The Film Crew - Time Out Chicago Feature: 7/13/2007 |
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Fantastic review from Time Out Chicago:
By Cliff Doerksen
Ever wonder what it would be like to see Rue McClanahan of The Golden Girls perform a striptease? Depending on your sensibilities, an only-somewhat-younger Blanche Devereaux shaking her assets on the stage of a burlesque club is either a highlight or a low point of the 1968 sexploitation potboiler Hollywood After Dark (a.k.a. Walk the Angry Beach), one of four bottom-feeding B-flicks to which the Film Crew has contributed an unsolicited and relentlessly disrespectful commentary track.
The Film Crew is Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, all of whom wrote for and performed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the long-running cult cable series about a hapless earthling imprisoned on a space station and compelled by mad scientists to endure screenings of the crappiest movies ever made. Nelson took over the role of human test subject from series creator Joel Hodgson in 1988. Murphy provided the voice of Nelson’s wisecracking robotic sidekick Tom Servo (a minimally retrofitted gumball machine); Corbett was the voice of the other, even snarkier robot, Crow (a bisected bowling pin glued to a pair of pie tins), for the last three of the show’s 11 seasons.
Reunited as the Film Crew, Nelson, Murphy and Corbett are committed to the charitable mission of providing commentary tracks to unloved and forgotten films, which will then be released on DVD by the indie label Shout! Factory. There are no robots or sci-fi trappings involved, and the pace of the comic riffing is a little more relaxed than it was on MST3K (which averaged 700 jokes per episode), but otherwise the new series should please the legions of “Mysties” who’ve been pining ever since the Sci Fi Channel cancelled their favorite show in 1999. “Basically Kevin and Bill and I really missed working together,” Nelson says during our recent conference call with the Crew. “And it didn’t look like there was going to be a Mystery Science reunion any time soon—or ever, for that matter.”
The three writing partners say they looked at about 150 wretched films before settling the first four titles of their series: the aforementioned Hollywood After Dark; a 1959 Italian gladiatorial epic called Giant of Marathon, starring well-oiled American muscleman Steve Reeves; Killers from Space, a 1954 sci-fi drama starring Peter Graves; and The Wild Women of Wongo, a tropical tale about an island where hideous ape-men lust after gorgeous Amazons in fur bikinis.
“I knew right from the first frame of Wild Women of Wongo that it was a keeper,” Nelson says. “Certain films just have you licking your lips right from the first shot.”
“There’ll never be a problem finding bad movies,” Corbett says. “The problem is finding a decent print of something suitable that’s in the public domain, so we don’t have to pay a big licensing fee.”
“Luckily the kind of movies we’re interested in are just the sort that tend to get orphaned,” Nelson adds.
What, we wondered, would happen if somebody stepped forward and presented a plausible claim to owning the rights to Hollywood After Dark?
“We’re counting on humiliation to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Murphy explains.
“Actually that very thing happened with some of the movies we used for Mystery Science,” Nelson says. “The publicity we gave the movies made them worth something again, and somebody claimed ownership and took them back out of the public domain, which is why certain episodes will probably never get a DVD release.”
Nelson has found a way to get around licensing headaches entirely with one of his side projects, a Web-based service called RiffTrax. “Basically it’s a podcast of some people making fun of a big-budget Hollywood movie,” he says. “But if you, the consumer, just happen to feel like downloading one and then synchronizing it with your DVD copy of the same film—which is a lot easier to do than it sounds—then what business is that of some Hollywood lawyer?”
“Yeah, how the heck is Mike supposed to know what people are doing with these MP3 files that are absolutely useless for any other purpose?” Murphy asks.
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