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Mar 29, 2016 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

So reliable you can almost set your watch by it: the latest volume of Mystery Science Theater 3000 has arrived from Shout! Factory offering up four episodes and an assortment of bonus features. Is this 35^th bundle worth your time and money? Where does it stack up next to their other DVD volumes on sale? As per usual, that’s easier to determine when we break it down to the individual episodes. Read on, fine folks:

Teenage Caveman: Joel and the bots take on this 1958 Roger Corman production starring The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn as the ringleader of a band of impeccably-groomed, thirty-year-old Prehistoric teenagers. He’s told time and again by his village elders never to cross the nearby river or he’ll almost certainly be killed by monsters, but young people won’t play by the rules, man. The movie itself is rather dull, save for a few fun scenes where pet lizards wreak havoc on miniature forest models, but there are plenty of riffs to be had at the expense of the clean-shaven cave people with stylish ‘50s hairdos. (There’s also an out-of-nowhere twist ending that even M. Night Shyamalan would be surprised by.) Notably, this is one of the shortest features in the MSTie canon, and so the episode is bolstered by two full shorts: “Aquatic Wizards,” about the wonders of water-skiing, and “Catching Trouble,” about a man named Ross who demonstrates how he abuses wild animals and sells them into captivity. The shorts are fun (and filled with Emo Phillips references), and are more exciting than the episode’s main attraction.

Being From Another Planet: An ancient mummy (from Mars, or something) is uncovered in King Tut’s tomb and taken home to a California university to be dissected by a bunch of undergrads. When one wily student breaks open a secret drawer in the sarcophagus and steals the handful of magical crystals within, the mummy-alien wakes up and goes on a killing rampage to get them back. This silly 1982 horror film stars Alias Smith and Jones’ Ben Murphy, and was released under the original title Time Walker, referring to the alien’s apparent ability to time travel. Joel and the Bots are forced to endure the movie’s many long, “scary” point-of-view shots, as the mummy spends a significant amount of the film stumbling around alone in the school’s dimly-lit boiler room. The spacey orchestral score, however, composed by Re-Animator’s Richard Band, is pretty good—and the composer drops by to share his memories from the film’s production in the disc’s main bonus feature. (For those who dare, the disc also includes the option to watch the un-MSTed version of Time Walker.) On the host segment front, Dr. Forrester’s “Tragic Moments” statuettes is one of the series’ best invention exchanges.

12 to the Moon: Twelve brave scientists hailing from different nations of the world crawl into a rocket fitted with lawn chairs and are sent off to the moon along with a dog, two cats, and some birds. This Columbia sci-fi cheapie was shot nearly a decade before man ever walked on the moon, and it’s pretty clear the filmmakers were purely speculating from the way these astronauts wander around a rocky planet with very Earth-like gravity, pick up exploding rocks and get sucked into pits of quicksand. Eventually they come into contact with the moon’s native inhabitants (they live underground so we never actually see them, which seems convenient for the low budget movie’s producers). The aliens are annoyed that humans are bothering them, and so they send them telepathic messages in Chinese (?) telling us to stay away. By the end of the film, the fate of the United States is at stake, and the multi-national space team must put away their differences and work together in order to save it from the alien attack. Mike and the bots’ riffing is strong in this one, particularly when they poke fun at all of the American actors speaking in exaggerated foreign accents. 12 to the Moon is paired with the 1956 General Motors commercial Design for Dreaming, in which a manic, dancing woman shows off the cars (and the kitchen) of the future courtesy of a long, surreal musical segment. This is a really good episode marred only by a somewhat single-joke set of host segments.

Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell: Mike, Crow, and Servo are subjected to a Mexican sword-and-sorcery production from 1988, starring John Allen Nelson as the hero Deathstalker, a swordsman far less cool than his fairly metal moniker might lead you to believe. Deathstalker’s been tasked by a good wizard with protecting a magical crystal from an evil wizard, who raises an army of dead warriors to hunt him down. With a real budget, this might have been a pretty rad movie—at least there might have been some cool practical effects or zombie makeup to make up for the bad script. Instead, the warriors from Hell look like middle-aged men with flour on their faces. There’s a lot for the crew of the Satellite of Love to poke fun at here, thanks to the movie’s misguided (and underfunded) ambition, and the totally dislikeable hero who’s a cocky-yet-barely-competent adventurer. The movie bad but entertaining, and the riffing above average—all in all, this is a pretty darn good episode. (On the included bonus doc, the actor who played the evil wizard owns up to a lot of the movie’s campiness.)

By this humble critic/fan’s account, this volume contains one great episode (Deathstalker), two very good ones (Being and Moon), and one episode with a mostly average film bolstered by two really fun shorts (Caveman). That’s a really good spread, especially considering how slim the pickings are starting to get episode-wise after 35 box sets and quite a few more individual releases. If you’re a casual MST3K fan trying to pick out a good entry set from all of Shout’s offerings, this is a strong option. (This is up there with Vol. XXXI for their best-rounded sets.) Obviously for anyone who already owns a few of these collections, XXXV is an easy recommendation for purchase.

www.shoutfactory.com/film/action-adventure/mst3k-volume-xxxv