Their heads silhouetted against the movie screen, the three of them watch and heckle, and, bar some returns to the framing device, that's more or less it. You have to give director Jim Mallon props for the sheer oddity of the concept (also used in a TV version) but the trouble is, he doesn't do enough with it. Taken in small doses, the jokes are reasonably witty, but, dovetailed in as they are around the B-movie dialogue, they have no way of building to any kind of crescendo. It's a shame they couldn't remove the original dialogue entirely and substitute their own the way they used to do on Who's Line Is It Anyway?
Things suddenly come alive when, having watched the B-movie people assemble a hokey communication-cum-teleportation device called an interrossiter, one of the robots suddenly remembers that he has one of his own somewhere, and goes hunting for it in his cabin, which is full of underpants. This folding-together of the two planes of reality is very funny, but there's far too little of it. A shame, too, that so much of the humour is off-colour (an insect man's brains look like testicles, the hero's nerdy sidekick is harbouring homoerotic impulses, a swirl of vapour has to be a fart,) because, with its bright, cheery sets and boisterous robots, Mystery Science Theater 3000 might have been a fun way of introducing kids to the dubious pleasures of the B-movie shocker.
