Your Stupid Minds

Another episode, another low-budget Corman special shot in Southern California. It's 1997's (or 1999's? Unclear) Born Bad! After a daring daylight convenience store heist where the born bad kids steal eight beers and $3.28 worth of snacks, Evan (Patrick Renna) targets the born bad kids for their biggest score yet: the local savings and loan! His step-dad is the president of the bank, who tries to impress his new son by flashing around bank blueprints and safe codes during dinner. They use this insider knowledge to... sneak into the bank at night? No. They just bust in with Point Break masks and rob the joint in the middle of the day. But the blueprints give them an important edge: they know the safe is the big metal room in the back. The crew includes leader/hothead Craig (Ryan Francis), even bigger hothead Bullet (Michael D. Weatherred), burnout moron Marco (Corey Feldman), girl Laura (Heidi Lenhart), and normal guy Brian (Justin Walker). Brian was recently accepted to Bard, and his parents are unable and un

We continue through Chris's second hand DVD collection with another film that, unbelievably, also has no direct involvement with Roger Corman. It's 1999's The Prince and the Surfer, which barely involves any surfing at all. Cash Canty (Sean Kellman) is a, and I cannot stress this enough, SKATEBOARD (not surfer) kid who spends his days as Southern California teenagers in films like this typically do: hanging out by the half pipe, saying "whatever" to his friends, not going to school. But after breaking into a swanky hotel, he finds a young prince of the made up country of Gelfland is his exact double! To adhere to the Twain plot, they switch places and then do... stuff. Prince Edward (also Kellman) hangs out with Cash's friends, including the pigtailed Mel (Linda Cardellini). Meanwhile Cash goes about seducing Edward's betrothed Galina (Katie Johnson). But the queen's evil vizier Kratski (Robert Englund) has ulterior motives for the visit to the United States. He wants to sell Gelfland to a mini-golf empire an

Your Stupid Minds sifts through some of Chris's $4 DVD acquisitions from Half Price Books and these things called "video stores" where our ancient ancestors used to purchase their entertainment wares. We start with the 1995 sci-fi direct-to-video low budget epic Galaxis (or Terminal Force), which some critic (we'll never know who) described as "Star Wars meets The Terminator." Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Richard Moll, Fred Asparagus (lol), Alan Fudge (lol), Sam Raimi for some reason, and professional Diablo III gold farmer Arthur Mesa. In a far off space battle that is in no way like the opening of Star Wars, Lord Tarkin (Craig Fairbrass) battles it out with evil space wizard Kyla (Moll). When Tarkin is betrayed by his sniveling wiener underling (Raimi) Kyla steals their magic crystal (which may be called Galaxis, the title is never mentioned nor explained) that gives them power or something. Ladera (Nielsen) comes upon Tarkin, who reveals to her that there is a second crystal, which she can use to defend the

What do you get when you combine Jackie Chan, John Cena, Euron Greyjoy, six Chinese production companies, AND the 2013 winner of the China division championship of the Miss Bikini of the Universe pageant? Why 2023's Hidden Strike, of course! Dragon Luo (Chan) is the legendary leader of a private security company tasked with rescuing the kidnapped Chinese workers of an oil refinery in Iraq. For whatever reason his estranged daughter Luo Mei (Ma Chunrui) is also there, but she hates him because, like Gunner, he was busy being cool in some far off conflict zone instead of bonding with her after her mother's death. Meanwhile, ex-special forces soldier Chris Van Horne (Cena) is just kind of hanging around a Middle Eastern village entertaining children and feeling kinda bad about American military adventurism abroad. In an attempt to get water or something for the village, he teams up with some terrorists/mercenaries in this plot to kidnap the refinery workers. After 40 solid minutes of deadly serious action intrig

We finally did it! After months of promises we finally got around to covering the (probably) last of Sony's Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movies. It's 2024's Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, and Russell Crowe. After a cold open action sequence in a Russian prison that serves as Aaron Taylor-Johnson's sizzle reel for his Bond audition, we are transported to the distant past of probably around 2012. Sergei (Taylor-Johnson) and Dmitri (Fred Hechinger, the Tim Robinson-looking fellow who played Caracalla in Gladiator II) Kravinoff are taken out of boarding school by their mob boss father Nicoli (Crowe) after their mother's suicide. The best healing can only be done once they hunt down a lion serial killer in the savanna named Zar. Unfortunately, Zar gets the drop on Sergei and he's horribly mauled. However, the lion's blood, combined with a magic potion administered by passer-by Calypso (DeBose) brings him back to life AND gives him Captain America-level superpowers. He leaves home an

Tubi? Jim Wynorski? Comic book movie? Sometimes I think we parody ourselves. Your Stupid Minds comes to you this time around with 1989's The Return of Swamp Thing, starring Heather Locklear, Louis Jourdan and Wynorski muse Monique Gabrielle. Picking up after the events of the last movie, as best we can surmise Swamp Thing killed Dr. Anton Arcane (Jourdan) but it didn't take, since he specializes in Ra's al Ghul style immortality practices. So Swamp Thing, a.k.a. Alec Holland, wanders around the Louisiana bayou campily beating up monsters and cajun caricatures. It vaguely resembles Alan Moore's run of the comic; as if someone recited major plot points from memory to the screenwriters while they watch TV. Meanwhile, Abby Arcane (Locklear) goes to her step-father's swamp compound in some vague attempt to learn more about her dead mother. She's met by Dr. Arcane's menagerie of 80s misfits: buxom British scientist Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas), asthmatic other scientist Dr. Rochelle (Ace Mask, who as far as we

One night in Bangkok makes a soft man mumble! Your Stupid Minds heads to Thailand and returns to the Steven Seagal well with one of his transitional films from theatrical to direct-to-video. It's 2003's Belly of the Beast! Jake Hopper (Seagal) is an ex-CIA agent whose daughter Jessica (Sara Malakul Lane) is kidnapped by... some group in Thailand. They also, coincidentally, kidnap her friend Sara (Elidh MacQueen), who happens to be the daughter of a United States Senator which sparks a covert international incident. Hopper tells his dead wife goodbye and immediately plods off to Southeast Asia to find his daughter. The CIA suspects the Islamic fundamentalist group Abu Karaf is behind the kidnapping, but Hopper, based on nothing, already knows it isn’t them. He takes some time to beat up a group of aggro young men menacing sex worker Lulu (Monica Lo), who immediately starts following Hopper around like a lost puppy. He also stops off at a Buddhist temple to meet up with his former partner Sunti (Byron Mann) and

Your Stupid Mind searches through the depths of Tubi to find a Roger Corman low budget direct to video dystopian cyborg film. It's 1991's Future Kick, starring Meg Foster, Chris Penn, and Don 'The Dragon' Wilson. It's the far-off future of 2025. Earth is ravaged by environmental disaster. Los Angeles is in ruins. Governments have collapsed and been replaced by mega-corporations. So absolutely nothing like our present. Howard (Jeff Pomerantz) is a rich guy who lives on the moon who creates interactive virtual reality stories. His wife Nancy (Foster) tries one out before his trip down to earth. During his earth trip, a woman reveals that New Body, one of those aforementioned mega-corporations, is murdering people and harvesting their organs. This is all done with the help of Hynes (Ed Lottimer), a psychotic killer with giant Vega-like blades on his hand. Hynes murders him, and Nancy must come down to earth to solve his murder. Meanwhile, Walker (Wilson) is a Cyberon, one of ten experimental cyborgs hunted down

Your Stupid Minds returns with loads of airport novel chills and spills in the third (and almost certainly final) entry in the Dan Brown Cinematic Universe (DBCU): 2016’s Inferno. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) wakes up in a hospital in Florence with amnesia. He must, with the assistance of a suspiciously helpful British doctor Sienna (Felicity Jones), piece together the last few days and figure out why people are shooting at him. It turns out evil billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) has created a virus to wipe out half of the earth’s population. Surely bringing the planet to 1975 levels of people will solve all our woes and not just delay them for a few decades! Langdon must run through a series of tourist attractions and frantic cuts to uncover the clues to the location of the virus. Zobrist, the nerd that he is, has hidden its location in a series of antiquities related to Dante’s Inferno. Langdon uses his skills as a Harvard symbologist and middle aged museum-enjoyer to piece the puzzle together. Expect

We’re a movin’ and a groovin’ into 2025 with a low budget direct-to-something action film starring Morgan Freeman and the third Hemsworth brother Luke. It’s 2024’s Gunner! Lee Gunner (Hemsworth) is a special forces veteran Medal of Honor recipient returning home from Afghanistan after four tours to his home town of Clinton in the state of The South. After stumbling upon a drug lab in the forest, his two sons Luke (Grant Feely) and Travis (Connor DeWolfe) are kidnapped by a gang led by Dobbs Ryker (Mykel Shannon Jenkins), son of imprisoned drug lord Kendrick (Freeman). Using his special forces training, hundreds of smoke bombs, and extremely jarring music cues, Gunner whizzes past stock After Effects CGI muzzle flashes to rescue his boys. How will be save his boys, and can he recover the truckloads of fentanyl the DEA seized in the process? Can he reconcile a broken relationship with his sons and vaguely Eastern European ex-wife Claire (Yulia Klass)? You’ll just have to listen to find out!

Your Stupid Minds continues its tradition of low budget Christmas movies with wrestlers in them with Country Hearts Christmas, starring Chris Jericho and others. Tori (Lanie McAuley) and June (Katerina Maria) are sisters seeking to become country music stars in Nashville. This was most likely set up in the previous movie Country Hearts, but that doesn’t involve Christmas so who cares? The sisters catch a big break and get a spot on a popular Christmas Eve live television show, but there’s one massive problem. They need to go to church! The women hem and haw about having to be on TV on the day before Christmas, missing key family events like church and... opening pre-Santa presents? Bear in mind, these women are adults and can still make it on Christmas Day, but that isn’t enough. Their dad Bones (Jericho) is a former rock star who has sobered up since his rock days. He spends his days Facetiming various family members to meddle in their personal affairs, traversing the cathedral-like hallways of his cavernous

Sure, we could have reviewed Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving the day after Thanksgiving. But we didn’t. We did another Eli Roth movie instead. It’s 2024’s Borderlands! Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter hired to retrieve the daughter of a definitely not evil billionaire named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). It turns out he’s evil and his daughter is a clone he made from the DNA of some dead alien civilization. He wants to use her as a key to unlock a vault full of floating cubes that he can use to make a lot of money. Evilly, I assume. Lillith teams up with a team of misfits, including soldier Roland (Kevin Hart, who is, guess what, short), archaeologist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), bunny clone girl Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), hockey masked psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and annoying robot Claptrap (Jack Black). They traverse through various video game levels, ripping off better movies and going pew pew pew to a bunch of bad guys. Can they unlock the vault? Is Tiny Tina really the chosen one? And, most importantly,

As we gradually transition from spook em up season to Christmas time, we dip into another Albert Pyun movie with his first directing credit, 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, conveniently named after its genre! Evil usurper King Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch, also see what they did there?) resurrects an ancient, I guess sorcerer but seems more like a demon named Xusia of Delos (Richard Moll) in order to smite the armies of his sworn enemy King Richard (Christopher Cary) and steal his kingdom. He does so, but while Xusia is weak Cromwell stabs him and he falls off a cliff. The only survivor of the royal lineage is Prince Talon (Lee Horsley) who manages to escape and plots his revenge by getting super buff and going on adventures for eight years. He takes along his father’s sword, a non-magic sword that has three blades, two of which turn into projectiles. Then Princess Alana (Kathleen), sister of the rebel leader agrees to have sex with him if he rescues her brother, who’s been kidnapped by Cromwell. Also res

We finish out our spooky Halloween month with an episode on the Day of the Dead where nobody actually dies (uh, spoiler). It’s M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 movie Trap! Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a mild-mannered serial killer fireman taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert for Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), her favorite pop star. Through some snooping and one very gregarious merch salesman Cooper finds out the entire concert is a trap to catch him, the Butcher! Who chops people up into little pieces. The Butcher must find a way to escape using his affably awkward skills as a professional liar. Will he be able to escape? Will his family find out? Will Agent 47 complete his mission? Did Shyamalan really cast Hayley Mills because she was in The Parent Trap? Is Your Stupid Minds done with the “bad” movie premise? You’ll have to listen to find out!

This ain’t your grandma’s exorcist. It’s the POPE’s exorcist! Russell Crowe plays the very real exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth in this very not real exorcism tale of 2023’s The Pope’s Exorcist. After Father Amorth (Crowe) conducts a “fake” exorcism on a troubled young man by tricking the demon into a pig and shooting it (at least it wasn’t 2,000 of them) he is sent back to the Vatican to be reprimanded for conducting an unsanctioned exorcism. Tightwad Cardinal Sullivan (Ryan O’Grady) reprimands him for being a loose cannon, for being too cool, etc. But then the pope (Franco Nero) sends Amorth on a new mission, should he choose to accept, to Spain to investigate a new possession in a little boy. Julia (Alexandra Essoe) arrives at a Spanish abbey with her daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden) and her young son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) left to her by her late husband. She’s going to fix it up and sell it to… a church? An abbey enthusiast? In any case, that plan is disrupted when her son starts acting all possess

Your Stupid Minds brings you Disney’s first foray into films based on their amusement park rides. It’s 1997’s made-for-TV movie Tower of Terror, starring Steve Guttenberg, Nia Peeples, and Kirsten Dunst. Buzzy Crocker (Guttenberg) is a former journalist drummed out of the journalism game for being a bad journalist. Now he’s fabricating photos for his supernatural tabloid stories with his teenage niece Anna (Dunst). When an old woman (Amzie Strickland) comes to him with the real story of the Hollywood Hotel elevator disappearance in 1939, he goes to the abandoned hotel to investigate. He eventually finds that everyone in the elevator is still around, in spook form, and can’t cross over to the other plane. With the help of Anna he works to try to free them.

We're back from an extended break to give you a real treat. New York Ninja (2021) has everything. A ninja. A roller skating ninja. A radioactive serial killer. Cynthia Rothrock (as a voice). And helicopters. In 1984, John Liu had a dream: to make a movie about a New York ninja. He shot 6-8 hours of footage, but his distribution company went bankrupt so the entire movie was scrapped. Cut to 2020. The new hotshot b-movie home video distributor Vinegar Syndrome unearths these reels with no script, storyboard, or audio track. They get to work basically reimagining the entire plot and restoring the footage. What we have here is a reimagining of what would have been an 80s film, cut, dubbed, and scored in the 2020s. John Liu (John Liu) is a non-ninja New Yorker whose pregnant wife is killed by one of the many roving violence gangs of 1980s New York. In his grief, he becomes a New York Ninja and starts throwing smoke bombs and shurikens at the gangs. It turns out the gangs (but not all of the gangs, some just like t

Your Stupid Minds is back! Did you know it’s the Olympics? We have a special Olympic-size episode for you, with Dolph Lundgren’s 1994 film Pentathlon! Eric Brogar (Lundgren) is an Olympic pentathlete competing for East Germany in the 1988 Olympics. For those of you who are normal, the pentathlon consists of five events: swimming, shooting, horseback riding, fencing, and running (the modern pentathlon has replaced horseback riding with some Ninja Warrior parkour stuff). Brogar wins the gold to spite his evil and abusive trainer Heinrich Müller (David Soul), who is also a big wig in the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Also to spite him, Brogar defects in the sloppiest way possible at the Seoul airport and runs onto the American team bus. In retaliation, Müller murders Brogar’s dad, and then the Berlin Wall falls two months later. Brogar is depressed, and spends the next four years in Los Angeles drinking, smoking, and watching a tiny little television while somehow maintaining perfect muscle tone and body

Your Stupid Minds comes at you with a movie recommended by Chris’s dad, the low budget UK adrenochrome-fueled revenge thriller I Am Rage (2023). Erin (Hannaj Bang Bendz) is a young woman with PTSD who decides to go to the family estate of her new boyfriend Adam (Derek Nelson). His entire family is there, including Adam’s brother Michael (Luke Aquilina) and his new partner Sarah (Antonia Whillans). After a “dinner” of blood drinking, Erin and Sarah are drugged and blood is extracted from their adrenal glands, because this is apparently an ancestral adrenochrome farm where they kidnap people and draw their blood at their height of fear to extract the sweet sweet drug within.* Erin quickly escapes using some sort of super power she has and goes on a rampage with Sarah by her side. Apparently, and this didn’t come up in her Bumble profile, Erin was trafficked as a child and held against her will for fifteen years. During that time she developed super adrenaline blood that allows her to roundhouse kick people and

Your Stupid Minds is back with more animation for you! Not anime, but anime-inspired, it’s the unreleased in America film adaptation of the comic Gen¹³ from Jim Lee, Brandon Choi and J. Scott Campbell. It’s basically if a OVA was slightly less leery and animated like an episode of Batman Beyond. Caitlin Fairchild (Alicia Witt) is a freakin’ NERD who is recruited by a shady paramilitary organization. Because of her promiscuous roommate and nothing else, she decides to drop out of college and head to this organization’s secret mountain lair, where she learns karate and is yelled at by a Nazi (Cloris Leachman). There she meets Grunge (Flea), a surfer dude, and Roxy (Elizabeth Daily), a smoker. There’s also the mysterious Zuko-like rogue Threshold (Mark Hamill) who looks suspiciously like the blonde kid in the cold open. Apparently they’re supposed to unlock their Gen¹³ powers, some genetic experiment that killed all their parents and gives them special powers. While snooping in the organization’s Secret Files Ar