Freebie Film Tip #30: Raul Julia's Monkey Business
Created | Updated Nov 30, 2014
Freebie Film Tip #30: Raul Julia's Monkey Business
I'll admit a weakness for Raul Julia, based largely on his wonderful performances as Gomez Addams. His sense of humour is also evident in this old science fiction venture, called Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. It's from a series made by PBS – US Public Broadcasting System – in an attempt to bring more 'quality' science fiction to television. Whether they succeeded or not is open to question, but I thought this one was amusing.
I'm informed that Brits 'don't get' Mystery Science Theater 3000, the series where an actor and some robot puppets make mocking comments throughout a science fiction film. Many US and Canadian viewers find the series extremely amusing. Most of the films given the MST3K treatment were, indeed, miserable, such as The Beginning of the End, in which Peter Graves battles giant grasshoppers in Chicago. (Skip to 13.30 for the judicious use of a postcard in lieu of CGI.) But I would argue that choosing Overdrawn at the Memory Bank was unfair. For this reason, I've linked you to the 'straight' version'. If you want to hear Crow and Tom Servo making snarky comments, find it yourselves.
This concludes the month of (mostly) science fiction freebie films. I hope you've found something you enjoyed in all of this. The archive will remain for a rainy day or sleepless night, as an aid to passing the time when it's just you and your computer. They probably didn't know it at the time, but that's what the people who made these films were doing it for.