Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is a movie of paradoxes, simultaneously the show's most visually-appealing achievement and its most frustrating missed opportunity.
It all starts as normal. The movie begins with Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) informing the audience of the general premise behind MST3K -- he forces Mike Nelson (Michael J. Nelson) and his robot pals, Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (also played by Beaulieu), to watch mind-numbingly awful movies to test the limits of the human psyche so that he can find the perfect bad movie with which to dominate the world. For this experiment, Forrester has Mike and the 'bots watch This Island Earth, which they gleefully tear apart to keep a hold on their tenuous sanity.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the movie is its length -- at 73 minutes, it is far shorter than the average MST3K episode (which usually hovers around 90-93 minutes). With the host segments taking up their requisite amount of time, that leaves less than an hour for movie riffing. This came about because Gramercy Pictures, the movie's distributor, noticed test audiences' patience with the movie's concept wavered around the 75-minute mark, so they requested Best Brains (MST3K's production studio) trim the movie to be consistent with audience attention spans.
So that is one big blow to the movie right there. It's a shame because the quality of riffing is generally quite high. Some people are more unforgiving toward the movie because the riffing is "dumbed down" (also at the request of Gramercy) so that general audiences will get the jokes. There aren't as many random Minnesota references or jokes about jingles from old dishwasher detergent commercials, but obscurity does not always make a joke automatically funny, so that was not such a bad compromise. Sucks if you are a super-elitist who thinks jokes are funny only if they reference soap commercials from 40 years ago.
The movie length really hurts the host segments, however. They, too, are abbreviated in comparison to the show's host segments, and it greatly affects their quality. The host segments are not bad (I actually think they are funnier the more I think about them), but they are not as bizarre and surprising as MST3K host segments tend to be. ("The Canada Song," anyone? Hockey hair? Grizzled Old Prospector Syndrome? And those are all from one episode!)
Fans of MST3K also noticed something off about the movie selection. Again due to orders from Gramercy, Best Brains was limited in the movies it could choose to riff on -- it had to be a Universal movie, it had to be in color and it could not be horrifyingly awful. (Interestingly, Best Brains actually agreed with the final demand -- it thought the movie riffed on should have a decent amount of action and quality so that audiences would remain interested.) This led to This Island Earth being chosen for the movie; it's definitely the best movie affiliated with MST3K (which isn't saying much), and it actually is not a terrible movie. Mainly the story is a bit dry and cliche, the acting is stuck in early 20th century super melodramatic mode and the effects are a bit dated (though far ahead of many science-fiction movies of the time). This Island Earth is not great, but it is certainly no Manos: The Hands of Fate or Monster A Go-Go.
One strange thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way is Gramercy's request that Best Brains sprinkle in more jokes with strong profanity and drug references so that the movie's rating would go up from G to PG. Its reasoning was that a G rating would be the "kiss of death" for a movie appealing to young adults. I can be as cynical as any other young'un, but the cynicism of that request disgusts me. It is easy to tell the Best Brains crew was not into that request, because most of the jokes with profanity and drug references are not funny (with one notable exception, which I unfortunately cannot repeat here, although I can say the joke is funny only because of the pure malice in Servo's voice when he says it). For the most part, these profane jokes are meaningless and add absolutely nothing to the movie -- swearing and drugs do not offend me in the least, but they do become offensive when they're used to prop up unfunny jokes, and especially when they are used in such a thoroughly cynical way.
If Gramercy was so concerned with appealing to MST3K's core audience (college-age geeks), then one would think it would have made the effort to make sure the movie's distribution was not so terrible. Having the movie appear mainly in college towns was the right idea; however, the movie would stay in these towns for a week or two at most, which was not enough time for word-of-mouth to spread that MST3K was in town. Trust me, MST3K fans are an obsessive bunch -- they would have watched the movie in theaters multiple times had it, say, been there more than one or two weeks.
MST3K: The Movie could have been so much more than it was. However, despite the negativity behind the scenes, it is an impressive accomplishment for Best Brains. The movie is definitely the most technically-advanced MST3K creation, and the movie in general looks great. It is also funny as hell -- MST3K's writers were good enough to get around all the limitations set upon them and make a hilarious movie.
It is just too bad that, in the words of Mike Nelson, production of the movie sucked the life out of the Best Brains crew.
EDIT: Choosing a specific scene for the MST3K movie is weird, so I'll just go with this montage of jokes.
