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American Hustle

Supersonic Man – New RiffTrax VOD!


If you’ve never seen Supersonic Man, you are in for a treat. The film is just freaking crazy, and that’s without the RiffTrax guys taking it to town. For those of you who are unaware that Italy produced a large number of superhero films beyond Puma Man, welcome to a bigger world that you will soon wish you never knew about. While there may be one of three Italian super hero films that aren’t terrible, there are plenty that are. There are actually two versions of Supersonic Man, the Spanish dub features a disco soundtrack that will destroy your ears as the film destroys your soul. Seek it out, if you dare! And seek out Supersonic Man on RiffTrax.com, destined to be a classic!

Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a copyright attorney that represents DC Comics handing out cease & desist letters to the producers of Supersonic Man!

Sadly, Supersonic Man, though he tries his hardest, still does his best to crib from various, more well-known sources. He has the Man of Steel’s strength, Dr. Manhattan’s occasional be-speedoed-ness, and yes, the awkward, moron-like flying of The Pumaman. What original attributes does he bring to the table, you may ask? Well, he uses his amazing supersonic powers to shatter the speed of sound and…turn a gun into a banana.

And he’ll need every banana he can get his hands on because a nefarious bad guy played by Cameron Mitchell (Death of a Salesman, Frankenstein Island, Space Mutiny) has an evil island lair where he intends to start slow, really focus his energies, and take over one very specific three block area in the city of Richmond, Vir—we’re just kidding of course, he intends to take over the entire world. Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeves: possession of the world’s lamest robot, which despite its slow movements and general clumsiness, can still shoot gigantic flames that appear to measure approximately a few degrees less than the core of the sun itself.

Can Supersonic Man outwit this foe and save humanity? Assume a rigid, very uncomfortable looking flying stance and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill to find out!

Supersonic Man RiffTrax

Silent Rage – New RiffTrax VOD!

There is a new RiffTrax VOD! The bad news it is another Chuck Norris vehicle – Silent Rage. It follows the standard pricing of $9.99 and feature the DRM-free goodness we all know and love.

Silent Rage stars noted racist homophobic bigot Chuck Norris, noted cool director Stephen Furst, and noted dead guy Ron Silver. It also features a lot of confusion at just what kind of movie it is:

Take Chuck Norris. Pair him up with the guy who played Flounder in Animal House. Quickly ball that screenplay up into a wad and toss it into a garbage can where it lands next to a half-eaten ham sandwich because that is obviously a terrible idea and what have you got? Silent Rage!

Silent Rage has trouble deciding what type of movie it wants to be. For some scenes, it’s a really, really bad action movie about doctors reanimating a serial killer’s brain. For other scenes, it’s a really, really bad comedy about a bumbling deputy. And in others, it’s a really, really bad romantic love triangle between Chuck Norris, an ex-flame, and his mustache. But when you add all these disjointed elements together, the results are magic! (One of those crappy plastic magic tricks that you ordered from the back of a comic book when you were seven and even you knew it pretty much sucked but you had to pretend you hadn’t wasted your parents’ money so you bothered your dad with it when he was trying to watch football until he told you to go outside.)

The plot is fairly standard. Guy kills innocent people, doctor revives him, biker gang invades town, Ron Silver plans a surprise party for his sister, doctor goes mad with power, guy kills again, doctor ignores warnings, Ron Silver breaks his wife’s heart by telling her her cinnamon cake is no good, guy keeps killing, Chuck Norris kicks some guys. And at one point the guy who played Flounder in Animal House tells an anecdote about a dog that is so wildly misplaced and tone deaf you’ll wonder if just maybe he should be kicked in the nads in real life thirty one years after filming it.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you probably won’t be so silent about the great deal of rage you’ll feel. Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Silent Rage!

Contains a few brief scenes of nudity. No gorilla-grams are provided.

Silent Rage RiffTrax

Bill and Coo

Starship Troopers RiffTrax Live Trip Report

RiffTrax Starship Troopers

RiffTrax beamed across America and also some other strange country called Canada to give the world some of the fruits of their Kickstarter, a RiffTrax of Starship Troopers. Disclaimer: I donated to said Kickstarter, which was originally meant to try to snag the film Twilight. You can find my internet name on the thank you page. I was joined as is usual at the theater events by Todd from Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!,

As per usual, the preshow featured funny trivia cards and word jumbles (My favorite being the Magneto/Cerebro jumble!) The show began on the Starship Troopers-themed set, and unlike the usual shows, we jump right into the movie without shorts (the film is long enough there probably wasn’t any time)

Mike, Kevin, and Bill also thanked the cast of Starship Troopers that have been helping promote the event (and a few watching in theaters), including Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, and Clancy Brown, along with please for them not to be mad or want to murder them later. As of yet, no member of RiffTrax has been found dead.

We all know the classic story of Starship Troopers – in a crazy fascist future, teenage models battle killer bugs and blood and guts fly everywhere. Verhoeven is a big fan of the blood and guts, and also of extremely ridiculous violence (one only has to look at his filmography to catch this!)

The ridiculous violence no one seemed to have a problem with. However, there is the famous coed nude shower sequence, which seemed like sort of a weird thing to be riffing over. Thus, it got hit with a skit for a Gorilla-gram! Which was weird and didn’t work that well. Maybe next time there is a RiffTrax film with lots of gonzo nudity we’ll get a different way to deal with it. Like just showing it, as they showed some of the nudity later. Or bring back the two Gorilla-grams, that seemed to work!

Quips were usually on point, with lots of references to past and future output from the cast. There was even a The Dog Who Save Christmas Vacation joke, showing a strong ability to look at IMDB links. Among the great bits was a sequence with the ferret, the pointing out how often the movie’s dialogue is just “Move!”, the Airplane! reference, and the very true slam on AT&T. I would rate Starship Troopers as among the best of the RiffTrax Live shows, maybe bested only by Manos (and the Daredevil one I saw actually live, which always win for me meeting Bill, Mike, and Kevin!)

There was minor controversy among a few disgruntled sourpusses who thought that doing a RiffTrax of a film that had satirical elements was somehow the worst thing that happened in the entire universe. This view was shocking, even as a big fan of Starship Troopers. Do people not know the movie is still ridiculous? I hold the view that you can RiffTrax anything (and there is a RiffTrax audio for Casablanca!), and Starship Troopers lends itself easily to that role. It’s not like you have to be a rocket surgeon to detect the satirical elements in a film where characters are literally wearing Nazi uniforms.

This RiffTrax Live will not be released as a separate digital download/DVD, so I was glad I was able to see it. There will be an audio file released eventually that will be able to synch with a copy of Starship Troopers, for a similar but not quite the same experience at your home.

Next up on RiffTrax Live is the original Night of the Living Dead.

RiffTrax brings the serial with Batman Takes Over!

RiffTrax jumps into the serial aisle with their latest release, Batman Takes Over, the first part of the Batman and Robin serial. It’s not the racist Batman serial, but the one that came after that. Batman and Robin is just cheaply made! Batman battles that famed Batman villain, The Wizard!

You remember him, right? Sure, we all do!

You can grab it now, and get ahead of the game. Because once the whole serial has been release, you will need to impress people with your knowledge. Just lay into them with your Batman and Robin superiority. They won’t know what hit them, and you will get bags of cash. Or arrested. You make the call!

We’re excited to present Batman Takes Over, the first installment in one of the earliest screen depictions of Batman ever made, the 1949 serial Batman and Robin! This is where we’d joke that we finally found a version of Batman and Robin worse than the Joel Schumacher Batman & Robin, but that is physically impossible according to Newton’s Law of Schumacherian Bat-Nipplage.

In this thrilling opening episode, Batman Takes Over…an hour to arrive at the crime scene, because he drives an ordinary car instead of a Batmobile. And, standing in for stately Wayne Manor, a slightly-less-stately suburban home. Batman and thirty-something boy wonder Robin are hot on the trail of The Wizard, so named for his lack of magic powers or costume resembling a wizard’s in any way. Speaking of costumes, Batman & Robin store theirs in a drawer in a FILING CABINET. And, and, and…well there’s too much great Bat-wrongness to tell here, you really just need to see this.

So squeeze into an ill-fitting costume, buckle your utility belt (ordinary belt), and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Batman Takes Over!

A full list of chapters, hopefully we get the whole shebang!
Batman Takes Over
Tunnel of Terror
Robin’s Wild Ride
Batman Trapped
Robin Rescues Batman
Target – Robin!
The Fatal Blast
Robin Meets the Wizard
The Wizard Strikes Back
Batman’s Last Chance
Robin’s Ruse
Robin Rides the Wind
The Wizard’s Challenge
Batman vs. Wizard
Batman Victorious

RiffTrax batman takes Over

Fangs of the Living Dead – New RiffTrax VOD!

It’s that time again, time time, when RiffTrax drops another new VOD title! Fangs of the Living Dead is the kind of film that will make you long for the days of Twilight. Or at least, make you long for the days you watched better Euro-horror. From Italy, land of 10,000 movies, Fangs of the Living Dead will be certain to give bite to those wanting a cool fix of riffing fun. Okay, just check out this sample.

Even before Prime Minister Berlusconi brought fame to Italy with his countless deviant and reprehensible acts, it was a sexy, saucy nation. And, according to its old horror movies, it’s also full of sexy, saucy, abandoned castles, owned by sexy, saucy, possibly dead but still wealthy men. And of course, most important of all, lots of sexy, saucy, scantily clad women to explore these castles and gasp at basically everything they see. As you might have guessed, our new feature Fangs of the Living Dead is loaded with your daily recommended intake of exactly this kind of Sexy Sauce (now available at Arby’s).

Leading the way is Anita Ekberg, known for being Miss Sweden, her role in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and most of all for going out of her way to keep people from finding out she played “the most beautiful model in Italy” in Fangs of the Living Dead about 10 years after all that.

Anita is summoned by her “uncle,” aka the Italian Vincent Price, to a remote castle he claims is her inheritance. What she discovers leads to a shocking twist ending, one SO shocking that not even the filmmakers knew it was coming – seriously, they made the movie one way and at the last minute the producers made them tack on a twist ending that makes no sense. See if you notice! (you will absolutely notice)

Ease into your most practical dungeon-exploring negligee and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Fangs of the Living Dead!

Fangs of the Living Dead RiffTrax