Rifftrax - Night of the Living Dead (2009) - By Duane L. Martin

Film Reviews: Rifftrax - Night of the Living Dead (2009) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Monday, June 01, 2009 @ 00:05:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

The Rifftrax series is done by the three guys who did the Mystery Science Theater show, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. The Rifftrax series is basically MST minus the characters. It's just the three guys doing a commentary of goofy comments over the film. There are a variety of films available in the series, but Night of the Living dead is the one I was sent to review.

I'm not going to review the film itself other than to say that it looked great, but got a little choppy in spots like it was suffering from dropped frames. This wasn't a major issue though and the visual quality of the film was otherwise really good. There's no point in reviewing the content of the film, because everyone who's reading this has probably already seen it numerous times, or at the very least knows what it is and what it's about. Plus, it's been reviewed to death like...everywhere, so there's no point in wasting time on it here.

What I will review here however is the commentary track done by our three MST guys, Mike, Bill and Kevin. The film can be watched in its entirety with or without the commentary track, and the quality of the transfer (minus the slight choppiness here and there) definitely makes this a copy of the film worth picking up. However, that said, I can't say I'd recommend it simply on the strength of the commentary alone.

I'm going to admit something here. I've only seen MST a few times, and I never really cared for it. I know it has a lot of rabid fans, but man...I'm sorry, but I just never found it funny. Sure there's an amusing comment here and there, but in general, I can come up with way funnier stuff on my own than I ever heard on MST. That said, I'm going to say that if I was going to watch a film with these guys making comments, I'd far prefer to watch it in the format that's presented here where it's simply a separate audio track without the characters and the framing of the film and everything else. Personally, I'd find it a lot funnier if they just ad lib dubbed over all the dialogue in the film rather than just making comments. Replacing the actual dialogue in these old movies with whatever goofy stuff you could come up with on the fly would be way funnier in my opinion than what we're presented with here. In fact, my wife and I do that sometimes on infomercials and the Spanish language channels and it's really a lot of fun.

There's really not much else to say. If you like MST and the goofy comments these guys make over the films, you'll likely really enjoy this series of releases. If you don't find it all that funny, or only randomly funny, they're still worth picking up just for the films themselves because it looks like the transfers are really clean and well done. It all comes down to a matter of personal taste. I will admit I did find a few of the comments funny and picked up a bit of trivia about the car Barbara was in being wrecked that I found quite fun and interesting, but in general, it's just not my cup of tea. There are however, tons of MST fans out there who will snatch this series of releases up like they were going out of style, and all I can say is, those that do are going to get a quality product, regardless of whether you watch it with the commentary on or not.