Drat Pack

It’s back to school season, and what better way for us to reminisce about our distant high school memories than through the lens of a failed young adult sci-fi franchise? Return to your own far-flung youth with 2011’s I Am Number Four, one of many attempts to make “Twilight but for boys” that simply didn’t take. Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we discuss literary crap factory overseer James Frey, the “designed by committee” world that this movie confusingly creates, and the perils of casting an Abercrombie & Fitch ad that a witch turned into a real boy as the lead of your film. Also we have a suitably orange cocktail to accompany this whole mess, a fitting reminder of that time when we colortimed all movies to be orange and blue in lieu of actually making them visually appealing.

Summer, alas, is over (even though it’ll still be like 80 degrees for a while but now with the added fun of 7:00 pm sunsets, such fun) and with it our unhinged musicals miniseries. So long, Something Like Summer! Hello, customary teen movie to kick off the school year! As we briefly discuss the teen sci-fi adaptation we’ll be covering two weeks from now, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris also talk about some other teen fiction- namely, stuff they wrote when they were teens (or younger). How much did we just rip off other media we liked? How many random topics could we cram into one work of fiction with no regard for logic or coherence? How many times did Leigh write something where a character gets amnesia (spoiler, they all have amnesia)? Did anything at all hold up to our jaded modern perspectives? Listen and find out, won’t you?

Hey, hey, hey! BIM’s on the way! BIM’s the only way! BIM’s all the way! (?) Look, any way you may hear it, our Summer of Unhinged Musicals has reached its natural endpoint, with a movie that is unquestionably a musical. And boy, what a nonsense of a musical it is! Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they attempt to make sense of 1980’s The Apple, directed by schlockmeister lunatic par excellence, Menahem Golan. Is it a modern-day retelling of the very beginning and very end of the Bible? Is it a movie fascinated by queer people that also thinks they’re wicked and sinful? Is it a disco musical that also seems to hate disco music? Friends, it’s all these things and so much more (by so much more we mean a lot men in thongs and Miriam Margolyes being groped by a bland-ass Canadian singer in the tightest pants the costume department was able to manifest). We’re also pretty drunk on our themed sangria, which seems fitting because watching this movie sober is potentially hazardous to your health.

What would summer be without summer movies to accompany it? Well, probably just insufferably hot. Thankfully, we have summer movies to distract us from (insert horrific woe here)! Leigh, Brendan, and Chris have a nice li’l chat about some of this season’s big blockbuster-y movies (and one smaller, more intimate one). From superheroes to dinosaurs to Chuck, the summer of 2025 has had it all! We also talk briefly about the upcoming conclusion to our Summer of Unhinged Musicals and the cocktail that we’ll be drinking to accompany it (hint: we’ve got a lot of apple themes going on).

The Summer of Unhinged Musicals continues with perhaps one of the most unhinged movies we have ever covered, period. For your pleasure (?), we present 2017’s Something Like Summer, an adaptation of a self-published absurdly long young adult novel that was for some improbable reason turned into an absurdly long movie musical. Blurbs really can’t do this one justice, but suffice to say there’s a lot of gay angst, a lot of questionable creative choices, and a lot of mind-numbingly bizarre plot points. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they team up yet again with past guest Faith to just tackle this mess beat-by-beat. And yes, we’re all a little surprised that this is our longest episode ever too, but there’s just an unending river of insanity to cover here. Naturally, such a movie necessitates both a cocktail AND baked goods, so we really are covering all our bases here.

As the year rolls swelteringly along, so does our Summer of Unhinged Musicals, and what better way commemorate this year’s miniseries than with yet another game (but one that relates to the theme)? Brendan dusts off an old chestnut from a while back where he posits a musical title and description and Leigh and Chris have to determine whether said musical is real or fake, but THIS time it’s exclusively jukebox musicals, the bane of the serious theater aficionado! Do you know enough about jukebox musicals to know if there’s one based on Enya songs? Or one based on the non-McCartney songs written by John Lennon? Heck, maybe some of these fake ones are actually seemingly more produceable than some of the real nonsense! Fittingly we also introduce next episode’s drink and unhinged movie musical topic (and boy is it a particularly bizarre one).

Another summer has begun, and with it, another miniseries. This year, we’re kicking off our Summer of Unhinged Musicals with a movie that… might be arguably a musical, but kind of probably isn’t. As you might be able to guess, it’s 2003’s The Singing Detective, a not-very-acclaimed movie adaptation of a very-acclaimed British series. Please know that despite the name, there’s no actual singing, just a lot of lip synching to recordings of 1950s pop standards, which is… a choice that might not fully have a reason behind it here! Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the many odd decisions this movie makes, the questionable directorial choices (why, Keith Gordon, why???), and why Robert Downey Jr. might have seemed like a good option for the lead but kind of doesn’t really work. Also accompanying the main feature is a cocktail as bitter and tobacco-tinged as Dan Dark himself.

Look, sometimes it’s very hard to come up with discussion topics and sometimes people are feeling sick so sometimes mini episodes just end up being a round table discussion of “what’s some interesting media you consumed lately?” This is one of those times. Listen in as Leigh, Brendan (partly), and Chris talk about some of these things, ranging from video games to movie adaptations of classic lit to attempts to extend the Sex and the City franchise long after its natural death. And with summer upon us, we also kick off a new summer miniseries featuring genuinely unhinged movie musicals. It’s going to be all-singing, all-dancing, long-suffering!

Could it, though? Could it indeed happen to you? Well, yes, it could, if by “it” you mean “watching a mid-tier 90s romantic comedy that sort of holds up.” If you mean “have a rando split a multi-million dollar lottery ticket with you,” then sadly the answer is no, it’s probably pretty unlikely to happen to you. Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we take in Andrew Bergman’s not-unpleasant 1994 movie It Could Happen to You, starring Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, and fully keyed in operating-at-fever-pitch Rosie Perez. It’s mostly a charming and frivolous little bit of cinema, so why did we feel the need to cover it? Could it be because of the weird “saintly man married to inhuman nagging shrewish wife” plot? The half-hearted attempts at magic realism or fairy tale vibes? The squandering of Stanley Tucci and Ann Dowd? In a word, yes. There’s some stuff to kick around here! There’s also a smoky iced coffee cocktail designed to be a tasty version of a glass of Folgers with cigarette ash in it, so if that doesn’t grab you then we don’t know what will.

We’ve got a movie coming up next week that focuses pretty heavily on a diner, so why not do a food-centric mini episode accordingly? Except it’s not really about diners or coffee shops, it’s about chain restaurants, so things kinda fall apart from there but hey it’s hard coming up with mini topics so pipe down maybe! We do another one of our li’l games where Brendan reads from a list of movie promotional menu items from famous chain restaurants, and Leigh and Chris have to guess which culinary abominations are real and which are (to date) not. Will Denny’s and IHOP ever be jailed for their crimes against humanity? Only one way to find out!