Music. To you from the last video store in the universe it's binge movies episode 163 i'm jason this is the show that ranks eliminates movies to determine which one is most worthy of preservation for all time even beyond the end times this episode we rank oddball movies of the 90s. Music.
I'm here with the man the myth the legend the phd of polymathery the man who discovered jamiroquai dr d david rosen lord and creator of piecing him together the ultimate schiller plugger uh this guy finds a way to get his own shit over on multiple social media platforms any way he possibly can king of promotions how are you sir i am great i am excited to talk to you about a bunch of really freaking weird movies so i thought about introducing this new
segment in the show and i'm not going to do it because i can't quite figure it out but i'm going to say what it was going to be and you're going to be the first one i'm going gonna do it too it was at the end of the show i was really gonna do this to like like multiple time guests and when i said okay get your plugs in as soon as you started talking i was gonna play like really loud music and be like a hype man and be like yeah yeah fuck
him up david fuck him up yeah yeah but it'd be so loud nobody could hear your plug that's what the bit was gonna be.
That's fine yeah just throw me in the show now but then i thought that somebody eventually is going to get offended because people got brittle spirits these days david you know that it's true it's really true i i i tweeted about brendan fraser the other day and i got some uh pretty mad mad tweets from gotta be careful because in the day we live in somebody might show up at your house and be like what'd you say what'd you say about him yeah i try to be really positive too
like this was a positive tweet and people still got mad but uh yeah i try to i try to put out a positive thing on you do mostly i would say that's true yeah people are still their spirits are so weak now you see yeah yeah are you technically a millennial are you gen x you're the tail end of gen x i i like to claim gen x but i mean my wife says i'm a millennial i i disagree is your wife younger just because i don't want it i don't want to be she's younger than me she's younger
by three okay so then i would listen to her yeah so you're a very very aged i mean geriatric i'm the oldest millennial ever basically yeah it's me and then everyone else oldest millennial you know how um oh my god it was mel brooks and what's his face they had the 10 000 year old man, oh yeah yeah yeah carl reiner yeah you're the 10 000 year old millennial you're the world's elders millennial.
New podcast there's a bit in there somewhere that honestly that feels very much it doesn't make any sense but that feels very like 1990s SNL, where it's like yeah and now david rosen the world's oldest millennial and there's nothing remarkable about you you're just yeah i'm really good at computers but i don't understand tiktok, you're just you're just a guy who just happens to be the oldest technically the oldest millennial yeah uh speaking of the 90s back when people well let
me ask you a question before i get in And what I think my opinion is where people want to say better in the nineties, but where were people made of stronger stock in the nineties? Do you think? I kind of do think so. And it's hard because like, there's so much more opportunity now to do things, but like everybody gets a chance to do things and then it's all kind of just watered down and like, nobody really knows what to like. Describing podcasting.
Sure. Absolutely. it's it's a tough thing we could easily do an hour just on this topic but yeah i do think that like generally speaking you're probably right the sweet spot for podcasting was that that rough era where it was still cost prohibitive for most people you had to really want to do it to do it yeah well that's and the audience the audience was there and it hadn't yet been commercialized it's been just a little bit commercialized
it gotten just a little bit cheaper to do it and And there was a, there was like a 18 month window. And if you did not find success at 18 month window, it's over. You're never going to find an audience. You're done. This medium is dead. Absolutely. Podcasting is dead. Yeah. You and I are hanging on to nothing. Yeah. We got in right at that, that perfect moment where we can be not entirely successful, but still continue to do it. Yeah. Not complete abject failures, but not remotely successful.
Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. You know, the main thing I think about are the nineties. And I, sometimes you post some of the music you like and some of the music you make. And I think to myself, remember, and you used to work in the music industry, like on the management kind of side promotion side, finding talent, so forth, so on for a major label. And remember when people used to care about selling out? Remember that was a thing. It was like, nah, man, I don't want to sign that record deal.
I don't want to be in no commercials, man. I don't want to be in any mainstream movies. I want to stay independent. That was a thing for, I don't know, a hot second. Whereas like you, I mean, and if you did right, if a band or actor or celebrity or athlete or whatever, if they transitioned to and got that sellout status, it had the potential to completely and utterly ruin their career. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And now everybody's entire goal is to be an influencer.
Isn't that the strangest turn our society has taken? Yeah. That's like the, that's goal number one. That's like get paid by major brands to do the stuff that we all used to just like constantly toil away at for nothing, you know, with no prospects whatsoever.
Now there's still no prospects, but like those few people that get it and actually get to sell out we're like envious of them the success success is now labeled not by what you can create but what you can get sponsored yeah it doesn't really matter what i'm making as long as i can get somebody to pay for it and and and the ends justify the means and so you know i think that this is a this is a a threshold moment for us as civilization for us very very elderly early millennials,
I think we're crossing over into boomer territory. I think that we were reaching that point where it was like kids these days.
They're sellouts they don't care they don't have our values they don't think like us they don't dress like us that's actually not true they dress like us they dress just like me in 1997 and i'm sick of it god damn it yeah yeah absolutely we're we're sick of it we're tired of it i remember when i was a pubescent boy in the mid 90s when most of these movies came out and we were all wearing you know black sabbath t-shirts led zeppelin t-shirts rolling stone t-shirts
and it was like we listened to that music but it obviously was not the music of our generation and now i'm seeing people rolling around in like limp biscuit t-shirts and corn t-shirts and marilyn manson t-shirts and all this sort of stuff is starting to come back it has been been back for a while and like i saw somebody the other day wearing a goo goo doll shirt and i was like you're 12 sure it's like they've gone back and they're like oh.
Man ever heard of this amazing band it's called the goo goo dolls what's that against goo goo dolls i've never thought about this before are there drake shirts are there dua lippa shirts like what there are a lot of bootleg like a lot of people make their own shirts because now with graphic design somebody just like makes their own shirt everybody can just do anything like a etsy or something and sell something that's what kids buy because the official merch
is usually pretty shitty and way overpriced. Yo god yeah like 40 for freaking like taylor swift is the worst merch in the game even her even her cult and it is a cult and i don't shame you if you want to be a part of a cult be a part of a cold i like to consider this show a cult you know they'll tell you like most of them tell you i mean these shirts aren't any good it's just that we've come a long way since the 90s it doesn't feel that long ago because we're boomers now or whatever
the equivalent is for us i guess it's elderly millennials but the world is completely different, it is it absolutely does that make you sad inside of course absolutely i am i'm an old guy that's what old people are sad inside at all times are sad so.
Did these movies fill you with temporary joy or were you like jason what the fuck, i i will tell you one of them filled me with pure joy the other ones were a mix of what the fuck to pretty damn fun so yeah just spoiler alert for where i'm going once we start writing these all right well look at my watch i think it's about that time without much further ado it's time to rank some of the oddest movies does it live up to the name overall oddball
movie yeah these are these are all insane you really picked a really wild five movies i gotta say here we go So with a movie that actually came out in 1989 by came out, I mean, it didn't, it was made, it was meant to come out, but it wasn't released until October of 1990. So it technically counts. I'm talking about the classic, you know, you love it. Thomas R. Berman's meet the hollow heads. Henry hollow head is the daddy dude working all shift just to pump home the food.
United umbilical is where he works. The best meter reader, this part of earth, the hollow heads, An average tubular family, they've pumped along happily for years until... Yes, dear, dinner. But you'll never guess who. My new boss. My promotion had just found a bend. Oh, Henry, that's wonderful news. After this shift, oh, honey. Miriam! Honey, we're home! Delightful domicile, Holloway. The day Henry Hollowhead's boss came to dinner, the waste really got ducted through the vent spot.
Don't think of me as your husband's boss. Think of me as the very closest. Music.
Meet the hollow heads currently has a not available at rotten tomatoes it was directed by thomas r burman written by thomas r burman and lisa morton it's the triumphant return of bobcat goldthwait lasting in the police academy series triumphant return of john glover lasting in the mouth of madness triumphant return of juliet lewis lasting from dusk till dawn triumphant return of joshua john miller lasting in near dark triumphant
return of ann ramsey lasting in deadly deadly friend when her head gets exploded. I was on that one. You were on that one too. It was officially released January 1989 to absolutely nowhere, and it got a home video release October of 1990. On a budget of not available, it has a box office of not available. Tonight at 8, survival is on the menu when a wacky family invites Pa's rapey boss from the slime tubery over for dinner.
Yeah, this one, holy shit. this one was really weird this was basically a live action hannah barbara cartoon and it i mean it kicks off right off the bat with like the worst rap song you've ever heard and there's a worse one loved there's a worse one it's in waxworks too it's in waxworks too oh really i got i got it i gotta hear that this was bad though one of the things i just want to throw this out there right right up front though one of the things
that i loved about this movie the constant like pipe sounds in the background the sound design of this movie was driving me insane while i was watching it okay no one knows what the hell this movie is so you're like why what does he mean pipe sounds. In a nondescript, presumably future, different planet, we're not ever really sure, humanoid-like civilization that is a live-action Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
It's sort of like the Flintstones, but instead of the dinosaurs being the household contraption, it's like slime monsters and worms and shit and bugs. Yeah, and everything comes around by tubing throughout everything.
Everything is a tube the phone is a tube the oven is a tube the the the the the post office is a tube they live in a just a world of nothing but pipes and tubes and it looks also it's like kind of like the jetsons and i was just like if the jetsons and peewee herman's playhouse and nickelodeon all like crashed into it it's sort of like a little bit of that what's like what's that design is it like new memphis or something like that where it's like all circles and i
don't and pyramids and weird shit there is this moment in the 90s late 80s early 90s where like this was a particular sort of like weirdo art culture aesthetic that they would get like art school weirdos to work on close to mainstream projects and like oh this person's a production designer at nickelodeon and it's just like everything's gonna look like this now and it's like oh this person's making this like this weird little movie and everything's gonna look
like this this like for a while every fucking thing in the world look like this it's sort of like a perverted 1950s, Yeah, yeah, I can see that. But the 50s never, actually, if you look back at the 50s, they never looked like this. Never, absolutely not. And yeah, I think Nickelodeon's a good example of something where everything kind of had that vibe of, you know, this is what things used to look like, but it's actually just really weird.
And it's not anything like what things used to look like. Like one, one thing that I had noted down that this reminded me of, of the early nineties, like commercials for like kids. Yes. And stuff like that. Like Zach's remember Zach's the, like the Lego like thing, you know, Zach, he's a Lego maniac. Oh yeah. Hell yeah. And it was always like, it looks like those commercials. Like the camera was always like up the nose of the adults and the dog's faces were like huge.
Huge and it was but they were all dressed like it was the 50s it was all like the stereotypical like mom and dad from the 50s moms wearing pearls and a dress like with a vacuum and like high heels and again it's like not really what that era was but but by the 80s we had collectively decided at least our parents had that this is what their childhood was in the same way that when we represent the 80s in our median culture it's not actually what the 80s was it's all
neon and like like bright colors that was like part of it but it certainly wasn't it it was like a lot of like crime and cigarettes and diesel engines manual transmission wood paneling you know most people weren't living in like i don't know the playboy playhouse or you know whatever so yeah, But yes, it, this is, it's so strange.
There's so much to cover with this movie. So somehow I discovered the production diary that the co-writer Lisa Morton did day by day from pre-production to post-production to release of the film diaries. And this is what she wrote in her diary.
The original script, this was like her, like an introduction to, she did like a, update like about 15 years ago where she was like oh well this is like looking back on and like this is a piece of the story or whatever so the original script differed radically from what was originally called life on the edge which is the original name of meet the hollow heads right i did see rather than poking fun in just 50s sitcom mystique the early draft attempted a sort
of pastiche parody of the last four decades of television now i want you to listen to this and see what this is reminiscent of the first half of the script was what we eventually expanded to be the entire film the second half would have followed the two teens bud and cindy to their party and it would become like a mondo weirdo that's maybe the good word for it mondo weirdo yeah like this whole style mondo weirdo take off on 80s teen exploitation comedies and then
we'd get a dash of like 60s drug culture thrown in for fun okay so it was really like only the this is her i'm just reading it as is okay so it's really only like three of the last four decades there was nothing in the 70s worth satirizing but you said i'm thinking about them like okay so if they're just going to satirize like three or four decades of television it sounds awfully familiar to a show called wandavision that we're just going to sort of flip through style to style to style.
Come to find out the little kid in this movie is Matt Shakeman. He plays Billy, like kind of the main character. He is scheduled to be the director for the MCU Fantastic Four. He was the lead creative for WandaVision. He is a director for shows like Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Succession, The Boys, and was one of the producers on Game of Thrones.
There's almost no chance that somehow this movie didn't embed itself in his brain and he regurgitated it maybe unknowingly as wandavision right wow that's wild yeah i mean and you gotta think too like honestly like i i whatever you think of this movie it is something that if you were.
A kid when you were making it like you've got to look back on this fondly like you've got to look back on it as like this this insane experience that you were a part of and i don't know i think i would love this movie if i was this guy matt shayne fondly or or he was traumatized one or the other i'm not exactly one of the others because it's it's both i don't know it's in that lineage of what we talked about this lineage of reinterpreting 1950s american
american domesticity into like a gross out nightmare nightmare and i don't know i guess maybe it's mondo weirdo is the art style we would call it i'm not sure but this is the sort of movie where a mom says to the daughter without any explanation to the audience connie don't you think you're a little young to start using softening jelly but it said not like an 80s sitcom just like you're watching leave it to beaver or something it's just like
you're watching the jetsons and like they're pulling judy aside and judy wants to go on a date to the dance and the parents don't like who she's going to take to the dance that's exactly what it's like and then and then like who decides like okay we're going to make a 50s satire sitcom sort of spoofy kind of a thing we're gonna make it entirely about pipes and slime and wacky contraptions yeah that's That's very strange. It's all super strange. It's, it's also played pretty damn straight.
I mean, sometimes it gets, yeah, sometimes it gets goofy, but it's also like most of the time, like played directly as the kind of like sitcom that, that it is. It's just super, super weird. They're trying to play. And John Glover is great at this. Cause he's got the, like such a large expressive face and that pointy chin. And so he look, he's, he's like, he reminds me of like, what's that grip has like the church or Bob or whatever with the guy who smokes the pipe or whatever.
He looks like that. He's got that very pronounced chin. And so when he's playing this, like I do willing to do anything.
Is the movie essentially is a sitcom plot that they actually repurpose in one division which is his new boss at the slime factory he he gets invites him over to dinner to try to make an impression because he wants a promotion and a raise and then the wife is like oh no the children are out of control and i don't have time to make an appropriate dinner and they're gonna be here right after work and oh my god and then everything else about it is absolutely fucking disturbed and bizarre
and strange and it looks like a weird 50s show via the 80s and there's like they're dicing up worms out of tubes and making food out of it the food is so slime and it's like it's like they're like you said it's like they're eating gack, imagine all this stuff nickelodeon tried to sell you in the 90s of like oh it's It's floam, but that's what they're eating. Yeah. That's their food. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's funny too. Like the plot that you mentioned just now,
that that's a 30 minute TV show. Correct. Like there's no way that could be an hour and a half movie. Well, they made it. They did it because the twist is after we get through, you know, 20, 30 minutes of introducing the family and the wacky world of this and Ramsey is in the underground where the The tubes sometimes get clogged and it's just gets, it's really fucking strange.
Then the boss shows up and the boss goes from being like a typical shmarmy 1950s TV show boss to like, and they, the way that they do it is it's very like he slowly ramps up. And so it's like, he's like roughhousing with the kid and he's like, oh, I'm just joking, junior. I'm just joking with you. But he's like really roughhousing him. So you're watching him going, he just tried to strangle that kid. And then it goes on and on for whatever reason, he's trying to murder Billy.
He wants to kill this youngest child and he's actively trying to do it at the dinner party and he's trying to, there's no other way to say it, rape the wife.
Life it's pure rape rapiness like it's it's a red which like is kind of like there would be the thing where like the boss comes over and he starts flirting with the wife or whatever this is sort of taking that to like its most logical conclusion which is hey you know those sitcoms you laughed at like they're actually pretty nefarious yeah but the movie is not a like a moral message movie the movie is ostensibly a comedy but but at the same time it's very earnest is that the humor comes from
them playing it straight like you know not not being too over the top and on that note i would say nancy met i think is how you would say her name who has done very little other than this movie who she plays the mom i think is by far the best part of this movie she's fantastic she nails this character this role perfectly yeah yeah i wrote down her her and.
Richard port now as mr crab neck the raping he's like he's so creepy but they are the best actors in this like they really they really get the vibe that this thing is going for and they they just nail it so then to extend it to your point because it is a 30-minute plot we sort of get the 30-minute plot stretched out then we get this like he's trying to murder and rape the fam And then it turns into the family is trying to murder him.
And then it turns into, they think they've murdered him and they're trying to get away with his murder.
And then it just kind of ends eventually but yeah for some reason their grandpa lives in like the underground of the the dark place the tubes they go feed them slop down there oh yeah, i forgot about that yeah that's creepy somebody better go feed grandpa and it's like they have to go into the bowels of wherever they are and there's this whole thing about they live on the literal like edge of the planet and if and if you go off of the edge of the planet like you you will
just go off into space or you'll disappear into this cavernous void of garbage. And, and like some boy that allegedly happened to him. And then they have this weird, like man, rat dog that has parasites all over it. They let in the house and they kids want to get the parasites to do something with it. And it's just a, it's a guy like in a weird pony play suit. Yeah.
Right was his name spike spike yeah yeah yeah don't let spike in the house you know he's got that parasitic infection and then he's just like got like postules and stuff he's just like oh my god is this good this is one of those movies where intention is so important in whether or not something is good and i i genuinely just don't know because this is such like a mystery of a movie that like i hadn't heard anything about i i actually i liked it you know i liked it because of how weird it was it
was also the first one i watched from our list and so i was like just kind of like oh shit okay we're going you know i'm in here you know i couldn't think of a better person to do this episode though because you like weird shit i do i do yeah i do like the weird is this the inspiration for the super mario brothers movie the first one.
There's there's a weird similarity of like i was watching this i was like why it was like i've never seen anything like this but i've seen other things kind of like and we kind of touched on that but like there's another movie this sort of reminds me of, And then it like, then when they got to Ann Ramsey and this is like when her disease, cause she had this disease where like her tongue was calcifying, which is why she sounds so weird in her later movies.
And they would kind of play that to comedic effect. Cause she would just like scream and you could barely understand what she, but she's dubbed in this movie. Like they have to put subtitles on her. Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause you can't understand her. And like the movie has its own language. Like, like, like the way that the kids make fun of each other. Like, you know, like it's almost like kind of like Pete and Pete.
You know where they would have like weird put downs for each other and like weird terminology, that's not of our world but you could kind of understand what it meant but they don't bother explaining to you at all it was like catch you later pipe slime and you're like the movie makes no effort to really make you comfortable with this world and be like oh well yeah i'm like what the fuck does this remind me of and she's down there in like gestapo gear talking about gonna
gonna feed these kids to some weird guy that lives in the pipes and i'm like what the fuck i'm like this is mario this is that weird ass super mario movie somebody was like you know that's a good i played mario that's the best way to adapt that has anybody ever seen meet the hollowheads i feel like if we made a spiritual sequel to meet the hollowheads and we called that super bar i feel like that would just go together now i will i will take that comparison
and raise you that I think over half of the five movies we're about to talk about could be compared to the Super Mario Brothers. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I do not know. All right. So when it comes to life on the edge, aka meet the hollow heads.
What would you give this at a 10 oh i'm going six i'm going sick okay yeah i'm gonna be honest with you that this has only happened maybe two or three other times since i've done this show i don't know i don't know that i can give this one a score.
So it's like i i don't how do you grade stuff like this it seems so it feels like to your point it feels like whatever their intention was it seems like they accomplished it, you know what the fact that jason isn't rating this i'm raising it a point i'm going to seven on mine because i was between six and seven and that just makes me even more excited about this so it's almost and i didn't hate it it does it does kind of run out of steam before it
may be like the ending isn't bad it's like somewhere in the middle where it's like oh boy it just just where it takes real long time and get that fucking dinner party yeah so for me i can give you a ranking and then like for me this is like the third of the week but i don't know what the score is i can't i can't give you a score i i'll say as long as you're mentioning your ranking this is an easy second place for me easy second place yeah we're gonna wildly wildly diverge,
It's a good, I think it's going to happen right now. I'm talking about 1991 is the dark backward, but it's currently has a 45% on rotten tomatoes. We're going to Hollywood. Music. The Dark Backward was written and directed by Adam Rifkin, which is a name I have not heard in a long, long time.
It's a triumph return of Judd Nelson, not seen since the days of The Breakfast Club, Bill Paxton from Titanic, Laura Flynn Boyle from Men in Black 2, James Caan from Alien Nation, Claudia Christian from The Hidden. This film was released July 26, 1991, in an undisclosed budget, and it made $2 million at the box office. A pathetic comedian in a garbage apocalypse apocalypse develops a third arm on his back instead of material.
I want to hear what you thought of this movie before i get into my my comments two million includes rentals by the way and when it was in theaters very very limitedly and it made 28,654 dollars in the theater sounds about right yeah is this is this the joker is this the most recent from the moment he's in that suit and gets on stage i was like wait a minute this is a this is fucking joker there's the garbage everywhere like is if you took this movie and king of comedy and taxi
driver and mashed it up i think the hidden secret sauce of that joker movie because everybody saw the scorsese everywhere but i think this hidden secret sauce dark backward judd nelson is that fucking guy from joker except for going crazy he just disappears from his own movie here's what i think about this there is a scene in this movie early on where judd nelson is trying to deliver a joke to laura flint boyle his his girlfriend at the time they're living in everybody this whole thing
is like squalor everything everywhere you look is the the most disgusting filthy production design i have ever seen in my life it's amazing they can't make movies that look like this and no they can't they just they don't have the money they just simply i don't i was like did they did they go somewhere this dirty or do they make some place.
There's so much garbage destroyed a small city there is right there is so much strewn and i say say garbage i don't mean like when i was litter i mean need ankle to knee deep seas of garbage.
That looks like real garbage doesn't look like hollywood garbage it looks filthy and rotted and disgusting and covered in feces and and piss and shit and everything else and they're just wading through it and i've never seen bill paxton look filthier in a movie in my life he is disgusting anyway so they're in bed and he's like telling a joke it's a horrible joke and then they got a very lame kind of punch line and then rather than they're like
it's the normal comedy beat where since you're laying in bed you would hear so there's no laugh you hear crickets, And instead in this movie, you hear a gunshot and a guy cat or wall. And there is absolutely no reaction from the two people in bed. And then the scene cuts. That is a sort of movie you didn't do where there is this, like, if duck man was a fucking movie, it would look like this.
It's that's a deep, deep cut. but if you remember duck man it was like just this horrendously this this movie could only be made in the 90s but bill paxton plays one of the all-time idiots in any film i've ever seen disgusting disgusting venial v like like he he looks like a walking std when he has a he has a orgy as a gang Reverse gaming with a handful of morbidly obese women who are only on screen for us to look at them and say how grotesque they are due to their obesity.
Okay. Different era. Yeah. And they're not just obese women. They're ugly, obese women. They have hairs coming out of their moles or missing teeth. They're filthy and they're in lingerie. That's four sizes too small. And they're so obese. They can barely walk. And. You're like, okay. And he couldn't be happier. He could not be happier. He thinks he's the most beautiful woman in the world. And we're supposed to look at him as a sicko for liking this. Right.
Yeah. Then he talks about, they're sort of trying to outgross each other as part of their foreplay. And he talks about how he eats shit for breakfast. And you think it's like a metaphor, like rancid, whatever shit. And then he's like, honey, go get my bowl.
And then the woman one of the women like waddles off in the kitchen and comes back with a with a china dish filled with what is supposed to be rotten animal feces and then we watch bill paxton after aliens this is the early 90s this man has made films yeah oh yeah he is just covering covering himself shoveling shit into his mouth to eat it and then he's rubbing it on his nipples and he grabs the.
Some obese women and he puts their faces and he has them lick the shit off of his nipples and then they got shit all over their mouths and their teeth are full of shit and they're laughing and that's one of 200 scenes just like that in this movie my biggest problem with if you're still listening is there is no metaphor it's there's it's very obvious that the movie is like the world is shit hollywood is shit hollywood is a diseased city we are diseased people and our and our desire to
get to hollywood and be rich and famous is a form of moral degeneracy and pollution and so the whole world is sort of a literalization of our interior life and desires for fame and fortune and.
How fleeting fame is and and how you don't actually have to be talented some freakish thing could happen to you and that way it's sort of prescient to the influencer culture okay so i'll give it that much my biggest problem with it is judd nelson develops a third arm and that is the entire inciting incident for this movie movie and by the time the movie ends and he loses the third arm he hasn't been in the movie for 40 minutes he just disappears from what is
ostensibly his movie so we could just watch bill paxton giving it his all and he is working boy he's got his working boots on for this movie and i don't mean in a bad way like he's probably to me the only redeeming factor of the film i i hated this.
I admired its production design I admired its strangeness I understood what it was trying to say but I I thought it was just a, bad imitation of john waters i thought it was i thought it was really trying so hard to be, transgressive that it just kind of made it as the kids would say cringe and it went on way too long way too long now i know you love this movie has already seen your letterboxd review of it so go ahead yeah now now that you've painted the picture for the listener.
Tell us what kind of a sicko you are all the shit and the weird you know sex stuff and this is one of my favorite movies i've watched this year i i i brand new classic movie when's this getting the criterion collection it deserves a spot absolutely no i i think that this movie is fantastic i first of all it's hilarious beginning to end it never stopped making me laugh sometimes i was like kind of in awe of how just disgusting it was but like you know the rest of the.
Time i was laughing though bill paxton absolute maniac you can't no words can describe how unhinged he like you think you've seen him unhinged you have never seen him unhinged like he is in this movie right like we're not doing him justice it's one of the absolutely most bonkers committed performances ever period incredible incredible and absolutely everyone else is great too i love james khan in this like so much i another thing that like you know you're talking about like
what the metaphor might be here and like i think it is i think there is more to it than just gross out like i think that there is a lot of interesting things being said about what we put ourselves through for you know some kind of a a job or a career in the arts and just like how awful that whole process is i i thought a lot about charlie kaufman's synecdoche new york while watching especially i think you're the first and only person who's made that connection.
It might be true that might be true yeah but i i saw that i saw death to smooch yeah okay i'll agree with you there yes very much so yeah i saw uhf a little bit the movie that are you a fan of tape heads i watched that for the first time i've never seen it which i know i've never seen it so good. So good. That and this are perfect companion pieces of these people who want to work in entertainment and they have this kind of hanger on who's pushing them, but at the same time is using them.
And they're, they're just such perfect companion pieces to one another in that way. And I think that you should definitely check that out when you get a chance, but, but yeah, this is a movie though. The thing that I really keep going back to though, though you were talking about it in the beginning of describing this is all the trash and the production design of this whole thing. It's absolutely insane.
Yeah. Remarkable. It really is. Like, I don't know how you make a movie like this because it seems like it would be a cheap movie.
I mean, it certainly made no money and it's just like forgotten, you know, but like this, a movie, like a movie looks like this in 2023, it would have cost like 30, 40, 50 million dollars to look like, this you know like i i don't know how you make a movie that looks like this it's it's absolutely nuts and like i said james conn is hilarious wayne newton shows up okay okay okay so time out right.
So wayne newton rolls up in the credits and i'm thinking okay i already like just based on the credits i'm sort of like i get what the vibe of this is going to be you know i'm thinking it's like wayne newton's gonna be like this kitschy kind of ironic almost like oh wayne newton's here you know what i mean and playing this character and like the joke is that it's wayne newton and i guess it kind of starts off that way but nobody told wayne
newton that because he actually turns in a legitimate performance that's very strong and i don't mean that ironically at all he's very good in this movie and and like you wouldn't think it but it definitely seems like he understands what this material is yeah who knows what he's seen in his years okay so maybe Maybe, so let me bring that point around.
You're a musician. We were talking before we started recording about the circuitous route that your life has taken through careers and whatnot in trying to promote your own music and get an audience for your music and so forth and so on and get opportunities to continue making music. And this sort of resonated with you on that level of like, oh, well, trying to make something is kind of gut-wrenching, right?
Right and this goes into that 90s angst of like we want to create art but the only way that you can sustainably create art is through commercialism and commercialism inherently kills art right that was like the whole conundrum that everybody had the 90s that like we said nobody gives a shit about.
Yeah yeah and you think that like what that's why you connected so deeply with it and maybe wayne newton that you and wayne have this in common where, When you put it like that The Vegas connection but also just like, Like, no offense to you, right? Because you live in actual Vegas. You don't live in, like, tourist Vegas. But isn't this sort of, like, spiritually what Las Vegas is? The trash, the filth, the commercialism, the greediness, the.
No, more than anything, the awful people you have to associate yourself with. That's what I'm saying. To get opportunities. Yeah. Like, that, like, I mean, like, the individuals.
The people that you randomly meet. and then they like tag on and you're just like you can't believe you spend time with the way he looks at bill paxton like oh my god i wrote down like a thousand bill paxton lines i'm not gonna like quote them all but like just some of the shit the last thing we need is for you to get spine cancer before our big break like he's blaming him he's blaming him for potential having having spine cancer. Yeah. Look what you did to us. You're going to ruin it.
Unbelievable. Just unbelievable stuff. Yeah. This movie is bananas. It's also a lot of body horror in this. You can like throw in a whole separate genre in there too. So. Yeah. I just kept waiting for something more to develop with Judd Nelson. And maybe this is also sort of a very nineties mentality, which is like, well.
You like an arm grab his back that's it what more do you want you know yeah that was almost like man i almost want like the the boil to be funnier than him and have a voice you know for the where the boil's funny but he's not you know like it's a and then that's kind of like how to get ahead in advertising where the advertiser grows a little head it gives him out of out of a boil and it it gives them all these like nefarious ideas and for and they work in the corporate marketing world,
so maybe that was very close to this so maybe you wouldn't have wanted to do that because that feels like you're just ripping it off but but he judd nelson possibly really fucking disappears on this movie he kind of does yeah i mean everybody else kind of takes over they they take what maybe that's the point his journey yeah and they take it over and and that that's just kind of what happens your opportunities get swallowed up especially once you don't have that gimmick anymore
you know yeah i think that is the thing with like maybe wayne newton and you relate to which is you see all these people who don't have talent but they have gimmicks, yeah they can write a gimmick to the to the nth degree you know and every podcast is just what's my gimmick i gotta get a gimmick i gotta get something to get people hooked in you know and that's gonna get them listening to me and then i'm off to the races baby i'm going to that i'm I'm going to hit the slots at
Spotify. Yeah. Woo-hoo. Yeah, there is sort of... This one was tough for me because it's like, I know what this movie is trying to do. And I am so thoroughly impressed by so much of what it was able to do. And yet the end of it, I still felt like I hated it. I felt like the, the sum was not greater than the parts and it never came together in a satisfying way for me. But I'm talking to you and thinking about waiting.
I kind of understand it. You know, like I think, I think if I had a closer proximity personally to show business like you have had and have, and Wayne Newton has, and Bill Paxton had, and Judd Nelson had, then maybe this would speak to me more. But I give it a 2 out of 10. It's not my worst of the week. It's my fourth. I can't say it's not worth checking out, though. But you could not make this movie today, correct?
Oh, God, no. yeah we didn't even talk about what happens at the trash dump oh shit yeah how do we forget about that yeah what would phil twitter say oh no if timothy chalamet played the bill paxton part in a modern version of this and chalamet does what bill paxton does in that garbage dump, Yeah. I don't know. Like every single person involved in the production would be canceled, but you know, I don't even know. This is a weird movie. I don't know how I forgot about that.
How do you forget something? I don't know. It's hard. Absolutely. Horrifying. Yeah. Two to 10. Number four, what's your score? What's your rank? It's a masterpiece, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Horrifying. Nine out of 10.
Like you we should as adults in the real world we should not have to say this fucking shit but i feel like we do which is like a review is not an endorsement and even like a like giving a movie high score is not an endorsement of what the characters in that movie do yes which is like i think that we used to know that because godfather a masterpiece i don't think anybody was like wow yeah those guys are great yeah i want to be just i want
to be just like them you got to blow people away and steal their cannolis like no like like we could we there's a differentiation between what the the morality we want for the world that we actually live in and the artistic representation of things that are on screen which are made in such a way oftentimes to reflect back to us the way the world actually is and it's not it's not a we're not blessing this and saying yeah yeah goodfellas yeah you know the the the romance of goodfellas
is part of the deception because scorsese is trying to get us to feel what henry hill felt what he what scorsese himself as a kid what made the mob so alluring to people right right if the movie is just like these are bad bad men and it's just constantly telling you how bad they are. What the fuck would the point be? We would never be able to relate to how bad. By seducing us, we become complicit in the crimes, and then we understand what it's like to be part of the world.
I don't know if Adam Rifkin ever got Scorsese level close of getting me to relate to Bill Paxton. I think once he started eating that bowl of shit, I was like, nah. Unless that's some kind of a spiritual metaphor. Unless that's a metaphor for podcasting and me watching all of these movies is me gorging myself.
Myself on literal bowls of shit i don't know uh where'd you rank this one oh this is number one for me for these five what was the score oh nine what i gave it a nine out of ten you're number one that means the dark backward is going on to the guest list and we'll continue on the rest of the season all right well we weren't on the same page there god i hope we're on the same page here.
1992's cool world which has a lower score than the dark backward four percent on rotten tomatoes that's amazing a new world has been discredited welcome to my world a big world around here everything goes except one thing a bad world no it's do not have sex with the cool world rated pg-13 starts friday july 10 cool world was directed by ralph bakshi it was written by michael grace mark victor and ralph back she had a credit on it as well it's trying to return of brad
pitt not seeing this inglorious bastards and kim basing her last scene and i don't even remember what but she was in something it was released july 10th 1992 and a budget of 28 million dollars in 1992 hollywood monies that's like 100 100 million dollar movie movie yeah it made 14.1 million dollars ralph baxter really wants to fuck cartoons and he's going to tell you all about it yeah no isn't that all this comes down to is that that's the this guy really has made i don't know a
dozen movies where he's like what if what if you can fuck a cartoon that's yeah so you got it's like yeah that's all i got i really want to fuck cartoons and then they made roger rabbit now everybody wants to fuck cartoons so i can can finally get a bunch of money for one of these movies that's all this is is this guy made.
A bunch of perverted shit and yes he made the lord of the rings as well but he also made a bunch of shit yeah and then roger rabbit was a huge hit and he conned somebody at a major studio. To be like i got a summer blockbuster for you yeah have you seen jessica rabbit i have a movie A cartoonist wants to travel it to the world. He created to fuck his creation coming this summer. David, you know, this we're old men. Okay. Again, scream at the clouds summer blockbuster real estate.
Used to mean something when a major studio put a movie out in the first or second week of july, they were like this is our whole year our whole year yeah it's right on this one movie this is it there was no big release in january february march april hell there weren't even that many in may summer really started after memorial day first of june in theaters and ran until you know roughly feel like labor day in june and july were the key for that fourth of july weekend somewhere around there
that was that key weekend this is the summer of 1992 limited space and they're like we're gonna put a shit ton of money behind all people back she and it's all gonna be about him want to fuck his cartoons and they marketed the shit out of it too this thing was everywhere you would have have thought this was everywhere this was yeah absolutely and i i'll just say i had never seen it until now um is one of those movies that i just never got around to but
like if you were to ask me to just start naming like 100 movies i could think of it would be on the list like this is one of like the big movies of the 90s as far as i was concerned no 100 we i remember this this This marketing was absolutely ubiquitous. And I remember, I think they got in trouble because they were airing commercials for Cool World during afternoon cartoons. That sounds right. And maybe that was just a local scandal, but I don't think so.
It got into that ad rotation, and somebody was not paying the fuck attention and was like, oh, well, it's animated, whatever.
Yeah, this can run at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. noon so you we were coming home from school and we were getting 30 second tv spots for fucking cool world and it had kim basiner who was from batman just a few years previous and they even marketers like oh kim baser for batman and she's like in this animated movie and she's like being sexy and it's kind of like roger rabbit and i can tell you that my group of male friends were so So horny for Holly.
We had, I remember full conversations near word for word around the swing set about her boobs in this movie. Because you have to remember, there is no internet. Short of finding a dirty magazine in your older brother's sock drawer or underneath his mattress or some dirty magazine stash that a weirdo put in the woods, which we all have experience of. Every male of a certain age found a porno in the woods.
Who put those pornos there we don't know but they were in every wooded area there was like yeah there was like a porno santa claus who just went from wooded area to wooded area it was like hustler penthouse even worse shit it was just like oh here what. Because we had no internet, because you just had to stumble upon like sexual stuff. If you were like 12, 13 years old, there's a, there's a cartoon that is this overtly sexual and there's a very sensual commercial.
It's airing in between gummy bears and duck tails. You're going to want to see this movie, right? If you're at that precipice of puberty, this all of a sudden is like, this is very interesting to me.
And there was major pushback against this movie there was parents parents groups saying it was like basically marketing pornography to children and it was originally intended to be like a hard r movie it i it has been and it was edited and scaled back so i think it's actually a technically pg-13 maybe r but it's definitely not hard r there's no explicit real nudity really really or even cartoon nudity really so it just kind of ends up becoming this,
the filthiest pg-13 movie ever made you know i don't i don't know how, well let me pause there i'll come back around to my final thoughts and what i think about the movie that's the context now you're watching as a grown man not as a perverted 12 year old in in the 90s. Sure. It's a grown man. In the new millennium. What'd you think of cool world? I thought it was an absolute mess, but I thought it was an interesting mess.
There are certain elements of it that I liked. You know, even though the animation doesn't quite hold up like some other things that try to do this style, it was still cool to see. And I had forgotten that Brad Pitt was in this. So it was interesting to see Brad Pitt in a role like this, which is just so kind of different.
My favorite thing about it was the soundtrack. soundtrack there's a lot of my life with the thrill kill call on here which are one of the groups that were really influential to me getting into making music so that music was awesome and there's a bunch of other great groups on here as well the whole thing is just so messy though like it it bounces around non-stop it was really hard to stay engaged with the story or anything that was really happening no no idea yeah it's
so all over the place so scattered and just unfocused is that it just made it a chore you know it is a chore and the thing i noticed is right okay we start in the past and brad pitt is coming home from the war and he's bought a motorcycle or something and he was mom's bottom motorcycle and he's like i'm home from the war ma up on where to go i'm gonna take my mom for a ride and then you know that all looks fine it all looks pretty good and i'm
like oh that's maybe better than i remember because i haven't seen it maybe about 10 years and and i've never liked it at all i'm not like i don't think this movie is worth a damn and i never have and no but then like essentially they get killed and he gets he's dying at the same time toontown more or less the cool world which is toontown basically is doing an experiment to to be able to punch holes in other universes. And rather than like, let him die.
This doctor sees him a voice by the Marsh, Philip Marsh and, and zooms him over in a cartoon world. And so he's still human. He's a humanoid, AKA annoyed, but he's living in cool world or whatever.
And okay. You're thinking we're using this incident to explain to us the rules of human, the world, human world versus the tune world and essentially it's like alternate universes it's like kind of what we see with like spider verse now where it's not playing as if hey this world's fiction and or it's or like roger rabbit where hey just take that street over there and you're in toontown it's like no we're in parallel worlds this world just so happens to be animated to you but yeah we're real
people to us kind of a thing it's like okay all right that kind of makes sense and so you You think, okay. It's very matrix. Yeah. Yeah. And in its version of multiple universities. Right. And so you're kind of thinking that like Brad Pitt will be your main character. And then, because we're kind of, through him, introduced the lay of the land and what the world's going to be. Then we just fade away from him. And I don't remember if we focus immediately on Holly.
I think we do. I think we kind of get into her story and kind of what she wants to be. And so you're like, okay, well, maybe she's the main character. Or maybe she's the main villain. Okay, we got it. We've got our protagonist and maybe our antagonist. Okay, great.
Interesting. and then like gabriel burn just shows up just it's just in prison with a drafting table in his prison cell oh yeah and you're like why is he allowed to have a drafting table and all of this these art supplies in this prison cell who is he what the fuck is going on that he's just he's ralph baxi well then he's just snatched into the tune world when his drawing of holly is like don't you you want to fuck me baby don't you want to fuck me come on on the
toontown come fuck me baby and then he's just in toontown and you're just like what he's like i created you and they're like oh he's a delusional he thinks he created the cool world and then there's like this. The machine isn't taking him to cool world. His dreams are, and his subconscious is connected to cool world. And so he ended up making a comic book series off of cool world for adults. That's the most popular comic book series. Everybody knows him, but he's in prison.
It is a lot like the matrix. Now that I think about it, the last, yeah, but he's in prison and then you're just like, that's 10 minutes into this movie.
It just starts falling apart. part every seam comes undone and it never comes back together it never comes back together it just gets messier and messier the integration between some really early digital hand-drawn animation back she there's so much animation this movie back she didn't do all of it himself so he hired like interns to do some of it you can tell they have certain scenes like take a roger rabbit scene david where it's very clear they
thought out like every gag in the every corner of the the frame even it's even happy in the background and they've really thought through the interactions between you know bob hoskins and roger or jessica rabbit or whoever and you know it's they've they really put the weasels and there's really you know there's the whole thing is you can tell it's been crafted this is a movie where they're standing at times in front of what appear to be cardboard sets yeah and their eye lines are not meeting at
all and then random hand-drawn cartoon. Images just appear over top of them that are not in the world that they're in or the the plane of physics yeah they're not even trying to match and it's just like. And then there's only like five seconds of it. They just loop it and loop it and loop it and loop it. And it just stops. And there's dialogue the entire time. And you're like, what was that? Did they see that? Was that in the room with them? Why did that happen? Yeah.
Yeah it can you explain that to me i i couldn't even possibly when you watch that where you're like what the fuck is that because it happens yeah because and because there's also like no rules whatsoever as to how anybody interacts with one another whenever they're in either the real world or in the cartoon world like it's all just random it's pure randomness every single moment went from moment to moment why does ralph back she's gabriel burn stan and start to become a cartoon i don't know
i don't remember like none of it like really like it then it wasn't explained and it if it was explained they might have switched it in the next scene so it's incoherent i don't know yeah yeah i i sense you want to move on i'm not going to allow you i'm gonna i'm gonna say say something probably deeply problematic and i don't mean this as pervertedly as it's going to sound or as sexist as it's going to sound okay when it comes to kim basing her voicing holly.
Hollywood she's very i mean she's kind of doing marilyn monroe kind of like oh mr president you know like that kind of thing seemingly knowingly because she references marilyn monroe and she watches marilyn monroe movies i'm thinking how does the cool world get our movies.
Wouldn't we wouldn't we appear freakish to them but okay whatever sure so she's in kind of intentionally been patterned after it's like she's like a pinup basically right there's a drawing of like a pinup she's a male fantasy and she's got these giant tits right because she's a ralph baxey sexual fantasy of course now when she becomes human in the 90s what she would become and who she would become would actually be pam anderson or anna nicole smith or jenna jameson because those were the actual
cartoon male fantasies the right we turned those women and they turned themselves into cartoon adolescent male fantasies of the 90s there they are a ralph baxi cartoon like anna nicole smith is a ralph baxi crumb.
Character come to life i fully expect crumb to like sniff anna nicole's shoes you know like like like harvey p car all these all these weird perverted guys who want to fuck cartoons they'd want to fuck pam anderson they'd want to fuck jenna jameson they would want to fuck anna smith because they're cartoonish in their appearance right fair at that time kim basiner is, Is too classy to play Hollywood. Yeah. There's like a disconnect. The moment she becomes Kim Bates.
I'm like, this doesn't even seem like the same, like the behavior is there, but I'm like, this doesn't seem like the same character at all. She's doesn't have the physical, her boobs aren't big enough. And I take her too seriously just to be this weirdo fantasy. Does that make sense? It makes sense. And I would also add to that, that she looks like a, a normal classy dressing up like, like it's Halloween dressing up like this. She does not physically or based on how we know her. Right.
Embody this kind of weird pubescent fantasy. Yeah. She's like, this is, she's almost like, you're almost like, oh God, I can't believe you're doing this. Like you almost feel once it becomes her like she does the voice she does the sexy.
Alluring seducing voice all that sort of like she does that very well that i want to take away from her performance but then once you see her you're reminded that she's a real actress and you're like i don't want to see this real actress, in this movie because it's too skeevy you almost wonder yeah you almost wonder if she like i mean obviously a gig is a gig and i'm sure she got paid well hopefully but like you know did she want to do
something this just skeezy like you know well there's like a lot of claims that like the movie didn't end up being what ralph wanted to be because the studio meddled and interfered and we got too afraid because his ideas got kind of borderline pornographic according to them and So they trimmed it back and they cut the content and they got rid of a lot of the plot. And then the other thing is that apparently now, what does this actually mean?
But the, the record, the, the rumor at the time that still persists about this movie is, I don't know if she got producing credit, but she was essentially the, the biggest star involved in this movie because Brad Pitt, this is early in his career, right after this is like right after Thelma Louise.
So he has no swagger whatsoever. And she apparently like through fits of the set and was called for for rewrites and wanted it to be this way and wanted it to be that way and so what you really end up with is what she wanted the movie to be what back she wanted the movie to be what the studio wanted the movie to be and it never gelled at all they were never on the same page at any point i think back she at one point quit the production they had to bring him back like it it was a
mess of a production and it's a mess of a movie it is the worst of the week and i give it a zero out of 10 zero is harsh but i hate yeah i mean i get it i definitely get it i don't i don't know if i can give anything a zero like there's very few movies i would even consider that like i was gonna go with a two but i i would because of the soundtrack i want to bump it a little bit it i'm gonna go to a three on this one but yeah i do i do but it's not great
it's definitely not great and do you regret having watched like not seen it all these years or you're like no it's about the right time to get to it yeah it's just a movie to just randomly finally get around to on a sunday at like 8 a.m or whatever it was i watched it but weird 8 a.m sunday movie.
This is a sort of share my uh can i share my remake idea i would yes but i would just say this is the sort of thing your wife walks in on you watching on a sunday at 8 a.m and going what the fuck are you into this is what i'm into baby this is my fantasy all right go ahead what's your remake idea okay so it couldn't be any worse than this movie okay and it's a terror it's a a terrible idea i i admit that right up front i just think it would fit really really well an ai remake of
cool world where it's all just you know the the this pervy idea of ai women you know and this guy going into ai to go be with his ai fantasy i thought it would be very literal and i thought what we would do is we would feed the script of cool world and description to ai that would have it like rewrite this but make it good and then you film that and be like this isn't this is a high school and then you could be like is it any better
yeah that would get a one from you and then what would happen if the ai cool world the ai art was actually better than ralph baxter's art and can we also say no offense to him or whatever but he fucking sucks and drawn his. His, his style is disgusting to look at. I can't, I cannot stand it. I love and drawn cell animation. I'm a fan of it. I believe in it. I think it's the most beautiful animation has been done in that style.
His stuff is so garish to look at. I've never ever, ever like his biggest, like the thing that everybody's It was like, it was actually good as Lord of the Rings because he adapted it for kids essentially and animate it, but it's still coherent and it captures everything it needs to and all that sort of stuff. People really, really enjoy that. And I cannot ever watch it because it is one of the most grotesque looking things I've ever seen.
Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of his stuff. I do like the style, but I haven't actually loved any of the stuff. What you want is you want an AI movie about a guy who wants to fuck big breast AI girls. I mean, I didn't say I want that. I said it was an idea. You said you needed it. A probably bad idea. I need it. I don't want it. I need it. I got a disease. Yeah, there you go. I got crumb disease. I got crumbs.
Oh boy rosen's a closet back she okay we figure that out there you go all right moving on to, really truly one of the strangest movies of the 90s but i remember being a really big deal at least for independent and international cinema of course i'm talking about the city of lost children which came out in 1995 and currently has an 80 on rotten tomatoes come back i had a thoughtless if these children only have nightmares it's perhaps because the evil is in you
why not seek the cause of your torment in the molecular study of your own tears who could make me cry well boss we could we could make you cry with laughter. Now it's time for a little bit of french with madame raspberry The City of Lost Children was directed by... And it was written by... Jean-Pierre Jeannot, Gilles and Adrien. It's the triumphal return of Ron Perlman, last seen in something. Probably. It's getting harder and harder for me to do that because I don't track it.
So it's literally in my head and I'm at 800 and some movies. That's how it should be though. It's more pure that way. Yeah. So now I'm at the point where I'm like, I don't know anymore, but I know we've seen him in something.
It may have been Alien Resurrection, but my gut says we've seen him since then this film was released may 17th 1995 on a budget of 18 million dollars the film made 11 million dollars a dim-witted strong man and cynical french muppet attempt to rescue a boy from a mad scientist who devours the dreams of children to stave off death this is the spiritual precursor to alien resurrection because most of this cast and crew including one of the directors is going to go
on to make this movie this is the movie that gets 20th century fox goes that guy's gonna steer the alien franchise i mean on the one hand it tells me that we were making bigger chances taking bigger chances with our franchise in the 90s than we currently are right like if you watch this movie which you now have would you have ever said to yourself in 1995 this guy should do alien no but i want people that are in charge to make I'm happy to hear them.
Now, can I personally relate to an aging misanthrope who uses his intellect to dissect the dreams of children in a vain attempt to ward off death? Is our culture hopelessly addicted to nostalgia because we are unable to grieve and lament? Does the American dream inherently still our development as people to complexly mourn the suffering of existence? And are rhetorical questions obnoxious? No, to all of the above.
Apropos of nothing i will say since you mentioned it earlier why is all a why is all ai art pattern after this movie every piece of ai art looks like it is concept art from this one film yeah well as we know it's just stealing everything is it only stealing from the city children the entire time i'm like the everything will every piece of air i've ever seen looks like like these people in these sets and these are weird people
this is a very very particular set there's not very many movies that look like this and all of them are from the 90s.
You know i i gotta say like i i as an artist i i'm like in the constant fight back against ai but like maybe it's because it's drawing from things like this a lot of the times i do actually end up liking a lot of the stuff i i hate when they do you know wes anderson does this or you know whatever but but when it's like just like a cool trippy you know 70s album cover you know like when it looks like that it's cool yeah you know do you know how many apes dc has dc comics,
we got a lot of apes yeah there's so many apes, like i don't know what era dc comics went through they were like we need another villain making an ape making a sir we've got 15 apes already i don't care make it another ape there are so many gorillas so many gorillas with there's multiple gorillas with super intelligence there's not one gorilla that's super intelligent there's monster mala there's there's the psychic gorilla there's there's there's several of them okay
and i think it's monster mala who is in love with the brain who's just a brain and a contraption that sometimes has like a german accent and they they are lovers they're together which is very odd but it is what it is got grod grod is one of the other ones gorilla grod. And the entire time this brain is in this pickle jar in this movie, trying to reason with the villains, Irving, who is a very lovable character. I just keep thinking to myself, could you do, does DC just, it's all fucked.
But yeah, sure. But to match the theme of this movie, which is we're just constantly returning the dreams of children over and over again to feel young, devouring them.
And comic books are essentially the dreams of children. children can we just can we get to the point where dc can just make a movie about like brain and mala's homosexual relationship they gotta try something like you know so brain in a jar that's a mad scientist and his gorilla companion in a interspecies homosexual relationship fuck it let's just do it put it on screen yeah we gotta get we gotta start getting weird with this shit give me you got all these gorillas
in your pantheon give me a movie per gorilla. Yeah where's the gorilla i'm down for a gorilla and what's this guy up to what's this director doing these days what's mark carrow and jean-pierre jeanette doing today get their ass out of retirement let's make some dc movies jean-pierre jeanette made something last year but i think i think they said it was terrible from what i well i've seen alien resurrection so i can believe that but give the guy 400 million dollars let's see what he can do yeah
i'm yeah you're doing you're doing the monster mala he's french he should be able to get the material you're doing monster mala yeah those are some toes of my thoughts about this movie i love little dead french kids this movie's full of little dead french kids and kids little little lots of them little french kids who wish to be dead and that's funny to me a child wanting to die in the real world is sad a child who is french in a movie quoting existential philosophy and
poetry before being walked off a plank to their death yeah to be caught by a scuba diving scientist who is has amnesia and has cloned himself a thousand times whatever whatever this is i liked it this This movie is, this is a weird, this was definitely like, I really liked the style of it. Like we're already talking about, but story-wise, this was a little rough. It was a little, it was a little hard to follow what was happening a lot of the time.
And it's just so all over the place with the, like the very surrealist elements and stuff like that. If you had to tell somebody, somebody said, walk into your shop and they go, David, I heard you on that podcast. What's that movie about? out if you had explained here you go here you go if you had explained this to your mom and dad how would you explain this movie to him.
There's like a surreal, weird world and Ron Perlman shows up to help save a little kid from these scientists that are experimenting on him and trying to like steal his brains or something. Did you gather that that is Ron Perlman's son? No, I didn't. So Ron Perlman is a strong man in some sort of geek show and they have kidnapped his son.
The strong man's name, Ron Perlman's name is One. and he only refers to himself as in the third person like one does this one does that he speaks almost as if he has the mind of a child and he this is his i believe it's his son or it's like adopted son to him and that boy has a friend who is the girl and she is old soul she's wise beyond her years and all this sort of stuff and hardened by being an orphaned and, and, and like some of her cynicism is played for like comedic effect.
And, and there is this oil rig that's out at sea that has a evil aging scientist on it named Croft, who is stealing the dreams of children to plant them in his own brain so that he doesn't age. And.
Gotcha see and i and yeah and he's kidnapping he's gotten to the point where he's like kidnapping kids to steal their dreams and so this boy his son or adopted son and her best friend get kidnapped and so they team up to go to go get him but in the meantime there's these, conjoined twins called the octopus who there's these tick things that drain there's the guy who Yeah, who has the dog, who has trained ticks that then carry
little vials that have mind control fluid that makes people aggressive. The main scientist from this oil rig who created Croft, because Croft isn't even a person, he's a creation. So one scientist created another scientist, and this gaggle of clones and this little person woman is very evil. They run this evil scheme, but the main scientist who created it all is gone.
He's disappeared no one knows where he's at what he's been we're coming to find out that all these other idiot clones are all like multiplicity they're all the guy from the wheelchair of alien resurrection they're all idiots basically differing types of idiots and they're clones of the original scientist and that's about as much as i could say because everything else that happens in it is sort of like this surrealistic fairy tale
almost like a gothic horror tale like there's another version of this movie that if it made slightly more sense would be guillermo del toro, yeah right like it has this sort of magical realism surrealist gothic fantasy element to it it is sort of like this primordial fairy tale sort of story about a little you know it's it's wizard of oz in a way a little girl lost in the woods trying to find something and some larger than life strong
man character is there to by her side there's all these motifs that are in play when you're watching the movie and you're like, this feels familiar and strange and unusual at the same time. And even at the time, like Roger Ebert's review of this was like, it's an amazing movie. I have no idea what happened. And I don't know what the plot is. I don't know what the plot of this thing was. And it's like, yeah, because that's the most straightforward version of the plot, David.
But it also goes in like 10 million other different directions. There's all of this, all this other shit you and I are leaving out. Yeah, there's no bunch of characters. There's a bunch of things like the, the whole, let me back it up. What did you make of the sequence of her one tier initiating a chain reaction about this entire town that led to the flea and the dog and the thing that that shit was sick.
Isn't there like the fact this was made in 1995 there's actually some like some of it doesn't help at all but there's some remarkable use of digital effects that seem like yeah like what he's doing in that sequence it's like not really a one shot but kind of like a one shot but you know it's done sort of digitally it doesn't feel like we'd really try to start do that until like the matrix sequels right it feels like the first time i ever saw that was like matrix reloaded or
something and like this guy did seven years earlier in this movie yeah and i truly like i don't think anybody else was doing it like how did he come to this conclusion how did they come to this conclusion of like oh we should do it this like even when all the like the clones and they're all on in a scene together sometimes like they're right like oh like touching each other they're right and it's like how the fuck did they do that in 1995 it's so yeah well there's a.
There's a lot of stuff in here aside from like that sequence. But like we were talking about the visuals, how it feels like they trained AI off of it. Like, I feel like this movie, even though I didn't know anything about it going into it, I feel like this is probably like a very influential has to be right on. Like, yeah, a lot of the sci-fi and action stuff.
There's even some main tracks. the first one where you're like some of the production design is like the green and the, drudgery of it and the water and the machines and so you're like yeah this has to be a highly influential film from a production design standpoint right yeah absolutely i would and i'm right through so it feels like i've digested this film 20 times over but i've never seen it.
That's fair maybe that's why i'm so lost even though i even though i like appreciate it and respect it i'm like just lost on you know what the hell happens because he does try to apply like the same kind of visual aesthetic and style to alien and we get a very fucking bizarre alien movie and alien resurrection yeah really which i don't i don't hate but alien resurrection i just think it's just as far as alien movies go it's just so far off of what all
the other ones are yeah it makes it a little hard to swallow but i think it's an interesting movie though it's an interesting movie i'm glad like you said that they picked an interesting filmmaker and gave them a their biggest franchise at that time or like do something but i because that would not happen in today no no yeah it's just so here's how i feel about this movie i feel like this is the sort of movie you could watch once and be like we're spying
to it the way we are and i i've never seen it either and be like yeah the visuals and so forth and so on but i'm a little cold on the plot or a story or whatever i also feel like this is another movie this is a movie that you you can revisit another time and and for whatever reason maybe your second third watch if you were to give another chance it just like could click with you and then yeah this movie fucking rules like i love this movie
like it has that feeling to it of like there's a chance if i saw this again. It would make as much sense as it's intending to yeah sure and i would really love it and i think there's like yeah there might be higher odds than not this is some kind of masterpiece.
But on a first viewing i can't quite put in that category so i'm unsure if it really rises that level or if i'm just too stupid to get it so i give it a 7.5 out of 10 it's my number two for the week i really like this one all right yeah i i give it a five but i agree with everything you were just saying there this is definitely the kind of movie that could raise a lot if i ever revisit it because there's a lot there it's just really hard to kind of parse it all out yeah,
Now, I don't want to be a sellout, but I see ads nonstop for the Cheech and Chong legal weed gummies on X. I'm just saying, if you can't get a prescription or you're in a place that doesn't allow recreational marijuana, maybe what you're going to do is you want to go on X, click the link for the Cheech and Chong Delta 8 marijuana gummies, THC gummies, and watch this movie and see what happens to you.
I mean, you might get some kind of liver disease from that stuff, but God knows what we'll do to you. But you might actually maybe it'll make sense of this movie sure speaking of sketchy pharmaceuticals it's time to talk about a movie where david rosen dr d is going to disappoint me. 1996 is kids in the hall brain candy which currently has a 44 on rotten tomatoes it's not that it isn't ready sir it's just that we have so much more testing to do dr cooper Cooper, is it ready or not?
The boss of a powerful drug company has just issued orders for a new tranquilizer to be rushed into production with hilarious results in brain candy. An audacious, clever, very funny new satire from the comedy troupe known as Kids in the Hall. The film was directed by Kelly Macon. It was written by Norm Hiscock, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson.
And you'll notice there's two folks on there who do not get a writing credit who are part of the kids more on that later trump return of brendan fraser of all people sure yeah if you ever want to see brendan fraser carrying animals out of a bathhouse orgy uh this is the movie for you the last thing the moment returns it was released april 12 1996 on a budget of eight million dollars It made $2.6 million.
A loser scientist cures depression and upsets the balance of human existence. But will anybody care? In 1996 was probably the height of my kids in the hall fandom. There are two types of people in this world. There were Saturday Night Live people. Well, really three types. Saturday Night Live people, mad TV people, and kids in the hall people. What about the state people? Because that's the type that I was. Let's say four of them. I guess five, we kind of, so this is the brigade. I was a kid.
I was a kids in the hall person through and through. I got, this is one of those things, right? An older friend who in the nineties called himself and other people called him Bilbo. This could only happen in the fucking nineties. And in my mind, Bilbo was the coolest guy who ever existed. He's the closest thing to like an older brother that I ever had. He was a, he was my camp counselor at camp. He showed me Monty Python for the first time.
He played black Sabbath for me for the first time he played. I heard something from my dad, but some, some other stuff from that era, right? He was that kid who was wearing throwback rock t-shirts from the seventies and sixties in the nineties, you know, and he was wearing bell bottoms and had dyed hair and all this sort of shit.
Right. and and probably the tail end of a gen x or maybe maybe very geriatric millennial and i think i watched 1941 with him for the first time which anytime it fucking rained at camp he would steal away somehow get his ass to a video store come back with tapes and movies and be like hey.
Got some movies and he would invite like four or five of us into some hidden place in the camp with one of those roll roll away tvs and we'd be in the dark hiding watching comedies and nothing, untoward ever happened he just introduced me to a bunch of cool shit and i am forever grateful to him he was the coolest guy who ever lived and in retrospect as an adult he was just a big big fucking nerd but because he was like five years older than me he was the coolest guy
ever sure and he introduced he had episodes of kids in the hall on tape and he introduced me the kids in the hall because he did the famous kids in the hall i smashed your head i smashed you i smashed your head introduced me to kids in the hall he introduced me to red dwarf come to find out red dwarf was on pbs and my dad was already watching it and kids in the hall was on heavy rotation a comedy central so in 1996 the summer of 1996. I was going to camp to meet up with Bilbo again.
And that spring, kids of the whole brain came to come out. And I wasn't allowed to see it. But I asked Bilbo if he saw it. And he told me it was awful. It was one of the worst movies I'd ever seen. He told me he hated it. It was nothing like the show. None of the characters from the show were in it. It just had none of the humor. It was a mess of a movie. I should never watch it.
And I've never watched it. i've kept my promise to bilbo some nearly 30 years but i broke it for david rosen you're my bilbo now amazing i broke it for you broke it for you and now i've watched this movie and this is one of the funniest fucking movies i've seen in some time when you open your comedy to telling people that life is shit and that real life doesn't have any happy endings and then you cut and soon it will be over and then you cut to scott thompson masturbating furiously to gay porn,
as his kids are downstairs and where's your where's your dad kids oh he's upstairs, is he looking at gay porn again yeah. There's you could not make this movie anymore doesn't matter that scott thompson is himself were actually a gay man but you couldn't do it and this this i think we got it wrong in 1996 i think this is a great film i wish i could join you.
No i do not laugh about it that i love yeah i think i think that was one moment that i did laugh that's my biggest problem with the movie is that i didn't laugh
a lot i i just didn't laugh that that much during the babies. I, for, come on no well as long as there's not any flipper babies yeah yeah yeah well there have been one or two flipper babies cut away it was like there's only a couple flipper baby i will tell you the funniest part of the entire movie to me we invented this pill for real depression not because you missed the bus or you don't look good in that yellow hat and that lady is standing there with the yellow hat just like yes it
looks like you are you talking about me that that that was my biggest laugh in the movie what about the prolonged suicide of his dad yeah i wish it was funnier i i love the idea of it too of the like the whole takedown of pharmaceuticals and i mean it's obviously very prescient of where we are now and like you know that's like everything nowadays and And so like it, it probably would have done better if it came out now, but I just wish it was funnier.
It bugged me how much I didn't laugh during this movie. When he's at a cocktail party and the first person they introduce him, he's completely sold out. Cause really what this is, is it's almost like, what if the kids in the hall made the jerk? Yeah. Like that portion of the jerk where he invents the thing and becomes rich and becomes a jerk and dah, dah, dah.
It's like that. That's the whole movie. What if the scientist sort of like sold out his ethics and morals out of starting off at a fear for his job and then got seduced by the power and the money and the influence and all this sort of stuff and through everybody's life or the bus. And then we are, we're jumping around the, all these other characters who are taking this drug and their experience.
And, and it seems like everything's wonderful and it's, you know, transforming lives and everything goes tits up at some point.
All of this is being overseen by lauren michaels before dr evil because everybody had lauren michaels impression and famously dr evil is what's his face doing dana carvey's lauren michaels impression he stole it from dana oh yeah yeah that's right mark mckinney is the one who he was the canadian guy who did the lauren michaels and so that's the impression and so the boss in the the movie is essentially lauren michaels and he's just playing lauren michaels i that to
me was funny the the they have him go all the way up to that fucking tower to be like what color should it be and he's like well you know with its pre-synthesized form it's a real it's a like a pastel blue and they're like orange it is they already just like it gets corporate america so So, right. Yeah. And it gets idiot billionaires. We are living in the throes of idiot billionaires and idiot politicians, the likes of which we have not seen since before the invention of the guillotine.
And this movie nails it. This movie nails what these people are actually like. Are you telling me that, would it surprise you if Elon Musk came out with stummies? No, not one bit. Stummies. Right? Gleam X. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And then the guy ends up getting a fucking bird in his eye. It's like, I was driving to my $65,000 car and a bird crashed into my window. Suddenly came to me. You know you know what the name for the drunk no the bird like there's so much.
It's it's a funny movie the thing is the thing is all these sketch comedy like the state stella price citizens brigade kids in the hall all this was all stuff i used to watch with friends all the time i feel like if i watched this movie with you i would have had a much better time with you just cracking up the whole time because obviously you were and i probably would have like that would have rubbed off i wasn't cracking up the entire time but when i was when i was laughing
it got genuine laughs and i don't laugh at comedies famously i watch a comedy i could watch a hundred comedies and i only want laugh at probably five of them and most of the time it's just more of an acknowledgement of sort of like huh that's funny like that yeah i laugh in my real life but i don't laugh at stuff in movies so for you to get a genuine laugh out of me out of a movie, it's like you've hit a spot the kid has no name the kid's name is cancer boy
hello hi doctor i'm cancer boy and what would you like to say to the doctor i'd like to thank you for your your marvelous drug. Oh, are you on it, Cancer Boy? No, there is no hope for me. But my parents are on it, though. They were so very low, not just because of me, but because my brother was born with his heart on the outside of his body. Is that a fact? Nice to make your acquaintance. Oh, sorry. Sorry. That's okay. My marrow is just low. Like, that's insane.
And he's so happy just to be there. And he goes to shake the kid's hand. They go, ow. And he goes, oh, I'm sorry. He goes, don't be sorry. My marrow is just low.
Did you see that did you see that the doctor in me did the my doctor in me did you see did you see and it's like i'm sorry but like in 1995 i think the funniest person on the planet was bruce mccullough who plays cancer boy that guy the two people who made me laugh the most only person who could maybe edge him out in 1985 to me was kevin meanie for whatever reason i thought kevin meanie was the funniest fucking guy but he was edged out anything bruce mccullough was in any sketch
and kids in the hall anything he did for the show he was on snl for a while most of these guys wrote for snl too at least for a short stint i just thought it was the funniest thing in the world and i love the kids in the hall revival series it wasn't it got real kind of like the last couple series of the original kids in the hall got more sort of like filmic and cinematic and sort of like these long pieces that weren't necessarily sketches and weren't even necessarily funny but like
or tending to be or just sort of odd but but i did enjoy that and this movie is somewhere we're in the middle it it doesn't hang together as a narrative not really but but. I avoid this movie for so long and maybe it's only funny to me because I'm, because I'm set with such a fan of theirs and it's the first new thing I've seen from them or because it's like, Oh my God, they made this and it, I agree with you. It almost feels more relevant now.
But like, if you made this now, you almost couldn't because people be like, well, it's so obvious, you know, right. What an obvious movie, but it's like, yeah, but they made this in 1995 or 1986.
Six so were you ever a fan of the show kids in the hall they were always any of it that i saw like if i was at a friend's house or something they put it on it was always funny but i never like really got deep into them i always liked all those other sketch shows the ben stiller show was one of my favorites you know i said ucb stranger with candy you know like any any of that kind of like even the edge you remember the edge i never sat
there and watched 39 helens agree and it was was just a group of women in a field in canada and they would say some sort of thing oh yeah it'd say some random thing it would be like 39 helens agree and that was it that was the bit yeah like there are certain things that hit you at a certain age that become so.
Formative to who you are i think kids in the hall is like so formative like my sense of humor it was defined by probably ghostbusters and kids in the hall yeah that's the state for me the state was that like that was my absolute favorite yeah so it was this is the equivalent of like if the state had made a movie that was a massive flop and was a stain on their legacy the 10 i mean that's my one of my favorite movies of all time i don't even know what that is you know you have I've never seen it.
That was their follow-up to Out American Summer. It's horrible. It's 10. Most people say so, but it's incredible. I've seen you give a lot of bad movies high, high score. You're absolutely right. You couldn't find anything in Brain Candy that you enjoyed? I said, I loved the, the idea of it.
Like, I really, really thought it was a really great idea to make something where, where somebody like rises through the pharmaceutical industry off of this, you know, depression medication and, and, and to build it around something like that is like, I think pretty genius. And there were a few good laughs. Scott Thompson's latent homosexuality at the therapist didn't make you laugh at all.
Part of the joke is that scott thompson was probably the single most out comedian yeah in the world and was most famous for playing a character pre kids in the hall that he brought the kids in all which is like buddy guy i think was the character's name which was the old school sort of very you could not do it in fact he's gotten almost canceled for doing it which is sort of so strange but he it was like the sort of burlesque like he'd sit on a bar stool,
and just like talk shit as a gay man with a cigarette. And that's just gotten him into a lot of trouble. So he's, but that we was doing it 50 years ago. Right. And so the idea that like, they finally make a movie and he would kind of do a version of this, this character in the show too. The idea, they finally make a movie and he's plays the most butch all like all the, Oh yeah. You know, the mustache is that there's a joke there. It's funny that like fans of the show didn't like it in 1996.
No, they didn't. That's it. You're right. Fans hated this movie. Yeah. Yes. It's so strange because it does seem like something, if you missed it and then came around to it, like there is a little bit of a reassessment of this movie, I feel like in the comedy community. And so it kind of makes sense that you ended up liking it. And I'm glad, I'm really glad you did because man, if there was some like little piece of something from, you know, the state that I didn't ever get to see from back.
Actually, I've never gotten to see their CBS special. So one day I'll, somehow be able to see that when they were supposed to make the junk jump to cbs and i'm sure i'm just gonna absolutely love it you know because it's this thing it's like a holy grail you know well bilbo wherever you are i broke our promise but it was worth it i sold out yeah it was worth it to get some entertainment i give this an eight out of ten it's my number one
for the week i'm putting it on the short list kids in the hall brain candy give it a second watch try it out if if you go into it, understand it's completely fucking ramshackle. And there's no, like the whole, like I'm gay, he's gay. And they're doing the whole parade and like gay, gay, gay. You're not doing that anymore. You cannot make this movie. No, of course. Yeah. And then they, they do like the bubs be Berkeley.
Like they go down, but they're on the street and then they come up and he's, he's in a, it was like a wrestling. Oh god bless god i love that guy okay what was your score what's your rank, I will give it a four and it's in fourth place for me. All right. It's time for a recap. Coming in dead last is cool world. Zero to 10. Come at number four, the dark backward two at a 10 coming in at number three with no particular score.
Meet the hollow heads. I guess if I had to give it a score, it'd probably be like say five out of 10, I guess. Uh coming number two is the city of lost children maybe one of the single most influential pieces of visual artistry of the last 25 years and neither one of us have seen it directly but we've certainly seen its influence come to find out very strange but maybe a masterpiece 7.5 out of 10, and kids of the hall brain candy.
I'm so glad you love that i don't think it's bad i give it an f10 i will say that the last 20 minutes it really just kind of loses the plot it really falls apart at the end it needs a stronger ending yeah perhaps all right so what's your recap okay fifth place cool world i gave it a four a little higher than you but you know fifth place for sure fourth place brain and candy with also a four third place the city of lost children with a five but like we said i think
i may like it better if i ever get around to re-watching it second place meet the hollow heads with a seven i freaking weird movie my kind of weird i liked it and number one the dark backward a new favorite nine for me i love this movie on our very next episode we'll be ranking in the films of Peter Himes, which includes 1981's Outland, 1984's 2010, The Year We Made Contact, 1986's Running Scared, 1994's Time Cop, 1997's The Relic.
Music. All right, David, I won't do the bit I said I was going to do. Where can we find you on the internet? Sure, you can find Piecing It Together wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast you can follow us on social media at piecing pod maybe join our facebook group popcorn and puzzle pieces and you can check out my music by david rosen.com i just recently released a horror film score for a film called blind malice that's on of course all the spotify's and the apple musics and all those kinds of places and check out my website by david rosen david since you're such a big fan of content and creating
more and more and more content we're about to to create some more content for our patrons over at patreon.com slash binge movies if you like david rosen you want to find out which of these films he would recommend you watch some weird sunday morning at 8 a.m become a patron over at patreon.com slash pinch movies all right until next time binge on. Music.