Your Stupid Minds

Your Stupid Minds covers 1982's Zapped!, a post-Porky's teen sex comedy where a teenage boy acquires telekinetic powers and uses them mostly to pop girls' shirts open.

Barney (Scott Baio) is a typical high school nerd (he wears glasses, you see), with free rein over his own science laboratory in the school, dosing mice with whiskey to see if they swim better while drunk. Somehow this results in the titular zapping, and he gains the ability to move objects with his mind. At first his hormones mostly control the power, as numerous ladies' tops are flung open, but soon enough his awful friend Peyton (Willie Aames) convinces him to use his powers beyond just sexual humiliation. Soon enough Barney is cheating at baseball, cheating at roulette, terrorizing a model plane enthusiast at the park for no reason, you get the idea.

There are numerous other side plots to get this thing well beyond feature length, including a drinking contest at Magic Mountain, a dream sequence involving Scatman Crothers, Albert Einstein, and cartoon salami, a Star Trek parody, and a sexual romp between Principal Coolidge (Robert Mandan) and teacher Ms. Burnhart (Sue Ane Langdon).

Barney starts to feel wary about the use of his powers, but not enough to stop him from enacting an inevitable Carrie parody at the prom, but by tearing off everyone's clothes instead of murdering them (spoiler for this movie, and Carrie, I suppose).

Your Stupid Minds tackles a prequel no one's ever heard of to a movie no one ever saw. It's 2022's R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned!

Roy Pulsipher (Jeffrey Donovan, replacing Jeff Bridges in the role) is a sheriff in 1870s Wyoming who's about to wed his daughter Charlotte (Tilly Keeper) to her weenie fiancé Angus (Richard Fleeshman). But some ruffians try to rob the train station and Roy is shot and killed in the ruckus.

Roy is sent up to heaven to the Rest in Peace Department (R.I.P.D.) where he must help them fight deados and maintain the balance between heaven and hell. He's sent back to earth with his partner Jeanne (Penelope Mitchell), a 15th century devout French woman warrior with a fear of fire (see if you can guess which historical figure she is). They fight the deados and Roy learns some things about understanding or something.

Did you know Frank Miller's The Spirit isn't the only Spirit movie out there? There's also an almost unaired 1987 made-for-TV movie adaptation! And it also isn't very good!

Denny Colt (Sam J. Jones of Flash Gordon fame) is a straitlaced cop who comes to town to investigate the death of his mentor Sevrin (Philip Baker Hall). It has something to do with art and artifact forgery and he's going to get to the bottom of it. But before he can even get started, he's shot in the gut and falls off a pier. He returns as… The Spirit! Except he isn't dead (just injured). He hangs out in a cemetery with his sidekick Eubie (Bumper Robinson) and is romantically pursed by the commissioner's daughter Ellen (Nana Visitor).

His special powers? Well… he can punch guys slightly better than other guys (but not if there are more than 2-3). He can also get knocked unconscious several times without any permanent brain damage because he's already pretty dumb. He also has the ability to instantly generate tiny form-fitting masks when the occasion arises.

Here we go again! Your Stupid Minds covers another much maligned Pinocchio movie, this time the 2022 Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and instantly dumped on Disney+.

Geppetto (Tom Hanks) is a sad old man who makes a wooden boy named, you guessed it, Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is there, there's the fox and the cat, Pleasure Island, Luke Evans appears, there's a whale. You've seen the 1940 Pinocchio. You know the deal.

Added to this one: a puppet love interest, some forgettable songs, some lines about "influencers" for the Zoomers, and lots of opportunities for 3D things that you'll probably never see since this never went to theaters. Lorraine Bracco is a seagull.

It's Pinocchio season! With a new adaptation of the classic tale burning up awards and another… not, we decided to cover the baffling and much maligned Roberto Benigni Pinocchio from 2002!

Geppetto (Carlo Giuffré) is a sad old man who makes a son out of wood. That boy comes to life as a middle aged Italian man (Benigni) and immediately gets into lots of hijinks. He's unruly, hyperactive, doesn't want to go to school, and loves candy. He leaves for weeks at a time to go on adventures where he's swindled, imprisoned, caught in a bear trap, or turned into a donkey. But the Blue Fairy (Nicoletta Braschi) teaches him how to be less horrible and he becomes a real boy/full grown man.

Your Stupid Minds kicks off 2023 with a movie that takes place in 2023 (so they say). The infamous 1974 film Zardoz, directed by John Boorman, fresh off Deliverance, and starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling.

Zed (Connery), a Brutal Exterminator commanded by the giant stone floating head god Zardoz to kill the Brutals as a form of population control, stows away on the giant floating head and finds himself in a bucolic village full of immortal hippies called the Eternals. The Eternals use the power of the Vortex to live forever. Since they cannot die, the Eternals can only punish one another (mostly for Bad Vibe Crimes) through rapid aging.

Zed is kept as a test subject by May (Sara Kestelman) to find out why he can die and also have sex. Conseulla (Rampling) hates him but is also intrigued. Zed navigates this strange world in order to exact his mission to kill the Eternals, because they hate themselves and want to die.

Featuring:

Ludwig van Beethoven, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Note: This episode originally aired November 16, 2016.

Your Stupid Minds goes back to its roots (once again) with the first foray into Hollywood(ish) by former football washout Brian "The Boz" Bosworth: 1991's Stone Cold! The Boz plays undercover cop Joe Huff (under the alter ego John Stone) to infiltrate a murderous, terroristic biker group led by Chains Cooper (Lance Henriksen).

After some mild blackmail from the FBI, Huff/Stone goes undercover to bring a violent Mississippi biker gang down. After feeding his pet lizard (maybe a Komodo Dragon?), he heads off to The South's Warmest Welcome to meet Chains, second-in-command Ice (William Forsythe), old lady Nancy (Arabella Holzbog), and token wuss Gut (Evan James) to bring down their drug dealing and general violence. Stone gets in deep when he gets feelings for Nancy, and makes up some elaborate drug buy with a limitless supply of FBI drugs.

Can Stone bring the gang down before their terroristic plans from to fruition? Will he get home in time to feed his lizard? Will Gut get the confidence he so sorely needs? Listen to find out!

Your Stupid Minds has maybe the quickest turnaround on a movie and reviews a Hallmark Channel original Christmas picture that came out on Friday. It's the classic tale of an optometrist falling in love with a colorblind hunk: The Most Colorful Time of the Year (2022)!

Dr. Michelle (Katrina Bowden, a.k.a. Cerie Xerox from 30 Rock) is a widowed single mom with a loser ex-boyfriend who highly suspects that her daughter's science teacher Mr. Stevens (Christopher Russell) is colorblind. This is because he is overly elusive when asked to identify colors. She signs him up for an experimental trial for a pair of glasses that allow him to see color, but he is resistant. He also hates Christmas, presumably because of all the colors.

Eventually he puts them on, and loves Christmas. He also mentions a classified secret government eye test he took, and then never mentions it again. But there's a catch: Michelle's jerk ex boyfriend Mark (R Austin Ball) is back in the picture. Even though she hates him, and her daughter also hates him, will they get back together? You'll just have to see (eh?) to find out.

On this episode of Your Stupid Minds, Chris's sister Sarah returns to the podcast because she's got a stick in her craw regarding the 2022 surprise sleeper summer hit Where the Crawdads Sing. Based on the book of the same name by Delia Owens.

Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is accused of the murder of the high school's star quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson) and tells her entire life story to defense attorney Tom Milton (David Strathairn). Her family, including her abusive father, abandoned her at their North Carolina swamp farm so she spent her childhood fending for herself.

A nice swamp boy Tate (Taylor John Smith) teaches her to read, and eventually she starts dating Chase. But the townfolk only know her as "Swamp Girl," the disgusting swamp creature who kind of resembles a normal little girl who sometimes doesn't wear shoes.

Will she be found guilty? Did she do it? Why did Sarah get kicked out of her book club? Did author Delia Owens have anything to do with that poacher's murder in the 90s? You'll just have to listen to find out. We don't have any answers for that last question, though.

Your Stupid Minds goes big this episode with a Giganotosaurus-sized episode all about Jurassic World: Dominion! Hey guys, remember Jurassic Park? This movie sure does!

After dinosaurs entered the real world in the last movie, they now roam the planet, eating foxes and nesting on the Empire State Building and whatnot. But also, giant prehistoric locusts are destroying crops. And there's a clone girl from the last movie and Biosyn, the once main competitor of InGen, wants to find her. After she's kidnapped, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who serve as her parents of sorts, rush off to find her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) try to solve the mystery of the giant locusts and go off to Biosyn's headquarters to find answers, with the help of, you guessed it Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Then they all fight dinos for a million hours and rehash every moment from the first movie that they didn't already do in Jurassic World. Remember Dodgson? Remember the shaving cream can? They're back!