The Dark Power – New RiffTrax VOD!

[adrotate banner=”7″]”Oh, Lash LaRue, I always wondered what happened to him!” — Nobody, Ever. Well, unfortunately, Nobody is going to get an answer, because Lash LaRue is featured in The Dark Power, which is the latest RiffTrax VOD! It’s got zombies, it’s got college kids played by actors that are close to collecting retirement, it’s got…well, that’s all it’s got. Luckily, the RiffTrax guys are what we got, and The Dark Power is the perfect fodder for their jokes. In fact, this movie might be too easy for the jokes. You might seriously die as you are bored by the film and laughing from the jokes, your body not knowing how to react and thus giving up. But it’s worth it, I hear. I can’t die thanks to my time serving as a prison guard on death row when this magic guy showed up….

Hey, Toltec Zombies! How often does that happen? George Romero, eat your heart out! Buy The Dark Power today, or you will face the wrath of very slow, very cheap Toltec Zombies. Eventually.

Hollywood legend Lash LaRue returns to the silver screen in this thrilling tale of zombies, the occult, and stretching the definition of “Hollywood legend” as far as our lawyers will allow us! Lash LaRue, as you’ll undoubtedly recall, was famous for being playing a cowboy that used a whip. In every movie he was in, he found a way to pick up a whip and crack it a few times. Cattle rustlers? Whip! Pistols at dawn? Whip! Bankrupt from loss of cattle because trying to stop cattle rustlers with just a whip is incredibly stupid? Whip! Dead from ignoring the pistols part of pistols at dawn and instead bringing a—Well, you get the idea.

Yes, Lash and his whip were inseparable. It’s even claimed that he taught Harrison Ford how to use the bullwhip! Sadly for Lash, he was providing his “whip lessons” on the set of Regarding Henry, and was escorted off the lot by security after startling Harrison in the bathroom.

But that didn’t stop Lash, and he’s still flinging his whip around in The Dark Power. And it’s a good thing too, because four ancient Toltec Indian chiefs have risen from the dead and are terrorizing a house full of college students who don’t look a day over 32. Turns out that defiling their burial ground was a bad idea! Who knew?

Can Lash drive his Chrysler there with his blinker on the entire way before the students are picked off one by one? Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for this RiffTrax to find out!

Dark Power RiffTrax

Wonder Women – New RiffTrax VOD!

[adrotate banner=”7″]Who do you call when there is trouble in the high-stakes world of jai alai? No, not that Jai Alai Busters, that would be ridiculous. You call a team of funky ladies who wear skimpy suits and beat up bad guys! Duh! Luckily, Wonder Women is another of those low-budget action films made in the Philippines that are simultaneously amazing but also ridiculous and dumb. And also luckily we have the RiffTrax guys along for the ride, to dole out ridiculous puns.

Remember when jai alai was a thing? Of course you don’t! I bet 80% of the people reading the plot description had to google the name, only to realize it’s that sport with the weird gloves shaped like Tostitos Scoops! (The exclamation point is part of the name!) Now if you excuse me, I’m going to go eat some Tostitos Scoops!, because that’s what winners do, and I am a winner.

Buy Wonder Women on RiffTrax.com!

This post was NOT sponsored by Tostitos Scoops!, in fact, they are sending a pack of angry lawyers upset that they are now associated with Wonder Women! Someone get help! Preferably a band of funky women in skimpy clothes…

A fiendish super-villain is kidnapping star jai alai players in order to harvest their organs! Even more shocking, someone pitched that plot to a Hollywood executive and they said “Yes, we’ll make that movie!”

And when you want an obscure paddle sport champion kidnapped, there’s only one group to turn to: The Wonder Women! No job is too big, no outfit too skimpy, no catfight with fellow Wonder Women worth passing up! (Warning: Please note that we said Women, not Woman. This movie does not contain any invisible airplanes or golden lassos. If you or a loved one dons an American flag style leotard at any point during the viewing, please consult a doctor, especially if it’s grandpa doing the donning.)

The only thing that stands in their way is Ross Hagen. Well, Ross Hagen and several thousand Filipino citizens who were apparently unaware that a movie was being filmed and literally stand in the way during the movie’s several chase scenes. Fortunately, their lives were endangered, quite possibly lost, for a quality production, one that uses something called “Brain Sex” as a central plot point.

Mike, Kevin, and Bill don Linda Carter’s Bracelets of Submission to riff Wonder Women, the rare sort of movie that manages to rip off Charlie’s Angels despite coming out three years before Charlie’s Angels.

via RiffTrax

Wonder Women RiffTrax

Santa Claus – RiffTrax Live Trip Report!

Mexican Santa Claus Rene Cardona K. Gordon Murray

Finally, a movie with the GUTS to show the true meaning of Christmas!


[adrotate banner=”7″]Santa battles Satan in the spaces between a hailstorm of Riffs! Yes, that fantacular Mexican Santa Claus movie, Santa Claus, once again faces getting constantly mocked at the holidays. With good reason, because it is insanity. INSANITY! I also like it, because it’s so crazy. Santa Claus has all the holiday tropes: Santa having special powers, shirtless keymakers, racist depictions of confused children, wizards, and devils going all Home Alone. They even have a nice clean widescreen print, the original René Cardona Mexican version with the K. Gordon Murray dubbing.

The strange mythology of Santa Claus deserves deeper exploration. Santa lives in purgatory with a collection of children from across the globe. The children are dressed in “cultural” attire of their homelands, which leads to the kids from Africa wearing leopard print undies and bones in their hair. For some reason all the white kids have their faces painted a ghoulish light grey. The children live in a giant room where they are forced to sing for Santa at his whim, in between slaving away producing presents for the children of the world. Some of the kids have the freedom to be Santa’s personal assistants, meaning they follow him around and help him battle Satan’s demons, who spend their time on Earth convincing children to reject Santa Claus and be evil. This strange twist on Christianity is further stranged by the presence of nativity scenes, meaning that Jesus does exist in this universe, but seems to play no role in the affairs of Earth. Only Santa cares about the corruption of youth, but as he can only come to Earth once per year, he is forces to sit back and complain and spy on children with his giant freakish telescope (complete with giant eye) and a radar dish with a huge human ear in it. A machine with creepy giant lips announces what is happening on Earth.

Santa not only lives with the enslaved children, but with Merlin the wizard (who is getting up their in years) and with a shirtless blacksmith who makes him magic keys each year (in between building thousand of doors!) Santa has only four white robotic reindeer, the creepy animatronics used will fuel your nightmares for decades. And yet when Santa does get to Earth, almost all his time is spent having a prank duel with a demon named Pitch, before a barking (yet friendly-looking) dog traps Santa in a tree for a few minutes. The main moral dilemma of the film is if good girl Lupita will ever get a doll for Christmas, or if she’ll go bad and steal a doll. Spoiler alert in that she does get a doll.

As you can imagine, this means Santa Claus is a target rich environment as far as Riffing is concerned. Already a MST3K episode, we got new jokes from Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. Corbett himself came dressed up as a “North Pole Guy” (what the website he ordered the costume from called the elf costume) and the audience immediately sided with him on the curly shoe debate. Spoiler alert, curly shoes rule, and straight-shoer Mike Nelson received a chorus of boos.

Before the Christmas cheer, we got a new short, another of the At Your Fingertips series, the most ponderous children’s shorts ever made. This time, At Your Fingertips: Sugar and Spice taught everyone how to mold sugar into bizarre shapes that it later suggested eating, giving a glimpse to an alternate world where childhood diabetes isn’t a major epidemic. And let’s not even talk about how hyper those kids will be after all that sugar, they’ll be running on the ceiling for weeks!

Overall, the show was hilarious, the riffs were on point, Craig blessed the world and Santa celebrated his birth by giving away a doll and having some rich kid get to see his absentee parents. Might have been nice to give Lupita’s dad a job, but what are you gonna do? Santa has always given rich kids more stuff, because Santa is a lousy fink. That’s right, Santa, you suck! On the other hand, RiffTrax rules!

Fun in Balloonland – new RiffTrax VOD!

[adrotate banner=”7″]There is a whole world of crazy obscure wacky weird films out there, and Fun in Balloonland is one of the most of all those things, and so much more, and soooo much painfully scary! Basically, it is perfect for RiffTrax, and their new VOD of Fun in Balloonland is guaranteed to be one of their classics that will be mentioned for decades to come in hushed tones of awe. If you only get one RiffTrax VOD in your life, I can recommend this entirely just upon being familiar with the original version and not having seen the RiffTrax version, because it’s just that crazy that it is magically perfect. Like the producers knew long ago that in the future people would record goofy commentaries about it on the internet. There can be no other explanation, because it’s just that screwed up! But don’t take my word for it, throw your money at RiffTrax.com right now!

We would say that Fun In Balloonland is our favorite RiffTrax movie that we’ve ever done, but there’s just one problem: it’s hard to really describe it as a movie. It is an event. To attempt to describe its plot to you would be like attempting to divide by zero. There are balloons, there are kids, there is a parade, and there were mercifully cameras rolling to capture the madness. It’s a spectacle so cracked and baffling that you’ll have to double check to make sure it wasn’t recorded at Pirates World, home of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

In fact, the Ice Cream Bunny would have taken one look at this flick and begged off saying “Too weird for me man! Even I have my limits! Oh whoops, lost another kid off the back of the fire engine. Well, you’re gonna get that.” Fun In Balloon Land throws a whole casserole of crazy at the screen: kindergartners in gold lamé diapers, giant Indian stereotypes, a maniac of a parade host, blow fish who halfheartedly tell jokes, a lengthy guessing game, The Farmer In The Dell, two headed cats, and something called The Marrying Turkey. Then Santa shows up. Trust us, it will all make sense when you sit down and watch it.*

We’ve been holding this one back for the holiday season ever since we discovered it at the beginning of the year and we’re delighted to finally present—no, unleash would be the better word—we’re delighted to unleash it to all of you. Please join Mike, Kevin, Bill, and the Marrying Turkey for: Fun In Balloonland.

*100% untrue.

Fun in Balloonland RiffTrax

Hawk the Slayer – New RiffTrax VOD!


[adrotate banner=”7″]RiffTrax is back with more wacky fantasy fluff, the new VOD Hawk the Slayer! Another fine film I saw oh so long ago, and I can attest that it is bonkers and awful and bonkful and all those other made up combined words. Featuring Jack Palance pre-City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, and with only half a face! There are characters named Gort, Voltan, Hawk, Crow, Baldin, Ranulf, and Drogo! A bunch of fantasy stuff collides in a monument of “Huh?” as Hawk the Slayer slays it’s way to being a movie you will compare to Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans. Maybe.

Buy it today at RiffTrax.com!

If you took a Dungeons & Dragons adventure written hastily by an 8th grader during study hall and turned it into a movie, you’d wind up with something a lot like Hawk the Slayer. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they actually got the script. But this movie has something that no D&D adventure can claim: Jack Palance. A whole lot of Jack Palance. Specifically MEGA-EVIL Jack Palance, playing a character named Voltan. He yells, kills, yells, whisper-threatens, whisper-yells, kills, and mostly just yells his way across the countryside. Seems no one can stop him until his brother Hawk – yes, his brother, despite being about 40 years younger – gathers an elf, a dwarf, and a giant to take him down. Not as much dignity as a Fellowship of the Ring, more of a… Crew of the Stuff.

Keen-eyed fans may recognize the dwarf from our release Prisoners of the Lost Universe. Also, the actor playing Hawk went on to portray Jack’s dad in Lost — hmmm, Prisoners of the LOST Universe, LOST, time to dig up your old Lost conspiracy theories because there’s something happening here, IT’S ALL CONNECTED.

Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for a heaping helping of Jack the Palance and Hawk the Slayer!

Hawk the Slayer RiffTrax

R.O.T.O.R. – New RiffTrax VOD!

[adrotate banner=”1″]R.O.T.O.R.! There are two type of people in the world: People who have seen R.O.T.O.R. and know that means this RiffTrax is an instant buy, or those poor souls who have never experiences the majesty and pain that is R.O.T.O.R. Imagine the most awful version of Robocop meets Short Circuit meets the gum stuck under your desk in 9th grade. Which means this will be awesome! Buy it today on RiffTrax.com!

R.O.T.O.R. could be described as The Room meets Cyborg Cop 2, and if that makes any sense to you at all then you know how excited we are about it!

It’s an embarrassment of riches, where to begin? Our hero Captain J.B. Coldyron, police robotics genius and ranch owner, whose dialogue was all dubbed by a different actor and written by a different species? The goofy office robot who somehow possesses more sophisticated intelligence than the dangerous “advanced” prototype on the loose, aka R.O.T.O.R.? Or what the acronym R.O.T.O.R. itself stands for: Robotic Officer of the Tactical Operations Research. Yes, the last word in the killer police robot’s name is Research, for some reason. Except later in the movie, when it suddenly stands for Reserve instead. Why? If you want an explanation, you’d better ask Shoeboogie, the wacky Native American janitor who loves to dance. Actually, don’t ask Shoeboogie anything, it’s probably best to avoid all eye contact with Shoeboogie.

Coldyron! Research! Shoeboogie! If you say those words real fast they kind of sound like a song, but they’re also three of the many reasons you should join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for the wonder of wonders that is R.O.T.O.R.!

RiffTrax ROTOR