Your Stupid Minds

Your Stupid Minds returns after a brief unplanned hiatus to give you a film generally reviled in both concept and execution across the entire political spectrum. It's hopefully one of Disney's last romps into the live action remake sphere: 2025's Snow White. We're all familiar with the formula by now: take an animated classic from the back catalogue, cast someone who can sing as the lead, someone who can't sing as the villain, fill the rest of the roles with nobodies you can pay scale, add some lens flares and CGI nightmares and shove it into theaters for a cool billion dollar global gross. This has worked time and time again despite its overwhelming superfluousness, but Snow White seems to have burst the bubble through a combination of political turmoil, excessive padding, and nightmare dwarfs. Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is a nice lady whose queen mom dies and king dad marries the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). The Evil Queen turns everything bad, but as long as her magic mirror tells her she's hot then Snow White is safe. One day the mirror says she isn't the hottest, and Snow White goes on the run to hide out with a cabin full of horrid looking CGI dwarfs. The 2025 version adds a bunch of dwarf lore where they have magic powers that help them find gems. This does not come up later. Snow White meets Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) a scrappier Han Solo style update of the prince from the original film. They have some repartee and then fall in love. This version adds some new forgettable songs and expands existing songs unnecessarily in order to pad this thing out to modern acceptable feature length. They all Les Mis up to the castle at the end to confront the Evil Queen and everyone eats apple pies forever. The end. Note: Apologies for the quality of my audio track. The recorder was low on batteries so I decided to switch to USB power, which resulted in some kind of interference. I cleaned it up to an acceptable state, but I promise it won't happen again.

After a contentious bidding war with New Line Cinema, Miramax was determined to revamp the Halloween franchise with this jumbled mess. It's 1995's Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, starring Donald Pleasance, Marianne Hagan, Kim Darby, and Paul Rudd. When Michael Myers and his niece Jamie (J.C. Brandy) are kidnapped by cultists at the end of Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers (don't worry, we get into the series chronology in the episode), Jamie is forced to give birth to a baby for we assume child sacrifice purposes. She escapes with her newborn but is murdered by Michael; the killer is singularly determined to wipe out his entire bloodline (but is shockingly not very adept at it). Meanwhile, a new Strode family has moved into Michael's murder mansion. Kara (Hagan) is a young woman trying to get her life back on track with her six year old son Danny (Devin Gardner). Much like his namesake in The Shining, Danny has special murderer powers and voices in his head, but unlike The Shining, this is unimportant and barely comes up. Tommy Doyle (Rudd, credited as Paul Stephen Rudd in this pre-Clueless role) is the kid from the first movie who talks about the Bogeyman. This run-in with Michael 17 years prior has left him traumatized and obsessed with the killer, researching occult reasons for his murder spree on the mid-90s internet. He finds Jamie's baby at a bus station and lackadaisically decides to take care of it while they kinda figure out a way to do something. Also Dr. Loomis (Pleasance) is back on his perpetual mission to find and apprehend Michael. Will these characters intersect? Does this movie have a purpose? Is Michael's mask too large, thick, and lumpy? Will someone get electrocuted so bad his head explodes? You'll have to listen to find out.

Your Stupid Minds starts its spooktacular October with a Spanish/Italian collab that numerous Letterboxd reviews describe as "giallo meets Scooby Doo," presumably because there's one mask reveal and some Italians are involved. It's 1972's The Murder Mansion! After an "exciting" car/motorcycle chase, speed demon Fred (Andrés Resino) steals comely hitchhiker Laura (Lisa Leonardo) from sweaty creep Mr. Porter (Franco Fantasia). Meanwhile, neurotic divorcee Elsa (Analía Gadé) races off into the foggy night with some other people. They all find themselves lost in the fog (even after Fred asks directions from the Grim Reaper) and end up at the titular murder mansion, an old house in the foothills of Spain with its very own cemetery! It's overseen by the young Martha Clinton, a descendant of the house's original satanic inhabitants. Soon, strange things begin to occur, not entirely spurred by Fred's morbid fascination with going to the basement. A lumbering chauffeur (not unlike Maniac Cop or Tor Johnson) and an old woman (not unlike Vampiria or an elderly version of Martha) keep menacing the house guests. Is the house really supernatural, or is there a a more earthly, Giallo-like explanation? How many times will Fred go to the basement? Will a murder ever happen in the murder mansion? You'll just have to listen to find out!

Wirework lover and wife guy Paul W.S. Anderson tries his hand at an adventure classic with 2011's The Three Musketeers! How is he going to find a way to add Matrix fights, laser traps and exploding airships into this one? Starring Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, Mads Mikkelsen, Chrisoph Waltz, and, you guessed it, Milla Jovovich. After a successful heist in Venice, the musketeers and Milady manage to steal Leonardo la Vinci's famous airship plans. Athos (Matthew Macfadyen) uses his classic scuba ninja skills, Aramis (Evans) his Assassin's Creed cloak-wearing skills, and Porthos (Stevenson) his getting into prison on purpose skills. However, tragedy strikes when Milady, with the help of the Duke of Buckingham (Bloom) betrays the team and steals the plans for the duke. One year later, D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is a Gascon bumpkin heading to the big city to start duels with everyone he meets. After picking a fight with Rochefort (Mikkelsen), the best swordsman in France, he picks fights with the 2nd-4th best swordsmen in France: the Three Musketeers. But they become friends anyway, and engage in a highly bastardized version of the book's plot in order to thwart the evil plan of Cardinal Richelieu (Waltz). Will the team accomplish whatever they were trying to do? Will they integrate a bunch of 2010s style 3D elements? Will an airship be shot at by an even bigger airship? You'll just have to listen to find out!

Your Stupid Minds returns to the deep well of Albert Pyun with another cyberspace type 90s movie about an evil VR arcade machine that turns you insane and then kidnaps you and is also Freddy Krueger. It's 1993's Arcade, starring Megan Ward, Peter Billingsley, John de Lancie, and Seth Green as "Stilts." After her mother's suicide, Alex (Ward) is struggling in school. During a visit to their favorite foggy subterranean arcade "Dante's Inferno," Alex and her friends check out a new VR machine called, uninspiringly, "Arcade," that makes you feel like you're INSIDE THE GAME despite it basically being a joystick and stationary Virtual Boy headset. After the amazing demonstration, Alex's boyfriend Greg (Bryan Dattilo) disappears, and Alex must find him. It turns out Greg was sucked INTO THE GAME and also the game is evil. She recruits Nick (Billingsley) to help. A visit to the video game studio and a talk with the game's creator provides surprisingly little information. He's just as confounded by his creation as everyone else. He doesn't know how it works or why it's evil, but they've got a Q4 financial report to release so it's gotta be released come hell or high water. Alex and Nick decide the only way to get their friends back (other friends are also sucked into the game both on and off camera) is to beat the game. Can they do it? And how convincing will these early 90s computer graphics be? This movie sat on the shelf for a few years. After the trailer's release, Disney sent them a cease and desist due to the game's not insignificant resemblance to Tron. They spent a few years replacing light cycles with skateboards before it unceremoniously sat on a different shelf: that of your local mom and pop video store.