Stinker Madness - The Podcast for Bad Movie Lovers

Beastmaster 2 - Dar hails a taxi

"Let's take the barbarian guy out of his world of fantasy and put him in our world of taxes and endless advertising," said a man in a tie once or twice. Unfortunately, for said tie guy, no fan of film has ever said, "Yes I want that." Yet this travesty of the genre still attempted to woo audiences by sending the Beastmaster into Los Angeles so we can watch what happens when he wants to get pizza. Hooray!
While the premise of this film is one that typically infuriates fans (see Masters of the Universe and Jason Takes Manhattan), Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time pleases from end to end. It has some sort of charm that doesn't make sense. The jokes are total crap. The acting is painful. There's no boobs. Yet somehow it all adds up to shenanigans that simple entertain lovers o' the stupid.
The true highlight is Wings Hauser's Arklon, who is arguably the lowest IQ villain in cinema history. His plan is seriously to blow up his world. He has already conquered the world, yet he thinks blowing it up will give him more power. There isn't some mystical element that blowing the world up turns him into a god or anything. He just wants a neutron bomb to blow the whole damn thing up, including himself. Ok, let's put that aside. In order to accomplish his goal of suicide and world-ending destruction, he decides to enlist the unwilling support of LA Girl, Jackie (Kari Wuhrer) who knows nothing of nuclear weapons but knows a lot about 90's fashion. Standing right next to Arklon is the witch Lyranna (Sarah Douglas) who has a great rack, wants to bang him, rule the world at his side, has superpowers, knows where the bomb is, has the means to get there and continually helps him without getting a single utterance of "thank you". Arklon's moronic antics culminate when he falls into a lake of fire and shouts his victory at Dar - and then burns up to death. Yup, you sure won buddy.
Beastmaster 2 is a breed of a different cat (or painted black tiger) from the first one in all sense. It should suck, but is a true majestic triumph of crap. Do it.

Steel - We'd rather have you just slam it, Shaq

He's a blue-collar Batman, that comes loaded with super-strength and a compassionate, pacifistic outlook. Slap on a bunch of not-bulletproof metal armor and give him a hammer/gun and Oracle (from Batman) and you've got Shaq looking pretty doofy.
So it stinks, sure. But we think this film is abused a little too much. It's currently at a 2.8 on IMDB and a 1.4 on Letterboxd. That puts it below Batman & Robin, and Catwoman. It's not even close to that bad. By your standard movie goer rating scale, this is just a 4. By our standards, it's a little higher than that. We make no claim that it's awesome but in no way is as awful as Catwoman. It's just a shitty movie.
However, it does have it's moments. The action is filled with dumbness. Steel's powers and weapons look terrible on screen. Shaq himself, in Steel Armor, looks like he belongs in Flash Gordon and he's just too damn big to be taken seriously. It appears the film-makers may have realized this and crammed this jobber with loads of camp. 
For some odd reason, someone thought it would be a great idea to draw a lot of attention to Shaq's dong. He continually gets shot by future weapons in the weiner, the camera hovers around it, and there's some pretty serious innuendo about size and his pelvic area. Yet it clearly should be targeted towards children - the movie, not Shaq's junk. Very strange decisions made.
It's a close call but we think Steel is a 2/3 do.

Christmas Evil - I Saw Mommy get Santa's Beard on Her Knee

 When your mom has a beard on her knee from a man who may or may not be your dad or Santa, you're best option is to obsess over Christmas until you're in your thirties and then you go all Buffalo Bob so that you can become the actual Santa. Not just copy cat. Actually Santa.
Christmas Evil is arguably one of the strangest Xmas films ever created. It was made a time when horror movies tried to play on any holiday and the jingly time was no different. See (but don't watch) such films as Santa's Slay, Santa Claws, Don't Open til Christmas, Black Christmas, etc... However there's a complete banana-factor to this feature.
Unfortunately to get to that banana-factor you have to go through a fairly uneventful montage of a man going all Santa. The performances are all solid and the cinematography is competent especially considering this is a drive-thru film. So that leaves you with an hour of not really having much to do. It's quiet, slow-moving and leaves not much room for riffing. I wouldn't call it boring, per se, but if you're coming for a mover-this ain't the one.
However, in the end, you've been left with one of the most clear, "Wait, what?" moments in any genre of film, let alone a holiday film. We won't go into the final 10 seconds of Christmas Evil here, but it makes the whole experience worth it. 
Happy Holidays, Stinker Family!
Streaming Do's and Don'ts
I Believe in Santa Claus w/ Rifftrax on Amazon Prime
Christmas Dragon - Amazon Prime
Ator: The Fighting Eagle - Amazon Prime
Tarzan - TV Series on Amazon Prime

Jingle All the Way - Booster Sucks, yo!

When you think of the holidays, you always think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe you just think of Arnold all the time. Which fits perfectly into the Xmas spirit theme for this film -- don't learn any lessons of Christmas, don't change how you feel about life and commit heinous crimes in the search of consumerism that you fail to accomplish.
Beyond how unbelievably bad it is overtly, I mostly want to talk about its failures for being a Christmas movie (as is tradition for our holiday specials). The primary problem here is that it can't even be an Xmas movie. It's a movie that takes place during Christmas (kiss my ass, all who say Die Hard is a Christmas movie), but it fails to achieve any Spirit of Christmas themes (hell, even The Star Wars Holiday Special manages that). 
Here's where people will say it makes a Christmas movie:
It takes place during Xmas 
Howard (Arnold's character) restores his relationship with his son via Christmas
It shows the consumerism of Christmas and man's greed during the holiday season but Howard finds a way to be better than that.
Here's the rub in order:
1. So what? Troll 2 is about eating food, does that mean it's a Thanksgiving movie? This line of logic that says "A film takes place on X time so therefore it's a holiday film because a major holiday is shown within it" is garbage.
2. Howard does NOT restore his relationship with his son via Christmas because this is clearly not the first time their relationship has been damaged/repaired within the same day. It's quite clear that this crap happens all the time. It's just Tuesday.... and also happens to be Christmas. In order to make this message, the time of Christmas and all its "holly jolly - be nice to your neighbors and family" stuff must be the vehicle for learning your lesson, not just the backdrop of this weeks poor fathering/becoming a good father debacle.
3. Sure, it does show people being manic during the holiday season. However, Howard doesn't rise above it or even partake in it for the resolution of the movie. The film can't even make the (bad) statement that if you buy toys for your kids, they'll have a good Christmas. Because Howard doesn't even buy the toy. He falls bass-ackwards into the toy. Basically, someone mistakenly hands it to him and he hands it to his son and takes all the credit for getting it. Completely not the spirit of Christmas (even the cynical take of it's another corporate holiday). Bleh.
It stinks, really, really, really bad. It's cringe-worthy in points. The written jokes are terrible. The effects are worse than PumaMan. But it's a must do for all. It's a staple in holiday films and the one you can always go to when you're tired of all the traditional movies and the staples of the season. Watch this and try to hide your own cynicism from your grandma. Screw her. She's a blatant racist.

Double Team - Baby Grenades Ahead

Before he was the US Ambassador to Kim-Jong Un, Dennis Rodman had a dream of being a big Hollywood actor. The path to victory? A movie where he fights tigers, exploding babies, references that aren't related to basketball and U.N.C.L.E. Oh yeah, JCVD is there too.
Double Team is silly in the same vein as any Cannon/Chuck Norris joint. There's a reason that major action movies died for almost 20 years (thanks Fast & Furious franchise) and this movie may have been a huge part of that decline. JCVD led the 90s in super awesome punching bad guy films and here in 1997 film-goers were willing to say "I've had enough of that". A plot that doesn't make any sense, horrific editing, and too too too many basketball related jokes just put them over the edge.
The action sequences are about as "over the top" as you can get. There's truck jumping, tiger's packing heat, exploding babies, foot knives, a machine-gun toting, horse-mounted loon, Belloq as head of CONTROL, under-water lasers, combustible swimming pools, human basketballs, and death nannies. Its crammed pack with so much bonkers action that its hard to keep up.
Come for the "plot", stay for the bananas action. It's a 7 pointer!

Lady in the Water - M. Knight's "The Room"

Spectacularly over-rated director M. Knight Shyamalan gives us his vanity piece in the vein of Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau and not only shows us he stinks at film as badly as they do, but that he's a giant, narcissistic, arrogant, terrible person. Good job!
So it's a fairy tale that involves water people called Narfs, who want to help mankind solve their problems. Standing in the way is their lack of sense of meeting people and a solo grass dog, but also the rules of being eaten by one of Gandalf's eagles. Ok... Now we know that if you look too deeply into most fairy tales, you'll find plenty of problems within the logic and that's fine. However, that is not what this jackass is trying to get us to not do. He tries to put forward some moral about man's desire to destroy itself without some sort of altruistic outside influence as a vehicle to change. What he succeeds in, is to say that he is the greatest story-teller ever to live and if you feel differently you should be eaten by a monster green monster.
Then there's his martyrdom. He plays a character in the film who is the object of the Narf's musing. This person will change the world via his book. It will be read by the future leader of the world, thus inspiring him to make mankind peaceful and prosperous. Yet at no point does he make an attempt to declare what is contained within his "The Cookbook". His only reference to its content is "Its got things about leaders and governments and society and stuff". THIS is the words of the greatest storyteller according to himself. What an asshole.
Aside from his giant ego and his complete hatred for anyone that critiques his work and doesn't worship it, this movie is crap. It's shot poorly, breaks its own rules constantly, has a terrible performance by Paul Giamatti, and conflicting character motivations. It also has a mermaid who has no pants, Ariel's treasure cave, gorilla/ent hybrids, and an apartment complex that was built next to Sherwood without a parking lot. Despite all that lunacy it's terribly boring, hugely unfunny and well worth avoiding.

Pet Sematary - Lotta history in that film, yeah

"Don't do down that path, yah", the strange drunk man with dubious ambitions said to the new residents. Later he would take them on a wondrous adventure to bury a kitty-cat that he himself murdered. It was the strangest thing that week until the dead son came back as Little Lord Fauntleroy with super-powers.
Pet Sematary is just another in a long line of Stephen King movies that raked in the cash but not one theater attendee bothered to pay attention to what was happening on screen. The entire plot is bananas (and falls squarely into "the idiot plot") but that's the least biggest draw for fans of our show. It's all the elements around the plot, ie. the truckers who are clearly trying to break speed records, the undead cat that is just like any other cat, Gage acquiring super-powers upon being reanimated and that the family never asks "Who the hell is this Judd Crandall guy anyways?"
It's a beautiful disaster and truly pushes the boundaries of bad movie laugh-ability with horrific tragedy. I mean, think about it. You are laughing at a child getting ran over - the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Yet the movie is so bad and the production is so crap that you are laughing.... during the worst thing ever. That is one hell of an achievement in bad film-making. Hell even Tommy Wiseau didn't do that.
Brain ghosts, strange accents, random maid suicide, magical beaver dams, open areas that echo with magic briefly, funeral fist-fights, The Ramones, evil dead babies who like "Puttin' on the Ritz" and zombies who just knock over things. This is a top-tier stinker.

Phenomenon - Sure Ain't That

Here's a fun concept. Let's put together a film with heavy sci-fi elements and themes in the vein of Twilight Zone and mash it together with a poorly motivated romance and have John Travolta stare at trees for the majority of it. That sounds like punishment.
Guess what though? It killed it. The box office loved this film despite the critics apprehensions. Flocks of people wanting to see some feel goodie type jobbers fled to the theater thinking that John Travolta was making a huge comeback (it was over 2 years later) and that he was good at acting as he did great at looking confused in Pulp Fiction. 
That's neat and all but here's the deal with this film. It's a continuous set of missed opportunities to be something truly good. It seems that a writer had a fantastic concept in a man given super-powers and then can accomplish nothing with them but have his life ruined by them and a pariah to his former neighbors. That's good stuff. However, the studio clearly stuck their damn noses in and said, "Well we need to have an hour of it be taken up by a romance. That'll get the ladies involved." In this case they were right when it came to cash, but relegates this film to the folks at Stinker Madness to expose it's flaws.
So now you've got this romance crammed into a sci-fi film in post-writing. Now I just saw Passengers (Pratt, Lawrence - 2016) and it is very much a love-story set against a sci-fi space travel story and it's quite well done. Romance/sci-fi mashups CAN happen and be good. However, it needs to be part of the concept and writing from the start. This didn't happen here and this romance starts to fall apart before it even gets going. Their relationship does not have a point B in it. There's A) where she is not interested and then C) she loves him. When did that happen? Oh yeah we were trying to tell a different story during the usual B). 
Beyond that, the film is quite stupid and falls victim to the idiot plot thanks to Travolta's George being a true idiot and Robert Duvall's Doctor of Town not ever looking at a medical chart. Then there's the reveal of the source of his super-powers and completely defeats the entire moral that the film has tried to establish beforehand. 
It's not good and not worth revisiting. Stay clear of all but the most bold.

Friday the 13th V - WTF is this?

We wrap up our Spooktober with a staple from a staple franchise and one of the strangest big box office horror films ever made. This is just a strange film starring "Jason" with lots of head choppins, boobs and a cast of some pretty unusual characters.
So Jason V is one weird film and frankly astounds that it ever frightened anyone...even children. It's seriously gentle in its horror, the plot is not frightening, Jason is not intimidating, and the gore is pretty mild. The MPAA really didn't help out this film at all as it's seriously cut down.
None of it lines up, of course, with any one who cares about continuity or character motivations. The killer doesn't know how revenge works. The hero doesn't know how idolatry works. The film-makers don't know how enchiladas work. It's stunny how little anything works.
BUUUUTTT....that's not why you come to a Jason movie, right? You come for the gore and boobs. Well there's boobs in this one...but the gore is incredibly mild. Most of the deaths occur off-screen and there are only a couple not-worthy ones that still fail to execute fully. So its disappointing there.
However, there's still enough here that isn't part of the Jason staples to show up for. The entire plot and setting is super weird. The cast of characters is simply mind-bending and the single greatest scene in the Friday franchise appears here...in a metal shitbox.
Not great, but still a good revisit.

Sleepwalkers - Starring Clovis, Attack Cat

Cat people. It's a movie about cat people. Written by horror master, Stephen King, it's arguably the most comedic horror film ever made. You thought Dreamcatcher was rife with errors...buckle in, folks.
Sleepwalkers is absolutely bananas. We'll just say right now that this is a must-do film for fans of crummy movies. It's a laugh riot. For instance, let's just put it out there that the chief action star of this film is a house cat, named Clovis. Clovis rivals Chuck Norris, Schwaz, Stallone and Van Damme in the pantheon of 90s action stars. I'm not joking.
So the film is basically about these cat people-- Ancient Egyptian people that have no origin but all of the superpowers (teleportation, telekinesis, invisibility, shape-shifting, invulnerability, immortality) and one of the most dumb weakness of all, allergic to cats. They are cat-people (half-people, half-cat) and their one weakness is cats?!?! Right. So if you've got a plague of cat-people in your town, if you don't have a Clovis, supercop, you're screwed I guess.
So the plot's dumb. Check! Then there's the elements. The makeup is awful. The action is ludicrous (see Clovis). The cameos are constant. The dialogue is atrocious (Perlman - "It's a Polish Fire Drill!" when someone steps in a bear trap). And the effects are... well... a clinic on how not to do effects (with the exception of one great morph effect when the Mustang transforms into a Trans Am). Also, that Trans Am is seriously bitchin'.
It's one of Jackie's best picks of the entire series of our show. Sleepwalkers is a MUST-DO film. Fantastic.
Streaming Do's and Don'ts
Curse of Chucky - Netflix
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - $2.99 on Amazon Prime
Ghoulies - Epix