TV Reviews : An Italian Hoot on ‘Mystery Science Theater’

What’s worse than watching a bad movie? Watching someone else watching a bad movie? Not quite. The oddly titled series “Mystery Science Theater 3000” offers the chance to catch up on sci-fi schlock, badly dubbed Japanese monster pictures, biker blowouts and other obscure nuggets of dung--with the bonus of a reasonably funny running commentary from three wiseacres in the row ahead of us, whose heads we see in silhouette at the bottom of the TV screen throughout the film.

Actually, the premise of the show--which has its third-season premiere today on the Comedy Central cable channel--is a little more complicated.

The film inflicted upon our marooned hosts today is “Cave Dwellers,” a 1984 Italian hoot starring beefy Miles O’Keefe as a prehistoric wearer of loincloths and bearer of swords trying to stop the detonation of a primitive atom bomb (?!). It’s the perfect fodder for this show, its screenplay being so minimal as to allow plenty of breathing room for the interstitial gags of Joel Hodgson and robot buddies Tom Servo and Crow.

Kids are a natural audience for this stuff, but some of the quips are surprisingly highbrow, or at least cinema-literate, with smart-mouth lines borrowed from everything from “The Grapes of Wrath” to Aerosmith. With the youth in mind, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” airs at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., though it’s really the sort of silliness that adults would ideally want to view in the middle of the night.