Roadhouse, Rifftrax

I watched the movie Road House with commentary by Riff Trax.

Riff Trax is from the boys at Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There was a cruel irony to MST3K. The show was about a man and two robots trapped in a space ship forced to watch bad movies. And to produce the show, the people on the show were forced to watch bad movies over and over trying to come up with the jokes they made during the films.

Of course, they could only do this with very bad movies----the people who owned the rights to GOOD movies would never allow their work to be ridiculed in this way!

They figured out a way around this. They recorded commentary separately. You download the commentary and listen to them make fun of the movie while you watch the DVD.

See their website here.

I know that on many of the Riff Trax commentaries they have more than one person speaking. On this, there was only Mike Nelson. It took a minute to get used to only one guy doing this.

I'd never seen the movie before. It was sort of martial arts movie featuring people who weren't martial artists, namely Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott, as bouncers out to clean up a bar. The bar is owned by the guy who played DeSoto on the old TV show Emergency!

Soon Swayze finds himself battling wealthy local kingpin Ben Gazzara.

I heard it was based very, very loosely on the case of Ken McElroy, a vicious criminal who terrorized the farming town of Skidmore, Missouri. He had been charged with serious felonies 21 times over the years, but he avoided conviction each time by terrorizing witnesses. He was convicted of assault for shooting a 70-year-old man with a shotgun but was released on bail while the conviction was appealed. He immediately went to a local bar brandishing an M-1 rifle and threatening to murder the man who testified against him. The next day, McElroy was shot and killed in front of 47 witnesses, not one of whom had seen a thing.

Road House had violence and nudity but I don't think I could have sat through it without the commentary. It was pretty funny.