Podcast: Zapped! (1982)

Your Stupid Minds covers 1982’s Zapped!, a post-Porky’s teen sex comedy where a teenage boy acquires telekinetic powers and uses them mostly to pop girls’ shirts open.

Barney (Scott Baio) is a typical high school nerd (he wears glasses, you see), with free rein over his own science laboratory in the school, dosing mice with whiskey to see if they swim better while drunk. Somehow this results in the titular zapping, and he gains the ability to move objects with his mind. At first his hormones mostly control the power, as numerous ladies’ tops are flung open, but soon enough his awful friend Peyton (Willie Aames) convinces him to use his powers beyond just sexual humiliation. Soon enough Barney is cheating at baseball, cheating at roulette, terrorizing a model plane enthusiast at the park for no reason, you get the idea.

There are numerous other side plots to get this thing well beyond feature length, including a drinking contest at Magic Mountain, a dream sequence involving Scatman Crothers, Albert Einstein, and cartoon salami, a Star Trek parody, and a sexual romp between Principal Coolidge (Robert Mandan) and teacher Ms. Burnhart (Sue Ane Langdon).

Barney starts to feel wary about the use of his powers, but not enough to stop him from enacting an inevitable Carrie parody at the prom, but by tearing off everyone’s clothes instead of murdering them (spoiler for this movie, and Carrie, I suppose).

Podcast: Killer Workout (1987)

Direct download.



Your Stupid Minds reviews a classic of the gym-based ‘80s slasher genre, Killer Workout, also known as Aerobi-cide.

An up-and-coming model (Marcia Karr) is horrifically burned in a freak tanning bed fire. Two years (or is it five years?) later, her twin sister Rhonda (mentioned only in online synopses) opens up a gym where babes and hunks are murdered with a comically large novelty safety pin. A needlessly confrontational investigator, Lieutenant Morgan (David Campbell), is assigned the case. Another hunk, Chuck, (Ted Prior), is sent by the gym's senior partner to work at the gym, and also knows white guy karate.

Some Notes

• Tanning bed fires are not all that uncommon.
• Not to be confused with Death Spa, which came out a few years later. Weirdly enough one of the teens in this movie vandalizes the gym with a graffito tag that says "Death Spa," even though no spa services are seen.
• A horrible VHS digital transfer with frequent tracking issues is available on Amazon Prime. There is also a Blu-ray version sourced from a PAL Beta SP and upconverted to HD, meaning better than the Prime version, but not by much.

Podcast: Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds finally covers one of the A-listers in the schlock movie pantheon: Andy Sidaris’s Hard Ticket to Hawaii. Sidaris was a sports director who decided to jump over to 1980s sexploitation flicks. With muse and former Playmate of the Month Dona Speir, he went on a quest to create the most bonkers action films of the decade.

Donna (Spier) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton) are buxom drug agents who stumble on an RC helicopter-based diamond smuggling drug ring. They elicit the help of boyfriend agent Rowdy (Ronn Moss) and Jade (South Florida kickboxing superstar Harold Diamond) to rescue their friend and blow up as many things as possible. There’s also a contaminated killer snake, several deaths by Bazooka, a zany handstand skateboarding assassin, and a spiked death frisbee.

Some Notes:

• Other films in the Sidaris shared universe: Malibu Express, Picasso Trigger, Savage Beach, Guns, Do or Die, Hard Hunted, Fit to Kill, and many more!
• Sidaris was famous for pioneering the "honey shot" during sporting events. This involved close-ups of sexy ladies throughout the game. Sports was a very dull affair before he came along.