Stinker Madness - The Bad Movie Podcast

Planning on holding hostages over the holidays? Better think again, because Santa will straight mess you up in so, so, so many ways. In the late 70's and 80's there was a string of terrible "Christmas" movies that featured Santa or a Santa facsimile going on a murderous rampage (Santa's Slay, Santa Claws, Silent Night, Deadly Night 1-3, et al.). It could be an easy mistake to confuse this movie with that band of sellout cash grabs. Violent Night is far from any of those films. While it does pay a little homage to that group along with other Xmas classic films (Die Hard and Home Alone being the biggest and most obvious), Violent Night is a true Christmas movie. Ok, well maybe not one that you watch with the kiddies and bitchy old Aunt Linda (she hates everything anyways) but one that could easily become an annual tradition in the right circles. Think Machette Kills but with Santa going berserker (spoiler: see what I did there?) on a group of heisting baddies, with the true spirit of

Over-editing, bad actors and continuity problems plague not just the film but the Miami Sharks as well in Oliver Stone's complete mess of a tale about football (maybe). Let me just start out by saying, I despise this movie. I didn't want to do it for the podcast. I still wish we hadn't. Its an insufferable mess that is 2 and 1/2 hours of my time wasted. I'm not a big sports movie guy and I'm especially not a big football movie guy (name a good one and don't say Brian's Song. That's not about football but this one isn't either, I guess) so going into this had some baggage that I was dragging into it. Maybe if I liked these types of movies, I'd have gone for it?  Probably not. See the problem isn't the sports here. There's actually some really great photography done and execution of action is top notch. My problem is that it is completely devoid of a plot/point. No character comes out in any different shape then when the film started. Nothing transpires that make me feel something. The script is rid

This week we split up the way too long and way to many cuts, Oliver Stone hates the NFL movie with Al Pacino. Expect Sam and Justin to weakly impersonate Al and go on diatribes about football inaccuracies and Jackie talks penis. More to come next week!

Go to a beach resort and find yourself craving Worther's and looking for the Ben Gay. M. Knight is back on the podcast for another chapter in his nonsensical filmography. So if you saw any trailer for this movie (see above) you already know the hook and most of the plot. You might expect some big twist considering the director and there is one but its very small and doesn't really change much so we're going to not worry about it very much here. What we are going to worry about is the incredibly stupid and nonsensical plot of being trapped somewhere that makes you age rapidly (50 years in 24 hours to be precise). Let me start by saying that there are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through. Some of that is physics based, some of that is "well we can't put that in a movie", but the biggie is that it breaks its own rules, which is a staple for M. Night Shyamalan. At one point a character (a hemophiliac who has a nose bleed for unknown reasons) gets cut on the cheek only to have it heal immediately.

The Russian mafia hatches a plan to blackmail America with the threat of Greek Fire microchip bombs delivered via Chinese counterfeit Levi's. The only thing standing in their way is CIA agent and his mark, a pants seller. Whatta bombshell plot! So its the film that kept JCVD out of movie theaters all the way until The Expendables. And there is a pretty good reason for that. Its either a) confusing, b) vague, c) nonsense, and/or d) completely stupid. Which I guess, makes its more confusing than anything. The biggest problem is the editing. This suffers from that terrible time in the late 90's and early 00's of over editing and slo-mo in scenes that don't call for it. There was also 20 minutes of action sequences cut out of the film and instead all the Rob Schneider stuff is left in. Nice. BUT what does make it in the film is one of the dumbest plots in an action movie and that's saying something. Its all about the pants. The CIA has three independent teams working on counterfeit pants....for years. Thes

Snoop takes us on a horror ride in an anthology shaped Cadillac as he collects to souls of the damned to be his neighbors as he rules the subdivision, The Hood of Horrors, in hell. Get ready for a grotesque block party! So go into this knowing that it only cost $5 million in 2006. That's not a ton of money. With that knowledge in mind, this is an very tight efficient little package. You've got animation (not cheap) and a cavalcade of guest starts (not cheap either) and some seriously clever makeup and effects (also not cheap). Director Stacy Title did a very good job of keeping this thing on track and seamless. Sure, it can be a little much at times (there might be a little too much attitude) but there's far more fun to help you get past too much butthole talk. Arguably it has one of the Top Ten on screen comedy deaths of all time. The rest of them also go pretty swimmingly as well with one managing to sneak in excessive comedy farts which I'm just never going to get sick of.  Its just a fun little an

A poisonous cat climbs into the body of another cat, escapes onto a crime yacht with some sexy coeds and proceeds to commit its own vigilantism. Its full on cat justice! So let's get to the point - Uninvited is sheer ridiculousness. Its a GREAT bad movie. Every aspect of this thing is exactly what you're signing up for, especially if you like baffling and non-frightening movie monsters. Plus you've stacked all that with Stinker hall of famers Greydon Clark, George Kennedy and Clu Galager. Supplementing the cast is a very hot and totally 80's fashioned Clare Carey that went on to be the wife of Coach. Damn you Craig T. Nelson!!!! So the cat - its very unclear on what the cat is. Best we can piece together is that there is a cat with a chip on its shoulder from being medically experimented on, gains some super powers, finds another cat and crawls inside it to disguise itself as just a precious little housecat so that it can get the Meow Mix. It's just a total misunderstanding that the cat is a

Lets put a terrible cast with no professional singing experience around a terrible script all while performing some of the worst music ever recorded. Time for Stinker Madness to step on some hair metal feelers. Now don't go storming the capital, but the late 80's hair metal/butt rock genre is a bunch of garbage. Which is fine. But this movie isn't. It's garbage. Nothing can be forgiven here, such as a time and place that the Sunset Blvd rock scene was all about in the late 80's. This is just nostalgia for a time when being a terrible person was celebrated. And it sucks. Its way too long. Has too many songs in it. Too many sub-plots. Too much "general audiences" editing. And too much people feeling sorry for themselves.  The performances are horrible. No one here (with the exception of Mary J. Blige whom you just feel bad for) has any vocal talent showcased by the lead Julianne Hough with her faux Britney Spears nasal whine. I will give everyone a little credit because Baldwin, Brand, Cruise and Ackerm

Air humping in leg warmers meets journalistic malfeasance and everyone's lives are ruined. But hey! Jaime Lee is hot, so I guess that's ok. Hailed as the film that ended Travolta's career (briefly, lets be honest) and set Jamie Lee back a few years, Perfect is anything but. Its way too long for such a paper thin plot and is stuffed with repeated unnecessary and irrelevant scenes that keep it dragging you into the depths of your sofa. Pedantic would be an understatement.  But poorly acted is not how we would describe it. At worst, the acting is "meh", "whatevs" levels aside from Jaime Lee who is pretty darn good here. Even Travolta who we love to bash on did just fine. It's not the actors who are at fault here. What IS wild about this is how heavily involved Rolling Stones magazine is, while also managing to paint the rag in a very bad light. Its somehow screaming out to us in 1985 "WE DON'T ACTUALLY DO GOOD JOURNALISM! DON'T TRUST US!". At no point, would I have wanted to place a subscription

A lack of the scientific method causes a medical failure that could still be cleared up with just a simple conversation. Yes, the MCU has their own idiot plot now. So basically, Michael Morbius has a rare, but vaguely proclaimed, bone/muscle disease that gives him and his bestie "Milo" (played by Matt Smith) a ticking clock of death that requires him to create a remedy that he alone can test on himself. I think I've heard of that before. Maybe from Robert Louise Stevenson. Anyways, he takes the potion and becomes a vampire-bat-man. Not a vampire. A man who is also a vampire bat. Milo sees his powers and decides to join him, but eats too many people so they have to fight. Morbius is a DEEPLY flawed movie. As mentioned above, the whole thing could have been avoided with the use of the scientific method. Which could have worked if Morbius was an outsider, alleyway style doctor. But he's not. He's supremely famous and has saved so many lives that he's awarded the Nobel Prize. Pretty sure he knows about the scie

3 little hemorrhoids, who are trained to be silent assassins by their "Ninja Tournament" winning grandfather, go to Japan to recover/keep a dagger that is used to unlock a treasure vault/give the same dagger to the winner of the "Ninja Tournament" in time to get home for little league played by adult men and farts. I can't express my contempt for 3 Ninjas Kick Back in words. I will instead commit Seppuku because I have made suck poor choices in my life that I have dishonored my family name by seeing it. Goodbye, cruel world. Ok, well now that that is over with, I'll try to demonstrate why you should avoid 3 Ninjas Kick Back like North Korea (perhaps not coincidentally, this movie is beloved by Kim Jong Un). Nothing works here. These children are not ninja. They are karate kids. Ninjas are trained silent assassins and they don't have competition tournaments for high schoolers. Then there's the dagger- Nope. I can't. I hate this movie so much that I am going to drink strychnine and th

Well here it is - this is the absolute worst movie we've ever had on the podcast. Ok so what must a film do to be a 1 star film? Well, first it obviously must suck. It has to be a terrible viewing experience. It has to contribute NOTHING of value to the viewer. But with all those pieces, we still give 2 stars for just those items. Making a movie is damn tough and just getting it done gives it a single star from us. BUT there's one very special piece that is needed to be 1 star - at the end of the movie, you realize the movie doesn't exist. What could I mean? Well think of Monster-a-Go-Go and at the end a title card and narrator tells you that the scenes you've just watched were fake and didn't happen. Its the WORST! How does that relate to Hell Behind Bars? The "plot" of the movie revolves around some diamonds. Our lead lady in prison is there because when she sold the diamonds, cops arrested her for killing a guy in front of them. Yet, the rest of the film is both "breaking out of prison/getting

The guy from Double Dragon teams up with the guy from a spinoff of The Cosby Show (ew) and that lady who died of mold in that documentary in one of the most under-rated bonkers banana business masterpieces of karate comedy ever put to film.  What a undiscovered treasure this masterpiece is. Just one year after this was released to video a movie was put in theaters and received much acclaim, success and two sequels called Rush Hour which is a clinic in film ripoffery if I've ever seen one after 20 years later watching Drive for the first time. There is no possible way that Brent Ratner didn't watch Drive and then say "yeah I'm gonna do a lot more of that in my film". There's no way. It's a travesty that this film wasn't a bigger deal because it is SOOO vastly superior to Rush Hour. Maybe just not as marketable to a mass audience. Every aspect of this is phenomenal. Dacascos is electric and displays skills that arguably rival any other movie martial artist, yes even Jackie Chan.

Good ol' Fred Flintstone gets caught up in a criminal conspiracy to defraud Slate Co's investors and embezzle millions of shells all while risking the lives of his family and destroying his neighbor and best friend's career, home, family and his dignity. Whatta guy! From the get-go you know something is wrong here. Fred is just a big of piece of toxic garbage. Yes, I know the character was based off Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners but it is a real experience to go back and watch what a huge POS he was. The guy's entire existence is centered around being "the tough guy" that everyone loves and has only one motivation - being liked and admired. And that's where the movie takes us. Its such a far cry from Homer Simpson whose real sin is being a lazy moron. Inside and past the undigested donuts is a true golden heart. A loving father and faithful husband. But that ain't Fred... at least not until he has an epiphany while on the end of a hangman's noose (yup, you read that right). You might see something simil

A tow truck driver decides to make a movie that teaches us a master class on how to boost cars. Someone knows way too much about stealing cars here. So along the same vein as Miami Connection, Deadbeat by Dawn, and The Room a guy who doesn't have any training or experience making movies uses his dubious personal funds to make his dream project - a movie. That's what H.B. Halecki did here. But he made a movie about what he knew - stealing cars. Ol' H.B. or Tobey by his friends, had a successful tow truck company which to me says he repossessed a lot of vehicles and so made a movie about breaking into cars and moving them without any one knowing.  Sadly, car thieving instructional videos aren't very exciting. That's the front 5/8s of the film. There's an attempt to church it up a little with a little bit of ADR comedy and you know how that always goes. There was no script for this movie and so that just makes a pile of movie. Its just scenes spliced together in no meaningful or predetermin

Getting from here to there has never been so dangerous! Dom Delouse wouldn't have survived 30 feet from the start line. So yeah, its a Cannonball run. That's about all it has in common with the Burt Reynolds classic. This isn't much of a laugh goofball screw fest. What we have here is something in between Deathrace 2000 and Cannonball Run. Its not really funny. Its not really that campy. But its not really a race movie either. Its like a little bit of everything. But wow does it have a lot of Hal Needham shenanigans that is missing from most Corman movies. Speaking of Corman, talk about a huge amount of cameos. Corman himself, Don Simpson, Martin Scorsese, Sly Stallone, Paul Bartel and Dick Miller! Wahhoo. I think what Cannonball suffers from is a very bad job explaining what the heck Dick Miller's character, Bennie, is up to. It turns out that he's trying to help his brother Coy win, but it appears up to about 9/10s of the way through that he's trying to kill Coy. So maybe people just couldn't really p

One tough cop and one tough public defender team up to take down the entire NYPD and one guy who owns a sex club and likes illegal street racing. The only thing standing in their way? More grenades. Do not be mislead by the very positive reviews by the critics here. This has got a 70% on Rottentomatoes. That is absolutely insane. This movie stinks, in a good way, but it stinks and it stinks hard. I mean, what did they see that we didn't? Oh, well there's lots of commentary about racism and corruption within police departments at that time. Yeah we saw that. Well what about the conflict within Roland on choosing money or his passion? Yep saw that too. What about Richie's path to lead him to this point in life? Wait, you're arguing that this is a good movie because his girlfriend waxed her apartment floors and the dog flew out the window because it couldn't stop? THAT'S YOUR ARGUMENT?!?!? He lives in a movie theater because of slippery floors?!?!? Did you see the part where a cop and public defender chase dow

Sure, its just West Side Story with skateboards but its....uh....hmmmm. I guess that's it. What you've got here is your classic tale of boy wants to win skateboarding competition, boy meets his rival, boy meets girl, girl is rivals sister, boy and rival skateboard joust with bean bags in a burning drainage ditch, boy blames girl, boy beats rival in downhill skateboarding competition, rival and boy become brothers in law and America is united. That ol' joint, you know. So if you're a skateboarder or someone who enjoys watching skateboarding, you're gonna prefer Gleaming the Cube over Thrashin'. Here the skateboarding is pretty sub-par for a film about a sport (aside from the pool competition that appears to be helmed by Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk). What Thrashin' does right though is ratchet up the corny cheese to about 50. The dialogue is so bafflingly terrible, the "tough" guys are comically fancy, And time after time, the characters make hilariously stupid decisions and then throw hissy

When the only way to get revenge for your brother's death is to drive at 200 MPH, don't. Because apparently you don't need to, or can't, or it really wasn't anybody's fault except your brothers. I mean the list goes on and on. So this is an Asylum movie, which we tend to steer very clear of because of the complete lack of writing that takes place and their usually horrible visuals. Well this makes no exception. The writing is incredibly terrible and the visuals are horrendous. What is hard to clarify is that somehow this one feels different from their other rubbish. There's really not any "boxes of dialogue" in the middle. There's no standing around with quick cuts between characters not really talking about anything but pretending their doing something important. 200 MPH is more just wandering between scenes that may or may not have anything to do with the plot but its too hard to tell because you're never really sure what the plot is exactly.  Maybe we're so desensitized that we can't see how cr

Billie Jean leads a movement of oppressed 80's kids against.....adults? Because she wants that damn $608 and FAIR IS FAIR! So once upon a hot summer in Corpus Christi, a 14 year old guy named Binx gets his sweet scooter trashed by some older d-bags. His older sister goes to the dad of said punk and demands he repay for the damages. Instead that guy tries to put her on a rape-repayment plan and gets shot by Binx. The kids bolt and become defacto Bonnie and Clyde figures of the day's youth. That's really more than you need to know about this film. I went in completely blind as to what it was and I am so glad that I did. Thanks alot Google for making us have to write up content each time that spoils the movie. Nice algorithm! I should revolt against the man too because fair IS fair. Anyways, the old d-bags do bad things (usually rape) and get away with it in the 80's is a fairly common theme we come up against on this podcast. See Tomboy, The Wraith, Savage Streets and so many others....I guess