The time since the end of Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been eased a little bit by Riff Trax, where Mike Nelson and friends (often his old MST3K cohorts Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, as well as the occasional out of left fielder like Neil Patrick Harris) offer downloadable commentary tracks for movies. The great thing about this service is that they can do commentaries for movies that they could never afford to license for MST – like The Phantom Menace.
But there’s something not exactly the same, and now some of that gap will be filled with the introduction of The Film Crew, a new direct to DVD series featuring Nelson, Murphy and Corbett doing commentaries on cheesy B movies they can afford to license. The set up is quite MST3K-like – three guys in a basement get assignments from their boss to make fun of bad movies – but just different enough to avoid whatever legal issues it is that keeps the from just doing MST3K as a direct to DVD series.
The first two The Film Crew movies will be out this summer – on July 10th the first movie, Hollywood After Dark, which is “a 1968 film about a down-on-his-luck loner who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tinseltown and finds salvation in the arms of a stripper (Rue McClannahan of TV’s The Golden Girls in her skivvies)” will be released by Shout Factory with a 19.99 ticket price. The second film is Killers From Space. It “stars Peter Graves (Airplane, Mission Impossible) as a nuclear scientist abducted by aliens to facilitate their invasion of earth. This cult classic features such ‘50s-era sci-fi favorites as A-bombs, genetically mutated super-sized creepers, and aliens with bugged-out eyes (suspiciously resembling halved ping pong balls).” That comes out August 7th, again for 19.99.
There are two more releases from The Film Crew scheduled this year: Steve Reeves in Giant of Marathon and The Wild Women of Wongo. You can see a trailer for the new series by clicking here. I’m hoping to feature some more The Film Crew content in the coming months, so stay tuned.
Click here for the official The Film Crew website.