a review of

2020 Cult Movie Challenge Week 35: MST3K Week Between this one and the other "lost" MST3K episode (another supermarionation movie, "Invaders From the Deep") I think I can see why they never went back to the Gerry & Sylvia Anderson well for the Comedy Central and later years. The "movies" (really just several episodes of their respective TV series stapled together without a true overall story arc) are executed well enough as puppet and miniature effects pieces that they don't look as laughably cheap as most of the films in the later MST3K mythos, which maybe takes some of the wind out of the riffing, as sparse as it is in these early eps. The bigger problem is that these movies are extremely boring. The marionettes are stiff, the vocal performances all sound like the same actor doing nearly the same voice, and the stories all seem to center around characters talking into viewscreens and long shots of impressive looking HO-scale models. It feels to me like how watching Star Wars or Star Trek must feel to people who have no investment in those worlds.