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Inspector Gadget 2

This week Sam brings Danielle the 2003 direct to VHS film Inspector Gadget 2. If you fondly recall the original 1999 film starring Matthew Broderick, or even the Inspector Gadget cartoon, then you’re leagues ahead of Sam and Danielle who only have the vaguest notion of what happened in that first film. Will that stop them from speculating wildly using only the sequel as reference? Absolutely not! So it’s time for a new film and and a new Gadget played by French Stewart. He’s apparently made Riverton so crime free after locking up Claw that he’s bored out of his mind and arresting anyone for the most minor infractions. Things don’t stay tranquil for long as Claw escapes from prison and prepares for a major heist: Steal all the gold from the Federal Reserve Bank which has recently relocated to Riverton for…reasons. But to complete this first heist, he needs to complete three smaller heists to steal materials to make a super-weapon. Sam hates this plan. Meanwhile, Gadget is eager to go after Claw, but is taken off the case by the chief who hates him because he’s constantly glitching and, even though the police made him, they refuse to fix his glitches since he’s just a “prototype”; just amazingly cruel. Anyway, he’s replaced with the fully robotic (and unnecessarily sexy) Gadget 2. While Gadget accepts this, his niece Penny (parents’ status: unknown) pushes him to investigate anyway. Meanwhile, despite Claw stating that he had all his assets seized when he was arrested, he manages to put together some amazingly complex bowling-pin themed gizmos to accomplish his heists. Why is he suddenly a bowling-pin themed villain? That’s an extremely good question! So join us to see if Claw will succeed in his insane plan, if Gadget will redeem himself, and especially if Gadget will find a way to either have sex with the new Gadget or accidentally inspire her to start the robot apocalypse.

Wonder Woman 1984 – Part 2

This week Danielle brings the conclusion of the 2020 film Wonder Woman 1984. When we last left our heroes they had just returned from a magical invisible jet flight to Egypt and had determined the best course of action was to either get everyone to unwish their wishes, or to kill Maxwell Lord, who had wished himself to become the magic citrine, lest we forget. Speaking of Max, he’s slowly unraveling mentally and physically, and finagles meeting with the President where he declares he’s a sovereign nation unto himself. Also, the President lets slip that they have a magic satellite thing that has a beam which will override the screen of any device the beam touches. And if you think the term “touches” is used there figuratively, boy would this magic wishing-citrine-now-human like to have words with you. While Diana as Wonder Woman shows up to stop Max, Barbara is there to foil her plans because she is also power hungry and won’t give up her wish-granted superhuman powers. Wonder Woman is defeated because her powers are waning due to her own wish to have her beau Steve back, who now inhabits the body of another man whom they have no regard for, and which is still totally not okay. While Max and Barbara fly to the satellite control island, Diana lets Steve go and renounces her wish (finally) and then lassos a jet plane to get her home. She also lassos lightening to travel, but this is a concept so astoundingly dumb that Sam refuses to acknowledge it’s a thing. Anyway, after Diana grabs some magic armor of a long dead (but not really dead because comic books) Amazonian warrior, she chases after Max and Barbara for a showdown on Satellite Control Island. Max has been broadcasting to the entire wold enticing them to wish using the magic of him touching them through a satellite beam video feed (seriously, how the wishes work in this movie is something beyond mortal comprehension). Chaos engulfs the Earth as wishes are granted willy-nilly, but before Diana can get to Max she must first fight Barbara, who has been transformed into a cheetah woman via the magic of the script says so. If you think their showdown is intense, wait until you hear how Diana defeats Max: Via the superpower of a very compelling, moralizing speech.

Wonder Woman 1984 – Part 1

This week Danielle brings the superhero craziness with the 2020 film Wonder Woman 1984. If you didn’t see the first Wonder Woman film, don’t worry, neither did Sam, and Danielle barely remembers it, so no context needed! Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is your average working 80s girl, only she’s really an immortal Amazonian from Themyscira who is still pining for Steve (Chris Pine), the love of her life and a pilot who died in World War 1. When a botched robbery brings a mysterious citrine in to the Smithsonian where Diana works with her mousy new friend Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), things start to go awry. While holding the stone, both Diana and Barbara make wishes in their heads and then a magic wind blows, foreshadowing the granting of their wishes. Barbara wished to be strong and beautiful like Diana, but Diana’s wish is a surprise for later. That’s when Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) rolls in, he’s the head of an oil company/Ponzi scheme who has just made a large donation to the museum, which seems to grant him carte blanche to just touch evidence, like the citrine, in an FBI investigation. He invites them all to a gala that night in his honor and Barbara is instantly taken with him and agrees while Diana declines. That night at the gala, Diana is now suspicious of Max and shows up anyway, and is immediately sexually harassed by every guy in there, since all men in this world are completely terrible. She brushes them off, but then one of them says a phrase that Steve once said to her, and Diana realizes her wish came true: Steve is back! Only, Steve is not himself, his consciousness has been shoved into the body of another man. What happened to the mind of the man whose body this was originally? Who cares, certainly not our supposed “heroes” Diana and Steve, who immediately drop everything to go have sex in that poor, possessed man’s home with his unable-to-consent body. Meanwhile, Max Lord (seriously, that name) has initiated a make-out session with Barbara in order to steal the citrine. With the citrine safely in his castle/home, Max does something absolutely bonkers and wishes to become the wishing stone. It might be reasonable to take a moment here to discuss the rules of the magic citrine, but the rules for this wishing stone are so arbitrary and crazy you’re just going to have to listen to all our rants to get it, there’s too much to include here. Maxwell then starts coercing others into wishing things that benefit him while touching him, and then also taking something from them in exchange for the “wish”, and if that’s confusing, get used to it. Anyway, Max jets off to Egypt while Diana and Steve, now back on the case, follow him in the dumbest way imaginable. This movie is so long, and chock-a-block full of nonsense, that Danielle has to end it there before Sam gets so angry at the inconsistent wishing rules and dumb Wonder Woman lasso tricks that he quits the podcast entirely.

Christmas Bounty

Sam kicks-off this year’s Winter Bizarre with 2013 ABC Family/WWE made for TV movie Christmas Bounty. Tory Bell is an average private elementary school teacher living in Manhattan and dating a handsome, wealthy man named James. All this changes when she gets a mysterious phone call from a gangster threatening her for putting him in jail years ago. So Tory bails on her boyfriend to return to New Jersey to seek the help of her family, all of whom are bounty hunters, to bring this gangster back to justice. This includes working with her ex-bounty hunter partner and former boyfriend Mikey Muscles (a.k.a. Beefcake). Somehow, this family of professional bounty hunters cook up the dumbest plan, which involves finding someone named Big Donna at a mall and putting a brick-sized GPS tracker in her purse. Against all reason, this works and they find the gangster in the only location this movie seems to have paid for: A dingy warehouse. Through a series of circumstance too contrived to relate, James shows up in this warehouse, and Tory scrambles to hide her bounty hunter past from him, for some reason. Eventually, after a shootout at a Christmas tree lot (yes, really) James is kidnapped and Tory must risk crashing a mob wedding to save him. Also, this whole time Mikey Muscles has been pursing Tory, never having gotten over her, even though she’s dating what is possibly the best man in the world. It’s no spoiler to say Tory returns to her small-town roots and boyfriend, though what is a surprise is that she does this in just the worst way imaginable. James, we’re sorry, you’re a prince and you deserve better.

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Now You See Me

Danielle brings a little magic into our lives this week with the 2013 movie Now You See Me. When a group of random magicians (sorry, illusionists) are recruited to partake in some fancy heists, Sam could not be more excited because, c’mon, magic heists! The all-star cast agrees to hit the targets designated by their mysterious benefactor—in the first instance, a French bank—as they perform the robberies while live on stage. Sam’s excitement quickly disappears like a rabbit into a hat as they proceed to just give the money away to the audience, and Danielle is unable to give a better explanation as to why these random performers would give away their heist money other than “For the love of magic?” Now pursued by the FBI and, even worse, Morgan Freeman the magician spoiler, the heists, and magic tricks, get progressively less believable, especially mentalist Woody Harrelson who legit can just mind control people like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luckily, the movie never slows down long enough to let you consider the ridiculousness of it all, throwing pure insanity at the audience like Dave Franco using magic-fu to fight FBI agents and a card trick that involves sticking a card in a sapling and then waiting 20 years for the tree to grow around it. Right from the start Sam demonstrates a knowledge of magic and and magicians that was as much a surprise to himself as it was to Danielle, but even he can’t fathom how that tree thing is a good trick, even from an entertainment point of view. There’s nothing up our sleeves as we attempt to make logic appear out of thin air for this move, so pick a card and enjoy the magic!

Reign of Fire

On this episode Sam brings Danielle the 2002 box office bomb Reign of Fire. In the distant future year of 2020 dragons have been awoken from their cicada-like hibernation and have ravaged the earth, reducing humanity to a few pockets of life. Quinn (Christian Bale) leads one such colony in Northumberland, though food is scarce and there’s dissension in the ranks. None of that really matters as soon enough militia leader Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) shows up to rope Quinn into his quest to wipe out the source of the dragons: The single male dragon living in London. At this point, Sam cannot understand the biology of a species that only has one male capable of breeding, and how these same dragons were apparently responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. Danielle, meanwhile, is more upset about the fact that the starving survivors let a perfectly good dragon carcass go to waste instead of just eating it. There’s also some tension between Quinn and his adopted son Jared about his joining Van Zan’s soldiers, but it’s over so quick Sam’s still not sure it wasn’t just a hallucination brought on by all the dragon special effects and dark lighting. Either way, the heroes square off against the dragon king in a battle that’s kinda lame, but does have a shirtless Matthew McConaughey wielding a battleaxe in one of the best scenes ever put to film, so it’s totally worth it.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

This week Sam introduces Danielle to the classic 1985 post-apocalyptic film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The Mad Max franchise is well known for telling the gritty story of the collapse of society, a nuclear apocalypse, and one man who attempts to survive alone in the new world. Beyond Thunderdome takes that serious story and makes it delightfully goofy in every way. After having his camel-drawn cart stolen, the titular Max ends up in Bartertown, the most advanced city in the Australian wasteland. He quickly becomes embroiled in a political assassination plot that is wildly over-complicated as the queen of Bartertown, played fabulously by Tina Turner, wishes to have the bodyguard of the mechanical genius behind the city’s success killed. None of that is really important as it’s just an excuse to get Max into Thunderdome with the formidable Blaster for a fight scene that is as delightful as it is bizarre. After some contrived shenanigans and the application of laws that are notable mostly in their ability to be chanted by a mob, Max is exiled to the wasteland but is rescued both by a magic monkey and a tribe of teenagers and children that have formed a cult religion about a savior pilot after being abandoned in an oasis. The crazy only escalates from there as Max and the kids are forced into a conflict with Tina Turner and the Bartertown Bunch mostly as an excuse to have a climactic train/car chase through the desert. That all sounds ridiculous, and it is, but the costumes are amazing, the is action way over the top, and the plot is nonsensical, so really, what more could we possibly ask for?

Die Another Day

Danielle brings Sam into the wonderfully strange world of James Bond with the 2002 movie Die Another Day. Although this isn’t Sam’s first James Bond film, it’s definitely one of the weirder he’s ever heard about. When your spy movie starts with James Bond and his team clandestinely surfing into North Korea only to have a helicopter they already control meet them there so Bond can replace and impersonate the diamond/arms dealer inside, you know you’re in for a wild ride. James Bond, with his usual lack of subtlety, proceeds to be captured and held for over a year by the DPRK before being released in a prisoner exchange. Bond quickly does what he does best and takes an unsanctioned trip to Cuba in search of the mole in MI6 that had betrayed him, but mostly ends up just having sex with a criminally underused Halle Berry. There’s some stuff about a de-aging clinic that turns you into the doppelgänger of whomever’s bone-marrow you get, but the movie doesn’t seem that interested in the details because it’s time for a crazy rich guy with a totally-not-evil-seriously-guys-it’s-just-for-peaceful-reasons-I-can’t-think-of-right-now space laser! There are so many crazy villain plots in this that Danielle struggles to finish her retelling in less time than it would take just to watch the actual movie. So come on and join the most famous of secret agents for some delightfully nonsensical action fun. Also, there’s a lot of setup about scorpions in the movie, but that never pays off, sorry.