The Film Crew

The Film Crew is a project of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, three former cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000. These guys must have really missed the good old days because the premise of The Film Crew is extremely similar to MST3K.

These three guys roast a terrible B movie which is broken up with host segments at the beginning, end and in the middle of the movie, which is very much in line with MST3K. The main difference is that the Film Crew is appearing pretty much as themselves, and there are no puppets or people showing up over the movie in silhouette. The humor is good, the interaction between the riffers is actually the point where the Film Crew might just excel over MST3K because the are not in character.

The biggest downfall of the Film Crew is the fact that they only riffed 4 movies, and then because of problems that they were having with the company they were working with, the project was put on hold and then abandoned. Mike, Kevin and Bill have moved on to another movie riffing project, Rifftrax, and it is doing really well. Rifftrax however has taken a few elements out of the mix, and while they are still riffing movies, they've taken away the B movie factor as they riff much more familiar movies including new releases that are box office hits. This leaves out most if not all of the camp factor, which I really like. The Film Crew fills that need just a little better to me than Rifftrax. Rifftrax does provide streaming video that is already synced with the rifftrax, if however the RiffTrax crew released some of their stuff in DVD format, I'd be tempted.

Here's the icing on the cake though. Three of the four Film Crew movies are available on hulu.com, the only one that's not is "Killers from Space". Fortunately for me, I own Killers from Space, so I've seen all of these movies now. The DVD's also have some funny bonus footage, which is really kinda neat.