2 Dads 1 Movie

Thanksgiving movies from the ’80s and ’90s are weirdly hard to find, so for week two of Feast Mode, Steve went with one that’s actually about going home for the holiday: Son in Law (1993), where Pauly Shore tags along with a South Dakota farm girl on her Thanksgiving break and somehow wins over her whole family. It’s Steve’s pick, and he watched it about a dozen times in high school. He was 13, it was PG-13, and that was the perfect spot: edgy enough to feel cool, tame enough that his parents didn’t care. A certain Tiffani Amber Thiessen dance scene sealed the deal. Nic had a long-running anti-Pauly Shore thing going until his wife Jeanie made this one of the first movies they watched together. Now his 14-year-old daughter loves it so much she writes down Crawl’s lines so she can quote them back.

Then comes some peak 2 Dads research. Nic sees Crawl hanging from a fire sprinkler pipe, doesn’t buy it, and actually contacts a fire sprinkler company to check. (Totally fine if you’re under 250 pounds. Thanks, Peter.) He also spots a feed bag in the background labeled Hog Grower and would really like a bomber jacket, please. Steve admits, against his better judgment, that the mud wrestling ring looks exactly like the diet chili he choked down around 2008. He also names a Tooth Fairy threat aimed at a little kid the darkest moment in a movie where two people get drugged. And Nic tells the story of showing up to his parents’ Thanksgiving in a $15 pilgrim costume and getting maybe the hardest laugh of his dad’s life.

There are plenty of nitpicks too. Steve notices that a raw turkey on the counter turns into a fully cooked feast about twenty minutes later, which Nic compares to a Ronco rotisserie infomercial. There are assless chaps that, from the front, clearly aren’t. And Nic puts the writing staff’s combined age at 408. Through all of it, both dads stay proud Lane Smith stans.

As Walter would say, let’s munch on some grindage.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Two cranky old neighbors in Minnesota, a lifetime of pranks, and Ann-Margret showing up across the street on a snowmobile at two in the morning. That’s Grumpy Old Men (1993), and it kicks off Feast Mode, a month of Thanksgiving movies Nic found the way any of us would, by googling “What’s a Thanksgiving movie?” It’s his pick and his first time seeing it. As a kid he had zero patience for old movies or movies about old people, and now, as he puts it, guess what? He’s a fucking old person now. Steve, meanwhile, rented this one with his parents more than once in high school, back when The Odd Couple and Some Like It Hot had already made him a full-blown Jack Lemmon guy.

What follows is a cozy, profane hang. Burgess Meredith, as John’s ninety-something dad, asks whether his son has “mounted” the new neighbor, which Steve rules is technically not a swear and somehow still the dirtiest way to say it. Both dads are horrified by a guest who announces you can learn a lot about a person from their bathroom (Nic’s house rules: eyes front, eat, talk to him, leave). Max’s basket of remotes sends Steve back to his audiophile dad’s LaserDisc setup and both of them straight into infomercial country, where Nic remembers life before the Magic Bullet, when he had to run fruit over with his car to make a smoothie. Steve gets wistful about a family wedding and the phases of life, bums himself out completely, and Nic has to remind him this was supposed to be Feast Mode.

Then there’s CPA Corner. Nic does this for a living, can’t let the IRS subplot go, and ranks it against Happy Gilmore in the growing genre of fake tax crises in Christopher McDonald movies. Throw in ice shanties, a fish release Steve says sounds like either a wail of terror or the most horrifying orgasm anyone has ever heard, and Walter Matthau’s face, which Nic nominates as the universal icon for something that smells really bad.

Pull up a bucket by the fishing hole and stay a while.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Steve’s sleep paralysis demon looks exactly like Drew Barrymore, so the opening of Scream is less a horror movie for him and more a nature documentary. He picked it anyway. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s 1996 meta slasher is Steve’s pick to close out Shocktoberfest II: Electric Boogaloo, which is brave for a man who apparently sees Casey Becker every time he tries to sleep.

Neither dad came in a seasoned expert. Steve thinks he caught it once in college, maybe, and then forgot about it until Heather brought it up about a decade ago and he realized he’d never actually made it to the end. (He did, however, own the Scream 2 soundtrack. For the Dave Matthews Band song. Priorities.) Nic saw it in theaters in ‘96 and then went on a long horror sabbatical that only ended when this podcast dragged him back in.

What follows is a loving, slightly unhinged lap around Woodsboro. Barrymore reportedly asked to be the big star who dies in the first ten minutes, which has Nic wondering whether Steven Seagal made the same noble sacrifice in Executive Decision. (Sure. Famously generous guy.) Henry Winkler’s uncredited principal kicks off a whole Seagal-to-Winkler spectrum of movie-star ego, and his giant scissors get compared to the ones you’d use to open a new gas station. The “teenagers” are all ruled old enough to rent a car. Nic also has some genuinely useful life advice: buy a small house so the smoke alarm can do its job. And don’t expect your garage door to commit to a kill like that one, since his stops for a cardboard flap.

Then Steve, speaking as “an overweight, bald, funny guy,” figures David Arquette must be absolutely hilarious in person. Nic pictures poor Adam Duritz finding out that Arquette noodling on a campfire guitar got the same raves from Courteney Cox as August and Everything After. And by the end, the show officially needs a hashtag for CRT TVs to the face.

Lock the doors, check the closet, and for the love of God, downsize.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

A scientist teleports a baboon inside out, and somehow that’s the thing that gets the romance going. Welcome to David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), the third stop on Shocktoberfest and Nic’s pick. He caught chunks of it on TV as a kid (one arm-wrestling match in particular never left him) and wanted a proper Frankenstein-style monster movie with Jeff Goldblum front and center. Steve, a haunted house, possession and slasher guy, had never seen it and admits he’d been dodging it on purpose. Body horror is not his jam. The dads’ advice for first-timers: eat two hours before, nothing until two hours after, and keep a Dixie cup of water nearby.

Before the goo even starts, they get stuck on names. Nobody can get past a smarmy ex-boyfriend magazine editor named Stathis (Nic offers his respects to every Stathis listening, then just switches to “editor guy”), and Steve has a theory that “Brundle” was picked purely so “Brundlefly” would work later. Stathis also gets dragged for hanging onto the key to Ronnie’s apartment and for a Maserati with a vanity plate that just says PARTICLE, which sends Nic into a public service announcement about job security. Do not get your employer tattooed on your body, folks.

From there it’s a steady stream of grievances. Nic wants to know why Seth went straight to baboons when rats exist, and Steve points out a goldfish would have done the job. Steve realizes the telepod guessing its way through rebuilding a steak is basically how AI works. Seth punches chunks out of what is very clearly a load-bearing beam, which Nic notes is a great way to get a girl to stay. Nic shares the story of Mel Brooks producing the movie without a credit, so random that Steve honestly couldn’t tell if it was a bit. And the wives check out entirely: Nic’s wife Jeanie suddenly gets very into her crossword puzzle, while Steve’s wife Heather swears she’s seen The Fly and absolutely has not.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And maybe skip lunch.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

It’s not technically a horror movie, but as Steve says right out of the gate, it’s scary as fuck in so many ways. That’s Se7en, David Fincher’s 1995 trip through a rain-soaked, never-named city (“a shittier New York without any of the cool shit,” in Nic’s words), and it’s Steve’s pick for Shocktoberfest. He first saw it in college during a brief stint as a film major, when someone insisted it was the perfect introduction to Fincher. Nic caught it around senior year of high school, when the lucky households with HBO and Cinemax were dubbing their own VHS copies. For this episode he watched it twice, once to feel it and once with notes. Dedication.

Both dads agree the title, with that little 7 jammed in the middle, is impossible to say out loud. They also agree that in a movie stuffed with horrific imagery, the thing that sticks with everyone is a ceiling full of pine tree air fresheners. Nic still brings it up every couple of months whenever something stinks.

From there it’s a gleefully grim stroll through the sins. Morgan Freeman’s switchblade gets a Best Supporting Actor campaign, his bedside metronome gets declared psychotic, and Steve, who dabbles in screenwriting himself, swoons over the names Somerset and Mills, which sound like either a wine cooler or a law firm. A cop getting annoyed at a detective for asking questions spirals into “Where you going with that wrench, plumber?” Nic is personally offended by Mills rolling around with his dogs on a newspaper-covered floor in his work clothes. He calls Marquis de "Sade" the only joke in the whole movie and declares the home darkroom “the official hobby of creeps.” Steve puts his writer hat back on to ask why Tracy would tell her husband’s partner of two days that she’s pregnant, and Nic nominates that scene as your official Junior Mints and bathroom break. There’s even a detour into the FBI tracking library books, once the stuff of mid-’90s conspiracy nuts and now, per Nic, “prematurely correct.”

Seven sins, one switchblade, and about a thousand little pine trees.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Tom Hanks has a week off work, a new neighbor who drives his garbage to the end of the driveway, and a firm plan to stay home and drink "a couple hundred beers." That's The 'Burbs (1989), Joe Dante's suburban paranoia comedy and the kickoff to Shocktoberfest II: Electric Boogaloo. It's Nic's pick, off a listener request from about a year ago (the schedule runs well into 2027, so get your requests in early), and he'd never seen it. Steve wore it out as a kid, a dozen or so viewings between ages 10 and 13, possibly on LaserDisc, and then didn't touch it for three decades.

Is it even a horror movie? Steve consults the official scale he worked out with his 8-year-old daughter: spoopy, spooky, scary, horror. This one mostly lands at spoopy, though the ice pick stuff left young Steve legit scared of the one sitting in a drawer at home.

From there it's a happy stroll down one very nosy block. Nic crowns the poodle the official comedy dog of the '80s (the chihuahua gets the '90s), and Steve's pretty sure this particular poodle is the same dog from The Silence of the Lambs. Nic's research turns up a writers' strike that left Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Rick Ducommun improvising a whole lot, plus the news that Bubbles the chimp was hanging around set, courtesy of Corey Feldman's friendship with Michael Jackson. Steve would like to know why nobody threw a little hat on him and found him a part.

Also on the docket: Nic's tip for talking your way out of a traffic stop (do not do this), Nic's dream where his landlord is Steve, a surprisingly thorough sardine debate in which Nic defends the fish and Steve learns something about fillets, and Steve's actual research into whether a basement furnace needs to go to 5,000 degrees. (A crematorium runs about 1,800. So, no.) And Nic lands on a real truth: the most inaccurate thing in cinema is how long it takes to dig a hole.

Does a childhood favorite hold up after thirty years away? What does a first-timer make of it? Pull up a folding chair. It's the best show on the block.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

What if a hitman went to his 10-year high school reunion? That's the entire pitch for George Armitage's 1997 action-rom-com Grosse Pointe Blank, and Steve thinks it's so perfect that nobody can ever make it again. It's his pick, and it comes with baggage: as a high school junior he took a girl to see it on a date. She was his junior prom date. She did not feel the same way. They stayed friends. Not everybody's for everybody. Nic saw it in theaters too, still owns both volumes of the soundtrack on CD, and came in honestly wondering whether 17-year-old Nic just had questionable taste or whether this thing is a classic.

John Cusack plays Martin Blank, a killer so committed to honesty that he tells literally everyone what he does for a living, and nobody believes him (Nic's daughter could not get over this). Nic calls Joan Cusack, as Martin's secretary, the Robert Horry of the movie, hitting every big shot. Steve's favorite gag is two feds faking out Dan Aykroyd's Grocer so he dives back into a bathroom stall for nothing.

The soundtrack gets its due. Steve calls the Live and Let Die cut to convenience-store muzak one of his favorite transitions in movie history, then mourns a Specials recording of "Pressure Drop" he can't find on any streaming service. Nic offers to burn him a CD. Steve isn't sure he still owns a CD player. Nic reminds everyone he doesn't understand the microphone he's talking into.

Elsewhere, Nic would happily trade one police tank for a Main Street radio station, and Steve names the one scene that popped him out of the movie (a therapist's answering machine blaring mid-session). He also admits that if a long-lost friend turned up standing over a dead body, he'd be gone. Dude, deuces. And Steve needs Nic to remind him that their own 20th reunion already happened. They literally hung out there together.

And Nic has a theory: Debbie dumps Martin, moves to Boston, tells Will Hunting all about her ex-assassin boyfriend, and that's how you get Jason Bourne. It's cinema.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

A guy's Jeep dies in the Arizona desert, his wife hops in a friendly trucker's cab to go call a tow, and then she just never comes back. That's Breakdown (1997), Jonathan Mostow's lean, mean Kurt Russell thriller, and it's Nic's pick by way of listener Matt DeLuna. Nic knows this one cold. He was working at Blackhawk Movies 7 in Danville when it opened, ducked into it on shifts, owned it on video, and quoted it endlessly with his buddy Todd. Steve had literally never heard of it.

He was sold before the credits finished, though, because the thing runs 93 minutes, and this show has turned both dads into true believers in the 90-minute movie. Then J.T. Walsh and M.C. Gainey pop up, which kicks off a tribute to the great initialed actors of our time. (CCH Pounder gets bonus points for having three.)

Steve goes hunting for plot holes and comes back with basically one: a Jeep that just drove in from Massachusetts with 245 miles on the odometer, somehow already needing oil. Nic figures Jeff is pouring in vanity oil so he looks like he knows what he's doing at a gas station. Then Amy's snack run goes on trial. Snowballs, Moon Pies, powdered donuts and a Yoo-Hoo in the desert heat, with not one salty thing in the bag. Steve is personally offended. Nic notes that an animal probably wouldn't eat a Snowball. Combos, Bugles and Gardettos are entered into the record, and the donut sweepstakes (win $90,000 or 90,000 donuts, your call) gets the full treatment, right down to the tax bill on a truckload of expiring pastries.

There's also a diner parking lot that looks like the cars were dropped from an airplane, a husband describing his missing wife by the brand of her sweater, a henchman who can't help freelancing while he plays dumb, and Steve's case for J.T. Walsh's quietly terrifying, totally ordinary evil. Steve calls it a one-note movie and means it as a compliment: ratchet, ratchet, ratchet, and then it just stops.

No epilogue, no six months later. Just a Jeep that deserved better and a bag of snacks that didn't.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) is Steve's pick, and for him it's less a movie than a load-bearing wall. He caught it on TV before he was ten, spent high school and college watching theater kids quote it at each other, and counts William Goldman as a personal screenwriting hero. Nic got there later, in high school or after, having grown up in what he describes as a no-VCR, no-cable log cabin where his dad was busy typing up his manifesto.

What follows is a very happy stroll through Florin. Steve's daughter still calls the movie "Princess Buttercup," while his son, currently convinced Raiders of the Lost Ark is the greatest movie ever made, never really got into it. Nic clocks young Fred Savage's Walter Payton jersey, Steve spots the Fridge Perry poster, and the case is closed: this kid is a Bears fan. From there, grandpa and grandson are simply Kevin Arnold and Columbo. Steve decides Humperdinck's perm belongs to a lady who works the front desk at the local orthodontist. Nic shouts out Mr. Hoover, their old high school history teacher and Andre the Giant superfan. And Steve's Wallace Shawn impression gets so good that Nic starts openly dreaming of a copyright strike.

There's a surprising amount of real-life peril, too. Steve's high school production of the Scottish play, with actual steel broadswords, got canceled over safety concerns (he was Banquo, and at one point the corpse yelped). Years later, a friend set Steve's wool coat on fire in a Walnut Creek coffee shop. On set, Andre's enormous hand doubled as a hot water bottle. Cary Elwes woke up in the hospital, still in costume, after Christopher Guest stopped faking a knockout. And Mandy Patinkin bruised a rib trying not to laugh at Billy Crystal.

Meanwhile, Nic's wife Jeanie cannot deal with Westley's mustache. Nic calls the albino torturer the most in-need-of-Carmex person he's ever seen. And the dads both want in on Fezzik's hangover soup.

As Steve says in his mock promo for this very episode, it's inconceivable that you won't enjoy it.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Seventy-eight episodes into a show about '80s and '90s movies, Nic realized they had never once done a Spike Lee. Then a buddy of his (white guy, mid-forties, Seattle) mentioned that Do the Right Thing was the movie he quoted most as a kid, and that settled it. Nic had seen it once in college and remembered liking it without it ever really sticking. Steve had never seen it at all, and watched it the day before they recorded, so you're getting a guy still slightly vibrating.

What they found is the hottest day in Brooklyn history and about nine things to argue about. Steve reads the whole movie as secretly Greek, with Señor Love Daddy on one end and the three corner guys on the other, a two-headed chorus that comments on everything and acts on nothing. He also slots it in as the second sweatiest movie they've ever covered, behind Predator, since Nic won't hear an argument against Bill Duke squeegeeing his own face with a disposable razor.

Then there's the pizza, which becomes its own subplot. Nic has grievances, numbered: the flimsiest box he's ever seen, a pie that looks like something the Ninja Turtles would eat, and the green can of Kraft parmesan, which he identifies as the cheese you use if you're racist against Italians. He would know. His Irish grandfather came home from the war that way. Steve, fresh off a pizza-making class on a work trip to New York, watches Danny Aiello bury the dough in flour and starts pleading with the screen.

They split on the Wall of Fame. Steve has zero sympathy for Buggin' Out's demand and total sympathy for the boycott. Nic points out that Buggin' Out is carrying the whole history of Black America on his shoulders, all day, every day.

And when it gets heavy, they let it. Steve teared up two hours after the credits, and his wife is the one who reframed it for him: despair is a luxury.

Hottest block in Brooklyn, worst pizza ever put on film, and nobody gets out clean.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands