This set happens to include a movie and its sequel: Fugitive Alien and Star Force: Fugitive Alien II. When a movie has two characters named Ken for no reason, it tends to be the kind of movie that practically gives away its own zingers. Basically, these two films are the height of the cheesy film arts. There are awful costumes (an alien attack force with orange curly wigs built into their helmets?), horrible writing, and an incomprehensible plot. These movies are worth it for the song Joel and the bots make up with the main verse, “He tried to kill me with a forklift!”
Samson Vs. the Vampire Women is a rather slow and plodding movie, which calls for jokes about how slow and plodding it is, but it wasn’t quite enough to help overcome the monotony. There’s a whole lot of Joel Hodgson in this MST3K set, which is a bonus for fans of the original series. Mike Nelson makes an appearance with The Sword and the Dragon. It seems promising as fodder for riffing, but it’s also pretty slow and plodding, and not one of the better episodes.
As always, there’s a ton of bonus material with this set that includes interviews and extra shorts from the series. Again, you get to see what the cast went on to do after MST3K and you learn some interesting insights into how the show was made. For example, there’s a great interview with Frank Coniff, who was a writer for the show and also played one of the evil doctors. He went on to work on Invader Zimm, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and several other various TV shows. He also speaks warmly about his connection to the show and his delight in hearing about how people loved the show and had great memories of it. The bonuses I like best are the extra shorts, often newsreels and informative videos that might have been played before movies in theaters, which tend to be a concentrated punch of comedy. These shorts really show off the skills of the cast much better than a stretched out movie, in my opinion. Unfortunately there’s only 2 in this set, but they’re still darn good.
Once again, this is another good collection for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The great thing about watching this old series is the fact that you can still see it’s genius today in the online series Riftrax, which supplies background riff tracks that you can sync up with a DVD at home. MST3K and its creators are still alive here, and in other areas of show business, proving that the show wasn’t merely some fluke, and these are some truly talented people.
