Your Stupid Minds: Recent Episodes
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As we gradually transition from spook em up season to Christmas time, we dip into another Albert Pyun movie with his first directing credit, 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, conveniently named after its genre!Evil usurper King Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch, also see what they did there?) resurrects an ancient, I guess sorcerer but seems more like a demon named Xusia of Delos (Richard Moll) in order to smite the armies of his sworn enemy King Richard (Christopher Cary) and steal his kingdom. He does so, but while Xusia is weak Cromwell stabs him and he falls off a cliff.The only survivor of the royal lineage is Prince Talon (Lee Horsley) who manages to escape and plots his revenge by getting super buff and going on adventures for eight years. He takes along his father’s sword, a non-magic sword that has three blades, two of which turn into projectiles. Then Princess Alana (Kathleen), sister of the rebel leader agrees to have sex with him if he rescues her brother, who’s been kidnapped by Cromwell. Also rescue some rebel troops trapped in a cave.Instead, Talon gets kidnapped and crucified. Lucky for him be’s bros with all the invited guests, so he escapes and defeats everyone and has sex (offscreen).
We finish out our spooky Halloween month with an episode on the Day of the Dead where nobody actually dies (uh, spoiler). It’s M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 movie Trap!
Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a mild-mannered serial killer fireman taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert for Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), her favorite pop star. Through some snooping and one very gregarious merch salesman Cooper finds out the entire concert is a trap to catch him, the Butcher! Who chops people up into little pieces.
The Butcher must find a way to escape using his affably awkward skills as a professional liar. Will he be able to escape? Will his family find out? Will Agent 47 complete his mission? Did Shyamalan really cast Hayley Mills because she was in The Parent Trap? Is Your Stupid Minds done with the “bad” movie premise? You’ll have to listen to find out!
This ain't your grandma's exorcist. It's the POPE's exorcist! Russell Crowe plays the very real exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth in this very not real exorcism tale of 2023's The Pope’s Exorcist.
After Father Amorth (Crowe) conducts a "fake" exorcism on a troubled young man by tricking the demon into a pig and shooting it (at least it wasn’t 2,000 of them) he is sent back to the Vatican to be reprimanded for conducting an unsanctioned exorcism. Tightwad Cardinal Sullivan (Ryan O’Grady) reprimands him for being a loose cannon, for being too cool, etc. But then the pope (Franco Nero) sends Amorth on a new mission, should he choose to accept, to Spain to investigate a new possession in a little boy.
Julia (Alexandra Essoe) arrives at a Spanish abbey with her daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden) and her young son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) left to her by her late husband. She's going to fix it up and sell it to... a church? An abbey enthusiast? In any case, that plan is disrupted when her son starts acting all possessed and weird. Ever seen The Exorcist? Ya know how demons are always carving words into their body, spider-walking, saying sexually inappropriate things, and so on? Well it's that.
Amorth arrives and teams up with the local Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) to exorcise this powerful demon. It turns out the demon possessed the dude who started the Spanish Inquisition, conveniently letting the Catholic Church off the hook on that one.
Can Amorth and Esquibel save this boy and destroy this demon? Do they have dark elements of their pasts the demon can exploit? Does a Vespa scooter really have enough horsepower to rip off the cover of a centuries-old catacomb? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Your Stupid Minds brings you Disney’s first foray into films based on their amusement park rides. It’s 1997’s made-for-TV movie Tower of Terror, starring Steve Guttenberg, Nia Peeples, and Kirsten Dunst.
Buzzy Crocker (Guttenberg) is a former journalist drummed out of the journalism game for being a bad journalist. Now he’s fabricating photos for his supernatural tabloid stories with his teenage niece Anna (Dunst). When an old woman (Amzie Strickland) comes to him with the real story of the Hollywood Hotel elevator disappearance in 1939, he goes to the abandoned hotel to investigate.
He eventually finds that everyone in the elevator is still around, in spook form, and can’t cross over to the other plane. With the help of Anna he works to try to free them.
We're back from an extended break to give you a real treat. New York Ninja (2021) has everything. A ninja. A roller skating ninja. A radioactive serial killer. Cynthia Rothrock (as a voice). And helicopters.
In 1984, John Liu had a dream: to make a movie about a New York ninja. He shot 6-8 hours of footage, but his distribution company went bankrupt so the entire movie was scrapped.
Cut to 2020. The new hotshot b-movie home video distributor Vinegar Syndrome unearths these reels with no script, storyboard, or audio track. They get to work basically reimagining the entire plot and restoring the footage. What we have here is a reimagining of what would have been an 80s film, cut, dubbed, and scored in the 2020s.
John Liu (John Liu) is a non-ninja New Yorker whose pregnant wife is killed by one of the many roving violence gangs of 1980s New York. In his grief, he becomes a New York Ninja and starts throwing smoke bombs and shurikens at the gangs.
It turns out the gangs (but not all of the gangs, some just like to go around smashing cars and murdering orphans) are behind a wide-sweeping human trafficking operation, led by the Plutonium Killer, a former CIA agent with radioactive powers, and hypnotism powers, and shapeshifting powers. He puts young women under a spell and then murders them, which seems like it would cut into his human trafficking bottom line, but I guess we all need hobbies.
New York Ninja flips around the city beating up street punks and having guns pulled on him numerous times. Can he save the day and defeat the baddies? Assuming John Liu shot that footage before pulling the plug, the answer is yes.
Your Stupid Minds is back! Did you know it’s the Olympics? We have a special Olympic-size episode for you, with Dolph Lundgren’s 1994 film Pentathlon!
Eric Brogar (Lundgren) is an Olympic pentathlete competing for East Germany in the 1988 Olympics. For those of you who are normal, the pentathlon consists of five events: swimming, shooting, horseback riding, fencing, and running (the modern pentathlon has replaced horseback riding with some Ninja Warrior parkour stuff). Brogar wins the gold to spite his evil and abusive trainer Heinrich Müller (David Soul), who is also a big wig in the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Also to spite him, Brogar defects in the sloppiest way possible at the Seoul airport and runs onto the American team bus.
In retaliation, Müller murders Brogar’s dad, and then the Berlin Wall falls two months later. Brogar is depressed, and spends the next four years in Los Angeles drinking, smoking, and watching a tiny little television while somehow maintaining perfect muscle tone and body fat ratio. He works at a greasy spoon and his boss John Creese (Roger E. Mosley) discovers he’s a gold medalist, and immediately starts training him so he can cash in on endorsement deals. You know, all those million dollar Nike sponsorships pentathletes are known to receive?
Müller is now also a neo-Nazi and travels to LA to raise funds for a terrorist attack on a local Holocaust museum peace rally, but upon arriving he learns that Brogar still exists and lives in town. Since this is the go-go ‘90s and he thinks he can have it all, surely he can perform this grisly terrorist attack and satisfy his personal grudge at the same time, right?
After a bike-by Luger shooting at the beach, Brogar escapes to his girlfriend’s hideaway cabin (possibly the same cabin from the 3 Ninjas movies) but Müller and his goons find him. He’s kidnapped and taken to the Holocaust museum so he can watch a rabbi explode on a tiny TV inside the terrorists’ van. Can Brogar escape and stop the attack, which conceivably is the only possible reason why he would be there? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Your Stupid Minds comes at you with a movie recommended by Chris’s dad, the low budget UK adrenochrome-fueled revenge thriller I Am Rage (2023).
Erin (Hannaj Bang Bendz) is a young woman with PTSD who decides to go to the family estate of her new boyfriend Adam (Derek Nelson). His entire family is there, including Adam’s brother Michael (Luke Aquilina) and his new partner Sarah (Antonia Whillans). After a “dinner” of blood drinking, Erin and Sarah are drugged and blood is extracted from their adrenal glands, because this is apparently an ancestral adrenochrome farm where they kidnap people and draw their blood at their height of fear to extract the sweet sweet drug within.*
Erin quickly escapes using some sort of super power she has and goes on a rampage with Sarah by her side. Apparently, and this didn’t come up in her Bumble profile, Erin was trafficked as a child and held against her will for fifteen years. During that time she developed super adrenaline blood that allows her to roundhouse kick people and tear out their hearts with her bare hands.
They have a final showdown in a local paintball arena against the family and some rich big game hunter jerk WIlson (Niko Foster). Who will win? My money’s on the woman with super powers.
*Please note: Adrenochrome is a real thing but the conspiracy theories you may have heard about it are not. Hunter S. Thompson made a joke about it fifty years ago and now we’re all living with the consequences.
Your Stupid Minds is back with more animation for you! Not anime, but anime-inspired, it’s the unreleased in America film adaptation of the comic Gen¹³ from Jim Lee, Brandon Choi and J. Scott Campbell. It’s basically if a OVA was slightly less leery and animated like an episode of Batman Beyond.
Caitlin Fairchild (Alicia Witt) is a freakin’ NERD who is recruited by a shady paramilitary organization. Because of her promiscuous roommate and nothing else, she decides to drop out of college and head to this organization’s secret mountain lair, where she learns karate and is yelled at by a Nazi (Cloris Leachman).
There she meets Grunge (Flea), a surfer dude, and Roxy (Elizabeth Daily), a smoker. There’s also the mysterious Zuko-like rogue Threshold (Mark Hamill) who looks suspiciously like the blonde kid in the cold open. Apparently they’re supposed to unlock their Gen¹³ powers, some genetic experiment that killed all their parents and gives them special powers. While snooping in the organization’s Secret Files Area, they’re attacked by some guards and Caitlin unlocks her powers (gets really strong, boobs get bigger).
Soon they all unlock their powers. Grunge turns into whatever he touches, and Roxy can levitate. They fight the Nazi lady in a giant mech suit. Can they escape the facility? Do they even want to? What does this group do? Will Disney ever acknowledge this movie’s existence? You’ll have to listen to find out!
What is that light? Is that Garzey’s Wing? Is he the Holy Warrior? Is that Garzey’s Wing? What was that? Garzey’s Wing? Yes, Your Stupid Minds is dipping its toe into anime for the first time ever with one of the worst OVAs of all time combined with one of the worst English dub tracks of all time. It’s Yoshiyuki Tomino’s 1996 three episode OVA Garzey’s Wing.Chris is a recent high school graduate who is SO easy GOING and continually fails his college entrance exams. When he goes to his home town to attend a high school reunion pool party, a giant mystical duck bifurcates his consciousness and half of him goes to the parallel world of Byston Well, while his other half remains in the real world and dead-set on attending this pool party.To put it as simply and clearly as possible, Chris must help the slaves of the Metomeus Tribe avoid the Dragorols and Daragau of Zagazoa’s War Beast Army Corps under the command of the ruthless King Fungun to get to the Boundless Plains of Gabujuju. Yamato Takeru no Mikoto has granted Chris the power of Garzey’s Wing, which allows him to fly or something. His Ferario friend Fellan-Fa, female warrior Leelince, and headband-wearing mystic Hassan-san help in this plane of reality, while real world girlfriend Rumiko lends her chi to help him on both planes while he also attends a pool party. Seems clear enough.Combine this with an absolutely abysmal late 90s English dub track where yelling constituted acting and we’re left with an absolutely baffling experience that would still be confusing even if this series actually ended properly. Join us as we somehow make sense of our convoluted situations and discuss this cacophony of fantasy nonsense.Some Notes:* We had the pleasure of watching this from a bootleg recording off of Sci-Fi from 1999 with period commercials intact. This is, truly, the preferred method to watch this. You need all the Toaster Strudel commercials to process what you just watched.
Heyyyy, this is Your Stupid Minds saying howdy to all the girls out there in podcast-land. We have a special edition of Your Stupid Minds: After Dark. If you download this episode before your morning commute please wait until night! We present the direct-to-video sequel to the Roger Corman ripoff of Fatal Attraction. It’s Body Chemistry II: The Voice of a Stranger (1991).
Dan (Gregory Harrison) is a disgraced Los Angeles cop who somehow got kicked off the force for beating up too many women. He returns to his fictional home town of San Angelo (not the one in Texas; it appears to be a distant suburb of LA) and breaks into his dead (?) parents’ house to start anew. He rekindles a romance with his high school sweetheart Brenda (Robin Riker) and things are looking up except for his overwhelming violent urges to beat the crap out of her.
Meanwhile, Dr. Claire Archer (Lisa Pescia) has escaped justice after killing, or being responsible for the death of, the married man she aggressively seduced. When radio psychologist Dr. Edwards (John Landis) goes cuckoo on air, Archer replaced him with a sex psychology show. The station manager Big Chuck (Morton Downey Jr.) gets wind of Claire’s dark past through a slimy private investigator Larabee (Clint Howard) and uses her sex tape to blackmail her into a bad contract.
Dan calls into the radio show as “John” with his rough sex problem. Claire clocks him almost immediately despite his use of the Batman voice and begins an illicit affair with him, undergoing a “treatment” to rid him of his urges to commit violence against women. In reality she just wants to torment and humiliate him, ruining any chances he has with the angelic Brenda.
Can Dan escape the clutches of the succubus Claire? Can Claire negotiate a better contract? Where did Clint Howard go? Wait, was that Jeremy Piven as the patrolman? Where is his hair? You’ll have to listen to find out.
In honor of the late great Roger Corman, Your Stupid Minds covers this incoherent Corman-produced family film The Skateboard Kid, starring Timothy Busfield, Bess Armstrong, and Dom DeLuise. And yes, the skateboard can talk.
Widower Frank (Busfield) and his skateboard kid Zack (Trevor Lissauer) move to Southern California where they are both turbo-bullied by a group of skateboard punks in the middle of the highway. After Zack’s skateboard gets smashed, he gets a new old one from an antique shop run by widow Maggie (Armstrong). Zack puts a lawnmower engine on it for some reason and then it’s struck by lightning and gains sentience and a horrifying claymation face. The skateboard, Rip (DeLuise) wisecracks and has magical powers, but is somehow the third most important thing going on in this movie.
The rest has something to do with an adult love triangle between Frank, Maggie and local car dealer Big Dan (Cliff De Young) who is trying to trick Maggie into marrying him because he’s a scumbag, he wants to own her crappy antique shop, AND there’s apparently buried treasure somewhere on the property he wants to steal. More hijinks ensue. One of the kids has the tiniest four wheeler in the world. Also there's a dog on the poster who's nowhere to be seen.
Your Stupid Minds returns to its loose theme of "Sicko Movies from the 1990s" (see: Blank Check, Milk Money, First Kid) with the hilarious premise of "what if an adult woman married a child as a joke?" It's 1994's Holy Matrimony, starring Patricia Arquette, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Tate Donovan. Directed by Leonard Nimoy.
After a life-changing carnival-money heist executed by Havana (Arquette) and her boyfriend Peter (Donovan), the pair retreat to a Canadian Hutterite community to lay low until the heat dies down. Peter is a former member of the community pretending he wants to return to the fold. In order to stay, he and Havana must marry. But when he dies in a car accident, due to their levirate marriage tradition (based on Deuteronomy 25:5), Havana must marry Peter's 12 year old brother Zeke (Gordon-Levitt) or be cast out. Since she wants to find her heist money, she calls their bluff and marries the child.
The movie descends into some second act zaniness where she learns the value of hard work (or doesn't), then they must go back to the United States to return the money, and are pursued by a corrupt FBI agent Markoski (John Schuck). Will they return the money? Will anyone learn a lesson? Is this movie as gross as the premise implies? You'll have to listen to find out!
Your Stupid Minds tackles manuks, saber-tooth tigers, and terror birds in our latest episode that covers Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, and Cliff Curtis! Featuring returning guest and Steven Strait expert Sarah Dobson Richard!
D’Leh (Strait) is a mammoth (manuk) hunter in the Ural Mountains who has determined he must kill a manuk all by his lonesome to marry Evolet (Belle). He does so, but not under the most ideal conditions, so he attains the White Spear and Evolet’s heart, but with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome.
Then some dudes on horses (with saddles and stirrups and metal weapons, somehow) steal half their tribe and D’Leh is determined to rescue them (mostly Evolet though). He and a few of his tribe mates traverse the smallest Sid Meier’s Civilization map available, from the snowy mountains, damp jungle, and desert, to a city of pyramids run by a creepy god emperor. Can D’Leh unite the slaves into revolt and save his tribe? Can we finish this movie before falling asleep? Did they go out of their way to make this historically inaccurate? Has there ever been a successful caveman movie? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Why should you listen to our latest episode? BECAUSE STONE COLD SAID SO! We’ve got 2010's Hunt to Kill starring Stone Cold Steve Austin, Eric Roberts (kinda), and various Vancouver-based character actors.
Jim Rhodes (Austin) is a U.S. Border Patrol agent about to assume a new desk job. When his partner Lee (Roberts) is killed in a botched meth lab raid (something Border Patrol does all the time), Rhodes moves to western Montana to be near a different border.
Rhodes's daughter Kim (Marie Avgeropoulos) is home on winter break and thinks her dad is cringe. When she's caught shoplifting, he must go down to the Sheriff's office to bail her out. Meanwhile, a team of the dumbest criminals of all time are betrayed by their leader (?) Lawson (Michael Hogan, Battlestar Galactica's Saul Tigh, and General Tullius from Skyrim for you Zoomers out there who love 13 year old games), who steals their stolen bonds and sets a bomb to explode. The team defuses the bomb, and now they're on the hunt to the Canadian border to catch their traitorous partner.
The team consists of the leader Banks (Gil Bellows), blonde lady Dominika (Emilie Ullerup), hacker Geary (Michael Eklund), karate guy Jensen (Gary Daniels), and hothead Crab (Adrian Holmes). To make a long story short, they go to the sheriff for info on Lawson before he sneaks across the northern border. Instead they end up killing him, kidnapping Kim, and taking Rhodes along to track Lawson. We now have a half dozen morons in the woods bickering with each other constantly, and Rhodes waiting for his opportunity to give all of these doofuses a Stone Cold Stunner and save his daughter. Everything goes south (or should I say, north) and Rhodes must resort to hunting to kill. Can I get a "hell yeah?"
What if someone designed a computer program based on a hundred of the worst serial killers, assassins, despots, and also Emperor Hirohito for some reason, used silicon snake technology to make him real, and set him loose in Los Angeles? Also what if this terrifying being was Russell Crowe and you see his butt and he acts like the Joker the entire time? Those are the questions that 1995’s Virtuosity asks. Join us and special returning guest Sarah Long as we deep dive into this ‘90s cyberpunk classic.
Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is a former cop wrongfully imprisoned (he did kill two innocent people, but it was an accident and he looked cool while he was doing it) performing tests in a VR environment designed to train cops on what to do if a serial killer creates a hostage situation in a Japanese restaurant. The program kills Barnes’s virtual partner, and then the serial killer program, SID 6.7 (Crowe) is made real and escapes into reality. Though SID is made up of many baddies, the “dominant” personality is that of Matthew Grimes (Christopher Murray), a super terrorist who killed Barnes’s family. Therefore Barnes is the only person who can stop him, so they implant a tracking/kill device into his brain and set him on the hunt.
Barnes’s de facto partner is criminal psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), a single mom with a precocious daughter Karin (Kaley Cuoco). I sure hope that kid doesn’t get kidnapped! Will Barnes stop the killer in time? Did he really shoot that woman on the train? Or was it the mass murderer holding her hostage? Why didn't they give that guy clothes before going on TV? And how do you say the name “Fichtner?” Is it like sphincter? All this and more in our latest episode!
Your Stupid Minds is back after a February break with the film that connects us all, it’s 2024’s Madame Web, brought to you by the delicious taste of Pepsi-Cola!
Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a sassy New York EMT who has trouble connecting to people except for her partner Ben (Adam Scott). After a near drowning she unlocks her latent spider power of seeing the future, something spiders are known for.
Meanwhile, Ezekiel Sims (Tahir Rahim), who, and I can’t be certain of this, may have been in the Amazon with Cassie’s mom when she was researching spiders before she died, is on the hunt for three superheroes who kill him in a dream. He utilizes the NSA’s 2003 super-spying technology to track them down. Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) are all on the same train when Cassie gets a vision of their deaths at the hand of Ezekiel. Cassie intervenes and from then on they’re on the run and trying to find answers.
Note: This episode originally aired on October 16, 2014.
Nick's out of town, so here's another YSM Classic! Read the original episode description.
Your Stupid Minds continues its Worst of 2023 limited series with yet another nine-figure Netflix action movie that they apparently forgot to promote. It’s Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot!Rachel Stone (Gadot) is a young statuesque superhacker who’s a new recruit to MI6. She’s part of a team including combat expert Yang (Jing Lusi), another combat expert Parker (Jamie Dornan), and another superhacker Bailey (Paul Ready). Their mission is to kidnap some Russian guy for information, which they fail at spectacularly.But Stone isn’t a normal MI6 agent. She’s actually part of an even secreter organization called the Charter, which does everything based on the word of an AI supercomputer called the Heart. The Heart has the power to change the tide of human history, but they mostly use it for video game vision in the field and spewing out useless probabilities in real time. As a double agent, Stone is tasked with finding out who’s trying to destroy the Heart, which for the most part she also fails at spectacularly until it’s too late.Cars blow up, people jump out of airplanes, and unconvincing CGI muzzle flashes light up the screen. It’s about what you’d expect from another $150 million Netflix screensaver. But is it better or worse than your average first quarter theatrical release action flick? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Your Stupid Minds starts 2024 with our Worst of 2023 limited series. Our first one is the John Cena action “comedy” from the director of Taken (no, not Luc Besson) and co-starring Alison Brie! It’s 2023’s Freelance.
Mason Pettits (Cena) is former Army Special Forces who injures his back in a helicopter crash during a mission to “liberate” the fictional South American country of Paldonia. After being bored as the most jacked lawyer of all time, he takes on a “freelance” job from his Army buddy Sebastian (Christian Slater) protecting journalist Claire Wellington (Brie) as she visits Paldonia to interview President Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba). The mission goes off without a hitch, Mason collects his $20,000, and his wife loves him again. The end.
Just kidding. The mission goes sideways when a coup d'état breaks out during the visit. Venegas’s worm nephew Jorge (Sebastian Eslava) is under the control of foreign powers who want to strip the country of its natural resources. Pettits, Venegas, and Brie must team out to save the country, and blow up some more helicopters in the process.
Apparently we’re only in Day Six of the Twelve Days of Christmas (look it up), so we’re doing another Christmas movie with Disney’s Robert Zemeckis’s 2009 CGI monstrosity adaptation of A Christmas Carol!Do I really need to explain the plot of A Christmas Carol? Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is visited by three spirits (Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey, and Jim Carrey) to change him of his miserly Christmas-hating ways. This adaptation is slavishly faithful to the text of the story, so it adds a lot of non-verbal CGI gobbledygook to take advantage of all 2000s era CGI 3D technology has to offer. Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, and Bob Hoskins are also present.The end! Merry Christmas!
Your Stupid Minds FINALLY gets into the holiday spirit with, what else, a Hallmark-style Christmas movie with a wrestler! It’s the free agent holiday movie starring WWE's Trish Status, 2022's Christmas in Rockwell.
Alyssa (Stratus) is a former child actress turned grown up actress who made it big at 12 years old with Holly's Puppy Christmas (or something similarly titled, I don’t want to go back and look it up). She travels to Rockwell, Nowheredaho (but really it's in Canada), her home town that she hasn't been to since she left as a child for the bright lights of Los Angeles.
Her goal is to fulfill her Christmas list, doing all the holiday things she missed out on as a child and are part and parcel for these types of movies: Go ice skating, sit on Santa's lap, hang out in a hotel lobby for a while. The only problem? It's the 25th anniversary of Christmas Holly's Puppies, and she doesn't want anyone (especially the press) to know she's in town.
She immediately has a meet cute with the obligatory bland single 30-something hunk Jake (Stephen Huszar). Jake runs an arthouse movie theater with his mom Juniper (Sheila McCarthy) and her secret lover Morty (Roy Lewis). The theater is failing because mom insists on only showing obscure ancient arthouse films that no one's heard of and do not exist. Other than that Jake is a complete blank slate, a man without a past, who speaks only in vague aphorisms. If he existed anywhere outside of a made-for-streaming Christmas movie he would be an amnesia patient or serial killer.
Short story short: The press find out Alyssa is in town and the Puppy Holly Christmas superfans lose their minds. She blames Jake but he obviously didn't spill the beans because he is incapable of independent thought or action. Will they reconcile and smooch? Yes. Is there any wrestling in this movie? No.
It’s officially the Christmas season! Here we come a-wassailing! Here comes Santa Claus right down Santa Claus Lane! Jack Frost nipping at your nose. We’re reviewing Assassin’s Creed (2016).Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is a convicted murderer who is being put to death in the Texas desert prison outpost in Huntsville. As he’s executed, he wakes up in a strange facility in Madrid. Sofia (Marion Cotillard) explains that they need to hook him up to a giant GLaDOS-like mechanical arm so he can tap into the genetic memory of his ancestors, steal the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code for free will, and this will somehow solve violence. Makes sense to me!Cal is apparently a descendant of a line of assassins who have been fighting the Knights Templar for generations, mostly for this Apple but for other stuff too. He meets other assassin descendants, who basically have nothing else to do but hang around this facility for a while. There is also the icy Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), the Gendo of this organization and father of Sofia, as well as Cal’s father (Brendan Gleeson) who he thinks killed his mother.Can Cal, under his cool ancestor assassin name of Aguilar, recover the Apple and save the world or something? Or is this creepy shadowy organization using sense memory VR to force you to do cool flips in 15th century Spain not all it’s cracked up to be? You’ll have to listen to find out! Also, if you didn’t know, this is based on a video game.
Your Stupid Minds covers a movie that may not exist, except in the deepest, darkest dollar bins of the seediest Walmarts of the world. It’s the David DeCoteau Punisher-lite tale Prey of the Jaguar (1996) starring Maxwell Caulfield, Stacy Keach, and Linda Blair.
Damien Bandera (Trevor Goddard, a.k.a. Kano in the original Mortal Kombat movie) is a drug kingpin who’s just been busted out of prison by his compatriots. Or is his name Banderas? He’s referred to as both in this movie.
Derek Leigh (Caulfield) is a regular 90s dad with a mustache who, for a 96 minute movie, spends a LOT of time in the first act with his loving pregnant wife and precocious son for them to not be fridged. His son Jeremy (Devon Michael) shows his dad the completely novel superhero he’s invented that has no ties to any existing intellectual property: The Jaguar!
Derek is visited by The Commander (Stacy Keach), his former boss at a secret espionage organization sporting a turtleneck, ponytail, and George H.W. Bush glasses. The Commander warns him that Bandera/Banderas, the guy he put away in an undercover operation, is out. Derek acknowledges his family may be in danger, and then goes to work. Bandera/s shows up where he works, shoots him, and throws him off a building. And mentions that he killed his entire family.
Three hours later, after he’s processed all of his grief, Derek decides to kit himself out and become a super karate vigilante named the Jaguar, fashioned after his son’s superhero. Will he fulfill his revenge? Was the Commander REALLY killed off screen in that car crash? Will there be a talking cat?! You’ll have to listen to find out.
I can't find a trailer, but you can watch it for free on Tubi.
Your Stupid Minds does one last spook ‘em up to round out the (now passed) Halloween season. It’s the Italian horror-infused prequel to a “real” haunting: Amityville II: The Possession (1982).
The Montelli family, made up of abusive father Anthony (Burt Young), manic mom Delores (Rotanya Alda), 26-year-old teenage son Sonny (Jack Magner), older daughter Patricia (Diane Franklin) and some other kids move into a new home in upstate New York possessed by a demon. They immediately begin providing ample dysfunctional fuel to feed the demon in his possession plans. The father is a physically abusive maniac, the oldest siblings have a weirdly close relationship, and the mom is fed up with it all.
The demon makes quick work of possessing Sonny and enacts its plan to murder the entire family. Can the local priest, Father Adamsky (James Olson) stop him in time. Will Catholic bureaucracy approve an exorcism? Will Sonny’s birthday party go off without a hitch? Considering this happens before the first movie, I think we can all assume this will not go well.
Your Stupid Minds is back with more spooky fare for Halloween. At least, it gives the air of spookification. If you find mind meld hypnosis machines, panopticon-like modern interior design, and fever dreams about locusts spooky, then you’d probably find 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic adequately spooky.
After a botched exorcism in Latin America leads to a woman “accidentally” setting herself on fire, Father Lamont (Richard Burton) is tasked with investigating the life and work of the late Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), who gave his life performing the exorcism in the first movie. He travels to New York where Regan (Linda Blair) has no memory of her past possession, and undergoes psychiatric treatment at a cutting edge facility led by Dr. Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher).
They use an experimental “synchronizer” machine to mind meld each other to relive past trauma in order to treat it. Instead, it unlocks the dormant Pazuzu, the demon from the first movie. Now Lamont must travel from Washington D.C. to Africa to Washington D.C. again to investigate this demon and defeat it once and for all. His travels involve seeking out a man named Kokumo (James Earl Jones), once-possessed by Pazuzu and exorcised by Merrin, who may hold the key, and special powers, the defeat the demon once and for all.
Just at the start of spooky season, Your Stupid Minds reviews the 1983 horror anthology Nightmares, starring Emilio Estevez, Cristina Raines, and Lance Henriksen.
Originally planned as a TV pilot, instead Universal packaged it together and gave it a wide theatrical release. Despite this slapdash release, it still managed to top #3 at the box office. That’s the ‘80s for you!
The theme is kind of urban legends, but that labeling stretches credulity. The stories include: A cigarette-addicted woman (Raines) who goes out for a carton despite the threat of an escaped murderer on the loose; a video game-addicted “teen” (Estevez) who gets sucked into a mysterious new arcade game; a priest who’s lost his faith (Henriksen) menaced by a black pickup truck driven by the devil; and a suburban family terrorized by a mysterious creature in the attic.
Your Stupid Minds whisks you away to a magical fantasy land based on the L. Frank Baum novels that no one has read in the last 100 years. It's Disney's reimagined 1985 sequel Return to Oz!
In an effort to reinvigorate its flailing film releases, Disney bought the rights to the Wizard of Oz book series with the intention of revitalizing the franchise. One small issue though: the books are very dissimilar to MGM’s beloved The Wizard of Oz from 1939. No worries, the bones are still there: the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodsman. Oh, they’re barely in the sequels? Who are these guys? Gump? Jack Pumpkinhead? Tik-Tok? Also where are the ruby slippers? They’re silver? We have to pay MGM royalties to use the ruby ones? Oh dear.
Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) won’t shut up to Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) about this magical land of Oz where she murdered two witches and saved the Emerald City and all its diminutive residents. So naturally Aunt Em sends her off to a quack psychoanalyst who plans to electroshock this 10-year-old until she stops using her imagination.
She escapes the sanitarium and returns to Oz, teaming up with a talking chicken Billina (Denise Bryer), a robotic soldier Tik-Tok (Sean Barrett), Jack Pumpkinhead (Brian Henson) who is, let’s face it, just the Scarecrow, and Gump (Stephen Norrington) a talking moose head strapped to a flying couch.
Dorothy is determined to save the Scarecrow from the evil Nome King, and must solve a series of puzzles and challenges that were probably more interesting when they were in a children’s book. Come along with us on our flying Davenport on this wild adventure!
According to the Alamo Drafthouse website (and, more likely, the press packet that Neil sent to the Alamo Drafthouse) Cade: The Tortured Crossing is about: "An identical AI twin brother restores an old mysterious mental asylum. He takes it upon himself to mystically train the patients as warriors for humanity and justice." Abstractly, that is a correct description of about 5% of the film, but adding additional information, or editorializing about the content, would not adequately prepare you for seeing this on the silver screen.
In a way, this is Neil's most ambitious film, combining his love of stock footage and indifference toward directing actors, he has chosen to eschew actual sets entirely, and composite greenscreened every single character into a dream-like void of proportionally disorienting stock photos and footage, even when using a real set (like a repeated scene of a man plopping into a dingy bed) would have been cheaper and more realistic.
If you haven't seen Twisted Pair, you will not be at a disservice, as basically nothing carries over into Cade except that there are two identical twin brothers, both played by Breen, and they have mystical computer powers. If you’ve never seen a Breen (such as our guest Austin) it's probably the second most baffling experience you can have being introduced to him (aside from Pair, which is probably his most impenetrable and least audience friendly).
So come with us on this journey, and we'll tell of our theater experiences seeing Neil Breen's newest masterpiece.
In honor of Meg 2: The Trench bombing at the box office, we decided to take a look back at its more financially successful predecessor, 2018’s The Meg! What if Jaws, but bigger?
Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is a world-renowned underwater saving people guy. When he tries to rescue a submarine that was hit by something big (I’m guessing a Meg) he is unable to save everyone and is accused of cowardice. Jonas now hides in Thailand drowning his sorrows in low ABV beers.
Meanwhile, a research station funded by Muskian billionaire Morris (Rainn Wilson) is trying to discover an even deeper layer within the Mariana Trench. They discover the layer, but are hit by something big (I’m guessing a Meg) so they ask Jonas for help. Can they defeat the Meg, or will he eat the entire station? You’ll have to listen to find out.
To complement Barbie’s wild success at the box office, Your Stupid Minds reviews a different toy tin-in movie, but a bad one! It’s 1985’s The Care Bears Movie!
A man who runs an orphanage, Mr. Cherrywood (Mickey Rooney), tells his orphans a story about two other orphans who learn the value of friendship or caring or not listening to an evil book, or something. Jason (Sunny Besen Thrasher) and Kim (Cree Summer) are befriended by the Care Bears, some cutesy little creatures who live in the sky city of Care-a-Lot.
However, a neglected and bullied magician’s assistant Nicholas (Hadley Kay) finds an evil book who convinces him to cast evil spells to get children to stop caring. Can the Care Bears save Nicholas? Will they befriend a new group of equally toyetic animals? Do the Care Bears have a boat? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Your Stupid Minds covers one of the most infamous erotic thrillers of all time, 1993's Body of Evidence, starring Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Jürgen Prochnow, Frank Langella, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, and more!
When millionaire Andrew Marsh (Michael Forest) is found dead in his sprawling mansion with a bunch of kinky sexy sex toys around him, everyone immediately suspects his kinky sexy sex girlfriend Rebecca Carlson (Madonna). She is arrested and sent to trial two hours later. Her lawyer, Frank Dulaney (Dafoe) has his work cut out for him to prove her innocence. Can he establish reasonable doubt against the prosecution’s argument that she sexed Marsh to death with a mysterious lethal drug known as "cocaine" in order to get his $8 million inheritance?
More importantly, can Frank resist her sexual advances and remain true to his wife (Moore)? Also how do you treat third degree burns from a gallon of candle wax dumped on your naked chest?
Note: The episode originally aired April 19, 2017.
Chris is in Portland cycling around under the protection of Antifa, so we're doing a repeat. To read the show notes, go to the original episode. Enjoy!
Your Stupid Minds gets down with the sickness with the 2001 Jet Li film The One! The movie that invented multiverses! [citation needed]
Yulaw (Jet Li) has discovered one weird trick to make himself all-powerful: If he kills all his other selves in the 124 other multiverses, their power transfers to him and he becomes the titular The One. Time cops hate him!
After killing one of the two remaining Jet Lis, he travels to the final multiverse after a space prison escape to kill his final self, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputy Gabe (Jet Li), married to veterinarian T.K. (Carla Gugino). But time cops Roedecker (Delroy Lindo) and Funsch (Jason Statham, attempting some sort of accent) are on him every step of the way.
Can Gabe defeat his other self, or will he succumb to a similar fate? Or can they live together in harmony as The Twos? And what do all the other multiverse Carla Guginos look like? We want to know!
Some Notes:
- Featuring the most early 2000s soundtrack of all time, with Linkin Park, Godsmack, Disturbed, TWO Drowning Pool songs, and TWO Papa Roach songs.
- Apparently Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was originally tied to this movie, back in a time when that was a somewhat novel concept.
Your Stupid Minds reviewed 2004’s Catwoman LIVE on the Exhibit Floor at Comicpalooza on Friday, May 26, 2023! Listen to us leave our respective metaphorical basements for the FIRST TIME to bring the bad movie gospel to the masses!
Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a mind-mannered artist and graphic designer at a major cosmetics company. The company has a new product, Beau-line, that reverses aging as long as you keep using it, but makes you hideously scarred like the Heath Ledger Joker if you stop. After being bullied by her boss George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) to deliver her updated ad designs to a spooky tube-laden makeup factory at midnight, she is killed and resurrected by divine CGI cats to become Catwoman!
Catwoman uses her new special powers for good, such as: beating up her neighbors for playing Hoobastank too loud, beating up some jewel thieves to steal the jewels themselves, basketball, and whipping. In her effort to bring her killers to justice, she runs afoul of the real power behind Beau-line, George’s wife Laurel (Sharon Stone). Catwoman is framed for murder, but will her new nice cop boyfriend Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt, playing a lone wolf) believe her? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Some Notes:
- For the first time ever, one of our episodes can be marked "clean" in iTunes.
Leading up to our appearance at Comicpalooza, we finally gave in to the hype and reviewed one of the most notorious and meme-worthy comic book movies of all time: 2022's Morbius!
Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has a blood disease that makes his blood not good and he has to walk with crutches. He travels to Costa Rica’s Cerro de la Muerte to capture a tube full of vampire bats in the hopes he can study them and reverse his bad blood disease.
The cure works, but as a result he turns into a cool vampire. His childhood friend Milo (Matt Smith) finds out he’s a cool vampire and wants to be a cool vampire too and he steals the vampire goo and turns into a cool bad vampire. They have a vampire fight and one of them wins (guess which one). Michael Keaton shows up at the end for some reason.
Comicpalooza Update: We're on the schedule! Your Stupid Minds will be at the Main Podcast Stage on the Exhibit Floor on Friday, May 26 at 4:30! Come by and watch us talk about Catwoman LIVE! You might also get a special Catwoman prize.
Anyone check the Comicpalooza schedule lately? Your Stupid Minds will be at the Main Podcast Stage on the Exhibit Floor on Friday, May 26 at 4:30!
Buy your pass to the con and come see us talk Catwoman LIVE!
Your Stupid Minds returns to ninjas with Cannon’s Nine Deaths of the Ninja from 1985, starring Sho Kosugi, Anthony Kiedis's dad, and Harlan Crow’s ex sister-in-law.
The team go to the Philippines and there’s some mild ninja stuff, Jennifer shoots some dude with an epoxy gun, and Sho Kosugi’s real sons play pranks on the terrorists.
A reminder: Your Stupid Minds will be at this year’s Comicpalooza in Houston, Texas, to discuss Halle Berry’s Catwoman LIVE! The convention is Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, so come check us out!
Some Notes:
- Emilia Crow and Robert Trammell Crow's divorce was covered in the February 1990 issue of Texas Monthly in a piece called The $76 Million Divorce. Robert is the late brother of Harlan Crow, the Nazi memorabilia-loving billionaire and Justice Clarence Thomas's BFF.
Your Stupid Minds comes at you with our fifth X-Men related movie, this time it’s the 2019 flop Dark Phoenix, another halfhearted attempt to adapt the Dark Phoenix saga without bothering with the Phoenix saga.
The X-Men are assigned a mission by the president to save some astronauts stuck in space. Though the mission is successful, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is blasted with an evil space cloud that starts to make her act cool. However, the coolness goes too far when she can’t control her new power. She tries to learn more about her past, and comes across Magneto’s (Michael Fassbender) mutant island sanctuary of Genosha (though in this movie it looks like a small plot of land in western Connecticut).
Meanwhile, Vuk (Jessica Chastain), a shapeshifting alien of the D’Bari race, is looking for Jean so she can... take the power, harness the power, trick Jean into helping her? It isn’t entire clear. But she’s evil.
Can the X-Men save Jean, or will this conflict tear them apart? Will Disney reboot the franchise after their Fox acquisition? How many times can we predict the second part of every line in this movie? How much was Hans Zimmer paid for this killer score? You’ll have to listen to find out (though we don’t answer most of these questions).
Also a quick update: Your Stupid Minds will be at this year’s Comicpalooza in Houston, Texas, to discuss Halle Berry’s Catwoman LIVE! The convention is Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, so come check us out!
Big news! Your Stupid Minds is part of the Comicpalooza Podcast Partnership Program! If you attend the convention (May 26-28 in Houston) you may get an opportunity to see us perform LIVE! Details forthcoming.
Peter and David Falcone (played by Peter and David Paul, respectively, since it’s entirely possible they are incapable of responding to any first name but their own) are two muscle-bound goofballs who need money to open their own Italian restaurant. When they stop a trio of assassins in a playground in which they just happen to be hanging out, the target of the assassination, Frank (Jared Martin) hires them to guard his two nephews.
Frank has turned state’s witness and plans to testify against an evil mob-like guy Leland Stromm (George Lazenby) for dumping toxic waste improperly. The two goons go to Frank’s mansion in their monster truck to guard the nephews, but wait a minute… the nephews are also… twins???
If you’ve seen Mr. Nanny you know how this goes. The twins, Bradley and Steven (Christian and Joseph Cousins) enact a series of escalating “pranks” on their guardians that border on (or are) attempted first degree murder. Eventually the twin sets become friends, but can they stay out of danger in time for the uncle to testify?
Your Stupid Minds covers 1982’s Zapped!, a post-Porky’s teen sex comedy where a teenage boy acquires telekinetic powers and uses them mostly to pop girls’ shirts open.
Barney (Scott Baio) is a typical high school nerd (he wears glasses, you see), with free rein over his own science laboratory in the school, dosing mice with whiskey to see if they swim better while drunk. Somehow this results in the titular zapping, and he gains the ability to move objects with his mind. At first his hormones mostly control the power, as numerous ladies’ tops are flung open, but soon enough his awful friend Peyton (Willie Aames) convinces him to use his powers beyond just sexual humiliation. Soon enough Barney is cheating at baseball, cheating at roulette, terrorizing a model plane enthusiast at the park for no reason, you get the idea.
There are numerous other side plots to get this thing well beyond feature length, including a drinking contest at Magic Mountain, a dream sequence involving Scatman Crothers, Albert Einstein, and cartoon salami, a Star Trek parody, and a sexual romp between Principal Coolidge (Robert Mandan) and teacher Ms. Burnhart (Sue Ane Langdon).
Barney starts to feel wary about the use of his powers, but not enough to stop him from enacting an inevitable Carrie parody at the prom, but by tearing off everyone’s clothes instead of murdering them (spoiler for this movie, and Carrie, I suppose).
Your Stupid Minds tackles a prequel no one’s ever heard of to a movie no one ever saw. It’s 2022’s R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned!
Did you know Frank Miller’s The Spirit isn’t the only Spirit movie out there? There’s also an almost unaired 1987 made-for-TV movie adaptation! And it also isn’t very good!
Denny Colt (Sam J. Jones of Flash Gordon fame) is a straitlaced cop who comes to town to investigate the death of his mentor Sevrin (Philip Baker Hall). It has something to do with art and artifact forgery and he’s going to get to the bottom of it. But before he can even get started, he’s shot in the gut and falls off a pier. He returns as… The Spirit! Except he isn’t dead (just injured). He hangs out in a cemetery with his sidekick Eubie (Bumper Robinson) and is romantically pursed by the commissioner’s daughter Ellen (Nana Visitor).
His special powers? Well… he can punch guys slightly better than other guys (but not if there are more than 2-3). He can also get knocked unconscious several times without any permanent brain damage because he’s already pretty dumb. He also has the ability to instantly generate tiny form-fitting masks when the occasion arises.
Available (for the time being) on the Internet Archive.
Here we go again! Your Stupid Minds covers another much maligned Pinocchio movie, this time the 2022 Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and instantly dumped on Disney+.
Geppetto (Tom Hanks) is a sad old man who makes a wooden boy named, you guessed it, Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is there, there’s the fox and the cat, Pleasure Island, Luke Evans appears, there’s a whale. You’ve seen the 1940 Pinocchio. You know the deal.
Added to this one: a puppet love interest, some forgettable songs, some lines about “influencers” for the Zoomers, and lots of opportunities for 3D things that you’ll probably never see since this never went to theaters. Lorraine Bracco is a seagull.
Your Stupid Minds has maybe the quickest turnaround on a movie and reviews a Hallmark Channel original Christmas picture that came out on Friday. It’s the classic tale of an optometrist falling in love with a colorblind hunk: The Most Colorful Time of the Year (2022)!
Dr. Michelle (Katrina Bowden, a.k.a. Cerie Xerox from 30 Rock) is a widowed single mom with a loser ex-boyfriend who highly suspects that her daughter’s science teacher Mr. Stevens (Christopher Russell) is colorblind. This is because he is overly elusive when asked to identify colors. She signs him up for an experimental trial for a pair of glasses that allow him to see color, but he is resistant. He also hates Christmas, presumably because of all the colors.
Eventually he puts them on, and loves Christmas. He also mentions a classified secret government eye test he took, and then never mentions it again. But there’s a catch: Michelle’s jerk ex boyfriend Mark (R Austin Ball) is back in the picture. Even though she hates him, and her daughter also hates him, will they get back together? You’ll just have to see (eh?) to find out.
On this episode of Your Stupid Minds, Chris’s sister Sarah returns to the podcast because she’s got a stick in her craw regarding the surprise sleeper summer hit Where the Crawdads Sing. Based on the book of the same name by Delia Owens.
Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is accused of the murder of the high school’s star quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson) and tells her entire life story to defense attorney Tom Milton (David Strathairn). Her family, including her abusive father, abandoned her at their North Carolina swamp farm so she spent her childhood fending for herself.
A nice swamp boy Tate (Taylor John Smith) teaches her to read, and eventually she starts dating Chase. But the townsfolk only know her as “Swamp Girl,” the disgusting swamp creature who kind of resembles a normal little girl who sometimes doesn’t wear shoes.
Will she be found guilty? Did she do it? Why did Sarah get kicked out of her book club? Did author Delia Owens have anything to do with that poacher’s murder in the 90s? You’ll just have to listen to find out. We don’t have any answers for that last question, though.
Your Stupid Minds goes big this episode with a Giganotosaurus-sized episode all about Jurassic World: Dominion! Hey guys, remember Jurassic Park? This movie sure does!
After dinosaurs entered the real world in the last movie, they now roam the planet, eating foxes and nesting on the Empire State Building and whatnot. But also, giant prehistoric locusts are destroying crops. And there’s a clone girl from the last movie and Biosyn, the once main competitor of InGen, wants to find her. After she’s kidnapped, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who serve as her parents of sorts, rush off to find her.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) try to solve the mystery of the giant locusts and go off to Biosyn’s headquarters to find answers, with the help of, you guessed it Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Then they all fight dinos for a million hours and rehash every moment from the first movie that they didn’t already do in Jurassic World. Remember Dodgson? Remember the shaving cream can? They’re back!
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds celebrates its 200th episode with a movie we probably should have reviewed already: 1986’s Chopping Mall, directed by Jim Wynorski. 80s teens. Killer robots in the mall. Barbara Crampton. What more do you want?Four young people and their four companions stay in the mall overnight to have a beer-fueled... orgy, I guess, inside of a furniture store. But there’s a small problem, a lightening storm has caused the security robots that guard the mall to go crazy and turn into killbots! Also, the mall is completely locked down with steel security doors at night (probably violating local fire codes, as one IMDb trivia writer points out). Will the young people make it out alive? And what of their companions?
Direct download.Next up in our mini-series of “80s Halloween Movies the Criterion Channel picked for us,” it’s Paul Schrader’s 1982 “remake,” of sorts, of the 1942 movie of the same name. It’s Cat People!
Orphan Irena (Nastassja Kinski) arrives in New Orleans to be reunited with her long-lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell), who is especially affectionate and nuzzly at her arrival. When he disappears for a few days, she finds herself drawn to a black leopard at the zoo. Meanwhile she’s falling in love with zookeeper Oliver (John Heard), who coaxed her out of a tree with some canned tuna or something.
Paul returns and continues to try to have sex with his sister. It turns out they both are descended from cat people. They can have sex with each other without consequences, but if they have sex with a person they turn into cats. The only way to turn back into a human is to kill a human. Paul does a very bad job of explaining this.
Will Irena embrace her cat people roots? Will she never love a human? Or will she give in to her desires and have sex with Oliver to bring out her inner cat? You’ll have to see for yourself. If it helps, there is a kickin’ David Bowie title theme song.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds takes advantage of the Criterion Channel doing our curation for us by choosing a spook-em-up in its 80s horror series: another Lucio Fulci movie, it’s 1981’s The House by the Cemetery!Dr. Norman Boyle (played by the incredibly Italian Paolo Malco) his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and their cherubic, etherial son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) move temporarily into a creepy New England house so the dad can do research or something.Over time it turns out this creepy house is, like, really creepy. Bob is clued in by another cherubic, etherial child Mae (Silvia Collatina) warning him against going to the house. A series of gruesome, Fulci-style murders later (not counting the one in the cold open that has nothing to do with anything), and Norman is determined to save his family from this malevolent force.Some Notes:
- Available on the Criterion Channel.
- See our last episode on Fulci, City of the Living Dead.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds releases a bonus second episode in two weeks to make up for being a week late last week. In any case, now we’re caught up. This time around we review a movie that was basically lost until 2013 when it turned up in a batch of 1,000 pornographic 35mm prints donated to the American Genre Film Archive. It’s 1976’s (or 1975, depending on who you ask) The Astrologer!
Alexander (played by writer, director, and producer Craig Denney) is a con man at a carnival who goes to Kenya to steal some diamonds with an oil baron and his wife. He gets captured and imprisoned (possibly more than once, it isn’t clear), gets out and steals some cursed diamonds.
Eventually he’s able to sell them in Tahiti and heads back to Southern California to find his fortune the traditional way: by starting an entertainment empire of a hit movie and six hit television shows all about astrology. Everything starts to unravel eventually and it ends with a quote from King Lear. Also starring Denney’s cousin Darrien Earle (named Darrien in the movie), who was also Lee Iacocca’s third wife.
Some Notes:
- This movie never got a home release because it has a number of unlicensed music (mostly from the Moody Blues) they never got the rights to. And also because the movie is really bad. Paramount took it down from YouTube, but it's on archive.org for the time being.
- I could provide an avalanche of trivia in this section, but you'd be better off reading the history of this film on Paste and Matchbox Cine. These are some excellent write-ups for this truly bizarre piece of vanity outsider art.
- Not to be confused with James Glickenhaus's The Astrologer, the also low budget movie released around the same time.
- Watch the purely insane dinner scene and tell me you don't want to watch this.
Direct download.
It's time to Geostorm! After a one-week delay, we're back covering one of the worst movies about a global weather controlling satellite network of 2017, it's Geostorm, directed by frequent Roland Emmerich collaborator Dean Devlin.
Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) is a world famous satellite designer who is the creator of Dutch Boy, a satellite network tasked with controlling the weather to combat the ravages of climate change. His bad boy ways cause him to get kicked off the project, and his brother Max (Jim Sturgess) is put in charge.
But, Dutch Boy causes series of freak weather occurrences so Max asks his brother to go up to the International Space Station to investigate. It turns out these aren't glitches, but something more sinister. Also starring Andy Garcia as President Andrew Palma, Ed Harris as Secretary of State Leonard Dekkom who is definitely not the bad guy, and Abbie Cornish as Secret Service Agent Sarah Wilson.
Your Stupid Minds covers one of the many movies leaving HBO Max at the end of the month in the platform’s effort pre-merger to make their streaming service really bad! This one isn't a huge loss though. It’s 2014’s Dracula Untold!
Vlad Drăculea (Luke Evans) is Prince of Wallachia and Transylvania and mostly a good dad and leader, despite some light impaling he’s done in the past. Sultan Mehmed II is leader of the Ottoman Empire and eyeing his territory, and also wants to take his son Ingeras (Art Parkinson) as a Janissary, so Vlad meets up with a disgusting vampire he met in a cave (Charles Dance) and strikes a deal with him to borrow his vampire powers for three days so he can kill the entire Turkish army and turn back into a human so long as he doesn’t feed.
Vlad’s wife Mierna (Sarah Gadon) is a little peeved he didn’t talk to her first, but eventually is okay with it and he tears through the Turkish army with his bat powers. Can he resist temptation and return to human form, or will he become a vampire forever? Obviously the latter, since Dracula is, like, a thing. So no mystery there.
Direct download.In honor of Nick being in Hawaii this week, we're doing another YSM Classics with our May 30, 2016 episode Hard Ticket to Hawaii.
If you want to read the original show notes, you can go to the original post. Aloha!
Direct download.
Blockade Entertainment went to Sony with a dream. “What if,” they said, “we took one of your lesser PS3 exclusive games and used old existing game assets to make a big budget movie?” Sony said “let’s do it!” and fished around in their couch cushions for enough money to slap this together on the cheap using a third string Korean animation studio. What we have is 2014’s Heavenly Sword, based on the 2007 game that no one remembered even at the time.
Nariko (Anna Torv) is an orphan part of a nomadic group of warriors tasked with protecting the “Heavenly Sword,” a powerful sword that is magic or something. But evil King Bohan (Alfred Molina, NOT Andy Serkis as IMDb claims. Serkis voiced him in the game) has made a pact with the Raven God and wants the sword to do evil things.
Bohan attacks the group’s base (I thought they were nomadic?) and Nariko is tasked with finding her long lost brother Loki (Thomas Jane), who is the chosen one and can use Heavenly Sword powers to defeat Bohan. Nariko goes on her quest with Kai (Ashleigh Ball) a violent little girl who turns out to be her sister. Also it turns out her dad is the group’s leader Master Shen (Nolan North) who hates girls.
Direct download.
After some heavy material about kids in King Arthur’s court and 3 ninjas, we decided on a lighter fare this time. What about a serial killer who kills and skins people? And also his actual name is Skinner? It’s 1993’s Skinner, directed by Ivan Navy.
Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi) is a mind-mannered nerd renting a room out to innocent housewife Kerry (Ricki Lake). But he has a horrible secret he’s barely able to maintain: he’s a serial killer who skins his victims and wears their skin. His name is Skinner.
Heidi (Traci Lords) is one of his previous victims who’s been hunting him down for five years, which mainly consists of her shooting up old timey 19th century opioids and then following Skinner to a river and mumbling about how much she hates him.
There’s also Kerry’s jerk husband Geoff (David Warshofsky) and a sleazy flop house owner Eddie (Richard Schiff). Will Heidi kill the killer before he strikes again? If she does, will we the audience even see it since this movie is shot and lit horribly? You’ll just have to watch to find out! Also, please don’t watch this.
Direct download.
This time, Your Stupid Minds reviews a forgettable 90s family movie that is available on Disney+, 1995’s A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. A kid travels back in time (or to an alternate universe where King Arthur actually existed) to 6th century England to show medieval people the wonders of Rollerblades and portable CD players.
Click to watch the trailer, since Disney has locked this shit down and you can't embed the trailer.
Calvin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) falls through a crack in the earth after sucking at a baseball game and finds himself in Camelot. He spends most of his time in this extremely strange situation trying to court King Arthur’s (Joss Ackland) daughter Princess Katey (Paloma Baeza). But also an evil Lord Belasco (Art Malik) has a nefarious plot to marry the king’s other daughter Sarah (Kate Winslet), even though she’s in love with the jousting instructor Master Kane (Daniel Craig). Calvin defeats the bad guy mostly though 90s catchphrases and gadgets.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds moves in reverse chronological order through the 3 Ninjas franchise with 1994’s 3 Ninjas Kick Back, the second movie in the franchise. If you saw the original 3 Ninjas and thought "this doesn’t appeal to me, a dumb babby, enough," then this is the movie for you!
Grandpa Mori (Victor Wong) and one third of the kids from the original movie are back and they’re going to Japan! ...Eventually. First they have to compete in the dirtiest Little League game of all time, and then a luggage switch-em-up forces Colt (Max Elliott Slade), Rocky (Sean Fox), and Tum Tum (J. Evan Bonifant) to commit identify fraud to go to Japan and bring a sacred dagger to their grandpa in time for the end of a ninja tournament.
But who is this? Evil bad guy Koga (Sab Shimono) is trying to steal the dagger for reasons. And he’s using his dumb nephew and his two dumb friends to do it! Also who is this Japanese girl Miyo (Caroline Junko King) who is so good at ninja stuff? And why won’t this kid on the opposing baseball team stop farting? And why does Tum Tum break the fourth wall at the very end? You’ll just have to watch to find out!
Some Notes:
- This was filmed after 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up and Rocky and Tumtum were recast, thus why the trailer rushes by their faces so quickly in the opening of the trailer.
- Reportedly Kim Jong Un's favorite movie as a child. Reported by no one except for an anonymous IMDb trivia item.
- "Glam," the bleach blonde surfer dude nephew of the villain, is played by Dustin Nguyen, who plays Zing in the show Warrior, and he's really good!
- Another return of Your Stupid Minds all-star Don Stark, who plays the umpire in this, the sheriff in 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up, some guy in Santa with Muscles, and Donna's dad in That 70s Show.
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In honor of the podcast's tenth anniversary (and because of scheduling conflicts following a long holiday weekend) we decided to repost what is, according to our analytics, Your Stupid Minds's most download episode: 1996's Skyscraper, starring Anna Nicole Smith and that guy from T-Force.
If you want the show notes for episode 134, you can go to the original post. Enjoy!
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds continues its “semi-recent movies that actually aren’t that bad and available on Disney Plus” series with the third Narnia movie that Disney dumped and neither of us got around to seeing until now. It’s 2010’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader!Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) are stuck in northern England waiting out the Blitz with their annoying cousin Eustace (Will Poulter) when they’re sucked into a painting and end up back in Narnia. They board King Caspian’s (Ben Barnes) ship the Dawn Treader and must recover some magic swords to stop an evil green mist from ravaging the land.Some Notes: After Prince Caspian underperformed at the box office, Disney quibbled with Walden Media over the budget (Disney wanted it to be $100 million, Walden wanted it to be something less absurd). Disney left the project and 20th Century Fox picked it up. When Disney bought Fox, Dawn Treader* came back to them.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds accidentally reviews two Kaya Scodelario movies in a row by covering a film shot in 2014 and intended to release in 2015. Instead it was dumped unceremoniously into theaters in January of this year. It’s 2022’s The King’s Daughter! Directed by Sean McNamara (3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain).
Marie-Josephe (Scodelario) is an orphan brought to 18th century Versailles for unknown reasons. It turns out she’s, get this, the king’s daughter. Specifically, the daughter of King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnon). So she must navigate the court intrigue of the palace while she finds true love.
ALSO, the king wants to live forever, so he uses his quack court doctor Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) to concoct a plan wherein if he eats the heart of a mermaid during an eclipse, he will achieve immortality. So the king hires a Captain Yves (Benjamin Walker) to capture a mermaid (Bingbing Fan) to do the deed. Will he go through with it? Will he have a change of heart? Did anyone see this movie? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Some Notes:
- In the time between shooting and release, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker met, dated, got engaged, got married, and had two children.
- One of the main reasons it was on the shelf for so long was Bingbing Fan, who plays the mermaid, got into some tax issues with the Chinese government and is basically blacklisted. Since this film had a lot of Chinese funding, the presumption was they were waiting for the scandal to blow over so it could release in China. It never did, so it was dumped into theaters this year.
- Also this is technically an anniversary episode. The Your Stupid Minds podcast began just over ten years ago: May 2, 2012. 🥳
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Your Stupid Minds features another underperforming pandemic film with this hard reboot of the Resident Evil franchise, removing Alice and the laser puzzles of the Paul W.S. Anderson films and sticking to something closer to the video game remakes. It’s 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City!Claire (Kaya Scodelario) is a former orphan from Raccoon City who returns to visit her brother Chris (Robbie Amell) and tell him something’s not right with the town. She is almost immediately proven right when a warning siren goes off and the T-Virus zombified townsfolk start attacking everyone. Can Claire, Chris, and the rest of the S.T.A.R.S. police squad escape the city before it explodes? Can they cram as much stuff from the games as they can? Will Jill Sandwich make an appearance? You’ll have to watch to find out!
To help you play along to the arbitrary rating, here's the GamePro Game Rating System:
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds returns to the ninja movie well in our futile attempt to find a bad one. Surely the huge flop reboot based on toys will do the trick, right? Right? It's 2021's Snake Eyes: G.I. Origins.
Snake Eyes (Henry Golding) witnesses his father's murder as a child, and he vows to get big and buff and seek revenge. When evil Yakuza guy Kenta (Takehiro Hira) says he'll give him his father's killer if he works for him, Snake Eyes agrees. It begins when he's asked to execute a traitor in the gang's midst, who turns out to be Tommy (Andrew Koji) heir to the Arashikage ninja clan.
I can't get into much more without spoiling the plot, so let's just say there are some cool ninja fights and a glowing jewel that vaporizes dudes. And of course Cobra is involved.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds returns to the well of meh Disney movies with an unfaithful adaptation of the broom dancing sequence from Fantasia. It’s 2010’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice!In a flashback to 740 A.D., Merlin (James A. Stephens) is betrayed by this trusted apprentice Horvath (Alfred Molina) and slain by the evil sorcerer Morgana (Alice Krige). A bunch of years later, in 2000 A.D., a kid named Dave (played by Jay Baruchel when he grows up) wanders into a curio shop and is given a magic dragon ring by Balthazar (Nicolas Cage). Ten MORE years later, in 2010 A.D., they must work together to stop Horvath from freeing Morgana, who will destroy the world or something.Some Notes:* Jay Bachual's only Disney role to date.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds covers the dingy, sociopathic, completely unnecessary sequel to Saturday Night Fever: the Sylvester Stallone-directed Staying Alive from 1983. And to sweeten the pot, we have a special guest: author and Plan 9 from Outer Space lover Katharine Coldiron!
It’s six years after 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, and Tony Manero (John Travolta) is a struggling dancer trying to make it in the big city. His on-again-off-again girlfriend Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes) supports him, despite his general flakiness and constant desire to cheat on her and treat her like a doormat. When Jackie scores a spot in a hit Broadway show, Tony ingratiates himself with/seduces the star Laura (Finola Hughes) and gets himself into the laughably titled and orchestrated Satan’s Alley. Tony sleeps with Laura, then becomes weird and possessive. Can he make it in the show? Or will his machismo sabotage his aspirations?
Our guest, Katharine Coldiron, has a new monograph out about Plan 9 from Outer Space, a movie that inspired our namesake and is near and dear to our hearts. It’s called, appropriately, Plan 9 from Outer Space and it is available through PS Publishing. You can find it in hardback or ebook and is also available from Amazon.
You can also find Katharine on her website, Twitter, and the Dana Gould Hour.
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What is Vanquish (2021)? Is it an action film? Is it a money laundering scheme? Is it a sweetheart deal with some new Uzbekistani streaming service? Whatever is is, it isn’t good.Retired hero cop Damon (Morgan Freeman) was paralyzed in the line of duty and therefore Freeman does not have to stand up to leave the room throughout the entire movie. He now lives in his giant glass mansion calling corrupt cops on the phone and scheming criminal deeds. He decides to “help” his ex-hitwoman caretaker Victoria (Ruby Rose) by kidnapping her sick daughter and making Victoria do five cash pickups in one night to get her back. However, not each pickup is what it seems. Is there some ulterior motive for his plan? Yes.Some Notes:
- Available for free (with ads) on IMDb TV.
- In the episode, Nick says that Spy Kids was shot on digital. This is incorrect. Spy Kids 2 and Spy Kids 3D were shot on digital, while Spy Kids was 35mm. We regret the error.
- For our zoomer fans who are unaware of pre-2017 memes, here's the full audio of the Christian Bale rant on the set of Terminator Salvation.
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Your Stupid Minds returns to its alternating YA theme with a book adaptation that Miramax and Disney had big hopes for, and then was dumped on Disney+ in the middle of the pandemic without so much as a $20 premium to watch it. It's 2020's Artemis Fowl, directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh.
Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw) is a super smart smarmy super genius whose mom is dead and dad (Artemis Fowl I, played by Colin Farrell) keeps leaving for long stretches of time for strange and sexy adventures. But one of dad's adventures puts him in hot water with a mysterious fairy (who looks like Ronan the Accuser) who kidnaps the dad and demands Artemis II give them the Aculos, an egg-shaped MacGuffin that has a bunch of power and stuff. Can Artemis save his dad? Using an elaborate heist-like plan and high charisma buff? Yeah.
Some Notes:
- The plot to this movie veers wildly from the original book. In the novel, Artemis holds a fairy for random, demanding a ton of leprechaun gold. Then, almost as an afterthought, he pays half the gold to his captive to cure his mom's insanity.
- Way too much gravely voice in this one.
- Available on Disney+.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds opens 2022 by covering Twitter’s latest punching bag: a Christian film where a group of German youth start a religious movement in an oppressive dystopian society by spray painting Jesus fish on trees and mailing people DVDs. It’s 2025 - The World enslaved by a Virus (2021).Taken directly from the description: “It’s 2025, The world as we have known in 2020 does not exist anymore. The Virus changed the world, and communism is all over the place. A global world language developed, meetings are illegal, traveling is illegal, and Christianity is illegal. A group of Christians is trying to fight back.”Roy (writer and director Joshua Wesely) is a young(ish) man trying to be Christian in a world where it’s banned. He and his sister Hannah (Antonia Joy Speer) spray Jesus fish around the place until Hannah is shot by one of the government’s goons. They eventually ban together with an ex-Marine, a hacker, and a woman on the inside named Leila (played by Wesely’s now-wife) to spread the gospel and keep out of reach of the authorities.This description sounds a lot cooler than what is actually in the film. The reality of what’s presented is a muddy, sloppy, half-written mess of meandering scenes, almost complete lack of conflict, sub-iMovie special effects, and ear-bleedingly bad Christian rock songs played in their entirety.Due to the recent heat from this film and the suspicious and unconfirmed age difference between Wesely and his now wife, both of their Instagram accounts are currently set to private. We’ll go into more detail about that in the episode.Some Notes: We probably linked to this video the last time Chris made this reference, but here's that clip of Julia Stiles talking about Neuromancer or whatever in the 1990s show Ghostwriter*. * The IMDb trivia section for this movie has been completely nuked because people kept vandalizing it (but not with Jesus fishs). * Possibly the most offensive part of this film is Leila's atrocious milk to cereal ratio in the breakfast scene. * Available on Amazon Prime and Tubi, but please watch it with a friend. * Your Stupid Minds has committed to returning to our previous schedule of an episode every other Thursday in 2022. Lucky you.
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Just in time for Christmas, we review our third Nutcracker movie in five years, 2018’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms! Eventually filmmakers will run out of ways to ruin this classic public domain story.
Clara’s (Mackenzie Foy) mom is dead. She and her family are sad. Her dead mom gives her a toy egg with a lock but no key. Clara goes to a Christmas party, talks to a weird scientist Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman) and finds herself in another realm (or realms? We’re not entirely sure which realm is what) with a Sugar Plum fairy (Keira Knightley), a Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), a guy dressed as an 18th century soldier but is just a regular dude but I guess he’s the Nutcracker but his name is Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), and some rats.
There’s something about finding the key, yes the key to the egg but also to a machine that does bad or good things. Some tin soldiers come to life and there’s a clown gang. There’s also some dancing.
1995’s Top Dog asks the big questions. Well, really one question: What would happen if we paired Chuck Norris with a dog to fight Neo-Nazi terrorists in San Diego and released it nine days after the Oklahoma City bombing? The answer is nothing good.
Reno (played by Betty the dog, uncredited) is a hero dog who plays by his own rules. After his human partner is killed by white supremacist terrorists, Reno teams up with loser drunk spin-kick cop Jake Wilder (Norris) to bust the case wide open. But there are some departures where Reno has to bust up a trap house, and watch the show Cops. Eventually they get around to stopping the terrorists.Some Notes:
- We don't actually know if ripping all the wires out of a C4 bomb will disarm it. So if you find yourself with an armed bomb under a limo that has the pope and the Jewish pope trapped inside it, it's best to leave it to the professionals.
- Top Dog noises provided by animal sounds expert Frank Welker.
Direct download.In honor of Halloween Kills slicing up the box office (and the holiday of Halloween in general) we reviewed a less successful foray into the franchise with possibly its worst entry, 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection!
After decapitating Michael Myers in the last film, the embarrassingly titled but by all accounts decent Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, this movie opens with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in a mental institution. The exposition nurse reveals that in a stunning plot twist that allows them to make more Halloween movies, Michael switched his outfit with that of an innocent father of three EMT, who was the person Laurie actually decapitated. Michael is still alive.
Laurie is in a constant state of pretend shock one year later, but lies in wait for Michael to come for her on Halloween so she can unleash her trap for him. Unfortunately for Laurie (and fortunately for Jamie Lee Curtis, who desperately wanted to stop making these movies) Michael slips out of the trap and kills her.
A year later, and unrelated to everything that just happened, some college students sign up to star in a livestreamed internet reality series called Dangertainment. After being recruited by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks), the cadre of horny teens are locked in Michael Myers’s childhood home and must search for clues as to why he’s so crazy. But what’s really crazy is Michael has been living under the house this entire time and emerges to kill them off!
Some Notes:
- Directed by Rick Rosenthal, who directed Halloween II.
- Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica remake) appears as Jen Danzig, I assume the daughter of Glenn.
- This movie continues with Halloween H20's continuity, which ignores Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I can't definitively say Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not canon; this universe may also contain an evil Irish toy company located in California that used pieces of Stonehenge placed into Halloween masks in order to turn millions of children into bugs and snakes when they watch a television commercial. I can't be 100% certain.
Direct download. Since we are completists, we circled back to watch Exit Wounds (2001). Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak and starring... well just switch out the cast from Cradle 2 the Grave but replace Jet Li with Steven Seagal. And add Michael Jai White, Jill Hennessy, Bill Duke, and the visage of Eva Mendes.
Orin Boyd (Seagal) is a loose cannon Detroit cop who is in a lot of trouble for saving the vice president’s life. As punishment, he must go to the the dreaded Precinct 15, the most corrupt precinct in the entire city. While there, Boyd has situations thrust upon where where he is required to Judo like fifty guys; whether it be the half dozen street punks trying to steal his truck, or the elaborate heist in the hall of records.
Through his bumbling, Boyd eventually figures out the force is crawling with corrupt cops trafficking heroin by soaking t-shirts in it and then drying them (yes, that’s their actual plan). Will he have to settle the score himself? Or will he have a little help from friend/foe Latrell (DMX)? Seagal also pummels a bouncer in the face with a chain for basically no reason.
Some Notes:
- For some inexplicable reason, the producers cast a yet-to-be-super-famous Eva Mendes in a small role, but completely re-dubbed her voice. In an interview on the Daily Show a few years later, Mendes claimed that a producer said she "didn't sound intelligent enough."
- In this movie, Michigan militia members disguise themselves as motorcycle cops and try to kill the vice president. Thus proving my theory (similar to "all helicopters in movies blow up") that all motorcycle cops in movies are evil (see: Exit Wounds, Magnum Force, Terminator 2).
- A helicopter also blows up in this movie when Seagal shoots a handgun that sounds like an Uzi at it.
- This a second time DMX Anthony Anderson Tom Arnold have stared in Cradle 2 the grave together (source)
Direct download.We’ll be honest. We were trying to watch Exit Wounds, the Andrzej Bartkowiak directed movie starring DMX, Anthony Anderson, Tom Arnold, and Steven Seagal. Somehow we mixed it up with Cradle 2 the Grave, directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak starring DMX, Anthony Anderson, Tom Arnold, and JET LI. We’re considering it an upgrade.
Anthony Fait (DMX) is a friendly jewel thief who steals from rich jerks and doesn’t use guns. With his crew Daria (Gabrielle Union), Tommy (Anderson), and Odion (Michael Jace), they break in somewhere and steal some mysterious black diamonds. Su (Li) calls Anthony and wants those stones. X won’t give it to him (what?) he won't give it to him. So Su beats up Odion in a subway.
Weirdly, Su turns out to be a good guy, because he’s trying to protect the stones from the evil Ling (Marc Dacascos), who steals Anthony’s daughter, which requires an MMA cage fight, backroom striptease, ATV street chase, and tank attack to get her and the stones back.
Some Notes:
- Just for fun, here's video from the X Gon' Give It To Ya mod for the Resident Evil 2 remake.
Direct download.Film critic, tabletop gaming enthusiast, and Trinity University alumnus Matthew Monagle joins Your Stupid Minds to talk about 2020’s The New Mutants, a film troubled by reshoots, company mergers, and a theatrical release right in the middle of a global pandemic.
Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) is brought to a mysterious facility after her entire family dies during a “tornado.” The facility’s sole employee, Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), tells her she’s a mutant (of the X-Men variety, not the post-apocalyptic) and she’s in this building for her own protection.
Dani meets other young mutants in the facility: Sam (Stranger Things’s Charlie Heaton), Rahne (Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams), Illyana (The Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor-Joy) and Roberto (Teen Wolf’s Henry Zaga), and together they try to take control of their powers (or discover what they are), figure out why they can’t leave, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (created by no one), and, if they have time, discover why their nightmares come to life and try to kill them.
If you’re wondering if this a) has anything to do with a certain “sinister” X-Men villain teased in a previous film, and b) if this will result in an entire New Mutants cinematic universe, the answer is yes and no.
Some Notes:
- You can find our special guest Matthew Monagle's written work on his Authory page. You can follow him on Twitter. He is a co-founder of Certified Forgotten, a podcast and website focused exclusively on the movies that have fallen through the cracks. He was also on the Hit Factory Podcast to talk about Ravenous, a Your Stupid Minds favorite.
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Strap yourself in and enjoy the ride for this fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek, aesthetically beautiful episode! Did you know Louise Linton, (possibly better known as the wife of Suicide Squad executive producer and former Trump treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin) produced, directed, wrote, and starred in her own movie about a girlboss serial killer? Did you know it's just as awful as I just described? Because that's 2021's Me You Madness baby!
Catherine (Linton) is a take-charge finance person who's rich, beautiful, confident, and also... murders and eats people? Whoa, talk about a twist! Unless you've seen American Psycho. But don't worry, this movie hangs a lampshade on that so this doesn't count as a ripoff. The movie (which takes place in modern day) also features a bunch of chart-topping '80s songs, just in case you forgot American Psycho took place in the '80s.
For the purposes of setting up this threadbare plot, Catherine catfishes a sexy conman Tyler (Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick) into renting a room in her hideous cavernous Malibu mansion in order to kill him. But things get complicated after an MDMA-fueled threesome, and Catherine starts to fall for him. Will sparks fly? No. Will they argue for the last third of the movie in a completely annoying way? Yes. Did Louise Linton hire a troll farm to spam positive reviews of her movie on Rotten Tomatoes? Almost certainly yes.
Some Notes:
- The sole IMDb trivia item is "Louise Linton came up with the concept for You Me Madness after falling asleep in a hot car following a trip to the pharmacy. She described a 'Doors-like vision' of an indigenous man telling her to make a movie about a girl-boss serial killer. So she did." It is most definitely completely made up.
- For juicier online content related to this movie, check out the Rotten Tomatoes user review section, which contains dozens of reviews from robot troll farms writing five star reviews two days after the movie came out. Including someone who claimed they watched it three times in a 24 hour period.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City contains two Michael Jackson songs: "Wanna Be Startin' Something," a definite b-side but a banger, and "Billie Jean," a definite a-side and also a banger.
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Hey, did you know a new Mortal Kombat movie comes out tomorrow? Huh, weird. Well, just by sheer coincidence, we reviewed 1997's Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, a movie reviled even by Mortal Kombat film franchise fans.
Shao Kahn (Brian Thompson), immediately at the conclusion of the first film, shows up to destroy the earth, breaking the rules of Mortal Kombat and rendering everything that happened in the last movie completely moot.
The remaining heroes Liu Kang (Robin Shou) and Kitana (Talisa Soto), as well as their non-union Mexican equivalents Rayden (James Remar) Sonya Blade (Sandra Hess) and Jax (Lynn 'Red' Williams) must team up once again to stop him. This time Liu Kang must unlock his Animality, thus saving his Babality for the nonexistent theatrically released second sequel.
Some Notes:
- Scorpion's Get 'n Go Outworld Kidnapping and Delivery Service: "I Get [Them] Over Here Then Get Outta Here!"
- Just for fun, here's Slate's Interview With the Guy Who Yells “Mortal Kombat” in the Theme for Mortal Kombat
- This may have been the first movie Nick saw where he realized that movies he thought he'd like could be bad.
- Available on HBO Max.
Direct download.Your Stupid Minds ends its two-movie cyborg series and jumps in to our tried and true “Worst of the Previous Year” mainstay. 2020 didn’t have a huge number of films to choose from, but luckily the first three months of the year, where the stinkiest movies usually reside, were relatively pandemic free. In January, Universal unceremoniously dumped Dolittle into theaters with little fanfare, and the shark critics (who can talk) swarmed on its carcass.
Dr. John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) is a doctor who can talk to animals. He also has a dead wife, so like all movies released in the last decade, he is stricken with grief, trauma, and depression. Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado) comes to him to say Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley) is sick and needs his expertise of talking to animals to cure her. Also, the lifelong lease for this properly is tied to the queen’s life and not his own for some reason.
Dolittle must sail to some place to get a book to go to another place to find the fruit of the Eden Tree to save the queen. He brings along his menagerie of CGI animals with unremarkable celebrity voices, including Emma Thompson as a parrot, Rami Malek as a gorilla, Kumail Nanjiani as an ostrich, John Cena as a polar bear, and so on. There’s also a kid named Stubbins (Harry Collett as a Tom Holland type, though Holland is also in the movie voicing a dog) who tags along, and Dolittle is chased by the villain Dr. Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen). And a whale shows up at some point. And a dragon poops out some bagpipes.
Some Notes:
- We don't understand voles and voles don't understand us.
- Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan for some reason. He's is known for writing Traffic and writing and directing Syriana.
- If you're going to have a dragon poop out some bagpipes, there should at least be some poop on the bagpipes.
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We continue our ad hoc mini cyborg series with a sequel to an Albert Pyun movie but not directed by Pyun: Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow.
Cash (a 17 year old Angelina Jolie in her first starring role) is a top-of-the-line cyborg created to seduce her company’s competitors and blow them up. Her and her karate instructor Colton Ricks (Elias Koteas) have a good rapport, but a mysterious mouth named Mercy (Jack Palance) connect with both of them on every available CRT television nearby.
Mercy helps them both escape and they’re on the run from competing cyborg hunters Chen (Karen Sheperd) and the unhinged Danny Bench (Billy Drago). They eventually find themselves at an outpost Fallout-style town where Colt must fight in a death match for the money to escape.
Trivia:
- Trigger Warning: 17 year old Angelina Jolie has an elaborate softcore sex scene in this. Jon Voight had her legally emancipated in order to do this movie and not have to be there to watch all the icky sex scenes (what a great dad!).
- If you want to throw up just like Angelina Jolie did after watching Cyborg 2, just read some of the wonderful IMDb user created trivia for this movie.
- Available to rent on Amazon Prime. Unless you want to do a trial of MovieSphere (whatever that is). Then it's free, or whatever.
Direct download.In a vague gesture toward Cyberpunk 2077, that game people used to complain about a month ago, Your Stupid Minds dips into Amazon Prime's vast archive of schlock and found 1992's Nemesis, directed by YSM mainstay Albert Pyun (Dangerously Close, Captain America).
Alex (Olivier Gruner, a Jean-Claude Van Damme type) is an LAPD cop with cyborg enhancements. He is tasked with finding his former partner and lover Jared (Marjorie Monaghan), who has gone rogue and allied with cyborg terrorists... or has she? He goes on his mission after a bomb is implanted into his heart without his consent.
Alex comes across various players in this confusing scenario, including cyborg babes, gang leader Angie-Liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a Lori Petty type named Max Impact (Merle Kennedy), his boss Farnsworth, a Mike Pence type (Tim Thomerson), and Billy, a Thomas Jane type (Thomas Jane). There are a bunch of shoot outs and some cyber eyeball gore. I think a Terminator attacks their helicopter. Some other cool stuff happens
Some Notes:
- Available on Amazon Prime.
- As previously mentioned, Thomas Jane has a small role as a naked sweaty smoking guy who almost immediately gets murdered.
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Legend has it every three years, Danielle and Valeah will return to Your Stupid Minds to review a middling Christmas movie. That legend has been fulfilled for Netflix’s The Knight Before Christmas, starring Vanessa Hudgens and some British guy. Featuring special guests, as previously mentioned, Valeah and Danielle.
Brooke (Hudgens) is a schoolteacher in small town Ohio who recently suffered a mild breakup that hasn’t really affected her at all, is ambivalent but not hostile toward Christmas, and has dead parents that are barely mentioned. When she hits a mentally unwell person with her car, she decides to take him home to her mansion and let him stay in her 1,500 square foot guest house. Never mind the man (Josh Whitehouse) is wearing full knight regalia, goes by “Sir Cole” (or “Circle” if you say it fast enough) and talks like a RenFest role-player. He’s cute.
As it turns out, Circle is actually a medieval knight, transported to the pre-COVID 21st century by an old crone in the woods to fulfill his quest of becoming a true knight. What is that quest? The crone isn’t clear. Hopefully it involves learning to drive a car, catching and eating a skunk, called Mrs. Claus an old crone, or putting an Amazon Echo into a freezer, because that’s what he does.
| | | Wife guy Santa. |
Some Notes:
- Available on Netflix.
- As Valeah points out, when Sir Cole (Circle) comes to the future present, four girls take a selfie with him. The establishing shot clearly shows two girls on each side of Cole, but on the phone screen it shows four girls on one side. I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
- Listen to Danielle and Valeah on previous YSM episodes for D.E.B.S. and The Spirit of Christmas.
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“BRING ME. MY. MONEY PLANE. REVIEW!”
-Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third (better known as “The Rumble”)
We finally got around to reviewing Money Plane. What is Money Plane, you ask? A 2020 movie about a plane. With money on it. Well, not really. Cryptocurrency. Which I guess can be considered money. And you bet on snuff films. Or something. And you rob it. Rob the Money Plane.
Jack Reese (former wrestler Adam “Edge” Copeland) is a thief with $40 million in gambling debts. When his crew is set up during an art heist, aforementioned criminal boss “The Rumble” (Kelsey Grammer) buys his debt and makes him rob a billion dollars in cryptocurrency from a flying casino. Which cryptocurrencies? Let your imagination decide that.
His crew, consisting of karate lady Isabella (Katrina Norman), hacker Trey (Patrick Lamont, Jr.), and not-as-good hacker Iggy (Andrew Lawrence), concoct a plan to rob the Money Plane, and then it mostly goes as planned. Also Jack’s friend Harry (Thomas Jane) is around to fly a drone in case things go south.
Direct download.A halloween spooktacular so good you’ll puke your guts out! It’s Lucio Fulci’s 1980 movie City of the Living Dead!
A New England priest (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself in order to open a portal to hell and unleash an army of the undead. Mary (Catriona MacColl) discovers his plot during a New York seance and travels with a reporter (Christopher George) to stop the zombie horde on All Saint’s Day through… means.
Meanwhile, the denizens of Dunwich, Massachusetts notice strange happenings in the town, including, but not limited to, earthquakes, make out hauntings, 30% of the population dying of fright (according to the coroner), skull smashings, organ pukings, and a perverted gas station attendant with a blow up doll.
Some Notes:
- Available on Amazon Prime.
- Nick erroneously states that Fulci probably put "100 pounds of maggots into a snowblower" to do the maggot storm scene. It was actually 20 pounds. He regrets the error.
- Reportedly, the original ending shot was destroyed, which is why the ending on the film sucks beans.
Direct download.We're sealing up our loosey-goosey Worst of 2019 series with the most notorious big budget movie of the year: Cats! Featuring special guest Sarah Richard (née Dobson).
Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is a cat abandoned by her owners on the mean streets of Cat London. There she meets up with a musical bunch of Jellicle cats who show her the ropes of what it means to be Jellicle. They all sing their silly songs as proof that they are the Jellicle Choice™.Meanwhile, the evil cat Macavity (Idris Elba), kidnaps all the Jellicles using magic and sends them to a boat on the Thames in order to secure his spot as the Jellicle Choice™ to go to the Heaviside Layer.That's the plot.Rebel Wilson eats a humanoid cockroach at some point.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds continues its ad hoc Worst of 2019 series with a big budget adaptation of a book that was not nearly as best-selling as the book: The Goldfinch! Starring a bevy of hot young male actors with incredibly silly names.
Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley) is a boy who is a victim in a terrorist attack targeting New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. His mother is killed in the blast and he goes to live with some WASP-y family friends. The matriarch Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman) takes a liking to Theo, but he is whisked away by his deadbeat alcoholic gambling addicted dad Larry (Luke Wilson).
He moves outside Las Vegas and befriends an emo looking Ukrainian boy Boris (Finn Wolfhard). There is some time jumping to the present with Ansel Elgort as adult Theo. Something about a missing painting. A young homoerotic experience. A deadly yachting accident. An elaborate European art heist. Some other things too. It's really long.
Some Notes:
- Roger Deakins was the Director of Photography. So at least it looks nice!
- The film acts like The Goldfinch painting is the greatest thing ever created. Here is is. It's smaller than a piece of legal paper.
- Nicole Kidman looks fantastic.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds continues its Worst of 2019 mini theme with a film that technically didn’t come out in 2019 (December of 2018) but also didn’t really come out anywhere, really. Nicolas Cage stars as another character named Joe in Maria Pulera's ghostly thriller dark comedy drama horror film Between Worlds.
Joe (Cage) is a widower Alabama truck driver whose wife and five-year-old daughter died tragically in a house fire. He comes across a woman named Julie (Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente) being choked out in a truck stop bathroom. He beats up the choker, but Julie explains the choking was consensual. She has a psychic ability to exist “between worlds” when she is near death. She needs to use her ability to rescue the soul of her daughter, who is in a coma after a motorcycle accident.
Joe and Julie start a relationship, but things are not what they seem as the recovering daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) begins acting stranger and hornier than usual.
Some Notes:
* Available on Netflix.
* Submitted by listener request. The listener writes: "Imagine a wealthy, cloistered Tina Belcher wrote an uncomfortably horny fake David Lynch film and had a fetish for giving Nic Cage embarrassing directions on set. That's basically this movie."
* This is the fourth time Nicolas Cage has played a character named "Joe." If IMDb rumors are correct, he will play a fifth Joe in an upcoming Joe Exotic miniseries.
* Yes, the Flop House Podcast just reviewed this movie a week ago. Let the record state we had no idea they were going to do that. We can prove it in a court of law.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds enters the world of Baker Dill as part of its ad hoc Worst of 2019 series with the flop Serenity. Don’t worry nerds! We’re reviewing the other movie named Serenity that was a big flop. The one about fishing and step-dad revenge. Not Joss Whedon’s space opera.
Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is an island fisherman trying to catch a giant tuna named Justice. His high school sweetheart Karen (Anne Hathaway) finds him and offers $10 million to kill her abusive husband Frank (Jason Clarke), and Dill is conflicted. This is all I can say without giving away the big twist.
Some Notes:
* Available on Amazon Prime.
* If you play a video game just to smash boxes, we don't judge you.
* This episode is rated T for Teen.
Direct download.
In honor of our one-off mention of the scene where a man throws a dog in the ocean, Your Stupid Minds reviews Hulk Hogan’s Mr. Nanny!
Sean Armstrong (Hogan, credited as Terry “Hulk” Hogan, which is still not his real name) is a down-and-out wrestler whose manager Burt (Sherman Hemsley) gets him a job as a bodyguard. It turns out Armstrong will oversee two psychotic children for Alex Mason (Austin Pendleton), the CEO of a microchip company.
While the two children find various clever ways to try to kill their new bodyguard/nanny, the evil Tommy Thanatos (played by the News York Dolls’s David Johansen, who also wrote and performed the soundtrack) finds devious ways to get his hands on a cutting edge microchip Mason’s company is developing. Hijinks ensue.
Some Notes:
* The dog throwing scene, just in case you missed it.
* This dumb song has been stick in my head for two weeks.
Direct download.
Apropos of nothing, Your Stupid Minds reviews 1994's Streets of Rage, a vanity project written, produced, and starring wrestler Mimi Lesseos.
I couldn't find a proper trailer without a butt shot so here's a fan made thing.
Melody Sails (Lesseos) is a former special forces badass and aspiring journalist. After talking to some homeless children in the slums of Los Angeles, she uncovers a pattern of child murder which ties back to evil British pimp Lunar (Oliver Page). Melody also juggles three different men after her affections, and fends off other men in the form of random street goons by kicking and punching them.
Some Notes:
Available on Prime Video in all its VHS transfer potato glory.
* The famous throwing a dog into a lake scene from Mr. Nanny*.
* The famous BullySmart™ video from Everything Is Terrible!
* Directed by Richard Elfman, brother of Danny Elfman and member of Oingo Boingo.
* Featuring wrestling legend Chavo Guerrero Sr. Here's a Mountain Goats song about him.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds reviews Sniper: Special Ops based solely on its horrific Photoshop Frankenstein DVD cover. And Steven Seagal is in it.
Jake (Seagal) is a 65-year-old elite Army sniper on a mission in Afghanistan (which has geography that in no way resembles Southern California) to save a kidnapped congressman. The squad leader Vic (Tim Abell) is also present, along with Vasquez, (wrestler Rob Van Dam) and some other people. Jake shoots two dudes with the sniper rifle, then it breaks and he never uses it again. One squad member is shot in the spine and unable to evacuate via the Humvee, so Jake stays with him out of the goodness of his heart (and not because leaving would require him to descend a number of stairs).
After the mission, the movie shifts completely to a story about a broken truck and a women with her child. There is also a plucky Lois Lane-like reporter Janet (Charlene Amoia). These storylines eventually converge, sort of, and Seagal stays seated for most of the movie.
Featured Music:
Crossing the Chasm by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3562-crossing-the-chasm
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Some Notes:
* Available on Netflix.
* Some of Rob Van Dam's sweetest wrestling moves.
* The story about Gene LeBell choking out Steven Seagal until he pooped his pants.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds enters 2020 with one of the worst of 2019: the John Travolta starring, Fred Durst directed movie out of time The Fanatic.
Moose (Travolta) is a Los Angeles resident obsessed with the past-his-prime action star Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa). He gets access to a premiere party only to discover he isn’t there. After multiple attempts to make contact, his friend Leah (Ana Golja) points him to an app that maps celebrities’ homes. He uses this opportunity to stalk Dunbar and do a bunch of other weird things.Some Notes:* In an inexplicable scene that stops the movie cold, "The Truth," a 15 year old Limp Bizkit song that no one knows, is featured prominently. * Devon Sawa plays the celebrity at the center of a stalking. Sawa famously played the eponymous "Stan" in the Eminem music video. * "All in the Family" by Korn featuring Fred Durst is the worst song of all time.
Direct download.
Your Stupid Minds celebrates the holiday season, nutcrackers, Lifetime movies, and incest-based coffee commercials with our latest episode of 2018’s A Very Nutty Christmas!
Kate Holiday (Melissa Joan Hart) is a woman who doesn’t dislike Christmas but is generally stressed out by it. She’s a baker and has to bake a lot of cookies for the holidays. After her actor/Santa boyfriend Mark (Ryan Caltagirone) dumps her, she acquires the original nutcracker toy which inspired the Nutcracker ballet.
Needless to say it comes to life as a hunky guy named Chip (played by the older brother of Simon from 7th Heaven) and they become boyfriend and girlfriend. He teaches her about the meaning of Christmas by saving her bakery while working on poverty wages and cracking a lot of nuts with his bare hands.
Some Notes:
This movie has some very nutty IMDb accoutrement, including this trivia: "In the Lifetime movie Santa Con, Melissa Joan Hart and Barry Watson played siblings, here they play romantic interests." This inspired a conversation between Nick and Chris regarding the infamous Folgers Coffee incest commercial. Two days after the podcast recording, GQ* published an extremely comprehensive oral history of said ad.
* IMDb Goofs: "When arriving at the theater, Kate is being repeatedly shushed by the audience while she's yelling at Chip, and she finally shushes the audience right back; at that moment an extra right behind her--a blonde lady wearing a pearl necklace--can't help herself but grin broadly and sweetly at Melissa, thereby breaking character: she, (along with the rest of the audience) is supposed to be very upset at Kate for yelling so much and disrupting the peace, but we can tell from that lady's sweet smile and tender look at the actress, that she was amused by how well Melissa performed her aggravation in that scene. This goof turned into a very cute moment."
Direct download. Special guest Adam Pecht returns to Your Stupid Minds to cover another poorly thought out and shoddily made horror film: 1990’s Demon Wind!
Cory (Eric Larson) and his girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapensée) visit the beautiful Napa Valley. The recent suicide of Cory's father compels him to visit his family’s old home. He assembles ten of his closest friends to help with the investigation, including Elaine’s jock ex-boyfriend Dell (T-Force’s Bobby Johnston), some nerd (Stephen Quadros), and a magician who is probably their drug dealer (Rufus Norris).
Despite the creepy gas station owner warning them, they go to the house and encounter a bunch of creepy stuff, such as a minotaur head, weird demon children who turn people into dolls, skeletons, flying knifes, a handwritten book with Latin phrases, and so on. Needless to say they all die and/or turn into Star Trek aliens. Spoiler alert.
Some Notes:
Available on Amazon Prime with really lazy captions. There's also a recently-released Blu-ray.
* Shot on "short ends," meaning the discarded extra film from other movies.
* The omnipresent fog was not intentional, but a freak occurrence while filming. The filmmakers decided to roll with it. Funnily enough, "fog" is not the same thing as "wind."
* For more of the special guest, listen to our episode for Dracula 3D*, where Adam also appears.
