Podcast: The Phantom of the Opera (1998)

For spooky October, Your Stupid Minds returns to an old favorite auteur. Dario Argento adds his own flair (i.e. gruesome deaths) to his 1998 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera! Starring Julian Sands, Asia Argento, and a bunch of Italians and Hungarians.

Christine (Argento) is a singer in the Paris Opera House who starts getting telepathic messages from the theater's creepy subterranean resident, known only as the Phantom (Sands). He loves rats and was raised by rats. Unlike every other adaptation, the Phantom doesn't wear a mask, and looks more like Sephiroth in leather pants. He kills two peasants trying to steal his treasure (the Phantom has treasure?) and sics his rats on ratcatcher Ignace (István Bubik).

Soon, the Phantom becomes infatuated with Christine. He kidnaps her and threatens star singer Carlotta (Nadia Rinaldi) to not sing. She refuses and gets bonked on the head (and a bunch of people die from a fallen chandelier).

The baron Raoul De Chagny (Andrea Di Stefano) is also in love with Christine, and his love vibes must counteract the Phantom's supernatural love vibes. Eventually the ratcatcher, after a near-fatal accident with a ratcatching car he invented with his dwarf friend, catches the rat-loving Phantom in the act with Christine, and commands the entire Paris police force to murder him.

Can the Phantom escape? Who will the mercurial Christine end up with? Why don't they just leave the building? Listen to find out!

Podcast: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

After a contentious bidding war with New Line Cinema, Miramax was determined to revamp the Halloween franchise with this jumbled mess. It's 1995's Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, starring Donald Pleasance, Marianne Hagan, Kim Darby, and Paul Rudd.

When Michael Myers and his niece Jamie (J.C. Brandy) are kidnapped by cultists at the end of Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers (don't worry, we get into the series chronology in the episode), Jamie is forced to give birth to a baby for we assume child sacrifice purposes. She escapes with her newborn but is murdered by Michael; the killer is singularly determined to wipe out his entire bloodline (but is shockingly not very adept at it).

Meanwhile, a new Strode family has moved into Michael's murder mansion. Kara (Hagan) is a young woman trying to get her life back on track with her six year old son Danny (Devin Gardner). Much like his namesake in The Shining, Danny has special murderer powers and voices in his head, but unlike The Shining, this is unimportant and barely comes up.

Tommy Doyle (Rudd, credited as Paul Stephen Rudd in this pre-Clueless role) is the kid from the first movie who talks about the Bogeyman. This run-in with Michael 17 years prior has left him traumatized and obsessed with the killer, researching occult reasons for his murder spree on the mid-90s internet. He finds Jamie's baby at a bus station and lackadaisically decides to take care of it while they kinda figure out a way to do something. Also Dr. Loomis (Pleasance) is back on his perpetual mission to find and apprehend Michael.

Will these characters intersect? Does this movie have a purpose? Is Michael's mask too large, thick, and lumpy? Will someone get electrocuted so bad his head explodes? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Podcast: The Murder Mansion (1972)

Your Stupid Minds starts its spooktacular October with a Spanish/Italian collab that numerous Letterboxd reviews describe as "giallo meets Scooby Doo," presumably because there's one mask reveal and some Italians are involved. It's 1972's The Murder Mansion!

After an "exciting" car/motorcycle chase, speed demon Fred (Andrés Resino) steals comely hitchhiker Laura (Lisa Leonardo) from sweaty creep Mr. Porter (Franco Fantasia). Meanwhile, neurotic divorcee Elsa (Analía Gadé) races off into the foggy night with some other people. They all find themselves lost in the fog (even after Fred asks directions from the Grim Reaper) and end up at the titular murder mansion, an old house in the foothills of Spain with its very own cemetery! It's overseen by the young Martha Clinton, a descendant of the house's original satanic inhabitants.

Soon, strange things begin to occur, not entirely spurred by Fred's morbid fascination with going to the basement. A lumbering chauffeur (not unlike Maniac Cop or Tor Johnson) and an old woman (not unlike Vampiria or an elderly version of Martha) keep menacing the house guests.

Is the house really supernatural, or is there a a more earthly, Giallo-like explanation? How many times will Fred go to the basement? Will a murder ever happen in the murder mansion? You'll just 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.

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: The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds takes advantage of the Criterion Channel doing our curation for us by choosing a spook-em-up in its 80s horror series: another Lucio Fulci movie, it’s 1981’s The House by the Cemetery!

Dr. Norman Boyle (played by the incredibly Italian Paolo Malco) his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and their cherubic, etherial son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) move temporarily into a creepy New England house so the dad can do research or something.

Over time it turns out this creepy house is, like, really creepy. Bob is clued in by another cherubic, etherial child Mae (Silvia Collatina) warning him against going to the house. A series of gruesome, Fulci-style murders later (not counting the one in the cold open that has nothing to do with anything), and Norman is determined to save his family from this malevolent force.

Some Notes:

• Available on the Criterion Channel.
• See our last episode on Fulci, City of the Living Dead.

Podcast: Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Direct download.

In honor of Halloween Kills slicing up the box office (and the holiday of Halloween in general) we reviewed a less successful foray into the franchise with possibly its worst entry, 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection!

After decapitating Michael Myers in the last film, the embarrassingly titled but by all accounts decent Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, this movie opens with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in a mental institution. The exposition nurse reveals that in a stunning plot twist that allows them to make more Halloween movies, Michael switched his outfit with that of an innocent father of three EMT, who was the person Laurie actually decapitated. Michael is still alive.

Laurie is in a constant state of pretend shock one year later, but lies in wait for Michael to come for her on Halloween so she can unleash her trap for him. Unfortunately for Laurie (and fortunately for Jamie Lee Curtis, who desperately wanted to stop making these movies) Michael slips out of the trap and kills her.

A year later, and unrelated to everything that just happened, some college students sign up to star in a livestreamed internet reality series called Dangertainment. After being recruited by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks), the cadre of horny teens are locked in Michael Myers’s childhood home and must search for clues as to why he’s so crazy. But what’s really crazy is Michael has been living under the house this entire time and emerges to kill them off!

Some Notes:

• Directed by Rick Rosenthal, who directed Halloween II.
• Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica remake) appears as Jen Danzig, I assume the daughter of Glenn.
• This movie continues with Halloween H20's continuity, which ignores Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I can't definitively say Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not canon; this universe may also contain an evil Irish toy company located in California that used pieces of Stonehenge placed into Halloween masks in order to turn millions of children into bugs and snakes when they watch a television commercial. I can't be 100% certain.