BEING FROM ANOTHER PLANET (?)
Notes: Reissuedby Film Ventures International, 1991.
Also Mystery Science Theatre 3000 show #405(1992).
Doug McAdden: Ben Murphy
Suzy: Nina Axelrod
With Kevin Brophy, Robert Random, James Karen,Sam Chew, Jr., Melissa Prophet, Austin Stoker, Gerard Prendergast,Shari Belafonte-Harper.
Executive Producer: Robert A. Shaheen
Produced: Dimitri Villard and Jason Williams
Directed: Tom Kennedy
Story: Jason Williams and Tom Friedman
Screenplay: Tom Friedman and Karen Levitt
Music: Richard H. Band.
Summary: In what the MST3K people call “a cinematic tranquilizer,”Doug McAdden, professor at the California Institute of Sciences,discovers a 3000-year-old sarcophagus apparently in a lost passageof King Tut’s tomb. Back home he opens it with the help of hisstudents. One of them, Pete, accidentally overradiates the mummy. Prof. Doug finds odd the signs of “hasty burial, minimalpreparation.” The mummy retains its internal organs. Petelater steals five crystals from a secret compartment in the sarcophagus.
At the press conference, another student touchessome green goo (“guacamummy,” says Tom Servo), the mummyis gone, and a janitor soon dies. The crystals have been dispersedas payment and gifts, and throb and glow occasionally when theyare about to be retrieved by the mummy.
Institute administration attributes the lostmummy to a student prank, but students keep dying or being hospitalized. Doug’s theory is that Tutenkhamen’s soldiers discovered a strangerin the desert. Tut visited, was sorely burned by an extraterrestrialfungus which consumed his flesh but to which the alien visitorwas immuned, and died. The strange traveller was weak alreadyand easy to entomb hastily, but the soldiers also died horriblyaround the sarcophagus, as earlier discovered. When Doug’s veryspecial friend and grad student Suzy notices a pattern projectedby light refracted through the gem on her bracelet, a search forthe remaining crystals yields Doug’s discovery in a boiler roomof what the MST3K people call a “travel Yahtzee” doohickey,onto which the crystals have been arranged. As administratorsconverge on the scene, the mummy shows up with the final crystaland turns into a rejuvenated alien. A cop tries to shoot it buthits Doug, who reaches the hand of the alien in time to be beamedinto disappearance with him. The sleaziest administrator touchesa remaining crystal and screams as his hand is immediately coveredwith the green slimy fungus.
Commentary: The “Bots” are particularly hilarious when they translatehieroglyphics which various characters silently keep viewing inpoorly lit rooms: “Dear Aunt Nefertiti; thanks for the socks.”
As for the film, well. The deflection of mummyinto alien belies further inability to make the monster in itspure form work as a creature of horror.