Comedy

It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie

To kick off the Winter Bizarre, Danielle brings the 2002 movie It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. Despite the absolute clunker of a title, this Muppet Christmas Movie does, indeed, contain many Muppets and their delightful antics. We open on a distraught Kermit killing the vibe at the Muppet Christmas party by lamenting that he’s lost the theater; it’s been repossessed by the bank. A celestial being of some kind named Daniel, or Danny El, (David Arquette) is watching Kermit’s misery from heaven (or something) and at first tries to convince his coworker (William H. Macy) that they need to intervene with a miracle. Ol’ Willy H. disagrees, and so Daniel goes straight to the person in charge: Whoopie Goldberg. Daniel explains what happened to Kermit in a flashback. Apparently, the previous owner of the bank died, leaving the evil Rachel (Joan Cusack) in charge. Rachel has decided to renege on the handshake agreement Kermit had with the previous bank owner to wait to collect on Kermit’s bank loan for the Muppet Theater until after their first week of performances. Rachel is deciding to stick to the letter of the contract which requires payment by midnight Christmas Eve. At this point, Sam thinks he’s identified the actual villain of the film: Kermit. The irresponsible frog somehow signed a contract on a bank loan with a term due before they could stage any shows at the theater, and which comes due at midnight (what?) on Christmas Eve (WHAT?!), and Sam cannot believe he then asks all his employees to forgo their salaries for a whole freaking year to cover his irresponsibility. Anyway, what follows is a smörgåsbord of guest stars and parodies of other Christmas movies and, for some reason, The Crocodile Hunter. So join us for this hilarious Muppet adventure that is most definitely bizarre and has Sam mumbling “Humbug” at Kermit.

Happy Death Day 2 U

Spook Retorts ends with a bang as Danielle shares the second installment of the Happy Death Day franchise with the 2019 movie Happy Death Day 2 U. Everyone’s favorite character is back, that’s right, it’s Fine Vagina Kid, henceforth known as Ryan. He wakes in his car after being evicted from the dorm room he shares with Carter so he and Tree could get freaky. Ryan then heads to the physics lab where he’s working on a magic device that blah blah blah something about time. That’s not important, what is important is that the dean is shutting them down and then Ryan is killed by someone wearing a baby face mask, which is somehow, still, the mascot of this school. Ryan wakes up in his car, he’s in a time loop! Tree is immediately clued in on this and helps Ryan capture his would-be murder, which is also Ryan. But, like, a different Ryan from another dimension? Or the first Ryan is from another dimension? Look, it doesn’t matter, as the movie will completely forget about this entire premise mere minutes later when Ryan One activates his magic science device and accidentally sends Tree into another time loop. However, unlike when this device was apparently doing this in the previous movie, this time Tree ends up in another, slightly different dimension. At this point, Sam is just so angry at this movie for trying, and failing, to explain why all this is happening rather than just getting on with the fun parts of the movie; this is an emotion he will feel continuously for the rest of this episode. Anyway, in this universe Lori is not trying to kill Tree, Carter is dating Danielle which makes Tree jealous, and Tree’s mom is still alive. However, Tree does manage to get herself killed a few times before enlisting the help of this universe’s Ryan to help fix the magic science machine and end the loop. Why doesn’t Tree have a doppelgänger in this universe? Don’t ask questions, that’s why. So join us for another fun filled romp through time looped shenanigans, where the twists are so dumb and out of nowhere they don’t even earn the name twist. At the end, Tree must make the most difficult choice of all: Stay in this universe where her mom is still alive, or go back to the other universe for the boy she’s been dating for, like, twelve hours. I know what choice I’d make.

Happy Death Day

This week Danielle brings the laughs to Spook Retorts with the 2017 time-loop movie Happy Death Day. One day, a sorority sister wakes up after a night of blackout drinking in a random dorm room. So far, so college. The young woman, whose name is Tree (seriously), makes her way back home to her sorority house where her roommate offers her a cupcakes, since it’s her birthday. Tree, being a jerk at this point, tosses the cupcake and seems determined to be mean to everyone around her, except the professor/medical doctor she’s boning on the sly. That night on her way to a party, Tree comes across an apparently magic music box that plays Happy Birthday and is immediately stabbed to death by someone in a baby-face mask. It’s important to take a moment here to explain that this college has a baby as their mascot, and they are apparently so proud of this fact they practically force everyone who even looks at the campus to take one of these masks. Both Danielle and Sam agree, it’s the most horrifying part of the movie by far. Anyway, immediately upon her death Tree wakes up back in that dorm room and relives the day again, this time avoiding the music box, but still being killed later by a killer who is somehow the most impressive stalker of all time. Seriously, best, most dedicated murderer ever. So Tree spends the rest of her loops trying to uncover who is murdering her and how to stop it. She also undergoes some character growth, but that seems mostly incidental to the whole not being murdered motivation. As the movie goes on, you can enjoy Sam becoming increasingly frustrated at a time loop that makes no sense, capped off with a twist that somehow just makes everything more confusing. When all is said and done, however, Danielle and Sam think one thing is clear: Tree is definitely going to prison.

All Systems Red

For their 100th episode, Danielle and Sam are joined by their friend Jim who shares the first book of the The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the 2017 novel All Systems Red. In the dystopian future, The Company is the major monopoly in the universe. Survey teams exploring worlds are contracted by The Company which also supplies at least one security unit robot for each team. One of these SecUnits has hacked its own governor to give itself free will and named itself Murderbot, and it has decided to use its new freedom to binge-watch soap operas and generally avoid people. Also, while Murderbot is called a robot, it’s more of an human-looking android, possibly made from a corpse? It’s unclear. Muderbot also has a dark history from before it hacked itself where it was accidentally ordered to murder its entire survey team. Murderbot’s current assignment is a survey team of space hippies, and they eventually encounter another evil sabotaging survey team that isn’t authorized to be on the planet and is undermining the space hippies for reasons that are largely irrelevant. The EvilSurvey team has been hacking other SecUnits using syringe darts (no idea how that works), which Sam thinks just shows that fleshy, human-like security robots are a bad idea. Murderbot is already hacked, so the dart has no effect on them, but eventually Murderbot fakes being hacked to infiltrate the EvilSurvey team in a plan so convoluted it can only be described as parody. Sam and Danielle do their best to follow a plot that seems almost perfunctory in a story that largely takes place in the mind of an antisocial robot and that is steeped in satire and Jim does an admirable job in the face of Danielle and Sam’s goofy incompetence. So join us for our 100th episode where we’ve come a long way, but are still just as weird as ever!

It’s a Disaster

This week Danielle takes Sam through the 2012 dark comedy film It’s a Disaster. When Tracy (Julia Styles) brings her new boyfriend (David Cross) to a regular brunch to meet her friends, they all quickly find themselves trapped inside the house together as a series of disasters threaten the world around them. However, they won’t let something like the end of the world get in the way of their interpersonal drama. This one is short, weird, and really needs to be experienced to be fully understood, but Sam is nonetheless impressed by the cast’s comedy chops, and the way the story makes life-threatening circumstances funny. Danielle really only cares that the cast contains America Ferrera. But the thing the two of them agree about the most for this brunch-pocolypse is “don’t be late”.

Evolution

This week Sam gives Danielle a crash course in fictional biology with the 2001 film Evolution. When a meteor strikes Earth carrying an alien goo which rapidly starts growing and evolving, it’s up to community college professors Ira Kane (David Duchovny) and Harry Block (Orlando Jones) to investigate and prevent the aliens from taking over the world. Only not really since they are woefully unqualified and unequipped the handle anything this important, thus the government quickly steps in with the help of CDC Deputy Director Dr. Allison Reid (Julianne Moore). Ira and Harry don’t give up, and, with the help of firefighter in training Wayne (Sean William Scott), are determined to take the glory of the alien discovery for themselves at any cost, often with a healthy dose of terrible science and misogyny, just because. Sam becomes increasingly irate as the film continually sprays bad science at him like shampoo through a fire hose, culminating in a solution so asinine it forces Sam to root for the military industrial complex. Danielle, meanwhile, is confused about when the rapidly evolving aliens could reach a point where humanity could parley with them, but is mostly upset that Dr. Reid ends up leaving her job for the utterly charmless Ira; we both think she can do better. So enjoy as Sam finds himself rooting strongly for the antagonists in a film that’s as fast and loose with its character development as it is with its science.

Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast which covers every film from 2007, especially the episode about Next featuring Danielle and Sam. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Toys

Sam introduces Danielle to the 1992 Robin Williams film Toys. Enter a whimsical world where an eccentric Willy Wonka-esque toy maker dies when his propeller beanie connected pacemaker fails. He leaves his wacky toy factory to his brother, three-star general Leland Zevo, instead of his man-child son Leslie for reasons that are unclear. Despite having no interest in toys, General Zevo agrees to run the toy factory, and quickly pivots to making “war toys” and then to making actual weapons of war that he plans to trick children into using for military applications. If that plan sounds insane, then the plan Leslie comes up with to stop this is somehow even crazier (hint: it involves making a highly produced fake MTV music video for no apparent reason). This movie has it all: Creepy murder-toys, unnecessary romance, gratuitous sex, overly complicated plans, eerie music, actually beautiful aesthetics, and more whimsy than a Wes Anderson fan convention. Despite all that, Sam is convinced this movie is actually a thinly veiled horror film and its world is actually a dystopia; Danielle is just plain confused.

Tremors

This week Sam helps Danielle up her Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game by bringing her the 1990 film Tremors. Perfection, Nevada is your typical middle of nowhere tiny town from which handymen Valentine McKee and Earl Bassett are hoping to escape to the city. Their big adventure is interrupted by a series of mysterious deaths and a landslide that wipes out the only road out of town. Couple that with some strange seismographic readings from the newly arrived graduate seismology graduate student, Rhonda LeBeck, and you have a recipe for giant, murderous, subterranean tentacle-worms. Danielle is so excited for the worms she can hardly contain herself and Sam can hardly contain his exasperation as she constantly wants to know more about them with questions he is nowhere near qualified to answer. Rhonda, however, quickly proves to be a giant tentacle-worm expert, somehow, and comes up with several plans to try and escape the deathtrap of a worm-filled valley. Unfortunately, the tentacle-worms, appear to be the smartest things in the valley and foil our heroes at every turn, while Danielle is frustrated that this rural town has a dearth of off-road vehicles they could use to just drive away and end this nonsense. In any case, after a worm briefly eats Rhonda’s pants, they make for their big escape using explosives and weapons from the local prepper couple. This movie inexplicably spawned six sequels and half a SyFy original TV show, and Sam and Danielle can only hope that all their questions about the lifecycle and origins of the tentacle-worms are answered somewhere within all that direct-to-video goodness.

My Boyfriend’s Back

The month of Spook Retorts continues with Sam sharing the 1993 dark comedy movie My Boyfriend’s Back. Johnny Dingle (yes, it’s that kind of movie) has been in love with Missy McCloud since before he can remember, and he is determined to go to prom with her no matter what. When a truly idiotic plan he concocts to win her affections goes awry, Johnny learns that not even death can stop his creepy obsession with Missy and getting that prom dance. Unfortunately, now a zombie, Johnny faces the conundrum of how to control both his lust for human flesh and the equally off-putting lust Missy suddenly has for this walking corpse. Throw in some zany antics and parents who are way too supportive of Johnny’s new diet, and it’s impossible to predict where this movie is going, though Danielle tries by tossing out several excellent alternate endings, as well as a dubious new business proposition. This movie may be low on the spooks, but it’s got wackiness to spare so Sam gives it at least five severed-thumbs up.