Sinning in LA

There’s nothing worse than going to see a bad movie. You’ve paid your thirty dollars, you’ve navigated through the ring of Dante’s Inferno that is the Arclight parking garage, and you’ve flipped through the racks at Amoeba while waiting for the show to start, passing up known entities for something presumably better.

You’ve lost two hours of time, the respect of the friends or the date that you’ve brought to see this horrible film, and you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth. But now, for somewhere around four dollars, you can turn something from sour to sweet very quickly.

Mike Nelson, of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fame, has found the answer. It’s called RiffTrax, and it will change the way you look at films, good and bad. MST3K had a simple premise: silhouettes on the bottom of your screen would watch terrible films with low budgets and awful premises and make fun of them. But you always wondered what they could do to something modern. Something with a huge budget and some star power. The Matrix, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or even the latest Vin Diesel vehicle. These movies certainly deserved the same punishment that was bestowed on some obscure sci-fi flick.

I love the salvage aspect of what we do and you wouldn’t believe the number of people that have emailed saying, ‘I was cursing your name for making me get it and now I love it,” said Nelson.

Licensing issues have been resolved by allowing viewers to download MP3 files of the Riffs, and then sync them up with the DVDs they already own.

“We come from the Mystery Science world,” said Nelson. “Almost all of them were terrible movies, so you have a lot of the obvious targets there. Doing movies that are borderline good is a slightly different thing but no less fun. What you find is that your commentary has to be a little sharper and focus on different things, so you don’t just get to go ‘Boy that guy blows.’”

Of course, not all of the movies are clunkers. “It’s nice to challenge yourself with movies you actually like,” said Nelson. They’ve also tackled Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, and Casablanca, just to see what happens when you take on some highly respected material. And it’s still very funny.

I have two favorites: Twilight and The Room. “I expected some spooky death threats written in blood but so far, nothing,” said Nelson of Twilight. And then there’s The Room. Perhaps you’ve seen the billboard of director/producer/star/writer Tommy Wiseau near Hollywood and Highland. He watches over the street like a darkened apparition of Benicio Del Toro, beckoning drivers to see The Room. “The billboard,” said Nelson, “costs him $5,000 a month or so.”

“My son, who is now 16, sought him out at Comic-Con and got pictures with him for me and they are by far the creepiest pictures I’ve ever seen. My lovely son, standing next to this ghoulish scrawny dude, with sunglasses on and like four belts on. I don’t know why I find him so hilarious.”

The Room is even some kind of LA Rocky Horror, with people showing up to screenings in costumes. “By the second time I watched it, I said we have to do this movie, even though it’s not going to be a big home run for us because there just aren’t many DVDs of it out there.”

Certainly an adventure worth taking, especially since the RiffTrax commentary makes such an atrocity watchable.

“There’s bound to be something there [at RiffTrax] for everyone and also we do the shorts, which people just love. The ten-minute educational films, so those are maybe a good entrance for people who are on the fence. It’s ten minutes of your time and 99 cents,” Nelson told us. It’s an easy way to cleanse your mind and soul after a bad movie date.

Now there’s a power that even the sparkly guy from Twilight didn’t possess.

// rifftrax.com