Now that we’ve got the ball rolling on this ‘Who Critiques the Critics’ segment, the time has come to look back at one of the pioneers of reaction video reviews. To understand what many of today’s modern producers of criticism-as-entertainment have built on, let’s delve into the world of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
There are lots of classic films I’ve finally got around to watching, only to find them oddly underwhelming. That’s not to say that I felt smart enough to poke holes in Godard’s Breathless, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, or even Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (which my dad used to insist would be one of the scariest things I would ever watch). These aren’t bad films; it’s just I can never view them in their original context.
I’ve been raised amid a world of cultural splendour which they made possible. Those great, rightly lauded, works might have been groundbreaking visual storytelling when first visited on audiences, but the people who used them as an innovative foundation to build from have left them feeling creaking and old by comparison.
To an extent, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the equivalent of that in popular film-criticism. I’ve been recommended it for years, either by people I have quipped through B-movies with on a bad film night, or by people who know I enjoy vicarious film criticism (from Folding Ideas to Best of the Worst) almost as much. But coming decades before any of that, MST3K is another pioneer that has fallen victim to its own success.
Manos: Hands of Fate
Pithily categorised as “an American science fiction comedy film review television series” by Wikipedia, the show was created by Joel Hodgson and premiered on a local TV network in Minnesota in 1988. It later moved to Comedy Central, and has been cancelled and revived on various different networks in the more-than three decades since.
I finally gave in to the recommendations this week, when I noticed that MST3K had been running an official YouTube channel – and had recently uploaded one of its most famous episodes, providing commentary to Manos: Hands of Fate. The episode remains the show’s best rated from its original run on IMDb – so it seems like a perfect point of entry.
While the show has changed host several times over the years, the original classic run saw Hodgson playing a janitor aboard a space station. With nobody but a group of jerry-rigged robots for company, Joel is tormented by Earth-based scientists who beam him strange B-movies to see what impact they have on him. Each episode opens and closes with strange skits, where Hodgson and his puppets act through some vague sci-fi conundrum, before being badgered into watching a bad film by their superiors. The mid-section is mostly just the silhouettes of the gang in an old theatre, watching the movies in their entirety, and riffing on every minor flaw they can find.
The show’s format will be familiar to many consumers of YouTube ‘reaction video’ culture, where – for better or worse – long-running shows like Half in the Bag, The Angry Video Game Nerd and JonTron set up a scenario where they are forced to watch a movie they wanted to talk about anyway.
In this episode of MST3K, there are also several cut-aways where the gang decide to recreate their favourite non-scenes (there is a lot of aimless Zoltan-esque driving in the film’s opening), and video messages from their bosses on Earth, who are apologetic. They know the point is to inflict bad films on their captive audience, but on this occasion, even the evil scientist feel they may have gone too far.
And let’s not beat about the bush. Manos: Hands of Fate is truly, mind-bogglingly bad. Not in an entertaining way, in a tedious way. Perhaps the strength of the episode is not the subject-matter, then, but the fact the MST3K crew find anything to talk about at all – any angle from which to snipe or chide the movie’s grating non-action.
Manos: Hands of Fate
Some of that comes from a willingness to simply let things flow, and not to force the humour – something which is an unexpected joy, considering just how constructed the scenario of having puppets ‘review’ a film actually is. One of the best ‘jokes’ as such, is the simple repetition of the film’s title in increasing frustration.
Every time someone sighs “Manos… Hands… of Fate”, you feel a little more of their will to live slipping away; an ebbing away of their thorny resistance in the face of its relentless and oppressive nothingness. And eventually that becomes really, inescapably funny. Less is more sometimes – something which the cringe-inducing ‘everything and the kitchen-sink’ stylings of modern MST3K emulators James Rolfe and Doug Walker could do with learning.
Similarly, when the car of the film’s protagonists breaks down, they take up lodging with a strange, hairy man-servant named Torgo. Torgo has clear ulterior motives, but as they remain obscured (both to deliberately create mystery, and due to poor storytelling), the crew begin to imagine his backstory and explain his erratic behaviours – even collapsing to despair when he messes up, “No, Torgo, noooo…”
But as the film progresses, and something resembling a plot about a murderous cult develops, the limitations of the MST3K format also become exposed. This is perfectly good entertainment, if you want to simulate a so-bad-it’s-good movie event without inviting anyone over – but that is an act of self-indulgence rather than film criticism. You can prove pretty easily you are smarter than Manos: Hands of Fate, and you can have fun at its expense, laughing at its silly visuals or mis-timed dialogue – but that doesn’t do much to help anyone in the future.
Manos: Hands of Fate
Beyond the famous assertion of the fictional food critic Anton Ego that the most sacred responsibility of the critic is the “defence of the new”, we also owe it to artists to explain why some things don’t work, and where future productions might learn from the mistakes of something written off as ‘bad’. Where possible, we ought to bare some of our own vulnerability, too, point to shortcomings from our own filmmaking experiences (most of us have some), and use them as teachable moments.
Looking at MST3K’s original run from a modern standpoint, then, it can also appear a little one-note. Particularly when compared to productions of the likes of Red Letter Media, which are not only wildly funny (and unrestricted by the sensibilities of network television executives), but look to point out where aspiring filmmakers watching might improve on the efforts of the artists whose work has been eviscerated.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth visiting Mystery Science Theater 3000’s growing YouTube presence, and the show’s sprawling catalogue of watch-along reviews, of course. On the basis of this showing, I’ll be back whenever I need a slice of something to lighten my mood – and to dip a toe into the sea of forgotten cinema which the show has become a custodian for.
But in terms of film criticism, the show is a little light these days. If you’re looking for a blend of banter and insight, this early trailblazer has long since been left in the dust.