Fun Box Monster Podcast

Fun Box Monster Podcast #135 Death Spa (1988)

When I'm looking to get buff, the first question I ask any potential gym is, "Am I going to have to lift that little key on the machine that changes the weights?" Inevitably these losers tell me I will. I storm off in a huff and swear off exercise forever. But at Starbody Health Spa they've fixed this. All you have to do is carry around a credit card and swipe it in the machine, probably talk to the guy in the computer room on an imbedded mic. He puts you in a cue of people who need similar help and he gets to you after a few minutes, setting the machine to the proper weight. Things were going great until the computer got possessed by the philandering owner's dead wife who is the sister of the computer tech. She started burning people with acid, exploding folks in the bathroom, killing people with fish, the whole thing. Long story short, it's all here in this tell all documentary. (I was Fred). So grab a five-gallon jug of Joe Weider's Protein Shred Nuclear Muscle Blast Powder, a cup of carob coffee, and join Matt and Tristan for a film that goes down smoother than a limp piece of asparagus, Death Spa. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #130 Alligator 2 : The Mutation

The usual way a filmmaker tends to approach a sequel is to take what was successful about the first movie and amp it up. Alien had one alien, Aliens has a pile of aliens. Right? This concept is turned on its head with Alligator 2, where the Alligator seems to be considerably smaller than an average alligator, and the movie is free from blood or any other exploitation elements. 

The plot plays very much like a double episode of an eighties action tv show, but just add an alligator. Corrupt land developer, dumping poison, buying up land cheap to build condos. A super cop who doesn't play by the rules goes against his chief and the mayor to stop him. Look out! You're going to cause a cave-in with all this new ground they're breaking. Anyway, the alligator isn't really part of the movie that much? If everyone who died had died from exposure to the poison in the water, it literally would have been the exact same movie. Anyway, despite it's many failings I somehow still love this disaster.  So put your favorite forced perspective gator puppet on a little wagon and invite your favorite reptile lady to your local house-selling-carnival, and join Matt and Tristan for the toxic bowl of sewer gumbo known as, Alligator 2: The Mutation. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #129 : Ghostkeeper (1981)

When you check in with the Ghostkeeper, your blues don't stand a...GHOST of a chance!

It's a non-stop laugh fest when three wacky snowmobiling funsters crash a cannibal family's secret mountain ski lodge! When the stodgy old cannibal Ghostkeeper tells them that she's closing the cannibal ski-lodge to make room for cannibal condos, those nuts from snowmobile house come up with a plan for a topless ski-contest that might just save the lodge! 

Check in for the night...you'll Wendi-GO away laughing! 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #128 Bloody New Year (1987)

When an experimental aircraft using time altering technology as a cloaking device crashes into an island resort celebrating New Year's Eve in 1959, the explosion traps the partygoers in a never-ending Groundhog Day style party. We don't see that story though. We see a 1987 group of teens arriving on the island and almost able to see the time-ghosts wandering around. Unsurprisingly these teens get picked off one-by-one. Then they become time ghosts too I guess. I'm not really sure. This thing is wacky as hell. The movie may not make much sense, but damned if it isn't full of fun nonsense.  So grab your hastily made snow globes, your human body sized pressure cooker, and your best wind up Santa, and Join Matt and Tristan for my new favorite New Year's horror movie, Bloody New Year. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #127 Silent Night Deadly Night : The Initiation

Were you too happy this holiday? Well we have a movie for you. Depressing, mean spirited, and not sure if it hates women or men worse. Definitely not a poorly made movie, just really not fun. It does have Clint Howard, so there's that. And FX by Screaming Mad George. That's pretty great.  Anyway, don't blame us, we warned you. 

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #126 Jaws The Revenge

      Jaws the Revenge is, at its heart, a story about family. Specifically, a family that is going to be eaten by a shark. 

     Many years after the events of the first movie, Sheriff Brody has died. Of fear. As is the custom on Amity, he passed the job down to his son. Unfortunately, this son has worse luck fighting sharks than his old man, and seconds after encountering our old friend Jaws the Shark, he’s dead. 

     Due to trauma, his mother develops a psychic shark-sense. She follows her other son to The Bahamas, falls in love with Michael Caine, and explodes a shark, all in what seems to be a long weekend. Also, Mario Van Peebles is there, really…really nailing a convincing Jamaican accent. Just, nailing it. 

   

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Fun Box Monster Podcast #125 : Alligator (1980)

This film gave me such nostalgia for my childhood in Chicago. I remember my parents would take us kids out to Lou Malnati's Pizza for a bowl of delicious pizza. Of course, we'd have to leave the family dog at home so he wouldn't get dognapped by the hordes of evil pet store owners roaming Chicago's historic streets for animals to sell to corrupt biotech labs.  

We'd take a leisurely stroll down the Miracle Mile, averting our gaze from the piles of mutated research animals that were abandoned in the gutters.

We'd take the L down to the Adler Planetarium, occasionally ducking behind cement barriers to avoid being devoured by thirty-six foot alligators that roamed the aisles unchecked.

All in all, Chicago has truly earned its nickname, The Big Alligator.

Join Matt and Tristan as they shine a dim flashlight down the surprisingly clean sewer tunnel that is, Alligator.  

Fun Box Monster Podcast #124 Scanner Cop (1994)

This is a story about those horrible unrepentant killers with dangerous powers, but now one of them is a Scanner. 

When little Sam is only a lad, he watches his Scanner father have a complete psychotic break and get gunned down by the police. Standard operation procedure kicks in here and the responding officer takes the kid home and raises him as his own. He's such a positive influence that the kid grows up to be a cop himself. 

Cut to years later, some escaped villains from a Superfriends episode are brainwashing ordinary citizens to kill policemen. Now Sam has to break his promise to his father and go off his anti-scanning medication to take down these insane cartoons. Will he be able to stop them before he loses control? Will he go crazy like his dad, and grow multiple tiny adorable heads on his regular head? 

So join Matt an Tristan as they venture down a filthy steam tunnel and into the hippy apartment that is 1994's Scanner Cop!

Fun Box Monster Podcast #123 The Hazing AKA Dead Scared (2004)

     In this unofficial, pseudo-sequel to Hell Night we again have a co-ed legion of doofuses locked in a fake haunted house to earn the right to join a fraternal organization. But this time, they remembered that they were making a horror movie, so they added blood, nudity and Brad Dourif, all in enough quantity to more than make up for the previous film.

     Also… they had just watched Evil Dead 2 and would very much like you to know that they are aware of how badly they’re ripping it off, but that this is an homage so quit being snarky. 

     So grab your Valu-Rite Necronomicon, your Etsy artist Kandarian Dagger, and your sexiest mannequin as Matt and Tristan talk about the movie that Brad Dourif's agent signed him to A YEAR AFTER RETURN OF THE KING!?! The Hazing. 

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #122 : Hell Night (1981)

Wow. This slasher couldn't have been softer if it was made for the Disney Channel. Made by a porn director and there's no nudity. Made with had the star of the Exorcist but barely had a single effective scare. They even had the star of Rock and Roll High School, and yet I didn't see a single Ramone.

The sad part is that if you watched a half-hour reel of the greatest hits of this movie, you'd think it was the  best horror movie ever made. Sadly, the rest of the movie is just boring kids either sitting and talking about nothing or walking silently.

So grab your high test cable and winch set, twenty thousand candles, and a fist full of quaaludes and join Matt and Tristan for the slowest movie this side of Warhol's Sleep, Hell Night.