407-The Killer Shrews

Film Year:  1959
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Ray Kellogg
Starring:  James Best, Ingrid Goude, Gordon McLendon, Baruch Lumet
MST Season:  4
Featured Short:  "Junior Rodeo Daredevils"

The Short

Two juvenile delinquents decide to be idiots and vandalize a horse’s rear end.  Instead of doing the sane thing and letting the horse kick them, old cowpoke Billy Slater convinces them to use their energy by organizing a junior rodeo, because these kids are obviously focused enough to do such a thing.

I hate rodeos.  I grew up with them, because my mother and sister were horse riders and both had been part of them several times (my mother was a barrel racer while my sister just marched through them with the US flag).  However, I just could never get into the sport.  I was constantly told that the only real men were bull riders.  I’m sorry that not tying up a bull’s testicles and being stupid enough to climb on its back makes me not a “real man,” but personally I can live with that.

Rodeos feel like animal cruelty for entertainment, which just doesn’t gel with me.  Needless to say, this short bugs the hell out of me.  Not just the rodeos, but the obnoxious kids and shameless western drawl narrator just makes me want to burn this thing.  Rodeos can go to hell.  And this junior rodeo can rot right beside it.

The Movie

I love myself a crappy monster movie.  The Killer Shrews, however, might just be that one monster movie that is crappy in all the wrong ways.  Our story is about a group of people trapped on an island by a hurricane, where a scientist has been conducting experiments on making human beings smaller in an attempt to prevent overpopulation.  Unfortunately his experiments also create a giant breed of shrew, who can kill with a single bite!

Originally a quickly filmed second half of a double feature with The Giant Gila Monster, The Killer Shrews fares fairly poorly as a movie on its own.  Gila Monster may not be a great movie, but it has some base competencies that Shrews lacks, which means you’re probably better off bailing on this double feature after the first movie is over.

Killer Shrews mostly takes place inside of a single set, which makes the majority of the film seem like a play.  It’s not a terribly exciting play, because the exposition being hammered into our heads is hardly compelling drama and the characters exist to provide a very base relationship with each other (there’s a love triangle because of course there is).  The film becomes a bit dull as we wait endlessly for some shrew action.

When we finally get to some promised shrew action, the movie doesn’t disappoint.  Well…it will disappoint those who were hoping it would be exciting.  Those hoping it would be hilarious will get their money’s worth.  The shrews look ridiculous, as the crew opts to put silly shaggy costumes on a group of dogs and have them chase our actors.  They look kooky, and the movie is dead set on making them come off as a threat.  It’s funny to see them try so hard with so little.

Finale is a hoot.  The rest of the movie stinks.

The Episode

One of my least favorite experiments starts with what could be my least favorite short.  Not only is the short annoying, but the riffing doesn’t cut it.  It gets off to a bad start after the title is announced in a thick country accent, “Junior Rodeo Daredevils,” and Joel pipes up “Smothered in gravy, TEXAS STYLE!”  I understand what this is a reference to, and to a lesser extent I understand why he made the riff.  The problem is it isn’t funny.  And when I say I don’t find it funny, I mean that I don’t find it funny at all.  The short is littered with similar riffs, where I get them but don’t find them funny.  As the short goes on there seems like there should be a lot that can be done with the material, but at times Joel and the bots become content with repeating the same lame jokes over and over.  It grows tiresome hearing “And the crowd goes wild!” “Yaaaaaaaaaaay.” repeatedly over the short’s brief runtime. Junior Rodeo Daredevils is a tiresome chore.

The episode would be worth watching if the movie picked up the slack, but it never does.  With the self-seriousness goofiness of the movie, one would think this episode would be a slam dunk.  While they’re sharper than they were with the short, this episode falls short of greatness by a good margin.  The first thing you realize about their work here is that the print of the movie they’re working with is really bad, which makes making out the dialogue a bit difficult.  The boys quickly making a running gag out of this, as they try to make out lines of dialogue as being something entirely different because they can’t make it out.  It’s amusing, but wears out its welcome.  They also try to play to the play-like nature of the movie, which is mostly shot on one set.  The results are mixed, skewing slightly disappointing.  The crew does have some fun with pointing out that the “shrews” are really dressed up dogs, and there are one or two good drunk jokes too.

As for the host segments, they’re passable but don’t really improve the episode.  I like that Killer Shrews board game Servo and Crow make (it’s not as funny as the one they did for The Unearthly though), but the segment drowns when they start breaking down over the movie.  The Killer Shrew cocktail they invent is kind of neat also.  I dig the Invention Exchange, which has Dr. Forrester almost destroying the world, but finds his invention is no match for Joel’s Jim Henson’s Edgar Winter Babies.

This episode just doesn’t rise to the occasion.  It’s sad that they couldn’t do better with this particular movie, but you win some, you lose some.  This one just happened to be a loser.

Not Recommended

The DVD

Killer Shrews was released by Rhino Home Video on their Volume 7 set.  While the video and audio were both fine, original discs that were sold were accidentally edited, and the opening narration of the film was lost.  The issue was corrected, replacement discs were sent, and the sets Rhino made since featured the corrected disc.  The one I purchased was the corrected version, so I never had this problem, but in this fanbase…man that was a shit storm.

The disc features three bonus shorts.  The first is an unreleased short called Assignment:  Venezuela, which was created as an exclusive for a CD-ROM version of the series (unfortunately it was cancelled, though this and a lost second short were both filmed), making this an awesome feature to have.  The short is pretty funny, as well, though the other shorts might just be funnier.  Taken from the Sci-Fi era, we also have Century 21 Calling (from Space Children) and A Case of Spring Fever (from Squirm).  The latter is my favorite of the group, personally.

The short featured on the episode, Junior Rodeo Daredevils, was featured on the Shorts Volume 1 compilation featured on Rhino’s Volume 2 collection.  Here the short enjoyed an introduction by Tom Servo.  This compilation was re-released by Shout Factory in their re-release of Volume 2, and also featured the intro by Tom Servo.