The Flop House - Flop House 2024 BoCo TEASER!

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Hear a teaser of this year's bonus episode about SPAWN  (1997), as well as a rundown of some of our other bonus content from the past and planned for the future, all available to Maximum Fun members who support the show at the $5 a month or more tier.   MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hey there, it's Dan reminding you that the Flophouse simply could not happen without the support of listeners like you We provide the nonsense for your ears while you're commuting or doing laundry or performing life-saving brain surgery And you provide the funding that keeps us pumping out the show week after week It's a symbiotic relationship. So won't you be the venoms to our Eddie Brock and go to maximumfund.org? Join and become a sustaining member. As a small thank you at the $5 a month level, you'll get access to Max Fund's back catalog of bonus content, including years of Flophouse material.

Here's a free taste of just one of this year's bonus episodes. Dan, what do we do on this podcast about bad movies? This is a podcast where we talk about a bad movie. This one was 1997's Spawn, and boys at 1997 bottled, distilled and bottled up and given back to me years later in a form that I can say, I didn't like this at the time, but now I'm kind of nostalgic for it. Nostalgia truly is the sweetest balm that takes the crap of yesteryear

and turns it into the delicacy of today. Only for the people who knew it was crap originally though. Yeah, it's as if Red Bull aged like wine. How do you know it doesn't? We gotta try. Find me some 100 year old Red Bull. I said that like I was the host of Family Feud. Show me hundred year old Red Bull.

Show me Red Bull. Sorry, zero people said that. Most of them knew it's not a thing that exists. Most of them. It's exciting that we're in Los Angeles because we're about to tell you a story about the war between heaven and hell as represented through some of the worst CGI ever put forth in a movie.

Shall we talk about this movie, Spawn? Let's talk about this movie. Before we talk about the movie, Spawn, I want to talk to you about the... So who here is familiar with the comic book, Spawn? Alright. Oh, okay, not bad. Spawn, created by Todd McFarland, one of the founders of Image Comics. The story of a guy who goes to hell and comes back with a cape, so big it blots out the sun.

I mean, I kind of like, like, I feel like modern superhero design is so keyed around not having capes that he's like, what if, what if he was more cape than character capes? I feel like he kind of helped kill capes, because he used up all the material. Yeah. When they design more heroes, they're like,

I wish I could put a cape on him, but I can't. So I guess... Spawn wasn't here yesterday. Clean me out. Excuse me, do you have any red cape material? Sorry, Spawn was here. Oh, I don't have a tale to tell you. This guy with some living chains bought it all up. I kept saying, is that enough cape?

And he kept saying, more cape. Yeah, I was standing next to his table and like, say when? He just didn't. Yeah. So let's talk about it. Okay, the movie starts as every good movie does with a voiceover over CGI flames, as we are told the story of how the Lord of Hell,

Malibuja, a character who has a design that didn't look great in the comics and looks even worse in a film. All the demons in this are either super weirdly shaped, there's really only two of them. Malbolgia has a huge pot belly and a big head of red hair and a long jaw that goes out way farther in the bottom than the top. Yeah, I mean, I kind of liked the way it looked in the comic.

As silly as it was, like it works in a way there that it doesn't work here. But it did feel like Todd McFarlane was like, what's gonna be really scary is if all of the proportions are really weird and like they don't like, what if his jaw didn't match the top of his jaw? Like, he'll just make it hard to bite things. I guess. Yeah, he looks like a hyena man.

I guess here's some fun facts from special effects mastermind Steve Kostanski. He says first, the 3D model they used was originally for American Werewolf in Paris. Oh. And oh yeah, it's pretty good news you can use. And also that they originally made like a rod puppet that they just ended up scrapping and not using. But I have a picture on my phone of that so I can show it to you after the show. Wow, cool. Give it to me. I can show it to you after the show. Wow, cool, can't wait to see it. Show it individually to everyone here after the show.

Come up to Dan and I'll send it to him and then he'll show you. If you know the password, I guess, yeah. Yeah, let's airdrop it to all of you. Yeah. Just turn your security off. Oh man, I'm just gonna put some mouse. Making Malbolgia even scarier is that

they could not get his mouth to animate properly for talking, I guess. So he just opens his mouth and the Voice of Frank Welker does that dr. Claw. Yeah, dr. Claw. Yeah, yeah, Frank Well, there's a lot of voices, but he's doing the dr. Claw voice Right, he got his doctor. He's not just Mr. Claw. He's a medical doctor actually. It is an English literature. That's the thing Yeah, so here's the here's the magic you have to match that You have to imagine that inspector gadget was in a battle with the devil all that time

That's all for that teaser But I wanted to let you know that we'll be dropping at least three more bonus episodes throughout the year focusing on the flop O'griffy of schlock meister Graydon Clark whom you may remember as the director of the mutant cat film Uninvited that we covered in our first episode with Gillian Flynn first We're gonna tackle joysticks a trashy 80s sex comedy set in the most sensual location of all, a video arcade, with an iconic performance from future White Lotus star John Grease as King Vidiot. Then we'll discuss one of the two movies both released in 1990 about the Lombada.

This one, The Forbidden Dance. This is the one with future Mulholland Drive star Laura Haring as an Amazon princess who comes to America to use the power of sexy dance to save the rainforest. And then we're going to cover Star Games, the only one of the three I haven't seen, but it features a late life performance from Tony Curtis and the video box has some kind of sad clown in like a space triangle like he's trapped in the Phantom Zone. So I'm very excited to see what is up with that clown.

On top of that, no guarantees just yet, but I hear rumblings from Stuart that he wants to run another campaign of his popular Flop Tales actual RPG series, which you can only hear in our bonus episodes. And just to give you a taste of some of the bonuses we put out in previous years, there's our Bratz DVD commentary, our Catz DVD commentary, a Country Bears commentary, a live Battlefield Earth show, a couple of crossovers with the Greatest Generation podcast, we did some bad TV episodes on stuff like Small Wonder, Rubic the Amazing Cube, Studio 60.

We did a whole episode that was just radio zork. Look, I cannot list them all, but if you want access to this library, and more importantly want to keep the show you've loved and or tolerated going all these years, head to MaximumFun.org slash donate to become a member at the $5 or more level. And to all our listeners, whether you support the show financially or can't quite swing it right now, thank you so much for listening. We quite literally do it because of you.

Thanks. ["The Big Game"]