT!" in the Fugitive Alien movies.
So rather than twist my brain trying to narrow the field down, continually correcting myself muttering "Wait, this one is good too!", I've decided that instead I'm going to give you a different list. I'm going to pick out ten of my favorite episodes that - for one reason or another - I don't think get the credit or attention they deserve. And to spare myself having to rank any of these episodes, I'm going to list them off in chronological order from Season 1 to Season 10.
Notable as the first episode to abandon the Invention Exchange at the start of the show since Joel's departure, this episode isn't notable for much else. Both Kevin Murphy and Frank Conniff decried Radar Secret Service as the dullest movie they ever covered, the movie basically being the 1950s equivalent of the many thriller films from the 1990s that were based around the amazing power of The Information Superhighway. Just swap "radar" with "Net" and you'll have some idea of what we're dealing with.
And yet, despite a duller than usual movie, there's so much about this episode that makes it work. For one thing, the host segments are all top-notch. Mike starts to stand out as a character apart from Joel, the skits establishing him as being totally incompetent as a robot doctor and being far more concerned with escaping from the Satellite Of Love than his red-jumpsuited counterpart. The Deep 13 skits where "Dr. Felix Frankenkeister (i.e. TV's Frank in a fake-beard) extols the power of Hypno-Helio-Static-Stasis With X-4 are gleefully insane. And the short before the film - a vehicle safety short sponsored by Union Specific Railroad titled Last Clear Chance - is one of the finest shorts the MST3K team ever tackled.
7. Village Of The Giants (Episode 523)
While many MSTies extoll the 3rd and 4th seasons as the show's Golden Age, this critic would also include the 5th season. Mike Nelson was fortunate to have a run of great episodes immediately after taking over the hosting duties but none of these episodes better showed that Mike had filled Joel's shoes than Village of the Giants.
Loosely based on the H.G. Wells story Food Of The Gods and overseen by writer/director Burt I. Gordon (the master of movies where things are made bigger through SCIENCE!), the cast of this film is a mishmash of actors who you probably saw somewhere else but can't place now. The one exception to this is Ron Howard, who plays a boy genius creatively named Genius. The movie is campy fun that takes itself far too seriously. But what really sells this episode is the alternatively touching and hilarious host segments where Dr. Forrester fires TV's Frank, hires Torgo of "Manos" The Hands Of Fate fame as a replacement henchman and it honestly appears that Frank might be leaving the show. This leads to the SOL Crew wishing him well with one of MST3K's finest songs - "The Greatest Frank Of All".
8. Deathstalker And The Warriors From Hell (Episode 703)
Produced by Roger Corman in response to the popularity of Conan The Barbarian, The Deathstalker Series is rightfully infamous. Any one of the Deathstalker movies might have made a fine MST3K episode yet the only one they ever tackled was Deathstalker And The Warriors From Hell a.k.a. Deathstalker 3. I suspect this may have been because this this film had the least nudity to edit out out of the entire quadrology. Or perhaps it was because this film - unlike the rest of the films in the series - seemed to be take itself completely seriously.
Either way, most people agree this was definitely the weakest of all the Deathstalker films - an impressive accomplishment when you consider that the fourth and final Deathstalker movie was 50% stock footage of other fantasy movies. But that is neither here nor there. What is here is some truly wicked host segments about Renaissance Fairs and a skit between Crow and Pearl Forrester that hints at their future implied friendship in the Sci-Fi Channel days.
9. Pumaman (Episode 903)
Perhaps the most well known episode on this list, Puma Man was continually rerun throughout the Sci-Fi Channel era. And yet, it hasn't been released for sale in any form. Reportedly this is due to difficulties Shout Factory is having in tracking down whoever currently holds the rights to this movie - one of the few superhero movies to make Batman and Robin look well-made.
The special effects are a mess, clearly meant to replicate those in Superman: The Movie with a lower budget. Our "hero" is a whiny twerp who has to be bullied into action by his Aztec-American sidekick, who is the real hero of the film. And the love interest - mind controlled by the villain for much of the movie - somehow manages to seem more vacant and empty headed in the scenes where she isn't being controlled.
10. Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (Episode 1003)
Notable for being the final episode of MST3K to be aired but not the last one to be filmed (apparently there were issues with securing the film rights that came up after filming of the episode was finished), everything about this episode screams "cheap". Borrowing footage from a horror movie made by the same director several years earlier, this was apparently meant to be the pilot for a TV show based around the concept of Merlin and his wife running a magical mystery shop and helping people solve their problems in the modern day.
It's not a bad concept for a story but it's oddly framed. Rather than having a narrator or Merlin himself set up the concept of the show... er, movie... we have Ernest Borgnine explaining the concept of TV pilots to his grandson and then telling him the story of this pilot he read once. So... yeah. Basically the whole movie is a really weird story-time session. This would be weird enough if the stories being told were at all appropriate for young audiences but all of the stories contain dark elements like evil toys from the Twilight Zone and a woman being granted the baby she always wanted after her crybaby husband is magically de-aged.
Reading through a recent AV Club article, it occurred to me that despite it being my favorite TV Show of all time, I had never composed a list of my personal picks for the greatest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Further contemplation caused something else to occur to me - I had no idea what movies I'd put on such a list!
"Greatness" is largely subjective, particularly with a show like MST3K which attracts viewers for a variety of reasons. As a famous fictional character I'm rather fond of once noted, everyone has a favorite Woody Allen movie or a favorite superhero that isn't the best of the bunch. Sure, everyone knows Annie Hall and Batman are the best... but that doesn't stop you from liking Radio Days or Green Lantern better. Similarly, everyone agrees "Manos" The Hands of Fate is a great MST3K episode... but damnit, you laugh so much harder at every "HE TRIED TO KILL ME WITH A FORKLIFT!" in the Fugitive Alien movies.
So rather than twist my brain trying to narrow the field down, continually correcting myself muttering "Wait, this one is good too!", I've decided that instead I'm going to give you a different list. I'm going to pick out ten of my favorite episodes that - for one reason or another - I don't think get the credit or attention they deserve. And to spare myself having to rank any of these episodes, I'm going to list them off in chronological order from Season 1 to Season 10.
1. Robot Monster (Episode 107)
A frequent nominee for the title of Worst Movie Ever Made, Robot Monster has little going for it besides its' title character - Ro-Man the Ro-Man. Played by expert gorilla actor George Barrows (who actually had a distinguished career after this movie) , Ro-Man is quite the sympathetic figure if only because the humans he is attempting to destroy are so incredibly annoying. The plot isn't worth going into. Suffice it to say it's the end of the world as we know it, except it's all a dream... OR IS IT?!
Why Is This A Great Episode? : It's no secret that The Best Brains team asked for Comedy Central to take all their Season One episodes out of the rerun rotation, believing the entire season to be of inferior quality. Even the most die-hard of MSTies typically think the show didn't start to be consistently good until the second season, at earliest. And Josh Weinstein reportedly objected to this movie being used in the first place, believing it was too infamous to be properly riffed and that it was ridiculous enough on its' own without commentary.
Personally, I agree with all of the above viewpoints.
And yet... this episode has moments of greatness that indicated the heights that were yet to come. While the riffs are often unnecessary and frequently are limited to Joel adding dialogue over bits where there is none or Crow pointing out flaws in continuity such as an unconcious hostage apparently tying themselves up, there are a couple of great lines here.
More importantly, the host segment skits - usually the weakest point of any MST3K episode - are amazingly effective this time around. There's just something unashamedly fun about The Bots attempting to roleplay Ro-Man and his commander before play-attacking Joel, who defends himself a bit too well with the conveniently placed break-away furniture. And the closing skit, in which Joel and The Bots don garbage-bag tunics and hum a dirge while pointing out Ro-Man's general incompetence and stupidity ("Ro-Man the Ro-Man used a cosmic ray that kept the cities of the world intact, to be enjoyed later by all Ro-Man. Yet, he lived in a cave. And not even a very good cave.") was an indicator of just how very strange yet hilarious the show would become.
2. Catalina Caper (Episode 204)
Originally released as Never Steal Anything Wet, this film marked an attempt by American International Pictures to mix the beach party musical and crime-caper comedy genres in one film. The fact that The Best Brains felt they could riff this movie gives you some idea of how successful they ultimately were.
Why Is This A Great Episode? : I picked this one for three reasons. First, there's a fair chance that most of you haven't seen this episode. Best Brains lost the rights to the movie during the middle of the original MST3K run, so there was a goodly amount of time when you couldn't see this episode in reruns. A similar situation came along years later, when the movie was optioned for a VHS/DVD release and then went out of print.
Secondly, this episode is notable as the first episode from the Comedy Central days that wasn't a low-budget B-Movie. Of course MST3K is synonymous with bad science-fiction, exploitation and horror/thrillers but Catalina Caper proved they could apply their riffing talents to other genres. Indeed, it proved that they could even tackle a musical comedy.
Finally, this episode contains Kevin Murphy's first turn lending his splendid singing voice to Tom Servo. The song he sings - a tribute to the film's heroine - has rightfully become a standard among MSTies and it is said that many a MSTie has serenaded many a confused woman with it. I speak, of course, of The Creepy Girl Song.
3. Teenage Caveman (Episode 315)
A timeless tale of youthful enthusiasm versus traditional conservatism, made slightly sillier in that the whole thing is set in caveman times, everyone is wearing costumes made from fake fur car-seat covers and the titular teenage caveman is closer to 30 than 20. Still, Roger Corman got it made on-time and under-budget, so presumably it was a success by his notoriously low standards.
Why Is This A Great Episode? : Another episode that has yet to be released for sale in any form (Roger Corman has apparently become much more protective of licensing his older works in recent years), this episode is a hoot and a half. There's a lot to make fun of - the cheapness of the costumes and sets, the haminess of most of the performances and the twist ending, which would be a good deal more effective if it were not so damned preachy.
This leads into a delightful skit where The Bots take on the role/roles of the closing narrator, in costume, and continue to try and "tie up a few loose ends" even as Joel (bemused as any parent might be, walking in on his kids playing pretend) tries to get down to the serious business of reading the fan mail. There's also a brilliant running gag with The Mads attempting to kill each other for the privilege of introducing this episode's Invention Exchange... complete with Star Trek fight music.
But what really makes this episode a must-see is the two shorts that accompany the main feature. Aquatic Wizards is a fairly standard 50's Sports Montage, made more enjoyable by the standard dark riffing. But Catching Trouble - depicting the "real life" (i.e. obviously staged) exploits of hunter Ross Allen attempting to capture several animals alive- will leave you howling with laughter even as you write out a check to the SPCA.
4. Being From Another Planet (Episode 405)
The world's worst Egyptology professor has to deal with the theft of his newly discovered mummy, a humorless dean who is convinced the mummy's disappearance is a plot to justify more grant money, a strange fungus that is slowly killing his students and reports of a killer dressed like a mummy. Originally released in 1982 under the title Time Walker, the new title gives away the "shocking" twist of this movie. Namely, that the murderous mummy that wasn't quite as dead as previously believed is actually an alien who REALLY overslept after a hard day of helping build the pyramids.
Why Is This A Great Episode? : Following immediately after the classic Teenagers From Outer Space,this episodehas become the neglected middle child of MST3K's Fourth Season. Surprisingly, Being From Another Planet was widely held by many MSTies to be the worst movie the show had ever tackled until it covered Monster-A-Go-Go and "Manos" The Hands Of Fate later that season. Indeed, Tom Servo spends the entire closing credits arguing this point with the rest of the cast and it's not hard to see why.
The "twist" ending is obvious to the audience long before anyone in the film works out what is going on. The characters who aren't idiots are loathsome, with even our professor hero carrying on a relationship with one of his students. All the performances are lackluster. And the effects are laughable, with the "trick" used to show things from the monster's point of view (i.e. a blue-green gel over the camera lens) making much of the film as hard to see as it is to watch.
5. Hercules (Episode 502)
Steve Reeves in the role that made him a household name and a Rocky Horror song lyric. Set against the story of Jason and the Argonauts quest for the Golden Fleece, Hercules renounces his immortality to win the acceptance of his fellow men and the love of a good woman. Basically it's like Superman 2, only with more dancing amazons in mini-togas and big, well-oiled Greek guys.
Why Is This A Great Episode? : With this episode, The Best Brains team proved that they could riff anything. They had tackled Hercules movies before. Heck, they even tackled the sequel to this movie - Hercules Unchained - first. But in all honesty, this movie isn't that bad. It isn't a great movie but it is good for what it is.
And out of all the movies based on Greek Mythology, it's probably the truest to the source material if you ignore little touches like Ulysses playing Robin to Hercules' Batman. Even then there's some cute touches that will have the mythology geeks chuckling, like Ulysses sending homing pigeons to his girlfriend assuring her he'll be home soon.
I was part of a panel for the most recent episode of the podcast Cult Film Fanatics, now hosted by United States of Geekdom. So if you ever wanted to listen to me muse on the irony that a musical based on the author's experiences getting off of drugs requires you to be high to appreciate it or wax philsophical on the importance of PG rated movies with nudity to teenage boys of a certain generation... here you go!
