Stinker Madness - The Podcast for Bad Movie Lovers

Knock Off - WHOSE PANTS ARE THESE?

The Russian mafia hatches a plan to blackmail America with the threat of Greek Fire microchip bombs delivered via Chinese counterfeit Levi's. The only thing standing in their way is CIA agent and his mark, a pants seller. Whatta bombshell plot!
So its the film that kept JCVD out of movie theaters all the way until The Expendables. And there is a pretty good reason for that. Its either a) confusing, b) vague, c) nonsense, and/or d) completely stupid. Which I guess, makes its more confusing than anything. The biggest problem is the editing. This suffers from that terrible time in the late 90's and early 00's of over editing and slo-mo in scenes that don't call for it. There was also 20 minutes of action sequences cut out of the film and instead all the Rob Schneider stuff is left in. Nice.
BUT what does make it in the film is one of the dumbest plots in an action movie and that's saying something. Its all about the pants. The CIA has three independent teams working on counterfeit pants....for years. These are deep operatives embedded in the Hong Kong industry of knock-off pants. Huh. Then the plot to blow up America with tiny bombs sent overseas by cargo freighters is such a unholy terrible plan. I don't think its gonna work out, Russian mafia. 
There's a lot of good and fun shenanigans abound but sadly it just suffers from too many moving parts and very unclear editing. Which still makes it a "do" but its not a guarantee that you're going to like it.

Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror - Blood and Beer Volcano!

Snoop takes us on a horror ride in an anthology shaped Cadillac as he collects to souls of the damned to be his neighbors as he rules the subdivision, The Hood of Horrors, in hell. Get ready for a grotesque block party!
So go into this knowing that it only cost $5 million in 2006. That's not a ton of money. With that knowledge in mind, this is an very tight efficient little package. You've got animation (not cheap) and a cavalcade of guest starts (not cheap either) and some seriously clever makeup and effects (also not cheap). Director Stacy Title did a very good job of keeping this thing on track and seamless.
Sure, it can be a little much at times (there might be a little too much attitude) but there's far more fun to help you get past too much butthole talk. Arguably it has one of the Top Ten on screen comedy deaths of all time. The rest of them also go pretty swimmingly as well with one managing to sneak in excessive comedy farts which I'm just never going to get sick of. 
Its just a fun little anthology that really isn't any lower quality than any of the other Halloweeny anthology that you put on a higher shelf, like Freakshow and Tales from the Crypt. Its not going to be in anyone's favorites list but its a good time and fun enough for Spooktober.

Uninvited - CAT JUSTICE!!!!

A poisonous cat climbs into the body of another cat, escapes onto a crime yacht with some sexy coeds and proceeds to commit its own vigilantism. Its full on cat justice!
So let's get to the point - Uninvited is sheer ridiculousness. Its a GREAT bad movie. Every aspect of this thing is exactly what you're signing up for, especially if you like baffling and non-frightening movie monsters. Plus you've stacked all that with Stinker hall of famers Greydon Clark, George Kennedy and Clu Galager. Supplementing the cast is a very hot and totally 80's fashioned Clare Carey that went on to be the wife of Coach. Damn you Craig T. Nelson!!!!
So the cat - its very unclear on what the cat is. Best we can piece together is that there is a cat with a chip on its shoulder from being medically experimented on, gains some super powers, finds another cat and crawls inside it to disguise itself as just a precious little housecat so that it can get the Meow Mix. It's just a total misunderstanding that the cat is a monster - it's just out there enacting cat justice against some really bad people. Leave the experiment kittie alone! It just wants a nice home like we all do, dammit!
Instead, 3 Garys find a couple bang ladies who have access to a yacht owned by an embezzling (?) villain and his man mountain henchmen/business partner. On the way to the Caymans, the cat breaks the boat (loud noises pisses cats off) and so they get picked off one by one for just being horrible people (except Clare Carey - she gets a pass for being too hot). Once the climax begins, buckle in because its one of the most ridiculous and hilarious endings in bad movie history.
This isn't just a do, its a mega do.

Rock of Ages - Butt Rock in more ways than one

Lets put a terrible cast with no professional singing experience around a terrible script all while performing some of the worst music ever recorded. Time for Stinker Madness to step on some hair metal feelers.
Now don't go storming the capital, but the late 80's hair metal/butt rock genre is a bunch of garbage. Which is fine. But this movie isn't. It's garbage. Nothing can be forgiven here, such as a time and place that the Sunset Blvd rock scene was all about in the late 80's. This is just nostalgia for a time when being a terrible person was celebrated. And it sucks.
Its way too long. Has too many songs in it. Too many sub-plots. Too much "general audiences" editing. And too much people feeling sorry for themselves. 
The performances are horrible. No one here (with the exception of Mary J. Blige whom you just feel bad for) has any vocal talent showcased by the lead Julianne Hough with her faux Britney Spears nasal whine. I will give everyone a little credit because Baldwin, Brand, Cruise and Ackerman have no business being in a musical and it's clear they did their very best. No one muddles through. Ok maybe Baldwin who clearly didn't want to be there. 
Go see a Baz Luhrmann movie and then nail your head to the floor instead.

Perfect - Maybe the 80’s weren’t that good

Air humping in leg warmers meets journalistic malfeasance and everyone's lives are ruined. But hey! Jaime Lee is hot, so I guess that's ok.
Hailed as the film that ended Travolta's career (briefly, lets be honest) and set Jamie Lee back a few years, Perfect is anything but. Its way too long for such a paper thin plot and is stuffed with repeated unnecessary and irrelevant scenes that keep it dragging you into the depths of your sofa. Pedantic would be an understatement.  But poorly acted is not how we would describe it. At worst, the acting is "meh", "whatevs" levels aside from Jaime Lee who is pretty darn good here. Even Travolta who we love to bash on did just fine. It's not the actors who are at fault here.
What IS wild about this is how heavily involved Rolling Stones magazine is, while also managing to paint the rag in a very bad light. Its somehow screaming out to us in 1985 "WE DON'T ACTUALLY DO GOOD JOURNALISM! DON'T TRUST US!". At no point, would I have wanted to place a subscription after watching this so...good job?
The plot is baffling and falls into the nonsensical realm of stinkers. Its border-line idiot plot, but also manages to make zero sense and is clear that no one involved knew anything about either federal espionage law, the FISA act, or subpoenas. Yes I know that maybe the majority of Americans don't but we aren't writing movies about that material either. A lot of the film's dumbness could have been avoided with just a single call to an attorney. 
Lastly, the film manages to step on its own John Thomas. In the climax of their relationship, Jamie Lee's Jesse Wilson deletes the article that Travolta's Adam Lawrence was writing (poorly) about gym life and how his main focus is a sexually liberated Linda who uses the gym as a place to meet dudes, in her endless pursuit of perfection. Jesse declares it will ruin her life just like a reporter once ruined her own - EXCEPT Jesse has never even met Linda from what we know AND Linda wanted the article to be exactly about that part of her life. The whole thing could have been a statement article on the decade and changed Linda's life for the better but instead Jesse destroys the whole thing (except she never saved the file on the 1985 word processor - oops) and everyone's future along with it and we're supposed to appreciate her position?!?! No she had the power to change LA and thus America's viewpoint of women and what a woman should be, likely allowing Harvey Weinstein 30 years in the business. #metoo could have happened 20 years earlier (saving a lot of people a lot of pain) if stupid Jesse had just kept her grubby little mitts off Adams work. But then Adam does something equally terrible - he rewrites the story as a fluff piece just to get back in Jesse's drawers. He should know better than Jesse about what the repercussions of that original article would have done but instead trashes the whole thing so he could get some gym rat ass. And that's worse that Jesse's actions - she's just a gym instructor. He's a crummy Ben Fong-Torres. Save America? Nah, sweet sweet leotard's crumpled by the bed for Adam!
The movie sucks. Skip it.

Morbius - Just be bat-men, guys

A lack of the scientific method causes a medical failure that could still be cleared up with just a simple conversation. Yes, the MCU has their own idiot plot now.So basically, Michael Morbius has a rare, but vaguely proclaimed, bone/muscle disease that gives him and his bestie "Milo" (played by Matt Smith) a ticking clock of death that requires him to create a remedy that he alone can test on himself. I think I've heard of that before. Maybe from Robert Louise Stevenson. Anyways, he takes the potion and becomes a vampire-bat-man. Not a vampire. A man who is also a vampire bat. Milo sees his powers and decides to join him, but eats too many people so they have to fight.Morbius is a DEEPLY flawed movie. As mentioned above, the whole thing could have been avoided with the use of the scientific method. Which could have worked if Morbius was an outsider, alleyway style doctor. But he's not. He's supremely famous and has saved so many lives that he's awarded the Nobel Prize. Pretty sure he knows about the scientific method. Secondly, to skirt the law to make his cure, he takes his lab into international waters - and then staffs the ship with mercenaries who have guns. Why did you hire gun-guys?!?!? Lastly, after he becomes a man-bat, he could have just sat down with Milo and come up with a plan for the next step that completes their research and fixes the issue with the cure. OR become vampire guys that aren't idiots who just eat random people. Then there is the fact that the movie tells us our hero is Morbius and our villain is Milo - even though they do the exact same thing and have the exact same character trajectory. Morbius ate the mercenaries. Milo stalks and eats some douches at a bar. That doesn't work.Lastly, it looks like dump. It is so based on rehashing cheap CGI that Sony used in other movies and bad character design because it "looks cool" and isn't actually. The teeth are too much. The "bat-aerodynamics" glow is butt as hell and it doesn't make any sense. The bounce fighting is vague and impossible to have a clue what is going on. Its just a mess of visuals that weren't well thought out. It is as if there is an "effects meter" and they had to get to a certain level for the film to be released so they just crammed effects in until they got there. Work done, boys. Time to go home!Morbius has very little to enjoy and is mostly just a joyless experience, even if your there to lampoon. Skip it.

3 Ninjas Kick Back - Kicked Out

3 little hemorrhoids, who are trained to be silent assassins by their "Ninja Tournament" winning grandfather, go to Japan to recover/keep a dagger that is used to unlock a treasure vault/give the same dagger to the winner of the "Ninja Tournament" in time to get home for little league played by adult men and farts.
I can't express my contempt for 3 Ninjas Kick Back in words. I will instead commit Seppuku because I have made suck poor choices in my life that I have dishonored my family name by seeing it. Goodbye, cruel world.
Ok, well now that that is over with, I'll try to demonstrate why you should avoid 3 Ninjas Kick Back like North Korea (perhaps not coincidentally, this movie is beloved by Kim Jong Un). Nothing works here. These children are not ninja. They are karate kids. Ninjas are trained silent assassins and they don't have competition tournaments for high schoolers. Then there's the dagger- Nope. I can't. I hate this movie so much that I am going to drink strychnine and think about how I've disappointed my father once again as I drift off to eternal damnation. See you in a minute, Satan. Oh? You hate this movie too? It's banned in Hell? Sweet!
Yeah, it's a don't.

Volcano - Stinker Madness Rerun

Tommy and Anne face off against some hot magma ("What's Magma?") in the first of two 1997 volcano movies. This one features a lead character who should be fired and never hired for his job, a slew of disaster movie clichés (Dog never dies, anyone?) and Stan, the Man-Chucking Man in possibly the stupidest movie we've ever seen on this show.
Let's start off by declaring how incredibly dumb this movie is. Every single bit of "science" is telegraphed to the audience because "Hey! They're stupid!" such as the definition of tectonic activity, gravity and magma. The volcano has a mind of its own and has Tommy Lee Jones sense meaning if Tommy is coming its sneaky and hides from him. The government officials of LA have no clue how things should work and it seems Tommy's Roark is the mayor as everyone calls him or reports to him daily even before the eruption. The Chief of Police even calls to obligatorily yell at someone, even if its completely unrelated to Emergency Management of which Roark is the director of. I can in no way define how stupid this movie is because in order to define something you must possess some semblance of intelligence. That would be a slap in the face of this movies lack thereof.
Then there's the effects. Too many people over use the "effects that don't stand up to time" but this thing never had a chance to stand up at all. I specifically talk about "the building" (and why there is a character to just set up that a building exists is beyond me). At one point, the cast stands in front of a large photo of the building as if they are there. Usually when someone looks at something fake they are looking at a painting that's supposed to be real but this time it's a photo....that's out of focus. Seriously.
"Hey I went a took a picture of that building you wanted for a backdrop", says the studio photog. "I used my camera phone and also my finger is over the lens a little. Do you want me to do it again?"
"Nope" says the director as he pencils in more exposition about what a volcano is to the masses of morons who never passed the 3rd grade who are watching this.

Hell Behind Bars - I’d rather go to actual prison

Well here it is - this is the absolute worst movie we've ever had on the podcast.
Ok so what must a film do to be a 1 star film? Well, first it obviously must suck. It has to be a terrible viewing experience. It has to contribute NOTHING of value to the viewer. But with all those pieces, we still give 2 stars for just those items. Making a movie is damn tough and just getting it done gives it a single star from us. BUT there's one very special piece that is needed to be 1 star - at the end of the movie, you realize the movie doesn't exist. What could I mean? Well think of Monster-a-Go-Go and at the end a title card and narrator tells you that the scenes you've just watched were fake and didn't happen. Its the WORST!
How does that relate to Hell Behind Bars? The "plot" of the movie revolves around some diamonds. Our lead lady in prison is there because when she sold the diamonds, cops arrested her for killing a guy in front of them. Yet, the rest of the film is both "breaking out of prison/getting those diamonds" - including people going through such stupid acts as killing themselves to get those diamonds - BUT THE DIAMONDS WERE SOLD TO A FENCE!!!! She doesn't have the damn things! We see it on screen! And the rest of the movie is about the damn diamonds and getting them.
So there's that. This thing is also a terrible soft-core porn with some of the most unattractive people to have ever been nude on screen. Then the sex scenes themselves are Neil Breen inspired as no one actually knows how to screw. And they are all so gross that if you saw this as your first exposure to sex, you'd be so scarred you'd become asexual. Ick.
Everything sucks. I'm mean it. There's no good here which is an incredible achievement. You can usually trip into something good in almost any production yet they managed to absolutely fail on every level. It should be in the bottom 100 if not the bottom 5. It's that bad. Do not watch.

Drive - it ain’t about cars, but its about awesome

The guy from Double Dragon teams up with the guy from a spinoff of The Cosby Show (ew) and that lady who died of mold in that documentary in one of the most under-rated bonkers banana business masterpieces of karate comedy ever put to film. 
What a undiscovered treasure this masterpiece is. Just one year after this was released to video a movie was put in theaters and received much acclaim, success and two sequels called Rush Hour which is a clinic in film ripoffery if I've ever seen one after 20 years later watching Drive for the first time. There is no possible way that Brent Ratner didn't watch Drive and then say "yeah I'm gonna do a lot more of that in my film". There's no way. It's a travesty that this film wasn't a bigger deal because it is SOOO vastly superior to Rush Hour. Maybe just not as marketable to a mass audience.
Every aspect of this is phenomenal. Dacascos is electric and displays skills that arguably rival any other movie martial artist, yes even Jackie Chan. Its not just his exceptional athletic, he's oozing charm. Kadeem Hardison is a perfect straight man in a very difficult comedic role. Brittany Murphy is stand on the table and applause good. Tracy Walter and John Piper Ferguson are brilliant as a couple frustrated redneck assassins.
Its a wild, wild ride and everything you want in a fun karate movie. Stop what you're doing and go watch this now.