Another Rifftrax last night: Planet Outlaws, a 1950's movie edited from a 1939 12-episode Buck Rogers serial starring Larry "Buster" Crabbe, riffed by Matthew J. Elliot and Ian Potter. A freak accident preserves blimp pilot Buck Rogers and his boy sidekick, Buddy, for 500 years. They wake after being rescued by citizens of the Hidden City, last free refuge on an Earth crushed by the evil ruler Killer Kane. A treaty with the Saturnian civilization will tip the balance - but who will secure their support, Kang or the City? Somehow, in a world of "gravity belts" and interstellar rockets and Dissolvo Ray invisibility, the answer will be found in a man who flew a 1930's airship into an icestorm...
The serial can't have been cheap to film, for all that the ship FX date terribly and the writing's all over the map; the art deco sets are fairly elaborate, and include a city shot that was probably spliced in from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. As a 12-episode serial, it might've been campy, B-grade sci-fi action fun. As a barely-over-an-hour recut, it's borderline unwatchable. As the Rifftrax site says in its pitch, it's like the opposite of a Reader's Digest condensed version, keeping all the extraneous stuff that doesn't actually explain who, what, when, where, why, or how anything happens. Even given the editing atrocities, though, the storyline has some serious weaknesses; after the good guys take a bad guy's ship and are almost destroyed when their own side mistakes them for an enemy, they do the same exact thing, with the same exact results, twice more. (Apparently, despite having communication devices capable of reaching Saturn in real time, nobody thought to install radios as standard ship equipment... though the bad guys seem to have their own radios when they need them.) The riffing's pretty fun, the British riffers again establishing their own flavor, but there's a fair bit of drag factor from the movie to overcome, further weighed down as the whole story is just a sci-fi tale being read by some mustached guy pitching the wonders and triumphs of American science as it defends freedoms around the world.
