Ep.#436 - Dear David, with Hallie Haglund

Hi, Floppers.

Before we start this episode, I just wanted to remind you we are in the middle of Flop TV Season 2.

That's right, the one-hour internet televised flophouse TV show is here for you the first Saturday of every month through February.

Just go to theflophouse.simpletics.com and get your tickets or season pass for this all-new flop house TV stuff.

We're covering movies we've never covered before.

We've got video segments.

It's amazing.

Just go to theflophouse.simpletics.com for flop TV Season 2.

This time, it's personal.

On this episode, we discuss Dear David.

I've heard of a Dear John, but Dear David is ridiculous.

I was thinking of a Dear John thing, too, just because I know it's one of Hallie's favorite shows.

It is.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

Oh, hey there, Dan.

It's me, Stuart Wellington.

Well, howdy, folks.

It's me, Elliot Kalin.

I don't see you much around these parts.

I'm Hallie Hatch.

Perfect.

You did it.

You did it.

I love that you got so caught up in the character that you forgot the objective of the lion.

I lost myself in it.

That's what happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it reminded me of when I would go into Hallie's office and after a while, she'd go, go on, get.

Get.

Go on now.

Get.

Poking me with a stick she had there.

Hey, this is a podcast where we guys.

What?

Did you guys see that Reba McIntyre is a new show out?

I I did I saw ads for it in the New York City subway what's that called again it's like so-and-so's place right it's guys it's called happy space

because I I of course want more Reba McIntyre TV shows but the problem is is growing up there was a local uh kids show where a uh like a clown hobo character and his frog sidekick uh introduced cartoons basically it was called happy space he was happy the hobo and so i can't see these ads and not be like,

this feels like stolen valor, Reba.

I was

playing fresh meals.

She does play a hobo that introduced cartoons.

That's not a Reba McIntyre song.

Reba McIntyre.

You know what they say?

Jolene.

Introducing the podcast printing.

Should have been a cowboy.

Am I right?

This is a God who made a honky dunk angels by Reba.

Damn it.

Yep.

Full some prison blues.

Yeah.

This is a Reba Mac.

Living in America.

I mean, don't even, like, I love the show Reba.

I watch the shit out of it.

But I still, like, to this day, I can't get over how, like, self-aggrandizing the opening credit song is because it's like, you know, she's a single mom who's a little bit more.

Wake up in the morning with a cup of ambition.

No, you're, you're messing up my bit, Elliot.

So it's okay.

You know, she's a single mom who works too hard.

I got Elliot to apologize, by the way.

I know it worked when I tried to shut you down.

So so she's a single mom who works too hard.

She loves her kids, and she'll never stop, you know, like giving hands on the heart of a fighter.

I'm a survivor.

But I'm like, have you watched the show?

She's like kind of a jerk to everybody.

I mean, she, you know, but fair is fair.

She doesn't.

She was a man, Stuart.

Actually, you got me.

Okay.

What if she was Heba McIntyre?

You would not have this problem.

You'd say, what a strong, dominating man.

Guys, take me away.

And as again, because it's Friday, I won't get out until Monday.

so I deserve

so.

Dan, what do we do on this podcast other than talk about Stuart's specific grievances over the Reba McIntyre theme song?

You can't see it at home, but there was almost a spit take.

This is a podcast where we watch a bad movie, and then we talk about it.

Normally, it's just us three knuckleheads, but we're glad to have Hallie back for

Hallie Ween.

The spooky.

It's both the spookiest and most adorable time of the year.

Yeah, we are deep into Shocktober, and so we're watching horror movies, and this time we

yeah, well, this one's questionable.

This felt like

a long TSA about bullying, maybe.

This was called Dear David.

Guys, real quick,

do you think we're going to get haunted by a ghost that makes us pee our pants for making on this movie?

Oh, no.

I didn't think I thought that.

We're all kind of approaching that age where we're going to be peeing our pants anyway.

Yeah, I feel like at this point, I'm like, okay, well, this is different.

I haven't done this in a long time.

I have two children.

I pee when I go for a run.

I push them out of my body.

You're still carrying around the damage of human reproduction.

Exactly.

Meanwhile, your husband, his penis hasn't changed noticeably as far as my parents.

His penis only leaks when it's diseased.

He pees his pants just for fun at this point.

Yeah, just for the challenge.

A lot going on.

So, dear David, this is from BuzzFeed Studios, and that's not a joke.

This was a movie about a BuzzFeed writer based on a BuzzFeed writer.

Based on a true story, Dan.

True Twitter thread.

Based on a true Twitter thread about a haunted apartment.

Well, I liked Zola, and that was based on a Twitter thread.

Is this the story?

Yeah, but the thing is, Zola,

did this movie also feature a montage of penises?

I'm sure there was some level of embellishment in the film Zola, but that was, you know, I mean, the life of of Damiel Zola was nothing like that.

It was grounded in our reality, whereas this movie has, you know,

a kid appearing in dreams and doing

monster things.

It specifically says it's based on a true story.

And I'm like, okay, I guess we got fucking evidence that ghosts exist.

Yeah.

Here David did it.

I mean, it's not even the first ghost movie to say it was based on a true story, to be honest.

Like, Amity Velhara has been pretending to be based on a true story for, you know, almost 10 on Twitter.

You're still allowed to make fun of it, Ellie.

You can't lie on Twitter.

Like everything on Twitter.

It's all true.

You would get a community note if it was wrong.

I have a real question.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Allie Hagland, the Daily Show with John Stewart.

Yes.

Which part of this was actually like how much...

It was the Twitter thread while he was...

Tweeting, but was a guy really tweeting like, my house, my apartment is being haunted.

Here are the things I'm doing?

Like, which part of it was part of the story?

I don't know.

I did not care enough to research.

But, Dan, you're usually like Encyclopedia Brown over here.

So, no, I mean, I did limited research on this.

I think that the,

I think it's based on a true story in that this guy tweeted that he was being haunted by a ghost kid in his apartment.

And he said that some of these

movie ghost kid happened, like his cats would act weird and like a chair would move and stuff.

Yeah, because cats are totally normal.

And

it became a popular thread.

And I think that that is all what is true.

And they didn't change his name.

And I'm assuming in reality his boss isn't played by Justin Long.

And they didn't change his comics to better comics.

Are those the actual comics?

Can I be a bully for a second?

Can I be a bully for a second?

Just for a second.

Wait, guys, we're entering the bully zone.

This is the one place where it's okay to be a bully.

Absolutely.

It's the bully zone and design.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Finally,

I'm not a fan of this guy's art style.

No.

I'm not a fan of the style and and the content, which is like stripped down cartoons as memes or like Twitter jokes style.

Yeah, nothing appeared to be funny in these cartoons, and they seem to be sort of the, I mean, it's in the bully zone.

He can say whatever he wants.

Yes, we are in the bully zone.

It's lazy.

There were lazy, like repeated frames of just like, you know, like he has this digital art, and they would just like double up on the, I don't know.

I just didn't like it.

Like, I'm willing to accept that, you know, not all art is for for me.

You know, I should be because I'm a straight, white, middle-aged man.

All art should

cater to my experience.

You are the default basic prototype of a human.

Sure.

No, we, okay, we should get out of the bully zone because we'll get to the point.

I'm just going to say after us.

Yeah, we don't want to go skate after us.

I will say while we're still in the bully zone, yeah, it's the comics are more about

a recognizable feeling than they are a joke.

And that maybe translates better when you are scrolling through a feed online than when it is being shown full frame in a movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I found it very hard to read.

There was a lot of reading involved in watching this movie.

This movie was almost a book.

It went by very fast.

I didn't read half of the comics.

I couldn't.

It was hard for me.

There was a lot of comments scrolling along the screen, a lot of tweets being put up on the screen.

What is this a production of Dear Revan Hansen?

I apologize for being mean about it.

I think it's because the bully zone went.

Well, we got out of there.

We actually just, guys, it was a trick.

We left the bully zone a minute ago.

oh my god i said so many terrible horrible things

terrible things yeah things about tour johnson yeah

no i went and like looked for comics by the actual guy to just confirm that these are him dan i just was curious like are these the actual comics and they were you know like it's the same i mean i've seen i've seen these around before yeah look if they can use the real freddie mercury audio tracks in bohemian rhapsody then they can use his real comics in the movie the actor doesn't have to redraw the comics dan It's okay to reuse them, you know.

I mean, especially because this is put out again by BuzzFeed Studios.

Yes, they are.

They're like,

what do we have?

What do we have lying around?

I think this guy wrote something.

Have they done anything else?

Have they done anything else, BuzzFeed Studios?

Yeah, that's a good quest they have.

Yeah, I don't know what

to call the movie.

Well, there was that.

They were doing an Amazon show, weren't they, about the Hulk Hogan thing, but then it never got put on the air.

Maybe I think the brutalist is from

BuzzFeed Studios.

I'm not sure.

Wasn't Infinity Pool a BuzzFeed Studios production?

I'm not sure about other movies.

I know that actually

was that a BuzzFeed movie?

There's a TV show.

Teton.

Sorry.

Tantine would be different.

Tantine's a different

TV show called Worth It that Audrey watched for a while that's about food.

That was a BuzzFeed Studios thing.

Okay.

Justin.

Gross from what the.

I'm guessing the I could be wrong, but the implication to me from just the title is whether or not this food that is probably unhealthy for you is worth it.

No, you're actually

wrong.

They, no, they go to,

they have

similar food, although sometimes they stretch the definition of like, what's the same kind of,

no, like they stretch what is the same food, but they, they eat food at different price points.

Ah.

And they're like, okay, like, this is, this is great, cheap fried chicken.

This is like the fancy, like consumer chickens.

Like, what's worth it here?

Like, what's the best that we had?

You know, it's like a zippy, like, I think it's like a 15-minute, it's fine.

Now, obviously, I just make two points.

Obviously, we have a lot to say about Dear David.

We're just bringing with

comments about it.

But also, obviously, if anyone from BuzzFeed Studios is listening, we would be happy to.

do work for you in exchange for money.

So don't take this, don't take this us feeling like we're superior.

We're just trying to get the word out about your studios.

Yeah, yeah.

Consider this.

No press is bad press.

All press is good press.

This is promotion.

You're working for exposure right now.

So anyway,

let's talk about the movie Dear David, shall we?

So we start with a title that explains that in 2017, that's right, everybody, we're going back in time, seven whole years.

You got to go back in time.

To 2017, a more innocent time when the president was a madman, as opposed to living in a time where the president is just an old man and uh adam ellis is documented

gary oldman cannot be president he's not an american citizen i don't think he's born in america he disappears into a character yeah could be him that's true like a dave type situation

a dear david type situation anyway

it says that in 2017 adam ellis documented strange happenings on twitter and it became a viral sensation i of course am an old man so i was not aware of this viral sensation until i saw the movie But do you think they were planning on naming the sequel to this movie, Meet Dave?

And they're like, fuck, that movie already exists.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah.

What if we called it David DuCovny?

No, that's a person.

Yep.

No laugh.

They're going to do the sequel was going to be Meet Dave.

Yeah, because you got to meet Dave.

You don't really meet him much, to be honest.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Well, we're not introduced to him.

Thanks for backing me up, Elliot.

Yeah, no, I'm with Stewart on this one.

Maybe it's just because he's wearing glasses now.

Anyway, the year, but then we don't go to 2017.

We go to 1996, New York City, and a guy who runs a store of some kind, he's super excited about the internet.

He feels like there's so much potential there for the future because tens of millions of people are using the internet.

And their son David loves computers.

He's always in the basement.

Was it even, I don't even think it was a million people.

I think he was like 900,000 people are on the internet.

Oh, I thought he said like 39 million people.

I can't remember.

Maybe I i only this is only one way to solve it we got to watch dear david again one of the strangest things in a strange movie i mean this is a thin movie but has some very strange stuff in it that at in this year of our lord

uh they think that they have to promote the idea that the internet is huge like this feels like a leftover from like fear.com or something

where they're flashing back and they're like, there's got to be so many people online and our kid is obsessed with it.

I I think they're trying to establish the idea that David and his family are like early adopters of the internet, but it also, again, does not seem like you need to do that.

It seems totally unnecessary.

But you also learn that David's mom is not happy about the stuff that she is being exposed to online.

She doesn't like that he, that David is sitting in the basement with no lights on, bathed only in the glow of the screen.

That's right.

He saw the black void.

This giant monitor glow, and he's like a kind of a pale, creepy kid, classic kind of horror movie creepy kid.

and uh david posts like a picture that he drew i guess which almost instantly online trolls start insulting him and then say why don't you kill yourself that's the end of this chilling scene because i hate to break it either yeah they they're really mean about that picture because like yeah i mean it's the best picture in the movie to be honest and the other thing is it's like it's better that

your art caused a reaction, you know?

It's better than if they just scrolled past it and care.

Exactly.

I mean, David should have just typed back, hey, you're talking about it, aren't you?

Yeah.

This is what Andy Warhol went through.

Also, I feel like Andy Warhol went through.

Ghost Andy Warhol.

I feel like this gets really muddy later in the movie where then, like, David is made out to be some sort of demon creature that possesses people.

He's a vengeful.

He becomes a vengeful spirit, you know, as so happens.

He's like one of those sadakos.

Yeah, but we're left, we're also left with the assumption, oh, he must have been driven to suicide from trolling.

And that's why, but that's not what happens in the movie.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

He doesn't become a vengeful spirit.

He appears to have been something beforehand, but we'll get to it.

Yeah.

Anyway,

that's the end of that.

Now it's 2017.

And I like the lesson they're doing here is it's not like the internet was a nice place and it was ruined by trolls.

They were always there.

Like they were the first ones, you know.

Now it's 2017 again, and there's this guy, Adam.

He is addicted to his phone.

He's commuting from Queens to Manhattan to the BuzzFeed offices.

He cannot get his face off of this phone.

The only time he stops is when he's underground in the subway because this is 2017.

It hasn't been wired for Wi-Fi in the subway yet.

I was just in New York City.

They solved that problem.

Everyone's glued to their phones while they're in the tunnel, too.

It's really a better way to live, right, guys?

Well, Ellie's complaining because his busking didn't earn him much money.

When L.A.

was saying showtime and flipping around.

There used to be an era when you walked onto a subway train and used out a showtime, showtime, press play on a boombox, and then almost kicked people in the face.

They would notice.

And now they don't even notice anymore.

Have you ever seen somebody get kicked?

I've never seen someone get kicked.

I've seen video of it, but I've never actually seen it in person.

No, I've seen it on those tables.

That's fake news then.

I want to say, like,

you know, if you have to take the subway long distances, I say, God bless having phones, and it's not wired for Wi-Fi as much as I would like.

There's still plenty of dead spots.

All right.

Yeah, it's just there's a thing called a book that people used to use.

I read books on my phone.

I read, I have the Libby app.

Okay, fair.

Yeah, and that's mostly what I do on my phone these days.

Okay, that's a fair point.

You know what?

As long as you're reading books on your phone, Dan, I'm okay with it.

But if you're looking, if you're a book.

What about like short-form erotica?

I mean, you compile enough.

The inside-out video game.

There's an inside-out video game?

Yeah, you shoot memories at other memories to eliminate the game.

Just like in the movie.

Yeah.

Just like in the Martin DuPont song, Inside Out.

Okay, anyway, so this guy's addicted to his phone, but he works at BuzzFeed.

It's okay.

He's a cartoonist.

Just like my shirt.

Inside out.

Just like my clothes.

So he's a cartoonist and there are all these trolls being like, your art sucks.

And his coworkers are like, don't respond to them.

Don't engage with trolls.

Don't do it.

I feel like the majority of people are like, oh, man, so real.

Or like, I love this.

But then there will be like one person will say something and it'll really stick in his craw.

Ain't that the way?

Ain't that the way, people go?

And

you think it would be easy to just ignore that.

But then you see like a, a, let's call him Man Decoy, who has a lot of trouble not engaging with people online who create even the smallest of criticisms.

Again, this is a totally hypothetical person.

Dan's going to choke you until you pee your pants tonight.

Look,

you know, now that I'm medicated, I have better emotional regulation, you know, executive function.

It's all going up for old man DeCoy.

That's good.

Dan Decoy is doing better, yeah.

And so Adam's boss, Justin Long, in a role role that we have to assume was shot over the course of a day, maybe a day and a half in one location.

But I will say also, the most fun thing in the movie, in my opinion.

By far.

The movie comes to life during the four minutes or so scattered through the film that he's on screen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is he supposed to be Jonah Paretti?

Is that a BuzzFeed person?

Yeah.

Are they related to Chelsea Paretti?

Yes, their brother and sister.

And their dad is a big,

like, mogul who like bought them each each an internet site.

Famous people

had a rich dad?

I think I'm right.

Well, yeah, I think

now I got to look it up.

I'm afraid I'm not sure.

I don't know who he's supposed to be.

They never ironic.

I'm not worried about spreading misinformation.

Well, if we're going to be in the bully zone, we might as well get our facts straight.

No, the thing is, we're not in the bully zone, but we haven't yet gotten to the AstroTurf zone where we can just kind of say made-up stuff, you know, the fake news zone.

Right now, we're in the woolly bully zone.

I got to tell hattie about it

this thing i saw oh i'm right i'm right i'm right okay so woolly bully dan what's that that song's literally about just seeing a really woolly bull right uh let's see well the lyrics i think like a highland cow woolly bully woolly bully woolly bully those are the only lyrics i remember

a thing he saw it had two big somethings and a woolly jaw and then they danced well now i got to check this out you got to do some research on this one that'll give me time to talk about the movie.

So Justin Long is like, Adam, your reach is not enough.

And

your humor needs to be more about the painful aspects of life.

It needs to be more painfully truthful.

And Adam's like, ugh, I'm going to lose my job if I don't, if I don't do that in this cutthroat world of online cartooning at BuzzFeed, if I don't get my reach.

And he complains to his boyfriend, whose name is Kyle, Kevin, Kyle, Kyle.

And

all Adam ever talks about in this movie is either his job or ghosts.

And Kyle, meanwhile, is like, hey, can I meet your parents?

Hey,

my mom is having surgery and Adam is

having a hysterectomy.

And he goes, Hey, I want to meet your mom.

And Adam goes, My mom is too crazy.

And guys, this is this is, I'm sorry, this is very important.

I think I need to do a dramatic reading of the lyrics.

Lyrics to Wooly Bully.

Not the whole thing,

but I'll go up through the first.

I'll go up through the first chorus.

Here we go.

Uno dos,

one, two, trace quattro.

I, Woolly Bully, watch it now, watch it.

Here he comes.

Here he comes.

Watch it now.

He get ya.

Maddie told Hattie about a thing she saw.

Had two big horns and a woolly jaw.

Woolly bully, woolly bully.

Yeah, drive.

Woolly bully, woolly bully,

woolly bully.

You could write a hit song about anything back then.

Yeah.

Do you think that they wrote the lyrics for that first?

And they were struggling to find the right

melody.

A perfect melody for this.

Yeah, it's actually a poem set to music.

I was trying to explain oldies music to my son, and I was like, Yeah, you don't have a lot of songs now where someone with a deep voice is just going

in the background and then goes, Yeah, at different points.

He's like, Did they used to do that?

He goes, They people loved it, they loved it so much.

Yeah, yeah, let me introduce you to the works of Cypress Hill.

Yeah, when I was talking about old things with him, that's why it was Cypress Hill.

And he's like, that's impossible, Daddy.

You can't be insane in both the brain and the membrane.

It happened.

That song is based on a true story.

Speaking of based on a true story, dear David.

So anyway, these two teens, we cut away to two teens.

They are trolling people online.

It is so cartoonish.

The dialogue is so after school special.

Hey, man, I don't think we should do that.

Come on.

Don't you want to be funny?

And they, they.

And I like when he's like, oh, I'm sick of this.

I'm going to go watch Riverdale.

Yeah, they might, they

do say that.

They literally say,

they got to place it.

No, you know, they might as well have been being like, we're in the bully zone.

We can bully here.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, dude.

Like, we can be bullies here, but they're going to be.

This is important.

Yeah,

this is important because this is where we learn the ghost rules.

This is where I meet Dear David.

Dear David is a profile that reaches out.

He will answer two questions, but not three.

And then they are mean to him and he warns them that he goes, How am I going to die?

Or whatever.

And he goes, You're going to die wetting yourself in bed.

And he's like, Oh, oh, whatever.

That night, Adam is out at drinks with his friends.

It comes out that he forgot that his boyfriend is going out of town to help his mom through her hysterectomy operation.

I mean, that's that's shitty partner behavior, honestly.

Adam is a bad boyfriend, the whole movie.

He's he does not deserve to win that.

This guy, and Kevin, Kyle seems to be such a

nice guy, you know, so thoughtful.

He deserves better than Adam.

That is for sure.

The thing is, some guys will invent crazy ghost stories just to get out of going to therapy, you know?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Literally invent crazy ghost stories.

Well, you know, later on,

David puts a grinder back on his phone to like break them up.

And I was like, wouldn't it be wild if he made this whole thing up just as an excuse?

Like, no, a ghost put Grinder on there.

I swear I'm not back on Grinder.

It was a ghost.

Well, I better lay the groundwork.

I better start pretending I'm being haunted just in case Kyle finds my phone and sees that Grinder is still on it.

Also, the idea that David, the 1996 kid ghost, is like, I'm going to get him.

I'm going to put Grindr on his phone.

Also, the idea that I'm sorry, if Kyle saw him on Grinder, that means Kyle was on Grinder.

He says that a friend of his saw it, which means that Kyle was looking at Grindr.

But he was away from home, helping his mom through a hysterectomy.

He just needed to lose lose himself physically for a moment.

He needed to leave his body by expressing his body with a stranger.

We don't know what agreement they have.

Yeah,

celebrate his ability to still conceive, to still spill his seed.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Because his mom lost.

He needs to seed catcher.

He needs to.

Seed catcher.

This is why you're not a doctor, Hallie.

I've got bad news.

It's about your seed catcher.

What?

Hallie's a urologist.

Don't worry.

We've done tests.

You should still be able to spill your seed.

What?

Hallie, Hallie Hadland, biblical urologist.

Well, anyway, guys, get ready.

It's about to start laughing.

Stop laughing and start screaming because we have our first real scare scene where that bully that was bullying dear David online, he's lying in bed.

Suddenly, a ghostly hand just kind of shoves itself in his mouth and is choking him and he wets himself and he dies.

It's not even that ghostly a hand.

It's like this is the first scare of the thing.

It's just like literally a hand comes out from the outside.

When I first saw it, I thought it was his own hand.

I thought that hand was scary.

I said,

that's what I did.

Yeah, it is the scariest thing in the movie.

But you're scared of the hands, Hallie.

That's the thing.

Crippling fear.

Whenever people accidentally call you Hallie Handlin, you know what I mean?

Get me.

Keep away from me.

There are five worms on the end of my arm.

Oh, no.

I found myself in the glove department.

God, how do I escape?

Well, Hallie, I made some hamburger helper for dinner.

So that night, Adam, he's lonely, he's depressed, he engages with some trolls.

Ah, a mouse, but the kind that you use for a computer.

Because your hands are.

Use your hands.

So anyway, that night, Adam engages with some trolls.

He calls a torrent of memes saying, die in a fire, which gets dear David's attention.

Which, again, is this supposed to be a red herring?

The idea that maybe David died in a fire, but that's not what happened.

And Dear David goes, Why are you so mean?

That's how he always starts.

And Adam ignores that and goes to bed.

The next day, he sees a chair rocking on its own in his room.

And then I do like that he sets up his own bedroom like it's a hotel room that just has a single chair pointing at the bed.

Yeah, just in a corner points at the bed.

Then he sees a new skill.

Well, Oh, that's for the cucking.

And I'll sing you to sleep after the cucking with a song I'll wrote just for you.

He sees a news story about a teen found dead in his bed.

The next night, he is obsessed with reading replies.

to his work again.

It's all he cares about.

What's his reach?

What do people think?

He has an ominous walk home.

And then while sleeping again, the rocking chair starts rocking.

And he briefly glimpses a ghost boy in the chair.

Hallie, did we scare you?

No, I was eating eating a salad.

I missed the first

scary thing you did.

So you felt protected.

Yeah.

You felt like you were doing something good for your bowels.

So at work, he hears a buzzing, and he seems to have been transported.

He's being fed a buzz.

And he seems to have been transported to the old store.

from the beginning where the moment bodega i think we can say it was a bodega it was a bodega i guess it's a bodega it looks more like a drugstore it looks like a bodega to me all right well we can agree to disagree.

Let's call it a bodega.

I mean, you're right.

When I said store, that's a bodega is not a store.

So that was a good correction.

That was good.

Yeah.

Specificity.

Yeah.

Elliot.

I prefer speca spin city, starring Michael J.

Fox.

What?

I prefer specificity.

Starry.

Oh, yeah.

Well, she cut her hair and then America fell out of love with her.

It's amazing.

Not since Samson has someone's hair been such the key to their power.

Yep.

That's why they call Carrie Russell America Samson.

So at work, he was a little bit more.

She was the face of Samsonite for a while.

Yeah, he was.

So she's been transported to the bodega where the mom is like, have you seen dear David?

Have you seen David?

Ask him two questions, but don't ask him three questions.

Then suddenly he's in dear David's dark basement.

He gets attacked.

And then he realizes he's back at his desk.

Oh, what a chilling hallucination he's had.

What a daydream.

I get that there's like they decide to include some rules.

Don't be a bully and don't ask him more than two questions.

But like it's pretty fucking lame, right?

Like, yes,

compared to like the ring or like candyman.

I was wondering.

Gremlins.

You know, I look

it follows.

I'll make an admission that if the film is

less than compelling, sometimes I miss things.

I was like, did I miss some reason why you can only ask two questions and no one else?

There's no reason.

No, just because you were were told, just because they were told that was the rule.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the thing.

I mean, at least the thing about the bullying

makes sense.

There's a reason behind it.

But it kind of makes sense, but once you learn David's backstory, it really doesn't make sense.

Baby, David was super into Japanese gift-giving ceremonies.

I feel like we don't actually know David's backstory.

We got a lot of versions of David's backstory.

Oh, so you're saying it's like a last year at Marion Vad type thing where like you figure out what's real and what's not real.

It's a real Rashamon.

We've got some unreliable narrators in this.

That's for sure.

I feel like we've got some unreliable filmmakers in this one.

Oh, yeah, you earned that smile.

You're in that devilish look right there.

Yeah,

so that night, there's a bunch of stuff.

He has his co-worker, Evelyn, comes over to keep him company.

It doesn't matter.

They find a camera on the floor.

I was not sure if that was something he owned or if it was like a ghostly appearing camera.

Well, what's for sure is the cats didn't want him to pick it up.

you remember?

No, and the cats don't want him to pick up the camera.

This leads to nothing.

This leads

to

unrelated.

Adam researches David online and considers tweeting about his apartment being haunted, but he's like, I'm not going to do that.

And he ignores his boyfriend's messages, but then he has a montage of like happier memories of being with his boyfriend.

And at this point, I'm not quite sure why he's ignoring his boyfriend's messages, except that he's a bad boyfriend.

I mean, the message was really gross.

He was just talking about how his mom couldn't take a shit because she was afraid she'd burst her stitches.

Yeah, but all then all you have to write back is like, ugh, that sucks, you know, or something like that.

LOL poor mom.

I mean, LOL goof emoji,

D-I-A-F.

The gif of

Stephanie from Volhouse going, How rude.

You know, yeah, it seemed like he was just in like a flow state of like looking up ghost stuff.

He's like, Not now, Keith.

I'm busy.

It's Kyle.

Kyle.

Kyle.

Kyle.

Yeah.

So later that night, does the rocking chair start moving again?

You better believe it.

And the ghost boy is like, Adam, I'm just a follower.

And Adam wakes up scared.

And then there's some Scrabble tiles that have been arranged.

Is the implication that David is speaking to him that way too?

It's like, David, figure out what your fucking thing is as a ghost.

Like, are you in a camera?

Are you a rocking chair kid?

Do you scrabble tiles?

Like, what's your deal?

But he did, he put D-I-A-F.

So it's back to the bullying thing.

Yes, it's back to the bully because it was all D-I-A-F memes earlier and he's back to that.

But it's, but even that, David kind of loses interest in that.

This was my first interaction with this acronym.

I'd never

heard of it.

I've never heard of it.

So apparently, it stands for Die in a Fire.

I'd never heard of it.

I mean, maybe the meme makes that pretty clear.

I mean, maybe.

Is it a real thing?

I don't know.

Or did they just make it a Hallie?

Go to know your meme.

I would be like, don't I give fucks?

Wait, is that

no?

Die in oh,

DIA.

Die Anu, it would have been enough.

Oh, no, it's a real thing.

It's a real thing, guys.

So we're the ones who are out of touch.

Yeah.

Dan, it's a

fright.

Sure is.

It sure is, man.

It's so good and it'll be a fine.

I wish that's what it's been for.

So Adam is like, I got to get away from this ghost.

So he moves all the way one floor up to the apartment above his own apartment.

This is a stupid thing to do.

This is New York City, guys.

Come on.

It doesn't happen.

No, it doesn't.

But also, the idea is like, I got to get away from this ghost.

Luckily, ghosts can't use stairs, I think.

So ghosts are notoriously leaden and bound to the floor.

One thing I know, it's like ghosts can't pass through walls or ceilings.

Nope, he's safe.

So he goes there.

He's like, I'm really stressed out with this ghost and this potential breakup that's going on.

I think I'm going to do the most stressful thing possible and move apartments.

So that's maybe that was his middle ground.

He's like, well, it'd be too stressful to really move, but if I can just move some boxes upstairs.

Well, that's the, I wish the movie then showed that he had an overlapping month so he could just take his time moving and stuff.

He didn't have to do it all in one day.

I mean, that's the way to do it, right?

It's worth the money.

It's worth eating that extra month's rent just to not have the stress of it.

Come on.

Just eat that rent.

Just eat it.

Just eat that.

Just shove it in your mouth.

Eat it up.

Yum, yum.

So he does move there.

The ghost, of course, follows him, and he starts tweeting about this ghost.

And his boss loves it.

And he writes a BuzzFeed article.

And his readers are like, you should perform an exorcism.

So he and his coworker kind of do a pretty half-assed exorcism.

And he tells his coworker, I've been avoiding calls from Kyle because I don't know how to respond when he says, I love you.

He keeps saying, I love you.

And I just don't know what the proper response is to that.

And, you know.

I got to say, it is a half-assed exorcism.

On the other hand, and I forgive me because I'm not Catholic.

They do manage to get one of those things that has smoke that comes out of it.

These sensors swing around.

Yeah.

So they went to that trouble.

They do get the sensor and like a holy water dispenser, too, right?

Yeah.

So they went to a

church supply store.

Where do you get that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christco?

Yeah.

Do you have to go to the Vatican for that?

I don't know.

They cut out the scene where he flies to the Vatican to ask the Holy Father.

I mean,

I haven't seen a Catholic version, but I see like down the street from my apartment, there's like Judaica stores.

I mean, the Jews.

so I'm assuming there's a Catholic version of that.

100%.

Of course, there has to be.

They don't make it themselves.

You know, you got to buy them.

They don't make those, you know, offeratory plates and stuff.

Yeah, you need that shit.

Offeratory?

Yeah, for your

offerings.

I just never heard the word offeratory before.

Tithes.

You got to tithe.

Yeah, when you got a tithe.

You got to tithe this.

So

I'm imagining instead of the got milk campaign, it's the Catholic Church and they're at present got tithe.

And it's just just different silly little scenarios where somebody has to.

Dollar bill over there.

Yeah, yeah.

All the kids today are talking about tithe pods.

Why aren't they talking tithe bowls?

It's a hot new craze that's sweeping the internet, tithing a tenth of your wages to the church.

Kids are loving.

It's called the tithe challenge.

Unfortunately, kids don't have that much in the way of wages, so it's not been that effective.

Yeah, it's mostly gum that they're giving to the church right now, but a tenth of all their gum.

So it's nighttime.

There's a spooky glowing mist under the door as dear David tries a different way to get at Adam.

And the cats are like, that's a classic Dracula tactic.

And the cats are like, I don't like this.

Also, the fact that David's already in the apartment.

So I don't know why

the mist under the door as if he's trying to get in.

I thought he was in the internet.

What the fuck?

Where is this ghost?

You'll find out.

Where does he live?

I really needed it answered.

What's this ghost's home base?

Yeah.

That's the kind of, that's the kind of note you get from executives.

I worked on a TV show once where some characters were licking a toad that they found in the in the forest to get high.

And one of the executive notes was, wait, so they just reach into a bush and pull out that toad?

So does this toad just live in that bush?

We're going to have to, we're going to need some more information about this.

It's like the audience is really going to bump on that.

You need to have a fucking breaking bad cold open of this fucking frog leaving its house, kissing its wife on the cheek, being like, going back to work.

I hope nobody licks my ass.

Another lick, another dollar.

Cane toads come from Australia, none.

Anyway.

And so the ghost David shows up and

Adam's like, what do you want from me?

And David's like, that's two questions.

And then hits him with a typewriter.

And he wakes up.

He's He's constantly having bad dreams of waking up.

Adam listens to a recording of the haunting.

Hears a noise downstairs, wanders around in the dark.

It turns out it's Kyle.

He's back.

Kyle's back.

His mom's hysterectomy is done.

He can be there again.

They have a very tense conversation about Adam's.

bad communication skills.

And Kyle listens.

And his ass fucking moved while he was out of town and didn't tell him that's a good thing.

Yes, he didn't tell me that you moved apartments.

And this is when Kyle's like, and my friend found your picture on Grindr.

And Adam's like, I took it off of Grindr.

I haven't been on there in a long time.

Well, also, I feel like that initial suggestion that this whole thing is just him trying to explain why he's back on Grindr and not get busted for it.

Also, prior to all that stuff, like he's just like, and by the way, you've been haunted by a ghost and I find out

you didn't.

I did find out online.

So while I was away, you moved, got haunted, and went back on Grindr, and you didn't tell me any of this.

He's like, oh, oh, oh.

You guys, Kyle fucking sucks, okay?

Kyle is the worst part of this movie.

Oh, really?

So, so tell me, because he is certainly a boring character.

Annoying.

He's just like all, like, I don't, I get why,

what's the main guy?

Adam.

I get why Adam's not into it.

It's like, get off my dick.

I know, seriously.

And, like, and then what's the thing with, like, I think that until you sort your shit out, I should move out.

And then he hands him his key.

And it's like, he moved apartments.

That key is to nowhere.

Don't worry about it.

That's a removal key.

Symbolic.

It's true.

That's the good one.

Maybe it was the key to his heart.

I don't know.

Yeah, is that a key to your fucking dresser?

Here's the key to our sex handcuffs.

Just take them for now.

I won't be using them.

So you'll need them in the binder.

A key to the city that you got and I don't want it anymore.

For defeating the penguin, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if he was given that key by Eric Adams, it's basically worse.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a

trash.

So do you think he's going to be the first?

Is he going to be the first mayor of New York to ever

just disappear and no one knows what happened to him?

I don't know.

Because he would not be the first mayor of New York to flee the country

when the law starts looking at him.

He would be the third mayor of New York, at least, to do that.

Wow.

Storied history.

Yeah.

Hey, for more about mayors who had to flee the country because of the law, listen to the 99% visible breakdown, the power broker.

We talk about it there.

Anyway.

Synergy.

Yeah.

Law girls.

So Kyle dumps Adam and Adam is still tweeting about the haunting.

He's losing touch with his friends.

His whole life is just about this haunting, just tweeting about it.

This is when he goes home.

He does the thing that all of us would do if we knew a ghost is in our apartment watching every move.

He gets ready to start masturbating,

but his laptop camera turns on, and he's like, Oh, man, oh, what?

That's probably why he's so stressed out.

He just needs to crank one out, right, guys?

Yeah, it's hard to do it.

It's not able to do it since I've been haunted.

It is hard to do it when you know that there's a ghost kid watching you all the time.

Yeah, so is that your nightmare?

It takes the flame out of things, right?

You know what I mean?

I don't know what that's a bot play on horse on or

I don't know.

And also, yeah, Callie, when she said that, she did a flat head sees you.

She did a hand motion where her finger was pointing up and then drooped.

And I wasn't sure what that was.

I guess that's that's a softening erection.

There's a ghost there.

Yeah.

So, Dan, is this your ultimate nightmare that you are jacking it to some internet porn and then the ghost turns your camera on, I guess, so that you're live streaming on the cam site he's using to masturbate to.

I don't know.

Do I get a cut?

I mean, that's part of it is I'm like, yo, yo, yo, like, did he already have an account?

Is he making coins and shit for whatever they, whatever?

Yeah.

I guess David must have set up an account.

He's always setting up accounts for him.

Yeah, he's constantly setting up accounts.

He's, he's sending stuff through his.

He's less a ghost and more of an identity thief.

at a certain point.

Anyway, then his phone starts playing back things that he said that are, you know, conversations had, but his follower count is blowing up because of this haunting that night and probably because of that the camera

sure yeah he's not afraid to bear all online this is when uh david uh ups things a little bit he literally drags adam out of bed and drags him through the vermin-filled bodega and then into i say glaring at hallie and then down the steps into david's basement and that's when uh we see Adam witnesses a scene where David's dad catches him looking at inappropriate online content and he gets mad at at him.

So David starts strangling his father and David's mom, in order to stop him, hits him in the head so hard that the top of his head just breaks off.

Yeah.

Which is hilarious.

This is a very funny thing to have happen.

Yeah.

And then he somehow manages to survive in a coma for 20 years

with a huge chunk of his head missing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not a head scientist.

Weren't there like

microchips and shit in his head?

Or am I think it's something else?

Oh, maybe that's later.

I think maybe you fell asleep while watching watching this movie and started dreaming something.

Possibly, but it is a it is a so this is, I guess, and this is, I assumed at the time, this is David's origin story, you know, which means that the why don't you kill yourself, that doesn't mean anything, the die in a fire, that doesn't mean anything.

Uh, no, he was just learning, he was learning the ways of being an internet jerk, I guess.

Yes, yeah, and he was being radicalized by the internet, yes, he wasn't, he wasn't victimized, he was radicalized.

That's the real horror story here, guys.

Yeah, it's an American horror story, yeah.

And uh, Ryan Murphy, listen to us.

And once you make a show about this, I think he's made 10 million shows about this.

He's made so many shows all about this.

Yeah.

This is what feud Betty and Joan was all about, being radicalized on the internet.

Not bad.

Like I say, not bad.

Put two stars.

You put two big stars in a show.

It is okay.

Any show that puts fake words in the mouth of Olivia Havilland to the point where she has to take them to court, I'm not in favor of.

You know, rest in peace, Olivia Havland, a true queen of Hollywood, one of the last links to to the classic era.

You know, I don't want anyone to take an anchor.

I mean, I'm not saying it was tasteful.

I will never, I will never tar, uh, tar Ryan Murphy with the tasteful.

Not like my nudes.

Stewart's nudes are very tasteful, extremely tasteful.

I would say he shouldn't just tape them up on the walls of subway stations, but you know, if you're going to tape up self-to-ready streets, you know, how are you going to do it?

Yeah, I'm trying to do some street-level marketing for your body.

Yeah.

Yes.

All right.

okay, that's fair.

Joy,

so Adam wakes up in the rain, he takes a shower, and when he comes to the shower, the phrase DIAF is written on the mirror in Steam.

Oh,

at work, Adam's just getting weird and distant.

He's just getting paranoid, he can't relate to people, and his boss is like again at this point.

Like, we know that David isn't like a sympathetic, anti-bully person, he's bad, he's a bad thing, yeah.

So, like, the whole like him harping on the DIAF thing

is Yeah, yeah, it doesn't really you're mean you're killing people

Yeah, good point

Yeah, it's it

seems that David is the real villain in this movie about an evil ghost

So and Adam's boss is like let's take this haunting project even bigger and Adam begs Kyle to help him find out who uses the dear David handle He's like can't you hack it or have one of your hacker friends do it and

Adam then brings in a sort of the here.

Okay, here's where there's two characters that should have been one character.

He brings in this sort of millennial psychic who just wanders around his apartment and is like, oh, yeah, there's bad energy in here.

The apartment's not haunted.

You're haunted.

And you got to find out the truth about David.

He starts doing some online research.

He decides to use the internet to research the ghost that's been haunting him for weeks that he didn't think to research on the internet, even though his internet job is all about using the internet.

He does some online research until a note is slipped under his front door, which leads him to a meeting in a coffee shop with an internet ghost psychic detective.

Internet sleuth internet sleuth and this is where and like this sleuth and that and that millennial kind of like uh um medium this should have been the same character they should have not been in it at all you know it was ridiculous they were like how do we just it seems like we've painted ourselves into a corner and we need some information provided but we haven't written a character who could provide that information we've painted ourselves into a corner by adapting this ghost tweet thread

by faking a thing that is not a story and doesn't have a story on it and here's where i do like when the the medium is in his apartment and is like, I'm getting really bad energy from your computer.

I'm like, no shit.

This movie, as Dan mentioned very earlier, it's a thin movie.

There's not a lot going on in this movie.

This is maybe the least amount of movie I remember us having in a movie at the Floppers for a while.

But it's also, there's no structure to anything.

Things just kind of happen and

wander along.

And so even the scares, there are times where I'm like, I mean, Night Swim was kind of similar in some ways, where it's like a series of the same scare over and over again.

And you're like, are you going to like heighten this?

Or when we see, or when an actor like Justin Long comes up, we're like, oh, thank God, this is an actual actor.

It feels like a movie for a moment.

I can briefly cling to this life boy.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

He is a real life boy, isn't he?

I combined a couple of different things, like

a life raft and a buoy or a

life saver.

That's what I was looking for.

Lifesaver.

Yeah.

So he's saying you're a little bit of a drink.

You guys will bring life boy to this year.

Yeah, life, yeah.

That's a

lifeboy and his message of life for all of us.

Speaking of lifesavers, I just want to take a moment to mention there's a joke in the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers where a woman falls out of a canoe and she says, throw me a lifesaver and throw me the lifesaver and Groucho takes out a packet of lifesavers and starts throwing them into the water.

My kids find this so funny, but they also are always like, wait.

They had lifesavers then?

And that always, that really gets to them.

I mean, that was the biggest surprise.

That's what I thought when you told me that joke just now.

It's a shock for modern audiences to be like, they had this candy in the 30s.

Yeah.

But that's why, you know,

the classics

taste the same or did it taste like sawdust?

I'm sure it tasted like sawdust and petroleum jelly.

It tasted like a bunch of twigs and herbs.

It's probably made out of cocaine.

Actually, that's good magnet.

It probably tasted better.

It'd be like real pork fat, you know, boiled in cocaine.

Yeah, sure.

So, anyway, it's all butter.

It's just slattered with butter.

Yeah.

Don't make them like that anymore.

Lard.

Lard.

Oh, yeah.

Lard, instead of corn syrup, it's just the sugar and the cocaine would just get mixed together, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, it earned the name Lifesaver.

It saved a lot of lives.

During the Depression, people didn't have that much to live for.

You could get by on the calories of one lifesaver a month.

Yeah.

Pemmican has been a big subject in the house lately because my younger son is like, I want to try some pemmican.

That's what I should have for my snack at school.

Who sells pemmican these days?

I think you have to, I think you might have to put some work into making that.

I don't know that you can just hop on down to Trader Joe's.

What is pemmican?

Is that the shit where you like keep it in your armpit while you march and then it like softens up?

I don't know about that.

But it's like a mix of like, of like jerked meat and like berries and, you know, and nuts and things like that.

Like it's a suit.

It's like a trail mix type of thing, but it's all like grossly mushed together.

Yeah.

Like a suit.

It's like a power bar or something.

Yes.

It's like a 19th century power bar or 18th century even.

Yeah, yeah.

So Hemmekan recipe.

Okay.

Dried meat, tallow, and sometimes dried berries.

Tallow.

Eating raw doesn't require refrigeration.

I don't eat beef.

I really don't get enough tallow in my current diet.

Got to eat some candles.

And it's Talloween.

You know, it's the time of the year.

So

he's doing this online research, and the ghost sleuth, the online sleuth, is like, hey, look, you should search online for a mad woman named Lupi Linda.

This sounds like the kind of shit Lupi Linda is always pulling online.

Yeah.

And he finds videos of this woman, Lupi Linda, who's a mental patient.

And these videos pretty well edited, right?

Considering it is a security camera feed from the padded room of a mental hospital, the fact that it has multiple angles and close-ups that are together.

It's pretty impressive.

It's very impressive.

And

she's being told that she murdered her husband and put her son in a coma.

And she goes, no, I fought the devil.

I fought the devil.

And then Adam sees a story that was briefly mentioned earlier in the movie as the sort of thing BuzzFeed should be on top of about a David who woke from a coma after 21 years.

Could it be the same David?

Wait, I have a question though.

Yes.

So are we to believe that what we saw in the dream before where David was the one who actually killed the dad is true?

Or are we to believe that the mom actually killed them both?

I think it is giving the movie too much credit to think it's being ambiguous.

I think that what happened, what we're being told is David was the, was trying to kill the dad, kill the dad.

She attacked David and then she was blamed for both crimes okay and that and she and she maybe is has now believes that david is possessed or a demon or something like that or who knows there's rare places that i'm going to compliment this movie uh but i did kind of i gave it a little credit i'm like oh that coma detail like i really didn't think that that was going to be tied in that was kind of fun that it was the same guy i am gonna be i'm gonna i'm gonna all parts of the buffalo this movie because i'm gonna say as soon as he mentioned it i was like well this is gonna be part of the plot at some point

okay but I'm glad.

But look, we can, we can, we can.

I thought it was successfully played off as a joke because Justin Long, like, it was introduced with Justin Long being like, You could make all these like lists off of this coma guy, like 21 restaurants you go to after you get out of a coma in New York.

Anyway, that's true.

Uh, he number one, Sabaro,

number two, number two, Times Square Applebee.

I was gonna say, get those fucking dollaritas, baby.

Number three, Guy Fieri's American Cafe.

You've been in a coma

for that one if you've been in a coma that long one sip of a fucking dollarita would blow your mind it would be especially if

your head was all flat

if a lot of your head is not there anymore then very much so yeah yeah uh so so adam goes to the hospital he is told by a at first very helpful receptionist that david died a few days earlier uh and then the guy's like who are you again and uh he goes oh i'm being haunted by his ghost he steals that guy's security badge sneaks into the records for David Johnson, which leads him to the address of David's doctor.

And also, the morgue thing

that the body has disappeared from the morgue.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot about that.

The body is disappeared.

And he goes to the doctor's house, just walks right in.

The door is open, just walks in.

I don't even think he rings the doorbell or knocks.

I can't remember.

And I think the door is open.

That's why it's so specific.

And he finds the doctor, Dr.

Landers, hanging dead.

At the top of the stairs, and a pretty nice foyer.

It's got stained glass.

This is stained glass.

I see.

I mean, the wild.

That looked like a Ditmus Park sort of

exact same thing.

That looked like a Ditmus Park house.

Where else in New York are you going to have a house like that?

Yeah.

And there's a thing.

This is a moment.

So he sees it.

He's strange to live in Ditmus Park.

Yeah.

And it's just a hop, skip, and a jump from Hinterland Spar.

It's lovely.

So he sees the body hanging, and then her eyes open up and he goes running out.

And I'm like, wow, this is based on a true story.

This happened.

And you know, and you know what?

And he doesn't, your eyes open, and he doesn't say, oh, let me help you.

Let me call 911.

You're not dead yet.

He just runs.

What an ass.

He's like, oh, you got this.

Okay, you're fine.

Oh, you're fine.

Okay.

I'll see you.

Since we were getting specific about New York stuff, I do want to say that the very

Ditmis Park, a neighborhood of Brooklyn most people are not familiar with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when they shot a movie.

That's where they shoot a lot of movies.

When he was going to work and it's like living in a suburb in the heart of New York.

It's amazing.

You can have a full, freestanding, freestanding three-story house is dan you're saying i we live near it i've seen it i'm saying for the listeners the listeners who live in places like alaska texas kuala lumpur australia brazil they don't know ditmas park yeah hey if if you're trying like if you're catching up on movies and you're watching shiva baby because you're like i'm going through a real racial senate phase uh shiva baby shot in ditmus park great great stuff anyway the point is uh it's just going to get uh less and less interesting what i'm about to say the longer we go go.

No, I just at the beginning of the movie, I wanted to say you're delaying now.

Now you're the one who's delaying now.

I wanted to say to anticipation again.

I wanted to say because it was demanded of me that I was watching the beginning when he was going to work and Audrey saw the very beginning and she kept being like, this geography makes sense.

Yeah.

He went out that exit and that's the exit he would come out of in the subway.

So

damning with more faint praise, Dear David,

New York

Geography.

Danning it with faint praise that's damning as in Dan McCoy.

But you say this.

The movie may not be based on a true story, but it is based on a true commute.

And you cannot take that away from it.

Exactly.

They did the work.

They did the work of figuring out how you would get from basically Queens to Manhattan, right?

So, okay.

So if you're coming to the city, you can use it as a guidebook.

So Adam, he's like, I'm going to do this.

He caffeinates himself, watches a movie on TV, trying to stay awake, falls asleep instantly.

When he wakes up, David is on the TV and he tries to get Adam to cut his own wrists.

He's like using his ghost powers to control Adam's arms.

And when Adam wakes up, his arm is all cut up.

At work, Evelyn is pissed at Adam for

sending her insulting.

Have we mentioned Evelyn yet?

Yeah, yeah.

That's the, that's the coworker who like helped him with the exorcist and stuff like that.

And Kyle calls and he's like, it was easy to find out who has that dear David handle.

Nobody does.

It doesn't exist.

You've got to let it go.

And then he's at work, and his co-worker's like, Hey, can you see, look, tell me what you think about this article?

And the article is 10 reasons to kill yourself at work, pictures of Adam killing himself.

And he's so mad, he's like, This is fucked up.

And he has a big blow-up, he starts shouting at everyone on the audience.

He's fucked up, you used AI to create these images of me.

It's this is also this is 2017.

So it's like, did he pose for these pictures?

At no point was he like, How'd you get those pictures of me doing that?

He just is also crazy.

Dog, you're being haunted.

Just assume everything fucked up you see is ghost-related.

Yes,

especially because when he sees the article, it really says top 10 reasons to be yourself at work.

Yeah, which, like, what would those reasons be?

I mean, I felt like the subplot of this movie is this other character who is holding on so tightly to their job, even though they should be fired.

And this is just more evidence that she does not know what she's doing.

Yeah, what are those top 10 reasons?

Dan, what are some reasons you should be yourself at work?

Uh, you know, Dan, you've never tried to be anyone else than yourself at work.

Uh, what other reasons?

Yeah,

yeah, it's only been

to my benefit.

Yeah, number one, keeps expectations low.

Number two, don't get called on to do work.

They don't trust you.

Number three.

What?

These are lies now.

These are getting into lies territory.

Number three, fading into the background means.

Okay, no, Dan is a great worker.

You should hire him.

So Justin Long, he comes out and he's like, hey, everybody, everything's fine.

You should go home.

Take it easy.

To be honest, he handles the situation pretty well.

I think.

I think he's a really good boss in this moment.

He de-escalates.

He does not get things worse.

He sends the troubled employee out, checks that everyone else is okay.

He's been set up as kind of a shallow guy, but he does a good job bossing here.

So good on you.

I feel like this was Jonah Peretti's editorial influence.

Perhaps.

This is where the boss is bad at his job.

Make him good at his job.

Yeah, yeah.

So we'll put this in the cheers column instead of the jeers column.

Yeah, because everyone knows your name.

And at home, Kyle is mad.

He's like, Adam, why did you send me these abusive emails?

And Adam is like, David's taken over my feed.

He starts posting anti-David cartoons where he's attacking David and he's drawn David with part of his head missing.

And people do not like it.

The comments are not good on this one, which I understand.

Stop bullying this headless ghost.

Yeah.

The idea, like, I want to mention Justin Long being like, well, your work was supposed to become more relatable.

And I don't think the audience can really relate to the feeling of being haunted by a semi-headed ghost.

And he throws David's rocking chair down the stairs and he's like, I'm in control now.

He's not in control.

David goes in and starts erasing Adam's work as he is doing it.

No, his art.

That's how he expresses his soul.

And Adam asked a third question, which I think is Scott Cloud would be shitting himself if he saw this part.

That's true.

But I'm trying to make understand and reinvent comics.

Stop.

No.

I reread Understanding Comics again recently.

Great book.

Just a fantastic book.

I wasn't a huge fan of his somewhat recent follow-up sculptor.

Did you read that one?

Sculptor, I liked the art a lot and I liked the storytelling.

I didn't love the story, you know.

Yeah.

But he's still a master craftsman, but it just wasn't the story for me.

But Zot, great series.

Can't deny it.

So if Scott McCloud's listening, we're not drafted.

You're mainly in the cheers category.

Still with Stewart's, but only partly in the cheers for that one.

Yeah, only partly for sculptor.

Okay.

And

Adam ends up.

Oh, so

this is when he asks David a third question, which triggers David's new ability to turn Adam into a living video game that he can control with a controller.

I forgot about this.

And it's like Dave, he controls Adam and makes him light himself on fire, but it's like he's he's both a video game character and also himself, but it's not like a computer animated video camera.

It's live-action footage of him moving like he's a video game character.

I could have, like, if this was where the movie was going to go, I could have used more of this earlier in the film.

This is pretty late in the movie to get this silly.

Yes, I agree.

Adam ends up back.

What do you think of the video game sequence, Hallie?

Were you this

video game experience?

As a gamer, yeah.

Yeah.

No,

I was confused about why there was like two of them now.

Yes, that you're seeing both the like Dear David version of it and the real version of it.

It was very confusing.

Yeah.

It was kind of, it was like, who is seeing this video game version?

But he's also, but

there are also two Adams.

Yes.

There was like a, and so I, that confused me.

Um, yeah.

And you're just trying to enforce ethics in the gaming and journalism industry, right?

That's why you're worried about it.

Yeah.

Uh, so uh, Adam, he ends up back in David's basement, and people from Adam's life are like, you suck, you're not good enough, you know, you'll never be good enough.

And then there's an evil version of Adam.

I tread tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

So I do know about games.

I don't appreciate the jokes as if because I'm a woman, I don't know about games.

No, I mean, the joke is more that you're just not, you don't play them, though.

I'm sitting for a video game.

I know, but that's the...

Okay, sorry.

I apologize.

I brought a fresh perspective as someone who didn't know anything about games.

The new Mortal Kombat?

No.

Yeah, she was coming up with,

she was assigned to the babe aladies for the new Mortal Kombat.

That's pretty cute.

Different ways to have the characters turn into babies.

Friendships.

That would be cool.

Yeah.

Okay, sorry, back to the game.

And then they're like, Hallie, you're on friendships.

And you're like, okay, well, what if he like reaches into his, his, reaches down his throat and pulls his intestines out.

And it's like, there's poop spraying out.

And they're like, no, no, again, we want friendships, not fatalities.

I don't get any of this because I don't play this video.

It's fine.

It's fine.

So anyway, there's an evil Adam who's like, you're always going to be alone.

Evelyn and Kyle, they show up to check on Adam because they haven't heard from him.

And they see his apartment is on fire.

And they shout for him.

and he hears them shouting, which gives him the strength to believe in himself.

But now he has to fight grown-up David, the ghost monster.

And again, this is a little late for this monster, David, to be showing up.

And Adam, luckily, he manages to take this ghost of a comatose child who's missing part of his head and beat him to death.

So Adam does win this fight.

Yeah.

But he does it through, like, also, I guess, claiming his own self-esteem.

Like,

during this scene, there's like a lot about, like, you know, I'm not going to let the internet tell me how to feel about myself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's, he has, he's, he's realizing that he can be the troll in his life.

He doesn't need other people to troll him.

Like, I mean, it's always been kind of messagey, but it gets real messagey at the end here.

Yes, very much so.

Anyway, Adam is about to escape the burning apart when a blast knocks him out.

And Evelyn and Kyle pull him to safety.

And Adam tells Kyle he loves him, which feels like a little, too, little too late.

Like, if, if he's got to drag you out of a burning building for you to say you love him, then this is not the man for you, Kyle.

Kyle should consider himself lucky he got anything.

People know that like stuff has been happening because, for instance, his co-workers, like the bad messages she supposedly got got changed to good messages.

But that confused me because I'm like, well, he doesn't remember sending any messages.

So why did that happen?

I mean, Dan, when I'm on, when I've had a couple in me, I'm sending all kinds of crazy shit to people in my contacts.

That's true.

Look, I've done that.

He's been haunted for days.

He's got all this built-up sperm in him from not being able to masturbate for a while.

So he's liable to tweet and text any positive thing to somebody.

Ellie, you're saying how much that hurts for a guy.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't understand how much that hurts for a guy.

It needs to get much like toxic gas, it needs to be vented periodically.

I just like the idea that when you get really horny, what you do is you send out really nice messages to people.

That's what I mean.

I'm killing it at work.

Maybe I just maybe my sexuality just triggers something different in me than you.

Maybe you have a more grim kind of kind of dark sexuality, but I get off on fracing.

Well, it's very mysterious.

It's a very mysterious sexuality, Elliot.

It's mysterious.

It's mysterious.

And it should remain that way.

And Kyle manages to save David's cats also.

And everyone apologized to each other.

But

as Adam is being taken away in an ambulance, there's kind of flashes of David's face in the reflection in the window, which I don't know if it was implying that he's still haunted or David lives in him now.

David killed, David lived in him, that the real Adam died.

And now David.

You think that's what it was?

And this is a true story.

It is a true story.

So in real life, that guy is now an evil ghost, is what you're saying.

And it ends then, it goes to a woman who's on a Twitch stream, and she's like, this Adam stuff is all fake.

It's so dumb.

And these snarky commenters are telling her to like,

to, to say three questions.

She goes, okay, I will.

Dear David, you suck.

Why are you so dumb?

Why are you so crappy?

And then so fugly.

So fugly.

That's right.

And then the screen glitches.

She doesn't even see his fucking picture.

How does she know?

No, she doesn't even know.

And then she said, no,

it undercuts her message.

Her second question was, for real,

remember?

Just the number for

real.

And their screen glitches.

She suddenly, her body is taken over and she smashes her own face into the table in front of her until it's a real pulpy mess.

This was a little bit too harsh for me.

And this feels so much like a scene that was tacked on at the end because they felt they needed more gore.

And I was like, too far, guys.

Too far.

I'm going to say something nice about whoever wrote this, which is that.

God damn it.

Are you in love with this person or something?

No.

God wrote the movie.

I forgot to tell you.

I'm going to say that they have never entered the bully zone in their life because whenever they try and write someone being a bully online, it is so absurd.

They're like, it reminds me of a.

So, my sons have really gotten into the idea of roasting each other, and they'll have kind of roast battles in the back of the car.

And the roasts are mild, these are mild roasts.

They, uh, they, they'll, uh, my older son, he'll be like, you know, you, when your mom is so dumb, you know, he'll do those kinds of stuff, but they never quite work.

And then my younger son will just turn to him and go, you're the stupidest person in the world.

And it's so intense.

He just says it so seriously.

And I'm always like cringing, like, ooh, rough.

No, I, Harsh, but fair, right?

I like to imagine Gabriel being like, you're talking about our mother.

That would be really funny.

We have the same mom.

But yeah, so that's, and that's dear David.

The ghost lives on and is just going after random streamers.

Maybe smash their face.

Maybe they added the scene at the end because they were trying to clarify for people who had confusion like some of us did as to whether or not David lived on through Adam.

They were demonstrating David lives on.

That he lived on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That it's not easy to kill a ghost.

So this, I think

the ending of the movie kind of reminded me of something.

I think this is going to lead us directly into final judgment.

So Dan, do you want to set up final judgments for everyone?

Oh.

So it's not going to lead us into, I'm going to lead it, and then this will be the beginning.

Okay.

Let's go offline about this later, Dan.

I don't know if we need to work this out on camera.

This is final judgment.

This is the section where we decide if this is a good movie, a bad movie, or a what movie?

No.

Right?

I got a mark.

I mean, to be honest, this camera is a little better than we usually are.

Shock October ones.

Was it totally scarifying, totally snorifying, or frighteningly funny?

Are the special Shocktober categories that everyone hates but me?

So, what I was saying is that

the ending of this movie, specifically the sequence where this woman who's a streamer uh ends up smashing her face into her keyboard uh brought to mind a movie that i think does a much better job of capturing the like alienating feel of

living most of your life online there's a movie called cam yes uh which is great uh it was directed by the same guy who directed uh how to blow up a pipeline a few years ago um did you say it's called ham Cam.

That's like camera.

Cam.

Cam.

Cam.

It's about Cam, like your favorite character from Modern Fan.

Oh.

And it's about a young cam girl who's very ambitious.

A young ham girl.

You know,

a young ham girl.

This is bad.

There's something about Stuart when he wears glasses that makes me want to go after him even more.

Now I get it.

I get it now.

I accept it.

What's about a cam girl?

So she's a cam girl.

She's very, she's successful.

And then she discovers somebody

seems to be impersonating not only like using her account, but like is her on the internet.

And she's trying to figure out why this doppelganger of hers exists in the digital space.

It's great.

And it just high, like thinking about like the ending of this movie mimics some stuff from Cam, and it just really highlighted the fact that this movie does not know what it's doing.

It's like they throw in a few scares here and there, but like it feels even to the title is wrongheaded.

Like you're calling it Dear David does not indicate it's scary or about a ghost.

It's calling to mind a Twitter thread, which if you're already interested in the Twitter thread, like you don't need the name, like call it scary ghost thing.

There's also like a YA rom-com movie called Dear David that exists already.

And the title works much better for that.

That's actually what I watched.

Oh, no.

So I'm going to say this is snorifying.

Snorrifying.

Yeah, I also say it's snorifying.

This is our friend Kevin Marr, who has the show Kevin Geeks Out, does a thing called the kindest cut, which is just, you know, taking a movie and like only including the stuff that you want to see in that movie, like the funny stuff, you know, and often it's enough to kind of give you an idea of the plot.

This is a movie that would really benefit from a kindest cut because there is like some wacky stuff in here that's really funny and weird and wrong-headed.

And if you cut this movie down to like seven minutes i would be amused by it but uh otherwise it has so much nothing going on that i have to say snorifying what do you guys think on in la on the other coast yeah i am also gonna call it snorifying because for all the reasons you guys said already like this just not very much happens and it feels very weird that it feels like it's being very like um

uh

why am i blanking on the word very like it's sticking very closely the details of erotic Yeah, very erotic.

It's it's sticking closely, I assume, to what happened in the Twitter thread, because otherwise you would have invented some more interesting things to have happened.

Right.

I don't know.

It's showing such fidelity, it seems, to it, but it's, it's such a, the haunting is so low.

Is that the word that escaped you, Ella?

It was not.

Fidelity?

It was not.

It's hard for you to recall that word.

Allie, it was one time, one time.

But it feels like there's just not a lot going on in this movie.

It feels like this.

I feel like after when I watched Night Swim, I was like, this movie doesn't really have the scares I'm looking for.

And then I watched this and I was like, Night Swim, I'm sorry.

You were doing what you needed to do.

But Dear David is, it's like kind of barely a movie.

It's and which is too bad because I like watching movies.

Hallie, what do you think?

Yeah, I liked the

premise of this movie.

I can't tell if you guys, it didn't seem messagey to me that there would be a horror movie about someone who's like a vigilante against

internet bullies.

I thought that was intriguing and like a good idea.

And then just, they just didn't do anything with it.

It made me feel like anytime I write something, I'm trying way too hard because

this

is the only thing I read

about this movie.

I'm like, this was a movie that they were like, yeah, let's go ahead and make it.

That's the part that confuses me about this movie.

I wouldn't be surprised.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised.

You never know what's going on behind the scenes if they were like, we have a release date set for this movie.

So go make it.

And they don't really have time to do much with it.

Like there's always, I will say, I'll give our proviso that we use sometimes where it's like, you don't know what's going on behind the scenes with movies.

The creative people who make movies are often undercut or handcuffed or held back or hurt by production difficulties, scheduling difficulties, the people they answer to money-wise.

So you never know.

I don't want to,

I don't want to go from, I don't want to be a real troll bully and be like, everyone who made this movie sucks.

They're really bad.

Yeah, we just said BuzzFeed.

I think we made fun of BuzzFeed Studios.

That was it.

That was the only thing.

And we made fun of those cartoons.

But that's, hey, that's pretty mild bullying, honestly.

That's true.

But you never know.

But it is.

Are you guys trying to be so nice just because of this movie in particular?

Or is this your new thing that you guys kind of nicer in general now?

But it is baffling to me that this movie was made.

Like, or they didn't, like that, someone didn't see the script and say, like, can we add some more ghost stuff in this?

Like, can we make this scarier or like funnier or like more exciting?

But

are they worried that like people are going to show up who are like, oh, I was a fan of the Twitter thread and there's changes and I don't like it.

Like do you think that's going to happen?

I mean, I wonder if, or it may be also just the fact that I wonder if BuzzFeed was like, stick with what we own, don't change anything about it.

I don't know.

Well, given the fact that none of us have researched the Twitter thread, we actually don't know if there is a lot of fidelity to the Twitter thread.

But I bet it did sell.

I bet it sold because of Zola, Stuart.

I feel like they probably were were like, maybe it sold even around the same time.

And they were like, that did so well.

Let's buy this one.

Ellie, do you think we could sell a movie based on our chore from years ago?

Oh my god.

Let's beat Studios.

I forget what I said about Dear David.

It's great.

Why don't you buy our script?

Took place in intellectual property theft there.

To quote Mr.

T Tiger, it's great.

Okay, you see.

I know he says they're great still.

This season on the Adventure Zone, Abnivals.

Get ready for a brand new crime-fighting trio here to protect the anthropomorphic muscular animal citizens of River City.

Featuring Justin McElroy as Axolisle, the firefighting axolato, Clint McElroy as Roger Moore, the debonair cow of mystery, Griffin McElroy as Navy Seal, the Ross Seal that has never served in the armed forces, and Travis McElroy as every other swollen critter in River City.

This swear-free Saturday morning cartoon-inspired story airs every Thursday on maximumfun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Emily Fleming.

And I'm Jordan Morris.

We're real comedy writers.

And real friends.

And real fucking cheap skates.

We say, why subscribe to expensive streaming services when you can stream tons of insane movies online for free?

As long as you're fine with 25 randomly inserted super loud car insurance commercials.

On our new podcast, Free with Ads, we review streaming movies from the darkest corner of the internet's bargain bin.

From the good to the weird to the holy shit, look at John Claude Van Damme's big old butt.

Free with ads, a free podcast about free movies that's worth the price of admission.

Every Tuesday on maximumfund.org or your favorite pod spot.

Hey, you know what?

We've got a sponsor this week, and that sponsor is named Factor.

And, you know, I love what they're putting down here in the ad copy because I'm a guy with a lot of sweaters.

And Factor reminds us that sweater weather is here, and it pairs perfectly with savory fall foods.

When you're having a sweater, when you're having a sweater, when you're having a sweater on your body.

You're going to down on a sweater because you're a moth.

You want to have some savory fall foods.

And Factor's fresh never frozen meals pair perfectly with your busy fall schedule and you know what for whatever reason and i know the reason i just have a bunch of like halloween loving freak friends and also we've got flop tv going on october is always uh filled with stuff yeah dan's swamped guys i mean i'm stuffed like a cornucopia yeah on a thanksgiving table So if you don't have a lot of time.

Oh, but that's in November.

Sorry.

Still the fall.

You know, you can have a corny copia anytime.

Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't just have to be in November.

When it comes to meals, everyone wants the same thing.

Options.

That's why Factor offers 35 wholesome meals every week.

So you'll always find something you love that suits your lifestyle from easy breakfasts.

That's a lot of meals for one week.

That's five meals a day.

You should not be eating that many meals.

Perhaps it's for a family, you know?

I mean, I think that's the options of meals.

Perhaps it's none of your business selling it.

That's true.

You know what?

I shouldn't be making a lot of people.

I shouldn't be

saying other people's food habits.

Thank you.

From easy breakfasts and smoothies to

delectable even, midnight snacks, Factor has over 60 plus add-ons.

There's no prep, no mess, just delicious meals that feature premium ingredients like filet mignon.

You like that?

You like that, Elliot?

Filet mignon.

Yeah, protein.

I do.

Shrimp.

Shrimp.

I like that also.

Shrimp's great.

And blackened salmon delivered right to your door.

Sounds good.

Ready in just two minutes.

You'll savor every last bite.

I've had some of these factor meals.

I, unlike Elliot, love to cook, but also, like Elliot, sometimes maybe I don't want to cook.

Just because you love something doesn't mean you want to do it all the time.

And factor meals is a great option.

These meals were delicious.

I enjoyed them.

So if you want to enjoy them too, you can go to factorymeals.com/slash flop50 and use code flop50 to get 50% off your first box and 20% off your next month.

That is code flop50 at factormeals.com slash flop 50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month.

Is factor brought to you by the same people who made fear factor?

Because I wouldn't need that.

No.

No, no.

This is nothing to be afraid of.

I think I've told the story before about how I didn't get to eat too many of our factor meals because my wife kept taking them to work for lunch.

I'd be like, I'll have this today.

Oh, it's gone.

Oh, I took that for lunch.

She liked them.

So Elliot had to eat sawdust.

Yeah.

Luckily, I had to decide to make my own pemican and get old lifesavers.

Yeah.

I have a little plug to do now that we're in the plug section.

If you are listening to this, you still have a little bit of time to go support.

Jiggle Studio,

a studio gym space opening here in Brooklyn, New York,

that my wife and I are opening with some friends.

This is our first time branching out from just doing bars.

Instead, we're doing a workout space that's going to be classes like yoga, Pilates.

There's going to be burlesque class, dance classes, and then Charlene's patented hangover helper class.

It's a ton of fun.

She's patented.

And if I say it on a podcast, it's patented, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Just take that class, put it in an envelope, mail it to yourself.

Thank you.

That's what I'm doing right now.

If you get get a chance, head over to Kickstarter and look up Open Jiggle Studios, and you can learn all about it.

There's some plenty of cool merch.

You can sign up in advance for classes if you live in the area.

And yeah, you can help our dream come true.

The Kickstarter is going really well so far and we're pleased with all the great support.

So thanks and open our gym, please, Jiggle Studio.

I also want to make sure people remember that, as Dan mentioned, we are still doing Flop TV Season it's going on right now for six months from september through february the first saturday of each month we are live streaming a one hour kind of tv version of the flop house and then that video gets archived and you can watch it whenever you want if you have a ticket to it it's the first saturday in every month the next episode we're doing will be november 2nd when we're talking Caddyshack 2 because this season is all about sequels.

We had a lot of fun with RoboCop 2, had a lot of fun with Breakin' 2.

We are ready to be hurt, to not feel good after watching Caddyshack 2.

But the theme song says, I'm all right.

I mean, the theme song to Caddyshack.

I don't know.

The Caddyshack 2 theme song says,

I won't be all right.

Yeah.

We went too far this time.

Nobody asked for another.

Wow.

Making it was kind of a crime.

Who knows?

Maybe we'll think it's great.

So

that's November 2nd, 6 p.m.

Pacific, 9 p.m.

Eastern Time.

We'll be broadcasting live, but if you can't make it, that's okay.

Your ticket gets you access to the video.

If you go to theflophouse.simpleticks.com, you can buy tickets or season passes.

What does the season pass get you?

It'll get you five shows for the price of six.

And it means you have access to all these videos.

You can watch them at your leisure through the end of February when the videos will be going.

Well, when the videos will be going back into the flophouse vault.

You said five shows for the price of six.

Did I?

Yeah.

I'm sorry, that's six shows for the price of five.

Just wanted, I didn't want anyone to not do it because they thought they were overpaying for it.

That's a terrible deal.

Nice, that would be a bad deal.

Sorry, season pass gets you six shows for the price of five shows.

It's like an extra.

So go to theflophouse.simpletex.com to watch flop TV season two.

We've been having so much fun with it.

Audiences have been loving it.

We've been getting good audiences.

We want you to join them and have that fun.

And while you're going to theflophouse.simpletex.com, also also make a note to yourself to go to your local comic book store where the first issue of my run of Harley Quinn from DC Comics should be out on comic store shelves now, unless it's sold out already.

That's Harley Quinn number 44,

writing by me,

pencils and inks by Mindy Lee.

The art looks amazing.

And I'm very proud of how it's coming out.

The first issue comes out

October 23rd, which happened already.

when this episode comes out.

So it should be on comic stores shelves now.

Issue 44 of Harley Quinn, written by me but first go to the flophouse.simpletics.com and get tickets for flop tv season two and now all right back to the rest of the show yeah yeah shut up shut up elliott it's time for letters it's time for it's time it's time for you to shut up and our listeners to say something

and then we say stuff back oh it's a sort of a back and forth then you can talk again um i just dan turned into such a such a troll all of a sudden he's really dear daviding me no i just i just got a yeah, I just, I got just got a Twitter message from Dear David.

He says he's following you now.

I got inhabited by a ghost.

Um, this first letter is from Ben, who writes, gentlemen.

You went to two different animals.

Interesting.

A lot of animals were named Ben.

At least two.

Ben G.

Oddly, the Ben in Ben and me, though, wasn't the mouse.

That was Benjamin Franklin, of course.

That is ironic.

Yeah.

Of course.

But there's a cartoon and everything.

Sure, and of course, there's the tale of Despero, which is a mouse, but not named Ben.

Yeah.

Well, if we're going to open it up, there's Mrs.

Frisbee.

You might be thinking, yeah, Rats of Nim.

Type will close west.

You might think Rats of Nim is actually Rats of Ben, but it's not.

No, it's not.

It's a different word.

It's easy to state to make.

Not Ben.

No.

No.

Mickey, way different than Ben.

Very different.

Two-syllable.

Different letters, different sounds.

Yeah.

Anyway, so

Brown Jenkin could be a Ben.

We don't know what his first name is.

See, you bring up Ben 10.

That is a Ben, not a mouse.

Again, that's a boy.

The funny thing is, the original Ben was neither a mouse.

It wasn't a mouse.

It was a rat or a

bear.

The original Ben.

The way this whole started out, we somehow migrated to mouse.

We were like listing mice i just think it's funny that

anyway uh

i'll keep this short and sweet good because we didn't um

my other favorite movie series is on cinema at the cinema one of the recurring gags is that it's obvious that tim heidecker's character rarely watches the movies they review i'm curious if there was ever a time in your podcast history where you believed one of your castmates hadn't actually watched or finished the movie y'all were discussing.

I mean, Stewart frequently doesn't finish the movies.

Well, are the credits count?

There was that time where Dan fell asleep during the movie.

That was awesome.

That was great.

I don't remember, but he was snoring, and I was like, should we wake him up?

No, this is funny.

There were

so long.

I think there were more than one occasion.

There was a Transformers movie and the RoboCop remake, if I recall correctly.

These Transformers are so long, dude.

And for every like two seconds of Anthony Hopkins getting blown up by a Decepticon or TJ Miller, TJ Miller getting killed like off-screen.

Yeah.

I mean,

you've got to sit through a character explaining the laws about statutory rape so that he doesn't get arrested for having an underage girlfriend.

Something that it's weird to have in a blockbuster science fiction action.

Yeah, that was a weird part of that movie.

That's happened.

Yeah, it's not a joke.

That's an actual part of the movie.

That happens.

That happens.

Which one was that?

Wasn't that plot point when

those two little robots were like, yeah, we can't read?

And I'm like, that's right.

Well, at least one of those times, I think I was sick.

So that mitigates it a little bit.

Sure, sure, of course.

You know, it's less fun to do the show this way than back when we could watch the movie all at the same time together.

Like, that's the most fun way to obviously watch a bad movie.

But I guess the one advantage is that should I fall asleep, I then...

feel an obligation to go back and actually watch the movie rather than if we're all watching it together.

We're just like, we're not going to go back and let Dan watch the rest of this movie.

We're just going to barrel ahead, and Dan will be surprised by to learn what happened after he settled off to Dreamland.

I don't know why I'm talking about myself in the third person so much, but

uh, I don't think I have other suspicions, though, about you guys.

No, not related to the podcast, yeah.

Um, all right, well, moving on then,

this letter is from Jared, who writes, Dear Peaches,

What would Hallie do?

Hallie whispered Kushner as if she was afraid saying his name out loud, he would appear in the room.

Summon him.

Okay, well, we got two questions here.

They're both short and sweet.

Dear Peaches, do you think Slimer has a smell?

I always assumed ectoplasm was odorless, but surely all those hot dogs have some effect.

Got to smell like hot dogs, right?

If he's lucky.

If he's lucky, he smells like hot dogs.

And his original name was Onion Head.

So do you think he smells like onions because of that?

Or do you think it was just...

What?

That was the name of the puppet was Onion Head.

He wasn't named Slimer until, like, what, the animated show?

Dan's pulling out all his first date information over there.

Well, I'm looking at Elliot for help, and he's giving me none.

You think that the man who's in charge of a Ghostbuster's property would, like, know something?

Encyclopedia Ghostbusters at?

I know on-screen canon.

I don't know behind-the-scenes nicknames, you know.

But I do assume that Slymer smells like John Belushi, since Slymer is somewhat based on the idea of John Belushi.

Oh, so you do know some trivia about Slimer.

The idea of John.

Based on the idea of Slimers.

Based on the vibe.

Okay, well, we can move on to the second question, which will hopefully prove less contentious.

No, well, I will go on the record saying, yes, I do think ghosts smell, but continue.

Also, why do old comics show someone wearing a barrel to signify they're broke?

Wouldn't a barrel cost more than clothes?

Sorry if these questions are too emotional for the show.

Well, the first one actually.

Yeah, I think I'm worried about this next one.

I mean, I assume that these are barrels, you know, from a time when barrels were used more frequently and these are discarded barrels.

That's what I was going to say.

There was a time when it was a lot easier to get your hands on a waste barrel.

These aren't crate and barrel, crate and barrel.

No, no.

Yeah, those would be expensive.

This would be

people.

Back when barrel rights were like spread out across the ground, like You couldn't throw a stone without hitting a barrel right.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

And then, and they'd be mad you were wearing one because that's a barrel wrong.

That's not how you're supposed to use that barrel.

But I think, yeah, it is from a time when

things were shipped in wood more often than they are now.

Now, the suspenders you use to suspend that barrel over yourself, those, that was, you have to pay for those.

That's the problem.

What do you use, like leather straps or?

Leather, I think.

It looks like leather.

Yeah.

I mean, that's strong enough probably to hold up a barrel.

If you use like something that's too delicate, it's just going to snap and the barrel falls down, and everyone will see you.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

If it's elastic, though, you get to go like, woo, woo,

the barrel zooms up and down on you.

Or, like, yeah, get Streganona to give you some of her fucking spaghetti

to make the straps out of?

Well, spaghetti straps, Elliot.

That is why you're at the same time.

I forgot spaghetti strap dresses started with actual spaghetti.

That's true, yeah.

Motto.

Back when Streganona chic was all the rage in Paris.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, this has been a surprisingly angry letter section.

I don't know why we're so mad at each other.

It's David who's done this to us.

Let's move on to

recommendations, movies that we watched recently that we might recommend.

I'm going to.

For the spooky season, I'm going to recommend a horror movie.

I'm going to buckle your freak belt.

I'm going to specify that in this case, I'm recommending what I think was a good, bad horror movie.

This is not, you know,

I'm not saying this is a quality film necessarily, but it was fun to watch.

I watched Flesh Eater from 1988, a movie that was written and directed and kind of stars the guy who was the original cemetery ghoul in Night of the Living Dead, the one that appears after he says they're coming to get you, Barbara.

And so he was like, hey, I can make a zombie movie too.

And he also is in this zombie movie as i guess the same ghoul like oh cool um

in the movie in a lot of ways not cool ghoul oh okay that makes sense the movie in a lot of ways feels like just a remake of night of the living dead but like

sleazier like uh more unmotivated night of the living dead as sleazy as return of the living dead or or around that level uh there's more unmotivated nude scenes in this like there's more like weirds like you know, there's like child death in this.

This feels like a, like a real, like, low-budget,

you know, programmer, but it's also really silly.

Like, it's a, if you're looking for a movie that will have you sort of scratch your head and saying what at the screen every few minutes, you know, dial up Flesh Eater.

You might enjoy it.

How do you watch this one?

I saw it on Tubby.

Tuby, it's a treasure.

Tubi treasure.

To keep with the spooky theme, I'm going to recommend a terrifying little tale called His Three Daughters.

Oh, no.

It's about three daughters reconnecting while their father passes away in the next room.

Oh,

it's not spooky at all.

It's very sad.

But it does star Carrie Kuhn,

Natasha Leone, ugh.

And

Elizabeth Olson.

They're great.

All three of them are great.

And it

feels like a very New York story.

I love a kind of a single location movie where you really get a feel of the apartment that they're in

and watching their, like learning about their relationship as it unfolds through dialogue.

It feels very much like a play put on screen, but in a good way.

I thought it was really charming and sad and great.

And I liked watching those three actresses, his three daughters.

I thought we were going to continue with the Halloween spooky movies theme, but, you know, I'll return to it, even though it seems like we're not doing that this time.

That's right.

I'm giving Stewart unnecessary criticism.

There's no reason for it.

Because I'm wearing fucking glasses.

He loves the glasses.

Look at his face.

It's the glasses.

He loves it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have an Elliot be mean to me, King.

Not a Dan, be mean to me.

No, no, no.

So, the,

do you like being dominated by a guy who's smaller than you?

That's the thing.

So I watched a movie recently.

Is it a movie from the Czech Republic or at the time, Czechoslovakia?

Yes, of course it is.

But it's kind of like a fun Halloween-y type movie.

It's called The Girl on the Broomstick.

It's from 1972.

And it's kind of like a Czechoslovak version of the kinds of supernatural fantasy comedies that Disney would put out in the like 60s and early 70s.

And this girl, Saxana, she is a, she's at a school for witches and she has to, and she's...

She is at a school for witches.

She goes to the regular human world and has to figure out how to cast the spell that will make it so that she doesn't have to return to the witch world before she wants to.

And there's a lot of goofy stuff that happens and a lot of silly things with magic going awry.

And just kind of like a short, fun, kind of like silly movie, very colorful and very light, but still has some of that Czech edge to it, you know?

So I really enjoyed it a lot.

It was just a fun movie to watch that has a Halloween-y feel, but is not scary.

And that if my kids would read subtitles, I would show it to them, but I think that they probably will not.

So, that's the girl on the broomstick.

You should just get you should just get Bong Joon-ho to come over and explain to your kids why they should watch movies with subtitles.

Oh, yeah, that's that's a good idea.

I'll just call up Bong, I'll just call up Diala Bong and get Bong Joon Ho to come over,

maybe text, yeah.

Oh, yeah, I don't know, you guys, I don't know.

Oh, oh no, we sent her into a spiral.

Uh, I guess, um, a movie I've been thinking about a lot recently is the original Scenes from a Marriage.

Have you guys watched that?

I've actually never seen it.

The Ingmar Bergman movie.

I've never actually seen it.

I've been meaning to for a long time.

It's very long, but it's really.

It was a community series, right?

Originally.

Was it?

I think so.

But I don't know.

It was like eight hours or something.

So that makes more sense.

But it's.

And you watched it all the way through.

You didn't know how long it was.

So you're like, I'll go to bed when this is over.

No, I don't know.

Something like the sun is up.

Your kids are like, mommy, we need to go to school.

No.

Still watch it.

No, but one of the big

themes that they revisit is this,

the husband being disappointed with how he's turned out.

He always thought he'd be great, and then he doesn't wind up being great, and his wife is sick of hearing him complain about it.

So you're saying

I would find myself represented in this movie.

I'm saying

I've been thinking about it a lot.

Allie, maybe you should plug your newsletter.

Oh, sure.

Check out my newsletter.

That hurts my feelings on Substack.

I

really, this household always rushes to read Hallie's newsletter whenever.

It is the same thing here.

When it shows up in my email inbox, I read it right away.

I never let it sit.

And it's always really good.

Hilarious and also brutally honest.

Brutally.

Really got to start being careful about the

my audience in Eagle Rock is growing.

So I gotta

had a I've had a few texts that say I feel famous when they've read their newsletter.

So

yeah, gotta find some new content to hurt my feelings.

So give it to me, guys.

Give it to me.

Driving to nearby cities and have your feelings hurt elsewhere.

Exactly.

I feel like you're going to do the thing that a lot of

memoir writers do, where they write a memoir that's about their life and people love it.

And then they're like, the next book is about, like,

well, I traveled the country trying barbecue at all the national parks.

They have to come up with some reason to be doing things.

Yeah, I'm going to be a real canaus guard figure.

That's

how you pronounce that, right?

Not to be confused with Mouse Guard, the comic book about mice, none of whom are named bands.

Yeah, yeah.

My struggle by the Mouse Guard guys.

Well, that's another Shocktober for the books.

As always, we're really the movies.

The movies, too.

We're always

happy that Hallie.

Hallie turned and smiled at me.

Did you see what I did?

The energy always is great with Hallie here.

Thanks for having me, guys.

I always love to be here.

Yay.

What do I say at the end here?

I say thank you to Maximum Fun.

Thanks to our network, Maximum Fun.

Our network.

Why not try some of the other Maximum Fun shows?

There's a lot of great ones.

Why not thank our producer, Alex Smith, who might

sound good?

Yeah, Dan, you should, and remember, Dan, to tell people that they should check him out online as Howell Daughty, the name under which he makes his music.

He has a new album out now, which is called I Need Some Help, right?

Hey, Dan, you should tell them about that.

You might mention that.

Another thing you should probably mention is that if people like this show, why not give us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts?

That'd be a great thing to do.

A positive review would really help us spread the word about the show.

Or, you know what?

Like, hey, tell one person in real life meat space that you think might enjoy this thing.

Hey, I love this podcast.

Maybe you'd like it as well.

If everyone did that, you know, I mean, only a small fraction of people would actually listen to that advice, but that's still a lot.

So thank you if you do that.

If only 1% of all the people in the world listen to this show, that's still hundreds of millions of people, right?

Or like tens of millions of people.

That's astounding.

Yeah.

It's a lot of pressure.

I'd have to

have to better it.

I'd have to be a little funnier, right?

Yeah.

We'd all have to be funny.

Yeah.

You know what?

Don't tell anybody about this show.

No,

no, do.

I rely on it.

Anyway,

this has been great.

For the Flop House, I've been Dan McCoy.

Yeah, I've been Stuart Wellington.

I've been Elliot Kalen saying, see you at the next episode of Flop TV.

And I've been Hallie Hagland.

Okay.

Bye.

It's a ghost at the end.

Wait, you guys don't remember one, two, three, four, roll it up a little more.

Five, six, seven, eight.

Sorry, boys, it's coffee break.

No.

Because it was about rolling up your shirt.

Your shirt.

Why are you rolling it?

I don't understand.

Yeah, it was like, yeah.

How far are you rolling this shirt?

Just right until the point, and then it's coffee break.

Oh, I see.

Maybe this is a Colorado thing.

No, I just.

Wait, this is a thing that people did to tease boys?

To tease the boys, yeah.

Girls do it to tease boys.

Oh, yeah.

Interesting.

You know, all the same, all the things are the same still.

My five-year-old is now going, hey, mom, want me to count to 100?

One, two, skip a few, 99, 100.

And it's like, I can't believe these things are so timeless.

How did they pass?

Then she she'd grab it and then like rotor Healies out of the room.

And you're like, oh, fuck.

Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

Supported directly by you.