It’s that time of year again! Smalltember (or Smallvember, if you’re nasty)! For our kickoff “smaller” bad movie pick, we took a recommendation from our podcast network colleague, the esteemed Mr. Justin McElroy, and watched Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders, starring Flop House recurring offender, Jon Voight. It’s a mashup of Clue and Saw that […]
We’re having an absolutely legendary Smalltember. First we covered The Legend of the Titanic, and now we’re looking into The Legend of the Roller Blade Seven. Apparently they’re legendary, but forgive us for being unfamiliar until now. It was made using a system RB7 star/co-writer/producer Scott Shaw dubbed “Zen Filmmaking.” According to his wiki, this is a “style of filmmaking where no screenplay and scripts are used in the creation of a movie.” We’ll see if getting zen delivers a good movie, or whether it’s better to… y’know… write things out and plan them ahead of time.
Due to the ongoing WGA – SAG/AFTRA strikes, we’re hitting pause on current releases, and focusing on some films 90’s kids will remember. And while we doubt most Smalltember(vember?) movies are union signatories, we decided to keep the train a rollin’ anyway and make this a 90s flashback Smalltember! We kick it off with 1999’s Italian-Korean-American co-production The Legend of the Titanic — a bizarre attempt to cash in on James Cameron 1997 mega-blockbuster Titanic, in the form of an animated film featuring a similar star-crossed romance, but with a lot more talking animals.
For our second and final Smalltember(vember?) show of 2022, we talk Pinocchio. No, not that one. Not that one either. The Russian one with Pauly Shore. Is that a thing that exists, and not just some weird chain of words we strung together? Apparently! We watched it, so unless it was a collective bi-coastal hallucination, it’s real! And we had to watch it, so now you have to listen!
Even though the last few years may have made everyone feel unstuck in time, there are still some things you can depend on — namely that, come the fall, Dan and Elliott will argue about whether it’s Smalltember or Smallvember. Anywhooo, we kick off the smallest time of year with Amityville in Space, the movie that dares ask the question “What if Amityville… but in space?”
Smalltember concludes with a doozy — Black Easter (previously titled Assassin 33 AD, in a slightly different edit) — the movie that dares ask “What if someone killed Jesus? …But not like, the people who ORIGINALLY killed Jesus. What if they were TIME TRAVELING MUSLIMS?”
America’s foremost hedgehog expert, Jamelle Bouie, returns to usher in Smalltember (vember) 2021, with our discussion of the make-work project for Dean Cain and Tara Reid, Andy the Talking Hedgehog.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in all our years of discussing bad movies, it’s that vanity projects are often the creme de la creme of bizarre and terrible cinema. And hoo doggies, do we have something special for you. Made in 2006, then shelved for nearly a decade before getting quietly dumped to streaming in 2014, writer/director/star Stuart Paul’s magnum opus, Deadly Lessons, is a fantasy self-help (?) thriller (?) that’s impossible to describe, but lord, do we try.
