SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Night of the Blood Beast (Turkey Day Version)
• Turkey Day ’95 Intros
• Original Night of the Blood Beast Trailer


The Pitch

A spacecraft picks up an unexpected passenger on its trip and crashes in a remote location in the mountains.

The Humans

John Baer, Angela Green, Ed Nelson, Georgianna Carter, Michael Emmet, Tyler McVey

The Nutshell

An astronaut that is declared dead is showing signs that he may still be alive. It turns out an alien has implanted its offspring into the astronaut, giving him a second chance at life. The crew view the alien with hostility and the astronaut becomes its advocate even after the murder of one of the crew members. Where will the astronaut’s loyalties lie when the fate of humanity rests on his shoulders?

The Lowdown

This episode starts out with a silly musical short about a young couple who never had a honeymoon. They are all packed and ready to finally take one when he gets a call from his boss demanding that he rewrite the music for his latest song. He grudgingly agrees to postpone his honeymoon once again and write a new song. Writer’s block strikes and luckily the couple’s fruity guardian angel inspires them with angel dust…Before inspiration hits, the wife sings and dances about what she wishes her house had, which looks suspiciously like an ad for the latest 50’s appliances.


Proof that the Westboro Baptist Church is wrong.

And now for our feature presentation. An improbably small NASA crash recovery team discovers that their astronaut colleague, Maj. John Corcoran (Michael Emmet), is dead. However, there are many irregularities that challenge this evaluation, for one, his blood now looks like a cartoon. For the first half of the movie, the Blood Beast primarily disrupts the group and acts as a saboteur, isolating them from the outside world.  Dr. Wyman (Tyler McVey) dominates this part of the movie using believable pseudo-science to explain why the condition of the fallen astronaut does not make sense. The other doctor and fiancé of John, Dr. Benson (Angela Greene), is mostly emotionless, but randomly decides to overact to express her grief.


The official NASA pickup truck/ambulance

The film then kicks into high gear and Dr. Wyman is killed off-screen, which happens to coincide with the resurrection of our astronaut, John. Despite the fact that John has no trace of blood on him and the doctor’s face was ripped off, he is the prime suspect. Lucky for him, the Blood Beast decides to crash the party and take the rap for the crime. It is at this point that I should mention the appearance of the monster. It is a mix of a parrot with a giant head and the skin of Swamp Thing. And to cap it off, when the beast speaks late in the film, she (It lays a bunch of Blood Beast babies in the astronaut.) has a voice with an echoic effect quite similar to the Grand Inquisitor from Venture Bros (“Ignore me”).



Blood beast babies are an endangered species, coming to a billboard near you.


The rest of the movie alternates between the expecting alien mother, John, defending the monster, and the rest of the crew trying to kill it. Eventually, John agrees to use his connection to the monster to feel out its location so that the crew can hear it out (but not before they prepare a batch of Molotov cocktails). The alien has the typical sob story of his people ruining their world and needing humans to help revive its species. John thinks this is horrible and aborts his blood beast babies by killing himself; personally I thought the alien sounded pretty reasonable. The Blood Beast is treated to a baptism of fire while threatening that more of his kind will hitch a ride on future spacecraft.

So this film is basically Mystery Science Theater’s bread and butter. It is incredibly mediocre and at times laughably bad on its own and Mike and crew inject jokes with ease. Even the running joke of calling everyone Steve still makes me laugh late into the film. They do such a great job that it is hard to separate the badness of the film from the jokes that make it so enjoyable to sit through.

The Package

This disc includes both the version that was aired during the Turkey Day ’95 marathon as well as the version that was aired subsequently. To put things into context it also includes the various introductions to the other films in the aforementioned marathon. There are cameos of characters from other episodes coming to visit Dr. Forrester for an unexpected Thanksgiving dinner, including The Devil from Santa Claus. I personally prefer the normal version because it has jokes directly pertaining to the short and feature film. If I had seen all the episodes that the characters come from I may have had a greater appreciation for the repeat appearances.

8.0 out of 10

Admit it. You want me.

Overall Package

There has been a recent explosion of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on Netflix Instant Watch and since I did not have cable during the original airing of the show, this is how I have discovered many episodes of this great show. So why get this set instead of watching another episode on Instant Watch? A great deal of love was put into this set which can only come from a true appreciation for fans of the show. Not only are the covers of the individual discs great, they include mini-posters of each one to plaster on your wall. You also get a Tom Servo toy to further clutter your workspace. My parents bought me enough media related toys in the 80’s to last a lifetime and generally I avoid such mantoys, but I do not mind showing my love to MST3k. In addition to the special features mentioned in the reviews for the individual movies, each one has an animated menu where Tom and Crow re-enact scenes from the disc’s respective film. This is the first time I have seen animated menus that did not seem tacked on and were actually very well done. One drawback is that the discs do not include chapters to easily skip around the individual films.



How I felt after finishing this box set review

Overall Score:  8.0 out of 10