Customer Reviews

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 10 (Godzilla vs. Megalon / Swamp Diamonds / Teen-Age Strangler / The Giant Spider Invasion)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The latest MST3K 4-disc set contains a good variety of episodes from seasons 2, 5 and 8. Two episodes feature Joel Hodgson as host and two have Mike Nelson as host. Three episodes are from the Comedy Central years while one is from the first season on the Sci-Fi Channel. Here is a synopsis of each episode:

212- GODZILLA VS. MEGALON
This extremely silly Toho picture from 1973 is a blast whether you love or loathe Godzilla movies. Its original Japanese title is Gojira tai Megaro. It is simply goofy beyond belief! The people of Seatopia, who live under the ocean, decide that it's time they controlled the surface world as well, launching an all out assault on surface dwelling humans. Their main instrument of destruction is Megalon, a large monster with big spike-like arms and a star-shaped projection on his head. Godzilla comes to the rescue, assisted by a man-made robot named Jet Jaguar that can change its size to become gigantic. Together, Godzilla and Jet Jaguar teach Megalon and the Seatopians a lesson they'll not soon forget.

This is a GREAT episode and includes some of the BEST host segments ever, including the "Rex Dart, Eskimo Spy" sketch, the `Bots get new arms sketch, the `Bots argue over whose monster is the "coolest" sketch, and the HILARIOUS translation of the Jet Jaguar fight song during the final host segment. The scene of Godzilla dropkicking as if flying through the air during the opening titles in later seasons of the show comes from this episode. This is a must-see episode!

503- SWAMP DIAMONDS (plus short: WHAT TO DO ON A DATE)
This is a 1955 Roger Corman "classic" starring Beverly Garland and Mike "Touch" Connors before his fame with Mannix. Beverly Garland leads a gang of escaped female convicts to a cache of diamonds and they kidnap the innocent Mr. Connors and his girlfriend along the way. A policewoman goes undercover inside the gang hoping to recover the stolen diamonds. Beverly Garland turns in the usual good performance and looks great doing it in spite of the mediocre film quality.

Host segments in this episode focus on the dating short as Servo tries to get up the nerve to ask Gypsy for a date. There's also a hilarious bit based on the "This Side of Paradise" episode of the original Star Trek series.

514- TEEN-AGE STRANGLER (plus short: IS THIS LOVE?)
This is the second episode of MST3K to be hosted by Mike Nelson after the departure of show creator Joel Hodgson. The main feature is a small independent film made in 1968 West Virginia about a serial killer in a small town and it looks every bit the amateur film. Highlights in this episode include Mike Nelson transforming into Mikey from the movie and the hilarious "The Janitor Song." The short is also a winner with some of the oldest looking "young people" you're likely to see on film; this is really funny stuff!

810- THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION
This movie is a 1975 monster flick from Bill Rebane, the same man who brought you Monster A-Go Go! This film is ever so slightly more competently made than Monster A-Go Go and actually features a couple of well-known actors: Barbara Hale of Perry Mason fame and Alan Hale, Jr. who was The Skipper on Gilligan's Island and also the sheriff in the film The Crawling Hand which was featured in MST3K episode # 106. The movie is really goofy fun, with large spiders everywhere, sleazy and gross yokel-type characters less appealing than the spiders, and a small car dressed up as the biggest and cheesiest looking spider of them all. The scene where Barbara Hale's character does an odd tumble down a hill is worth seeing all by itself and there's plenty of other good material here as well for the MST3K writers. This is certainly one of the more fun episodes done after the show moved to the Sci-Fi Channel. The amusing host segments are based loosely on the classic SF film Invasion of the Body Snatchers rather than on the film featured in the episode.

This DVD set also contains the following extra features:
-MST3K Video Jukebox with 15 songs from the series
-Photo Gallery
-Outtakes consisting of about 15 minutes of the best moments from "Poopie 2"

This is a great set any MST3K fan, film buff or comedy aficionado would enjoy, with a wide variety of film genres and seasons of the show represented here. Join Us! Movie Sign!

Once there was a time when bad movies didn't necessarily disappear but found a new life. That new life was called Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it refined to an art what many had done for years: make fun of bottom-of-the-barrel films.

For those unfamiliar with MST3K, the premise is that an innocent man, Joel Robinson, has been shot into space by a mad scientist, whose sadistic experiment is to subject Joel to bad movies and see how long it takes for him to snap. Joel is smart enough to construct some robot friends, in particular Tom Servo (who looks something like a living gumball machine) and Crow T. Robot (who looks something like a robotic crow). This trio watches the movies together and maintain Joel's sanity by mocking the films. Later, Joel would be replaced by Mike Nelson, but the concept remained the same.

The four movies in the tenth collection are another set of really rotten films:

Godzilla vs. Megalon is pretty awful, even by Godzilla movie standards. When nuclear tests disrupt the undersea kingdom of Seatopia, it retaliates by sending oversized cockroach Megalon to destroy the surface world. When opposed by robot Jet Jaguar (at least that's what it sounds like), another monster joins Megalon, while Jet Jaguar is allied with Godzilla. What follows is a tag-team wrestling match with four monsters. At least Godzilla vs. Megalon has the excuse of being an obvious kids' movie. The others in the set have no such justification.

Swamp Diamonds is an early Roger Corman film. I'm willing to admit that Corman is not as bad a moviemaker as some say (his Poe movies are typically good), but this is one of the movies that cemented his "bad" reputation. A pre-Mannix Mike Connors is kidnapped by escaped female convicts (one of whom is actually an undercover cop) and they go into a swamp seeking some stolen diamonds. Done correctly, it could be good, but it isn't, so it makes good MST3K fare.

The truly shoddiest in the bunch (which makes it the best in the set) is Teen-Age Strangler. Sure, you expect the writing, direction and acting to be lousy, but even the title doesn't really make sense (watch and you'll understand). At least the Giant Spider Invasion deals with a giant spider, or at least a VW Beetle dressed as a spider.

In addition to the movies, we have a couple of short educational films, What To Do on a Date (part of the Swamp Diamonds episode) and Is This Love? (accompanying Teen-Age Strangler). We also get a Video Jukebox and a photo gallery. All in all, this is another fun-to-watch set Joel, Mike and the `bots once again attack these movies with great wit, and gets a full five-star rating.

This MST3K collection is already primed to be one of the best yet, primarily for the inclusion of one of my all-time-favorite episodes (Godzilla v. Megalon, aka Jet Jaguar) and one of the top 10 MST3Ks ever: Season Eight's Giant Spider Invasion.

The latter is one of the most tragically awful things ever slapped onto celluloid, and Mike-n-bots are in PHENOMENAL form on this one. The presence of Alan "the Skipper from Gilligan" Hale, Jr., his sister Barbara "Della Street from Perry Mason" Hale, and Steve "Lucky from The Wizard of Speed and Time" Brodie as main protagonists provides a wealth of ridicule fodder, due primarily to their utterly generic handling of utterly generic dialogue in utterly generic scenes.

Add to the above the aggressively repulsive hick characters that populate the "diamond-n-spider-meteorite" storyline, and a wildly lame titular monster, and you have all the ingredients for some of the most inspired heckling ever to issue forth from the First Row.

The riffs on this one are classic, from "Packers???" to "Johnny Crappleseed" to "PUDDING!!!!" to "Don't act with your tongue, Alan...". Giant Spider Invasion lives in the same lofty environment that houses Mitchell, The Clonus Horror, Wild World of Batwoman, Manhunt in Space, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Attack of the Eye Creatures, Hamlet, The Screaming Skull, Pod People, It Conquered the World, and Manos: Hands of Fate. Grab this one with confidence... it's one of the MST3K keepers.

These 4 eps:Godzilla vs.Megalon,Swamp Diamonds,Teenage Strangler and Giant Spider Invasion are some of the best from different seasons,so I'm excited when it comes out!Glad to know there are extras on this set and I hope in future volumes there will be more extras in each one...Thanks Rhino! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

...Netflix still openly offers it for rent. You might be best served renting each of the discs through them in order to experience the Rhino-exclusive extras instead of paying almost $300 for it.

That said, it's worth the watch. If you have the money to blow, then go for it. For the rest of us, renting is about the only shot the rest of us have.

Due to some kind of hush-hush recall of some kind, for reasons as of yet unspecified by Rhino, this Volume 10 is not going to be available for much longer! Consequently this title is going to get progressively harder to get the longer you wait. Personally I had to get my copy off of e-Bay because Amazon couldn't fill my initial order, (though they may have some in stock now so they're always worth a try). So if you're a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan and want Vol. 10, don't hesitate another nanosecond and start shopping immediately.

First of all I like to say that I have been a MSTie since I first watched Wild Rebels and I must say that I get so excited everytime Rhino puts out a new set. I enjoy the sets so much better than buying them in singles because of the variety you get. I also enjoy the fact that they are finally releasing some of the episodes from the Joel era because even though I like Mike just as much as Joel, it is just nice to some of there older episodes getting their chance at DVD immortality. With of that being said, all I can say is please buy this set. I hope ToHo studios gave the green light for Rhino to use the Godzilla movie because we don't want to have to deal with an amazing colossal blunder if all of you MSTies out there know what I mean.

Word is that Rhino is re-releasing volume 10 in February with the Godzilla movie replaced by the ever-classic "Giant Gila Monster." And "GGM" is to be released as a separate disc. All together now: I sing whenever I sing whenever I sing.
Oh, and the rest of volume 10 is/was good, too. And it didn't steal no bike neither.

Opening Credits (Beginning Remarks):

I frequently visit the mst3kinfo website to discover when the next MST3K collection will be released. But what's usually more important is not when the volume will emerge from Rhino, but what it will contain. For me it's always a fun mix between finally being able to own episodes that I've already seen and enjoyed, and anticipation of episodes I've only heard about. This time it was mostly a case of finally seeing episodes new to me. But one was an episode I had been long looking forward to viewing again. Some brief comments on each of the episodes follow.

GODZILLA VS. MEGALON

Although only two monsters are named in the title, the film actually contains more than the expected number of heroes and villains. Godzilla, you know. Megalon is a sort of giant insect with metal spikes for arms, called to Earth by an ancient subterranean civilization to destroy humanity. Jet Jaguar is a humanoid robot built by a Japanese scientist that displays a surprising amount of self-awareness and independence, even going so far as to re-program itself so that it can grow from human-sized to Godzilla-sized in a matter of seconds (Asimo has nothing on this guy). Gigan is a giant robotic lizard thing which allies itself with Megalon.

The second half of the movie involves these four monsters beating each other up on models of Japan. This is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the conventional way of getting to the second half of the film involves sitting through the first half, and the first half is a duller than watching paint dry. On the plus side, the jokes from Joel and the bots liven it up a lot.

SWAMP DIAMONDS

When the plot summary contains a gang of jail-breaking female bandits on the run from the cops and attempting to find diamonds they buried before their previous arrest, "boring" should not be the adjective one would use to describe the final product. And, yet, there is no way around using that descriptor here.

The film stars Mike Connors (a.k.a. Mannix), credited here as Touch Connors. A police woman infiltrates a gang of three woman, along the way capturing and falling for Connors' character. This is a typical Roger Corman piece of fluff, but fortunately - once again -- Joel and the bots keep us from falling asleep.

TEEN-AGE STRANGLER

If TEEN-AGE STRANGLER had been made in the 1970s or 80s, then it would have been what we now call a teen slasher movie. However, this was made in the relatively more restrained 1960s, and therefore is only a teen strangler movie.

The plot of the film is almost exactly what the title suggests. A suburban high school is being terrorized by a criminal who goes around at night strangling the local teenagers. As the cast is made up mostly of teenagers, the quality of the acting is really all over the place which gives the MST folks lots to mock (their send up of the nerdy Mikey character is hilarious).

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION

I hadn't seen this episode since back when it had aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, so I was really looking forward to it. As you can guess this one involves a giant spider from outer space terrorizing rural Wisconsin in the 1970s. The casting director must have been calling up people completely at random; I can see no other way in which they got both Barbara Hale and Alan "The Skipper" Hale in the same movie. The Wisconsin setting gives the gang a lot of fodder for jokes (remember that Mike Nelson and a few of the writing staff had once lived in Wisconsin). The repeated references to the Green Bay Packers team and players never failed to crack me up.

Love Theme (Conclusion):

This was quite a good collection and one which I was eager to get my hands on once the contents were announced. I hadn't seen this Godzilla episode, and based on their mocking of other Japanese monster movies, I couldn't wait to see this one. THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION had been one of my favorite episodes of the Sci-Fi years, so I couldn't wait to see that one again. This is a nice mixture of different eras from the show's run, so it should be great for fans and newbies alike.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is without a doubt the greatest television show of all time. I have been buying these Rhino DVD collections since they began releasing them and treasure each and every episode. I hope you didn't hesitate to purchase this one because it had an extremely short print and is already selling for 3 times its original cost. Don't delay to buy any of the other volumes because they could lose the rights to sell any episode at any time. Any of the Japanese films like Godzilla vs. Megalon are especially insanely hilarious episodes. This collection is a great sampling from different years of the show with The Giant Spider Invasion coming from the Sci-fi channel era. Probably the greatest thing about MST3K is that the more you watch the episode, the funnier it gets and you love it even more. I have never tired of an episode yet. As you can probably tell, I am a huge fan of MST3K. If you have never seen this show, you need to see what truly great artistic television is all about.