Podcast: Pinocchio (2002)

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.

What makes this even more baffling is the atrociously mismatched English dub, featuring Breckin Meyer, Glenn Close, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Kevin James, Eddie Griffin, Cheech Marin, Topher Grace, Queen Latifah, Regis Philbin, and Jim Belushi.

Podcast: Zardoz (1974)

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

YSM Classics: Stone Cold (1991)

Note: This episode originally aired November 16, 2016.

Another repeat! This is one of our faves, 1991's Stone Cold starring Brian "The Boz" Bosworth and Lance Henriksen. You can read the original review on the original page. See you in the new year!

Podcast: The Most Colorful Time of the Year (2022)

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.

Podcast: Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

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 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 townsfolk 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.

Podcast: Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

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!

Podcast: Chopping Mall (1986)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds celebrates its 200th episode with a movie we probably should have reviewed already: 1986’s Chopping Mall, directed by Jim Wynorski. 80s teens. Killer robots in the mall. Barbara Crampton. What more do you want?

Four young people and their four companions stay in the mall overnight to have a beer-fueled... orgy, I guess, inside of a furniture store. But there’s a small problem, a lightening storm has caused the security robots that guard the mall to go crazy and turn into killbots! Also, the mall is completely locked down with steel security doors at night (probably violating local fire codes, as one IMDb trivia writer points out). Will the young people make it out alive? And what of their companions?