Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Touch of Satan / The Atomic Brain

Shout! Factory's recent, absurdly bare-bones Mystery Science Theatre 3000 DVD releases got me thinking about Canadian Netflix. You see, if you want to watch these films in the U.S., you can just get yourself on Netflix and queue them up. If you're in Canada, you can't and, to be honest, what with rights issues stymieing the showing of MST3K in Canada when it was contemporary, I wouldn't hold my breath for that ever happening. Living in Canada is a bit like being stuck on the Satellite of Love and Netflix Canada is our Dr. Clayton Forrester, sending us only a selection of bizarre also-ran movies rather than, you know, anything we'd like to watch. While that problem doesn't really have anything to do with these DVDs, it also sort of does. Because, really, who wants to spend 15 dollars on a disc and a plastic box? Oh, and the cover too, I guess, but that's nothing to write home about. It's possible you're going to watch this again and again, but can you really be bothered to get up, find the disc, put it in your DVD player, wait for the menus and then press play? There aren't even any extras. Ultimately these are perfectly acceptable Mike-era episodes of MST3K, with the cheesy '50s horror of The Atomic Brain preceded by an even cheesier short, What About Juvenile Delinquency? The Touch of Satan is generally what MST3K does best, ripping apart nonsensical '70s drive-in fare, in this case a nothing-much-happens horror. These releases are really only valuable for completionists, as previous DVD releases are out-of-print and pricey, but if were a completionist, you'd already have them, right?