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Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Wild World of Batwoman

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Wild World of Batwoman

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $17.96
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Laughing out loud
Review: Ever notice that you don't really laugh out loud when you're alone? Well, while sitting on the couch alone on a Sunday afternoon, this movie made me laugh until I hurt. Give the MST3K folks a movie with no plot and horrible acting and they'll turn it into on of the funniest things you've ever seen.

The (supposed) plot: scientist builds atomic hearing aid - Rat Fink and his agents steal it - Batwoman and her clan of scantily clad Batgirls save the day. Trashy? Yes. Awful? Yes. Entertaining? Absolutely.

Coupled with the "Cheating" short, this is one of the best episodes of MST3K I've seen. The typically unpredictable combination of obscure cultural references and Ye Olde Scatological Humour can cater to all of your comic sensibilities and leave you exhausted and begging for more.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "You're Speaking in Chinese Again!"
Review: This is the original uncut version of 'The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman', as director Jerry Warren wanted it seen. The world was not ready for it when it was made and it still isn't. Most people know this film from Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where it was one of their most diabolical experiments ever. This is the un-MST version, so you are on your own. Good luck.

This is one of my favorite MST episodes because this movie is so unbelievably bad. Rarely has a film been so badly conceptualized, scripted, acted and directed. For lack of viability, I think that the only movie to top this is Warren's own "Frankenstein Island", where Katherine Victor plays Shelia Frankenstein. Here she plays Batwoman. Batwoman and her Batgirls spend the movie fighting crime against a dizzying array of bad guys (including the Mole People) but in the end are able to save the atomic powered hearing aid and, thus, civilization. If this sounds like a mess, that's not the half of it. This movie must be seen to be appreciated.

Five stars for staggering ineptitude on the part of every single person involved with this film. It is a work of grade Z genius!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "And it will pad the film immensely!"
Review: I think this may be the best MST3K I've seen yet. It had a neat short with an actual plot, continuing skits (and an interesting character bit during the opening credits; "You can't have popcorn in the theater!"), and a movie that almost transcends the definition of MST3K fodder. What's amazing is that, if treated seriously, the scenarios might have worked! Mike complains about Ratfink's lack of focus, but what's better than a super-villain with RANGE, as seen in Ratfink's multi-tasking: steal the atomic hearing aid, perfect the duplication process, spike your enemies with dancing serum, breed your mole-monsters with your archenemy's aides and exploit the ancient city. And check out Batwoman's variety, too: high-tech, seances, AND a go-go girl squad? What was going through the filmmaker's mind when he threw all this together? It's too bad he didn't have MORE stuff to splice in! And who IS Batwoman and what's her history with Ratfink? What's the secret of her quasi-vampire secret society of super-girls? And what WAS the deal with the horseshoe? En media res is always nice, but this movie demands a prequel. Mike and the Bots keep up with this zaniness quite well with an above-average collection of quips ("Sir, are you sure you have the right office?" "Simpson, eh?" "I will BRING YOU DOWN, Johnny!" "What's the story, morning glory..." "You don't care about my lunch at all, do you? You know it's there and you deliberately sit on it!" "Jello shot, ma'am?" "What about the hearing aid, am I crazy, wasn't that the plot! "). The only thing I couldn't understand is why no one commented on Professor Neon's remarkable resemblance to Dr. Forrester!

"You've made some powerful enemies, son."

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Folks, we're sure something just happened here
Review: This isn't the funniest episode of "MST3K," but it might be the most bizarre.

Okay. There's a group of women who are vampires, except they only drink synthesized blood and don't bite anyone, and it looks like they fight crime, except at the beginning of the movie two of the "batgirls" watch a guy get robbed and killed, then call Batwoman to tell her they just saw a guy get robbed and killed and, you know, we thought we'd just pass the word on.

Then another batgirl is kidnapped by two refugees from a touring show of "Guys and Dolls," and taken to a laboratory with a vaguely European scientist (70 percent of MST3K's movies had "vaguely European" characters) and his assistant Heathcliff. The two have an co-dependent and slightly abusive relationship, sort of like a campy "Last Tango In Paris."

Anyway. The scientist has made a pill that makes people happy (which translates into a lot of twists), except that makes Rat Fink, the chief villain, mad for some reason. Then Batwoman saves the batgirl and has to start looking for a hearing aid that is Rat Fink's real power, except it's also nuclear bomb, and Rat Fink's real real power is making multiple copies of himself. There's also a seance with a cringe-worthy slice of Chinese stereotyping, a twist party in a cafeteria and a lost underground city. I won't ruin the stunning ending of "The Wild World of Batwoman."

For all that, the movie crawls along at a snail's pace. The tempo means this shouldn't be your first MST3K episode, since the commentary, while good, doesn't really pick up until the second half of the film. But it's all worth it to hear Tom's agonized "ENNNNNNDDDDDDDDDD!" near the conclusion of the epic.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: "Like a Warhol movie, only it's weird..."
Review: While watching this movie, you may wonder to yourself, "Who the heck would put something like this out?" Well, that honor lies squarely on the shoulders of schlockmiester supreme Jerry Warren. In the 50's and 60's he released a number of no budget movies, his specialty (for lack of a better term) being horror movies. He was also responsible for importing a number of low budget Mexican movies and mutilating them for his own, fiendish purposes. He passed away in the late 80's but not before unleashing his last movie, Frankenstein Island (1981), on an unsuspecting public.

The only thing that makes The Wild World of Batwoman barely tolerable is Mike and the 'bots. I will say that this movie has everything from vampire women who drink synthetic blood, go go dancing (and lots of it), an atomic powered hearing aid, a mad scientist who has a thinly veiled homoerotic relationship with his hunchback assistant (see their poignant kiss near the end), happy pills, mole men, an evil masked villain named Rat Fink, a secret laboratory, an underground city...yes, this movie seems to have everything except a discernable plot.

Maybe I can sort it out...let's see...there's a costumed crime fighter named Batwoman who doesn't really fight crime, and she has a cult of vampire women who drink synthetic blood who act as her operatives, assisting her in her non crime fighting. Then we have an evil masked villain named Rat Fink, and obvious rip off of Ray Dennis Steckler's Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1965). This guy looks like a lame Mexican wrestler, and his only real power beside coming up with extremely elaborate yet pointless schemes is the ability to duplicate himself, with the aid of a machine. He has a mad scientist working for him, whose biggest accomplishment is the invention of a happy pill (Prozac?) and also creating a race of mole men. He has an extremely annoying hunchback assistant with the mental capacity of a grape. (He's not really hunchbacked, as he just walks around hunched over most of the time) Rat Fink is also saddled with a couple of henchmen that, in comparison, make any of the henchmen from the campy 60's Batman TV show look like friggin' Einstiens.

Anyway, seems Rat Fink wants to steal an atomic hearing aid (!?) from the Ayjax Development Company for some diabolical purpose. Batwoman has been hired to guard it, but fails miserably. Batwoman and her crime fightin' beauties mount a plan to recover the device, and the movie ends.

There's a ton of irrelevant stuff (I really wanted to see where the whole mole man/underground city plot threads were going), but once the extraneous padding is removed, the movie is probably only about 15 minutes long, instead of it's 70 minute run time.

Mike, Crow, and Servo do an excellent job providing much needed humor to yet another unwatchable movie, and while not among the best of the episodes, it certainly holds up well. I agree with other reviewers that this particular episode probably wouldn't be the best place for the uninitiated to start. A better introduction, in my opinion, would be Hands of Manos, or maybe the slightly more palatable Cave Dwellers episodes.

Along with the movie, this disc contains a short called Cheating, and the boys do quite well giving it the treatment it deserves. Also, available on this disc, is the unmystied version of the movie (no commentary by the boys). One interesting aspect I've noticed with a number of the early releases by Rhino of this series is that there didn't seem to be a lot of consistency from the release of one episode to another. From the menus, features, even to the packaging, nothing was really set in stone. This disc contains a postcard of Joel (or Mike) and the 'bots, while others didn't. After many of the episodes available were released in single disc format, Rhino elected to release what they had left in a set format, providing more standardization. Not a complaint on my part, as I am happy to even see this at least some of the episodes available on DVD, but it always struck me as odd.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Ching Chang Chong Chung!
Review: Let's see. This movie starts out with a murder in an alley for some reason. Then we go into this club where nothing but girls are dancing(Mike:" Whoa! That's 40 pounds of butt in 30-pound butt capacity pants."). There's this crime-fighting woman named Batwoman who's got these bikini-clad assistants who basically just kiss guys and dance a lot.

A villain named Rat Fink steals an atomic hearing aid with the help of these two hoodlums and this goofy scientist named Neon and his Igor-like sidekick named Heathcliff. Along the way, there's this soup that makes you dance without music. There's a seance in which this spirit speaks what the moviemakers think is Chinese("Ching Chang Chong Chung!"). And there are these monsters in a cave.

So far, this is my favorite MST3K. ...

The movie is one of the most dreadful ever made and is still hard to take even with the commentary. But this is one of MST3K's best efforts.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Where do they FIND this stuff??
Review: This is one of my favorite MST3000 episodes, a true feast for bad-movie fans. It features not one, but two bizarre films to be spoofed. The first, an oh-so-earnest fifties-era industrial black & white short on "cheating," contains some of the worst performances I have seen in a long time. The director tried to make his film look surreal and Bergmannesque, a delusion of grandeur that results in some very funny comments from the MST3K team. The robot interludes, typically the least funny parts of an episode, here play off the short and deliver some great comedic interplay.

The second film and main attraction, "The Wild World of Batwoman," is almost incomprehensibly bad. This is the kind of film that could only have been made in the 1960s. You keep asking yourself, was this intended to be hilariously weird, or was the director simply on a par with, say, Ed Wood? Batwoman herself looks ridiculous, with a lumpy frumpy shock of a haircut, a cheap black mask and a bat tattooed right above her pulchitrudinous cleavage. She bears no resemblance whatsoever to a DC comics character. Her "bat-girls," decked out in bikinis for most of the film, spend most of their time either go-go dancing or obsessively reciting chapter and verse of the arcane bat-regulations.

The director's obsession with food is worthy of a Jan Svankmajer film. In the beginning, the girls force a newbie to drink what is supposed to look like blood, later explaining that it is only a synthetic substitute. Later on, there is a plot about drugged soup that makes people dance compulsively. Some of the scenes are so bizarre (but politically incorrect) that they would have been funny even without the MST3K commments...a seance interrupted by a disembodied voice screaming in ersatz Chinese, or the villains donning disguises that look like something out of Yiddish theater.

One of the characters, who looks something like Martin Mull, sits motionless for about five minutes during an interminably stupid and boring scene. When we later discover his dark secret, which puts him on a par with Robin Williams in "One Hour Photo," the moment is so badly bungled that we can only sigh and go on to the next absurdity.

If you are a MST3K fan, this one is for you. If you are not, give it a try.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: one of the best episodes on dvd
Review: this is one of those simply unbelievable movies. the only way the existence of this movie makes sense is if you consider that maybe it was intended for children...like a "spy kids" for the 60s. maybe that's why my parents are so nuts.

we all know that the worse the movie is, the better the episode of mst3k is. so, needless to say, this is one heck of an episode. mike is hilarious in one of his early episodes, and the short: "cheating," features some great riffing by the mst3k crew.

for MSTies: anybody notice that the mean gene okerlund lookalike from "The Giant Spider Invasion" is in this movie? i can't believe they didn't make a mean gene joke in this episode! the resemblance is uncanny!

the wild world of batwoman is a great buy...classic mst3k through and through

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Don't get this unless you are buying it for the bikinis
Review: Boring. Stupid. The heros (Batwoman and her vampires) are more inept than the horribly inept bad guys (Ratfink and his team). Tom and the robots couldn't seem to come up with much, other than the general agony of being present. The bikinis and their contents are the source of the three stars.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Subtle but not without insight
Review: This movie is an interesting exposition of the human condition. Despite the unfortunate title, this movie has little to do with the DC comic. This is a more serious movie, although there is a concrete 'superhero' metaphor. (You really have to watch and UNDERSTAND the movie understand this) As demonstrated on this site, I think most people will miss the subtlety of this film, and the issues of deep human psychy that it deals with. Unfortunately, in order to pursue these theames, the film makers were forced to make some concession in terms of the continuity and the addition of scenes which are really pointless in terms of the overall plot. A cinamatic masterpiece, but for the reasons above, often critercised and agrivating to the less knowledgeable (read MST3K and fellow reviewers).


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