F02: Invasion of the Animal People
Duck and Cover (Short): The vigilant cold war hero Bert the Turtle teaches us how to survive a nuclear strike. You must always be ready, at any time, to duck and cover when you see the flash. Even an ordinary newspaper can save you from the incinerating heat blast! Merely crouching against a wall will protect you from a nearby nuclear explosion! Honest! And if we all clap our hands and believe real hard, maybe we'll see that blast-zone radiation doesn't even harm us! Yes, America, believe it!
Plan for Pleasant Living (Short): A guided tour of a Better Homes model house. Every single wretched decorating concept mixes together into a bad acid trip as you are taken on a tour by a relentlessly cheery and smiling housewife. People allergic to tangerine should not watch this short.
Invasion of the Animal People: This film is a repackaging of a fifties monster film from Lapland. And if you haven't heard of the wildly successful Lapland cinema empire, that should be a clue! The whole movie has the feeling of stock footage, with a surplus of snowy landscape shots and travel montages. The American version adds quickie voiceover work by the legendary B-movie bookend, John Carradine. Sadly, this is the highlight of the film.
What is the movie actually about? It's hard to say. There is clearly an alien landing, a search party of scientists, and lots of footage of Lapland and/or Switzerland. The "invasion" appears to take place when one oversize bigfoot starts rampaging through a native village and tries to take the lone female character captive. There is a dramatic climax that involves chasing the monster with torches, reversing footage of the alien ship landing, and an incoherent epilogue by long-lost narrator Carradine.
Prologue:
In an attempt to improve quality, Servo labels all the
components of the Satellite of Love as part of an ISO 9000
compliance plan.
Invention Exchange: The Mads, plagued by oversized rodents in their irradiated basement, produce a better mousetrap. Mike and the 'bots present the Page Flipping Finger, which is not nearly as obscene as it sounds.
Segment Two: As a follow-up to the model home short, Mike and the 'bots each present their own model (miniature) home. It all ends in tragedy, as we knew it would.
Segment Three: Dr. Forrester decides he's going to crack down on the brazen mutated rats, so he equips TV's Frank to pursue them through the ventilation system.
Segment Four: Struck by the sudden loss of skiing abilities by one of the movie characters, the SOL crew discuss this completely untenable plot twist while suffering a similar fate.
Segment Five: The 'bots show Mike their own stripped-down visions of today's film.
Stinger: John Carradine talks about groping. No, really.
For the second episode, we deliberately chose a more challenging film. Sure, something like Little Red Riding Hood is great, but it almost needs no comments; this episode featured a dry black and white number that really tested our writing skills... And the good news is: I think we did a fine job on it!
What to say about the film? Well, you could say that it's hard to follow the story. This is akin to describing arsenic as unpalatable. Somehow, somewhere, the editing and re-editing got completely out of control and we're left with small shreds of story arcs flung out of the fray.
At the beginning of the movie, a woman in a city goes berserk and runs around in her nightgown, a popular theme which is clearly the director giving a nod to Manos. (Anyone who points out that this film was made years before Manos will be asked to leave.)
Because this was a rather short film, it also gave us a chance to use some short subjects. I've always had a strong fondness for these, so I was glad we could actually fit two into this episode without running too long. The short about the model home ended up almost as a disturbing horror piece due to the ever-present smiling face of that housewife. Look at the above photo of her fondling her chair cushions ("They're quilted!") and displaying her demonic rictus! It will haunt your dreams...
By the way, be sure to enjoy a good shout of "Peudreuse!" when watching.
This film provides a chance for the Mads to do their own skit, and at long last we get to use the air duct grill built into the back corner of the set. For those die-hard MSTies who have begun collecting mindless minutia about our series, we thought you'd like to know the grill was installed specifically for this segment when we designed the set. The basic concept was there, and we knew that if we didn't get the grill installed now it would look funny if it suddenly "appeared" later. But now that the segment is filmed, we have no further use for the grill and will be replacing it with an aquarium. Keep an eye out for the fun-filled antics involving Frank and those mischievous Koi in upcoming episodes!
Richard Halliday (Best Boy), in his debut role as a Civil Defense worker, played it to the hilt! For his bit, Richard operated an actual Geiger counter found on E-bay. We were all fascinated by it until we discovered that Stephanie Peterman (Production Assistant & Assistant Director) was strangely radioactive. At this point we all had a good laugh at the malfunctioning piece of equipment and went about avoiding Stephanie for the rest of the day.
Credit Where Credit is Due [14 Jul 2001] Through an unfortunate oversight, we neglected to properly credit the Snowman song sung by Mike, Crow, and Servo during the latter half of the movie. This song is from Cannibal! The Musical (1996), and was written by Trey Parker. Very funny, and definitely worth a viewing.