Movies that would be great MST3K material.


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drnuncheon

Explorer
Robot Jox - big, crummily-done mecha battle in an awesomely uninsiring display. There is a reason this sort of movie is usually done animated and not live action, and this shows why.

Invincible - starring Billy "Titanic" Zane as a smug immortal guy who trains a buch of troubled youth to stand around while he beats up the main bad guy. The scene where he rides the bicycle through the fountain while (smugly) lecturing them is indescribable.

Beowulf - with Christopher Lambert! While it hasn't been MST'ed, I did write a "Mike Nelson Movie Megacheese"-style review of it, which I will reproduce here for your viewing pleasure.

BEOWULF

Just finished watching this direct-to-video release (well, OK, it was released theatrically in Europe, which says nothing for their taste) and it is of that "entertainingly bad" level of quality that spawns so many great MST episodes, so I thought I'd recommend it here with a short summary. So, read on, but spoilers abound!

As the movie opens, a fortress with a giant mechanical flaming claw on top of it (a sure sign of a quality movie) is under seige. Inside the fortress, a group of armored warriors lead by Hrothgar are hunting a monster. Cleverly, Hrothgar has donned a helmet with no eyeslits before going after the beast. This prevents him from seeing that his daughter's breasts are prepared to spring free from her leather bodice. However, it does not work well against the monster, who kills a few of Hrothgar's friends.

After watching this, a girl (not the daughter, a different girl) decides to run for it. She is caught by the beseiging army, who prepare to execute her with a giant straight-razor. Enter Christopher Lambert. Lambert stars as Conor MacLeod - although he's changed his name to Beowulf, after borrowing Keanu Reeves' wardrobe from THE MATRIX and Wesley Snipes' arsenal from BLADE. He beats up on the beseigers and rescues the girl, but she runs away and dies anyway.

Well, he enters the castle, finds out that it's being terrorized by a guy in a rubber suit and a small CGI budget, and offers to help. First he has to prove himself by defeating the castle's current badass (who is obviously not as badass as Grendel, otherwise the movie would be over already).

Then Hrothgar gets seduced by a Samantha Fox impersonator who is way too attached to her hair crimper. Oh, and Grendel kills some people.

To protect the women and children, they herd them all into a small enclosed space where nobody can get in except for Grendel. This minor flaw in their plans is quickly discovered, and Beowulf confronts the monster in a scene with choreography reminiscent of the classic martial arts film GYMKHATA. Not surprisingly, he gets clawed to ribbons.

But it's OK, because he gets better, and decides that since fighting the monster with his entire arsenal and a bunch of people helping didn't work, he should confront the beast alone and unarmed except for a spring-loaded dagger made by the inept assistant weaponsmaster (played by some sort of substitute Wayans brother). So he climbs down into the cellars of the Paris Opera House and stands in the middle of the room and waits.

Well, that doesn't work too well, because the monster runs up and whacks him. Undaunted, he tries it again, and it works about as well the second time. Eventually he gets the idea of fighting back, and he uses the dagger to rip Grendel's arm off. He then lets the creature go, because the movie's still got about half an hour before its over.

Anyway, everybody's happy, he sleeps with the girl, and the former resident badass is seduced by the Samantha Fox lookalike (remember her?).

Beowulf gets nervous, because there's an "older and more subtle evil" around, and it's making his spider-sense tingle. When he and the girl get to the main hall, we discover that "subtle" means killing people by making them bleed from their ears and mouths, rather than ripping them in half - a very important distinction.

Anyway, Grendel is still alive and kills Hrothgar, and Beowulf kills Grendel. Then the Samantha Fox lookalike shows up and tries to seduce Beowulf, but homie don't play dat, and so she turns into the Borg Queen crossed with a spider and a bat courtesy of the rest of the film's CGI budget. There's some more acrobatic fighting, Beowulf discovers that she has propane for blood, and uses a lamp to blow her up.

In classic B-movie tradition, the castle inexplicably begins to fall apart, and he and the girl escape to go wander around the world fighting evil.

The movie is set to a hideously inappropriate techno soundtrack - my wife is of the opinion that it was trying to be Mortal Kombat, but Lambert was clearly playing MacLeod and not Raiden, so I'm not too sure. Anyway, give it a watch if you're in the mood for that sort of thing.
 
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