A radio... to communicate with the departed.
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| Pictured: Me as I write these reviews. |
An episode of MST3K can live or die on the SOL crew’s reaction to the movie being riffed. Ideally, the movie has a lot of badness going on to give them a lot to riff on, like in Carnival Magic. But, even a dull, dreary movie can result in a great episode, like Manos: The Hands of Fate. But, “die” is the appropriate word here, because The Dead Talk Back is as listless as a corpse. And though they have some fun, Mike and the Bots don’t bring much spark of life to it.
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| Sorry, I'm from Texas, all I have are gun jokes, not crossbow ones. |
“C’mon pal, if you’re gonna murder somebody, seize the moment!” Tom says during the movie’s beginning as a mysterious man stalks a woman before killing her with a crossbow. Seizing the moment could really apply to this movie, as even with a short before it, it drags its slow run time out like a zombie lumbering out of a grave. We meet psychic researcher Henry Krasker, a man with dramatic line delivery and fantastic hair who calls himself, “A bit of a private investigator”, to which Crow adds, “I sell parts of my record collection to make ends meet. I also manage a bowling alley. Oh, well, look I’m kind of between projects at the moment… Please help me.” Krasker claims to have made, “A radio... to communicate with the departed.” “Gasp!” exclaims Tom with absolute sincerity. We then meet the rest of the people at the boarding house Krasker lives in, characters who should be interesting but just come across as either bland or overacted, like a single mother, a jazz musician, a religious fanatic, and an aspiring model, who Krasker’s voice over tells us will be dead in an hour and a half. It feels like it takes the entire time getting there. “Renee now had 39.5 minutes to live… She now had 39 minutes to live. She now had 38.75 minutes to live…” Crow counts down as the movie kills time while Renee lays around her room. After her death, the movie basically becomes a slog of a police procedural as the cops bludgeon viewers with narration and interview every member of the household, badly. “And another brutal interrogation scene peters out,” Crow says. Eventually, the movie remembers, “Hey, this is about a guy with a radio that can communicate with the dead! Let’s try that!” So, with 30 minutes left, we get an excruciatingly long séance scene. “These poor people are gonna confess just so they can get outta here,” Mike figures. Eventually it turns out… the jazz musician did it! Also, there was no radio that could talk to the dead, they just had the victim’s friend dress up as her ghost to lure out the guilty party. The End.
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| Time killing tension! |
While they have a fun good riffs at the movie’s expense, this is one of those movies that just drags, with enough plot for a short but dragged out to feature length. They could’ve dug deeper into the movie, such as having more fun with Krasker, who is on the edge of being an eccentric and memorable character. They try with making the old lady a food addict, and they do have some fun with the cop voices and their narration, but in the way of Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, where it felt like they were making more out of the movie than it was giving them, here the movie doesn’t give them a lot, is pretty dry, and they don’t built much on it. Like when Renea retreats to her room, and Crow says, “She’s sneaking into her own lingerie drawer,” or when the jazz musician talks about putting on some dillies with Renea, and says he doesn’t want his parents to know, Mike says, “They’re anti dilly.” Still, their professional riffer attitude does shine through, so we get some good lines like, when Renea talks to someone on the phone and says she’s not supposed to call someone there, Mike says, “You being Amish and all,” or when one of the cops enters the room to talk to another, Crow says, “Kiss me, hard.” The quantity of jokes is fine, but the quality just felt lacking to me.
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| Hogwarts' cooking instructor. |
But, the episode is saved from the doldrums by two things. One is the short. The Selling Wizard is about display freezers for grocery stores made by Anheiser-Busch. The Wizard herself is an attractive woman in a semi-ridiculous outfit. Huzzah. It falls in the lower-middle of their shorts, not giving them a lot to work with, but being just kinda silly in that “internal industrial corporate video” way that they can breeze right through it. “Ah, the pizza dominatrix!” Tom cries when the Selling Wizard herself shows up. And as the short winds down, Mike calls it, “Leni Reifenstahl’s most powerful film.” It doesn’t quite give them as much to work on as something like Design for Dreaming, but this is the kind of short they can breeze right through. It’s just that that attitude would’ve benefited the movie itself more.
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| I heard a guy wearing weird sunglasses tell me all the boxes actually said, "We are your only God." |
The other thing saving the episode is Crow’s Jerry Garcia impression. In host segment three, Mike and the Bots dress up like the Grateful Dead (“Mike, remember, the name of the movie is The Dead Talk Back, we’re The Dead, get it?” Tom explains). This leads to them singing a Grateful Dead style song, only for Crow to upstage them all with an extremelyyyyyyyy looooooooooong wah-wah-ing guitar solo. Like, it carries over into the fourth host segment, and plays over the end credits and even the Rhino DVD menu. Jokes that wear out their welcome, only to come around the bend and be funny again always kill me. Add in Crow’s ridiculous Garcia wig and beard and you’ve got comedy gold.
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| At least their Ben & Jerry's flavor is good. |
Maybe the largely inert movie just sat on me during my viewing of this, but I’m sad to say I didn’t have that great a time with this one. It’s got a lot of riffs in it, a good short, and a fun running gag in the host segments, but this felt like one where the movie, either by being boring or even not interestingly bad enough, let them down and they couldn’t quite lift it up. If it had been worse, it would’ve engaged them more and even gotten the audience to root for Mike and the Bots to rip into it harder. As it stands, it’s an episode that, while having all the goodness of MST3K, doesn’t reach near the greatness it usually does.
Short in a Riff:
Meanwhile, the Soviets were launching Sputnik. -Mike
Movie in a Riff:
To talk to the dead, press 1. If you’d like the Ethere um, the Imperium, or the Emerald Beyond, please hold. -Mike
Random
Asides:
-The main memory I had of this episode was the main guy
having weird facial hair and that’s it.
-I like how the Mads’ evil invention of pinpoint marketing is basically how online marketing works now. Why do I feel a chill all of a sudden?
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| I think they invented the algorithm for this, too, the evil maniacs! |
-I like what the Sol-Mates have to say about the riffing on this episode: there aren’t a lot of memorable riffs because most of the riffing is Mike and the Bots reacting to the narration, so we don’t get some big comical riffs like on other episodes, they’re just little reacitonary riffs, and they just kind of blend together and you end up just watching the movie. A good explanation for why I didn’t really like this one. That said, the Sol-Mates really did! So maybe it’s a taste thing.
-the SoL-Mates also did their own seance with their review for the movie. Check it out here!
-”Mike, it’s you, and you’re cool!”
“But I don’t smoke!”
“Isn’t it time you started?”
-The movie says it’s based on true events, but I’d bet good money it’s not based on anything real, like events or imagination or talent.
-The guy playing Krasker does an okay job, but if this had been a role that Donald Pleasance or John Carradine had said yes to, it would’ve made this movie a lot more fun.
-The main guy Krasker being a weirdo in a boarding house is the most believable thing in the movie.
-This movie may have terrible narration, but at least it’s not The Creeping Terror.
-The movie almost achieves a documentary-like feel through its ineptness.
-There’s a decent gag about the violence on the news at the 60 minute mark. Even Mike and the Bots have to admit it’s a good gag.
-I actually like the shots of the characters running during the chase scene. Not bad! But I like the dweeby noises Mike and the Bots make as they run even more.
-hoo boy, does Paul Chaplin have a lot to say about this movie and this episode in the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. My favorite bits:
-“There’s a loser named Henry Krasker working on ways to talk to people after they’re dead, probably because no one will talk to him while they’re alive (Whoo! Good one!)"
-"So the dead never do talk. It’s just a real dumb movie"
-"There actually is detail in the film, but each detail exists in perfect isolation, unconnected to any other detail." (Very accurate to how it feels to watch the movie)
-"What I’m saying is it’s a bad movie. It’s a bold statement, and I’ll stand by it."
-"There was a time in my life when I had long, stringy hair and I believed that any song the Grateful Dead had ever done was better than any song any other band had ever done. Now I realize that’s not strictly true"
-So the movie was produced in 57 and went unreleased until 93. I. CAN’T. IMAGINE. WHY.
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