Cinematic Titanic Review: "Alien Factor"

Another Cinematic Titanic offering! Today is "Alien Factor", a pretty crummy late-70s low-budget alien movie. It was almost like rewatching "The Giant Spider Invasion", except the riffers' voices were completely different.

The riffing was pretty solid through the movie, and I enjoyed it. At one point though, the riffers even acknowledged that the movie was difficult in spots to riff, as Josh broke what little of the fourth wall existed to state, "This is why riffing is hard!" while one of the characters was involved in an oft-seen repetitive action. There were a few spots where I was just begging for a riff to be said, but unfortunately there were no callbacks this time. (Dangit, "This is where the fish lives!" C'mon, Mary Jo, you watched that heap of parrot droppings!)

The live audience still does terrifically in helping the mood along, and there were a couple of riffs (one by Trace, and one by Frank with comments by Trace) that got the crowd going. I also enjoyed that the riffers broke out laughing over both the movie itself as well as a couple of the riffs that were happening. I suppose that one of the disappointments with MST3k is that the riffers sometimes seemed as if they were just tossing jokes and there was really no interaction between the jokes and human reaction, as if there was a mandate that they had to be silent. Well, this is definitely a strength of the Cinematic Titanic franchise, especially apparent in the live episodes.

Last note; I saw the trailer preview they did for East Meets Watts. I feel completely vindicated when I noticed that they ended the trailer on Josh's Journey riff. There were a couple other spots in the movie that they could have shown, but that Journey riff was the culmination of some good riffing, just like a big guitar hit and the final chorus.

Minor mainentance note: Blogger is discontinuing FTP publishing. This pretty much means that the blog itself has to be hosted outside the www.nabiki.com/mst domain, and if anyone has bookmarked this page (?, yeah right...) they will need to adjust their bookmarks once I finish transitioning to a Blogger-approved domain. I will post more details when they come available, and my deadline for this is 1 May 2010.