Mystery Science Theater 3000 Parties

We arrived first for the party.

The snow crunched under the tires of my “arrest-me red” 2001 Honda Insight as we pulled into the driveway at 218 Something Lane, the home of George & Leslie Mcewan at 6:18 PM. The sky was deep into twilight, stars beginning to appear.

The driveway was wide — wider than the 2 and a half car garage behind it. Snow was piled three feet deep on either side. I swung to the left to leave room for the other guests soon to be arriving. I put the car into Park, set the hand parking brake in between the seats, shut off the lights and the heater, took my key out of the ignition, and opened the door. It scraped a little on the icy snow piled nearby.

I trotted around behind the diminutive vehicle to open the door for the passenger side, in which sat my lovely but very, very pregnant wife Christy.

We gathered our snack foods out of the trunk. Pork rinds, Fruit2O drinks, oranges, cheese, and miscellaneous munchies were neatly arranged in bags underneath the cargo net under the hatchback.

George & Leslie’s new home was beautiful. According to George, it’s a “tri-level” home, which, according to him, means “split level with an attitude”. It has a kind of foyer before you reach the stairwell, which gives the foyer a dramatic vaulted ceiling and spacious ambience.

But we weren’t here for the home tour! Within a few minutes, other guests began arriving. John & Kelly Olsen with their brood. Jay & Julie Barnson with two of my favorite neices, Rowan and Brenna. Bryan Brown with his kids — unfortunately, his wife Jenny was home ill. Jacob & Melissa Proffitt and their children. And the circle was complete.

We chowed down for about forty-five minutes, making small talk. Much of the male chatter was about jobs — leaving them, losing them, and getting them. John, Jay, and Jacob are programmers. George is a CAD draftsman for some kind of mechanical engineering firm. Bryan and I are sysadmins. A consummate geek crowd, here for a consummately geeky reason:

Mystery Science Theater 3000.

We call them “MST3K Parties”. In case you’re unfamiliar with MST3K, it was a series on the Sci-Fi channel. They’d take an old, bad sci-fi movie, wrap a thin little plot about a guy getting shot into space because his boss didn’t like him around it, and then you’d see the backs of the heads of the guy and his two robot friends as you watched this really awful movie.

The whole funny thing about this isn’t the cheesy B-movies. It’s the amazingly hilarious comments the three commentators make the whole time. The movies are generally so thin on plot that you don’t miss anything due to the commentators “down in front” on the movie screens.

Anyway, my first exposure to this was “Attack of the The Eye Creatures”. No, this wasn’t a typo. The title actually read:

Attack of the
The Eye Creatures

Really weird. They had like one goofy rubber-suited alien, and then the rest of the eye creatures were people in black sweatsuits and white gloves.

Last night’s features were:

• Lucas in Love: OK, this isn’t rightly an MST3K feature, but this ten-minute short is hilarious, and appreciated by all the Star Wars fans in our audience. I’ve never seen it before, and we laughed our butts off.
• Lassie the dog in The Painted Hills: This is an original-cast MST3K episode. Unfortunately, the most memorable thing about this one was that the tape kept getting screwed up in the VCR. The tapes are, at this point, ten-year-old copies off the television set, so it’s kind of understandable. Anyway, Lassie had definitely seen better days by the time this film was made. She was pretty fat. I’m trying to remember some of TomServo’s more memorable quips, but am falling short. Maybe someone else can fill them in? Most memorable comment by the MST3K actors: “What, he has sand in his lap and Lassie has to come rescue him?” Thought it was pretty funny.
• Beginning of the End: Some guy who’s name and middle initial is “Bert I.” made this joke. Apparently, old Bert I. was responsible for an enormous number of cheap sci-fi flicks in the fifties.
  This one was about some giant crickets levelling the city of Chicago. The special effects were fantastic. At one point, they obviously had a postcard of a large Chicago building which they had put some crickets on and then filmed them crawling across it, to simulate the crickets scaling the walls of the building. Of course, the crickets get shot by the hero and fall off, leading to the most memorable comment of the night, “Oh no, they’are going to blow on the postcard again!”. Bert I. seemed particularly proud of one scene in which a cricket falls off the building by playing it three or four times in a row in nearly the same order: hero blasts cricket, cricket falls, hero blasts another, cricket falls, one more, and it falls.
  Mmm, artistic 😉
  Old Bert I. didn’t like to waste any film, either… the first forty seconds of the movie was of an empty road. No music. No nothing. Empty road. Then a car finally passed.
  Other than the “postcard” line, the most memorable line of the movie, for me, was when there were three people jammed in the front of a car onscreen and TomServo pipes up and says “And the guy in the middle says ‘Hey, this isn’t a stick shift!'”. Pure comedy at its finest!

Anyway, MST3K night rocks. Lots of fun. If you can obtain a few copies, I heartily recommend putting together some geeky friends and hang out for a night making fun of movies. Heck, go make your own MST3K night with friends. You see, filmmaking hasn’t really gotten better — technology for effects has just gotten cheaper. For a wonderful example of this, go rent the movie “Timeline”. Invite a bunch of friends and plan on picking out all the hokey moments. Enjoy!