K09 - Phase IV

Observation: During the second to last sketch, Josh uses his Gypsy voice while voicing Servo.

Movie Description: For some vague reason or another, a bunch of ants gain intelligence in the Arizona desert and start killing everything, spiders, mantises (mantisi?) and people. A generic looking scientist type guy and a wanna be Loren Green type guy who happen to be in the desert for reasons that are equally vague sit around and pontificate on ways to kill them, leading up to a scientist v. ant war. A orphaned girl of indeterminate age rounds out the tiny, tiny human cast.

Movie review: Seriously, how much can you talk about a movie that is 40% close up, slow motion shots of ants doing... Whatever it is that ants do. Its quite neat really, even the gross shots of them getting squished. I'm quite curious how they got the ants to 'act' or how much film they wasted waiting for them to do the same. But overkill is the word. The movie is decent enough that when the crappy, no ending ending happens its rather dissapointing.
6/10

Riffing: When your movie is 40% close-up shots of ants, your riffing is logically 40% ant puns and thus, the riffing on this. If they were still improvising at this point, I have to say I'm quite impressed by the amount of puns they come up with on the spot, easy as they are. If this is typical of the rest of KTMA I think I'll be a-okay. This only looses a few points for the space between riffs.
Best riff: C. "Aww kitty." J. laughs "No that's a lamb."
5/10

Sketches: In the second movie break, I at a certain point Joel makes a joke, then wonders why the movie sign light hasn't come on, they then improvise for another thirty seconds or so before it hits. God I love the energy of this early show, even if it isn't always all that funny.
4/10

Overall: Pretty decent movie, pretty decent riffing, pretty spotty sketches, pretty alright episode. A bit of a tangent: Its interesting watching these things in order, as an isolated, blah episode is made so much better by the... For lack of a better word momentum that these early shows are building. You can see things developing like the flow of riffing or the characters. I'm now pretty pissed at myself that I haven't watched these before.
5/10

What I learned: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is brough to you by Pizza and Pasta who are only as far away as your phone.