Fun Box Monster Podcast

Fun Box Monster Podcast #103 : SHAKMA (1990)

When Roddy McDowell, the head of an inexplicably animal-based medical school, get a hair across his ass to inject the most dangerous animal they have in what appears to be a huge menagerie (you know, because it's med school) with a drug that usually calms animals down, but once in a while drives them murderously insane, things go poorly.

Despite his obvious cinematic familiarity with primates, he somehow missteps and this turns out to be one of the times the serum makes a monkey murderous. Oh, also there's a completely incomprehensible subplot about them playing some live action role playing thing that makes zero sense and is just a flimsy pretext to get them locked in the building.

Typhoon the Baboon is a freaking star. He delivers big time. The rest of the cast were apparently so afraid of Typhoon, that they had a hard time staying on top of what they were doing. You know. Because of the justified reputation baboons have for ripping arms off and eating faces. 

PS. I love this movie, but dammit nothing makes any sense. There's barely a single action, plot element, or scrap of dialog that I could follow.  If you take two seconds to think about what anyone is doing it will break your brain. So just go with it.

Sit back, cut yourself a big slice of whatever they're keeping in the fridge of the baboon brain surgery unit, grab a handful of immobilization dust and join Matt and Tristan in the cinematic monkey crematorium known as, SHAKMA. 

 

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast Episode #102 : The Unborn 2 (1994)

Those lovable murderous demon-babies are back! Unfortunately for them, this time they're pursued by Linda, the Terminator you get if you order through the Spiegel Catalog. By the time we catch up with Catherine and her monster-baby Joey, Linda has already thinned the killer-baby population of California down pretty handily.

But Catherine, the mind controlled, millionaire, children's book author has a brilliant plan. After fleeing the killer-baby lab leaving piles of dead scientists in her wake, she moves to a suburban neighborhood and buys a house under her real name, and continues to publish books in a national market...again under her real name.  HOW DID THEY FIND HER???

As any parent will tell you, you can't stop a baby from murdering, and little Joey is no exception. But after eating a couple of teens, and a couple of Child Welfare people, mom starts thinking there might just be something up with little Joey... So get your baby all settled in with some raw meat, pull up your plywood dining room table, and join Matt and Tristan for the exploding microwave of schlock that is, The Unborn 2. 

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #101 : Amityville 1992 : It's About Time

Being an architect is stressful. You come home from landing your dream job. Your ex-girlfriend, who watches your kids because your so awful nobody else on earth will talk to you, meets you at the door with a weapon. You let that go, because you think she might cheat on her insufferable new boyfriend with you. She does, and just as you're starting to feel good abut ruining their relationship, you get mauled by an evil ghost dog controlled by the clock of a 15th century serial killer that you brought back from the demolition of the original Amityville House. Mondays, right? 

So you try to get back to work, but it's tough because you've got a bad case of demon-rabies. All this, and the kids won't leave you alone. They're messing with your model trains, getting locked in rooms, getting transported through time, sometimes turning into infants. You know what I mean. It's the whole architect thing. Sure, you've made some mistakes, but that's why haunted houses have magic clocks that can rewind time.

So put on your sexiest model-train-engineer's outfit, tip your diaper delivery service,  set your cursed clocks to Evil Daylight Savings Time, and join Matt and Tristan for the gooiest entry in the Amityville franchise, AMITYVILLE 1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME!!!

Fun Box Monster Podcast #100!!!! TERRORVISION! (1986) Featuring a Special Drop in From Ted Nicolaou!

We made it 100 episodes so we decided to treat ourselves to one of our shared favorites! Terrorvision!!! Plus, I had talked to writer / director Ted Nicolaou a few months earlier for the magazine and had a little audio snippet of him talking about the movie, so I dropped that in too. (I hadn't listened to it before we recorded so we rehash a bit of what he says.) 

 

When LA's most eighties family installs their new DIY 100 satellite, they accidentally pick up the essence of a mutated family space pet known as the Hungry Beast. These dingdongs are too obsessed with the newest Noodles video to care that they're getting picked off one-by-one, and go about their swinging, survivalist training, and in the case of the sister, I guess...dating King Vidiot from Joysticks? Either way, it all adds up to one of the most incredible pieces of surreal eighties film you'll ever see. So join Matt and Tristan as they enter the Ouzo flavored pleasure dome known as, Terrorvision! 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #99 The Chilling (1989)

The Chilling is a film which poses some really poignant philosophical questions about the spiritual morality of cryogenically freezing people, secretly harvesting their organs, and selling them on the black market. It also calls into question the decision to not only hire Dan Haggerty as a security guard, but give him keys to a forklift. 

We may never agree on the answers to these questions, but the one point we can all agree on is that if a conductive fluid is injected into a cadaver and that cadaver is struck by lighting it will be raised from the dead and go on a killing spree. That's just obvious cryonics 101 shit. 

So get on your silver cryo-suit, grab your medical grade sword, and join Matt and Tristan as they talk about the devil's work that is, 1989's The Chilling. 

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #98 Slaughterhouse (1987)

At it's core, Slaughterhouse is an inspiring tale of a father and son triumphing over the corporate forces that would take over and industrialize their beloved family farm.  However if we zoom out to the macro level, it could be said to be the story of America. 

    When Lester Bacon, owner of Bacon and Sons Slaughterhouse, is offered a deal to either pay off his back taxes or sell out to corporate interests, he doesn't look to the government for a bailout. He pulls himself up by his bootstraps, and through sweat and gumption, convinces his deranged three-hundred-fifty pound boy Buddy to murder them with his custom pig-foot meat cleaver.

     Buddy is truly the "everyman" in this story.  Like many of us, he is a massive lumbering murderer who only speaks in pig-grunts, due to being mostly raised by hogs. His story is our story, and his triumphs are our triumphs. 

     Your heart will soar as you attend the KFAT Pigout dance, and see the blooming romance between Skip and Liz who's dream to make a "horror video" will sadly go unfulfilled.  As well as other characters who probably had hopes and dreams, but the director decided they were none of our business. You'll cheer, as Skip is later impaled on a meathook, preventing countless deaths due to his terrible driving.

You'll laugh and cry, and maybe...just maybe, Buddy can teach you a little bit about yourself in the process. 

So get your little screamers out of the room, open your finest can of dog food, and sit back as Matt and Tristan discuss one of The American Film Institue's Top 100 movies of all time, Slaughterhouse. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #97 Voyage Of the Rock Aliens (1984) W/ Special Guest Michelle Souliere,

In a very special episode of The Fun Box Monster Podcast, we find the answer to the question, "What if Troma was given a million dollars to remake Grease, but had to keep it PG-13?" 

When some guys dressed as nuns try to kill Jermaine Jackson in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Pia Zamora runs off with him and they have a Romeo and Juliet thing which turns out to have been just a music video from another planet.

If watching this happen in the first five minutes of a movie is too much for you, Voyage of the Rock Aliens may not be your cup of tea. But if it leave you wanting more, get ready for a fake DEVO, a giant murderous tentacle, a chronically ill puma, the fake Stray Cats, Ruth Gordon leering at dudes through a telescope and a terrifyingly cut Craig Scheffer. This was a special episode we did with my wife Michelle, and she is fully to blame for this episode. Enjoy!

 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #96 Warlock (1989)

A Warlock from the 1600's gets transported to the eighties closely pursued by his mortal enemy, Redferne; a witch-hunter and smelly coat enthusiast who will stop at nothing to kill him. He hits up a psychic medium and learns that he's been sent there to assemble the Grand Grimoire, an evil text that contains the name of God, which if uttered backwards will undo all of creation. Some how he sees an upside to this, so goes about it, even though undoing all of creation means he won't have any place to store his many ponytail scrunchies.

Redferne meets an unlikely ally and they have lots of fun fish-out-of-water hijinks, including a trip to an Amish guy's house, a ride on a plane, and visit to a train-yard. Well...it's way more fun than it sounds. So grab your filthiest rat skin coat, your most flammable basket of kittens, and join Matt and Tristan for the most magical and mysterious tour since The Magical Mystery Tour, Warlock. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast Episode #94 Axe Giant : The Wrath Of Paul Bunyan

Gather 'round kids and let old grandpappy spin you a yarn about old Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox Babe. Well, you see old Paul was a great big feller. Looked kinda like a lost member of that band GWAR. Now everyone hated old paul because he was a horrible mutant. And old Paul, he only loved two things in the world, his Ox, and some lady who didn't actually like him or seem to even know who he was.

Sadly one day old Babe caught some type of digital rabies and started floating around the forest 2 or 3 inches off the ground. Round about that time, a kindly old lumberjack came by to put poor old Babe out of his misery. Paul, being a bloodthirsty mutant, didn't appreciate the help from the lumberjacks and cut them all into tiny pieces with his mighty axe. And that's the story about how the "Field of Dismembered Lumberjacks National Forest" came to be.  So pull out your massive ox-horn bong, update you Adobe After Effects license, and join Matt and Tristan for the tallest tale ever told, Axe Giant : The Wrath of Paul Bunyan. 

Fun Box Monster Podcast #93 Amityville Dollhouse (1996)

A doofus with seemingly no construction experience decides to build his family a home on the burned remains of a house where a horrible tragedy took place. He then marries a widow with a nerdy kid and lots of baggage, effectively Brady Bunching them together with his hunky son and young daughter in the Winchester Mystery House of bad wiring and leaky gas-lines. Luckily for this doofus, the place is haunted by an inexplicable replica of the Amityville house that he finds in his shed, and it manages to burn the house down so he doesn't have to feel guilty that it was his DIY heating system that did it. Before that inevitable conclusion, you get a pile of fun scenes including a wasp that punches a dude in the face, Ed and Lorraine Warren reimagined as a cool biker couple,  a giant mouse that torments a child, goo, more wasps, weird little sack people, a jiggly rubber satan puppet, and some dollar store cenobites. So get all of the shirtless basketball out of your system, gather around the fireplace on a cool August night in the Arizona desert and take a whack at the spider-filled piñata of fun that is, Amityville Dollhouse.