Podcast: The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

This ain't your grandma's exorcist. It's the POPE's exorcist! Russell Crowe plays the very real exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth in this very not real exorcism tale of 2023's The Pope’s Exorcist.

After Father Amorth (Crowe) conducts a "fake" exorcism on a troubled young man by tricking the demon into a pig and shooting it (at least it wasn’t 2,000 of them) he is sent back to the Vatican to be reprimanded for conducting an unsanctioned exorcism. Tightwad Cardinal Sullivan (Ryan O’Grady) reprimands him for being a loose cannon, for being too cool, etc. But then the pope (Franco Nero) sends Amorth on a new mission, should he choose to accept, to Spain to investigate a new possession in a little boy.

Julia (Alexandra Essoe) arrives at a Spanish abbey with her daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden) and her young son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) left to her by her late husband. She's going to fix it up and sell it to... a church? An abbey enthusiast? In any case, that plan is disrupted when her son starts acting all possessed and weird. Ever seen The Exorcist? Ya know how demons are always carving words into their body, spider-walking, saying sexually inappropriate things, and so on? Well it's that.

Amorth arrives and teams up with the local Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) to exorcise this powerful demon. It turns out the demon possessed the dude who started the Spanish Inquisition, conveniently letting the Catholic Church off the hook on that one.

Can Amorth and Esquibel save this boy and destroy this demon? Do they have dark elements of their pasts the demon can exploit? Does a Vespa scooter really have enough horsepower to rip off the cover of a centuries-old catacomb? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Podcast: Tower of Terror (1997)

Your Stupid Minds brings you Disney’s first foray into films based on their amusement park rides. It’s 1997’s made-for-TV movie Tower of Terror, starring Steve Guttenberg, Nia Peeples, and Kirsten Dunst.

Buzzy Crocker (Guttenberg) is a former journalist drummed out of the journalism game for being a bad journalist. Now he’s fabricating photos for his supernatural tabloid stories with his teenage niece Anna (Dunst). When an old woman (Amzie Strickland) comes to him with the real story of the Hollywood Hotel elevator disappearance in 1939, he goes to the abandoned hotel to investigate.

He eventually finds that everyone in the elevator is still around, in spook form, and can’t cross over to the other plane. With the help of Anna he works to try to free them.

Podcast: New York Ninja (2021)

We're back from an extended break to give you a real treat. New York Ninja (2021) has everything. A ninja. A roller skating ninja. A radioactive serial killer. Cynthia Rothrock (as a voice). And helicopters.

In 1984, John Liu had a dream: to make a movie about a New York ninja. He shot 6-8 hours of footage, but his distribution company went bankrupt so the entire movie was scrapped.

Cut to 2020. The new hotshot b-movie home video distributor Vinegar Syndrome unearths these reels with no script, storyboard, or audio track. They get to work basically reimagining the entire plot and restoring the footage. What we have here is a reimagining of what would have been an 80s film, cut, dubbed, and scored in the 2020s.

John Liu (John Liu) is a non-ninja New Yorker whose pregnant wife is killed by one of the many roving violence gangs of 1980s New York. In his grief, he becomes a New York Ninja and starts throwing smoke bombs and shurikens at the gangs.

It turns out the gangs (but not all of the gangs, some just like to go around smashing cars and murdering orphans) are behind a wide-sweeping human trafficking operation, led by the Plutonium Killer, a former CIA agent with radioactive powers, and hypnotism powers, and shapeshifting powers. He puts young women under a spell and then murders them, which seems like it would cut into his human trafficking bottom line, but I guess we all need hobbies.

New York Ninja flips around the city beating up street punks and having guns pulled on him numerous times. Can he save the day and defeat the baddies? Assuming John Liu shot that footage before pulling the plug, the answer is yes.

Podcast: Pentathlon (1994)

Your Stupid Minds is back! Did you know it’s the Olympics? We have a special Olympic-size episode for you, with Dolph Lundgren’s 1994 film Pentathlon!

Eric Brogar (Lundgren) is an Olympic pentathlete competing for East Germany in the 1988 Olympics. For those of you who are normal, the pentathlon consists of five events: swimming, shooting, horseback riding, fencing, and running (the modern pentathlon has replaced horseback riding with some Ninja Warrior parkour stuff). Brogar wins the gold to spite his evil and abusive trainer Heinrich Müller (David Soul), who is also a big wig in the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Also to spite him, Brogar defects in the sloppiest way possible at the Seoul airport and runs onto the American team bus.

In retaliation, Müller murders Brogar’s dad, and then the Berlin Wall falls two months later. Brogar is depressed, and spends the next four years in Los Angeles drinking, smoking, and watching a tiny little television while somehow maintaining perfect muscle tone and body fat ratio. He works at a greasy spoon and his boss John Creese (Roger E. Mosley) discovers he’s a gold medalist, and immediately starts training him so he can cash in on endorsement deals. You know, all those million dollar Nike sponsorships pentathletes are known to receive?

Müller is now also a neo-Nazi and travels to LA to raise funds for a terrorist attack on a local Holocaust museum peace rally, but upon arriving he learns that Brogar still exists and lives in town. Since this is the go-go ‘90s and he thinks he can have it all, surely he can perform this grisly terrorist attack and satisfy his personal grudge at the same time, right?

After a bike-by Luger shooting at the beach, Brogar escapes to his girlfriend’s hideaway cabin (possibly the same cabin from the 3 Ninjas movies) but Müller and his goons find him. He’s kidnapped and taken to the Holocaust museum so he can watch a rabbi explode on a tiny TV inside the terrorists’ van. Can Brogar escape and stop the attack, which conceivably is the only possible reason why he would be there? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Podcast: I Am Rage (2023)

Your Stupid Minds comes at you with a movie recommended by Chris’s dad, the low budget UK adrenochrome-fueled revenge thriller I Am Rage (2023).

Erin (Hannaj Bang Bendz) is a young woman with PTSD who decides to go to the family estate of her new boyfriend Adam (Derek Nelson). His entire family is there, including Adam’s brother Michael (Luke Aquilina) and his new partner Sarah (Antonia Whillans). After a “dinner” of blood drinking, Erin and Sarah are drugged and blood is extracted from their adrenal glands, because this is apparently an ancestral adrenochrome farm where they kidnap people and draw their blood at their height of fear to extract the sweet sweet drug within.*

Erin quickly escapes using some sort of super power she has and goes on a rampage with Sarah by her side. Apparently, and this didn’t come up in her Bumble profile, Erin was trafficked as a child and held against her will for fifteen years. During that time she developed super adrenaline blood that allows her to roundhouse kick people and tear out their hearts with her bare hands.

They have a final showdown in a local paintball arena against the family and some rich big game hunter jerk WIlson (Niko Foster). Who will win? My money’s on the woman with super powers.

*Please note: Adrenochrome is a real thing but the conspiracy theories you may have heard about it are not. Hunter S. Thompson made a joke about it fifty years ago and now we’re all living with the consequences.

Podcast: Gen¹³ (1998)

Your Stupid Minds is back with more animation for you! Not anime, but anime-inspired, it’s the unreleased in America film adaptation of the comic Gen¹³ from Jim Lee, Brandon Choi and J. Scott Campbell. It’s basically if a OVA was slightly less leery and animated like an episode of Batman Beyond.

Caitlin Fairchild (Alicia Witt) is a freakin’ NERD who is recruited by a shady paramilitary organization. Because of her promiscuous roommate and nothing else, she decides to drop out of college and head to this organization’s secret mountain lair, where she learns karate and is yelled at by a Nazi (Cloris Leachman).

There she meets Grunge (Flea), a surfer dude, and Roxy (Elizabeth Daily), a smoker. There’s also the mysterious Zuko-like rogue Threshold (Mark Hamill) who looks suspiciously like the blonde kid in the cold open. Apparently they’re supposed to unlock their Gen¹³ powers, some genetic experiment that killed all their parents and gives them special powers. While snooping in the organization’s Secret Files Area, they’re attacked by some guards and Caitlin unlocks her powers (gets really strong, boobs get bigger).

Soon they all unlock their powers. Grunge turns into whatever he touches, and Roxy can levitate. They fight the Nazi lady in a giant mech suit. Can they escape the facility? Do they even want to? What does this group do? Will Disney ever acknowledge this movie’s existence? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Garzey's Wing (1996)

What is that light? Is that Garzey’s Wing? Is he the Holy Warrior? Is that Garzey’s Wing? What was that? Garzey’s Wing? Yes, Your Stupid Minds is dipping its toe into anime for the first time ever with one of the worst OVAs of all time combined with one of the worst English dub tracks of all time. It’s Yoshiyuki Tomino’s 1996 three episode OVA Garzey’s Wing.

Chris is a recent high school graduate who is SO easy GOING and continually fails his college entrance exams. When he goes to his home town to attend a high school reunion pool party, a giant mystical duck bifurcates his consciousness and half of him goes to the parallel world of Byston Well, while his other half remains in the real world and dead-set on attending this pool party.

To put it as simply and clearly as possible, Chris must help the slaves of the Metomeus Tribe avoid the Dragorols and Daragau of Zagazoa’s War Beast Army Corps under the command of the ruthless King Fungun to get to the Boundless Plains of Gabujuju. Yamato Takeru no Mikoto has granted Chris the power of Garzey’s Wing, which allows him to fly or something. His Ferario friend Fellan-Fa, female warrior Leelince, and headband-wearing mystic Hassan-san help in this plane of reality, while real world girlfriend Rumiko lends her chi to help him on both planes while he also attends a pool party. Seems clear enough.

Combine this with an absolutely abysmal late 90s English dub track where yelling constituted acting and we’re left with an absolutely baffling experience that would still be confusing even if this series actually ended properly. Join us as we somehow make sense of our convoluted situations and discuss this cacophony of fantasy nonsense.

Some Notes:

• We had the pleasure of watching this from a bootleg recording off of Sci-Fi from 1999 with period commercials intact. This is, truly, the preferred method to watch this. You need all the Toaster Strudel commercials to process what you just watched.