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 102 - THE ROBOT VS.
THE AZTEC MUMMY with short: COMMANDO CODY PT 1
Genre:
Dated, low-budget Horror (1958, B&W)
Short: This
experiment begins with the very first installment of
Commando Cody in the Radar Men From the Moon
serial and it’s a very dated little cliff-hanger piece
of which further episodes will be featured for most of
Season One. The riffing by J&tBs is rather
sparse and disappointing, adding little entertainment
value to this short.
Synopsis:
The feature is a dubbed import from Mexico, in which a
scientist puts his daughter (named Flora) under
regression hypnosis. He finds out that she was an
Aztec princess in a former life (why is everyone
else’s former live always something exciting? Am
I the only person who was a tree slug in a former
life?). And in that previous life, Flora presided
over a ceremony in which a warrior was cursed and buried
alive. So this scientist immediately takes an
expedition to the Aztec site his daughter talked about
under hypnosis and there, they find the reanimated mummy
of the warrior just wandering around. They leave
when the mummy is apparently destroyed in an explosion
but now, years later, the evil bad scientist named
“The Bat” has kidnapped Flora and returned to the
Aztec site to revive the mummy. He succeeds in
doing this and also in creating an evil – and goofy
looking – human robot that he plans on using to
control the mummy. Of course, none of this goes
according to plan and the mummy destroys the flimsy
robot and kills the Bat. The good scientist and
his daughter allow the mummy to return to the Aztec
temple, where it was just wandering around and wasn’t
really bothering anybody anyway.
Don’s Review:
Bad and extremely dull movie that lacks almost any goofy
charm – even the ridiculously goofy robot at the end
is too little too late. The riffing on this was
extremely sparse, with long stretches of silent, and
when it wasn’t silent, the comments were rather weak and
not very funny overall (only when the robot shows up
late in the movie did the riffing pick up a decent pace
but that scene doesn’t last long). Add to that
some rather half-baked host segments about demon dogs
and this is one of the weakest episodes of the show ever.
Very disappointing – I can see why BBI is not proud of
a lot of the Season One episodes.
Trivia Note: The demon dogs from the host
segments are seen during the opening show theme in
Season One.
Don’s Rating:
[ S: 
F:  ]
Josh’s Review:
Jumping from The Crawling Eye over to The
Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy can be compared to jumping
from College Baseball all the way up to the Major
Leagues. It’s impossible to say that the potential for a
good episode wasn’t there in The Robot vs. The Aztec
Mummy, but at this particular time, Joel and the
bots had only done one movie for the national series,
and it wasn’t nearly this bad. The crew of the SOL were
still new to the idea of riffing the movies with a
script in hand. The first movie they did, The
Crawling Eye, had some very fun special effects and
monsters. The story was cheesy but enjoyable. All of
this came together and the episode was still rather
watchable even with the sub-par riffing of that time
period.
The Robot vs. The Aztec
Mummy is a very different movie. This movie cannot
carry itself, and Joel and the bots weren’t nearly
prepared enough to try and carry it. The movie itself is
the definition of dull. Besides a couple scenes where
the Aztec Mummy attacks some scientists, nothing ever
happens until the anticlimactic final showdown.
Listening to an evil mad scientist drone on endlessly
while Joel and the bots sit motionlessly in the theater
mostly speechless is far from fun. If you have The
Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection Volume 1,
here’s a little experiment you can try. Pop the DVD of The
Creeping Terror into your DVD player, but make sure
the disc is turned over so it’s the un-mstied version of
the film. Watch the entire movie.
Now that you’ve finished, how
much fun was this film to watch? Sure, there are some
mildly entertaining scenes in both The Creeping
Terror and in The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy,
but nothing really worth sitting through, if you don’t
have a decent MSTed version to see. Bottom line, there
is no decent MSTed version of The Robot vs. The
Aztec Mummy on the market. If you can’t enjoy the
film for what it is, you’re going to have a hard time
enjoying it even on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The host segments featuring the
demon dogs aren’t very funny, as Don mentions, and while
I applaud Best Brain’s attempt to have some kind of a
sub-story, it really needed to be better than this. The
segments were nonsensical and kind of hard to follow due
to some very bad special effects. I realize the show
likes to sort of reflect the bad special effects that
take place in the featured movies, but there is such a
thing as crossing the line. This episode couldn’t have
cost more than fifty cents to produce. Don’t rush out to
see this episode unless you really insist on seeing
every one. You really won’t miss much.
Josh’s Rating:
[
S: F:
]
Related Links:
(1) Mighty Jack’s MST3K Review (Episode Review)
(2) Oh,
The Humanity! (Movie Review)
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