Cinimatic Titanic: The Oozing Skull

A Review by Nick Peron

If my past reviews have indicated anything, I'm a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and to date I've done three different related reviews (A video review of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Volume 12 box set, A review of Mike Nelson's Rifftrax edition of the Three Stooges in Swing Parade, and a review of the Film Crew's edition of Hollywood After Dark) is it any surprise that I would now review yet another project by other former members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 then? No probably not.

So for starters, what the hell is Cinimatic Titanic? Well it's the latest project created by MST3K creator Joel Hodgeson, who (I guess) came up with the project in light of the fact that with fellow co-creator Jim Mallon making a mint releasing MST3K episodes on DVD, and Mike Nelson, Bill Corbet and Kevin Murphy's own success with their Rifftrax projects, Joel probably wanted to add a little healthy competition while making a living with a concept he made popular.

Cinimatic Titanic, is essentially another take on the whole "making fun of a bad movie" dynamic that was popularized by MST3K. It uses Joel's trademark "Sillouette" appearance, this time instead of sitting in theater seats (which is apparently trademarked by Best Brains Inc) it instead has the riffers sitting in office chairs on risers and utilizing various stage props as well.

CT features the comedic styling of former MST3K alumnai, Joel Hodgeson (who we cannot forget played Joel Robinson during the series first five seasons), J. Elvis Weinstein (the original voice of Tom Servo and Dr. Erinhart), Trace Beaulieu (the original voice of Crow, and Dr. Forester), Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forester), and Frank Conniff (TV's Frank) essentially they sit through the movie and they make jokes and wise cracks, and utilize sight gags in order to make watching a bad movie somewhat more enjoyable or at least amusing.

Like MST3K, and some of it's successors, it also has "breaks" in which the various members of the CT crew order the movie to stop and then they would initiate a sight gag that would have some form of correlation with the scene in the film.

Their first release is a film called the Oozing Skull, which is available through EZ-Takes, either you can order the DVD (which is only available to those living in the US and you don't get any fancy DVD labels or a case or nothing) or via download (which you can print off your own DVD case and labels.) Being how I live in Canada, getting the DVD proved to be very difficult, and I was lucky that when it became available for download on EZ-Takes it allowed me to download it. (On an aside, you may want to check out EZ-Takes, it looks like it has a lot of interesting films for sale, our very own Chris Seaver has a number of his films from his company Low Budget Pictures available on the site as well.)

In this first edition, the CT crew savages through the movie The Oozing Skull (AKA Brain of Blood), released in 1972, I suppose it was to try and cash in on previous cinematic succcesses involving brains such as The Brain That Wouldn't Die and The Atomic Brain (wait, they weren't successful either, they totally sucked ass!)

If there is one unwritten rule of movies that I believe in, it's that if you make a horror movie with the word "brain" in the title and it was made anywhere between 1950 and 1979, the following items are usually true:

1.) You're movie is going be slow, boring, and uninteresting

and

2.) Usually the title is misleading or just plain wrong.

Allow me to present the evidence to the court your honor, I would like to show the jury:

The Atomic Brain suggests that perhaps it features a (possibly giant) atomic powered brain, but it's just about an old lady who hires a mad scientist to use atomic power to switch her brain into a young body. The Brain That Wouldn't Die, suggests an undying brain, but instead gives us a head on a pan. They Saved Hitler's Brain uses the same motief, however a more accurate ittle would have been They Saved Hitler's Head in a Jar. And of course, we have the Oozing Skull, which features many many skulls, in various states of undress, and scenes where they're dropping blood, but there is no actual skulls that ooze in this movie. There is a skull that bleeds, but I think that hardly qualifies as oozing, as it suggests a pustule or sore of some kind, but the bleeding skulls in this movie are ususally doing so because somebody is cutting them open.

Okay, enough lamenting about the misnomers, what the hell is up with this movie? Well it's about this ruler of a mid-eastern city that has a palace that is actually a post card photo... But anyway... You know there are many many things wrong with this movie when they cast a white guy with bad teeth to be the ruler of a Muslim country. Anyway, so this guy is going to die because he is decrepitly old, so he gets his aides togeather (includiing a guy named Mohammad, the only person that could visibly belong in a Muslim country) to bring him to the United States after his death in order to have his brain transplanted into a new, younger body before anybody in his home country can find out that he's dead.

Why is this important? Because apparently, white dictoator dead = total chaos of this unnamed Muslim country.

So they take him to this specialist in America, who is an expert in doing brain transplants. If you haven't clued in that this guy is not on the up-and-up, you'll get soon be convinced when you take note of his midget assistant (any mad scientist worth his grain of salt always has an assistant that's a midget), and the fact that he goes into a huge angry rant about his genious when you bring up the fact that he has been shunned and cast out by his medical colleagues. Oh and then there's Gore.

Who is Gor? Well, Gore is just your trademark hideious freak. You know, big, strong, dumb, perpencity to chase after attractive women, is really not that bad a guy, but is judged due to his horrible deformation, or hideious scars. In the case of Gor, he was a stupid redneck that, during a innocent day playing with a Wham-O Airblaster gets said Wham-O busted and battery acid spilled in his face by two drunken rednecks fixing a deralect car.... And no, I'm not making this up, that's actually part of the plot.

So, the doctor is left to remove the brain of the dead dictator and put him in a young body while the others wait near the airport for a few days. Gor can't find a useful body, and there's something to do with blood being needed but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal considering they've been drawing blood from the same kidnapped girl the whole time.

Anyway, there's a lot of filler going on in this movie, including a good 10 minutes of the film devoted to removing the dictators brain and putting it into a domed container connected to banna clips, so I'll get to the point of the plot here...

So of course, as you may guess, without finding a good body for the dictator, they put his brain in Gor's body. Top this off with most of the dicators aides getting killed except for the betraying bimbo blonde, and his faithful blond follower. Oh and the girl in the dungeon escapes and forms a lame romance with said blond heart throb, somehow a kid with a cap gun gets caught up in all of this.. Oh and the blond has convinced Gor to follow her in the woods and he chases after the kid because Gor's personality is reasserting itself in the body and then the scientist goes after them all and Gor kills just about everybody, and well... you get the idea...

Anyway, like any depressing exploitation film from the 70's, it does not have a happy ending, at least not really. I mean, the dictator gets his brain put in a non-deformed young body so that he can return to his people. But by the end of the movie, the midget, the blond sex-pot along with most of the rest of the supporting cast are killed. The faithful servant becomes the unwilling doner of one (1) young and vital body for his leader to inhabit, and the mad scientist becomes a welcome friend who is granted asylum to conduct his experiments in the dictators home country.

And that my friends is the movie. Which I don't have to bother giving you my two cents on, it's a horrible movie, plain and simple. You know it, I know it, so let's get to something that I can review, namely the proformance by the Cinimatic Titanic crew. If you want to make the a comparisson to the type of riffing done for this series, it's more like the first five and a half years of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The riffing is more aimed towards making funny observations as opposed to putting down the movie or it's actors (which is was more common in later years of MST3K), the worst thing anybody says is "Douche bag" and "dick weed", but short of that, it's all "plesant" riffing. There are the (sometimes obscure) pop-culture references, but it looks more like they're sticking to observational humor without the sarcastic bite that some other well known riffers are inclined to use.

However, it suffers from the same bland monotone and lack of life that I found Hodgeson's MST3K cast seemed to give, that their jokes were too well rehearsed. In contrast, I liked the work of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbet, because they put a bit more life into their proformances. Bill Corbets stinging sarcasem and angry out bursts and obvious impatience towards the movie he is viewing is personally my favorite. I find that when Hodgeson, and his gang get togeather they rehearse it a bit too much. You'll nice that during Nelson's run on MST3K (and in Rifftrax and the Film Crew) the riffers often laugh at what's going on on the screen, or perhaps deliver a line that's unexpected causing the others to crack a bit. I prefer this better, it seems a little less rehearsed and more spotaneious.

Hodgeson's technique of course relies heavily on watching the movie multiple times and coming up with a pre-determined jokes that are cued by the films time-code. But from the sounds of things Cinematic Titanic seems to not deviated from the script (much like those early MST3K days.) I think it lacks a lot of human element that others would give it.

That's not to say that this edition of Cinematic Titanic isn't funny, it has it's funny moments, there are some very funny one liners that they make, but they're spread out throughout the movie so you have to wait a while to hear something that'll make you laugh out loud.

However, that may not entirely be the riffers fault either, I'd also like to think that the movie itself should share some of the blame, and while I said the Oozing Skull is a bad movie, I neglected to mention the fact that it's dreadfully boring (or perhaps I did, in which case, allow me to reiterate once more that it's horrendiously boring) and I think the movie itself can impact the potential for the riffing to be funny.

All the CT cast members have the potential of coming up with really hillarious stuff, but let's face it, if the movie is really bad they're not going to have many funny things to say about it. There are plenty of "Joel" MST3K episodes that are down right hilarious, Mitchell, I Accuse My Parents, "Manos" The Hands of Fate and then there are the ones that aren't that funny, they usually (at least to me) were the ones they showed frequent similar movies about: Pretty much every movie distributed by Sandy Frank, the Hercules movies, these movies weren't that funny because they were so mind numbingly boring that the jokes also weren't that funny. I mean think about how bored you were watching Heculese Unchained.... Now picture having to watch it five or six times in a row, thinking of funny comments to make about it and writing it all down? Oh, you also can't say fuck, penis, shit-brownies, or vaginal blech. Yeah, I know, I'd be hard pressed too.

The site gags, were hit or miss, there were a few of them. two of them were funny, the other two were duds. How the sight gags worked was that during points of the movie each CT member would have the film stopped and do their little number. The funnier of these moments were when "Stephen Hawkings" wheeled onto the stage during a brain transplant scene and said "If this works, I want to be next" (or something to that effect), and when J. Elvis decides to compose a love theme for two of the films bland characters (I won't ruin it, because it'll take away from the funny) The final sight gag is brilliant in it's execution, while the film is going through a flashback montage at the end of the movie, the CT folks do a montage of their own sight gags.

All and all, the first episode of Cinematic Titanic is entertaining to watch, and a bit nostalgic of the early MST3K episodes, and of course this is only the first of (hopefully) many future releases, so I'm sure that they'll get better with time and they'll come up with sight gags and riffs that are even funnier than this one. It certainly has a lot of potential.

As of the time of this writing, there is presently only one Cinematic Titanic episode available, there has been a significant delay in production due to a number of factors (the writers strike cheif among those) and since CT is an independent production, it does take them a longer than usual amount of time to secure the rights to the various movies, and rent the stage space to film their production. Last check, there are three new episodes of Cinematic Titanic currently in the works and should be popping up on the internet sometime soon.

So, at the end othe day, for a first episode, Cinematic Titanic isn't that bad, it could be better. I'd totally recommend it for anybody who is a hardcore MST3K fan, or a Joel Hodgeson fan, or at least if you're a completist. If you're a casual fan, I'd say maybe skip on this one and wait for future releases.

But check it out for yourself, you can visit Cinimatic Titanic's website at http://www.cinematictitanic.com or you can download their first release (or have it delivered to your door if you live in the US) by visiting EZTakes, just search for Cinematic Titanic.