MST3K Top 25: #23, "Horror At Party Beach"

When you think of MST3K, you probably think of a black and white 50s/60s scifi movie being riffed on by three figures in profile. There's a reason for that - they did a lot of black and white sci movies, but, well, they aren't good. They're also short, and pretty repetitive and frequently burdened with a whole lot of sexism. I mean, yes, Jack Frost has the father reassert his "natural" manly leadership, but it's based on traditional Slavic folklore - bad gender dynamics are to be expected, and the setting is pure fantasy.

And, holy crap, every time I watch this movie, I forget just how racist it is. First, though, the plot. Sorry, the "plot."

In a small coastal town, kids are partying on the beach while, out at sea, people dump nuclear waste overboard which immediately causes a human skull to mutate into a giant humanoid figure that looks like someone jammed a clam on top of an old-timey diving suit and then jammed a bunch of hot dogs in its mouth.

The first victim of these monsters is, of course, the girlfriend of our main protagonist, a blue-eyed, blond-haired scientist-type. The rest of the movie is taken up with the scientists coming up with enough clues to figure out how to kill the monsters while they run around killing young women. Almost exclusively young women. Frequently really dull-witted, under-dressed young women. Yeah, it's pretty darned skeevy.

Eventually they figure out that the creatures are vulnerable to elemental sodium, get a bunch of the stuff and ... throw it at them? Frankly, their delivery system appears to be government-issue clips of sodium exploding, as it is wont to do when exposed to water.

With a running time of less than 80 minutes, they still manage to make a movie where basically nothing interesting happens. There are a few things though:

1. The costumes are gloriously derpy. This isn't unusual for a scifi movie from this era, but they're given long, loving shots, in close-up, and more than once.

2. The initial scene where our hero and his girlfriend encounter what Crow calls, "Jean Paul Sartre's biker gang." They're almost entirely non-threatening, are built up as villains for an entire scene and then just ... disappear after their one confrontation with the hero.

3. The science talk. It's long, it's boring, it's deeply implausible and I just love all of it.

Less loved are the scenes with the black housekeeper. They're dreadfully, horribly racist. Seriously, just gross.

The host segments are excellent here, especially their surf rock spectacular, "Sodium," but otherwise there's not much here to recommend the movie.

Rating: C-. This is a cookie-cutter black and white monster movie and it's just not a whole lot of fun to watch without commentary.

MST3K Top 25: #24, "Jack Frost"

Continuing in my reviews of some person's top 25 list of MST3k movies, it's Jack Frost!

No, not you.

Former a sort of troika with two other movies, Jack Frost is one of several Russo-Finnish productions that the boys and the bots endured, and it's probably my favourite of the lot.

Produced by a film company with far more love of their native lands' mythology than they have moviemaking talent, this is, in its essence, a retelling of a whole bunch of Slavic stories, with its main set piece a story in which a young and powerful hero learns an important lesson about humility in pursuit of his lady love, a young woman who lives a Cinderella-like life of misery in a house with a horribly mother, a browbeaten father and an ugly stepsister who is the apple of her mother's eye. I mean, a beet of her mother's eye. Beets are Russian, aren't they?

Anyhow, if you've ever read Joseph's Campbells, "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" or watched a George Lucas movie, you know about how this movie goes. It begins, as they always do, with a young, beautiful woman named Nastenka being threatened with a horrible beating if she doesn't knit a pair of socks in a single night, which means that she has to plead with the dawning sun to stay down for just a few stitches longer, while out in the woods her future husband Ivan beats up a bunch of bad guys, throwing their clubs into orbit, before ignoring the admonition of a mushroom-headed wizard and pridefully attempting to shoot a mother bear with her cubs in order to impress Nastenka, causing him to gain the head of a bear. Y'know, the usual.

Not you either.

So, cursed with the head of a bear, Ivan goes off to do good deeds in an attempt get back in the mushroom wizard's good graces, and hopefully in Nastenka's good graces as well. After driving off several groups of people with his horrifying bear-headedness, he encounters an old woman who needs helps getting to her home in the mountains. She rides him bear-back* all the way home, finding out when she gets there that she's blind. The mushroom wizard restores Ivan's fine-looking head and he tears off looking for Nastenka.

Meanwhile, Nastenka's put back to the grinding wheel, working hard for her mother in an effort to get the ugly stepsister married off. It works out in one of the ways you expect it will - the mother does everything she can to hide Nastenka's beauty, Nastenka remains pure and faithful to herself and when she tries to sacrifice herself to help someone else (the stepsister, in this case), she's revealed to be as beautiful on the outside as she is on the inside. Naturally, her mother commands her father to take her out to the woods to abandon her. Horrified at the thought, he decides to go against her, but rather than let him face her wrath, she sacrifices herself again and jumps off.

That's the stuff.

Then she meets Jack Frost! Finally! Near the end of the movie! He's actually a pretty nice guy in this iteration, basically just a dude responsible for bringing on winter with a magic staff that you must never touch or you fall into eternal slumber. He takes her off to his place to warm up, then takes off, leaving behind his staff because of course he does.

Meanwhile, Ivan can't find his beloved and so consults one of my favourite characters in all of folklore: Baba Yaga. She flies across the sky in a mortar piloted by a pestle and lives in a cabin that runs around the land on chicken feet. She's basically immortal, is always cranky and is typically either the villain of the tale, or the person who tells the hero what they need to know, but only after they beat her challenges.

In this case, the challenge is evidently stuffing her into her own oven. A couple of times. Tough old bird, that Baba Yaga. He snags a magic sled and heads over to Jack Frost's where, if you've been following the plot at all, you know that Nastenka has touched Jack Frost's staff* and now sleeps in a deep, magical slumber. Does she awaken from it when Ivan confesses his love for her? Yes, yes she does.

They return to town, with Jack Frost who, seeing how terrible the ugly stepsister and her mom are, drives the ugly sister away on a pig-driven sled with a dowry of ravens. And, of course, gender balance is restored and the henpecked husband is restored to being the head of his house as Ivan marries Nastenka in what amounts to a cutscene.

Fin.

Whatta Fin. The movie is ridiculous, but the skits are even better. Mike dresses up like Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, Bobo and Brain Guy have a petty squabble after spending too much together, Crow gets turned into a bear and eats Tom Servo - it's just a great episode of MST3K all around.

Rating: B+. It's not traditional Western filmmaking, and it's goofy as all heck, but it's also fun and fast-paced and is really supposed to make you laugh. I think that's what a lot of people miss about mythology in general - it's supposed to be funny. Odysseus telling the Cyclopes that his name is "Nothing" is supposed to make you laugh; Robin of Locksley being genuinely terrible in a fistfight is intended to make him a little mockable. The humour here is ... Finno-Russian, but it's supposed to be there, and I would watch this movie without Mike and the bots. Well, I would, except I've watched it about half a dozen times with them, so...

* Yes, I see what I did there.

MST3K Top 25: #25, "Alien From L.A."

A while back, my wife sent me a top 25 list of MST3K episodes, and we've gradually been working our way through them during quarantine, at the rate of one or two a week. The boys love Mike and/or Joel and/or Jonah and the bots, so it's a nice time to gather 'round and laugh together. Because Facebook is basically my living room and I generally end up talking about bad movies with people in my living room, imma gonna do that now.

 

The first movie on the list is "Alien From L.A.," a Golan Globus production directed by Albert Pyun. People who are at all into B-movies are already groaning and rolling their eyes - Golan Globus and Cannon Films are among the worst studios ... ever, really, and Albert Pyun was one of their favourite directors because he was cheap, and worked fast. He's probably best known for the 1990 Captain America movie, which is as terrible a movie as can exist and is a part of the genuinely terrible decisions that nearly drove Marvel Comics out of business.

 

That’s a story for another time, though, as there’s more than enough terribleness in “Alien From L.A.” for me to talk about. The movie came out in 1988, and is … loosely science fiction, so, of course, it had to have a gimmick. The first involves a shy, unattractive, nerdy heroine making a journey to the center of a hollow earth where she meets threatening weirdos who teach her the real meaning of self-esteem, such that when she returns to the surface, she is a bolder, more confident person.

The second, stranger gimmick, is that the shy, nerdy heroine is played by Kathy Ireland. Yes, that Kathy Ireland. In order to make us believe that Kathy frickin’ Ireland is unattractive, they dress her as frumpily as possible, give her glasses so massive and thick they could be used to focus an industrial laser and instruct her to talk in a high-pitched voice that sounds like some combination of nails on a chalkboard and a small child screaming. It’s genuinely the worst part of the entire part, and you’d better believe that Mike and the bots take every opportunity they can to make fun of it.

 

Our movie begins with her dad falling to his apparent death “in Africa,” before cutting to Los Angeles where young Wanda Saknussemm (that is not a spelling error) is dumped by her hunky boyfriend (Don Michael Paul) because they’re incompatible. And, frankly, he’s right, because she’s freakishly annoying and he has at least the vestiges of a personality.

 

She gets the letter about her father’s death, which leads to some immediate questions. Her father’s “death” consisted of going up a set of stairs in what looked to be an Egyptian tomb in the basement of an abandoned house, completely alone. I mean, saying that her father vanished would make sense, but the plot requires that she be pining for her father for the entire movie, so, here we are. By the way, as Mike and the bots point out, her emotional reaction to absolutely everything is staring absently into the middle distance, so we don’t get much actual pining. This is par for the course with a Pyun film - the plot and characters just sort of mill around on screen for the running time of the movie, and then it ends. Aren’t you looking forward to the plot description?

 

Well, it’s pretty short, really. Wanda heads off to “Africa,” where she goes to the same abandoned house and falls down the same hole at the top of the same stairs. She wakes up in an underground dystopia that looks like every single lava level that every single video game in the 90s had, with mostly red and purple rocky backdrops and periodic gouts of flame. There she and an underground dweller face off against a group of toughs where she learns that the underground is pretty much a hardscrabble dystopia, and loses the first layer of her unattractiveness - those massive glasses and her frumpy over-sweater.

 

And here’s where the meandering begins. She and the underground dweller, who inexplicably is attempting an Australian accent, go to the big city where it turns out that people from the surface world are wanted, for reasons. Well, sort of. For some reason, the powers that be don’t want anyone to be aware of the surface world, which is why they announce that she’s in the city over their public address system. After a costume change, she ends up hunted in a confusing series of “action” shots where she loses and gains at least two additional male love interests before finding her father and returning to the surface world. We close with her confronting her formal male love interest, now dressed as one expects Kathy Ireland to be dressed in the 80s - in a revealing bathing suit.

 

That’s … that’s it. That’s the movie, folks. It’s one hour and twenty-seven minutes of Kathy Ireland talking in a high-pitched, nasally voice and a whole bunch of questionable costume choices.

 

Final Rating: D-. This is a low rating, even for an Albert Pyun file, but even for him this is a cheap, generic sort of movie. There isn’t a single scene worth watching, really, and despite its short running time it still manages to feel plodding and slow. Do not watch without the MST3K crew, or an equal astute group of jokesters.

BLM Nashua Vigil

(I did my best to write down all of the names of the speakers, but I'm sure I got some spellings wrong. If you're reading this and have any corrections, please drop them in the comments. My goal here is to amplify the voices I heard, and I cannot do so nearly as effectively if we don't know whose voices they are.)

Last night, on June 6th, I was the guest of some very gracious hosts. I went to a vigil hosted by Black Lives Matter Nashua and, well, that makes me a guest. The meeting was partly for me, but it wasn't about me. I get that this makes some people uncomfortable, the notion that they're not the center of things, but, as I said, they were gracious and ... well, right to do so.

The vigil was at Greeley Park on Concord Street, which the city closed off for the duration. Not only was Concord Street lined with cars, but I and my companion noticed that basically every single side street was well. Somewhat amusingly, there were still spaces at the park itself, but we allowed that it was all right as they'd need them for some of the more elderly attendees, as well as those with families. There were easily over a thousand people in attendance, after all.

Everyone took some pains to keep socially distant, and everyone was masked. I saw a fair number of people who had their noses sticking out the top of their mask, but, well, that's gonna happen. We're new to this, we're all new to this.

Police presence was minimal - I spotted six officers, and three or four plain clothes officers, and the chief of police was also present. About halfway through the event, a helicopter began circling overhead - I never got a good look at it, but I suspect it was a news helicopter as there was a persistent, though relatively small media presence.

We took up position under a tree with some friends from work and waited for the event to get underway.

First of all, I mentioned this on Facebook, but if you really think that BLM is funded by George Soros, let me assure you that the man is a skinflint on a level that would make Scrooge McDuck think he was a too tight in the purse-strings. They couldn't get the first mic to work, and Jordan, the organizer, attempted to rally the crowd by yelling through a vastly undersized megaphone. He introduced two clergy members, whose names I didn't get, and, well, the first guy didn't have any problems at all.

He prayed for peace, for understanding, for change and for the Lord's guidance. The second clergy person tried to use a megaphone with her mask on. It worked about as well as you'd expect, which is a shame.

The first speaker was Annie Kuster - as I said to my travelling companion, "Hey, it's that lady from my voicemail!" - and while I fault her for a lot of things, I can't fault her for enthusiasm. She charged the stage with that janky mic in hand and belted out a greeting to everyone, ending with a cry of, "Black Lives Matter!" Everyone applauded, as you do, and a guy up front jumped up and started trying to lead a chant of "All Lives Matter."

He was escorted from the premises by a lone officer. As I observed later, I suspect he was not arrested for anything, but that was entirely within his control. Jordan took the stage again and that was when it was made clear to the non-Black folks in the crowd that they were guests in the space tonight, and this was a place for Black voices and experiences. Which is fair. I mean, it's in the name of the event and everything, so it shouldn't've been a surprise to anyone.

The first speaker was Melanie Levesque, senator for the 12th District of New Hampshire. She spoke in measured tones about the Pettus Bridge march during the Civil Rights era, tied it into the demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death and wrapped back around to talking about the systemic issues from the 60s that persist into the present day. While she said that, "the vast majority of law officers are good and just," they are part of a system that makes racial disparity inevitable. She closed with a quote from Barack Obama, "Don't boo, vote."

Next up was Jim Dunchess, the mayor of Nashua, who read a prepared proclamation. I haven't been able to find the text of the proclamation as of this writing, but it was good to see a high official of the city present there. He was calm and conciliatory, every measure a politician, but the sort that seems to actually be getting good done in his city, to look at his record.

Third was Linda Gathright. She spoke for only slightly longer than Annie Kuster, but spoke powerfully. She is the Clerk on criminal justice for the town, and asked that anyone with concerns about interactions with the police let her know about those issues. She called for us, and for the BLM movement to focus on "actionable policies and reforms," ending her speech with the admonition that "black lives are not disposable."

Shoshanna Kelly spoke fourth, and while the others certainly were emotional at times, she started by telling us, "I'm going to try to get through this without crying," and seemed to manage to do so only by speaking with great passion. She talked about George Floyd's daughter saying, "Daddy changed the world," and charged all of us to prove her right. She also spoke in less than glowing terms about the president, and said that "A leader is not elected ... a leader is what you do," and charged us with things that we could do to lead. It was getting dim out at this point, and I was writing in a tiny notebook, so I might've missed one or two, but the gist is:

1. Buy from a Black-owned business

2. Donate

3. Read a book from a black author

4. Listen

5. Come to a Community Conversation*

6. Talk to your kids

7. Ask questions

8. Vote.

On that last one, she commented that, "voting is the difference between fighting the system and changing the system." She closed with, "Black lives are worth it, and America is worth it."

Elaine Davis then came out and sang, "Rise Up," a capella, over a janky microphone on a warm, windy early summer day. She killed it.

Next was Grace Kandecki, who was introduced as a "youth," but carried herself with enviable poise. She was born in the Congo, but spent most of her life in the States. She talked about systemic racism as being an abstract set of standards, cultural norms and laws that produce unequal opportunity for people "of colour," and spoke against increase militarisation.

Kurt Burtram might've been my favourite speaker of the night, if I had to choose. He used humour in the best possible way: to disrupt. His jokes were only occasionally intended to lighten the mood and were usually aimed at the non-Black members of the audience as a friendly but pointed barb. He talked a lot about his family and friends, his personal experiences with racism in New Hampshire. As he put it, "I know who I am: I am not a threat to you." He closed with what seemed to be a gag, doing a genuinely terrible impression of Louis Armstrong as he croaked out, "What A Wonderful World," throwing in jokes about how he'll "only see friends shaking hands after Covid." When we were done singing with him. He put the mic back on the stand and said, simply, "And I think to myself, 'what a wonderful world.'" And left.

Jaden Smith followed up with a poem, whose title I didn't catch. The overall theme was pondering the notion of living in a "world where everyone's colour blind," and how that wouldn't fix the problems that we think it would, ending with a stanza in which she exclaimed her pride and self-worth.

Next was Kendall Reyes, a former NFL defensive end. He spoke unguardedly about his own failures to properly serve the Black community he came from, but said, "We're all here because we want to do better," ending with an admonition that everyone there donated $10 to a cause, or spent 1 hour a week volunteering, we could make a difference.

Nala Doyle was not soft-spoken as she exclaimed that the problem with police wasn't a few bad apples, but a rotten tree, and advocated for demilitarisation of the police and the removal of qualified immunity.

Samantha Searles, the Communications Director for Black Lives Matter Nashua, gave a memorable introduction: "I came from black slaves that could not be killed, a Cherokee who would not be moved, and a white man who loved a black woman before it was legal." She never let the foot off of the gas, going hard after the racist comments of Manchester alderman Joseph Kelly Levasseur, the current president and a lynching in Claremont*. She ended with the argument that, "If you really want change, vote or, better yet, run for office yourself. With what happened in 2016, lack of experience or ability is no longer an argument."

Hutch Mosely is an 8th grader and he's kind of incredible. He spoke with gravitas and ability well beyond his years when he said, "We can be angry all we want, or we can stand up and make a change," closing with a quote from Barack Obama: "We are the change we seek."

Alana Shoat opened with thanks to the crowd, saying, "I've never felt to at home in my community and I've been her my whole life." She talked about the inadequacy of a single month, the shortest in the year, for Black History month, and that the struggle for civil rights was, "not about black people versus white people anymore, or about left versus right anymore, it's about all of us versus injustice," closing with the observation that, "All lives cannot matter until black lives do."

The closing speaker was Jamila Ashanti Scale, who read from a statement that was very powerful and moving - my pull-quote was an admonition to the spirit of George Floyd that "justice will be served and you will not be forgotten." As she spoke, a rainstorm started, and a rainbow formed behind the bandstand she spoke from.

The event closed with a series of statements from Jordan, the organizer of the event, recapping a lot of the points already made, and observing, "We can boo and vote; I think we can multitask," and talked extensively about his radicalization at the death of Sandra Bland, and how mobilized he and the rest of his online friends felt in that moment.

Throughout the even, the victims of injustice were named almost a hundred times - George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and a dozen others.

Apart from the one gentleman who tried to disrupt the event, is was entirely peaceful. I've felt more threatened picking up take-out, which makes me think of Alana Shoat, and makes me hope for a day when she can feel the kind of security I'm privileged to feel every day.

* Police found there was no hate crime because the other kids had put the loop of rope around their necks too, there wasn't proof one of the other boys pushed the black boy with the intent of hanging him, and there were no racial epithets on that specific occasion, although there had been in the past.

"Riots Are Complicated"

I said this on Facebook and it was taken somewhat poorly, as it's not a blanket condemnation of riots.

I won't condemn riots.

They aren't nice, they are polite, but they are periodically necessary, if you look at history. I mean, Spartacus? The hero of the movie Spartacus? The hero? He started out by leading a riot. Well, I mean, we call it a rebellion now, but it was a riot. What he did was illegal, and the people that he fought against were the duly and properly empowered structures of society, and he tried to stab them in the face.

One could argue that what he did was just, in the long arc of history. One could argue that it was right, in the end, but at the time? He was a rioter. He's one of the many revered and beloved rioters in history.

Of course, we are distant enough from the riot to distanced from the damage it caused and the lives that we lost, and we're definitely not the Roman Republic. I mean, senators don't even wear togas anymore, except in their frat boy stage.

Now, that doesn't mean that public violence in protest of authority is always and ever a good thing, but it does mean that I won't condemn all riots, particular ones that are y'know, ongoing. I'm pretty sure the Roman people weren't terribly pleased with the Third Servile War at the time.

Now some people have brought up looting as being the especially bad thing here but, y'know what? They divide into three basic groups:

1. Outside actors. We know that there have been a bunch of people not associated with Black Lives Matter or any other organization behind the protests who've been looting, vandalizing and otherwise rampaging, some of them with the specific intent of making the protests violent. They're gross and awful, and they need to be stopped. In a lot of cases, we're actually tracking them down and arresting them, like the racist yahoo who set fire to a courthouse in Nashville.

2. Opportunists. Yah, I know, I'm supposed to angry with them because it's unjust, but unless and until Jeff Bezos looses his purse-strings to pay his people a living wage, I remain unconfused as to who's stealing the most wealth and property.

3. Activists and protesters. It's been said repeatedly that "these people," the regular activists and protesters who succumb to the urge are "hurting their cause." I'm going to keep this as simple as I can: In a world where four men killed a man in broad daylight, and only one of them is currently under arrest, and only after massive public pressure, after unjust death after unjust death, after being told that they can't kneel during a song, they can't speak from a stage, they have to protest just so, behave just so, with no real change, how much more "hurt" do you think their cause can be?

Riots are complicated. We might not want them to be, but they are.

And, yes, violence doesn't solve anything - what it does do, is make new problems, and sometimes those problems have a clearer solution than what was there at first. Is that going to be the case this time? We don't know. We can't know, because we're in the middle of this thing. I hope I'll see you on the other side.