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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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MST3K Season 13: All The Movies, Details, and Release Date

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Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Turkey Day isn’t just an annual marathon of classic episodes to sit back and watch on Thanksgiving. Depending on the timing, fans watch it hoping to see some kind of news. In this era when MST3K’s always in flux, viewers have their fingers crossed that we’re going to see some kind of look into the future of the franchise. Luckily, Turkey Day 2021 gave us plenty to sink our teeth into.

To get us back up to speed, after years of being off TV, a Kickstarter campaign started up in 2015 and successfully brought MST3K back for an eleventh season on Netflix for 2017. It ran for fourteen episodes and while the new cast needed some time to figure themselves out, it had plenty of high notes. Then things seemed to wither before it had a chance to soar.

The twelfth season hit in 2018 with a mere six episodes, each cut shorter than your usual MST3K episode. Netflix quietly cancelled the show, with part of the agreement being that creator Joel Hodgson had to wait at least three years before finding a new home for the show. A series of live tours helped keep the brand active, but COVID threw a bit of a wrench into that.

Thankfully, another successful Kickstarter will bring us another season and a new home for the show. This time, we’re getting thirteen episodes on Gizmoplex, an upcoming streaming service for checking out MST3K stuff with a little RiffTrax material thrown in for good measure. While some episodes will feature Jonah Heston (Jonah Ray) with his versions of Crow and Tom Servo (Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn), other episodes will feature the live tour’s Emily Connor (Emily Marsh) and her versions of Crow and Tom Servo (Nate Begle and Conor McGiffin).

What Movies Will be on MST3K Season 13?

Throughout Turkey Day 2021, short 30-second trailers were scattered, revealing all thirteen movies.

Experiment 1301: Santo in the Treasure of Dracula (1969)

MST3K has been sadly light on luchador superhero movies. We hadn’t seen any of these babies since TV’s Frank left back in the sixth season with Samson and the Vampire Women. Much like that classic, this stars legendary Mexican wrestler El Santo as himself, albeit a more fantastic version. Like in the sense that he had built a time machine that allows people to experience past lives. The woman who he uses for this experiment is the reincarnation of one of Dracula’s victims and this leads to the luchador and the King of Vampires throwing down.

Experiment 1302: Robot Wars (1993)

Advertised as a thematic sequel to Robot Jox, Robot Wars brings a similar style of post-apocalyptic robot-fighting action. This Full Moon Entertainment release features giant robots battling it out with stop motion that somehow makes it look incredibly rad and incredibly cheesy at the same time. At least it looks better than whatever was going on in Atlantic Rim.

Experiment 1303: Beyond Atlantis (1973)

In what was supposed to be a pure exploitation film until the studio decided to make it more family-friendly in hopes of a wider audience (ie. have the women wear tops), Beyond Atlantis has a pretty simple setup. A group of adventurers, including one played by Sid Haig, are out to rob an island of some hidden treasure. They bite off more than they can chew once they discover that the natives are half-fish! And not in the usual mermaid way, but in the sense that they all have weird piranha eyes. It’s creepy.

Experiment 1304: Munchie (1992)

Munchie is actually the second part of a trilogy, sandwiched in-between Munchies and Munchie Strikes Back. Born out of the attempts to capitalize on the success of Gremlins, we somehow end up with this terrible family comedy starring a greaser rodent puppet with the voice of Dom DeLuise. Munchie tries to use his magic powers to help a loser kid get revenge on his bullies and catch the attention of a very young Jennifer Love Hewitt in her film debut.

Months back, I interviewed Joel Hodgson and he mentioned how season 13 will feature the “new Manos.” I have to imagine he’s talking about Munchie. Word from those who wrote the episode is that it nearly broke them.

Experiment 1305: Doctor Mordrid (1992)

We have another Full Moon release and this one is sort of awesome on its own. Granted, the MST3K treatment is welcome, but you can totally watch this on your own and enjoy it. As the story goes, Full Moon was going to make a Doctor Strange movie, but due to some complications, they lost the license. Hence, B-movie royalty Jeffrey Combs plays Dr. Anton Mordrid, the ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL of the Mystic Arts.

Experiment 1306: Demon Squad (2019)

Once again, the record for most recent movie on an episode of MST3K is broken. Demon Squad is about a “paranormal investigator” who is trying to solve a crime while dealing with all sorts of otherworldly folk. It sort of comes off as an inexperienced filmmaker’s attempt to make a noir mystery with the cast of Nightbreed and a ten dollar budget. It looks rough, but seems to have some heart in its attempt.

Experiment 1307: Gamera vs. Jiger (1970)

Back in the Joel era, MST3K cut through the original Gamera movies like a knife through butter. A couple of the movies never got the treatment, so here we are. As Japan puts together Expo ’70, they accidentally unleash a new kaiju threat in Jiger. Gamera not only gets his ass kicked by the beast, but he’s also infected by Jiger’s offspring. The only thing that can save the world now is the children and their love for Gamera. That’s usually how these things work.

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Experiment 1308: The Batwoman (1968)

What happens when you take an El Santo movie and replace him with a woman who just bought a Sexy Adam West Halloween costume at Party City? This very, very unauthorized mess from Italy. The Batwoman (no, not that one) is a scantily-clad professional wrestler who lives the high life and has to stop a mad scientist and his ridiculous lobster monster from taking over the world. Said mad scientist owns a boat called “Reptilicus,” so I’m looking forward to the callback jokes there.

Experiment 1309: The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967)

Ah, so this is interesting. The Million Eyes of Sumuru has not only been featured on RiffTrax (along with its sequel The Girl From Rio), but it was also part of the KTMA-TV “season 0” of MST3K. The movie deals with Sumuru, a terrorist leader of a sect of ass-kicking supermodel assassins. Their plan is to have women conquer the world, a plot that can only be stopped by one Frankie Avalon. I can’t believe it took them thirty years before revisiting this gem.

Experiment 1310: HG Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1979)

Despite its title, this movie has very, very, VERY little to do with the book of the same name. Instead, it’s Jack Palance starring in a movie trying to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, only succeeding in giving us a sci-fi mess. There is some effort mixed in there, but the whole thing is just a dreadful attempt to ape a popular brand. At least the robots are sort of cool, if clunky.

Experiment 1311: The Mask 3D (1961)

No, it’s not about the wacky green vigilante or the ugly redhead. Instead, The Mask 3D is about a psychiatrist who tries on a mystical tribal mask and trips out on it. He becomes addicted to wearing it and his surreal visions, even though it turns him into a violent psychopath. Huh, maybe it’s not too far from the comic character after all. Anyway, this will be the first Halloween-based episode of MST3K and the only black-and-white entry for this season.

Experiment 1312: The Bubble (1966)

Feeling like a full-length Twilight Zone episode, a married couple’s vacation goes awry when they end up in a village full of people acting strangely. Soon they realize that not only is there a glass dome around the village, but aliens appear to have taken over. Yeah, that twist is a lot more obvious in the retitled version called Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. Though that version of the movie is nearly two hours long, so maybe it’s better that we just get The Bubble instead.

Experiment 1313: The Christmas Dragon (2014)

Father Christmas is dying because something something magic and the only ones who can save him and save Christmas itself are a ragtag team of medieval orphans and their newly-discovered pet dragon. Like many pieces of modern crap you’d see riffed, this movie uses a LOT of digital effects, high quality masks, and an excessive amount of scenes shot in the forest. Apparently, this episode will feature Jonah, Emily, AND Joel riffing together.

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MST3K Season 13 Release Date

As revealed at the very end of the 12 hour+ Turkey Day marathon, MST3K’s thirteenth season will begin on March 4, 2022. Considering the last episode announced is a Christmas-themed one, it’s likely that all thirteen episodes will pop up over the course of 2022, but Joel has let it be known that they aren’t doing one big binge-ready dump. The episodes will arrive when they’re ready.

In addition to the thirteen episodes, there will also be monthly live events on Gizmoplex. No real details on what those will entail. We’ll also get twelve shorts! Man, I missed those.

Check out some quick trailers for each movie as well as information on Gizmoplex here.

The post MST3K Season 13: All The Movies, Details, and Release Date appeared first on Den of Geek.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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MST3K: Joel Hodgson Reveals the Secrets of the Gizmoplex, Teases “the Next Manos”

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A few years ago, Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its grand return. Through an incredibly successful Kickstarter, they raised enough money and showed proof of enough fan interest to get the show back with a new season. Netflix acted as the home to the eleventh season with fourteen episodes and much fun was had by all. The Return also led to a series of live tours that kept going until COVID kicked in and they also did a Dark Horse comic spinoff.

Unfortunately, Netflix wasn’t so enthusiastic in the aftermath. The twelfth season only contained six episodes, emphasizing the challenge of binge-watching them. Then Netflix unceremoniously dumped the show. Well, at least we have the fourth season of GLOW to look forward to.

…oh, you bastards.

But now the MST3K team have a brand-new Kickstarter project, “Let’s Make More MST3K & and Build the Gizmoplex!” Yes, Joel Hodgson and friends are going the Bender route (minus the blackjack and hookers) of making their own streaming service of sorts specifically for MST3K viewing and checking out the brand-new episodes. The good news is that the initial goals were met, but the true, final goal is still a ways to go. They have until Friday night, May 7 to hit $5.5 million. If they meet that, there will be twelve episodes instead of the definite six.

Also cool is that while previous incarnations of MST3K have been based on mad scientists torturing one group of subjects at a time, the upcoming thirteenth season will feature two separate groups! Jonah will return with Baron Vaughn as Tom Servo and Hampton Yount as Crow for some episodes, but other episodes will feature the the cast from MST3K Live with Emily Marsh as Emily Crenshaw along with Conor McGiffen as Tom Servo and Nate Begle as Crow.

And if they reach the final stretch goal, Joel Robinson will come back into the theater for another round or two! Neat!

Speaking of Joel, I had the pleasure of speaking with series creator Joel Hodgson about the Kickstarter and the new episodes. Here’s what he had to say.

Den of Geek: So to start with, we have a new Kickstarter out there, “Make More MST3K.” This time, rather than shopping it around, the funding is based around building Gizmoplex, a streaming service. Can you give us a basic idea of what the Gizmoplex is all about?

Joel: Well, the idea of the Gizmoplex is a premiere theater. The Mads have built a Cineplex on the moon, and they’re prepping the make it a tourist attraction and screening movies there. And on the practical level, the way you access it is you can watch it on a lot of your different devices and on smart TVs and stuff like that. And there’s also a few features, like you can watch it with friends and chat. If you happen to buy episodes or bought episodes through the last Kickstarter, you can watch those there, too, kind of like your own locker or library with your shows in it.

Very nice. So since you’d be calling the shots this time, would you still restrict the episode length, or would you keep it uniform?

I think most the time we found that the sweet spot is the whole show should be about 90 minutes. We tend to cut the movies so they fit that. We don’t show them in their entirety, because sometimes these movies are poorly made.

Ha! I’ve caught on to that, yes.

Yeah. Right?

So last season you guys did “Ah-tor”/”A-tor”…I don’t know how to pronounce it, Ator the Fighting Eagle.

A-tor, yeah. Everybody says it different. I say “A-tor,” but a lot of people say “Ah-tor.”

Which was a huge deal, because it’s the prequel to what I consider to be the first true classic episode of MST3K, Cave Dwellers. Are there any other series you’d like to revisit? Any chance we might finally get some more Master Ninja out there?

We’re always looking for that. The tough thing with me with Master Ninja is that it’s made for TV. And so, the aspect ratio is… It doesn’t really give you that immersive academy aperture vibe. So I tend to want to do movies that are more wide screen. 4:3 to me is just so tough because everybody has these nice big TVs now and phones, so it doesn’t quite look right there. But we are experimenting and looking into trying something where we might be able to use a 4:3 in and change the aspect ratio, so it looks right.

Yeah, because one of my favorite sub-genres of Mystery Science Theater movies, I’m just fascinated by it, is just, whenever just two episodes of a TV show or a pilot or something are stitched together and they try and say it’s a movie. I always think those are just the weirdest experiments.

It’s true. And they are really interesting, and they are really super disjointed. I agree. They do have a unique profile, I think.

We have a movie we just screened that we’re trying to get, that I have to say is… We watched it, Matt and Cheryl and I, the other day, and it left us all really, really depressed. And we had ended the day, saying that’s a no-go on that movie. And then I thought about it, and I realized that we should probably do it. It might have components of that same kind of – oh man, what would you call it? It’s not like despair. It’s kind of like…a malaise, kind of the same way that a Manos: The Hands of Fate has this kind of malaise feeling to it. It was really weird, but I do think in some ways it could out-Manos, Manos.

I think Manos works because you get this really weird feeling as you watch it. You can’t tell if the filmmaker is really talented and is giving you this feeling of…almost like the air has gotten sucked out of the movie, and you wonder if they know what they’re doing or if it’s just a happy accident, that the movie gives you this really weird kind of feeling…

Yeah. Just kind of like a dread that goes through it. There’s just a dread feeling as you’re watching it mixed with wanting to take a shower.

Yeah, yeah. It’s really funny. You can’t tell if the filmmaker did that deliberately, or if it’s an accident, because there were things that work with that movie, where it was like they shot it with a specific type of camera that only could shoot 35 seconds of film at a time and then they did all the sound later. And by the time we got it, the print was really bad.

This new movie has those same kind of feelings that you can’t put your finger on, but it’s amazing in its own right. I had never seen this movie before. I never even heard of it before. But when we first watched it, we just said, “we can’t do this movie.” Then I realized that it would be really great if we could do it.

I’m very much looking forward to that one. So are we ever going to see any of the live touring shows in any form? I know it defeats the point and the purpose, but with 2020 and the whole pandemic screwing everything up, maybe we could get a little taste?

We’re looking into it on a couple of different levels, and we would really like do that. It’s really different, and it’s very ambitious to shoot a live show. We’re up for it, and we’d like to try it.

So to answer your question, I believe we’re planning on…I think the touring cast is going out once COVID is wrapped. We’re already planning another tour. We’re interested in recording those new ones, if possible.

With the comeback, the villain henchmen, the Boneheads, are based on the bad guys from Infra-Man. Has there been any plans or interest in covering that movie for the show at all?

I do love that movie. It’s actually a really good point. I’m going to look into that. I do love Infra-Man, and it would be really fun to do that. I mean, it kind of changed my life, man. I saw Infra-Man when I was… It was probably in the early ’80s at an art house cinema, and it was pretty amazing. I thought it was pretty great. And the idea of an ironic viewing and all that, that was when it dawned on me.

In fact, I’ll tell you something. When I was working on the idea of Kinga, the way I did it was I took the Dragon Queen from Infra-Man and I put Lucille Ball’s head on her in Photoshop. So that’s kind of was the beginning of Kinga. And then I thought that Felicia Day was probably the closest thing we have to Lucille Ball right now.

No disagreement here. One thing I’ve noticed with the MST3K resurgence over the past few years is that it seems like when you left the show, you decided to, I guess, distance yourself from it for a time, which is understandable. Since you’ve come back home, you’re now seeing all these Mike era episodes that you’ve never seen before. I know the other night you saw Hobgoblins for the first time, which was a treat to watch. What’s the experience been like? And are there any moments or movies that really stand out to you?

It’s really fun. I mean, I think that obviously it’s really fun to see one that I haven’t seen, and there are style things that are really different that they did after I left, that kind of in my mind, feels really foreign to me. So it always takes a little getting used to.

I’ll give you an example. The set is very disorienting to me, the way they lit it, because I think they actually lit the back of the set brighter than the characters. My thinking was always the set is the background plate and you want to light the characters. So that’s always really disorienting to me. It’s kind of shadowy, and the idea was… It’s just a style difference. Right? Nobody seems to notice, but that’s always a little disorienting for me is the way it’s lit, the whole segment.

Were there any movies that if you really wanted to do, but weren’t available for whatever reason, especially for the Netflix seasons?

It doesn’t work like that. We always start with lists of movies that are clearable. We don’t window shop and then tell the lawyers to go talk to other lawyers about clearing a movie, because that never works. So we just start with movies that are available and use that to create the aggregate of what we can go for.

The thankless job of the show is that you have to watch these movies over and over and over and over again. Are there any movies that just didn’t get old for you?

You’re kind of like an animator when you go through it, so it’s manageable. This one movie that I’m kind of billboard-ing as the next Manos, I’m not even sure I want one writing team to manage it, because I think it would bring a lot of despair. So I’m going to break it up between two or three writing groups. They’ll each manage a third of it, and they don’t have to watch the whole thing and be responsible for riffing on the whole thing. That one I’m really concerned about, and I’m going to make it as a challenge, and I’m going to bring it in when everybody’s got their chops. I mean, it’ll probably be the last movie we write for this series just because I want everybody to feel really comfortable and confident that they can get through it.

I was a big fan of the Dark Horse comic series you guys were involved in. Are there any other special projects cooking or that you’re interested in trying down the line?

Joel: The Gizmoplex is fascinating because it is really limitless, the kind of content we can make for it. And the nice thing is we can do events around specific movies. It’s really wide open, and I’m looking forward to that. It could be a vehicle for a lot of our ideas and a lot of the things we want to do.

I mean, one of the things I’d like to do… We experimented a little bit. We did this with the men and women from Critical Role. We did a night where we read the comic book and it was projected on a big screen in a club. We did it at a comedy club in LA, and it worked really great. So I think it’s very likely for us to do more things like that. If we wanted to, we could do the whole comic book series, and break it up, so it’s 20-minute installments that happen before a feature, or a classic episode, et cetera.

***********

In the meantime, as we get closer to the Kickstarter deadline, the MST3K crew are hosting a series of live events online. Most of them are commentary while they watch classic episodes. Here’s what’s going on, leading to the big finale.

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