Holy shit! Two things I love dearly are coming together to make the constant existential crisis we laughingly refer to as "life" somewhat bearable: Rifftrax is going to be doing an exclusive riff on an unreleased film from director James Nguyen, the mastermind behind the bad movie classic BIRDEMIC. The film is a sci-fi take on Hitchcock's VERTIGO called REPLICA. Here's how Nguyen describes the film, in an exlusive interview with AV Club:
[It's] a story about the potential good and evil of technology, in particular cloning. The good part is that you can replicate organs and replace ones that are cancer ridden. That’s the good part. The bad, is that the person doing the cloning can become a living god. I work in Silicon Valley; I’m surrounded by biotechnology. The movie that really inspired me to make Replica was Vertigo, but the catch is the technology aspect.
Mike Nelson, former host of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 (or MST3k if you're cool), and current co-host of RIFFTRAX, continued in the same interview:
[Nguyen]’s a singular talent who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock…In REPLICA, a guy’s girlfriend dies in a tragic accident appears to happen at about seven miles an hour. She dies and then he finds a woman who looks very much like her, only she obviously used a store-bought Walgreens hair dye and turned herself into a different person. That’s actually her clone, and he becomes obsessed with the clone of his old girlfriend. Sounds sort of like Vertigo made by a madman.
Riffing on something that hasn't even been released yet seems to be something new for the former MST3k-ers, as Mike points out:
There’s probably been some release for everything we’ve done…We had a strong suspicion that Replica would be good. We heard from Mr. Ngyuen that, unlike his other films, this one was more of an immature vision and that made us lick our chops. ‘Wait a minute, there’s a film that’s worse than Birdemic?’
And Kevin Murphy, voice of the Tom Servo robot puppet on MST3k, and Riffrax co-host, had this to say about it:
He used this digital background technology that was intrepid for a while, but then people realized how utterly shitty it looked so they stopped using it…There are these wonderful moments where characters appear to be floating in midair above where they're supposed to be sitting. It delighted me to no end.
Bill Corbett, the final Rifftraxer, and voice of Crow, elaborated:
One of the things that delights us from the James Ngyuen canon of films, is that all of his characters are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are dumb as rocks and deal with very round numbers.
When asked why filmmakers, like Nguyen and Tommy Wiseau (THE ROOM) are so willing to see their work riffed to shreds, Murphy responded, "People like getting their names out there…especially if they’re not the best filmmakers in the world. There is no such thing as bad press" while Corbett added, "it’s all in good fun, and there’s an enlightened self-interest at work…Not to be too crass, but the enlightened self-interest does sometimes come in the form of money."
Meanwhile, Nguyen is hard at work on his newest feature, BIRDEMIC 3: SEA EAGLE, which will probably be my next most anticipated Rifftrax show.