There are films so horrifying - so bleak and hopeless and insidiously evil - that they simply cannot run longer than ten minutes. Twenty tops. To run any longer would be to burn a hole of insanity through the very fabric of logic and reason. The horror is too Cyclopean. This shit would make Lovecraft run screaming back to Innsmouth, seeking sanctuary amongst the comparatively normal descendants of Dagon. And yet, these small slices of cinematic Satanism come packaged very disarmingly: vanilla frosted and sugar-sparkle-sweet, straight from the atomic oven of the innocuous 50s, smiling like a suburban sunrise in spring, white as milk, American as pie and as sickening as sixty Twinkies slammed into an empty stomach in less than thirty seconds and chased with a jug of Kool-Aid.
These evil entities are known collectively as "shorts." And much like Legion, they are many, and their ultimate aim is the destruction of mankind.
Fortunately, the valiant warriors known as Joel, Mike, Tom and Crow provided a filter for those of us who couldn't possibly bear the full force of these Hellscapes. In time, these brave men and 'bots shall be known as Saints. Or not. Look, most of us cringe and whimper through these one-reel horrorshows once. These guys sat through them over and over and over again, looking for the chink in the armor, driving home their swords of sarcasm and disdain again and again, until at last the mighty beast falls, slain by the cynical indifference of the generation they themselves birthed.
What follows is a list of the most horrifying shorts ever to be shown on MST3K. I dare not post them in their entirety, for fear of invoking their whitebread menace and possibly becoming possessed of a desire to vote Republican in the next election.
#1 - Mr B Natural (1957)
Remember the Lust murder from the movie
Seven? Where the guy who was forced to wear the dildo dagger and fuck the whore to death starts screaming
"Fuck! Oh god! Oh god! Please help me! Please help me!" Yeah, I had much the same reaction to this short.
The Plot: Conformity was the law of the land in the 50s, and if you didn't fit in, you may as well be a Commie. Young Buzz Turner is a social outcast at Republican High School. You see, Buzz wants to hang out with Jeanie - aka the cutest girl in school - but even when she asks him over to her place after school, he freezes and runs home to write an essay. His mother, unable to fathom why Buzz is such a dud (but not why she named him Buzz to begin with) frets when he heads upstairs to read. Fortunately, a woman who calls herself Mister pops into his bedroom in a shortie jacket and tights and convinces him that buying a trumpet will turn him into a Popular member of the white race. Buzz spends the rest of his life providing the music for the school sock hops and not dancing with Jeanie because he's on the clock. When rock and roll swept the nation soon afterwards, Buzz - sensing his doom - hunted down Mr. B. and blundgeoned she/it to death with an electric guitar.
The Stars: Bruce Podewell played Buzz at the age of fourteen. He tried his hand at theater production, direction and banjo playing, and died in 2013 at the unripe age of 69. Sadly, his nickname really
was Buzz, and his actual dad played his dad in the short. This was Betty Luster's last known acting role (thank God) and after twenty odd years as a showgirl, she married, settled down, lived long and died in 2011.
#2 - Catching Trouble (1936)
The Plot: An arrogant He-Man heads out into the Everglades to prove his masculine manliness by terrorizing two baby bears, whose distressed howls make this short even more despicable. There's no point to this film, it's just an ego-stroker for Ross Allen, who proceeds to rope up the bear cubs and deliver them to a zoo for profit. Would that the bears mother had emerged from the underbrush, taken Ross's head in her jaws and cracked it open like a fucking walnut. Ross also parades around an incredibly depressed looking Native American who is apparently his helper, but is really just there to look primitive and ignorant next to All American Ross, King of the Chest Hairs, Conqueror of Petting Zoos and founder of his own alligator farm.
The Star: Apparently, Ross became something of a hero in Florida after opening a reptile institute and becoming an expert herpetologist. When he died of cancer in the early 80s, they named a goddamned island after him. I, however, choose to remember him as a tormentor of baby bear cubs. His status as an alligator wrestler/rattlesnake milker does not impress me and quite frankly, the details of his declining years makes me wonder if Tobe Hooper's film
Eaten Alive was a biopic, starring Neville Brand as a flimsily disguised Allen.
#3 - Cheating (1953)
The Plot: This dark, gloomy, murky little tale of a boy - ostracized by his peers and left to dwell in sorrow because he cheated on a math test - was rumored to have been inspired by Ingmar Bergman's Through A Glass Darkly. I totally made that shit up. John, in his power fueled drive to claim the student council seat and begin his long and prestigious career as a politician, neglects to do his homework, instead caving to his desire for a hamburger. The past comes back to haunt him when his friend Mary gets caught passing him the answers! Her dress would later be inspected by officials and samples collected. I made that up too.
The Stars: There aren't any. I couldn't find a single person willing to admit that they'd been in this film. But holy shit, the director was Herk Harvey! Apparently, Herk had quite a career as a documentarian, churning out such gems as Why Study Industrial Arts?, Why Study Home Economics?, and What About Juvenile Deliquency? By the end of a prolific decade spent shaming schoolchildren into entering the conformity machine, Herk went and took and did a little horror movie called Carnival Of Souls, which was
almost as disturbing as Cheating. Almost.
#4 - Design For Dreaming
The Plot: A ditzy pixie drops acid before bed and dreams herself into a car show. Unfortunately, she's still wearing her pink pajamas, so she needs a wardrobe do-over by the top clothing designers in the world. She also can't walk without dancing extravagantly, so her husband (aka The Phantom of the Fucking Opera) has to carry her around. She singsongs her way through her auto wishlist and finds herself planted in the Kitchen of the Future, baking cakes and making June Cleaver look like a guttersnipe by comparison. Finally, she and her oddly masked husband drive away on the Highway of Tomorrow, make a wrong turn and end up eaten by cannibals in the desert hills of Arizona. Or didn't you see the remake of
The Hills Have Eyes, featuring Miss Pixie Pants in the pre-credit sequence, pulling a nuclear cake already starred with candles out of the fucking oven?
The Stars: Who cares? The short is the real star here, having gained cult status due to its kitschy, kicky ridiculousness. It's a chilling tutorial for empty consumerism and has popped up in other such embittered films as The Game, The Stepford Wives and a Nine Inch Nails concert. How's that for bleak?
#5 - Body Care & Grooming (1947)
The Plot: See this woman? She is happy. She is content. She has been lobotomized by society, shamed into spending every waking minute of every single day making sure her appearance is pristine. She has been starched and bleached and polyurethaned into the Perfect Woman, acceptable, marriagable and utterly without an identity. Happiness cannot and will not be attained until you pull up your socks, straighten your slip and make the boys like you. Mannequin Mary here is the spokeswoman for Conformity. Suppress your dreams, do not entertain original thoughts, do not question authority or deviate from the imposed norm. Brush your hair, brush your teeth, wear clean underpants, marry and reproduce. And when she finally wakes up sometime in the sixties, she'll be prescribed Xanax and nod off in front of the soaps, a menthol dangling from one hand, a half finished bottle of Jim Beam in the other, hair still in curlers, reeking of Lemon Pledge, while her kids sneak out of the house to smoke reefer and have sex, and her husband boozes away at the Sneaky Tiki, having an affair with a hostess named Leilani.
The Stars: None that I could find. Just squeaky clean whiteness, reminders that high heels and heavy bracelets are a sin and lots of shots of people lathering up and being really, weirdly happy about it.
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