Recent Viewings: Ping Pong Summer & A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

So it's been awhile since I just talked movies here on the blog. Used to be I would just post whatever came to mind whenever I wanted, and then I kind of got back-logged on posting about stuff I've picked up at Goodwill and everything else has sort of dropped off again. So... since I've seen a bunch of interesting films just recently, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about a couple of them to kind of get back in the habit of doing that again. 

In the past few months I've seen some summer blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jurassic World, and while they were pretty fun what I really want to focus on with this post is a pair of smaller, quieter films that I watched on streaming that have very honestly been some of the best movies I've seen this year so far. Let's start with the first one, a throwback-to-the-80's flick called:

Ping Pong Summer has been on my radar for a little while now. I'm a fan of the Cult Film Club podcast, and noticed they had put together an episode based on this movie. I'd never heard of it at the time, and assumed it was some old 80's flick that I had just never heard of. I put off listening to the episode on the off-chance that I would track this down and see it soon (still haven't listened to the podcast, but plan to soon). It was the blog Flashlights Are Something to Eat run by Tim Lybarger that really got me to seek out the movie however... Why you may ask? Because he revealed that it was streaming for FREE on Amazon Prime. (And if Lybarger likes it, odds are the WORLD will like it.) 

The family Summer vacation. A (sometimes painful) rite of passage.

Written and directed by Michael Tully, the movie is actually from 2014 but is set in 1985. It's a retro endeavor in the same vein as movies like "Adventureland" and "Take Me Home Tonight". But I'm not really sure the similarities to those films extend much further past that detail. Where those two films felt like they were trying to BE 80's movies or semi-faithful recreations thereof, I would argue that "Ping Pong Summer" takes advantage of it's 80's setting to the MAX but tells its story through a very self-aware, very current-day filter. If I had to compare this film to any others, it would be some sort of bizarre mish-mash of "Napoleon Dynamite" and "The Way Way Back," neither of which were definitively 80's set-films, but felt like they could have been. Like "The Way Way Back" this is a movie that seems to be about a boy floundering for acceptance in a temporary summer community, and like "Napoleon Dynamite", it revels in the absurdity and bizarreness of the excessively mundane world we find ourselves living in day-to-day.

According to Teddy Fryy, one can never have too many spoon straws.

"Ping Pong Summer" obviously has some DNA donated to it from 80's films in general, with elements of "National Lampoon's Vacation", "Better Off Dead", and "Karate Kid" liberally sprinkled throughout, but it's interesting how much it doesn't lean too far in any particular direction. It's a movie that in equal measures can't seem to decide if it's a spoof/parody, a commentary on 80's culture, a genuine coming-of-age story, a kids' film, or a "remember when" nostalgia piece. It feels a little muddled at times because of this, and as a viewer you may be tempted to try and latch onto one definition or another... but trust me. Don't. It's way more fun if you just smile and enjoy the trip to Ocean City.

Leathery relatives. Genuine beach people.

The movie stars Radford "Rad" Miracle, who goes to Ocean City with his family every summer. This year, Rad brings with him a burning love of Ping-Pong and parachute pants. His goth sister hates his guts, his parents are kind of lame, and Rad just can't seem to fit in with the locals. UNTIL he meets Teddy Fryy and gets brought to the "Fun Hub" which is basically a rec room with some arcade games and a snack bar... but it becomes Rad's oasis of cool. That is, until he's challenged by Lyle, the local rich kid who seems to take insane pride in his own ping-pong skills.

Pictures: the fiery, blazing awkwardness of your teenaged crush.
And your regrets for not "going through with it" when it comes to that kiss...

It could be argued that in some ways the trashy souvenir store opulence that IS Ocean City is a sort of character in the film itself, as is the 80's time period. They both definitely lend a voice to the proceedings. As for the others, Rad is awkward, unsure of himself, but desperately wants to fit in and be one of the cool kids. He just wants to feel comfortable in his own parachute pants. Teddy Fryy is a walking 80's cartoon character with some of the most incredibly earnest but awkward dialogue in the film. His rap skills are stilted and his jheri curl is on point.

Try not to stare into the eyes (or denim vest) of pure evil.

The love interest for Rad, Stacy Summers, has what is rumored to be at worst a cocaine habit, and at the very least a serious sugar problem. She is fickle throughout, equal parts aloof and encouraging until she get's off the "Funky Punch" and get's her head straight. The villains of the piece, Lyle and Dale chew the scenery in the scenes they're in, being unbelievably evil for a couple of ping-pong loving teens. Dale on his own has some of the most disturbingly quotable lines in the movie, such as: "Inseminate him!" and he wears his hero worship (or is it more?) for Lyle on his sleeve. Lyle meanwhile is your typical well-to-do bully. You've met him before. He could have fit smoothly into the Cobra Kai. Rad's parents, played by Lea Thompson and John Hannah are loving and supportive, if a bit confused by their children, and play the typical 80's parents to a tee. And of course there is Rad's goth sister, who exists simply to be the annoyed sister.

Randy Jammer: Fish wielding neighborhood vigilante and Ping-Pong aficionado.

And then there's Randy Jammer, played by Susan Sarandon. Rad meets Randy as his neighbor first, and then through a series of encounters, Rad discovers Randy is a ping-pong pro. He begs Randy to coach him and Sarandon does her best Mrs-Miyagi-with-a-beer-glass-as-big-as-her-head impression (that beer mug was one of the few things to draw a legit bark of laughter from me, as the humor in this film is usually kind of subtle) as she guides him through an afternoon of "making contact" and "recovery routines".

Our heroes reconnoiter. 

Rad struggles to win the girl, and beat the bad guy at ping-ponging, to prove his own self-worth and win the respect and admiration of his family, his temporary summer friends, and Susan Sarandon. This could literally have been a Saved By the Bell-esque Saturday morning live action tween show in mini-series form and no one would have batted an eye. You might read that like it's an insult, but I don't mean it as one. It's this kind of middle-of-the-road quirkiness that gives the film charm. What it lacks in weight it makes up for in fun 80's-style fluff or awkward situations that catapult you back to your own childhood (in the 80's or otherwise).

Over all, Ping Pong Summer is a fun ride. I recommend it to nostalgia fans and fans of weird, awkward humor. I watched it on Amazon Prime, and for all I know it's still on there, so if you're a subscriber, check it out. Now on to something a little different than a week at Ocean City playing ping-pong...

I don't remember when I first heard about "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" but I know that when I noticed it was available to stream on Netflix that I'd already heard good buzz about it. I could simply describe it as an Iranian vampire movie... but to leave it at that would be a HUGE disservice (especially considering it is NOT in fact an Iranian film! It was filmed in California!). Much like "Ping Pong Summer" above, "A Girl..." (as I will call it from now on) dances across several blurred lines for genres, influences, and themes. 

He totally stole that cat. (It's the director's cat)

Bad City is... well it's a bad city. And in Bad City, there lives an assortment of rumpled, depressed, broken people who go through their routines as a mode of survival. Arash, played by Arash Marandi,  is a young man caring for his heroin addicted father. You get the idea that Arash is perhaps at his core, a romantic, but one who is also kind of morally grey. In fact, "A Girl..." at it's heart is much less a horror film and much more a noir film. It's probably very much for this reason that the movie is filmed in black and white. Arash is not so much a hero as he is a damaged young man trying to find his way. He wants money, he wants love, he wants the good life but is floundering as to how to get any of those things, when there are obvious monsters (not the vampire) who have already achieved these things for themselves all around him. 

Trading a cape for a chador and the wings of a bat for a skateboard.

And then there is the vampire, referred to only as "the Girl". We don't know what to make of her at first, as she stalks and kills one particularly prominent character early on in the film. This is the most violent and "gory" moment in the movie. In fact, as far as vampires go the girl is a fairly tame one, only making a couple more kills in the entire movie. But that's because this film is not about her being a killer necessarily. It is about life being drained away in various forms, whether literally at the fangs of a vampire, or the life and culture gulped up the greedy oil derricks pumping away in several scenes of the movie, or life sucked away by time and missed opportunities, or drugs, or vanity... or whatever else there is in life that can take from you or be taken from you. The girl is listless and powerful, and you get the idea that she is lonely and bored in her existence. We actually see her toying with people in Bad City more than killing them.

The song "Dancing Girls" by Farrah has been obsessively replaying on my iPod ever since I saw this scene.

That she has a morbid sense of humor and a deep love of music are obvious. The girl dances to records in her apartment when she isn't out mimicking old men on the street to creep them out, or stealing skateboards from children. But the girl as a character by no means feels simple or silly, instead she seems all the more sad for these antics. The way actor Sheila Vand plays the girl, she feels endless and powerful like the dark and deadly blade of a knife in the dark. To see such a creature desperately trying to feel something is bleak indeed.

Don't do ecstasy and dress up as Dracula. #truth

I wasn't sure what to make of "A Girl..." during the first 30 minutes or so. There is struggle as we establish the characters, and a death by exsanguination, and honestly I almost considered turning it off because I had no idea where all of this was going. But then... Arash meets the Girl and things start to change (Actually, there are some incredible scenes just before this event that caught my interest as well, but this meeting is the major turning point). The scene in which the two meet and interact for the first time is the best in the entire movie. You see the change in the Girl almost immediately, and while you aren't sure what her intentions are at first, this first encounter between the two is so satisfying I almost teared up a little. 

The cat always manages to come between them.

I found the end of the movie shocking in its simplicity and satisfying in the way that everything in the story feels resolved yet nothing in the story truly is resolved. It's that beautiful ambiguity that makes you wonder what the future holds for the characters. This movie was INCREDIBLE. It is moody and visually beautiful. It plays with the tropes of vampire films, Iranian culture, and uses the techniques of filming in black and white to their utmost potential here. The use of a chador in the place of a traditional vampire's cape is genius, and looks beautiful in many of the shots, as it is often the darkest, blackest thing on screen, even in the darkest scenes, and you wonder if there is some double-edged commentary here, using a symbol of female modesty as the dual symbol of the vampire.

Overall, I would describe "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" as a noir fairy tale, but not in any kind of ironic or sarcastic way. The director describes it as a "vampire spaghetti western." There are genuine elements of all those kinds of storytelling and it is an incredibly well-put-together film for it.

So there you have it folks! A couple of movies I've watched recently on streaming service that really made an impression on me. I'll be back soon enough with some Geeky Goodwill Goodies, so keep your eyes peeled for that and in the meantime, Happy Hunting!

A Whole New Bin of Awesome Pt. 2

So here we are, rummaging once more in a bin of awesome stuff that I picked up this past summer. It is of course a sequel of sorts to the bin of awesome I picked up the summer before that. What does the future summer hold in store for me? Only time will tell. 

But for now, let us be content to simply explore THIS bin. Right NOW. 

Buckle up buttercup because this layer of the bin is going to be very Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-heavy. Now, the LAST bin that I bought from the same guy the year previous also included some TMNT figures, and specifically a Muckman figure... so I assume the guy who sold me this bin is some sort of wheeler-and-dealer when it comes to toys.

This gives me an extra Muckman to pass on to a friend, which is completely Hunky-dorey. The pair of Genghis Frogs is fine too for the same reason. I kept the one with the belt (none of these guys were exactly rich in accessories... or retained all of their body-parts as you will soon see) for my shelf, and set the other one aside for a rainy-day.

Dirtbag here just happened to be one of my favorite figures as a kid. I have no idea why. He's not really anything to get excited about (and this one is missing his tail, which you can't see) but he was always one of the heavies when I played action figures as a kid. Maybe because he's not quite as silly looking as some of the other figures? Dunno. Next we have Scumbug, a fan favorite that I never had as a kid. You can see though why everyone likes him... he's GNARLY. Mine is unfortunately missing all of his gear, which renders him a bit useless in a fight. And I also ended up with an extra Usagi Yojimbo, which again is fine by me.

Here we have Wyrm, Tattoo, Wingnut, and Leatherhead. Possibly some of the most tragic figures in the bunch, seeing as almost all of them (not including Tattoo) are missing body parts. Wyrm's left hand, Wingnut's wings (But hopefully not his nuts), and Leatherhead's leathery head are all M.I.A. (Luckily I have a completed Leatherhead in my collection already). Wyrm is another one of those bizarre fan favorites that I never owned as a kid. As far as I know he never made an appearance in the cartoon, but he did show up in the comic book. Tattoo showed up in the cartoon, but bizarrely as a mutated hamster, which is the worst shoe-horning of an action figure into a cartoon that I have ever heard of. Tattoo in the Archie comics was just a sumo wrestler who seeks the turtles' help in rescuing his dog. And Wingnut? He's awesome but I hate the fact that he's missing his wings. 

My three favorite TMNT action figure finds in the bunch had to be these three dudes here though. King Lionheart is from the later sets near the end of the line, and Ground Chuck was another of my absolute favorite TMNT action figures as a kid. I got him and Dirtbag around the same time. This kangaroo is Walkabout, and is the first one of his kind I had in my collection. I was later gifted one in better condition, including his sidekick mini-figure... but that is a story for another day. 

So a total of 13 TMNT action figures were included in the bin, in various states of dismemberment and disarray. This added 9 new figures to my collection, and gave me a pile of figures that I could pass on to others. But that isn't the end of the Turtle-y goodness by any means!

The TMNT Pizza Thrower was included in the bin as well! This was another one that I had never owned as a kid, but I was more than happy to add it to my shelves now! It even had three of its pizzas included in the mix.

Included were some random loose parts as well. The eyeballs there belong to the Foot Cruiser, which I almost started hyperventilating at the prospect of finding in that bin... only to be disappointed when I didn't find it. That thing is AMAZING. The plunger gun I actually (in a bizarre coincidence) already had a random handful of pieces to already. It was this orange gun piece that was included in the awesome bin though.

I already own the sewer playset, so this one is extra for me. I never owned this playset as a kid, but now as an adult I have two (this one already has a designated home, I just need to get it there...)!!!

By far though THIS guy was one of the most exciting finds in the ENTIRE BIN. While Killer Bee is yes, technically an action figure, I think of him more as a vehicle. He's missing his grapnel gun and his chainsaw, but other than that he's mostly complete, which was VERY exciting to me. 

This was one of those toys that I desperately wanted as a kid, but just never got. The colors, the expression on his face... the whole package to this guy is awesome. Seeing him in that bin in the back of that truck was just one of the factors that convinced me to pick up that bin.

So between the robots in the last post, and the TMNT figures in this one, we've now covered the first two thirds of the contents of the bin. There are a handful of items that I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to waste any time on, since they're not very exciting. But there's one more entry to go where I'll be sharing the last of the stuff I was really excited about at the very least. So stay tuned for that!

I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies soon enough... so until then, Happy Hunting!

Rock Lords! An Off-the-Wall Post About Some Off-the-Wall Toys

Hey there everybody! For a change, I'm going to actually talk about something I didn't buy while out thrifting, but instead something I picked up on eBay. Normally I stay away from eBay talk on here, but I just love this topic sooo much I couldn't resist. 

ROCK LORDS!!! 

When I was a kid I collected a ridiculous number of toylines, from Star Wars, to Masters of the Universe, to Thundercats to Real Ghostbusters, to G.I. Joe, to TMNT. I was never huge fan of Transformers toys although I did love the cartoon. I ended up with a few GoBots in my toy box because they were the cheaper alternative and (in my memory at least) easier to figure out.

An offshoot of the GoBots were the Rock Lords, which were not transforming robots (with a couple of exceptions) but instead transforming creatures made of living rock. And yes, when they transformed, they turned into the rocks pictured above. They did indeed transform into (ridiculously unconvincing) rocks. This makes them one of the saddest punchlines of all 80's toy jokes because in all actuality, the Rock Lords were incredibly cool action figures that would have made more sense if they simply didn't transform at all... but in fact the transforming action just adds to their charm.

The factions of Rock Lords don't have fancy "Autobot and Decepticon" style names, so they're just good or bad. The leader of the "good guy" Rock Lords is Boulder. Boulder here is one of my all-time favorite toys period. He is one of those toys that I managed to hang onto through various cleaning purges, and as a result he managed to team up with everyone from all of my various other toy-lines over the years. He is also one of the few Rock Lords that actually resembles a rock when in rock form. One of the things I love about this line however weird it may seem is how the transformation mechanics really forced the designers to find a balance between the seeming natural elements of the rocky outer shells and the living elements inside, while still being a functional action figure. In some cases, like Boulder, this was a perfect, successful balance. In others however...

... like Magmar here, the conversion is less successful. Magmar is the leader of the evil faction of Rock Lords. He is supposed to be a bad-ass, but unfortunately his articulation is ridiculously limited due to his design. His arms move up and down but his pointless elbows don't really do much to enhance his arms posing, and his legs actually bend backwards, like a crane's. What I do genuinely love about Magmar's design are the color highlights and the mohawk. The yellow on his chest and shoulders here actually reads a much darker orange color in person (think my flash bleached it out a bit) and the green accents are pretty badass. I didn't own Magmar as a kid, and so my evil Rock Lords were led by Stoneheart (who I do not currently own, and who is therefore not in this blog post).

This weird looking fellow is Crack-Pot. As a kid I thought he was kind of creepy, and I think I ended up treating him as a villain. He is, in fact, actually a heroic Rock Lord. He was the only other Rock Lord from my collection to survive the great toy purges alongside Boulder.

This fantastic fellow is Brimstone. He was one of my absolute favorite villains from the line as a kid. He has the peculiar distinction of still having his eyes visible when he transforms into a rock (you can't see them in the picture at the top of the post because I have him flipped over on his face) and due to his hunched appearance and color he reminds me of a crab. This was always the "crazy guy" of the bunch, all hissing and screeching while he fights.

This rugged guy is Granite, and was given to me by Brian of Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture fame. Granite was always Boulder's second in command in my mind, and a loyal friend. Nuggit (the little gold robot I also haven't tracked down yet) always played the part of the sidekick, so I wouldn't call Granite that. He's more Boulder's Samwise than his Woozy Winks. He does however remind me these days of the Sontarans from Doctor Who.

Actually most of the Rock Lords look like a combination of Doctor Who creatures cross pollinated with Gwar band members, so that's not surprising.

This last figure I currently own is Styx 'n Stones. Following the "my army of evil henchmen must include a two-headed monster" trope, here we have the double-trouble threat of Styx n' Stones. I LOVED Styx n' Stones as a kid. Two-headed villains were freaky and fun! You can see there's some color coding going on to help you differentiate between the two. Styx, on the left has pink coloring, while stones on the right gets red. This extends from their eyes and mouths right on down to their... toenail polish.

And here they all are as a group, good vs. evil, all in a group. I remember obsessively transforming these guys back and forth between their warrior and rock modes. It's too bad the line wasn't more popular because I found these to be genuinely cool to collect and play with as a kid. In addition to the ones pictured in this post, I also owned the aforementioned Nuggit and Stoneheart, as well as Marbles, Slime-Stone, and Pulver-Eyes I will probably not bother to track down ALL of the Rock Lords, but I might try checking some or all of these guys off my list one or two at a time. For now though, I'm pretty happy with the six-pack I currently possess.

What about you? Do you remember Rock Lords? Or do you have some other weird toy line rom the misty memories of your childhood that you feel like didn't get the love it should have?

Well that's it for today kiddos! I'll be back soon with some Geeky Goodwill Goodies (or something else) soon enough, so until then, Happy Hunting!

Catching up with the Goodwill Geek

You know, I never take time to just get on here and just... like... talk about stuff. I have a lot of blogging friends who focus their blogs on all aspects of their lives, not just the junk they buy in the course of a month.

I know. It's shocking.
But stay with me.

I thought I'd give it a try. But... if I'm not going to be blogging about the crap I've bought and brought home from Goodwill... or Mardens... or Dream Catcher Antiques... or some other store... I thought I'd take a post to talk about some of the stuff I've been doing, some of the stuff I watched/read/listened to in August, etc. I think I might try to make it an-end-or-maybe-the-beginning-of-every-month kind of thing from now on.

So here goes. Don't expect content any deeper than "Guess what I bought!" by any means.

I've just finished reading Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. It's a collection of essays on pop-culture, and some of them border on enlightening. It's been slow going for a number of reasons. I don't get as much time to sit down with a book as I used to for one. But for another, I have a hard time buying Klosterman's tone in many of his essays. In so many of his pieces he derides egotistical hipster high-brows for poo-pooing on certain subcultures... but it really just comes off as a hipster (who considers himself above the other hipsters) pointing at a bunch of hipsters and going: "Don't you just hate those guys?" BUT I did especially like the essays he wrote on The Sims, Pamela Anderson, Breakfast Cereal, Serial Killers, Saved By the Bell, and I especially love the parallels he draws between The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites (He postulates that they are essentially the same film).

I finally got around to watching Paolo Sorrentino's "This Must Be the Place". It stars Sean Penn as Cheyenne, an aging emo rocker who I imagine MUST be modeled after Robert Smith. I really, really like almost everything about this film. It has the road-trip element that so many of my favorite films do, and also the outsider/misfit as protagonist that covers the rest of my favorite films. I think my main complaint about the film has to be that Penn's portrayal of Cheyenne occasionally just seems impossibly unreal. He completely OWNS the character, but it's so hard to imagine this flesh-and-blood Muppet of a man existing and interacting with other human beings. It's obvious he's supposed to resemble the aforementioned Smith, but elements of another aging rocker: drug-addled, wife-dependent Ozzy Osborne bleeds in there as well. It's a coming of age journey story for men with Peter Pan syndrome, and it uses a Nazi war criminal angle to get there. So much emphasis is put on Cheyenne and his interacting with the world that the Nazi angle didn't feel especially important. It was more an ends to a means that could have been almost anything else as long as it got the ball rolling. Overall I really liked the film though. I liked the pacing and the character development, and the little vignettes that get us from point A to point B. I'll be watching it again sometime in the future for sure.

In other news, my daughter is obsessed with doing make-up FX work. She's been watching SyFy's Face-Off with her grandmother since last year sometime, and now she's been experimenting on herself. I've been doing all I can to encourage her. Above you can see a number of her experiments. I hope she sticks with it because she has a lot of natural talent and she's just starting out at 13. I could see her making a career of this. She'll randomly poke her head into my Geek Cave and look at me with one eye (because the other one is apparently torn from its socket) and ask me to take some pictures for her. She's having fun and she's being geeky and I couldn't be more proud. 

Finally, I've been listening to a handful of podcasts lately, and I wanted to highlight a handful that I've been enjoying. 

Nerd Lunch Podcast

The Nerd Lunch Podcast just recently hit its 100th episode. They're a trio of guys, CT, Pax, and Jeeg who discuss everything in the interest of "nerds" although in my opinion, I really think it's more of a "geek" show than a "nerd" one. They cover topics ranging from fast food, movies, comics, classic geek books, and "other" stuff. It's the "other" stuff where the magic happens... like deciding who the "Expendables" of other movie genres would be. Or what foods you'd choose if your replicators on the Enterprise were broken and you could only have 10 choices for the next several decades. The thing I love most about this podcast is the pseudo-professionalism balanced with fun... meaning, the guys have a great time but take their topics seriously. They don't meander off topic the way a lot of pod-casts do, and while the occasional swear can be heard, for the most part the guys treat their listeners with respect. While I have no problems with profanity when I'm disciplining my kids*, I hate foul-mouthed podcasts that just wander all over the map when what I really want to hear about is what horror movie icons are going to bite it first during a zombie apocalypse.

Stuck in the 80's Podcast

Stuck in the 80's is a podcast that I just recently discovered. Like as in I've only heard about 3 episodes. But I'm hooked already! they mainly talk about 80's music that I can see, with a healthy smattering of 80's films mixed in. These guys were a little bit older during the 80's than I was... but it's all still pretty relevant stuff to me. And like the Nerd Lunch podcast above, these guys stay on topic and have fun while taking their topics seriously.

Thrift Store Movie Score Podcast

The Thrift Store Movie Score is another podcast I discovered recently. It's... interesting. There's none of the polish you see in the above two podcasts. The hosts Justin and Christine tend to be a bit... distracted from time to time, but they have a certain kind of goofy charm. They mostly talk about goofy VHS films they've found in thrift stores. They go into great depths analyzing the plots of the films they've watched, and pull in pop-culture references from their own past experiences. Again, it's not super polished, so a lot of times it feels like the hosts have done zero or less preparations to discuss some of their films and they ramble on at times about details I can't even begin to fathom the reasoning behind... but honestly, it works. Justin and Christine are a bit younger than I am so again there's some gaps between what they're nostalgic for and what I would be. But the podcasts are fun and still manage to bring back some memories. I especially liked the podcast about the Elijah Wood film "North" and another film "Motorama" I'd never heard of.

The Cult Film Club Podcast

The Cult Film Club podcast is one I actually discovered through Shezcrafti. It is the podcast that inevitably led me to discovering the Nerd Lunch podcast. Jaime Hood teams up once a month with Shawn Robare and Paxton Holley (the same "Pax" from Nerd Lunch above) to discuss a cool cult movie. But they don't just "discuss" a movie. They discuss their favorite parts, they discuss the terrible acting. They discuss where they have seen the actors in the cast before and since. They also recast the movie with their own casting choices. In other words it's not just some dry analysis of old weird movies you've never heard of... it's FUN with weird old movies you've never heard of. It's like those bizarrely in-depth discussions you used to get into with your friends at like... 3 o'clock in the morning about the Mortal Kombat movie. 

It was nice catching up with you guys, but that's it for me tonight! I'll be back soon with more Geeky Goodwill Goodness! Until then, Happy Hunting!

*Maybe I'm kidding... maybe not.**

** I am.