Welcome, one and all, to the brand new Very Incredible Movie Theater 4 dot com! This is your source for news about our hysterically hilarious commentaries, and our awesomely outrageous live performances.

“Live performances?” you may be asking yourself if you’re at all familiar with our 3 YouTube trailers for our Godfather commentary, or my incessant Facebook whoring of this project. “How in the hell does this dog shit lend itself to a live show?” Well, I’ll be honest with you:  we’re not entirely sure yet. But lets all find out together, won’t we?

Very Incredible Movie Theater 4 will be making it’s live debut at Garden Friends, the home of the famous Main Street Theatre Company (a company that puts on some fine shows, including a production of “Man of La Mancha” which still gives me chills thinking about it over ten years later. As good as they are, I’ve never quite gotten the name “Main Street Theatre Company”. As a Sayreville resident for over 16 years, I know damn well they had auditions at the Civic Center on Dolan Street, the used to do their shows at the Step Inn on MacArthur Avenue, and now they’re performing on Bordentown Avenue. These lying SOBs haven’t been within 4 blocks of Main Street! Wow, I’m still in parentheses. Better close them) on January 16. We will be going on following our good friends, Death by Improv. It’s only five dollars for two hours of comedy (well, ninety minutes for sure, DBI will probably be awesome as usual. Even if they’re having an off night, they can always fall back on making fun of Nugget. That shit never gets old. [FYI, Nugget is a very nice dude and a good friend. Still, would it hurt him to take care of that body hair? It’s a good thing he trims the beard from time to time, otherwise he’d resemble a bear that got sprayed on the upper half of his face with Nair, as that would be the only place that would be hairless. In all seriousness, Nugget is a wonderful guy. But if he ever brings his leather hat out of the mothballs, do not, repeat, DO NOT put it on your head, or touch it without rubber gloves on. Holy shit, bracket in parentheses, I better gets back on track]. Or else Brown can say something ridiculously pretentious and intellectual that no one on the planet will get, and I’ll bust out laughing only to make other people think I’m smarter than they are. I’m a superstar.  Time to close the parentheses again). Now that I’ve regressed to a ridiculous amount, let’s get back on track:

January 16, 8 PM
Garden Friends
3018 Bordentown Avenue
Parlin, NJ 08859

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten the pluggage out of the way, I’d like to share the story of the genesis of Very Incredible Movie Theater 4.

I’ve loved Mystery Science Theater 3000 since I was 11 years old. This should come as a shock to exactly no one who’s ever a: Been on this website before, or B: Spent any significant amount of time with me. I discovered it on Sunday mornings on Comedy Central in 1996, and was instantly hooked. Anyway, I fell in love with the show, even when I didn’t get most of the references. Joel, Mike, and the Bots were funny as hell, and even my eight year old sister now gets a chuckle out of some bits from the show, and it stopped production over year before she was born.

My discovery of MST3K was also around the time my Mom’s cancer, which she’d been fighting for years, really started to get the better of her. This was a miserable time in my life, as I remember very vividly being in denial about how sick my Mom was. When my Dad told me that things weren’t looking so great, I remember lying awake in bed that night, worried sick. Then I thought to myself, nothing is going to happen. My Mom has been around my whole life, and that’s not going to change, I thought. Call it hope, call it denial, whatever, I was certain that this wasn’t changing.

I was quite wrong. My Mom died on February 1, 1997. Almost twelve years later, I have memories of that entire horrible week that are so vivid, they may as well have happened yesterday. I tried to put on a brave face, but it was all an act. I was wrecked. Anyway, I really don’t want this to get too depressing, so I’ll cut this part of the story short.

Some months later, my brother and I were watching our VHS copy of MST3K Episode 513, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. My Dad was watching it with us. We were all laughing, and, to be completely honest, it is the first I can really remember laughing after my Mom’s death. My Dad, after the show finished, asked if they sold any more episodes of MST3K on VHS. They did, we told him, so in to the car and off to Border we went, where we picked up Episode 301, Cave Dwellers, and what may be my all time favorite, Episode 303, Pod People. We got home, watched both episodes, and laughed so hard our sides ached. It was, to this day, one of the best nights of my life.

Over the next couple years, MST3K became a staple amongst the Murthas. We taped each episode on Sci-Fi and watched them as a family, and laughed and laughed and laughed. We probably haven’t done this now in about eight years, and I really want to get my brother and Dad and I together and watch one again, for old time’s sake.

I know this is going to sound cheesy, but my point is this: MST3K was one of the first things that made me feel human again after my Mom’s death. I laughed my heiney off at that show, and it felt good. The best laughs a person can ever have are the ones that come out they feel they are at their lowest point. I  really needed to laugh then. MST3K helped make me feel good again, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.

I met Mike Farley in high school. We started hanging out towards the end of freshman year, and discovered a shared love of MST3K. It’s one of the things, I think, that brought us together. Mike, over the course of the last ten years, has become like a brother to me. He’s also one of the funniest son-of-a-bitches I’ve ever met in my life.

As happens sometimes in life, we lost track of each other for awhile there. We’d talk on AIM every once in a while, but that was about it. Then, one night in late 2007, I found myself hanging out with Mike, and voiced my desire to riff on stuff. Mike told me he wanted to do the same thing. We both agreed it would be a hell of a lot of fun to get something like this off the ground. So, of course, we promptly forgot about it for several months.

Then, this past summer, I found about RiffTrax (a spiritual successor to MST3K in many ways) opening up iRiffs, where fans can post their own homebrewed riffs for public consumption. I spoke with Mike, and we quickly decided that this was something we needed to get working on. And we have, over the last couple of months, and I can honestly say, riffing with Mike has been one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.

The point of all of this is, MST3K means a lot to me. It helped me feel good during a time in my life that I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to feel good about. While some might think we’re ripping it off, in my mind, we’re doing it the highest honor we could possibly give it. If something we write, say, or otherwise joke about does anything at all to make someone feel better and forget the things in life that suck, if only for a minute, this whole exercise will totally be worth it.

Anyway, that’s the abridged (!) version of what VIMT4 is, how it came to be, and what it means to me. Getting a chance to do this live, with my best friend, is a dream come true to me. And, while I hope VIMT4 has a long future in front of it, if nothing else comes of it past this upcoming live show, it’s already a success in my book.

Phew. Sorry to be so maudlin. Come back again real soon, hopefully we’ll have something funny for you guys to read or watch.

Yours, yours, yours,

Mick Murtha

Watched What Dreams May Come on cable a few weeks ago and cried the whole way through