“Mystery Science Theater 3000- The Movie” is one of my all time favorites.

The story: As with the TV series, the movie revolves around the evil Dr. Forrester torturing his subjects (Mike Nelson and his robot pals Crow and Tom Servo) with horrendously bad movies. In their motion picture debut, the gang is forced to watch a 50’s sci-fi film called “This Island Earth,” which is about aliens needing help from humans to save their dying planet. Along the way, we also get short host segments with Mike and the bots.

As many times as I have seen this film, it still cracks me up on each and every viewing. True, “MST3K: The Movie” is essentially a TV episode made for the big screen, but the fact that this film is so great is a testament to how brilliant the show was. As a reviewer who endures countless bad movies, it’s refreshing to watch a group of comedic geniuses mock bad movies in order to make them more enjoyable. I only wish they could mock every bad movie I review. You may be asking yourself, what’s so fun about people making fun of movies? To me, the appeal of “MST3K” is the quick witted and cultured jokes. Not only do they make references to such pop culture icons such as William Shatner, “Casablanca,” “Mork And Mindy,” Tangerine Dream, and Michael Stipe, but there are also plenty of sexual innuendos, and character/script cut-downs as well. I just admire the fact that the writers can relate anything and everything to what’s going on screen.

The 1.85:1 widescreen picture quality gets a big thumbs up from me. Sure, the print for “This Island Earth” is grainy and filled with scratches, but the host segments and so forth are crystal clear. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track is also worthy of praise as the dialogue is clear as can be.

Sadly, no extras have been included. It would be nice to see the deleted scenes on disc one day.