514-Teen-Age Strangler

Film Year:  1964
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Ben Parker (Spider-Man's Uncle Ben?)
Starring:  Bill Bloom, Paul Ensign, Jo Canterberry, John Humphreys
MST Season:  5
Featured Short:  “Is This Love?”

The Short

This first short of the Mike era is sex ed, 50’s style, where sexual relations don’t exist and men and women only get married because they find the other totally keen.  Peg and Joe are college students but have just gotten engaged and their family is concerned that they might be rushing into the commitment.  The short consists of people trying to talk sense into the young couple, only to have them elope in the end and drop out of college anyway.

The short was obviously meant to stimulate discussion in a classroom, as the teacher is supposed to ask the student whether Peg and Joe did the right thing.  It’s possible that the intent was for there to not be a right or wrong answer and let the viewer draw their own conclusions, but in the context of the film itself it seems to me that Peg and Joe are both stubborn and not too bright.  Maybe college wasn’t the best place for them after all, yet the idea of these two lunkheads breeding doesn’t appeal to me either.

Maybe that was intentional too, to sway toward the side of them being brash so they can plant the chastity seed in the heads of teenagers.  Whatever the reason, the short works well enough for its purpose, but its grey area needs work.

The Movie

It’s amateur hour in the theater, and we have a movie that really makes you long for the lavish production values of Bride of the Monster.  This low budget, independent pile of…er I mean thriller sees an unknown assailant who attacks teenage girls and strangles them to death.

Often overlooked in fan circles, but Teen-Age Stranger is one of the very worst movies ever featured on the show.  Maybe people don’t want to grill it too much, because its limitations make it almost like picking on a little girl with Down syndrome.  But it’s just a mess of a movie, obviously a cheap attempt to rake in some cash from the exploitive teenage horror crowd that was becoming popular at the time.  But that attempt is really the only interesting thing about the movie, as it plays out almost like a proto-slasher movie before the slasher movie craze.

But there’s so much padding, bad acting, obnoxious characters, and poor filmmaking that the movie never ceases being a complete pain in the ass to watch.  At every turn where I try to find a positive aspect about the production, the movie finds itself doing something completely stupid to brush it off.  In the end it comes off as a really odd and annoying thing that the 60s produced, and honestly I have a fairly low tolerance of a lot of things 60s as is.

At any rate this film is proof that just because something didn’t come out of Hollywood doesn’t mean it’s immune to sucking.

The Episode

“Doin’ da butt!  Uh-uh.  Doin’ da butt!”  (One of those scenes where I just laugh my ass off every time)

Here we are with Mike's second outing as host, and while it doesn't quite reach the level of his impressive debut, Teen-Age Strangler is a quite good follow-up, further cementing that the Mike era could be just as good as any episode hosted by Joel.

The riffing on the short gets the episode off to a great start as our boys mock the simplistic affair with the greatest of ease.  I especially love their listing of made up short names during the end credits.  The movie segments mostly keep momentum, which is a best case scenario when you have a movie this bad.  The gang especially gets a kick out of Mikey, and relish every minute the little guy is on screen.  They also aim to enhance the ineptitude of the production and manage to fly this shaky airplane gracefully and effortlessly.  It’s a fairly impressive effort by Mike and the bots, because this movie genuinely is the bare minimum of content to qualify as an actual story and if they were any less funny than they are here it would be easy to just shut the episode off without feeling you’ve missed anything.

The host segments are less successful.  None of them really stand out, as it looks like Mike is still trying to find his on-screen mojo with Kevin and Trace.  At times he feels almost as if he’s trying to fill the surrogate father role that Joel had, and infuse it with the “one of the guys” vibe that would eventually become, and it’s not working.  The Invention Exchange is also a hard knock, as both inventions really lack imagination nor are they really funny.  The Mike era would find a groove that works for it, but it’s definitely not here.

Teen-Age Strangler proves to be a solid sophomore effort for the new host of the series, even if growing pains are present.  Mike is still dynamite in the theater and has a natural flow with his robot companions, which is still enough to make one optimistic about this new turn in the series.

Good

The DVD

This episode was released on Rhino’s Volume 10 and its reissue, 10.2.  Video and audio is exceptional, and there’s a pretty solid outtake reel of season 7 and 8 thrown in for good measure.  Shout Factory rereleased the 10.2 box set with this bonus retained.

The short Is This Love? was the third short featured on Rhino's Shorts Volume 3 collection, which was an exclusive bonus disc if you ordered The Essentials set through their website.  This disc was also featured on Shout Factory's Singles Collection.