MST3K (606)

606 - The Creeping Terror - What a great, bad movie. The carpet monster is brilliant. The "ADR is too hard" narration, the overexposed film, the choppy editing and strange asides are all deliciously amateur. The scene in which the monster makes love to a car is indescribable. This is exactly the kind of movie I expect to see on this show.

Bad as the film was, I think its monster was pretty original. Usually in the films from this era, you're going to get either a giant turnip or an alien that miraculously looks just like a Homo sapiens. The carpet monster is huge, hungry and amorphous. He kind of looks like a reared up centipede. His erect head resembles a sexual organ and his mouth, located exactly in the correct spot below, resembles an excretory orifice. If I were still in college, I could write papers and papers of baloney just on this aspect alone. Anyway, I've never seen anything like it. Point me to the Aurora model kit and I'll grab my charge card.

"Hey, if you could help me out by climbing in..." With plenty of eating-related jokes to make about the monster, the riffing had plenty of fun to offer. That poor monster. The caloric intake he required every day must have been astounding.

I guess there was a lot of time to kill in this episode. Both the end credits and the "Mike's Hi-Fi" segment ate up acres of minutes using the cheesy song from the movie's dance sequence. I loved the "Hi-Fi" segment. The expressions on Mike's face as he soaks in the "sweet spot" sounds of his system were perfect, as was the technobabble relating to the equipment he purchased.

It was kind of a loose theme in the host segment this episode. The guys stick it to Love, American Style (twenty years after its cancellation), coffee shop snobs, audiophiles, Tories and, um, bad launderers. You said it, Mike and the bots!

"And Bobby's hopelessly inbred synapses slowly begin to fire." (8/10)

film d. Arthur Nelson [as A.J. Nelson] (1963)
mst d. Jim Mallon (17 Sep 1994)