RiffTrax, an audio commentary featuring comedians Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, knocked another one out of the park at last week’s live show.
Unlike their previous show, which involved a complete roasting of the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster “Starship Troopers,” this month’s show marked a return to the gang’s standard practice of making fun of old low-budget movies with George Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead.”
Never before has someone so hilariously pointed out just how much of the movie is just scenes of people’s carpentry skills, or Karl Hardman’s acting choice “to start his character with inexplicable rage and just go from there.”
The idea behind RiffTrax and its precursor, Mystery Science Theater 3000, can seem pretty strange to the uninitiated. Think of it like watching a DVD with some friends where someone makes an occasional humorous observation or quip about what’s happening on screen. Now imagine those friends are all professional comedians and they’ve been doing this for 20 years and you’ve got RiffTrax.
Nearly every line uttered by the three comedians had the audience in hysterics, and the lines were dispersed well enough through the film to keep the audience consistently entertained while still allowing them to follow the film’s story.
As for the film itself, “Night of the Living Dead” remains an enjoyable monster movie classic in its own right and fans of the film are still likely enjoy this version of it, as long as they don’t take things too seriously.
Anyone who likes re-examining movies from a comedic standpoint should definitely give RiffTrax a shot. Their live shows are consistently funny and are definitely worth the price of admission.
Another RiffTrax Live show will air in select movie theaters throughout the Ann Arbor area on Dec. 6 and feature the truly awful 1964 film “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.”
For those who missed out on this live show but would still like to see it, it will be available for download soon on rifftrax.com.