Greetings, Nextlanders! Thank you all for your patience as this schedule is coming a tad under-the-wire this month, as we were discussing right up until the recording of today's episode which films we'd be tackling for our November Watchcast slate. The one thing we knew for sure? We were gonna do some real stupid movies. However, unlike past Novembers, these movies aren't terrible. Well, we don't think they are, anyway. To each their own, of course. But to our minds, these are not bad movies. Ridiculous, certainly. Fairly stupid, of course. But bad? Not this year.

Given our somewhat herky-jerky Watchcast schedule this year, we didn't want to saddle the end of the year with groaners. Instead, we have chosen four profoundly goofy films that don't take themselves particularly seriously, and instead revel in their own idiosyncrasies at every possible turn.

Here's what we've got on tap for this month.

Monday, November 2nd: Freaked (1993)

The reason for the season, as it were. After seeing an absurdly fresh-faced Alex Winter in The Lost Boys, Vinny and Brad expressed interest in checking out Winter's directorial debut. Vinny knew what this movie had in store for him, as like me, he had seen it multiple times on pay cable during lazy sick-day afternoons growing up. I don't know if Brad knew what was in store for him.

Freaked also has the dubious distinction of being one of the biggest box office bombs we've ever done on the show. Fox buried it after a leadership change at the studio, and while I think the degree to which they buried it was wildly unfair, I don't blame them for having a bit of trepidation about their $12 million horror comedy that mainly featured a red-faced Randy Quaid doing his best Jim Rose impression and its ostensible star in half-a-body's worth of goopy, drooling monster prosthetics. At the same time, I kinda love this weird, lumpy movie. It's one of the most deeply early-'90s MTV movies anyone ever made, and the thing's got the joke-fire pace of a Naked Gun movie, while (mostly) avoiding punching down in the way this era's comedies often did.

I don't want to say anything else. If you've never seen it, buckle the hell up.

Where to Watch

Monday, November 9th: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

We ticked off one major John Carpenter box late last year when we did Escape from New York, and now it's time to knock another one off the list. I feel like we've been saying the words Big Trouble in Little China pretty much since the Watchcast started, and now here we finally are.

I'm not sure how much I need to describe here, as I feel like even those of you who haven't seen it have probably picked up on the vibe if you've ever heard anyone talk about it. Kurt Russell is truck-driver-turned-action-hero Jack Burton, who gets mixed up in some fantasy weirdness when he runs afoul of a Chinatown gang run by an ancient wizard (the great James Hong). None of that really emphasizes just how ridiculous this movie is. It's quippy and absurd in some of the same ways something like The Golden Child is, and the fantasy elements are dialed up in a way that calls back to some of the more outsized Hong Kong movies of the era. Your Masters of the Flying Guillotine and Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain type stuff. Some of that stuff in this movie was also a very direct influence on the Mortal Kombat developers. I bet you won't have much trouble spotting what I'm talking about.

Where to Watch

Monday, November 16th: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Fun fact! Screenwriter W.D. Richter, who previously wrote the adaptations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Needful Things we've done for this podcast (and who did a heavy rewrite on Big Trouble in Little China) also wrote (and directed) this! He formed his own production company specifically to make this movie, and it folded immediately after it failed at the box office. I think that's sad, but I also sort of understand people's disinterest in it initially, because this is not an easy movie to sell.

Hell, I'm not sure I even know how to sell it. Peter Weller plays a rock-'n-roll dimension-hopping scientist superhero who has to fight off an evil scientist (John Lithgow at his most sneeringly manic) over some magical technology. I don't think any of that description properly captures the truly bizarre (and intensely '80s) vibes of this thing, but that's fine. All you really need to know is that the cast is incredibly stacked (have fun playing spot-the-actor in this one), and the whole thing's a gas. I haven't seen this since I was like 19, so it'll be fun to see if this is as rad as my teenage self made it out to be.

Where to Watch

Monday, November 23rd: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

After Tim Curry passed earlier this year, I really wanted to find a way to get this movie into the lineup. I would have been plenty satisfied with one of his other great starring roles, but I think this is the ideal one to celebrate such a singularly sensational actor. After all, as good as he is in movies like Clue and It, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is as definitive a Curry performance as there ever was.

If you don't know much about this one beyond its reputation, it's a pretty standard dark-and-stormy-night kind of thing, with a stranded young couple forced to trudge up to a creepy old mansion filled with strange and colorful and sexually charged characters who sing and dance and occasionally perform deranged experiments.

I've got a long history with this movie. Back when I was a dirtbag teen, the Berkeley Rocky Horror cast would come through town a couple of times a year to perform in front of the movie. I think I went to my first one when I was like 14 or 15, and I'd never been a part of anything quite like that. I had such a good time with it that when some friends formed a local production, I served on the behind-the-scenes crew for a year or so. I generally hate musicals, so the fact that this one got me as good as it did is downright shocking.

Brad's definitely never seen it, and I don't think Vinny has in totality either. Can't wait to see what they make of it.

Where to Watch

And that's November! Reminder! There will be no Watchcast on November 30th, as I'll be out for Thanksgiving the previous week. Star Trek season 3 will resume and conclude in December! That's it! I have no more reminders or notes! Have a great November! Exclamation point!

--A