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With this episode of the famed Stinker Madness Podcast we prepare for 1997's Starship Troopers from master of stuff, Paul Verhoeven. Despite having a solid IMDB user rating, the critics panned it. Does Johnny Rico get better with age? Can Denise Richards be more than just walking boobs? IS the only good bug a dead bug?

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• The Runner - Netflix

Pop Quiz, Hot Shot? - How do they do drugs in film?

• Sniffing cocaine - powdered lactose
• Heroin cooking - sugar & baking soda
• Smoking weed - Wizard Weed - weed with no THC. Same things cops use when they go undercover.
• Crack rocks - Rock candy OR glue and baking soda
• Needle injections - prosthetic arms, trick needles, OR for budget movies - stunt guy just frickin' does it.

The Great Superpower Debate

• Face freezing power - 2.5/10

About Starship Troopers - Movie Information

Sam's Boring Bullshit

My confused relationship with this film begins in 1997 when I saw it at the theater. It was as any of my confused relationships have gone. I take a girl out to tacos and then afterwards there is that “should I ask her to ice cream even though I am not that into her” moment. I don’t ask and two years later I find out she was allergic to tacos and she just wanted to tug me off in her Camaro. That is when I realize, holy shit, I didn’t get what was going on there, I would have totally got my wiener pulled in the back of an American classic, alas that ship had sailed and the tug boat headed down the stream to tow a different load into the bay of soiled upholstery. That is about what happened with me and this movie. When it came out I thought it was okay but kind of weird, totally didn’t get it. I read the novel about 5 months after seeing the film and would, for the next five years or so, hold Starship Troopers as the gold standard for how to fuck up a novel.

For 25 years, people have been celebrating a film about a FBI guy spending 3/4 of the movie trying to get fired and perhaps sent to prison, while steadily falling in love with a dude brah. Since its release apparently no one has watched it because this crap stinks and not in good ways.

I'm sorry to say everyone but this movie just isn't very good NOR is it very bad. It is as middle of the road and completely unremarkable as any movie has ever existed. What? It's not very good? 

Johnny Utah finally graces our presence in Kathryn Bigelow's second appearance on the show. Can it POSSIBLY be a good movie? Can it be a bad movie that everyone thinks is good? Or is it just the same as her Near Dark and just meh? Least Busey is in it.

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life - Netflix (No longer available)
• The Thaw - Amazon Prime
• The Brain that Wouldn't Die - (with MST3K) - YouTube
• Darkman - Netflix

The Great Superpower Debate

Telekinesis limited to 8 ft range and 40 lbs. - 6.5 stars

For years people have been requesting a remake of a really stupid and poorly thought out 90's movie with horrendous acting and too many "dude bros" and then make it much much stupider. Wait...no one asked for that? Then wait the hell is the point of Point Break (2015)?

The story of 2015's Point Break is truly one of the more poorly thought plots in recent memory. Johnny Utah must go undercover into some extreme guys again and to do it he must also do extreme stuff to build up their trust. There the plot similarity ends. The real dumb stuff is the motivation of Bodhi and his crew. They are going to save the Earth (environmentally, ie. "Mans progress is totally harshing my groove, bro" crap)...by doing 8 extreme sport/stunts. Yup. Save the Earth by jumping off stuff. Now one can argue that they are environmental terrorists who are going to stop corporations from damaging the Earth by extreme criminality but at no point would any of their stunts do that, one, in fact, damages the Earth more than the activity they are preventing and then halfway through the movie, they just give up on that completely and just do extreme sports so, as Bodhi puts it, "become one with the Earth". If only "becoming one with the Earth" meant splattering into the side of it at terminal velocity.

In what very well may be the worst mad scientist plan of all time, Professor Stoner (didn't make that up) turns innocent David from Man to Snakeman to.....well mongoose lunch. It's ssssssso ssssssstupid! It should be mentioned that no other film on this podcast is as worthy of being a MST3K episode.

Sssssss suffers from being not only very poorly thought out but also has some of the least movie making efforts ever attempted in film. It's not quite as useless as Frogs but tries to dupe us that it is a film but just showing shot after shot of crazy! snakes. However, they are live snakes and the actors aren't trained professionals so that at least makes these sequences viewable. Each sequence of snake business is spent wondering if the actors are going to get bit or smooshed or if they are accidentally going to kill one of the little serpents. ASPCA be damned!

This week Justin rolls the dice on maybe the worst movie title of all time. Seriously, try to tell your friends your watching Sssssss and listen how it comes out of your mouth. Onomatopoeia should never be used in film titles. But we think its about snake men...

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• Moonraker - Hulu Plus
• The Living Daylights - Hulu Plus
• Tomorrow Never Dies - Hulu Plus

The Greatest Super Power Debate

Fish Man - 6.5 stars

In the year 1994, disco has become such a force in culture that record producers can rule the government forcing the citizens of Earth to face prison time and social rejection if they are not down with "BIM"...we still aren't sure what BIM is but apparently you must be down with it. However, we are not.

This movie stinks! Wow is this not how you make a movie and its such a mess that it becomes a spectacle. Normally, movies that predict the future are pretty off in their predictions of how we live but this one is WAAAAYYYY off. I don't remember glam in 1994's music. Maybe I misses something but I don't remember flannel having alot of glitter on it. But this film just can't believe that disco and "The Bay City Rollers" weren't going to rule music.

Jackie brings us her third musical mess with 1980's The Apple from Cannon Films, directed by none other than Menaham Golan. Can it beat out other similarily crappy 1980 films Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu?

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• 36th Chamber of Shaolin - Netflix
• Hidden Assassin - Netflix
• Assassins - Netflix

The Great Superpower Debate

Shitting Telepathy

Yor does not come from the future. He comes from over there. Sorry for the spoiler. He is still awesome. The ladies love him, the men fear him and Yor believes himself to be the most rad dude of all time and he might be right.

Yor is one of those wacky Italian movies that believes to be a good idea with a good story but is just a mess of silly business. Yor bounces smugly from scene to scene veritably stating directly to the audience, "Hey, did you know I'm awesome? Cause I am." His motivations aren't clear, his actions are bonkers, and his idiom is dubious. He's great. He even has his own awesome theme song (Yor's World) that rivals "Do You Want to Be a Hero" from Biggles: Adventure in Time and "Stargrove" from Never Too Young To Die.

For years, Sam has been praising Yor: The Hunter from the Future and now its finally time to share it's hunky goodness with the rest of the world. Let the scantily clad ladies fill our eyeballs. Plus we don't talk about Star Wars OR Christmas!

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films - Netflix
• Cannonball Run II - Hulu Plus
• Timeline - Netflix
• 36th Chamber of Shaolin - Netflix

The Great Superpower Debate

The Super Penis

Four buddies with superpowers given to them by an alien that may or may not be mentally handicapped, have to team up to stop poop monsters from making people get icky tummies. Really, that's the movie. Wow....

In our first 2 parter ever, we break down 2003's Dreamcatcher. This movie is insanity. There is just about everything you want in a bad movie in this one. It is a scosh too long but this one's got it all with the combination of the stupid plot, the bad acting, the cheesy movie monster (it comes out butts), the dubiousness of Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore's characters, and Dudditts. Wow, Duddits. We love you, Duddits.

Duddits is the man of the week as we go back to one of the most surprisingly bad (we mean bad) blockbusters of all time. It's 2003's Stephen King based Dreamcatcher starring every single actor ever!

I gotta admit, whomever cut that trailer did an epic job of polishing a turd. It really looks like a good movie. Way to mask all the poop monster stuff!

An Internet meme gets its own movie which is supposed to be a Christmas movie but isn't. How long will it be before Lifetime calls us for the first Stinker Madness movie?

This film sucks, even by Lifetime Channel or made for TV standards. It's truly torturous. Strike one is talking animals. Strike two is the unending "jokes" that Grumpy Cat makes usually involving breaking the 4th wall. Strike three is the movie has nothing to do with Christmas. Take the Christmas decorations out of the mall and the movie remains completely unchanged. Even Kirk Cameron can make a movie about Xmas.

Jingle bells all and merry Decemberween to you. Jackie brings in a Lifetime Channel original Xmas movie starring a cat who is an Internet meme. It can't be awful right? Talking animals, the magic of Xmas and a network notorious for making awful cheese family fests?

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• Star Trek: Nemesis - Netflix
• Mortdecai - EPIX
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service - Hulu Plus

The Great Superpower Debate

Super Fast Wardrobe and Makeup Changing

Some guy who is NOT named Biggle's has ONE adventure in just ONE time. So with an inaccurate title, we travel back and forth to 1917 to defeat the Nazi's secret sound weapon that makes things too hot. Don't ask too many questions.

Biggle's on paper sounds like a missed gem from our youth. The idea of a man named Biggle's traveling through time and having hijinx sounds like it would become your favorite movie when you're 12. Apparently the books are exactly that. But this movie is not. Biggle's is not the protagonist. It's a guy named Jim Ferguson who somehow gets transported back and forth from the present to 1917. So even he doesn't have "Adventures in Time" He just goes back to ONE time. So if you are looking for a sillier Bill and Ted's, you're not going to get it.

Brought to you by Timelonel, the best cure for time travel headaches and Ted Stevens, Time Gigolo

This week Sam brings in one of his favorite movies from his childhood called Biggles. It's a time travel movie that desired to combine Indiana Jones with Back to the Future. Sounds like a recipe for success to us!

Mac and Me is truly a turd. We didn't like it at all. Sorry about that.

The movie fails on so many levels especially for a children's movie. The complete lack of a relationship between the clone of ET's Elliot and MAC left us scratching our heads wondering why the characters try to do anything for MAC. All MAC and his family do to the protagonist family is fuck shit up. Twice the main child dies and twice he is saved by the "MACs" but he wouldn't remember either time as he was clearly dead, so one can't use that as an argument.

Show opener - Justin has lost his ability to do anything but play Fallout 4 and Jackie is left with no choice but to go on Sammy Jesse Raphael.

It's the final film in our 3 piece "Monster Buds" series and we close with a film we've been planning on since we started the podcast. It's the tale of a film executives trying to cash in on the buzz of ET (a film no one on Stinker Madness likes) so odds are pretty low that we'll enjoy this one.

C.H.O.M.P.S. is like a slow painful death from a stab wound in the tummy while getting your head pressed in an iron maiden. It's awful. Even if you are a dog lover, you will want this annoyance to cease to exist within 30 minutes. 

Seriously, Jackie and Justin own 3 dogs and they are part of our family. We are huge dog lovers. But nothing can excuse this little bastard. You want him to die and when he finally explodes you instead of feeling bad, are thrilled because its at least a few minutes where you don't have to be assaulted visually and aurally by this movie. 

Part 2 of our Monster Buds series and this time its a robot dog with superpowers played by an actual dog. That can't be a recipe for disaster in any possible way!

Streaming Do's and Don'ts

• Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge - Netflix
• Creepshow 3 - Hulu Plus
• The Colombian Connection - Amazon Prime
• Senorita Justice - Amazon Prime

Good Neighbor, Bad Neighbor

• Beethoven the Dog - Beethoven
• Hooch - Turner & Hooch
• Kujo - Kujo

About C.H.O.M.P.S. - Movie Information

Sam's Boring Bullshit

The poster for CHOMPS features a sheep dog with a stick of dynamite in it’s mouth while either being struck by or shooting out at least 6 lightning bolts.  I can’t see it paying off, six lightning bolts should get an R rating.