S02E04 - Catalina Caper

Plot

A priceless Chinese scroll is stolen from a museum, and the thieves make their way to the beaches of Santa Catalina Island in California. There, a group of teenagers on vacation become mixed up in a deadly game of international theft as the scroll lures several people toward it. While the mystery goes on, beach parties are held aplenty.


Movie Review

For the first time, MST3K provides us with a comedy film...as in a film that was trying to be funny, as opposed to unintentionally being funny. So of course, since Catalina Caper is on this show, it fails miserably in any attempt at being funny. Oh, it's funny in some ways, but not in the way the film makers intended, I'm sure.

The first thing that becomes apparent upon watching this movie is that it isn't really trying to be a movie but a showcase for young girls in bikinis. Released near the end of the beach party film craze, Catalina Caper makes no bones (or does it? *ba-dum-tish*) about its agenda. In over half the scenes in the film there are young girls wearing next to nothing and shaking their moneymakers to cheesy dance music. Are they necessary to the plot? Of course not, but they're there for a reason, and everyone knows what that reason is.

In addition to the T&A, there are songs. Horrible, horrible songs sung by either local bands or a real singer with no shame, i.e., Little Richard. While Richard's song is a bland piece of dreck that hardly damages his actual musical career, the other songs are hideous tunes that only a local band could come up with. I hope the bands in this film got paid well for the advertising here, because their horribleness will live on for eternity now.

And I'm not even counting the opening song, a mushy piece of pap called "Never Steal Anything Wet" sung over a cartoon intro reminiscent of Moon Zero Two and (yep) The Pink Panther. Again, this film doesn't have the benefit of Henry Mancini doing the score, but at least Catalina Caper's opening tune is more tolerable than the blaring choirs of Moon Zero Two.

Now for the comedy...but what comedy? The only funny moments in this movie come from unintended ridiculousness, and the moments that are meant to be funny fall flat on their face...literally. Much of the failure here has to do with the two characters designated as the comedy relief. The first, one of the thieves named Larry, is a doofus with the brain of an eel, and his idiocy and cowardice is somehow meant to be amusing but ends up annoying. The second, an insurance investigator called Fingers O'Toole, is worse. Apparently, he is meant to be the Peter Sellers of this film, but he has none of Sellers' charisma or talent. Every fifteen minutes or so the film cuts to a shot of Fingers being a clumsy oaf: tripping over gangplanks, dropping his briefcase into the ocean, using a fishing pole to accidentally remove a girl's bikini top, awkwardly riding a skateboard...he's a nonstop pratfall. And he isn't funny. At all. He has no comedic time and his exaggerated actions are just silly and unnatural. His catchphrase is "I don't believe it," and I don't either.

Outside of the alleged comedy, there are several things wrong with this film. Naturally, with this being a beach party flick, the women are treated as nothing more than accessories. But there's an even more bizarre thing wrong with this flick: the complete lack of minorities (outside of Little Richard, of course). Trying to find anyone that isn't white is like playing Where's Waldo?, and while it's refreshing not to see any minority stereotypes like in Jungle Goddess, not seeing any minorities at all while all the white folks resemble Hitler Youth is kind of unsettling.

And what about the story? Ee gads, they really didn't seem to care about it, did they? Oh, it makes sense, but it's still a convoluted mess made up of coincidences, conveniences, and contrivances. The film seems to see itself as a mystery caper, but there is no mystery: we know who stole the scroll, and we know what the thieves ultimate plan is. The only thing we don't know (but can easily guess) is the identify of Fingers, and his idiotic pratfalls make him too annoying to care about. No, there is no mystery here, just a lot of poorly written scenes to (ironically) pad out the film so the real padding (the hot half-naked girls) can eat up more screen time in between. The final few minutes of the film do try to resolve things, but do so too quickly for a satisfying payoff. But considering this film's true purpose, would anyone really be that disappointed?

It's amazing how, when it comes to bad movies, the serious movies are usually unintentionally funny and the comedies are unintentionally unfunny. Catalina Caper is no exception.


MST3K Review

This being the first comedy film riffed by Joel and the bots, their style of jokes is noticeably different than their usual fare. Some have pointed out the inherent difficulties in trying to make funny a film that has already tried (and failed) to be funny, and I can see where they're coming from. There are some good strong riffs in this movie (one in particular being my favorite of the series so far*), many of the riffs focus on the movie trying to be funny and fake-laughing at the poor attempts at humor, then wondering why the previous scene was meant to be funny. Talking about why a movie fails to be funny isn't funny in itself, unfortunately, but I suppose there's little one can do with such painful attempts at humor.


*A woman is getting changed behind a rock, and a boy on the other side of the rock has his back to the rock. Says Crow, "Looks like he's stuck between a rock and a hard place."