A few weeks ago, in a move that surprised and saddened a lot of fans, Joel Hodgson sold his stake in Mystery Science Theater 3000 to his partner on the show, Shout! Factory. Hodgson created the show back in the 80s and had struggled for years to regain control of it from the parties that held it (and didn’t really know what to do with it) after the show’s cancellation in 1999. He brought it back with a massive crowdfunding campaign back in 2017 and produced three more seasons, the first two with Netflix, before crowdfunding for a fourth revival season fell short. Ever since, MST3K fans have been sort of in limbo, wondering what would come next for our beloved franchise.
What I don’t think anybody expected was the announcement that hit earlier this month. RiffTrax, the spinoff movie riffing company that was founded by Joel’s successor Mike Nelson, launched their own campaign to crowdfund four new MST3K episodes, “The RiffTrax Experiments,” bringing Mike back to the Satellite of Love for the first time since the 90s. What’s more, Mike’s RiffTrax partners Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett are along for the ride, reprising their roles as Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, as well as their roles as the “Mads” Professor Bobo and Brain Guy. The campaign smashed its original goal of $20k in minutes, and with still a month left to go, it is currently (as of this writing) sitting at a hefty $1.8 million. That’s an awful lot of movie megacheese.
Mike, Kevin, and Bill aren’t going it alone, either. Mary Jo Pehl is coming back as Pearl Forrester, and the previous “Mads” Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff are returning for one of the four episodes as Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV’s Frank. The band is getting back together, and while there’s a bittersweet feeling that Joel won’t be involved, there’s still a real thrill and knowing that MST3K is going to live on. There hasn’t been any word about the people who starred in the revival series (most notably Jonah Ray, Emily Marsh, Patton Oswalt, and Felicia Day), but I hope that their time with the show hasn’t come to a permanent end.
At some point, I’m sure somebody is going to release a behind-the-scenes documentary or oral history of the last few years of MST3K and talk about how all this came about, but for now I’m going to content myself with the knowledge that MST3K will live on, and the guys who have been doing it for so long are back in the saddle again. All that said, the next question to be answered has to be this one: with four new MST3K episodes coming our way, which movies are going to get the business? The whole point of the series, after all, is to make fun of cheesy movies – the worst they can find. (La la la.) Murphy has promised that in these experiments they’re going to focus on “classic bad, not modern bad.” And there are a LOT of bad movies to choose from. They’ve already announced that one of the four will be the 1978 David Carradine film Deathsport, a sci-fi movie about a sporting event that means death for the losers. It’s kind of like The Running Man, but with motorcycles.
That means there are still spots for three more films, and while the RiffTrax crew have no doubt already decided what they will be, that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to speculate. So here, for your edification, are my Three Wishes for movies that I would love to see get the MST3K (or even RiffTrax) treatment in the new episodes. In no particular order:
Evilspeak (1981)
I watched this Clint Howard clunker with my wife Erin just a few days ago for part of our 2026 FebNEWary Challenge, and before I was even ten minutes into the movie I knew that this was a film deliciously ripe for riffing. Howard plays Stanley Coopersmith, an orphaned military academy cadet who is relentlessly picked on and tortured by Stock 80s Teen Movie Bully #37 (played by Don Stark). Howard happens to stumble upon the remnants of an ancient Satanic cult (this was the 80s, did I mention that?) and begins using their sacred books to summon the spirit of their murderous leader (Night Court’s lovable giant Richard Moll) to help him enact his revenge.
There’s so much going on in this movie, and none of it is good. First of all, anybody who has ever seen Clint Howard knows that he was born at about the age of 56, making him look far older than the rest of the 30-year-olds playing teenagers in this one. Second, he summons the evil spirits with the help of an evil computer, thus predicting the rise of ChatGPT by a full four decades. The kills are ridiculous – over-the-top and goofy, with decapitations that look as realistic as popping the head off a Barbie doll and an ending that promises a sequel that – and I can’t figure out if this is a good thing or not – was never made.
This is not, by any metric that would be used by rational human beings, a good movie. But hot damn, is it FUN. You can’t help but laugh at how ridiculously melodramatic everything is, with fake tension and drama wrought from every scene. At one point I looked at my wife and paraphrased a line from another RiffTrax commentary: “This does seem like the kind of movie that would kill a dog.” (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t wrong.)
All of this is to say that Evilspeak has everything you want in a movie to be riffed. Bad acting, bad effects, a bad story, and an earnestness to it that makes it all worthwhile. It’s fun to watch this one even without the riffing, but I can only imagine how much better it would be with Mike, Kevin, and Bill slinging their bon mots.
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)
Erin introduced me to this Cantonese martial arts flick a few years ago and holy hell, is it insane. Louis Fan plays Riki-Oh Saiga, a man with super strength who is sent to a private prison where the inmates are forced to do slave labor. Of course, he has to use his powers to take down the system from within, a takedown that includes enough blood and body parts to populate a dozen and a half Stephen King adaptations.
This movie makes Evilspeak look like Fiddler on the Roof. There is no plot structure, nothing about it makes the slightest bit of sense, and the fight scenes are utterly ludicrous. Watching it is like watching a looping video of a frog in a blender for two hours, except that the frog has a more clearly definable motivation than anyone in this film. It is absurd and awful and painful, and I wanna see it riffed SOOOO bad.
That said, this one is probably a longshot. No matter who has been in the seat of the Satellite of Love, MST3K has usually tried to keep their content relatively family-friendly, and that would be hard to do with Riki-Oh. To be certain, the gore and violence is so absurd and cartoonish that it is impossible to take it seriously. Being offended by this would be like being offended by a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. But it’s still there, and editing it down would leave you with a movie that’s about seven minutes long and has absolutely nothing left to recommend it. It’s probably more likely that this would be a RiffTrax movie, as those films have often drifted into edgier content than their puppet show predecessor. But I would have felt remiss if I hadn’t at least suggested it.
Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)
If you think you know everything there is to know about the Frankenstein monster, think again. In this movie directed by Ishiro Honda (the same man who gave us the original Godzilla and Mothra), the Germans manage to get the heart of the Frankenstein monster during World War II and send it to Japan to keep it away from the allies. When the US bombs Hiroshima, the heart is believed to be lost – until years later, when a boy is found wandering the streets and rapidly growing to gargantuan size.
Yep. Honda turned the Frankenstein monster into a kaiju.
Some of my favorite MST3K movies are the ones where they’re riffing on giant monsters (the classic Gamera episodes, for example, and the more recent Reptilicus from the Netflix revival), and I would love to see the guys sink their teeth into this one. You get all the usual fun from mocking a kaiju movie of the era, such as destroying model cars and cities, or ripping on the inherent goofiness of a guy in a rubber suit portraying a giant monster. But on top of that, you add the Frankenstein layer, giving ample opportunity for wild riffs as the bots try to reconcile what’s happening on screen with what they know from the Boris Karloff movies or Mary Shelley’s original novel. (“Mike, I don’t understand, when is Elsa Lanchester gonna show up?”)
To be fair, this isn’t really a bad movie – certainly not the way that Evilspeak or Riki-Oh are. But virtually any giant monster movie of the 50s through the 70s can provide ample fodder for riffing, and this is one that’s a little bit different from any of the ones that they’ve done before. I think there’s room for an awful lot of fun here.
There you have it, friends, three heapin’ helpin’s of grade-A cinematic cheese that I would love to see get targeted by our pals at Mystery Science Theater 3000. I have no idea who owns the rights to any of these movies currently, I should point out – it could be that it would be logistically impossible to get one or even all three of them. But this is a wish list, after all, and stuff like that doesn’t matter nearly as much as finding something you can have fun with. Whatever the final three movies turn out to be, I couldn’t be happier to know that MST3K is going to be beaming back down to us again before too long.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Also Q: The Winged Serpent. They should do Q: The Winged Serpent.
Blake M. Petit 