Stinker Madness - The Podcast for Bad Movie Lovers

Top Gun - aka Third Grade

Ok, you know what happens in this film. You've seen it at least twice and then have it crammed down your throat anytime you watch anything about 80's pop culture. But ask yourself this: what is Top Gun actually about?
Look, this movie is thing because of two reasons: Kenny Loggins and Tony Scott shot the hell out of it. If you remove those two things (or just the Tony Scott aesthetic) you've got Navy Seals again. Think of the world we could have had if Tony Scott sucked at cinematography. Tom Cruises doesn't become a huge deal, Scientology disappears and we never get The Mummy. Sure, Desert Storm might have lasted a few months longer but seriously Val Kilmer might still be funny and Katie Holmes life would have had less oppression/slavery in it.
Why? Because this thing is devoid of content. Its Megaforce levels of nothing happening. Yes jets fly around and people have hang down contests with undeclared winners but absolutely nothing happens. When you're more invested in the story of Iron Eagle, you've got a film that isn't exactly Shakespeare. The closest you could come to a story is that a boy with daddy issues shows off his daddy issues. That's not a plot!
If you can get past the lack of plot, you might be left asking, "Well what does this movie say about anything?" Here's where things get interesting. I can't help but think Top Gun despite being a cultural phenomenon, was a catalyst to changing the tone to America's foreign policy and military agenda (until 2016 to 2020) - it wasn't a good strategy to use Vietnam era dickheadery anymore. You couldn't just stick jack-asses in planes and point them in a direction and say "blow up whatever's over there". We learned we actually needed people with objectives and ideas and skills and not morons with phallic obsessions in charge. Trump arguably won because his voters were forced to watch this on loop Clockwork Orange style. That's possibly the best theory of what happened in 2016 (its better than "economic anxiety"). So you're gonna have to decide for yourself if the world would be a better place without Top Gun. Seriously, funny Val Kilmer....
Well, I'll get off my soap box. Top Gun sucks and I hate it.

Iron Eagle - Plane Nonsense

Teenagers form up to take down an evil empire in their flying ships. Oh and rescue daddy. And get sage advice from an older veteran. Oh and act like a bunch of idiots along the way.
So I had no idea how bad Iron Eagle actually is. I had a level of expectation that it was mostly dumb and corny but WOW Iron Eagle is over-the-top stupid. I mean its hard to describe. It truly has to be seen to believed. Between the plot of a teenager likely bringing about WWIII while rocking out to Queen to flying through Beggar's Canyon in a deathrace to Jason Gedrick's constant deadpan in the face of death AND bad grades, you can just read what a stinker this thing is.
I guess if we had to complain, its pretty lackluster in the action department. The action in the front end takes about 3 minutes and there is a long complaining, training and failing sequence before about 15 minutes of action at the end. And by action I mean model airplanes suspended by fishline and strapped with firecrackers getting blown up for about 4 frames. It at no point is very exciting or visually interesting. 
While all that is said Iron Eagle is a must view for stinker fans. You might not even remember how bad it is so buckle in for a Hades bomb of dumb and fun.

The Demolitionist - Dark Angel or Dark Brain-eating Zombie?

Nicole Eggert goes part Robocop, part Wolverine, part Deadpool and all terrible in this cheese-fest from the 90s dark action bandwagon, while also managing to cram in Richard Grieco's true acting ability and still managing to be somewhat boring.
This is another movie that has all the things that are required to make a bad movie awesome yet isn't because of the filmmaking elements of the time. The feel and tone of the film bogs down all the awesome crap that happens. Its like a delicious donut served only with Metamucil. Boy, you want to enjoy the donut but your stuck drinking your geriatric medicine. Do you pass on the whole experience?
So outside of the clichés of mid-late 90s film, there's a lot of fun here. Richard Grieco is allowed to finally go full Grieco. That's not like letting Nic Cage off the chain, but its pretty close. Grieco would have won a best bad actor SMABFA if we had a podcasting time machine (plus all the evil that Sam would do to hot ladies). His performance alone is worth the price of admission.
Next to him, Nicole Eggert isn't good here and maybe never is but she doesn't exactly have a script by David Mamet to work with here. She's stuck lamenting being dead most of the time, while pondering if being a zombie detracts from her attractiveness. She does what she can. Its also not really her fault that her costume sucks and her action moves are wooden.
While the film should be lampooned for its acting and script, it should also be applauded for its budget production design and world building on a very limited budget. The Demolitionist's tri-guns that are repurposed prank cigarette lighter guns, the zombie injection chair, the lab for the Lazarus Project, and the mayors office all should receive a "Best Cost Efficient Production Design" Oscar. I'm sure that's what you showed up for, right?
So if you can stand those 90s tropes or even revel in how crummy they are, you'll likely greatly enjoy The Demolitionist. Sadly, I hated The Crow when it came out and I hate it now, so the Metamucil of the film reduces its star count to a barely "do" if you've never seen it.

Dirty Dancing Part 2 - Stalking Baby and Her Dad

The autobiographical story of how a teenage girl breaks her dad's "no banging guys who knock up other ladies and then get them terrible abortion doctors" rule over the summer at a sex-trafficking church camp for rich hypocrites.Yes, I know this is your mom's favorite movie. There's strike number one.What Dirty Dancing is (besides a cultural phenomenon) is a non-movie. A series of events without what we in the biz like to call a plot is not a movie. No, the plot isn't "Baby falls in love" - that is over within the first 1/3 of the movie. No, the plot isn't "Baby learns to dance and wins the competition" - that happens halfway through. Best we can do is the plot is "Father learns daughter's summer love didn't impregnate a grown woman". That's not really something to put 100 minutes around.Secondly, there's the icky. This movie is dripping with icky. No, it's not the dancing. The dancing viewed through modern lenses is quite wholesome. The icky is the glorification of statutory rape. Baby is 17. Johnny is 25. That's rape, period. Yes it wasn't illegal in NY in 1963. That doesn't make it ok. Stop making exceptions for having sex with children. Its not ok. But wait, there's more ick. The entire setting of this film is a sex-trafficking and forced prostitution resort. The wait staff's job is to bang the daughters of the rich customers and the entertainment staff's job is to bang the lonely wives of the rich customers - whether you want to or not and bitch better have my money. Its gross.With that in mind, should you view this movie? Nope - and not because of the ick. The ick doesn't mean this movie should be censored or "cancelled" as dumb Ohio wrestling coaches gone US Congressmen wish we were saying. The ick just needs to stop being glorified. No, just don't watch this movie because it sucks and is bereft of actual content that makes up a story.

Dirty Dancing Part 1 - Lawrence Welk's Church and Prostitution Camp

The autobiographical story of how a teenage girl breaks her dad's "no banging guys who knock up other ladies and then get them terrible abortion doctors" rule over the summer at a sex-trafficking church camp for rich hypocrites.
Yes, I know this is your mom's favorite movie. There's strike number one.
What Dirty Dancing is (besides a cultural phenomenon) is a non-movie. A series of events without what we in the biz like to call a plot is not a movie. No, the plot isn't "Baby falls in love" - that is over within the first 1/3 of the movie. No, the plot isn't "Baby learns to dance and wins the competition" - that happens halfway through. Best we can do is the plot is "Father learns daughter's summer love didn't impregnate a grown woman". That's not really something to put 100 minutes around.
Secondly, there's the icky. This movie is dripping with icky. No, it's not the dancing. The dancing viewed through modern lenses is quite wholesome. The icky is the glorification of statutory rape. Baby is 17. Johnny is 25. That's rape, period. Yes it wasn't illegal in NY in 1963. That doesn't make it ok. Stop making exceptions for having sex with children. Its not ok. But wait, there's more ick. The entire setting of this film is a sex-trafficking and forced prostitution resort. The wait staff's job is to bang the daughters of the rich customers and the entertainment staff's job is to bang the lonely wives of the rich customers - whether you want to or not and bitch better have my money. Its gross.
With that in mind, should you view this movie? Nope - and not because of the ick. The ick doesn't mean this movie should be censored or "cancelled" as dumb Ohio wrestling coaches gone US Congressmen wish we were saying. The ick just needs to stop being glorified. No, just don't watch this movie because it sucks and is bereft of actual content that makes up a story.

End of Days - The Devil IS the Reject

Its Schwazenator vs Y2k fears! The epic battle begins! Meanwhile, Gabriel Byrne gets a handful.
So what we've got here is that Satan wants to ensure that the Anti-Christ's mom is gonna be good to go when she's old enough for a rogering. The PROBLEM is that it takes about 15 views to understand that. The film is mostly just nonsense action sequences that could very well be just unconnected events if one isn't taking notes on the dialogue (or listening to a podcast discussing this all).
The late 90's...why did you have to ruin every silly movie with your dark pre-apocalyptic tones?!?! End of Days is a cheesy Arnold movie that would have been a classic if it had been made 10 years earlier. But the damn 90's ruined it. You can expect common fair such as jump scares, choppy editing, a hero that hates his life outside the events of the film, and trench coats. Change these things to big hair, exploding choppers and electronic drum kits while leaving every thing else the same we've got a classic stinker. Argh.
The action is silly, the plot is nonsense, none of the movie's rules get followed, the one-liners are solid, the dialogue is atrocious and Robin Tunney's top is off. That's enough to pay for the price of admission - but just expect to deal with going through a Se7en wannabe, just like every other movie from this time period.

Stay Tuned - or Just Listen Now

If 1980's Hollywood was obsessed with water shortages, the 90s was obsessed with evil cable TV. Here a husband and wife get sucked into a hellscape of television also known as CBS Primetime.
So what we've got here is that John Ritter's Roy is obsessed with watching TV and ignores his responsibilities, his kids and his wife. Pam Dobber as Helen seeks for a way to get him off the tube but that problem works itself out when both are sucked into a Devil's Gambit that sends them through various television parodies and tropes. If that wasn't the setup for 90's comedy gold...let's chuck $25 million at it!
When you've got parodies like "The Napper Crapper" and "Golden Ghouls", you HAVE to spend $25 million on it! I mean it's got John Ritter and Pam Dobber in it! $25 million! Where everything went right in UHF (even though it was a flop too) very rarely does anything go right here. It's a series of hammy Full House style jokes and groan inducing one-liners. It comes off as a compilation of SNL's worst sketches with the writer's dropping the mic after you vomit.
This can be skipped by anyone with anything else to do. Just go watch UHF again.

The Ice Pirates - Don't pirate the movie

Perhaps it was your favorite movie when you were 9. Maybe you should watch it again as an adult - it might still be your favorite movie.
Some movies that have production failures on the level of The Ice Pirates go into the barrel of cinematic toxic waste. The list is so long that we have only started to scratch the surface of such turds. Yet The Ice Pirates is a spectacle. Its failures never detract from what it was attempting to be and accomplish.
Usually when you have a Hall of Fame worthy film, it's because of it being misunderstood by a mass audience or falls into the "its so bad, it's good" style. However, The Ice Pirates is what it is - a cheesy great time. There's no hidden commentary. There's no laughing at it ironically. It's just a movie that could never have been "good" by its nature and still manages to be great.
The cast is fantastic. The jokes are solid. The set pieces are iconic. And the end is absolutely spectacular. There is a reason so many great writers borrow from The Ice Pirates. If you haven't seen it - watch it. If you have - watch it again. You'll thank us later.

Steel Dawn - Where does all the meat come from?

Its a straight-up western, but because its from 1987 it has to be set in a post-apocalyptic world and instead of cowboy hats, we get hair-spray helmets. Despite everything there might be a good movie buried in the sands.
So its Shane, Once upon in the West, Star Wars and Fallout 4. Ok, maybe Fallout 4 is Steel Dawn. Clearly, Fallout 76 is Steel Dawn. Anyways, this is a hot mess. 
The music doesn't fit. The world doesn't make any damn sense. The plot doesn't make much sense. The hair makes no sense. The action is ludicrous. The Stranger's one-liners are silly. It's just a pile of not doing a good job and yet...somehow it feels like there's something good here.
The tone of the whole movie is a fairly conventional western theme. A lone wanderer with a dark past shuffles into town, where he meets a widow and her son along with their jealous and lonely foreman, and has to defend the farm from a rival who wants their resources. That's about as western (or Japanese samurai, of which most spaghetti westerns are imitations of) as a movie gets. Atop of that is solid camera work that highlights this tone and story. It seems like there's a good movie buried here.
Yet because its a PA film, you've got a bunch of nonsense; like sand-people, cool looking but useless weapons, crappy and dirty sets and future cars that mostly suck. You've got characters who don't make sense and motivations that are dubious at best. Sprinkle in some scenes that are bonkers like the romance in the dirt, the party crashers at "the gathering", inept henchmen and why they live in the wasteland in the first place makes this an absolute must do and likely a favorite for many a viewer.

Krull - Gun Swords, NOPE!

Its one of those iconic 80's swords and sandals/science fiction blend movies and beloved by many. We can understand why, but this was a massive failure that likely cost the genre decades of great movies until the LOTR Trilogy.
So Krull is one of the most expensive movies of the 80s and fails on so many levels. You've got the classic inaction in action (nothing happens during action sequences), the choreography was done by Stevie Wonder, and the effects and sets are so overly impossible to do that they end up looking like 2nd grade paper Mache. The wire work is only worse in Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. The costumes are atrocious and prevent the actors from actually engaging with each other or the scene itself. Its a mess.
While all of that may sound like Red Sonja or Dune, Krull falls more into the Flash Gordon's of bad movies. Its loved because of the cheese and the failures. Add in wizards living with kids in rocks, a doofer for a hero, forgetting to use The Glaive, the cyclops who can see less than the blind guy, plot advancing by "I know a guy who knows a guy", Star Wars similarities and the rules of the universe make this a classic stinker. Krull is one of those unique films that is too long but if you cut it down it'd only be worse. It's not anywhere near a Hall of Fame discussion but shouldn't be missed by anyone except people who have stuff to do, like laundry.