S02E06 - The Ring of Terror

Plot

Short: After failing to kill his adversary, the mad scientist rescues his captured chauffeur from the police and maintains a bit of a lower profile, though he does share the secret of his emerging power with his assistant-chauffeur. Meanwhile, the heroes continue to work on an antidote for the mad scientist's strange paralyzing formula while dealing with a spy ring that hopes to steal the scientist's creations for themselves.

Film: A graveyard keeper narrates to his cat the sad tale of a young man who supposedly knew no fear. A promising medical student who showed no signs of fear at anything - snakes, cadaver dissections, etc. - his courage will be tested at a fraternity initiation that looks to tap into a dark secret he has kept from almost everyone he knows.


Movie Review

Unlike the last time, The Phantom Creeps doesn't skimp with the cliche in its cliffhanger ending resolution: our hero manages to escape from the car just before it barrels off the cliff. After that...well, who the hell cares? A complete mess of a narrative in the second episode, the third episode is even worse, showing front and center the writers' inability to care about structure, plot, or anything interesting.

We still only care about one character, the mad scientist, and that's because he has the good fortune of being played by Bela Lugosi. And we still have no good idea where the story is going, as new plot points are introduced while others are left hanging. Some might call it complexity, but for a serial series like this, simplicity is preferred, especially when one tries to crap a good story into such a relatively short window of time. The opposite was true in Radar Men from the Moon, where the story was padded beyond belief. Here, ridiculous plot point upon ridiculous plot point is shoved into the story without concern for its overall effect on the narrative, making it suffer as a result (not to mention boring).

Apparently this third episode of The Phantom Creeps is the last one shown on MST3K, which I think is for the best. Let it be snuffed out quickly rather than painfully extend its death a la Commando Cody's serial shorts from season 1.

As for the movie...egads! What a wretched piece of cinema this movie is! The Ring of Terror shouldn't even be called a movie, even though it meets the basic requirements (more or less). What this movie really is, however, is a TV episode. A thinly stretched TV episode. A TV episode of what, you may ask? Let's find out and postulate.

The movie starts out with a framing device, an old man who is the keeper of a graveyard telling a story to his cat about one of the graves. It's the owner of this grave whose story he tells, and it's this story that takes over the bulk of the film. What happens is one of the biggest offenders of padding I've ever witnessed in a movie. The movie, I'm guessing, is meant to be some kind of horror story, but the only "horror" takes place at the very end with scattered "jump scares" here and there that are more comical than terrifying. Everything else is just an extended back story for the protagonist, a medical student who has a reputation among his friends for not being afraid of anything.

And oh, god, how horribly unnecessary the back story is. It tries its hardest to build up the main character's history, but all it really does it slow the film down to a crawl as it struggles to find anything relevant to the final big moment. You could likely excise 80% of the film and you'd still have a coherent story - that is how bad the padding is here. And the eponymous Ring of Terror? It appears a couple times briefly about halfway through the story, and then briefly again at the end. But its appearance is so laughably superfluous that I'm thinking it was put there just so the filmmakers could name the film something other than "Boring Medical Student Who Dies At the End From Fright."

Oh, and let's talk about the medical student...or students, I should say. Every student in this film is nowhere near college age, and watching a bunch of adults acting like teenagers is hilariously awkward. Outside of this, though, every "teenager" (including the protagonist) is forgettable. Oh, wait, scratch that, not all of them. There are a couple of overweight characters whose weight and constant eating is a running gag throughout the film. Now, I'm okay with fat jokes for the most part, but the filmmakers were unusually cruel to these two, especially in portraying them as pigs that eat all the time. But I suppose they had to pad the film with something other than uninteresting discussions about our hero's bravery.

Can I talk about padding again? Because really, there's nothing else to talk about this stretched out premise. Let me count the ways that this film pads the run time of this cinematic abomination: 1) show how brave our hero is by making him kill a snake; 2) show the two fat people dancing awkwardly; 3) show a professor demonstrate an autopsy...for faaaaaaaaar too long; 4) manufacture some conflict between the hero and his girlfriend about his work to become a doctor; 5) show people we don't care about go through their fraternity initiations; 6) make the hero walk through the cemetery and mausoleum for (again) faaaaaaaaar too long before he finally reaches the film's climax.

And for what? I'll tell you what: a Snopes article. Yes, an urban legend ending. Remember the famous hook on a car door urban legend? Well, Ring of Terror decides to one up that and show our hero dying by being frightened of a hand that supposedly reaches out to grab him. All that buildup...for this. What a waste of celluloid.

This shouldn't be a movie. It shouldn't. It should really be a TV episode for a series, like Tales from the Crypt, only the framing device storyteller is an old guy with a cat and the horror story is a bland recreation of an urban legend. Come to think of it, that's a terrible idea, which likely explains why it was made into a film to begin with.



MST3K Review

While the riffing was not as good as Rocket Attack USA, Joel and the bots had a lot of fun with this episode, especially regarding the elderly "teenagers" of the movie. There were a few noticeable lagging patches here and there, but overall it was an enjoyable bout of riffing. The short didn't get as much attention, though, likely because Best Brains was growing sick and tired of The Phantom Creeps. And honestly, who could blame them?


Stinger Review

Instead of going for the low punch and poking fun at many of the fat people jokes in the film, the stinger instead opts for one of the "teenagers" spouting a bizarre line reading of the phrase, "Weird? Yeah, I guess that is the word for it. Weird." The isolating camera shot only makes it more awkward. Not the most memorable of stingers, but from a movie this dull, it's the best they could've found, I suppose.