Weirdhouse Cinema: The Boogens

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty one American horror movie The Bugins, directed by James L. Conway, starring Rebecca Balding and Fred McCarran.

Rob.

I think it's a bit of serendipity that you got to watch this movie on an airplane on the way back from actually being in some caverns like seen in the movie The Buggins.

Well, yeah, as featured in The Buggins. Yes, actual caves, which may come back to in some upcoming episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But yeah, fresh off of some adventures in some actual caves, I got to experience these adventures in probably not actual caves. Yeah.

I read somewhere that the cave sets here or the mine whatever, you know, the underground cavern sets were built in a grocery store, I think.

Okay, but a look pretty good.

Yeah, But so you were on an airplane, maybe with a head cold, watching The Buggins. That sounds like a that's a mind space.

And clearly as the as the filmmakers intended, with me occasionally having to like lean forward if there's like a little bit of nudity in the film to keep the people in the seats behind me from seeing it and wondering what I'm watching, but not that there's a lot of nudity in this one.

Yeah, So before you ask, yes, this is a movie, I picked about eighty percent on the basis of the title I came across. I'd never seen The Buggins before. Uh, And I got to the title and I watched the trailer, and the trailer is great because there's no narration for most of it. It's just scenes from the movie, a lot of screaming, you know, creature cam kind of looking up from the floor, chasing people around. And then it gets to the very end of the trailer and suddenly

Yeah. It's almost like he didn't really know exactly how to land the Boogins. How he felt about that. I don't know how I feel about the Buggins. It makes me think of Boogers. It makes me think of Boogieman and boogey Men. And I think when you first brought this movie up, I had a moment where it's like, is I confused this film with the Willies and maybe to a certain extent, creepyzoids, Like there are a.

Few critters, a little bit of that critters.

Yeah, a lot of silly monster named films, but the one i'd seen before, Munchies.

Yeah, is okay, very important question by your criteria. Is the Buggins a Gromlin's film? No, No, okay.

Yeah, these are just I don't want to spoil too much about the creatures, though. I guess at this point we'll go ahead and just remind you if you want to, if you want to experience the Buggins without any additional knowledge, now's a good time to jump off and go watch the Boogins. But otherwise we're going to spoil stuff. I will say that the creatures and the Boogins, the titular Boogins, are not They're not clowning around. They are predatory monsters.

There's no mischief, there's no Grimlins quality they're they're not making jokes. There are a lot of jokes in the film, and there is mischief, but it's by the human characters. Yeah. So The Buggins is a low budget I would have to be honest and say slightly annoying, but in other ways cozy and sort of adorable tunnel underground themed monster movie set in the Colorado Rockies.

Yeah, I think that's a good read. I wasn't annoyed by it. I guess my tolerance for annoyance and B movies is pretty high at this point.

I mean, I'm not saying it's a bad time, Like I really enjoyed The Buggins, but Roger I found moderately too severely grading.

Okay, I'll go with moderately, But maybe I was just I was just really chilled out on the plane for this one. But I do agree with the coziness. I felt like this movie had a really strong seventies sitcom sort of vibe, a little bit like sex comedy sitcom, like basically Three's Company, except without a laugh track. I think you could have dropped a laugh track in here and a nineteen seventies early eighties audience would have known how to react. And you also have no like don

Yeah. So, the premise of The Buggins is a a couple of young mine workers guys in their twenties named Mark and Roger rent a cabin. While they're not like experienced mine workers, they're doing a summer contract or something to clean up an abandoned silver mine in the mountains of Colorado, and they invite up to join them at the cabin, a couple of lady friends and also a

Absolutely? Yeah, Like it doesn't really have any of the mild to severe sleeves of like an early eighties slasher picture. And yeah, the characters have more of that like nineteen fifties nineteen sixties heart to them. Yeah.

Well, and the weird thing is there is a character who is I think explicitly supposed to have a sleazy connotation, but it's kind of a Scooby Doo version.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's very overt and silly.

Yeah yeah. You get the impression that he's maybe I'll talk. Yeah, there's a lot. He talks a lot about how much he wants to make the sex, but I don't think it ever gets around to it. In this picture.

He does does well well. They're interrupted by the police in the one scene where I don't know how far they got.

Yeah, I don't know how much sexing actually occurred. It seems like there was a definite cutoff plane and I'm not sure they ever got it back around to picking up where they left off.

So I looked into the reception history of The Boogins. Did critics like the movie? Opinions seem mixed, But in the July nineteen eighty two edition of the Twilight Zone magazine, this movie got a humming endorsement from author Stephen King. So Stephen King had stepped in to do guest film reviews. I think the regular film critic was away for some reason, and so he has a column in this issue of Twilight Zone magazine called Digging the Buggins, in which he

Yeah, I think energetic is a stretch. It's pretty laid back and relaxed for the most part. Yeah, so some great scenes with tension to them, but yeah, even by nineteen eighty one standards, I wouldn't say it's particularly energetic. I mean, this is the same year that we got the first Evil Dead film and Joe Dante's The Howling, So yeah, those are.

Both much more energetic. Yeah, but there's a sort of King's take, and haven't I wasn't able to find the full text of this article. I don't think it's been digitized online anywhere, but I found a blog post where somebody was summarizing it, and they said that in this film review, Stephen King scolds audiences for only wanting mad slasher movies and for thinking themselves above a rubber monster.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I love Stephen King. I'm never going to stop loving Stephen King, but I will add that he has never been shy about going all in on something that he loves if it's like it. Certainly if it's a new adaptation of his own work that he digs. But yeah, he can be very enthusiastic about the things that he likes.

Now, one thing I thought would be worth discussing about The Buggins before we get into talking about the cast and crew is the production company that put it out. So let's do a sidebar on Taft International Pictures.

Yeah, this is very fascinating. As I'll get into it, I read I was reading a little bit about this via Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Film Guides.

Okay, so my main source on this was an AV Club review of The Boogins by Keith Phipps, which went a bit into the history of this company. It wasn't originally Taft International Pictures. It was previously known as Sun Classic Pictures, but Son with two ends like the guitar amplifier brand.

Mm hmm, yeah, because I believe if you only had one in, it's an adult publisher. So they had They're like, I put another in on there and then then they'll know it's for family content.

So Phipps referred to Sun Classic Pictures as quote one of the most profitably disreputable film distributors in cinematic history, despite not being an adult content thing. Instead, they were disreputable due to their track record of putting out factually decrepit documentaries and running shameless advertising and putting together like TV and radio promo spots for the movies that would promise way too much, way more than these movies we're

Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding. So this is a Sun Classics was a Utah based company dealt mostly in documentaries, but again not classy documentaries, sensational nineteen seventies docs that we'd rightfully identify as conspiracy theory and cryptic cryptic flicks today really sort of the forerunners, the mind poisoning forerunners of later day conspiracy thought, I would.

Say, yeah, the media arm of that. So some examples that they did religiously themed documentaries and also conspiracy ones, historical conspiracy things. So one, for example is a famous one called In Search of Noah's Arc from nineteen seventy six, a movie that famously claimed to have found the final resting place of Noah's Ark on a mountain in Turkey.

Yeah. Yeah, they also did these sort of like you almost get the sense of these were adaptations of classics for like students to watch. They did a seventy nine adaptation of the follow The House of Usher, and then also and I think that one had Martin Landau in it, and then a TV adaptation of Sleepy Hollow starring Jeff Goldbloom. We'll come back to that one. That one actually won some awards for them.

I wonder if it's similar to the Roger Korman thinking and adapting Poe Like, well, if you're adapting classic literature, you get the benefit of both. It's out of copyright protection, so it's public domain. And then also this is something that people might watch in schools, so you get some automatic uptake because it is quote classic literature, you but it's also horror, you know, so you can kind of lean into the more exploitation elements if you want to.

So a lot of so definitely some family friendly content. Yeah, some dubious documentary work that is at times promoting things like ancient aliens and also attempting to use scientific information to prop up Christian theology. So an interesting company here.

But apart from the content Phipps pointed out how in the seventies, Sun prospered through very particular marketing and distribution tactics. So Sun used a distribution tactic known as four walling, where instead of the normal method you would use when you release a film of splitting box office sales with

Yeah, and everyone has to know about the historic Jesus because it's all we're hearing about.

And apparently they made pretty good money this way now. For some reason, I wasn't sure about what caused this shift. Maybe you had some information on this. But by about nineteen seventy nine or eighty, something shifted and Sun which had at this point adopted the new name of Taft International Pictures, I think were they maybe acquired by another company.

It's my understanding that they were acquired at this point by Taft Broadcasting, which it actually ties back to Published, a public company that was owned by the brother of Howard Taff, So it has some roots to it, Okay, presidential roots, if you will.

So this company around the year nineteen eighty shifted from making family entertainment like Grizzly Adams and religious documentaries and conspiracy stuff too, science fiction and R rated horror. So in the year nineteen eighty they released the sci fi thriller Hangar eighteen with Darren McGavin of Oh I'm blanking on the name of the show Culchak.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, The Nightstalker.

And also had Robert Vaughan from Battle Beyond the Stars and the movies we've talked about. I think Hangar eighteen was featured on a very early episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand. I don't know if you've seen this one.

I don't think I've seen that one, but that sounds right.

So that's nineteen eighty and then in nineteen eighty one we get there are rated horror extravaganza The Buggins.

Yeah. One of the things that Michael Weldon points out is that this was a lot raunchier than previous fare from some classics. But I have to stress, like only mildly ron raunchy compared to family films and rather tame documentaries. I guess because it's like, yeah, there's a butt at one point, what more can you say? Some talk of sex and some amount of blood, a little bit of gore, but nothing crazy, certainly by today's standards.

Though I did want to say I think the part of the movie where we see a butt is one of the funniest moments in the film because of a cinematography choice where the camera does almost a crash zoom on the butt, like it's the shining and there's a bloody haget, except it's just somebody's butt.

I do not remember this particular zoom all that well. I think this is probably a part of in my viewing where I was kind of like hunching over to make sure that the people behind me weren't questioning my viewing.

Habits scandalizing the family.

Yeah. Yeah, So technically this was not their first horror venture, because you know I mentioned follow the House of Usher, but it certainly would not be their last either. They would go on to have a hand in the production of nineteen eighty three's Kujo, nineteen eighty seven's The Monster Squad, as well as nineteen eighty sevens The Running Man, which of course was another loose Stephen King adaptation.

Okay, that is interesting. All three of these movies have their fans. I think, you know, these are not totally disregarded in horror history.

Yeah. I mean, I have to admit I've never seen Kujo or read Kujo, so I don't have a lot to say about that. Grew up with The Running Man, you know, it's pretty wild. The Monster Squad recently rewatched. I have mixed thoughts about it, but yeah, does have great monsters in it.

Yeah. Now, one thing I think we need to address in the beginning here is the title The Boogins. We have been assuming, and I think we'll continue to assume in the episode that the buggins is the name of the type of creature that attacks that we have to that's just an inference on our part, because the movie

Okay, so can't call it a boogeyman called Buggins instead, Yeah, which I don't know. Again, kind of a silly name. It does, at least, you know, for us modern viewers, it makes us think of things like gremlins. It sounds a little war full of whimsy than it actually is, because, again, as we'll find out, these are just predatory monsters from the deep.

A few other things that different reviewers have noted about the film that I also found notable inexplicable relationship with the one dog in the movie. So, the characters in the film have an extremely cute dog named Tiger, and all they ever do is complain about how they don't like Tiger and what a burden he is. I've never heard people be this hard on a dog before, and it's especially weird because the dog is very lovable and a really good dog. Actor like, this dog is hitting

Tiger is great. Yeah, Unfortunately, we have no idea the name of this actual dog. Maybe the dog's name is Tiger as well, but it's not one of these K nine actors that is credited but it's an amazing performance, Yeah, hitting his mark, reaction shots, a lot of screen time. Really, we get like lots of scenes in which Tiger is exploring the old house and then is having encounters with the monster before we really get to see it. So I would say, arguably the best the best performance in

Another thing that basically every reviewer makes a note of is the weirdness of the character. Roger and I agree. I think this has to be the single horniest character ever written. Almost every single line of dialogue this character speaks is about how he is ready for sex.

Yeah, it's true.

Like while he's at work, while he's doing anything, that's what he's talking about.

Yeah. The the actor playing him, who will get to in a bed, has this kind of kind of a Dana Carvey vibe to him, Like it's a little bit like Dana Carvey and it has that that like how like how sleazy can a Dana Carvey character be that sort of thing? So he ends up feeling, you know, fairly, you know, he's fairly likable, Like, even though he keeps talking about how he wants to have sex and he's gonna have sex, like, he doesn't come off particularly gross

He is a weirdly like a preopadic Garth's just strange type of character portrayal. And the other thing I think we have to mention is the unusual design of the Buggins. I don't know whether to criticize or commend to the movie for the Buggins design. I still have been thinking about it for days and still haven't made up my mind about it. Credit I think to the movie for the Buggins reveal being quite an unusual type of monster. I can't think of anything exactly like it, so it

I guess in general, I would say they were ambitious enough to go for something other than just a man in a monster suit. Yeah, but I think maybe they should have gone with a man in a monster suit. Like it's a mix. Like they they went for it, and in some shots, like the final creature looks good and at least is very interesting and original, but I don't know that I love it, Like I wasn't even it didn't leave me that curious even to go look up like pictures of the full creature so much. I'm

There are a couple of I think genuinely effective horror images or set pieces in the movie. Not so much once you finally get the Buggins reveal. But before we'll get to this later. I I thought one scene that actually looks pretty scary and was memorable was the scene where it attacks through the intake grate on the floor, you know, and the great bends down and it becomes a pit.

Like.

I thought that was good, pretty scary looking, an unusual image, almost in kind of a Jallo way, striking in the way that it manipulates or uses strangely a familiar object that we all have around us in our houses, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I would agree with that, And I'd say also, they do a great job of making sure that the Buggins is completely lethal. It is a deadly adversary, and they treat it very seriously, and and that rubs off on the viewer.

Yeah, Rob, you had an elevator pitch for this.

Yeah, it's basically the Minds of Maria, except Buggins instead of Ballrock. The Buggins are our ball Rock.

I did not think about the minds of Maria, But you're so right. They were warned not to go in, the entrance was sealed. They had decided to go in anyway, and they dug too deep and unleashed something.

Yeah. Yeah, this is a familiar trope in various various horror movies, horror stories, even some Stephen King stories as well, where you have some sort of a creature that is either it's in some sort of like deep environment that has been opened up, you know, a real environment or a magical environment that has been accessed via human mining and then is covered up again but then unlocked once more. Now we could ask a lot of questions about how

Well, actually I have some other thoughts about that.

Oh yeah, I.

Think it does not eat humans because we never see it humans. It attacks humans, but the human corpses that we find in the movie are completely They've got all their flesh intact. I mean they're wounded and they.

Just kind of wounds the face and all.

Yeah, but it doesn't eat the flesh of the humans, and that makes me think that something else is going on. It's not attacking because it is a hungry predator. I'm wondering if it's territorial or is it attacking to protect its nest or whatever. You know, We just there's so much we don't know about the ethology of the Bogins.

We need some sort of shady documentary to do a jump in on this and give us some ideas.

Yeah, yeah, the Bugin's mine.

Yeah all right. Well at this point you're like, Okay, I actually do need to go watch The Boogins. Well, it's widely available for digital purchase in rental. Again, I watched it on my phone on a flight, but you can also get it on Blu Ray from Keno Lorber. They put out a twenty twenty four release of the film and it has a number of fun sounding extras on it, so it seems to have despite being maybe a obscure pick, it has a really solid physical release.

Should we talk about the connections.

Yeah, let's get into it here. And a lot of these connections are going to tie directly into Sun Classics. A lot of the people involved were Sun Classics folks who at least started out with Sun.

Classics Sun Veterans.

Yeah, yeah, two ins two right. Yeah. So the director here is James L. Conway born nineteen fifty American writer, director, and producer who got his start with Sun Classics, beginning with the seventy six documentary In Search of Noah's Art, which we already mentioned, and then four episodes of the TV spinoff of Son's Grizzly Adams film in seventy seven.

I've never seen it, but I saw that he had I think he was involved in directing episodes of Charmed the show.

Yeah, no, it Charmed as well. Yeah, there'll be a connection here to his wife as well. That's that was an Aaron Spelling Witches show, I believe.

I don't really know. I just saw Armed was like often the first thing that would come up when you google this guy.

Yeah, so, you know, very successful in television, and he was nominated for a nineteen eighty one Primetime Emmy for the Legend of Sleepy Hollow in the category of Outstanding Children's Program.

Is this the one that had Jeff Goldblum in it?

Is?

Okay?

As Akabad Krane. I haven't seen it, but that's what I've heard about for years and was excited to see it tied in here.

Now, there was one name in the credits here I was briefly confused about because the IMDb lists the screenwriters as David O'Malley and Jim Kof, But in the movie itself the script was credited to O'Malley and Bob Hunt. But I think Bob Hunt is a pen name.

Right, Yeah, that's the pen name that Jim Coof uses here. Born nineteen fifty one, writer and producer. This was his first credited produced screenplay, but he'd go on to become a pretty well known screenwriter. A lot of folks may recognize his name from nineteen eighty one's A Hidden, ninety eight Rush Hour, two thousand and four's National Treasure, twenty sixteen's Money Monster, and a whole bunch of episodes of TV's Grim which he also created and produced.

Okay, for a while, I've had The Hidden on the list of movies to check out, potentially for Weird House. I'm interested in that.

Yeah, Yeah, I haven't seen it, but it looks pretty fascinating. I want to also point out that this screenwriter is also tied into questionable nineteen seventies documentary work, because he was apparently a researcher on the Leonard Nimoy hosted Insart Shops series back in nineteen seventy eight. Wow, you get the impression all these guys you know they were destined for other things, but they were initially stuck in this world of grimy, questionable documentaries in.

The Bermuda Triangle zone.

Yeah, they just had to escape it. That's our screenwriter. But then we also have our one of our main screenwriter, but we also have a story credit to Thomas C. Chapman, who nineteen forty six through twenty eleven a SUN writer and producer, whose first writing credit was seventy three's Deadly Fathoms. That was a SUN a diving documentary film narrated by

Based on the title, I guess that would be a spoof of the nineties erotic thriller, generally like Fatal Instinct, Fatal Attractions.

Yeah, I guess they kind of slammed two of them together there. Yeah. I may have even seen part of it on TV. I don't remember.

I've never seen this one.

All right, let's get into our cast here, starting with our heroin, Trish played by Rebecca Balding.

Fundamentally likable heroine. Yes, absolutely, yeah. Rebecca Balding is a very nice presence in this film, whatever else is going on, she just seems like, you know, Trisha's got her head on straight, and Rebecca Balding just does a very likable energy.

Absolutely yeah. So she lived nineteen forty eight through twenty twenty two, Arkansas born. She'd been working in TV since seventy six at this point, appearing on episodes of shows like The Bionic Woman, Supertrain nineteen episodes of Soap That was probably her biggest role at the time. She'd also already done one other horror film, seventy nine Silent Scream, which was produced and written by the Wheat Brothers who had gone to give us Pitch Black, among other things,

I have read anecdotes about Rebecca Balding and James L. Conway. The version of the story I read is that they met for The Bogins, like, she showed up for casting and the moment they met, James L. Conway was like, Wow, I think I'm in love with her. And then the story goes that like two weeks into filming, she proposed marriage to him and they got married.

Oh wow. So yeah, well yeah, and would remain married until she passed away in twenty twenty two. But yeah, and then would work together again obviously on Charmed. Yeah. I agree, she's she's got great girl next door charm in this film. You know, it's just really good.

The Bogins is a love story.

Yeah. Ultimately, I don't want any of the characters in this film to be killed by slimy monsters from the Silver Mine, but especially not Trish.

Okay, but so in the movie, Trish has a love interest, and that is the character Mark played by Fred McCarran.

Right, right, and she does her characters does not know Mark previously.

This is this is one of the weird things about the setup of the film. We'll talk more about this later.

So Mark is played by Fred McCarran, who have nineteen fifty one through two thousand and six American actor who's credited TV in film work goes back to I think around seventy seven. He shows up in a bit background part in nineteen seventy sevens The Goodbye Girl, and before this film, he also had a supporting role in nineteen eighties Zana Dude. That's the roller skating movie that starred Olivia Newton John. Subsequent to credits included eighty three's The

Well, yeah, he's a good compliment to Trisha. So Rebecca Balding has girl next Door energy, Fred mccerrn has boy next door energy. He's just a kind of nice, strapping young lad who is He spends a lot of the movie just humoring This guy will get to in a minute Roger, Like they have this this dynamic where Roger is just monologue, doing horny monologues and Fred Mccaherrn's just like, you're crazy, man, But yeah he's sweet.

All right. So that's that's our main couple. But then we also have this other couple. Jessica is Trisha's friend. Trish and Jessica have come up together to visit the mountains. Jessica is played by Anne Marie Martin born nineteen fifty seven. Martin's acting credits go back to seventy six and include various TV shows and such films as seventy nine as The Shape of Things to Come and the nineteen eighty slasher film prom Night, starting Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Even without knowing that's the rest of her resume, I somehow feel like Anne Marie Martin brings the slasher movie energy with her into this film. Does that make any sense?

Yeah? Absolutely, Like once I saw she was in prom Night, I'm like, I think I saw Prom Night ages ago. I don't remember much about it, but I'm absolutely certain her character dies in it. You can tell, like, where are you build in the credits for a slasher film, it's like, oh, yeah, you're in the victims zone for sure.

Yeah, that's a good point. I've never thought about it like that, but basically, yeah, if you are neither top billing, if you're like not top billed, and you're above like seven or eighth build, you are definitely going down.

Yeah. So. Her subsequent films include ude eighty one's Halloween, two eighty four's Runaway, and two hundred and ninety eight episodes of Days of Our Lives from eighty two through eighty five. Now that that Runaway credit is important to mention here because she was married to popular novelist Michael Crichton from eighty seven through two thousand and two, and actually co wrote the nineteen ninety six film Twister with him.

Mm hmm, okay, yeah, I rewatched Twister a few years back and that was a I remember it being a pretty fun time.

Actually, yeah.

Yeah, it's a very it's kind of a silly movie and that the sometimes you feel like the tornado really has a mind, like it's chasing you know. But yeah, it was a fun ride.

And Runaway I would I would be interested in coming back to that one. Runaway. Oh, it's a It is a silly movie with very very dangerous, very unconvincing robots, okay, and some unique casting. All right, So that's Jessica. Jessica's boyfriend is Roger, who we've been talking about a lot already. Roger is our horn dog.

Whereas he calls himself hormone man.

Hormone man. Yes, that's right, he calls himself that. Nobody else calls him that. Yeah, I really.

He has a whole hormone man act like he does a bit.

He lays it on so thick. I am suspicious whether Roger has actually had sex before. I think he's a little little two out there with all of this stuff. I think we're building up to his first time.

It conveys an insecurity and a nervousness.

Yeah yeah. And then again, he has this likable quality to him where he doesn't He talks about sex all the time, but doesn't come off as particularly sleazy.

So I think he crosses the line in a couple of points, but most of the time he just comes off as dorky.

Yeah yeah, yeah, more of a dork. I would agree with that. So he's played here by Jeff harr I couldn't find any dates on Jeff Harland, but he's still around and I think still working. He'd worked in TV for a few years prior to this film, popping up on the likes of Morgan Mindy and Buck Rogers in the twenty fifth century, and has remained active over the decades.

Oh interesting, I wonder, Well, I'm trying to think who this guy could have been in Parks and rec.

He shows up in a single episode, and my family is actually doing a big rewatch of Parks and rec right now, and I think we're in the next to the last series, and I don't think we've gotten to his part yet. Oh but now I'm on the lookout.

If I just had to guess, I'd say he stands up in a meeting to make it inane comment.

I saw a screenshot, and I think that would be a good guess. But I saw a screenshot and I think maybe he's a local business or politician type that they're going to encounter later on. But I could be wrong on that. It's also like that I've seen him already and just was not looking to recognize anyone.

So the characters we just talked about are our main four, some of twenty somethings in the movie, but there are also a couple of other major characters who are the older mind guys, like the boss at the Mind Brian.

Yeah, and we're gonna have less details on these guys, but Brian is played by John Crawford who lived nineteen twenty through twenty ten, and his credits include seventy twos, The Poseidon Adventure. In seventy six is the Enforcer and then his second in command if you will, is this guy Dan played by Med Flory who lived twenty six through twenty fourteen, and his credits include a supporting role in sixty threes, The Nutty Professor.

Oh, and this movie also has a crazy Ralph character.

That's right.

Yeah, it's got John Lormer, who many people will remember from creep Show. I Want My Cake.

That's the Yeah, the probably my least watched segment from creep Show. I think I've sometimes skipped over that one. But yeah, that's where a lot of people are going to recognize him from but this is guy. Yeah. John Lormer lived nineteen oh six through nineteen eighty six and has a very long history with television. His TV credits go back to I think the late nineteen forties, and his credits include I can't even begin the list all

Oh, who are the other ones who came up like that? Lately? It's the guy plays the old man in home alone, the old man at the airport who was in something we saw.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know if we've talked about him directly, but William Hickey is one of the actors I always think of in this category, Like it seems like he just always played an old man, even when he wasn't that old of a a right, Yeah, all right, just a few more credits behind the scenes here before we get into the plot. We mentioned the Bogins. We've got we have to we have to give credit to the

Yeah, can I come? I'd say this maybe an example of execution is more solid than the design, which is questionable. Does that make sense? Like? Yeah, real is like, once you've got your mission, here's what the Buggins is going to look like. I feel like they executed that about as well as it could have been done.

Yeah. Yeah, though they do have design and construction credits.

Yess that's true.

Yeah, they they would they would benefit from our praise and our criticism here. Yeah, I don't know. I guess one of my things is like, what is the buggin supposed to be? Like what kind of triglafauna is it? Is it like a cave cricket? Is it a turtle? Is it an octopus? Like I thought it was going to be a cave octopus before we actually found out what it is. A reminder there's no such thing as like a freshwater cave octopus.

But yeah, it's it's a spider turtle, rat octopus.

Yeah, it's okay. It's a weird hybrid concept, and I guess given the design elements here, they did a pretty good job. All right. Finally, the music here is by Bob Summers. I have to say, pretty solid late seventies early eighties kind of slasher theme music here. You know, when we get into the tense moments, it does a fine job.

Definitely works pretty well in the trailer.

Yeah, Summers. We've talked about Summers in passing before because he did the score for The Eliminators, the mostly boat based action adventure sci fi film that we watched a few years back.

Scientist, Mercenary, Mandroid Ninja together they become the Eliminator.

Yeah. Yeah, So he'd worked on that. He worked on a film called The Night, and he worked in the music department on a number of films such as Sideways, Night of the Comet and metal Storm. Also worked on various Sun Classics projects.

Oh, metal Storm, the Destruction of Jared Sen exactly. Yeah, there you go. All right, Well, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Let's jump in.

We begin with a Taft International Pictures logo. Looks very classy, copper text, gleaming. What do you think?

Yeah? I liked it. I got a little excited. You know, it's kind of neat when you see a different film production logo that you haven't seen before. You're like, oh, feels a little different. I don't know exactly what to expect.

Some things like I didn't know this movie was made by a bank kind of looks like it, yeah, yeah. And then we get a red out and the title is scribbled in a kind of cursive font in red on a black background. And after this we moved to a very Ken Burns style pan and zoom sequence over some cpa toned old newspapers and photographs, old timey harmonica music plays, and all these newspaper clippings are from the

I'm assuming that the general vibe of this intro is maybe in keeping with the documentaries that had come out previously from Sun.

Classics Documentary Tactics. I didn't even make that connection, but yeah, the kinburns, pan and zoom, and they had previously been making all of these documentary films. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, start with what you know.

So the action begins with a scene at the reopening of an abandoned silver mine in the mountains, just outside of a Colorado town called Silver City. So all around the entrance snow is piled high and we can see evergreen trees in the distance, a high altitude mountain environment. And here we meet four characters. You've got the two bosses in charge of the operation. You've got Brian played by John Crawford, who has a likable enough demeanor, but

And it's worth noting like none of these guys are are bad at all, Like even our I think in a picture from certainly from later on in the nineteen eighties and certainly into the nineties, at least one of the bosses here would have been a hard ass or would have been a villain of some sort.

Yeah, yeah, but they're none of these are villains.

Yea. Yeah, they're pretty good bosses. They're very understanding, you know. So I again that comfy vibe here. We're at least when we're in the human realm, we're among friends. It's the buggins we have to worry about.

That's a good point. Yeah, this is about human camaraderie in the face of an overwhelming evil that is from below. Yeah, So the boss is the chains off the gate and they open up the tunnel and the younger guys haul up a generator, and all of Roger's dialogue at this point is stuff about He's like listing the number of hours and minutes it's been since it was last six o'clock and Mark and Roger are They also talk about how they're new to mine work, so the older guys

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, maybe this is acceptable in the eighties, but also it just it feels like that sitcom energy you know where it's like, oh, these two don't know each other, they're gonna make a love connection. You know. It works well enough for the picture, but doesn't hold up the close scrutiny.

Yeah, so Mark is skeptical about this multi day destination blind date, but Roger is offering him assurances laced with horny weirdness, like he's like, I saw Trish naked in a hot tub, You're gonna like her.

Yeah, And they seem to have no plan for the weekend, like there's no talk of I mean, obviously Roger has planned. Roger has plans, but it's I'm not hearing anything about the hikes they're planning to go on. It seems like there's a vague plan to make spaghetti. But then it's like the guys end up working most of the time anyway, So yeah, it wasn't really well constructed this weekend.

When they never talk about skiing. But when we see the ladies driving up in their car, they have skis on the Vestroy car, so it's like maybe they had plans to ski. But so once the older guys start blasting the mine with dynamite to clear out some of the old cavens, we cut away to Creeper Cam. There's this old guy played by John Lormer, the guy from Creep Show, standing on a snowy hill overlooking the mine entrance.

He is.

Yeah, And for the first three quarters of the movie there are going to be a lot of scenes of this old guy lurking around outside wherever.

The characters are. And we know from the get go what this guy's here for. This is the old dude who's gonna warn us about the evil Like there's no doubt about it. That's the old Doom.

He's that guy. Anyway, at the end of the workday, Mark and Roger head out talking about how they have to pack up so they can move into the cabin

I guess, so, I guess she's the landlady. Maybe she's also a real litter as well.

Maybe. Yeah, So she's taking care of the cabin for some reason, heading up to the cabin that Roger and Mark have already rented, and she's getting it ready for them to arrive the next day. I think she said she has to get the heat going. So when we first meet her, she's driving alone up the snowy mountain road in a wood paneled station wagon, and then a deer wanders into the middle of the road in front of her, and she somewhat comically exclaims, oh my god

Now, is this character Martha?

I don't remember if we ever learned her name. Yeah, why were you looking up who the actress is? Yeah?

I was looking. There is a character named Martha played by Marcia Dangerfield, so possibly her. She was also in Footloose in eighty four. Oh, okay, in bats in ninety nine. But yeah, I'm like you, I don't remember her ever actually being named.

Well, anyway, the cops might say her name later, but I don't remember what it is. Anyway. She arrives and she walks around in the house in the dark with a flashlight, cursing at things. She eventually gets the power on and she makes a phone call to somebody, explaining what happened and explaining that she will need to stay the night because her car is wrecked. Meanwhile, outside, John Lormer pulls up and starts sneaking around in the snow,

Yeah, because this is something we'll see multiple times throughout the picture.

It's kind of interesting. I think the movie is not totally unique in this regard. There are similar, you know, tricks employed in movies that have small monsters that attack from the ground level. But it is kind of interesting that the movie has a lot of shots from the ground lingering on people's feet and legs, a kind of predatory watching of people's feet and legs. And I think this is in part trying to take advantage of that fear that people have about things reaching out from under

You know. I don't think I heard this one before. It sounds very impractical, like, yes, you're going to hide out under a car like that's pretty cramped unless you're hanging out under big old trucks. And then once you've slashed the victim, you're going to crawl out and then attack them again. It seems like you're just gonna They're going to put the boots to you before you even craw out from underneath the car.

So, yeah, I looked this up, and this is for the most part, not something that actually happened, at least I think there now. I'm not sure about the details. I think there may have been a case much later, like long after this was already an urban legend of something like this happening, But at least in the early times, when stories about this were spreading like wildfire, this was not happening. There are you know, no records at the

Yeah. I mean it probably comes down to like our natural tendency to be on the lookout for things like you know, serpents in the grass, or or the potential that that some sort of a naturally occurring like small cave or overhang might have some sort of a creature held up in it and if you get too close then they might you know, attack and self defense.

Yeah, so I think the movie is trying to take advantage of that kind of fear. They're reaching out from under something and getting you by the feet fear, and so that is what the Buggins cam is tapping into in a way. So we see from the monster's point of view, as like feet and leg go by, but then also as people cower and scream as the monster is approaching from the floor looking up at them, and then also the attack. The Buggins attack almost always has

Yeah, and it seems like the Biggins has at least two tentacles going on some sort of arms. One is for grabbing and the other is for slashing at a distance.

Yeah, it's got a nail on the end of the tentacle. So the next day the cops pull the landlady's car out of the ditch. There's no sign of her around and down at the mine, our boys are still exploring and they're mapping out the tunnels. They find a cave in, perhaps the one that closed the mine in nineteen twelve, and they start clearing away the rubble by hand. I don't know what you actually used to clear a rubble in a tunnel. Maybe you just pick him up, and

Wow, what part does he call herman? Is the butt? I don't know.

We could have no idea what part of the body it would be. Yeah, we'll have to assume his gallbladder is Hermann. So Jessica pulls over so they can let their dog, Tiger, have a bathroom break. Tiger is an off leash mania. He just runs off into the woods. They set him loose, and then they're kind of surprised when he doesn't immediately come back. They're like, why did he run away?

I don't know.

So the next scene Jessica and Trish are walking around in the snow calling for the dog and complaining about him and calling him names. You know, come here at Weasel Breath. I don't know if we've already discussed everything that needs to be said about this, but one of the most shocking things about this movie to me is the non stop expression of negative sentiment about this cute little dog. It feels almost like the screenwriters thought they should include a cute dog, but maybe they hated dogs

Oh, I don't know. They do trash talk the dog.

A lot, non stop. They never say anything nice about the dog.

But the dog is also absolutely cute and is one of the stars of the picture. And you know, we don't have we I don't think we as the viewer have reason to hate the dog. The dog's not going around doing things that deserve death by monster or anything. I don't know. It made me, I did. It did make me reflect a little bit on my relationship with my own pet, who's not a dog and is a cat. But you know, I probably talk a lot of trash

So after a while they get tired of looking for Tiger and they head back to the car. I don't know if I mean like they're planning on leaving without him or something. But then when they get there, Tiger is sitting on top of the Volkswagen like womp womp.

Yeah again, you could have you could have dropped a laugh track on this film, and it would have worked perfectly for much of it. Like it's it clearly has that good natured comedy energy going on.

The next scene is pretty funny. Back at the mine, the guys break through the rubble pile and just beyond it, the tunnel opens up into this big chamber. It's shimmering with purple light. They go in and it is an underground lake or pond. There's this big, you know, very still water, massive still water covered with fog. It's kind of atmospheric at first, you know, it's not the most expensive set ever, but it's you know, they get it

Well, you know, he's in his spare time, he reads up on human ancestors, and so he was very curious to see if this was indeed a modern human.

Skulls Australopithecus in the cave. Yeah, so, you know, they've got this massive bone midden in the cave. In the cave, it seems to contain the bones of twenty or thirty human bodies. They're all mixed up and jumbled together, and they're like, what could have caused this? And they're like, well, it probably a gas leak or something. You know, these are the miners who died in here.

Meanwhile, we just glimpse something like a large creature swimming in the underwater pool, but no cause for alarm. Let's just keep looking for that silver.

So Trish and Jessica arrive at the cabin, Jess claims the room with a big brass bed for herself and Roger, and she starts testing out the bed like jumping on it, and it immediately breaks and falls to the floor. Meanwhile, Trish wants to take a shower, but she can't get hot water, so she goes to the basement to turn on the water heater, and while down there, she hears some odd noises and there's some suspense while she reeps

Yeah, yeah, I didn't fully understand the timing of all of this, but yeah he has. But he assures him it's like, look, you've got you don't have to leave till three am. Do whatever hormone Man stuff you have to do up until three am, but then you've got to go to Denver and pick up the maps.

This is the first scene where Roger does a Hormone Man monologue. So he starts referring to himself as hormone Man, and he's narrating it like a Superman radio serial. You know, Hormone Man can leap tall buildings of sex. And while Hormone Man is yammering, we suddenly pan over to the grizzled old Codure and he's just like spying on Hormone Man. And so we're just gonna get a lot more creeping

But it's still it's like, I'm not buying for a second that this guy's a threat. It's like he's here to tell us about the monster. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. His message is not I'm going to harm hormone man. It's that hormone Man is in danger and needs MP.

But he's very anti social, He's I guess the whole time, He's like, should I tell him? Is now a good time for me? Don't? I don't want to come off as awkward or weird, but I've got to warn him about these boogets.

So back in the cab our, Core cast is finally united. Jessica and hormone Man have a screaming tickle fight, and Trish and Mark's first meeting happens in the middle of this. So like, Mark comes in the front door balancing a bunch of boxes from the liquor store heavy Core's presence in this film, Core's banquet, and he's got a box of a vodka brand I'd never heard of, called barren

What.

Yeah, So they share some cores banquet, and then we get a bit of their backstory too. So Mark, you know, got out of electrical engineering school. He's working this mind job until he figures out what he wants to do next. Trish and Jessica went to journalism school together, and Trish just got a job at the Denver Post working on their Sunday magazine, so she is aspiring for a bigger career in journalism. And then there's a knock at the door. Who is it? It's the cops. They are trying to

Yeah. I wasn't surprised that Tiger survived this encounter because it seemed like the film had already devoted a lot of time to Tiger, and also just sort of the general knowledge that you shouldn't kill off a dog in a film if you can avoid it. Not that it's stopped plenty of films that we've watched for weirdout cinema.

Well, but they do later.

That's the weird thing. I don't remember Tiger dying, Yeah, pointed out to me when we get back to it. Maybe I was hiding the film from people or something.

It happens off screen, but okay, it does happen.

Yeah, Yeah, And I guess it's surprising that Tiger would eventually get killed in this It seems like tiger would be your survivor because he's again he's great. I would put this performance and the way they shot it like on par with Jonesy and Aliens. You know, easier to do with a dog than a cat. But still we're invested.

Yeah, it's funny that you pointed out he's a survivor because he does have the eye of the tiger.

M that's true.

So at dinner, our four some they stumble out of a restaurant complaining about the bad food, and then they head over to the billiard hall where the bosses are shooting some pool. Because remember, hormone Man has to get the keys to the truck so he can do the overnight drive. So hormone Man takes the truck and the other three hang out.

I want to point out this surprised me, and I think maybe speaks again to the good natured heart of this film. Roger has been talking this big game about the sex, and his bosses are even like, look, you can do whatever you want till till three am. That's when you have to leave. Roger instead of like pushing to the absolute limit of his time and then leaving for his work trip, is like I need to go to bed early so I can get up at three am. Like he's so he's ultimately so responsible. Yeah.

Well, and he's telling the other people, He's like, y'all hang out, y'all have a good time. I'm gonna go. I gotta go do my thing.

Yeah.

And so the other three hang out at the billiard hall with the bosses. Yeah, and that's weird. Jessica, it turns out, is a pool hustler. She starts She's absolutely destroying Dan at pool for money, and he keeps going double or nothing and she keeps winning. Meanwhile, Mark and Trish sit at a table drinking with Brian and again hilarious that this destination multi day blind date has turned into getting drunk with my blind date's boss.

Yeah. Luckily, everybody's just a likable character and to get along so well.

However, Trish does learn some important clues in the scene. Brian tells her about the history of the mine, so she learns that there were cave ins. She learns about the big pile of human bones they just found. By the way, have they reported these unburied human remains to authorities?

I don't think.

Yeah, Because we go back to the mine later and they're still there. Nobody's done anything about him, so Trish gets interested in this and says she's going to go to the local newspaper office the next and check it all out. Also later in the scene, we get to see Mark and Trish getting into a bit of awkward

Yep.

The next scene is, unfortunately the death of hormone Man. Yeah, a hormone man comes home. He finds a mess all over the floor. He blames it on Tiger and then he runs around the house cussing at the dog, but he can't find the dog. Then hormone Man gets into bed. We know this won't be for long. Buggins Cam fires up in the basement starts zooming around, going around the boxes in the dark. Then Roger decides he needs to get out of bed and leave for his midnight road trip.

Yeah, and he gets the full business. He gets the like the claw of the throat.

Oh yeah, yeah, he gets messed up.

Yeah, there's no doubt. Like it's not like, oh, we've got to save Roger later on, like Roger's toast.

So by the time Trish and Mark get home, Roger is missing. They assume he's already left on his trip. So they build a big, roaring fire and they have sex on the living room floor. And in the middle of this there is yet more of what we initially assume is Boogin's cam, but it turns out to be Tiger cam. Something's creeping on them on the floor, but then it's Tiger and he's just like yep, yep, And so turns out Tiger is fine. While looking for the dog the next day, Mark finds a weird hole in

Yeah, yeah, I don't know, but I guess she perhaps rightfully thinks that maybe Roger is not marriage material.

He's not ready at least, yeah, maybe he will mature anyway. Trish heads off to the local newspaper office, the Silver City Gazette, to go into research mode. So while she's there digging into the archives about the mine, she talks with this older lady who has worked in the newspaper business for years, and this older lady is trying to pitch her stories. She's like, Oh, you should do a story on when the Denver Post had the first girl paper boys.

Yeah, And then then Trisha's like, actually, I want to talk about the mining accidents. And for a second, I was kind of expecting it to be like, oh, we don't talk about the mining accidents around here, or get some resistance, but She's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Actually, let's research that now, let's do it.

Yeah. So Trish learns all about the tragic history of the mine, the strange sightings, the cave ins, She learns of a man who was sent to a mental institution after trying to collapse the mine with dynamite, and then finally reports that some miners inside the mind said they were attacked by something.

You know, I want to jump ahead to something that is going to be revealed later, but we've already gotten a sense off here, and that is that supposedly all of the houses in this area are connected via basement tunnels to the mines.

Bizarre.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it. We get some great payoff in the film with this, but it does not make logical sense to me.

I don't think it makes any sense at all, except that they had to have a way for the Buggins to get into their house.

Yeah, because you want it to be a mine menace movie, but also a basement menace movie, so you need a system of tuns connecting those things.

So we are later told by John Lormer's character that all the houses in town are connected to the mine. By Sam hols.

Maybe they were just like, we just want ways for people to get to work without having to go out in the snow. What if they could just cart directly from their basement too?

Oh that's true. Yeah, it makes me think about like, you know, far far northern college campuses and stuff that underground passageways. So meanwhile, that day at work at the mine, there is vandalism. Someone has painted death on the mine entrance.

You have a dance kind of like that's that's above my pay grade though, I'm just here for the silver.

Also here, the old coadure is like stealing sticks of dynamite out of the back of a truck. Trish comes to visit Mark at work and they start comparing discoveries. They learned that we learned that Jessica has found the boss's truck still in the garage at the cabin, So where's hormone man. Also, Trish tells Mark what she learned at the newspaper office. There's weird things are doing, and so Trish decides she's going to go back to the cabin to see what's up. And then back at the

Yeah, public domain.

Yeah, and just notice like the inhabitants of this cat are really diligent about hygiene. There's just lots of bathing.

Yeah. Well, I mean I feel like I'm if it's cold, taking a hot shower or something you can do, right, that's true.

Yeah, So Tiger is barking at her through the door. She tells him to be quiet, and then while the water is running, guess what happens in the basement fires up the Buggins cam And then here we get to what I was saying earlier is I think the best horror set piece in the movie the intake grate. There's a furnace intake vent on the floor covered by a metal grate, and suddenly a tentacle reaches up through the grate and we see the metal folding down inwards in

Oh man. See, I think I was in disbelief, like I just couldn't imagine Tiger would be dead at this point, Tiger's going to come back once more, but he does not. But I love the use of the grade here because I remember I think maybe maybe one of the houses that I grew up in had one of these, and I think maybe my grandparents' house had one. And as a kid, there is that weird sense of like there's

We lived in houses with these, and strangely enough, our dog was always really freaked out by them, Like if he had to cross the grade in the floor, he would jump over it.

He didn't want to step on it.

I mean, maybe that had to do with just the sensation on his paws, but he also acted just generally afraid of.

It's like there's dust down there. It's it's a weird vibe.

And so anyway, the sound makes Jessica get out of the shower. She has to investigate. She wraps herself in a towel and goes looking, and while she's checking out the grate, she is attacked. Something grabs her by the arm and pulls her into the grate. She manages to get away, but her arm is all bloodied now and this turns into a chase. So we still don't see the full form of the monster, but it chases Jessica

Yeah, I don't know. It raises so many questions about the tunnel infrastructure in this town. Yeah.

So in the middle of this, Mark realizes that Jessica and Trish are in danger. So he rushes off to the house. He stops to call the police and send them ahead also but this leaves Brian and Dan in the mine with John Lormer, and before Lormer can use the dynamite to close the mine again, Dan is attacked by the monster and then John Lormer is also. He like sinks to the ground in terror, and this is the part where he sized the word buggins. And then

At So at this point have we lost both silver mine bosses and the old Brian's still okay? Okay?

Are they have been boggins again?

It's without the nastiness of an actual slasher film. We have no deaths in this movie where we as the audience are supposed to enjoy it on some level, either in an understandable way or a nasty way, you know,

Yeah, it does not have the quality that some slasher films have of resentful violence, where it's like you're seeing people get what's coming to them. It doesn't feel like that. So so back at the cabin, Trisha arrives and she finds the whole scene. So there's trash scattered all over the floor, water running in the shower, the gaping grate in the floor. It kind of reminds me of you get a scene like this in a lot of slasher

Yeah, you know what it makes me think of. There's a topic we discussed on Stuff to Build your Mind in the past about what happens when you have too many elements in a particular imaginary work. How Like if you have two things like, oh, it's part man, it's part horse, Like, okay, that's evocative, But if you have three to five things, Yeah, we don't necessarily know what to make of it.

Okay, folks, we just had to go off Mike for a minute to figure out, try to remember what this thing was talking. It was when we did a core episode on a paper in the journal Cognitive Science from two thousand and six by norn zion at All called Memory and Mystery, the cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive Narratives.

Yeah, And I think that's the error here. There are too many elements that I'm just doesn't leave an impression. If they had just gone with say spider turtle or squid rat, then I would they would have left more of an impression. But instead they went for all of it at once, and my mind just doesn't really know what to think of it.

Yeah, I think that's right anyway. So they shoot the Biggins and then the cops like it's all dead now, instead.

Of and they got me here. I was a sucker, and I was like, okay, seems about right, and maybe it's kind of like that fifty sixties charm here. You know, so many of those pictures ended with law enforcement showing up and killing the threat. I was just like, all right, totally say with cops have here, They've done it, saved the day.

But no, the Buggins then wakes up and it eats the cops face, bites him right on the face, and starts getting and we never get any explanation of the Buggins. By the way, so the house catches fire. There's no way to escape up the stairs, so Mark and Trish have to escape to wear into the tunnels.

The tunnels. This is great, so it's paying off no matter how weird it is. It's paying off.

They go through the hole in the well, we see the cabin explode, just explode, like the walls are made of c four uh. And they are again attacked in the tunnels by the Buggins. This At this point, Mark gets attacked and Trish saves him by smashing one of the creatures of the big timber beam. They encounter Brian, who is still alive at this point, but then Brian gets snatched from above and kind of hanged by a Buggins tentacle. That's creepy. Yeah, But then Trish and Mark flee.

Yeah. Yeah, have we truly isolated the Bugin's threat? And how many Biggins were down there? How many escaped, how many other Bogins related fatalities have occurred in the Tri County area. We just don't know.

Bugin's danger remains, so Trish and Mark are okay, though they walk away while the credits roll in sad music plays, and that's the end of the Buggins.

You know. Thinking back on it now, I can really see why Stephen King probably dug the movie so much, you know, because you can see a number of things that King is notable for digging, you know, the old fifties and sixties monster movies obviously, but also kind of like that, you know, he's very much a part of that, like nineteen eighties, like to a certain extent, nastier trend in horror, you know, also the sort of the working Joe vibes of it all and underground tunnels, you know,

Yeah. I can see Stephen King just enjoying a silly monster movie, hm, maybe for way in ways that are not totally related to its objective merits. Yeah, and just wanting to go into battle for it.

Yeah yeah, and uh yeah, and I honor that for sure. Yeah, because at the end of the day, Yeah, the Boogins is a very watchable, very fun film. The monsters feel dangerous. They might be a little goofy when you finally get to see them, but I mean, compared to other rubber monsters that we've that have been revealed to us in films, these things are not bad at all. I don't want to I don't want to make it sound like they're particularly crappy looking or anything.

Something's not quite working perfectly with them, but they do work on some level. I mean, it's not the the Eye creatures.

Right, They're not so goofy looking that we're just laughing out loud when we finally see them. We're just kind of like scratching your head, like, huh, that's in them, that's the Boogins.

Okay, all right, yeah, okay, I see yeah, rat spider, turtle, octopus. Yeah, okay, hmm. Gives you something to think about. They go home. Chew on that a little bit. Why the rat, spider, turtle octopus?

Where do they come from? Where indeed do they end up going? We have no idea. We just know that we shouldn't have disturbed them to begin with.

One last question before we wrap up any more thoughts about can you see the legacy of like Bermuda Triangle and Bible documentaries in this horror movie? Does that come through it all? Like what's happening?

I think so. I mean, we can definitely see the documentary influence on the initial setup, but also in the sense that in documentaries are typically stories in which is certainly when you think of like seventies and eighties, like, none of the humans are the bad guys, They're just normal people, you know, out there in the world. And then there is a mystery beyond human life, beyond normal life, and so the bookends closely matches up with that. There's

Yeah, there is. I can see it in the going into the archives segment to like try and find the old stories that give you something sensational to talk about. I can also see, not to be mean, but in the feeling of trying to make more of something than there is there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh.

And then finally also I would say in the sense of oh, making like Bermuda Triangle documentaries there's a kind of you were warned there's a danger out there, you know, we had the warning that we didn't listen to the prophetic voice sort of thing.

Yeah, you can also see it as sort of a payoff to the frustration of making those documentaries where they're like, why don't we just make a horror movie and then we get to choose what the thing is and the thing is absolutely real, and then it can murder a whole bunch of people.

You don't have to feel bad about making stuff up.

Yeah, let's just like absolutely make something up, and then we can make it as cool as we want to make it and don't have to like read between the lines and like torture the data to try and summon the specter of them on.

Yeah. Okay, Well, once again I enjoyed the Bogins. I hope you did too, Rob.

Yeah, this one was a fun one, good pick. Sometimes it's the random title based choices that end up being the most rewarding. All right, well we're going to go and close it out here. Just a reminder to everyone out there. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just watch a weird movie here on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at con tact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.