Last night, in select theaters nationwide, many Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) fans laughed hysterically at the encore live event Manos: The Hands of Fate put on by the guys at Rifftrax. Rifftrax is the evolution of MST3K after the television show was cancelled on Comedy Central. Rifftrax takes terrible movies and audibly makes fun of the terrible writing, direction or cinematography ("riffing") and has a large following online. The original MST3K was the creation of Joel Hodgson who has since created Cinematic Titanic which riffs bad movies as he did with MST3K and Rifftrax does today.
In last night's The Best of Rifftrax Live, the audience was treated with two 'shorts' before the feature presentation of Manos, and fortunately were in the same quality caliber of Manos. The first short was Welcome Back, Norman, which is a 7 minute movie short created in 1979 by Shevard Goldstein. The short featured a salesman trying to leave an airport parking lot and it was Rifftrax gold as it was one of the stupidest thing I had seen on a cinema screen. Then the audience was treated to a California Prune Board promo which showed a guy drinking prune juice which had the audience laughing. Last night's audience in Boca Raton, Florida was much younger than previous live events consisting of about 30 viewers who appeared to be mostly in their early 20's.
Then the main feature began with Manos: The Hands of Fate featuring Michael Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbet offering the riff commentary during the film. The film featured Torgo, who has apparently been enslaved by The Master, who is supposed to be a menacing character from dead, however is nothing more than comic fodder. The 'horror' movie from 1966 involves a small family going on vacation in their car to Texas and gets lost, stumbling upon a house with the character Torgo standing, well barely standing, at the front door. Little do they know The Master wants another wife, however Torgo wants the new woman for himself. And comedy ensues...I mean horror.
Although Manos played last night, Rifftrax is offering the public another chance to see an equally bad movie next week with Plan 9 From Outer Space. "I'm really excited because it's not every day you get a chance to see the worst movie ever made, and then a week later, see a movie even worse than that," Nelson said in a release. "Truly, you owe it to yourself to see these classics of the genre."
We also learned after the film that a Manos sequel is in the works and more information about it can be found here.
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