“RiffTrax- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”
It's incumbent on me, to meet the highest journalistic standards to which this site aspires, to fully disclose any bias I have in writing this review. Said biases are as follows:
Michael J. Nelson is God.
Mystery Science Theater 3000, WITH TRACE, is the finest comedic endeavor ever undertaken by any sentient beings in the entire Universe.
Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, I can continue with this highly dispassionate, impartial review of the Star Trek V Rifftrax.
The Prelims
Well, I'm told by my editors that some you reading this might have no idea who Mike Nelson is, or for that matter, what Mystery Science Theater 3000 was. I'll repress my rage at that ignorance long enough to say that you should just use the Wikipedia god gave you to find out what it was. For those even too lazy to type it in, I'll provide the link: The Link.
The RiffTrax
Picking up RiffTrax is easy, when you allow all the scripts required to do so through your FireFox “NoScript” plugin, otherwise you might, like myself, encounter a white screen with no information on it right before you theoretically add something to your cart. Really, I'm trying not to sound too mentally impaired here, it was an honest mistake that cost me some time and further hair loss. The cart works through PayPal, and includes a straight credit card order option if you don't have a PayPal account, like us cool people do.
It's a short hop to the roughly 30MB download which includes an MP3 and text file instructions. You might be thinking this sounds fairly... rudimentary. And it is. As instructed by the text file and the opening of the MP3 file, your steady finger on the play/pause button is required in order to get a good sync going. Basically, you'll need to have your TV/DVD setup somewhere in the vicinity of something that can play an MP3 file. In my case (pathetically perhaps), my formerly awesome 3 year old home-built gaming computer is naught but 5 feet away, so I played the MP3 there with the speakers pointed at me. If you have an MP3 player, etc., you can use them as well, or even burn it to a CD, like all you young whippersnappers do these days.
Included on the RiffTrax, roughly every 10-15 minutes or so, is the helpful synthesized voice of “Disembaudio”, who will speak a line of dialog straight from the film. If Disembaudio and the DVD line sync up, your RiffTrax is on target. Judging from the RiffTrax forums, some folks have trouble with “drift” in later parts of films, possibly due to very tiny lags when some DVD players change chapters. Imperceptible, mostly, but over time they can build up and throw off the audio a bit. The solution is equally as rudimentary- simply pause either the DVD or the Rifftrax, depending on the nature of the miss-sync, for a second or so, to get things back in harmony. I didn't experience this issue myself.
Star Trek V- The Final Frontier
Um, do we need to do this? You know the score right? Harve Benett was ritually sacrificed over this movie, if I recall correctly. Just in case: Spock's emotionally overwrought half brother kidnaps some wholly uninteresting people in order to lure a starship to the Planet of Intergalactic Peace in order to steal said starship, which naturally turns out to the Enterprise, and take it beyond the Great Barrier, which, between the Original Series and this point, magically inverted itself from being on the outside of the galaxy to the inside. He does this in order to find "God."
Kirk and company tag along, and after some really "emotional scenes", such as implied nudity on the part of a 57 year old woman, they end up face to face with "God." Kirk astutely points out this can't really be God because, 1. he needs a starship, and 2, he doesn't look like Mike Nelson. There's some kind of electrical disturbance and it turns out Klingon disruptors can destroy spectral beings.
The End.
Star Trek V- The Rifftrax Experience
Ah, bittersweet, is really the only good way to put it. While enjoying the antics of Mike and special guest riffer, Tom Serv-, er, Kevin Murphy, one couldn't help but be brought back to those good old days. Granted, if you never experienced them, this won't be an issue for you. In terms of films the MST3k fan base desperately wanted to get “the treatment,” The Final Frontier was always at or near the top of the list. Well, it's finally happened, just not in the way a lot of us expected.
But it has happened.
It's all here- the jokes about Shatner's greed, ego, and directing prowess, fake Klingon sayings, the slightly resigned, calm “ugh” when the first few frames of the “fan dance” appear on screen. That's pretty much the same “ugh” anyone utters when that happens, in fact, but they make it funny, dammit. Honestly, if Comedy Central had any sense, or even a long term memory, they would have gotten Mike to do the Shatner Roast.
The jokes keep coming, stopping only to let that next bit of riffable dialog through. Anyone familiar with the MST3k “formula” knows the score, if you're not, you should try to keep the laughs under some control, as you'll end up missing the next joke if you're too busy yuking it up from the last one. MST3k fans shouldn't expect any of the “classic bits”. Everything here, though representative of the style, is fresh. Kevin doesn't lapse into any “Servo” routines. Depending on your point of view, that might be a good or bad thing.
I've focused a bit tightly on the point of view of an old MST3k fan. Uh, I am one, that's why. Don't let your complete unfamiliarity with MST3k deter you from trying this out. You'll find it funny without knowing a lot of “back story.”
Removed from the pretext of the show, Mike and Kevin's smooth banter sounds a lot like the same casual exchange of riffing any fans have when doing their own group viewings of awful movies. Though perhaps a lot more consistently funny. Mike isn't “Mike Nelson- stranded astronaut/guinea pig” and Kevin isn't a small hovering robot named “Tom Servo”. They're two guys making fun of a bad movie. Even if you haven't ever watched MST3k, a lot of you know that feeling of camaraderie from a shared “bad movie experience.”
I've been there myself with the guy who runs this place, exchanging acerbic one-liners while enduring bad b-horror and sci-fi. You don't have to be a crazed devotee of a dead television show to like RiffTrax.
I mean MST3k, by the way.
Any problems I have with Rifftrax are just the ancient, misguided ramblings of guy who desperately wants a long-dead TV show back on the air. This is (partly at least) a Star Trek fan site, so many of you should be familiar with that point of view. I want Mike, Kevin, and Trace to pick up their little cow-town puppet show and come back to me. It just not going to happen.
For now, Rifftrax will fill the void nicely.
Related Film Frontier links
Michael J. Nelson takes on Star Trek V
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home