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Dec 08, 2015 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Shout! Factory’s latest Mystery Science Theater 3000 box set serves up four films from the American International Pictures library. Without further ado, we’ll look at each episode to evaluate whether this particular volume is a must-grab.

War of the Colossal Beast – This early episode is more notable for its bonus short subject than the feature itself. Mr. B Natural is as legendary amongst MST3K canon as they come—it’s on the same level as Manos and Mitchell, as far as its importance to the series’ mythos. It’s a short promotional film that Conn Instruments made in the mid-50s to sell kids on joining band once they hit high school. It’s about an awkward teenage boy who’s visited in his bedroom by a magical elf named Mr. B. Natural—bafflingly played, Peter Pan-style, by an attractive, nubile woman. Her frequent, startling displays of her dark magical powers and constant lecturing on the spirit of music are as disturbing to the audience as they are to Joel and the ‘Bots, who conjure up their A-game riffing for the short. Mr. B. Natural is referenced time and again in callback jokes throughout MST3K’s run, and Mr. B herself even showed up during one of the Turkey Day marathons (which can be found on MST3K: Volume XXXI.) The film itself is a sequel The Amazing Colossal Man—riffed by the SOL crew earlier the same season—about a man who was exposed to radiation and grew into a 60-foot-tall, out-of-control monster. It’s a fun movie with pretty good special effects; the riffing and host segments are all pretty humorous, which makes it a pretty strong episode.

The Undead – This movie doesn’t deal with vampires, zombies, or any other monsters that its title would lead you to believe. It’s about hypnotic regression—using hypnosis to connect people with their past lives—which must have been a big “thing” back in the 1950s. In Roger Corman’s The Undead, our hero—a scientist—pays a pretty young prostitute to let him send her back into her past—all the way to medieval times, when she a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft. Most of the movie takes place in this era, with knights, witches, and a gravedigger who never stops singing and making graveyard-centered puns. The movie itself is really entertaining—the Devil himself makes several cameos—and the riffing is very good; there’s also a host segment poking fun at the bad witch’s shapeshifting powers that’s gold.

The She-Creature – Unbelievably, this is the second AIP-produced movie dealing with the subject of hypnotic regression in this box set. This time, instead of a heroic hypnotist sending a young woman back to the middle ages, an evil hypnotist uses a young woman to channel a primordial monster into the present, which he commands to murder people for him. The monster looks kind of like the creature from the black lagoon, but with breasts—because, y’know, it’s a she-creature. A lot of fun is had by Mike and company at the expense of the movie’s bad guy—an uber-serious stage magician—but there are quite a few slow, talky stretches that really bring down the pace. There are two very funny host segments, but the rest fall pretty flat.

The Viking Women Vs. the Sea Serpent – A rather dull Roger Corman sword-and-sandal flick paired with a pretty good ‘50s short subject on the many things a girl can learn from taking a course in home economics. Viking Women is a Corman flick, so you know that it’s going to star a bunch of buxom young actresses. They’re Vikings here and their men never returned from their latest excursion, so they climb into a boat to go looking for them. They wind up shipwrecked on an island where they’re captured by a cruel king and have to escape. The runtime feels heavily padded by lots of scenes of characters quietly walking from one place to another, or re-hashing their escape plans over and over. Because so little is actually happening on screen, Joel and the bots have very little to actually riff on—you can tell they were low on ideas because the episode is threaded with a long, unfunny recurring joke about waffles that occupies not only the riffing, but most of the host segments. The short subject is pretty good, but the feature itself is non-essential.

That brings Volume XXXIV’s final tally to two really good episodes and two so-so ones. However, this set is elevated by its most significant bonus feature. It Was A Colossal Teenage Movie Machine: The A.I.P. Story is a feature-length (!) documentary about the infamous independent studio known as American International Pictures. From the 1950s to 1980, AIP was responsible for more than 100 low-budget b-movies. The majority of these fell into the exploitation markets: horror, science fiction, juvenile delinquent and beach party and other “teen films.” Their output included many of Roger Corman’s films, as well as supplied a lot of riffing material for MST3K episodes. The documentary talks to the children of AIP’s founders, as well as Roger Corman, poster artist Albert Kallis, and several of the directors who worked on AIP films. It’s an engrossing and highly informative film, on the same high quality level of Ballyhoo’s mini-documentaries found on previous MST3K sets. This special feature—and, of course, the legendary Mr. B. Natural—put Volume XXXIV into easy recommendation territory, even for casual fans of the show.

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

Author rating: 7/10