Do you like stag films that could easily get a PG-13 rating? Maybe a PG? How about when they’re crossed with Lost, but minus the easy to follow plots and pesky intrigue? Do you wish Spider-Man wasn’t so chock full of heroics and believable science? Then have I got the movie for you! Horrors of Spider Island, as featured in mst3k #1011 is what I like to refer to as a really horrible awful terrible bad not at all good film. It’s the fourth out of five new to IS movies in this year’s Thanksgiving marathon.

Running at Wednesday the 22, 8:35 PM and Sunday the 26th, 2:35 AM.

[Edit 11/17: added links]

Introducing our third (of five) “new” movies this year for Turkey Week: Hercules Unchained, as featured in mst3k episode 408. A few factoids on the film:

• This was the first of four Hercules movies featured on mst.
• This was the second of Steve Reeves‘ two turns as Herc.
• This is the last of the four to premiere on Inventing Situations. Hercules Against The Moon Men [410] and Hercules And The Captive Women [412] have been with us since the start of our turkey marathons and Hercules [502] premiered last year.

I had to remove the copy of Sylva Koscina singing “Evening Star” (the love theme from Hercules Unchained) to make room for the turkey week pictures, sorry. I left it as anexercise for the reader to create their own mash-up with this, The 5th Dimension’s (Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep at All, and Gypsy’s mash-up of the two.

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Now that we’re done with all those campaign ads, here’s a little something I whipped up to promote the upcoming Thanksgiving festivities at IS:

Direct link to the video.

As the eagle eyed mstie will no doubt notice, all but one of these bits were also used as stingers, which sort of explains why the flow from clip to clip is not always as good as it could be. I leave it as an excercise for the viewer to identify what films these come from, which one wasn’t a stinger, which one is edited differently than the stinger version (this is simply how it appeared on the copy of the film I had), and what movie I lifted the audio from.

Please feel free to share this vid with any msties you want to turn onto capping.

[Edit 11/17: Links!]

I don’t think anything says Thanksgiving quite like confessing to the murder of fat barkeeps. That’s why we’re adding Paul “Boris Badenov” Frees‘ 1959 classic The Beatniks to our annual Turkey Week marathon this year. Well, that and the fact that it was featured in episode 415 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This film demonstrates why Frees is remembered as one of the great voiceover artists and not as one of the great writer/directors. Actually, it only demonstrates the latter, though to be fair, it’s almost sort of a good movie, by mst standards.

The episode itself features both one of my favorite host segments (”You’re probably not a Beatnik”) and riffs (”Dish of Ice Cream? Don’t tempt me!”). The film features no Beatniks what so ever.

Running Tuesday the 21st, 12:47 PM, Thursday the 23rd 8:40 PM, and Saturday the 25th 10:40 PM.

(Update - 11/11/6: As promised, the mp3 is gone.
Update - 11/19/6: As promised, the replacement mp3 is also gone).
Some more links: youtube videos of the song and the stinger, and the whole movie at archive.org.

November’s not even 24 hours old, so it’s time for me to start plugging our annual Thanksgiving marathon of films that were featured on mst3k. The first new to IS film for the year is Bloodlust! (1961), as featured in episode 607. It’s a heartfelt story of a fellow who likes to hunt - people. Since the people he hunts are mostly killers and Robert Reed, he could be a remotely sympathetic character, except for the fact that he’s thoroughly unsporting and not that great of a hunter. In addition to showing up on our schedule for the week of Thanksgiving, selected pictures are already available for riffing over at Wasting Precious Time, along with a random selection of grabs from films from the early seasons.

Random factoids:

• In the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Mary Jo notes that they agreed to limit themselves to one Brady Bunch joke for Robert Reed. I’m sure the cappers will exercise the same restraint. Just remember, the only funny thing about the Brady Bunch is that anybody over the age of ten ever watched it. And even that’s more ’sad funny’ than ‘ha-ha funny.’
• This movie might feature one of the most sincere readings of the phrase “so long, suckers” in film history.
• Since we’ve already got Uncle Jim’s Dairy Farm this makes nine episodes we’ve got the short and the feature for.
• The jacket of the dollar bin DVD I picked up of this film lists Mike Nelson and Tom Servo in the cast. I can almost imagine getting Mike Nelson on there from some weird cut and paste, but I have to think their was a mstie having fun to get Tom on there.
• Rewatching this episode, it was nice to recall a simpler time when the notion of “Scooby Doo: The Movie” was still just an absurdist notion and the character of Pearl Forrester was still well motivated and remotely funny.

Running at Wednesday the 22nd, 1:05 PM and Friday the 24th, 7:35 PM.