Podcast: War of the Worlds (2025)

Your Stupid Minds jumps right on the zeitgeist to cover possibly one of the worst movies of 2025. Released just a week ago on Amazon Prime Video, War of the Worlds (2025) asks the question "have you ever wanted to see the classic H.G. Wells story adapted into a 90 minute Microsoft Teams meeting?" And the answer from the public is a resounding "NO!" We should also note this movie was shot in 2020 using COVID protocols, and it shows.

William Radford (Ice Cube) is NSA's only employee. When he isn't using government resources to spy on his daughter Faith's (Iman Benson) fridge, or uninstalling Counter-Strike from his son David's (Henry Hunter Hall) Steam account, he's trying to catch a hacker known as "Disruptor." He thinks he's pinpointed his location by copy/pasting his IP out of his YouTube video's source code (lol) and a task force comes to a building to take him down.

Of course, if you've seen the title of this movie, you know none of this matters, because aliens invade and blow up a bunch of landmarks with meteors. The invaders are after data, trying to suck out all the data from the world's servers so they can become more powerful.

With the help of his family and NASA friend Sandra (Eva Longoria), William uses all the apps available to him to save the world. Of course, he needs a little help from Faith's boyfriend Mark (Devon), an Amazon driver who uses his elite delivery skills to send William a flash drive packed with alien-killing viruses to his location using a drone. Did we mention this movie is on Prime Video?

Will they save the world? Will Mark get promoted to a golden pee bottle? Will you throw up from the camera swirling across a computer screen at 3,000 miles per hour? You'll have to listen to find out! But please don't watch the movie.

Podcast: Kraven the Hunter (2024)

We finally did it! After months of promises we finally got around to covering the (probably) last of Sony's Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movies. It's 2024's Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, and Russell Crowe.

After a cold open action sequence in a Russian prison that serves as Aaron Taylor-Johnson's sizzle reel for his Bond audition, we are transported to the distant past of probably around 2012. Sergei (Taylor-Johnson) and Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, the Tim Robinson-looking fellow who played Caracalla in Gladiator II) Kravinoff are taken out of boarding school by their mob boss father Nicoli (Crowe) after their mother's suicide. The best healing can only be done once they hunt down a lion serial killer in the savanna named Zar.

Unfortunately, Zar gets the drop on Sergei and he's horribly mauled. However, the lion's blood, combined with a magic potion administered by passer-by Calypso (DeBose) brings him back to life AND gives him Captain America-level superpowers. He leaves home and heads to Siberia to murder poachers and hone his skills.

Years later, Dmitri is kidnapped by rival mob boss Aleksei (Alessandro Nivola) a.k.a. the Rhino, who he got a surgical procedure to turn into a rhino man unless he's constantly pumping anti-rhino venom into his body through a backpack. Sergei, now going by Kraven, goes off on a series of expensive-looking adventures to save him.

Can Kraven save his brother in time? Who's really behind this kidnapping? And, most importantly, when does Kraven get his VEST? You'll have to listen to find out!

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: 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: 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: 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: Madame Web (2024)

Your Stupid Minds is back after a February break with the film that connects us all, it’s 2024’s Madame Web, brought to you by the delicious taste of Pepsi-Cola!

Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a sassy New York EMT who has trouble connecting to people except for her partner Ben (Adam Scott). After a near drowning she unlocks her latent spider power of seeing the future, something spiders are known for.

Meanwhile, Ezekiel Sims (Tahir Rahim), who, and I can’t be certain of this, may have been in the Amazon with Cassie’s mom when she was researching spiders before she died, is on the hunt for three superheroes who kill him in a dream. He utilizes the NSA’s 2003 super-spying technology to track them down. Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) are all on the same train when Cassie gets a vision of their deaths at the hand of Ezekiel. Cassie intervenes and from then on they’re on the run and trying to find answers.

Podcast: Heart of Stone (2023)

Your Stupid Minds continues its Worst of 2023 limited series with yet another nine-figure Netflix action movie that they apparently forgot to promote. It’s Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot!

Rachel Stone (Gadot) is a young statuesque superhacker who’s a new recruit to MI6. She’s part of a team including combat expert Yang (Jing Lusi), another combat expert Parker (Jamie Dornan), and another superhacker Bailey (Paul Ready). Their mission is to kidnap some Russian guy for information, which they fail at spectacularly.

But Stone isn’t a normal MI6 agent. She’s actually part of an even secreter organization called the Charter, which does everything based on the word of an AI supercomputer called the Heart. The Heart has the power to change the tide of human history, but they mostly use it for video game vision in the field and spewing out useless probabilities in real time. As a double agent, Stone is tasked with finding out who’s trying to destroy the Heart, which for the most part she also fails at spectacularly until it’s too late.

Cars blow up, people jump out of airplanes, and unconvincing CGI muzzle flashes light up the screen. It’s about what you’d expect from another $150 million Netflix screensaver. But is it better or worse than your average first quarter theatrical release action flick? You’ll have to listen to find out!

Podcast: Freelance (2023)

Your Stupid Minds starts 2024 with our Worst of 2023 limited series. Our first one is the John Cena action “comedy” from the director of Taken (no, not Luc Besson) and co-starring Alison Brie! It’s 2023’s Freelance.

Mason Pettits (Cena) is former Army Special Forces who injures his back in a helicopter crash during a mission to “liberate” the fictional South American country of Paldonia. After being bored as the most jacked lawyer of all time, he takes on a “freelance” job from his Army buddy Sebastian (Christian Slater) protecting journalist Claire Wellington (Brie) as she visits Paldonia to interview President Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba). The mission goes off without a hitch, Mason collects his $20,000, and his wife loves him again. The end.

Just kidding. The mission goes sideways when a coup d'état breaks out during the visit. Venegas’s worm nephew Jorge (Sebastian Eslava) is under the control of foreign powers who want to strip the country of its natural resources. Pettits, Venegas, and Brie must team out to save the country, and blow up some more helicopters in the process.

Podcast: Christmas in Rockwell (2022)

Your Stupid Minds FINALLY gets into the holiday spirit with, what else, a Hallmark-style Christmas movie with a wrestler! It’s the free agent holiday movie starring WWE's Trish Status, 2022's Christmas in Rockwell.

Alyssa (Stratus) is a former child actress turned grown up actress who made it big at 12 years old with Holly's Puppy Christmas (or something similarly titled, I don’t want to go back and look it up). She travels to Rockwell, Nowheredaho (but really it's in Canada), her home town that she hasn't been to since she left as a child for the bright lights of Los Angeles.

Her goal is to fulfill her Christmas list, doing all the holiday things she missed out on as a child and are part and parcel for these types of movies: Go ice skating, sit on Santa's lap, hang out in a hotel lobby for a while. The only problem? It's the 25th anniversary of Christmas Holly's Puppies, and she doesn't want anyone (especially the press) to know she's in town.

She immediately has a meet cute with the obligatory bland single 30-something hunk Jake (Stephen Huszar). Jake runs an arthouse movie theater with his mom Juniper (Sheila McCarthy) and her secret lover Morty (Roy Lewis). The theater is failing because mom insists on only showing obscure ancient arthouse films that no one's heard of and do not exist. Other than that Jake is a complete blank slate, a man without a past, who speaks only in vague aphorisms. If he existed anywhere outside of a made-for-streaming Christmas movie he would be an amnesia patient or serial killer.

Short story short: The press find out Alyssa is in town and the Puppy Holly Christmas superfans lose their minds. She blames Jake but he obviously didn't spill the beans because he is incapable of independent thought or action. Will they reconcile and smooch? Yes. Is there any wrestling in this movie? No.

Podcast: Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023)

It’s finally here! In keeping with tradition, we reviewed Neil Breen's newest film Cade: The Tortured Crossing, an actual sequel to Twisted Pair that acts more like a spiritual sequel to Twisted Pair. Joining us is friend of me, the show, and bad movies in general Austin Buchan, who knew absolutely nothing about the movie or Neil Breen before watching it.

According to the Alamo Drafthouse website (and, more likely, the press packet that Neil sent to the Alamo Drafthouse) Cade: The Tortured Crossing is about: "An identical AI twin brother restores an old mysterious mental asylum. He takes it upon himself to mystically train the patients as warriors for humanity and justice." Abstractly, that is a correct description of about 5% of the film, but adding additional information, or editorializing about the content, would not adequately prepare you for seeing this on the silver screen.

In a way, this is Neil's most ambitious film, combining his love of stock footage and indifference toward directing actors, he has chosen to eschew actual sets entirely, and composite greenscreened every single character into a dream-like void of proportionally disorienting stock photos and footage, even when using a real set (like a repeated scene of a man plopping into a dingy bed) would have been cheaper and more realistic.

If you haven't seen Twisted Pair, you will not be at a disservice, as basically nothing carries over into Cade except that there are two identical twin brothers, both played by Breen, and they have mystical computer powers. If you’ve never seen a Breen (such as our guest Austin) it's probably the second most baffling experience you can have being introduced to him (aside from Pair, which is probably his most impenetrable and least audience friendly).

So come with us on this journey, and we'll tell of our theater experiences seeing Neil Breen's newest masterpiece.

Podcast: R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned (2022)

Your Stupid Minds tackles a prequel no one’s ever heard of to a movie no one ever saw. It’s 2022’s R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned!

Roy Pulsipher (Jeffrey Donovan, replacing Jeff Bridges in the role) is a sheriff in 1870s Wyoming who’s about to wed his daughter Charlotte (Tilly Keeper) to her weenie fiancé Angus (Richard Fleeshman). But some ruffians try to rob the train station and Roy is shot and killed in the ruckus.

Roy is sent up to heaven to the Rest in Peace Department (R.I.P.D.) where he must help them fight deados and maintain the balance between heaven and hell. He’s sent back to earth with his partner Jeanne (Penelope Mitchell), a 15th century devout French woman warrior with a fear of fire (see if you can guess which historical figure she is). They fight the deados and Roy learns some things about understanding or something.

Podcast: Pinocchio (2022)

Here we go again! Your Stupid Minds covers another much maligned Pinocchio movie, this time the 2022 Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and instantly dumped on Disney+.

Geppetto (Tom Hanks) is a sad old man who makes a wooden boy named, you guessed it, Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is there, there’s the fox and the cat, Pleasure Island, Luke Evans appears, there’s a whale. You’ve seen the 1940 Pinocchio. You know the deal.

Added to this one: a puppet love interest, some forgettable songs, some lines about “influencers” for the Zoomers, and lots of opportunities for 3D things that you’ll probably never see since this never went to theaters. Lorraine Bracco is a seagull.

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: The King's Daughter (2022)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds accidentally reviews two Kaya Scodelario movies in a row by covering a film shot in 2014 and intended to release in 2015. Instead it was dumped unceremoniously into theaters in January of this year. It’s 2022’s The King’s Daughter! Directed by Sean McNamara (3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain).

Marie-Josephe (Scodelario) is an orphan brought to 18th century Versailles for unknown reasons. It turns out she’s, get this, the king’s daughter. Specifically, the daughter of King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnon). So she must navigate the court intrigue of the palace while she finds true love.

ALSO, the king wants to live forever, so he uses his quack court doctor Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) to concoct a plan wherein if he eats the heart of a mermaid during an eclipse, he will achieve immortality. So the king hires a Captain Yves (Benjamin Walker) to capture a mermaid (Bingbing Fan) to do the deed. Will he go through with it? Will he have a change of heart? Did anyone see this movie? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Some Notes:

• In the time between shooting and release, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker met, dated, got engaged, got married, and had two children.
• One of the main reasons it was on the shelf for so long was Bingbing Fan, who plays the mermaid, got into some tax issues with the Chinese government and is basically blacklisted. Since this film had a lot of Chinese funding, the presumption was they were waiting for the scandal to blow over so it could release in China. It never did, so it was dumped into theaters this year.
• Also this is technically an anniversary episode. The Your Stupid Minds podcast began just over ten years ago: May 2, 2012. 🥳