RT03

The fine folks at RiffTrax have kindly asked those of us who are watching this through the Best Friends service to not spoil the movie being used in this episode for those who won't see it until next week.  I'm doing my best to honor that, but this puts me into a conundrum  because I can't properly review this episode without talking about the movie.  Consider this paragraph a SPOILER WARNING buffer to throw off those who are just passing by at a glance.

Please enjoy this photo of Clara from Doctor Who in various poses to pad out this upper section.

You're welcome.

Need more buffer?  Here are the opening credits to the 1999 syndicated television series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

AND NOW, OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

NO, REALLY, THE REVIEW STARTS RIGHT NOW.

Film Year:  2000

Genre:  Fantasy, Horror, Adventure, Comedy

Director:  Alvaro Pesseri

Starring:  Adam O'Neil, Holly Laningham, Cyrus Elias, Helen Preest, Peter Boom

MST Season:  The RiffTrax Experiments

The Movie

Leave it to RiffTrax to gain control of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for a handful of episodes and just throw in the most RiffTrax movie to ever be featured on the show.  This also happens to be the first movie from the decade of the 2000's featured on MST3K, stealing that title from the proposed Season 14 movie Ballistica, though that movie's release date came with an asterisk (that movie's dates of release range from 2009 to 2011 in different countries), so it's good to have one that is solidly in that decade.  Even if it is something that is almost indescribable in every way.  It's movies like this that make a Mystery Science Theater blog a chore.

::Richard Attenborough voice:: Welcome to the Mummy Theme Park!

The story of this bizarre Italian video production is that a descendant of Cleopatra prays to the god Osiris to unearth an ancient tomb that will return the hayday of ancient Egypt to power.  A Middle Eastern tycoon then finds the tomb and turns it into a theme park attraction, complete with mummies that he has scientists augmenting with robotics and gizmos to make it look alive (I want my family to do the same thing with my corpse after I'm dead).  Through various acts of sabotage and malfunction, the mummies wreak havoc on the park and all two of its guests.  The premise is very Westworld.  They even throw in a reference to that other malfunctioning park Michael Crichton property, Jurassic Park.  I can only imagine all of this is on purpose, because if this movie happened by accident, then that makes it even more astounding than it already is.

I don't know if I can adequately sum this movie up.  This movie feels like a Cinemax softcore porno that suddenly lost the budget for the sex scenes and decided to pad itself out to try and trick people into thinking it's a real movie.  But that also feels like an insult to softcore porn, because porn at least has a tangible background.  Most of this movie has this weird rear-projection effect, where actors are standing in front of a screen and the backdrop is just added in.  This is how a lot of expensive movies are made nowadays, but back then, it was a sign your movie had no money so you had to pretend you had a set.  The weird thing is that Mummy Theme Park is very inconsistent about this.  There are a couple of elaborate gore sequences that seem to either be lifted from an entirely different movie or were filmed first and drained all the cash from the budget.  There are also some production design when the movie does actually have a set, but the settings all appear to be cheaply made and shoddy, and these are all sandwiched in between the projected set nonsense that litters most of the movie.

Ignoring the production itself, it's hard to pinpoint what this movie actually thinks it is.  I think it's trying to be trashy fun in a Roger Corman spirit, but this group of MST episodes did it no favors in sandwiching it in between two actual Corman productions.  Corman movies are made fast, cheaply, and are mostly nonsense, but they are made by people who know how to make a movie.  I wouldn't even compare this to an Asylum film, because the difference between this and Atlantic Rim is that Atlantic Rim at least pretended to have a story.  And if we're comparing movies made with no money, Demon Squad had script ambition and production problem-solving cleverness.  Mummy Theme Park has none of these virtues.  It feels made by people who don't know what they're doing and they made a movie that has limited energy to actually do anything.

It might be trying to be a parody of those patented Crichton theme-park-gone-amok stories, but it's not really that funny.  You can tell there are jokes.  The main characters are so aimless and dimwitted that it has to be intentional.  There are also a trio of harem girls who like to smack each other around in scanty clothing, like a Penthouse production of The Three Stooges.  There are also some jokes that are very similar to gags that were featured on The Simpsons.  One of the mummies' rampages is based on camera flashes, which has echoes of The Simpsons' own Westworld parody in Itchy & Scratchy Land.  There is also a very odd scene where a mummy becomes sexually aroused by our lady lead's breasts, which is almost an exact duplicate of a joke from the fake Simpsons movie trailer "Soccer Mummy."  I first thought that this had to be a Simpsons reference because it's literally the exact same joke, but I double checked the dates and the Simpsons episode actually aired two years after this.  I highly doubt the Simpsons writers saw this movie, so we'll chalk it down to parallel thought.

If I were to project any sort of purpose onto this flick, one thing I noticed is that the film could possibly be viewed as a commentary of the commercialization of culture and heritage and being a harsh portrayal of cultural appropriation via tourism.  I don't think this movie did that on purpose.  Maybe it did.  Maybe this is what the filmmakers wanted to get across the whole time and they just didn't have the resources to properly communicate it.  But what chews away at that is how meandering the film is, not going anywhere half the time and dawdling on weird racial portrayals and nudity (which is censored out of the MST version).  The movie didn't even think to give itself a title card.  And I checked the uncut version on Tubi.  It doesn't have one.  We can't blame the episode this time.  If basic film courtesies like this are being tossed to the side then I don't think this movie is doing much by design and is just playing it by ear.

The Episode

The Mummy Theme Park was the big mystery title of the season and I'm not sure what I expected, but I wasn't expecting this.  This movie is a level of Z-grade bad that the MST3K rarely delves into.  It's beneath Incredibly Strange Creatures and probably even tops Manos and Monster A-Go Go levels of "Why does this exist?"  That said, this batch of MST3K is called "The RiffTrax Experiments," and RiffTrax has a knack for finding absolute bottom-of-your-shoe garbage, prying it off, and feeding it to us.  If this is a genuine crossover between the two entities, then perhaps we needed a movie like this.  Mummy Theme Park is actually from the director of Flight to Hell, which was featured on RiffTrax last year.  It's curious that they used this for an MST3K episode when it has a level of establishment already housed on RiffTrax, but let's not get pedantic about this.  They clearly saw something special in this movie's inconsistent madness and decided to put it on a pedestal.  I can't say I blame them.  The only issue is that I'm not sure the movie lives up to the mystery hype that is surrounding it.  One would almost expect it to be something special.  If one is familiar with RiffTrax's catalog, you'd know that there is nothing special about this movie.  They have arguably done much worse and more amusingly stupid.

The riffing rebounded for me in this episode.  I was not smitten with the choices they had made in Deathsport, but there is a lot of freshness here.  It's probably because the movie is more refreshingly weird than we've been seeing, which inspires more variety.  Oddly, the riffers don't spend much time commenting on the movie's shoddy effects work.  They almost seem more amused by just how weird the movie is.  Because the riffers seem to think this movie is funny, the approach to this movie can feel a little soft.  There are good reactionary riffs at several points, as the film can take them by surprise as to where it's going to go at any given moment because there is goofy monster mayhem one minute and in the next the movie has moved on to broad racial depictions that are poorly dubbed and almost less offensive because they've been rendered incoherent.  One of my favorite riffs in this episode mocks how Mummy Theme Park looks like a Saudi palace, prompting Servo to sing 🎶"Prince Ali, fabulous he, whoops we're in Egypt!"🎶  That was probably the hardest I've laughed at any of these RiffTrax episodes so far.  I also quite enjoyed the mockery of the mummy arousal scene, as the mummy gazes lustfully after the object of his desire, and Crow asks "Are you Rachel Weisz?"

Speaking as someone who grew up with a crush on Rachel Weisz...no.  No, she is not.

The host segments are the best of the batch so far.  I quite enjoyed Servo excavating the Sarcophagus of his own grandfather, which begs the question of whether this grandfather is the one married to his grandmother in Touch of Satan.  Crow and Bobo get into a Wiki flame was, which is aggressive hilarity, and Pearl takes a cue from the movie and tries to summon Osiris to heed her call.  I don't think there was a wasted minute outside of the theater.  However, inside of the theater, I do have one hiccup.

Probably the big thing that makes me feel like there is a roadblock in the comedy of this episode is that this movie is too slow.  It meanders for about fifty minutes before finally offering up some violence.  I'm assuming the uncut version had some nudity to soften the blow of this, but this episode censors it and makes it feel more drawn out.  The movie's weirdness can only push the needle so much.  We had gotten halfway through the episode and I felt like I hadn't watched anything.  Because of that, I'm feeling more muted about this one than I want to be.  It's certainly a silly time, but I think the high point of these special episodes is still Sting of Death.  Mummy Theme Park is a big swing for the fences, though.  I respect the play, but it's a triple and not a Homer.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Good