JoelSchlosberg

You don't even have to look it up on IMDB - the end credits in the movie itself list not just 1, not even 2, but 3 stunt doubles for Jovovich: Three stunt doubles! Ah ah ah!

And then there's “Manos” The Hands of Fate: “Manos” is the Spanish word for "hands"!

With regard to the "he's screwed" pun not getting across what happened to the deceased to those who can't already see it, isn't that the point of action movie kill puns? As exemplfied by one of the legendary Schwarzenegger kill puns in Commando (but I repeat myself)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR9CdLV0xzU where the whole point of the line is that Ahnuld needs to mislead the flight attendant so that she doesn't realize that the passenger in the next seat is still because he's actually dead, and not merely zonked from exhaustion. In the previous HDTGM movie The Running Man, Arnold's "he had to split" kill pun doesn't really explain what happened to the defeated foe, but the point is that he doesn't consider it worth the bother to do so. (Then there's the kill pun in the Star Trek Voyager episode "Rise" in which the crew visits a giant "space elevator" that can move people between a planet and orbit. On the way up, the villain attempts to knock one of the Voyager crew off the elevator, explaining that the missing person "returned to the surface" ... only to have that very line used to describe his own eventual fate of actually free-falling to the planet just like Jason X!)

One very simple thing I don't recall anyone bringing up yet: why is the hologram programmed to create only 2 campers for Jason to kill? When buying time is of the essence, why not distract him with 20 or 200? Especially since 2002 was three years after a certain movie famously pushed the imaginative limits of cyberspace (and about two years since everyone else had ripped it off): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oZi-wYarDs

Correction: It's stated that Jason X was profitable since it had a budget of $11 million and made $16 million. But that doesn't mean that the studio made $5 million profit! Some of the $16 million went to the movie theaters' cut rather than back to the studio, and $11 million to make the movie doesn't include the expenses of distributing and marketing it. It's difficult to determine how much those costs are (with studios infamously using them to claim that even such mega-blockbusters as the same year's Spider-Man didn't make any profits to avoid contractual obligations to share them), but it's reasonable to assume that they added more than half of the original budget. And the ranks of movies that made more than their budget includes such infamous flops as The Lone Ranger (made $260 million, had a $215 million budget) and Waterworld (made $264 million, had a $175 million budget).

Although they wouldn't have the funniest part of that bit, Jason being caught off guard at the first two Friday the 13th movies not having the hockey-masked killer popular memory has retroactively imprinted on the entire series. Which is well-known for not being well-known as the basis for a famous scene in Scream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1M3w_o7cOc Plus it's deliciously ironic that Gene Siskel deliberately gave away the ending of the original movie in his review, since he broke spoiler etiquette to reveal a plot point that is surprising for completely different reasons than he assumes:

The podcast compares the revived Jason to "Bebop or Rocksteady with a little bit of Krang"... I was surprised that in throwing out comparisons to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mutant villains, there's no direct mention of what would seem the most obvious parallel... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxcnfgpaS0 ...a masked, blade-brandishing main antagonist who has apparently been killed off, only to be revived in a bulked-up, stronger and more metal form by excessive application of futuristic technology: Shredder's reincarnation as Super Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze!

Plus Grendel's mother is as horrific and deadly as her son, just like Jason's.

As explained in one of the first movies about cloning by Hitler's doctor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVCMKN_1SeM

Wouldn't "Santa Claus with a mohawk" just be Mr. T?

It so happens that callow misconceptions about sex involving belly buttons also turn up in Stephen King's It.

My theory is that it's a reference to the Jewish practice of going out for dinner on Christmas day to Chinese food restaurants, on a day when they and movie theaters are among the only outlets not usually closed, while Christians are at home having family dinners (with the family in A Christmas Story going out for Chinese food when their meal gets eaten by the dog the exception that proves the rule). The "Jewish Chinese-food-and-a-movie Christmas" is at least well known enough that SNL did a segment about it: [media=''] [/media]

Isn't "Cyber-Bloggers" redundant, since any blog is by definition online and thus in cyberspace?

In all of this episode's discussion of Paula Abdul, I don't recall hearing about a connection to another HDTGM film... ... The Running Man! That's right, she choreographed all of its wonderfully cheesy dancing.

Agreed. It is perverse (no pun intended) that fictional cinematic portrayals of sex and violence made for and viewed by consenting adults are often treated with more censure than ones involving actual coercion on set.

TBH, I had forgotten about the behind-the-scenes controversy, and it didn't seem right to mention the in-the-movie relationship in the same breath as the two Criterion titles that are infamous for portrayals of sexual cruelty (for instance, Roger Ebert called The Night Porter "as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering" and TV Guide calls Salo "nearly unwatchable, extremely disturbing, and often literally nauseous"). And Lea Seydoux did say this about the director:

Most of those are Joe Dante movies, with that particular director going to great lengths to put Dick Miller in a small role in almost every one of his movies. For instance, Miller is one of the two garbage collectors in The 'Burbs... a movie which, due to taking place entirely in an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac, has almost no other minor characters! Since I associate Miller with Dante and thus with Dante's sly self-parody (where having such a recurring actor is in itself an in-joke), it felt jarring to see Miller in the exact sort of small cameo role he'd have in a Joe Dante movie, but in a movie with an utter lack of self-awareness. (Ditto for all the similarities to Robocop; a Paul Verhoeven movie's gratuitousness always has an underlying layer of satire or subversive humor underneath. Chopping Mall doesn't even really satirize the easy target of consumerism!)

The Criterion Collection has always had a sleazy side, with occasional stuff like The Night Porter and Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (and the not-so-sleazy but still very sexually explicit likes of Blue is the Warmest Color and the I Am Curious movies). And, though their version is loooong out of print, they had the first DVD release of the unrated version of Robocop (with all the extra violence that had to be cut to get an R rating).

Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High Aka Vol. 2 premiered this month and, like its predecessor Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1, it's chock full of gratuitous nudity, both boobs and... other body parts (including some which do not exist in nature). And then there's Black Dynamite (the 2009 movie), which Roger Ebert praised at length for its gratuitous nudity, but also implying that it was the first such movie in a long time:

One of those names is the same as the title character of the Twilight Zone episode "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" ... a man who discovers that he can trade personal qualities with other people (for instance, he can get a year younger if someone else agrees to get a year older, and can similarly switch medical conditions, personality traits, etc.) which he uses to woo a lady who had turned him down for lacking empathy. In other words, the director of Chopping Mall took on as a fake name that of a guy who is trying to get laid by taking on qualities of other, nicer people!

I love how that barely even counts as wordplay, it's just Ahnuld being Ahnuld. That era's less charismatic action stars couldn't make non-puns into puns through sheer force of will ( , anyone?) but Ahhnold Schwarz can! As for comebacks to Arnold puns, there's always Batman's to Mr. Freeze. In terms of the contenders for all-time best worst action movie pun, I can never quite decide between "plain zero" and this Steven Seagal gem:

Heh, you were also the only one to out-color-theory-nerd me back in the thread for The Phantom about whether or not purple and green count as opposite colors!

Sounds like an allusion to the pop image of how humans evolved from less intelligent ancestors, with foreheads steadily expanding to accommodate increasing brain size, so that a "low forehead" would be a dumbed-down monkey-business throwback: This is alluded to, for instance, in the opening pages of the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

There are a whole bunch of shots spread out through the movie where Subzero's name is written on the betting-odds chalkboard as "ZUBZERO"!

When that guy is removing the explosive collars, why is anyone else in the room besides the person whose explosive collar is being removed? Arnold et al. are just standing well within blast radius for no apparent reason. Even the guy whose collar was just removed flinches from the ticking collar rather than, well, running!