Ep.#447 - Venom: The Last Dance

On this episode, we discuss Venom: the last dance.

Might I say it that way?

Perfect,

perfect, yeah.

Cut, print,

use exactly.

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

And I'm Elliot Kalen.

Hey, folks.

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Yeah, this cool show is where we watch movies that either audiences or critics rejected or were we're middling on, often the case of this particular series.

Or we were excited to talk about it.

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Yeah, yeah.

The theme month.

The theme month, of course, this being Max Fun Drive, we're doing a very exciting theme month.

All movies without Spider-Man in them.

I'm talking Craven the Hunter.

I'm talking Venom, The Last Dance.

I'm talking heartbeats.

Directed

by Paul Schrader.

One of the least Spider-Man-having movies there is.

Prove it.

Listener, prove to me that Spider-Man is in Heartbeats.

You can't.

He's not in it.

Therefore, it fits the series.

But obviously, a couple of those are part of the Sony Spider-Man universe, notable for its lack of Spider-Man.

It's the Spider-Man without Spider-Man universe.

Yeah, just like

Baloney.

You got him.

You did it.

Hank it up.

We succeeded.

This is a comedy podcast as well as being educational.

So in this, in this case, even though we're under hints and life hacks in the podcast app, tips and tricks.

This one's about Venom the Last Dance.

The last dance between Eddie Brock and Venom.

One would presume it seems like this is actually going to be the final.

They sure kill Venom at the end.

So in the spoiler alert.

First movie, we were led to believe that Venom died and then he shows up again at the end.

And then the second one, doesn't Eddie die and then Venom brings him back?

I think so.

There's nowhere else to go from.

There's certainly no way that this could be brought back as some sort of stunt in the larger like the MCU mainline.

uh stuff and not this weird side eddie that they co-produced the fact that this is the only profitable profitable part of the spider-man without spider-man universe i don't think that would let them ruin the narrative coherence of the series by bringing the characters back from the dead.

I don't know about that.

Anyway,

this one, but this one.

So Venom 2 was the one that ended with him being pulled into the Marvel Universe, right?

Yes, and this addresses that briefly

at the beginning.

But so let's get into it.

Let's do it.

Who's doing the summary this way?

Me.

Oh, buckle yourself.

Sort of the venom of the podcast.

Yeah, you're the real venom of the podcast.

Got that lethal protector energy.

Sure too.

Yep.

So we begin the movie, as by closed captioning said, with hissing and snarling, and we meet Null, God of the Void,

slicer of worlds.

Now, this is a Marble villain that actually exists.

What we say, not as what?

Not as I presume, some bullshit that Venom made up.

But I looked it up.

He does look like a World of Warcraft villain.

Yeah.

He does.

He is the villain from a storyline that was in the relatively recent Venom comics named The King in Black, where it turns out that he is the personification of the void.

He personifies the void by basically being an evil, earny looking type of like smiling like a rigged, pale, long-haired, white-haired character.

And he is the creator of the Clintar, also known as the Symbiotes, and he can do stuff to control them and whatever.

And he represents destruction and nothingness.

And in the, I don't know if they've made this connection in the movies, probably not, but like Gore the God Butcher from the Thor movies and the Thor comics, he is connected.

That's how he gets his power sometimes, is somehow connected to Null also.

And this, I mean, the existence of this character made more sense to me when I started, when I remembered that, like, you know, in the Marvel universe, we have these corners that are like Asgard or what, like, more high-fantasy corners.

Because watching this movie, I'm like, this seems weird that there's this sort of like, dark fantasy character with like a flaming sword in shackles somewhere somewhere and that that's somehow connected to the venom sympathy.

And at no point does he actually interact with any other characters.

Yeah, it's true.

I will say this is a character who I have mixed feelings about in the actual comics because it does feel like it takes a character who

I grew up with thinking of as a crazy guy with superpowered clothes that are also crazy.

And he is more of a

murderer who thinks he's a hero and hates Spider-Man.

And this blows him up into a cosmically important character who at a certain point, is the only thing standing between total destruction and the continuing existence of the universe.

But it is weird to suddenly start this movie with a character who looks like Elric, basically, like, you know, talking about how he will make the universe burn and things like that.

Which is something that Elric would probably do, yes.

Sure, yeah.

Evil sword and everything.

So I could see how this might be jarring to audiences who are not familiar with this character at all.

It's a real tonal shift for the Venom series.

But Null drops some backstory on us.

He was betrayed by his, quote, children, which is, of course, on these symbiotes.

He talks about some bullshit codex that will free him.

And so the movie has its MacGuffin, and he sends some non-symbiote slimy monsters to find.

Xenophages or Xenophages.

Xenophyphages.

Okay.

Is that from the comics?

I think they are from the comics, yeah.

A lot of this null stuff, I read it at the time and it didn't quite suit it.

There is a codex in the comics, but it's in, I think, the blood of Dylan Brock, Eddie's estranged son, who's a kid, who eventually becomes Venom for a little bit.

And

it's all stuff that, it's, it's, it's stuff that doesn't, it's not the Venom that I grew up with.

That's all I'm going to say, you know.

But this is a lot of comic stuff, yeah.

Um, so we join Eddie Brock, though, uh, Tom Hardy, our hero.

He's still in himself.

He's still at a bar in the MCU universe that he was, of course, zapped into during No Way Home, but he's quickly sent back to the No Spiders,

presumably by Doctor Strange off screen.

We don't see like this talking to the same pole that opens up a bartender played by Danny Reyes from Ted Lasso.

It really is, it really is an enormous waste of the idea of Eddie Brock showing up in the Marvel universe.

And I don't know if I think it is funny.

to make a big deal out of him being transported there and all he does is hang out at a bar and then get sent back home or if i think it is a waste of potential and i'm not sure i mean because the other thing is that Venom in the comics, we've probably talked about this with the other Venom movies.

His whole motivation is that he hates Spider-Man.

Eddie Brock's career was ruined by Spider-Man.

The Symbiote was rejected by Spider-Man.

So they combine their hatreds of Spider-Man into become this new being that hates Spider-Man the most.

And so for Venom to show up in the Marvel Universe, I guess the implication is now he's going to go after Spider-Man.

Why would he?

They don't know each other.

They're strangers.

It doesn't matter.

I do.

I do.

My favorite bit in the comics was when Spider-Man defeats Venom by being like, okay, Symbiote, you can come back and like, I'll take you back.

And the Symbiote, like, pulls too hard and that he and Eddie are joined too closely and it like knocks them both out.

Like, perfect.

It's, and it's also that, like, they, so the whole thing is that the symbiote and Eddie Brock have permanently bonded in a way Spider-Man refused to do with the Symbiote.

When him saying, like, I'll take you back, it's what I like about it, it is, it is the hero defeating the villain by breaking the villain's heart by showing that the villain's like teammate would rather be with Spider-Man than with Eddie Brock.

Which is kind of like the way audiences have reacted to this non-Spider-Man universe.

I guess so, yeah.

But anyway, in what is for Eddie Brock bar prime,

tropical bar prime, Venon quips about being done with multiverse shit.

The whole audience applauds, I assume.

They're like, yeah, we get it.

And he does some Tom Cruise cocktail stuff.

Love it.

Makes him drink.

On the news, a convenient report relating to Eddie Brock himself.

He's wanted for murder for something that I'd forgotten about from Venom 2.

It's also amazing that this local American crime story is on Mexican news.

Well, that's English language news broadcast in Mexico, you know, but it's a big story.

It's a bar that's catering to tourists.

It makes sense.

Yeah, good point.

Good point.

It's always tuned to MSNBC or something.

Yeah.

But

yeah, it's because he supposedly killed this cop at the end of the last movie, which, of course, it was not handled.

Probably Carnage did it or something.

Carnage did it.

That copy bonded with the not-at-all

no-imagination name of Patrick Mulligan.

He is the character from the comics, but I just love they're like, I guess he's an Irish cop.

Let's call him Patrick Mulligan.

Like, sure.

They're like, okay, we got to hide out in New York because we're wanted

men slash alien.

And they're immediately picked up on CCTV as they leave the bar, so we know they're being watched.

They do some lethal protector shit, eating up some

dogfighter guys.

That's Tom Hardy's.

Tom Hardy's really passionate about dog rescue so I'm glad that he gets to bring his love into this that's true he does love dog the thing is we see they have a lot of dogs in cages I think it's just kind of implied that they're doing something bad with the dogs we never see them do anything all we see like a charger that has a bunch of note like hash marks on it oh okay so maybe that's it because all we really know is that these are a bunch of guys

these are a bunch of guys with fights yeah

Monday buy dogs.

Tuesday, make them fight.

Wednesday, kill other dogs.

Because all we really know is they're guys with tattoos.

It's all here.

Black and white.

Yeah, they do a fight.

This fight's kind of funny.

Eddie throws a shoe at one point, which leads to

a movie-long gag about how he's always losing his shoes.

And so as they leave, one of the big other monsters is lurking in the shadows, and someone somewhere says, get me General Strickland.

So you know, things are getting serious.

It's General Strickland being called in.

Oh, boy.

There is a lot of things.

He's got Strict in his name.

You know this dude doesn't fuck around.

The scenes between General Strickland, we'll get to them, and the scientist in it, it is non-stop them saying Juno Temple, them saying exposition to each other that those characters would already know.

And I was like,

there was much, and I will not blame the writers of the movies for this, but there was so much of the movie where I was like, why am I trying so hard to hide the exposition and the things that I write when these characters are just stating it outright so blatantly, you know?

Well, let's talk about him.

We meet him right now.

Chua Tell Chia 4 shows up.

He's the second go-around in the MCU, baby.

He wasn't even.

This is not the MCU, technically.

He was Mordo.

Oh, that's right.

He was Mordo in the Doctor Strange movies.

But that's a different universe, so it's okay.

He kidnaps the bartender because he's been exposed to this symbiote guy, I guess.

They're trying to figure out information.

I don't know.

This is, of course, an American military operation.

So, of course, they can go into Mexico, kidnap a Mexican national, and then how do they have the jurisdiction to do anything?

It's probably black ops by the way i guess it's but it's all black ops but they're all in i mean they're of course all wearing green camouflage as they walk around a mexican city but you know yeah that's ridiculous we should be sending them to canada apparently to stop all the fentanyl that's i guess what

sorry

bad reference to bad stupid people making stupid news um let's see we're introduced to do you know temple temple's character she's having some kind of dream where she's a kid with her brother who's like i want to work at nasa so bad bad and then he gets struck by lightning.

He's like, as long as I am not exposed to my only weakness, lightning boots.

I love space and the things that come out of it.

Uh-oh, something from the sky has killed me, but I love it so.

This is so weird to me because it's like, what, are we not going to believe that Judo Chippel could work as a like alien scientist at NASA without having a backstory involving a kid brother dying from lightning?

The thing is, Dan, sometimes when people make movies or tell stories, they're like, my audience is fucking stupid.

So I need to make things as clear as possible and explain every little fucking thing because they're idiots.

I have this job because I had to fulfill the dream of a man who died.

I guess if ever there's, it's, and this is a character they don't do that much with in the movie.

It feels very strange that they've given her any backstory or flashbacks at all.

Yeah.

They should have used that.

time to give her stuff to do in the present.

Yeah.

Now, so according to Wikipedia, she's haunted by the death of her brother from a lightning strike that also paralyzed her arm.

I did not recognize her as having a paralyzed arm.

No, no, no.

Did you notice that?

No.

I didn't notice it at all.

Okay.

But it is very funny to suddenly go to a flashback for a character who otherwise will receive no character development

throughout the film.

Well,

she and Strickland head for work.

Where do they work?

Not in an office.

Area 51.

Not Area 51.

They work under Area 51 in a different area.

Because Area 51 is being decommissioned, as we hear on the radio.

It's being decommissioned in the funniest possible way, which is by having voice-activated tanks of acid spill out onto the buildings to dissolve them.

It is the funny, I don't think it's a good idea, actually.

And of course, they're setting it up for it

to be used in the big climax against the bad guys, but it is a very funny way to demolish government property is to set up a huge tank of acid, attach it to a voice activation trigger so that Strickland has to go to each one and say, Strickland.

And then it says voice activation recognized and then just sprinkles acid out of the tanks onto the buildings.

Yep, he's using the Chekhov brand

brand acid tanks.

Acid tanks, yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, these two are a real odd couple.

She's optimistic about aliens, and he's a real, like, everything's a potential enemy guy.

Not since the thing from another world have we seen, have we seen such an interesting pairing of a scientist who likes aliens and an army guy who doesn't?

Yeah, in the biz, we call this a Dharmin, Greg.

I mean, they're not technically a couple, though.

They're not a romantic couple, we should say, also.

They were a romantic couple on Dharma and Greg.

I thought they were just roommates.

No, no, they were married, Stuart.

Oh, I want to watch the show again.

It's a big thing to miss.

You might have watched Dharma and Grieg, in which Dharma and Edvard Grieg, the composer,

shared a room.

They were just friends.

They were just roommates, yeah.

Well, at ARA51, they're studying the cop that Eddie supposedly killed, but he has a

stray space goo all over him, and he's turned into a symbiote himself, or he has one, rather.

He has a symbiote now.

Now, did they, he, does he already have one, or they exposed him to one?

I think he had one, and he wasn't doing well, so they had to bond him with another symbiote or something.

Ah, I see.

Okay.

The 51 crew interrogate the cop.

They learned that the symbiotes came here to try and escape null,

which, I mean, like, it's a weird...

I don't know.

it's a weird way that this movie tries to make all of the symbiotes into sort of like nice guys.

They're all refugees from an alien monster, alien authoritarian, yeah.

Also, still do, like, you know, bite people's heads off and eat them.

Um,

but uh, whatever, you know, it's, it's the classic, we'll make you like these guys by having a bigger bad guy

situation.

Um,

and the cop has some sort of generic fantasy vision of an apocalyptic future with a flaming sword, and he goes, the darkness has teeth.

And meanwhile,

it is so funny to me.

Anytime this happens in a thing, and I'm sure I'm guilty of it in my own work sometimes, or will be in the future, where people are like, Explain to us what's going on.

And instead of saying, We're fleeing Null, who's an evil alien god, and he's trying to find and destroy us, it's like, it's like, out in the darkness, he waits.

The darkness has teeth.

Something grew.

The sword, or like in 28 days later, what happened?

I just grew up grew the wanderers.

He's at the looking for cheese tip, causing trouble.

Both of them together.

Of course, because Stan Sakai works on both.

Where in 28 days later, when a guy wakes up from a coma and he's chased by a zombie, and he's like, what's going on?

And the woman goes, it didn't happen the way you'd think it would happen.

And it's like, just tell me that there's zombies on the loose.

I want to know what the antecedent to it is.

It's the it that I'm wondering about the existence of, the identity of.

Yeah.

Well, Eddie and Venom

are flying to new york not the normal way but on the outside of the plane it's pretty funny actually clamping on the outside it's funny but like it's weird because like eddie himself is mostly outside of venom like venom could engulf eddie but instead eddie's sort of like hanging on to venom up in like at 30 000 feet or whatever

where there's not enough oxygen to live and it's super cold and also the symbiote i don't remember if it's the same in these movies but in the comics the symbiote is weak has weak one of his weaknesses loud sounds so to be strapped to the side of a plane would be very difficult for him probably i mean later on there's a reason why eddie can't go full venom but i don't think they know that at that point no they don't know that there's a reason to yeah it's mainly a goof you know

just for silliness i mean it's a silly movie come on um there's a mid-air action sequence they're attacked by one of the monsters and venom turns into a parachute to save eddie um that's cool and then we meet a ufo conspiracy couple who are like driving around in like a winnebago uh and i didn't know starring reese if

I didn't recognize him at first.

And I'm like, oh, Reese.

Reese Eiffens

appearing in yet another Spider-Man related movie after playing the lizard in the Amazing Spider-Man series.

Yeah, it's great.

I just, I wanted a Reese's piece, and I got one.

Piece of Reese.

I will say, this family, it's this hippie family that is trying to see Area 51 so they can see an alien.

Yeah.

I at first hated this family, then loved them, and then got very disappointed that they didn't go away and they had to be part of the climax of the movie.

There's a part in the movie that's coming up where they're riding in,

Eddie is riding in their car and they're singing a song together.

And there's a moment where the mom is driving and the daughter, who's a teenager who hates her family, is in the front seat and the mom kind of holds onto the daughter's hand and the daughter looks at her and smiles at her.

And they have a younger son who's genuinely enjoying this trip.

And I was like, this is the most real.

any characters have felt in any of these movies in years, I feel like.

Just this one family that is doing like kind of a family thing and Eddie is just there watching it.

And I was like, I really love that this moment in this character.

And then the characters keep showing up throughout the movie.

And I'm like, come on, guys, just let them go.

I would say the scene is slightly undercut while they're singing Major Tom that.

Venom is shouting the lyrics alongside this.

Yes, that's true.

It's more the moments between the family, and not Venom going, this is my jam.

Yes.

Oh, you know, that kind of stuff.

Well, the emotion is undercut.

We can argue about that scene when we get to it.

We're not quite there yet.

Oh, God.

Eddie notices that Venom is acting weird when they say that.

When they say Venny for a moment, I'm like

my cousin Venny.

My cousin Venny.

Oh, man.

Yeah,

we'll get my cousin Venny.

His lawyer is

the judge.

His symbiote is the lawyer.

And then Marissa Tomey is shouting at Venom, going, my biological clock is ticking like this.

So his accent is pretty, would be fitting for

a New York junior.

But now you mentioned Venom in the scene.

He goes, the two youths.

Excuse me, what is a ute?

You know, utes.

You know, now I just want to see my cousin Venom.

So you're saying Grits cooks faster on your stove top than anywhere else in the known universe.

Eddie notices that Venom is acting weird.

And

this is manifested by Venom being sort of like a little floating head next to Eddie with, you know, symbiote tendrils attached.

And

he's like, why are you acting weird?

He forces him to do an exposition dump where Venom explains if Eddie died, Venom can bring him back to life.

But the act of doing that would combine their DNA, forming a key called a codex.

And uh-oh, turns out that's already happened.

We see a flashback to a previous Venom movie where Eddie died and a thing that I also had forgotten.

I had forgotten about.

I'm not glad for this explanation, even though it is.

We'd be lost in the darkness like Noel.

Yeah, and Noel needs that codex to escape the prison that Clintar put him in.

It just rolls off the tongue, this non-gibberish.

I never liked the name Clintar.

That's straight from the comics.

I've always thought it was not a good sounding name for that alien subspecies.

I am President Clintar from another land.

But if Eddie or Venom dies, the Codex goes away.

Yes.

So how do they get the Codex without killing them?

I don't think Noel cares about killing them.

I think he's fine with doing that.

But if he kills them, the Codex goes away.

I think it's the, well, who knows?

I don't know.

He keeps him alive until the last minute.

I don't know.

Shove him into a keyhole.

Okay.

Shove Eddie Brock into a giant keyhole.

Because if the whole thing was the Clinton, the xenophages were just trying to capture him and take him back alive, that would be more fun than them trying to eat everything.

I think that I, well, the xenophages are not the best tool.

for getting someone and bringing them back as opposed to just eating everybody.

But it's similar.

I imagine it's a similar situation to Borderlands, where they're under the belief that the girl is the key to the vault, but that using her to open the vault will kill her, probably.

It's that kind of thing.

So probably xenophages would, maybe they can, I don't know, maybe they can pull the codex out of them or something.

I don't know.

It's a dumb movie.

It doesn't make sense.

I told them to do that.

So this is also an alien species that eats people and then spits the blood out the back of their head like they're a wood chick.

I kind of like that part.

Yeah.

The other main plot upshot of all this gibberish is that Venom cannot totally take over Eddie, as I said before, because when he's in full control, the bad guys can sense him.

Oh, right.

So I come to a Venom movie and I don't get to see fucking Venom.

Don't worry, Short.

You're going to get to see plenty of Venom because they just can't help themselves.

And you're going to get to see a Venom horse, a Venom frog, some other Venom stuff.

Speaking of that horse, they find him right now.

I didn't love, I don't know, I felt bad for the horse because it starts out with like, I'm asking you to make that horse go without killing it.

And I'm like, don't put that thought into my head movie.

No.

But just do the thing.

But they find a horse, they turn him into a Venom horse.

Does Venom do this shit in the comics where he like?

The thing is that sometimes they'll put the symbiote on different stuff, but the whole thing about Eddie Brock and the Symbiote, at least originally, was that like they're bonded permanently.

Now they cannot be separated from each other.

But then eventually they did find a way to separate him and he's gone around and there's been Venom animals.

But I feel like when they do it, it's not, well, actually, they'll do it with other symbiotes a lot.

There was a Tyrannosaurus Venom at one point.

Like, there was, you know, they do that symbol.

Land in the Savage Land or something?

I don't remember if it's something like that.

All the characters have had Venom symbiotes on them at some point or another now.

But they gallop at super speed to Don't Stop Me Now by Queen.

Do you think, how did you guys feel about that song choice?

Did you feel also as I did, but that is a song that I've heard a lot in stuff now?

And I'd be happy for me to find a different song and got across the same idea.

Somehow, I had actually not heard that song pre-Shawn of the Dead, even though it's a big queen song.

But since that time, yeah, it's all over the place.

It should have been what, like, Take Me Home Country Road or something.

What do you think?

I mean, that would have been funnier if it was Take Me Home Country Road.

It's funnier to have not a high-energy song while you're watching a guy get pulled by a horse covered in an alien goo.

What if it went, wild,

wild is the wind that takes me away.

What if that song was playing?

What was that?

I've been riding to the desert on a horse from Nelly.

Actually, it has a name.

It is Venom.

What about Goodbye Horses?

But Q Lazarus.

Yeah.

I don't know that song.

Have you ever seen Silence the Lambs, Elliot?

Yeah, that's when he's like sticking his penis between his eyes.

Oh, that's when he's like dancing to himself.

Okay.

Yeah.

Goodbye, horses.

Add it to your gym mix.

I will.

The mix that I play when I'm hanging out with my friend Jim Davis, creative Garfield.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, yeah, it's all zones-based raps.

Well, anyway, the Army,

they don't buy this, like, we're refugees then.

By the way, if you put a single Happy Monday song on that playlist,

Jim Davis loses his shit.

He's going to be so mad.

Mondays are never happy.

Go on, Dan.

No,

I appreciate it.

So

Chubatel's like, let's go snag Venom.

I thought

it was like, let's go snag Venom.

Let's go snag Venom.

I feel like I'm going to drop some Venom in on the way home?

I like him so much as an actor, but

he is always forced to play a guy with a lot of gravitas.

And I would love it if he got to be like just a silly guy.

Yes, I would love that too.

I feel like he's got it in him and I wish he could use it more often.

Yeah.

I thought this was a kind of fun action sequence, even though, Elliot, you expressed disdain for Venom bonding to other things, but I like this river action sequence where he's like...

When the Venom symbiote is kind of like jumping from animal to animal and it's just a second of siege, I was like, that's cool.

I like that idea.

Yeah, he becomes a fish.

He becomes a frog, a venom frog.

He saves Eddie by fully transforming, even though that'll tip off the alien again.

And Eddie, before he's fully transformed, Eddie kills one of the soldiers that is chasing after them.

And this really bothers him.

I mean, they did bite the heads off of four men earlier in the movie, but this one particularly bothers him, I think, because he can't say Venom did this.

It's I did this.

He did this.

And he also likes see, like, their mask comes off after he shoots them.

And he looks them in their face as the last light of life.

Also, you know, like, I am, I'm not personally in favor of just going out and killing criminals, but at least in his morality, he's like, oh, these like Venom's got to eat.

So we're eating criminals, not like someone who was presumably just ordered to take me in.

Yeah, but I mean, these like black bag squads, they're, they've probably done all kinds of horrible shit.

I guess so.

The thing is, Venom also likes to eat chocolate.

And so they could just buy a lot of chocolate, but instead they go out and they bite the heads off of criminals.

It feels like at that point, it's a choice to eat the brains and kill those people.

I will say, one thing I want to say about, which we haven't really talked about this, is Tom Hardy really commits to playing a guy who looks like he is a total wreck and just like a total slob who is at the end of his rope and has hit rock bottom.

And I really like that about it.

Tom Hardy, a guy who can be incredibly physically intimidating, but he makes himself seem like such a wimp.

It's a sense, yeah, it feels like a superhero movie where the dude Lebowski is like the hero of the movie, just kind of shambling through and not and

does not look like he should be winning fights and that.

And I really like that aspect of it, you know.

He looks like a guy who has been worn out by the past few movies.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, you've got a Venom on you.

And

we see this in the long flashback sequence at the very end, the flashback montage of times shared between Eddie and Venom, a lot of which just happened in this movie.

But you do see a couple from the first movie, and you're like, oh man, he was a little bit younger.

Back at Area 51, Juno,

Temple interrogates the Symbiote again, and the Symbiote's like, Venom is the one who has the codex, which gives the army even more motivation to kill Venom.

Meanwhile, Eddie meets that family of hippie alien seekers who offer him a ride to Vegas.

And as previously mentioned, there's a sing-along to David Bowie's Space Odyssey that Venom loves.

He's for once.

Space Oddity, right?

Sorry, Space Oddity, yes.

For once, he's glad he did not eat people.

And yeah,

the emotions perhaps are a little undercut by Venom yelling out lyrics, but I enjoyed it because I was imagining Tom Hardy playing Venom, loving David Bowie's face sympathy,

and knowing how much he loves to play that character and do that crazy voice.

I feel like a lot of these choices are probably in line with things Tom Hardy wants to do.

Like he's not doing things he's not into.

My guess is that Tom Hardy has a certain amount of control at this point, yeah, over what's happening on screen in these movies and what he does.

But this scene, like, this is the kind of scene you would have seen in an older movie, and then those characters would have dropped him off at Vegas and they would have had a goodbye, which we see, and they would have disappeared from the movie.

Or later, maybe they would have looked at a TV and seen Eddie on the TV and been like, that's the guy we saw.

But instead, these characters keep coming back throughout the movie, and it, it lessens.

This is this one scene, like I was saying, has an emotional power that I feel like is a real thing about it.

Eddie seeing a family at Venom seeing a family that he will never have.

That's an experience he'll never experience.

And Venom says to to him,

we should have had a family or maybe we should have had children.

And I was like, oh, this is a real like emotional moment that is working for me in this movie.

But at the movie, yeah, it cheapens it each time.

And

as soon as I saw that kid and he's like, I'm afraid of aliens, Deddy, I'm like, oh, they're going to put him in danger later.

I don't want that.

Like, that's not something I want in this movie.

And I mean, I feel like that's kind of symptomatic of all the Venom movies is that like they

they're fairly standard and then they have occasional brushes with actual like interesting stuff like what when Venom went to the rave in the second one

and performs a song, right?

Yeah,

yeah.

Well, much as the movie sort of takes a break at this point for a song, let's take a break to go over to Stuart for some more Max Fun Drive stuff.

Earlier, I mentioned a thing called the Max Fun Drive.

And if you've been listening to our show, you have probably already heard of this, but I need to explain what the Max Fun Drive is all about.

This is the one time a year where our show and the other shows on the network come to you, the listeners, hat in hand, saying, why don't you support our show it's also a time that we put out some of our best shows we are doing three full-length shows this month uh during the max fun drive and they're all about movies without spider-man we also are going to put out a bunch of we have some cool bonus stuff there's uh in addition to bonus content that's going to be in our bonus feed for all members and i'll talk about that in a sec we're also going to be doing things like on the evening of the 20th Dan and I are going to be doing a show from our Twitch from my Twitch stream where we do a show called the Slop House, where Dan and I cook things in his kitchen.

I cook up drinks.

He cooks up food.

We get hammered.

It's pretty fun.

And we answer the questions that are burning in your brain that you want to ask us right away when we are at our drunkest and easiest to convince.

I think we're also going to be doing a AMA on the Flophouse Discord, which there will be more info, I'm sure, in the show notes.

And this is also the best time to join during the Max Fun Drive, because this is when you are going to be able to kind of help boost the numbers, unlock extra things, and also have access to all kinds of cool new gifts.

Gifts?

Well, I'll talk about that in a second, but first I want to talk about why being part of MaxFun is important to us.

We are supported almost entirely by listeners.

We are not beholden to some kind of, I don't know, like giant mega corporation that hands down rules for what we can say on the podcast or controls our content or forces us to do ads for companies that we don't believe in.

No, by being listener supported,

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And I think it's good to say, like we own our own show and we work in sort of concert with the network and we get the largest cut of the money and the network gets some of the money, the network, which is worker owned and operated.

So it is owned by the people and the money goes directly to the people making the shows or helping the the shows.

So what this is leading me to is to say, please, why don't you support us today by becoming a MaxFund member?

Head to maximumfund.org slash join.

And when you get there, what you're going to see, if you're a first-time member,

you're going to set up your account.

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I mean, there's so much going back for what we've been on MaxFun like almost 10 years now.

So much stuff.

And that's all going to be right to your feed.

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But if you support at the $10 a month or more, you're going to get a pin of your choice.

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Let's get back to

our buddies, Eddie and Venom.

The eternal buddies.

What are they up to?

Well, they've just made it to,

what do you call it?

Las Vegas.

That's what I call it.

Lost Vegas.

Or most people are.

They shamble around Vegas for a while,

kind of just talking to themselves.

At one point, they knock a guy out so Tom Hardy can put on a tuxedo.

I do like the bit where he's not allowed to go into a Vegas casino because he doesn't look good.

And I'm like, guys, he looks exactly like everybody I've ever seen in Vegas.

Yeah, what is this dress code for the casino?

But, you know.

Also, I kind of missed the days where the symbiote was his like clothes.

I kind of, you know, maybe the producers are like, for God's sakes, Tom, we'll let you look like a shamples for most of the movie.

Put on a tuxedo once in this film.

And they make jokes about

how he looks like the sexiest man alive.

And I'm like,

I'm sure he was People Magazine's sexiest man alive at some point.

Here's my fix for why Venom can't be his clothes is because I think that would get to the point where there's enough venom on him that maybe the xenophages can see him or something like that.

I don't know.

But you're right.

In the comics, Eddie Brock is just wearing underpants with the symbiote on top of him and it just changes clothes depending on what he wants to do yeah yeah and they're like big old tidy whiteys right like they're like sometimes in underwear they're usually white yeah they're just just big white haines underpants yeah man man

awesome in the casino venom immediately like no wonder they're close because all he's wearing is underpants and then he's covered with his best friend yeah yeah everyone's dream you have to wear your best friend around

skin to skin like a like a mother and a newborn baby while i was watching this movie

not to give too much info on the life of Stuart Wellington.

As I was watching this movie, I was sitting down on the bed.

I was wearing some, I think I was wearing my jeans, which is important because that is the cue for my cat Muscles to jump onto the bed and then roll around on my lap for a while because he doesn't like bare skin.

He only likes jeans.

Unlike Venom, he doesn't like being skin to skin.

He likes to be on my jeans.

But it was a moment where I'm like, oh, Muscles.

Muscles was also kind of groggy because he was recovering from having surgery.

So he was rolling around on me.

And I'm like, muscles is kind of like my venom.

Like, he yells at me.

He's annoying all the time, but I love him going.

You brought it back.

Cause like, I, you know, I was also wondering, Dan, how is it related to anything?

I'm like Elliot.

I love cats.

I do like them.

I like them.

But I was kind of wondering what the

why are my two friends concerned about me telling a story about my life?

Aren't they interested in my life and want to hear from me?

Is that really a story about your life?

Yes, just because I wasn't the hero of the story.

Sometimes we're not the main character in our lives.

Because they facilitated a moment of closeness between you and your beloved pet.

Anyway.

Ella looks angry at the idea that I could have a closeness with somebody that isn't him.

Well, Elliot, next time I'm wearing jeans, you can roll around on my lap.

Thank you.

That's all I'm asking for to get the full experience.

In the casino, Venom has an immediate gambling problem.

He wants to play the slots.

They run into Mrs.

Chen, the deadly order from the first couple of movies.

She's been winning big.

They go to her room.

She looks great in her sequence dress.

She wants to dance with them.

And Dancing Queen starts.

And Venom, I guess, is so overcome with the power of dance, he forgets the one rule that he can't fully become Venom because he immediately does it for this dance sequence with her yeah and uh that's that's what that's what is is the xenophage not going to notice because he's dancing so cool that it that the codex is there no it does notice i mean i i like to think that venom wanted an audience to his dance it is a fun sort of weird fake out because they do that though like they have the monster show up and then uh venom hides inside eddie again and it's like you know t-rex rules and oh like oh the mod he can't sense the monster anymore he'll just go away uh and then the army comes in and kidnaps immediately afterwards so i guess that was the fake out um

meanwhile the hippie family is at area 51 they want to break in see what's up uh hippies right yeah that's they're always breaking always trying to break into area 51 that's the thing i know about hippies for sure uh a devenomized eddie runs they're also let's just say also these are bad parents it's one thing to take your kids to look at area 51 it's not a hippie it's another thing to have them be sneaking in under the fence at

a classified military installation.

And I think the eldest child keeps pointing out that

they're bad parents and they should be taken away from that.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, so Eddie runs in.

Eddie's in a jail cell.

He runs into the cop in the next cell who tells him to release the symbiote army kept in the lab and to keep the codex from null.

The army shows up to fuck everything up like officials tend to to do, and in the chaos,

very libertarian bent from Tim all of a sudden.

Well, I guess you want to drain the swamp and take a chainsaw to the deep state, Dan.

Wow.

Okay.

I'm talking about the military-industrial complex specifically.

Yeah, you're mad about all these DEI hires that are screwing things up for America's military.

He normally talks about that off-air, man.

I'm just amazed he's bringing it onto the show and doing the max flat drive, no less.

It's an anti-military stance,

not the people, but sort of the general vibe.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Yeah.

The robots that are in control.

It's all people, Dan.

Anyway,

lizard people is what Dan says.

Yeah, yeah, because he's been listening to a lot of David Icke's

stuff.

All the shape-changing multi-dimensional lizards.

Oh, yeah, Dan.

They create chaos so that Eddie and Venom can be reunited, solving a plot complication almost immediately.

Yeah, like the symbiote jumped on one of the researchers and then like bounced from her to Eddie, right?

I don't know, man.

It happened so fast.

It all happened so fast.

Yeah, it's a duck blur.

The monster shows up and Gino Tempo listens to Venom's like hissed instructions to release the symbiotes who bind to various scientists to fight the monster.

And everyone breaks.

Which is what we signed up for, right?

We signed up for a movie featuring a ton of venoms and we get a ton of them.

I mean, it's a sequel to a Venom movie.

It's going to have more venoms each time.

Those are Easter egg venoms.

Yeah, are these all Easter egg venoms?

Not all of them, but many of them are Easter egg venoms.

There's Riot, there's Toxin.

These are characters that are loosely based on symbiote characters that are also in the comics and who don't show up that often.

And later on,

not to spoil things too much, but Juno Temple bounds with a symbiote and she's got cool symbiote hair.

I like that.

That's how you know she's a lady.

There's a comics, there's a symbiote lady who has long symbiote hair, yeah, in the the comics.

Are there any

at least male characters with symbiote hair?

No, the male characters tend to be pretty bald when they're when they're in the symbiot mode.

Yeah, it's only a lady's thing, yeah.

Much the same way that the personification of death in the Marvel Universe is a skeleton in a robe, but she still has boobs, so you know she's a lady.

Yeah, I like how you said personif as personification, which is what the first version of Sonic the Hedgehog when his face looked too human.

Too human, too much, yeah.

Those little teeth.

The fight spills out to where the hippies can see them.

Eddie reunites with them.

At one point, one of the sympiets yells at Chuatel for killing another one of them, saying, We are not the bad guys.

I'm like, What are we doing here, everyone?

Dan, this Venom movie about a man who has alien clothes that is being stalked by other aliens, it's got an important message about not othering

different than you.

Yeah.

Aliens are different.

I do have a point on this.

This xenophage is like unstoppable.

It like scarfs, scarfs people.

If it takes any damage, it like reconstitutes.

You blow it up and it's fine.

You shoot it and it's fine.

Although it is vulnerable to having its head chopped off, as we find out later.

That's the one thing it can't do.

It's vulnerable to when the right character kills it.

That is

the little finishing point.

I was going to bring this up when we got there, but

we may as well talk about it now.

Yeah, later on, one head gets chopped off.

Another one gets blasted in the head with a rocket launcher.

And I'm like, okay, I guess that kills them.

everything literally everything else has just had them reconstitute themselves and the movie is not really making it clear that these are like permanently dead especially when there's like so many monsters racing all over the place I this is one place where I as a stupid audience member could have used someone like cut off their heads it's the only way to kill them and to be like okay I know where we're at now thanks thumbs up I know the rules but

Their head is their connection to null, so they must not have it severed from their body.

Well, speaking of things the monsters can and can't do, at this point, it lets out a ringing signal to both alert null and also temporarily separate the symbiotes from the people that they're on, which had me wondering, why did this monster not do this at any time earlier in the movie?

He's got to be on a fucking cooldown or something.

If they have that ability all the time, it's OP.

It is going to ruin the game.

And they don't necessarily want to separate.

the symbiote from Eddie too, because they need that sweet codex.

Eddie zooms off on a motorcycle to distract the monsters for a while from the family who've decided they don't like aliens after all, other than their friend Eddie.

Chuatel is stabbed by a monster tail.

Meanwhile, Venom and another symbiote use chopper blades to cut off a monster's head, fully killing it.

Eddie's pulled to safety.

They say motorcycle tricks, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Venom uses his

long arms to pull Eddie to safety.

He's been stabified by some shrapnel or something like that.

And Venom's like, I I have to sacrifice myself to keep the codex from locking Null.

These sentences.

So he does a hero walk while the symbiote absorbs various monsters, which is yet another thing where I'm like,

he could do this all the time.

I feel like as silly as

this is,

there was something like, there was something weirdly sad about this scene between the two characters.

Well, you know what I found genuinely tender?

I was about to get to it.

He ejects Eddie out to keep him safe while he's putting himself in acid.

And there's this weirdly sweet moment I thought where he sends a little tendril out to put an armored door over Eddie to try and protect him from what's coming up next, which is he does not do that for Chua Toldchu.

No, no, Chua Tolchu.

He's

dying.

He's just holding him up to the voice recognition thing so he can say, Strickland, and then have the acid come down.

And he blows everything up with

a grenade, too,

which I'm not sure how that door protected Eddie because that grenade also seems to set off like the entire

anything explosive in the general vicinity goes up.

I mean much the same way that in Craven, he is blown up with a missile and then falls in a

pile of rubble falls in him and he just bugs Bunny his way out where he just suddenly is standing behind the bad guy with no explanation.

It's just hero stuff.

At the last minute, as everything explodes, Juno Temple is only able to save one of her colleagues by breaking a test tube and turning herself into a symbiot host at the last minute.

And Eddie.

Oh, Briggs, she's got a best friend now.

It's cool.

Eddie wakes up in the hospital calling for venom, and an army guy's like, he's not coming back.

These Sony movies were a bad idea.

He's not coming back.

I love this fun.

This is a very funny moment when he looks over and there's just been an army guy standing there the whole time, waiting for him to wake up, I guess, to deliver the message to him.

But it's just very funny.

Yeah, but at least he pardons Eddie for anything he possibly could be prosecuted for with the cave.

Something that a military leader doesn't really have the ability to do.

Well, maybe he's a messenger.

I mean, I guess so.

He adds the caveat that, of course, he will be indefinitely detained somewhere if he speaks a word of any of it.

And then we have the ending of the film before the credits.

What?

Where Eddie walks around New York dreaming a sentimental montage of all of the fun times he had with Venom.

Because Venom had been talking about how much he wanted to see New York.

Yeah, the one thing I missed.

Ruined slimes of memories plays.

Sorry, go on.

Yeah, it's fine.

The one thing, the one clip that they did not play from previous movies, I really would have liked the moment where Michelle Williams is sitting with him on a stoop and she's like, Eddie, I'm sorry about Venom.

I'm sorry about Venom.

What a great line.

We're all sorry about Venom.

And he stares out at Lady Liberty and he says, I won't forget you, buddy.

Weirdly, sentimental ending a tale of a man in love with an alien like no shit dude he's not gonna forget the like months he was bonded with an alien biting people's heads off no matter how much therapy he can get he will never forget venom uh i mean it does open the possibility that he'll get married have a family and then just be like he'll be eating dinner sometime be like oh you know who i just thought about Venom.

I haven't thought about him in years.

Yeah.

Who?

Oh, Venom.

I never told you about him.

My roommate/slash body mate.

Oh, we were.

Yeah.

We were so close.

Yeah,

he's on a camping trip with friends, and somebody gets bitten by a snake.

And they're like, hurry, Eddie, get the anti-venom.

He's like, venom?

I got a story for you, buddy.

Eddie, there's not time.

So the listed run time for this film is one hour 50, but here at 1 hour 32, we get credits.

And Stewart was like, ooh, I'm living on borrowed time, baby.

And he turned it off.

Of course, are there credit scenes?

You better believe it, Vin Hedge.

There's a mid-credit one where Nulls swears he's going to find a way to Earth and destroy it.

Don't worry.

We'll never see him again.

She says, and you will watch.

And I'm like, I don't know.

I don't think so.

Unless they change around.

Unless somebody changes his mind, but maybe, I mean, if it happens, we will watch it for the podcast, probably.

Yeah, of course, yeah.

And then there's the end credits.

The actual last dance.

Yeah.

At the very end of the credits.

Wait, there's another one?

Yeah, the bartender emerges from the smoking ruins of Area 51 where he'd been held, and a cockroach crawls up to some remaining symbiote in a test tube, which retroactively gives context to some utterly meaningless chatter Judo Temple has with the security guard earlier about how cockroaches survive,

you know, for millions of years or whatever.

And I'm like, yeah, that's a, you know, that's the true thing about cockroaches.

Why is this in the movie at this point?

Like, and it's funny because the security guard just like also nods like, yeah, yeah, you're not very good at making small talk are you?

Well, go on.

Does it become like a venom cockroach?

It threatens to, but the screen goes black.

It's implied that this cockroach will now be a venom cockroach, which is one of those things where it's at we've already seen a venom symbiote.

We've seen venom symbiotes in the wild on people and other animals.

We know there are other venom symbiotes that survived.

So I don't quite know what the purpose is of this moment.

If it's supposed to seem cool, but the idea, usually this is when you realize, oh, there's still one left.

We know Juno Temple's walking around with one on, right?

Like the other ones are still around, I think.

So

it kind of undercuts the coolness of finding out there's another because you know there's a bunch of other ones too.

Yeah.

Well, let's get into our final judgments of the final or last dance.

Dance, yeah, not the final dance.

Is this a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie kind of like

this is entirely out of like weird affection that I've grown to have for these movies, having to watch all of them for the podcast.

I did kind of like this.

I think it's just Stockholm syndrome of like, Tom Hardy really loves doing this.

There's enough silly things in each movie that I have fun.

And this one, like I said before, the credits drop was only an hour and a half.

So I kind of liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone per se.

So it's not your recommendation for this episode.

Circumstances have caused me to learn to love Venom the way Eddie has.

that you've been bonded to the Venom series as Eddie Brock is bonded to Venom.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like this is kind of on the border between a bad, bad movie and a movie I kind of like.

There's so, like, it is, I feel like it's by the numbers in a lot of ways, but there are weird moments that are great.

And it is just such a strange thing that this, so much of the movie is this guy who's like kind of hapless and like barely a hero, just wandering around.

And then there's just a loud voice yelling at him.

And you don't even see Venom for most of the time.

It's just like, I don't know, it's just such a strange choice.

It's just they're weird movies.

They're weird movies, okay?

Right.

I think we can agree they're weird movies.

Yeah, I agree with you.

It's on that same line for me between bad, bad, and movie.

I kind of liked when it's just, exactly, when it's the weird moments where it's just Tom Hardy and Venom talking to each other.

That, that's the kind of stuff.

In the first movie, I was like, all right, he's like a wise cracking alien who loves pop culture stuff.

But now that has grown on me, and I think it's because, you know, weird, it's weird to say this, but I feel like Tom Hardy has grown into the Venom character in addition to making the Eddie Brock character more of a shambling loser, you know?

And so I really like that.

But anytime it's dealing with the main plot of the movie, it's super...

dull and exposition heavy and by yeah like you're saying by the numbers and it's kind of fascinating that like tom hardy has basically turned this into i and i'm assuming he has a lot of control over this, but I feel like the movies have turned into a weird, like, love affair between Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy.

Like, it's like he's like,

it's just such a weird thing.

And I would much rather see a movie about, at this point, about Eddie Brock trying to have a regular life and dealing with the fact that he's like

a drop dead Fred type version of Venom, you know?

Cause I agree, right?

It's this weird thing of.

a love affair between two characters played by the same actor who feel like they're playing different sides of that same person.

And that's more fun to me than any of this stuff.

It would be so much more fun if they had lowered the stakes and there was like no other Venom characters in there.

And it was just like him like, yeah, like him like, okay, I have to deal with, yeah, I'm just like doing a, it's like a slice of life story where he's like dealing with like neighborhood problems, basically.

Yeah, that's what I want to say.

Sure, you want to?

Yeah, so earlier today, I've been doing a lot of teasing, folks.

I'm the tease master today, and I was teasing all the bonus content that we have.

And you know what?

We have so much bonus content available for anybody who supports the Max Fun network and our show.

Well, just anybody who's a supporter at $5 a month or more.

Everybody has access to this massive library of bonus content.

A library that you can also like tweak and tailor.

depending on what your needs are because not only do we have bonus content on there but all the other shows on the network have been contributing bonus content and some of those shows have been on the network longer than us uh we've done so many cool things from like full-length, feature, feature-length, full movie commentaries, so that you can try and sync up the thing to watching the movie.

I think we did one for country bears.

We did one for what, cats?

Cats.

Yeah, some other things.

We have a bunch of like weird side episodes where we did an episode where we were like did the put the flophouse treatment to some TV shows.

And then, as Dan, I think Dan or Elliott mentioned on a previous episode, we did a

series of three kind of

slightly shorter episodes of the podcast where we go over the movies of Graydon Clark such as joysticks the one of the Lombada movies he made and what Star Games which is yeah that's something which is basically a family home movie that is is released as a yeah as a film yeah yeah it's something special you know what it occurs to me that this this is the second one of the of the drive.

Some stretch goals have been announced by now, so I just want to reinforce them on the main

episode, main feed here.

Like, as in previous years, we have stretch goals.

If we get 500 or more

new or upgrading members, we're going to do a raffle like we did before.

We're going to pick,

I think, 30 of y'all to get stuff from all of us, whether it be swag or a personalized drawing from me.

And also

for a thousand,

the stretch goal is there's a script that I wrote that I'm going to produce as a fully,

you know, like fully produced radio play.

So, if that intrigues you, if you're like, oh, some scripted content from Dan McCoy that he has to do a lot of work for,

you know, make me do that work by becoming a member.

And basically, what Dan's saying is that if you are considering signing, if you're considering supporting, do it now.

Will you please go and support the flophouse today by going to maximumfun.org/slash join to support today?

Now, one final piece of Boco that's bonus content.

It's pretty, it's close to my heart is there's a couple of episodes of the Flop Tales where I make Dan, Elliott, and Jubin play role-playing games with me with me as the dungeon master.

I have a feeling that some of our listeners might be interested in tabletop role-playing games.

And that was a thing that started as us doing a crossover from a way past, what, eight years ago or something,

Max Fun thing where we did a crossover with the the Adventure Zone.

So we played some D and D and I got them to do that.

And then we have since spun into other settings.

There's like a weird boiled, almost pseudo-Lovecraft game.

There's one where they are animated dogs.

And then this

year

we produced a game where

I had them running and staffing a seaside seasonal restaurant on the first day of the season and just trying to keep that thing going, kind of in the vein of TV shows from the 70s, like It's a Living or Alice or something like that.

And those shows are the

flop tails, or in this case, Slop Tails, are really important to me because

that's a hobby that I love.

And it's also by far the most work I've ever done for the podcast.

And with that in mind, one of the things that's great about our show and doing it listener supported is that so much of pop culture these days is being increasingly controlled by

a small group of very big companies.

And it feels like if you want to support, like watch anything or listen to any music, you're giving money to companies that are not cool.

They are bad companies.

They are bad and they are supporting bad people.

And one of the great things about supporting us and supporting kind of creator-owned things is that you get to feel like you are putting your money toward the people who are actually making the thing that you're enjoying and not just some kind kind of like bullshit world Zaibatsu that's like grinding out content just for the sake of it.

Your money is directly supporting us, and I think that's really important.

And for me,

I found that specifically during the pandemic, it really helped me

realize my priorities when it came to where I'm putting my money.

I'm not just asking you to support the Flophouse or support the creators you love.

I put my money where my mouth is.

I like to put my money toward things like Bandcamp, Patreon, and I'm also a MaxFun member.

I like to, if there's creators out there that are making things I love, I like to give them money if I can.

And that's one of the nice things about MaxFun is that not only they give us a platform for doing this, they give us the freedom.

to make the show that we want, and they give you a relatively easy way to support us, the Flophouse, your favorite podcast.

So why don't you head over to maximumfund.org slash join and become a MaxFun member today, please

uh let's uh let's do some letters guys let's do some letters treat ourselves that's yeah that's what we call it right doing letters well i'll read them and then

correspond uh this is from adam last name withheld do the letter magoyan uh

yep director of exotica and the sweet hereafter yep adam writes as a native minnesotan I hold the 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary, Jingle All the Way, near and dear to my heart as the pinnacle of the 90s Minnesota film renaissance.

Standing alongside Fargo, Maul Rats, the Mighty Ducks, Drop Dead Fred, and Drop Dead Gorgeous as an essential piece of our cinematic this.

Drop Dead series.

Drop Dead Before Midnight.

This year, my wife and I meticulously tracked and mapped Schwarzenegger's Christmas Eve film Odyssey to get a turbo man for Jamie and determined that to jingle all the way means driving 100 plus miles and or 3.5 hours plus in search of one very specific last-minute gift, not counting shopping, committing multiple felonies, pushing his SUV 10 across town, or many, many other shenanigans.

Are there other movies that come to mind for compressing an absurd amount of chaos into one day slash night?

Thanks for the laughs and keep your stick on the ice.

Adam last name withheld.

Not after hours.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Well, the thing is, like, I got to say, I love the one crazy night conceit, and I will forgive the idea of like a bunch of chaos being compressed into one night because that's part of the fun of it.

What always bothers me in movies, even though I know that one of the points of filmmaking is we can compress or expand time at will.

It's one of the magic powers of the cinema.

But when a movie really relies on like putting something off for a long time for suspense and then at the end, like, oh, we magically did it in like five minutes at the end of the movie, and that's okay.

Like, I don't like that kind of like playing with time, but uh, I like it when they take the moments before death and they slow it down, and I get to see my hands running through the wheat field.

I can see my dead family far off in the distance, and I realize revenge was worth it, you know?

Or if you're like falling down the middle of like an atrium in a big building because Dred has shot you or whatever happens.

Dred has smashed a a tube of slow-mo into my mouth and then thrown me off a building.

And I get to experience Slow-Mo style.

What a picture.

What a picture.

What a picture, indeed.

I think the only thing that bothers me along those ways is when characters go from

hating each other to being in love with each other over the course of one night, you know, or one day.

That happens a lot in movies.

No, man, you haven't lived.

I guess not.

I guess not.

But it can also be fun to see something.

Yeah, where it's just like, oh, what a night.

Oh, so much stuff happened.

What a night.

Yep, that's how it goes.

So much stuff happened in this movie.

This actually, just like the last episode, this listener question is going to tie in with my movie recommendation.

Oh, wow.

Teaser.

Oh, the tease master strikes again.

So, wow.

Toes.

Toes.

Alex, edit that, whatever Dan just said about teases.

Oh, that's a new catchphrase.

You've been tozing.

um

so that doesn't really answer but it sort of does blake last name withheld also writes in

blake writes the ice cream truck just drove by

and i was immediately tell him

man blake edwards is waiting for an ice cream truck

the ice cream truck just drove by and I was immediately compelled to cease my lazy day, get out of my awesome Jedi bathrobe and get dressed.

I didn't run out there in the nude, and run after it to buy a Batman popsicle.

I am 40 years old.

What are things?

So

this is one of those baby shoes, never worn tech stories.

What should I do?

What are things that create such a childlike sense of honest nostalgia for you that you have no choice but to indulge?

I don't mean fan service.

I mean the stuff that actually triggers emotion.

Love you guys.

Blake, last name withheld.

Thanks, Blake.

This is a hard one to

go.

Like, I feel like oftentimes we sort of like dance around the question because it's easier, to be frank.

But

there's stuff like that came to my mind.

Like, I love a movie that has...

stop motion in it just because it creates this like connection to like such a simple like beautiful past craft.

But it's not like I'm indulging in a particular thing.

It's just like a thing that I like when it comes up.

Another sort of thing that came to mind is,

you know, my childhood

movie hero was always Harrison Ford in Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

And so no matter how grumpy the man is,

Red Hulk.

I'm like,

you know, even during the lean Harrison Ford years, I always at least considered seeing a movie that had him in it just because he was in it.

Was that one with Brad Pitt, the IRA movie?

The Devil Zone.

The Devil Zone.

Ugh.

Review.

What do you guys think?

I mean, I find that most of my nostalgia gets triggered by seeing old commercials, like the commercials from when I was a kid.

They feel so different than modern commercials.

But also, I think like the taste of Hebrew National Beef Salami is a real taste of my childhood that I don't don't get that often.

You know the touch of the fabric of my life, yeah.

But in terms of movies, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, there's certain movie, I mean, it's just, there's certain movies that

like, I think movies that are, have a very mid-80s level of technology.

Whenever watching those, there's a certain sort of nostalgia to like when I was a little kid and just how much more analog the world was and how much less digital it was.

So I have a real, you know, the for a long time, the

like Anna Perna logo, which is looks very much like a VHS tracking, the ornamental TV turning on, that would really get to me.

I just thought of one that I really turned around on

early CGI.

At the time,

I was just angry.

I'm like, well, we have ways of doing the thing that you're doing that look better for the technology and budget you have, you know, but now.

Like, they had a rock.

Why do they have to come up with this CGI scorpion thing that I'm doing?

But now I look back at that stuff.

I'm like, oh, give me more.

Like, I just saw

at the most ridiculous, the most recent ridiculous sublime screening at the Nighthawk with Virtuosity.

Oh,

beautiful.

I mean, well, like, we did, we did that live show about spawn.

And, like, when the spawn movie came out, I was like, ugh, this looks terrible.

But watching it now, I'm like, this looks beautifully terrible.

Yeah.

And it's all nostalgia.

It's just nostalgia.

And it's in that, like, in Virtuosity, is like the world that Sid is in is this like very vaporwave world where it's, you know, it's like, oh, it's just a vast void with columns in it, and someone's playing giant chess pieces behind him.

I'm like, this is what we thought technology meant back then.

Yeah.

It all looked like, you know, like the animated menu on CD ROM.

Yeah.

I, uh, I'm, I think you guys have kind of answered the main question pretty well.

I mean, I will also throw in there: if I ever see in a movie, if I ever see glass bricks, like a glass brick wall, I'm like, oh, fuck, give me that shit.

Yeah.

I feel like there's going to be some silk stockings here.

But

there's a thing that I have trouble with, and that's

when I was watching the first season of The Bear, there's an episode where they install a like a ticket machine for doing takeout orders.

And the sound of that fucking ticket machine is drives me insane.

Like it reminds me of working in places where I had a ticket machine or

with the

timers at the bar bar have a very specific tone.

And if I ever hear that specific ringing tone, like I hear it in my dreams sometimes, but like one of my bartenders was playing a song that had

that ringing tone in it.

I'm like, turn that fucking thing off.

I used to have, I had an alarm clock that made the same sound as the alarm clock at the start of the theme song for the animated tick TV show.

Oh, okay.

And I remember at one point re-watching one of those, and that sound came up in the beginning, and I was like, ugh, like even though I was awake, I jolted as if I was waking up.

Yeah, like when movies use the, like, use what the stock Apple, like, iPhone alarm thing, I'm like,

I hate this movie.

Yeah, I hate this.

I want to leave.

Um, let's, uh, let's recommend some movies, shall we?

Yeah, why not?

Do they make any good ones?

I don't think

no, thank you.

Um, I'm gonna do something a little unusual, and I'm going to recommend a short film.

Um, it's from Elliott, is this okay?

This looks, I mean, he's recommended short films before, so he can do it again.

Yeah.

Thank you for the ruling.

Precedent is on your side.

Yeah, well, you know, that doesn't always mean anything.

I appreciate that you have kept to

old ways.

It's Windy Day is the title from 1968.

I found it on the

Criterion channel.

I was looking to see what sort of animation, what sort of short animation they had on there.

It's

directed by Faith and John Hubley, a married couple.

They made a lot of animated.

Yes, yes.

And this one, it's their two daughters, one of whom went on, grew up to be a founding member of Yola Tingo.

I found out

looking up this movie.

But this is some audio of the two daughters playing.

And

it's at least...

somewhat just like found audio, like improvised stuff, but I think that also from what I read, it was guided a little bit by, you know, the hands of the parents.

But, you know, kids are not going to,

it's going to go off into weird directions.

And this is a beautifully animated little short that is audio of two real children playing, and it captures sort of the Phantasmagora.

Things like keep shifting.

The

older girl wants to put on a play.

The younger girl is like, why do you always want to do plays?

Doesn't want to do it until like it starts happening.

And then, of course, she wants to join in.

and it it just really captures the feeling of kids at play and how they sort of stumble into weird and profound misunderstandings about the way the the world works because they're children um like the movie kids right not like that at all and uh

yeah elliot mentioned that john hubley did a lot of stuff i was looking him up did disney work did work for upa was responsible for the mapo commercials i want my mapo co-created Mr.

Magoo, did a bunch of Sesame Street animations, did the Doonesbury animated

special.

Like, his hands are all over the place.

Is that about politics?

Probably.

But it led me down a rabbit hole of looking into more of that work because it's interesting stuff.

Yeah, and they did a number of cartoons using kind of kid audio.

Yeah.

Also.

Yeah, that was really good.

Stuart, what are you going to recommend?

I'm going to recommend a movie that kind of fits into the compressed time, lot of stuff happens genre, and that's a recent comedy called One of Them Days, starring Kiki Palmer and Sizza.

It's basically like a goofy

friend buddy movie where they are facing a economic crisis and they have to get it done by the end of the day or else bad things will happen and things keep getting progressively worse for our two heroes.

But they are both very charming.

There's a bunch of weird characters intersect with their journey.

It's a lot of fun.

And

I saw this movie, I feel like about a month ago when it was in theaters.

And it was just so much fun to see a movie like this in a movie theater because it's so rare to see like comedies, like mid-budget comedies showing up in movie theaters.

And yeah, it was just like a fun hangout movie with two leads who are incredibly likable.

And I would watch them make another one of these.

So that's my review.

One of them days.

I'm going to recommend a movie that's kind of the opposite of that.

It's a documentary that is not a fun Hangout movie and is about a main character who is very unlikable and very

a little frightening.

And this is the movie The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On.

This is a Japanese documentary from 1987 that Kazuo Ohara directed.

And it follows this guy, Kenzo Okazaki, who he's a veteran of World War II, and he has become convinced that it is his calling to go and confront other veterans of World War II for their failures, both the failures of how they took care of the soldiers who were fighting for Japan in New Guinea, and also it is to confront them over their attempts to try to go back to normal life rather than becoming kind of almost biblical prophets of the madness of the war.

And he is a very difficult person.

He is at times a very violent person who is who he'll be confronting someone about what happened to them in the war and then just start beating them up because they're not doing they're not saying the things things he wants them to.

And

he was especially focused on the deaths of two soldiers that

were executed under somewhat mysterious charges of desertion, but they were executed after the war had officially ended when they shouldn't have been able to be tried on those charges.

And this is a spoiler.

Most of the movie is him talking to people in tense meetings that because of Japanese etiquette more than anything else, I think people will sit down and talk to him and the meetings

and try to talk calmly despite the tension.

But about halfway halfway through, suddenly all their conversations become about cannibalism among Japanese soldiers during World War II and who they were eating and why they were eating them.

And

it was just one of the most, one of the biggest kind of sudden breaks in my understanding of what a movie was about in the middle, in the middle of it.

And it happens very calmly that someone is just like, yeah, anyway, I heard they were killed because they were going to talk about all the cannibalism that was happening.

And then suddenly the movie is on that road.

And it's a, it's a, it's like a real life portrait of almost like a real life kind of like Travis Bickle type person

and this crusade that he's on that is of questionable value and the secrets that he's digging up potentially going on.

And it's a, I found it to be a really kind of like fascinating movie and a really hard-hitting movie, though it's not always,

sometimes it's a, it's an unpleasant watch, even though it's mostly scenes of people just talking to each other in different in different rooms and occasionally being beaten up by this guy.

It's not a screwball comedy, is we?

It is not a screwball comedy.

It's not a particularly funny movie.

And that's The Emperor's Naked Army marches on.

Well worth seeing, but it's not a fun hangout movie.

Cool.

At all.

Stu, any last Max Fun Drive words before we sign off?

Yes.

What I'm going to say is: if you are considering it, if you're on the fence, why don't you join Max Fun for five bucks a month?

That is five bucks a month, that is like one egg a month.

So you can join, and that'll give you access to the full bonus bonus content library.

And you can

try what it's like over here on the good side of supporting Max Fun shows.

You can also boost your membership if you can't do a full upgrade, or if you're living large, why don't you upgrade that membership and get some of that cool swag so you can show off your allegiance to Max Fun and impress all your friends?

There's great gifts, there's tons of Boco.

You support creators like me, like Dan, like Elliot.

Yeah, so please join today.

Go to maximumfund.org/slash join and become a MaxFun member now.

Thank you for that forceful pitch.

And thank you to our producer, Alex Smith.

He goes by the name Howell Dotty as a musician, as a Twitch streamer,

you know, making jokes on the internet.

You can find him.

And thank you, producer Alex.

Thank you to the network.

Thank you to you, the listener, for being with us.

Well, you're one of the hosts.

And for the flop house, I've been Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

And I'm Elliot Kalen.

Bye.

See ya.

I wonder if this is the first time that the director of a movie has been an actor in the sequel to that movie.

Who was the director?

Because Andy Serkis directed the last Venom movie, and he plays Null in this movie.

True.

Yeah, he really plays the hell out of it.

Characters barely exist in the movie.

Director for this is the longtime screenwriter.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah.

So that was kind of nice.

Getting a chance.

Sure.

Put them in, coach.

The movie's not very good.

Something that Venom would probably say.

Put them in, coach.

Put them in, coach.

Eddie, put them in, coach.

Put them in, coach.

That's first class for them.

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