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mst3kproject · 7 years

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Reptilicus

I defy you to find something in this movie that doesn't qualify it for MST3K. Giant lizardy monster? Check. A musical number that has nothing to do with the plot? We have that. Actors who appear to be dubbed despite also appearing to speak English? The entire cast! Black and white footage tinted blue in an effort to make it look like it belongs in a colour movie? You betcha! Wooden acting? Beakers of kool-aid standing in for SCIENCE? Foreigners pretending to be Americans? Toy boats? Yep, Reptilicus has it all, wrapped up in a bright technicolour package by our old friend, American International Pictures!

It seems tailor-made for the show, and Joel apparently agrees. I wrote most of this review before I found out that Reptilicus was slated to be the Season 11 debut, and now I’m looking forward to seeing how many of my predictions here come true when the episode hits Netflix on Friday.

SPOILERS: none of them! Not a damned one!

Copper miners on the tundra of Lapland discover a piece of a frozen prehistoric monster in the arctic permafrost (never mind that the scene was shot on a nice spring day in the woods somewhere). A guy named Sven is charged with bringing the find back to civilized parts for study. I hope you like Sven, because he's going to keep hanging around for the entire movie, and apparently possesses the same all-purpose security clearance as a Japanese child. He's still in town when the chunk of monster thaws out and begins to regenerate. Ultimately the regrown beast escapes its tank at the Copenhagen Aquarium and goes on a cartoon-people-devouring, scale-model-smashing rampage. Because what else is a prehistoric lizard monster going to do with its spare time?

Yep, that's the quality of effects we're talking about here. I like the windows that appear to be drawn on with crayon.

Being as the movie is set in Denmark, the sign on the building where the monster parts are being kept says AKVARIUM. I don't know why, but my friends and I used to find that outrageously funny. Every time it appeared on screen we would all shout AKVARIUM! in obnoxious faux-German mad scientist voices. Of course, that was years ago. We're now thirty-somethings with mortgages, children, and assorted professional qualifications – but I bet if we all got back together and watched this movie, it would be exactly the same. AKVARIUM!

Had the MST3K of the 90s ever seen fit to tackle Reptilicus, I'm pretty sure they would have made some kind of running joke about the AKVARIUM. I can also imagine them asking Reptilicus if he'd like some coffee with that Danish, the two monsters taking turns on the hexfield to offer competing stories of why Gamera vs Reptilicus fell through, and Dr. Forrester and Frank putting together a 'Visit Beautiful Deep Thirteen' campaign – with or without a lounge act.

It almost feels kind of unfair to attempt any actual analysis of this movie. Analysis is for movies that have higher ambitions, and Reptilicus really does not. If I squinted hard enough I might be able to pull something about scientific over-reach or cooperation between nations out of the mess, but whatever I came up with would be sort of a Last Minute 11th Grade King Lear Essay, made mostly out of coffee and bullshit. All Reptilicus wants is for the audience to have a good time (and maybe to visit Copenhagen), and it does accomplish that even if not quite in the way it wants to.

Rather than talking about what Reptilicus fails at (and believe me, it fails at quite a bit), then, let's talk about how it succeeds. What we really have here is a very fine example of how having something fun to look at can go a long way towards saving a lousy movie.

When you get right down to it, just about everything in Reptilicus is bad. The plot is contrived and full of holes – why do we keep Sven around when by all rights he should be back in the arctic doing his damn job instead of hanging around in Copenhagen? How stupid is just about everybody at the AKVARIUM to let the tail thaw out? Could they really not come up with a better way to suggest drugging the monster than the old trope about 'somebody offhandedly says I wish we could do Thing and somebody else goes why not'? How does General Grayson keep forgetting about the monster's regenerative powers so that he starts shooting at it again?

The acting is terrible. Apparently there's a reason for this – the Danish actors who starred in the production didn't speak any English and had no idea what their lines meant! That's why everything had to be dubbed over later, which means each performance in Reptilicus is a collaboration between two un-talented actors who were truly less than the sum of their parts. Worst of all is Carl Ottosen as General Grayson and the uncredited guy doing his voice. Ottosen almost always looks like he's not entirely sure what he's reacting to, and voiceover guy has only two modes: grouchy grump and solemn declaration. Sometimes he manages to do both at the same time. I hate to say it, but the best actor in the movie is probably Dirch Passer as Petersen the Comic Relief Janitor, who has a passable sense of physical comedy. He almost manages to sell his reactions to things like the electric eel and the microscopic view of his sandwich, even when the jokes themselves aren't particularly funny.

The characters don't have much to them. Sven is a terrible main character, without charisma or recognizable personality or even any motivation. He sticks around for the whole movie and spends most of it just standing there watching other people do stuff. Sometimes he answers phones or acts as a chauffer. He comes across less as the movie’s hero and more as its administrative assistant. Grayson's just there to shout orders and complain, but he's still closer to being a proper protagonist than Sven – maybe this is why they have him narrate a few scenes, in an attempt to correct this bizarre oversight. The professor's two horny daughters never amount to much, and Passer's comedy can't quite save Petersen from being the character everybody most wants to see die (he does not, but at least he's out of the story once the rampage begins). The Scientists are Movie Scientists, too interested in what they might learn to think about things like consequences and personal safety.

The effects are the opposite of convincing, always drawing attention to themselves as effects rather than contributing to the story. I've seen some ridiculous movie monsters, but Reptilicus himself (everybody in the movie refers to the creature as male) is right up there in the top ten. He looks something like a very silly Chinese dragon – a long, skinny, snakelike beast with a forked tongue, a mane of ratty fur down his back, tiny useless legs, and a pair of small wings that are, tragically, never used. Apparently a scene of Reptilicus flying was filmed, but was deemed ‘too unbelievable’ and cut from the film. The monster's acid-spitting consists of squiggles of green goo that resemble radioactive silly string. When he eats a farmer, it is represented by an animated cutout of the man in Reptilicus' mouth.

Okay, so I did just talk about how the movie fails, and I could keep doing so for some time. The comic relief isn't funny. The movie stops for a moment to break into a travel ad. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The point is, Reptilicus objectively sucks and if it were shot like a modern disaster film, all gritty and gray and trying for realism, it would be insufferable. Instead, however, it's cartoony and colourful, and while the effects aren't convincing they're always at least creative. The sets always look like sets, and the models always look like models, but they're elaborate and inspired. Everything sucks, but movie are a visual medium, so if it's fun to watch the viewers will forgive all kinds of sins.

It's also a perfect example of an important bit of bad movie truth: you can't make a bad movie on purpose, not the good kind of bad movie. People can try, but they come up with stuff like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which I couldn't even watch all the way through. A truly enjoyable bad movie is one that's trying hard to be a good movie and fails in just the right sort of ways – an intentional bad movie is the equivalent of a belabored explanation of a punch line that wasn’t that funny to begin with. The thing that makes Reptilicus so much fun is the same spark that animates Teenagers from Outer Space, or Starcrash, or even Troll 2 – its sincerity.

Reptilicus is one of the most utterly unapologetic movies I've ever watched. We've all seen movies that seem a bit embarrassed by themselves – remember Being from Another Planet, which wishy-washily tried to be a Serious Movie about Serious People instead of just embracing the fact that it was about a fucking space mummy? Reptilicus is the opposite of that. It's not ashamed of anything, even in the places where by all rights it should be. Its monster is an immobile puppet in a scale model, but the shots linger lovingly on every shoddy detail. Peterson the Comic Relief Janitor ought to be painful, but the script is so earnest that he somehow becomes a meta-joke: the very fact that he's not funny is itself funny. Somebody thought the movie could be used to sell Copenhagen as a tourist destination, so they have the characters tour the city and talk about what a great time they're having. The movie never gives less than its all to anything it puts on the screen.

So yeah, I love Reptilicus. It's never boring and it’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and there's nothing in it that's either offensive or scary. There are much worse ways to waste eighty minutes of your life.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #reptilicus #60s

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