CT 8: East Meets Watts (Live)

Those guys and gals at Cinematic Titanic have been away from the DVD releasing schedules for quite a while now. The reason? Because they've been touring the live version of CT like the clappers so they have. They've been doing some of the already available episodes and new films not yet tackled. East Meets Watts is one of these new films and forms the basis of the first live show show to be filmed and released.

At first the new format is a bit of a shock. There's laughter, the performers are visible instead of silhouettes and there's no Dave "Gruber" Allan featuring wrap-a-round story. But that shock quickly abates thanks to one cheesy kung fu 70's-a-thon of a movie and some of the funniest riffing yet from CT.

Seriously, the sample provided by CT doesn't do this justice. The movie does a lot of the work for them of course. Bad hairdos, worse clothing, humongous cars and the sort of jive patter only 70's TV and film characters ever spoke are all to be expected. Add some dodgy dubbing (a scene begins with a character clearly speaking but with no sound, there's no need to even riff it it's so funny), unglamourous locations ("the letter said meet me at the gravel pit in America"), frankly erratic editing ("Hi, I'm a houseplant") and some shite stunt work ("Lucky they jumped on an edit") and it's an entertaining ninety minutes by itself.

Instead all of this just acts as perfect riffing fodder. Plus the riffers are clearly feeding off of the crowd that gives the riffing an energy sometimes lacking in the studio editions. This is also the case on Rifftrax's live DVD of Plan 9 From Outer Space as well. Having people react to the jokes, plus the added pressure of flubbing your lines, seems to do them good. Plus CT has now been going for a while and as such the writing has gotten stronger. Some of the observations in this are incredible, such as the Asian boy band Out Of Sync, that the mute woman must have shrunk because her mirror is placed slightly too tall for her and that the easiest way to get a law named after you is to pick up some hitch hikers. In fact the whole "journey" portion of the movie, two trucks, a jog whilst handcuffed together through some unappealing woods and the final lift from a stranger produces some of the funniest material of the whole show. There's also one visual gag that could only work live brought about by the movie's nonchalant racism towards the black and Chinese lead characters.

All in all this is probably Cinematic Titanic's finest offering yet. A goofy, fun movie, a change of format and some fantastic riffing make for a must see. The one minor grumble is that it makes you want to see them live in a desperate sort of way. Sadly geography has a key role to play in shafting that one for some of us. That disappointment will be short lived though if they don't wait so long to release another DVD. Seriously, eight months was way too long.

East Meets Watts, and the previous seven Cinematic Titanic episodes, are available to buy on DVD or download here.