ChunkStyle

I think that first encounter with Gnorm was in AMH's garage so he just had to get him inside the house from there.

I 100% agree with Jason the joke about commandeering the hearse was very funny. It got me thinking that we need some kind of Hollywood Joke Clearinghouse where they can gather up the truly great jokes from otherwise bad or just unseen movies and give them to new movies in the future. Once of my favorite little things in the movie was early on when Zadar was whisper dictating to Reggie who was on the phone with the cops each line Zadar said got quieter until at the end he just mouthed "have a nice day" without vocalizing at all. It was such a weird and funny choice. Anthony Michael Hall's car had a custom license plate that said OYNK. Is that his way of joking about being a cop?

This was a pretty short movie so I think they could have added a few minutes for every character to announce what high-powered and high-stress job they left behind to settle in an idyllic Christmas village. I was very curious to know what Drosselmeyer was doing in that market when he was off screen. When MJH went to track him down that other vendor said with some scorn something along the lines of "that old nut went back to Germany!" What was he doing that got on their nerves so much?

Realizing that this movie was made by native English speakers hit harder than the end of The Usual Suspects. @SuppleContours post was great and very informative. Before reading that I actually came here to write that I think this is maybe the first movie that HDTGM has covered that the podcast could buy the distribution rights for the film. I'd love to see what the logo and fanfare they'd add up front would be. Of course in the end it would all be a disaster as everyone complains that they are covering too many HDTGM Films on HDTGM.

I can't recall the last time my reaction to a movie's climax was so at odds with what the movie was going for. I laughed out loud when Daario the 2nd whispered "boom". I'm glad I wasn't in a theater to ruin the experience for the one other person that would have been there. The part of the movie that bugged me the most is all of the other characters who served no purpose other than to establish the pattern to be noticed. Fate had to intervene in all of their lives too just to put them in the right place and the right time. I think if you start tracing back each of their lives that brought them to that moment then it will very quickly spiderweb out and everything in the world is just clockwork to get to the Grand Central Station showdown. Essentially this movie leans very hard into the idea of predestination which I have never cared for at all.

I think that is probably right. It is just the fact that the house is a lease that is throwing me off. If I was the one leasing the house that stocked wine cellar would be extremely bad for my health as I'd think the more I drank the better the terms of the deal have become. At the very least my friends would be getting lots of wine as gifts. Or on the other side if the terms of the lease are that the wine cellar is treated like a hotel minibar that means the leasing company has to send in some poor intern to do a full inventory and make sure that every bottle in there is what they had on the books and hasn't been replaced by Two-Buck Chuck. I guess thinking about this proves that I am not cut out to live the lifestyle of a psychotic anti-terrorist vigilante. But that does kind of bring me to a larger point. Gabriel says he wants that 9.5 billion dollars in order to prosecute his war on terrorism. But it seems like a decent chunk of that will also be going towards paying for his billionaire playboy lifestyle. Which doesn't really seem like a necessary component of his job. Maybe if he ran a more lean operation he wouldn't have put himself in the situation of needing to kill Americans he is supposedly protecting in order to get more money for his war chest.

When the FBI guys have Gabriel's crime mansion under surveillance one of the agents says that it was leased 2 weeks ago by a blind corporation. That just made me wonder about the wine cellar. Did the house come with a stocked wine cellar? Or did Gabriel go through the trouble to stock the whole thing for the very short time they'd be living there?

I'm going to add Quiver Distribution to the list of winners during this pandemic along with billionaires and insider-trading senators. I feel like they took advantage of the absence of movies in the theater to pretend like this would have been theatrically released. Even before HDTGM covered it I was aware of its existence but that should never have been the case for a movie like this that should have gone straight to the $3 DVD rack at a gas station. This movie is so stupid in so many ways but I think this one may set a record for how fast it gets there. In the very first seconds of the movie in the voice over Man Bun is talking about the importance of having a good team by saying "It takes more than one flint to start a fire" and using it as if it is a well understood metaphor for a strong team with a diverse skill set. It doesn't take a team of flint to start a fire it takes just two pieces. And they can be identical. Unless you are including the kindling and wood that gets burned as part of your team metaphor?

I think there is one potential serious character flaw with Kaz that is a lot worse than everything else. How long had he been thinking he might be the Mangler before he declared to Denny that he was going to turn himself in? The bodies had really been piling up by the time he said that. I'd say as soon as you have the idea that there is a 50/50 chance that you are a fugue state serial killer go ahead and take some action to get yourself out of the game. With how fast the Mangler seemed to be going Kaz wouldn't have had long to wait to find out it wasn't him. I'd call it criminally negligent to bet these women's lives that you aren't the Mangler and stay on the streets. Speaking of how fast the Mangler was killing women I got the feeling that his murder spree hadn't started all that long before the movie picks up. But presumably Charles has been a pozatski since he was a teenager like Kaz. So what was the inciting incident that got the Mangler going?

Mary the Wino's story is extra tragic because it seems like her whole life she was carrying around a formula that she could have sold to a pharmaceutical company for several million dollars. Pebutrocile would have had a long reign as the most popular elective medication in the world until Viagra hit the scene. I'd say conservatively Michael was growing about 2 pounds worth of hair a day. The material to make that hair has got to come from somewhere. How many cups of yogurt a day was Signor feeding Michael? I don't know if the calorie math is appropriate in this case but if it is and Michael needs an extra 7,000 calories a day to make all that hair then he is eating like 70 cups of yogurt a day.

I thought the relationship between Shelley Long's character and her husband seemed really good but there was just one thing that was very weird. When Gus pulls up for the blind date and is in his car struggling to put on his wig there is an off camera conversation (that I would have not caught without watching with subtitles) where Long's husband is learning for the first time that he was the inspiration for the male leads of all of those romance novels. So after 15+ novels is Gertz the first person to ever ask a question about them? How could he have possibly gone so long without knowing that?

I just want to know what that scientist could have been working on that he required that level of protection. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no one working on the Manhattan Project or Apollo Mission ever had that kind of security detail. This movie centered on demon ninjas but yet somehow there was a more interesting story somewhere off screen. This movie went a long way towards fighting the stereotype of the the silent ninja during the fight in the dilapidated house. The sound mixer turned all their knobs up to 11 for the floorboard creaking in that scene.

The difference in their art style also makes the sole law of "Noids Don't Have Sex With Doodles" feel very weird to me because practically speaking it seems like the law applies to less than 1% of the population. It'd be like if in the US the only law was "360 Dunks Are Not Allowed". Sucks for the people that can and would like to do that. Will never apply to me.

The most improbable thing in this movie was not the existence of an alternate dimension cartoon world but that Jack Deebs channeling his vision of it into a comic book would be a huge hit. I was curious if anyone had theorized what the content of those books would be and found that DC published a 4 issue Cool World prequel comic to go along with the release of the movie. The first issue can be bought online right now for $2.60. It retailed for $1.75 at the time so its value hasn't quite kept up with inflation. They have also been posted online. http://vlcomic.com/read/comic-cool-world-eng/1 I read the first issue and here are some highlights if you don't want to waste your 10 minutes. Harris is a petty criminal in the first issue not a detective. Almost every object in the comic is anthropomorphized. Cool World is one of (many?) cartoon worlds it is right next to Sweet Place. Holli tries to seduce Harris to get to the real world but he won't break that rule even though he is a criminal. Another human enters Cool World while he is dreaming so presumably other than Harris and Deebs that is how Noids get to the cartoon dimension.

At the live show this question for the panel came to me right as Paul was leaving the audience: Can you describe how you felt when you saw that the movie ends with the "To my father..."? Because for me I think I experienced an emotion that I have never felt before or since. It was like horror, embarrassment, bafflement, and thinking it was sweet all occurring at the exact same time. I stupidly re-watched this movie ahead of listening to this episode and this time it occurred to me how stupid it is when they show the planets' locations by what constellation they are in. Constellations have no meaning whatsoever for locating something in space the various stars that make up a constellation are likely thousands of light years apart from each other and that a constellation has any meaning at all depends on where you are observing it from so the stars line up to form a vague shape. Then to make it even worse they give the constellations scientific sounding names like JR24. The whole point of a constellation is it happens to look like something you can name. If our ancestors hadn't been extremely bored I don't think we'd even have the concept of a constellation today.