303 - POD PEOPLE (RHINO DVD Box #2 and VHS)

Genre:  Low Budget ’80s Horror (1983, Color)

Don’s Synopsis:  Fairly recent horror movie about space aliens landing and leaving a bunch of eggs in a cave out in some of the foggiest woods in the world.  Some hunters are in the woods poaching, when one of them finds the alien eggs and starts poaching them.  But a grown alien – which looks like a guy in a furry outfit wearing a cheap plastic helmet with an elephant-like nose – shows up and kills the poacher by touching his forehead.  Two other poachers – one with silver hair, the other just with a lot of hair – are ditched in the foggy woods when another member of their group decides he wants out of the movie and takes off in their truck.  So, making the best of the situation, the two stranded poachers go around poaching some more.  Meanwhile, a completely talentless rock group quits laying down new music tracks (thankfully) and heads to these same foggy woods to camp for the weekend.  So the poachers run across one of the girls camping with this rock group and decide to poach her too!  They chase her and she falls off a short cliff, where the evil alien touches her forehead, causing it to break out with acne.  Meanwhile, a wussy young red-headed boy named Tommy lives in the same woods with his family, and he finds the cave with alien eggs, taking one home with him.  When the egg hatches, he names the strange long-nosed alien creature that pops out “Trumpy” and this new pet soon puts his supernatural alien powers to very goofy use.   Also about this time, the rock group brings the injured girl who fell off the cliff to Tommy’s house for help, but the girl soon dies because the evil alien touched her.  The evil alien then kills the two poachers and soon kills some more members of the rock group (I think he must have heard some of their music).  Finally, the evil alien and Trumpy meet up in the foggy woods.  Tommy protects Trumpy while the evil alien is shot down.  Tommy then abandons Trumpy in the woods, where he can grow up and also learn to kill like his evil older sibling.

Don’s Review:  This is one horrible movie!  It’s like a bad E.T. rip-off poorly combined with an alien horror movie, with virtually no continuity tying everything together.  I mean, what was the point of having the poachers in it?  Or why was that untalented rock group in this?  Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply replace the lot of them with some campers and leave out all of the pointless stuff at the beginning?  Nothing tied together in this movie, so much so that it seemed like it is really just ideas for entirely different movies loosely strung together.  And, as for the look of the movie, why was the fog machine set so high that half the movie just looks like a cloudy blur?  Despite the awfulness of this film, watching this episode is really enjoyable due to the riffing.  Because, with the notable exception of too many Smucker’s Jelly and Chief/McCloud repeated lines, the riffing by J&tBs in this episode is pretty great throughout, with a lot of dead-on riffs for so many scenes in the movie (I particularly love the “Potato” scene).  And equally as great as the riffing and, arguably, the real highlight of this episode are the host segments, all of which are directly movie-related and absolutely hilarious!  The best segment is a spoof of the awful musical number “Hideous Control Now/Idiots Control Now” from the movie, and I also really liked the segment that spoofs ambient New Age music (this segment probably appeals to me because I’m actually a fan of a lot of that type of music).  Although this awful movie may not be for beginners, this episode was an excellent choice by Rhino for video release.

Don’s Rating: 

Forrest’s Synopsis:  It's E.T. meets The Evil Dead in my favorite bad movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000: Pod People!  Reading mythology expert Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell claims that all myths have universal elements of the human condition, archetypes and religious yearnings that show up throughout history in stories.  He calls this the "monomyth".  It got me to thinking, can bad movies all share things in common that make up the "monobad film"?  So I decided to compare and contrast Independence Day and Pod People to test my experiment out.  Both films are about threatening aliens coming to earth.  So far so good.  The structure of Pod People follows the lives of three groups of people.  In one camp, you got some redneck hunters in the woods.  In another you got a goofy looking kid with red hair named Tommy who wishes he only had an extraterrestrial friend.  The other group is some rock group that retreats to the wilderness on a sexual vacation.  The three groups end up colliding with each other throughout the film.  Independence Day ALSO follows a similar structure.  You got your redneck farmer and his kids, President Bill "Somebody Please Hire Me" Pullman with his daughter and staff, Jeff Goldblum and his stereotypical Jewish father and, of course, Will 'Who Da' Man, I Da' Man' Smith and his stripper girlfriend - who ALSO end up meeting and interacting with each other throughout the film as well!  Next you got your alien menaces.  In Pod People, the aliens travel billions of miles in a meteor, only to crash on earth and get pushed around, humiliated and misunderstood.  In Independence Day, the aliens also seems at first intelligent, but end up being really stupid.  If you can travel billions of miles across space, being defeated by a redneck with an anal probe grudge, Lone Star from Spaceballs, Jeff Goldblum's Fisher Price "My First Laptop Computer" and Will Smith is just sad.  The boy Tommy in Pod People finds one of the alien eggs that came to earth.  The egg hatches and he names the alien Trumpy.  Trumpy apparently has an evil twin that goes around knocking off the human characters one by one.  In Independence Day, we also have our crop of good and bad aliens: the bad aliens being the invaders that demolish entire cities, the good alien being Brent Spiner.  The characters also share in common the fact that they are all stupid.  Pod People closes in a touching scene where Tommy tells Trumpy "I hate you Trumpy! Go away." Independence Day also ends on a touching note as Will Smith fulfills his son's promise of fireworks. The end.  While we're on the subject, I'd like to see how Will Smith would act if aliens really invaded earth.  Would he yell and scream "WHO DA' MAN!?" or knock out an alien with one punch, whilst smoking a cigar and saying: "Welcome to Earth."  My personal opinion is that he'd much more likely piss his pants, scream like a girl and shoot himself in the face before the aliens can give him an anal probe, but that's just me. 

Forrest’s Review:  The late, great movie director Stanley Kubrick once said: "The truth of something isn't so much the think of it, but the feel of it."  That perfectly can sum up why I love Pod People.  Despite it being a horrible rip off of Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extraterrestrial, I simply love this movie for reasons beyond anything rational. I love the silly new age music, I love the outdoor-sy feel of it.  I love the stupid characters, and the story, as terrible as it is, keeps me glued to the seat always waiting for another classic bad scene (such as the "Trumpy, you can do magic" scene, or the strange scene where the rock group is driving through the woods with bad music).  This movie is just so bad and so ambitious that I think it's a classic for the archives of bad films.  This was the first full length episode of the show I had seen and it was the one that made me an instant fan of the show.  It remains my favorite.  The host segments are terrific, each one being a classic (and all musical) with Joel and the Bots version of the rock song in the film which they call "Idiot Control Now" (the real song is "Hear The Engines Roll Now"), their new age music "Some Guys In Space" spoofing the music throughout the film, their version of the "Trumpy can do magic" scene and ending with the sentimental favorite "Clowns in the Sky".  I don't know how else to describe this episode other than the odd sensation (nostalgia?)  I get every time I see it.  Words cannot describe how much joy this episode gives me.  It stinks!
Trivia Note:  The movie shown in the beginning and closing credits were lifted from the movie Galaxy Invader, another one of my favorite bad films. 

Forrest’s Rating: 

Josh’s Review:  Pod People is one of the most popular episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000and for very good reason. Many will argue that it’s one of the worst movies ever featured on the show, but it’s engaging enough to hold an audience’s attention when assisted by Joel and the bots. The same cannot necessarily be said about some of the more truly awful films such as Monster A Go-Go. 
      Sure, Pod People has its flaws, but most of these actually enhance what makes this episode so great. First off, I have no idea who the target audience is for this movie and I would bet that the director doesn’t either. At times the movie seems intended for teenagers and young adults, particularly during the horrible action sequences. Also, the overlying sexual themes, though pretty tame and not very objectionable, certainly don’t seem to be made for ten year old children.
      Then on the other hand we have what appears to be a kid’s movie. This is apparent when we follow the trials of little Tommy, a young boy who finds an alien egg, hatches it, and raises the hideous beast that emerges from it. The largest piece of evidence supporting that this is a kid’s movie is the highly bizarre scene involving poorly done stop motion animation in which every material possession in Tommy’s room begins dancing around. Surely scenes like this aren’t supposed to be interesting to teens and young adults!
      The second major flaw in this movie is that it has more loose ends than a bucket of hair. It’s fine to allow the audience to think a little, but to make them try to imagine half of what’s taking place is entirely inexcusable. We never learn enough historical information about the so-called “pod people.” We never learn anything about Trumpy’s magical powers. We never learn why victims of the pod people have star formations imprinted on their heads after death. We never learn what happened to the rangers. We never learned how the old man survived the attack from the pod people, only to die in a later scene. We never learn what happened to Trumpy after being abandoned. Obviously, there are a lot of things we, the audience, never learned.
      To top it all off, the characters were all unlikable and very stupid, even for victims in horror movies. Notice that nobody ever checks to see if the first victim is even alive. They end up nursing an apparent dead body for a very good portion of the film.
      Now, the riffing by the crew of the SOL was excellent.  While I felt the running “Chief! McCloud!” gag got old about half way through the movie, the rest of the riffs were stellar and very on target. The host segments were also very strong, with two of them spoofing specific scenes in the movie. There is a certain almost unexplainable charm about this episode that really has to be experienced instead of described. This is an episode that you probably should own, if you don’t already. It really is that good. 
      Note: Listen carefully to Crow when he says “self burying monster.”  This line was apparently flubbed or poorly timed by Trace the first time through and it had to be repeated. You can hear the original read through echoing in the background if you listen closely.

Josh’s Rating: 

Related Links:
   (1) Mighty Jack’s MST3K Review (Episode Review)
   (2) DVD File (Rhino MST3K DVD Collection Vol. 2 Review)