Read it and Weep

5,000 years before the events of The Mummy, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was The Scorpion King. A half man half scorpionking, a warrior unlike any before him, an anachronistic pile of charming muscle.

It’s a fine movie, great for son and divorced father to wile away an hour and a half on an alternate Saturday.

Today’s episode is brought to you by our first ever Meat Market vendor, Nathan Heigert. His graphic novel Shade: The Dying World is up on Kickstarter and you should back it now. It looks great. As a special for RiaW listeners, anybody who pledges $35 or over will get a free sketch in addition to this week’s special bookmarks/needlepoint promotion.

Find out more about the Meat Market at meatmarket.space.

Also, here’s a blurry screen-grab of when Ezra’s baby showed up dressed as mustard:

When The Rock, a Las Vegas cab driver, picks up two adorable blond alien children THE RACE IS ON. Where? To Witch Mountain. The one with no witches? That one.

The Rock is at his best when he’s got a heart of gold and something to punch and the combination of Men In Black (but not nice ones) and aliens (murdery ones) gives him that exact opportunity. They race, he wins, it’s all good in the hood.

We’re joined by Xua who’s got a new record out, synthesizers + field recordings from his trip to southeast Asia.

Question of the week: Who’s your favorite billionaire?

The biggest disaster that could ever befall Hollywood is The Rock leaving. The 2nd biggest would be an earthquake that killed everybody.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stars in a by-the-book disaster movie. California experiences a huge earthquake, a nerdy scientist predicts it but not in time, and The Rock has to save his family. Sure, he lets tons of people die in the mean time, but he’s really into his family.

It’s not great, and it’s certainly not The Rock’s most The Rocking movie, but it’s got plenty of fun stuff and the CG destruction of many parts of California that kinda deserve it.

We decided to kick off Dwayne “The Rocktober” Johnstober (AKA #TheRocktober) with one of his jungly-er movies. The Rundown, which had the working title “Welcome To The Jungle”, is about The Rock punching people. Just like everything else he does.

This time The Rock has to punch people in Brazil to bring back painfully unfunny Sean William Scott. He punches people, monkeys, and a brick pillar. Even Christopher Walken can’t stop him; that’s how powerful our buddy Dwayne is.

Happy #TheRocktober, everybody. Stay punchy my friends.

There were two main things people were worried about in the 80s: nuclear war and giant frogs. So it makes perfect sense that a movie would get made about a sex god fighting against mutant frogs created by a nuclear war.

Now, of course, it would be totally different. It would be a sex god fighting against mutant frogs created by global warming.

But it wouldn’t be as much fun. And that’s Hell Comes To Frogtown is, it’s fun. It’s got Rowdy Roddy Piper (rest in rowdiness) and he can’t really act but he sure can hang around being a sex god.

What would be really difficult for Ezra to understand for his #EasyMonth episode? How about a science fiction book about a two headed hand-faced horse who takes a giant cat, an emo dude, and the emo dude’s sex friend across the universe to a man-made planet thing for no good reason? Yep. That.

Ringworld is the incredibly sexist 1970s science fiction book about just such a journey. It’s complicated and boring, like Larry Niven had some ideas about space and wanted to describe them for a couple hundred pages but couldn’t think of a story to put around those descriptions.

Happy honeymoon, Chris and Tanya. We miss you.

Dana Carvey is… a master of disguise. You can tell because his name is Disguisey. What that means in practice? Some really bad impressions and a lot of fart jokes.

I’d write more about it but I’m #RidingEasy this week so I know pretty much nothing about this movie. Seems bad though.

Five teenage girls are best friends until one goes missing. Then they turn into… ex best friends united by a secret about a blind girl. And then… man, it’s confusing with all these time jumps.

We watched Pretty Little Liars s01e01, s02e09, and s03e09 and while the first one was intriguing, the others made no sense at all. Somebody murdered somebody. Somebody is blind or isn’t. Everybody’s cheating and nobody seems upset that teacher is dating a 16-year-old.

And for the debut of #EasyMonth, Chris didn’t have to watch it! Amazing!

Happy September, Caitlyn, and thanks for sponsoring, Caitlyn’s friend Just Sarah!

It’s time to get wet and stay wet once and for all, fair Meat Suits. Because for our #WetMonth finale we turned the water all the way up. It’s Waterworld, the insanely overbudget and underwhelming action movie from the 90s that, it turns out, isn’t as bad as your heard.

Alex and Lisa loved it, actually, while Chris and Tanya were a bit more skeptical. But everybody agrees it wasn’t the terrible boat-wreck they’d heard it would be. Happy #WetMonth, everybody. See you in #EasyMonth!

Harry Nilsson did acid in the woods and noticed that the trees all had points. So he wrote an album that got turned into a made-for-tv movie about people with points on their heads.

Oblio, he doesn’t have a point on his head so he’s shunned. He meets some weird dudes and then gets unshunned.

It’s weird. It’s kinda charming. And the music is good.

Congrats to Mike Painter, the winner of our Live Show Sponsorship Prize!