The Little Unicorn (Rifftrax)

Film Year:  2002

Genre:  Fantasy

Director:  Paul Matthews

Starring:  David Warner, George Hamilton, Brittney Bomann, Byron Taylor, Emma Samms, Mick Walter

Rifftrax Year:  2017

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

The Movie

A little girl's horse is dying as it gives birth to a foal and the girl wishes for a unicorn to come and save her.  While her horse still passes away, the foal turns out to be a unicorn, which she cares for as her new pet.  But when word reaches out that a real life unicorn exists, everyone across the world wants to see, steal, or profit from it.

The Little Unicorn is the first film on Rifftrax directed by Paul Matthews, and won't be the last.  He's had a strangely diverse direct to video career, which not only brought us other fantasy films such as Merlin:  The Return and Fairy King of Ar, but also the sci-fi horror film Deadly Instincts and the goofball action movie Berserker:  Hell's Warrior.  That's an interesting thing to discover after watching a low budget movie featuring a glowing horse with a horn glued to its head.

What about The Little Unicorn?  It's certainly...a direct to video children's fantasy.  That cannot be denied.  Is there anything much to say about it?  It's very...cheap.  I guess that's a thing to say.  The film tries to trick children into thinking it's magical with some minimal special effects practices, such as the earlier mentioned horse with a horn glued to its head, and a lackluster glowy effect for the "unicorn."  There's not a whole lot that the unicorn does except stand around and glow like that, which is supposed to be enchanting, I guess.  The climax features the creature flying, via just pasting it against the sky.  It's not like we can give the damn thing wings, we have to keep the budget down.

If I were a parent in 2002, I guess maybe this would be worth a shot to see if my kid will shut up and watch it for an hour.  I don't really see a kid being all that interested in it, unless they were five and really liked horses and sparkles.  It's dull and doesn't offer a lot for the child's attention span except those few base things.  There are probably some creative things they could have done to catch that attention if they really wanted to, but instead their movie is content with LOOK AT THE GLOWING PONY!

The Trax

Probably the best thing The Little Unicorn offers Rifftrax is its simplicity.  This is not a complicated movie to understand, so if one wants low demand viewing in their Rifftrax, The Little Unicorn might top that list.  At the same time, while The Little Unicorn is simple, it's not exactly diverse.  The film never evolves, and one wonders how many jokes they can make with such a one-note movie.

That's not to say it's not an unworthy 'Trax, just a mellow one.  There are some good chuckles in this offering, as the movie's innocence makes it an easy mark.  While they never go "adult" with the riff, they do skew a tad more mature, as their jokes usually look upon this childish story from the perspective of world-weary adults who are familiar with how the world really works as opposed to it's portrayal in the film.  The broad stereotypical portrayal of characters from various countries also come under fire, because while they're (barely) unoffensive, they are extremely animated and absurd.  This is an ample opportunity for Mike, Kevin, and Bill to insert themselves in those stereotypes and play with them until they're content.

The Little Unicorn is a silly movie with a silly commentary lain on top of it.  I can't quite recommend this as exceptional Rifftrax, as it seems like more of a "mood" piece than anything.  I feel like this is perfect for when I'm feeling that exact need for the Rifftrax experience offered here, as the laughs are pretty solid and the movie doesn't provide anguish, but I find my attention drifting if I feel as if I need something more from the movie itself in the riffing experience.  But overall, I'd claim this is a good effort.

Good

Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen (Rifftrax Shorts)

Rifftrax Year:  2014
Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

Santa sighs in relief that this time it was just a Fairy Snow Queen and not an Ice Cream Bunny.  Yes folks, we are given one of the greatest Christmas specials to ever feature Snoopy...no, not THAT Snoopy...a tiny imp woman who brings all of Santa's toys to life while Santa is napping.

This is one of those short films that tries to charm through it's quaint whimsy, as it doesn't really have a story and is just a fun idea for kids of "What if your toys were alive?"  Toy Story this is not, though arguably it's more terrifying than Chucky.  The short relies a lot on imagination, as the toys themselves aren't really toys, but rather people in costumes.  Perhaps I can suspend disbelief on some of them, but when I see that sorry Raggity Anne or that crummy Candy Lion costume, it's really hard to play at the short's level.

To be honest, I found myself nostalgic for that classic episode of The Twilight Zone, not the one with the living doll, but the other one with that group of people trapped in a cylinder and can't get out.  Those who've seen it know what I'm talking about.

This short was initially riffed for the Santa Claus Conquers the Martians Live show.  It's been a while since I've seen that one, but I think it played well with the audience, if memory serves.  But like most studio riffs of Live performances, recreating the experience isn't quite successful.  What strikes me about Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen is just how little goes on in it, and it's a very meandering sixteen minutes.  Credit where credit is due, the trio make the most of their time, but boy was I wearing out by the end.

The big plus of this short is that there is a lot of physicality in it without dialogue, which does provide ample opportunity for commentary.  When actions start repeating themselves is where the short starts to wear, though surprising the riffs don't feel too repetitive.  There are some running gags about a candy-eating lion and the imp's name being "Snoopy" possibly treading a copyright issue.  There are some good belly laughs at the core of this short that make it worthwhile to recommend, but I don't think it's something I'll pop in every Christmas.

Thumbs Up

👍

K15-Superdome

Film Year:  1978
Genre:  Drama, Thriller
Director:  Jerry Jameson
Starring:  David Janssen, Edie Adams, Ken Howard, Clifton Davis
MST Season:  KTMA

The Movie

This TV movie aired in January of 1978 as a promotional tie-in to Super Bowl XII, which was held at the real life Superdome in New Orleans (which has held the Super Bowl as recently as 2013) and saw the Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos 27 to 10.  Superdome is a drama about shenanigans leading up to the big game, as a quarterback finds himself unable to tend to his wife's needs, another is caught up in a management deal, gamblers try to fix the game, and a killer is on the loose.

Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is the sports trivia behind it, and I'm admitting this while not being much of a sports guy (I like watching games, but am no buff by any stretch).  Also mildly interesting is that it's directed by Jerry Jameson, who MSTies will see down the road as the director of It Lives by Night.  Superdome was directed after that film, which saw Jameson's career spiral into more television projects and less theatrical films.

But this movie itself?  It's a fucking chore.  I can't even watch this movie through my beloved MST3K without my attention drifting.  It's a meandering bit of nonsense that only exists to fill two hours easily and piggy back on the hype of a much more exciting sporting event.  The plots are a bore of labored drama and the murder mystery isn't involving in the slightest, because it's constantly being brushed to the side.

I can't say a bad word about the movie's cast though, which is led by The Fugitive's David Janssen (who MSTies will see again in Space Travelers).  Everybody is fine in the movie, but they're given nothing to work with.  Every scene in this movie is just an excuse to scowl.  The film then constantly reminds us with a text crawl every other scene to tell us the Super Bowl is coming, assuring us that there is something exciting on the horizon.  Then the movie doesn't bother to show us an actual game, probably alluding that the game that followed a week later was it.  Well...I guess something exciting did actually happen.  It just happened seven days later and wasn't in the actual movie.

The Episode

Really the most noteworthy aspect of this episode is that for many years the final host segment to this episode was lost.  Then on a fateful day in 2004, a MSTie named Teresa Dietzinger popped up on the MST3K Discussion Board asking about the segment and wondering if anybody had a better copy, as her's was in worn condition.  Considering that back then we had some major gaps in MST's KTMA legacy (which have mostly been filled in the years since, save for K03), this was HUGE news for us.  So a huge thank you to Ms. Dietzinger for giving us a more complete set, as we were five years post-cancellation and any new material was more than welcome, no matter how small.

The host segment in question is rather simple, as it's just a plug for the MST fan club.  Ms. Dietzinger had it recorded becasue it showcased some fan art she sent to the show (her's was the first one featured).  It's actually a bit of an outlier to the rest of the host segments, which are presented almost as a clip show, which is probably a joke because the series is only on it's fifteenth episode (a similar joke episode was done for the animated Clerks series, which presented a clip show on the second episode).  In these segments, Servo is typing a memoir (with his "feet") and is recalling previous events.  The only full-on host segment reairing is one from SST- Death Flight, though there is a conclusive montage late in the episode.  Interestingly, two of his flashbacks are actually new host segments, one in which Servo almost talks Dr. Forrester and Dr. Erhardt into bringing the Satellite of Love back down to Earth before Crow screws it up (which oddly sets up the movie), and the mid-segment features an off-screen Joel being kind of a dick.

If I haven't talked about the movie segments yet, that's because I don't really have much to say.  This movie is boring as fuck and the KTMA improv riffing has a few fun moments, but isn't spicy enough to make this thing anything more than a total snooze.  There's even a period in the third segment in which the theater seats go quiet for a very long time and you can just feel their tiredness in the air.  It very much feels to me like this movie was selected based on its football-based premise and without having watched it, and they're realizing they made a mistake in real time in the theater.  And considering that in these KTMA days a lot of an episode's appeal rides on the movie, Superdome becomes one of the season lowlights.

Poopie!:  Josh also, at one point, coughs in the theater.  Joel hugs the Servo puppet's shoulders and asks him if he's okay.

There are a few moments in the episode that I enjoy, as there is an almost-fight between Servo and Crow in the final theater segment that got a laugh out of me, while a few of the zingers delight, but are drowned out in an experience that is dull as dirt.  I'd probably call Superdome one of the weakest episodes of the series, because I have pretty much no desire to watch it again, outside of a full-fledged series rewatch.  Even when it hit my rotation just now, I was tempted to just jump over it to the next episode, but this review had to be written eventually.  There is not much I can say about something that inspires so little, so I might choose to talk about the fan art instead.

Not Recommended

Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine (Rifftrax Live)

Film Year:  2017
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  Mark Steven Grove
Starring:  Casper Van Dien, Cynthia Rothrock, James Lew, Brit Laree, Sara N. Salazar, Mark Steven Grove
Riff Year:  2019
Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Featured Short:  "Values:  Telling the Truth"

The Short

A teacher tells her class a story about truthfulness, in which a group of boys walk around town for a while, not doing anything particularly truth or lie-related really.  Eventually they stuff their pants with stones and start tossing them at things.  Soon they hit an old lady's window, and two run away while one gets caught.  What would you do?

First thing I'd ask is whether or not running away is the same as lying?  Technically screaming "Oh SHIT" and running is not being untruthful.

This meandering short takes a while to get to its point.  Maybe you're telling a story about kids who were going about a normal day only to find themselves in an unexpected situation, but you really shouldn't focus on dawdling to tell your story.  The key to a story is relevance, especially when a moral is concerned.  If your audience's attention has drifted off before you reach your event, then what is the point?

The short isn't particularly well done either, as a female teacher relates the story in the classroom but it switches needlessly to a male narrator for the story segment.  Then it reaches that awaited climax and the moral of the story seems to be accepting responsibility for one's actions and not telling the truth itself.  Granted, there is some overlap, as accepting responsibility requires a degree of truthfulness, but it's not really the moral that we signed up for based on the title.

The Movie

So...there are people who genuinely think Starship Troopers is a bad movie.  I don't agree with them or even understand them, and I don't want to.  But here we are at another Rifftrax Live with another sci-fi flick starring Casper Van Dien.  After watching Star Raiders:  The Adventures of Saber Raine, I'm just going to plug my ears and scream "LALALA" whilst hearing Starship Troopers whining in the future, because THIS is what a bad movie looks like.*

*Disclaimer:  This reviewer is fully aware that one movie's badness does not negate the badness of another, as movie quality is mutually exclusive in each entity.  Starship Troopers is still a great movie though, and you're wrong.  So... 😛

Star Raiders:  The Adventures of Saber Raine features Van Dien as Saber Raine, a disgraced space soldier who is currently exiled on a planet with a lizard woman he helped evade capture from his fellow troops.  One day, three more soldiers show up looking for a kidnapped prince and princess, who have been taken by an awakened overlord named Sinjin, who is hellbent on ruling the galaxy.  Saber Raine is enlisted to help them on their quest.

If Star Wars had maybe half the budget of your typical Asylum picture, I imagine it would look a lot like Star Raiders.  For a modern, bottom budget attempt at a sci-fi picture, Star Raiders can be mildly amusing in how silly it is, but it's so damn earnest about itself.  I'm not entirely sure what the intent of the picture is, because I'm positive these people knew they weren't making high art (or something all that good, for that matter), but there seems to be some sort of effort to either ignore its budgetary constraints and pretend it's destined for greatness or to just embrace itself and just have fun.  It might even be a mixture of the two, as certain cast and crew might be seeing this movie as two different things.  I can't really find much info on this movie either way, and based on its cliffhanger ending it seems to have been made with the intent of creating a sequel or two.  Whether that will ever happen, I'm not sure.

Several things I can say for certain about this movie:  1.  There isn't much Star Raiding.  2.  There aren't many adventures for Saber Raine.  Technically this movie is about a singular adventure for Raine that takes place on a single planet.  There doesn't seem to be much money for changing settings, so the majority of the film takes place in a rather lovely forest locale.  Saber and his compadres spend most of the movie wandering around or jogging, depending on if they're fighting bad guys or not.  The villain scenes are usually shot in a generic cave set, without much wiggle room.

The film does have some touches where it's reach exceeds its grasp, and sometimes charmingly so.  The alien effects are flat out adorable, with the really bad make-up jobs that this movie refreshingly doubles down on.  One of our main characters is a blue-skinned reptile woman who has a prominent role in the film, but her make-up is a very stiff mask with a mouth that doesn't close.  So they paint her lips black, have her constantly keep her mouth agape, and try and hide her mouth (unsuccessfully) when she says her dialogue to prevent showing that the two sets of lips aren't connected (I also suspect that her dialogue is ADR too, but I'm no expert on that).  She's hardly the only poorly created alien, as there are also bug men and a dude that looks like mutated Erhardt from the MST Black Scorpion episode.  Also, our main villain is missing half of his head, and it's awesomely silly.

But, as I mentioned before, the movie is incomplete.  No, I don't mean that the effects aren't finished or they didn't finish shooting the film, I'm sure the movie is as it was always intended to be.  But, it ends with our villains getting away and our heroes chasing after them, and the bad guys tease some other scheme being set into motion.  The blatant sequel bait makes the ending frustrating, not because you want to see more, but rather you've watched this nonsense this far and you don't even get an ending.  I might even see a sequel just to spite the cliffhanger, but that might very well be what the filmmakers wanted from the audience's reaction:  to get the next one rage clicks.  That idea seems puzzling, but this is a puzzling movie.

The Live Show

"You know what, for 1992, these effects aren't that bad."
"This is from eighteen months ago."

Octaman was a more interesting bad movie to me than Star Raiders.  I have more questions about Star Raiders, personally, but the movie as a whole is fairly vanilla, dime-a-dozen, DVD bin trash.  As a result, I wasn't that "into" Star Raiders as it played out at the live show, though I found myself having fun with the show itself.

"Can anyone tell what it means to tell the truth?"
"I CAN!  I'm sorry, I'm lying."

Let's start off with the short, which admittedly starts off a little slow.  The big problem with this short is how meandering it is, which sometimes makes it a struggle to riff.  But once the short starts to dive into a general direction, the riffs start to climb, and by the time we get that wild image of children stuffing lots and lots of rocks into their pants, the short becomes officially hilarious.  As more event happens, the laughter rolls with more ease, and this show gets off to a rollicking start thanks to this appetizer.

And remember..."CHUBCHUBCHUBCHUBCHUB!"

Star Raiders puts up a false appearance at its beginning, with a cheesily rendered CGI space chase, which gets the audience in the mood for more ugly looking computer animated nonsense, but then switches itself up almost immediately with slumming on a forest planet.  Because there's a misrepresentation in how it presents itself early on, we get a wild swing of laughs early on then it steeply drops off after that as we wait for the movie to...do something.  It's not all that dissimilar to the experience of the short after that, as it escalates, albeit at a slower pace since it's much "longer."

I use quotations there because this Rifftrax Live is one of the shortest ever, running barely longer than an hour and a half.  Star Raiders is a short movie, running around 80 minutes, and that's including credits (which are cut out of this version).  There's not much foreplay with the riffer introduction, which is basic stuff like shouting out Kickstarter backers and a minimal amount of smalltalk.  One can't say the Live show of Star Raiders isn't efficient, because of how tight it is, but because of that tightness, the slow moments do tend to stand out more.  But if you're patient, the laugh quota will climb and by the time our favorite blue reptilian alien shows up, the strong humor starts to become a regular occurrence.  I especially like the riffs on her and the other aliens, because they're so fun and silly looking.  There's a great line where she alludes she can't have a sexual relationship with Casper Van Dien's character, to which Bill responds "I have one hole for every bodily function."  They also get some mileage out of the bug man, who they dub as "Gary" and claim he's their favorite character.

This is another one for the solid string of Live shows we've been getting.  So far we haven't had a genuinely great one since Samurai Cop, but I'd claim that with Octaman and Star Raiders, 2019's offerings have easily blown 2018 out of the water.  Next up is a re-riff of Giant Spider Invasion, and as a general rule I'm not entirely enthused by re-riffs.  But that would be an interesting film to see on the big screen, so I hope they make something fun out of it to cap off this good year of Live performances.

But that's looking into the future, so let's concentrate on the present, and I feel Star Raiders is one worth watching.  And if by some act of God allows that sequel they're baiting to get made, then I hope we get a Live show of that too.

Good