3/5 Lots of fun with a slight problem...
  by Roman Martel (California USA)
After a very entertaining first volume of short films, Rifftrax delivers a second round of educations shorts with funny commentary by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. I was looking forward to this volume, especially after seeing a clip from "One Got Fat".

One Got Fat - This short is about has disturbing as was hinted by the clip. Children with monkey masks riding bicycles into danger. Most of them are killed or injured in some way. All the while a narrator explains away the horror and pain. Lots of material for the riffers to work with and it keeps them quipping away the whole time. One of the highlights of the disc.
5 out of 5 stars

Lunchroom Manners - After some school children watch a puppet show featuring a dunderhead Mr. Bungle, they decide to do everything in their power to avoid becoming him. At first it seems harmless, but after a while we begin to wonder if Mr. Bungle is plaguing their minds. Another very funny short with lots to work with.
4 out of 5 stars

Each Child is Different - This one actually has a sound idea at its heart. It encourages teachers to understand that a child may have other factors affecting their performance in school. But the execution comes across harsh and bleak. Most of the children used as examples lead depressing and dead end lives. As it gets more tragic the funnier it gets. Kind of a mixed bag though. If you laughed at some of the more dark MST3K shorts (Last Clear Chance or Days of Our Years), you'll enjoy this. Others might find this too dark.
3 out of 5 stars

Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast/Petaluma Chicken - Words can't really describe this one. The first half is 70's and seems to have a narrator asking Cathy why she won't eat breakfast. But the question is never answered. The second half is a 50's film about a man making a huge omelet. One of the riffers asks if they've suddenly walked into a David Lynch film and it was all too true. So strange and odd that the riffing almost seems redundant.
3 out of 5 stars

Act Your Age - Some poor dope defaces a desk and ends up asking the question, why can't he or his peers act their age. A high school principle takes a special interest in the question and a survey is produced. This one seems to go on a bit too long, but the riffing is solid.
3 out of 5 stars

Harm Hides At Home - Crossing guard by day and super hero whenever some moron starts a fire: Safety Woman is there. This is one odd 70's short film. It appears to be humorous on the outside but everyone is deadly serious. Starts out pretty funny, but has that 70's dreariness to it that slows the film down. The riffers do a solid job and keep you laughing through the slog.
3 out of 5 stars

Coffee House Rendezvous - A 60's film about making your very own coffee house\teen hang out\folk music scene in your town. Maybe this was supposed to be an option to the evil influence of hippies? Rock music is considered annoying in this flick, and the kids seem to be an odd mix of beat poets and bad folk singers. On the long side but the riffers are up to the challenge, just when things seem to be winding down they get you laughing again.
4 out of 5 stars

Are you popular - 50's and very strange. At first it talks about how girls who "park with boys" may appear popular, but they really aren't. Then it goes into how a boy should ask a girl out on a date. Plenty to work with in this one and it's just the right length.
4 out of 5 stars

Good Health Practices - A brother and sister demonstrate how to eat right, use the toilet and keep clean. Extra strange with all the toilet hygiene referenced here. This keeps things really lively for the riffers. Plenty of bodily function humor in this one, but the short is really asking for it. I was laughing pretty hard in spite of myself.
5 out of 5 stars.

The average here is a four star disc. There are no two star shorts here, but there are fewer 5 five star efforts than the previous disc. Still it's a solid bit of comedy for this disc.

Now for the problem. The sound mix on my disc was problematic. Some episodes, like "Good Health Practices" were perfectly mixed, I could hear the riffers and the short with equal clarity. But some were really badly mixed. "One Got Fat" is the worst offender. Sometimes I couldn't hear the short, but the riffing was fine. Other times the riffing was overpowered by the narration of the short. The result was that much of the humor was lost. I ended up watching the thing twice and while it was hilarious, it was a lot of work to get there. "Lunchroom Manners" and "Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast" suffered in similar ways, but to a lesser degree.

I've noticed that others have had this problem too, and so I feel I must take at least one star off the score for the poor mixing job. It doesn't seem to happen to everyone, but just be warned that it could affect your copy. It's still a three star effort, but you might find yourself using the volume control more than you want to on these.

4/5 Rifftrax give George some more beans...
  by McGillicutty (The Sooner Nation)
Rifftrax Shorts Vol. 2

Another collection of 9 riff-tastic shorts from former MST3K and current [...] performers Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. Most deal with improving the manners of American youth and health practices and like the first volume is very entertaining for the riff lover in all of us.

Highlights start with "Lunchroom Manners", a short featured on Pee-Wee Herman's HBO special back in the '80's. It's very funny stuff but I was surprised that Mike, Kevin, & Bill missed some obvious targets, listen for the narrator's line "...and he knew what else he wanted." and see just what the boys overlooked. "Each Child is Different", which shows children with different problems at home gets a prime blasting from the Rifftrax trio. The line "Give George some more beans" is right up there with MST3K classic phrase "Watch out for Snakes!" from "Eegah". Few shorts are more weird than "Coffee House Rendezvous", which promotes establishing "coffee clubs" on college campuses for the betterment of the students. Coffee, bad music, and lots of smoking probably didn't convince a lot of university presidents of the idea, but it is funny stuff.

"One Got Fat", narrated by Everett Edward Horton, famous for the "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the Rocky 'n Bullwinkle Show is a pretty tough one to sit through despite some decent riffing. I guess seeing children in disturbing monkey masks will do that. "Are You Popular" has the strobed look of a Youtube video on dial-up. And "Safety: Harm Hides at Home" is pure 70's pain, seemingly influenced by that Saturday morning fave "Isis".

My favorite riff happens at the end of the "Cathy" short from Bill, "Stop the projector? Why didn't we do that four minutes ago?"

The DVD itself is pretty bare bones with no extras, but should be expected for the 10 buck price tag. Let us hope that the Rifftrax trio keeps putting out more winners like this.

4/5 What's with the giant spoon?
  by James D. Crabtree (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
The shorts the guys chose for this DVD were obvious condidates for the MST3K-like treatment. Some of these are such strange films that without the commentary they would be almost unwatchable! My favorite out of this whole bunch was the one on coffee houses. Who knew folk singing could be so annoying?

4/5 "Are you a Mr. Bungle?"
  by Andrew McCaffrey (Satellite of Love, Maryland)
Rifftrax is a spin-off or sequel to "Mystery Science Theater 3000" where three of the writers/performers from that show sell both mp3 files of movie mocking commentaries (which you sync up manually with the big studio's DVD release) and straight-to-DVD features where the commentary has already been synchronised up with a movie (usually a low-budget, public domain film) . I have found the feature length Rifftraxs to be hit-or-miss; some of them are great, but others leave me a little cold.

However, this is the second release they have made of commentaries over old industrial training shorts. These short films are a hold-over from the old MST3k days, and the shorts they tackled oftentimes resulted in producing some of their funniest material. Where would MST3k history be without Mr. B. Natural, Coily the Spring Sprite or a Date With Your Family?

And like Rifftrax's first volume of short films, the riffers do a great job of selecting nutty, bizarre material and interspersing quips, puns and observations into the already full sea of non sequiturs and nonsense.

Due to a variety of circumstances, I had actually previously viewed some of these short features in their original unmolested form before Rifftrax had added their commentary. So not only was I looking forward to watching their take on these, I also knew exactly how goofy, confusing and strange some of their starting material was.

This single DVD collection puts together nine short films which had previously been for sale via the Rifftrax website.

1) ONE GOT FAT. A bicycle safety film in which the protagonists are small children wearing disturbing, distorted ape masks. Charmingly, all but one of the kids are horribly killed or maimed by ignoring simple safety precautions while bicycling to a picnic. The precocious child then eats the lunches of his fallen peers in lieu of mourning.

2) LUNCHROOM MANNERS. School children watch a rude and clumsy puppet (Mr. Bungle). This short and lightweight demonstration causes all the children to radically alter their entire behavior for the rest of their lives.

3) EACH CHILD IS DIFFERENT. An instructional film intended for elementary school teachers. If not for the merciless mocking, this would be an incredibly depressing experience. Adults are taught that individual children may have horrifically dark, bleak and disturbing home lives.

4) WHY DOESN'T CATHY EAT BREAKFAST? A film which asks a question and then refuses to answer it. An absolutely pointless film as far as I could tell. This short is paired with PETALUMA CHICKEN which is equally confusing, featuring a chef attempting to make the world's largest omelette with help from an oversized spoon and women who do aerobics in a giant bowl. Two utterly incomprehensible movies.

5) ACT YOUR AGE. A high schooler caught defacing a desk decides to chart his way towards maturity with the help of statistics and focused polling of his family and peers.

6) HARM HIDES AT HOME. A normal suburban crossing guard is tracked by a U.F.O and given strange alien powers. She becomes Safety Woman, whose abilities are limited to providing her neighborhood children with lessons about fire safety coupled with instant teleportation. Given the description, you'd think the producers were trying to use humor to provide kids with a valuable lesson. But for some reason, the film takes its alien-enhanced heroine very seriously.

7) COFFEE HOUSE RENDEZVOUS. I'm not exactly clear on who this film is aimed at, but its message is that coffee houses of the '60s are a great place for young people to hang out. Features frequent close-ups of coffee and also a lot of sounds coming out of some kind of musical instruments.

8) ARE YOU POPULAR? I've watched this short two times now, and I still don't see how it answers the title question. Instead, it solemnly informs teenage boys that if they wish to date teenage girls, they must schedule their encounter some time before the evening in question. I wouldn't have thought it would take ten minutes to make that basic point.

9) GOOD HEALTH PRACTICES. The distillation of every food health film you've ever seen. Disturbingly, this must contain the most references to urination and defecation than any other film of its era.


Usually, the more outrageous or ridiculous the short, the more fun was to be had from MST3k/Rifftrax. The films here are certainly absurd and Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett get in a lot of excellent jokes. They aren't merely rehashing the jokes from their MST3k days, but it certainly has a very familiar flavor.

(One thing to note is that unlike some of the other straight-to-DVD Rifftrax, here there is no option to view the material without the riffing commentary. Given that most of these films are available freely on-line that probably won't be a problem for anyone dying to hear every available line of dialog in its original unscathed condition.)

5/5 But I Don't WEAR a Belt!
  by JennMars (NJ)
Just bought Rifftrax Shorts #1 and laughed so hard I started choking at the lake scene in "Drugs are Like that." I turned off the DVD player and got on the computer and ordered Volume 2. The boys have still got it!