The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in the United States, leaving the nation’s movie theaters either shuttered or operating at limited capacity. But at the Minneapolis-area home of Rifftrax’s Kevin Murphy, the cinema is alive, well, and safely socially distanced.
“I bought a portable projector and a theater screen and we’ve been sort of doing a repertory on our patio,” Murphy said. So far, the programming has included Stand By Me and a night with the Marx Brothers, Wallace And Gromit, Bugs Bunny, and the families of his Rifftrax colleagues and fellow Mystery Science Theater 3000 alums Bill Corbett and Mike Nelson.
“I have to say, that was the highlight of our summer,” Corbett said. “Finally: some summer joy!”
It’s the closest the seasoned movie riffers will get to a theater anytime soon: The novel coronavirus has already led to the postponement of their first live performance of 2020, with a second—set for October—currently up in the air. Their usual venues are closed, and the number of people who come out to see Rifftrax probably exceeds the capacity of Murphy’s patio, so they’re taking the show online—to the watch party app Scener, which they’ll use to take on the premiere episode of Stranger Things this Wednesday, July 22 at 8:30 p.m. ET.
“We tested it out, and it seems to work remarkably well,” Murphy said. “The fact that it accesses Netflix means we have a lot of different titles that we can have fun with.” The first hour of the supernatural thriller will play side-by-side with video feeds of Corbett, Murphy, and Nelson as they make jokes in real time.
“It will be absolutely live, and we’ll be playing without a net,” Murphy said.
Rifftrax was working remotely well before the pandemic: They’ve been simulcasting performances to movie theaters through Fathom Events since 2009, and video-conferencing was already a regular part of their creative process. “We come together once a week as a company on Zoom,” Corbett said. “And we found a pretty good way to rehearse remotely through Zoom. So, of course, some Chinese company has all our data,” he joked. “But, you know: My data’s not very great, so they can have it.”
The Stranger Things riff is an encore of one originally recorded in 2018. None of the cast had watched the Netflix series before then—“maybe one of our writers, Sean Thomason or Conor Lastowka had,” Corbett said—but its period setting has long provided them with comedic fodder. “If you want an encyclopedia of ’80s references, I think between the five of us, we’ve got them,” Murphy said.
Does Wednesday’s show point to the future of live Rifftrax events? Corbett and Murphy didn’t rule out the possibility of bringing their planned Hobgoblins and Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes riffs to movie theaters this fall, but they also acknowledged the ongoing obstacle of COVID-19. “We don’t want to put anybody at all in a dangerous situation,” Corbett said. “So that is first and foremost. But we also want to try to honor the momentum of what we set out to do this year if we can.”
While discussing Hobgoblins—a fan-favorite from the ninth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000—Murphy went into the fraught relationship he and the rest of the Rifftrax crew have developed with the shoddy Gremlins knockoff. “I think we kind of hate the film, because it’s dumb and it’s also boring,” he said. “But it’s perfect for what we do because it’s dumb, and it’s also boring. We can’t make it less dumb, but we can certainly make it less boring.”
You could say the same thing about online events like the Stranger Things riff during times like these. Rifftrax can’t make this pandemic less dumb, but they can make it less boring.
22 Comments
Guys! I would pay to hear you riff online! Take my money!
I legit love Rifftrax. It’s the closest to the peak MST3K that was seasons 3 to 7 for me. And now…HI-KEEBA!
WATCH OUT FOR SNAKES!
HE TRIED TO KILL ME WITH A FORKLIFT…OLE!
Any movie with Wockicha-Wockicha is alright by me…
I thought the Rifftrax guys normally aimed at bad cinema. I went to a brewery viewing of their work on Twilight:New Moon, and my stomach hurt bad from laughing.But Stranger Things? Stand By Me? Wallace and Gromit? This is some quality stuff.
They’ve long since moved into doing quality stuff, saying their choices have absolutely no bearing on how much they like or hate it (though the general tone of the jokes is typically a clue). Hell, they’ve even done Casablanca.
The initial paragraph, I believe, was about the things that the RiffTrax guys have been watching with their families on the porch with a portable projector. So not what they are riffing.That being said, Rifftrax has expanded past the bad 70s and 80s B-movies that MST3K primarily dealt in and have done a lot of movies people would call good. They are hit and miss on quality, its harder to have people riff on a good movie then a bad imho
Few have been as gutbusting entertaining as their RiffTrax on Abraxas with Jesse Ventura and Sven-Ole Thorsen.
Their Twilight riffs are what drew me into their website in the first place. Every one of them is brilliant. Watched the whole stupid series solely for the riffs (the first in the series is dreadfully boring and bad, the remainder are more “good-bad”, still stupid but faster paced and ridiculous in fun ways).
I was legitimately disappointed that they didn’t do a 10 minute retrospective sequence during the indulgent, interminable credits of Breaking Dawn Part II. If the film itself was going to revel in its a multi-year odyssey of god-awful moviemaking, Rifftrax should as well.(The worst movie is Breaking Dawn Part I. The other installments all have weird stuff to latch onto – the first movie’s a totally by-the-numbers origin story with some visual flair and The Baseball Scene, New Moon has memorable-yet-terrible stuff like the depression montage/the tourist group being marched to their deaths, there’s the tragic stories of the newly turned vampires in Eclipse, and the showstopper apocalyptic decapitation battle scene in Part II. BD Part I, meanwhile, boils down to “They finally have sex” followed by like 80 minutes of a strawman abortion debate.)
I went to a Rifftrax Live simulcast of Starship Troopers (which was PACKED; these things sell!) and nearly died laughing.“You’re it, until you’re dead or I find someone better!”“Awww, those were my wedding vows”
The theater environment in my local theater when I went a few years ago was great, too (Anaconda, maybe?). A really fun time.
One key point missing about Hobgoblins: yes its dumb, and yes its boring, but its also fantastically sleazy in a uniquely immature way. Between the oversexed couple, the phone sex stuff, and the strip club, it all feels like a “dirty” movie written by a horny 13 year old virgin. If it was a just a cheap Gremlins rip-off it wouldn’t be as memorable, but its a cheap HORNY Gremlins rip-off and that is something special.Also home to one of my favorite MST3k lines that I sing all the time: “Its the 80s/ Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!”
Why do they riff movies that were already done on MST3K. None of the ones I’ve seen are better then the MST3K episodes.
Yeah, Hobgoblins is already one of my favorite eps and I can’t imagine them improving on it. Still, at this point they have covered more movies and shorts for Rifftrax than they did for MST3k, so finding new stuff is probably a challenge and I understand them going back to fan favorites every now and then. And considering the original versions still exist and I have watched them many times, I don’t mind mixing it up every now and then to watch the Rifftrax version of Manos or whatever. They have also sometimes do live versions of stuff they already covered ON Rifftrax, and I am happy to live in a world where I have multiple versions of them riffing “Setting Up a Room.”Honestly I think Rifftrax is rarely if ever as good as the best of MST3k, you can tell its a smaller group of writers with less variety of references and styles of humor, but I always want to see more bad movies and hear more jokes so I keep watching.
I miss the Robots. The best Rifftrax movies like Samurai Cop are funny without the riffing.
The puppets are definitely missed, Rifftrax has less charm without that homemade quality (and the separation of character from performer). And agreed on the best movies working on their own, I watched Samurai Cop and Miami Connection multiple times with friends and had a ball long before Rifftrax ever covered them. I even watched Birdemic pre-Rifftrax, although I don’t think I could watch that one multiple times without the riffing. I do love some of the absolute oddities they find, though. I don’t know if I could have made it through Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny without their riffs, and that’s become a favorite.
A lot of the ones that are MST3K classics they do in front of live audiences. I’m assuming it’s because, if people are paying money for a ticket, you’d want to give them something that you know they’re going to love.
When it’s the Rifftrax cast re-doing a movie that cast did (say, Time Chasers or Space Mutiny), I’m with you. But when they re-riff, say, a Joel episode? I’m good with that. Different senses of humor, different delivery.
“Can you catch a venereal disease from a movie?”
God, I could have sworn that line was from Zombie Nightmare, but I’m wrong. Also one of my favorites.
Yeah, the whole host segment from Crow starts off mentioning how much the movie hates women. And the horniness never comes across as remotely appealing, its completely gross and horrible.Fun fact! Road Rash (or whatever his actual name is) played the pawn shop owner in Pulp Fiction.
It’s my lucky day it’s time for Rifftrax
I just came here to say: “I’m Cherokee Jack!”
Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff are doing a live event tonight, 7/21. They are riffing “Glen or Glenda” live. Details on Frank’s Instagram or Twitter account.https://www.eventbrite.com/x/the-mads-glen-or-glenda-live-online-riffing-show-with-mst3ks-the-mads-tickets-111691323756