Rating: 
Summary: "Looks like Casual Day at Control Data"
Review: Zounds -- the sight of our zoftig hero is enough to make even Luke Skywalker go over to the Dark Side. One of the most deliciously bad movies EVER, and Mike and the 'bots give it the full treatment it deserves. Store these images away for future nighmares: The wild scene with everyone swinging on ropes, while the soundtrack reverberates with "Ellie Mae goes to the see-ment pond"; Count how many times the Norm Crosby lookalike says "little doll,"; and finally Batwoman playing the organ (where's Al Lewis when you need him?) in her "hideout" that looks like part of Levittown. Who knew that drugs were such a problem in Hollywood, so early on? Don't try to figure it out - just let the wave roll over you and swim with it.
Rating:
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:
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: 
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: 
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.
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