The other day, while scanning a handful of year-in-film pages on Wikipedia for an upcoming feature, I noticed an interesting pattern: Nestled among the more prominent, more memorable, and more influential titles were so, so, so many Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies. I’ll admit that I’m probably more attuned than most to notice that particular pattern, but it did make me wonder: Were it not for MST3K, would any of these movies—Mitchell, to name just one that I came across—wind up as part of this crowdsourced history of the medium? Beyond all-time turkeys like Robot Monster, Bride Of The Monster, and Mac And Me, I feel like most of what’s been played on the Satellite Of Love would’ve been lost to time if a VHS hadn’t landed in the hands of Frank Conniff or one of his successors in movie-screening for the show. Just consider a case like Manos: The Hands Of Fate, whose legacy, if you can call it that, is due almost entirely to Mystery Science Theater.
Despite the bellyaches of the various filmmakers and actors whose work has wound up on MST3K, the show is an invaluable force for film preservation. Or, if I may be permitted a groaner both worthy of and related to the third RiffTrax Experiment, film excavation. Just when you think you’ve heard of every last so-bad-its-good movie, just when it seems like any future MST3K revivals will be limited to Shout! Factory acquisitions and the legendary sci-fi stinkers finally freed up by the 2023 death of Wade Williams, along comes The Mummy Theme Park with its clunky title, conspicuous dubbing, and scrappy visual ingenuity that screams “special effects guy turned filmmaker.” What a low-rent marvel. What a feast for Mike and the ’bots. What a perfect articulation of the question Joel Hodgson asked himself while reading The Golden Turkey Awards in his college dorm: “‘Why isn’t anyone making shows with these adorable, weird movies?”
“Adorable” doesn’t quite apply to a movie as leering and racist as The Mummy Theme Park—but I would say that it’s charming in its strangeness. It has its parallels to other Italian-produced MST3K movies (those scenes with the Osiris statue are begging for a callback to Donald Pleasance and his Pumaman mask), but it’s also unlike anything else that’s ever been on the show. It fits the same “it’s good when the movie is a little entertaining” bill as Deathsport, but its stabs at ripping off Hollywood blockbusters on a shoestring are far more one-of-one—all those forced-perspective sets alone! The miniatures and the rear projection scenery that make up director Alvaro Passeri’s cartoon vision of Egypt set up some solid riffing—and they’re arguably the closest an MST3K movie has ever come to the production values and art direction of MST3K itself.
Pair that with enough directorial acumen, onscreen charisma, and psychedelic experimentation, and you can wind up with something like Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House. Thankfully, The Mummy Theme Park has none of those things, so it leaves a lot of cracks for Servo, Mike, and Crow to spackle over with jokes about the movie’s drip of a lead, the nonsensical workings of the park and the horny mummies at its center, and the subplot about the sheikh’s harem that “feels like the director working something personal out—possibly something prosecutable.” The mummies are great fodder for some Muppet-voiced inner monologue; you can hear the RiffTrax team having a ball with the gross-out vfx, too. I was laughing right along Kevin Murphy and Mike Nelson after Crow’s “Unlike most mummies, I’m juicy!” It’s nice to hear that the guys can still surprise each other after all these years.
And it’s nice that the Forrester family still has some surprises left in the vault. And nice to have a few more sketch-comedy beats in the host segments this time around. Did I lead this recap with a Wikipedia-based anecdote because of Crow and Bobo’s editing war over the free encylopedia’s entry on Mary Worth? Who’s to say. But that opener is a great melding of a contemporary topic with some classic MST3K raised-on-pop-culture minutiae. I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with Grandpa Servo during intermission (or getting the old-time baseball runner there, rather than as a post-credits bonus), but then that would’ve delayed our return to The Mummy Theme Park. And I just had to get back to that Mummy Theme Park. Thankfully, the doors there open extremely slowly.
Stray observations
- • I’m running short on time this afternoon, so I’ll come back and fill out the strays with favorite riffs and other notes later. But don’t wait for me to share your favorites down in the comments!
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