Every year Hollywood makes hundreds of movies. This is one of them!
1996-04-19
$5.0M
73 min
Dr. Clayton Forrester figures he can rule the world if he deadens his subjects' brains by making them endure terrible movies. Exploiting his access to nearby satellite-dwellers Mike Nelson and his robot pals, Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo, Forrester makes them watch "This Island Earth", a cheesy 1950s spaceship film. But when Mike and friends make funny comments throughout the movie and others that follow, Forrester's plan looks increasingly flimsy.
It might be really funny to a lot of people, but it didn't work for me.
I know there are a lot of old movies that are painfully bad. Some of them are so bad they're funny. This is quite well known. What I didn't know was that there had been a TV series in the past that made fun of these movies. “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was a series that never aired in Portugal and that I only became aware of when researching this film. Now I understand better certain things that I didn't realize when I was watching it, but even so, I feel that it is a film that is not for me.
Before writing, I went to see an episode or two of the original series to compare. What the film did was, essentially, a movie episode. The differences are minimal, and that seems a bit lazy to me right off the bat. There are lots of films based on good TV series, and it's not uncommon for the opposite to happen, but generally there is an effort, on the part of those who make the films, to give us something different, even if the base is there. That didn't happen here.
Also, the film tries to make witty jokes based on the older film, but it splatters roundly on the floor with each one. First, because there is a bad placement of the jokes, which happens before we even realize why, as if it were a spoiler. And then, because they are dull jokes, a type of humor that seems like it would only have a chance to work at the expense of a few very alcoholic drinks. I just don't like humor like that, and therefore the movie didn't have any jokes. Luckily, it was a fairly brief movie, just over an hour, or I would have stopped and moved on to something really more interesting.
