Fun Box Monster Podcast

A young student named Beverly has been given the opportunity of a lifetime. She's being invited to hang out in the woods of Serbia with classmates who absolutely loathe her and bully her ever chance they get. Once there she gets to sleep in a shack with no walls, and learn about her own heritage...which she clearly despises, plus she's going to marry the devil!  All for only eight hundred bucks!?!...

A body-switching, heavy-metal-loving, Ferrari-stealing, serial-killer-alien is running wild in LA, and the only thing that can stop him is Kyle Mclaughlin. If you are a Hollywood executive and someone gives you this pitch... if you hesitate for even a second, you should be fired on the spot and removed from the entertainment industry forever. Grab a boombox, a pocket full of stolen IRS Records Tap...

Llamageddon is just another bloated Hollywood blockbuster, relying on expensive flashy special effects and star power. When are we going to see Howie Doin come back to the small, quiet films that were a hallmark of his lauded early days? I miss the Howie who brought us the masterful tone poetry of Pinky's Sense of Llama. The sensuous heat of August Llama in Paris, or the gritty realism of Llama Dr...

Berserker is the timeless tale of a Viking who's ship crashed in Utah so he ate a bunch of people and became half bear. Also, there's a real bear who may have been killing people, or not, and it's got George Buck Flower going really big on a Swedish accent. So strap on your bear-mask, get your cool-guy degree in Political Science, and join Matt and Tristan for the best Viking slasher movie I can t...

It's hard to see where the characters go wrong in the film Stage Fright. Was it making a modern dance adaptation of I Spit on Your Grave?  Was it seeking  medical attention for a sore ankle instead of just keeping off it for a while? Was it seeking that medical attention at Italy's version of Arkham Asylum? Was it having an inexplicable owl mask? Was it all the barrels of burning trash in a buildi...

When an evil priest summons a child with three thumbs, who may be the avatar of Satan, to murder a group of people who may be his former classmates, or complete strangers that he just doesn't like, things start to get weird. He's punishing, and I guess redeeming (?) them for sins that seem to come from the seven deadly sins (?) but sometimes don't. And the punishments (redeemings?) are completely...

     When you think of God, you think beard, robe, wise, kind all-knowing, right? WRONG STUPID. He's a gorilla with a mohawk that dresses like Blackie Lawless from WASP. Man did every theologian in history back the wrong horse! But not to worry, this film sets the record straight.       Whether it be godly feats of strength like breaking plates and eggs, or eventually knocking over a lightweight c...

When her relationship with an Emmy-winning football player fails due to a dispute over his rubber leg scar, Jennifer runs into the arms of her second love, Danish folk festivals. She hops into the Action 6 Action Station Wagon and heads out to get her pulitzer on the mean streets of some dumb town with a folk festival. Sadly, due to a tragic mixup, the only place left to stay is at the local murde...

When killer mutant slugs start pouring out of the water taps in a small town, the local health inspector, Mike Brady, snaps into action. After every single person in town tells him he’s insane, he decides to prove them wrong. How does he do that, you might well ask?  Why, by hiring a local high school’s science teacher to make hundreds of gallons of explosives that they will pump into the sewers,...

Clint Howard accidentally makes some giant ticks by spilling his weed growing steroid. Outside of that? What more do you need to know? The movie is a classic and how they made it for a million dollars I honestly can't imagine. This thing is gold. So fill your pockets with steroids, dump your up-and-coming A-List children in the woods, and join Matt & Tristan as they suck down the big bucket of del...

Things are going great for famed photojournalist, Ted. He's got a great career, a beautiful wife, and fifteen sherpas to listen in on he and his wife having sex. The whole deal. That all ends when his camp is attacked by a Nepalese werewolf. Ted eventually kills it, but not before it murders everyone at the camp except for Ted, and leaves him infected with werewolfism.  He returns to the States, b...

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...

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 ha...

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 g...

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...

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 t...

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 corporat...

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 ano...

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...

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 wa...

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 i...

Every generation there comes a movie that is so transformational to the very fabric of society that it is hard to step back and see it as simply a film. Plutonium Baby is such a film. Although it has been seen by only a handful of people, Plutonium Baby has been called the greatest film of the twentieth century. The scene of Billy eating a whole trout by the pond has been hailed as a possible cure...

The Curse is the story of a woman trying to keep her family together by marrying a man who is conservatively eighty years her senior. The son, played by a young and very unhappy Wil Wheaton, makes the crazy logic leap that the giant, veiny, glowing sphere that has skidded a half-mile across the family farm, might just be from space. The family remains unconvinced, even as their vegetables and live...

1987's Dolls is a sort of modern-day retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel. Only instead of a candy, this house is made mostly of dry-rot and mouse poop. You still have the two innocent children, but they are now played by a little girl (Judy), and a child-like adult (Ralph). The comparison breaks down here, because our witch is actually a husband and wife witch team, who are seemingly taske...

André Toulon is a kindly old puppet maker. For reasons unknown, he has an ancient papyrus scroll with the secret to imbuing inanimate objects (specifically puppets...but I don't see any rules that it wouldn't work with toasters and couches) with life. When he sees two (maybe?) SS officers coming to capture him, he kills himself to avoid his secrets getting into the hands of the (Nazis?) Humanity h...