One more in the series, here’s my review of Ring of Terror, starring a bunch of people you’ve never heard of.
The story is about med school students, their girlfriends, and how they’re trying to pledge to a fraternity. The main character has no problem with the dissection and autopsy-ing that goes on while his fellow students do, yet he has a lingering childhood fear of the dark. We later learn that when his grandfather died and before the funeral, his body was at their home. When he asked his mother to leave the light on, she said no. As he cried, she said he’d better stop or his dead grandfather would get up and beat him. Something like that, anyway. So he has this fear of the dark, but pretty much of nothing else. At their pledge party, each student is sent off to do his humiliating thing, while the hero is sent to the mortuary to steal the ring from the John Doe they watched being autopsied. While in the act of stealing, a cat walks by the window just outside, he gets scared, the corpse’s hand gets caught on his coat, which makes him think it was coming alive. Then he dies of heart failure. That was, literally, the whole movie.
As a twist, part three of The Phantom Creeps was played at the end of the show. Very light on plot and heavy on cheese, I don’t recommend watching this without Joel and the bots to save you.
I rate this movie six empty seats—about enough for each of the fraternity people that decided what humiliating things to make their pledges do, one of which led to a death. So not funny.
Okay, here’s another review in the series, Rocket Attack USA. This movie was prefaced by the Bela Lugosi episodic short, The Phantom Creeps part two. It’s about a scientist that discovers invisibility and has exploding spiders that put people into suspended animation. But enough of that, let’s get to the movie.
Rocket Attack USA is a propaganda film about the Soviet satellite Sputnik and how it allows the Commies to invent intercontinental ballistic missiles before us. Our spies do the best they can to thwart the commies and steal information, as well as protect the beautiful female defector that sleeps with the fat drunk Russian general to get information. The spy gets killed right after the woman he was falling in love with and was supposed to be helping. Then the whole movie shifts gears and we’re now in New York, where the missile is about to hit. We scramble fighters and shoot some of our missiles, but they aren’t enough, the Russian bomb hits and half of New York is blown up. At the very end the words We can’t let this be the end come on the screen.
This movie was not very cohesive (obviously), and was certainly not worth watching without Joel and the bots making fun of it. I rate it three million empty seats, the death toll from the missile impacting New York.
Continuing the series of reviews, here’s my take on Catalina Caper, episode four of season two.
This movie starred Tommy Kirk, who to me will always be “that kid from Swiss Family Robinson.”
Anyway, Catalina Caper was (compared to other films MST3K does) a relatively good film. Small wonder it’s one of the commercially available episodes. It’s very loosely about an art heist, but more about the 60s being a time when you could film lots of girls in bikinis shaking it for the camera. So here we go: thief steals half-million dollar scroll from a poorly guarded art museum and smuggles it on board a boat bound for Catalina Island, where bunches of scantily clad teens hang out and dance all the time. The boat trip over was interrupted by a seriously high Little Richard (just look at his eyes), who sings a song while they all dance around like monkeys. One guy (obviously some type of detective from the beginning) is the comic relief—he is constantly tripping over umbrellas or falling in the water.
So the thief takes the scroll to his buddies on a boat. They are attacked by an agent of the Greek guy that is going to buy/steal the art from them, and the scroll gets dropped overboard in its waterproof container and sinks to the bottom despite the air inside. The teenagers are recruited by the thief and his buddies to have a “scuba party” at his boat, and top prize was for finding the scroll case. The bad guys reappear in scuba gear on the boat—for some reason nobody ever notices them climbing up on the deck until they’re up and had time to get their guns out of the ziplock bags they had them in. The bad guys are slipped the fake that was intended to be sold to their boss all along. The teenagers find the scroll, but don’t let the thieves know about it. Instead, they use it to “scare them straight” and cook up a plan involving the bad guys and the police.
The movie wraps up with the original scroll returned secretly to the museum, the clumsy detective guy revealing himself and attempting to arrest the thief and his buddies, the scroll case was empty (because it was returned), the thief gets off free, and the bad guys attempting to steal the real scroll getting caught and going to jail.
That’s pretty much the plot, minus gratuitous shots of girls in bikinis dancing around for the camera. I rate this movie four empty seats—one for each missing member of the Swiss Family Robinson.