Believe it or not, some of us just don’t relish the idea of having to download a movie and watching it in all of its pixelated, choppy glory. Despite that we live in a world where people can simply log on to a website where pirated torrents of the latest blockbuster lie in wait and thousands upon thousands of public domain titles are available from commercial sites alone, I still cannot bring myself to watch a feature-length movie or even a short on my computer. I prefer to have something tangible that I can pop into my trusty ol’ DVD player and watch on my television with some stereo sound (where applicable).

Now, don’t get me wrong, kids. I love to download things off of that there Internet contraption.  Why, there’s a whole web full of ripped music, photos of other people's pets, bootlegged porn, and of course, the inevitable viruses that all of those bootlegged porn downloads bring that keep us on our toes in an effort to try and prevent those nasty Trojans from leaping out of their wooden horse and attacking our CPUs.

Ah, but I digress.

So anyway, I have always been a devout fan of the hilarious antics that Mystery Science Theater 3000 brought forth to the viewers of cable television for ten years, and when former MST3K host Michael J. Nelson developed his brainchild RiffTrax for the web, I found it to be nothing but pure genius. In case you have never experienced the RiffTrax sensation, the RiffTrax website offers viewers MP3 downloads of comical commentary tracks from Mike Nelson (with numerous joint efforts from other MST3K alumni such as Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, among others). The process is simple: the writers create a solo soundtrack for a film (ranging from classics such as Jaws to decidedly anti-classic flicks like Road House) which you in turn download and play on your iPod (or other such device) while you watch the movie on your DVD player (a special RiffTrax player for your computer is also available to solve any synchronization problems which may come up from playing two separate devices at once).

A few public domain feature-length titles have been released to the RiffTrax site that can be downloaded as a whole, movie-plus-commentary. But, as I said before, I’m just not the type of person that likes to watch a movie on a computer screen, so it is with great pride and joy that I feverishly watched all of the RiffTrax titles that are now available on DVD from Legend Films and are coming to stores in June. With a total of 10 different titles now at our beck and call — all of which feature uproarious commentaries with Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett — it’s hard to know which one to go with first, and so, I begin this critique with what is quite possibly the most famous bad movie of all time...

Article Author: Luigi Bastardo

Luigi Bastardo is the disgruntled alter-ego of Adam Becvar, a thirtysomething lad from Northern California who has watched so many weird movies since the tender age of 3 that a conventional life is out of the question. …

Visit Luigi Bastardo's author page — Luigi Bastardo's Blog