The Magnificently Huge Podcast

Happy New Year 2021 and welcome to the 3rd Annual MagHuge Freshitravaganza Show! It’s our usual “we took the last 2 weeks of the year off and don’t have a real topic so let’s just talk about all the movies & TV we gorged over the holiday break” episode. Because let’s be real, 2020 sucked hard. And like you, we only did the bare minimum to entertain ourselves while stress-eating junk food from the...

Get ready for the lumpiest lump of coal in our collective 2020 stocking as the MagHuge team dives into classic Christmas horror movies! It’s been a pretty horrible year, what with the pandemic and all, so we are dumping our usual Holiday Cheer for some Krampus Fear! We even throw in a couple of Psycho Santas and a ghost of Christmas Future in our picks and nix for solid alternatives to the regular...

If you are as tired of superheroes as we are right now then you are gonna love this hot take on The Boys, a dark satire that eviscerates the recent Disney/MCU commodification of the comic book movie genre with a steel-toed kick right to the codpiece. Loosely based on the ultra-violent cult comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, The Boys explores the basic idea of “What if superheroes were real...

Some movies think you’re dumb. They create situations that are so unbelievable, you can’t side with them any longer. Breaks in logic so severe, only a fan of the “Fast and Furious" movies could possibly stick with it. Like when James Bond falls into a 200 foot gorge, but of course he survives because… reasons. This week’s episode is a discussion of the movies that stretched the reality possible in...

Ever watch a movie and think, “This is just plain weird”? Like us, you can probably come up with dozens of examples of films that were intentionally strange. The challenge this round was to come up with examples of movies that, instead of being deliberately odd, appeared to be made in earnest but turned out INCREDIBLY WEIRD. LIke, WTF-level weirdness. Like, why would they make this? That’s it, tha...

When you sit down to a movie called Killer Klowns From Outer Space, you pretty much know what to expect. This cult B-movie from 1988 is both a glorious tribute and giant middle finger to the classic alien invader movies from the 50’s we all loved as kids. Only this time, it’s murderous Klowns™ who have landed on Earth to harvest humanity for food! Played with tongue firmly in cheek, this film by s...

Remember...The Nuge’ll taint ya! A long time ago, music was performed by people with instruments. That led to people who were really good at playing them. And that led to Supergroups: Collections of the best performers who are the finest in their own bands, teaming up to make what was hoped would be an even bigger musical success. Think Avengers with Les Pauls. This week, we go over some of the bi...

Episode154 - Heathers Vs. Mean Girls Two cliques enter, one clique leaves... Welcome to the High School Movie Grudge Match Thunderdome! We pitch 80’s black-comedy classic Heathers against 00’s teen classic Mean Girls in a head-to-head battle for ultimate Snark Supremacy! How Very. That’s So Fetch. Oh, and ⅔ of our crew had never actually watched Mean Girls before, but all of us have been quoting H...

Some movies are all sizzle and no steak, sad to tell you. We have a theory: Awesome Trailer = Awful Movie. And by our math, this formula is correct about 92% of the time. So here is our salute to the pitfalls of movie marketing! It’s the campaigns that got us excited to see a film opening weekend. And how most of these ended up being giant disappointments, along with the few rare times we hit the...

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is a big-budget studio actioner that arrived to theaters everywhere with a giant thud in the Fall of 1985 and quickly fell into pseudo-obscurity. We’re not even really sure what about this film baffles us the most. Was it the utter abandonment of all the sex and violence that made the original series of pulp novels so much fun? Maybe the not-even-cool-for-its-ti...

Greetings, our excellent friends. When you don’t have any movie theaters, or George Carlin, or any new ideas at all really, can you still make a good movie? Can you take Keanu Reeves, who has spent the last 25 years trying to shed his surfer idiot image, and bring him back to that same persona with any credibility? Can you justify getting the band back together? Do they get better? Do they? Find o...

Ben Folds Five is a trio of dudes who, back in the 90s, gave us great music that was not quite pop, not quite punk, but something gloriously in between. With front man Ben Folds banging the keys on his piano, along with Robert Sledge on fuzzed-out bass, and Darren Jessee on drums, they created a very distinctive lo-fi, guitar-free sound that is a weird blend of jazz, rock, pop and punk that the ba...

Set phasers to OMG, because it’s a whole show about random Star Trek trivia you didn’t even know you wanted! That’s right, we found 20 amazing Clickbait facts (well, okay, maybe more like five, let’s not push it) about the Star Trek universe - from TOS to Discovery - that will blow your mind and leave you more exhausted than a good pon farr… because The INTERNET! For example, did you know that Pic...

Logan’s Run from 1976 is perhaps the most Super 70’s sci-fi epic ever made. Especially since Star Wars came along barely a year later and changed movies forever. But for a brief, shining moment in the early 1970’s we had a good run of films that presented gritty, dystopian futures... that still looked like they were set in the early 1970’s. With obvious scale-model cities, disco fashion, bean bag...

This round we dare to tackle the burning question: How many Highlanders can there actually be? The answer might surprise you. But one thing is certain, we were shocked - SHOCKED! - to learn that MagHuge team member Brian had never before seen Highlander, a definitive cult classic of trash 80s cinema. How does that happen? So we had a Gathering to get a fresh perspective on one of the most iconic g...

This week, we’re taking a look at a small, mostly overlooked film about the housing bubble crash of 2009. Why? First, because while “The Big Short” was certainly a good film, this is more about the mechanics of what sank our economy and the kinds of people who made those decisions. Second, and more importantly, right now we’re on the brink of a major economic collapse and it pays to be mentally pr...

If an 80's kid didn’t have HBO growing up, they knew someone who did and watched the hell out of it. But let’s go back further, to the 70's and the early days of cable television when it was still limited and kind of pricey. You certainly couldn’t get unedited, commercial-free movies on your television. Until HBO, that is. Back in the day, Home Box Office was KING and made cable a necessity. Befor...

Episode 144 - Back to the Future Roads? Where we’re podcasting we don’t need roads! That’s right, this time we go Back to the Future with Marty and Doc in a very accidental 35th Anniversary Celebration of the biggest movie from 1985! Yep, it’s the classic time travel incest comedy with the world’s most tricked-out Delorean that spawned two sequels, a cartoon show, a theme park ride, and now this p...

Why are vampire movies all the same? Either they’re romance movies where a bored woman gets swept off her feet by a posh zombie, or they’re supervillains who drink blood, can’t go outside, and may or may not have reflections, hate garlic, or squeal when holy water touches them. We honestly don’t answer this question this week - we just complain about what’s wrong with them. We also talk about the...

By the Power of Grayskull! We open up the Listener Mailbag to grab a suggestion (Thanks!) and tackle one of the most iconic bits of 80’s pop culture ever - He-Man and the Masters of the Universe! The genius of it all is that Mattel (home of Barbie and Hot Wheels) figured out how to syndicate a 30-minute infomercial for toys by disguising it as a daily cartoon adventure that was part Conan the Barb...

The Cold War came to an end in 1989. A year later, Hollywood gave it a grand send-off with an adaptation of Tom Clancy’s breakout techno-thriller, The Hunt for Red October. Set in 1984 at the height of US-Soviet tensions, the movie slaps a fresh coat of paint on the classic Cold War tropes to do for submarines what Top Gun did for jets. The chase is on to find a rogue USSR nuclear sub trying to de...

Question: Between the original 1987 version of Robocop and the 2014 reboot of Robocop, which is better? And why is it the original 1987 version? We’re diving into the universe of OCP’s most controversial crime fighting machine. We look at how such a goofy concept of a half-robot, half-human, all-crime fighter could have so much wit and black comedy in the middle of the Reagan era. We’ll also tear...

1999 was arguably the last big watershed movie year, one brimming with a crazy number of now-recognized classics that helped push cinema into the next millennium. That’s it, that’s our thesis. 1999 was crazy full of unique studio movies that would likely never see a green light in today’s franchise-driven climate: The Matrix; Office Space; Fight Club; Sixth Sense; American Pie; Being John Malkovic...

As the historic Dr. Demento radio show proved, pretty much anyone can make a novelty song. But it takes a true talent to make an entire album of funny songs that stands out, much less build a whole career on it. Join us for a Laugh & Listen Jamboree of some all time favorites in the funny music biz - from Weird Al all the way back to Spike Jones, and everything in between! It’s all the hits and pl...

Before you could call up any comedy special on streaming, before cable TV was bloating with stand-up comics.... There was the “party album.” Comedy sketches and audio laughs on a circular slab of vinyl. This week we dive headlong into the lost art of comedy albums. We also saved a bunch of these albums that are all available on YouTube. If you want to listen to any or all of them, check it out her...