MST3K 811 - Parts: The Clonus Horror

811 - Parts: The Clonus Horror
Air/Release Date	June 7, 1997
MST3K Director	Kevin Murphy
Turkey Day(s)	November 28, 1997, 12am
AKA	Clonus The Clonus Horror
Movie Director	Robert S. Fiveson
Year	1979
Cast	Keenan Wynn Peter Graves Dick Sargent Frank Ashmore Timothy Donnelly
Preceded by	810 - The Giant Spider Invasion
Followed by	812 - The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

“	(Clones Lena and Richard wake up the next morning after a night of sex and, thanks to camera positioning, it looks like Richard's crotch is smoking) Wow, she really WAS on top of Ol' Smokey!	”
	- Crow

The Movie

Synopsis

Parts: The Clonus Horror

A group of young people is raised in an isolated compound that promotes their physical fitness and limits thier education. It is eventually revealed that they have been grown from the cloned cells of the wealthy and powerful to serve as organ banks. They are indoctrinated, drilled, monitored and guarded at all times, until it becomes necessary to lobotomize them and harvest their organs.

We found it! This is the horror!

One of the clones begins to suspect that their existence is not normal. He escapes and seeks help in the outside world. He discovers that he is the clone of a successful journalist who is the brother of a US politician (Peter Graves). Ethical questions are raised before the clone and his new family are silenced.

The Island Controversy

The film's director, Robert S. Fiveson, has accused the 2005 Michael Bay movie The Island of being a Clonus ripoff, and along with producer Myrl Schreibman, eventually sued for plagiarism. He ended up settling out of court for an undisclosed amount. [1] [2].

The Episode

Host Segments

The Crew puts on a show

Prologue: Mike has decided to grow a mustache. The Bots are supportive. Initially.

Segment One: True to form, the Bots are less supportive of Mike's choice to shave off his mustache. Meanwhile down on the planet, the camping Mads are awoken by the arrival of a trio of young Space Children who've run away from their parents.

Segment Two: The Mads are forced to play with the space children, causing various degrees of mental and physical pain for all involved.

Crow gets a nose job

Segment Three: At the end of her rope, Pearl convinces Mike and the Bots to put on a public TV style kids program to distract the kids. Aiming nice and low at first, but as they get fancy, they lose their audience.

Segment Four: Drawing from their own lives, Pearl, Bobo and Observer each give the space children "that" talk.

Closing (Segment Five): Crow has gotten a nose job and Mike can't look away, while down on the planet the Mads have just gotten the space children to the sleep. The soothing poem Tom has written is perfect to keep them that way, but it's musical accompaniment is not.

Stinger: "Sure!"

MST3K cast

Regular cast

• Michael J. Nelson - Mike Nelson
• Mary Jo Pehl - Pearl Forrester
• Bill Corbett - Crow T. Robot / Brain Guy
• Kevin Murphy - Tom Servo / Professor Bobo
• Jim Mallon - Gypsy (credit only)

Guest cast

• Michael J. Nelson - Bobby
• Bridget Jones - Darlene
• Paul Chaplin - Scooter

Trivia

• During the end credits, Mike impersonates Peter Graves promising an upcoming Biography on the life of Peter Graves. A week after this episode was taped, A&E aired an episode of Biography focusing on Peter Graves.
• The Space Children appear to be heavily influenced by the title characters in the Star Trek episode "And the Children Shall Lead".
• This is one of the few "full cast" episodes in which all of the regular members of the cast and the credited writing staff - Nelson, Murphy, Corbett, Pehl, Chaplin, and Jones - appear in scenes together (see also Experiment 701T). Jim Mallon does not appear, but his direct involvement with the show was winding down at this point.
• Robert S. Fiveson was leery of the MST3K treatment of his movie until it reached the smoking crotch gag. Then he was won over.
• This episode aired sixth during Sci-Fi Channel's Thanksgiving Marathon.

Callbacks

• "Hey it’s…oh, I thought it was Dale."
• "And I'm the Posture Prince." (Posture Pals)

Running Jokes

• Every time characters in the film mention America, Mike and the bots sing "Today!" à la the Neil Diamond song.
• The Groin Attack in the skits.
• Gags about Lena's nose.
• [Bang] "Ow." [Bang] "Ow!" [Bang] "Ow." [Bang, ricocheting noises] "Ow."
• References to Peter Graves' role as the host of Biography.
• References to Dick Sargent's role as the Other Darrin.
  • Crow: "Dick Sargent... Didn't he play Dick York on Bewitched?"
• One scientist's resemblance to Mario.
• "Parts: the X Horror"

Quotes & References

• "Apparently E. E. Cummings wrote this."
  E. E. Cummings was a writer mainly associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.

• References to Biography
  Featured actor Peter Graves was the host of the A&E television series Biography, an hour-long documentary series that examined the life of a prominent person each week. Similar references were made in a previous episode featuring Peter Graves: It Conquered the World.

• There are a number of references to the female protagonist's "truncated nose"; at one point, Mike makes a comment that she fell asleep on a "dermabrasion" wheel. Dermabrasion  is a process in which skin is scraped and resurfaced (sometimes with a wire brush) to smooth its appearance and texture.

• The kids in the host segments are a reference to the Star Trek episode "And the Children Shall Lead".

• "TODAY!"
  Taken from the chorus of the Neil Diamond song "America".
• "KOYAANISQATSI..."
  Directly references the Philip Glass tracks "Prophecies" and "Koyaanisqatsi" from the documentary Koyaanisqatsi.

• "Parts: The Village People Horror!"
  "The Longtime Companion Olympics!"
  "Winner of the International Jeffrey Games!"
  "Terrence McNally holds weird auditions!"
  "Clonus: The Boys in the Band Horror!"
  All are references to gay icons: the disco group The Village People, the film Longtime Companion, the film Jeffrey, noted gay author Terrence McNally, and the play/film The Boys in the Band.
• "Why is Gilligan there?"
  One of the actors in the back is wearing a bucket hat; Gilligan from Gilligan's Island is often seen wearing a bucket hat.
• "I got into Hamburger U.!"
  Hamburger U. is fast-food giant McDonald's training school.

• "I've grown accustomed to you." "Like breathing out and breathing in."
  Lyrics from "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from the musical/film My Fair Lady.

• "Oh, I have the vapors!"
  A reference to Scarlett O'Hara, the female protagonist of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind. In archaic usage, "the vapors" is a reference to certain mental or physical states, such as hysteria, mania, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, fainting, lightheadedness, PMS, etc. where a sufferer lost mental focus. Ascribed primarily to women, it was related to the concept of female hysteria. Today, the phrase "a case of the vapors" is most often used either melodramatically or for comedic effect.

• "Ah, they're giving him the Keith Richards special!"
  An urban legend claims Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was so desperate to get clean from heroin for a European tour in 1973 that he went to clinic in Switzerland and had all of his blood replaced with clean blood. Richards later said he made it up because he was tired of answering questions about drugs. Insiders have said that he most likely underwent hemodialysis to filter toxins from his blood.

• "Oh, that was a good loose meat sandwich!"
  A type of Sloppy Joe sandwich originated in Iowa made famous by Roseanne Barr who started a specialty restaurant based on the sandwich and promoted it on her TV show Roseanne.

• "I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna start a band called Air Supply."
  The clone protagonist resembles Russell Hitchcock of the Australian band Air Supply. Servo later misquotes some lyrics from "All Out of Love."

• "His feet are making a Don Martin noise." "Splot, splot!"
  Don Martin was a MAD magazine cartoonist known for creating characters with over sized feet that made strange noises when walking.

• "The little bushmen didn't know what to make of the can."
  In the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a glass Coca-Cola bottle is thrown out of an airplane by a pilot and falls to the ground unbroken. Set in Southern Africa, a tribe discovers the bottle and believe it to be a gift from their gods and find many uses for it.

• As the clone escapes, the bots hum the "underground" music from the NES game Super Mario Bros.

• "So, he's running through fields of wheat." "Wheat."
  A reference to Woody Allen's Love and Death. You can watch the scene here.

• "What do you know, we aren't at war with Eurasia."
  An allusion to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• "That porn theater is owned by James Galway!"
  James Galway is an Irish classical musician.

• "Soundtrack by Yngwie Malmsteen."
  Yngwie Malmsteen is a guitarist known for his extremely fast guitar riffs.

• "Monty will take Messina, while I sweep in from the North!"
  A loosely paraphrased line inspired by Patton, a 1970 epic biographical war film about U.S. General George S. Patton during World War II.

• "No one's guarding my father!"
  Said by Al Pacino in The Godfather.

• "Parts is parts!"
  A short-lived advertising slogan used by the Wendy's fast-food chain in the early '80s.

• "Yeah, saw the Dead there, saw the Dead there..."
  Fans of the American rock band Grateful Dead, called "Deadheads", often followed the band from city to city and attended dozens of their concerts.

• "And he bumps right into Bruce Willis."
  In the movie Die Hard, Bruce Willis' character spent a lot of time climbing around in elevator shafts.

• Mike's speech to Pearl in the third host segment ("There is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.") is taken verbatim from Raiders of the Lost Ark, spoken by Belloq (Paul Freeman).

• "Got to get to the sculpture garden!"
  The footbridge in this shot looks identical to the footbridge over Interstate 94, which leads to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

• "The Ravenite Social Club."
  The Ravenite Social Club was an Italian American heritage club and espresso bar in Little Italy, New York City, that was used as the headquarters of the Gambino crime family in the late 1970s and 1980s

• "It's the all-white version of Salaam Bombay!"
  Salaam Bombay! is a 1988 Indian Hindi-language crime drama film that depicts the daily lives of children living in slums in Bombay (now Mumbai), India's largest city, as well as organized crime scenes in India.
• "Watch, he'll run into Chauncey Gardiner coming the other way."
  Chance, the gardener (aka Chauncey Gardiner) is a simpleton who is mistaken for a genius in Being There. After having to move out of his home, Chance wanders the streets aimlessly, discovering the outside world for the first time.
• "Are you one of them preverts [sic]?"
  Keenan Wynn, who plays the reporter in this film, said this line as Colonel Bat Guano in Doctor Strangelove.
• "As soon as Tanta Kringle gets in here, we'll get started."
  Tanta Kringle is a character from the 1970 Rankin/Bass Christmas television special Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. She is the Elf Queen and the head of the Kringle family, and the guardian of Kris Kringle when he was a child. Both Tanta and the woman in this scene wear their hair in a bun and have a vaguely similar outfit.
• "That means he's a friend of Dorothy."
  The character is wearing an earring in his right ear. In the late 1960s, ear piercing began to make inroads among men through the hippie and gay communities. Traditionally, a right-side piercing identified a man as gay as part of LGBTQ “culture and code” to secretly identify oneself to the community. A "friend of Dorothy" is a gay man; and more broadly, any LGBTQ person. The phrase dates back to at least World War II, when homosexual acts were illegal in the United States. Stating that, or asking if, someone was a friend of Dorothy was a euphemism used for discussing sexual orientation without others knowing its meaning.
• "The true people's choice..." "Gus Hall!"
  Gus Hall was a leader and chairman of the Communist Party USA and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate. He was born in Minnesota, and in the early 1930s he moved to Minneapolis and was involved in hunger marches, demonstrations on behalf of farmers, and various strikes during the Great Depression.

Memorable Quotes

[Voices are heard whispering and muttering.]

Crow: Mike, I think the voices in my head are a little louder than usual.

. . .

[The crowd cheers wildly at Senator Knight's campaign rally.]

Mike: Hooray for the '70s!

Crow: Shaun Cassidy for President!

Servo: We want Billy Beer!

. . .

[The title card reads 'parts: the clonus horror']

Crow: Apparently e. e. cummings wrote it.

. . .

[The movie's opening credits list Dick Sargent.]

Crow: Dick Sargent. Didn't he play Dick York on Bewitched?

. . .

[Two bare-chested male clones are competing in Greco-Roman wrestling.]

Servo [as Guide]: This is not sanctioned, gentlemen. You are doing this on your own…

. . .

[Clones Lena and Richard chat by a campfire.]

Lena: I like it. It gives me time to write.

Richard: Write?

Lena: Yeah, I write my thoughts and my ideas.

Crow [as Lena]: I've already filled a Post-it note.

. . .

[Clones Lena and Richard wake up the next morning after a night of sex and, thanks to camera positioning, it looks like Richard's crotch is smoking.]

Crow: Wow, she really WAS on top of Ol' Smokey!

. . .

[Clone Richard searches through some top-secret files.]

Mike [as Richard/Winston Smith]: Whaddya know — we aren't at war with Eurasia!

. . .

[Richard reads a file written in a careful, round cursive.]

Crow: Thanks to Miss Taylor's fourth-grade class for transcribing our secret clone notes!

. . .

Mike [as Richard]: Black helicopter… Roswell… Area 51… Waco… formula for Coca-Cola…

. . .

Jake: This place you keep talking about, Clonus...

Servo [as Jake]: Is there a bar?

. . .

[Rick's hairy, bikini-clad torso advances towards the camera.]

Mike: Oh, we found it! This is the horror!

Servo: Stop it! What have we ever done to you?!

. . .

Jake: Professor, you know that tape will blow the lid off of everything?

Crow [as Jake]: Speaking of, where's the bathroom?

. . .

[Rick Knight confronts his brother Jeff about an incriminating videotape.]

Rick: You knew about the tape, didn't you?

Jeff: Yeah. You saw the tape?

Rick: Yeah, and it's scary.

Crow [as Rick]: Adam Sandler's in it.

. . .

[As the movie's closing credits scroll, Servo riffs on Peter Graves's brother James Arness.]

Servo [as Peter Graves]: "James Arness: Ugly and Stupid". Tonight on Biography.

Video Release

• 

  Commercially released on DVD by Rhino in October 2007 as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection: Volume 12, a 4-DVD set with The Rebel Set, Secret Agent Super Dragon, and The Starfighters.
  • The set was re-released by Shout! Factory in October 2019.
    • The DVD features a trailer for the original film as well as an interview with director Robert Fiveson specifically taped for the release, discussing the making and genesis of the film as well as The Island controversy and the MST3K take on his film. He even credits the MST3K fans interest and knowledge of Clonus with helping his case.

preceded by: Season 7		MST3K Season 8					followed by: Season 9
		1997
801	Revenge of the Creature	1997-02-01	809	I Was a Teenage Werewolf	1997-04-19	817	Horror of Party Beach	1997-09-06
802	The Leech Woman	1997-02-08	810	The Giant Spider Invasion	1997-05-31	818	Devil Doll	1997-10-04
803	The Mole People	1997-02-15	811	Parts: The Clonus Horror	1997-06-07	819	Invasion of the Neptune Men	1997-10-11
804	The Deadly Mantis	1997-02-22	812	Incredibly Strange Creatures...	1997-06-14	820	Space Mutiny	1997-11-08
805	The Thing That Couldn't Die	1997-03-01	813	Jack Frost	1997-07-12	821	Time Chasers	1997-11-22
806	The Undead	1997-03-08	814	Riding with Death	1997-07-19	822	Overdrawn/Memory Bank	1997-12-06
807	Terror from the Year 5000	1997-03-15	815	Agent for H.A.R.M.	1997-08-02
808	The She-Creature	1997-04-05	816	Prince of Space	1997-08-16