Podcast: Molly (1999)

Your Stupid Minds returns from a brief summer sojourn to cover a movie that MGM had so little faith in, it premiered as an in-flight movie a month before theaters. It's 1999's Molly, starring Elisabeth Shue, Aaron Eckhart, Jill Hennessy, and Thomas Jane.

Molly (Shue) is a woman with what seems to be autism, but kind of presents as whatever the movie needs it to do. The institution where she's lived for decades is closing down, so her brother Buck (Eckhart) must take her home to his trendy '90s Venice Beach loft. He considers this a huge imposition, and after she ruins his big advertising presentation, he's determined to "fix" her.

A new institution has developed an experimental surgery. They can't diagnose her exact condition, but they sure can try to fix it! The cause of autism, as this movie would assume, is a red blob in her brain. If they can make the blob smaller, then her brain can work better, or something.

With the help of another intellectually disabled orderly from her old institution Sam (Jane), as well as Drs. Brookes (Hennessy) and Trehare (Elizabeth Mitchell), the procedure is a success and Molly begins speaking and performing new tasks. She embraces her manic pixie dream girl status to start dating Sam, go to a Dodgers game, crash a cool vampire production of Romeo and Juliet, and generally start enjoying life.

But, since we are pulling a lot of the plot from Flowers for Algernon, something is wrong and she begins regressing. Are they able to reverse the regression? Can Buck stop being such a jerk? Will we all learn valuable lessons about ability and disability, family, and accepting yourself? You'll have to listen to find out!

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?

Podcast: Snow White (2025)

Your Stupid Minds returns after a brief unplanned hiatus to give you a film generally reviled in both concept and execution across the entire political spectrum. It's hopefully one of Disney's last romps into the live action remake sphere: 2025's Snow White.

We're all familiar with the formula by now: take an animated classic from the back catalogue, cast someone who can sing as the lead, someone who can't sing as the villain, fill the rest of the roles with nobodies you can pay scale, add some lens flares and CGI nightmares and shove it into theaters for a cool billion dollar global gross. This has worked time and time again despite its overwhelming superfluousness, but Snow White seems to have burst the bubble through a combination of political turmoil, excessive padding, and nightmare dwarfs.

Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is a nice lady whose queen mom dies and king dad marries the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). The Evil Queen turns everything bad, but as long as her magic mirror tells her she's hot then Snow White is safe. One day the mirror says she isn't the hottest, and Snow White goes on the run to hide out with a cabin full of horrid looking CGI dwarfs. The 2025 version adds a bunch of dwarf lore where they have magic powers that help them find gems. This does not come up later.

Snow White meets Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) a scrappier Han Solo style update of the prince from the original film. They have some repartee and then fall in love. This version adds some new forgettable songs and expands existing songs unnecessarily in order to pad this thing out to modern acceptable feature length. They all Les Mis up to the castle at the end to confront the Evil Queen and everyone eats apple pies forever. The end.

Note: Apologies for the quality of my audio track. The recorder was low on batteries so I decided to switch to USB power, which resulted in some kind of interference. I cleaned it up to an acceptable state, but I promise it won't happen again.

Podcast: The Prince and the Surfer (1999)

We continue through Chris's second hand DVD collection with another film that, unbelievably, also has no direct involvement with Roger Corman. It's 1999's The Prince and the Surfer, which barely involves any surfing at all.

Cash Canty (Sean Kellman) is a, and I cannot stress this enough, SKATEBOARD (not surfer) kid who spends his days as Southern California teenagers in films like this typically do: hanging out by the half pipe, saying "whatever" to his friends, not going to school. But after breaking into a swanky hotel, he finds a young prince of the made up country of Gelfland is his exact double! To adhere to the Twain plot, they switch places and then do... stuff.

Prince Edward (also Kellman) hangs out with Cash's friends, including the pigtailed Mel (Linda Cardellini). Meanwhile Cash goes about seducing Edward's betrothed Galina (Katie Johnson). But the queen's evil vizier Kratski (Robert Englund) has ulterior motives for the visit to the United States. He wants to sell Gelfland to a mini-golf empire and turn it into Golfland.

Also, Cash's dad Johnny (Timothy Bottoms, who is uncredited because they forgot to credit him) falls in love with Queen Albertina (Jennifer O'Neill). It's all very Shakespearean, except nothing really happens at the end and instead of a mass wedding we get a rushed epilogue read by some surfer dude to try to convince us this movie had anything to do with surfing.

And for whatever reason, in the Tubi version Jon Voight appears in a poorly mic'd intro where he says he wants to see more modern Mark Train adaptations because he is a "concerned father." Lol.

Podcast: Body Chemistry II: The Voice of a Stranger (1991)

Heyyyy, this is Your Stupid Minds saying howdy to all the girls out there in podcast-land. We have a special edition of Your Stupid Minds: After Dark. If you download this episode before your morning commute please wait until night! We present the direct-to-video sequel to the Roger Corman ripoff of Fatal Attraction. It’s Body Chemistry II: The Voice of a Stranger (1991).

Dan (Gregory Harrison) is a disgraced Los Angeles cop who somehow got kicked off the force for beating up too many women. He returns to his fictional home town of San Angelo (not the one in Texas; it appears to be a distant suburb of LA) and breaks into his dead (?) parents’ house to start anew. He rekindles a romance with his high school sweetheart Brenda (Robin Riker) and things are looking up except for his overwhelming violent urges to beat the crap out of her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Claire Archer (Lisa Pescia) has escaped justice after killing, or being responsible for the death of, the married man she aggressively seduced. When radio psychologist Dr. Edwards (John Landis) goes cuckoo on air, Archer replaced him with a sex psychology show. The station manager Big Chuck (Morton Downey Jr.) gets wind of Claire’s dark past through a slimy private investigator Larabee (Clint Howard) and uses her sex tape to blackmail her into a bad contract.

Dan calls into the radio show as “John” with his rough sex problem. Claire clocks him almost immediately despite his use of the Batman voice and begins an illicit affair with him, undergoing a “treatment” to rid him of his urges to commit violence against women. In reality she just wants to torment and humiliate him, ruining any chances he has with the angelic Brenda.

Can Dan escape the clutches of the succubus Claire? Can Claire negotiate a better contract? Where did Clint Howard go? Wait, was that Jeremy Piven as the patrolman? Where is his hair? You’ll have to listen to find out.

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: 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: 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. 🥳

Podcast: Fifty Shades Freed (2018)

Direct download.


A mere eleven months after our previous descent into erotic millionaires gallivant-ing around, we're back to the grindstone with our review of Fifty Shades Freed! Now that Ana has married hunky but troubled Christian, they're just gonna bone all day every day in their sex dungeon forever with no repercussions, right? But other handsome people have their own ideas! Smallville-alum Eric Johnson (Lana's meathead boyfriend) wants revenge on Christian and Ana! Because they ruined his career after he attempted sexual assault? No, a much dumber reason!

Join us as we get progressively madder at action-interrupting ski lodge visits, wonder at the very obvious storylines for G-list characters cut down to single lines, and struggle to keep track of who is who in a movie composed entirely of blandly attractive people with no interesting traits.

Notable Notes:

• The Aspen Cottage Finally Pays Off! Nothing happens there, though!
• These movies take place in a mythical movie universe where you're not allowed to consider not having a kid if you get pregnant
• The book has achieved sentience! 

Podcast: The Spirit of Christmas (2015)

Direct download.


Special guests Valeah Beckwith and Danielle Nasr return to the podcast as we continue our Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas Movie series with the Lifetime/Netflix film The Spirit of Christmas.

Kate (Kati Salowsky) is a high-powered big city workaholic lawyer from Boston who has no interest finding true love. Her goateed boss instructs her to go to a cozy rural bed and breakfast in order to appraise it for sale. The property has problems selling because it’s haunted by a hunky ghost murdered 95 years ago. The ghost Daniel (Thomas Beaudoin) takes corporeal form for the twelve days leading up to Christmas in order to solve his own murder. But when he begins to fall for Kate, things begin to change.

Some Notes:

• Chris was right. The Spirit of Christmas first premiered on Lifetime. It's now available on Netflix.
• Only characters in this movie: Lawyer lady, hunky ghost, Sebastian Gorka boss, Silver Fox innkeeper, Silver Fox's love interest, some people from the past.
• Technically, Thomas Edison and Edward Johnson invented Christmas lights in 1880. Whether they got to rural Massachusetts for public consumption by 1920 is another question.

Podcast: Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

Direct download.



Your Stupid Minds tries a semi-new release before the other big name bad movie podcasts can take a crack at it: Fifty Shades Darker! Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) return per contractual obligation for this needless sequel to the passable first film Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ana and Christian are broken up. And when you break up with someone, it’s important to just move on. Just kidding! You should buy several photographs of her at a public gallery, follow her around and maintain a dossier with her picture and measurements. Luckily this works (when you’re a billionaire), so the lovers reconcile and proceed with progressively kinkier “vanilla” sex.

Unfortunately their disgusting love is tainted by pockets of tension which quickly dissipate, such as a rapist boss with the on-the-nose villain name of Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), crazy ex-lover Leila (Bella Heathcote), older abuser Elena (Kim Basinger), and third act helicopter malfunction. The movie is mostly Batman Returns at this point, except with Christian being much more manipulative and aloof than Bruce Wayne.

Some Notes:

• Yes we are two men, so we can't help but compare Christian to Batman the entire time.
• Keep an eye out for Chekhov's Aspen Cottage in the film which never pays off.
• How made shades of grey are there, anyway?
• "I want to go to a masquerade." "...You want to go to a mass grave??"

Podcast: Bolero (1984)

Direct download. 
Fans of truly execrable cinema are in for a treat as we review 1984's Bolero. Can the film that gave MGM an excuse to end its shameful partnership with the Cannon Group/Golan-Globus be that bad? What if I told you it also won the Razzie award for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (beating out Faye Dunaway in Supergirl!), Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst New Star? For once, everything you've heard turns out to be true! This film is indefensibly, inexplicably bad!

Algunas Notas:

• Auteur Theory at Work? Noted statutory rape-avoider John Derek met Bo while she was a high school dropout. In the film, a 14 year old proudly asserts that she is already a woman and will soon have sex with a famous bullfighter.
• The film was not given a rating by the MPAA, unofficially making it NC-17/X, but was still given a wide release.
• While Bo Derek's hair and Superbowl shuffle place the film in the late 70s/early 80s, Bo's infatuation with Rudolph Valentino film The Sheik (1921) places the movie in the 20s, while the use of the song "As Time Goes By" during a visit to Morocco seems to place the film in the 30s. Either way, this is clearly pre-Franco's Spain.
• You might remember John Derek from his unforgettable performance as "Joshua" opposite Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and "Where's Your Messiah Now?!" Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments, a film that came out the year Bo Derek was born.
• Golan-Globus were so unhappy with the film that they wanted to be given ownership of the Derek ranch somehow.

Bonus: Here's a Joan Rivers Interview with Bo Derek from 1984:

Podcast: Fateful Findings (2013) (Rebroadcast)

Direct download.


Note: This is a rebroadcast from April 3, 2014 to gear up for our 100th episode spectacular. For the show notes, head over to the original Fateful Findings post.

Podcast: Accidental Love (2015)

Direct download.

As part of Your Stupid Minds’ Worst of 2015 week, we have a single episode highlighting an appropriately forgotten lemon of the previous year. To call Accidental Love a 2015 film, however, is somewhat unfitting. Originally titled Nailed and helmed by prestige Oscar bait director David O. Russell, this film went through production hell following the recent 2008 financial crisis.

Filming proceeded from 2008 to 2010 with numerous stoppages (some say up to fourteen) due to lack of payment. Russell eventually left the project, and when the eventual rights holder decided to cobble it together into something resembling a film, David O. asked that his name be removed. Therefore the fictitious “Stephen Greene” is named as director.

Accidental Love is a high concept farce wherein Alice (Jessica Biel) is shot in the head with a nail gun as her boyfriend proposes to her at a local Indiana restaurant. When she is somehow refused treatment at the local hospital because she’s uninsured, she goes on a quest to Washington to seek universal healthcare. She sleeps with her representative in Congress Howard Birdwell (Jake Gyllenhaal) due to the nymphomania side effect of her injury, and then more things happen, some of which might be interpreted as jokes. Also starring Catherine Keener, James Marsden, Tracy Morgan, Kurt Fuller, Kirstie Alley, Bill Hader, Paul Reubens, and some other people.

Some Notes

• James Caan left the project due to creative differences regarding his characters' death. James Brolin filled the role.
• In an effort to trick people into thinking the movie might be good, the Canadian distributor misquoted the AV Club's A.A. Dowd. "[T]here’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke" turned into "A comedic masterstroke."
• Worst of 2015 lists are often do a poor job of representing bad movies. They usually opt to simply include mediocre films which underperformed financially. This list from Rolling Stone is particularly egregious and insulting to actually terrible movies.
• And, because we will never forget, David O. Russell's masterful temper tantrum on the set of I Heart Huckabees.

Podcast: Fateful Findings (2013)

Your Stupid Minds celebrates its FIFTIETH episode. In keeping with our status as a cutting edge resource for all things camp, cult, genre, b, and otherwise considered bad movies, we went on a special podcast field trip to the Alamo Drafthouse for a special midnight screening of the newest entry into the bad movie canon: Fateful Findings!


Las Vegas filmmaker Neil Breen brings us his supernatural hacker romance thriller. The protagonist (played by, who else, Neil Breen) gets into a car accident and unlocks supernatural hacking powers, which he uses to hack the most secret government and corporate secrets. This doesn’t sit well with his pill popping wife Emily, who slurs her displeasure in a heavy polish accent.

Some Notes:

• Fateful Findings definitely resides on the Bad Movie Mount Rushmore, with Neil Breen’s face alongside Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, and James Nguyen. If someone with artistic skills could please illustrate this vision that would be great. With Wood as Washington, Wiseau as Jefferson, Nguyen as Roosevelt, and Breen as Lincoln.
• Follow us on our new Twitter account, @YourStupidMinds!
• I apologize to all the heavy Sony Vegas users out there who I may have insulted.
• "A SUSPENSEFUL, HARD HITTING THRILLER FOR THE INTERNET AGE!" - Earwolf (forums user lizanddickfan1, most likely quoting the Fateful Findings press release)
• Also forgot to mention, Your Stupid Minds is five years old yesterday. Peruse some old reviews and re-read your favorites!

Direct Download.