I am not a big fan of MST3K.
Some have credited the show with resurrecting lost films or commenting on the history of Science Fiction cinema, but in general it seems to me that it has become far more difficult to find many of the films they’ve mocked – largely because of the perception that any movie they’ve featured is trashy. When the theatrical version featured a film generally regarded as a classic – This Island Earth – one has every reason to be skeptical.
The Projected Man is, in fact, less deserving of Mike, Crow and Tom Servo’s taunts than most of the movies offered on the show. It is a typically reserved British SF thriller of the era, with a little more emphasis on character and plot than the American films it copies. I had expected it to fall closer to the distinctly British strain of SF horror originally inspired by the Quatermass films. Nor is it much like the film I expected it to resemble, Timeslip (aka, The Atomic Man) – a film typical of another strand of British SF: Charles Eric Maine’s series of crime thrillers with SF elements. Instead it seems closer to American films from the late 50s, say, a cross between the 1958 The Fly and John Agar’s The Hand of Death (1961), with a scientist who kills everyone he touches, thanks to a failed transporter experiment. But the clear plastic scientific equipment could only have come from a 1960s British SF film.
One the whole I found it an enjoyable little B scifi-er, with a few nice touches. I suspect in our instant everything age, it may seem a touch slow in places, but there are worse ways to spend a stormy night when you just don’t want to leave the house.
rivets on the poster 