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Most of my regular readers are already familiar with both RiffTrax and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. For anyone who doesn’t, if you’ve seen Mystery Science Theater 3000, you already have an idea as to what it’s about. Three people from that show, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, started the project, which allows users to download “riffs” of numerous movies and run the audio while watching said movies. Sure, you don’t get the skits, but really the best part was watching three guys (or one guy and two robot puppets) make fun of bad movies.
While these are usually paid-for downloads, the group has put a few public domain movies up at Hulu.com, and to show this off I went with one of those movies every bad movie geek should see, Ed Wood’s “classic” tale of aliens who reanimate the dead in a devious plot to get noticed and tell us how stupid they are. With a remake (I’m not kidding) currently in production, it’s a good one to go with.
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Some more about RiffTrax: Nelson had wanted to do funny commentaries for films, but not wanting to be sued and without the show not being able to even afford the low-budget movies and the rest of the Best Brains crew went off on, having simply downloadable commentaries seemed the way to go. And it’s taken off, including live performances that have been broadcast on UStream and on movie screens across the country simultaneously . RiffTrax is so popular that a community is following their path. To their credit, the RiffTrax folks have made it possible for these “iRiffs” to be hosted at their site (also downloaded for a fee), allowing others to kind of share in their success.
To make syncing the DVD and commentaries easier (at least if your watching on a Windows computer as of this writing) there is now an official RiffTrax player that you can download and use to watch the DVD and Riff together without the extra work of trying to sync the two recordings. Only a few movies now are compatible, but they’re working on more and other computer formats are also being developed (like the Mac or Linux).
To see more from these guys, various guest-stars, and the next generation of riffers, check out the RiffTrax website.
As for Plan 9, well, what’s to really say? Wood made the movie on a low budget, the writing is entertaining for the long reasons and you can find better effects in film school productions even before computers. It was the final movie for Tom Keene (who played Col. Edwards) and Wood used footage of Bella Lugosi from a different movie, as the actor had already passed away. (As the riffers noted, other scenes used a different “actor”, Tom Mason, who was actually his wife’s chiropractor.) Otherwise, there really isn’t a lot to talk about. What you see is what you get with this one.
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