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Post by duane on Jul 27, 2013 13:13:06 GMT -5
The old thread for this hasn't been posted in for five years, so I think a new one is appropriate.
I think "Ring of Terror" is one of the worst. Loaded with scratches and brightness flickering, and it's so dark it makes me sick. Might as well watch the episode without my glasses on. What's the difference?
The shorts are also in pretty bad condition. "A Date with Your Family" is particularly poor. I also find that brief moment very early in "Last Clear Chance" where there's a massive splice parting hilarious. "I couldn't do it." - "Because of the tear in the sprocket holes."
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Post by Skyroniter on Jul 27, 2013 13:55:57 GMT -5
Hard to get any worse than "Mad Monster." Ugly print of an ugly movie.
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Post by crispyglennmanning on Jul 27, 2013 14:38:35 GMT -5
Horrors of Spider Island has horrible video quality!
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Post by Mike Flugennock on Jul 27, 2013 16:35:22 GMT -5
You don't say if you're talking about the quality of the photography/sound, or the quality of the particular print that MST3K had, but...
My top five, right off the top of my head:
1. The Creeping Terror. Besides the print MST3K had to work with being hopelessly scuffy, every damn' shot in that picture is contrasty and overexposed -- except, for some odd reason, the dance hall scene. Ed Wood may have been a hack, but at least all the shots in his movies were properly exposed.
2. Monster A Go-Go. The print is really nasty-looking, and the quality of the photography itself sets the bar for poor photography... and this doesn't even take into account the quality of the sound -- as if it were recorded on a Radio Shack handheld portable cassette recorder.
3. Manos, The Hands Of Fate. When I heard about the independent project to digitally remaster this stinkburger, all I could think of was a silk purse, a sow's ear, and lipstick on a pig. It looks like old Super 8 footage of somebody's vacation. When Servo (iirc) remarked that every shot looked like somebody's last known photo, he wasn't that far off.
4. Racket Girls. Towards the middle of the movie, there's a couple of spots on the print that look as if they've been repeatedly damaged and spliced back together, resulting in dialogue that's so badly hacked up that you almost can't follow the plot in those scenes. Still, it makes for some of the best riffs in the movie.
5. The Phantom Creeps. As Dr. F says, "...bad print, bad sound, bad for you!"
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Post by duane on Jul 28, 2013 9:50:21 GMT -5
I'm discussing the quality of the print Joel/Mike & the Bots were viewing in the theater.
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Post by Crowfan on Jul 28, 2013 13:05:29 GMT -5
At or near the very top has to be The Creeping Terror. Not only is the picture quality bad, but the whole narrator telling the story doesn't work.
Their print of Manos was bad and also they edited some of the wives wrestling out(saw the Rifftrax version which left it in). I'm guessing the wives were the whole reason Manos was made....
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Post by TV's Cowboy on Jul 28, 2013 13:09:24 GMT -5
The print for Secret Agent Super Dragon was pretty bad with it's faded quality and times where characters look like they teleport onto the screen.
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Jul 28, 2013 13:15:55 GMT -5
The Commander Cody shorts. No love was lavished on them in their making or in their storage and it shows. Everybody is faceless except in the most extreme close ups, muddy sound, cheap sets.
Nipple nipple tweak tweak!
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Post by sol-survivor on Jul 29, 2013 16:42:14 GMT -5
All four of the Russo-Finnish (or whatever) prints are kind of faded and seem to have frames missing. You can see how beautiful they must look in pristine condition, but these prints are definitely not.
I read a review somewhere once of "The Incredibly Strange Creatures..." which raved about the "gorgeous saturated color". Whoever wrote it was either hypnotized by Estrella or had a much better copy to look at.
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Post by dph on Jul 29, 2013 17:15:17 GMT -5
Aren't some of the problems with "The Castle of Fu Manchu" attributed to print?
Girl in Gold Boots isn't the best print either, considering all of the skips.
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Post by Mike Flugennock on Jul 29, 2013 20:54:58 GMT -5
...Girl in Gold Boots isn't the best print either, considering all of the skips. Yeah, but not all of those skips were due to damaged parts of the print being spliced back together. Don't forget that one scene in the diner where Buz seems to teleport into the shot. Oh, and I almost forgot that one scene in Assignment: Venezuela: a stationary-camera shot of the car driving down a road... they hit a spot where they spliced a film break together, the car appears to magically vanish from the road, the narration is cut off in mid-sentence, and Nelson says "...being sucked into a time portal!" In fact, one of my favorite running riffs is one they use any time there's a bad splice in a scene where the camera is stationary and a character seems to magically bilocate from one part of the shot to another: "whoops, hit a worm hole, there!" As I recall, there's one in The Dead Talk Back, in Girl In Lovers' Lane, and a really funny one in The Sinister Urge. |
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Post by Monophylos on Jul 29, 2013 21:37:21 GMT -5
Indeed The Castle of Fu Manchu print used in the MST3K episode is quite horrible. A film called Blue Underground released a restored version a while back and it looks (and sounds) much better, as you can tell from this trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJH0KN_UXd4 Why anyone wanted to waste effort on restoring this piece of sh...surely very quality, quality filmmaking is unclear to me. I don't think any film or short comes close to the "General Hospital" shorts' horrible horrible sound quality. Dreadfully boring and practically inaudible. |
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Post by dph on Jul 30, 2013 4:48:44 GMT -5
I think it would be a tie between "The Phantom Creeps" and "Undersea Kingdom" for overall horrible print quality.
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Post by duane on Jul 30, 2013 6:30:48 GMT -5
I don't think any film or short comes close to the "General Hospital" shorts' horrible horrible sound quality. Dreadfully boring and practically inaudible. Yeah, not only that, but re-watching them on the serial DVDs shows that they're watching poor VHS transfers. Bad print and audio, plus add in the graininess of bad VHS, and you've got a loser. |
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Post by continosbuckle on Jul 30, 2013 23:06:43 GMT -5
I think "Ring of Terror" is one of the worst. Loaded with scratches and brightness flickering, and it's so dark it makes me sick. Might as well watch the episode without my glasses on. What's the difference? I don't know. The daytime shots in Ring of Terror weren't really that bad. They certainly were clear enough to see what was going on. The Phantom Creeps or The Crawling Eye were both terrible-looking. One that would probably shock a lot of people is... Beast of Yucca Flats! Lee Strosnider, who shot the film, said that it was originally shot in 35mm. If you've seen a good clean copy of the film, which I have, it's unbelievable. Most of the prints online and in the DVD collections where this film exists are terrible copies, and that includes the print MST3k used. It's still a terrible film, and it's not shot terribly well, so the visuals aren't interesting, but they sure look good! You can see Tor's head rumples and Jim Archer's pocky complexion clear as day! Those scenes where the kids drink from the "pond" (which would totally be salty)? You can actually see what's going on there! |
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