Watching the Movies For MST's New Season

The director of Demon Squad just offered me a production T-shirt. How come Doomsday has never offered me one of these? So selfish.

Obviously I said yes because OMG.

Y E S

If Jack Black sat on it at some point, even better.

I knew you were a Ghostbusters 2016 bro at heart.

During the Kickstarter for this season of Mystery Science Theater, Joel had made the comment of having just screened a movie that "ruined our day" and he felt was "The New Manos." The movie he was referring to was a little flick called The Bubble (which coincidentally came out the same year as Manos). So with those large expectations, what is The Bubble?

The Bubble is a paranoia sci-fi thriller about a husband and wife who make an emergency landing in a small town just as their baby is about to be born. After their little miracle is brought into the world, they begin to notice the people of the town act like odd zombies people who move around in a near-lifeless drone. Chilled by everyone's behavior, they try to leave and find that the entire vacinaty is surrounded by a sort of plastic shield. Theorizing that the entire town is trapped in a dome created by aliens, they conspire to make their getaway.

Of course, it's a story we have seen before. One of the first things to pop into one's head when thinking about this movie is the Stephen King novel Under the Dome, or even The Simpsons Movie. Those both came out many years after The Bubble, but we can see similar stories being told way back in the days of Twilight Zone with Where is Everybody? or The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. Twilight Zone very much seems to be on The Bubble's mind, as it plays out very much like an average episode where characters find themselves in strange surroundings and have to guess what is going on and how to navigate through them. The problem is your average episode of Twilight Zone is a half an hour long, while The Bubble takes a concept that might make a swell episode and expands it to three times that length. It feels like it's taking forever to get from one plot point to the next and when it doesn't, it feels like it's running circles as the audience is ready for the narrative to be three steps beyond what it's doing. I'd like to stress, the premise of The Bubble is fine, it's just dull. It gets so stale that the audience begins to feel like a trapped animal along with the characters.

The movie could almost be some sort of performance art, because it's replicating the felling of being in a cage to an audience that was supposed to be watching a movie about people trapped in a cage.

The movie gets so aggressively unpleasant as it goes, which seems to be intentional based on how unsafe the characters are feeling. Things just start getting befuddling after a while, as our characters seemingly kidnap a can-can dancer from town and take her along with them for no reason at one point and even then hardly acknowledge her existence. Things tip to a breaking point as our characters are feeling so helpless that they start talking about mercy killing their baby and even possible cannibalism as food becomes scarce. I'm not sure if I'm feeling the right anxiety at these scenarios that the movie intends however, because it wants me to be worried about what's going to happen and instead I just feel like I'm stuck watching this thing and I'm very uncomfortable with that.

Moving away from the story, this production was filmed utilizing what was a supposed new 3D technology called Space-Vision, which has tech specs that I'm sure would bore most readers so I won't repeat them, though the film's director Arch Oboler has a varied career that somehow ended with him pioneering new 3D technologies, also directing 3D films Bwana Devil and Domo Arigato. The acting is reasonably solid with notable performers in the leads, including Mod Squad star Michael Cole, Gidget Goes Hawaiian title performer Deborah Walley, and singer Johnny Desmond in a supporting role.

Is The Bubble "The New Manos?" I'm going to say no. The thing about Manos is that it's such a bizarre film from a production standpoint that it's hard to get a foothold on to figure out what you're supposed to think of it. The only other film I can think of that matches Manos in that category is Birdemic: Shock and Terror. The Bubble is a functional production, so it already has a leg-up on Manos. It's just an unhinged one that is trying to be a ride but results in the viewer claiming "I want to get off." It's a shock to the system in trying to stick with a movie to the very end and it doesn't even pay off for those who do.

Next Week:

Bro… where you been? I told you, Doomsday and SnoBorderZero to watch this movie 9 years ago. I even threw it into the Film Club.

Did you watch the movie or masturbate to it?

I remember watching this movie a couple of times on TV in the eighties.  I also remember seeing the visual FX shots pop up again and again in various Roger Corman productions.  Corman spent more money on the visual FX for this picture than he usually spent on an entire movie, so he was determined to get his money's worth out of that footage!  Like most movies of the era, Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) is loaded with casual sexism that's rife for riffing by modern standards.  If I recall correctly, Robert Vaughn is essentially playing the same character he played in The Magnificent Seven (1960).  The other odd bit of casting was for the lead.  George Lucas stole the eldest son from the family TV series Eight is Enough for his hero, so Roger Corman stole the eldest son from the family TV series The Waltons.  John Boy is just as blandly uninteresting in the movie as he was on TV.  

This flick is prime riffing fodder, especially for more modern viewers.  By MST3K standards, it's got very high production values, and a relatively high profile cast.  I'm hoping that Joel will handle the riffing of this one himself, since I seriously doubt Jonah or Emily ever watched BBtS before it's selection for the show.

Well, the new season doesn't look like it's going to be happening any time soon.  The Kickstarter failed to reach the minimum target goal.  A lot of Misties felt burned by the release of season 13 onto free platforms like PlutoTV, Twitch, etc.  I suspect Joel & Company will once again look to a streaming service to foot the bill, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  They might also want to give serious consideration into sticking with movies that are in the public domain.  There are thousands of titles available free of charge for them to riff on.  

I'm writing a piece on what exactly happened with this for my blog, but it's a lot of things. There's a chance they could try again in March and it could turn a completely different result, though I'm of the opinion that MST needs a streaming partner to survive. The Gizmoplex was a great experience, but MST is too walled off over there. It can't grow its audience because only the hardcore fans jump into it, which is why Pluto TV was the right move. Pluto definitely doesn't have the money to fund another season, however.

I put off watching all the other movies from this campaign because I was waiting for them to finally announce more (the campaign rolled over and played dead halfway through, which was when I knew it was going to go south). I have copies of all of them now, and if season 14 comes to fruition or not, I still plan to go through them.