The Attack of the Killer Old Movies : Television: ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000,’ a cult cable success, uses sick humor, along with cultural references to all things obscure and forgettable, to draw its audience.

A severed hand crawls across the screen in an old, very bad sci-fi movie. And a robot watching the film from the front row of a theater in outer space remarks: “Hey, look, they found the hand of the (one-armed) drummer of Def Leppard.”

That sick humor, along with cultural references to all things obscure, kitsch and forgettable, have made “Mystery Science Theater 3000” a cult cable hit as this week it begins a fifth season of showing and heckling some of the worst movies ever made.

“Most people are hooked because of one or two of the more obscure lines,” said Jim Mallon, the show’s producer. “They thought that they were the only people who remembered some actor or some weird event and they’re won over by the idea that these guys trapped in space know about it too.”

The show’s premise is that a human lab technician and his two robot sidekicks are marooned in space and forced by two evil scientists to watch an endless stream of bad movies, such as “The Crawling Eye,” “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and “Viking Women and the Sea Serpent.” Viewers watch with them and hear their snide comments.

“People talk back to the TV all the time,” said Kevin Murphy, one of the show’s writers. “And they tell us that we’re giving legitimacy to something they’ve been doing in private for years.”

For example, in the show’s season premiere on Comedy Central (Saturday at 7 p.m. with a repeat Sunday at 10 a.m.), the trio is forced to watch the 1959 “Hercules” movie. When Hercules rides past Doric columns from a broken-down Greek temple, one robot exclaims: “This is ancient Greece. They didn’t have ruins yet.”

Later, when the all-male crew of a sailing ship lands on the island of Amazon women, who mate with male visitors and then kill them, the robots comment as the men march single file to meet the Amazon leader: “It’s the Bataan sex march” and “Hey, Mary! Guess what’s for dinner? Manwiches.” The ridicule in this one episode also includes references to rock star Pete Townshend, artist Jim Dine and radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin.

The only rule is to avoid any topical references or political jokes simply because by the time the show gets on the air, the joke might be too obvious and overused or it might not be funny anymore.

“There aren’t a lot of Joey Buttafuoco jokes, but we’ll pretty much make fun of anything, although we do have strenuous arguments over just how cruel we can get,” said Mike Nelson, the show’s head writer. “That Def Leppard thing is about as low as we’ve ever gone.”

The barbs fly so effortlessly from human star Joel Hodgson, who created the show, and the two robots, Tom Servo and Crow, that it seems that they are improvising them on the spot. Not true.

Much of the commentary does originate improvisationally, but well before the taping. The “Mystery Science Theater” writers--Hodgson; the voices of the two robots, Murphy and Trace Beaulieu; Frank Conniff, who appears in the show as the evil scientist, Mallon and Nelson--sit down together to watch the film, shouting out jokes and comments spontaneously while a stenographer writes them down.

The writers then sift through the mountain of barbs, song lyrics and human sound effects, re-watching the movie over several days until they come up with a final script. Hodgson and his two robot charges, which are operated from below like puppets, sit in movie chairs watching a monitor and trashing the action at the appropriate moments. Viewers see the trio silhouetted in the front row of a theater as the movie appears on a big screen in front of them.

“These movies are really bad and the worse the movie, the better it is for us,” Murphy said. “There’s a lot of convulsing and retching and it gets pretty grueling after several days of the same thing, but there is a lot of joy to examining why the movie is so bad. You sort of can get a perverse pleasure from watching them. There was this one movie where they had a car crash scene with no car involved, and then a guy comes upon the accident and picks up the severed head of his girlfriend and runs with it under his arm like a football. How can you not enjoy that?”

Since 1988, when Hodgson and Mallon created the show for a TV station in Minneapolis, the luckless space travelers have sat through nearly 100 crummy movies.

“We started with sci-fi because they are so classically bad and I like to think that there are more bad films in this genre than any other,” said Mallon, who noted that none on his staff are science-fiction buffs. “I’ve since learned that I’m wrong and that this concept works in any genre. We just did a Lassie movie. But still, those terrible sci-fi special effects are fun to make fun of.”

They produced about 20 episodes of the show for the Minneapolis station before HBO’s Comedy Channel bought the show in 1989 and the local station “found God,” Mallon said, and went to all-religious programs. Though they have sparked interest from a major Hollywood studio to produce a big screen version of the show, the “Mystery Science Theater” team continues to live and work in the pastoral environment of Eden Prairie, Minn.

“It’s too hot in L.A.,” Murphy said. “And this is a hell of a nice life and a hell of a nice job. We’re getting paid to watch TV, which is exactly what my high school teacher said would never happen.”

None of the “Mystery Science Theater” team admits to heckling films they go to see in movie theaters--in part because it would be rude to other paying customers and in part, they say laughing, they only pay to see “good” movies.

“I rank openly on the local news, though,” Nelson said, “but my wife tells me to shut up.”

Soon, Nelson will be able to rank as much as he wants without interruption. In October, Hodgson, who has been the star of the show since its inception, will escape from space, relinquishing his red jump suit to become just another writer on the show. Nelson will take his chair in the outer space theater. Though Nelson’s personality will be different than his predecessor’s, he insists that the show will remain virtually the same.

“The concept is the star,” he said.

And, of course, the bad movies, which, in this upcoming season of 24, are as bad as ever. They include “Warrior of the Lost World” (1984), “Swamp Diamonds” (1955), “Super Agent Super Dragon” (1966) and “I Accuse My Parents” (1945).

“Some are worse,” Nelson said. “We have a really good batch of bad movies, except we did accidentally do ‘The Magnificent Ambersons,’ so we apologize for that.”