Let's face it, folks: Super-hero movies are pretty ridiculous. Even a smart, complex film like The Dark Knight is, at its core, still about a WASPy ninja who dresses up in a bat costume so that he can fight an evil clown with sonar phones. Now, that inherent bit of silliness isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that they present the perfect target to the former crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to take on in Rifftrax, which is exactly what they've done with their latest offering, which pits them against this summer's Thor.

Check out the preview clip after the cut!


For those of you who are too young to remember Mystery Science Theater -- and for the rest of you, yes, I'm as alarmed as you are their existence is a legitimate concern -- it was a TV show that ran for ten years in which a man and his robots were forced to watch terrible movies, keeping their sanity by tearing into them with legitimately hilarious commentary. It might seem like a pretty simple premise, but trust me: If you know someone who spends a lot of time making fun of, say, old comic books and movies on the Internet, then chances are that MST3K was a pretty big cultural touchstone.

The demise of the TV show was pretty grim for all concerned, but a few of the cast members/writers have kept at it, and, thanks to the power of the Internet, have figured out a way to set their sights even higher by releasing commentary tracks directly to the masses. Thus, Rifftrax was born.

Along with taking down comic book movies like The Dark Knight, Iron Man and the overwhelmingly requested Batman & Robin, they've also managed to hit dubious classics like Troll 2, Glitter and The Room. They've even provided the second-best commentary track for Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone -- the first, of course, being cartoonist Brad Neely's "audiobook," Wizard People, Dear Readers.

ComicsAlliance readers may recall that I was a pretty big fan of Thor, but judging by the write up at Rifftrax, their reaction was a little more harsh:

Thor is the rare superhero movie that raises important questions. Namely, the important question "If Thor was considered the good superhero movie of 2011, just exactly how wretched must Green Lantern have been?"


I'm going to go ahead and guess we'll find out when Green Lantern hits DVD in a couple of weeks.

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