Popcorn Pulse 35: Wax Girlfriend

While passing through a nice but still shady neighborhood, Tim and Weltall stumbled upon a Waxwork. “Gee, that’s a strange place to put a waxwork” said absolutely no one born after the Roaring Twenties. But that’s an actual line from the movie Waxwork(1988). It stars people playing college students who act like they’re in high school and look like they’re dreading their kids piano recital.

If that wasn’t enough to get you excited, Waxwork has cameos from actual famous people. John Rhys-Davies shows up just long enough to transform into a werewolf before collecting his rent check. David Warner wears a Wonka-esque costume for half of the ten minutes he appears. You can also see Miles O’Keefe, of Hercules fame featured on MST3K, recite lines like someone glued his dentures together during makeup.

Weltall then discusses The Girlfriend Experience[2009]. It stars a former pornstar Sasha Grey. She plays a prostitute who has a boyfriend. There was a budget for the film and has other actors in things called “scenes” which were then edited together in a sequence. Some people watched this in theaters but not enough to cover the costs.

Tim then talks about Sneakers(1992). It features Dan Akroyd going bugnuts insane for minutes at a time in his small parts. Meanwhile, Robert Redford is trying to steal a magic cryptobox which can haxxors nineties computers easily. Redford ends up giving it to the wrong people and steals it back so he can give it to the NSA who, oddly enough, aren’t playing the villains.

Popcorn Pulse 32: Strange Fall

Like a slinky pitched over the side of a building, the joint discussion of the week revolves around Fallen (1998). In it, Denzel Washington plays a cop who’s yet to be too old for this shit. He ends up being haunted by a demon who can pass along to someone new with a pat on the shoulder. It ends up inside mister Rogers after he stops to comfort James Gandolfini for being in Get Shorty. This allows Rogers to terrorize a small Midwestern town until he’s hunted down by Werner Von Van Helsing.

Tim then decides to trot out a film that’s aged worse than the Mona Lisa inside of a compost pile in Louisiana, Dr Strange(1978). It features a man for whom no is merely a suggestion and mustache wax gets itemized on his taxes. He plays a psychiatrist who finds out he will now have literal magic hands which he uses to battle Morgan La Fay for custody of Merlin’s bones. Also, the sorcerer supreme has the Jedi mind trick in his bag which he uses no less than three times.

Weltall discusses Brother(2000). It’s about a man named after the honorific for big brother who doesn’t turn out to rule Eastasia. He drops out of the Yakuza and moves to L.A. to find himself. Upon arrival, they go to a wedding, get completely wasted and wake with no memory of the previous night. This culminates with a wild seventeen minute car chase on the highway which ends with Keanu Reeves punching a speeding bus at him.

Popcorn Pulse 31: Wormtongue

Cyberpunk doesn’t crop up in films these days. During the nineties though, they were as numerous as the Buffalo on the US. Death Machine (1994) is one of these corpses, stuffed and mounted for generations to gawk and poke at.

It stars Wormtongue, an actress from Lawnmower Man 2: Death of the Franchise, two guys with bit parts from the Fifth Element, the brother who dies first in Die Hard and Commander Porkins. Wormtongue unleashes the titular Death Machine when he gets fired by the CEO while demanding his job back. The only solution they come up with is to stuff a random terrorist into a cyborg suit and make him fight the killer alien robot. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 31: Wormtongue”

Popcorn Pulse 30: Safe Below

This episode does not feature, for once, an eighties semi-obscure sci-fi movie featuring a celebrity slumming for a paycheck. For a change of pace, it features a semi-obscure sci-fi flick from this decade instead. Safety Not Guaranteed [2012], a movie that’s based on a meme which is, in internet years, fossilized and hung up in museums. Let us explain why they butchered the movie with the ending. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 30: Safe Below”

Popcorn Pulse 29: Singlecorn End

Confusion and distraction run amok in this episode as Tim and Weltall do their best to talk about late nineties classic, Dante’s Peak(1996). In it, James Bond loses a girlfriend to a volcano and then declares war on lava spewing mountains. After killing a number of gelatinous talk show hosts, he takes a vacation in the state of Washington where he hopes to wait out the years until legalization.

However, being a vulcanologist, Bond has spent many a days and nights blaspheming the ancient Greek god. Angered by Bond’s hubris, he throws a hammer at a nearby mountain, causing it to turn into an active volcano. Bond must then save Sarah Connor, two whiny kids and a dog before they become part of the future exhibit, Pompei 2 the revengance. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 29: Singlecorn End”

Popcorn Pulse 28: Assault on Time

Chance can be a fickle master at the best of times and often leaves you when you need it most. And so it was for Wetall when Tim got to choose the movie for the joint review this episode. Tim picked the original Assault on Precinct 13(1976) by John Carpenter.

Tim likes it for the atmosphere being an action film shot in the style of a horror movie. Weltall was frustrated by the incredibly slow pacing at the beginning and the seemingly senseless direction. Though we both agreed some of the lines were hilarious, unintentionally, and the titular assault was fun. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 28: Assault on Time”

Popcorn Pulse 27: What Wound

There was a time in the nineties when Steven Segal’s agent would actually call him back. This was around the same time he actually fit into suits and didn’t look ridiculous squinting angrily at anyone who dared put their fists in his personal space. It was the nineties and it was a heady time for all of us.

Then the millennium came and went and we discovered he wasn’t all that cool. Hollywood still hadn’t gotten the memo so they stuff Segal into a uniform and a movie, paired him with DMX and called it a day. Which is how we ended up with Exit Wounds, a movie which was based on a book that everyone decided to ignore and, instead, created a generic story featuring corrupt cops and drugs. Also Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson are in it as comic relief. Consider yourself warned. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 27: What Wound”

Popcorn Pulse 26: Chicago Adventures


In the great tradition of mashups comes a film from the nineties that takes Short Circuit and Friday the 13th and blends them without care for the end result. We do our joint review, based on a recommendation, on Evolver from 1995. And like all movies about technology from that decade, it features VR helmets and polygon graphics that would embarrass anyone who’s ever held a joystick.

Luckily for everyone, the main thrust of the film has little to do with shitty video games as imagined by a screenwriter who only has a fuzzy impression based on a round of Donkey Kong he watched the local kids play while washing his sheets at the laundromat. It is instead focused on a toy robot built by Q who decides that people suck and could use a little more hatchet in the face to make them right. The robot, Evolver, is then thwarted by the kid from Dutch and his designated love interest, the girl who was on one episode of Clarissa Explains It All. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 26: Chicago Adventures”

Popcorn Pulse 25: Hallow End

Being as this was made and intended as a Halloween companion episode, or at least themed as such, we decided that a throwback into something within the horror genre would do. Which left us with the mere burden of choice. What to choose? A slasher or zombie flick would be expected though trite. We both abhor found footage and similar films so that left quite a few movies in the bin. Continue reading “Popcorn Pulse 25: Hallow End”

Popcorn Pulse 24: Ghost Ho

Sometimes we like to perform scientific experiments here in the pulse network. We are, after all, prone to bias just as the next squishy humans in spite of our expensive cybernetic upgrades. For example, there is the hypothesis that when Tim picks the movie of the week Weltall is sad.

In yet another test done towards that end we did a joint review of Ghost in the Machine. A vehicle for Karen Allen of “Who the fuck is that? Oh yeah, the lady from Raiders of the Lost Ark” fame. It also has Chris Mulkey who is another of the inexplicably recognizable members of the “That Guy” cadre. It features a serial killer who gains immortality on an early nineties internet, the ability to hack electrical lines and a very pixilated body. Did we mention that there’s a scene where people play a video game like a lobotomized Walrus?

Weltall then discusses a spiritual successor to Clerks called Bros Before Hoes. It even features a video store for hijinks and shenanigans. Tim then digs further into the cesspool of the seventies and talks about The Car. It features a younger, scowly James Brolin and the inspiration for a character design in an episode of Futurama.

Music

Intro

HomeBaser (UncleBibby) / CC BY 4.0

Outro

AstroTurf (UncleBibby) / CC BY 4.0