It’s time once again, my friends, for “Blake’s Five Favorites,” that Geek Punditry mini-feature where I talk about five of my personal favorite examples of whatever tickles my fancy on that particular week. These lists are neither objective nor comprehensive – they are based purely on what gives me the most joy to talk about on the day that I write the list. The list may be different if you ask me again tomorrow. This is the way my brain works. But for today, I want to tell you guys all about five of my favorite movies that have been tackled by the good people at RiffTrax.

A quick history, in case you don’t know what RiffTrax is. Back in the late 1980s, a group of comedians from Minnesota brought the world the gem that is Mystery Science Theater 3000, a series that showcased classically bad movies while the performers (some in puppet form) cracked jokes about them. This wasn’t a new idea, of course. People have been making fun of bad movies for probably as long as movies have existed. But these guys were really good at it, really funny, and MST3K lasted for many years across many networks and even their own feature film before fading away in the late 90s. In 2007, MST3K alumni Michael Nelson started RiffTrax, a new platform where he and various guests would continue the movie-riffing treatment. Originally, RiffTrax focused mostly on commentary tracks that viewers could synch to major motion pictures like Iron Man, but over time the focus on big movies dwindled as they gravitated more towards the older, low-budget fare that had been the lifeblood of MST3K. They still do the occasional big movie, but most of their output these days are on older films they can buy the rights to. Nelson was joined by fellow MST3K performers Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, and the three of them have been the lifeblood of the company ever since.

What I love about RiffTrax, and MST3K as well, is not just that it’s funny. It is, of course, there would be no point to the exercise if they weren’t funny. But I’m impressed in the way they can recontextualize movies, turn them into time capsules of the era in which they were made, or wring gold out of the most baffling creative choices. And not for nothing, when you’ve been hearing these three guys cracking wise for upwards of 30 years now, there’s a comfort to it. It really is – as the old MST3K commercials used to claim – “like watching cheesy movies with three of your funniest friends.” So here are my five favorite RiffTrax features. This does not include the many, many shorts that they’ve riffed, nor any of the “RiffTrax Presents” films, which feature other riffers than the main three (although I’ve grown to be a huge fan of the Bridget Nelson/Mary Jo Pehl riffs, and I could easily do a Five Favorites just for them). When I’m looking for a laugh and I want a classic riff, these are five that I turn to time and again, in no particular order.

The Apple

This amazingly ill-conceived musical from 1980, released by the legendary Cannon Films, was a sort of science fiction take on the Garden of Eden story. The movie is set in the distant future of 1994, and just to make sure you don’t forget it, they remind you about 20,000 times in the opening number. It’s almost as persistent a message as the fact that Bim – whoever the hell Bim is – is in fact “on the way.” The plot, such as it is, follows a young woman who sacrifices her true love for a musical career that seems to spiral her downwards into a world of sin and debauchery. The greatest sin, though, is probably the costume choices.

A great Rifftrax movie is one where you can tell the guys are having fun making fun of it – on occasion they’ll even include them laughing at one another’s jokes in the track. This is one of those movies where you get a sense early on that they’re enjoying the cheese in front of them, and The Apple serves up a veritable buffet of dairy products. It’s the kind of movie that makes you not only question the filmmaker’s choices, but makes you wonder what ever made anybody think it was a good idea in the first place. It is, in short, a gold mine of riffing.

Cool As Ice

Remember the 90s? Don’t worry, this movie will make damn sure that you do. In 1991 Vanilla Ice – kids, he was actually a musical performer of some sort – released this film that is to motion pictures what New Coke was to soda. Ice “plays” a…honestly, I’m not really sure who the hell he’s supposed to be, but he rides with his buddies into a small town where they have to rent rooms while one of them gets their motorcycle fixed. He ends up getting involved with a local honors student whose dad was in the witness protection program and who winds up on TV during the slowest news day in a century. 

Cool As Ice is what you would get if Mad Libs were a movie. There are a few plot points that seem to have been pulled randomly out of a hat, with a script hastily assembled by some intern desperate to find a way to link these various points into something resembling a narrative while, at the same time, providing several excuses to showcase a Vanilla Ice song somewhere along the path. Nobody in the movie behaves in a way that is recognizable as a sane human being, and the Rifftrax guys are eager to point that out, as well as spend several moments trying to reconcile the fact that this movie has the same cinematographer as Schindler’s List. 

Super Mario Bros.

No, not the recent The Super Mario Bros. Movie that came out in 2023. We’re going back to the first Super Mario Bros. movie, the live-action film from 1993 that Bob Hoskins referred to as the greatest regret of his entire career. Hoskins and John Leguizamo are Mario and Luigi, transported to another universe that in virtually no way resembles the colorful, exciting world that fans of the video games have loved for decades. Instead we get a sort of bland, cliched dystopia where Dennis Hopper (of all people) as King Koopa is ruling with an iron fist. If you have ever wondered what would happen if somebody did a lot of cocaine and tried to make a version of 1984 with video game characters, the result might be something like this. 

This is the kind of movie that you watch and wonder how anybody involved actually agreed to be in this thing. Hoskins, remember, had recently had his star blown up by Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Dennis Hopper was already a legend. Leguizamo was a popular up-and-comer, and yet for some reason they all agreed to be in this film. Much of the meat of the riffing here comes from the incomprehensible disparity between the film and the video game that it was ostensibly adapting, and the utter confusion we get from these guys is what makes it so much fun.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

There are actually TWO versions of Birdemic available on the RiffTrax site, the studio edition and the RiffTrax Live version, performed on stage in front of an audience and then broadcast to theaters all over the continent via Fathom Events. I love the RiffTrax Live films, and on those rare occasions when I get to go to one these days, there’s nothing like being in a theater full of RiffTrax fans enjoying the show together. There’s a certain energy that comes with the live shows that the studio versions – enjoyable as they are – just don’t have. If you’ve never had a chance to go to a RiffTrax Live screening, the next one is going to be Timecop, scheduled for this August, so try to pencil it into your calendar now. In the meantime, several of the previous ones are available on RiffTrax.com.

Anyway, Birdemic is director James Nguyen’s 2010 “thriller” about an invasion of birds. Killer birds. Just attacking people for no reason. Nguyen is an unrepentant copier of Alfred Hitchcock (his earlier film Replica is an attempted sci-fi ripoff of Vertigo) and he calls this a “tribute” to The Birds, minus any degree of tension, quality, believable effects, or anything resembling entertainment. In fact, the birds themselves (which look like they were lifted from a mid-90s Windows screensaver) don’t even show up until the halfway point of the movie. The first half of the film is a weak attempt at a love story between a woman whose face betrays the fact that she signed the contract to make this movie before reading a script and what appears to be a mannequin being controlled by some sort of inner mechanism, perhaps powered by rodents on a wheel. Watching this movie without Mike, Bill, and Kevin cracking wise about it is difficult. I tried it only once, with a group of my own funny friends, and it was only our own relentless mockery that made it survivable. Watch it twice.

Fun in Balloon Land

The last thing I want to point out about RiffTrax is how they will find movies that you never would have known existed were it not for them, and then bring you along as they descend into madness trying to make sense of them. Fun in Balloon Land is such a feature. Released to two theaters in Davenport, Iowa in 1965 (that sounds like a joke but it’s the truth), this “film” features a child being read a bedtime story and then having a dream, probably heavily influenced by mushrooms, about a huge empty warehouse full of hideous balloon figures and people in disturbing costumes, intercut with scenes of more balloons in what appears to be a Thanksgiving parade.

There are other RiffTrax movies that appear to have been made mostly for advertising purposes. Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny was somehow supposed to entice people to visit a now-defunct Florida theme park, while the Jim Carrey-starring Copper Mountain was an unapologetic plug for the Club Med resort. But making and releasing a feature film to promote a giant balloon company, something that the average human being will never have any reason to patronize, is one of the strangest decisions in all of cinematic history. The film itself is disjointed and bizarre, with a narrator that sounds as if she’s describing all the events on screen under duress. Listening to the riffs, you hear the guys get increasingly more confused as the film goes on, until the end when they, too, sound as though they’ve been driven to the brink of insanity. This movie has become a Thanksgiving staple for me.

There are many, many other RiffTrax movies I could have mentioned, of course. They’ve done classics like Night of the Living Dead and House on Haunted Hill, obscure superhero flicks like Supersonic Man, holiday clunkers like I Believe in Santa Claus and literally hundreds more. If you’re new to RiffTrax, though, these five are great movies to get you started. Check them out and join in the fun.

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. Dammit, he forgot all about Rollergator! And Santa’s Summer House! And To Catch a Yeti! And…