This hour-long Canadian variety show is very nearly the Halloween equivalent of The Star Wars Holiday Special. At least it has its share of cheesy, dated charm, and unlike the SWHS, it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a variety show (no flimsy plot to link the songs and sketches together). It was filmed for Canadian TV in 1980 (when some remnants of the 1970s were still hanging on--hence, the disco-ish theme song and overall 70s-ness of it all). But it was shown on American TV a few times in the early 80s--the link I've provided was from a 1982 Chicago airing, and I'm pretty sure I saw it on Philadelphia-area TV, one Saturday or Sunday afternoon, in 1983.

The premise: the classic Universal monsters, along with a slew of assorted aliens and BEMs, do a variety show full of comedy sketches and a song or two. (Dracula makes a wisecrack early on about variety being "dead", which made it the perfect vehicle for an undead host.) Most of the jokes are sub-dad jokes or so dated they barely make sense now, and there's even a somewhat homophobic joke--you know, for kids!--with two robots who didn't know the other one was male.

Of course, you can't have a variety show without guest stars, and this one delivers--Dionne Warwick performs her then-recent hit "Deja Vu" (and pretty well, too) and Rip Taylor shows up for his usual brand of "comedy"--confetti and all.

There's also one other semi-familiar face (or, at least, voice)...the Wolf Man is played by Peter Cullen, best known as a voice actor and the voice of Optimus Prime. (He is, after all, Canadian.)

This show's overall cheesiness and datedness should provide LOADS of riffing fodder--certainly, the riffs would be funnier than most of the jokes! After all, you've shown you're good at lampooning 1970s Halloween specials with The Night Dracula Saved The World...

Here's a link to check out (complete with 1980s commercials...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8uVnkA-j0I&t=496s&ab_channel=TheMuseumofClassicChicagoTelevision%28www.FuzzyMemories.TV%29

You want three reasons, I got one answer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV7h4-2ZUqE

A guy gets killed with a frisbee. The beginning of the movie introduces a "contaminated" snake that features prominently in the conclusion. It stars a former ******* centerfold, as quality films do. Does she take her top off? Son, everyone takes their tops off. There's gratuitous martial arts, gratuitous rocket launcher shooting, and gratuitous ugly 80s guys running around with guns. It's directed by Andy Sidaris, who made a sort-of career out of buxom lady action movies. Why yes it's part of a series. He also directed one episode of The Gemini Man starring Ben Murphy. Now that's a pedigree.

It's stupid, it's hilarious, and it's fun. DO IT.

My favorite MST3K riffing episodes, were the ones involving old black & white horror and science fiction movies from the 1950's and 1960's. The worse the movie was, the better the fun factor. You knew that whatever the movie director's were envisioning, it wasn't anything like what you were seeing on the screen.
The Astounding She Monster starts out with sub-standard special effects, and begins with narration that is like an omnipotent being watching and judging the drama as it unfolds and giving you some useless information to set up the story, that really doesn't add much to the drama except to make the already incoherent script even more incoherent.

The "Astounding She Monster" who is an alien from another planet, pretty much just walks around a lot in a shiny blurry spandex body suit. As she moves she looks like she's a model walking on a catwalk, and I kept hearing the "Right Said Fred" song in my head "I'm Too ****" being played every time she appears. She does have the touch of death, so that's at least one cool thing that she has going for her, and I am not going to give away the startling surprise ending to this movie, that I never in a million years could see coming. The most surprising thing for me in this movie was that they didn't have (?) when they blessedly concluded the movie with (The End), even though they do suggest that someday in the future, a visit from another astounding she monster might be possible.

This movie is the reason why I have always, and will continue to: Keep Watching the Skies.

As a mercifully short film, "The Astounding She Monster" should provide plenty of riffing moments to skewer with the razor sharp wits of the "Truthsayers" known as Rifftrax. Have fun boys (and girls too).

Sybil Danning as the titular "warrior queen" and a typical overacting Donald Pleasance as the ruler of Pompei star in this ridiculously low budget film about slaves and gladiators and uh...a volcanic eruption, apparently. With a soundtrack that sounds like someone's cat running over a Casio synthesizer, a poor man's Lou Ferrigno as a baddie gladiator, and footage obviously borrowed from another movie because they couldn't afford to hire enough extras, you have a pretty good formula for plenty of riffing. What's the plot, you ask? Good question! I think the writers forgot about that. But you do get to see lots of female nudity, Sybil Danning chopping off a man's head, and Donald Pleasance getting run over by a chariot... So there's that, I guess.