Podcast: The Avengers (1998)

Your Stupid Minds returns from a much needed rest to bring you an all new format. After three years of blogging about bad movies, Chris and I thought "what's the next step for two white guys in their 20s who have everything?" Why podcasting of course!

Cheer and shout as we introduce the all new Your Stupid Minds Podcast, hosted by yours truly and Chris Dobson as we use our distinctively nasally voices to comment on and dig into bad, camp, B, genre, and otherwise fun movies.

Our inaugural episode begins by deceiving our budding viewership into thinking we got a sneak peek of the much anticipated superhero epic Marvel's The Avengers. Instead we chose a dull, nearly forgotten spy comedy from the late 90s of the same name.

Uma Thurman, Ralph Fiennes, Sean Connery, and Eddie Izzard star in this boring retread to the mod 60s spy show by acting like British robots amid a cacophony of disjointed and bewildering action. Enjoy!



Please give us a few days for the podcast to be included in the iTunes directory. In the mean time you can always subscribe directly by adding our RSS feed to your podcast subscriptions.

Special thanks to Max Mechanic for creating our fantastic theme song.

Rising From Our Graves

Hey folks, you might have noticed things have been pretty quiet around the your stupid minds HQ lately. Nick and I both got pretty burned out by the end of the year, reviewing a movie every week in addition to our full time jobs as daredevil jet pilots who don't see eye-to-eye.

We've been planning some big changes in the meantime, and as soon as Nick gets back from his vacation we'll hopefully get back on a somewhat regular schedule of posting here.

While you wait, please enjoy this complimentary 42 second scene.

Rex Reed: Bad For Everyone

Rex Reed of the New York Observer has been an outspoken advocate of the decline of quality criticism and the rise of the uninformed "my opinion is equally valid" Internet culture that has arrived on the scene to review film in the past 15 years. In a way, he's right: I already addressed the problems of film criticism here, in a different rant. But unfortunately Reed's own criticism is typically a poorly written caricature of a snooty film snob, to the point that it's hard to tell whether any given snooty pseudo-intellectual nonsense quote is actually from him or made up. So I made a game of it! Try to guess which of the following quotes actually come from Rex Reed or me, making things up while holding my pinky in mid-air so I can emulate Reed's style.

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.