Elliott quizzes us about prequels. Does anybody like them? Why prequels? WHY?

Stuart cracks the code to TV writing success, and gets some notes from his friends in the industry.

Cagemas comes but once a year! Unless, since this one is a little late, it will technically come twice this year, and none times last year. It’s confusing. It’s annual is what we’re saying. We celebrate the work of Saint Nicolas Cage this time with a discussion of the snakes-on-a-boat-and-also-other-animals thriller Primal. And for an august occasion like this one, you need a special guest! So this episode we welcome hilarious sweetheart Josh Gondelman of Desus & Mero and his book Nice Try.

We devote this mini entirely to the most obvious topic for a show being released the day after Christmas — Big Johnson T-shirts.

We’ve been wanting to get Alonso Duralde on the show for a while — not only because he’s the senior film critic for The Wrap, and not only because he’s the host or co-host of a number of podcasts, including Max Fun’s own Who Shot Ya?, but because he literally wrote the book on Christmas movies. So, of course, this holiday season he picked a movie that barely sort of has Christmas stuff in it — the double-Moore weepie Six Weeks. THANKS FOR NOTHING, BUDDY! (jk – he’s a delight.)

We break out of our normal format a bit for this BONUS EPISODE! How so? Well, #1, we watched a movie that we were all pretty sure we’d like (and, spoiler alert, we did) — the body-swap horror-comedy “Freaky,” and #2, instead of doing letters and recommendations, we take a bit of extra time to talk to Barbara Crampton about her career.

Holiday hustle and bustle means it’s finally time to release the OTHER episode, taped at Boston’s CitySpace, about Godzilla: King of the Monsters. CAN YOU HANDLE THE THRILLS?

Elliott gives us a report from the field about the Douglas Trumbull directorial effort Brainstorm!