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Hey there, Joel here with my buddy Matt from How to Money. Matt, summer's right around the corner. I know you got that travel bug. What adventures do you have planned? Oh man, you are going to love this. We're planning this epic road trip up the East Coast with the entire family. Just think lighthouses in Maine, monuments in DC, plus everything in between. That's amazing.
I'm jealous, but I'm thinking about stowing away in your luggage. But wait a second. How are all six of you going to take this road trip? Okay, so initially we were thinking about taking an RV, but I found some really awesome Airbnbs along our route, places with something for everyone. And what I really love is that with Airbnbs, we can always start our days with like a
A good breakfast at home? Like, it's our home away from home, and I love that routine. I don't know if you've ever tried getting a family of six out the door, let alone trying to find some breakfast in the middle of a city that you're not super familiar with. It's a challenge, plus it's a budget killer. Yeah, that's true. Sounds like chaos, to be honest. And you know, that's actually what makes hosting on Airbnb so special, right? You're giving travelers a chance to really live like a local. They even have the co-host feature, which gives you access to a network of high-quality local co-hosts
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, today we're going to be reading back a batch of messages from our email address. If you have never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try sometime? You can always email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. We love messages of all kinds of feedback to recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting to add to a topic that we've
talked about on the show. Of course, if corrections are ever necessary, you can reach us at contact at stuff to blow your mind.com. You can also just write in to say, hi, tell us where you listen from, how you listen to the show, how you found out about us, that sort of thing. That's always a stuff we like to learn.
Anyway, again, contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Always feel free to get in touch and your message may end up being featured on a listener mail episode like this one. Yeah, yeah. And hey, we also have a discord server. If you want to join that, email us at the same address and we'll send you the link. Let's see, Rob. How about we start off with this response to our shield wall episodes from our listener Ahmed. Do you want to read this or should I?
Sure, sure. I'll read this one. Ahmed says, Hey, guys, Ahmed again here. I just listened to your first episode about the speculation around captured Roman legionaries in western China and thought of another firmer example of different cultures meeting and our knowledge of that via armor. Tlingit coin armor. Here's one example, but you can easily find others online. And then, Rob, I pulled in a couple of images of what Ahmed linked here into the outline.
But I think it's some kind of hide or leather base. And then on top of that, there is just this array of metal coins all side by side, sort of strung together that creates a scale like formation, actually, to come back to the image of fish scales.
Yeah, yeah, it's quite impressive. You know, I believe I had read about this at some point in the past, but I don't know that I've ever seen an example of it in person. And for that matter, I'm not even sure I'd seen a photo of it before. I think I just read like a casual mention somewhere or another.
But Ahmed continues and says, the Tlingit of Pacific Northwest were involved in both conflict and trade with Russians looking for fur in the 1600s or the 1800s, and through them were exposed to Chinese Qian coins, whose central donut hole made for an easy way to secure the coins into a layer.
This is one of those examples that exists squarely in the historical record, but I often think about how nuts it would seem if it did not. And we had to guess at the lengths that brought Chinese currency into this use in North America. Yeah, yeah. Even beyond this example, I think the Tlingit and other Pacific Coast people
Like the Heda, had some of the coolest and most unique armor in North America, with elaborately carved heavy wooden armor often covering the trunk as well as the neck and head, leaving just a slit for the eyes.
And again, here, Rob, I pulled in a picture that Ahmed linked into the outline. This is of armor, the armor he mentioned in a museum collection today. And this also looks very interesting, very cool. Like the armored part on the torso is composed of kind of ribs, like vertically aligned ribs that all go side to side around the lower part of the torso. And then a narrower plate of ribs like that coming up through the chest.
Yeah. And then the helmet part of it is fascinating. It's sort of bullet shaped coming up into a cone on the top with beautiful like red and orange decorations. And then below that, the carvings on the face have a kind of monstrous marine mammal face kind of design. Is that what you're seeing, too? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's very cool. Yeah.
Ahmed continues here and says,
Indigenous Americans put protection aside in favor of mobility once firearms made heavy armor and shields obsolete. With some interesting exceptions in areas like the Great Plains and the Pueblo cultures where shields had spiritual significance, it's a great look at the very diverse cultural spheres in pre-colonial North America seen through the lens of military defenses. Anyways, keep up the great work. Amen.
Well, thank you so much, Ahmed. Yeah, this was really interesting. Thank you for sharing with us. In fact, you always write such great emails. Please get in touch after every series we do. All right. Looks like we received some listener mail related to our series on cynicism. Yes. Let's see. Rob, you want me to do this one from T? Yeah.
T says morning fellas loved the series on cynicism. If you'd be so kind to throw it back into the Saturday mix in a few months, I'd like to listen to it again after some time to reflect. Can't promise anything to you. Usually we, we let it around a year ago by maybe before we do a rerun, but it, it varies some, but you will probably hear it again. Anyway, of course you can listen to it anytime you want, right? Yeah. Yeah. The magic of asynchronous media.
So T goes on to say, one thing I did want to point out is that legitimate companies are training their customer base to be cynical to anything that seems to be communication from them.
The fishers and the smishers have gotten so good. I'm not sure if I know the phrase smishers. Fishers, of course, is, you know, people fishing for information through like emails and stuff. Smishers, would that be SMS? Fishers? I don't know. They're bad, too, though. I just I know from context of the sentence that they're bad as well. And I don't trust them.
Actually, JJ just confirmed for us that smishers does in fact mean that, which is nice because now I have a nicer name for them than the one I usually call them when I get one of these messages on my phone. But if it's SMS, why are they smishers and not smishers? I think you answered your own question there. Anyway, T writes, I am adjacent to the mortgage industry, and part of our product sends out emails about paying your mortgage or things that happened on your account.
We actively avoid putting links to anything in those emails simply so the instructions to the customers can be to never click on links in emails that seem to be about your mortgage. Always go log into the portal.
The text messages we send out never have an actionable link in them. They're all essentially, this payment was made to your account. If you have questions, log into your portal. And this is also the customer service can reiterate to the customers to not click on things about your mortgage. Mm-hmm.
If you've bought a house recently, likely there are footers at the bottom of your agent's emails, your lender's emails, your title attorney's emails, etc., saying to not trust any wiring instructions without verifying first. There are some real horror stories of fishers getting to a buyer at just the wrong time and having them wire their down payment for the house to them instead of the escrow agent. Thanks as always, T from Florida.
Yeah, T, this is really interesting. And I have a number of thoughts here. This actually connects to something I've said on the show, I think months or even years ago before we did the cynicism series. And so I'll come back to that in a minute, but.
I remember when I was not too long ago going through the mortgage process, we got lots of warnings exactly like this, that we would likely be hammered with attempted scams, you know, while you're involved in getting a mortgage or when you've recently gotten a mortgage. Just be aware of that. Also, all this stuff you're mentioning, don't wire money except to this exact account. Ignore emails giving you a link to click on or saying that account details have changed, stuff like that. And
And I would argue that this kind of particular preparation within the mortgage lending scenario falls more under the reasonable social skepticism umbrella than under social cynicism. Now, you remember in the series, we made the distinction that at least as we were using the terms skepticism is like doing your best to
to either grant or withhold trust on the basis of evidence. You're looking for objective clues, objective information about the trustworthiness of a person or situation, whereas cynicism is a bias. It's an evidence-neutral bias against trust.
So another way I'd put it relevant to your example, T, is that I would not call it cynical to be cautious of scams in a situation where scams are very common and very dangerous. It would be cynical to be cautious of scams in a situation where you have no good reason or evidence to suspect a scam is taking place. Yeah, like it's cynical to assume everyone is Jason Voorhees.
But it's it's it's healthy to assume that anyone wandering through the woods in a hockey mask with a big old machete is Jason Voorhees. And that's what and that's the thing. Most of these sketchy emails and texts are that they are they are very sketchy for a reason, you know. I mean, I guess some are more convincing than others, obviously. But yeah, this is a healthy amount of skepticism that people are employing here.
Great analogy. Exactly right. So, yeah. So I would call this like reasonable situational skepticism rather than cynicism. On the other hand, T, I think I get exactly the point you're driving at. We looked at a bunch of studies in the cynicism series before.
Pointing to the fact that a person's level of social cynicism is, I think, partly an aspect of their fixed personality, but it's partly not. Partially, it is something that can fluctuate according to our experiences. And so I would suspect that having to deal with a lot of situations in which a reasonable evidence-based approach is to be very wary and stingy with trust, that that's
having those sorts of experiences could sort of bump up your general cynical biases in unrelated areas of life, whether or not those biases are actually protecting you the same way they would in these situations rife with scams. And another thing is beyond just like the mortgage process, certain things about modern life, I would say, especially about communications technology, I think have the toxic effect of
creating a digitally ever present threat of scams because the internet and also various forms of computer-based automation have made scamming so much more efficient in the last couple of decades. Like you can, you know, it used to be real work to develop each scam lead, you know, back in the day. And now you can just spam millions of people with attempts to initiate an email or text message scam at extremely little cost and
And even more sort of customized or targeted scams are easier to confect with the digital tools available today. So even though in most aspects of life, most people, most of the time, are still very trustworthy, the fact that you are always digitally a few clicks away from an ever-present threat of having your identity stolen or having somebody steal your life savings, that
The proximity of that threat throughout your entire life now, I think just kind of waters the weeds of cynicism so that they grow everywhere in your mind, not just where they belong, like, which is like on sketchy looking emails and text messages. And so given all this, I think I've said this on the show before. I believe that it is underappreciated how maliciously influential cynicism
internet and phone-based scams are in our culture today, not just because of people's material losses. I mean, I think almost everybody knows somebody or has a, has a close relative who's lost a bunch of money to some, like, you know, to an email or phone scammer, but it's not just the material losses, which can be devastating. It's because the
presence of these types of scams viciously undermines general social trust, which I think we now have even better reason to believe and a better understanding of how that kind of generalized cynicism is a really, really bad thing for each individual and for the culture.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's honestly ruined some forms of communication. Like, I don't answer my phone. Like, if someone calls me, I just assume that it's some sort of, at worst, nefarious force, but perhaps just some sort of like a cold call, you know, trying to get me to donate money and sometimes to a good cause, but I'm not going to do that over the phone because of all the scammers that ruined it. Yeah.
So, you know, I just, I'm like, all right, let it go to voicemail and I will probably delete it there. Yeah. Our digital and communications environment has created an
asymmetrical scam threat where it's weird that I think it really still is the case that you can trust most people most of the time. But at the same time, through electronic communication, a scammer is always just is right there waiting for you. You know, they're they're like a picked up phone call or a text message reply away.
Yeah, we've made the world smaller in a lot of wonderful ways, but also in a lot of terrifying ways. So I might not put my faith in phone calls anymore. Maybe I should put my faith instead into mystery cults. We, of course, did a series on mystery cults, and we continue to hear back from some folks about this topic. This one comes to us from Lex.
Lex says, super short message, but this was too funny and on point not to send your way. In your episodes about mystery cults, you discuss that certain techniques or special effects might be off-putting because they seem deceptive or irreverent in some way. Looks like some churches are really towing that line.
And they included a link for us to check out here. And I'm not going to tell you how to find this. I don't know, maybe some of you are familiar with this already, but it involves some sort of a church environment where there's like a big drop cloth that presents the sacrifice.
this kind of like puppet Jesus that rises up from the tomb. Am I interpreting this correctly? Yeah. Yeah. So there's like an altar and then behind it, by the way, I, I, it looks to me like it's an Easter service, but I can't tell for sure. And I don't know what, where, or what church this is, but yeah, there's like a tapestry in the background showing a golden archway and a sunrise landscape. Also electronic dance music is thumping. It's like a four on the floor beat.
But then suddenly the tapestry falls away and it reveals a different painting. It's like a blooming garden and a blue sky. And then a spring-loaded Jesus statue launches up out of some hidden device in front of the painting so that his head is framed by like a big painted halo on the backdrop.
Jesus is also holding a flag. Looks like a red velvet flag. And no judgment, by the way, you know, religious art and special effects. That's a matter of taste to some degree, at least. But the switchblade Jesus was indeed funny to me. I think the funniest part was the speed at which Jesus rises up. If he had just risen slower, it would have been less funny. Yeah.
I mean, I'm all for it. Yeah. Throw some production into it, you know. Puppet Jesus is, like I say, puppetry is a legitimate and very ancient medium. It is an art form. Therefore, I think it's perfectly fine. It's great that it should be involved in religious rights. It has been since time out of mind.
Anyway, Lex says, love the show and appreciate your hard work to bring it to us. Happy Friday, Lex. Okay. General call to listeners here. Please send us more examples of puppetry, animate statues, and automata used in earnest, not for laughs, in religious services. I want to see more of that.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are some terrific examples. You know, very recently my family went and saw a performance of Javanese puppetry here at Emory, here in Atlanta, Emory University. And, you know, these are generally they're telling retelling Hindu epics, you know, and it is a very traditional and like sacred performance. So, yeah, I'd love to hear more examples of that sort of thing.
as well as contemporary examples. There's a lot of church puppetry out there in Protestant services. And yeah, that stuff can be interesting in its own right as well. ♪
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All right, let's see here. We got a message from Carlos. This is in response to our series on pretend play subject line in defense of Vygotsky. Uh, so Rob, it's been a little while, um, since we did this episode. So I've kind of forgotten the context of the, the, the,
Person here that Carlos is talking about is the 20th century Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Can you can you remind me what the context was in the episode that Vygotsky came up? Basically, I think we were talking more about the ideas of Dr. Sandra Russ. There's a paper talking about her ideas and also comparing some of her ideas to those of Vygotsky.
If memory serves, though, I don't think any of Russ's ideas were necessarily tearing down Vygotsky, but, you know, kind of like building upon them. But then again, I think that the comments here that Carlos wrote in about are fair. So, yeah, let's go ahead and hear them. Okay. Carlos says, hey, y'all, just wanted to write in to defend Vygotsky, whom you featured in your recent episodes on Imagination and Propaganda.
play. In your episode, he came off as stodgy and anti-play, but I'm not sure that's fair. I was already acquainted with his work as it pertains to art and literature, especially his The Psychology of Art. In this work, he seems to really appreciate the value of art. While this isn't quite the same as play, it definitely gets into the importance of the imagination. Just a couple of quotes from the MIT Press Edition 1971. Quote,
Thus, poetry or art is a special way of thinking, which in the final analysis leads to the same results as scientific knowledge, but in a different way. And then also, quote, Psychological investigation reveals that art is the supreme center of biological and social individual processes in society, that it is a method for finding an equilibrium between man and his world in the most critical and important stages in his life.
And then Carlos picks up again, not directly related to play, but he does seem to have a great appreciation for the role of creativity, perhaps above and beyond productivity in society. Thanks, Carlos. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for writing in, Carlos. Point well taken. And these are also some wonderful quotes here. All right. Let's get into a little Weird House Cinema listener mail. It looks like we're continuing to hear from folks about the telephone box.
this one comes to us from beau beau says uh hi guys i love your show and have listened for years i'm a little behind in the moment but i was thrilled to hear your episode on la cabina
Good old days. Yeah.
So one day watching whatever was on TVE2, this film was shown. This was in 73 or 74, so it was a rerun. I was 12 or 13, and it started out as funny, that is, until the end, which scared the bejesus out of me and gave me nightmares for some time, and it definitely became unforgettable. At the same time, of course, I had no idea about the symbolism of the film. The director says that the film can be interpreted in many ways, which is true, but for me, in the grown-up hindsight, it is clearly a political statement.
Remember that disappearances actually happened at this time under the Franco regime. What happened to those people? Well, obviously they did not end up in telephone boxes in a bunker, but this is what the film carefully addresses. And then we get a bullet list here. The surveillance view of the plaza may be someone pushing the button if someone suspicious enters the box.
The tie is key as a symbol of nonconformity slash suspicion. The other guy caught in a separate box also has an unusual tie. We talked about the pattern a bit of all these ties with a dotted pattern. On the other hand, there is a short scene during the transport where a guy who exits a red telephone box with no problem, he wears a nice neutral gray tie. Ah.
I didn't notice that. Yeah. The mindless telecompany workers, non-thinking and just doing their job, actually symbolizing normal people not wanting to upset anything. The apartment complex building, the uniform frame for the followers.
And the circus performers are the marginalized weirdos that are non-threatening to the regime, providing plausible excuse for openness. I could go on, but bottom line is that this film deeply touched me, and I am glad that you covered it. Best regards, Beau, now living in Copenhagen. Well, thanks, Beau. I think, yeah, you make some great points there. I think we talked about this in the episode, but my take on it was, despite the director saying that, you know, the
The film could be interpreted as being about whatever kind of box metaphorically you are trapped in.
It just struck me as that it had to, at some level, be a political analysis, like that it was a political comment, especially when some of the comments the director made about it not being a direct critique of the Franco regime were made early on, where it seems like he may have thought he had to say that, right? You know, in order to actually get it out, he had to say, no, no, no, this isn't a threatening piece of art. It seems to me like it obviously is. It's clearly supposed to be politically subversive.
Though I can also believe that it had these secondary meanings as well, that it's not just a political allegory. It's just like it can mean a lot of things, and there is one thing especially that it seems to mean. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting thinking about how repressive regimes take art that is open to interpretation, because I think there are plenty of examples of
of skilled artists being able to sneak something by them, sneak commentary and criticism and so forth past the censors. But then there are, you know, any number of cases where the censors are latching onto things that maybe do not have a political intention. But since, you know, they're vague enough, since they are open to interpretation, they are open to criticism from any given regime.
Anyway, Beau, thanks for writing in. I do always enjoy hearing about how listeners encounter these different movies and shows in the wild, in their lives, and the influence that those films had over their lives. So, yeah, thanks for writing in. Totally. Thanks, Beau. All right, this next Weird House Cinema message is from Megan. Megan.
Megan says,
Both movies also, uh, or both movies always looked very frightening to me. So I only recently decided to finally watch pin. I would classify it as odd and uncomfortable and having some Freudian slash adult themes, but not really scary. Two fun facts. The male protagonist acted in a Canadian classic. You've just talked about in listener mail. Uh, and that is cube, not Jim Henson's the cube, but the Canadian, uh,
I don't know, puzzle horror movie cube where people are in a bunch of cubes and most of the cubes have like a razor that cuts you apart or something. Yeah. We may come back to that one in Weird House Cinema. That's, that's, it's become a classic in its own way. Did I mention this last time that cube is one of those movies where I saw it's terrible sequels before I saw the original? Oh no, I don't remember if you did. Yeah. I think I first saw cube two hyper cube. I don't know if I'd say that one's worth it.
But I worked my way back to the original and it's been many, many years, but I remember liking it at the time. I remember the scene in which the dude is cut into little cubes by wires being like just super impressive at the time. I think that was the main thing I connected with back then was that that was a really cool, that was a quality kill. Not so much some of the ideas bound up in the concept. So that one would be a fun one for me to revisit for sure.
Uh, let's see. Megan goes on to say, I have a personal connection to Penn because a second cousin of mine, Bronwyn Mantle plays the mother. Okay.
Anyway, this film isn't as wild as my previous recommendation, Treasure of the Four Crowns, but it might be a good one to watch if you'd like to explore some Canadian content. Megan, that was you. We actually took your recommendation and covered Treasure of the Four Crowns on Weird House. Absolutely not one of the better movies we have watched, but I have very fond memories of covering it on the show. That one often comes to mind when I think about how the quality
quality of our Weird House episode seems to be kind of unrelated to the quality of the films. Yeah, yeah. You never know what's going to... Sometimes it's just great to talk about a great film. Other times, you know, maybe more often than not, the ones I really get into are films that are rougher around the edges but have those gems embedded in them that you kind of have to dig out with your fingernails. I don't recall what the real gems inside that particular movie were, but I think we did find a few.
Yeah, it had fewer gyms than most, I think. But it was still, like I've said about several things recently, it's not good, but it's a good time. Anyway, Megan says, as always, thank you for all the wonderful content, both the regular science episodes and all the fun bonus content. I love it all. Smiley face emoticon, Megan.
Yeah, I have not seen 10, but it is notable that it's based on a novel by Andrew Nederman, who also wrote the book that The Devil's Advocate is based upon, the Al Pacino devil lawyer movie from the 90s. Uh-huh, yeah. We were just talking about that movie off mic before we started here today, and I have a very specific memory of being a kid in the 90s and thinking about The Devil's Advocate. This is a serious movie for grown-ups. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I think it did have that air at the time. I have not seen it since it came out, though. I have. I don't know if it's a serious movie for grownups. But anyway, looking at Pin, it looks to me... So it's like a kind of bizarre psychological horror thriller. It's got...
Uh, it's got like weird family relationships and murders. Uh, it, the main premise from what I can tell is that there's a doctor played by Terry O'Quinn who creates an anatomically realistic human dummy named pin to use in educating his small children about medicine and the human body. Unfortunately, I think at least one of his children sort of turns into Norman Bates, but sub in this dummy instead of Norman Bates, his mother. Hmm. All right. That doesn't sound good.
Also, Rob, I attached a screenshot of what the dummy looks like. There appear to be a couple of varieties. There's a skin on and skin off variety. And yeah, super creepy. Yeah, I agree. I agree. This is a very creepy looking dummy for sure. Skin on also looks pretty bad. Skin off is creepier. But I don't know, skin on is also kind of creepy. So yeah, I agree.
You know, I've actually been very interested in doing some sort of ventriloquist dummy horror film at some point or another. One that I had been considering already is the film Devil Doll, a black and white picture that some of you remember from Mystery Science 3000. But then we also had a listener write in with a recommendation for another one that's kind of been on my radar.
Oh yeah. Right. So, uh, our listener Chris says, Hey Joe and Robert, I would like to recommend the 1978 film magic starring Anthony Hopkins and Burgess Meredith. It's sort of an evil dummy made me do it movie though. There's more to it than that. Uh, Chris says Hopkins does an outstanding performance for what is essentially a 90 minute episode of tales from the crypt. Keep up the great work guys. Chris.
Yeah. Again, yeah. Attenborough, screenplay by William Goldman based on his novel. So, yeah, there are a number of attractive elements here. You know, I think I was just browsing recently and there's a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray of Devil Doll. Ooh, okay. Yeah, that's right. I think I got an email about that. Yeah, I'll check.
You'll have to check that one out. That's one that I remember even in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 form, I found pretty unsettling. Just something about its tone and there's kind of like a deadpan uncanniness to it. Hi.
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This next one comes to us from, oh, it's another Robert. That's why I was thrown off guard there. This Robert says, Dear Robert and Joe, First, thanks for a wonderfully varied podcast. I listen regularly on my walk to and from the university where I teach creative writing. I just heard the listener mail episode from April 3rd, 2025, and noted one of the suggestions for the upcoming anniversary is the Japanese film Wild Zero.
Hearing it brought me back to seeing the film in grand style at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal in 1999. The director, Tetsuro Takuchi, was in attendance, and I recall him looking fab in a silver sequined blazer and a feather boa, along with an entourage of 12 or 15 comrades, all dressed in the over-the-top Shibuya-kai style popular in Tokyo at the time.
The film's a science fiction, rock and roll, zombie apocalypse, comedy romance gender bender, and it holds a very special place in my heart. The real-life band at the center of the story, Guitar Wolf, was the inspiration for a fictional band that appears in one of my children's novels, The Creature Department, a band with a name I know you'll enjoy, Boris Minor and the Karloffs. It might not make the anniversary episode, but I'd love to hear Wild Zero get the Weird House treatment. Very kind regards, Robert.
As I think I said last time, I saw this movie way back when I was in high school, and I remember it made a very positive impression on me then. I remember it had the feeling of a movie with a real zest for life. Yeah, I actually never saw it, but I'm very familiar with seeing its poster art. Definitely going to places where I could rent or see movies or learn about movies. I do remember seeing this box art a lot.
All right. This next message is from Uber Cthulhu. Uber Cthulhu says, and by the way, you know, friends, you can always write in with the pseudonym. Just specify. We'll use whatever name you give us. And if you use your real name, we'll just use your first name. Uber Cthulhu says, hey, guys, I absolutely love your shows. I listen to them regularly. You have a masterful way of dissecting and appreciating the films you feature.
Uh, thank you. Uh, I'm curious if you have ever done a show on the Equinox. It is a film that I saw once at about age eight and never came across again for many years, but it really made an impression on my youthful, malleable brain. Fast forward about 35 years. And I was having a conversation with a great dearly departed friend of mine about strange films that we had seen. He turned out to be the only other person I'd ever met that had seen it.
In any case, I sought it out, and after a long search and almost $80, I procured it. Wow. It's just as strange as I remember. In a few words, I will describe it as young couples in a woodsy area trying to picnic beset by demonic possession, other dimensions, and Ray Harryhausen-type creatures.
Oh boy. You know how to get our attention. Uh, uh, Uber Cthulhu says, and get this. It features a young, young herb Tarleck from WKRP in Cincinnati. Okay. Uh, anyway, sorry to be long winded. Love your shows. Please feature it. Uber Cthulhu out peace. Love getting tidings of peace from Uber Cthulhu. Uh, but also, wow. I was not previously aware of this movie. I looked it up and it looks good. Uh, according to what I've read, uh,
It sounds like a combination of the original Evil Dead and a movie that I've seen called The Day Time Ended. Oh, yeah. Have you seen that one? That one's good. Yeah. It's like where a family goes to a house in the desert to be repeatedly subjected to encounters with special effects reels. It's mostly stop motion dinosaurs, but also there's like a looks like a Betamax camera that floats around in the air.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh, so I found a stream of it online and I was just like skipping through to various parts. There's one part in the middle where a cabin in the woods is being attacked by a giant land squid with green thorny arms, uh,
Uh, then there's another section that's got a monster with like three fins on his head and big ribs protruding out of his body. Also at some point, the human characters are fighting a big green guy in a pelt who looks like a combination of EGOT and the incredible Hulk. You see this guy here, Rob? Yeah, this, this, uh, I've seen some clips from this film. I've never watched it in full. Uh, it's my understanding that it's the, uh, that the effects are largely the work of David Allen.
who's come up on the show before because he's had his hand in stop-motion effects for so many films, including two that we've watched before, The Dungeon Master and Robot Jocks. There we go. So, yeah, I'd be up for Equinox at some point, one I've never seen, but it's kind of been on the list for a long time. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
All right, we're going to close things out here with a message from our Discord server. This one comes to us from HotNapalmDeath, who writes in and says, I was thinking you guys might consider doing the Denzel Washington trilogy since you did Virtuosity. Fallen and Ricochet complete the triumvirate of Denzel versus Psycho.
You did the sci-fi. Ricochet is hard drama, but Fallen is supernatural. Otherwise, basically the same idea. Denzel versus Super Smart Psycho all came out in the 90s. I remember Fallen was like a movie that a bunch of my friends in high school thought was really cool. And I never saw the whole thing. I think I saw like a few minutes of it on TV and that's it. Yeah, I think it was on in the background, like when I was in school or something.
Um, now Ricochet, I do, I do remember seeing that one because, um, this is something that, uh, uh, the, the listener here gets into, but, uh, John Lithgow is in it playing the villain and he's a deliciously over the top psycho villain, uh, in that picture.
All right. So they continue in there. Also, The Quick and the Dead, which we mentioned, is particularly good and provides connections to so many other things. Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lance Hendrickson, Keith David, all directed by Sam Raimi.
I fully believe John Lithgow is the most versatile actor of his generation. He is great as a villain, both subtle, Dexter, realistic but extreme, Ricochet, and completely over-the-top, Buckaroo Banzai. Oh, he's Dr. Lizardo in Buckaroo Banzai, yeah. Yes.
But he is equally at home in Subtle Comedy, World According to Garp, A Normal Comedy, Third Rock from the Sun, To Zany, Buckaroo Banzai Again, or dramatic roles like Footloose, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Terms of Endearment, and so forth. Yeah, I think that's a solid read on John Lithgow. He has such a wide range, and he's proven himself believable in so many different sorts of roles.
I don't know that he's played a or I haven't seen him in a villain role in a while. So it's at times it's almost it almost shakes me to remember that. Oh, yeah, this guy playing like the sweet old man character has played some just vicious psychopaths in his past. This is funny. I'm like apparently unusually underexposed to John Lithgow. So I know I'm from Buckaroo Banzai, where, of course, I love him as he's the villain there. He's got like sharp teeth and he's usually got electricity coming out of him and stuff.
But I never made it to his season on Dexter. Never seen Ricochet. Never seen The World According to Garp. Never seen Third Rock from the Sun or Footloose or Terms of Endearment. I'm just all behind. Harry and the Hendersons, though? I think I have seen that. It's been a while.
The most recent thing I think I saw him in is what they did, two seasons of a new Perry Mason series on HBO that I think was underappreciated. I thought it was excellent. John Lithgow plays Perry Mason's, this lawyer that he looks up to and works for early in his career. And it's just, it's a great performance. Oh, wait, I did catch him in, he was in Conclave.
I don't want to spoil anything about Conclave, but he's got an interesting role in that. That's the movie where they pick the next pope, right? It's where they pick the next pope. See, I don't want any spoilers on the pope selection, so I'm not going to watch it until we get a new pope, I guess. I actually quite enjoyed Conclave. All right. Well, I'll have to give it a look. I'll put it on the list of new releases right under Death of a Unicorn. Death of a Unicorn, then Conclave.
For a second, I was mixing up characters, though, because I was like, wait a minute, is John Lithgow the the the pope candidate who vapes? No, he's not. That's a different pope candidate in it. It's got a vaping, perhaps pope. Is this a part of the Jude Law young pope, hot pope universe or is this separate? No, no, it's not hot. No, it's not especially hot or young or or hip, but it is interesting. OK.
All right. We're going to go ahead and close up the mailbag for this episode, but we'd love to hear from you. All of your conclave-related thoughts and more, you can write into us at that email address that we referenced at the top of the episode. And Joe will throw it out again here in a minute as well. Let's see. Other places you can find us on Instagram, we're stbympodcast. If you're on letterboxd.com, you can follow Weird House there. Username, Weird House. We've got a nice list of all the movies we've covered over the years and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes next.
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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