Here’s clips from random shorts, not all the shorts presented tonight:

An iRiff, for those who have not enjoyed our first effort on the Asylum classic Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, is a downloadable audio commentary that syncs with a particular film, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000.  I was first introduced to Monster Squad when friend and fellow Pwner recommended Monster Squad when we were throwing around ideas for movies to riff.  One viewing and I knew Monster Squad was perfect.

It has everything you could want: It stars a motley crew of pre-teens who for some reason hold the key to whether evil will be defeated or will reign over the Earth.   There’s an older, super-cool high school kid (Fonzie level hipness is inferred) who inexplicably wants to be in the titular Monster Squad to hang out with geeky pre-teens, and subjects himself to a “monster test” in order to gain admittance.

There’s a veritable cavalcade of ye olde time Universal movie monsters, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, the (utterlyl pointless) Mummy, and the Creature of the Black Lagoon.  Dracula is the lead bad guy, trying to rule the world or something like that.  Wolfman, the Creature, and the Mummy are relegated to useless henchmen.  Frankenstein is portrayed as a simpleton who opts not to obey Dracula’s commands and instead proves a ineffective force for the good guys.

I don’t think it’s possible to make a case that Monster Squad is a “good” movie, but it’s equally hard to argue that it’s not fun.  Sure the plot has holes big enough for Jabba the Hut to build a summer house in with room for a swimming pool; sure the rogues gallery is completely anemic other than Dracula, and even Drac uses his amazing powers to do stuff like lighting the fuse of Acme dynamite; sure the heroes are snot-nosed brats whose primary weapon is a kick to the nardulars and a compious serving of luck; sure there’s homophobic dialogue and oodles of cruelty to the fat kid constantly referred to solely as “fat kid;” and sure there are plenty of other “sures” I’m sure I left out.

If Monster Squad was part of  your childhood experience, what better way to relive it than with the dulcit tones of Yours Truly, Brian Alterman, and Tom Stephens poking fun at it along the way?  If you’ve never seen or heard of Monster Squad, what better reason to go check out it and endure — I mean, enjoy — it for the first time with the hilarious iRiff from your favorite cinematic masochists, the aforementioned Your Truly, Brian Alterman, and Tom Stephens?

Check out the Youtube sample here, embedding is disabled for reasons we can’t seem to fix.

Dozens of watchings, hours of discussion — all so we can mock it passionately and completely. Our latest victim or rather the film that most recently took us as victims is Monster Squad. The movie is great in the way that many children’s movies from the 80s are great. It’s impossibly ridiculous, fraught with sickeningly bad fashion, ridiculous dialog, and it has that kid from “The Wonder Years” (no not Fred Savage, the other one … no not Josh Saviano the other one… no not Danica McKeller either, the OTHER one). The truth is though that it was fun to watch. Many of the types of movies we suffer through have no redeeming qualities, which of course amuses us. This however genuinely amused us. So we decided, “why not make a good bad movie better?”

So, check out our iRiff Monster Squad and enjoy. Let us know what you think.

Here are two vids to give you some idea of what goodness Planet of the Dinosaurs contains, the first being the Rifftrax original song for the DVD menu, put to images:

The second is clips from the film itself put together by a fan on Youtube: