If you didn’t watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central and the SciFi Network, it was a very funny series created by Joel Hodgson featuring a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a satellite in space and forced to watch horribly bad movies. The gimmick of the show was that the man and his robots made a running commentary on the film, making fun of everything happening on screen, ripping the movies’ flaws apart and adding smart-assed dialogue to the film. They’d even rip on the credit roll & make that funnier than most things you’ve ever seen on tv. Hodgson created the series and originally played the stranded smart-ass on screen, but when he decided to leave the show he was replaced by head writer Michael J. Nelson who did a fantastic job for the rest of the shows run. Some of the episodes are available on dvd and as pirated video online.. so if you like The Funny Stuff, get on that.
I tell you all of that because Michael J. Nelson has a brilliant new project called RiffTrax. It’s basically Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary tracks for big famous Hollywood movies like Titanic or The Matrix without the movie.
You buy the commentary tracks for $1.99, rent the movie from wherever, load the commentary on your iPod or burn it to a disk, then watch them together they way you did The Wizard Of Oz & Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.. except the resulting effect is you-laugh-your-ass-off instead of you-are-a-big-nerd-on-acid.
The first movie they ripped apart was Roadhouse. RiffTrax says:
This is it – the best movie ever made about a world-famous bouncer and his epic struggle with the evil owner of the local J.C. Penney. Patrick Swayze is at his most shirtless as Dalton, a bouncer who is as comfortable quoting Zen aphorisms as he is kicking drunken men in the head. The incomparable Sam Elliot is hilarious as Swayze’s grizzled but lovable mentor, growling out lines like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” and running his weathered hand through his long, gray, greasy hair. And Kevin Tighe (of Lost) as the owner of the titular roadhouse delivers one of the strangest performances ever committed to film.
Road House is the comic mother lode and Mike takes advantage of every smashed beer bottle, throat kick, and monster car smash-up in his hilarious running commentary.
You can vote online for which movie you’d like them to do next: Showgirls, XXX, Fight Club, Wild Things, Rocky IV, Sixth Sense, Matrix, Minority Report, or Cocktail. Personally, I don’t care which one is next, so long as he keeps doing them.
Visit www.RiffTrax.com
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