(Taken from my MST3K Review review)

It's E.T. meets The Evil Dead in my favorite bad movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000: Pod People!. Reading mythology expert Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell claims that all myths have universal elements of the human condition, archetypes and religious yearnings that show up throughout history in stories. He calls this the "monomyth". It got me to thinking, can bad movies all share things in common that make up the "monobad film"?

So I decided to compare and contrast Independence Day and Pod People to test my experiment out. Both films are about threatening aliens coming to earth. So far so good. The structure of Pod People follows the lives of three groups of people. In one camp, you got some redneck hunters in the woods. In another you got a goofy looking kid with red hair named Tommy who wishes he only had an extraterrestrial friend. The other group is some rock group that retreats to the wilderness on a sexual vacation. The three groups end up colliding with each other throughout the film. Independence Day ALSO follows a similar structure. You got your redneck farmer and his kids, President Bill "Somebody Please Hire Me" Pullman with his daughter and staff, Jeff Goldblum and his stereotypical Jewish father and, of course, Will 'Who Da' Man, I Da' Man' Smith and his stripper girlfriend - who ALSO end up meeting and interacting with each other throughout the film as well!

Next you got your alien menaces. In Pod People, the aliens travel billions of miles in a meteor, only to crash on earth and get pushed around, humiliated and misunderstood. In Independence Day, the aliens also seems at first intelligent, but end up being really stupid. If you can travel billions of miles across space, being defeated by a redneck with an anal probe grudge, Lone Star from Spaceballs, Jeff Goldblum's Fisher Price "My First Laptop Computer" and Will Smith is just sad. The boy Tommy in Pod People finds one of the alien eggs that came to earth. The egg hatches and he names the alien Trumpy.

Trumpy apparently has an evil twin that goes around knocking off the human characters one by one. In Independence Day, we also have our crop of good and bad aliens: the bad aliens being the invaders that demolish entire cities, the good alien being Brent Spiner. The characters also share in common the fact that they are all stupid. Pod People closes in a touching scene where Tommy tells Trumpy "I hate you Trumpy! Go away." Independence Day also ends on a touching note as Will Smith fulfills his son's promise of fireworks. The end. While we're on the subject, I'd like to see how Will Smith would act if aliens really invaded earth. Would he yell and scream "WHO DA' MAN!?" or knock out an alien with one punch, whilst smoking a cigar and saying: "Welcome to Earth." My personal opinion is that he'd much more likely wet his pants, scream like a girl and shoot himself in the face before the aliens can give him an anal probe, but that's just me.

The late, great movie director Stanley Kubrick once said: "The truth of something isn't so much the think of it, but the feel of it." That perfectly can sum up why I love Pod People. Despite it being a horrible rip off of Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extraterrestrial, I simply love this movie for reasons beyond anything rational. I love the silly new age music, I love the outdoor-sy feel of it. I love the stupid characters, and the story, as terrible as it is, keeps me glued to the seat always waiting for another classic bad scene (such as the "Trumpy, you can do magic" scene, or the strange scene where the rock group is driving through the woods with bad music). This movie is just so bad and so ambitious that I think it's a classic for the archives of bad films.

This was the first full length episode of the show I had seen and it was the one that made me an instant fan of the show. It remains my favorite. The host segments are terrific, each one being a classic (and all musical) with Joel and the Bots version of the rock song in the film which they call "Idiot Control Now" (the real song is "Hear The Engines Roll Now"), their new age music "Some Guys In Space" spoofing the music throughout the film, their version of the "Trumpy can do magic" scene and ending with the sentimental favorite "Clowns in the Sky". I don't know how else to describe this episode other than the odd sensation (nostalgia?) I get every time I see it. Words cannot describe how much joy this episode gives me. It stinks!

Trivia Note: The movie shown in the beginning and closing credits were lifted from the movie Galaxy Invader, another one of my favorite bad films.


Buy this great episode of MST3K. Huzzah!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS