I am screaming and punching myself

MST3K: The Creeping Terror

At first, I ignored this little gem on the first Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection. (After all, I had Skydivers, by the legendary Coleman Francis, to occupy my attention.)

Then my friend and fellow MYSTie Charles asked what I thought of the ridiculous monster in The Creeping Terror, and I had to go back and actually examine the film.

My verdict on the monster? Well, as Tom Servo put it, it is creeping.

Seriously, this thing barely gets up to 1 mph, yet it consumes humans like M&Ms. Charles said it reminded him of a bunch of folks under a carpet, and that's the best description I've heard yet.

See, 'cause when you've got a bunch of folks underneath a carpet, they can help a victim climb inside the monster:

"Ya got her, Frank?" "Yup. Upsie daisy, here we go."

The monster likes to eat folks headfirst, which results in a lot of these shots:

A lot of these shots.

Which makes me wonder if the director had a "thing" about legs and feet.

Hmmm.

Yyyyeah.

And here's a little something for the ladies:

After a "strange object" lands on Earth, through the miracle of missile launch footage run backwards (no, I'm not kidding), one monster emerges from the capsule while another stays inside it and runs the electronic equipment... or something.

We're told that the law enforcement of Angel County, where the capsule landed, are doing all they can to figure out the situation. What's really great about The Creeping Terror is that all of this is told to us while we watch the conversations take place. (My apologies for the awful video quality. My video editing settings are a work in progress.)

I can't figure out what the deal is there, because we have sound for some of the scenes in the movie but not others. Did the sound equipment malfunction? Did the actors do such a bad job that the task of moving the plot forward was punted to the narrator? Or did the filmmakers just patch together a bunch of unrelated footage to try to make a movie, using narration as a kind of cinematic duct tape?

It's a mystery of cosmic proportions. But enough about the goofy-ass dubbing. Back to the goofy-ass alien! After emerging from the capsule, the monster eats a bathing suit-clad couple making out, which is just a given in these types of movies. From there, it moves on to eating a housewife (head-first, we must presume):

Then, it chows down on a little boy and his grandfather, in a sequence that yields one of the biggest laughs in the movie. Grandpa falls into a stream that's maybe 4 inches deep and Tom frantically yells "Let the current carry you away! Swim!"

From there, the monster scarfs up an entire hootenanny, using another making-out couple as an appetizer. It's confronted by the only civilian in the movie to stand up to it. Unfortunately, that civilian is attempting to use as a weapon...

... a guitar. It doesn't work too well.

Now, you'd think the monster would be stuffed by now, unable to eat another bite. But no! This insatiable alien heads for the town dance, apparently held in the middle of the afternoon and attended by people with a median age of 39.

You hear that song in the dance sequence? It continues throughout the whole thing. It's like 7 or 8 minutes long, and it has no obvious verse, chorus, entrance or exit points. To borrow a line from another episode, it's a Mobius strip of song; it continues endlessly to no discernible purpose.

The monster eats a few folks at the dance and scares away the rest. But it only seems to scare them to lovers lane (the scenes feature the same actors), where it eats a couple ... in a really disturbing way.

Then it mauls a dude in a crapped out car and seems to, once again, hump the car in a kind of dominance-celebrating move.

You know, no matter how big the monster supposedly gets, its "head" is always the very size of a dude holding a giant head on a stick. Funny, that.

Finally, the county government wises up and calls in the army.

An Army dude blows up the monster with a grenade, then the doctor guy (we saw him talking with Martin the sheriff; what he was actually saying, we'll never know) sifts through the remains and realizes something urgent. He beats feet over to the capsule, there's an explosion, another alien comes out and mauls him a bit, then Martin beats the crap out of the electronics within the capsule.

The doctor guy dies. The end.

What did we learn? Not much of anything. But fortunately, Mike and the bots can point us to the underlying theme of The Creeping Terror.

Enjoy!

MST3K: Red Zone Cuba

Every MSTie has an episode that they can only watch once, The One That Broke Them. This is that episode for my friend Galen; when he loaned me his DVD, he said, "I'm not even sure I want it back."

And to be sure, Red Zone Cuba took its toll on Mike and the bots. As Crow put it, "I want to hurt this movie, but I can never hurt it the way it hurt me."

Personally? I kinda dig it! You could say I find it entertainingly appalling.

See, what you have to understand about Red Zone Cuba is that it's part of the Coleman Francis trio (along with Skydivers and The Beast of Yucca Flats, both of which have also been MST-ified), which means it's going to have no redeeming features whatsoever. 

From the moment you hear the theme song, you know you're in for hard time. I mean, after all, it was sung by...

...John Carradine!

As Mike (I think) notes in the clip, Coleman Francis looked a lot like Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. In fact, perhaps he was mistaken for Curly too often, as Francis seemed to work overtime to create a story and a character that were the opposite of the goofy, happy-go-lucky Stooge's image.

Woo woo-woo-woo-woo? I don't think so.

The story begins with Curly—er, Coleman breaking out of jail and joining two itinerant ex-con migrant workers. "We follow da harvest," one of them bleats, and you know that Francis was going for a Steinbeck/Hemingway vibe with that, but instead it just sounds kinda stupid. 

The three decide to join up with a force that's planning to invade Cuba, since they're supposed to receive "a t'ousand bucks ta join, and a t'ousand bucks when it's over." The guys don't really take to the training, and who can blame them when their invasion map looks like this?

Nonetheless, they do some activities on a hillside and eventually shove off for Cuba. (To my delight, the constant MST3K response to the movie's use of "shove off" is a cry of "You shove off!")

This, apparently, is Cuba. (Its resemblance to New Mexico is completely coincidental.)

And this, apparently, is Castro! Hee!

After some skirmishes that appear to take place in someone's front yard, Coleman and compadres are captured and imprisoned.

See? Cuba!

They escape and flee by way of...

... the Cuban Air Force!

They land somewhere (we're never told where), and find the restaurant of the damned.

I think this clip really summarizes Red Zone Cuba: the mindless violence, the lack of explanation for anything, the relentless unattractiveness of settings and characters and the total disconnect to what passes for the rest of the plot.

From there, they hop a train and visit the presumed widow of one of their fellow invaders. Back in "prison" in "Cuba," Sargeant Chastain had made the mistake of telling them there was a fortune in pitchblende in a mountain he owned.

Mrs. Chastain is agreeable to the plan.

Now, you see that expression on Mrs. Chastain's face? That's the closest to happy anybody gets in this film—but you wouldn't know it from the music! Red Zone Cuba has the most inexplicably perky incidental music I've ever seen. Here's a montage:

But, of course, such lighthearted shenanigans can never last in a Coleman Francis film, and before long, everyone is arrested, wounded or just plain gunned down.

And on horrible film stock, too.

Is there a moral to the story? Not really, unless you want to count "Don't invade Cuba with only 7 guys." But perhaps a greater lesson can be learned from the works of Coleman Francis as a whole, and that lesson can be taken from a character in City Slickers:

"Lord, we give you Curly. Try not to piss 'im off."

MST3K: The Starfighters

No celebration of the wonders of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be complete without a mention of one of my personal favorites, The Starfighters.

It's about planes. And the Air Force. And flight safety. And refueling. And an awkward, contrived romance. But mostly it's about refueling.

And the really great thing? It's almost a musical! Seriously, there's so many orchestral arrangements that at one point Crow is compelled to ask, "Are all the other armed services as easy-listening as the Air Force?"

During that last refueling scene, Mike even picks up Tom and the two dance... well, to the extent that a dude holding an inert puppet and moving around can be called "dancing."

But the songs kick into high gear when a certain piece of rescue equipment is introduced. No sooner does the flight instructor say "poopie suit" than it's like Christmas for Mike and the bots.

I like to call the above number the "Poopie Suit Hop," while the valedictory scene is treated to the more solemn (yet less dignified) "Poopie Suit Anthem."

In a truly strange coda, in a recent episode of "Bones," bodies wearing black nylon uniforms were exhumed and examined. To my utter astonishment, I learned that poopie suits are actual Navy-issue equipment. I would say "art imitates life," but under no circumstances could "The Starfighters" be called art.

MST3K: Horror of Party Beach

There are things you know about me: I'm cranky, I hate summer with a passion and I watch a lot of bad movies. But what you might not know is that I am a rabid fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Oh, sure, you might be able to guess, what with my patron saint being Tom Servo and all, but I don't think that does justice to the extent of my obsession.

I own 132 episodes of the show: all the box sets, all the single-releases, plus 55 more DVDs of episodes that I got from this site. (I also own 2 of the Film Crew DVDs, books by Kevin Murphy and Mike Nelson and a bunch of RiffTrax. And I really need to start acquiring stuff from Cinematic Titanic; I'm letting the Joel side down!)

What I'm trying to say here is that I am very fond of MST3K, and I thought it was time to share that love with you. Some episodes are particular favorites of mine (I could write a thesis on Mitchell), so those seemed logical to highlight.

Here, we examine episode 817, The Horror of Party Beach, one of the seemingly endless supply of mid-60s black-and-white monster movies. This one is special, though, because it's kind of a musical. And it fails quite spectacularly on both levels.

Honestly, we must ask ourselves: Is this the horror of Party Beach?

Screen shots shamefully snagged from badmovies.org, who actually watched the whole thing straight!

(Is it the horror of anything, really? Characters keep commenting on how it smells of rotten fish, as if the filmmakers understood that they had to ramp up the repulsion because the visual alone just wasn't cutting it.)

... or is this the horror of Party Beach?

Meet the Del-Aires. "Who?" you ask. Exactly. I don't know what's worst about this band: that their songs are bad, that there are so many of them throughout the movie or that they're catchy and stay in your head, where you absolutely don't want them. Damn band can't even lip-sync, fer Chrissakes.

Of course, this could also be the horror of Party Beach:

Okay, it's a dance number. Fine. But it lasts forever, and it doesn't even take a break when a fight breaks out; suddenly, it's like Cirque du Soleil is settling creative differences. Plus, it's scored by, of course, the Del-Dang-Aires.

But I'd say this is truly the horror of Party Beach:

Yes, it's one of those charming mid-60s movies that believed it was actually set in the mid-1860s. Eulabelle, the domestic employee of the scientist dude there, actually discovers how to kill the monsters (but she does it accidentally, of course; can't have the help thinking they've got deductive reasoning skills!). One thing I love about the MST3K treatment of this awful movie is that Mike and the bots give Eulabelle a sort of internal life and agency that she doesn't really have in the original material.

I really hope Shout Factory (the current publisher of the MST3K DVDs) releases Horror of Party Beach soon; it's got so much to offer. If you've seen it, feel free to leave some of your favorite memories or riffs in the comments!