Yes. It is bad. Very bad.
Some ‘bad’ movies are highly amusing and watchable (Girl’s Town). Some are just hideously painful. The kind you want to block from your memory.
Sadly enough, that’s not the absolute bottom of the barrel that MST3K/Rifftrax scraped. It’s down there, certainly, but for my money the absolute worst of the worst is
Castle of Fu Manchu. It’s bad. It’s
bad bad. Not even Sir Christopher Lee, who has been known to rescue horrible material from the muck by dint of his sheer awesome, could save it. Not even Joel and the Bots were able to make it watchable without sheer pain.
As for RiffTrax, the most unwatchable film of their repertoire is
Super Mario Bros. Mostly because the more I watch it, the more I see the complete mutilation of a beloved franchise. and so even Mike, Bill and Kevin’s jokes can’t add any mirth.
Though I do get a chuckle from the “
IT’SA ME!!! MARIO!!!” riff that Kevin makes at one point in the film.
But for a good bad movie, but one that should only be watched on MST3K, check out
The Starfighters. It’s a plotless, pointless movie, a stealth PR campaign for the Lockheed F-105 Starfighter (hence the name) that makes the plane even more unappealing. Prepare yourselves for endless refueling scenes, talk of corn detasseling, plot arcs that go absolutely nowhere and that are not resolved by film’s end, the opportunity to learn WAY more about the Air Force’s pilots than you ever wanted to and can never unlearn (two words… “poopie suit”…) a completely unprepared for acting (future) Sen. Bob Dornan as the “star”, and a plot point that proves the central idea that the film was trying to rebut – that the F-105 was an unsafe aircraft. Sheesh.