#wild rebels

[gotankgo]

«2-8-1969 - Spring Lake (E of Grand Haven), MI - the M-104 Drive In had a great show with She Devils On Wheels, Born Losers, The Hellcats, and Wild Rebels.

The Starlite in Ludington had The Conqueror Worm, She Beast, and She Freak.»

[emilysidhe]

I have a ton of knitting to do if I’m going to finish my friend’s afghan in time for her wedding next weekend, so I’m watching the top 100 MST3K episodes as voted by fans back in 2016 for a kickstarter, going from bottom to top https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/Top_100_Episodes_of_MST3K

Top 100 Episodes of MST3K

A list of the Top 100 Episodes of MST3K was compiled based on a survey taken of backers of the Bring Back MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 campa

I expect to finish my current project by movie 90, or at least the high 80s, but there is always more knitting, so we’ll see how far the project gets.

Tag to block (or follow) is #mst3knitathon

There’ve been over 200 episode of MST3K, so every episode on this list has been voted into the top half, even the stuff at the bottom.

100. Episode 207 Wild Rebels

Summary: A stock car racer dramatically quits the sport after losing everything he’s invested when the car he’s bought to race is destroyed in a flameout. He is almost immediately recruited by a biker gang, who want an expert in cars to be their getaway driver for robberies. He initially turns them down, but is then recruited successfully by the police, who want him to work with the gang as an undercover operative to bring them down.

MST3K lore or notable moments: In the sketches of this episode, we learn that GPC is not, in fact the stupid one of the robots. Instead, it’s that she’s in charge of running the “higher functions of the ship” and that takes up enough of her CPU that it’s difficult for her to talk with what’s leftover. Joel puts the other bots in charge of some of the more vital functions of the ship and holds his breath in order to chat with GPC’s unfettered personality, but it’s not long before she has to resume control so that life support kicks back in and Joel can breathe again. Also, the Mads introduce the hobby-hog as their invention exchange, and that was included in the promotional material for years.

What do I think about it’s place on the list? This was a more fun episode than I remembered! I *love* getting our first look at GPC’s more articulate personality (that she has in the Netflix era and onward), and the movie is one of those ones that’s *instructively* bad because of all the ways that it’s almost good. Sure, it’s still an MST3K flick - the protagonist is a total nothingburger without personality or motivation; the gang leader with pretensions to counter-cultural intellectualism and the hair-triggered violent one are both forgettable stereotypes; and every scene goes on at least twice as long as it needs to. But the final shootout in the lighthouse has some cool shots and good use of space, Linda’s speech about “living for kicks” and her role as the gang’s caser who uses her ability to blend in with square society to gather information make her an interesting female lead, and even the silent fourth gang member has a backstory that a more competent movie could have done something with: he used to be a champion surfer until he suffered a traumatic brain injury when his board hit his head during a wipeout, and now he can no longer speak. But he can still process language, and he participates in a lot of the gangs plans by calling the leader’s attention to information in newspapers or maps and using nonverbal communication to indicate what he means. There’s a lot of cool ideas and fun moments spoiled by bad execution.

I don’t think this ought to be a top-50 episode, but I would rank it higher than the bottom, especially since there are other biker movies that I don’t think were as good higher up on the list.

Content warning: to show that the gang are bad guys, there are swastikas everywhere, which is shocking in a film that doesn’t comment on them at all.

[mst3kgifs]

We’re having a great time. Wish you were here, scientists!

[dailymst3kquote]

We can't go straight up.  Remember when we tried that?

Crow T. Robot

[mst3kproject]

207: Wild Rebels

I guess if it's time to tackle the movies I've been trying to avoid, my next review should be a biker flick.  I don't really like the biker episodes, but then, I don't really like biker movies in general, and the fact that MST3K naturally chose bad biker movies doesn't help me enjoy something I didn't enjoy much to begin with.  Now, bad monster movies, on the other hand...

The hero, I guess, of Wild Rebels is racecar driver Rod Tillman.  Other than owning a magical disappearing, reappearing guitar, he is not at all an interesting person.  After wrecking his car, he decides to get out of racing and goes to a bar where he meets a biker gang consisting of leader Jeeter, ultra-violent Banjo, Designated Chick Linda, and mute Fats.  They need a getaway driver for their next robbery, and I guess none of them can drive a stick shift.  Rod wants nothing to do with them, probably because of the Nazi flag in their hideout, but then the police ask him to help them gather evidence against the gang.  With Rod in tow, the bikers rob a gun shop, then a bank – not because they really want the money, but just for kicks!

I hadn't seen this episode for a while, and I'd forgotten Joel's joke about the Nazi-themed bikers having Trump's Art of the Deal on their shelves.  Everything old is new again.

This is one of those movies that it's kind of hard to say anything about.  It's bleak and dull, and in the closing sketch Joel and the bots already went through its low points quite thoroughly.  “The villains were so cliché, they were laughable,” “so the hero was supposed to be unattractive and spineless,” and so forth.  That basically covers Wild Rebels.  It's a series of tropes and symbols standing in for a story, with a 'hero' we're never given any reason to be interested in.

The very first thing we see Rod do in the movie is give up.  He's wrecked his car, so he decides to give up on racing entirely.  He meets a girl in a bar, but when the gang tells her to get lost so they can talk to him, he gives up on her with only a token protest.  This is actually pretty realistic, given that he barely knows her and the bikers are fairly intimidating, but in the context of his abandoning racing, it just seems to cement 'quitter' as his core character trait.

That needn't ruin the movie, of course – maybe Rod's character arc is learning to see things through, or to stand up for himself!  But character arcs just aren't something this movie does, and Rod never seems to change.  His return to racing was a setup to get the gang's attention, not Rod actually trying again.  When Banjo jealously attacks him, it looks like Rod's starting to grow a spine as he successfully defends himself, but it's a false alarm.  At the climax of the film he just cowers at the top of the lighthouse stairs waiting to be shot, rather than doing anything that might be considered heroic.

The gang members are stereotyped thugs, who seem to do what they do just Because It's Evil.  Linda even says as much: they aren't interested in money or cars or high living, they just want the adrenaline rush.  They have no backstories, no explanation of why they are the way they are.  They surround themselves with Nazi symbols, like the swastikas on their jackets or the flag in their hideout, but they don't seem to have any actual ideology.  The fascist imagery serves only to reinforce that they are bad people, which has already been amply estalished by their behaviour.  It's a lazy substitute for proper characterization.

I don't know how old any of these characters are supposed to be. The actors appear to have been in their late twenties to early thirties.  In the serenade scene Linda looks like she's around forty. The slang they use never rings true.  It's like your parents trying to use emojis.

The romance between Rod and Linda is as unmotivated as anything else.  He knows she's one of the murderous thugs he's trying to bring to justice, and while he might pretend to be interested in her as part of his act, he has no reason to develop real feelings for her. She, meanwhile, repeatedly calls him a square and knows that he's an untrustworthy outsider.  She might pretend to be interested in him in order to keep an eye on him, but again, there's no reason for her to actually fall for him.  They have no chemistry and nothing in common.  Why does Linda kill Jeeter to save Rod?  Does shooting a friend who trusted her really give her the kicks she craves?  Or could the writers not think of any other way to end the movie?

The entire dramatis personae feel like they exist only as players in this particular story.  We don't really know what they were doing before the movie began, and we have no idea what Rod is likely to do next.  It doesn't seem like his story is over, because it never really began.  He had no personal stake in any of this – he just drifted into contact with the gang, and seems to decide to become a police informant merely because he doesn't have any better idea what to do with himself.  T-Bird Gang was not a good movie, but Frank had his father's death to avenge and was determined to do it with or without police support.  That's a character motivation.  Rod doesn't have that.

Because the characters have no real personality or motivation, the story cannot really be about anything.  T-Bird Gang was about a quest for justice, and feels unsatisfying because it does not end in the way that theme would seem to demand.  Wild Rebels feels bleak and hollow because it doesn't even have a theme.  Movies like The Violent Years and I Accuse my Parents tried to be about why people turn to crime.  Village of the Giants tried to be about the idea of rebellion.  Wild Rebels isn't trying to be about anything at all.

If the film-makers had a goal beyond 'get the movie in the can and earn a few bucks', I think it was simply to make us feel as bad as possible.  The beginning, in which Rod gives up on racing despite the encouragement of his friends, is depressing.  The bar scene contains cringeworthy bad dancing, almost on a par with The Creeping Terror.  The bikers murder a couple of barflies for no good reason.  The gang's hideout is a ramshackle place full of paraphernalia associated with the most despicable parts of history. There are multiple musical numbers and they're all terrible.  Joel describes the experience of watching Wild Rebels as like 'being dragged through a dark tarry abyss' and that's as accurate as anything else in the ending sketch.  There's nothing fun or exciting in the whole movie.

There are a couple of places where the movie is mildly entertaining, but never in the way it wants to be.  The bit with the syringe in the bank is laughably impractical.  The movie's signage would blend right into Killer Klowns from Outer Space – there's the Swinger's Club sign that looks like it was drawn with Crayola markers, and the Citrusville First National Bank that Tom Servo describes as “printed with electrician's tape on ceiling tile”.  Tires squeal on grass.  The movie ends in the world's artsiest railing kill.  'Citrusville' is where the Man-Thing's swamp is in Marvel comics.  Each of these is a nugget of amusement, but they don't add up to enough to make the movie worth watching even on that level.

Now that I've run out of things to say about the movie, I'm going to do something I don't usually do at any length, and talk about the episode.  The riffing is mostly pretty good, with some golden lines like blessed are the grease monkeys, for they will lube and Ronald McDonald, shaking his McBooty, and the joke about the ventriloquist's dummy trapped in Rod's suitcase.  The host sketches, with Wild Rebels Cereal and Dr. Forrester trying to figure out what ee-yuh-ka-ee! means, are instant classics.  But it's also got some very uncomfortable moments in it, as Joel and the bots make fun of a character's mental handicap.

We are told that Fats suffered a head injury that left him unable to speak.  He seems to otherwise have his wits about him – he can read, as demonstrated by his drawing the others' attention to the newspaper, he can certainly drive his motorcycle competently and he seems to know what's going on.  But when he's on screen, we get lines like blue light special on chromosomes – extra ones! or riffs delivered in 'stupid' voices.  There aren't that many of these, but they're very uncomfortable to hear.  The swastika-wearing characters in the movie actually treat Fats with more respect than the peanut gallery does!

On the other hand, this was also the episode that began some proper characterization for Gypsy. Wild Rebels was when we found out that most of her processing power is occupied with running the Satellite of Love, leaving little room for anything else but occasional thoughts of Richard Basehart.  Later episodes would develop Gypsy further, and she went on to become a rare example of a comedy character who is an outspoken feminist without being a bra-burning, man-hating joke.  Although I have to wonder... if she runs the 'higher functions of the ship', what kept the satellite going before Joel started building robots?  Did he simply take the ship's existing control computer and give her a way to express herself?  Or did Dr. Forrester and Dr. Erhardt send him up to a satellite with no functional life support, so that he had to build some before he ran out of air?

Eh, it's just a show.  I should really just relax.

[silver-stargazing]

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Season by Season:

Season 2 (1990-1991)

“Kids shouldn’t try this at home. Kids shouldn’t be watching this movie at home. We’re seasoned professionals.”

[donutandotherdonut]

Host Segment 1 (S02E07)

Joel & the Bots start by discussing the overly-eloquent dialogue of the main biker character, Jeeter, who does at times seem strangely well-spoken for the type of character he is supposed to be.

This discussion leads directly to a series of drawings, which Joel has prepared to illustrate his explanation of some of the more intellectual biker gangs you might not have heard of. Above, we see Satan’s Sardonics, the lesser-known motorcycle-borne wing of the Algonquin Round Table.

Here we see Truman Capote as the rebellious president of his own M.C., Oscar’s Wilde Ones (Joel: “They were leather boys.”) So, yes, this is another one of those segments where some aspect of the film serves as a jumping-off point for a series of ridiculous puns and other assorted wordplay, combined with pop culture references. Make no mistake, we love this. However, there is a certain pattern emerging in Season 2, and it is our duty to point these things out. 

Next, Joel shows Norman Mailer all decked out as the leader of Hell’s Egos, although Joel reveals this illustration a bit late. The timing makes it seem that this is an illustration of Mailer’s rival gang leader, Gore Vidal of the Vidal Sassoons. However, the illustration does bear a resemblance to a specific photograph of Norman Mailer. Honestly, the Editor can’t be 100% sure. Confidently, we can say this illustration is definitely one of the two.

All these gang rivalries only end when all the various clubs come together to beat up poor Dick Cavett, seen above. The final illustration, below, shows Ted Koppel’s gang, in an effort to show that these gangs continue among intellectuals to the (then-)present day. Delivered bluntly, the gang’s name gets a well-deserved giggle: they’re called The Bloods. 

Ted Koppel rides with Stephen Hawking, and rivals Bill Moyers’ gang, Moyers’ Marauders. Bill rides with Joseph Campell, but his toughness turns out to be a myth, making Ted Koppel’s gang the toughest of them all.

At the end, Joel assures his Bots that they can always ride with him, as long as they stay away from his special lady, Gypsy. This is just a little reminder of the ongoing host segment plot in this episode, wherein the romance between Joel and Gypsy is commenced. Of course, Crow has to be all sarcastic about it, and rude to Gypsy, and Joel is disappointed. He’s not mad, he’s just disappointed. With no small amount of pride, The Editor wishes to point out that you can actually see this sarcasm on Crow’s face in the above screencap. These perfect frames don’t just find themselves, you know.

[mst3kgifs]

Oh. Well, you can use it for that, too.