Melinda and I attended “Rifftrax Live – Starship Troopers” on Thursday. This is the first RiffTrax Live I’ve managed to attend, and it was a hoot and a half.
Through a kickstarter fundraiser, Rifftrax finally managed to secure the rights to a relatively recent blockbuster, and the results were worth the effort. Instead of making fun of a movie that excruciating to watch unriffed or is ineptly done (such as Plan 9 from Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate), they tackled a movie that is bad on a completely different level.
Starship Troopers was an excellent choice. We’re talking a film that has some poor casting choices (“Denise Richards as a starship pilot” being the big one, though you could probably add “the entire cast as people from South America”), improbable enemies that overcome futuristic weaponry using Flintstone technology, strategies that only work because the humans make poor decisions, such as flying their immense craft within an elbow’s reach of the next ship even though they have the entire stratosphere to spread out in…and ham-handed Nazi propaganda analogies that are about as subtle as a Lady Gaga dress.
Favorite riffs from the evening:
“I can fit an entire can of tuna in my mouth” – Spoken as Denise appears and won’t stop smiling.
As Jake Busey’s hand gets stabbed onscreen: “Ow! That’s the hand I use to hold my giant toothbrush!”
“It’s Captain Sue Ellen Mischke!” – Indeed it is.
“That breaks my bad!” – The military commanding officer is the DEA guy from Breaking Bad, who apparently hasn’t aged a day.
“Yeuchhhhh.” – Not really a joke, just an exasperated groan at the sight of yet another shot of Jake Busey’s mugging, horse-teethed face. Probably got more laughs than anything.
The next Rifftrax Live is in October, when they’ll do “Night of the Living Dead”. My understanding is that they would like to someday riff on “Twilight”, but we’d be talking serious dough to do it. (Imagine all the young girls itching to see it on the big screen again, only to have three middle-aged guys making snide remarks throughout it. Wouldn’t that be awesome?)
