Riding with Death

If you enjoy watching a discombobulated, incoherent dumpster fire of a movie, then Riding With Death is for you. Please, for the love of God, do not watch this without the MST3K commentary. I tried once without it and it was brutal. You have been warned!

Certainly not. This, the Master Ninja stuff, and two Kolchak movies (Crackle of Death, and Demon & The Mummy) display the odd penchant for taking two bad episodes of a TV show and stitching them together into one crummy movie. The strategy behind this is the studio wants to save the good episodes for separate syndication, so whoever makes these movies takes the worst episodes and stitches them together. I'm old enough to have seen Gemini Man, and these _are_ the worst episodes of that series, which displayed a modicum of intelligence at the best of times. They deliberately pick out the worst episodes to save the best for syndication, and the result is this unwatchable crap.

well let's just say that one line from "Riding with Death" completely summarizes the type of movie it is and that is a big, fat turkey.

This one was deliciously roasted on MST by Mike and the oh so funny robots, with many references to how dopey the hero, Ben Murphy really is.

The flimsy plot jumps from an explosive being transported in a truck to another explosive substance being used in a race car to kill off some people for no apparent reason. The reason for the jumping of the plot most likely stems from the fact that the movie is no more than 2 episodes of a short lived 70's T.V. series, slammed together and released in theatres. Oh well flimsy plot aside, the rest of the movie is just plain horrific, most of the bad stuff is in the form of awful acting, which raises the question as to how this got made into a T.V. show to begin with.

Well, the MST version was a lot of fun, though this is still an incredibly bad movie. 9 for the MST version, none for the actual film.

Like most folks, I suspect, I saw Riding with Death on MST3K. There's no question that it's a totally hackneyed, badly acted, horribly edited movie. But there's something about their attempt to splice together two separate episodes into a movie that moves me. They're incredibly clumsy in their attempt; mainly it consists of totally obvious voiceovers while the camera shows a shot of a truck or a landscape. Gene Roddenberry, whatever his flaws, was able to do this brilliantly in "The Menagerie." But watching the attempt in Riding with Death can be fun, and all the 70's stuff (e.g., fadeaway jerk handshake) is a blast. So I give it a 2, perhaps my first-ever non-1 for a Msted movie.

This is actually two unrelated episodes of the 70's TV show "Gemini Man" strung together to form a movie. And a really bad one too. It's not hard to see why this show was so short lived. Stars Ben Murphy (of "Being From Another Planet" and "Parasite" fame) and the hideous Jim Stafford. A real awful, rotting chunk of 70's cheese.

Good MST3K episode, though.