493: The Despiser

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So that guy with the trash bag on is like waving people, but then he throws the flare into the water and then the troll doll is like, follow the flare.

Gordon Gordon follows the flare and drives off the bridge into the wormhole that was marked by the flare hitting the water.

So, like, this was the plan.

Like, yep, so many moving parts for this

very heavily choreographed.

Like, they rehearsed this.

Like, Bin Bagui and Troll Doll had to rehearse this so many times to get it right.

God, awful

movie, movie, movies.

Welcome back to the Gamcast, where each week we sample another selection from Christian Cinema because making a living as a juggler was really fucking hard.

I'm your host, No Illusions, and sitting 700 miles to my immediate left is my good friend Heath Enright.

Heath, welcome back.

CGI.

We're getting into some technology.

I'm

excited.

Technically, yeah.

And unfortunately, Eli is going to be unable to join us today.

He's really going to miss this one.

But in his stead, we're happy to welcome back guest masochist extraordinaire Michael Marshall Marsh.

Great to see you again.

Great to be here.

I'm so glad I could make this movie.

This movie is incredible.

I loved every second of it.

Oh, absolutely.

Like, if you love bad movies, this is one.

Truly delightful.

Absolutely.

So tell us, Heath, what will we be breaking down today?

We watched Despiser.

It's the story of what happens when people who deserve heaven end up going to purgatory, like World War I and World War II heroes.

And of course, a movie writer whose wife doesn't understand that Despiser is a winner.

And Marsh, how bad was this movie?

Well, if you love dystopian tales of a ragtag bunch of rebels fighting for freedom and redemption against untold evil, but you also miss those sweet, sweet graphics of the PS1,

you will love this movie.

PS1 just pulled out its headphones and threw them down.

Right.

No, but this is what happens in a movie when no one in the movie is ever willing to say, no, that's not good enough.

Right?

Nothing was not good enough for this fucking film.

All right.

Is there anything you guys want to nominate this for being the best, being the worst at?

Yeah, I'm going to go with best worst review of this movie, and it's pretty positive.

This is from this movie's pretty bad website, but they put this up there on purpose.

It says, Despiser is the tightly scripted tale.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then it adds lots of machine gun battles, car crashes, fireballs, turreted castle raids, and campfire dialogue about the meaning of the apocalypse.

What movie did you?

I don't know.

It continues.

It's the Beastmaster, as envisioned by Dante.

I

loved it.

V Dante.

Three and a half stars.

V Dante.

Three and a half star review.

I don't know out of what, but I'm assuming for.

And that was by Joe Bob Briggs.

Okay.

Drive-in movie critic.

Well, if you had asked me what Joe Bob Briggs thought of this movie, I think I probably just based on the name alone could have told you he would have loved the tightly scripted fireballs and turreted castles.

Tightly scripted.

Absolutely.

We've got Joe Bob Riggs's understanding of Dante.

That's what this, yeah, that's why he's comparing it to Dante.

He's heard the word Dante at some point.

All right.

So I was piggybacking on the graphics issue that we've already discussed.

I was going to go with best worst vehicles in motion.

So

the exaggeration in PS1 graphics that Marsh made earlier is that they were PS2 graphics, right?

That's the exaggeration that he used.

Like, they're legitimately PS2 level graphics and like constantly there will be be fair yeah right there'll constantly be these cars driving down roads and the roads are uneven so the cars will like suddenly be at a dead angle and then flat and then upward angle and then flat it's amazing

yeah it's so good Oh, and I've got to go best worst self-insert.

Yeah.

Because we've got a story here of Gordon, who's an artist.

And Gordon is absolutely meant to be Cook, the writer of this.

Phil Cook, I think the name of the guy who's the writer, director, did everything on it.

Again, going to the incredible website behind this film, we hear the story of how this came to be.

And it was written originally in 1989 as the story of a struggling young painter in a new marriage trying to be taken seriously as an artist.

But he writes, as time went by, both Gordon and I, the main character Gordon, got a little older.

So now despise the story of an artist.

Coming to grips with disappointment after many years of beating his head against the canvas.

And he says, Something that anybody who hits 40 can identify with since his midlife crisis.

You have to rewrite it because he got too old and sad.

I love that the character got older with him in his

well.

I'm not sure if this movie can be left alone with its own fucking shoelaces.

So we're going to keep the break brief.

And when we come back, we'll dive into all the 1.2 gigapixel per second action of Despiser.

This movie is the Jeffrey Epstein of movies.

Hey, Heath, what's with the Ninja Turtles and the footy pajamas?

Oh, I'm reverting to childhood, Marsh.

I can't handle the stresses of adulthood anymore.

Oh, is this a politics thing?

No, good question.

It's actually a dinner thing.

Do you know that as an adult, I'm expected to come up with something to eat?

every single day, like multiple times.

I do, yeah.

Yeah, well, I'm sick of that question hanging over me all the time.

So I'm returning to a time when I could just ask my mom and then yell for like fish sticks if it was gross.

Well, Heath, if you're tired of figuring out what's for dinner every night, why don't you try HelloFresh?

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Okay, that sounds great, Marsh, but what if I don't have time to cook?

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But have you actually tried it?

I sure have.

I love the way the meals unpack in seconds and I love the way it's saved time going to the grocery store.

I had some delicious meals.

All right.

I'm sold.

How do I sign up?

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Just go to hellofresh.com/slash awful 10 FM.

All right, thanks, Marsh.

You bet.

Now, if you excuse me, it looks like Noah's having the same problem.

I saw him in there playing a video game system that came out when he was like nine.

Oh, no, he just like does that.

Ah, huh.

All right, guys, welcome to the first Writer's Room meeting for the Despiser.

All right,

right.

now guys look I know that we've all got differing visions for what this movie should be but Craig said the only way he was gonna let us use his copy of Spider-Man movie maker 2000 is if we all agreed to work together so I figured we'd just all go around the room and say what movie we would make if we could have our way right look so I'll start I want to make a science fiction movie about aliens trying to take over the world.

Well, I want to make an action movie about car chases and explosions.

Well, I want to make a Christian movie about the love and redemption of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Okay, good ideas.

I want to make a dramatic exploration of a downtrodden middle-aged artist whose family and friends long ago gave up on his amazing, amazing dream, suffocated by the parade of humiliating.

creative compromises that fuel capitalism, desperate to find one single goddamn thing in his life that he could point to and say, I accomplished that.

Just increasingly certain that thing will never come.

You want to remind me about that?

Are you okay, Todd?

And his wife would tell him that she hates him, but secretly, secretly, when she's talking to her mom,

who also does definitely hate him, she would admit at that secret point that she actually did really, really love him and really believes that he could be something more than a waste of, quote, donatable organs.

Uh-huh.

All right, so a movie about a starving artist who winds up in purgatory, but there's a bunch of aliens who took it over?

Why would there be aliens in purgatory?

I don't know, Jaden.

Oh, maybe the explosions could be nuclear.

Hey,

you're going to finish that.

It's a bottle of sleeping pills.

I know, man.

And we're back for the breakdown, and we're going to open up on a logo that might as well smash a beer can on its fucking head.

Does an eagle cause like when Colbert did this?

It was ironic, people.

Okay, yeah, we get the sound effect as well.

We get the

of the eagle, we get a tech effect on the titles.

This movie is spoiling us right from the off.

It's great, yeah,

yeah.

So, we get this then it chants USA, USA, for a while, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But then we get my best worst right away: we get a car driving fast along the roadway and coming across a church in a PS2 game.

Yeah.

Honestly, I saw that and the car is, it's, it's smashed into a church.

It's on fire.

And I was genuinely waiting for like Eli to step out of the car and be like, sorry, sorry.

You know how Pringle's crumbs get in the bottom and you want to grab it.

It's hard.

It's hard to reach one.

Ah, really sorry about that.

The burning car itself, it's because it's like silver and angular and on fire, I wrote, that's what you get for trusting a cyber truck on autopilot because it does look

like that's what happened here.

Doesn't it, though?

Yeah.

No, I said there's a car burning or at least fire adjacent.

The graphics are not great, guys.

So then these four characters get out and they're all dressed like fucking clue suspects or something.

Right.

Pretty sure one of them is running liquor for Al Caporn.

I'm pretty sure.

The way he's dressed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of them's an old-timey soldier.

One of them looks like they killed Kennedy recently.

But we find out later that it it is actually like four people from four different time periods.

Yes, no, it is a temporal village people on purpose.

Yeah.

Including someone who's Japanese, asterisk.

Yeah, right, right.

I almost went with best, worst Japanese guy.

So, but this is Kanjar's car, but where's Kanjar?

I guess Kanjar is one of their teammates, and then they find him hanging upside down from a cross as they walk in.

So he's fucked.

Kanjar's gun.

And it's great.

He's hanging upside down from this cross by a single piece of string because to cut him down, they cut the smallest piece of like the thinnest string I've ever seen.

And just means like that was very load-bearing string.

Also, like, because he goes,

one of the characters' name is Nimbus, and he turns to another character named Kumi, and he says, cut him down.

And Kumi has a giant knife way too fast.

Like, way too fast.

It's a tactical belt and a tactical knife.

So, yeah, so Nimbus loads a few glowing pink bullets into his gun.

I feel like you arrive with your gun loaded, right?

Well, that's what those were because

they've got a normal gun with normal bullets, but then he puts the gun down and it looked like he picked up a laser pen.

And I thought, oh, I really want the bad guy to be a kitten.

I want people to be like, that's where this is going.

Don't worry, I can get him.

Bad guy, bad guy.

Yeah, but so they're going to go into the church.

Charlie, who is the girl, she has a put-me-in coach moment really quickly.

The only thing I wanted to point out is throughout the early stages of these graphics, this looks exactly like the British kids' TV program Nightmare.

And it's really hard because most of the listeners will not understand that, but it's really off-putting because it looks exactly like an episode of Nightmare from like the 80s, 90s.

If anybody wants to know what traumatized every British child growing up, you should look at Nightmare on YouTube.

And I do want to know that.

That is a nightmare.

K-nightmare.

Yeah.

It's K-Nightmare.

Yeah, it's amazing.

But yeah, it looks exactly like this.

Like the Kano Rogan experience.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly like that.

Yeah.

Is that the new show that you're on with Cecil?

It is the new show with Cecil.

It's fun.

It's interesting.

We should

really good.

So, okay.

So Nimbus goes into the church where he finds the bad guy.

Now, I'm going to just save you a lot of the headache that I have.

The second to the main bad guy in this movie switches bodies.

We don't learn that until way later.

So, like, I spent so much time wondering who the fuck this character was, right?

But this is the bad guy.

And now they know that, like, big face scars are cool things to give your bad guy.

So they decided to give one to their bad guy, but they gave him just a vertical cut across his forehead that looks like a kind of like a frown.

It's

so silly.

Or a lobotomy scar.

It looks like he's been recently lobotomized.

Right.

So, yeah, but so Nimbus and the bad guy, this is the shadow man.

They have a short tete-a-tete, and then they shoot at each other quite a bit.

Yeah, I enjoyed that because they didn't know like when it was, it was just like, all right, that was enough speeches, right?

Gunfight?

Gunfight.

All right, cool.

Yeah,

right, right.

So, yeah, so, and genuinely, there is no way to describe what Nimbus is doing here without using the words QPQ, right?

Like, he's just starting, he's got to turn and shoot these other bad guys that are running at him.

He's having a blast.

Yeah.

What's happening here is the actor is trying to sound like Samuel L.

Jackson

as fast as he can.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's Samuel L.

Jackson.

And the baddies aren't just running at him because at one point, one of the baddies throws himself through the window of the church, like several stories open.

Yes.

And then just kind of like lands on the ground in front of him

for so long, just out of nowhere.

What's their plan?

Two main people are fighting and then just like smash.

And someone flies into frame, hits nothing, nothing, does nothing, smashes into the ground, completely useless.

Guys, this seemed really cool in my head.

I had a light, I had a whole thing.

I'm really sorry, boss.

I thought I was going to get him.

I missed by a lot.

What, what did he hope was going to happen?

Because, like, church windows are already like 20 feet off the ground or something.

So, at best, he had a 20-foot drop into the fight.

He's just like, uh,

so yeah, so he shoots him with the pink glowy bullet eventually, and he lightning explodes, right?

There's a chase scene in here that I'm leaving out.

And he does a speech from Joshua 23 instead of Ezekiel.

It's so good.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I didn't even catch that.

But yeah, like Nimbus will speak almost exclusively in Bible quotes, right?

Yeah.

Throughout the, well, I'm sorry, in the action sequences, his shit talk will be Bible quotes, like Bible man, but he doesn't use them otherwise.

Also, he says he does give a speech from Joshua 23, but it's just Joshua 23.

Like, there's a bit missing there.

Like, you've got the chapter, but not the verse.

so it's like i don't know if i've never heard a bible like verse reference with just the chapter it's in yeah

also it went too long so like he shot the guy and the guy's dead and he's like that was that was joshua 23.

all right

interesting but he's not dead it turns out he's not dead no well it's sort of not dead yeah so okay But then we're going to cut to our, we're outside of this weird universe that we've been in, the CGI universe that we've been in up to this moment.

So we're going to cut now into the real world where Gordon, our main character, is being woken up by his boss in front of his computer.

Yeah, in front of his 1995 copy of Photoshop is what he's doing.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

He was on 1995 Photoshop making a magazine ad, apparently, for a power drill called the Atlas, but there's a photo of David, like Michelangelo's David, not Atlas, holding the drill.

I was like, really?

You didn't?

It's not very...

You couldn't get Atlas?

And there's statues of Atlas.

Did you not have the rights to?

Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was a drill or a sander or like a Hitachi magic wand.

It was definitely some sort of power implement in front of this like naked statue.

There's a lot of homo eroticism in there.

Some sort of tool that holds a glowing pink something.

Yeah, I thought it looked like that, too.

But like, we'll see other examples of his work in a moment.

And they all seem to be like imagery of classically naked men.

And I thought this was like foreshadowing.

It isn't.

This is what they wanted him to be working on.

I guess.

I wanted his boss to be like, Gordon, can we have a quick word?

I mean, we're doing drills here, mate.

They don't always have to be statues with dicks.

You can advertise drills with other things.

Trying to make it artistic.

Whatever.

So two notes on this scene.

First is that...

Somehow, guy getting woke up at his computer looks every bit as unrealistic as shooting a demon with lightning bullets just did.

I have no idea how they manage that.

But secondly, this is a pretty boilerplate scene, right?

Like, this is a pretty basic standard beginning of the movie.

We just need this boss to be an asshole and this guy to quit or get fired, right?

Yeah.

To sort of like teach us, to show us that, you know, this guy's down on his luck.

Everything's going wrong for him.

And they managed to fail so spectacularly on thisly because, like, the idea has to be like for this to work, the guy has to just be doing his job, and the guy, the boss has to be being a real dick, and then he has to get like emotional about it or get frustrated and quit.

But like,

he caught him sleeping on the job.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

And also we find out he hasn't saved his work at any point and he loses all of his work with the click of a button.

So he's like incompetent in multiple different directions, the hero of this movie.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

But it happens to all of us once we get to 40.

Like once you get to 40, this is very relatable, actually.

These are perfectly reasonable concerns.

Yeah.

The boss is a dick.

Yeah.

Once I hit 40, I started putting in statues with penises into all my work.

What are you going to do?

I'm 40.

Come on.

Yep.

But Gordon's fired.

No, he quits.

We have that whole moment.

And he stands up like he's going to punch his boss and he's threatening his boss with his fists.

But I just, it's a very small moment.

But when he's doing a fist, he's doing specifically the got your nose pulls with his hand.

So I'm just going to watch it what he's trying to sort of persuade his boss with.

He also ends by yelling, you narrow-minded, uncreative butt-plug.

And that's the end of the scene.

It is, yeah.

He was pretty proud of that one.

So then we cut to Gordon.

He's driving home all angrily.

He gets home and damn it if his wife's not moving out.

Her U-Haul is mostly filled.

I got to mention, though, on the way home, we get him being like,

butt plug.

Yep.

Is what I said earlier.

Yep.

I said to myself while driving.

I said to myself in a scene that I wrote to myself about the thing that I just wrote.

Yeah, it's fucking incredible.

Yeah.

I'm a good script writer, I thought to myself.

Tightly scripted.

So he gets home and he's like, Maggie, my wife, why are you moving out?

And she hands him the note that says they're going to be evicted like tomorrow.

Yeah, he's not been paying the rent for a significant amount of time.

And again, he's meant to be the like the sympathetic hero here.

Like, oh, it could happen to any one of us.

How have you been ignoring the fact that you haven't been paying the rent and then withholding that from your wife?

It's yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Well, and then the amazing bit is, is he he looks at the letter that says, you know, you have to be out by the 15th and he goes, oh, they said they'd give us another week.

And I'm like, yeah, that would have helped.

You just quit your fucking job.

Why is eviction in movies always like a fucking pumpkin at midnight?

Like every time.

It's not ever like that.

So, yeah, so Maggie's going to live with her mom, but Gordon's not invited.

And then, so at this point, he has to also tell her that he got fired.

And so they have a fight about how she's sick of being poor, but he's an artist, damn it.

But he's not an artist because we've seen his work, and it's fucking terrible.

He doesn't have an eye for it at all.

This guy is useless.

Also, he looks disconcertingly like the disgraced sports presenter, Richard Keyes.

He looks exactly like that.

And I couldn't take my eyes off that.

Throughout the rest of the film in my head, he's Richard Keyes.

He's like presenting 1997 Premier League highlights, is what's going on in my head.

Marsh gave us a photo of that guy in the notes, and I just thought it was a screenshot, and I didn't think about it any further.

Yep, sure as hell did.

So, yeah, it's by the way, speaking of what a terrible fucking artist he is, as they're having this conversation, there's a painting behind him that they very clearly are trying to show you.

Look at what a great painter he is.

This is the most ridiculous gas station-ass bathroom-ass painting that you can imagine.

Sorry, it's just crappy.

It's just a sculpture of Thomas Kincaid with his dick out, really, yeah.

So, okay, so that late that night, they finished packing the U-Haul, and there's just this great moment.

I see we all have this in our goddamn notes where the two guys that are helping Maggie pack the U-Haul, they do this sort of brushing their hands off, we're done motion.

Yeah, it's the job done, hands slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, is what they're doing to themselves.

Yeah, it's but it's exactly in unison.

It's pretty right.

Very clearly, the director says, No, no, guys, do like this, like you're done, and they just do it exactly three times, both in unison.

Slap, slap, slap.

that'll hold we said together

so gordon and maggie have their goodbyes he says i'll call you tomorrow she's like or don't or don't would be good and then she's just gone yeah yeah out of your life yeah and norm's like so beer and he's like yeah beer so okay so now we've got he's driving home or somewhere or something but he's tired right Well, is he tired?

I think he's, I thought he was meant to be like absolutely wasted because it's like Norm says to him, beer.

And then the next thing we see is him like behind the wheel eyes half closed like incomprehensible i thought he's like completely hammered by this point oh he's 100 drunk driving and very depressed because his wife just left him yeah the hero of this movie almost kills some kids while drunk driving and he's like oh yeah he's a sympathetic again when you hit 40 it happens it's perfectly understandable the situation is very relatable actually well yeah so that's the thing is happens when you're in your 20s and 30s too everybody deals with that yeah but so here's the thing though is that like, honestly, that changes how sympathetic the character is so much that I erased it from my mind, right?

The idea that he's drunk because he's just a completely, he just belongs in hell now after this or whatever.

So, yeah, so he's driving along drunk, tired, whatever, and there's a couple of kids playing in the road.

They jump out in front of him.

He swerves and misses him and he crashes.

When he crashes, I freeze framed it just before he crashes it because I wanted to check out these properly sweet graphics, these 1995 Photoshop graphics.

The kids, okay, that's bad graphics.

The second before he crashes, there's some sort of weird, crucified, but sitting-down brown man on screen.

I've, did you guys notice this?

I did not.

I thought I went crazy, and I had to go back several times so I can catch the exact moment I could see it.

Yeah, I see it in your notes.

I didn't notice it in real time, but uh, yeah, I was there.

I honestly, given how bad the graphics are, I'm going to assume that was an accident, right?

Like, the guy was like, oh, fuck, I didn't mean to put the ad, nobody will notice.

Sprad pinstick.

Yeah, that's meant to be an ad for a power, power drill that I've actually.

actually.

Yeah, but so he stumbles out of his crashed car directly into a FMV game from 1993,

right?

Also, he tries to get out of his car and he can't because the camera's in the way.

He sort of pushes the door and it won't move, and the camera has to take a step back to let him out.

Oh, that's amazing.

And their ability to create a dreamlike world within their budget is so shitty that they actually have a VO of Gordon going, why is everything so dreamlike here?

These might look like bad graphics, but this is where I am, really, for real.

Yeah.

It's so weird because, yeah, he like swerves into, I don't know, a badly CGI'd wormhole, and then he pops out and he's in a partially still photo of a mob of apparently vampire hunters who are.

perhaps launching an ICBM.

And I was like, oh, I've had a stroke.

No, no, no, no.

That's what's what's happening in the movie.

No, and so like all of these guys that are just dressed as fry guys

are running around below him or whatever.

And the main bad guy, who is now in a different body, is giving a monologue to Gordon about how he's in purgatory now and he'll be part of the team of fry guys.

Yeah, yeah.

And the thing is, he's in purgatory because the bad guy calls him a self-sacrificer, but that's not our experience of him so far.

Because what we've seen is he's losing his job because he's falling asleep at work.

He's lying to his wife about how much debt they're in.

And then he's drunk driving his way into barely missing killing some kids.

And that is purgatory-level behavior.

That is how you get, not hell, that is purgatory.

That's medium.

It's good to know.

And it's wild when we figure out who else gets sent to purgatory and why.

Like the standards that this universe is setting are incredible.

He did some bad stuff, but if you're a pretty fucking great painter, you're

really good stuff.

So, yeah, so they attack him.

He picks up a stick and whips a little ass with it.

But just then, Nimbus and the gang show up in a dodge neon

to save him, right?

They come with me if you want to live him, right?

Yeah, they've got a like a blue model of a car, and it does like a sweet skid with the incredible graphics.

And I looked it up at that point, and this film came out in the same year as the final Lord of the Rings film.

So, in terms of what the graphic standards could have been,

what technology was out there.

Yeah.

The budget for this was 35 grand of his own money because he spent like a decade trying to get it financed and then was like, fuck it.

I'm going to do it myself.

That's amazing.

And there's an incredible moment.

I don't know if you guys watch this with the subtitles on.

I had the subtitles on the captions on throughout.

As the blue car filled with the heroes drives away, the bad guy, the subtitles, have him shouting, stand and fight, you curds.

And I was like, whoa, curds?

Really?

Like, not, are you sure it wasn't turds or curs or even like cowards, depending on the American accent?

But no, the subtitles went, I'm sure he's making an ethnic slur.

I'm sure it's a race thing for him.

Specific political hot tick.

So they drive away.

There was an ICBM in the background of this.

They blow that up so that there could be a giant explosion behind them as they drive away.

Right?

Hey, question.

If a bullet hits an ICBM, a nuclear explosion happens.

Nuclear explosion.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Obviously, if anything at all hits an ICBM, nuclear explosion.

They're just hair-trigger type stuff.

It's like ACME ICBM.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's actually how they're meant to be detonated.

You've got to sort of send the missile and then you've got to like eyeball it and just shoot it at the right time to blow it up.

So, okay, so they're driving away.

Now, the good guy team has Gordon, and we're going to meet the team.

This is where we're first going to be introduced to the incredibly white guy, Fumi Tamasawa.

Yeah, I had to Google this because throughout this guy,

as you say, Fumi Tamasawa is played by Frank Smith.

And I was like, oh, you're really doing the accent, are you, Frank?

Oh, you can't.

And I had lots of notes about him not being Japanese.

And there was so many that I thought, I've got to look this up.

So according to the film's website, Frank was, first of all, a cop in real life and a sales executive for Biolabs.

Oh, good to know.

And he is of Japanese descent and has a love of Kurosawa films, which made him apparently the perfect choice for the role of the stoic, noble, kamikaze pilot Fumi.

Oh my.

So

he is at least some part Japanese, but he is also Frank Smith, the former class.

At the very top of the landing page, he's actually Japanese American.

So just so you know, first thing you should do.

So it's fine, actually.

Yeah, he's Japanese, much in the way that every redneck I know is 116th Cherokee or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, but then doing the accent, Noah.

Yes, that's the method.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Ultimately, he can identify with whatever part of his family he wants, but the accent is bullshit.

Really glad that Kanjar got killed early and we don't have to have that character.

Yeah.

Whatever that accent might have been.

But like on Fumi, they really stress how Japanese he is to the point where Nimbus is throwing around slurs and like racial stereotypes.

At one point, he says, oh, that's just Fumi's rice-headed version of things.

Oh, whoa.

Oh, is that what he actually said?

Yeah, yeah.

Again, it's captioned.

It's on the subtitles.

I thought, this is not long after that line about Kurds.

I thought, where is this film going to take us?

Right.

It levels out it doesn't go as far as it could but yeah jesus well it's gonna take us to purgatory for the horrible racial stuff well right but so so and right after that of course right after he says that he turns to gordon he goes you're not one atheist are you and i'm like ooh do you have a slur for that

he doesn't know gordon's catholic and he explains that they're in purgatory and gordon's like wow you know there hasn't been an action sequence in almost three minutes and so then there's a sudden car chase and they have to drive away from the bad guys we get another vo that's like this place doesn't look real at all yeah anyway

actually we're in a world of bad cgi spider-man movie maker 2000 assholes premium so i i've never used so many quotes in my life before as i did in this sentence where i wrote they're dodging explosions as they drive their cars down the road.

Like literally, like so often in this movie, it's just like they CGI'd something.

You're just like, it's just a car driving down a road, man.

You had a car and a road at your disposal at some point.

It's like every noun in this film has to be in scarecords because it's not really there.

Like, you can have some nouns sometimes.

So, yeah, so, but the shadow man is chasing them in his car now.

His driver gets killed, so he has to dive-roll out.

A lot of dive rolls in this movie.

Okay, it was fun watching a like demon leader guy dive roll out of the car and then be like, oh, my fucking knee.

Dog hurts so bad.

I'm going to throw up.

I'm going to throw up.

I'm a demon.

And they go back to it.

We get to see it.

They do.

Yeah, they do.

Yeah.

So, and then that ends, and they're just like, oh, so should we pick up our conversation we were having earlier?

He's like, yeah, yeah, pick up the conversation where we were.

Right.

Yeah, sure.

So they drive on.

We learn that Nimbus died in World War I.

We learn that there's the despiser is the main bad guy who we haven't met yet, and the other bad guy is the shadow man.

Yeah, there's a great when we learn when Nimbus is from the dialogue.

I mean, this is tightly scripted, remember, very tightly scripted, impressive level of dialogue.

He says, and I fought in 1913.

1913,

1913.

And this one's about to come.

1913.

1913.

So, okay.

So sometime later, Gordon wakes up in the back of their car.

They're in a garage camping out, right?

This is where we first realized that the girl, Charlie, had been going for an Australian accent that whole time, right?

Did we realize that?

Because I think there was a line earlier where she's Australian, and everything after this feels like she's meant to be like somewhere between Dick Van Dyke and Mary Poppins.

Like, she's just taken the entire pattern of Mary Poppins and smooshed it together.

At one point, her line is, I ain't no gent call.

And I think that's meant to be cockney.

Okay.

All right.

So, see, I had her as Brooklyn gangster from the 20s up until this point in Australian from this point on.

Oh, I had her as very accurate British accent throughout.

Oh, okay.

Basically, me.

Yeah, completely.

Yeah, really.

She talks at one point about membo jambo.

I have no idea where that was coming from.

That's you.

That's you.

You do say that.

I don't understand.

I say that all the time.

She yelled bloody scroats at one one point.

Is that a British or Australian thing?

I think it's a bit of both.

It can be a cockney thing.

It's definitely an Australian thing.

I think there's times when cockney and Australian overlaps, and she somehow manages to miss both of those.

That's right.

At no point does she overlap on that.

Swerves out of the way of the Venn diagram altogether.

Yeah.

Well, so this is also, so they're all sitting around having cans of beans, which they're going to do quite a bit in this film.

They're sitting around having each a can of beans, and they explained to him that what's going on here is that the Tunguska event, and I'm like, oh, I'm listening, was an aliens crashing into the earth in Russia.

And when that happened, they died.

And God couldn't figure out where to put them

between heaven and hell.

So he put them in purgatory.

And damn it, if they didn't just take purgatory over.

The timeline on that is weird, though.

Because it's like, yeah.

80 years ago, the aliens crashed, but we know that Nimbus has been there since the First World War, which is more than 80 years ago.

Like, what was he doing in Purgatory before then?

Because to try and get out of Purgatory, they need to sort of win this battle.

Right, right.

This battle wasn't there when he got there.

So was he just like driving around

in some sweet cars going over some unconvincing CGI bridges waiting for a battle to arrive?

I guess.

Was the shadowmen already there?

I have no idea.

So, like, God made purgatory and then realized, like, I don't, I don't like the vibes in purgatory.

I'm going to try to like bump up the average.

I'll send send a few war heroes to like

do some good stuff there.

Also,

all the bad guys, the ragmen, I think they get called.

Someone says, oh, those are soulless beings.

So, well, why don't they in purgatory?

If they haven't got souls, how are they in purgatory?

Right, but as they're explaining this, somebody's like, oh, there hasn't been an action sequence in like three minutes, has there?

So they hear a noise and Gordon and Jake have to go check it out.

Now, Jake, we haven't mentioned yet, but he's a private dick from 1923 or some shit.

Oh, is he?

I thought he was a cowboy to begin with, but that might have just been the tins of beans.

I might have been confused about the tins of beans over a campfire.

He's got boots on.

I thought he was a cowboy.

So he does a southern accent selectively, so I guess I could see how you got that.

Yeah.

But they go to check out the noise and a little monster runs by.

And they're like, oh, it must be one of the little aliens that was on that spaceship that crashed into purgatory.

Yeah, because I think at one point he's like, what is it?

It's like, well, the answer is whatever animation you could get for about $8.

That's what it is.

But like, is Jake meant to have never seen one of these before?

Because he's surprised as well.

Yes.

But he's been here for ages.

He's been here since whatever time he died, which is a significant portion of time ago.

Has he just got lucky and never encountered one of the aliens that's overrunning purgatory?

I guess, yeah.

Yeah.

It appears that way.

So

they argue over who's going to squish it and it runs off.

So they have to chase it deeper into this weird basement they're in.

Right.

So to be clear, we see like a little green crab monster in like, you know, 8-bit.

And the idea is that like this alien was medium on its faith in Christ and had to go to purgatory along with the war heroes.

I feel like what's supposed to have happened here, I don't know, because I don't think that the writer was entirely clear on this, but I feel like what's supposed to happen is that the spaceship crashed into purgatory.

Oh, wow.

Oh, the physical place.

Yes.

That makes more sense than what I had in mind.

And all the little aliens spilled out.

I don't know

because they're very unclear on that.

Later,

it seems that the aliens died and were sent to purgatory.

I don't, yeah, because I'm not sure.

I was confused about this because this, there was a bigger, and we'll find it, we'll follow this little alien to a bigger alien.

So I thought, well, this must be like a baby alien.

So I was confused as to why it's in purgatory and not limbo because it's an unbaptized baby.

It should be in Limbo.

Okay, they

from a liturgical point of view.

Physically,

The theology of this is all over the map, actually.

Purgatory has like a place you can go to if you have alien technology that flies through galaxies.

Okay.

I think.

Yeah.

So maybe.

God probably fired the like director of aviation or whatever and replaced him.

Yeah.

So, but eventually the little alien takes them to where a big alien is.

They have to fight the big alien and they blow it up with a grenade.

Lots of grenades in purgatory, as it turns out.

Unfortunately, the fucking mushroom cloud from this grenade alerts the shadow man to their location.

It's such a big explosion, but like they are within throwing a grenade's distance of the grenade when an explosion that large goes off, but they're apparently fine.

They're definitely fine.

Yes, very selective grenades in this movie.

We'll see that a couple of different times.

But ultimately, so they run outside.

They can see the shadow man coming.

Gordon steps out in the street to stop him and then

disappears.

I love that the like demon leader guy, Shadow Man, is he's driving like a Ford Taurus.

Yeah, yeah, Civic, maybe.

So, yeah, so, but then Gordon disappears, and then he wakes up next to his wrecked car.

His friend Norm is like reviving him.

Oh, God.

And I really wanted this movie to be him like switching between reality and purgatory every time he dies.

So he just like binary sort of switches on and off.

Yes.

It doesn't do that.

That would have been great.

I thought something interesting was getting set up here with that, with like the way you would jump between these.

Apparently you can just like physically crash into them.

Yeah, right, right, yeah.

So yeah, so, and they have this stupid movie moment where like, you know, he's just been in this terrible accident and his friend's like, I got to take you to the hospital.

He goes, no, no, I'm fine.

No, you're not.

Nobody outside of a movie character and a wanted murderer would be like, I don't need to go to a hospital in this particular moment.

No, I'm fine.

And it's like he's not fine because very clearly, he's been thrown from the car in the crash.

And we know that because he's got a very slightly bloodied nose.

Like

not another scratch on it, but his nose is very slightly bloody.

So, you know, he's really, really struggling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

His car is fully exploded, but yeah.

There's also one little moment where he looks up after this crash.

He's supposed to be like back in real life.

And he looks up and he sees like an evil guy wearing a gothic hazmat suit in the middle of the highway.

I had him as dressed as a baked potato.

Yes.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like a gothic baked potato?

Yeah.

I just had him as a camp staring man because he's looking incredibly like his persona is very camp as he's doing it.

Yeah.

Okay.

And that guy in the weird suit is just like, hey,

okay, bye.

Like, and that's it.

That's, and that's it.

That's a weird assignment from the despiser.

I'm not clear on like what would, what would that accomplish, but.

Yeah.

But so, so, okay, so he goes back to Norm's place, down some aspirin with some beer.

It's a plot device.

It's to keep the audience up to date.

Tightly scripted.

You don't know how to do it tightly scripted.

That's what your problem is.

You're not scripting tightly enough.

When he gets to Norm's house, so like Norm doesn't take him to hospital.

That would be the responsible thing to do.

So instead, he just looks after him the normal way, which is to give him an entire overdose amount of painkillers and some booze.

And I thought,

feels like that's a hint because he's not taking you to the hospital, but he is giving you everything you need to finish the job you were doing, guys.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

So, yeah, so he falls asleep.

We zoom back and we go back to purgatory, and this is where we see the shadow man limping up to the despiser to tell him he failed,

right?

Now, the despiser, we haven't seen this bad guy yet.

We're only going to see him in silhouette for right now, but he's got four arms and like five tails or whatever.

And so we're going to see him, and we're also going to learn at this point that the shadow man transfers his consciousness from one human body to another as he dies right that that question finally gets solved yeah i like that they're trying to have this big talk to each other about you know like demon strategy and despiser again yeah he has like a bunch of extra arms and legs because he's like a bug alien monster and we're just seeing his silhouette and he's clearly just like doing like a kata with the weird sword-shaped stuff on the back of all his tails.

And I wanted the shadow man to be like, Hey, hey, can you just don't do the kata for a second?

It's so distracting what you're doing with your tails there.

You're supposed to be flailing his arms and tentacles in the air the entire time.

I had the same thing, like, why is he doing like, I don't do that with my arms when I'm told it would be amazing if I did, but I do.

Do you want a fidget spinner maybe?

Here, grab this.

Grab this in any of any of those hands with tails.

It's cool.

It's very rare that you think to yourself, let me make sure everyone can see how many arms I have in this conversation.

So, okay, well, I can't help but feel we're failing in our effort to communicate just how bad this movie is.

So we're going to take a quick break and re-strategize, but we'll be back in a minute with even more of The Despiser.

Hey, Noah, be honest.

Does this t-shirt make me look cut, swollen, yoked?

It does not, no.

Man, the ad promised it was going to transform my dad, bod.

Was it one of those ads from a social media company started at a university near Boston?

Yeah.

yeah, it was.

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Oh, what's

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Yeah, I got some of the activewear from Quince, and it's great for my workouts.

Yeah, Yeah, those workouts are probably better than mesomorphic t-shirt technology.

Yeah, because those are nonsense words.

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Got it.

Thanks, Noah.

No problem.

So, just for the record, t-shirts can't morph your body with technology.

Yeah.

You should leave a bad review about that very obvious lie on the aforementioned social media platform.

Oh, they don't allow fact-checking.

Right.

Yeah, got it.

Well, hey there, Gordon.

I'm Charlie, and I'm from Australia.

Welcome to the team.

Uh, thanks.

And I'm Jake from Texas.

Glad to have have you on board.

Pleasure to meet you.

Hi.

And yeah, I'm Fumi Tomasawa from Japan.

It's an honor.

Oh, weird that you don't have an accent.

Nope, nope.

Not doing the accent.

We did the accents.

The character was played by a guy named Frank Smith.

I'm doing Frank Smith's accent accurately.

Frank Smith did the accent.

Frank Smith looked a little Hispanic, didn't he?

I'm just going to talk normal.

Fine, fine.

Hey, hey,

I have a question.

Okay, is it about my accent?

No, no, it's about the cars, actually.

Oh, okay.

What'd you want to know?

How do we have cars in purgatory?

Do what now?

I mean,

does Nissan deliver here, or is there a Nissan factory in Purgatory?

All Nissans are built in Purgatory, actually.

Okay, but how do we fill them up?

Are there gas stations in purgatory?

Yeah, but the

pump is always out of order.

Always got to go inside.

All right, what about the guns?

Does purgatory have armories?

No, my gun arrived in the same way that we did, actually.

Okay, what did your gun do to wind up in purgatory?

I'm not really sure.

It used to belong to some kid in Pennsylvania.

Watch out when you use it, though.

It pulls pulls a little to the left.

Just a little.

And we're back for more of this shit.

We're going to rejoin the action with Gordon waking up at Norm's place the next day.

Yeah.

And he has some immediate leftover Chinese and some beast light from the fridge.

I was like, Breakfast and Champions.

This is traumatic.

I've done that so many times.

Well, when you get over 40, you know, it's very relatable.

It's very relatable.

My entire college experience and 20s.

Happens to us all.

Also 40s.

I'm fairly sure, given that he's at his friend's house and this is the normal stuff that his friend's got going on, I think his friend's life is more of a purgatory than

so he calls Maggie on the phone I had in 1992,

but he hangs.

He hangs up when she answers, I guess.

For some reason, we see that happening on her side from the Fawn's point of view.

We get Fawn Cam, like Fawn POV, which is such a weird choice

so and then we we watch this scene where he's looking over his old sketches of her but they couldn't afford to get a real sketch artist to sketch her so what they've done is that they've cgi'd in sketches of her yeah right they put pictures of her through a sketch filter but but like it's video not still like he well right yeah he drew maggie into the video for take on me apparently that's like the level of graphics were looking at

a Danish guy in a leather jacket rescues here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

I'm surprised, Noah, that you don't have in your nodes the thing that I had in my nodes here, which is throughout this scene, something has been ticking loudly for six fucking minutes.

Fucking God.

And worse than that, every time we get a different camera angle, the ticks aren't synced.

So we get a different tick schedule every time we change.

Yeah, there would be a fucking syncopation or something every time you pain.

Oh, his rotary rotary phone was stuck and it was just trying to get back.

Just very slowly ticking back, yeah.

Oh, it was the loudest clock imaginable.

Yeah,

so, but as he's looking over his old sketches, do you think he read ticking clock in like Sid Fields and was like,

you know what?

That sounds good.

Oh, I didn't have one of those yet.

Do you think that's why it's in a car?

Because it's the hero's journey.

That's why it's a car and a border.

So, okay, so that I really want a three-beat.

I'm so sorry that I don't have a three-beat.

I don't have any of the trolls.

So as he's looking over these sketches, his nose starts bleeding, and then he looks at this.

He's got a pencil that's got the little troll on the end of it.

And the troll starts going, you're going to die, you're going to die, which is the only thing that they bothered to animate this troll saying.

So they use it 408 times in the next two scenes.

Okay, this guy, Philip whatever, had some serious, aggressive, negative experiences with troll dolls in the 90s, apparently.

But again, this is totally unrealistic.

They do have this troll doll saying, you're going to die over and over again.

And that's completely unrealistic because my sister had one of those in the 90s.

And they're programmed with three different phrases that repeat on a loop.

So it should be you're going to die, then another phrase, another phrase, then back to you're going to die.

Exactly.

So this movie makes no sense.

It's complete bullshit.

So he runs out of the house.

He's walking down this the street and he's stopped by a homeless guy wearing a trash bag like homeless guys do right but apparently this is like a demon that's invading from purgatory or something right to send him a message yeah and the demon guy's like you got to come back to purgatory and he's like no and he just keeps walking and then the demon's like all right i'm gonna teleport up a block come back to purgatory please or we'll kill maggie I don't know.

Can we do that?

Maybe.

Yeah.

So now what we reveal here is that the Despiser now desperately wants to get his hands on Gordon because Gordon managed to get out of purgatory.

And that's what the Despiser wants, right?

So they're now threatening Maggie.

They're telling him that they're going to kill Maggie if he won't come back to purgatory and show them how he did it.

Yeah.

So, okay, so we cut to mom's place.

Mom apparently lives in Grand Theft Auto 3.

Yeah, this is where we learned that this movie didn't even have, look at that tall building levels of money.

We have to animate a tall building.

And like an office block, that she lives on the very top floor of what looks like an office block.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, she lives in the penthouse of a WeWork, for sure.

Right, yeah.

So we get a few moments of mom and Maggie chatting about what a piece of shit Gordon is.

And you could just, you can just tell that the writer is imagining his ex-wife's words into this conversation or something, right?

Because the mother-in-law is like, he's a piece of shit.

He'll never amount to anything and you should divorce him.

And Maggie's like, I don't know.

I think he's actually a pretty good guy.

And if it wasn't for you always sort of imposing your will onto me, I think our marriage would have worked out just fine.

Yeah, actually, you're right, Maggie.

Podcasting is a great idea.

I now agree.

Economically sound decision.

Yep.

So, yeah, so she, but after the conversation, she sneaks away to call him and she notices a guy outside the window of mom's penthouse apartment, like standing on the ledge.

Yeah, who seems to be floating initially, although he is standing on the ledge.

I love this ledge, right?

Because we do get to like when we cut to it, we'll see, like, from the ground and then back up again.

So the CGI is like, huh, you know, it really is quite high.

Don't worry about it.

It's quite high.

Then we see the ledge.

The ledge is like an entire street wide.

You can set up a tent on that ledge and never worry about falling off.

The jeopardy is just gone immediately.

Yeah.

Right.

So Maggie sticks her head out the window and she sees the guy.

This is Jeff is the jumper, right?

Okay.

And she's like, hey, bud, you want,

you can jump?

And he's like, yeah, I think I'm going to jump.

She's like, oh, do you want some tea?

And it turns into

like a waiter's scenario where she's like, tea?

No?

Coffee?

No.

He's like,

I'll just have a water right now.

Yeah.

And she gets some a water.

And then he's like, tap water, not sparkling.

You don't need to open a bottle.

Just the tap water.

I don't have to pay for it.

I know where the comm is here.

You get the expensive water and then it comes on the bill and I didn't want it.

Yeah, right.

Do you have a creme brulee by any chance?

No.

And so she goes, she gets him a water and she's like, hey, I'm going to come out on the ledge with you now.

And we're all like, why, though?

Why would you do that?

You can talk to him perfectly fine without endangering your own life here, Maggie.

And he explains that he's out on the ledge because he cost his bank that he works for billions of dollars.

He got debanked like Mark Andreessen's real friend

from Canada.

But I love this moment.

And I know the listeners are like, what the fuck is going on?

Jeff's a demon, and it's all going to be revealed in a second.

But the conversation is so bat shit that we have to go into it, right?

Because he's like, I cost billions of dollars to my bank, and I'm about to kill myself.

She's like, yeah, no, I got some shit going on too.

My husband, total piece of shit.

I just got kicked out of my house.

He's like, oh, really?

Let's talk about you then now.

Well, she also, he says the name of the bank.

It's Washington Central Bank.

And she's like, oh, I've got money in that bank as well.

So I thought the demon was going to try and persuade her to kill herself, like rather than anything else.

It's like slowly kind of lure out on the ledge, give her the reasons to jump.

And when that fails, we get one of my favorite moments, which is surprise crow attack to knock the water out of her hand.

Yeah, no, the crow's going to knock her off a building.

Oh, no, it's fine.

No, actually, the crow was just there to add suspense.

But just then, Gordon rushes in.

Apparently, he has keys to mom's apartment.

He rushes in and he realizes that it's the demon pretending to be this suicidal guy.

And the demon's like, ha, got her, grabs her arm and jumps off the building.

Now, if, listener, if you would like to watch this movie, it is currently, I believe, it's on sale on Amazon for $0.00 on sale from its usual cost of $0.99 for rental.

See, those tariffs are working.

But at 41 minutes and four seconds, the demon pulls Maggie off and they both fall off the building.

And we have to watch two people fall off the building.

And the graphics for the two of them falling off the building are hands down the most terrible shit, the most amazing, terrible shit I've ever seen.

Yeah, they're amazing.

They're amazing.

It's like they go instantly into like skydiving bowls together, like sausage right all night.

Okay, what was the bird for, though?

It didn't do anything.

No,

a bird just flies by and it's like, oh, that might sand pellegrino.

And then they just do the rest of the scene that matters.

Yeah.

So, okay, but so they fall down.

Maggie survived the fall, but she's all comatose or whatever.

So she's in the hospital.

And the doctor goes by Gordon and the mom.

And he's like, well, you know, if she makes it through the next 24 hours, her chances are good.

And I'm like, that's a nice way of putting she probably won't live through the day.

That's very,

give a positive spin.

And she is hooked up to the world's oldest life monitoring machines as well.

I'm pretty sure these machines are like monitoring Neil Armstrong's vital signs when he walked on the moon.

That's how old these are.

So, yeah.

So then, so he's Gordon's sitting there with her after everybody else has left and a fucking CGI demon comes out of the wall to explain that they've dragged her into CGI purgatory and will only only release her if he'll come back and show them how to get out.

Right.

And I was sure this was the movie fucking with me because when a wall grows a face and starts talking to you, that literally happens in the kids' TV show Nightmare.

That's like a central part of what happens all the time.

It's, yeah, it's like a game show where kids have to walk around a fantasy version of like a medieval type thing and answer like riddles and stuff.

And one of the riddles is asked by a wall that's got a face.

I thought you are fucking with me.

Like, if I swear to God, if this wall makes like Gordon answer a riddle, I'm turning this off right now.

Okay, this guy, Philip, got like clockwork oranged into watching Knightmare and like a troll doll was there and like a bad thing happened and he wrote 100%.

Weird.

So also, by the way, the despiser is who's talking through the wall, I think, right here.

Yes, I guess.

Earlier, the despiser explained that he has one power in the tangible world.

And that power is going into people's dreams and making them do his bidding.

Yes.

But now, okay, okay, I mean, he has like at least one more power, the wall talking.

Because he can make a wall, you can do a wall talk.

Yeah, that's a binbagman as well.

He can send some binbagmen in the middle.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Yes, yes.

Why would God give powers to people in purgatory or alien monsters?

Yeah.

Especially, one might argue, alien monsters.

I don't understand.

Yeah, because we'll find out he's got one of the power, which is to very, very slowly pull like nuclear missiles through wormholes, but like very, very slowly.

He's got that ability for some reason.

And he's got a guy dressed as a baked potato out on the road.

It's all kind of shit.

Yeah.

Hey, God, did you give a power that's like the opposite of nuclear non-proliferation?

Did you do a nuclear proliferation power for an alien monster?

In purgatory?

So, okay.

I'm doing it a mysterious way.

Shut up.

So I love the listener's experience right now where they're going, what the fuck do these guys keep talking about nuclear missiles for?

I know.

You think if the main fucking concept of this movie was nuclear missile based, we'd have introduced nuclear missiles at this point in the film, wouldn't you?

Hey, I've been having the same thought throughout this movie, too.

That was my experience until just about now.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So now Gordon, he runs back to Norm's place now, knowing that his wife is in trouble.

He stomps on the troll pencil topper, so that comes back.

Yeah, it's probably the troll's fault, so that's fine.

You've nailed it, Gordon.

You've probably dealt with this whole issue by killing the troll pencil.

But then he has to, he tells Norm, he's like, hey, look, Maggie's being held captive by a bunch of dead guys in purgatory, and I need guns to get her back.

And Norm reacts appropriately, right?

He's like, dude, no, you're crazy and need to go to a hospital.

But he grabs Norm's, he goes into Norm's gun closet.

This is fairly common in America, by the way, Marsh.

How is it?

Hey, Norm, you have a gun closet with the American flag on the wall right above it, right?

And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Obviously.

Yeah.

Quick question.

Is that a giant unlocked box with several guns?

And it turns out some fucking grenades in it.

There's a couple of grenades, guys.

I was about to tell you, I also have grenades in there.

Yeah, at this point, I was worried that Norm was in a militia.

I was writing, where was Norm on January 6th?

I mean, it doesn't matter now because he got a pardon, but we still should probably know.

They literally say that he's in a militia right after

because they have to explain why he wouldn't have grenades.

He's like, those grenades are illegal.

And he's like, they're yours.

Norm.

He's like, but I'm part of the militia.

It's cool.

Norm's going to purgatory.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah, he'll be fine.

Well, he was there for a while.

Then he did get a pardon.

So he's back out.

All right, but so Gordon steals Norm's cars and his guns and his grenades, and he starts driving along.

The cops are chasing him.

There's a troll hanging from his window.

That troll talks a bunch of shit, too, I guess.

Yeah.

And then baked potato guy is in the road and he's got a flare.

Also,

his bin bag that he's wearing, his garbage bag, is now like shimmering with all the stars of the universe, I think.

Yep.

Okay.

That's how you know where this fits into the plot, Marsh.

I thought it was a good device.

Hey, look, that effect is available on Spider-Man Movie Maker 2000.

Goddamn, we're going to get some use out of it.

Apparently,

you sparkle with the color of the secret weapon that like your kryptonite is also the color you sparkle with.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, it's a little bit of foreshadowing.

So, yeah, so the

trash bag guy directs him off the side of the road.

He drives off of a bridge right into a CGI tunnel that takes him back to purgatory.

Right.

Okay.

So that guy with the trash bag on is like waving people, but then he

throws the flare into the water.

And then the troll doll is like, follow the flare, follow the flare.

So Gordon follows the flare and drives off the bridge into the wormhole that was marked by the flare.

hitting the water.

So like, this was the plan?

Like, yep.

So many many moving parts for this

size.

Very heavily choreographed.

Like, they rehearsed this.

Like, Binbag Guy and Troll Doll had to rehearse this so many times to get it right.

Right?

Troll's just like, line.

Yeah.

Follow the flare.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Keep rolling.

Keep rolling.

I got it.

I said, follow the fair.

I said, follow the fair.

He's looking for a circus now.

Let me fuck this up, guys.

Does my hair look stupid?

So,

so, yeah, so he gets to purgatory.

They let him bring the whole car and the grenades and everything.

And then he throws the troll doll out and he shoots it.

There's a very long sequence with the troll running back and forth, avoiding, trying not to die.

The troll's more of a major character than his wife by this point.

He gets more screen time and more lines.

Right, yeah.

We watch a long sequence of a guy murdering a troll doll with the gun in the movie.

Ineptly, ineptly murdering a troll doll.

I need to know what happened in in his life where this fad made him so fucking angry.

Well, and then the very next thing in my goddamn notes is he drives into the techno for a bit and we see his wife who has been TP'd on the Appian Way.

I don't know what the fuck because she's wearing little weird white and there's like toilet paper flowing behind her as though it was the despiser's tail doing a kata or something.

And he's driving by a bunch of crucified people.

I have have no idea what's happening right now.

Yeah, I just realized the troll doll as well.

The troll doll is like the troll motif goes throughout, and that seems like a weird thing for a film made in 2003.

But then I remembered it was written in 1989.

Oh, and so I should have included that because that was a really up-to-date reference that he still hasn't let go of.

Oh, and that was the skibbity Ohio toilet that he put in there to be like, I'm hip.

Yeah,

right, amazing.

Let's play some pogs, huh?

90s.

so but eventually gordon pulls over because he sees the shadow man and all the ragmen the

the bad guy from earlier and all the fry guys all standing around an electrified

missile drill i yeah it it's it's some sort of slave labor camp for evil animations i think because they're all very heavily animated right

yeah and so apparently somehow or another, they're using this device to dig nuclear missiles out of the ground in purgatory.

Why would those be there?

I don't know.

What?

Also, they're going to use the missiles to get out of purgatory, right?

That's what the bad guys are trying to do.

They're going to try that, yeah.

Yes.

Why wouldn't you just let them leave?

Well, because then they'd be in the real world and they would take over Earth.

Oh, the idea is that they zoop up and now they're going to like terrorize the real world as alien monster demons.

Okay.

All right.

No, withdrawn.

Withdrawn.

No, this is the plot makes sense now.

We have no evidence that their intent is to terrorize the main world.

They just want to leave.

Like they landed.

Well, that's true.

Yeah, no,

they keep assuming that.

It seems like they're just like really smart, friendly aliens.

They happen to look like bugs, so everybody thinks they're monsters.

That could be it.

Yeah, I want to see if this movie, from their point of view, of like they land there 80 years ago, they're trying everything they can to get out.

They realize if they take weapons that are going to destroy people's lives in the real world, if we take those off people so they no longer have them to kill each other, we can use that to get out of here, killing like saving two birds with one stone in that we're removing nuclear weapons from the world and also freeing ourselves from purgatory.

They are the good guys in this movie by a substantial thing.

Yeah, because when they eventually nuke all of the other people in purgatory, they go to heaven.

It's yeah, right, right.

It's a really interesting story.

Strange.

Just needs the needs the Cobra Kai treatment, needs the wicked treatment there, you know.

Okay, so, but then that night gordon's camping and maggie all tp'd or whatever she shows up in like ghost form to check in on him yep

there is an amazing acting moment because all the acting in this movie is incredibly terrible like breathtakingly terrible except for when gordon turns to her and he goes are you all right and she gives him the perfect what the fuck do you think look

yeah i'm doing a kata with like toilet paper all over me and just sitting here in the middle of a lake i don't know what's happening i think i got pulled into purgatory no i'm not doing great i'm not doing great yeah and he tells her at the end of this conversation i love you and she says i know it's like oh yeah she she hand-soloed you i hate to see it i like spending time with your podcast but i don't actually

So yeah, but she tells him he has to go find all the other named characters to get act three going.

And then she's like okay so i gotta go back to dancing with toilet paper or else i get in trouble with the the spider guy yeah right right

so okay so he sets off to find the gang the gang is mid-action sequence at the river they're trying to

i it doesn't fucking matter it doesn't matter and i don't know right so they're just they're running from the action sequence right and they're trapped yeah and is this is this the place that they were in last time because the building outside didn't look the same but then when we see them they seem to be back in identical corridors with the monster that they previously explored with the grenade.

But they're back.

Is it just they had one set and we

think it looks the same, or is it meant to be in the same place?

I've no idea.

I don't think it's supposed to be the same place, just one CGI set.

The mother-in-law's there in the background.

Also, and it's a really small point, but he's he's driving his, well, Norm's car around, which means he's taken Norm's car to purgatory.

So, like, does the car have to redeem itself now as well?

Has the car done to itself?

Now, up until now, the demon monster guys, the ragmen, who I've been calling the fry guys, they've been running around with like blunt weapons and scythes and stuff.

There's a scene here where the shadow man is swapping out all their scythes with machine guns, which was legit funny.

I quite liked that.

Credit where credit's due.

Yeah, that was excellent.

Also, this bit where Gordon in his car drives up to this scene, but rather than going to the building to help, he drives to a nearby parking garage that's there.

And there's, there's a multi-story parking garage in Purgatory.

Yes.

I bet the rates are really expensive.

And then you got to like, when you get in, you got to wait for someone, like ages for someone to like back into a space.

And then they pull out, they're not quite square, and then back in again.

It's like six, seven times of that.

Can never find your car when you come back in.

Yes.

You know what?

I'm going to find street parking.

Oh, now I have to get back out.

I'm going to go into the mall and get a validation from like the pretzel place.

I could go for pretzel.

Okay, so but what he realizes this is that from up on his garage, the good guys are all getting trapped on the roof of the other building.

And there's a giant like radio antenna on the building he's on.

So he just needs to blow up that antenna and it'll fall such that it'll create a bridge that the good guys can cross, thus saving the day.

Yeah.

So he's going to do that, but he's going to do it really fucking slow.

Incredibly slowly by duct taping some grenades to this radio antenna which means he brought duct tape to purgatory as well yep it's like oh i really want to i bet it takes him like way too long to find the end of it and then he does manage to find it it kind of splits down the middle he's got to start all over again

he also brought beans he brought guns lots of beans grenades duct tape a little bit of yellow twine and a whole bunch of cans of beans.

Okay, well, let's be fair.

Norm just drives around with a lot of cans of beans just naturally, right?

That was all.

There's already a lot of narrow, but we still got Norm's like

a duct tape in the back of his mind.

That box you keep for like useful items to be on the road with, yeah, just full of bean cans.

Absolutely.

So, but, and I just, this is such a minor point, but hey, Gordon, you don't have to grenade all three of the guy lines.

One guy line, I mean, that's not doing any work at all.

And also,

I put a picture of it in our notes.

I know, listener, that you can't see our notes, but the effort that they put into CGIing this radio antenna across the two buildings is less than the effort I put into putting a screenshot of it into the notes.

That is true.

Yours took way more skill to get that into the notes.

Oh, my God.

It's so bad.

So, okay, but now one at a time they've got to cross this makeshift bridge.

So we have a bunch of suspense as the bad guys shoot stormtrooperly from below.

Okay, I did enjoy the walk across because they're having trouble with the walk.

They're like, oh, it's hard to straddle it.

My legs are all, I got to walk kind of silly.

To be clear, though, they're walking on

CGI.

Nothing.

They're walking on nothing.

So they're like miming like an awkward walk with a green screen.

And then they added this.

It's so good.

And they're getting shot at.

Yeah, like Jake is having to like straddle the middle bit of the bridge is is the choice he's gone for but like how he's doing that is he he's walking like he's badly shit himself and he's trying to avoid smearing around too much like he's he's resigned to some smearing but he wants to minimize the smearing absolutely looks like that moment where you're like i have to stop i have to stop i can't walk i have to hold

oh and then you've got the lady who was australian at one point cockney at other points she feels like she's just cycling through all the anglophone countries like she's gonna be south African for a while, I'm pretty sure.

She says of this bridge, quote, I could cross that bridge in half the time.

Yeah, that's literally the line reading.

Yep, yep.

So, okay, yeah, so Jake makes it across, and Fumi makes it across.

Canimbus make it, yeah, he makes it across.

So now Charlie's going last, and the bad guy gets there.

So he's coming across the bridge with her.

And she has to have the moment where, like, she sacrifices herself and pulls the bridge down, but takes the bad guy with her.

Yeah, and the way she pulls the bridge down is to sort of like twist a tiny little bit of one of the nearby bits of metal on it, and the whole thing just instantly falls into its constituent parts.

Like, that way, she might just find the one load-bearing little bit of that bridge.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, she might as well have to fire at it with a fucking targeting computer, but use the force at the last minute.

It's fucking ridiculous.

Also, as that's happening, the good guys are out of ammo, so they have to like run back to the truck to get ammo.

And what they see is that Gordon has packed like 1,000 cans of Hormel chili and one extra ammo clip in like a haystack formation.

So they're just rambling around in chili cans for a while.

Yeah, it's so good.

Like the way they get out of ammo as well, it's not like they all shoot and realize they're out of ammo.

It's like each of them take turn to shoot like one bullet from their gun and then learn it's out of ammo and then go for their other gun, shoot one bullet.

That one's out of ammo as well.

And we go through a chain of that happening.

It's like 11 times.

Yeah, it's goddamn amazing.

So, yeah, but they don't make it back in time with the ammo.

She takes down the bridge, and her and the shadow man fall.

And I think we all need a minute to process the loss, given our emotional connection to Charlie.

So we're going to take a quick break.

But first, let me give Act Three the hard sell.

Will Nimbus and Fumi be all like, cube, cup,

will the shadow man be like,

Will Gordon be like,

find out the answers to these onomatopoeia and more when we return for the fittingly ridiculous conclusion of Despiser.

Somehow Fumi's onomatopoeia was racist.

I don't know how they did it.

It absolutely was.

But it was racist.

Hey, Heath, have you seen the sledgehammer?

Oh, I think it's in the shed.

Misleading.

Exit sign.

No, but good reminder.

No, I'm actually, I'm tearing out some sheetrock to find the old phone jacks.

Like, like for a landline?

Yeah.

Man, I'm getting killed on my bill from big wireless.

I'm fed up with the crazy high prices and the so-called free perks that actually cost more in the long run.

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This month, they tried to charge me for undercoating.

Undercoating.

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All right.

Thanks, Heath.

No problem.

So I guess you don't need to break into the wall anymore.

No, I'm still doing that.

Really?

You're going to do that anyway?

And is that a

rotary phone?

Yeah, no, I like that clicky noise when it spins back.

Yeah, yeah.

No, me too, actually.

It's like

right?

It's so

soothing.

Yeah.

Tough year, man.

Yup.

The Despiser.

Welcome to your evaluation.

I am God.

What?

Oh,

right.

Sorry.

So here's what happened.

You died during a big crash.

And when that happens, when you die, you get zooped up to the pearly gates.

And my guy Peter decides if you go to heaven or if you go to hell.

Ah, not really following that, but okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So, Peter said he wasn't sure how to handle your particular case.

It was kind of an interesting one.

So, I'll be doing an eval.

And according to your file, you have not

accepted my son, Jesus Christ, as your Lord and Savior.

Sorry, what?

My son, Jesus,

you never accepted him him into your heart.

You're supposed to do that.

I don't know who that is.

I'm a space traveling bug from another galaxy, man.

Oh, are you?

Yeah, I mean, like, bug body, extra arms, legs.

It probably says on the paper that you're looking at.

Oh, right.

Sorry, just give me a second here.

Despiser crashed in Russia.

has not accepted Jesus

space traveling bug from another galaxy.

Okay.

There it is.

There it is.

Yeah.

No, that's on me.

This is kind of last minute.

I didn't really have time to read like the whole thing for the meeting.

Yeah, no worries.

No worries.

So

heaven?

Yeah.

Ah, well, here's the thing.

Rules are pretty clear for getting into heaven.

You

really got to love my son as your personal savior.

So.

Listen, like, I'm sure your son's a great guy and all, but I'd never heard of him.

You've never published anything, even in my galaxy.

But, like, you know, I'm super good for the universe.

I invented intergalactic space travel.

I was bringing that technology to Earth.

So, you know, seems maybe you could just make an exception, you know, because of the amazing science.

All right.

You know what?

You know what?

You're breaking my balls over here.

Tell you what.

Tell you what.

I can do

purgatory.

It's like a, it's like the medium one.

You have a medium one?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's for like when I can't really choose.

You know what I'm saying?

For when you, God,

can't choose.

Correct, yes.

Uh, okay.

So who's there right now?

Oh, yeah, good question.

It's mostly rag people and...

war heroes who died fighting against the Nazis.

Cool.

Yeah.

Okay.

I feel like you're being a real dick.

You know what?

Every single time with that, every time,

maybe I'll bring him back.

Make one the richest man in the world.

You don't know.

God.

And we're back for still more of this shit.

We're going to rejoin the action with the team some distance away mourning Charlie's memory.

Never even figured out what that accent was.

I just want to say in the distance, you can see there's some crows in the sky.

And it's like, yeah, there's crows in purgatory.

Pretty sure it's going to be the ones that Disney removed from Dumbo.

It's the horse gross.

You did help Dumbo, so that's good.

But

Fumi's like, wow, those are racist.

So they demand to know how Gordon disappeared, but he doesn't know how.

That doesn't stop him.

from promising to help them also get back out, though.

Which is incredible because like Nimbus wants to to get out but like how you are more than a hundred years old I really want you to get out into like a decrepit super old body that immediately dies a skeleton yeah

so

they also they explain here that when you die in purgatory it's like an atheist you get an atheist death you're just dead dead yeah right which is good because like they needed that to have any stakes Right, because everybody'd just be like, well, yeah, you could get out of purgatory by dying, apparently.

Yeah, because they have this conversation while they're talking about Gordon's wife being there.

And Nimbus asks some pretty unusual questions.

At one point, he says to Gordon, Is your wife a go either way kind of gal?

And it's like, personally, you only just found out she existed.

I don't think you should be prying that much.

And there's a lovely bit of dialogue as well because Nimbus says, Well, you know, only people who've fallen into despair end up here.

And Gordon says, She fell from a building.

And I wrote into despair,

but yeah nimbus is also saying like okay well she's got a secret evil backstory she is not christian if you know what i'm saying and gordon's like what no no she's not wasn't the butt stuff we did we forgive for that she's a go either way a kind of go yeah so she likes my podcast But they realize that they're going to need to raid the tower where the despiser lives, right?

But to do that, they're going to need some cooler cars.

So it's time to go to a car dealership in Purgatory.

I bet those rates are awful.

Yeah, Purgatory has a car dealership we're going to see here in a second, and it's called Friendly Phil's New Cars.

So that's cool.

Yeah.

Convenient.

What is the economics of Purgatory?

There's car dealerships.

We also find out there's gun shops because they go off and buy guns.

We've seen lots of guns.

So does someone work in the car dealership?

Does Friendly Phil work in the car dealership?

Who are the customers?

Is it the shadow people?

Do they make up the, is there a currency?

Are there weekends?

Like, let's come on, let's world build here.

I want to dig in.

So there's the mall with the parking garage.

So there's like a purgatory version of that.

Oh, obviously.

Also known as a mall.

Yeah, right.

Interesting.

It should have been called a Limbozine company.

Oh, nice.

Nice.

But so there's also this weird bit where like they, they both get like Corvettes or whatever, and Jake wants a Corvette too, but he's not ready for his own cart.

This has nothing to do with anything, but they they

do shoehorn that in on their tightly scripted 90 minutes So okay, so they head out to get some ammo from the purgatory ammo shop from friendly Phil's new bullets or something.

Yeah, right, right, which is also part of the economy Or maybe they dig him up with the purple missile digger.

I don't know.

So just a really small one for each individual

Guys, I think we could just go to Dick's Sporting Goods in the mall, right?

There you go.

You can get all the ammo you want.

So then, okay, so then we head back to fucking Lego, Baradur, or whatever, and we check in with the bad guys.

Shadow Man has fucked up another body, so now he has to requisition another one from the circle of nervous guys that stand around in the despiser's throne room.

Yeah, God, he is going through those bodies the way my wife goes through tubes of toothpaste.

Like, just squeeze from the bottom of the body.

There's still plenty of life left in there.

Push it against the side of the sink.

You'll get more life out of that body that way.

Marsh, I've never felt closer to you.

Yeah, but this is where we learn that if they dig up, this is so fucking stupid and convoluted.

And may I just say, not tightly scripted.

If they dig up enough missiles, they can explode their way into Earth,

which means

they don't need gordon

no no they don't at all no anyway so but they again okay like how are their missiles there like who buried like nuclear pirates in purgatory or like all right

what the fuck is happening Oh, I thought they were pulling them in from Earth.

Like this was like

a purple electric-y portal type thing that they drag them through

Earth.

So they're all taking them from Earth into purgatory.

Oh, that's even more.

So it's like a hollow Earth thing, but like purgatory is

like a little kind of portal kind of thing.

Yeah, like a little teleporty type thing.

Like in like in Stranger Things, like they're opening like a door to the upside down or something.

Oh, it's upside down.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's up, like north or whatever.

But it's, it's like, it's true that they don't need Gordon, but like to a point where Despiser even has to say that earlier, like, oh, just when I was so close to being able to have my plan, now Gordon can just come and go.

It's like, yeah, like you've timed this wrong in the script.

This makes no sense in the script at all.

Like, it could have been that you had no idea how to do it and Gordon arrives, or Gordon needs to stop you blowing up the world.

And that's the jeopardy here.

But the jeopardy shouldn't be that you want to also know how Gordon's doing it.

So you've got a backup plan, I guess, or other options.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No fucking clue.

Okay.

So now the team is all sitting around the campfire, still mourning Charlie, I guess, when suddenly there's a nuclear Maggie explosion.

So

I guess what's supposed to be happening here is that Gordon is asleep and dreaming.

While he's dreaming, the bad guys accidentally drop one of their nukes, which of course causes it to explode because that's how nukes work.

And Maggie, with her ghost psychic communication toilet paper on the Appian Way powers, comes in his dream to tell him, hey, they got a bunch of nukes over here.

You better get over here quick.

Yeah.

and then she's like, Anyway, I'm going again.

Bye.

And then she shrinks really, really small because they can't figure out a way of making a fade away.

So they just like grab the top corner of her, grab the little box in the top corner, and slowly shrink it down.

Okay, I just want to say that was one of the most challenging scene explanations I've ever had to do on this show.

So I'm just pretty proud of myself for getting through it.

All right.

Okay.

So this is when Gordon wakes up from that, I guess, dream.

And then he sees the mushroom cloud and he's like, that is a hydrogen explosion we're all sterile now great yeah and I was like what are you worried about right now you can't fuck each other this squad of four dudes and repopulate purgatory what does that mean you're in purgatory yeah also like you're 42 you're not gonna have kids now and the guy he's got Nimbus fought in the first world war his chances of having kids from here are gonna be slim at

100

yes

yeah but this is where Gordon's like oh, you know what they're trying to do is blow their way out of purgatory.

We better stop them quick before they get to Earth and take over.

Right.

Yeah.

And he's like, yeah, we dealt with this in the Navy.

Yeah, he says like each of those rockets carry as many as 10 nuclear warheads.

It's like, is that how the rockets?

I thought they have one warhead.

Do they have like 10 different warheads?

It's like a sort of a nuclear hydra.

Is that how these things work?

Well, if you cut off one warhead, two warheads appear.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but Gordon knows his nukes, damn it, right?

Like they drive up to the to the Despiser's Tower and they pull out their binoculars or whatever, and he's naming all the various nukes.

So, he knows his shit.

This is where he's like, oh, just that bomb by itself is as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

And then Fumi has to go, the what now?

Which is

awkward.

Awkward.

Yeah.

See, it's crazy because we learned, as I said, Fumi is meant to be a kamikaze pilot.

We learn he's in purgatory for his self-sacrifice.

His self-sacrifice was blowing up a battleship, an American battleship

during the war.

They don't really touch on that too much, that he's on the wrong side of World War II and he's still in purgatory for it being a self-sacrificial act on his behalf.

Forgot it's about the heroics of it.

It's not

the team you're on, you know,

balanced.

So then there's this weird fucking moment where Nimbus decides to tell us a backstory that we don't need or care about about the last time their team tried to to attack this tower.

The only purposes it serves is that it explains to us that the weird pink glowy bullets that he had from before were discovered and are the only thing that can truly kill the shadow man and the despiser.

Yes, and it's great because he's like, and I've only got one left.

And so, oh, and it's for the shadow man.

And then, oh, so how do we kill the despiser?

Don't worry, I've got another one.

I have a second one.

But it's bigger, so it's different.

It's like a grenade, actually.

It's like right out of Sid Fields again, but like they run into a problem.

It was like, we have one kryptonite.

Perfect.

Wait, we need to kill two Superman bad guys.

I have one, too.

When I said one, I meant one per bad guy.

It's one per bad guy.

We've got to ration them out.

There's a great bit too where Jake's like, oh, hey, what does the despiser look like?

And Nimbus has to be very cool.

It's great CGI, regardless of what you might hear from podcasters in the future.

It's actually pretty fucking solid for 2003.

It's really hard to do.

Yeah, so if you imagine like those wavy arm things you get outside of a used car, like three of those in one guy.

So, okay, so now they're ready to go.

They drive onto the bridge to attack the tower.

Luckily, Gordon was in the Navy, which makes him a crack shot with a semi-automatic rifle from a moving car on uneven ground.

So he's just plugging bad guys one after the other.

And they drive past the gatehouse and like they just shoot and they get through fine.

And it's like, if your big evil lair is in a massive, massive sea of lava with only one bridge, just perfectly straight bridge on the way in and out, you've got to have a better gatehouse than that.

Really?

Honestly, it's all about the gatehouse.

It's all about the gatehouse.

Guards are just like, you have to do a riddle.

Ah!

Even just second gatehouse would be bad.

That's already really optimistic.

It's like three into the onslaught.

The little spikes that go the other way.

Yeah.

So, but the shadow man sees him.

Apparently, he's out digging up missiles or whatever.

He sees them.

So he's chasing them now.

There's a moment here where like Jake needs a grenade, but he drops it.

It winds up on the floorboard.

And we're like, oh, I bet, you know, that'll come in and become important later.

It's no.

And it's the week.

No, not really.

It does come back.

The funny thing is that it even comes back, but not in a meaningful way.

It's so dumb.

Yeah.

I wanted the grenade to like fall in between the seats and he's doing that finger thing for like a minute.

Yeah, just pulls up a lollipop or something.

Yeah, right, right.

It's an old fry.

Oh, there's my fucking headphones.

God damn.

Oh, and this car chase, again, it's so fucking stupid.

It's so stupid because they, at speed, go straight through the gatehouse.

And the people, the bad guys in the gatehouse have to like scramble around to get get into their car for a perfectly straight road.

And their car catches up with the good guys who had a head start and a running head start.

Yes.

Which means either the good guys slowed down or the bad guys have got a much, much superior vehicle.

Either way, this car chase should be instantly done because the bad guys should be able to catch them immediately.

But they get, it's Mario rules in that they get just like speed drive, just enough to be competitive.

Rubber branding, a blue shell comes out.

It's so stupid.

They even show us the speedometer for a second of the good guys.

Nimbus's car.

They zoom in on the speedometer and they're going 45 miles per minute.

Well, it's a pretty narrow bridge.

That's actually very fast for a narrow bridge over lobbies if you think about it.

I would think I would go slower.

But so they're driving along this bridge and they're in two cars, right?

So Jake and Fumi get ahead, but then the shadow man fires a fucking blue shell, apparently

from behind, and he blows a Minecraft hole in the bridge, right?

It's like perfect squares that it blows up in.

And it doesn't even destroy the entire width of the bridge, it just destroys the middle.

So it's like, oh, it's fine because one of your cars is already on the other side.

You can just walk along the bits of road that aren't broken and get in the back of their car.

There's space.

All the bad guys done is stop him from catching you.

Yes.

They don't think of that.

They do not think of that.

They might as well just like marble madness very slowly around themselves.

So

so yes but they stop the car gordon jumps out nimbus is still in it and the shadow man hits the car with his car and it skids halfway over the hole or whatever but it's bad enough the wreck is bad enough now that nimbus is gonna die right so gordon pulls him out and they they have the last the fleeting moments emotional connection thing that happens between these two characters.

Yeah, but Gordon drags drags him out of the car, but drags him in the direction away from the tower.

You're already like, the car is wedged in the middle of the bridge.

You could drag him towards the tower, and then you don't have to worry about getting across anymore.

You fucking idiot.

He doesn't do that.

Nope, he does not do that.

He accidentally fires the big bullet, the big

super bullets that was supposed to kill the despiser.

And then, and, and I love, too, because that's what like Nimbus sees him do that.

And he goes, well, fuck.

Now, how are we going to kill the despiser?

And then he dies.

i know man it's a side-scroller we're going this way let's go yep yeah he just died from disappointment in golden really honestly so foomi and jake they they claw they walk back over because again like you said you can just walk over that one side of the bridge they walk back over and they they have a sad moment over nimbus jake says and i quote the big gun gone

No idea why he lost all of his small words there.

But then Fumi does some racism, and then they set his body on fire because it's cool to walk away from things that are on fire, I guess.

But again, this is so, so stupid.

First of all, they've got to pour a lot of petrol on him.

We haven't seen petrol stations, uh, gas stations in purgatory.

I assume they're there, I assume

they haven't staffed or anything like that, yeah.

But they burn like Nimbus's body, so that's on fire in one side of the bridge, but on the other side of them is his car on fire, so all you've done is trapped yourself on a perfectly straight, narrow bridge between

on either side.

And now the bridge is on fire,

right?

Do you think this is like a metaphor about like burning the bridge to the past so you can only go forward to the future?

Well, I don't know, it was pretty tightly scripted.

So, and then the remaining characters they drive somberly onto the tower.

Gordon notices the grenade from earlier.

He says, Oh, there's a grenade in your floorboard.

That's dangerous.

And Fumi's like, Oh, thank you.

And he puts it back in his butt.

Then it's thinking, Fumi's the one that had it in the first place.

So we've just returned to the neutral of Fumi has grenades.

Yeah, we had Chekhov's grenade has been found and will not be particularly deployed as well.

Yeah.

Oh, it's going to be pretty fucking important.

Just put it in the console.

That'd be great because it was rolling around.

Yeah.

Yes.

By the way, the bridge has a road that just from the bridge goes straight.

Through an open door into the lair.

There's not a gate or any closures or anything.

They just like.

They put it all like that into that gatehouse, really.

Yeah.

They really did.

The layer looks like it's been made out of the cardboard from the inside of cereal boxes.

That's how badly I designed this thing.

It's the best.

And the first thing we see once they get inside, there's just a big pit with the rag people demons having like a disorganized collection of nukes just strewn about, lying there.

Yeah, like these that they pulled out of the ground, like the little onions in Mario 2, and just threw them into this pit.

Yeah.

It's like when magpies steal like shiny things to line their nest with.

They've done that, but with nuclear weapons.

With nukes.

Yeah.

There's also a great moment as they're driving into this fortress where they all have to like, they're going through the gate and they're all supposed to look up at the gate as they drive past it.

But of course, it's all CGI.

So they're not looking at anything.

So none of them are looking in the same place at the same time.

So like they're all noticing different details on the way in, I guess.

I love that the movie runs into like a, we don't know what to do now in the movie.

Like we watch it happen.

They, they get into the castle, they get out of the car, they see the dumb pit, and then nothing happens.

And one of them's like,

ollie, ollie, oxen-free, except I think he says, all ye, all ye outs and free, because he doesn't know that expression,

which was weird.

Oh, interesting.

And nothing happens.

And then they're like, hello,

bad guys.

Do we have like a final fight?

It feels like we have a final fight, guys, and nothing's happening.

Somebody press like R3 and see if there's like a lineup thing or like a

some sort of indication.

Yeah.

So they all get there and they're like, well, so what do we do from here?

And they're like, I don't, I don't fucking know.

And then the ragmen start popping out of this, these holes all around them.

They've learned that Gordon knows how to get in and out of purgatory and they want him to save them.

So they chant free us like

Like Eli doing a bit that Heath refuses to interrupt, right?

They do it for so goddamn long.

It goes on for like 12 minutes.

And I like that as well because it means that Gordon has been like the talk of the town.

He's been the gossip in all the canteens of the rag boys.

But he won't free us.

And so eventually they pick up weapons to try to attack him.

They just pick up sticks and stuff that they can find around him.

So Fumi just machine guns them all to death.

Yeah.

Like, God forgive me.

And then he just pulls down this otherwise primitive horde with a machine gun.

Yes.

Okay, all the rag people, when they came out, didn't it seem kind of like a weird musical was about to happen?

It did, yes.

Like extras from Oliver now have to be saved out of purgatory.

I really wanted a musical number.

And then I was like, I really wish the whole thing was a musical now that I think about it.

Really?

Well, you know, I have a feeling the rights are pretty cheap.

And this is not, this again is another of the not tightly scripted moments because once Gordon is seen as like the messiah to all of the rag boys, you'd think he like leads this rebellion army into like battle against the main bad guys and like frees them and everything.

But when they just sort of say, well, can you free them, Gordon?

He's like, ah,

no.

So they immediately turn again.

So, well, you're on the same time.

Right.

And then they machine gun him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they all escape into these weird blue tunnels that eventually emerge into a glowing green sewer.

Right.

And it looks like it was shot inside of a super intense soft play area.

Yeah.

He's like scrambling through the tunnels.

What do you think the tunnels were for when they built this lair?

Interesting.

So I was like, slides, maybe?

Like where

slides for the rag people to have fun?

I always wanted that in my house when I was a kid, like a series of slides for sure.

When you were a kid, shit.

Once you hit your 40s, you still want slides.

You still want slides.

It's reasonable, yeah.

So, but they come out and they find this like triggering mechanism for all the nukes, right?

And fucking Gordon starts pointing out all the different parts of it, like this is a bit for Sesame Street, and we're going to learn all the parts of a nuclear weapon, kids, or something like that.

Yeah, he's like info dumping on you like nuclear weapons for his special interest.

Yeah, very special.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He points out, he's like, that's an MGS missile launch board.

So to be clear, he was in the U.S.

Navy.

So the U.S.

Navy was arming purgatory, apparently.

And I was like, all right, you know what?

That actually does track.

And then he's like, I'm thinking that countdown timer activates the bombs.

He's like, thanks.

Thanks, Gordo.

Solid.

Appreciate that.

Maybe that was it.

But just then, the despiser pops out of the water.

And he's 40 foot tall.

How deep is that water?

They're not on the ground floor of this building.

Oh, interesting.

So talk me through the architecture of this building.

They were like, well, yeah, the despiser's like, yeah, I'm going to need like the third floor to be 40 foot tall and filled with water just so I can jump out and do the scare thing.

Okay.

It just feels like this is bad property for drainage overall.

Maybe we move to a different spot.

Well, let's put in a bunch of tunnels.

I was going to say it's perfect for drainage.

So, okay.

So, the despiser.

This is uninsurable.

Is there insurance in purgatory?

Yeah, there is.

We have to get it.

It's, it's

bad of trying to get insurance for a water bed.

Trying to get a water floor, an entire floor of water.

Oh, you're never going to get insurance on that.

So, yeah, so now the despiser, I don't think i mean i'm sorry words fucking fail me on describing what kind of cgi because it's almost like it almost looks like bad stop motion animation it's so bad right it's very much there's a reason he was a silhouette for the rest of this film yeah he did not want to blow this that early right so yeah so they he grabs gordon and he's about to eat him but gordon pulls out his pistol and shoots the despiser in both eyes

and we get the despiser being like, my eye, ow,

my eye.

Like, imagine the first time Jaws pops out of the water.

It's like, ow, fuck.

Yeah, you get the paper toast.

Who shoots a harpoon, honestly?

So good.

And he has to explain.

He's like, my eyesight will come back in.

like two minutes and 30 seconds or something.

I regenerate, but it's kind of slow.

Just give it a minute.

But this isn't the end of me.

And then he pulls the despiser is like, but don't forget, I have Maggie.

And so he pulls Maggie out of this little fucking Faberge egg cage that he's got.

Yep.

That he then immediately smashes.

So why was she even in the egg cage to begin with?

He's just smashing her for effect.

Look at it.

Get in there, please.

It'll be really good when he gets here.

It's really distracting when she keeps dancing.

Sometimes I need to close it up.

So I'll just have it ready.

And she's shrunk down to like half size size because his Faberge egg thing had to be a particular size in CGI.

I don't know.

Apparently, uh, so he throws her, and then this is where Gordon explains his plan.

He says, Ha, but you know what?

I happen to know that you don't have enough nuclear bombs to escape purgatory.

Apparently, he knows how many nukes it takes to escape purgatory off the top of his head.

He was in the Navy, they teach you shit like that.

They teach that in the Navy, yeah, yeah.

So, but he's like, But if I, so if I blow up these nukes now, you'll lose all your nukes, and everybody will get nuked, and you won't even be able to get out of purgatory, right?

And he's like, oh, damn, don't let him do that.

Seems like you wouldn't arm it yet until you have enough of the missiles that you need.

Well, all you have to do is drop them, though, right?

Or shot them.

There's no arming.

You just, you know, touch them or whatever.

Right, right, exactly.

Touch them hard.

So the despiser starts yelling for the ragmen to stop him.

He says, I had to go back and count this.

He says, stop him, ragmen, or stop him, ragmen, 11 fucking times in like the 90 seconds of this, last 90 seconds of this fight.

It's incredible.

But ultimately, he does pull out Chekhov's grenade.

He does.

How did I completely forget that?

He does actually use the grenade.

Yes, to save the day.

He throws it out where all the nukes are.

And of course, a grenade going off near a nuclear bomb makes it go off.

You know, those damn nukes, air triggers on those things.

He is very lucky that the grenade had like a fuse, a timer that was long enough for it to get all the way to the ground because it's flying through the air for a very long time.

I wanted it to explode just when it's like coming down to level with the floor below where all the water's right.

Oh, no, no, you didn't blow up the nukes, and now all the water's draining out.

This is a nightmare.

Well, also, he has to throw it out the window.

I'm gonna have to replace those gutters now.

Come on,

this is why you can't get insurance, guys.

so yeah but so but then there's a huge nuclear explosion there's a series of nuclear explosions right because fuck yeah there is but we know that it's good nuclear explosions because there is a post nuke sparkle

and it's pink which is the color of kryptonite so you know you won

yeah it's one of those good nuclear explosions like the one in hiroshima if you listen to the uh american poster yeah right right

so then we cut to somebody has, I guess, drug Gordon out of the water and given back on earth, has drug him out of the water and given him CPR.

So he's back in reality.

It's morning now.

Just to be absolutely clear, it is morning.

He's getting CPR, having been dragged out of the river.

It is morning.

It was the dead of night when he went into the river.

How long has A, he been in that river, or B, has this guy been doing CPR awaking out?

Like eight hours of just constant CPR.

Like, come on, I believe in you, kids.

You can come back from the river.

I'm not giving up on you.

So he's out, but what about Maggie?

Right.

So he runs back to the hospital.

Maggie is flatlining, but then he shows up and he's like, come on, Maggie, come home.

And so she's fine.

She comes back to life.

Dramatically.

She dramatically comes back to life.

And then she goes like, Gordon, I dreamed you rescued me.

And he's like, oh, fuck, that's just a dream.

So I guess.

I guess none of our problems are solved.

You probably still hate my fucking guts, though, then in real life, huh?

And we're penniless and homeless, and it's a real issue.

I've got no job, it's a real issue right now.

Yeah, yep, but don't worry about it because now Gordon is painting again.

So we cut to his big gallery opening, which is how you know a painter's really made it if they have a gallery opening.

Just cut to Maggie's mom writing him a check for the rent again.

Okay, yeah, right, right.

He's still an artist, huh?

Yep.

All of his art is incredibly shit.

It's so bad.

It's so banal.

And then the very last one that we see is just a painting of all of like all the named characters from purgatory holding guns and looking at him.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

There's also, there's a moment here where Norm shows up and he's like, all right, man, you put a bunch of guns and

grenades into my Jeep and you stole it.

You drove off a bridge and no one ever found it.

What the hell, man?

Dick move, man.

Yeah.

You have to pay me back for those cans of hormel chili, by the way.

I want those back.

But like, Norm's having that conversation with, has he just blanked Norm for the months it's taken for him to get all this art together and organize a gallery exhibition?

Has he just not spoken to Norm?

Right.

He's like, you know what?

I'm going to his goddamn gallery opening.

He's got to talk to me there.

Well, I also like the other friend who I don't even think we even get a name for him.

The other friend that's always with Norm, he just goes like, oh, are you still on about that?

Come on, man.

Once in a while, your friend steals all your grenades and crashes your car into a wormhole, and you got to move on, you know.

I thought this is America.

And then we get one last shot of Nimbus and Charlie and Jake and Fumi all driving around in, I guess it's supposed to be heaven.

It looks like Holland.

So that's heaven, right?

Well, they're in a pretty reasonable family saloon, which I guess makes it heaven.

They're not in the fancy fast cars anymore.

They don't need that.

So they're right, right, yeah.

Exactly.

Heaven is driving around with four people in just enough space in a mid-sized sedan.

Yes.

Obviously.

What is it for you, Heath?

I'm thinking of a person placed.

Yes, right, right, right.

Eternal paradise.

It is eternal.

The green.

All right.

Well, I guess that's going to do it for the Despiser.

I honestly, I was disappointed not to find out that there was like a part two, three, four, and five to this motherfucker.

Oh, yeah, we need a series.

Marsh, I hope you had as much fun as we did with this one.

Oh, this is incredible.

Yeah, absolutely.

This guy has an oeuvre of movies, by the way.

Oh, actually.

They're not sequels to this, but he's done a bunch of stuff.

Oh, I'm so happy.

Nice.

All right.

And of course, if you want to hear more from Marsh, be sure to check out his new podcast, The No Rogan Experience, which we're going to have linked on the show notes.

If you want to know Rogan without actually listening to Joe Rogan, that's the place to go.

So that's going to do it for our review of the Despiser.

That's not going to do it for the episode just yet, though, because we still need to do this to ourselves again next week.

So Heath, tell us what's on deck.

We're going to be watching hidden secrets in our shared calendar, by the way.

Eli puts descriptions in sometimes next to it when he pastes a movie in.

The description says, David A.R.

White won't fuck his new girlfriend because his old one is dead.

Okay.

That's all it says.

That sounds pretty Valentine's Day romantic.

Of course, it's going to come out several days afterwards, but Eli was trying.

I get get it.

I get it.

So, with that to look forward to, we're going to bring episode 493 to a merciful close.

Once again, a huge thanks to Marsh.

Again, be sure to check out the show notes for links to more of his stuff.

And an even huger thanks to all the Patreon donors that helped make the show go.

If you'd like to count yourself among their ranks, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash Godawful, and thereby earn early access to an ad-free version of every episode.

You can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review and by sharing the show on your various social media platforms.

And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our sibling shows, The Skating Atheist, Citation Needed Dnd Minus, and The Skeptic, available wherever podcasts live.

If you have questions, comments, or cinematic suggestions, you can email on movies at gmail.com.

Tim Robertson takes care of our social media.

Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Slotnick of Evo Diraffs on Mars.

All the other music was written and performed by our audio engineer, Morgan Clark, and was used with permission.

Thanks again for giving us a chunk of your life this week for Heath Henry, and Eli Bosnick, I'm going to Lucius promised to work hard to earn another chunk next week.

Until then, we'll leave you with a breakfast club close.

Donald Trump invited the Despiser to meet on Capitol Hill to talk about strategy going forward for that region.

The Despiser gave Trump a detonator figurine as a gift.

Norm went on to have to get all new grid names.

Gordon's new art career was going fine until AI came along and completely replaced him, leaving him to drive his car into the river again, but for real this time.

The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle and the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025.

All rights are reserved.us.

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