MST3K (K17)

K17 - Time of the Apes - (aka Saru no Gundan: "Episode 1" + Saru no Gundan: "Episode 26") Kinda like Robin and Alfred fighting crime while Batman's MIA. That's the feeling I got from this ep, where an inexplicably nude Joel is floating in space outside of the SOL. Was that a Hulk Hogan action figure?

Even compared to the other two-riffer shows (K06 & K12), the riffing was pretty poor. Servo was overly reliant on monkey puns and neither bot had too much to say. Each bot did get exactly one laugh out of me despite this. Servo: "We almost got a cool shot there," when a low-angle camera almost gives us a glimpse up the main female character's shirt. As a heterosexual male, that happened to be almost exactly the thought floating through my own mind at the time. I love when I have an MST match like that. I also liked Crow's quip, when the humans are departing from His Excellency, that "they're going to open up an electrolysis salon." It was the perfect time to say something like that.

I liked the host segment in which the bots try to fool us with an old clip of Joel. In fact, that clip was more of a treat than they could've known, as it was from the MIA K01. I also dug the "that wasn't really the host segment" trick they pulled after that. It actually mirrored the end of the movie in a way.

I think Sandy Frank might have been onto something genius here. Taking the first and final episodes from a TV series originally broadcast in another language and created by an entirely different culture and smushing them together creates something Buñuel would've slit his own eyeballs for. I could've done with a little less enthusiasm on the part of the English voice actors, however. It seems like the last half-hour of movie consisted of four people yelling at the top of their lungs. I still have a headache. (4/10)

film d. Atsuo Okunaka & Kiyo Sumi Fukazawa (1974)
mst d. Vince Rodriguez (2 Apr 1989)