In the past, I have mentioned my love of Rifftrax, the brainchild of MST3K stars Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy and Mike Nelson. Tonight, they performed live in Nashville, with the show broadcasting in theaters across the nation. I was lucky enough to find a theater near me in Indianapolis.

They could have chosen any movie to riff and it would have been entertaining, but they chose the mother of terrible cinema: Ed Wood’s disaster, Plan 9 from Outer Space. I can easily say this was the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.This is a zombie movie with only three zombies, none of whom actually eat people. This is a movie where the invading aliens are lead by someone who, to quote the Riffers, “makes Richard Simmons look butch”. This is a movie that goes from day to night to day to morning all in the same scene (sometimes the same shot). And this is the movie that, after Bela Lugosi died during production, replaced him with someone much taller and just hid his face for the rest of the film. The Riffers absorbed all this crappy goodness and gave us comic gold in return.

Besides the actual film, we were also presented a wonderfully riffed short, “The Flying Stewardess”, a couple delightfully fake advertisements from SomethingAwful.com and the funny musical stylings of Jonathan Coulton, who is probably best known as the composer of Portal’s theme song (an earlier recording of one of the songs he sang tonight can be found at the bottom of this article). The Riffers themselves came out with Coulton before the film and sang their own song, “Plans 1-9 from Outer Space”. Even though we were not actually in the same theater as them, there was such a great energy in the theater that we might as well have been in Nashville ourselves. I can honestly say this has made my week and I can’t wait until the next Rifftrax Live.