Impressions

Wow! This is a bad movie! It’s a good MST3K episode, but the movie is terrible! In fact, this is the worst movie panned by the crew yet! (No disclaimer. I mean it this time!) During this time in world history as we sent men into space for the first time, there was a fascination with the idea that astronauts would get radiation or a parasite and come back as monsters (Crawling Hand, Monster-A-Go-Go, Night of the Blood Beast). Apparently this is what the audiences wanted to see, so everyone tried to cash in on the craze. In this case, I don’t think there was a whole lot of cashing-in. Robot Monster is hilariously bad, but at least the monster showed up. Manos is terrible, but it impresses you with its evilness and there are cute girls fighting in it for a few minutes. I have a theory that Monster-A-Go-Go was not a film at all, but an amalgamation of the strips of film left on the cutting room floor from another movie. That would explain why the monster is never in it (all the film of the monster went into the other movie), why there are many minutes of people standing around and cars driving by (these scenes were edited out of the other movie) and why the movie jumps from place to place with no continuity. All the continuity was snipped out and put in the other movie. I’m making this all up, of course, but if you think about it . . . it makes a lot of sense.

The short is just ok, in my opinion, but other people seem to like it. It’s one of those where the narrator tries to show you the value of something (in this case, ice sports). The riffing is pretty good.

Synopsis

An astronaut gets irradiated and when he returns to Earth, he goes around either killing people or accidentally irradiating them to death--it’s unclear which. Come to think of it, maybe he didn’t kill anyone and the deaths were just normal accidents and the monster (a figment of hundreds of people’s imaginations) was wrongly accused. He is, as Joel pointed out “a monster so expensive we couldn’t show him in this film.” He walks around with no apparent purpose and very slowly, but even so, it takes all the military, police, and firemen in Chicago days to find him. Again, I say he walks around but all we ever see is some legs walking and the back of a man once in a while. So maybe that’s all red herrings? Maybe the whole movie is red herrings! That’s it! Sorry, I got lost for a second there. When they find him, they trap him in a sewer, and then, presumably because a death scene would be too traumatic for the audience (assuming there is an audience), he never existed and the astronaut in question was found safely at sea after re-entry. There is no explanation for how all those people died. And there’s no explanation for the tiny plastic capsule they found and mistook for the real one. One possible explanation is that NASA is so stupid that they found the tiny plastic capsule in the tree and mistook it for the real one. Then a few people died and they made up the irradiated astronaut theory to explain some sinister plot to cover up the corrupt activities of Chicago’s mayor. I don’t know. I’m trying to read something into it so that I can explain why anyone would make such a movie when they could have been doing something useful to society like getting sterilized.

Host Segments

Prologue: Tom and Crow are making a gigantic cheese thing.

Segment One Invention Exchange: The Mads invent Johnny Longtorso (inspiration for the hilarious song). It comes with nothing included and everything is sold separately. Joel and the Bots invent nonviolent action figures. Frank is the judge. He rules in favor of the Mads, so the movie is Monster A-Go-Go instead of Local Hero.

Segment Two: Gypsy doesn’t get Tom. Tom says, “Nobody gets me. I’m the wind, baby!”

Segment Three: Joel and Tom play keep-away from Crow.

Segment Four: Tom and Crow ask Joel to explain the “Pina Colada Song” to them. He explains it in his off-the-wall Joel way.

Segment Five: Joel makes Tom into Happy King and Crow into Sir Giggles Von Laughs-A-Lot. This doesn’t cheer them up. Joel asks the ’Bots to each name one good thing about the movie.

Stinger: The monster looks around stupidly after hearing a pinging sound.

Funny Riffs

Tom as Narrator: Any moment now, unspeakable horror, trust me.

Narrator: The long wait began.
Joel as Narrator: And you're going to see every minute of it.

The ridiculously small space capsule is shown.
Servo as Narrator: Douglas was pear-shaped, very short, and stood the whole way.

Tom: This has been a test. Had this been an actual movie, you would have been entertained.

Monster A-Go-Go IMDB Page

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