Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

This movie...hoo boy
MST does 3 biker movies in season 2, this being the first but IMO not the best. Its probably the most adult movie they ever tackled, and they do a pretty good job with what they have to work with. Some interesting MST trivia: at this point in the show they wouldn't watch an entire movie before selecting it, so after obtaining the rights they were all pretty shocked by the rape and murder of the main characters girlfriend. Obviously that scene was edited out, and movies were screened from begining to end from that point forward.
I hadn’t seen this episode in quite some time and I was happy to realize it’s a lot better than I remember. However, considering the year it actually aired I was pretty surprised by the language the film got away with uncensored, especially the f@g joke.
The riffs are solid, the host segments are pretty fun especially the side hacker song, though segment 2, where they do play by play is way to long. This is also the only time I can recall where Cambot riffs the movie, when he puts up an ESPN like crawl at the bottom of the screen. Ross Hagen makes his first appearance in MSTied movie, he's back again later in season 2. This episode gave us a few great catch phrases that would pop up quite often in the series: “That was number 5!â€

I know MST3K is all about riffing on bad movies, but the series works best when the so-called 'bad films' themselves are actually quite watch-able in their own rights, with the comedic commentary only adding to the experiences ("Santa Claus, Prince of Space, Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster", ect).

"Sidehackers", however, nearly falls to the opposite spectrum of this argument, despite it being no where near as miserable of a film as say "Devilfish" and "Invasion of the Neptune Men" (AKA "Prince of Space II: Without Joy"). Although the our heroes do an admirable job with the material, I agree its a pretty tough sit through, complete with one bummer of an ending.

i think it's funny that the response from everyone on here seems to be that the episode is generally unenjoyable, but I remember back a while, I burned a bunch of episodes to DVDs for my uncle as a birthday present...and I wanted to find the 25 "best" episodes, and this one came up a LOT.

[of course, i also tried to focus mostly on the first season 2-5 (with a few exceptions) because my uncle always said that he preferred Joel as the host.]

I liked it, personally.