MST3K: Anti-cinema?

Yeah, for sure. My doubts about Welles came from seeing him in live interview shows late in his life. He was kind of amusingly arrogant, had no doubts about his greatness, but that all wore thin. As much as he was great, he was also a portly windbag. He was sophisticated in his film making and he NEVER missed a chance to tell everybody. It was as much about him as it was about the movies.

Again, like Welles, Heaven's Gate was such a monster that I've never gotten back to it. Between being overlong and slow, I got to a point where I could not bear another western. I grew up on those and got overdosed. A long western just made me not want to re-visit.

MST3K is even worse than I thought. They not only ridicule "bad" movies (many of which are actually good) but even good ones. Simply subhuman and vile lack of respect. Not only do they run a constant revolting commentary of the film but they also make detestable breaks to introduce disgusting gags and scenes, totally taking one out of the original film. There's no respect for the original work of art. They're making themselves the center of attention. Absolutely reprehensible. Contemptible curs.

This is the kind of treatment of a film that shows an appalling lack of love for cinema, no respect for the original auteur, no respect for the original language (notice the dubbing), and no respect for anything whatsoever. Simply nauseating. It's only fit for detestable, mindless popcorn-eaters who want to make fun of something they don't understand, something that's far beyond their cognition and taste.

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Now, for a startling contrast, the correct handling of the film: Released in the original Russian language with English subtitles, with the English dub being one of the alternative tracks just for completism's sake. Restored to full glory so that the popping colors can speak more than words:








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Now, how many people who watched the MST3K version wanted to engage with the original work of art in an honest and cinephilic way? None. Not one of them. MST3K doesn't only not tackle the worst of the worst like some people seemed to have suggested but also ruins a plethora of actually good films that they still want to mock in their monstrous and repugnant sketches for apemen-level audiences.

Is anybody still going to pretend MST3K is anything more than an abhorrent act of rape of film? I'm beyond repulsed with MST3K and their atrocious handling of films that are as anti-cinema and as anti-human dignity as it gets. There's no more being nice from me. Such deplorable behavior and dismissive mistreatment of films must be harshly criticized and people who choose the MST3K version over the original must be stigmatized and shamed. How we watch our films matters and it says everything about us, our approach to cinema, art, and life. The culture of cynicism, irony, ridicule, and mockery discourages budding cinephiles from approaching a large swathe of films or otherwise infects their brains with a preconceived notion of how to approach a big chunk of movies.

It's anti-love for cinema.

It's antithetical to the principles of cinephilia.

It's disrespectful towards the auteurs.

It lampoons the artistic merit of the original works.

It does nothing to restore the original works or to make people want to see them in a sincere and unadulterated way.

The commentaries are exercises in mockery, not constructive criticism like commentary tracks on releases by, say, Criterion or Vinegar Syndrome. The latter can be very knowledgeable while still being optional and not butchering the original work.

By watching the MST3K version you're not watching the original work. Period. And you don't deserve the original work anyway.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Heaven's Gate will definitely have that effect on a lot of folks.

They do us all a service. Humans need constant reminding that they should not take so many things so seriously. Movies like The Crawling Eye, or The Crawling Hand, or The Slime People certainly rank pretty low on my cinematic scale.

If anything, the show has resurrected them from cinematic death. They got a second chance that most of them didn't deserve, but they are perfect for that moment when movies are actually entertainment, often bad entertainment rather than something that needs to be studied and analyzed.

We NEED junk, or at least I do. Now, if only we could have a show like this for Dr Zhivago or Citizen Kane or The Raging Bull or Gone With the Wind.

Dude, Jack Frost made for one of the funniest ****ing episodes that show ever had; stop griping about it already, geez.

The fact that they make fun of good movies too completely undercuts the other points you're making, about teaching people not to take films seriously, or rendering it impossible (as if we're all mindless sheep who can't parse the layers of anything) to consider them on their own. Seeing that they'll roast good and bad movies alike shows us that the jokes can be unrelated to the quality of the film and therefore does not automatically invite us to discard them.

Also, was this your first actual exposure to it? Because if so, I'm not sure it was ever going to get a fair shake. And I know you'd have to agree since that follows the same basic logic I just referenced. The same logic that says people can't get past their conditioning and their initial expectations.

They're perfect for that in their original version. There's no need to butcher them.

Do you need to make fun of art in such a lazy and obnoxious way?

I guess you do... I'm sure there are enough normie a-holes doing such commentaries for serious films at home. I think this is puerile and shameless, but at least those people don't make it public. MST3K not only makes it public but also, through its popularity, creates a whole culture that allows watching films in a ridiculed, abridged, broken version.

It was "funny" to watch (for whom?) so that makes it OK to mock, ridicule, and corrupt a work of art and keep corrupting a few generations of already brainwashed content eaters? Such an asinine argument.

I see the always-disgusting MST3K also did Godzilla vs. Megalon - a great Godzilla film. They also did some other Godzilla movies. They did The Deadly Mantis, too, a film I saw yesterday. It was quite good, though nothing special and far from my favorite monster pictures. I also watched Killers from Space - a surprisingly good film with a great atmosphere (directed by Billy Wilder's brother, of all people!). MST3K mocked it, too.

It should actually reinforce them for the many MST3K fans. It doesn't for me, though.

???

Sheep mentality is a strong one. No coincidence most MST3K fans have normie tastes and aren't much of cinephiles while a strong group of cinephiles enjoys cheap films that MST3K mocks in their original version and even holds some of them dear. This kinda gives away the rhetorical game of MST3K supporters who supposedly CAN appreciate those films outside of MST3K, but NEVER DO and NEVER WATCH THEM outside of the MST3K version. They only use the argument that they technically, possibly, maybe could.

My belief is that they THINK they're all bad movies. But even if they don't, they inevitably make many people THINK those films are bad just because they got the MST3K "treatment". For God's sake, the whole idea for this show is "Look at this bad film, let's make fun of it!". If they did the same to a Tarkovsky or a Godard or a Suzuki, I'm 100% sure those films would be rated much lower nowadays and would have many people ridiculing them for how bad/pretentious/stupid/bad/terrible they are.

Shepherds with a strong and far-reaching voice tell the flock what to think and what to do. An evil shepherd will make the whole flock jump off the cliff.

No. I had the displeasure of being exposed to an MST3K version of a movie many, many years ago. I remembered the silhouettes of the hosts permanently pasted onto the lower part of the frame, ridiculing the film in a supposedly funny way. I couldn't remember the sketches in between the film's scenes, though, until I checked out MST3K again yesterday.

I think MST3K prefigured the worst of today's internet humor. All the more reason to hate it.

No, and often, they don't. There are lots of very clever, well-written jokes. Sometimes based on deep watching of the film itself, which also kind of contradicts some of the criticisms here.

You can dislike it on an axiomatic value level if you want but the idea that it's all "lazy and obnoxious" simply isn't true. Some of the jokes, however, are silly, but silly/stupid does not mean it requires less thought to construct or perfect, either.

If most MST3K fans have "normie tastes," (which I assume is just you speculating and not based on anything quantifiable, yeah?) that would probably be because most people, full stop, have normie tastes according to you. So far from being a criticism, or even a relevant observation, this just feels like statistical illiteracy.

Anyway, there are earlier posts that deconstruct why this "it's not what cinephiles do" stuff is counterproductive and seems to be working backwards from a desired image, rather than actually coming at each question objectively, so I don't see any point in continuing to cite this invented and arbitrary metric as if it should mean anything to anyone.

I have no idea where you're getting this idea, but I don't think it's true at all. It also wouldn't conflict with anything I said earlier if it was.

Your belief is 100% wrong, then. Have you actually looked at the films that get riffed? Not just MST3K, but all the stuff that's followed. RiffTrax has done Jurassic Park and Casablanca. They riff films that almost everybody loves.

This is where I think some actual knowledge of the subject matter would go a long way. It's fair enough to talk about this on an abstract level, about the very idea of riffing and why you dislike it. But you're now trying to argue with things that require at least a moderate bit of knowledge about the topic.

No, it isn't just that, that's what I'm trying to tell you. That's what it was originally, and it's branched out in ways that pretty much entirely invalidate this.

Also, I should just let you know that any argument which boils down to "people are stupid and unable to think for themselves" is just never going to land with me. I think it's just a really lazy way to dismiss things.

Okay, so...this was your second?

Amen to this.

Well, you probably think Nolan and Gerwig are good directors & writers, so here's where our tastes do not agree with each other. I find most humor (especially American/English humor) bad, and I think that even if the jokes were good, there's still the overarching issue of infringing on the original film. It doesn't matter if the members of MST3K privately love those films. They ridicule them publicly and make people think of those films as terrible.

I have no doubt most modern superhero films require a lot of work/thought to construct, but I think they're pieces of garbage all the same. It's obnoxious to make fun of films that are better than anything you can ever make anyway. And watching MST3K is a lazy way of consuming content with no respect for art underneath it (the original film).

It's no speculation, it's anecdotal evidence, which isn't perfect but certainly isn't unfounded. I browsed through thousands of thousands of film-rating site profiles and I can see the trends relatively well.

It means something to those who love film, is enough.

I already told ya I spent many hours browsing through thousands of profiles of people and I know the trends amongst the normies almost as well as I know the trends amongst the elitists and cinephiles. Most normies wouldn't touch a bad movie if not in the MST3K version. And if they touch the original, they rate it 1/10.

I looked at some of them, is enough and terrible enough. Even if they believe some of the films are good, mocking them is also bad.

Is this supposed to somehow make them look better? I already noted in my previous post that the fact they riff on good films should make MST3K fans like it LESS, not MORE. But regardless, I also said that it doesn't matter to me. Anyway, we're talking about MST3K, not RiffTrax's later engagements.

Nah, your clever sophistry is not changing a thing. Following your logic, if they now riffed on an Abuladze or a Weerasethakul, that'd retroactively make their riffs on everything they did before fine by the sheer idea that now they're also riffing on masterpieces. I said I believed they thought those films were bad and I meant MST3K. You never proved that the MST3K members thought that the films they mocked in the MST3K program were good movies. Maybe you can do it. I don't mind you trying. But even if they did think them to be good, that wouldn't change a thing, as I noted in what you also responded to:

Cool but even if they now said they're sorry for the disrespect they showed to those films throughout the years by ridiculing them, that wouldn't change their sins from the past.

I think you have too much faith in people, then. I observed enough profiles to see how autosuggestion, posturing, (your favorite) performativeness, and all sorts of biases work on people rating and reviewing films. For one, there's that big idea of the next big thing and people swarming to love it. The "This is the greatest Japanese film ever made! I've seen 3 Japanese films" kind. Then you have elitists just copying other elitists' ratings. And of course, you have people who were told a film is bad and then hate it when they watch it themselves. Are there people who watched MST3K and then the original and then started loving bad movies in their original version? Yes, I think there are, but very few. Doesn't make what MST3K is doing fine anyway.

That's two too many. I don't need to eat crap to know it not only tastes awful but is also unhealthy to me, both physically and mentally. There's that fetish of coprophagia and we more or less tolerate people who do it in the comfort of their own house (even though we might think them disgusting) but we don't go around telling people it's a great idea to eat shit. Likewise, I believe that people are free to watch MST3K but that it's terrible and unseemly and disgusting and says a lot about them. I won't start disliking them just based on that one thing, but I'll sure have some contempt for them if they do that and call themselves cinephiles/film buffs at the same time.

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Anyway, for what it's worth, there's that Situationist film called Can Dialectics Break Bricks? that elitists love. It has a similar (and yet very different) approach to what we're talking about. It uses an old kung fu film and dubs it with all sorts of Marxist/Communist/revolutionary nonsense. I hate it for many reasons, including reasons very similar to why I hate MST3K, namely the very idea of violating an original work of art with minimal effort/changes (coming up with "funny" commentary/dub) and also that the commentary/dub is making the film worse by being simply offputting/dumb/disgusting.

Now for the differences, that French film is an example of détournement, anti-art, Lettrist anti-cinema mockery. All of that is fascinating and bears minimal marks of artistic creation and ingenuity. Still, I can already see the incoming arguments for MST3K being art, and I want to avoid this, so there's a much more important difference.

The main difference I see is that Can Dialectics Break Bricks? changes the original film so that its message is totally different, absolutely obscuring the original message, whereas MST3K keeps the original message or only obscures it a bit but adds jokes about that message/style/what's happening anyway. In other words, Can Dialectics Break Bricks? is watching a film of a Commie who butchered an old kung fu film, while MST3K is watching an old film with drunken friends who just wouldn't shut up and stop the film to show you their weird and embarassing theatrics.

I think what MST3K is doing is lazier/stupider/more disrespectful, even though I think that Can Dialectics Break Bricks? is terrible and I bet the original film it uses (The Crush) is much better.

Just curious... which kind of humour do you like?

Anything not too many other people like.

I'm not talking about taste. There's a difference between saying you don't like something and saying it's lazy or obnoxious. There's a lot of humor that isn't for me, but which involves evident skill and thought. My objection was to the specific terms you chose, not with you disliking it. I'm not going to bother repeatedly posting flat contradictions about taste.

That's fine, but that doesn't mean that any criticism that springs from that is as valid as your initial objection to the very idea of riffing on films. Your position can remain intact (or, more accurately, unfalsifiable) even while its supporting claims can be wrong.

It absolutely matters in relation to all the psychoanalysis and speculation you're putting out there about them and the people that enjoy their work. Saying it's bad is not something I can disprove, but suggesting they do this out of spite or hate or dislike of the films or ignorance or anything like that, on the other hand, can be.

Again, if you'd merely said you didn't like it, I wouldn't have disagreed. You specifically chose the word "lazy," which obviously cannot coexist with the "I'm sure...it requires a lot of work/thought."

And there's simply no basis for you to say that watching this involves no respect for the art underneath. There's no basis for pretending others are incapable of appreciating these films on more than one level. I know this, because I literally know people who love them for what they are AND for the humor that can sit on top of them.

Okay, but that only addresses one of the parentheticals. The core point was that you already think most people have normie tastes, so it's meaningless to say this is true of MST3K fans, as if this somehow demonstrated that the format is poisoning them against weird little films. I actually know a lot of fans of this stuff, and I would say without question they like weirder, schlockier, stranger stuff than your average moviegoer. It's honestly not even close. They are way, way less normie than the general moviegoing public. They're generally huge nerds with odd little obsessions, which makes sense because this practice started wildly outside of the mainstream, and frankly still sits well outside it. It's totally surreal to me to hear this referred to as if it were some kind of mainstream consumerist product.

I think working backwards from a desired label or identity rather than simply being what you want to be is pretty much always inadvisable, but that's just me. The moment you ask yourself not "do I like this?" but "is this what a cinephile would like?" you've lost the plot.

Look, I'm not going to demand empirical evidence for every general observation about people or the world. But it also isn't fair to pretend that browsing ratings is enough to make broad condemnations. I know actual people, lots of them, who watch this stuff, so if you wanna play dueling anecdotes I'm happy to do it. And if you wanna say that people are so heavily influenced, that necessarily includes you, particularly having already formed a strong opinion before investigating these things. Confirmation bias has a really strong pull, especially when you're skimming reviews rather than talking to individuals.

But I'm glad you agree with my earlier claim that people are finding these films only through riffing, since that's probably the single most important point: that the purity you demand would effectively erase these films rather than have them initially watched the "wrong" way.

No, it's supposed to rebut the claim quoted directly before it, which is customary.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're only going to say things that matter. If it doesn't matter to you, you can exclude it and save yourself that time, and me the time of disagreeing with it.

Since when? It's literally the same people, doing the same thing. And your objections have been to the entire idea, not to any specific incarnation of it.

I'm comfortable with that position. The world has made more sense to me the more I've attributed differences in opinion to differences of priority, or to value that was hidden from me, rather than the idea that those differences were just inferiority.

There's a pretty big difference between saying people can be influenced and saying they're total sheep incapable of thinking for themselves. The former is obviously true. The latter is just misanthropy. And of course, it's always other people who have this problem. Not us. We sit outside and above this particular failing of humanity.

Anyway, I don't think there are "very few," and I think you'd have to be a lot more curious about this subculture to form an opinion like that.

You are not required to watch a bunch of riffs to have an opinion on the concept (though it would make that opinion more informed). But you probably are required to watch more than a tiny fraction of them if you're going to make claims about what kinds of things they riff, and how they riff them, and why.

Some of it is silly, and some of it's clever, and it would be easy to get the wrong idea about it from the odd excerpt. Similarly, you could watch five minutes of George Carlin's fart jokes (which he once famously introduced with "NOW FOR A FEW FART JOKES!") and conclude he's basically just a child who finds scatological humor hysterical, but anyone who kept watching would know he also dealt in penetrating social satire. This kind of range exists in lots of things, but I'd say it's particularly prevalent in comedy.

On top of that, I can't really square this with your various disparagements of normies for having uninformed opinions. Literally in the quote just before this one, you mock the idea of someone praising a Japanese film despite having seen only three. How is this different?

This is the choice we always face when someone we admire disagrees with us. We can downgrade them, or we can reevaluate ourselves. It is not an easy choice but it is a very important one, and I'd say if we only ever find ourselves doing one of those things, we probably are not properly oriented.

You can say it's stupid or disrespectful. It manifestly is not lazy.

Mostly women getting beat up or raped and men getting huge hard-ons and pretending to be gay. Also, lots of scatological humor and making fun of people dying, and stuff.

Seriously, though, I'm a rainy type of guy. I rarely laugh. I find most comedies unfunny and try-hard and deadpan even if they're not deadpan. I like some satires, especially Japanese ones. They never make me laugh but they can be really insightful/clever.

Thanks for the reply, Yoda, but I think there's no point in continuing this. We have too disparate an axiomatic view on MST3K and similar stuff to reach any meaningful consensus..

This may be a crucial part of the disagreement one or both of us should've noted earlier.

Fair enough.

I've loved MST3K for at least 27 years, continuing with Rifftrax. It's all in good fun. If a piece of art, or its fans, are to fragile to accept some harmless ribbing, then it sounds like they're not very confident in the quality of the original material.


I do agree that Jack Frost has a lot of unique and wonderful visuals. Most of the comedy comes from the unfortunate/hammy dub.


It gets me thinking. What's the best movie MST3K has done an episode on? The most watchable


There were a good number of Hercules, Godzilla, and Gamera movies early on. I enjoyed the Magic Sword and Roger Corman's Undead. Devil Doll, Pod People, Time Chasers, and Overdrawn at the Memory Bank were delightfully bizarre. This Island Earth was also good, albeit with very goofy looking aliens.


But I never thought any less of these movies because of MST3K's jokes.



Anyone else have some favorites?

Have they ever done The Day of the Triffids? I think that should probably be hilarious.

Wow. I'm glad to be out of this one....too many words.

No, but they did do It Conquered the World. That's another good one.