My wife was at bunko last night, and that means I got to watch a little MST3K. I decided that I would watch one with a little culture and watch Hamlet. It is a 1961 made for German TV version that has been dubbed, and it is as bad as it sounds.
If you don’t know the plot to Hamlet, shame on you, but here it is. The dead King visits his son, and says “Dude! Like your uncle killed me with ear poison, and then married his sister! You should kill him back!” Hamlet is like “that is probably true but I should check by staging a play first.” His uncle hates the play proving that he killed the king, so Hamlet kills his girlfriend’s dad, which makes sense. This causes his girlfriend go crazy and drown. Then her brother is like “Hamlet you a such a jerk!” Hamlet’s uncle is like “you should kill him with the poisoned sword because I like to kill people with poison”, so he does, but not before Hamlet kills him with the same sword, and his mom dinks some poison his uncle made for him, and then he kills his uncle with the sword too, so poisonings all around!
The takeaway here is that if you are going to take revenge do not kill your girlfriend’s dad, and if you find my plot inaccurate, good.
This version of The Bard’s Hamlet was awful. There are two sets, and it is extremely slow moving, and it makes you feel bad for German TV viewers. The Bots and Mike are uneven in this movie, and I think that is because they don’t want to make fun of Shakespeare’s dialog, and so that just left them with the sets and the bad acting, and there was a lot to go on there, but I had hoped for funnier.
It was still pretty funny, but they went for long periods of time without making a joke, but when they did make their joke it usually landed, but there are better MST3K episodes to watch.