Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XVI DVD Retrospective

Release Date:  December 1, 2009

Buy it here!

Episodes Featured:
The Corpse Vanishes
Warrior of the Lost World
Santa Claus
Night of the Blood Beast (Turkey Day Special)
Night of the Blood Beast (Standard Version)

Shout Factory gives us a little holiday treat in this volume of Mystery Science Theater, which sees not only a Christmas special but a bonus presentation of the little seen Thanksgiving special as well.  Volume XVI is good to have around the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to help keep your sanity from all the stress from all that wonderfulness.  I think we all need a laugh around the holidays, and this volume does the trick.

Episode wise, Night of the Blood Beast is easily the best.  And what's this?  There are two versions of that episode?  That's right!  Two versions of Blood Beast grace us with the exact same riffing but different host segments.  I think the better of the two is the Turkey Day version myself, but you really can't go wrong when the movie segments are that good.  I'd give the runner up position to Warrior of the Lost World, which is just fun.  There are die hard fans of Santa Claus that are probably screaming at me right now, and while it's a fairly popular episode it never quite clicked with me the way it does with other people.  It's still worth watching though.  The Corpse Vanishes is a fairly middling first season entry that weighs down the average, but it's not poor in the slightest.

Average Rating (scale of 1 to 4, Blood Beast counts as one episode):  3

Video is fairly strong throughout the set, with good audio as well.  That Turkey Day version of Blood Beast highlights the set, and we're also given the Turkey Day bumpers that led up to the episode as a bonus!  Think of it as a delightful prelude!  Kevin Murphy also talks a bit about the Turkey Day bumpers in a featurette as well.  On the movie related side, Santa Claus offers a documentary about the film's legacy while Warrior of the Lost World director David Worth talks a bit about his film's production.  Also featured are some trailers for The Corpse Vanishes, Santa Claus, and Night of the Blood Beast, radio spots for Santa Claus, and production photos for Warrior of the Lost World and Santa Claus.  Concluding the set is a promo for the Wonder World of K. Gordon Murray.

During the initial run of this set it was packaged with a bonus Tom Servo figurine, which is fairly cute.  Unlike the Crow figurine in the 20th Anniversary Edition, this figure is full bodied, making it a tad more appealing.  The detail is quite good, with the exception of the arms, which are made solid instead of slinky, but that's nitpicking since the arms would have been impossible to replicate.

The box art is Shout Factory's stock art, featuring the logo in the upper left hand corner, the theater seats at the bottom, and the roman numeral XVI painted in red in the center.  As always, the fun art is inside, which offers four slim cases with new artwork by Steve Vance, as well as for bonus posters featuring the same art.  The Corpse Vanishes features Tom Servo as a bride in a lab being experimented on by a looming Crow, as the Bela Lugosi character.  Warrior of the Lost World features the two bots riding our favorite talking motorcycle which is firing guns on a lonely, post-apocalyptic road.  Santa Claus features Servo as Pitch the Devil attacking Crow as Santa.  Night of the Blood Beast features Servo and Crow as a pair of Steves being attacked by the Blood Beast.

Disc art is the Shout Standard of episode titles against a starry backdrop.  Menus are traditional Shout Factory 3D animation.  The Corpse Vanishes is a menu that's a role reversal of the poster, in which it's Crow who is strapped to the table and experimented on by Servo, who sucks out Crow's neck juice with a syringe and injects himself, turning a lovely shade of blue.  Bela Lugosi looms in the background of this menu.  Reversing THAT scenario, Warrior of the Lost World features Servo in a bed in a white room while Crow looms over him, with the motorcycle in the corner spouting catchphrases on its screen.  Santa Claus sees Crow on a snowy Satellite of Love as Tom Servo the Devil teleports around and annoys him.  Night of the Blood Beast has Servo being X-Rayed for Blood Beast children, as the shadow of the Blood Beast roams in the backgound causing Crow to shoot at it and set the room on fire.

With three good to great episodes and one okay first season offering Volume XVI isn't really my most highly recommended set, though if you're looking for something fun during the holiday season it's a sound investment (along with copies of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Christmas that Almost Wasn't, and the Volume XXXI Turkey Day set).  That Tom Servo figure it initially came with is well worth having in one's collection as well, though unfortunately it's out of production.  One can still buy the set itself which is one that I think most will want in their collection.

521-Santa Claus

Film Year:  1959
Genre:  Fantasy
Director:  Rene Cardona, Ken Smith
Starring:  Jose Elias Moreno, Jose Luis Aguirre, Lupita Quezadas
MST Season:  5

The Movie

Before Tim Allan put on the suit, before Christmas Almost Wasn't, and before he even Conquered the Martians, Santa Claus starred in this weird little number from Mexico.  Being the uncultured American swine that I am, I'm not fully certain what the lore of Santa Claus in Mexico really is.  But I wonder if 1959's Santa Claus Mexican film is any indication of what it's like whether or not our interpretation of the myth is just as strange to them as this film is to us.

Santa Claus is the mythological man who gives presents to good children all over the world every Christmas, though in this instance he lives on the moon instead of the North Pole, enslaves children instead of elves, and is serviced by Merlin the Wizard for magical spells that allow him to do his job every year.  This year a devil named Pitch intends to harass Santa, prevent children from getting presents, thus leading them to grow up to be rotten and bad so the gates of Hell will welcome more souls.  Santa tries to overcome Pitch's tricks and complete his mission, as they contend for the soul of a poor girl named Lupita, who only wants a doll for Christmas.

If you give credit where credit is due, Santa Claus is a very interesting film to watch.  It's inventive and imaginative and it's constantly doing something...interesting.  There's also something that needs to be said about how it incorporates further Christian values into Christmas instead of treating Santa as a toy machine for everyone.  The idea it presents is that Santa rewards one's morality and encourages them to continue to be a good person, while those who are bad risk turning down a dark path to the dark afterlife that could await them.  Lupita is a very good focus point in this movie, because it's very easy to feel for her.  It's clear she lives a hard life and she tries to make the best of it without turning her back on the morals she has been taught, and the audience genuinely wants her to get the one gift she asked for because we feel she deserves it.

But it's not as simple to judge a movie based on its good intentions.  Santa Claus is an acid trip.  It's a weird world, shot strangely, and brought to life almost nightmarishly.  There are so many freaky designs thrown in our faces, with robot reindeer, giant mouths on a giant computer, and literal depictions of the depths of hell.  It's a strange and surreal trip, one that might be worth watching if you're interested in movies that will throw everything it has at you, and then pull something different out of its ass five minutes later.

Santa Claus might have been a favorite movie of mine on the show if it weren't somewhat sluggish.  It takes a while to get going and even when it does it doesn't have a full forward momentum.  Santa Claus is never boring, but at times it tries to be.  It's almost as if it's daring us to be bored by going into two different directions.  And that aspect makes my head hurt.

The Episode

It's become something of a tradition that each host of the series gets to riff their own Christmas movie, providing a rotation of holiday specials depending on who you might favor.  Mike is offered his chance less than ten episodes in, whether he's ready for it or not, and he's given a film that's much stranger than his fellow hosts had to contend with.  Stranger than Santa Claus Conquers the Martians?  Surely you jest!  Oh boy, if only it were an exaggeration...

Santa Claus is an open target for whatever the series wants to throw at it.  It invites it.  It likes it.  It feels as if it's getting off on the reactions of the viewer.  That might be half the fun of this episode alone, because this movie is certainly one of a kind.  The riffing thrown at it is a pretty solid reactionary riff, though the film's tendency to meander sometimes causes my interest to wander.  It becomes very tedious early on during an extensive and mildly offensive "Children around the world" sequence where Santa plays an organ while kids in stereotypical garbs from various countries sing native songs.  Mike and the Bots put their tongues in their cheeks and try to amp up the offensive nature to an absurdist level, and while it's kinda funny it is just telling the same joke for too long and it becomes dull.  The further the movie ramps up the more enjoyable the riffing experience becomes, as it's just such a cuckoo world this movie offers and there is a lot of room to play.  It can be said that maybe they safely coast on the craziness of the movie too often, and when the movie slows down that can be a problem, but it's a fun episode overall.

The holiday host segments aren't exactly favorites of mine, though I do quite like the gift exchange, especially Mike's "Joike" sweater (see, Gypsy started knitting it for the other guy and...).  The song, "Marry Christmas, If That's Okay" is cute but it's no "Patrick Swayze Christmas."  The Bots trying to contact Mike's family "The Nelsons" is one-note, but fine.  The Santa Klaws band is...interesting.  These segments don't really generate a lot of enthusiasm in general from me.

Santa Claus is a good, funny episode but for me it fails to really leave an impression (other than the bizarre movie itself), though it's popularity shows that I'm in the minority on that.  For me it's no match for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but it was a solid effort to live up to it.  It's worth putting on during the holiday season, though most of the time I'll be doing one of my Christmas errands as it plays in the background.

Good

The DVD

Santa Claus slid down our chimneys in Shout Factory's Volume XVI set, with solid video and audio.  Special features kicked off with a twenty minute documentary called Santa Claus Conquers the Devil, a look back on the production of this weird holiday treat and interviews with Kevin Murphy and Paul Chaplin reflecting on the episode and their own battle as Santa and Pitch.  There is also a theatrical trailer, a radio spot, and a stills gallery.  The disc concludes with a promo for The Wonder World of K. Gordon Murray documentary.  This disc shares a lot of bonus features with VCI's release of the uncut feature film, though the Conquers the Devil documentary is extended with MST info.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume 11 DVD Retrospective

Release Date:  June 26, 2007

Buy it here!

Episodes Featured:
Ring of Terror
Indestructible Man
Tormented
Horrors of Spider Island

After the previous two film rights clusterfuck sets, I'm sure Rhino was more than happy to do a set of easy to obtain black and white films for this Volume 11 box.  There's a theme of B-movie to Z-grade WTF level trash here, and I'm sure there was nothing here that got Rhino sued.

The episode quality remains in a comfort level of "Good, not great" with the exception of the earliest episode, Ring of Terror, which really anchors down the overall rating of this set for me.  But other than that you get a couple of fourth season goodies with Indestructible Man and Tormented, with the latter being my choice episode of the set.  The sole Mike/Sci-Fi era episode of the set is Horrors of Spider Island, which is another that I recommend, though the movie might be a little tougher to digest for most.

Episode Rating (scale of 1 to 4):  2.5

I think the audio and video of this set ran pretty well overall, with the exception of the rough film masters on the movies themselves.  The bonus features are highlighted by Tormented, which has a roundtable with director Bert I. Gordon, his daughter/actress Susan Gordon, and character actor Joe Turkel.  Also featured are MST Hour wraps for Tormented and a Video Jukebox of songs from the show.  Rounding out the set are trailers for Indestructible Man, Tormented, and Horrors of Spider Island.

The cover art mimics a trailer park on fire, which it seems the MST logo is emulating that of a meteor that has struck it.  It's a pretty fun idea for a cover, though it might have been more at home for a set that featured Giant Spider Invasion, which is a movie that actually featured a lot of trailer trash an a threat from a fallen meteor.  The interior art behind the discs is dark and hard to make out, but it looks like trash from the trailer park against a starry backdrop.  Rhino has fun with the disc art once again, though using internal organs for Ring of Terror might make one lose his lunch.  Indestructible Man features an X-ray of a rib cage, Tormented features seaweed, and Horrors of Spider Island is, of course, a spider web.

Rhino's menus are also fun.  Ring of Terror features a crypt among tombstones.  Indestructible Man features stills of Lon Chaney Jr., Marian Carr, and Casey Adams, with two electrodes generating electricity.  Tormented has Tom Servo falling from a lighthouse (so much for that hover skirt!), and concludes with his ghost haunting the sky with Vi's floating head.  Horrors of Spider Island has Servo caught in a spider's web as the spider hovers behind him.  Like most Rhino menus, all have theater seat silhouettes at the the bottom with Joel (regardless of Horrors of Spider Island being a Mike episode), Servo, and Crow.  Servo however is absent from the seats in the latter two episodes as he has been inserted in the menu itself.  All menus open with the doorway sequence of its respective host.

Regardless of my opinion on Ring of Terror, I don't think Volume 11 is a set MSTies will regret owning.  I think most will like certain episodes more than others, but there is bound to be at least one episode on here that pleases your average fan.  But there are also sets out there with more consistent episode offerings out there, so this might not be the place to start.

409-Indestructible Man

Film Year:  1956
Genre:  Science Fiction, Horror
Director:  Jack Pollexfen
Starring:  Lon Chaney Jr., Max Showalter, Marian Carr, Casey Adams (who incidentally was NOT in Catalina Caper)
MST Season:  4
Featured Short:  "Undersea Kingdom:  Chapter Two - The Undersea City"

The Short

The Atlanteans discover our heroes in their midst and chase the intruders.  Over and over.

Boy let me tell you, if you love watching people in silly costumes ride horses this is the serial for you.  You'll get more than your money's worth here.  There is little else of value in this final taste of serials that Mystery Science Theater has given us.  The fact that there is so little story in the second chapter of Undersea Kingdom does not bode well for future installments.  I don't blame the show for dumping it because I was getting tired of it too.  Maybe all of the running back and forth meant something in the long run, but I'm not too enthused to watch the entire thing to find out.

The Movie

Indestructible Man stars the son of the legendary Man of a Thousand Faces, Lon Chaney Jr. (who incidentally also had a bit part in the serial paired with the movie in this episode).  Cheney was best known for playing Lenny in the 30's version of Of Mice and Men and of course playing the title character in The Wolf Man.  By the 1950's he was fairly typecast in productions like this, due to his years being the "go-to" guy for horror movies on the Universal lot (in addition to the Wolf Man, he also played Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, and the Mummy), so there is no shortage of cheap horror flicks during Cheney's declining years.  Indestructible Man is...one...of these.  That's really the most that can be said about it.

Indestructible Man is yet another movie of Chaney on a rampage.  This one has him playing a convict sentenced to death, vowing vengeance against those who he blames for his fate.  After his execution his body is donated to a scientist for an experimentation, in which he is accidentally brought back to life and made seemingly invincible (hint:  he isn't, what a rip).  The revived criminal then seeks out those who wronged him for revenge.

Indestructible Man does very little to break out of it's comfort zone, providing a safe and uninteresting revenge thriller with a supernatural twist.  I think a lot of one's enjoyment lies in how much one loves Chaney's work and films like this in general.  I like Chaney quite a bit, though it's easy to become impatient with the film for its lackluster pacing and really no general destination other than the inevitable destruction of someone who is supposedly "indestructible."  Blandness isn't the worst crime a movie can commit, but it can determine which films get remembered and which don't.  I don't think Indestructible Man is very high up on Chaney's most remembered films list.

The Episode

It's the end of an era as we watch the final serial chapter ever seen on Mystery Science Theater.  It was an experiment that had started and stalled several times and always failed to ignite.  Rifftrax later saw one through to the end several decades later, as they riffed the entire Batman and Robin serial (which is pretty great I might add) but MST just always seemed to get bored with them.  I don't really blame them as they have so little content here that things to observe seem few and far between.  Occasionally they'll latch onto something and turn it into something fun, but this second chapter didn't seem like a worthwhile return to the Undersea Kingdom.  I'm pretty happy with traditional shorts from here on out, thank you.

Moving on to the movie, they have something fairly unremarkable to work with.  In general the riffing does keep the episode above the movie's blandness constantly, which makes the episode an easy recommend overall.  Occasionally they'll tangent into run-on territory with mixed results, as there's a dialogue scene about a third of the way into the movie that they feel is a bit on the dull side and go on for a few minutes about how bored they are.  To be fair, they do some fun visual stuff with this bit such as Servo laying down to fall asleep before degrading into yelling at the movie to move on.  There's also a tangent with a terrified witness who tells her story wide-eyed, and our riffers try to get her to blink.  Both of these points in the episode can be funny, but it feels like they run much longer than they should.

The host segments are solid, with probably the most enjoyable being the opener where the 'Bots trade voices, which is trippier than it should be.  Another winner has Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy playing cops in Deep 13, giving Dr. Forrester and Frank a noise citation.  Also featured is a fun Undersea Kingdom parade, Joel trying to imitate Lon Chaney's eye close-up, and a discussion of uses for indestructible powers.  The Invention Exchange sees the cute concept Cereal Box Novels, while the Mads' can't show us theirs because they're "wearing it."

Indestructible Man runs a tad middle of the road in its worst moments that leads me to think a tad lesser of it, though to be fair the episode is pretty enjoyable when it hits my rotation.  It's a solid episode in general, though I think some might consider it more of a comfort food episode than others.

Good

The DVD

Indestructible Man lumbered onto video shelves in Rhino's Volume 11 collection, with decent video and good audio.  The only special feature was a trailer for the film.

Undersea Kingdom was paired with it's preceding chapter on the Serial Variety Pack bonus DVD that was offered through Shout Factory's website on their Volume XXVII release.

"The Buddha's Secret"/"The Clay Coffin" (MST3K Comics)

Issue Number:  4
Release Date:  February 6, 2019
Adapted From:  Black Cat Comics #1, Horrific #2
Original Publication Date:  June/July 1946, November 1952

In reading the latest issue of Mystery Science Theater 3000:  The Comic I found myself mostly reminded of the experience I had in reading the second issue.  There's an incomplete Jonah story in Black Cat and a Crow short story in Horrific, and just as before Crow's is much, much funnier than Jonah's.  I might be a tad bit more lenient on this issue because I didn't find Jonah's tale as chaotic here as it was in issue 2, though there are a few things I feel anchor it down.

However before I indulge in negative criticism, I'd like to give a few positive notes.  The issue did make me laugh surprisingly early in the first and second panels in which Max questions Crow's comic personal of "The Crow Keeper" being a knockoff of the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt.  Kinga bluntly reminds Max that he himself is a knockoff of the more popular TV's Frank from the original MST series, which is very well played.  We are then thrust into Jonah's new Black Cat story, "The Buddha's Secret," which gets off to a shocking start in which our actress/vigilante heroine is made up in yellowface for a movie as actual Chinese men stand off camera and congratulate her on how "native Chinese" she comes off as, which is just so offensive that it's kind of funny on its own in shock laughs.

Mickey Rooney would be proud.

As for the rest of Jonah's tale, this one has Black Cat gifted a little Buddha statue from her actual Chinese consultant on the film.  It is then thieved from her dressing room and she goes in pursuit.  She tracks down the thief to a garden museum ran by her consultant, where she finds Chinese thugs whipping the son of her consultant, Chang.  She saves Chang only to discover that he was the one who stole the Buddha, which he hid jewels inside to pay off a gangster.  The story ends when the gangster comes for payment.

These Black Cat comics are very wordy and there is a lot of text to read even without taking riffs into account.  The plots are clumsy and layering humor on top of them doesn't help.  Opening the MST comics with them really tuckers a reader out.  This one is okay overall, without any big laughs had.  There is a cute running gag with Waverly inserting himself into fight scene panels and translating grunts, but that's about the only memorable riff portion of the story.

Turning our attention to Horrific, Crow is still the big laugh riot of this comic series.  Here he tells a mildly interesting story of a sculptress who discovers her husband is having an affair with the maid.  She murders the maid and covers her in clay, posing her as a statue to wow the art critics (I think I've seen an episode of Get Smart like this).  She then gets plastic surgery and poses as a new maid with the intention of doing the same to her husband.

Crow lifts the comic past its laugh quota pretty fast as this tale starts, with one of the strongest laughs of the book happening early on as the sculptress passes her housekeeper thinking to herself "I wish I had her looks!  Grover would probably love me for myself instead of my talent!" and the maid thinks at the same time "I wish I had her talent!  Grover would love me for myself instead of my looks!"  Crow also relies on a lot of puns during this macabre tale, with one of my favorites as our main character is about to unravel her bandages from plastic surgery, to which Crow responds "Good news!  You're going to be a MUMMY!"  These Crow Keeper stories are a blast!  Keep 'em comin'!

Oh wait...it actually looks as if Crow has been sucked out of his comic as something goes haywire on Kinga's end.  Crow, Gypsy, Growler, and Waverly wind up at the Bar S Ranch from Johnny Jason, Teen Reporter and just lounge around the house, leading Kinga to try and spice things up with a Wizard of Oz inspired Totino's Pizza Rolls commercial.  It's fun, but Horrific would have been the better closer.

It looks as if comics are about to collide for the final two issues of this limited run.  I'm curious about how crazy this is all going to get, but with the promise of no more stories from the most consistent run in these issues, is the series going to stay funny?  It's hard to say right now, but this issue is pretty good as a whole.

Good

902-The Phantom Planet

Film Year:  1961
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  William Marshall
Starring:  Richard Kiel, Dean Fredericks, Coleen Grey, Francis X. Bushman
MST Season:  9

The Movie

Slight echos of Fire Maidens of Outer Space and The Mole People can be felt in the premise of The Phantom Planet, so there's not a lot in this movie we haven't already seen before.  Except for an Incredible Shrinking Man twist!  An astronaut finds himself stranded on an asteroid and shrinks down to less than a foot tall.  There he finds a colony of tiny people and taken prisoner...where he is sentenced to be free and stay there forever...because logic.  While there he gets into a romance with the native girls, because everyone wants the almighty Caucasian stranger in these movies, and intervenes with a war with an alien race called the Solarites.

Phantom Planet is also cheap in many ways we're familiar with.  There is plenty of stiff model work, clumsy compositing shots, and of course silly looking alien costumes on display.  It's a genre film made like it was trying to get quick dollars from kids who like rocketship movies, though the film's talky nature suggests that it might have initially targeted at an older audience.  But while there are some fine premises featured in The Phantom Planet, it feels like at some point it got dumbed down and its budget slashed.

As is the film is perfectly watchable.  It probably never would have been a classic, but the film services some minor entertainment beats for people who love movies like this.  It is more likely to appeal to the camp demographic of that audience however, as it showcases limited effects work, some goofy designs, and a gladiator match that involves pushing a metal rod from one side of the room to the other.  I dig it for the most part, though its pacing sometimes makes it something of a mood watch.

If you need more of an indication of what you're watching, there's a bombastic narrator in this film who claims this story is "Only the beginning..." and then the film ends with the words "The Beginning" instead of "The End."  The beginning of what, I'm not sure, since the movie's story pretty much had a definitive ending, but that's the kind of corny nonsense you should expect from this movie.

The Episode

"Wow, there's so much gravity out in space!"

The Phantom Planet's pacing and dry tone are a bit of a hurdle when it comes to riffing this film, but when I come out the other end of this experiment I find myself immensely entertained.  The laughter comes early with 60's sci-fi movie logic trying to blindly guess what space travel is like, and the quips are pretty quality.  From there on the film introduces a new concept in a small world, causing the transition of a shrinking leading man leading to more inspiration from our comedians ('Oh...why did THAT have to shrink twice as much as the rest of me?").  The film threatens to go on a bit long as it belabors itself, causing things to feel slightly stale at times, but there's usually something new around each corner to excite our riffers.  The metal rod death match is hilarious, the love triangle gets good laughs, and when we get Richard Kiel lumbering around in a ridiculous alien costume looking like a giant biped bulldog all bets are off and the puppy dog running gags are in full force.

"All dogs GO TO HELL!"

The host segments are a bit slighter, mostly concentrating on Pearl, Observer, and Bobo moving into Castle Forrester.  We see Pearl opening her World Domination Starter Kit only to find pieces of her doomsday machine missing, a supposed haunting (AKA Bobo), and an angry mob of villagers welcoming them to the neighborhood.  On the Satellite of Love, Mike and the Bots get into a pretty hilarious Andy Rooney impression contest (and I think Servo won), Servo ponders "The Good and the Beautiful," Mike floats off into space due to Crow's neglect, and Mike also shows off his water glass music skills.

I'm not sure if The Phantom Planet makes very many top ten lists, if it does I'm not surprised.  It's a quality episode that I laugh a lot during.  Sometimes I can feel the movie anchoring the episode down though, which holds me back a bit from loving it too much.  Still it's one to pop in if your looking for solid laughs and an old fashioned, cheap movie.

Good

The DVD

Rhino released The Phantom Planet on their Volume 8 collection, with good audio and video but also without special features.  The episode was later re-released by Shout Factory on their re-release of the set.  It featured a trailer for the film as a bonus feature.

1112-Carnival Magic

Film Year:  1981
Genre:  Fantasy
Director:  Al Adamson
Starring:  Trudi, the chimp
MST Season:  11

The Movie

The ringleader of this three-ring amateur circus Al Adamson, who Cinematic Titanic fans will recognize as the director of The Oozing Skull and East Meets Watts.

Whew boy, we're in trouble.

Carnival Magic is a low-rent production about a circus magician who saves his circus with the help of his talking chimpanzee, Alexander.  Also:  A love story of carnies, an asshole lion tamer, and a greedy doctor who wants Alexander for himself.

Carnival Magic is one weird movie.  It's a premise seemingly targeting families and yet it completely botches everything that would make it fun for family viewing.  It has a talking chimp who mumbles incoherently more than he talks, while the circus setting has no flair and nothing really all that neat.  Would it kill them to show off something fun or neat to enchant the kiddies?

The film doesn't really have much of a plot.  It just stumbles around from scene to scene depending on where it falls.  Sometimes it's interested in its main magician and chimp and sometimes it forgets them entirely and follows a pair of lovebird characters who don't really contribute anything.  Then it decides to show off more adult things that throw the tone of the piece even more askew, such as the drunk lion tamer who beats his wife (and what child doesn't want spousal abuse in their movie?).  The movie doesn't know how to concentrate on its own goal of telling a story about a talking chimp.  But then again it seems clueless of how to make the idea of a talking chimp enchanting.

Carnival Magic is...Carnival Magic.  It very much is a movie of its own design, and it's...something.  It's attempts at whimsy are a colossal failure and it's just such a plodding, aimless movie in general.  There is plenty of carnival in this movie, but there is no magic.

The Episode

The temptation is strong with a new Mystery Science Theater series to find a movie where you really swing for the fences.  I'd caution anybody to embark upon such a mission away from it and first try to master Little League before you audition for the majors.  The crew of the relaunched series has swagger and confidence, and it seems with Carnival Magic they're looking for their Manos, Monster A-Go Go, Red Zone Cuba, or Hobgoblins:  a movie so bizarrely awful that it causes the viewer to ask themselves "What the fuck am I watching?" while some quality quips bring us to hysterics.  The difference is that the teams that riffed that group of aggressively bad movies had more experience under their belt, and while the new series has some veterans on the writing staff, they've embarked on this challenge in what is essentially their first season in a group of episodes that were made simultaneously before they ever really had an opportunity to learn what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong.  I've seen some claim Carnival Magic is a series highlight, but for me it's a major strike out.

The big issue I find I have with this episode is that for movies like this to work on the show the riffing needs to be in part reactionary, where the bizarreness of the movie just takes them by surprise at times.  A lot of the riffing of the new series doesn't feel like they're naturally watching a movie but rather reading lines toward it, and reaction riffs are almost non-existent.  Carnival Magic is begging for some sort of reaction, but instead they just...read lines toward it.  Now, I'm not going to lie and say I didn't laugh during the episode, in fact there is a magic act about bending bars halfway through that made me laugh quite a bit, but the episode has no rhythm.  It features an aggressively bad movie for a crew that just isn't ready for it.

The big talk about the host segments is a guest appearance by Mark Hamill, star of one of the greatest screen achievements of all time, Batman:  The Animated Series (oh, and Star Wars I guess, but who cares?).  He stops by with a space circus, sings a catchy song, and tries to recruit Jonah and the Bots as space carnies.  This segment is a lot of fun and one of the highlights of the relaunch.  Hamill promises he'll be back, and we can only hope!

Kinga also takes the opportunity to announce her intentions for a ratings stunt wedding to Jonah, much to Jonah's surprise and Max's dismay.  Despite this being a plot point of some sort, it's never brought up again in the episode.  Also featured are a Carnival Magic themed parade, Crow and Servo playing redneck cops, and Tom as a motivational speaker.  The Invention Exchange features Yeasta Pets, which is mildly amusing, and Flavored Sweat, which is gross.

I want to like this episode just as I want to like every episode MST has to offer, but it just doesn't work for me.  I would have much rather have seen them tackle this movie in season thirteen when they are more sure-footed.  Some people get a lot of laughs out of this one, I get a few smiles and chuckles, but am mostly bored.

Not Recommended

The DVD and Blu-Ray

Carnival Magic was released by Shout Factory on both DVD and blu-ray via their Season 11 set.  My copy is a Kickstarter exclusive #WeBroughtBackMST3K Collector's Edition blu-ray, which features stellar audio and video.  There are no bonus features on the disc, however it shares it's disc with the preceding episode, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II.