I stole this pic from The Onion. It was funny and worth keeping around…
You may notice a theme here—I’m going through the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, what is perhaps my most favorite TV show of all time.
Last night I watched The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, dubbed in English. This movie was way worse than The Crawling Eye, which I didn’t think possible at the time I watched it.
Before the real movie started (it was quite short, 65 minutes), there was a “short film” entitled Commando Cody & the Radar Men from the Moon (Episode 1). Holy cow it was bad. “Commando Cody” is a scientist that dons a leather jacket over his suit and a jet backpack, and flies through the air like Superman—the old black and white Superman they used to play on Sunday mornings when I was a kid. He does the stomp-jump almost the same way, too.
Anyway, things (buildings, powerplants, trains, etc) are exploding and the government sends scientists to the moon to fight the moon men who are using their Lunarium-powered (a mystery element found only on the moon) atomic ray guns to attack Earth, to soften it up for their impending invasion.
Commando Cody also has a seriously stupid-looking helmet that looks like three holes punched out of a trash can. But I digress. The scientists take off to the moon with a woman they try to leave behind, but she insists they’ll want her along for her cooking abilities—gaaahhh! Definitely some choice pre-women’s lib dialog going on there.
There are tons of fistfights, arguments settled old-school style with broken furniture and really bad acting. Commando Cody flies around on the moon just like he does on Earth, because apparently their atmosphere is just as good as ours (and gravity, too). Commando Cody dukes it out with the moonmen, who continue to blast things with their atomic-lunarium-powered ray guns.
I dread part two, but it’s like watching a train wreck (it has those, too), you just have to keep watching to make sure it can’t get any worse, yet it still manages to outdo itself.
Okay, on to The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy. First off, you hear this 45-minute long recap of what happened five years ago, filling in back-story about the Aztec mummy and how Flora was hypnotized and revealed that in a former life she was sacrificed in an Aztec ritual. To prove that hypnotism and past lives weren’t a hoax, the doctor sets out to find the location of the sacrifice and retrieve the golden breastplate and bracelet she talked about. He finds them, and falls under the curse of the Aztec Mummy, Flora’s past-life lover cursed to protect the treasure forever.
No mention of any robot whatsoever until about the last 12 minutes of the movie, where we find another doctor, the evil “The Bat”, has built an invincible human robot to defeat the mummy so he can steal the treasure for himself. This human robot is obviously a man in a metal box—his helmet shows just the face, though. Anyway, the Aztec Mummy kicks the robots ass, Flora gives the treasures back to the Mummy she loved and that was the end. This film sucks so bad it distorts nearby gravity.
Holy cow this movie was one of three in a series. Who funded this crap?? Who paid good post-depression money to watch it?
Last night Lorien and I braved the 20°F weather to get tickets to see The Bucket List. It’s about two guys that find out they don’t have a lot of time left to live and go out and do things they never had the chance to do before. It was full of humor and heartwarming friendship, broken and repaired relationships, etc and had a good ending. It’s rated PG-13 and has some language.
My favorite character was probably “Thomas”, or Tommy. He was billed that way in the credits, but he said his name really was Matthew, but Jack Nicholson’s character thought it was too biblical, so he just called him Tommy. That cracked me up.