For as long as movies have existed, bad movies have existed. But it’s only really in the past quarter-century that the most seemingly unwatchable flicks have carved out a genre unto themselves, and amassed a rabid following of guilty pleasure-seekers in the process. (We’re looking at you, Tommy Wiseau.)
Much of the credit for this taste turnabout is owed to Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson who, with his wisecracking band of homemade robots, created a whole new bad movie subgenre when he premiered the soon-to-be cult classic series on November 24, 1988: The riffable movie.
“The analogy I use is that the only thing better than a good magic show is a bad magic show. And I think it’s true with movies,” says Hodgson who, in addition to creating the series, wrote, produced, and starred in the first 100 of MST3K’s 197 episodes. “If it starts to unravel, it’s just as interesting for some reason.”
Inspired by Kinji Fukasaku’s The Green Slime, a 1968 sci-fi schlockfest in which a team of astronauts blows up a giant asteroid that’s hurtling toward Earth only to bring the mutating substance of the title back to its ship, the premise for Hodgson’s series, which began its run locally on KTMA in Minneapolis, is rather simple: A man (first Hodgson, then later head writer-turned-host Mike Nelson) trapped aboard a spacecraft known as the Satellite of Love becomes the plaything of power-hungry evildoers intent on discovering a movie terrible enough to aid them in their quest for world domination. But that’s just the setup. The real show is the never-ending onslaught of movie commentary—known as “riffing” to the initiated—that ensues courtesy of Joel (or Mike) and robots Crow and Tom Servo, thus turning formerly unwatchable movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate, Soultaker, and Hobgoblins into bona fide cult classics.
Though Hodgson—who post-MST3K went on to create Cinematic Titanic, another movie-riffing venture that hosted live shows—believes that “movie riffing works with any movie,” the decision to focus his creative efforts on B-movies was mainly “a function of being able to get rights to these forgotten movies much easier than we could blockbusters or more famous movies because we did have to scribble over the tops of them,” he says. Hodgson explains that in the show’s earliest days, “film distributors would create these packages of movies. You’d buy like 24 movies and half of them would be good movies and half of them would be bad movies. We just wanted the bad movies, so that was kind of disruptive for them. Because they realized, ‘Oh the junk we’re putting between the good movies is what these guys want.’ So that was how it started.”
It wasn’t long from there before the show took off. In 1989, a year after making its local debut, Mystery Science Theater 3000 went national as one of the first shows to premiere on Comedy Central (which, at the time, was known as the Comedy Channel). In 1997, it moved over to Syfy (then known as the Sci-Fi Channel), where it finished out its decade-plus run two years later. And reignited interest in some of cinema’s best worst lost classics.
“I grew up on all kinds of sci-fi and monster movies, but Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped rekindle my interest by showing some stuff I was familiar with but hadn’t thought of in years, and some so obscure even I hadn’t heard of it,” says writer-director-actor Larry Blamire, who has perfected the art of B-movie mockery with deadpan subtlety in movies like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and its sequel. “And I truly think there are some instances where it is next to impossible to watch [the movie] without Joel or Mike and the Bots. By the same token of course I have some favorites that I can’t watch on MST3K [like The Magic Sword] since I can’t shake that childhood fondness. But the level of invention of MST3K was so engaging, so sharp, so charming in its incorporation of handmade props and songs and stuff—I’m really admiring of its ingenuity. And it should be noted just how smart the humor was, especially compared to a lot of what we see now.”
Actor-comedian Paul Scheer, star of The League, grew up watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, but admits it wasn’t the movies that most compelled his fandom. “I always think that the most interesting thing about that show is that it didn’t make a difference what they were watching. It was more the camaraderie between the hosts,” he says, which is fitting considering that Scheer co-hosts his own bad-movie podcast, How Did This Get Made?, with his wife June Diane Raphael and The League co-star Jason Mantzoukas. “As a kid, I knew that those movies were bad, but that was the least engaging thing at the time. I just wanted to see those characters together.”
The show’s playful spirit even managed to make fans out of a few of its onscreen targets. “There are a lot of actors and people that liked it,” says Hodgson of the film-industry folks who saw their work get the MST3K treatment. “The first guy who really stepped forward was Miles O’Keeffe, who played Ator in Cave Dwellers. He was a football star who played Tarzan in the Bo Derek Tarzan movie [Tarzan, Ape Man] and he did a bunch of these Ator movies in Italy, which were kind of like Conan the Barbarian movies. He was the first guy who got in touch with us and it was really weirdly disorienting because he was just laughing and saying, ‘Man, I’ve been waiting for someone to do this to my movie for a long time.’ You realize that actors are ultimately powerless and have to do their jobs. And they all know that half the time what they do is going to be perceived as good or half the time it’s going to be perceived as bad. So he had a great sense of humor about it. And most actors do. The actors seem to be less offended than the producers.”
Hodgson speaks from experience. “I just met somebody who approached me [about] this distributor named Sandy Frank,” he says. “We kind of singled him out because we noticed that he was distributing all these movies and we kind of deified him in a funny way and created this song around him. And the guy I met said that he’s still really upset about it. I think this is back in the day when all this was invisible and where it was like, ‘I’m a distributor. I found all these foreign films. I’m just going to re-voice them and sell them to an American market. And who’s ever going to know that I did this?'”
The Hobgoblins cast on the very first day of filming, without a clue of the later infamy the film would earn on MST3K. (Photo courtesy Rick Sloane)
Not all of MST3K’s victims felt as, well, victimized. Some of them, like Hobgoblins writer-director Rick Sloane, even offered themselves up as sacrifice. Sort of. “I’m always amazed how the story of how I submitted Hobgoblins to MST3K has become so widely known,” Sloane says. “I never mentioned it to anyone. Peter Rudrud at Best Brains contacted me directly after they had passed on my Vice Academy films and asked what other titles I had available. I submitted my first two films, Blood Theatre and The Visitants. I intentionally left out Hobgoblins since I had a feeling from the beginning that that would be the one movie they would want. I really wanted them to use The Visitants, a tale of aliens who invade earth on Halloween night and kidnap teenagers from costume parties, [but] they said it was too intentionally campy and asked if I had anything else. I grimaced and finally gave them a copy of Hobgoblins. I heard back from them within two days: They wanted Hobgoblins.”
Sloane watched the show so knew what to expect, and admits that he honestly loved his episode. “I met Mary Jo Pehl a number of years later and she said I was the only director who ever liked the MST3K treatment of their own film. They improved the film dramatically. It was barely watchable in its original version. While I enjoyed every joke that was at an actor’s expense, I was seriously horrified when they did the fake interview with me over the end credits. It’s become a fan-favorite joke and is constantly quoted on the Internet.”
But the gentle ribbing proved to be a boon for Sloane and Hobgoblins, which he had made a full decade before its appearance on MST3K. “The film was long forgotten by 1998 and all of a sudden I was being asked to do interviews about the movie. According to Syfy, Hobgoblins was the highest-rated episode of MST3K that they ever aired.” Which, in 2009, led to a Hobgoblins sequel. “I admitted from day one that Hobgoblins 2 was only possible because of the success of MST3K’s revival of the original. I submitted Hobgoblins 2 to both Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax, but they both thought it was too easy of a target.”
MST3K wasn’t the first series to poke fun at the moviemaking medium. Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection was a live show-turned-syndicated series in 1985 that dubbed jokes over the actual dialogue of movies like The Little Princess and Night of the Living Dead, while The Canned Film Festival was a late-night movie offering from SNL alum Laraine Newman that ran for a single season in 1986, with movie ribbing reserved for intermissions only. But MST3K was easily the most successful, earning more than a dozen prestigious award nominations throughout its 11-year-run and softening the path for bad movies to come.
What Hodgson didn’t foresee was the recent rash of purposefully terrible movies that have popped up more as Twitter-bait than as well-intentioned movies gone hilariously awry. “These movies being made now that are deliberately bad kind of remind me of The Blair Witch Project phenomenon, where people flooded the theaters to see The Blair Witch Project because it was all a big misunderstanding,” Hodgson says. “Because 75 percent of the people going to the movie didn’t understand that it was a Hollywood movie made to look like a documentary; they thought it was a real artifact. Like The Blair Witch Project really happened and these people got killed. That’s why people went into the theater. It wasn’t because they understood that these clever indie filmmakers were making a fake documentary. And I think a lot of the movies on Syfy like Sharknado are sort of based on the same thing, where the general audience doesn’t perceive that they are deliberately making a bad movie.”
For their part, Scheer and his How Did This Get Made? co-hosts have no interest in playing into the hands of these types of intentionally bad moviemakers either. “Those are the ones that we try to avoid,” he says of the podcast, which originated following some intense conversations surrounding the inanity of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Old Dogs. “Even when we’ve done Sharknado, we’re jumping over the jokes that they think they’re making and into some of the more bizarre choices on top of that. No one should be setting out to make something bad. It’s such a weird idea: ‘We didn’t really try’ or ‘We didn’t care enough to make it good.’ It’s such a cop-out and I think that that makes it automatically less appealing. People are always saying, ‘Do the Gary Busey movie with the gingerbread man,’ but that’s too easy.” (For those of you keeping track at home, that would be The Gingerdead Man.)
Scheer’s ideal film is the kind he describes as “a colossal misfire. One of the things that I always point to is that in these movies that are trying to be cool, no matter what, there’s always a surfboard or skateboard scene. And it reeks of too many cooks in the kitchen or no one minding the shop. Those are the two that are the most interesting to me.” And there will certainly never be a shortage of those.
“I think people look at movies like restaurants,” Hodgson observes. “They say: I love going to a good restaurant so I’m going to be able to start a restaurant. I think people think: I like good movies rather than bad movies, so I will make a good movie and avoid making a bad movie. They behave like they have this control and it’s just not true. If people knew how to do it, then every movie would be great. The heart of movie riffing is really collaborating with a movie to create something that’s totally new. Kind of like creating a variety show on the back of another show. You just need a good host body to do that.”
This Thanksgiving, MST3K fans have the chance to experience yet another live-streaming Turkey Day Marathon. Though the lineup of titles is kept top-secret until the holiday, Hodgson leaves the choices up to the people. “It was never clear to me when I was working on the show what was a great episode and what wasn’t,” he admits. “Each MST3K is so epic—there are like 800 riffs in every show. So it’s really like a message in a bottle. They all go out and then certain ones come back.” But he does have a couple of personal favorites: “For the Mike episodes, I loved The Final Sacrifice. I think that’s super strong. For my episodes, I like different ones for different reasons. But the one that I think is really strong because it’s a really unusual movie is I Accuse My Parents. It’s also got a short that’s really insane called Hired. It’s this really epic, two-part training film for salesmen I think for Chevrolets. And it’s when the auto industry is at the height of its powers and could make these Hollywood-grade productions. It gets into the guy’s life and what he’s dealing with at home and his mom and his dad and it’s really funny. Those two together work really well.”
But if Hodgson has his way, the riffing will continue beyond Thanksgiving, courtesy of an all-new online Mystery Science Theater 3000 reboot. “Oh man, we’re working on it,” Hodgson says of the latest news. “I had hoped we’d be able to talk about it at Thanksgiving. I don’t think we’ll be able to close by that time. But we’re really trying. I think about it every day and work on it a little every day. One way or the other, it’s going to happen I think.”
