MST3K (203)

203 - Jungle Goddess (w/ The Phantom Creeps, Chapter One: The Menacing Power) - After Commando Cody crashed and burned in season one, I wonder what made the guys dip back into the serial barrel again? If we needed to stick with serials instead of real shorts, they chose well. Creeps, so far, is much more entertaining than the rocketman. Bela is great and the man is an expert at playing a mad scientist. I love the head on the robot monster he commands. I'd never think to put a sort of demonic, tiki idol head on a robot. Weird. I also love all of the secret passages and doors and such Bela has in his lab. The invisibility belt and the fake spider that's magnetically attracted to an exploding pellet are just icing on the cake.

One thing I don't understand is how Commonwealth Pictures Corp was able to rip off Universal's horror movie music. I heard snippets of Bride of Frankenstein and The Mummy in there. Also, I'm pretty sure the exterior of Bela's mansion was used in one of the Mummy sequels. Why they didn't go whole-hog and make Bela a vampire, I don't know.

Speaking of spiders and exploding pellets, the guys base a host segment around selling these items. It wasn't SPACOM! , but few things are. What they really needed is something to cut to. The segment was filled with tiny explosions which require both SFX material and set up time. Flubbing a line in the middle of this segment would be bad, given that the segment is just one long take. You can see Joel begin to look more worried about messing up as the segment progresses. He seems glad to make it through mostly intact, despite a few mistakes. At least the He-Man spider got more use here.

Hopefully, this will be the most racist movie MST covers. As a huge Superman fan, I cheered out loud when I saw George Reeves in the credits. Once the movie got going, my enthusiasm waned. At least Superman didn't play the part of genocidal Bob, who I couldn't wait to see get a spear in the back.

The guys set thing as right as they can, especially during the viewscreen host segment. Is Mike going to appear as different visiting movie character every episode? I won't complain at all if he does. (6/10)

film d. Lewis D. Collins (1948)
short d. Ford Beebe & Saul A. Goodkind (1939)
mst d. Jim Mallon (6 Oct 1990)