Mixed Review

This it it - all 68 Marvel Movies, ranked, sorted, and tossed aside like so many cardboard Hugh Jackman movie theater standups. From X-Men to The Avengers, from The Incredible Hulk to just Hulk to The Incredible Hulk again, from The Fantastic Four to Fantastic Four to Fant4stic - this is every theatrically-released movie based on a Marvel Comics property - and then some - whittled down March Madness-style until we discover which adaptation bests the rest.

With the release of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and its retelling of the Manson murders dredging traumatic history back into the public eye, we sat down to watch three movies released in the decade following the horrifying and world-changing events of August 1969. Two of them are horror movies using Manson figures as catalysts for gruesome violence (I Drink Your Blood, Deathmaster) and the third is a made-for-TV retelling of the lengthy Manson trial that eventually indicted the hippie guru and his followers (Helter Skelter).

Full episode credits can be found at mixedreviewpodcast.com

You will believe a shark can roar. You will believe Dennis Quaid can find gainful employment at SeaWorld. You will believe a shark is trying to kill every member of your immediate family for reasons only a shark can understand. In this episode, we cover Jaws (1975), Jaws 2 (1977), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987).

Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

Ignored upon released, rediscovered on video, and blithely discarded in the trash bin of late '80s animation outliers, The Brave Little Toaster retains a cult following of grown adults swearing up and down its superiority to Toy Story, an actual cinematic achievement. But is there still something to be said for these anthropomorphized dumpster appliances?

Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

It's about time one of these movie podcasts covered Showgirls. We're definitely the first to do so.

Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

After the double successes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero returned to the salt mine to unearth an unholy vision of the American apocalypse: Day of the Dead. Roundly dismissed by critics in 1985, its offbeat charms have generated a whole new cadre of admirers. Does it deserve its new devotees? Or should it CHOKE ON EM?

With Theron Seckington.

Music:"News Theme" and "District Four" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"Walk to the Ritz/Sarah at the Ritz" by John Harrison, Day of the Dead: Original Movie Soundtrack

Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, released one year apart, star Juliette Lewis and feature a journalist attempting to document and define evil. One is a thriller, the other a barrage of images, a cacophony of sound, a prescient nightmare of oppressive finality. One is forgotten, the other too controversial to embrace. Drunk on shandies, we try to exhume the bodies and sift through the wreckage left in their wake.

Move beyond the lungs, peer past the kidneys, climb down the ribcage and behold ... there's a little man inside our livers! Telling us to drink more! A few of us become audibly intoxicated during a throaty discussion of three science fiction films that take place inside the following: a random Russian guy (Fantastic Voyage, 1966); Martin Short (Innerspace, 1987); and Bill Murray (Osmosis Jones, 2001).

In 1939, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None set a new standard for mystery novels. 60 years later, some beer-swilling Yanks  began producing Americanized retellings in the form of Identity (2003), Mindhunters (2004) and Sabotage (2014), three brainless thrillers featuring excessive gore, foul-mouthed arseholes, and absolute creative bankruptcy. Kevin and William spend far too much time answering one question: Why? Why in pluperfect hell would you pee on a literary masterwork?

Why, in the middle of the 1990s, did Sinbad happen? And why did he just as suddenly disappear? We struggle with these questions while discussing FIRST KID and SHAZAAM, two family comedies about sad little white boys who meet a big lovable goofball who unexpectedly turns their lives around.