S01E03 - The Mad Monster

Plot

Short: After escaping from the moon men in the last episode, Commando Cody and his companions on the moon plan their next move. They decide to steal a large ray gun from the moon men's laboratory and take it back with them to Earth. With the help of one of his friends, Commando Cody infiltrates the moon men's base while unaware of the tank that is to give chase to them.

Film: Cast out of the scientific community by his peers, a mad scientist presses on with his theories of combining the essence of man and animal together. Using his mentally slow gardener as a guinea pig, he successfully changes the gardener into a werewolf. Not content with proving his theory correct, the scientist plans to get revenge on those who mocked him by killing them with his creation.


Movie Review

After watching the first episode of Commando Cody's adventures, I had hoped that the second episode might be an improvement in some way or other. Instead, the serial learns nothing from its initial outing and makes the same mistakes. I suppose this is a signal that I shouldn't expect much from these shorts (then again, I'm watching MST3K, after all).

After escaping from the moon men in the first episode's climax, Cody heads back to his spaceship and his friends, where...talking goes on. Just plain talking. What struck me was that the moon men did nothing to give chase or stop them, they just let him go. The reason given for this lack of chase is, frankly, pathetic. Are villains really that naive? Does a villain always display his superiority by letting the hero roam freely like this? It's utterly ridiculous, and it's sad that it's been used so much that it's become a cliche.

Beyond that, there's really nothing notable about this episode outside of the hammy acting. The cliffhanger is eye-catching, if only because one wonders how they'll escape it so easily.

The movie, The Mad Monster, is a good example of an almost unwatchable film. Why? Because it takes itself way too seriously. Of course, this doesn't always hurt a bad film, but in this case it really pulls down any enjoyment that a B-movie buff might look for. And for a movie about a werewolf, that's saying something.

Maybe it's the almost nonexistent score, which means all the silence is filled with movie static. Maybe it's the seriousness of the actors, who seem to believe they are in Casablanca. Or maybe it's the characters, who are bad caricatures of film roles the Academy Awards go gaga over. The most excruciating example of this is the gardener, Petro, who is mentally retarded. He talks slowly and plainly, trying to sound sympathetic but instead becoming an agonizing stereotype. His simpleminded-ness is merely an excuse for why Petro doesn't question being a guinea pig for the mad scientist's experiments - beyond that, it adds nothing to the character and comes dangerously close to being insulting.

The other characters are no better. The mad scientist's daughter seems to think she's Judy Garland and tries to act like a person with authority but still ends up doing little to actually move the story forward. Her would-be boyfriend the reporter is even worse, a quirky yet admirable fellow who is determined to get the story regardless of what stands in his way. And the mad scientist? Since this film was made in 1942, do we dare expect something other than a stereotypical raving lunatic? And let's not get into his grand scheme to sell his werewolf serum to the defense department to create an army of werewolves...okay, let's. It's completely ridiculous! And when, at the film's beginning, he imagines arguing with the scientists who cast him out about his plans, the imaginary scientists actually make more sense than he does regarding his idea!

Outside of the terrible set pieces (the swamp was particularly bad), the laughable dialogue, and the barely there plot, the most notable thing that stuck in my mind was a scene where werewolf Petro actually kills a child (off-screen, of course). The death of a child is one of those moments that tends to rub people the wrong way if done incorrectly, and I can only wonder what 1942 audiences thought of this moment. Or perhaps the really bad acting made them laugh it off, which is even worse.

In short, Mad Monster is bad, bad, bad. Just plain bad. Had the budget been any smaller, I could imagine it being virtually unwatchable.


MST3K Review

The riffs in this episode seemed to be a bit of a reversal of The Crawling Eye, where the joking started slow and picked up speed near the end. Here, the joking starts out strong and then peters out as the film goes on, ending on a bit of an unsatisfying note. Joel and the bots even leave the theater a few moments before the end credits, as if they could find nothing else to say in the closing seconds.

Thankfully, they do seem to be getting better about their timing, as they didn't talk over the dialogue as much as they did in the previous episode. Still, it's not one of the more memorable episodes that the series has done, which is to be expected. The film itself is also a piece of dreck (well, more so than usual), which likely made riffing a bit more difficult than usual (usual being the stuff I'm more familiar with, i.e., the Sci-Fi episodes...not the best comparison, admittedly).

Even so, with this being season one, it's expected that there be a lot of kinks left to work out, so all we can do for now is just move on to the next episode.