Cinemanimals

We talk about Robo-Dog months before having watched it.  Which I’m sure we all forgot about.  We talk a lot about Paul Reubens, mostly in a positive way.  We dissect this film Dunston Checks In and while we have some positive remarks about the technical filmmaking, it remains a mystery if anyone actually liked the movie.  We find out what orangutans find sexy about one another and what we find disgusting about them.  We debate if this is the last theatrical film starring a movie about a monkey. And we go deep in understanding the saying “spare the rod, spoil the child”.

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* * This week’s episode is un-edited, uploaded “as is” * *

This week we watched ROBO-DOG, a 2015 film about a dog who suffers an excruciating death and is revivified by an Inventor Dad, who installs a vacuum in Robo-dog’s butt. We get deep on what exactly a “real” “life” “live-action” “dog” is and whether a dog portraying a robot dog counts as one, and whether this episode is even valid for our podcast, and ultimately whether the whole Cinemanimals universe is valid or not. Someone says something about Howie Mandel, Mikal sets the record straight about toilet paper and reads the URL for an exclusive website full of animal facts and and then reads the titles of a lot of movies other than the one we are talking about, Mike delivers a mostly-accurate sixty second lecture on the history of grammar and shares a hard truth about the word spatula, and Simon shares his correct opinion that it’s funny when a character’s clothes are blasted off.

**UPDATE: episode has been fixed!  It is now one hour and forty-five minutes instead of abruptly stopping at one hour.  Hopefully quality is a little better as well.  Thanks for understanding!

The lost episode that at least one fan specifically asked for.  And here at Cinemanimals, the fans get what they ask for.  This episode clocks in at one hour and forty five minutes.  That’s longer than the movie by a lot.  But it’s a quick hour and forty-five minutes because we get to listen to Simon slowly lose his mind as he re-tells THE ENTIRE movie shot by shot, more or less.   Without a doubt, this movie is a lost classic.  We talk about too much to mention, plus I did not listen back to the whole thing.  NO TIME, I’m busy!!  But I recall we develop a movie called Chimpanzee Nanny, or Chimpananny.  Copyright.  What else can I say?  Um, don’t worry, the ape in the movie never actually wears a doctor’s lab coat as seen on the DVD cover.  Let us know what we talked about.  There is too much to love about this trainwreck of a film.

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Sorry for the extended absence from posting. We have no excuse and we know we have let the fans down.  We know there are people out there whose lives were negatively impacted by this.  But fear not, because WE ARE BACK.  In today’s nightmare, we examine the “based on a true story” movie that stars the animal from the “true story”.  Much of these truth is debated by us.  We discuss whether or not Harry Connick Jr. is CGI or not, plus his inability to no ooze charisma. We talk about  Morgan Freeman’s first on screen kiss. Mikal attempts to describe the plot of the movie, but gets lost in an over-attention to detail. The spoiler train arrives as usual.  Corporate greed and capitalism are briefly discussed, some pretty good zingers are thrown, and then we get real about dolphins and their tendency to rape humans as well as their own kind.  Then we learn too much about science experiments in the 1970s involving dolphins, LSD, and inter-species sensuality.  Simon and Mike liked the movie, but also did not understand that the title is a pun.  Thanks for welcoming us back after our holiday.  The animal movies keep coming and we keep watching them.

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Notice the various posters for this movie.  The dog definitely never rides in a flying sleigh.  Notice the different dogs featured on the covers.  Notice the various Dean Cains.  Notice the Dustin Diamond.  Yes, we wish everyone a happy holiday in the worst way possible.  By recommending terrible movies featuring animals. In this episode, we are all feeling very depressed and angry because we all watched different garbage movies about the holidays.  The movies all sort of involved dogs.  Only in retrospect did we realize we should’ve watched The Christmas Bunny because there are not  too many bunny movies.  We discuss Deep Fake Technology Dogs and moist paint.  We examine the confounding Joel Paul Reisig “movie” A Dog For Christmas, which we thought starred two Dean Cains, but it doesn’t.  Only one Dean Cain.  We learn some history about Dean Cain.  The movie also stars Screech from Saved by the Bell and that guy from Home Improvement.  Does the movie feature a dog?  Maybe.  Listen to find out.  Then we half-watched a few other “movies” and try to explain them.  We get back to one of our most important questions: does the dog push something off of a shelf?  The upsetting film A Golden Winter features a character named Tinkle and deals with abandonment and the foreclosure of a house.  Husbands lie to their wives so they can take naps.  Sorry if this ruins your holidays.

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From the dungeon of unpublished Cinemanimals episodes, we unearth a movie that you might not believe actually exists, but sadly, it does.  Or maybe magically it does.  And when the movie about the talking hedgehog also stares Tara Reid and Dean Cain, well it would be stupid NOT to watch this movie.  By the way, the hedgehog never rides on a horse as the DVD cover hints.  Director Joel Paul Reisig has his own production company called “Be Your Own Hollywood.”  Feeling super-inspired yet?  Not much competition in the hedgehog movie genre.  This is one of those episodes where we are so confounded by what was on screen, the line between our distaste and pleasure becomes blurry.  There a million ways to lose your mind while watching this movie.  And we talk about all of them.  This episode was originally recorded in spring 2019.  It is also another “fan” edited episode, completed by Harrison Pasley, many thanks to him or else we would have nothing to post.  Or maybe blame him.  Get ready to hear us avoid talking about this film for as long as we can.  Then we can’t stop.

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Ah, back in the simple times of the 1980s, when placing random characters in Africa was funny.  Back when Africa was funny enough on its own.  Throw in Dom DeLuise (father of 21 Jump Street star Peter DeLuise) and a naughty, talking monkey, played not by a real monkey but rather by a little person in a monkey suit, and well, frankly speaking, this is movie magic.  As usual, we ponder who was this movie made for?  We ask if staring at a wall for the same amount of time as the movie length would be time better spent?  This episode is our first one edited by a guest editor and listener.  I’d say this person did well!  AFRICA!

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Mooch Goes To Hollywood really destroyed us.  This is not an “alone movie” as Mike says in this episode.  So many things about this “movie” make no sense.  And the parts that do make sense are deeply problematic and misogynist.  But hey it was the early 70s right?!?  Compares to Linda Lovelace’s sad life.  Shout out to Benji and Thurston Howl III.  Not a single “joke” in this movie is funny.  The color of the film is legitimately vomit-inducing.  And Zsa Zsa Gabor gives lots of questionable advice to Mooch.  Oh, poor sad Mooch. This is a rarely seen movie for a good reason.  We had high hopes for it.  Then we felt like we got sucker punched in the stomach.  Fun.

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Do you the difference between a mule and donkey?  Neither do we, but we almost figure it out on this episode.  Do you know what a “hinny” is?  You will if you listen to this special bonus episode.  Why is it special and bonus?  I’ll tell you why.  Because we recorded it back on 4/20.  Four twenty dude!  This was technically our third episode, but we hadn’t actually started posting yet.  We were perfecting our craft.  We still are.  Forever.  Anyway… this movie called Gus from 1976 does not feature a donkey (Don Key), but it does feature Don Knots.  And it is about a football playing mule (American football).  The mule is from Yugoslavia.  And when it kicks, wow the sound effect is really something else!  This is a Disney movie, from a time period where Disney was making a lot of movies like this.  It’s got some really special moments and we believe the first movie to use the classic animal-sports movie line “well, there’s no rule in the rule book that says you can’t…”  The mule even gets drunk!  You’ll feel drunk just by watching the movie or listening to this podcast.

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A TALKING PONY?!? is actually about a talking horse, not a pony, but neither the fact that it talks nor its status as a horse has any bearing whatsoever on the plot. And it’s not the horse seen on the cover of the DVD.  Like many of the films we watch, this one exudes a palpable contempt for its audience, but unlike the others, A TALKING PONY?!? ramps up the contempt quotient by intermittently not even being a film, which means it’s the first film we considered rejecting not because it doesn’t have enough animal in it, but because it might not be a movie in the first place.  At the beginning of the show we do a self-crit about what qualifies a movie as an animal movie, Mikal updates us about the animal trainer he’s been emailing, and at the end, Simon blows the whole genre wide open with a meteoric hot take about the form.  As always, we remind you not to watch this movie.

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