This film has been bugging Donner for almost twenty years and he's got a lot of things to get off his chest. From Nimbus III to the Great Barrier, Donner lets this God-seeking godawful mess of a movie finally have it.
"The guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 are back, and back in style." - Richard Corliss (TIME)
Comments
The preview looks good... I'll have to add this movie to my netflix. : )
Donner is apparently someone who is used to reviewing movies, and thought he'd do a movie-length review of this movie. That isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it isn't the same thing as a track of assorted riffs and other jokes to help make the movie less painful to watch. I do like that he does not hate everything and everyone in the movie, and that he stops to say things like "Well, I actually like this line", or "Notice what's going on in the background here, it's a cool effect". I'd like to see more of that, actually. It seems to me that we can make fun of movies without having to pretend to hate absolutely everything that's being shown. ___p___
But this really is a running commentary on the movie, and about 25% of those comments are just variants of the sentence "This part is really stupid!". Yes, we know it's stupid, but for a *riff* track you need to add something entertaining to make the stupidity less painful. Another 5-10% of the jokes are gay jokes, which get really pointless really fast. Now, this does have some very good jokes, and it does have the informative bits which are nice, but still as a whole I'd say this is about a 3-star riff track. ___p___
There are also some audio issues here, with some kind of oddball echoing in parts of it. You can also hear parts of the movie playing (very quietly) in the background. Not loud enough to listen to the movie, but in louder parts you can use that to figure out if the riff track is still in sync with the movie. On the downside, that is a bit distracting. ___p___
The whole track also seems to have been recorded in a single take, probably because he was trying to get it done quickly enough to beat the deadline for the contest. Donner seems to know enough that I could see these dvd-commentaries being worthwhile, but more time would need to be spent in making them. Make the whole commentary as good as the interesting or funny parts, and drop the rambling or generic "this scene sucks" comments.