MST3K Weekend II
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
This weekend was the second annual MST3K event at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater. This time, Joel Hodgson was accompanied on the lot by season 8-10 host Jonah Ray to meet fans, sign autographs, and take pictures. In addition, the two hosts were scheduled to perform a live riff on Saturday night for the 1940 Bela Lugosi film The Devil Bat.
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
This weekend was the second annual MST3K event at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater. This time, Joel Hodgson was accompanied on the lot by season 8-10 host Jonah Ray to meet fans, sign autographs, and take pictures. In addition, the two hosts were scheduled to perform a live riff on Saturday night for the 1940 Bela Lugosi film The Devil Bat.
I got the VIP pass last year for the Q&A with Joel Hodgson and got his autograph and took a photo with him in the projection booth, so I passed on the VIP experience this year and spent the pre-show hours hanging out with my friends on the lot. Gene and Ben were both on the lot on Saturday night, and Zack was there on Friday and Saturday, along with his Tom Servo and Crow robots.
Zack also brought The Sifillis Crew with Soda Olheiser, Smort Smortz, and other characters from his book, along with copies of his Quest-O-Tron board game and Sifillis Starter Kits.
There was a costume contest on the lawn that was shown on the big screen before the features on both Friday and Saturday. The guy who played Torgo from Manos: The Hands Of Fate last year (far right of the photo above) came back and entered the costume contest on Saturday, and once again, he won.
The first movie of Friday night was the 1967 South Korean Godzilla knock-off, Yongary: Monster From The Deep. This was riffed on by Jonah and his robot friends in the ninth episode of Season 11. The film is about a kaiju named Yongary (pronounced like dungarees, but starting with a Y instead of a D) who is awakened by an earthquake that came as a result of nuclear testing.
The monster Yongary looks and behaves like Godzilla's derpy little cousin. He spits fire, drinks oil and gasoline, and is prone to fits of dancing when he's not knocking down buildings in search of food. The movie is very cheesy and a hell of a lot of fun, and Jonah's riff on it was excellent.
The second riffed film of the night was Kevin Connor's 1974 fantasy adventure The Land That Time Forgot, which was also an extremely cheesy movie with a fun Jonah riff.
Prior to the final movie of the night, there was a digital screening of the 1952 Merry Melodies cartoon short, Feed The Kitty. This is the one where a giant bulldog named Marc Antony adopts a little kitten and he knocks himself silly trying to hide the kitten from his owner. In 1994, this short was voted as the 36th greatest cartoon of all time by animators.
The last movie of Friday night was a feature length film on 35mm that was selected by Joel, but was shown without any riffing: the 1965 western comedy Cat Ballou. I was looking forward to seeing this more than any other film this weekend because of the trailer for the film that was shown on the lot in the weeks leading up to this event.
Cat Ballou stars Jane Fonda as the titular character and Lee Marvin in a dual role as Kid Shelleen and Tim Strawn. Marvin had a breakout performance for which he won Best Actor at the 38th Academy Awards. It also features Dwayne Hickman, who I remember best for his role as Dobie Gillis.
Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye appear throughout Cat Ballou as traveling minstrels who perform songs that act as a plot narration. This was Nat King Cole's final film role, as the singer was diagnosed with lung cancer during the production of this film. He passed away on February 15th, 1965, four months before Cat Ballou premiered in Los Angeles.
The presence of Stubby Kaye was the main thing that caught my eye when we first saw the trailer. I first became aware of him from Joe Bob Briggs during his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show from the first night of the 2021 Jamboree at the Mahoning. During this show, Joe Bob played Stubby Kaye's song Jubilation T. Cornpone from the 1959 musical Lil' Abner, which has been stuck in my head ever since. Kaye is probably best known to my generation for his final role as Marvin Acme in the 1989 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I wish that I could tell you more about Cat Ballou, but I only managed to stay awake for the first half hour. I'm pretty bummed out about that because I was really looking forward to seeing this, and this is probably going to be the only time that it's screened on 35mm at the Mahoning. I think that I'm going to have to stock up on some sugar free energy drinks or I'm going to end up dozing off for the third film in every Friday night triple feature.
After the costume contest for Night Two of MST3K Weekend, a man named Matt McGinnis took the mic to introduce Movie Riffing Melee. I had no idea what he was talking about at first. I've never heard of Matt McGinnis before, other than seeing his name mentioned as one of the guests that would be on the lot on Saturday night. I looked him up as I started writing this, and I guess Joel met him at a movie riffing camp that he hosted at a community college in 2012, and he has been working on Joel's tours and as a producer of MST3K on 23 episodes from 2017 to 2022.
After the costume contest for Night Two of MST3K Weekend, a man named Matt McGinnis took the mic to introduce Movie Riffing Melee. I had no idea what he was talking about at first. I've never heard of Matt McGinnis before, other than seeing his name mentioned as one of the guests that would be on the lot on Saturday night. I looked him up as I started writing this, and I guess Joel met him at a movie riffing camp that he hosted at a community college in 2012, and he has been working on Joel's tours and as a producer of MST3K on 23 episodes from 2017 to 2022.
Matt explained that the live riff of The Devil Bat was going to be done like a game show that put Joel up against Jonah. I'm a bit familiar with this format because they did something like this at the MST3K 30th Anniversary Tour that we got to see at the Kirby Center in 2018. The way it works is that an icon pops up on the bottom left or bottom right corners of the screen, at which point the person assigned to that icon has to riff the film. If they hit their cue, they're awarded five points. If they miss it, they deduct five points.
I never really understood the point of this format. First of all, the icons popping up throughout the film are distracting and they tell the audience when to expect Joel or Jonah to say something. This pretty much kills the spontaneity of the show. Imagine watching a comedy film with a big icon of a smiley face popping up at the bottom corner of the picture every time one of the actors said something funny. Also, the game show aspect really doesn't add anything to the riff. Nobody really cares which of the two of them win, and they really don't do any smack talk against each other or anything like that, so it just sort of falls flat. At best, it feels like a regular episode of MST3K with an annoying icon that keeps popping up over the movie to tell you when to laugh.
So, the movie is broken up into three rounds. Joel and Jonah did the riffing for the first round. However, after that point, they invited six people from the audience, with three people joining each team, and these audience members did the riffs for the second and third round. I guess it's a fun experience for those six people and their friends, but it kind of sucks for everybody else. The selling point of this event was that we were getting to hear a live riff from two of the hosts of MST3K. This felt kind of like going to see a concert of a band that you love, only to have them play a third of the setlist before handing the instruments and the mic off to a cover band that they noticed in the crowd.
To top all of that off, the audio track in The Devil Bat dropped off at around the 59 minute mark of the movie, right at the start of the climax when Bela Lugosi's character is about to get his comeuppance. If the folks at the Mahoning put this together, they would get on the mic, apologize for the delay, and figure out a backup to get the rest of the movie on the screen. The Devil Bat is in the public domain and the entire film is available to stream for free on YouTube, so it wouldn't have been too difficult. Instead, Matt rewound the file and tried playing it again, and when the audio of the film failed to work the second time, he pretty much just said "Ok, show's over, let's tally up the points" before telling us which team won. He then came on the radio during intermission to tell us how the movie ended.
In short, the whole live riff thing went off about as well as a fart in church. If they have another MST3K event at the Mahoning next year, I hope they pass on this idea and just show episodes of the show. Frankly, I would have preferred it if we just got to see The Devil Bat on the big screen without any riffing at all.
At the end of intermission, Rob projected his 35mm print of the 1955 Merry Melodies cartoon One Froggy Evening. We've seen this a few times over the years at the Mahoning, and it's always a hit.
Next up was Jonah's Season 13 riff on the 1992 Jim Wynorski turkey, Munchie. This movie is about as cheesy as a family comedy can get, and is probably best remembered today as the feature film debut of Jennifer Love Hewitt. I had never seen the movie before, but it's every bit as terrible as its reputation. It's the very definition of "so bad, it's good" because you can see that it's a sincere attempt at making a good movie, and it's just so damn unintentionally funny that you can't help but to smile. Jonah's riff was spot on and very funny. I'm glad that the night ended on a positive note.
In addition to Jennifer Love Hewitt, the cast of Munchie includes Dom DeLuise as the voice of the titular character, who is probably the worst puppet or animatronic or whatever the hell it is that I've ever seen in a motion picture. The cast also featured Loni Anderson, Arte Johnson from Laugh In, Buck Flower in a bit role, and an actor named Ace Mask who I'll always remember as Victor Von Helsing in my all time favorite horror comedy, Transylvania Twist.
There was a third feature on Saturday night called Destroy All Neighbors. It's a 2024 movie starring Jonah Ray, but neither my wife or I were all that interested in seeing it, so we headed out during the second intermission to get some extra sleep.
And that's a wrap on the second year of Mystery Science Theater 3000 at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater. It was fun overall, but I'm probably going to skip this event if they bring it back for 2026. The pricing for the event is a little excessive compared to the other annual events on the lot. The general admission tickets were $25, and to put this in comparison, tickets for the upcoming Chiodo Con weekend, which is also a triple feature with three special guests in attendance, are $15. The VIP tickets for this past weekend were at a level that I didn't even consider getting them. I might go to one of the nights next year if they show Pod People or if they have a night dedicated to three episodes that I'm particularly interested in. If not, I'm just going to see what The Gap has going on that weekend.
