Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume 5

Since making fun of really, really, really bad movies never gets old, Mystery Science Theater 3000 never wears out its welcome. In this batch, Mike Nelson and his robot pals Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo take on four deserving cinematic atrocities: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues, a terrifyingly awful monster movie; Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, a hideously defective fantasy flick; Time Chasers, an appallingly dreadful time-travel film; and The Touch of Satan, a mind-bogglingly horrible story about witches. Though frankly, all of these films have the touch of Satan--as Mike shudders in his intro to the Merlin movie, "there's Satan all over the thing." Personally, I prefer the earlier years of the series, when it was still on Comedy Central and featured the laidback, sardonic stylings of Joel Hodgson; the Mike Nelson, Sci-Fi Channel era, from which these entries hail, aren't quite as tight or clever. But they're still pretty funny. Recommended. (M. Johanson)