603-The Dead Talk Back

Film Year:  1993 (filmed in 1957)
Genre:  Mystery, Suspense
Director: Merle S. Gould
Starring:  Aldo Farnese
MST Season:  6
Featured Short:  "The Selling Wizard"

The Short

For those store-owners who need to know the importance keeping food fresh and cool with attractive packaging, this short is for you.  We see a large selection of refrigeration and freezing units as well as how it might display one's product.

And speaking of attractive packaging, here's a model in a skimpy outfit to guide us every step of the way.

For those maybe interested in how your fridge cools food down, this might be a helpful guide.  Though it's primary focus is to sell coolers to stores who might need them, but let's face facts, these models are long since out of production.  So the last point of interest for those who don't care is a pretty woman in a dress.  Yay!

The Movie

Originally filmed, edited, and completed in 1957, it appears somebody just forgot to release this movie.  Of course it couldn't be so bad somebody locked it up and had the decency to not subject the public to it, right?  ...Right?  Whatever happened to this movie it was unearthed in 1993 and released direct to video.  A year later it appeared on Mystery Science Theater, almost like an act of fate.

The Dead Talk Back is the story of a murder of a young girl, and a paranormal researcher living in the same boarding house is called upon to help solve the case.  Can he really communicate with the dead?  The answer is pure MST bad movie gold.

It's apparent while watching this film why nobody was in any rush to release it.  It's very drawn out, poorly structured, poorly acted, and by the end a complete waste of time.  The idea of a paranormal mystery is sound, but it feels like it was given to a group of people who didn't really know how to make a movie.

That's really all that can be said about this movie.  It's a limp nothing of a movie that doesn't inspire much to be written about it.  I'm happy that an unreleased film was found and given a chance, but it's hard to believe anybody was enthusiastic about it when it was discovered.

The Episode

The Dead Talk Back isn't an episode I remember much when I think back over the show.  But when I do think of it I always remember enjoying it just enough to say it was worth watching.  I think the movie itself is largely to blame for any forgettable tendencies one might have with this because it's a giant load of nothing.  But the riffing itself does a lot to give the film worth.  There are belly laughs aplenty, though not many huge ones.  The flaws in the film are very large and they are easy to pick at.  I love the narrator constantly reminding the audience that the woman they're following is going to die at any moment, only to have Crow point out that any suspense is going out the window because we know what's going to happen.  The film gets weirder and weirder, and Mike and the bots get more flippant and dismissive as a result.  The movie stops feeling like it's trying to be a real movie, so they stop treating it like one and it just becomes something to react to because it exists.

Likewise, The Selling Wizard also isn't a short I remember much when I think back over the show.  Watching again now it occurs to me that it's probably because of how talky it is, and the riffers can hardly get a word in edgewise.  There are definite moments where they drop to silence and just kind of listen to the short because they can't fit a joke in, which is sometimes frustrating.  What material that does get through is uneven, though there are some nice laughs.  It's not the worst short of the series (my personal vote goes to Junior Rodeo Daredevils on that one), though it's toward the bottom.

The host segments are more or less defined by the Grateful Dead parody in which Crow goes on an obnoxious guitar solo that fills up almost three host segments.  It's actually fairly funny, kinda in the way Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes in The Simpsons is funny.  It just keeps going and going, past the point where you've had enough and back to the point where you find it funny again.  Other host segments include a Dead Talk Back radio show and a fire drill, which are both cute.

 But I'd have to say this is a strange case where Mike and the Bots lift a movie on their shoulders in a celebratory move in showing off this weird thing that was lost for decades, but maybe being on this show gave purpose to it being made.  Life's funny that way.

Good

The DVD

The Dead Talk Back communicated with the living via Rhino's Volume 8 collection.  The video had constant tape flaws, and the audio is mostly fine though slightly garbled in one second.  There were no bonus features.  The volume was rereleased by Shout Factory with better results, and even an interview with actor Myron Natwick to boot!

The Selling Wizard was featured in Shorts Volume 3, which Rhino released as an online exclusive on their Essentials set.  Shout Factory rereleased it as a part of The Singles Collection.