Product Description
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There may be no finer (and certainly no funnier)
meditation on monsters than this collection of episodes from the
cult comedy series MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. As food for
thought, we are served subterranean slime people, a giant praying
mantis, Soviet spies and, perhaps the most terrifying of all,
enormous teenagers from the disturbing menu of Americas twisted
psyche. Battling these Goliaths for US with their slings of
sass and silliness are Joel, Mike and their robot henchmen Tom
Servo and Crow. The monsters are gruesome and the movies even
more so, but the riffs are risible and retaliatory, proving
definitively that revenge is actually a dish best served funny.
.com
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Consider this 27th voyage with the Satellite of Love as
a tour down Mystery Science Theater 3000's memory lane, as it
features some of the earliest episodes from the Peabody
Award-winning satire series, as well as entries from its later
incarnation on the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) Channel, all of which make
their DVD debut with this four-disc set. The poverty-struck
creature feature The Slime People (1963) is culled from the
show's debut season (1989-1990) on The Comedy Channel (prior to
its merger with Ha!, which resulted in the formation of Comedy
Central), and if the riffing and interstitial skits lack the
rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness quality on which MST3K made
its name, those elements have clearly jelled by the time series
creator/original host Joel Hodgson and the talented writers/cast
members tackled the deeply paranoid Cold War thriller Rocket
Attack U.S.A. (1961) in its second season. Season five's take on
Village of the Giants (1965), director Bert I. Gordon's
rock-and-roll version of H.G. Wells's The Food of the Gods, is a
standout experiment thanks to a terrific string of host segments
in which mad scientist Dr. Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) decides to
replace his affable henchman, TV's Frank (Frank Conniff), with
the hideous goatherd Torgo (played by head writer turned host
Michael J. Nelson) from the infamous Manos: The Hands of e
(1966). And the inept big-bug goof The Deadly Mantis (1958), from
the show's eighth season and first on The Sci-Fi Channel, shows
the durability of its formula in the face of numerous cast and
format changes, including the departure of Beaulieu and arrival
of Bill Corbett as the new voice of Crow T. Robot and Mary Jo
Pehl's Pearl Forrester assuming the main villain role. The
of the "experiments" makes Volume XXVII a worthy addition to any
MST3K devotee's collection, while the supplemental features
extend the deluxe afforded to the show by Shout
Factory's releases.
Chief among the extras is another installment of Life After
MST3K, which focuses on Trace Beaulieu's multi-hyphenate
experiences as actor (Freaks and Geeks), children's book author,
comic book creator, and TV writer (America's Funniest Home
Videos), as well as his reunion with fellow MST3K vets in
Cinematic Titanic. The genre documentarians at Ballyhoo Motion
Pictures do typically excellent work with Chasing Rosebud: The
Cinematic Life of William Alland, which traces the Deadly Mantis
producer's trajectory from membership in Orson Welles's Mercury
Theater (he played the reporter in Citizen Kane) to overseeing It
Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954), Tarantula (1955), and many other '50s science fiction
favorites for Universal. Short interviews with Slime People star
Judith Morton and Village of the Giants' Joy Harmon (Cool Hand
Luke, 1967) underscore their good-natured dismay at being
remembered for such absurd pictures, while trailers for Mantis,
Slime People, and Giants round out the set. --Paul Gaita