BOGGY CREEK II: AND THE LEGEND CONTINUES. I'm a little ashamed to say, but I kind of liked this movie. Well, pieces of it anyway. Certainly not the poop flashback. Or the skinny, shirtless, son-of-the-director-getting-a-movie-role guy. Well, anyway, this is the movie that did for Arkansas what GIANT SPIDER INVASION did for Wisconsin. As Mike Nelson points out in the DVD-bonus intro, this is actually the third, not the second, film in the Boggy Creek saga -- figure that one out. A great big monster with nothing better to do terrorizes some huge, filthy Arkansas character (in a weird alternative universe, this frightening man at the end would be played by Orson Welles).

MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS. Somehow Ernest Borgnine got roped into... this. He plays a kindly old man telling his grandson some bedtime stories. (Does this remind you of the linking elements in THE PRINCESS BRIDE? The comparison ends here.) Apparently Borgnine's character was a TV writer and during the course of this movie he tells his son of two rejected scripts involving Merlin the sorcerer running a magic shop in the USA of the 1970s.

The first story involves an evil guy who writes reviews for a living (Amazon Top 100: beware) accidentally learning magic and lighting his cat on fire. The second is about an evil monkey toy that kills all the pets in a small suburban household. Oh boy, this movie was just awful. Apparently I wasn't the only one to think so; most of the riffs just involve the cast blatantly insulting the film rather than coming up with amusing quips. I can't say I blame them, but this ends up being a lesser episode.

TIME CHASERS. The film that does for Vermont what BOGGY CREEK II did for Arkansas. Here lies a goofy science-fiction movie (that's not all that bad actually) about a computer geek who builds a time machine out of a charter airplane and a Commodore Disk Drive (I, too, once owned a Commodore 1541, but I never thought of hooking it up to a airplane -- this is why I'll never be a time-traveler). This is quite a lot of fun, although the time-travel logic doesn't quite seem to make sense. It looks like what would happen if a film crew shot a film in locations where they didn't have to pay any money. So, a public library becomes a corporate office building. A mall food court becomes a mall food court... of the future. And a rather modern-looking group of Revolutionary War re-enactors becomes, well, you can probably guess.

In the DVD introduction for TIME CHASERS, Mike Nelson informs us that the producers of the film found out about their film's imminent featuring on MST3k and threw a big party on the night of the premier. While they said they were fans of the show, they didn't quite seem to expect the "savaging" that the film received. Apparently, the party ended up being a bit of a depressing event. But the party should be lots of fun for everyone else; the mocking that this movie gets is hysterical. Crow starts out refusing to accept Mr. Hockey-Hair as the film's star, and things just get funnier from there.

THE TOUCH OF SATAN. This movie would be about a half an hour long if they cut out all the awkward pauses. The film's protagonist (who looks quite a bit like a young Gen. Wesley Clark with 70s hair) wanders into a nice country walnut farm that happens to be where Satan lives. Or maybe it's just Satan's bride. Or his daughter. Or something. I just finished watching it, and have no desire to say anything else about it. The sarcastic comments directed at it are well aimed and well deserved.

The release of these MST3k DVD sets serves to remind me of how much I miss this show being in production. By a strange quirk of fate involving rights issues, MERLIN'S SHOP, although the third episode produced in the show's tenth and final season, ended up being broadcast about a month after the final episode aired. "The movies," Mary Jo Pehl coyly predicts during what would end up being the last host segment, "are only going to get worse." Well, the years since MST3k went off the airways have proved the evil Mrs. Forrester correct. And how can we expect to survive the awful films that the future will throw at us without our three friends in the bottom right corner easing our pain?