Stinker Madness - The Bad Movie Podcast

• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - This buddy cop movie is getting in the way of my stinker!

  Getting the unique title of being so bland that it isn't worth it's own terribleness. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the rare kind of bad movie that doesn’t even earn the dignity of being fun bad. It’s a two-hour shrug—completely unremarkable in its beige, water-logged blandness. You keep waiting for something—anything—to break the monotony, but the movie just keeps paddling in circles, content to be as tepid as possible. If “wet cardboard” were a cinematic aesthetic, this would be its crown jewel. And here’s the truly tragic part: there is plenty of stupidity floating around in this bloated fish tank of a plot. Dumb worldbuilding, goofy lore drops, baffling character motivations—you name it. The ingredients for a delightfully trashy disaster are all right there, begging to be mocked. But the presentation is so suffocatingly dull and flavorless that you can’t even muster the energy to enjoy the nonsense. It’s like being handed a plate of absurdly shaped food but discovering it somehow tastes like nothing at all. The cast flounders through their scenes, seemingly unsure whether they’re in a superhero epic, a Saturday morning cartoon, or a contractual obligation. The action is limp, over-processed, and slathered in CGI so flat and lifeless it makes a screensaver look dynamic. Even the attempts at humor feel like they’ve been filtered through three committees and a desalination plant. By the time the credits roll, you’re left not with irritation or amusement but with the numbing realization that you just watched a movie that managed to squander every opportunity to be interestingly bad. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom isn’t a glorious shipwreck—it’s a soggy beige sponge. And there’s nothing here worth squeezing.

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• Air Force One - OMG DON'T LET THAT HIGH GUY FLY THE PLANE!

  “Air Force One” is the kind of movie that grabs you by the collar, shouts “GET OFF MY PLANE,” and dares you not to grin through the whole ride. It’s the most unabashedly earnest “Fly Hard” ever committed to film—yes, it’s Die Hard on a plane, and yes, it knows it. Yet somehow, through sheer force of will (and Harrison Ford’s presidential scowl), it keeps its two-plus hours aloft with crowd-pleasing momentum. Sure, the premise is absurd to the point of parody: the President of the United States personally throwing hands with terrorists at 30,000 feet. The script asks you to swallow far more than peanuts—plot holes you could taxi a 747 through, logic leaps that would make John McClane blush, and an “Idiot Plot” where the villains make decisions that seem scientifically engineered to defeat themselves to keep the movie going. But the movie never stops long enough for any of that to really sink in. It just keeps hustling, barreling from corridor shootout to cockpit crisis like a blockbuster with someplace urgent to be. The special effects… well, bless them. Even in the late ’90s, some of these shots looked suspiciously like the world’s most patriotic PlayStation cutscenes. But their rubbery seams and digital wobble just add to the charm—this is a movie that’s trying so hard to thrill you that you forgive it for occasionally looking like a flight simulator running on Windows 95. And that’s the thing: despite its flaws—maybe even because of them—Air Force One is a blast. Ford and Oldman chew the scenery with gusto, the pacing never really sags, and the film delivers exactly the kind of fist-pumping, flag-waving nonsense it promises. It might be ridiculous, but it’s ridiculously entertaining.

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• Final Destination 3: Love Rollercoaster

  Final Destination 3 marks the point where the series’ once-ingenious death-trap premise starts to feel a bit mechanical. The franchise’s formula — a character foresees a horrific accident, cheats Death, then scrambles to outwit its unseen design — is intact but beginning to show its age. The opening roller-coaster disaster is spectacularly staged, yet it’s also a reminder that we’ve seen this all before, only with diminishing returns. There are still flashes of the dark humor that made the earlier entries work, particularly in some of the elaborate kill sequences. But here the film seems oddly unsure of whether it wants to play things straight or wink at its own absurdity. Gone is much of the gleeful self-awareness that made Final Destination 2 such a fun, macabre ride; instead, FD3 leans harder into teen angst and pseudo-philosophical dread. Mary Elizabeth Winstead does her best to ground the chaos with a solid performance, and the inventive set-pieces — especially the infamous tanning bed scene — keep things intermittently lively. Still, the connective tissue between the deaths feels more like an obligation than a thrill, with dialogue that takes itself far too seriously for a film about Rube Goldberg-style fatality. By the time Death checks off its last victim, Final Destination 3 feels less like an inevitability and more like repetition. It’s not bad, just tired — a middle entry coasting on the momentum of its predecessors rather than carving out a fresh reason to exist.

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• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - And the Snooze Button of Chaos!

  There’s a great movie hiding somewhere inside The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai—but you’ll need a map, a microscope, and probably a flux capacitor to find it. Despite its gloriously weird premise and a cast that includes Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, and Christopher Lloyd, the film feels like the cinematic equivalent of someone dumping every genre into a blender and forgetting to hit “mix.” What could have been a clever cult adventure ends up as a directionless mishmash that mistakes confusion for complexity. The biggest sin here isn’t that the film is weird—it’s that it’s aimlessly weird. One moment it’s a rock ’n’ roll adventure, the next it’s a dimension-hopping sci-fi, and then suddenly it’s a love story or a satire. The problem is it never commits to any of those identities long enough for the audience to care. Every cool idea is buried under three others that go nowhere, leaving the viewer dazed rather than dazzled. And while the cast is stacked with talent, even they can’t bring focus to the chaos. Weller plays Buckaroo like a man who just read the script five minutes before filming, while Lithgow chews scenery in a way that’s entertaining only because nothing else is. The movie keeps hinting at depth—a sprawling universe, quirky characters, offbeat humor—but it never follows through. It’s as if someone wrote ten beginnings and forgot to write an ending. At the end of the day, Buckaroo Banzai isn’t strange enough to be a great cult film and not coherent enough to be a good one. It’s a cinematic shrug—full of potential, short on payoff, and surprisingly dull for something that promises interdimensional adventure. A “so bad it’s good” movie at least makes you laugh; this one just makes you wish it would pick a lane and go somewhere—anywhere—interesting.

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• Cabin Pressure - As boring as that guy who talks to you on the airplane

  “Cabin Pressure” (2003) is the cinematic equivalent of being stuck on the tarmac forever with a dying paperback and a screaming air vent. It’s not just dull; it’s aggressively, proudly dull—an unviewable mess that mistakes droning cockpit chatter and recycled stock footage for suspense. If turbulence were interesting, this movie would still find a way to taxi around it. From the opening minutes, the film announces its priorities: beige sets, beige lighting, beige characters speaking in acronyms about systems we never see break in any satisfying way. Scenes repeat like safety demonstrations—pointless, bloodless, and performed by people who look like they’ve already mentally clocked out of the shift. The “action” is mostly cross-cutting between bored faces and a model plane that’s never given a convincing sense of scale, speed, or danger. You can practically hear the temp track begging to be replaced by something—anything—with a pulse. The script is a wasteland of clichés and filler, the kind of movie where every problem is solved by the next line of dialogue rather than an actual set piece. No character has an arc; they have altitudes. Every attempt at ratcheting tension stalls into holding patterns: more radio chatter, more hollow commands, more reaction shots that mistake blinking for acting. Even the inevitable “hero moment” feels perfunctory, like someone looked at their watch and said, “Guess we should land this thing.” For Stinker Madness seekers, there’s no campy payoff here—just the slow, oxygen-starved fade of a production that never gets off the ground. “So bad it’s good” requires swagger, accident, or at least a spectacular crash. “Cabin Pressure” offers none of that. It’s boredom at cruising altitude: a feature-length layover where the only emergency is keeping your eyes open.

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