…movie lines that are meant to be serious but end up sounding unintentionally funny due to the poor delivery.
I recently re-watched “The Horror of Party Beach” and got a good laugh (as did Mike and the bots) at how Hank tried to reassure Elaine near the end about her father’s condition, but the delivery made it sound more like he was bored rather than concerned.
“I just saw your father and he’s been burned badly, but he’ll be fine.” There are several other examples. What are some of the group’s favorites?
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Women of the Prehistoric Planet:
“Hikeeba!”
Sidehackers:
“My own flesh I don’t love better! I’m not good enough for him…how many times I ask him to ride with me and he says noooo..”
When John Agar calls out “earthquake” near the beginning of The Mole People, he says it with the tremendous indifference of a man who ran out of iced tea.
I’m willing to cut the Gesture Professor some slack, though.
and, not so much a line reading as some intern sound editor found a discarded piece of tape from another movie on the floor and spliced it in thinking “I don’t know what this is but it probably goes here I guess”:
“I’m comeeeeeeeen!”
“On some of the earlier snarf farms…”
“A wounded animal that big, is not good.”
“You mean to tell me this Casey was pumping Buffalo about what happened in Europe?”
Two words: Fromicidal maniac.
Parts: The Clonus Horror
“Sure!”
You can’t hear it in the MST3K version because it’s covered up by Servo’s “Who said that?”, but what cracks me up is after the “Watch out for snakes” line, the actress playing Roxy lets out this weird scream. Except it sounds more like she’s going, “WHOO!”
Boggy Creek II “I saw the little creature.”
Cracks me up just thinking about it.
So, nobody’s yet mentioned Valeria from Robot Holocaust, the despotic conqueror of New Earth who’s too bored and mushmouthed to make a convincing 80’s porn-video dominatrix?
And as we know, the proper line is “I asshew you, Dagwan, they are all dewmed…”
What about that monologue that Ross Hagen delivers in “Hellcats,” something like: “Badge say, ‘take your old lady and that hog and move… I tell the blue, I got rights….”
A stone-cold mess, that one.
“My a. . .nosewheel feels mushy.”
Fathermushroom I don’t think Gary Oldman could do much with that script. All due respect Fathermushroom.
“You disgusting woooorm!” So bad yet so good.
And I wish I could remember which episode but there’s a scene in some black and white movie where someone informs a woman of danger and her response is the worst acted “oh no” I’ve ever heard.
“He learned too late that man is a feeling creature…”
Moon rock? Oh wow…
My God,what is it?? from The Creeping Terror…
Monsters in the hood.
“You know, so many men, whentheyloseawifetheytrysohardtodenytheylosttheymarrysomeone exactlylikethe _first_ wife; hardly seems fair using the living to bring back the dead does it”
“No I suppose it doesn’t.”
This one’s not the fault of the actor, it’s just a very (unintentionally) funny line that no line reading could improve on:
“Today is dedicated to Uranus!”
From “Horrors of Spider Island”:
“Don’t you think I’d rather be in a bar in Singapore, drinking an ice cold beer, instead of this hawribble stuff?”
“I like coffee!”
You wanna fly? Let’s fly!
“Flag on the moon.”
In “Space Mutiny”, when the limping David Bowie guy is convincing his fellow officers to join the mutiny, the lone holdout says something along the lines of, “This is treason, which I warn you I must report!” Really bad line read there.
“Racket Girls” is full of bad line reads. Just about everything that comes out of the mouths of Peaches, or the girl Sully forces into prostitution, is laughably bad. But the worst is Rita Moreno’s line,”I am the champion of all Mexico!”
From TISCWSLABMUZ when the chorus girl visits Estrella and says ‘I can’t tonight, I have a date.’ It was like she was already bored from cooking the steaks and doing the dishes
The witch lynching mob from Touch of Satan. The way they chant, “Burn the witch,” is so apathetic, like they’d rather be at a Packers game.
A lot of them can be seen in the stingers, like the blind man’s oddly calm “Help me.” in “Rocket Attack USA”.
Or this gem in “The Leech Woman”:
“Then it couldn’t have been Ms. Talbot. A week ago, she was in New York.”
“So was the murder.”
…Me and my big mouth.
“4 days ago a fire fell from the sky, and I thought everything that it brought would just extinguish and burn away. Now for all the questions and doubts I had, everything seems so clear”…
“You know, Captain, every year of my life I grow more and more convinced that the wisest and the best is to fix our attention on the good and the beautiful. If you just take the time to look at it.”
Well, who wouldn’t??
The (lead) red-headed babe’s stone faced, absolutely wooden reading of the line,
“That’s absolutely fascinating……”
from one of my all-time favorites, Werewolf (# 904).
I’ve never seen an actress (supposedly) trying to convey “fascination”, and so utterly failing at her ‘job’.
CLEARLY she was hired for reasons completely unrelated to any (alleged) acting ‘talents’ she thought she had (i.e., Her twin assets (barely) contained in that skin-tight, white t-shirt worn during the pool (billiards) game in the barroom).
Come to think of it, the other babe (interestingly, also a red-head) who appears only briefly in the film (earlier on, when the main male protagonist (Paul?) first checks in to his room at the weird, old shotgun-toting, cigar-chomping (gatekeeper’s) strange B&B (or apartment, or whatever the hell that place was supposed to be) ALSO seemed to bear similar ‘talents’ strictly unrelated to any acting ability she may, or may not have had…… :-/
From “The Creeping Terror,”
“My God, what is it?” delivered in a flat line monotone.
Riding with Death:
“This can’t BE?!? You’re DEAD?!?!?”
If we expand to include Rifftrax, then we also have “solarpanels”.
“No input file specified.”
oh wait, that’s what happens when I try to navigate to mst3kinfo.com!
“Space Mutiny” is full of odd, funny line readings. For example, Captain Santa’s odd pronunciations of “the possible mo-tive behind the attack” and “load the file into the compute-er”. The misplaced emphasis just makes you go, “Huh?” And Kalgon and McPherson’s lines are worth a whole page of entries on their own.
“Get out of here! You disGUSting WUUUUUURM!!”
Can’t believe no one has mentioned “my nuts”! Must have read ” Mom, am I nuts”.
I can’t either (see #12).
I think a lot of it has to do with the way J.C.’s face contorts as he drawls out that “noooooo”.
“But, he would never dare venture into OUR territory!”
–Nila, in Cave Dwellers
“Sargassum — the Weed Of Deceit!”
–opening narration in Blood Waters Of Dr. Z
“I put the… beats in my own… script, and I’m sticking… with them!”
–Michael J. Nelson
I liked how that Betty chick always sounded as if she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
All of Mickey’s dialogue in Screaming; Skull, if only because he sounds like Snagglepuss.
Palermo: “I’ll blow her brains OUT!”
(Crow: “All over THE boat!”)
Another Riding with Death gem (which I haven’t seen listed here):
“OPTICAL ILLUSION-NUH!”