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Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Chandor and producer Neal Dodson; a making-of piece; deleted scenes; and a photo gallery.
Movie: ***
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: VOLUME XXII (2011). Of the 22 original MST3K episodes specifically created for the Minneapolis station and never to be seen nationally, nine of them featured films that were reused in later seasons. Two of those are included in this latest box set.
Time of the Apes (movie made in 1987; featured on MST3K in 1991) and Mighty Jack (movie made in 1968; featured on MST3K in 1991) were actually Japanese TV series later cobbled together as movies and brought stateside (in dubbed versions) by producer Sandy Frank, who had a whopping 10 titles showcased on MST3K (including five Gamera titles). Time of the Apes is, natch, a Planet of the Apes rip-off while Mighty Jack stole mightily from the James Bond franchise. The former allows Joel, Crow and Servo to reference all manner of monkey business (Lancelot Link, BJ and the Bear, and, groan, The Monkees), while the absolute incoherence and general wretchedness of the latter seems to flummox even our hosts (in The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, Frank Conniff, aka TV's Frank, notes, "At the time there was a general feeling around the MST3K writing room that Mighty Jack was the worst one we had done yet").
The other two episodes in this set are mercifully Sandy Frank-free. The Violent Years (movie made in 1956; featured on MST3K in 1994) is the best show in the set, with the Satellite of Love crew letting loose with a rash of wisecracks at the expense of this dreadful "message movie" written by none other than the immortal Ed Wood. Dopey in the extreme, this centers on four privileged, teenage girls who go on a crime spree. The best moment is arguably when one of the women starts shooting at the police, who then return fire — this reaction somehow catches her by surprise, leading her to exclaim, "They're shooting back!" (to which Crow adds, "Bastards!"). The film is preceded by the hilariously earnest 1952 short A Young Man's Fancy, about a preppy dude who's more excited by electrical utensils than by women.
Finally, those of us familiar with the tragic story of Rondo Hatton might find that some of the laughs come uneasily in The Brute Man (movie made in 1946; featured on MST3K in 1996). Hatton was a high school football player and war veteran who later suffered from acromegaly, a degenerative disorder that enlarged and distorted his facial features. Ever so sensitive, Hollywood elected to use him as a monster in several horror yarns, including this one. Get past the gags centered around his physicality, though, and the episode offers plenty of laughs, including a flock of them directed at the 1946 short The Chicken of Tomorrow.
DVD extras include a new introduction by MST3K regular Mary Jo Pehl; 1997's behind-the-scenes special The Making of Mystery Science Theater 3000; the new half-hour documentary Trail of the Creeper: Making The Brute Man; and archival interviews with Kathy Wood (Ed's longtime wife) and Dolores Fuller (his girlfriend).
Collection: ***
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011). WETA-created and PETA-approved, this box office hit stood at the center of a campaign that boasted about how the film employed the Oscar-winning team behind Avatar and the Lord of the Rings trilogy to invent its photorealistic primates. Others have been prone to highlight the "realistic" part; I tend to accentuate the "photo" portion. In this outing, kindly scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) ends up "adopting" a baby chimp that's been made super-smart by a drug initially created by Will to combat Alzheimer's in humans. Named Caesar, the chimp goes from cuddly infant to questioning teen to, finally, betrayed and embittered adult. Along the way, Caesar crosses paths with a vicious zookeeper (Tom "Draco Malfoy" Felton, playing the anti-Kevin James), Will finds love with a vet (Freida Pinto) who's his match in dullness, and Caesar engages in risible sign-language conversations with an orangutan (suddenly, I had a real hankering for Every Which Way But Loose). Created by Peter Jackson's WETA Digital outfit and played (as it were) by Andy Serkis, Caesar is a CGI triumph, although there's still an artificiality about the look that keeps the figure at a distance (personally, I found Serkis's "performance" as the title character in Jackson's King Kong remake to be more effective). Still, the film proves to be a reasonably entertaining experience, culminating in an all-out battle between apes and humans on the Golden Gate Bridge. But for all of its technical prowess, the picture never stirs the soul like the classic 1968 original, which dovetailed its allusions to real-life civil unease with its muscular handling of a surefire sci-fi hook. When the original's Charlton Heston bellows, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" it's a clarion call to humanity; when a character in this new picture says it, it feels like an unearned co-option.
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