Stinker Madness - The Podcast for Bad Movie Lovers

King Solomon's Mine - Adventure for Hire

Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone team up in arguably the best/worst knockoff in film history and arguably Cannon Pictures most fun and most accessible project. Hashtag shenanigans to come.
Campy, cheesy, corny, and whatever C words you can come up (no not that one) fit here. While clearly being an attempt to ride on the financial coattails of Indy, King Solomon's Mines departs greatly in tone. Its more of a Errol Flynn knockoff than anything with Harrison Ford in it. Sure, there is no swashbuckling, but there's an endless parade of "adventure shenanigans", overly ridiculous villains, and constant damsel in distress scenarios with Sharon Stone's Jesse Houston.
Yet, it still maintains a high-level of Cannon ineptitude with bananas set-pieces, terrible rear-projection (think Megaforce), poorly thought-out plot and character motivations and one after the other one-liners. I mean if you wanted The Delta Force mashed up with Batman: The Movie with a cheesy layer on top of Robin Hood, you've found your movie.
This is hall of fame level stuff here guys and highly rewatchable. Make sure to watch or revisit.

Sundown: You Better Take Care

Despite it's own best attempts to keep it down, like its terrible VHS cover and misguided title, this western with vampires is an absolute must-do and instant classic. Can we finally have peace with the bloodsuckers?
So the premise here is that vampires have been sent into hiding and chose a small town in the west called Purgatory to sit out the years in relatively quiet peace built by Count Mardulak (David Carradine). They've built their own factory to produce a blood substitute so that they don't have to murder anymore and keep their numbers manageable. That's all going well until the Mayor or guy in charge of staffing (?) Ethan Jefferson (John Ireland) hatches a plan to take over the town and return to the old bloodsucking days. Add in a visit from Van Helsing's descendent (Bruce Campbell) and a family of four with a history to the CEO of Vampire Science Co and you've got a volatile situation brewing.
Most times when you have a premise and a vision for a film such as this, you end up with complete failure. The jokes are groan-inducing, the plot gets loose with its own setup, the pacing and the tone shifts from scene to scene and someone (usually a Cameron Mitchell simulacrum or Coolio) botches their entire performance leaving the rest of the cast rolling their eyes at their colleague. None of that happens here. The cast chemistry is tight; it's clear they all had a great time making this. The actors are let loose upon us with no reins. Bruce Campbell is as "Brucey" as he gets outside of his Ash roles. David Carradine is allowed to be both creepy and charming at the same time. M. Emmet Walsh (the lovable Mort) is a show stealer and relative unknowns Morgan Brittany and Deborah Foreman work in tandem with the heavyweights seamlessly. Usually you need someone like Steven Sorderbergh to rangle this many egos and have it work, but director Anthony Hickox manages to get it done somehow.
It's camp is at a 10 but never gets stale or too much. The jokes are hilarious. The action is bananas. The effects are super-cheesy and wonderful. Most importantly, it keeps the gas pedal mashed to the floor for it's run length and never lets off the brakes. I would change not a hair on its wonderfully shaped head and know that this deserves to be a staple in any cult movie collection.

Hell of the Living Dead - Hold on to your lunch!

It's a road trip movie with a cast of psychopaths through zombie infested forests, cannibalistic tribal villages, eclectic owners of mansions, and kittens who live in grandma's tummy. Rough to view in places and absolutely hilarious in others. Viewer beware - this is advanced class stuff.
This movie comes with two major warnings:
if you're burned out on zombies this one ain't gonna bring you back
if you have eaten food in the last few days, prepare to vomit it in your lap
Because Bruno Mattei is who he is, he's stolen a ton of footage from other films and sources to fill in the time to get to 90 minutes. There's plenty of shots of critters and birds being critters and birds. Ok, instead of fades and wipes you transition with birds and critters, ok. Well here, he's managed to stick with that plan but he get his hands on some documentary footage about cannibals and tribes that do icky stuff with corpses and then crams WAY too much past the shock level and goes into the vom-zone. Some viewers will need to leave the room or see their analyst mid-movie.
Getting past it's primary flaw, there's a TON of fun here starting with the zombies. These are likely the most inept zombies ever. Zombies are inherently inept to begin with hence the "just walk past them joke" in modern pop-culture. However, not only are these zombos incredibly slow moving, they appear to forget that they only have one goal - the taste of sweet sweet people brains - and mostly care about getting teased about being zombies. If you find yourself surrounded by these shamblers, just make fun of them and dance around. Even if their teeth are already touching your skin, they'll just get sad and forget their entire idiom. Absolutely insane.
Sad or not, there's almost a good movie here. Following a team of elite super-SWATs as they become mentally and physically exhausted and suffering from PTSD while still in the TS part would have been something truly special. Instead this was forgot about as Bruno just wants to be Bruno. We love him for it and instead we get one of the most off the mark zombie movie ever. Just be ready to hit the fast-forward button when they reach the village.

Witchery - Evil Dead 4?

It's Evil Dead part III (only in Italy) and has absolutely nothing to do with it. It also has nothing to do with Hoff being Hoff nor Linda Blair being Linda Blair. Nor does it have to do with a plot that makes any sense. Nor does it have to do with being enjoyable.
Witchery (or La Casa 4 in Italy - thus the sequel to Evil Dead) is the baffling tale of a fallen actress whom lives in an island hotel and becomes a witch at some point and then attempts to perform a ritual to either close the gates to Hell or summon Satan to provide the seed for the anti-Christ. It's really impossible to tell what the hell (or not hell) is going on here. You've then got Hoff and Blair running around in the hotel trying to piece together what's going on while avoiding death and trying to escape.
That's all fine. The problem with the film is how it is presented. You've got what reads like a stinker masterpiece on paper but sadly everything takes way to long. The pacing is like betting on a racehorse that is a sure bet and then the gates open and it just walks along the racetrack. You're screaming at the movie, "Get out there and run, you nag!" The pacing isn't even because the film is trying to build suspense and psychological horror. It's really like "hey we paid for this set and makeup - lets milk the hell out of it".
So you've got poor pacing and a plot that you can't figure out all to the backdrop of mumble acting while setting it to trapped on an island boring business. Sadly, Witchery is milk toast. You can skip it.

Wish Upon - Hope you like Teen Witch

Most will see this as a Monkey's Paw retell but it's really and truly just a recut of Teen Witch but without all the singing and dancing and then they made it so much crappier...crappier than Teen Witch. Yup.
Some movies are prime for knocking off, right? See the endless list of Jaws and Conan movies from late 70s and 80s. See any Roger Corman movie post-Star Wars. Sure, you won't work very hard on it and make just a few bucks but hey, that's easy money. 
So why in the hell does someone say let's mash up the tone of Final Destination 72 with the story line of an 80's movie with a cult status only with fans of bad movie podcasts? I mean who the hell are they kidding? This is just Teen Witch. One of the damn wishes Claire makes is literally "I want to be the most popular girl!" And of course, at the same point in the film, she gets it all taken away from her and has a feeling of desperation for her life without her magical powers. I mean, WTF? Teen Witch?!?! Who the hell asked for that? Or were you just that lazy? 
"Well I gotta rip of something since I'm clearly not capable of writing my own story so I'll rip off a movie that no one remembers except for a handful of people that only like terrible movies." GTH.
Past that, you've got the clear influence of the Final Destination series. The deaths that are paid for the "blood price" of the monkey's paw, I mean wish box, are overly elaborate with many red herrings in the Rube Goldberg style death sequences. Sadly, while the FD manner of this is frequently fun the ones in Wish Upon leave much to be desired with only the death of Sherilynn Fenn coming within the ballpark of sadistic fun that we hoped for.
Wish Upon is a true turd that doesn't have anything of redemption that makes it a do on our end. Avoid.

The Rift - Literally in an octopus' garden

A NATO team of the least qualified sea-men (giggle) take the Beatle's submarine down to the depths of the sea and find some icky monsters, hungry starfish and love. Of course they do.
So some might call the Rift a Leviathan and Deep Star Six knockoff, but we see this as much more of an Aliens knockoff, which becomes its fatal flaw. The plot is just so familiar and could take place in space just as easily as it does it under the sea. You've got the expedition into tunnels with an unknown monster patrol ahead. You've got the "military wants the monster for biological warfare" yadda, yadda. You've got the ship breaking down due to sabotage, yadda yadda. It gets tedious just watching Aliens again.
Yet, the effects are a blast with much gore and goop. The monsters are unbelievably inappropriate including the star(fish) of the show. Legs come off, heads get sploded, and Ray Wise gets a face full of slime by the hands of R. Lee Ermey and Jack Scalia's hair explodes throughout the whole movie.
It's not anything special, but The Rift is still a do from us.

Tango & Cash - Stinker Madness Rerun

Two cops find love in each other's egos, while attempting to clear their names from a villainous plot to take over the world's salted caramel industry. Stallone and Russell team up for one of the raddest buddy cop dumb-dumb rollercoaster. It's shenanigans.
 
This episode originally aired in January of 2017.

Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding - worst revenge plan ever

An old villain from Mitch's past comes back to enact revenge by.... having him get married to his one true love? With a cast of Baywatchers this size, and a plot as dumb as it is, this has got to be one wild ride, right? Well....
Sato (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) comes back from season 2 of the Baywatch TV series, to get revenge against Mitch and Hobie for getting him arrested. That's all fine and good. The issue lies in how he decides to get it. He gets his girlfriend to have Face-Off style surgery to look just like former show member and off/on again Mitch love interest, Stephanie Holden. Then she must seduce Mitch, bone-down with him repeatedly, get him to propose and then get him to agree to have the wedding on a volcano island so that Sato can put his friends in James Bond style death traps and let Mitch save them. Lots of moving parts in this diabolical-ness.
While Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding is VERY Baywatchesque - it's just too much like a 2 hour TV Episode and not enough like a movie. Yes it has the tone and pace of an episode from the height and stinker quality of the peak of Baywatch. Yes it's the greatest cast in the history of the show. Yes its a great close to the show after the horrendously uninteresting Baywatch Hawaii. But this is a major missed opportunity for the team. We needed a lot more "movie" in it. Car chases, stuntmen on fire, exploding choppers, various stink-eyes given and much more karate fights.
Even if they'd gone with just generic film tropes and did nothing imaginative here, Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding could have gone down as a cult classic. But what it is can only really appeal to people who love the show and at this point, those people are few and far between. It's a sad way to end.

Coronasode 14 - Will they ever end?

This week we dive into the Le Petit Huey/Starlight candy debate, a welcome to Patreon supporter Clauzy and his watch recommendations, Sam gives Jackie "the hook" and then takes on soap (again?), reviews of Phantasm II & III, Journey 2, Return to Oz, the final Tales of the Baywatch, and El Chupacabra.
Check out Teen Samurai's YouTube channel for some rad music based on your favorite stinkers: Teen Samurai

The Last Dragon - Stinker Madness Rerun

A flashback to 2016 when we were all so much less wildfired. It's a movie that we all gave a "do" on and an special Sam choice about obsession, music, and of course, karate. You'll enjoy this rerun if you missed it the first time, so enjoy!