Your Stupid Minds

We continue our October scary-movie-a-thon-thing with the terrifying and impossible to alphabetize cyber thriller .com for Murder. Directed by schlock semi-master Nico Mastorakis, this ripoff of Halloween, Psycho, Rear Window, etc. stars Nastassja Kinski (Cat People), Nicollette Sheridan (former Michael Bolton paramour), Roger Daltrey (Vampirella, The Who), and Huey Lewis (of the News).

When hotshot architect Ben (Daltrey) leaves his temporarily handicapped wive Sondra (Kinski) in the care of her sister and a completely computerized mansion named Hal, she uses the opportunity to antagonize murderers in an online sex chatroom. When she annoys the wrong murderer—a hacker who goes by Werther—he uses the opportunity to send her video footage of a murder (encrypted as a racist public domain cartoon) and then go after her as well! Meanwhile FBI Agent Matheson (Lewis) takes the case despite lacking a basic understanding of computers and technology.

Join Nick, Chris, and returning special guest Sarah Long (from Episode 42: American Strays) as we try and figure out how to add blood effects to chatoom text, why the director thought the delete key could possibly execute any sort of command, and the murderer’s extremely dubious time estimate for death by wrist knick.

Your Stupid Minds reviews SCARY MOVIES throughout October, so cover your eyes and prepare yourself for the spookiest jump scares and bloodless murders that the MPAA will allow at this particular rating threshhold. It’s Rupert Wainwright’s dull remake of John Carpenter’s somewhat flawed The Fog, but instead of early 80s suspense it’s a mid-2000s Trajan-fonted teen slasher!

Nick Castle (Smallville’s Tom Welling) is a boat guy on the small Antonio Island, off the coast of Oregon. He takes tourists on his boat with his first mate Spooner (DeRay Davis) when the anchor snags on something… something GHOSTLY! Meanwhile Nick’s girlfriend Elizabeth (a non-kidnapped Maggie Grace) returns to the island, unaware of Nick’s affair with the sultry local DJ Stevie (Selma Blair). But all of this relationship drama is largely moot because ghost pirates show up.

2005’s The Fog splits the difference between Carpenter’s supernatural giallo influences and adds high-tension gore-less slasher suspense throughout. As a result the original plot makes little sense, such as when Elizabeth breezes through an entire 19th century journal as they outpace the fog in Nick’s truck. And based on the intentions of the ghostly beings inside the fog, many of the murders leading up to the denouement make little sense.

Your Stupid Minds reviews a poorly titled action thriller In the Blood, starring former MMA standout turned action movie heroine Gina Carano. Join us as we discuss the long-awaited return of Danny Trejo, after literally three episodes without an appearance. Carano marries a bland, blonde, handsome son of a rich businessman (Treat Williams), and after he is kidnapped during a bizarrely intricate plot, she becomes the top suspect of island law enforcement led by Luis Guzmán. Will Gina find her husband and kill a bunch of dudes? Is her character a psychotic, Michael Myers style villain, or the hero of this movie? What is proper zipline safety procedures? Tune in and find out!

We go back to our B movie roots with an independent sci-fi monster flick shot right here in the heart of Austin, Texas: 1985’s Future-Kill. Despite its ultra low budget and muddy cinematography, the filmmakers somehow convinced famed surrealist artist H.R. Giger to create the poster image, which is far and away a hundred times better than anything in the actual movie. Giger’s rendering of the main villain “Splatter” is mysterious, ghostly, and terrifying. Future-Kill’s Splatter looks like a scrawny guy in a bike helmet.

After a brief intro with Splatter and Eddie, the leader of the mutant punk protest movement, Future-Kill moves over to a zany frat party full of a bunch of reprehensible frat dudes displaying amateurish pranks. The balding frat president says these no-goodniks must make up for their antics by performing the zaniest prank of all: go downtown into mutant territory and kidnap a gang member. Needless to say it does not go well and they end up running for their lives in a world without pay phones or public transportation.

The sequel everyone in 1989 had been demanding (it actually knocked Rain Man off the top of the box office charts), it's The Fly II! Featuring... one guy from the previous film, and some video footage of Jeff Goldblum as the Fly on VHS. When Geena Davis's character from the original film dies in childbirth, evil businessman/science enthusiast Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson), has the baby raised in a lab, where he grows at super speed into the brilliant but somewhat awkward Eric Stoltz. Bartok hires Stoltz to continue his father's work into matter transporters, which he quickly uses to impress Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga of Spaceballs) by failing to transport her cactus. As their romance blossoms, and Stoltz closes in on re-creating his father's work, he makes a startling discovery about a web of lies Bartok has told him.

We continue our theme of “Unnecessary Sequels Readily Available on Netflix Which Involve Immortality, Resurrection, and Christian-motifed Revenge Plots” to bring you our second reviewed Highlander movie: Highlander: Endgame!

Wiping away all memories of Highlander II: The Quickening, Endgame brings in the star of the Highlander television series Duncan MacLeod (Adrian Paul) as he carries the torch from the ridiculously haircutted Connor McLeod (Christopher Lambert). Evil highlander Jacob Kell (YSM favorite Bruce Payne) is killing highlanders in some elaborate 500 year old revenge plot, and it’s up to Duncan to stop him. There are also large gaps in the highlander mythos which we assume are filled by Highlander III: The Sorcerer and the television series, though Endgame does a poor job of bringing us into the fold. Mostly the movie is a mishmash of self-contradicting highlander rules enforced by either the Watchers, a mortal group calculating highlander power levels, or no one. It’s not entirely clear.

If you like horrible period drama wigs, a confusing confluence of western and eastern influences, and Bruce Payne mugging his way through the movie, Highlander: Endgame may be for you! We’ll do our best to nitpick highlander rules, contemplate the aggressive nature of immortal sex, and discuss the prevalence of the White Guy Karate throughout the film.

Your Stupid Minds continues its summer sequels series (once you do three in a row it's a series) with the fourth and final Crow movie made as of 2014: The Crow: Wicked Prayer! When tiny scumbag Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong) is murdered by an all star team of Satanists, Cuervo is transformed by a magic crow into an instrument of embarrassingly dressed vengeance. Can pre-teen mall goth Crow overcome Tank from The Matrix, Tara Reid, MMA champion Tito Ortiz, and David Boreanaz over the course of one night, or will some sort of elaborate, ill-defined plan by the Satanists come to fruition?

We continue our ongoing Ayn Rand series with Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike. Many of you may remember us waxing political in our episode of the first installment, and by this point we stop perpetuating a New Criticism analysis and just dig right in to all aspects of the source material, especially authorial intent. For some inexplicable reason, the filmmakers completely recast everyone, replacing Taylor Schilling with an older Samantha Mathis. The third movie, which they’ve raised money for by mooching off of Kickstarter contributors, will continue this trend of complete re-casting to pretend like it was intentional.

Atlas Shrugged II continues the thrilling tale of Dagny Taggart and her amazing trains, Hank Reardon and his amazing steel, something about an amazing train engine, and the always mysterious John Galt, who continues to kidnap the best and the brightest around the country. Meanwhile, the government has instituted the stupidest economic plan in existence, and all the amazing and logical industrialists think it’s moronic because it is.

In honor of World Cup fever, we review the most ludicrous, vaguely soccer themed movie we could find. Air Bud returns (without the original Buddy) for the third installment of the franchise: Air Bud: World Pup! Buddy and a kid who looks like Simon from 7th Heaven (Kevin Zegers) join the school’s new soccer team to impress their respective beaus: a fake British girl Emma (Brittany Paige Bouck), and her unspayed Golden Retriever. While Simon woos the girl with Natural Born Killers sunglasses and leather jackets, Buddy makes sundaes and shows up for nightly booty calls.

Meanwhile, a former dog catcher Snerbert (played by Martin Ferrero, the lawyer from Jurassic Park) stakes out Emma’s ridiculous mansion in an attempt to kidnap her dog for some reason. There’s also something about a dog playing soccer.

This episode features special guest and Chris’s sister Sarah Dobson, an expert in soccer, England, dog-ownership, and being a girl in the early 2000s.

This time around on the Your Stupid Minds podcast we present Episode 0: the secret lost podcast pilot. We originally recorded Lucky Number Slevin as our first episode back in February 2012, but ended up recording a WHOPPING 35 minutes instead of the 20 we were originally going for, so we shelved this one for a rainy day.

One of our most loathed movies, Lucky Number Slevin tells the needlessly complex and Tarantino-esque story of Slevin Kelevra (Josh Hartnett), a bath-toweled man with an impossible no-way name who navigates the machinations of two themed mobs, one led by The Boss (Morgan Freeman), the other by The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley). Slevin smugs his way through the misadventures, along the way courted by Manic Pixie Dream Girl Lindsey (Lucy Liu), and his own elaborate ulterior motive. Bruce Willis’s hairpiece also makes an appearance.