Podcast: The Octagon (1980)

Your Stupid Minds is back! Chuck Norris uses his iron leg to battle ninjas, mercenaries, and deceptive women in the low budget classic The Octagon!

Strap yourself in for the best approximation of the plot we could put together. Scott James (Chuck Norris) is a famous martial artist who has a secret past as a ninja. Or just trained as a ninja. He has an evil Japanese brother Seikura (Tadashi Yamashita) who got kicked out of ninja school and is now training terrorists against their will in the art of ninja. Scott goes on a date with a woman and she’s killed by ninjas. He goes on a quest to find the ninjas and his evil brother.

Meanwhile his misogynist friend A.J. (Art Hindle) is desperately searching for a reason for his character to be in this movie. He’s horning in on Scott’s dates and swearing revenge on ninjas for the flimsiest of reasons.

Scott visits McCarn (Lee Van Cleef) a murderous mercenary, but a good one. Scott uses him to try to find Doggo (Kurt Grayson) who has some connection to the ninjas. Scott tries to become a mercenary but fails. Luckily that dangling plotline is recovered when Doggo tries to kill him. Scott finds another beautiful woman on the side of the road, Justine Wentworth (Karen Carlson). Scott has a structured settlement and he needs cash now, so this is the perfect woman for him.

He helps Justine with her car and she tries to seduce him but he's too cool. She's also trying to betray him, or trick him, or something? Anyway, A.J. dates her for a while and then she's killed by ninjas. A.J. swears revenge on the ninjas but then is kidnapped by the ninjas.

Scott finds a third woman who is ninja proof and they're off to kill the ninjas. He does so and saves A.J. By the way, the Octagon is some sort of obstacle course with ninjas in it. There's also some guy named Tibor but I forget what he does aside from sell furs.

Podcast: 3 Ninjas (1992)

It's our fourth and final foray into the 3 Ninjas franchise! We have finally completed the series in reverse chronological order by covering the original film. It's 1992's 3 Ninjas, starring Michael Treanor, Max Elliott Slade, Chad Power, and Victor Wong.

Rocky (Treanor), Colt (Slade), and Tum Tum (Power) are three normal Southern Californian kids except for one small difference: they spend their summers learning the deadly art of ninjutsu with their Grandpa Mori (Wong). Their training looks suspiciously like karate, and Grandpa's lessons seems slightly contradictory ("Ninjas never fight those weaker than them," "Don't fight an opponent you can't beat.") but that's neither here nor there.

Meanwhile, the boys' father (Alan McRae) is an FBI agent trying to catch all around bad guy Snyder (Rand Kingsley). Their lives intersect through Snyder's connection to Grandpa Mori, who trained Snyder in the ninja arts, which he now uses for evil.

The 3 ninjas return to their wildfire kindling home so Rocky can awkwardly flirt with his girlfriend/next door neighbor Emily (Kate Sargeant) and battle it out with a cadre of stereotypical bullies on the basketball court. A trio of bumbling surfer stereotypes break into their house for some Home Alone style hijinks and then the kids are kidnapped.

Can the boys escape the vast ship that is their prison? Will Grandpa save them in time? Does a goon get explosive diarrhea? You'll have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Guns (1990)

Your Stupid Minds returns to the world of Andy Sidaris in 1990's Guns, with all your favorite Sidaris tropes: babes, hunks, Hawaii, remote control boats, regular sized boats, backwards planes, rocket launchers, motorcycles inside vans, poor marksmanship, helicopters, and so on. Starring Dona Speir, Erik Estrada, Phyllis Davis, Danny Trejo, Amon-Ra St. Brown's dad, and about 14,000 other people. With the return of special guest Nico Mesa!

International criminal the Jack of Diamonds (Estrada) concocts a convoluted plan to kill off secret agent Donna Hamilton's (Speir) friends to distract her from noticing a Chinese gun smuggling operation he's at the center of (you know they're Chinese guns because each one has a red star sticker printed off of their home inkjet printer).

Despite his cross-dressing hitmen killing the wrong person, the plan works and Donna and her team of bodacious 80s agents descend on Las Vegas (and, when they feel like it, Lake Havasu City, Arizona) to shoot guys with bazookas, copulate on top of motorcycles, and rotate through a menagerie of exotic vehicles to catch this bad guy who they haven't even identified. Also, Jack kidnaps ADA Kathryn Hamilton (Davis), who happens to be... Donna's mom?

Will Donna stop the bad guy? Will she save her mom? Will she blow up Erik Estrada with four bazooka blasts? Is there any of Danny Trejo's famous dummy work? You'll have to listen to find out!

Notent Notables: 

• The best kill is easily the remote control boat murder, available here.
• Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton) is replaced as Donna (Dona Speir)'s partner without explanation. Her comic relief duties are delegated to two clownish hitmen and a magician.
• We joke about the character Donna being someone who would go insane in the social media age, particularly as she survived in the world of master criminals that is Molokai, Hawaii. The real Dona Speir is much more normal, as she is now a recovery coach who is three decades sober and wrote an autobiography about her addictions and recovery in 2019.
• Rodrigo Obregon, one of the few returning actors from Hard Ticket, is back for the third time in our series, playing a third different character. He is not done being in these movies by a long shot.

Podcast: A Line of Fire (2025)

In his attempt to distance himself from the increasingly tedious God's Not Dead franchise, David A.R. White tries out a standard action thriller with the finest washed up actors Hollywood has to offer. It's 2025's A Line of Fire, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Jason Patric, Katrina Bowden, and Scott Baio.

Cash (White) is a retired FBI agent, widower, great dad, fantastic cook, and patriot with amazing hair who everyone likes and is cool. When his former partner is gunned down at a yacht party by GTA Online maniacs on WaveRunners, her niece Jamie (Bowden) retreats to a safe house and calls Cash for help. He takes time out of being the greatest dad and man who's ever lived to save her, gunning down meaty goons with CGI muzzle flashes and computer squibs.

Despite being the greatest FBI agent to ever live and smartest man alive, he seems unconcerned that every time he calls his former FBI buddies for help, his plans are thwarted by the homicidal drug cartel. Josef (Patric) knows his every move: casting his chess piece acolytes across the board via Facetime from his Southern California McMansion. Meanwhile, Javier (Gooding Jr.) traipses around his chaste Miami fully-clothed strip club, fielding Zoom calls for his drug empire over the sound of quiet club music.

Can Cash save Jamie and his daughters (who are of course kidnapped) in time? Can he trust his former FBI colleagues, such as the Nick Offerman-y Rocco (Tommy Snider) or the fashion homunculus Joan Rycker (Eve Richards, whose acting is so bad it makes me question the order of the universe)? You'll have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Red Sonja (2025)

Did you know they made a Red Sonja remake in 2025? You didn’t? Well they did. Here it is. It’s 2025's Red Sonja, starring Matilda Lutz, Robert Sheehan, and Wallis Day.

Red Sonja (Lutz) is a young Hyrkanian girl whose village is destroyed by some evil emperor. She spends the next 20 years or so wandering around in the woods with her horse, completely incurious of the apparently vast diaspora of her people across the land. Eventually the new emperor Draygan (Sheehan) sends some guys to kill fantasy forest rhinos. Red Sonja gets mad and starts a fight with his Mercy Graves style henchwoman (slash lover? Unclear) Annisia (Day). Red Sonja loses and is imprisoned inside a little mini-Gladiator ripoff movie in the middle of this movie.

When he was young, Draygan stole half of the holy book of the Hyrkanian people, using its knowledge of power orbs, flamethrowers, and RobCo brain-computer interface chips to escape slavery and ascend to emperor.

Red Sonja fights her way out of gladiatorial bondage, still keeping her signature chainmail bikini so online weirdos don't get mad at the movie. Can she save the land and avenge her people? Is Draygan really so bad? And what’s in the second half of the holy book? Maybe like a nine-bolted crossbow or a Super Soaker that shoots acid? Who knows! You’ll have to listen to find out.

Podcast: Man of the House (1995)

Your Stupid Minds is back in 2026 with 1995's Man of the House, part of a crop of mid-90s Disney live action comedies about how hard it is to be a father or whatever. Starring Chevy Chase, Farrah Fawcett, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and George Wendt.

After Ben's (JTT) father left the family years ago, he has formed a close bond with his mother Sandy (Fawcett) and is wary of her new fiancé, U.S. Attorney Jack (Chase). In an effort to bond with his future stepson, Jack joins the Indian Guides and befriends a bunch of weirdos, including pack (or whatever, I only know Boy Scout terms) leader Chet (Wendt). Eventually, through the ancient art of being corny as hell, Jack slowly grows a connection with Ben and cracks his cool Six Flags appareled 90s exterior.

Meanwhile in a completely different movie, Jack has put away a stereotypical mob guy in prison for fifty years and the bumbling mobster son has vowed revenge. In the climactic finale, the mob son and his doofy capos traipse around the woods of the Pacific Northwest trying to assassinate Clark Griswold like they're in that Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos. Since this is a Disney family comedy, spoiler alert, Chevy Chase isn’t assassinated by mobsters.

Podcast: Christmas Bedtime Stories (2022)

Per holiday tradition, Your Stupid Minds returns with another Hallmark Christmas movie, one that is so insulting not even Hallmark Christmas movie fans like it. It's 2022's Christmas Bedtime Stories, starring Erin Cahill, Steve Lund, and Charlie Weber.

Danielle (Cahill) is a war widow mother whose perfect Marine husband was killed in combat three years prior. Christmas is coming up and, since all major events in her life revolve around Christmas, she's feeling the loss especially hard. These feelings are exacerbated when her chaste Ken doll boyfriend Pierce (Lund) proposes. She says yes, but then starts to see some undeniable signs of her dead husband: lights flickering, a man in a military town wearing a Marine Corps jacket, snow in Virginia in late December. Undeniable.

The movie putters along with 50 different conversations of people coming up to people and asking "heeeyyyy, are you okay?" Danielle talks to her sister and friend (or are these the same person?) who materialize in her living room with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc whenever she needs to talk.

Meanwhile, her daughter Audrey (Alice Comer) has some consternation over the upcoming father-daughter dance, which takes place at school smack dab in the middle of winter break and seems like a particularly cruel event to host in a military town, where presumably half of the fathers are currently on deployment. A classmate is bullying Audrey for having a dead dad, but since this is a Hallmark movie this confrontation occurs off screen to avoid any unnecessary intrigue or drama. Who will take her to the father-daughter dance? Does she even really care that much?

After this relatively rote romp through familiar Hallmark tropes, the movie completely nukes all of the difficult themes it was attempting to address with an ending so stupid it actually made me like the movie a lot more. To find out what it is you'll just have to listen (or watch the movie, I guess). Also Nancy Grace co-wrote this. What's up with that?