Podcast: Gunner (2024)

We’re a movin' and a groovin' into 2025 with a low budget direct-to-something action film starring Morgan Freeman and the third Hemsworth brother Luke. It's 2024's Gunner!

Lee Gunner (Hemsworth) is a special forces veteran Medal of Honor recipient returning home from Afghanistan after four tours to his home town of Clinton in the state of The South. After stumbling upon a drug lab in the forest, his two sons Luke (Grant Feely) and Travis (Connor DeWolfe) are kidnapped by a gang led by Dobbs Ryker (Mykel Shannon Jenkins), son of imprisoned drug lord Kendrick (Freeman).

Using his special forces training, hundreds of smoke bombs, and extremely jarring music cues, Gunner whizzes past stock After Effects CGI muzzle flashes to rescue his boys. How will be save his boys, and can he recover the truckloads of fentanyl the DEA seized in the process? Can he reconcile a broken relationship with his sons and vaguely Eastern European ex-wife Claire (Yulia Klass)? You’ll just have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Country Hearts Christmas (2023)

Your Stupid Minds continues its tradition of low budget Christmas movies with wrestlers in them with Country Hearts Christmas, starring Chris Jericho and others.

Tori (Lanie McAuley) and June (Katerina Maria) are sisters seeking to become country music stars in Nashville. This was most likely set up in the previous movie Country Hearts, but that doesn’t involve Christmas so who cares? The sisters catch a big break and get a spot on a popular Christmas Eve live television show, but there’s one massive problem. They need to go to church! The women hem and haw about having to be on TV on the day before Christmas, missing key family events like church and... opening pre-Santa presents? Bear in mind, these women are adults and can still make it on Christmas Day, but that isn’t enough.

Their dad Bones (Jericho) is a former rock star who has sobered up since his rock days. He spends his days Facetiming various family members to meddle in their personal affairs, traversing the cathedral-like hallways of his cavernous McMansion, and trying to get his horses to have sex with each other.

June husband Justin (Jeff Irving) is lonely while his wife is in Nashville, drinking heavily, and having financial troubles. Why he can’t run a failing winery in Nashville with his wife is beyond us. Meanwhile Tori has a love triangle (or square? Maybe a Love Sputnik, since all the lines need to connect back to her?) with three different dudes.

We could go on about the plot forever, but I can assure you the first world travails of this extremely co-dependent family are just as boring on screen as written. There’s also a product placement for Zillow so egregious it’s basically a 30 second commercial in the middle of this movie. Enjoy!

Podcast: Borderlands (2024)

Sure, we could have reviewed Eli Roth's Thanksgiving the day after Thanksgiving. But we didn’t. We did another Eli Roth movie instead. It's 2024's Borderlands!

Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter hired to retrieve the daughter of a definitely not evil billionaire named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). It turns out he's evil and his daughter is a clone he made from the DNA of some dead alien civilization. He wants to use her as a key to unlock a vault full of floating cubes that he can use to make a lot of money. Evilly, I assume.

Lillith teams up with a team of misfits, including soldier Roland (Kevin Hart, who is, guess what, short), archaeologist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), bunny clone girl Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), hockey masked psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and annoying robot Claptrap (Jack Black). They traverse through various video game levels, ripping off better movies and going pew pew pew to a bunch of bad guys.

Can they unlock the vault? Is Tiny Tina really the chosen one? And, most importantly, who cares? Find out in our latest episode!

Podcast: The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

As we gradually transition from spook em up season to Christmas time, we dip into another Albert Pyun movie with his first directing credit, 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, conveniently named after its genre!

Evil usurper King Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch, also see what they did there?) resurrects an ancient, I guess sorcerer but seems more like a demon named Xusia of Delos (Richard Moll) in order to smite the armies of his sworn enemy King Richard (Christopher Cary) and steal his kingdom. He does so, but while Xusia is weak Cromwell stabs him and he falls off a cliff.

The only survivor of the royal lineage is Prince Talon (Lee Horsley) who manages to escape and plots his revenge by getting super buff and going on adventures for eight years. He takes along his father’s sword, a non-magic sword that has three blades, two of which turn into projectiles. Then Princess Alana (Kathleen), sister of the rebel leader agrees to have sex with him if he rescues her brother, who’s been kidnapped by Cromwell. Also rescue some rebel troops trapped in a cave.

Instead, Talon gets kidnapped and crucified. Lucky for him he’s bros with all the invited guests, so he escapes and defeats everyone and has sex (offscreen).

Podcast: Trap (2024)

We finish out our spooky Halloween month with an episode on the Day of the Dead where nobody actually dies (uh, spoiler). It’s M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 movie Trap!

Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a mild-mannered serial killer fireman taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert for Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), her favorite pop star. Through some snooping and one very gregarious merch salesman Cooper finds out the entire concert is a trap to catch him, the Butcher! Who chops people up into little pieces.

The Butcher must find a way to escape using his affably awkward skills as a professional liar. Will he be able to escape? Will his family find out? Will Agent 47 complete his mission? Did Shyamalan really cast Hayley Mills because she was in The Parent Trap? Is Your Stupid Minds done with the “bad” movie premise? You’ll have to listen to find out!

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.