Your Stupid Minds

Special guests Valeah Beckwith and Danielle Nasr return to the podcast as we continue our Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas Movie series with the Lifetime/Netflix film The Spirit of Christmas. Kate (Kati Salowsky) is a high-powered big city workaholic lawyer from Boston who has no interest finding true love. Her goateed boss instructs her to go to a cozy rural bed and breakfast in order to appraise it for sale. The property has problems selling because it's haunted by a hunky ghost murdered 95 years ago. The ghost Daniel (Thomas Beaudoin) takes corporeal form for the twelve days leading up to Christmas in order to solve his own murder. But when he begins to fall for Kate, things begin to change.

It's the Holiday season, so Chris and Nick get into the spirit by crossing into the unexplored frontier that is... Hallmark Christmas movies! That's right, a series of Christmas-time reviews from people who are absolutely not the demographic for them!

We begin with 2004's A Boyfriend for Christmas, where Holly (Kelli Williams of The Practice) makes the titular Christmas wish as a child to a creepy Santa (Charles Durning, frequent Santa). A mere 20 years later, Holly meets Ryan (Patrick Muldoon of Starship Troopers), a rich hotshot lawyer who lies about his identity and participates in Santa's twisted love scheme. Will Santa's Christmas prophecy come true? Will Holly wind up Ryan, or her sniveling evil ex-boyfriend (who is even richer than Ryan)?

Your Stupid Minds finishes off the Lesser Baldwin series with the 1994's Showtime original high concept sci-fi porno Dead Weekend starring Stephen Baldwin.

During a fake earthquake evacuation in a dystopian LA-like city, Weed (Baldwin) and Payne (David Rasche) are officers in the paramilitary police force assigned to catch a rogue alien while also murdering as many gang members as possible. Weed uses this opportunity to have sex with a strange woman in the woods, who, guess what, turns out the be the alien. Not just an alien, but a shapeshifting super sexy nymphomaniac alien who requires sex to survive. Also annoying radio DJ Joe Blow (Tom Kenny) screams awful voices into his microphone the entire time.

Your Stupid Minds continues its Lesser Baldwin series with 1999's forgettable and nearly unacquirable Desert Thunder. Directed by Jim Wynorski (Vampirella, Chopping Mall) and starring Daniel Baldwin, Desert Thunder is about a fictitious late '90s operation to bomb an Iraqi anthrax facility before Saddam can attack a major European city. Though the stakes are high, the film is mostly about Baldwin recruiting a team of misfits to fly F-14s in an abandoned Boy Scout summer camp in the San Bernardino Valley. At first they don't get along, but after beating up rednecks at a nearby bar, they learn to work together.

Your Stupid Minds moves into our Lesser Baldwins series with the reasonably forgettable Fair Game. Based off the same crappy book as Cobra, Kate McQueen (Cindy Crawford) is a high-powered female Miami lawyer who's shot at while jogging. She gives her statement to the swaggering and inexplicably Italian-American Det. Max Kirkpatrick (Billy Baldwin), which then sets off a series of elaborate tech-inspired terrorist assassination attempts on Kate's life. Max must help her survive and find out who is doing this and why. Also Salma Hayek is there.

Your Stupid Minds finishes out the Cynthia Rothrock series with one of her most beloved films: China O'Brien! No, it isn't the story an Asian Irish fusion restaurant with sesame fish and chips and black and white rice pudding. It's a kick-ass karate film in the style of Road House and Walking Tall.

After city police officer China (Rothrock) is not punished for committing a justifiable homicide in self defense after an alley karate fight, she returns to her unnamed home town to pick up her decade-old high school relationship with Matt (Richard Norton) and visit her family. Her father is the town sheriff battling systemic corruption, prostitution, and crime. After he dies in a fiery car bomb explosion, China runs for sheriff and roundhouse kicks the corruption out of town.

Your Stupid Minds continues its ad hoc Cynthia Rothrock series with 2014's Mercenaries in which she barely appears! A team of four incarcerated women (Zoë Bell, Kristanna Loken, Vivica A. Fox and Nicole Bilderback) are forced to save the president's daughter from a crazed female terrorist (Brigitte Nielsen) an an Expendables-style mission at the behest of CIA agent Mona (Cynthia Rothrock). They travel to some middle Asian country (that looks nothing like Southern California) and ingratiate themselves using their feminine wiles in order to kick butt and save the day.

Your Stupid Minds returns to one of its most-frequently used tags: martial arts! Join us, gentle listener, won't you (© Karina Longworth), as we travel to the world that was Hong Kong cinema in the 1980's, as brought to us by director Corey Yuen (DOA: Dead or Alive, this amazing JCVD Russian kickboxer fight, The Transporter), featuring our first but not last film featuring Cynthia Rothrock.

Trigger Warning: Even though no children should ever listen to this podcast, there is a sequence where we talk at length and repeatedly about the 100% irrefutable fact that Santa Claus is not real. If you are an irresponsible parent whose children can listen to profanity-laced podcasts yet still hold onto the worldwide delusion as to the existence of a fat man who breaks into your house and gives you presents, you have been warned.

Your Stupid Minds covers the third and therefore best entry in the Look Who's Talking franchise, Look Who's Talking Now! Released and taking place three years since the last movie, James (John Travolta) and Mollie Ubriacco (Kirstie Alley) return to their iconic roles. This time Mikey (David Gallagher, a.k.a Simon From 7th Heaven) and Julie (Tabitha Lupien) are older and have their own voices, but guess who can talk? The dogs! And no other kinds of animals! Danny Devito and Diane Keaton come on as Rocks the mutt and Daphne the prissy poodle, respectively.

With Mollie recently out of a job and James getting a new high-flying gig with a sexy female boss (Lysette Anthony), will their marriage hold together? Considering James shows absolutely no interest in this wealthy British adulteress, yes! But also they get two new dogs and they can talk (to each other) and boy do they not get along until later when they do! Also a little girl schools Charles Barkley on the bball court during a dream sequence. Believe it or not this movie did not make much money.

This time around Your Stupid Minds delves into the scary alternate universe science fiction dystopia in Pure Flix's God's Not Dead 2. Producer and "Pastor Dave" David A.R. White returns with an all-star cast that dwarfs the middling 90s television actors of the first film (Dean Cain, Kevin Sorbo), with some people who can actually act. Grace Wesley (Melissa Joan Hart) is a saintly Christian high school history teacher who gets into hot water for answering a direct question about Jesus in her AP U.S. History class. Evil atheist ACLU lawyer Peter Kane (Ray Wise) descends on the small Arkansas town to prove once and for all that God is dead (by proving the existence of the Establishment Clause). Can the Crusaders for good defend this attack on religion? Is Pat Boone Melissa Joan Hart's dad or husband? Did any of the filmmakers actually talk to a lawyer before writing this? Will any more minorities be slapped in the face by overbearing anti-Christian fathers in God's Not Dead 3? Only time will tell.