RiffTrax: Add Some Riff to Your Movies

You've seen Casablanca seventeen times. You've watched Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, ten times. You've even seen last year's smash hit, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull, enough times to take it's shine off. You're bored with the movies you have at home, but you don't feel like going to the movie store. You don't want to flip through the endless channels of nothingness on TV. You want something, familiar, but fun.

Search no more, entertainment fiend! Rifftrax is here to save the day! What is Rifftrax, you say? Why, only the best thing since Mystery Science Theater 3000! In fact, it's made by the same guys who made MST3K! It's all of the fun of these fellows ripping on a movie, in a quick and easy to use new format! Rifftrax operates out of www.rifftrax.com, offering a large library of movie add-ons. They're often cheaper than a movie rental, and they're loads of fun!

Here's how it works:

Go to www.rifftrax.com and browse through their selection, or search a movie you're interested in seeing with rifftrax. There are some titles that are offered on-demand, which means that you can order the whole kit-n-kaboodle on your computer. The audio is already pre-synched up with the video. Their selection of on demand videos isn't very large, but it does offer strange titles such as: Plan 9 From Outer Space. The majority of on demand titles are public domain-type shorts that only cost $0.99. Feature length films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Missile To The Moon cost $9.99 and $7.99, respectively.

For most people, the best route is to download simply the trax themselves. There are many mainstream titles like Twilight, Red Dawn, Tron, Star Wars and Harry Potter. The bigger titles usually cost $3.99, while less popular or older titles are anywhere between $0.99 to $2.99.

I recently purchased a Rifftrax for the Tommy Wiseau film, "The Room". The download usually takes less than 30 minutes (my Rifftrax was 68.2 MB) and comes in either a .mp3 or .riff format. If you select to use the .riff format, you'll have to download the Rifftrax player on the Rifftrax website (which is free and relatively quick and easy). This player will sync up your movie with the Rifftrax audio perfectly, so there's no need to fiddle with timing. If you opt for using the .mp3 file, you'll have to cue up your audio track to the video. However, it's not as difficult and you'd think, since they do have cues for you to follow to get the best synchronization possible.

I watched "The Room" with a friend first without the Rifftrax audio, then with the Rifftrax audio the next day. Since "The Room" is already a comedy, we enjoyed our first viewing, but I must confess that the laughs were exponentially greater with the Rifftrax. I'm now a faithful customer and I'm looking forward to spicing up the rest of my DVD collection!