Podcast: Money Plane (2020)

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“BRING ME. MY. MONEY PLANE. REVIEW!”
-Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third (better known as “The Rumble”)

We finally got around to reviewing Money Plane. What is Money Plane, you ask? A 2020 movie about a plane. With money on it. Well, not really. Cryptocurrency. Which I guess can be considered money. And you bet on snuff films. Or something. And you rob it. Rob the Money Plane.

Jack Reese (former wrestler Adam “Edge” Copeland) is a thief with $40 million in gambling debts. When his crew is set up during an art heist, aforementioned criminal boss “The Rumble” (Kelsey Grammer) buys his debt and makes him rob a billion dollars in cryptocurrency from a flying casino. Which cryptocurrencies? Let your imagination decide that.

His crew, consisting of karate lady Isabella (Katrina Norman), hacker Trey (Patrick Lamont, Jr.), and not-as-good hacker Iggy (Andrew Lawrence), concoct a plan to rob the Money Plane, and then it mostly goes as planned. Also Jack’s friend Harry (Thomas Jane) is around to fly a drone in case things go south.

Podcast: Skyscraper (1996)

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Your Stupid Minds presents a ‘90s stuntcasting double feature this month, starting with Skyscraper, which is Die Hard plus boobs plus helicopter and starring Anna Nicole Smith.

Carrie Wisk (Smith) is a helicopter pilot for Helescort (which sounds like a prostitute delivery service) and married to LAPD cop Gordon (Richard Steinmetz). When she delivers some evil dudes to a downtown high rise, she arrives in the middle of a deadly game of cat and mouse. They try to recover the last piece of a superweapon microchip, while she struggles to stay alive. There are also 2.5 sex scenes in this movie.

Some Notes:

• Available streaming on Amazon Prime.
• Some more information on the SimCopter gay rave Easter egg.
• Also starring T-Force's Daron McBee a.k.a. Malibu from American Gladiators.
• Next week we're watching Breakaway starring Tonya Harding and Joe Estevez. Good luck trying to find it.

Podcast: 12 Dates of Christmas (2011)

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Your Stupid Minds finishes out its Hallmark/Lifetime/ABC Family Christmas series and the year with ABC Family’s 12 Dates of Christmas starring Amy Smart and Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

Kate (Smart) is a single thirtysomething jerk who is trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend during the holidays. While shopping for an expensive present for him, she is spritzed in the face with perfume by a careless clerk and knocked unconscious. She wakes up and goes on with her day, only to relive Christmas Eve over and over in a fashion that in no way resembles another famous movie where a jerk relives the same holiday over and over. Can she get back with her ex? Or will she find true love with her hunky widower park designer/youth orphan hockey coach blind date Miles (Gosselaar)? We think you already know the answer.

Some Notes:

• Martin Short is a class act on the Today Show.
• Available on Netflix.

Podcast: The Spirit of Christmas (2015)

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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.

Late to the Party Review: After Earth is Not a Good Film

Unless your sole source of movie information is a blog/podcast site about bad movies, you probably know by now that After Earth, the $130 million dollar budgeted Will Smith/M. Night Shyamalan project, is not a good film. Rotten Tomato "Top Critics" weighed in by saying things like:

"The story trajectory is so obvious that one of Shyamalan's cheesy surprises would have been welcome..."

"After Earth merits comparison with 2000's Battlefield Earth..."

and

"Impossible to take seriously."

The robots in the new I, Robot sequel

Transformers: The Movie (1986)

We all know what to expect from movies based on cartoons, right? A bigger scope, a bigger budget, a new threat, an inexplicable team-up with Courtney Cox? In a lot of ways, Transformers: The Movie hits all those notes. The action is a little more intense, we're jumped 20 years into the future, and the animation quality is improved. Then, towards the end of the first act, or what would probably be the end of an episode if this were broken into separate episodes and aired on TV, Optimus Prime dies. In a summer movie made for children, the leader of the Autobots dies early on and does not return.

Spoiler alert.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Fresh off the success of Halloween 1 and 2, producer John Carpenter had a crazy idea: what if the next Halloween movie doesn't have Michael Myers? He dreamed of a world of annual "twilight zone" tales of the macabre without a total dependence on a monster in a series of worsening films. Shockingly, it turned out even worse than my spec-script for "Saw 7" about a haunted house (with no Jigsaw or saws of any kind).

Thanks for the vital data, JJ Abrams!

Starship Troopers (1997)

What it is: Starship Troopers, the 1997 Paul Verhoeven sci-fi film "inspired" by Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel of the same name.

Why you should watch it: Heinlein's novel is a straightforward and technologically innovative ode to militarized society. Verhoeven read the first few chapters and thought: "What if instead of two hours about bootcamp and civic duty I showed a bunch of prettyboys in Nazi uniforms getting their guts ripped out by giant bugs?"

Well? Do you?

Black Sunday (1960)

Slightly altered review format this week: cutting more of the "review" aspects, leaving more commentary and information.

What it is: Black Sunday, also known as "The Mask of Satan."

Black Sunday also has suitably creepy promotional art.

Why you should watch it: It's the directorial debut of Mario Bava, one of the greats in the horror genre. It's also the debut of Barbara Steele, a large-eyed actress who would go on to star in dozens of B-movie horror before making brief appearances in people inspired by her work: people like Jonathan Demme in Caged Heat, and David Cronenberg in 1975's Shivers.

Liquid Sky (1982)

A film that would need would need lithium in order to be considered "Lynchian," Liquid Sky was released in 1982 at the height of the New Wave movement. Liquid Sky serves as a sort of synecdoche of the movement, full of bizarre costumes, confused gender roles, and synth music that infects your brain. It's not exactly "good," but it holds a bizarre appeal: a good box cover quote might be "...mesmerizing..."

Corpse-chic.

They Live (1988)

John Carpenter's They Live opens in a modern day (late 80s) and slightly more poverty-stricken representation of Los Angeles. Nada ("Rowdy" Roddy Piper) rides the rails from Colorado looking for work, and manages to land a construction job which allows him the opportunity to remove his shirt while making money. The job gives him enough cash to afford a reasonably sized shanty in the Hooverville down the street. He notices some suspicious activity in the church across the way, which coincides with recent hackings of local television stations. Unfortunately nobody seems very keen on a sweaty bearded man's face yelling at them, so this effort often falls upon deaf ears.

Wake up from your living consumerist dreamscape and I'll give you that Super Soaker you always wanted.

The Chaperone (2011)

Despite being a 13 time WWE/WWF world champion, Triple H has never had nearly the same success outside of the wrestling business that his old rivals The Rock and Steve Austin have achieved. And when you are behind Steve Austin in your film career, you have not accomplished the level of success necessary to be a supporting villain in The Expendables. Before this year, Triple H's non-wrestling work consisted of a handful of TV appearances basically playing himself, and one supporting villain role in Blade: Trinity. That changed in 2011, as WWE films, the production company that gave us such classics as The Marine, gave Triple H the starring role in a family comedy/all-ages heist movie The Chaperone.

Pretty well sums things up.

The Marine (2006)

Ever since Dwayne Johnson's propulsion into Hollywood stardom, the World Wresting Federation (WWE) and its domineering owner Vince McMahon have culled their ranks looking for the next The Rock. But rather than give him up to the Disneys and Universal Pictureses of the world, McMahon hopes to use his own WWE Studios to reap the rewards of his fame.

Such is the case of wrestler John Cena. Akin to a hulked out Mark Wahlberg, Cena emulated Wahlberg's Marky Mark routine and spent his early wrestling career making bank on the resemblance, short of producing his own Starz series Cortège, about the hangers-on of a super star professional wrestler. Instead, Cena begins his screen career with the 2006 film The Marine, about a beefy soldier ousted from military service whose wife is kidnapped by homicidal diamond thieves. If you base the quality of a film by the number of times a hero jumps from an exploding building, The Marine is your flick.

Stepping on the flag? For shame.

3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (1998)

For three months in 1997, at the height of WCW's rise from second rate wrestling promotion to the premier wrestling promotion in the world, their world heavyweight champion was MIA. The year before, Hulk Hogan had electrified the wrestling world by turning heel (wrestling term for bad guy) for the first time in 15 years. To cash in on his suddenly increased marketability, Hogan, in his infinite wisdom, disappeared from television for three months to film a 3 Ninjas sequel and a third rate action movie. The Home Alone-esque 1992 original 3 Ninjas had been a hit, but two sequels in 1994 and 1995 had seen diminishing returns. Finally, after a 3 year break that saw an almost completely new cast from the first film six years earlier, 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (3N:HNAMM) was released to enormous yawns.

Sadly, "guy in denim jacket" was held down by WCW politics
and never received a championship title match.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

After Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughn both dropped X-Men: The Last Stand for creative and professional reasons, Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Rush Hour 3) was brought in due to his history of, as the X3 IMDb trivia page puts it, "making successful films out of rushed productions" (emphasis mine, to highlight the exquisite wordplay). After all the care Singer put into the franchise with the first two films, bringing Ratner in to fill in is like hiring a competitive eater as the executive chef of your five star restaurant.

Ratner cosplays as Wolverine's cousin Chet. Codename: Woodchuck.

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

After 1978's Superman was a box office smash, Superman II and III garnered diminishing but still profitable returns. It wasn't until 1987's Superman IV that the franchise completely imploded, both in financial success and thematic coherence. The franchise was sold to Menahim Golan and Yoram "Golden" Globus, the Israeli B-Movie producers responsible for YSM favorites The Apple and Over the Top. Rather than an appropriately paced and grandiose film, Superman IV features only remnants and signifiers of this once great spectacle. Chopped down from 134 minutes to an incoherent 89, the film speeds through the plot faster than a locomotive, makes frequent thematic and logical leaps over tall buildings in a single bound, and flies over the audience's heads with Superman preachily declaring world peace in front of the UN.

Superman urges the world's children to brush twice a day.

Captain America (1990)

With the success of Captain America: The First Avenger this summer at the box office, it's easy to forget that Marvel has tried to cash in on its most patriotic creation more than once. In 1979 they made a TV movie starring Cap on a motorcycle with a clear plastic shield, and in 1990 they tried again with a feature that flopped so badly it didn't even get released until a direct to VHS deal in 1992, two years after it was made. And for good reason.

That "A" doesn't stand for France!

Spawn (1997)

Back in the 90s during the EXTREME Liefeldian comic book trend of guns, muscles, pouches and seemingly interchangeable character models, Image Comics emerged and marketed itself as a viable third party comics opportunity for those wanting a change of pace from DC and Marvel's tired gimmicks, rote storylines, and shameless exploitation of decades old characters. Unfortunately, Image often differentiated itself by simply ripping off existing DC and Marvel properties.

Spawn was unique to this new crop of heroes. Instead of emulating a single character, he attained the powers of every single superhero. It comes as no surprise that such an unimaginative model would create an equally lackluster film. General audiences didn't gravitate toward another superhero origin story with awful Doom 2 special effects.

"My Spidey Sense is tingling! I have that, right?"

Deadfall (1993)

Like the end of the month itself, we close July with a Nic Cage performance so intense it will melt children's popsicles if they sit too close to the screen. In 1993, we finally got an encore performance of a Coppola directing an Estevez, in the grand tradition of Apocalypse Now and, uh... The Outsiders. It's... not great.

A taut 90's photoshop.

Wild at Heart (1990)

It's natural for one of Hollywood's most fearless actors to team up with one of its most fearless directors. What's surprising is that it took until 1990 for Nicolas Cage to collaborate with David Lynch, only to never do so again. Cage brings his signature manic delivery, Elvis infatuation, and snakeskin jacket to Lynch's ultra violent Wizard of Oz referencing psychotic surreal romantic road movie Wild at Heart.

You! Guilty!