Movie: "MST3K I"
Year: 2015
Rated: Unrated
Genre: Comedy
Directed by: Various
Writing credits: Michael Nelson, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, et al

Reviewer: Dr. Boogie
Posted: 11/18/2015

Plot: The Catalina Caper

A fun teenage beach romp is disrupted by a scheme to steal an ancient scroll.

The Creeping Terror

A hideous alien crashes on earth and goes on a rampage.

Bloodlust!

A group of college students are forced into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse on the island of a deranged hunter.

The Skydivers

Tensions arise when a skydiving instructor is visited by an old flame whose advances he spurns.

Review: Well it finally happened: Shout Factory is running out of new MST3k episodes to publish. Cause for concern? No, just the opposite. You see, now that they're closing in on the end of what they can release, they're going back and re-release what Rhino had released back in the early 2000s.

Volume one is a Season Six-heavy selection with just one outlier in Catalina Caper from Season Two. Bloodlust marks the high point, while Skydivers, directed by infamous MST3K director and Curly Howard impersonator Coleman Francis, is most definitely the low. Something about the endless repetition of skydiving just doesn't make for a good film, even with Mike and the 'bots trying to provide some levity. Granted, they're all terrible, terrible movies, particularly Creeping Terror (how do you ADR an entire movie!?), but as any MST3K fan will tell you, there are degrees.

I can't claim to have seen the original Volume One because I don't have almost $200 to spend on the out-of-print original, but based off Rhino's other releases, the picture quality on these restored episodes is a lot better. No disrespect to Rhino for their efforts, but Shout Factory has been killing it in terms of taking this old standard def cable show and smoothing out all the rough edges to the point that all those shoddy uploads on Youtube simply won't do anymore.

The downside of the republishing is that the collection doesn't include any of the inserts or any of those well-done DVD menu animations. Small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, especially considering they're gearing up to re-release all the old DVDs that are currently unavailable to all but the most loaded of fans, but still disappointing. Thankfully, there's still a good amount of extras on the DVDs themselves to make up for it. Most notable, though not directly MST3K-related, is a trailer for The Creep Behind the Camera, a semi-fictional account of AJ Nelson aka Vic Savage aka the guy who directed and starred in The Creeping Terror. That's part of what makes MST3K great: you get to laugh at a crappy movie, but sometimes you also get to laugh at the crappy people behind it.

Schadenfreude Volume One.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)