The MST3K Halloween Extravaganza

I've been awfully heavy on my favorite tv series of all time, next to Sailor Moon so today's post is a small collection of horror themed/related/attempted in some films' cases movie episodes. Note, I tried to go for a balanced Joel to Mike ratio, but there were 2 snags: 1) Joel did more monster/giant monster movies and scifi than horror movies, and 2) there weren't many people hosting some of the few horror movies Joel did do (I really wanted to post The Tormented D:). But its a fair sampling of halloweeny movies so let's shove onto them.

First up is a perennial favorite: Manos: The Hands of Fate. We've talked a smidge about it in Day 1 this year, but briefly: the feature of the episode stars no one, a film (if you can call it) made by a fertilizer salesman on a bet, in which a family of three get lost in the desert close to civilization and are set upon by a polygamous cult, headed by the Master, and caretakened (...>> s'not a word) by the now infamous Torgo. The short preceding the movie is the second part of Hired!, where a Chevy dealership owner tries to whip his staff into shape.

The second film has never been summed up as beautifully as an uploader of the episode, so I'll just paste it here: "Be prepared for some sort of fear (though perhaps not the right kind) with Zombie Nightmare. A teenage boy is killed in a hit-and-run, but his mother, having lost her husband in the beginning of the film (yeah, I didn't catch on to that either), turns to voodoo to seek revenge. The son-turned-zombie attacks those who were in the car with a baseball bat, but with Adam West (aka Batman) on the case...! No, there really is no way to end that."--moviesign2525

This film is of special significance to J-MACHine and I simply because all these wonderful metal bands were drafted for the film (as seen by the opening credits), yet the soundtrack is almost all bad synthesizer music. Enjoy, Astroboytoys, Zombie Nightmare. 8D

Preceded by a disturbing (to robots, anyway) Gumby short, "Robot Rump(us)", The Screaming Skull claims itself so scary that the makers of the film offer free burial services to those who die--of FRIGHT, mind you--while watching the movie. It seems like a rip-off of the novel Rebecca, only it has skulls and Mickey, your Torgo replacement for the evening, though it IS based on a novel, but not Rebecca. (Apologies, the opening has been removed in this video.)

Alternate titles for this film were Looking for Mickey, Screaming. Skull. and Knocking on Doors: The Movie.

Batting third in our line up is the infamous Werewolf, "starring" Joe Estevez (though he "stars" much more prominently in perennial favorite Soultaker), and a cast of people with accents that allow them to mangle even the simplest of multisyllabic words. Known best for its stinger: "This is absolutely fascinating. :|"

Another film I've slightly touched on in Day 1, and one of my fav episodes, this is without a doubt as bad as Manos. I present to you the FIRST MONSTER MUSICAL: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? Yes, with the punctuation like an excited teen texter and a title as long as a Panic! at the Disco title, TISCWSLaBMUZ is described on IMDB as: "Jerry falls in love with a stripper he meets at a carnival. Little does he know that she is the sister of a gypsy fortune teller whose predictions he had scoffed at earlier. The gypsy turns him into a zombie and he goes on a killing spree."

Its more like MORE people with outrageous accents try to talk to each other, there's some random and badly shot murders, sandwiched between musical numbers that have really nothing to do with the film. Still, its a fucking laugh with or without Mike and the bots, but I'll leave you in their capable hands. You filthy peeeegs.

And rounding out our movie extravaganza is a Joel era episode, and in fact a very early one. Joel and the bots are subjected to the infamous The Crawling Eye, which is the first episode aired on un-public access, and becomes the LAST movie the show has Mike and the bots watch at the end of the series almost 10 years later (albeit only the opening, as the true last film would be the italian spy thriller Diabolik). Like a soothingly comforting call-back to where it all started, The Crawling Eye, also known as the Trollenberg Terror stars Forest Tucker and little else.

Without this episode, however, I would never have found the Freakazoid episode The Cloud half as hilarious as I did when I first saw it, so as your bonus, I've included both parts to this episode so you can laugh along with me. A perfect parody of a lousy movie, watch as the animators make that extra effort to really mirror the original. NOTE: the original vids have of course been taken from youtube, so here's the best I can do with Dailymotion. It has the entire episode, starting with In Arms Way and The Cloud is the second segment, near the end. Click the nonsensical image to take you to the Dailymotion vid.

--Dio (10/5/11)