Over the weekend, I took my honey lamb out to the Ford Amphitheater for a little Mystery Science Theater 3000 reunion called “Cinematic Titanic,” an event that had roughly 2/3 of the cast of MST3K talking over a movie, live. It was kind of weird, hanging out with lots of upper-middle class people in their thirties and forties in a giant packed outdoor amphitheater, drinking wine and watching a show I used to watch while on speed in college, or while sitting on a dirty floor packed with teenagers in an old Tulsa apartment.
Anyway, there I was at the amphitheater Saturday night, and at the last minute, they announced they’d swapped out the actual film they were going to use. Instead of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (which I’ve seen before, and really wanted to see get the MST3K treatment) they showed the Doomsday Machine, a film patched together in 1972 from footage taken in 1967, which had Casey Kasem and M*A*S*H* veteran/Patch Adams producer Mike Farrell in supporting roles. The Wasp Woman was “just not shitty enough.”
Needless to say, The Doomsday Machine was insanely shitty, and their dessication of it was incredibly funny. And though I was never much a fan of the character Pearl Forrester on the latter-day MST3K episodes, Mary Jo Pehl was great doing voices in the film. When a female Chinese spy on the big screen killled a woman and then left the room with an evil look in his eyes, and Pehl said “Now to break up the Beatles!” hey, that was some funny fuckin’ shit!
For the next round, I hope they savage the movie they talked about doing when I saw the premiere of their own movie in 1995–an audience member then asked what “modern” movie they’d like to do, and Trace Beaulieu offered the idea of Cutthroat Island!