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.