Sardonicast - Sardonicast 150: Cube Trilogy feat. April & Colin from Canada

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Guest podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/@nosuchthingasabadmovie Support the Show for $2 a month and receive all future episodes early at https://sardonicast.com and https://www.patreon.com/Sardonicast. Buy Sardonicast T-Shirts, and other merchandise at https://teespring.com/stores/sardonicast. Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/sardonicast Website: https://sardonicast.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sardonicast Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/sardonicast Twitter: https://twitter.com/sardonicast Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sardonicast Sardonicast Highlights: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8AhJ0bzQgs5fb9m_ZCRqkw/featured   Alex's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/IHEOfficial Adam's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/YourMovieSucksDOTorg   Alex's Twitter: https://twitter.com/IHE_OFFICIAL Adam's Twitter: https://twitter.com/2gay2lift   Adam's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/YMS   Intro music by: https://www.youtube.com/user/anUnkindnessvideo   Timestamps: 0:00 Intro + Guest Questions 14:40 Cube (1997) 47:22 Cube 2: Hypercube 1:14:14 Cube Zero 1:45:35 Cube (2021) 2:07:32 Q&A 2:35:34 Recommendation + Outro

Three, two, one. Viewer, beware, you're in for a scare. That was from gruce bumps. Grooze bumps. Groo bumps. Grus bumps. I watch gruce bumps and eat shishy. I'm Adam from your movie sex.

I'm Alex from I.H.E. My addition to the intro is just... But you can probably hear that laughing in the background. We are not alone. a special episode. Who is joining us today? Hi, I'm April at Manski. And I'm Colin Cunningham. Hello. What the fuck do you do? Who are you? Who are you? How did you get on this podcast? How did you hack our signal? We're hacking all the way from the other side of Canada. Toronto, Canada. Damn. That's where we were a month ago. I can't believe that. It feels like it was two

weeks ago. I think I'm still recovering, by the way. Yeah, same. It feels like it was a year ago. I don't know. The way that my time flows is entirely just fucking inconsistent. I have no idea how long it's been. You could tell me it's June, 29. It's like you're in the hypercube. It is as though I am in the hypercube.

That is correct. That is an apt analogy. The hypercube, definitely not the regular cube. No, no, no, no. This isn't regular cube business. So we've got, we got some people in the audience. They're probably wondering, what, what you do? What sort of presence on the internet do you have?

What are you known for? Well, we have our own podcast, me and Colin and our friend Justin. We host called No Such Things a Bad Movie. And we have over 100 episodes. We've been doing it for a few years now. And we talk about bad movies and we talk about things that we like about them. and what I do is I'm a commercial video editor and colorist here in Toronto. Woo!

I am also on that podcast. Yes. And I'm a visual effects. What? No. And I'm a visual effects artist in Toronto. And Adam, you both may have seen me. I've been on some red letter media videos.

From time to time, I pop down and visit Milwaukee and we shoot some stuff. Yeah, that's all. That's all I got in my life. What is your favorite moment or appearance that you've done on this, whatever this red letter media is that you call it? Yeah, sounds niche. There have been some funny moments. I think the funniest one we've done is the osteoporosis dance episode.

I agree. Where Mike just, yeah, he breaks me, which he tends to do in his hatred for the elderly. I was just lose it. That one in particular, I was just dying, laughing. And I don't think I recovered. So I'm really curious. Do you actually think there's no such thing as a bad movie? Is this like a true principle if you're trying to spread the word?

I think a couple of movies. I think Black Devil Doll from Hell. You're always ragging on Black Devil Doll from Hell. I think that movie has merit. I think I was outright saying it in the episode. that this is a terrible movie and do not watch it. It is awful. There are a few movies that we've disagreed or just been like, no, it sucks.

I watched a, where it was a movie called Sledgehammer that I was just like, this is terrible. It was a David Pryor movie. There's a long time ago. You also didn't care for Chairman of the Board with Cat Top. I still found things to like about it. So we always find something we like about it. Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, we've watched some of the pretty notorious bad movies. We did Master of Disguise. not too long ago. Which was great just for hearing about that 9-11 story. Yeah, I think it's a little exaggerated, but there is some truth to it. I don't think it was literally they found out on set, but they did like some sort of weird memorial or pre- Yeah, we found out.

It was done after 9-11, but he was wearing the turtle outfit, and they did a little kind of moment of silence for 9-11. before going right into shooting with the turtle. So I'm looking up some of these films. I looked up black devil doll from hell. Oh my God. You got to see that. One of the stills does remind me of like Chuckie from goosebumps.

So that ties in pretty well. Oh, yeah. That's right. It's a very sexual movie. Yeah. If Chuckie had sex with women. I think he does. On screen many times.

Does Chuckie ever fuck in those movies? If he fucks the girl? It's so dull. It just makes you so uncomfortable. Oh, my God. It's not bad. I want to comment just so the titles that you've listed as just ones that are just irredeemable and so bad that you're considering changing the name of your podcast, even.

Where do you find these films? Are they all viewer suggestions? A lot of them seem really niche. And that's also, you know, Red Letter Media Wheel of the Worst is also a lot of these things. Just like, where are these coming from? This doesn't, does this have an IMDB page sort of thing? Well, when we first started, we just picked, we used to do two movies an episode, which we don't do anymore, but we would just pick them.

And we often had a theme. Sometimes it would be like, okay, two horror movies or like, we did two movies with, like, judge in the title or something like that. But it became too hard to do two movies. So we just did one. And once we did that, we just started taking turns picking. So every week another person would pick just kind of like you guys do. And then we also have on our Patreon, if you're subscribed on the $2 level and up, we have like a lottery.

So every like a couple months, I pick a patron and they get to pick any movie they want as long as it's available for us to do. Yeah, and not for a Patreon episode for the main feed. Yeah, there's no like kind of niche ones though. I think the weird ones, especially the ones that we mentioned, are all from Justin. Yeah. So he has an insane encyclopedic knowledge of like every movie ever. he has like multiple movie podcasts. He's very knowledgeable.

And yeah, a lot of them are either like weird things that people have either suggested to him or he's found like through like lists on letterbox. Like, and it's, yeah, stuff that we've never heard of. A lot of low budget streaming things too, but we've found some good discoveries that way. Yeah. Not black devil doll from now. Well, hey, and we're talking about it so much you guys are going to have to review it. I've added it to my watch list.

It seems fascinating. Yeah. Great Halloween movie. Oh, I'm like clawing at my legs right now. Oh, come on that. So does it get a, does it get exhausting to kind of, like, it seems like your conversations on your podcast are just like, let's find the most exhausting fucking possible thing that we could possibly watch.

Like, does it, do you have any regrets? Do you have any regrets? No. Oh, my goodness. Well, a lot of times, well, someone will pick a movie that they like, but they know is bad. And then everyone else hates it. It hates it, you know? Like X3 or something is a good example.

It's usually the boring ones. I find like even though, you know, there's really nothing to talk about, we just sort of veer off and just talk about whatever. Yeah, like that happens a lot. Those are honestly like the most fun episodes. And I find like, you know, I look at my notes that I take before recording and it's like, God, I got nothing to say about this movie. And usually those are the most fun episodes to record because we just like shoot the shit. Yeah, exactly. And then we forget that we're supposed to be talking about the movie.

And it's like, oh, yeah. Well, I'm about to start a competitor podcast called Always Something to Say About a Bad Movie. Just to prove you wrong. Yes, there are bad movies. Alex, do you have any questions for our guests before we start the cubes? I found something really random that got a beef of Colin over a little second. Hell yeah. What?

I was looking up. Yeah. No, I was just scrolling through IMD, seeing all these credits from Twilight. to hold whatever and all this kind of stuff. But it was more the acting section that caught my eye. 2006 is The Wild. You're credited for a character. And I found this video on YouTube, right?

If you're doing this like British accent, what is the story behind this man? Oh, no. It's available on Disney Plus, if you ever want to see it. The movie. Yeah, the movie. Yeah, the movie. Yeah, that was a DVD. Okay, so I was, I worked on the movie.

I was a lighting artist. And the director Spaz Williams, Steve Williams, he worked at ILM. He was the guy who did like the Tyrannosaurus Rex for Jurassic Park. He did T-1,000. This was his directorial debut. And so he came to Toronto where I worked. And he would just get me for doing temp voices. So they would be constantly working on the script.

They would have the storyboards. And then he just sort came down one day. And he's like, who can do voices? Like, all right, Colin, like, come upstairs. like, you know, do William Shatner, you know, for this line and blah, blah, blah, and do this and that. So they were supposed to get, I think I could probably say it. They were trying to get Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, John Leiden.

So this was me doing a stand-in voice for him, just not even like knowing what he really sounded like. And then that fell through. And then the director ended up just thinking I was kind of funnier anyway. just wanted to keep me in. So there you go. Yeah, so that movie should interest you, Alex, because it's like the bizarro Madagascar. Yeah. Have you seen it, Alex? I haven't seen this one, no. I've always seen that poster. But yeah. Same. It's like a big Disney production, right? But it's only got like 27K ratings and stuff. I guess Madagascar took it thunder or something. Yeah, it was supposed to come out, I think the year before Madagascar and then production got

oops. And they were based on the same script. right? Yeah, similar idea. So they were trying to... Exactly. Yeah. So that's DreamWorks, M.O. pretty much.

So, yeah, we were going to kind of beat them to the punch. And then our production just got, you know, fell behind as it happens. And then they ended up coming out a year before us. So at the time that movie came out, it was known as the Madagascar ripoff. Well, if you had all of your character designs to be like blocky cube lion instead of... real regular lion, then you probably would have went out faster. Yeah, exactly. Had to get that realistic looking fur. Yeah, I know. The fur glow. But if you want to know more about the wild, we did an entire sinkable commentary track on it on our Patreon for our podcast. So check that

out if you want to know more about it. Which is weird. I didn't even think it came out on Blu-ray, but it's an HD on Disney Plus. But yeah, I think they just released a few DVDs. So that little thing on YouTube, Alex, is one of the, I think, the only DVD extra that came on the TV. That's funny. Just you. Yeah. And by the way, he's only in one scene in the movie. It's a very short scene, but pretty funny. Oh, my God. My birthday is on the poster. It says hitting the streets April 14th. Oh, yeah. Wow. Damn. That's what, that's what happened to you. You came. You hit the streets. I became wild and hit the street. The tagline. Start spreading the newspaper.

Oh, God. Is that the tagline? I mean, that's what it says on a poster on IMDB. And they have New York. They're only in New York for like one scene, I think. Oh, yeah. It's a real, uh, Jason eight. Exactly.

Friday to 13th part eight. It's true. That's very funny. Anything else, Alex? Before we... Throw out a couple of episodes of your podcast you'd recommend as good, particularly good episodes. People seem to like. the Jingle All the Way episode that did a lot moral combat annihilation did pretty big numbers

um the Grinch it's two Christmas episodes for what for whatever reason the Grinch we just sounded miserable on well because we were just so angry we all hated that's fitting it's thematic but i remember my friend listened to the Grinch episode and said like it sounded like we had all had a fight before we started recording because we were so he could sense some attention it's just we all hated the movie so much yeah it's like something something Some of them, I mean, some, it depends when we record. So now we record like in the morning usually, like when we're recording right now or in the afternoon. But sometimes if we record in the evening, you know, we've had a couple beers, it can get a little rowdy.

I get very cranky when I come home from work and have to record. Usually in a bad mood. Yeah. That's where we record early now. We switch to mornings delightful. Everything is great. So I was actually thinking about revisiting Jingle all the way at some point doing like a watch-along or something on my stream is it like I have I have nostalgia for it it doesn't hold up you not necessarily like in a

well I never watched it as a kid but I kind of saw it a little bit we were like oh it's terrible but when we did it for the podcast we were like actually it's kind of funny it's I actually I have a new I have a new appreciation for it it's it's funny that like everyone in it is is just so awful as a person you just like despise everybody in this film so in that respect It's, you know, it's a good time. Yeah, I mean, Sinbad is quite a large personality. You get to, in, like, so many jokes, like, haven't aged well, you know, Sinbad threatened to blow up, like, the radio station.

I definitely think it would make a fun, like, a funny, like, stream or, like, Adam and Powell's video or something. Okay. Jamie! Jamie! Alex, we should try to remember that for Christmas, maybe. Yeah, good suggestion. I haven't seen that since I was a kid.

Crazy. from memory even yeah it was like one of my favorite movies as a kid great recommend for Christmas if you're looking to do something really good a black devil doll from hell is that a Christmas movie no no okay well all right we're going to talk about the cubes we're going to talk about all the cubes we're going to slice them and dice them is a Halloween episode also our 150th episode by the way of the podcast. Congratulations,

congratulations. We're recording this a little bit early. Still in October, but the episode should be public, like on the 30th. So, like, right before Halloween. And so it's, it all makes sense.

The stars aligned. It all came together. The cubes aligned. Doing, you know, the most Canadian movies, I feel like I have to stand up for the national anthem.

Well, except for the remake. Oh. But the previous three Japanese movie Yeah The previous three Couldn't be more Canadian If they tried

Yeah I feel like That's just a normal Japanese game show Is like Oh yeah That was a life in prizes Nesubi was in it

Yeah do you want to So Colin you You begged us to do Cube You said I will not do Any film That's not Cube

I think that was April That was me Was it you I have to Yeah She is obsessed with this movie.

Colin, you were the one that you said you like had a hand in it when it came out, right? I have a connection to this film. So I don't know if we keep going to talk about that now or should I? Sure. Yeah, please. Yeah, tell us why we're cubing time. Okay, so I'm a VFX artist, like I said. And yeah, the place that did the wild, it was core digital pictures.

Mm-hmm. It was William Shatner's effects company in Toronto. And the owner, say, so filmmaker Norman Jewison, who did Fiddler on the Rooster, He did Jesus Christ Superstar in the heat of the night. He's got a film school in Canada. Oh, he did Moonstruck as well. He's got a film school in Canada called the Canadian Film Center. And they have like a, I don't know if it's like a couple years or a three-year-long program or something like that.

And the owner of Corps was on the board of directors. And I think at the end of the program, all the director students pitch an idea. and then the film center picks one to make into a feature film. And then they get a lot of people to sort of donate their time. So they get like professional crews kind of volunteering and stuff like that. And then Corps was offering free effects. So Vincenzo got this made and then Core did all the effects in the movie for free. So I didn't personally work on it, but I was there at the time.

And then a couple of my friends did most of the effects that you see on screen as a favor. And I think I read that this was the first film. that the Canadian Film Center produced. And I think they do it every year now. And from then on, I think Vincenzo became really good friends with KOR. And I think they did all of his movies up to Splice, I think. Yeah, they continued to work together. This was the first film made in Canada ever.

Ever. That's right. We didn't have movies before Cube. Yeah, that's it. We only had 2D animation, and we called it Squared. Yeah Jesus Christ Now it's in three dimensions

As soon as we invented the third dimension And color That was it, yeah Color pretty important In this movie Right Yeah so this is a I watched this when I was younger

Alex is this your first experience with Cube Or have you seen it before? No I watched Cube I was quite a fan of this movie When I was younger I've seen it a couple times but I haven't seen the rest of them before. That was a new experience for me.

But yeah, we'll get to those. We will. We shall. Yeah, so I guess anybody listening, you probably should have watched the movie already, but we'll give a little brief synopsis. Basically, people wake up, they're in a cube. They say, get me out of here.

I didn't do anything, and they try to get out of there. Will they get out before the end of the movie? I don't know. There's traps. There's drama. There's math. What more could you want? It's basically the whole movie.

That's all I know. It's literally everything you need. Yeah, I'm sold. It's actually kind of surprising because this is a very, you know, it's a low budget film. And I guess one of the little tidbits about the filmmaking and the practicality of it is they repurposed the same room over and over and over and just had different lights behind the panels, basically. But. Yes. point during the film as you're watching it does it feel like oh it's just the same room there's

there's a very clear sense of continuity in space and it's it's cheated well enough that it's never not convincing in that sense i agree they had a they had one like one and a half or one and a third of of the cube so they had like so when you're looking through the hatch there's another wall over there because we're trying to figure like okay was that an effect no because they couldn't afford an effect like that um so they had another wall there and like when they're shooting, they're just trying to use as much of the space as possible. So they're like right to the edge of where, you know, like the fourth wall would be. So if they moved like an inch, you would see the set, basically.

But when you're watching it, I never think about that. I feel like I'm in this big structure. Yeah, they did it. It's very cleverly planned, you know. It does the absolute most, I think, with what they had. Yeah, and you never feel like, yeah, the location's getting boring because they kind of change it up. But yeah, as far as the lights go. Even though it's just color.

Yeah, like, so they actually originally planned to shoot it in sequence, which is a very, like, first-time filmmaker idea. Yeah. Because I was like, oh, it's so great seeing how these characters kind of grow and change. But, like, he thought that how long is it going to take to change the gels? And it takes, like, at least an hour. And then it would take even more. Yeah. So they're like, we can't do that.

So we have to shoot all the red room stuff first and all the white room stuff in another day. And, like, that makes it harder on the action. but I think they all did a fantastic job. They didn't have the light panels that you could just, like they do now, like the LEDs or you can just change the color like after the fact. From your fucking telephone. Yeah, it's insane, which I think the Japanese one did. But yeah, for this one, I think they had to like manually change all the gels.

It was gels on all six sides. Yeah. And then the actors were like complaining that it was so hot in there because you're essentially in a light box. Damn it. That sucks. Didn't even think about the heat. Yeah, it has a great sense of continuity despite that and so shout out you know

Props to script supervising and all that but also the makeup because you can tell over the course of the film their lips are getting more chapped the implication is they're getting more dehydrated Yeah, getting sweaty and also the acting like it does you know it's not the best acting that I do have some criticisms with the acting But it doesn't feel like it's shot out of order that's one thing that You know the continuity of the film is actually really well done, and that's kind of impressive. There's a real scrappiness to it, you know, especially when you look up, like, we said low budget, but 365,000 Canadian.

That's pretty crazy. Wow. I'm never really thinking about that. Yeah, yeah, that's really impressive to me, and it was that was that carrying it because, for sure. Yeah, as Adam kind of pointed to, there's some funny acting,

which is part of the chan to me. There's, like, a cornyness to some of these performances, some of the deliveries. Some of the degree. There's some like kind of age concepts that I don't know if we'd really be playing with in the same way now. Yeah, but I like this one. I was quite a fan of this coming back to it and experiencing the queue. It's got a really good concept.

And I think I liked it better this time. I've only seen it once before in the theaters when it came out. I think it only played very briefly in Canada. I think it was a huge bomb here. Yeah, it was. It was worldwide released. but the gross is like corner to be it's like under a million i think in japan it made a lot of money and uh but in canada it made nothing so i think i caught it on the first weekend because it was

probably gone by the second weekend it did premiere at the Toronto international film festival and it won like the best new filmmaker or new director award just want to point that out first Canadian film is what it won first they had to create the award just for the whole festival the award has existed for a long time but this is the first one So what I heard is that someone, like a distributor from France, saw the film in Canada and saw its potential and then gave it a French release where it did fairly successfully and then wound up, you know, the success in France wound up propelling it to other countries as well. But for whatever reason, it just appeared in Canada. They just gave it gave up on it. But, you know, another part of film making and making a film successful, especially in 1997, is the marketing. And what they wound up. doing for the French release is they put money into advertising. They let people know that it exists. Oh my God. Which is a big thing and people just forget that even if you have the best fucking movie ever, if nobody knows that you can watch it in a theater and you can watch it anywhere. Like people are going to see it. So good reminder for everybody. It's crazy. It's like Netflix. If it came out of Netflix, you'd never even know it was on Netflix. It'd be buried somewhere like. Yeah. It would get I'm thinking of ending things and no push. for Oscars. And the Academy doesn't even know that movie got released.

It's like, okay. Yeah, so I mean, this was my first time revisiting it. And I think I liked it a lot better this time. And I think I, especially after watching the sequels, I appreciated it a lot more. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You really figure out like what it gets right when you watch all the sequels into totality, you know. Yeah.

But even just simple things, like the using those colors, not only just to keep things varied or kind of trick the view into thinking that the room is changing, but like, you know, linking it so when it's red, they have more of an argument and using the blue for when they're problem solving. Yeah, there's some smart ideas going on. And just, yeah, going back to that scrappiness. Another fun thing. In ways, it almost feels like a proto-sortomy, you know?

Yes. It's not really like solving. Yeah, totally. It's not really like, they're not given the framing of like the serial killer making them solve traps or whatever, but that whole, like, you know. bottle movie problem solving element and the gore of course like the the opening kill with the like cheese wire cutting people up and it's all it's all fun in how they they achieve that stuff yeah that's kind of what I'm waiting for that's really done well that opening oh yes it's

it kind of shocked me how well it held up and it's probably one of the better ones that I've seen 100% well they did have practical effects that were also um like I forget the name of the studio Calgary they uh they had to the acceptance payment just for the materials, but they did all the labor for free. So that was also like kind of like donating there. Yeah. And like, yeah, like that opening, the opening sequence is, it really kind of gets you in the space of the movie. And it's like, okay, it's really, really gruesome. But like later on, there's another death, pretty good death by trap. But everyone else who dies is not not killed by a trap. It's all the dynamic of the people. They end up murdering each other.

And that actor, Julian Richings. Oh, yeah, there's a joke about him that he's in every Canadian movie because he practically is. Yeah, we see him from time to time walking around Toronto. He just has the most unique look. It's like his face is so interesting to look at. And yeah, he's in every like Canadian TV show and a movie you can imagine. He always pops up. He was in Boe's Afraid.

Was he? Yeah. God, he got 228 credits. He's a busy. man. Yeah, he's like in everything. Oh yeah, and he was in, so Vincenzo Natale did an episode of Cabinet of Curiositys. That's, yeah, Vincent's, or I don't know if you guys have seen that. Yeah, David Hulet. Yeah, David Hewlett, who I absolutely love, but I got the chance to see this movie in a theater for the 20th anniversary. They were doing a screening of it in Toronto,

and that was great. So some of the actors were there, Julian Richard, Ritching, Richardings was there. Maurice De Wint, the lady played Holloway, Mark Corvin, who did the score, was there. Some of the production people, so they talked a little bit about it. Vincenzo did like a phone in,

like a Zoom pre-recorded thing. But it was wonderful to see it with an audience, because obviously I'd never seen it with an audience before. And the thing that really stood out to me was the gore. At that point, I hadn't seen it in about 10 years, but I kind of forgot how violent it can be. And people were like, that was pretty neat.

I think this movie, even though, you know, most people don't get killed by the traps and there's moments of gore, they're done so effectively and they're done at the right points in the story. There's a reason why there is a trope for the opening kill. It's so that it sets up the stakes, right? So if you know what the movie is willing to do to its characters and if you know in how convincingly of a way or how interesting of a way or how terrifyingly of a way that it's going to present. it, then that gives you enough information to be scared for the next characters or to know that, oh, death is on the table here. This isn't like a fucking PG movie. These characters could die. And it helps imagine the stakes and imagine the world that you're supposed to be involved in.

And even if that next kill doesn't happen for a while, it's kind of like that tension is sort of hanging over everything. We need to feel as scared as the characters feel. And I think that's what is so one of the things that's so good. great about this movie is it kind of puts you in like their mindset like what if you were in this cube you know what would you do and seeing them slowly kind of figure out you know these things about themselves and these numbers and you know trying to figure out the puzzle that is that is the cube it's fun to kind of try and figure it out with them and you kind of feel like you're along for the ride

that's that's kind of how I feel about it yeah and like you said the saw movies but it's kind of like the same thing with like the original they kind of like wake up you know not knowing where they are how they got there uh so you're kind of like yeah yeah you've kind of like thrown into the situation with these characters and you know you're kind of figuring it out well like talking about the characters i think the the greatest strength of this movie is the dynamic um between the characters i just love how how diverse they are they all look very different and they all have kind of these very different viewpoints. Not the case necessarily with the later movies, but we'll get to that.

But I love how, you know, I think that, yes, there are some cheesy lines, but I think it is a really great script. And I think that, well, the character work is like, everybody kind of, you see them kind of as one thing and then they slowly kind of reveal themselves to be something else. You think that Levin is just to, you know, help us little girl. And she ends up being like the smartest one there. and she's like super key to getting them out. Obviously, uh, Quinn, he has these, you know, grand ideas of himself.

Great depiction of a cop in media way, way ahead of this time. And wasn't Holloway like a conspiracy nut as well? Yeah, so she's like a doctor, but she kind of seems like a, yeah, kind of a bit of a nut, but then she ends up being, you know, the most kind of compassionate one when they end up meeting Kazan and she heard just like care-caregiving you know nature just takes over and she's like you know we're still human it's it's all we have left like we have to book out for each other and yeah like quentin reveals himself to be psychopath basically you know he has issues he's got a few issues what's what i find fascinating is that in a film with some questionable performances

Kazan didn't feel not handled properly because and like that that's That's such a thing where in so many other movies, it's like, oh, what are you doing? Or like, what's going on? Like, you know, you don't handle it properly and it feels like kind of offensive or disrespectful. But this is one movie where it's like, oh, okay, no, this is like a, you know, empathetic character. It's not, it doesn't seem like a mocking performance. It seems like a perfectly fine. The fact, he's the, like, one survivor by the end of it too.

Yeah. It's like kind of a fun way to wrap up. Kind of like he's like the most innocent of them all, so he gets out. But, you know, that actor did do research with, you know, people. have autism before the movie. And I think you can tell for sure. But something that they said on the commentary track, which I was able to listen to the other day, was that it's nice that this is, you know, a character with autism. It's not a movie about that. It's just this character happens to have, you know, a different mental disability, right? Yeah. And it ends up, you know, being a

savant, right? Yeah, which is good. I was getting a little worried when he started kind of, kind of screaming, I guess like he, the red rooms that he doesn't like or something like that. Sensory overload. Yeah. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. Is this what this is turning into now? Yeah, thankfully it didn't become that. So, yeah, he was just one of the characters.

But, yeah, and he kind of added that level of tension, like when they go into that room or he can't make a sound. Oh, that scene is so good. That is a memorable scene. It's fun. Yeah, there might be the best scene in the movie. Probably, yeah. Like the tension actually really works well. Yeah, they balance.

very well. You're just sort of on edge, like, oh, my God, something's going to happen. Yeah. And like, yeah. Speaking of which, I think the sound design in this movie is like super key to it being successful. Yeah. Especially, yeah, like that sound of the door opening. Like, obviously, that's all manufactured.

They had issues with the doors shooting. Apparently, they kept breaking. So then they had to keep shooting scenes that don't involve doors opening at all. And like, they only got them really like to close by themselves on like the second last day of the shoot or something like that. You all know, like, disasters that happen on a low-budget film. It's that cheap Canadian labor. Exactly. But, yeah, like the spike room, I love, like, the sound of it just, like, jutting out.

And then, like, as it, like, goes in, it has almost like a synthy, like, sci-fi sound to it. It's almost kind of beautiful. And also, the score is great. Mark Corvin, great composer. He did The Witch and many other things I can't think of right now. But he's really good. and he really fought Vincenzo to get any kind of melody at all in the music. And there really is like that kind of one song that plays a couple times,

but otherwise the score is very atmospheric and minimal, and I think that works. Yeah, it feels like it's kind of like a lynching like soundscape kind of thing. Yeah, it just like a, yeah, it just sort of, I don't know. You don't really necessarily notice it. It just adds a little bit of extra, yeah, dread, yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I love that song

I think it's great I like it yeah some good dialogue in this film I do like there are some you know fun kind of quippy lines like the guy going like

suck on it keeps the saliva flowing like that's a good little mini reveal or whatever we want to call it the expectations being subverted just with the dialogue also

some words that might sound very confusing to people who are not Canadians. Yes. Saskatoon. They mentioned Saskatoon. And the characters will just randomly speak, throw French words in there. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is so Canadian. Also, mispronouncing French words, even more Canadian, right? Where we're, like, I wasn't exactly bursting with joie de vivre before this.

And they're calling Ren's. And I love how Levin says to Quinn, she's explaining some math thing. And she just goes, bonjour. Like, you know, like, hello, right? Like a valley girl thing. But she just says it in French, which, by the way, I've never met anyone who said that. No. Well, they're trying to pretend that they're American.

So they're pronouncing it badly, you see. These are totally not Canadian actors, April. This is what happens when you give Canadians Cartet Blanche to do what is. Yeah, that's right. Saskatoon is a city in Saskatchewan, by the way. It's not great. There's nothing there. Which is a province in Canada.

Yes. Yeah. Just a lot of flat land. Some of my relatives. Oh, you have relatives in Saskatoon? Yeah. That's why I've been there, and I can say it's not good. Oh.

They say there's a line. where they're like talking about the coordinates, they're like negative one and zero on Z. There's some British in there. Nice. Well, Canadian Z is Z. So it is British. We use British stuff selectively.

We forgot Z was that in Britain. Yes. I didn't even notice. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. We have little bits of other people's cultures and we just don't commit in one direction. Either way.

When I do say that down in the States, I get some looks. Yeah. Like, what? You could call our country a bit of a hypercube in that sense. You could, yeah. That's what I would call it. Yeah, I pretty much, I think I've said pretty much all I want to say about this movie. Other than as someone who gets a little bog down in the details sometimes and I really want to understand things, they present the mathematical

element and they say it and they're all, you know, in the context of the film, it's all very convincing in terms of the characters realizing things and there is a sense of discovery. But I was so confused about it in the sense of like, okay, you're saying these conclusions that you came to, but I really don't know how you came to that. Like when the cubes are back in the original rotation is not really something that was ever explained in terms of why they would know that, I think. I'm guessing it's because there was like three groups of numbers. So like all the numbers are like there's like three digit numbers and there's three groups

of them. So I guess they just deduce that those are the three positions. There's only a certain number of, uh, what would you say? Like coordinates of cubes. Yeah. Well, again, commentary, Vincenzo, because he's like calling out things that he doesn't like about the movie and he's like, they should have ran into more empty spaces. that would have made a lot more sense.

Because if there's like, yeah, because if they're shifting around that much, there would be empty spaces, right? But, yeah, what are you going to do? He's like on his own commentary, calling out his film. Of course.

Come on. This sucks. Yeah. It's like, hey, you wrote it, man. Yeah, well, I mean, they did, they consulted a mathematician, obviously, to help create the puzzles and the discovery and all that.

And it's interesting. and I like how it's described and I like the whole like okay there's like what was it 70,000 cubes maybe or at least configurations. I think it was 26,000. Something like that yeah.

Something 732? There's some sort of fan wiki page that kind of goes into the math and I've seen not only what's on the wiki but also the comments underneath it and I feel a bit closer to understanding what the hell's

going on but I just yeah I'm not really it didn't fully grasp it. I would like to understand it more. Did you take math in school? I did and I was. I was pretty good at math, but I would need a refresher in terms of just getting back into the,

yeah, to get my cube license back. To get back into the hypercube class. Because you don't use it for fucking 20 years because it's like, come on. It's one of those things. It's one of those things in the movies

that you kind of just have to trust that you know whoever's making it yeah whatever so it's like when they say you know uh what was that the core remember that movie the core when they said you know we consulted with real scientists oh yeah everything in this movie could happen and it was like the most ridiculous stuff they had like the million like degree heat on the other side of the door yes it was like nothing in that movie could happen i'm not a scientist and i know that remember in the movie frozen adam green he said everything was real meaning that everything in

everything in front of the camera was real they all got eight bite dogs but speaking of understanding what's going on that's one of the things I really appreciate about this movie is it knows where to draw the line with the mystery element they throw the characters arguing with each other throwing out theories of like what is this cube

is it a government thing is it an alien what's going on and they never feel the need to like drop the exposition dumps that we get in some of these sequels and some of these ridiculous explanations that kind of ruin the whole mystery. But it becomes too explicit. We don't need to know. And anything they could have shown outside, it would just be disappointing, a la the sequels. It's not like they're lacking, like, tension or conflict because that's really what carries it for me is that kind of villainous character of Quentin.

He has so much fun to watch. His facial expressions like a lot of like. Oh, my God. Keep it together. He is an awesome, like, villainous force. Yeah. So you don't even need to explain it. But it could easily devolve into just one of those movies.

And it's like a pet peeve of mine where it's just a bunch of people yelling at one another for, you know, an hour and a half. And it's just so grating to watch those types of movies. But it kind of rides that line where it's like, okay, you know, it's not too much. Yeah, I totally agree. Everybody has their own distinct personalities. It's not just a bunch of people like here. Yeah, the worth character. He mentions that he was contracted and that little twist of him.

He's involved somehow, but it's still never really properly explained exactly how and he doesn't really know all the answers. So, yeah, they keep it just the right level. Yeah, like he gives an explanation to what he thinks, but we really don't know if that is the whole truth. He's like, I looked and from what I could tell, nobody is in charge. And, you know, if that's your interpretation of it, I think that's much scarier than And what conspiracy theorists think is there's always either like one person or like this like elite group up top who's pulling all these strings.

You know who. You know who. This would just happen and it could be built and then they just decide to just put people in it because it's there essentially. Like that's scary. And yeah, not to get too far deep into it. But if you look at it like for a metaphor for life, we're all just dropped into this world. We don't know how, we don't know why we're here. And like, who is in charge?

We want to think that somebody is, you know, controlling things or does things for a purpose or for a reason. That could be God, say, but, you know, we don't really know and we never will know. So we have to just keep our heads down and look at what is in front of us. And the other thing I just want to say I really love about this is like, you think that it's just random people, but then you find that they all have a skill that's necessary to escaping. And that's just like, wow, finding that is so. So it's fun because you're like, okay, so they all do have a purpose. You know, they have a function.

They all have a skill. What would we give this film out of 10? Oh, 10 out of 10. As I said, I saw this in high school. I was shown in a media class. I became obsessed with it. I went one summer I watched it every few days. So I have a long history with this movie.

You should see our place. It's just like April's just like. Yeah, she's like scribbling. You've got that greebling all over the walls. Yeah, the walls are just covered with like numbers and equations and stuff like that. Also, just one, I just wanted to point out, we kind of talked about it, but the design on the wall of the cube is so cool. And they never do that again in the sequels. Yeah, boy, to what you said.

Like, apparently, there's the attention to detail, like, it's like art, right? It's beautiful. And then apparently, like, Levin's glasses when they broke, they actually broke that in a certain way to kind of mirror the look of the panels on the wall. No. Also, I just want to ask you guys, have you seen any other of Vincenzo Natale's movies? I saw Splice. I like Splice. Yeah, I've seen Splice.

I've seen he's done a lot of TV, right? I like Hannibal a lot. He's done like six episodes of that, I think. Yeah. And in The Tall Grass came out not too long ago. It's kind of a cube-esque movie. It's based on Stephen King, right? Is it a cube-type film?

Yes. It is. But people get lost in tall grass and they can't find each other. They can't get out. That's cool. Something kind of neat about that movie is it kind of recreates a moment from Cube where Quentin is holding Holloway up and something in his head just snaps and he goes, I'm going to drop you and he does.

And that exact moment happens with characters in the tall grass. And I was like, well, I got that reference. I don't know if anyone else got that. Oh, you know what's cool is him letting the doctor go to cause a death, but then when Quentin dies, it's because they didn't let him go. He gets crushed. Oh, yeah. Held him back.

Yeah. Yeah. The other way. There was some callbacks. Yeah. I remember the artists working on all this stuff. So I had no context for it. I hadn't seen the movie.

So they would just be working on all the traps and stuff. And then I saw that cube kind of smearing him. across the wall. It was really cool. So kind of seeing it in the theater is like, okay, that's what it's from. What would you give it out of ten? I would say on re-watching it, I would give it a good seven, seven. Nice. It's a solid, you know, for what it had to work with, I think it does everything right and really kind of like, you know, uses all those resources. Yeah. This would be, I'm just like a tad under. that. I do appreciate that scrappiness of it. I do love that about it. This would be like a very

high kind of six out ten three star for me. There's just too much about it that like the silliness levels. I love it for it, but it does hold it back in certain ways for me. And I do love when he gets smeared across the wall at the end of the tempting character. But it's also one of the moments I really wish they could have, I don't know, somehow built something to display. Because he is kind of like the villain of the movie and I would have loved to have seen his end kind of match like the opening scene in terms of that, those practical effects. And they had a fake leg and that was all, because that's like in the cube after, after he gets smeared.

Yeah, yeah. That's all they had. That's all they had. Yeah, yeah, there's some age stuff about it. But yeah, yeah, even from this conversation, just thinking about the, the distinctness of all these, it's only like six characters, but they all are all very memorable. They've all got the, their different quirks. I like the dialogue that comes from their banter and the tension that comes from it.

And yeah, it's a clever little movie. I do like it a lot. And I'm giving this one a very high five out of ten. I'm a monster. Let's move on. Cube 2, HyperCute. I liked it. I liked it a lot.

My rating system, everybody listening this. Well, we all know what that's like. We all know what I'm like. I'm a monster. I'm not offended. It's okay. I figured I would like it a lot more than you guys. But it sounds like you did like it.

I did like it. I did like a watch-along stream to it. And it was the most, I enjoyed a cube film. Well, if you're starting at five, you know, I can only guess at what you're going to give the next ones. Yes. This one has the best title, though. You've got to give it that. I can't believe you would call something HyperCube.

Is this square? It's like cubed two like squared, like cube squared? It is. Yeah, I think so. Stylistically, yeah. Cube 2 colon hypercube. Yeah. You just called it Hypercube.

I have another connection to this movie. Uh-oh. Not only that it was shot in Toronto. You have a connection to all of these movies. Did you direct it? I did not. Yeah, under a pseudonym, which I cannot pronounce. So I mentioned that I was at core who did the effects for the first movie.

So when I left Core and I went to a company called Toy Box in Toronto. It was another visual effects. My boss's name was Dennis Berardi. And soon after I started there, he quit and started his own company called Mr. X. And Mr. X, this was their very first job after they split off and formed a company. And they eventually became producers on the third one. So there you go. So I know all the people in the credits.

Thank you. Did the visual effects. You are to blame. I hope they don't listen to this because I don't have nice things to say about the effects of this movie. It's like they misunderstood everything that made up for this one great. Yeah. I know. I mean, I cannot get over the two.

choice of the white walls. It's a bad design. They're so blown out the whole movie. Everything looks ugly and it's just like a piece of like like plastic. Like it looks cheaper than the first movie. It couldn't have been. It couldn't have been though. It must have had more budget.

It was five years later. Let's see. That's crazy. Tube to budget. Yeah, there's some speculation. I don't know if there's anything confirmed. Some people are saying I hear it was this. much, but it's like, I can't.

Good source. I heard it from a friend. Yeah, it's, yeah, let's talk about the set design, because it's very bright for absolutely no reason. Yeah. Which is weird because the director

is a cinematographer. I know. He's a cinematographer for Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. American Psycho, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. So I can only imagine, like, he built the set this way or wanted it this way to make it easier for lighting,

because I think he was the cinematographer on this as well as directing it. So maybe it just made everything easier. That's just like, turn the lights up to full brightness. Maybe no one cared. And they were like, let's just do this as fast as possible and get paid and get out. Because that's the feeling that I have. None of the actors are acting like they give a shit. They're all terrible.

And they, and I, it's like, okay, they're all Canadian actors again. I'm not trying to be mean to my homeland, but these are like the D tier, if the last actors were like the A and B tier. And they're all acting like they don't care that they're in a death trap at all. Like they're practically like quipping about it. And it was awful.

Yeah. Yeah. The pool of talent in this one is not quite the same. The guy with the knife. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's Welsh. Oh, really?

He's a main character in American Psycho 2, and I immediately recognized him because I covered that recently. And for some reason, it was also the same costume designer, and somehow I pulled that out. I looked at the name and the credits. I was like, Donald Wong,

was that the costume designer from American Psycho 2? Was that a Canadian movie? American Psycho 2? I don't know. I think the first one was definitely. Oh, really? Was it? I think we shot in Toronto. Yeah, we shot in Toronto.

Yeah. I mean, filmed in Canada versus Canadian movie. There's a lot of movies filmed. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But yeah, some weird connections to American Psycho 2 for no reason. I don't know why. Yeah, that's visible.

I feel like I was looking up a bunch of the actors and this one and maybe even the third one and American Psycho 2 kept coming up. Yeah. And I don't know why. Murdoch Mysteries. Well, every Canadian actor has been on Murdoch mystery. I think, yeah, it's like a... Okay, he moved to Canada.

Sorry, he's from Wales and then moved to Canada, sorry. Yeah, so, yeah, Murdoch Mysteries has been going on for like 17 years, I think, at this point, but like every single cast member has been on that show. Yeah. And probably the red green show at some point. True. You don't need to explain what the red green show is. Alex, do you know what the red green show is?

No, please explain what you're talking about because you speak it. Can you say it again in English for me? They like saying that in these movies. It's just this bad comedy show. Oh, it's a good comedy show. Just terrible. Terrible. It was a classic.

What does it mean? Red Green is the name of the character. And it's a guy who is just like a Canadian. He dresses up in like plaid kind of lumberjackie. And the show is kind of like a, um, it's supposed to. It's like home improvement. Exactly. It's supposed to be like a.

here I'm going to teach you how to be a handyman, but he just uses duct tape for everything, and it just works. Oh, okay. And so he'll like... This is what you guys were raised on. It's got like 2,000 ratings. Yeah. Yeah, great's awesome.

There's a bunch of it on YouTube. There's some classic... It's a part of our heritage, you might say. If you like anti-comedy, it's great. I remember enjoying it when I was younger. I don't think I actually watched it. I just saw like a million commercials for it. And then they had a movie called Duck Tape Forever, which why are we even talking about this?

Well, I'm just going to point out his sidekick, Red Green, looks like literally he was identical to look and act and general presence of my youth counselor at my shirt that my parents made me go to when I was younger. So that was funny. That's funny. All right. before this conversation turns into a real hypercube. Let's get back to the film. So we're talking about the sets. There's one part where, actually a couple parts,

where it almost just seems like they're green screened, but I wasn't sure if they were because the lighting from behind them was so blown out and overexposed that that outline could have just been because of how shit the lighting was. So it made it look like a green screen when I'm not sure it was. I know that they did use,

they did use green screen at a couple. couple points during the film, but, you know, some of the characters were, like, upside down. I was like, you didn't even have to green screen that if you just thought about it for a bit. Yeah, it's very strange. Turn the camera, you know. Well, speaking of, like, you know, we were talking about how great the original opens, like the opening scene. What the hell happens in this?

It's like you're expecting some, you know, kill or something like that. She falls up. She just, like, gets yanked upwards and that's it. Whoa. Yeah, it's like, I. You don't even know if she dies. No. Sorry.

We're just laughing and then they get the hard cut to like cube, hypercube or something like that. It's not scarier because there's no physics. I don't know if that's what they thought was happening. They're like, we're taking it the next level. You're going to think she falls down? Uh-uh. Up. No.

It's scarier when you fall up because then it's on your head when you land. I guess so. Oh, my God. But yeah, this movie also introduces like time warp things, slow rooms, fast rooms. Which, I mean, to its credit, I think that's a good concept. There's, you know, if you're going to mix up the formula for a sequel and, you know, you've got the same set, you've got to introduce some new mechanic, I think. And there's a lot that could have been done with that that they didn't really do. I couldn't even follow like the plot.

Like maybe I just wasn't paying attention. It ruins the fundamental rules, you know, like while there's still some crazy sci-fi stuff going in that original and kind of keep up with the characters. But here it's like when they're talking about quantum teleportation and these gel walls that like burn you, it's like too much to try and explain. And yeah, it just loses that fundamental horror or tension. Yeah. It's what happens to any of these people. Yeah, they're really annoying. It's one of my notes here is just annoying characters.

Remember the old lady? She was straight out of an M. Night Shyam. Milan movie. Hell yeah. Yes. And here's what's weird about this is they decided that everybody got to keep their clothes in this one. So in the original it was like, okay, their clothes get stolen by whoever kidnapped them or

something. And they have essentially prison uniforms with their names on it. But the characters are so distinct and likable and memorable that you never need to, like they don't need to be dressed differently for them to, you know, for you to remember who's who and all this shit. In this film, they're dressed differently, but there's nothing to the characters. There's nothing to that, like, they're very simple and basic and pretty annoying. Very annoying characters are their costumes, basically.

That's all I really remember about them as people. That's just like lazy writing. It is very. Women in a ball gown, that's her character, basically. Gouser, the ratings on this show just doubled. Is that a line? That was the Todd Howard guy, yeah. He looked exactly like Todd.

Howard and he was a video game developer. Oh yeah, he does. That's the young guy. I thought for some reason he reminded me of like a teenage Jordan Peterson the way he spoke. I don't know why. This is very strange. How about when they have sex and there's sex in the cube? We're fucking in the cube now, guys, and they're spinning in the middle of the room, like

a top. Like what was that? And then they die? They, well, so here's what happened is they went to the beach. room that turns you old. Right. And also those dummies, I don't know if they were supposed to be rotted corpses or rapidly aging corpses, but they looked like something out of a spoof movie.

Like, it really, really did. Like, I was laughing. That lighting is not doing the many favors. And they really hold on close-ups of them for very long periods. It's like something you'd find it like Spirit Halloween or something. Oh, yeah. The makeup also near the end of the film, I was like, is the implication that he's getting older? Or is he frozen?

I think they did spray, like Halloween, old spray paint on the... I thought it was frozen. I think it's older because it's like a kind of... I thought it was supposed to be older. I thought it's supposed to be older because he's like... Yeah, it's like a time wave or something. Yeah, it never implied that there was like a cold room. No, there was like an ice room, wasn't there?

No. There was like ice shards coming out of the wall. I think that was... I don't think so. I think there was. No, those weren't... Were those supposed to be ice? I thought those were just supposed to be, like, random cubes.

Like glass. Crystal or glass or something like that. Yeah. Like, I don't think that was supposed to be ice. It's an utter failure of the CGI that we don't even know what it is supposed to be. See, that's, that sucks because in the original film, you know, sure, the spikes are CG, but they're spikes. They're metal. Yeah. Metal adjacent.

Keep it simple, stupid, yeah. It's like easy to understand. Yeah. You know that you can get. impaled by them. You know, you can get like sliced by the fucking metal wire. But when you're using fucking crystal

CG, like, we don't know what the hell that is supposed to be. Now we're all arguing over whether or not it's supposed to be ice or cold or like for an old race. For four different people to watch the same film and none of us have like any solid

comprehension about what that was supposed to be. And it influences how we feel about the makeup for a major character near the end of the film, is he supposed to be old or cold? Is it old or cold? We don't know. That's insane.

It just absolutely not being able to communicate things. It's a choice by the director to keep it ambiguous. Oh, yeah. You know, what do you think, is he cold or old? Old or cold? This is me, this is as the director, I'm thinking this. Well, like, also, they made absolutely

no effort to make them look like they had been in there for any amount of time. But that just goes with my comment of them. They don't act like they are even in a death trap, really at all. The scenes are interchangeable. You could take scenes from anywhere in the movie and place them anywhere in the movie and it would flow just the same. There's no sense of progression.

There's no sense of discovery. There's no sense of like, you know, the makeup in the original movie and the continuity there or like the character is getting angrier with each other and having that happen in a realistic, empathetic sort of way. No, it's all just fucking random. It might as well just be random. And it goes on forever. Especially with the whole doppelganger thing.

Oh yeah. People die and then duplicates of them just show up later. So like the deaths don't even mean as much. No. And the whole thing of like at the end of the first cube, it's like a triumphant moment for that character. But like when the woman makes it to the end of this one, it's like I don't even understand what you did.

Do you even get here? No. She just survived, I guess. Then she gets out and also I hate that we see outside and then they just blow her brains out. So how am I supposed to feel about that? Oh, yeah. If you asked me to even tell you which character made it out, I wouldn't have been able to say before you're like. That's so funny. And then, yeah, you reminding me about that ending.

And it's a very distinct ending. So I was convinced that I actually hadn't seen this film. And then when I rewatched it, I was like, oh, I guess I guess I guess. I have at one point, at least once, because some of it was just kind of familiar. And then at the very ending, I was like, okay, for sure, this is, there's something about this that I definitely watched before. And I watched this two days ago, and now I've forgotten it again already. I had some, my notes just sort of like peter out by the end.

So I had to look up, like, how it ended. I'm like, yeah. Oh, God, yeah. Just like the movie, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting, April you just said about them. going out of the cube and how that ruins so much of like the world building and the mystique. They do it another time in the movie when they're introducing each one of those characters. And there's kind of like graphic montages for each one, just pointously visually explaining each one.

Yeah, the split screen. And so why? It's kind of ruining the atmosphere to pull you visually out of, I suppose it's like an ugly apple store the whole time. Yeah, exactly. I was like anything to get out of this, this bright, white. Heavenly light. But it's like, why? Like, color, that is such a strange choice, considering, yeah, he is a cinematographer.

Surely you'd understand the, you know, the mood you can get over what you can communicate with color, especially. It's just such a baffling decision. I think it has to be just, you know, for efficiency. This is like probably his first time directing. Let's just make it all look ugly, though. And then we don't have to make anything look good. It's just like, you know, look, I'll save money. I'm going to be the cinematographer.

It's like, I've never directed a movie before. just light the whole thing up Johnny and then whatever. Fuck it, we'll do it live. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to change lighting between setups. That's what I don't think he cared. I think it's a paycheck, probably. There's a really frustrating moment in this film where the character says out loud,

the gravity is shifting and then the camera turns 90 degrees. It tilts 90 degrees. But the gravity doesn't shit. The characters just walk the same. The gravity is the same direction as it was before. But the camera, like, there's so many interesting and creative ways you can do this and still do it practically, by the way. Right? You can just cut it at the right time where at the start of, at the start of the shot, they're in one position where it makes it seem as long as they're standing still that they're in gravity's in one particular way, but it's not.

And then you tilt the camera and then you reveal that gravity was, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, like Ramey's Spider-Man was like a year before this, right? True. Does a similar kind of time. True. And especially with the set where, like, the floor could be the ceiling. You don't have to do anything crazy to achieve that effect. That's how they did it in the first movie.

You don't have to build an upside down set. The set is an upside down set. You fucks. You've thought about this for, you know, a few minutes at least, you know. So you don't expect the director to have done the same. No. He's just happy to be working. Man.

Yeah, what a crazy, frustrating film. Yeah, it made me angry. It's just rotten. And I'm like, wow, okay, that first one is better than I give it credit for at the time. And I mean, if we're doing the thing we do in our podcast where we have to say something nice about it, the only nice thing I can say is that it was laughably inept. And I laughed at it at parts. So some of the kind of hypercube, you get that kind of like floating geometry.

Oh, my God, that thing, that float. spinning cube tetra what do they call it tesseract tessorac yeah it's like it's like kind of folding in on itself so it's revealed oh god so it kind of opened the blind the blind girl was she actually blind or was that all fake

wait I think there was a twist with her but I can't remember like what the reveal was that she was some famous hacker that built the cube yeah I don't remember that at all she hid from people she blew the whistle on something and she's like I went the only wear it

place they wouldn't follow me into the hypercube yeah she found out yeah they were putting human it's like this company called eyes on or something that I think is behind everything yeah and then she's like I find out that they were like putting people into the hypercube and they were going to kill me so I escaped by going into the hypercube uh yeah I don't even remember how she dies but Izon that owns the company the video game company cyber thrill. The other character makes games for and he's going to sue them for some

reason and they're like, you'll never win the lawsuit against cyber thrill. Yeah, they're all connected somehow. I represent Eisen. Right. Why so many characters? It's like, what? There's eight main characters here. Yeah, it's too much. Way too many. Like, I think there's seven total in the first one,

but the first guy gets killed immediately. Yeah. Then there's six. and then goes down to five really fast. Is there a single good death scene? No. Because that's not the most memorable stuff in that first movie. Well, the only one I remember is that CG cube, like, sucking up the Jerry Whitehall guy

and, like, kind of dicing him. Yeah, but that looked terrible. Yeah, it looked kind of funny, but. And then he's back. Yeah, that guy, that's that super Canadian actor that has like almost 300 credits or something. It's like he's been in a lot of commercials and stuff. Wait, look up any actor in this and they've just been in every Canadian TV show since the dawn of time. Then it's all revealed that the blonde woman who survives to the end was like a plant sent in by Aizon to get the blind girl's necklace.

Right. That had all the hacking information or something that she was going to release. I forgot. Oh, God. And then it's like, but she's like in a pool and it's it, is that you enter the cube and it's not a real, a real physical place? I don't know. Sure. You know?

It's theoretical there. Anything is possible. Yeah, I don't know how it connects. I mean, other than sort of taking the concept of like the cube and traps and whatnot, I don't know how it's supposed to connect to the first one at all. I kind of got the sense that it was like, well, people who thought the first one was boring and you never got to see what's outside. We're going to make it cooler.

We're going to show you what boring is. There's this really awful trap that sequels are. find themselves in or just people who don't know what to do with an IP making a sequel where they think, we got to double it. Everything that was good, you got to double it. But they don't understand what was good. And they're like, well, what was good about the first movie was that probably there were like a few thousand rooms or 10,000 rooms.

So we're going to just have this line where the old lady says, in a hypercube, there could be 60 million rooms. So that's crazy The physics are crazier There's more characters And there's more versions of the same characters And none of them ever really die And there's

Fuck, it's just so convoluted and stupid And nothing matters They're so hung up on the scale for some reason We're gonna double the brightness The cube itself is bigger And that bugged me too Yeah It's less claustrophobic

Yeah exactly It just seems like they're just hanging out in like a waiting room or something. It looks like, you know, when you go to Hideo Kajima's office, his new office for his game company, he has a big white room. It's like, you know, it looks like the 2001 room or something like that. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Is there, is there, what's the opposite of a weeb?

Because that's what Kajima is. I think someone said Westaboo. Westaboo. All right, what do we think? What's our rating on HyperCube? How many HyperCubes at a 10? Give it one. Give it one.

Yeah, this is rotten. I would give it like two. There's nothing. That's very generous. Yeah, okay, I'm taking it down. No, you were right. You were like, I like the idea of this thing. Well, it's like the concept, but they just drop the ball on like.

They drop the cube. They dropped the HyperCube. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. There was something about. this that even though it was so dumb and annoying and like missed the whole point, I was kind of compelled by just where they were taking it. It's just like what? Where did they take it, Alex?

No way. It's just crazy. It's slightly longer as well than that first one. It's like five minutes longer and it feels it. But I don't know. I was kind of just like, no way that it, okay, the gravity's shifting. Okay, now it's a tesseract. Now there's quantum teleportation. It's just like, man, and the doppelgangers. And the fact, I couldn't even remember, like, when you were recapping what that main character's, like, point was. And I can't remember a single attribute of her character, but... No. Is there a main character?

She didn't have a... The blonde? Is that the main character? Are we deciding that's the main character? I'm deciding just the main character, yeah. I think so, yes. Yeah. But I don't know.

The cube is more of a character in this film than any of the others. It's the eighth, the ninth character. And yeah, like just the Todd Howard showing up and all these characters and the floating sex scene. Like, yeah, I don't know. This was like a one and a half star to me. Stupid. You're all so nice. Give it an extra, an extra star for him stabbing that old lady.

Yeah, the old lady does, does get stabbed. I forgot. Yeah, because you shouldn't trust her for some reason. Heaps of stabbing. That guy's stabbing everybody in this movie. Yeah, they will. had all like accessories. He collects a bunch of watches.

I was kind of hoping for him to be like decked out with like just armor of watches and like a flame or flame. That's right? The first real death you see is a guy trying to hang himself like right with his. Yeah, that's right. His tie. It's not even like a trap. And he never shows up really again much.

We just see different versions of him having hung himself. So we know that his character throughout every alternate reality is so consistent. The moment he wakes up in a cube, he's like, well, I'm dead. I can try this David Carrion trick. It's always been too risky before, but I got another movie. Yeah, I mean, what is he got to lose? Yeah, go for it.

Exactly. You might as well see if it feels good. He handcuffs himself to the ladder, doesn't it? Just so he can get it like melts. It's like the odds of me being found are astronomical. Astronomical. Astronomical against. Anything higher than a one feels wrong for me.

Yeah. I can't stomach it. I can't stomach a two. feels too generous for me. Easy one out of ten. Terrible, awful movie. They misunderstood the assignment. It sucks how forgettable something is when I've clearly seen it before, but I didn't even

know. Didn't even know that I'd seen it before. If you asked me whether or not I'd seen HyperCube. I would say, no, of course I haven't. I don't remember anything about it. I don't know what HyperCube is. I've logged in the letterbox, so I know that I will remember never to watch this movie again. Exactly.

Even by accident. I give it an extra star just for the name. The confidence to put an hypercube in there. I'm not going to forget a lot about this movie, but not Hypercube. Do you think like Elon Musk is a big fan in this movie when he was coming up with Hyperloop? It's not just a regular loop. It's hyper. It's hyper.

It needs to calm down. There are two more quotes that I just see in my notes that I want to mention before we move on. I hate how they tried or at least. least pretended for a moment to be doing this math thing, but they say, maybe it's a coordinate of some kind, but in four dimensions. It's like, okay, fuck, go fuck yourself. And I was hoping for more complicated math, but there was none. They just didn't care. And then the line, holy shit, variable time speed rooms. One of those words feels redundant, right? Like time and speed. A variable, doesn't that mean? Trying to sound smart. Yeah, variable speed rooms, you could say,

or variable time room. What is time speed? Bullshit. And she was so stupid for not understanding he was in slow mode. Like he would have been, he was stuck there for like a year and had to come to her.

She was just like, what is wrong with you? Awful. Awful. And I can't, without my notes, I would not remember anything in this fucking movie.

Absolute garbage. All right. Cube Zero is a prequel film. from 2004. Oh. I didn't know that. Did you not know that? No. It's news to me.

It's a prequel. I mean, it's zero. I just, I didn't think about that. I think it is, right? Now you're making myself second guess myself. No, I think it is, but I didn't know that until I looked it up today. Oh, that's funny. I mean, yeah, it must be, right?

Well, the technology is not as advanced as the hyper. That's true. Yeah. It's like more rusty They kind of Yeah They go in a different direction Very

It's like a side cool To cube the original maybe Yeah Side quill It's another cube Okay Somewhere who knows I'm just trying

Yes A side I'm just thinking What do we say about this movie They They Directed by Ernie Barbarat

Barbara. It's funny how they, whose name came up on the second one, and I think he's the producer or writer of the second one. I think producer, I think. And again, I don't think he had directed anything before. So they keep giving these movies to people who, like, aren't directors. Also, director Ernie Barbarash, producer on American Psycho 2.

Yeah, see, there's more connections. What is happening? I don't know why. Movies are intertwined, but apparently they are. Have you seen that, by the way? No, I haven't seen it. No, I haven't seen it. I should watch it.

The Milakunas? Yeah, it's great to watch right after American Psycho 1. Very unique experience. It's not, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we get it, so in some ways, this film kind of tries to go back to its roots, almost as if to attempt to, to correct the Cube 2 hypercube disaster. Yeah.

And in some, you know, we get the opening death scene that's kind of reminiscent of the first one. Yeah, and it did have some good practical effects that, you know, the guy's face and skin falling off. There's some fun stuff. That was pretty cool. We've got some colored lighting in the rooms.

True. Like, it's obviously the cube looks better. than the last movie because any it would have to um but i didn't care for this movie really at all but it was better than the last one yeah better than hypercube yeah yeah really i don't i found hypercube mind's 10 and i'm gonna be real this one was more boringer it was boring i think it's i think it's better shot than the second film oh yeah big time yeah technically it is better and also i thought the acting was better but if you like to laugh at bad acting then you definitely want to watch two over this one.

Although, the second half of this film, Cube Zero, I'm just kind of, I'm so, I'm so confused why this weird eyeball man

who seems like he belongs in literally a goosebumps kids show. Yes. You're not wrong. Christopher Lloyd could have played him. He was like that level of like chewing the scenery, goofy.

It's such a weird choice. They like really focused on the sci-fi element. with these sequels. Yeah. His underlings had these like finger sci-fi things

in the keyboard like flipped over for no reason and it was like a sci-fi keyboard. Yeah, it's almost like Johnny Nomonic props that had been left over. Yeah. And the sound effects too

when they're like using their fucking invisible keyboards like peep, peepoo-beepo every time it cuts back to them it really goes off the rails when this character shows up and I was kind of

On board, I think, somewhat up to that point. You can admit it. It's okay. I was like, okay, okay. It's winning me back to the Cube franchise here. You got colored lights, you know, for different rooms. They have that like set that the two guys, the two guys that are kind of monitoring everything. You know, they built a set.

They got props and everything. I don't want props. And I don't want them to leave the cube. I don't want to see outside the cube. No, to be fair, those two guys are kind of in the cube. They're just in like a nicer room. And that's kind of revealed later. But I thought we were, you know, we're getting a glimpse behind the curtain, which I thought they should have either committed to one way or the other.

Like, you know, okay. Yeah, they just be throwing out concepts that they can't commit to at all. Yeah. That was kind of the hook for me. It was like, oh, so these are the guys that deal with who the contestants, if you want to call them, but actually managed to get out. And like what happens next or where does that? go and there's that whole scene where they do deal with the ex-co worker who's in that position and it's it all comes down to this query about if they believe in god do you believe in god which they never

expound on they never really like explain like where that's going yeah i thought they were going to revisit that or yeah it was it was going to be some you know twist at the end or something came of that. The whole movie is just, we're just doing testing. Just, just vague testing on what, on everything. Yeah, I was thinking like at the ends, like one of the guys would make it out and like, do you believe in God? And then he says, yes. And then burn him anyway. Yeah. But I mean, that would be a pretty small payoff. I know, I know. Well, compared to the twist that they went with. Okay. Okay. I fucking hated that. Obviously, as I am such a big fan of the original. I thought it was an extremely portat.

And they just wanted to connect it back to the first movie and be like, oh, he's that guy. But that character wasn't lobotomized. So what are doing? The character wasn't lobotomized. But I don't think, so they set things up in a way where they're clearly at the very least trying to remind us of that dynamic in that character. Yes, they are.

And they're the exact same dialogue and they shoot it in the exact same way. Exactly. So the implication is that. that he was also lobotomized, which is, like, not only dumb, but kind of offensive. Yeah, it's insulting. That performance offended me, and also just offended me as a fan of the first one

where I thought the character was done so well, and then this is just like, remember this character? Well, what if, also, his name is difference. Oh, whatever. Well, yeah, his name is different, because I just interpreted that as he's not literally that character, but perhaps over the course of time there's enough of the exact same scenarios

taking place like he's not the first guy to be lobotomized and he won't be the last that's how I interpreted it too but the person I was watching it with like was confused as to oh is that supposed to be the same character so it is just not communicated well

that whole twist I was looking at the name tag it's a reference to make people who love the first movie feel good but it made me angry. But I was kind of, I was thinking, okay, they're going to do something different with this movie. We're just all going to be seeing it from, you know, behind the curtain. And I wish they maybe should have committed to that instead of kind of just mixing the two.

Let's just go behind the scenes. Even though I don't really want to see that, it's like at least they're doing something different. Yeah, they couldn't help themselves, though. The whole thing looked like a cheap Canadian TV show as well. Yeah, very. It felt it gave me goosebumps. It felt like the outer limits. Yeah, goosebumps are like Star Trek.

Star Trek spin-off. So it's as if they, what's so weird about this, so when I was watching these films when I was younger, I was like 13 or something. I was doing so in such an uncritical way because my brain, that's just how I watched movies. And I was just like, I would just watch any horror movie and it didn't matter. And I didn't, you know, I didn't think about anything in terms of directing or production. or just even like people involved artistically with the film and different voices and all that shit. And so when I was watching this, I remember a part of me being kind of excited that they were explaining more about what's outside because I just thought of it in terms of, oh yeah, there's more to this universe. I want to see them.

I want to peel back the curtains as if the universe in of itself is some sort of like objectively existing thing and not just whatever the writers decide it is. watching this right now it's sad that it's as if they want to explore more about what's outside but they don't have the budget but the whole reason why the cube was inside in the first movie

is because it's not only like practical for the sake of the script and the emotions but it's also practical for the budget which you don't want to be overly ambitious and show something you can't in a film like this especially if you don't have the talent in terms of how to show it in a way that doesn't feel super fucking cheap. Like, it kind of ruins it to know, oh, outside the cube is just a random forest in snipers.

Like, what the fuck? That's it. Yeah. And like, was that little girl just running around out there the whole time? I don't know if that was real or what that was supposed to be. Yeah, it might have been a dream. Okay. Oh, my God.

It was his comic book. It was in his fan fiction that he was drawing the whole movie. chess man and brain man I forgot about that he should be hired by marble yeah I think the people that want to see more of the world the same people that go to like Prometheus

and they're like yeah explain the space jockey from alien it's like no no you're fool no I want to know I want to know how the universe started yes I want an explanation for everything.

You see, he was always going to, you know, Ridley Scott. He always meant to. Oh, yeah. This was the plan all along at him. He wasn't just making it up. They just didn't have a technology yet. That's right. Same composer as American Psycho 2.

Oh, my God. I will say, like, the score for this one and the last one was definitely trying to sound like the first score. I've been failing. I thought some of the sounds they were whipping out were pretty bizarre. They were going for like bongos and accordions. Yeah, that's right. Didgerid do in there? Yes, it's an accordion music.

I was a didgerid do in there, too. It was like, what's it? Yeah, I felt like I was eating at like a Parisian cafe or something. Yeah, yeah. Was it Alexander des flas? Did you do a shape of water or something? I think so. Yeah.

It was like watching Ratatoui or something. The accordions kind of reminded me of like 12 monkeys. I think maybe... I said the same thing when we watched. Yeah, April said the same. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a part in the movie. So do we, I barely remember any of the characters.

There's the main guy. There's a girl he has a crush on. And then everybody else, like, oh yeah, there's a guy who gets crazy cat eyes at the end. Yeah. He's like a super soldier. Yeah, he like jumps really high. Yeah, he like Super Mario jumps. Yeah.

He's got like a brain chip and a, uh, like an insignia carved into his head. Head, his forehead. That's right. Soldiers of some kind. And I think that, yeah, I think the snipers in her dream. So these two guys who are kind of observing the people inside the cube record her dreams. Oh, I forgot that was dream recording.

Yeah. So, of course. Dream recording. So she's running from with her, with her daughter, and then the snipers shoot her and then bring her back into the cube. And I think the snipers have the same kind of tattoo on their forehead. And it bugged me so much because his tattoo is like crooked a little bit. It's not symmetrical.

It's not, yeah, it really bugged me. There's the overweight gentleman. But when she meets the soldier for the first time, she's like, I hate you. Your people are scum. And then she spits in his face. And the edit is so funny. It's like you don't even see the spit leaving her mouth. And they cut to the spit already on his face and just add like a splat sound effect.

That's funny. It's so cheesy. Great editing. So, okay, so they make an attempt to explain first what's beyond the cube

so in a way where you see the people who are in the control room recording dreams for some reason who are not prisoners but might be later. And we get the explanation

of, I don't know why, but they get fed, like, I guess, really high calorie pill meals that may or may not taste like entire. fancy dinners.

There's a red and a blue pill, I think. True. There had to be a reference. One is steak frets, yeah. Well, that's the whole dream of the future. It's like, in the future, it'll... You don't have to eat food. Take a pill and they'll make you eat the bugs.

Exactly. What is it? The cricket cubes from Snowpiercer. Yeah. Yes. And so when introducing their lives, they kind of, they're trying to explain more, but I'm still left with more questions because we don't know how they got there. We don't know, like,

they don't know why they're there and they apparently signed some consent form, but did they? And also, I don't know how long they've been there. I don't know how long the film takes place over. And it's weird how their entire life, as we see it, it's just playing chess and sitting in recording dreams and like maybe drawing a comic picture. Do they have beds? Do they sleep any? Like, do they have a room there that they sleep in? Yeah, I assume so.

Or do the pills just keep them so hyped up that they never have to sleep? They just take a pill for that as well. Yeah. Yeah. It reminded me of, like, two characters from, like, lost or something like that. Like, this would be one of the lost, like, what do they call them? The stations where it's just two guys. The Dharma stations.

But that structure is so truncated, you know, because there's all this time wasted on setting these guys up in this room that's never really expounded on. But at the same time, they do keep cutting inside the cube where it's basically just a retelling of the first movie, but worse in every way. But boringer. They just go ahead and have these characters all have already met, and they're just like, hey, we're a team and we're going, you know? Like we don't get to know any of them or get to see them discover each other or... Yeah, because they're kind of splitting the time up between the people in the cube and the people outside of the cube.

But then it's sort of revealed that there's other people kind of higher up than the people outside, but we never really see who they're talking to on the phone or whatever. It's just guy with a cane. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. That's the only higher up person. He, I guess, owns the entire business, but also his hands are in it so much.

And he oversees everything and, like, shows up for the lobotomy just to say something. and like just the one guy who just really likes being in control of everything and he's just so weird his reveal is so so bad when the elevator doors the elevator doors open and there's like a glint on his eye it's insane it's just like what are we doing now i feel like the genre changed as soon as he showed up yes yes exactly it turns into schlock in that moment yeah yeah they might as have goofy silly music playing. His whole fucking entourage is goofy as fuck with their silly Johnny

mnemonic gloves and they're typing booh-boo noises. Yeah. I just, I don't know what the hell they were going for. I don't know why they would want that in this film or this universe. Because it's supposed to be a horror movie. It's rated R. Like, this isn't a kid's show. What the fuck?

Is he supposed to be scary or funny? I don't know. It's impossible to tell. Yeah. Yeah. It's very... It's very broad. The performance is very broad.

Extremely. He has a line where he's like, I don't trust technology or something like this. When he's got, he's got like a crystal robot eye. I was like, I don't know what you mean. Which annoyed me again because it was not level with his other eye. It was a bad prosthetic. It looked terrible. They're lucky the director of the second movie didn't do this

It would just be blasted with light And you'd see how shitty it looked Yeah you're right You somewhat of a cool name Yeah Yeah So the character died He decides even though he's

You know trying not to stir the pot The entire film He's like I'm gonna get in trouble If I talk to you Shut up Things are fine By the end of the movie When the whole goofy entourage shows up

and his friends in trouble, he tries to help him by yanking out electrical cables that very nonchalantly too. Literally, the film plays it so seriously and as if it wasn't, as if he's not one of the strongest people on the fucking planet. Just yanking these things out that are live electrical cables, just moving it, like, as if it's nothing.

And it's so weird that, You know, if you, you almost don't realize how crazy it is what they're showing. Yeah, and they have, like, the most pitiful, like, kind of CG sparks that they've kind of comped over them. Yeah. Yeah, I hated that whole set. Their room with all the wires and the monitors. I just didn't like looking at it. Very uninspired.

Yeah. Yeah, but, yeah, I agree. At least the cube has, you know, back to basics. The cube looked a little more like the regular. cute. The one good thing about this movie is Sailor Moon was in it. Oh yeah. Girl, woman who did the voice for the English dub of Sailor Moon because of course it was dubbed by, I think it was DEC in Canada full all Canadian cast because it was cheaper and she is in the movie and I was like, wow, she has a really like high-pitched voice and I looked her up and

I was like, oh my God. Yeah, you can always tell when people are voice actors in movies. Usually, yeah. It's like, A unique voice. You look them up. Of course. That's funny. The inside of the cube might have looked way better than the first, sorry, the second movie, a bit more close to the first movie. It's like, okay, we're trying to bring things back.

The CG exterior cube shots, so when it's showing it moving through, like when it's doing the elevator thing. Right. It's too bright. And you can see everything. And that's probably why it looks so shit. The original film, you know, there was a point in time in the late 90s where good movies recognized, hey, if you just have things really dark, the CG looks better.

Some skill of this somehow, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy that it looks worse than the original, yeah. It looks much worse. There was a point in like the kind of like end of the 90s beginning of 2000s where it's like, we can do fucking anything in CG, show it all. And we were not there. Not understanding limitations. And even today, it's like trying to make the whole movie in CG and then just wanting to do

it cheaply and. like oh let's we don't want to pay the animators that much let's just make the whole movie look weirdly dark let's do let's just make the whole movie dark okay fuck off oh my god I have a weird note here that I'm curious if any of you noticed so on the Blu-ray and on the Amazon version I checked with people in my chat

there's there's a black line in the top left corner at the very top left corner of the frame that just stays there the entire movie that doesn't go all the way across the screen. I didn't notice that. You might not see it because if you're watching it in full screen, there might be like a part of your monitor or television that's covering it, but I was watching it in a window on my monitor, like in windowed mode.

And you can see it. I didn't notice. And it's there and it's like actually just in the official release. No, we didn't notice it. We watched this on 2B. No one did like any quality control on this. Apparently. And what's cool?

What's crazy about it is this has a fucking Blu-ray. It's from 2004, right? And it's so sad the commentary on how films get successful or how films have longevity in terms of passive income and sales. The only reason this has this is because it says cube in the title. You can release the exact same fucking movie, not put cube in the title, wouldn't get a fucking DVD, wouldn't get a Blu-Rue. Right. Nobody would be buying it on iTunes or whatever over the course of time. It's making all of this residual income just for the name alone because it feels like it's a part of a franchise. And everybody that watches it just forgets how bad it is and wants to revisit it every fucking 10 years, I guess, or hasn't seen it. Or they forget they watched it.

Yeah. I believe this wasn't released theatrically. It was just directive video. Straight to video. Yeah. So maybe that's why, but you know, yeah. I don't think Blu-rays were out in 2004, were they? It seems a tad early. Yeah. I think it was like 2000. That's early. Yeah. So eventually someone decided, hey, there's enough interest that we can release an HD version of this.

Oh my God. Which is just sad to think about based on the quality of the film. Well, I don't know. The weirdest things get Blu-ray releases these days. It's true. I did get a good laugh. Speaking of the kills, they've got a few good ones in this movie. I forget.

I forget the guys. name. He's like the fact. I hate it. It's like the fat guy character. He is a horrible death. He's like the nicest guy in the movie. And usually you kind of save those deaths for like, you know, the real villain. The villains. Okay. He can. It's like what did he do to deserve this? It's like saw. Yeah. You're fat. You are a smoker. Yeah. So he, it's like, I think one of the women's walks into a cube and steps on like this. hypodermic needle that comes up from the ground. Hypercubic needle.

Hypercupid. Sorry. That's Sailor Moon. I think that was Sailor Moon. Oh, yeah. Okay. So it's, and then it's revealed to be like a flesh eating disease or something. And so they all come into the room and she's there.

And then the fat guy's like, now and he starts wrestling with her. And then she scratches him. And he's like, oh, it's nothing. It's just a scratch. And then I love every time they cut back to him, uh, within seconds, his like, face is like deteriorating more and more and more. I don't remember any of this. I watched this two days ago.

And then they're like, well, you're dying, so you're going to help us like, you know, figure out which rooms are trapped. Yeah. So they send him into the next room. And I think he like, one of the guys pushes him, you know, so he's already got this flesh eating disease. He's going to die. So they shove him into this room and he falls.

And then these big, like, sonic, like, I don't know. Oh, yeah. He got sound blasted or something. Oh, the exploding thing. Yeah. So they, like, they blow his head up. with like sonic waves. But is that the guy that gets blown up and he disappears and there's just nothing left?

There's just like two pieces of dust. Probably, yeah. But yeah, he explodes in like a bloody mess. I'm like, oh my God. What other traps are in the movie? Like, I remember that one and the opening one. It's like the acid trap. Yeah, I can't recall any other ones.

And we watched this yesterday. Wait, wait. There was another version of the kind of wire from the first movie. Oh, yeah, a guy gets, like, strung up. Yeah, it's like an old guy, and I think he steps in the room, and all these wires wrap around him, and then they start kind of getting pulled back into the thing. Yeah, although it kind of looked more like rope and less like a metal wire, but he gets taken apart.

He gets sliced, and it's like a way worse version of what happened in the first movie. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And it's revealed that they're all criminals and that they signed a waiver. Or did they? Yeah, who knows? So it's like you can either be executed or get a shot at surviving. We're going to stick you in this cube.

And then apparently the all signed waivers. Yeah, it's like, all right. Why did they wipe their memories? Did they wipe their memories? I think so because- Yeah, they say they can't remember who they are. Why would they do that? I don't know.

Yeah, you got me. Ask the guy with the silver eye. Yeah. And came out the same year as the first saw. True, yeah. Oh, my God. Really? Yeah, they missed the forest for the trees for the potential of just,

just have a string of rooms with, like, fun traps in. And they go to figure out how to get, it's not complicated. It's really not. They hung up in just such strange concepts. Yeah, let's go sci-fi with the gravity change, you know, or a hypercube, or, yeah, let's go outside of a few layers above the cube and see, I was like, nah, you all missing the forest for the trees there. Like, it's so simple.

Misunderstood the assignment. Yeah, it's like they read like the IMDB reviews for everyone who was like, oh, you never found out like what happened at the end. So, yeah, they're ready to get in. Yeah. Listen to the 13-year-olds is the moral. Yeah, the soft franchise knew what it had. You know, they didn't get into like Hyper Saw or whatever.

Oh, wait a second one. There's still time. There is still time. Bring back Tobin Bell like. and again and again. Keep it going. Keep it going. We're on a roll.

Yeah. I heard the new one's kind of good. Alex and I talked about it. We, we, we, it's, it is a return to form. Right. We'll say that much. Okay. It's a return to the old stuff.

You know what pissed me off in this movie? They said Z instead of Zed. Those assesles. Oh, wow, how dare they? They forgot their Canadian roots. And all the actors are Canadian again. I know. So why are they pretending it's an American movie now?

Yeah, no. Don't like that. Bullshit. Yeah, do we have anything left to say about the, guy with the snake eyes and he just stands in the room and the room's about to like everything resets and vaporizes for some reason after a certain amount of time. Yeah, so I think somebody... They reboot the cube.

Yeah, they reboot the cube. I think the guy with the silver eye does. And then I think that just incinerates everybody in all the cubes. But they have a certain amount of time where they can get to the exit. I think the guy who, I don't know, worked behind the scenes kind of enters the cube. he's like kind of a creepy perv, isn't he? Yeah. He just like, you know, falls for this girl that...

Yeah, he is a creepy perf. Maybe not as much as like Quentin in the first movie, but, you know, it's the ongoing theme. Yeah. And then we go outside and we get Golden Eye 64 sound effects from the same group. And that was honestly, that was when the movie was like starting to get good for me. It was like the last five minutes. I was like, please, more of this. It was so funny.

I was having a time of my life. Their POV is really funny too because it's like this digital POV. You see like the bullets flying going Pio Peeo Peeo! You see the little like bullets. It's so funny. Yeah.

Yeah. The reticle moving like all over the screen not sticking to the center at all. It's fun. So yeah, it's a, yeah, the super soldier. What he like, you think he's dead. And then he comes back to life, jumps, jumps up. And like, I don't know.

He started fighting her. something like that. He gets, he gets incinerated. They all jump into the water and then he burns up and it's like the lamest like, yes, incineration. I think that's the one he was. Why can he super jump? Did I like, how was he able to do that? Snake eyes. Oh, I think they showed in the computer. They're like, moon boots. There was a whole like brain chip angle going on. They like put chips in everyone's brains. Yeah. So they said like blocking pain receptors and like appreciating like. like super jump ability. Put all his XP into his jump ability.

True. All right, what do we give it at a 10? I'm going to do three. And that's going to be nice. I'm going to be nice. Very nice. It might be like four and a half, maybe. The nicest that anyone could possibly be.

I'm of the opinion these get worse as they go along. I know you guys say you like, you love this one a bit to Hypercube but no at least that was kind of funny the whole time

to me at least in some way it was either funny or entertaining or weird where this was just like the structure is silly

the run time is too long they just get longer as they go along for some reason these minutes too it's like just keep it 90 minutes it's like

there's not enough meat on the bone I don't understand why it's called cube zero still I don't understand why they've got Mario Powers

it's just a vague kind of remake of the first movie like it's just nothing about this one, work for me, Superboy. I want to see more Mario Powers. Yeah, I'd prefer that. At least that'd be funny, you know?

Yeah. Super forgetsable. The fact we can barely even mention like three traps or any of this stuff. It's very sad. This is the point. Yeah, yeah, one star, man. It's maybe less memorable than the first, the, than HyperCube. Yeah, HyperCube has got his moments at least.

I give this one a one out of 10. It's so it's tied with HyperCube. Really? Okay. Yes. I think I enjoy it slightly more, if only for the fact that I remembered one or two things about it. You know, like, I can't, I literally HyperCube is just like gone from my brain. And the whole movie just morphed into itself where it's like, Cube Zero, I remember that there's dudes in a computer thing doing a hack and time. And I remember that they go outside and it's golden I-64.

as long as I can remember a couple things that elevates it above hypercube. And also, I was having the time of my fucking life during the golden eyed scene. So that was great. Well, there's that. But yeah, one out of ten. Again, it would feel wrong to give it anything higher. It would make me feel bad. And so, yeah, there was a remake, a, a remake, 2011.

This is bizarre. From Japan. And I watched it for the first time. I guess it was the only one of the Cube films that I hadn't seen before is what I now understand. When did, when was the last time you guys watched it? I watched, I just checked my letterboxed. I watched it on June 25th. Okay, yeah.

So I understand why you wouldn't want to rewatch it. It was only a couple months ago. I skimmed through it this morning. So I follow Vincenzo and Italia. on Twitter and then he was tweeting about it. I didn't even know it was a thing. So he said, oh, I'm like really excited. I'm, you know, a fan of the director, blah, blah, blah.

Had no idea it had even come out. So, yeah, until April watched it. You didn't watch it. You just watched like a recap of it on YouTube today. I skimmed through it. It looked so boring. Yeah. It's fine.

It's fine. Oh, you mean it's fine? As in it's fine that you didn't watch it. Okay. I was going to say. I was getting a bit scared there because like this was the worst one to me. This was like, unbearable. Okay.

Okay. I made the right choice. Yeah, yeah. If the other ones missed the assignment, this was, this was something else. It's a remake, right? Yeah. They didn't even like hit the same beats in the same way. Like it completely, man, it just skipped over everything that made that first one good.

And it's the same story. This is just somebody like looking over at his buddy's assignment and then copying it down. And then missing some important. things. The thing that my main takeaway of this movie was that it was trying to be a commentary on the generational gap in Japan about how old people hate young people, young people hate old people. And that's really the only thing new that it's bringing to the story. But like, yeah, it doesn't even get like the stuff that the original gets right with the fun of the traps or the different characters. Half of these characters look exactly the same.

They have the same age. They have this. Shut up. They have the same haircut. I'm sorry, but they have the same haircut. There's an older guy, a younger guy, and a woman, and I clocked that she was a robot halfway through. I was like, either she is the worst actress I've ever seen or she's a robot. And it's like, why even have her in the movie?

Yeah, I made that same. Give one of the guys a different hair color or something, you know. So I know that sounds bad. It sounds bad, but it's true. I agree with you, but I would say if they had different, like, or distinct or memorable personalities, that would just do the job. That would help to. It didn't seem like there was a lot of dialogue in this movie.

It seems like endless scenes of just people moping around. A lot of nothing. A lot of nothing and you don't give a shit. I was pretty much just chatting over the entire film about nothing to my chat. In a room where I'm just the only person in this room and I'm just talking to my Twitch chat about how dumb the movie is. And I was thinking like in terms of the ratio of like how much how much I'm talking versus is not talking during a watch along.

I think this is maybe like up there. I think this is maybe like in my top five. And like it's in Japanese. So you probably miss some of the dialogue. I mean I was reading the dialogue. I watched it pretty passively too. I was, I think I did it in two chunks because I was like,

oh, this sucks. And then I turned it off. And then I was like, I guess I'll finish it like later. Yeah. I was debating building some furniture to to this film. It is one of those.

It is hard to pay attention. Yeah. And plus we were, I was like cramming all these movies. I haven't seen any except for the original. So I'm like watching, you know, a new cube movie every night and they already start to kind of like blend together. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm like, oh Christ, I'm gonna- It's a challenge.

Yeah, I'm like, am I gonna rewatch, you know, the first movie basically, again, in Japanese? It's much worse than the first. Oh, much worse. It is much worse. It's crazy. So like, you're right with the generational divide thing, but there's another theme going on where like all these characters talking about suicide and attempting to, you know, like, all these characters talking about suicide and attempting to do that. suicide and attempting suicide. I think there's like two or three suicide attempts.

And the whole like villainous character instead of a the awesome Clinton from that first movie. There's some complexity there. He changes as a character from the beginning and you kind of, yeah, you follow that journey with him. But here, the like lead kind of villainous role is this guy who's kind of a store clerk. Like that's that's his thing, you know? thought maybe they were going to fill in that character from the first movie, you know, he's

kind of fibs, I'm just working an office, but it turns out there was more going on. But it was like, no, I guess the lead villain here is just a guy who worked in a shop, and he just talks about how working in a shop is hard. And then he talks about committing suicide. And it's like, what? What are you doing? That's all you got. Yeah, that is all you got.

And like this whole fixation on this main character, um, who's considered himself responsible for I guess his brother's suicide. She's also suicide in this movie. Yeah. Which they show on a screen. They have a movie theater in the cube now. That's funny to me. I was thinking about how they probably intended for it to feel.

And I was thinking about like, you know, maybe if this was like, if the whole thing was like animated, like the whole movie was like 2D animated or something. Or maybe if they were playing with like how they were showing it in terms of, you know, of a stylistic choice or you know an old boy when he like goes back to the the school and he's there following himself or whatever something like yes where you could maybe think it's a memory or not give something too literal but as I'm watching this film I'm thinking like okay we're drones filming him like this is yeah this is a shot with a with a very specific depth of field with like I'm thinking of it in terms of like the lighting and the

lenses. I'm like, this is, you're, you filmed this with a camera. And so I'm, and you're watching it on the wall and it's a movie theater room and I don't get it. The characters are watching the movie that they're in. Yeah. There's editing. There's cutting back and forth. Yeah, I'm like, who filmed you? Yeah. I think it was slow, doesn't it go slow motion at the end? Yeah. The guy's jumping off. There's some funny slow motion in there. Yeah. Slow motion blades at the beginning. Just a weird sentimentality that it has. Like, forgot that it was supposed to be a horror movie. Like, these people have just. I just met and like when they gradually die one by one they're like screaming and crying and like in pieces.

I was like, why? Yeah, yeah, it doesn't earn its emotions at all. There's a lot of very insisted, forced implied emotions that just don't matter. It's funny that they had, they tried to do this weird sort of like thematic parallel to the kid falling just in the door. He's just chilling in between, like in the door zone, and the kid starts falling in slow-mo. And they're like, no. But then it also shows the flashback of the, like, I guess his brother or whoever, like falling off the roof. And it's like, well, wait, would this, would the kid falling not matter if, like, is this supposed to be like, well, now it's really sad that the kid's falling or now it's, now it really matters because this is triggering an emotion in his brain.

It's making him remember about this other time. it was falling and it's just so obvious. And then I think about like, well, okay, the kid probably would have just fallen and been fine anyway. Like, what is the tension here? What is the tension here? He probably just would have fallen and been fine. Kid's about to get shot by fucking lasers.

Never happens. The kid's invincible the entire movie. They take turns fucking pushing each other out of the way in this manipulative bullshit whole scene where I guess they knew exactly when the laser was going to fire and just managed to dodge or push each other out of the way. the way at the exact moment where I was charging up. Fuck.

So annoying. There's no like logic to the traps. Or the characters. I think out of maybe any movie I've ever seen ever, these are the characters that collectively the entire cast has the slowest reaction time to anything. For them to figure out anything that's happening, they're in the room where the fan blades are up top.

They're all coming down. Like one of them is just deciding to stand. He's not going to crouch. He's like, oh, I'm just so scared that I've, I'm not crouching. There's like people, nobody looks for a door until somebody yells it out

like a minute later. Like, hey, maybe try opening one of the doors. And then even once they got that idea, there's the door on the bottom and the guy has to yell for the other guy to do it. He's like, open the door!

And he doesn't do it. And then he has to do it himself. And then even when they get the door open, they have to like grab everybody out of the room who's everybody's just like too frozen and scared to react to anything that's happening. Right? Same shit when the gas

starts getting released, they all just kind of like chill there. Like, there's something happening. Leave now. Two of the characters just like face the wall and they just start coughing and they're like, uh, uh, like get out of there. Get out of there. Everybody's so stupid. That one character is a robot.

To be fair, they are all suicidal. They're suicidal, yeah. So maybe they just, they want to die. They want to, they, they, I feel like we're prodding at that Android thing too casually. Like, how is it dumber than Hypercube? Matt, there's a robot character in there and it's like, I guess that's supposed to be the twist kind of reveal original idea

for this one? Yeah, I don't get it. I don't understand the point of that. What does he mean? It's just a reveal at the very, very end, right? I don't understand the purpose. The movie was sexist. I know.

Hashtag they don't trust women. Right? Put an actual female character in there. Yeah, it's from Japan. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of expected. Yeah, I also don't understand the animation they do at the end

where they show the characters that have died and then they show their age and occupation in this weird sort of like flashy futuristic cube animation. And some of them it says, completed. Yes. Just like because they died. But one of their jobs just said part-time job, which is funny. Just part-time job?

One of them just said part-time job. The main character is shown to survive, even though he's like trapped in that room with the robot spikes that go into like tree. The tree spikes. I think it's like continued on that one. Yeah. It's very easy.

It might just be not well translated also. That was, yeah, they were preparing for the sequel, I guess, on that one. I was disappointed he didn't Mario jump out of the room. True. Just like fell. Also, I mean, we haven't mentioned how important boots are to this franchise. Oh, yeah. Just wanted to mention boots.

I'm surprised they haven't done, like, you know, some merch, some, like, cube boots with, like, extra long laces. Yes. Anytime you get into a place, you throw the boot ahead of you. I just find the timing of this so strange. Like, it's nearly two decades between this and Cube Zero. It's like, why then? Like, what's your angle? I don't think it exists to try and capitalize off of the name recognition.

I think it exists just to take an idea that works and make a low-budget movie. And in all honesty, there are ways where you could remake and maybe improve or add new life to the series in ways that don't completely bastardize it or make it terrible. Even if it's not as good as the first movie, you could make something out of the cube franchise. the Cube IP add some new traps add some new angles to the traps maybe rethink how you want your characters to discover things or the types of dynamics that can exist or blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah there's a million things you could fucking do there's no limitation as to what you could put behind one of those doors we should be seeing the maximum amount of creativity from people creating a new cube film because as we've seen in the second fucking movie you could just have something where physics doesn't even matter.

It's not like you're bastardizing the franchise no matter what you put in the fucking room at this point. You can do anything. So why is it that a team of people that are supposedly supposed to be creative people, why can't they figure out doing something that's interesting? They were like rehashed, reused traps, and then the new ones just looked like shit and we're dumb.

We should be saying some cool shit. Yeah, Vincenzo. Well, I mean, good for him for never doing a sequel. You know, because it doesn't need to be a sequel. I wonder if he got any, like, you know, some residuals from, from the space. I don't know. His name was in, like, the special things. You'd have so, right, yeah. You would think so, but I don't know.

I mean, did the original writers get credit for just the idea? I don't think so, because it's like, you look at like a Friday the 13th movie. It's like, does every Friday of the 13th have to, like, give money to the people that made the first one? I think for the writer. Yeah? Yeah, the writer, when you create the concept, that's generally how it works. works with licensing, I think. Yeah, because it was a big, like, kind of to do about the writing on Friday the 13th

because one of the characters wrote the character Jason. So he was, like, it was a big court battle, and that's what has held up the Friday the 13th franchise for so long. Like, they had to, like, cancel the video game, I think, or something like that. Because one guy was like, I wrote the character Jason, so therefore, you know, blah, blah. That's why I think Jason X was a thing, which I worked on, by the way. It couldn't be a Friday the 13th movie It had to be called Jason Axe

Oh wow Oh yeah yeah There's all these like rules and whatever Who came up with what? I thought that this film As soon as it opened up By the way Alex I have to ask you this Before I forget

Did you recognize the guy from the first trap In the opening death scene? Yeah perfect days Yes He was the guy for perfect days It kept rating things out of ten Yeah that was okay The first opening death scene

It wasn't so bad chest. Yeah. It wasn't so bad. It needed more blood, though. It's like that cube kind of came out of his chest and it was like a big cube of jelly or something. Yeah.

Or his clothes needed to be affected more when it was, like, it didn't look right when the big pillow. It was odd. Yeah, it was just sort of solid meat, but you'd have like organs and bone. Yeah, it would be messier. Like, you're just a big, it's like an open cavity inside of you. It's not just solid meat. Solid block.

It was not good, but it was the best part of the movie. Yeah, for sure. Like the movie might be fine. from that moment and then quickly it started deteriorating and I think that the moment where I started realizing this is a gigantic piece of shit

was not just after the bad acting but after the first really long sequence of the most confusing fucking music when the woman shows up I guess robot when she shows up she's just staring through the door

and the music is doing this like crazy fucking like anime what's going on like I don't know how to describe it. Like the tone was all over the place. And the scene went on for so long and nothing was happening. I was like, what are you trying to communicate here?

And I realized it was a hilarious, dumb piece of shit. Yeah. No, I figured it was going to be more just a one-to-one kind of remake hitting the same beats. That's what I'd heard about it. That was just like boring for that reason. But it's, no, it's boring for a different reason. It would be kind of fine and watchable if that's all it did.

It was just try and modernize it. But no, it does completely miss the point in worse ways than, Cube 2, Hypercube and Cube Zero. Like, it's even more boring than them to me. Being bland is a worse crime. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Especially when you do have the exact comparison and you are a remake and you're basically

retelling that story that's already been told. The blueprint is there. It's embarrassing. How does it look worse? How does it look worse? Yeah, it did. It did look worse. Like the cube itself looks worse than the first one.

Yeah, I was kind of disappointed because. Because at the beginning, not only did they have a trap and a death that just seemed fine, but also the cinematography in that opening scene was also fine. Like, there was a long shot going throughout the length of the cube. And then quickly after that point, throughout the rest of the movie, all the shots are just so tightly framed and so weirdly close in a way where I'm like, what the hell? Where did the cinematography go?

Like, are you in a different set now? Like, what's going on? Like, that was bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. Second unit director probably. I guess, maybe. Did that opening show. Yeah.

Or they probably, yeah, they didn't have the opening shot. Oh, yeah. Something to spice it up. Maybe they did it later. The color of the room changed like a mood ring. Yeah, it did. Yeah, because they have those, like, LED light panels we were talking about. Yeah.

Change it on a web. Do whatever. Yeah. But what, did that add to anything? Did that make it better? Like, what, for what purpose? They were just showing off. They had some, like, kind of animated lights going like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

Yeah. Oh. I ever. Whoa. Now look at them in the audience. Into the theaters. Yeah, I was very checked out progressively as this film went on. And I felt no guilt or shame whatsoever in just kind of talking over it.

Now I feel much, much better for having not watched it. Oh, please. You made the correct choice. Yeah. Oh, thank God. I just couldn't do it. It was just too much cubes. I don't want to see cubes ever again for another while.

I need a rhombus. Unless they're in my glass. I need a do decadrine. And made of ice. Even a triangle would do. Pyramid. Yeah. That's how they start out.

Hyper pyramid. Yeah, I think I'm pretty like, I don't have anything more to say about this shit. Oh, fuck it. There's nothing to say. Yeah, there's nothing on this one. Yeah, very bland. I would probably give it the lowest rating because, well, it had kind of the potential to be better than those. other two sequels. It just, it just fails. And so it is probably the worst of the, of the sequels.

So I give it a one. Wow. Okay. Well, I don't know. I didn't really watch it, so I can't get reading. Do it. Do what I do. No, no. You don't want to welcome that, that attention. The internet will tear me apart. No. I don't know. Whatever. It's, if it's not even worth, If it's not even worth watching, then, you know, I can't even rate it. So just whatever. One, zero. Zero. We got it.

He said the number. You're canceled. That's going right in my letter box to zero. Yeah, I'm right there. Half star, one out of ten. Just, yeah, completely misses the point. Don't even bother with this one. The other ones have at least something to talk about.

There's just nothing here. I give this one of two. I give this one a two out of ten. I think it's slightly better than the last two films. You don't want to pay attention to it. You know, it's best experienced by not watching it. But at the same time, I feel like it was a bit more, you know, it actually looked like a movie at points, not like a television show.

There was more of a higher production level. Yeah, there was some competent things there. barely which I mean the the previous two films are like so astronomically bad I don't often give things one out of ten like it's not something I just do and hand out like candy

that's fun though at least this was so long an hour 48 come on yeah it does not need to be that long 90 minutes that's that sweet spot it's embarrassing it's bad but it's somehow somehow the other ones were still worse so yeah two out of ten from me

but we're not we're splitting hairs here it's true they're all terrible they're all just so awful why did we do this why did we do this we're cubing hair's hey bro it wasn't my idea to watch all the sequels I thought it was no it was Adams it was my idea oh wait a go god damn well it was because like episode 150 I'm like yeah we gotta do a big Halloween no I'm glad I've seen hypercube like you guys like you hate hypercube but I don't know I'm loving it more and more than more I'm thinking about. Alex, you have a history of just liking things with silly names, okay? I see your fucking bodies.

Bahubali. That does play a small role. I see three, okay? I see your shit. I'm on to you. I feel like my eyes are cubes. I'm cubed out. I've got to tell you guys, I'm cubed out.

Yeah, after four cube movies, although I didn't re-watch 2021. It's a lot in one week. Yeah, it's a lot of cube. I don't want to see flat walls anywhere. I don't know. I have this instinct just to defend Hypercube. There's nothing wrong with that.

At least I had that stabby guy. Yeah, like, I mean, I am looking back on it slightly more fondly just because it's funny, but when we were watching it, I was just angry. I did like the guy getting shredded up by the spinning Hypercube. Yeah, of course.

I very much did not like that. One out of ten. Okay, let's do some questions from the Suddonacus community. If you'll leave your own questions for future episodes, head over to the suggestion thread on the subreddit. Just like Johnny Stevie did. It was a question for Colin. Oh, what's your favorite VFX shot you've ever worked on? Also, how has the VFX industry evolved since your early days?

Oh, favorite VFX shot. I think probably the work that I did on The Cell. It was a movie by Tarcim Singh. Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn. I kind of did this sequence on my own. That's something that I was the most proud of, I think. It's when she falls through the air into the Roman pantheon. She kind of falls through and then floats down wearing like this red dress.

It's a very iconic scene. They even showed it at the Oscars one time. That was like they had that year, that year they had, it's like Cirque de Soleil was doing like a performance in front of the screen on the stage at the Oscars. And then they had my shot where she falls through the ceiling. And then one of the Cirque de Soleilis was wearing like a big red flowing dress. And I was like, oh, yeah, there we go.

That's awesome. That is dope. made it man how's the industry changed industry has changed oh god and some ways for the better like when when i was coming up it was you know early 90s so it was like you know cg was just sort of getting started at that time um uh ever you know just super excited you didn't get overtime or anything you know didn't get overtime pay but works crazy hours just because you wanted to uh and you kind of loved it. Now it's just sort of, it feels very exploitative, I think, at this point. People do usually get paid overtime now, so, but it's just, I don't know, it's just something that

I've been working in commercials, I think, for the past 10 years or so, and I briefly got back into kind of long-form TV, TV visual effects, and I'm happy I'm back in commercials now. let's just say that. It's just, it was not fun. It was just, I don't know. It all kind of felt gross. So now it's like all these companies are starting up, you know,

divisions in India so they can kind of exploit, you know, Indian employees. Cheaper labor. Exactly, yeah, just doing front work like, you know, rotos and stuff like that. So it's just, I don't know, it's kind of a good time to move on, I think. from film and TV stuff.

But on a similar line, more of a question we can all answer here from BR Solo 121. What is an underappreciated slash underrated visual effect, digital or practical that really impressed you? My mind, I don't know why this lingers in my mind because it's such a like forgettable movie to me,

but towards the end of that film, Ender's game. There's like this CG bug. I don't know. blew my mind at the time. 2013, remember the textures on it looking crazy. I was like, oh, we're like so close to that just photo realism. But I just, yeah, I wish it could have been a more memorable film.

I have seen that movie, but I don't remember the specific look of the bug. It's a very slow, boring film. Very boring. I can think of one. There was a very underwatched series on Netflix called Smash. Saturday morning All-Star hits. It's really funny. It's basically it's kind of like,

kind of like VHS where you're supposed to be watching like an old VHS tape, but there's like these TV hosts introducing these cartoons, but they're like fake cartoons that they did for this show. But it stars Kyle Mooney and he plays twins. And he's just, they're just like going back and forth, like doing these like, you know, taped segments. but it is almost impossible to tell that he that he's just one person.

It's done so well. And it's like the camera is moving around in that kind of like 90s style and like zooming in and like back and forth. And they just did it with a motion controlled camera. But it's seamless. Like it is so good. Like I said, if you didn't know that he wasn't twins, you would think that he was. And that's a very funny show, by the way. I highly recommend it.

So that's my answer. This is like early kind of CGI days, but there's a movie called, I think it was Stephen Summers' first movie called Deep Rising. We treat Williams, Fomke Jansen. It's a blast. It's a really, really fun, gory movie. There's a scene, it's like they go on to some, like, ship to kind of rob it, and then they find out everyone's dead, and it's like the sea monster has gotten on board.

And then there's a scene where, like, somebody swallowed by the sea monster, and it kind of regurgitates him later on in the movie and he's sort of half dissolved by the stomach acid and he's still alive. And it's sort of mind blowing how good it is. It's so disturbing to look at. But that was like early days of CGI and it's still kind of really, really effective. Cool. I guess based on the phrasing of that question, Neville Dean and Taylor do some things practically when they used to work together that people

just didn't recognize were practical and it always kind of fucking pissed me off like at the end of crank they're literally like flying in a helicopter like he's literally hanging out of a helicopter

and I love the sense of style that they have with the camera work and just how the directors are like really in there and like up close and they're very much a part of the stunt team. The director's like on rollerblades hitching behind a fucking motorcycle just to get the shot. And even in their like worst received movies like ghost writer's spirit of vengeance, there's a shot where a character, you know, flies off of a car basically and a camera follows them and like essentially they're like

flying off a cliff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like the behind the scenes footage, you can see, like, yeah, that's the director holding the camera basically being shot over a cliff with some safety equipment. Like, there's, yeah, there's a lot of shit that they were doing that was never really fully appreciated because people just have an expectation of the laziness of how movies are made. And so they don't see, you know, when a shot looks like that, they just think like, oh, it was in front of a green screen.

You just flew in front of a green screen or something like that. But no, like they're fucking, you know, they're doing some crazy shit and just kind of went unappreciated, which is sad. But, yeah. I feel like we've lost a lot of that. Like the kind of marvel of watching something really cool. You know what I mean?

Everything is just sort of like hand-waved now. Like, it's like CG or effects or whatever. Well, it's interesting because you'd think if you were to ask me 10-plus years ago, what movies would look like in 2020? I would have thought that we'd be at the point where CG is just like a seamless thing that you can't tell the difference between And depending on how it's used it is Depending on what kind of texture There's so many visual effects shots if you look at the

Visual Effects reel for something like the Wolf of Wall Street a movie where you wouldn't think Yeah, that there's a bunch of CG or compositing or you know replace backgrounds or you know elements that are entirely CG. But there is. There are. And you can find this on YouTube or Vimeo, I forget where, but look up the visual effects reel for the Wolf of Wall Street, and you'll see the movie in an entirely different light. You'll be like, oh, wow,

actually, there's a shit ton of visual effects shots here. And I think it's funny and kind of sad at the same time that those are never nominated for Oscars. And every single time it's the Oscar nomination for visual effects, it's what are the most obvious visual effects? What's the movie that had the most obvious visual effects? The most. Or just the most effects.

Yeah, like, I think it's incredible when you can't tell that they were there. That's an art in of itself is not being able to tell that it's a visual effect and thinking that it's real, right? Like, is that not the goal for many films? Yeah, I think we've reached that point and have been there for a very long time, but it's just the way that the studios, you know, especially the Marvel movies, how they just run the productions where they're constantly just, changing their mind as, you know, during post-production and, you know, changing characters, costumes and all the sort of stuff right up to the last minute. So, you know, a lot of the stuff that just ends up looking like just trash. And when you see that trailer for like the marvels or whatever, oh my God, it just looks so cheap and awful. And it's like, you look at the

budget is like $300 million. And then you look at the creator, which was like $80 million. And it's just impeccable. Like everything is just disdain. just so well done. Yeah. You know, it's just like ex-Machina kind of level, but, you know, on a much grander scale. So it all comes down to just knowing what you want ahead of time and planning for it and not just like making it up as you go and constantly. Practicality.

Exactly. Yeah. It's a tool at the end of the day. You know, it can so easily just be abused. I can use as a cheat code for like your Meg twos the trench or whatever, you know. We don't even really need to concept. anything just sitting on my make to the trench Jason Statham's gonna come out you now what you say oh bring another British accent again I like it your blood is like just

boiling right now this one from Vince is depressed is interesting this is some pretty recent news that's just come out when you start recording this episode a 24 and they'll be looking into starting to make more IP films and action films to return a profit after spending so much and losing more money than earning. Do you think this will ruin the company or a sign they're just the next big player in town? Honestly, if we get cool, low or mid-budget action films from them, as well as their dramas and horror, I'd be happy. As they already had one action movie, might as well embrace it as it is profitable. As for IP, they are Friday the 13th and want Halloween. It could work. Just be weird of a decision to acquire. and milk it. I just want to point out that the reporting around that is kind of, it's kind of been misleading. So there's a lot of people will be sharing what are essentially opinion pieces that throw in things like Bow is afraid when that is not at all mentioned by anybody from A24 as a part of their business decision to do that.

And a lot of this is speculative, because I don't even know if A24 came out and said that's what they're doing. but the real news is essentially that they got like a what 2.5 billion dollar evaluation by some like new investment firm or something and so people are speculating that in order for them to live up to that new evaluation of a company that they would have to be taking on some larger IPs and they might and it seems like they would I believe that they were in a bidding war for a franchise. It might have been Halloween, but they lost to another company, like MGM might have paid more. I don't remember. But essentially, that's what's happening. A lot of people are just repeating opinion pieces as if they're fact, and it's not really, like, I mean, either way, I guess to answer that question, sure, it depends on what they do with it. I could see them doing a fine job with tackling a trilogy, as long as they stay true to their roots and their values

as a company and make sure to work with creatives and allow them to have control over a project. I'm hoping that nobody involved with Bo is afraid was expecting it to make its money back. That's my hope. They'd have to be insane. Yeah. They would have to be insane. So otherwise, I mean, they're pretty good business-wise. I mean, I saw that headline, and I was just like, you know, skimming past it on Twitter.

And I thought it was a joke. I thought it was like an onion headline and I just moved on. Like I didn't even think about it. So I didn't think it was real. I mean, I don't want to see A24 to do IP movies. But if someone has to, I guess, but like. Maybe they could have like a spinoff label or something. Like, you know.

Do we need more Halloween? A25. It's not a bad idea. If they're going to do like more genre movies, then I would obviously love that because I like genre movies and I would be interested to see. Yeah. But, like, you know, they have this reputation. And if they, I think people are worried they're going to, like, ruin that reputation. Sully it or something, yeah.

But, I mean, every studio is going to make good and bad movies. They're not just going to have the best track record. But I know at this point, like, people will see, oh, 824, I'll go see it, you know? And that's an interesting brand, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know the type of movie you're going to. For the most part, I think that if you go to their website and you look up, like, every film that,

they've ever distributed or produced, you'll understand that there's not only a bunch of duds in there, but not everything adheres to this same, you know, genre or expectation of what an A424 movie is. But still, that doesn't stop people from having certain expectations or, uh, recognizing that I guess most interesting horror movies that have come out in the past decade have been A24 related. Yeah. Yeah. When I see the logo, you kind of like perk up like, ooh. Yeah. Yeah. This This is worth watching. So yeah, you just have like a little spin-off label that you do for like the IP stuff, like the, you know, dimension films.

B-24. Well, he said A-26, but there you go, B-24. Yeah, so they keep those budgets under control. Yeah, dimension films. That was like a spin-off for all the schlocky stuff. A-24, Hypercube. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah.

Okay, I'm all right. Hypercube films. I love that. Yeah. that's the way to do it so then you keep the A24 name for like the prestige stuff or whatever the classier

the classier stuff I got to throw the the webs of bone here we're always getting these questions this stuff but come on let's give this one to J-1087 what's everyone's personal favorite anime series

not film they specify well I mean I grew up watching Sailor Moon It's a big, big influence. We have a giant poster of Sailor Moon beside us right now. But, I mean, as a series, it's a very, it's a monster of the week episodic show geared, you know, to kids and teens. So, you know, rewatching it, it's not as fun as the more, like, serialized shows that, you know, I got into much, much later in life. I really like Steinsgate.

That's a good sci-fi. I've watched Shiro Bako twice. That's the anime about making anime. It's like a workplace anime. Yeah, I mean, it's really cool. I liked it a lot. Yeah, I'm going to have to consult the list. Oh, my God.

I actually have a list on my phone. Every time I walk by the TV, April's watching a new anime. I haven't watched many in a while. There was like the volleyball one. There was the one about camping. Oh, the volleyball one. That's great. Yuri on ice.

Yuri on ice also I loved. Doro Hadoro was really fun. That's on Netflix. It's like about a guy who has a dynamite. dinosaur head. That's a really fun, like, hyper-violent kind of sci-fi world, but there's also magic. Obviously, Death Note I liked, but I mean, that's kind of like the boring answer. I don't care if it's the boring answer. That's my favorite anime. I love it. There's so much, I love revisiting it all the time. Yeah. I've re-watched that, I think, once or like one and a

half times because Colin was watching it. And then you never finished it. So we should, we should finish that. I need to finish that. Yeah. You got about halfway through. So, yeah, I don't really watch anime. Other than, you know, walking by the TV. seeing what April's watching. I don't really. So that's probably the only one that I kind of like sat through, which I really have to finish. We watched that cyberpunk one, although we didn't finish that. We think got almost all the way to the end. That was pretty good, actually. Yeah, it wasn't bad. Yeah, yeah, I liked that. Edge, uh, the edge runners, I think. Edge runners, yeah. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was solid. I wouldn't say it's my favorite.

Mine would be like just unexpected. I don't know, Cab would be, but I don't have the biggest range of anime under my belt, but that's because of the cor-old. The obvious one. Oh, yeah, kind of to crazily that was more of an introduction to corgis than like the royal family was to me like i'd never really thought about them before so it's kind of a weird backward way to be introduced to that that's funny yeah i still listen to that soundtrack to this day so do you guys know about this i heard some about this crazy anime i was just trying to find it right now where like the plot was about i think it's this one oshinoko you guys heard of this not by name um this character is tasked with helping deliver the child of Hoshino, a famous pop idol whom he admires without the knowledge of the general public.

However, the night of the delivery, the doctor is murdered by an obsessed fan and is reincarnated as the baby. But the baby still has the memories of the doctor. No, I have not heard of that. That's the kind of thing that I don't know. This is why I love anime. Nothing ever surprises me when I find out what anime is are about. Okay, sure. Yep.

Yeah, I don't know, man. Dinosaur had reincarnated. Is your yearly anime bone. Yeah. Okay, let's do all this one from Slow Magenta. As you've matured slash learn more about film, how has your opinion or standards changed on what makes a movie truly horrifying slash scary? Can a movie be scary in a good way and bad from a filmmaking perspective?

I think like if it's scary, it needs to have good filmmaking. I kind of think that. Like, I love horror movies. There's kind of two kinds, though. There's the kind that are, you know, more of the B movie side, which are, you know, funny. They're definitely not scary. Something like Slumber Party Massacre 2, for instance. There's, you know, if there's fun kills, I love that.

Or like the new evil dead. Like, to me, that was just like a lot of fun. But it wasn't scary at all. And then I think that the movies, it has. have much better filmmaking that are actually scary or something like the nighthouse is like a good example like I thought that was like really creepy hereditary yeah super creepy um uh yeah so I think that there's two kind of for me just just like the kind of slurkey directions it can go and they're both equally they're fun for me what isn't scary CGI monsters in your movie yeah that are

running around in like a horror movie. It's just like, no. I, yeah, I don't know if I can think of an example of something that scares me that isn't well filmed in some way, right? I think that that might be necessary, but I would, maybe, uh, unless it's unintentionally scary. Mm-hmm. Although, like, when I saw the Blair Witch Project in the theaters and that came out, that scared the bejesus out of me.

But that is well filmed. well, you know, it's a, it's well, put together. Yeah, it's definitely a style for sure. Is it like? It's smart in how it's constructed in the same way that Cuba is. It understood it's limitations and decided to make something based on what they could do and they pulled it off. Yeah, I think so. But when you're talking about like, I don't know, the sort of technical aspects of like, I don't know,

what makes something like well shot. Sure, it's like, it's, you know, kind of aping the sort of like VHS style or found footage whatever but I don't know yeah I don't know what I can yeah consider that well shot no but it suits the style I guess sometimes when a horror movie leans more into like psychological concepts that can that goes a long way for yeah yeah yeah's a lot of the horror which uh as I've gotten older I kind of appreciate more that's what gets me more about like uh than a martyrs or something like that where a lot of the horror has kind of been implied or yeah the places it makes your mind go is the but I suppose that is good

filmmaking in a way like what you're implying what you're not showing so yeah it's difficult to think of something that doesn't do both at the same time yeah even like like like David Lynch type stuff where it's more just sort of heady and creepy just about the tone and the vibe that you're getting from the movie like from the sound atmosphere yeah just The atmosphere is just does a lot for me. Send on this one from 100, 100, what? Do you think there's an issue of criticizing comedy in movies where people just say it isn't funny?

And that's it. I see this pretty often from every reviewer and I'd rather people explain why something isn't funny to them and what they do to make it funnier. I suppose it's a bit like horror in a way where, you know, some people do find things scary. I mean, it's very subjective. Comedy is very,

subjective. I feel like in some ways I can articulate why I don't find something funny. So like in a Friedberg-Seltzer movie, I would argue just referencing pop culture. The joke shouldn't just be, hey, I recognize that that's a thing, right? There should be more to it and maybe you can use that as part of a joke, but otherwise, I don't find that funny. And maybe to some people they do find it funny. I mean, of course some people do find it. But like we know that literally just pop culture references in of itself, in of themselves are funny to some people, but at least I can articulate why I don't find that funny. But you're right.

Humor is very subjective, and you might as well be saying, you know, either I don't find that funny or like, I don't find that sexually attractive. It's as subjective as that, right? Yeah, and if you don't find something funny in a movie, I think you should also be able to maybe critique the filmmaking and be like, okay, well, I didn't laugh, but at least it had good, this, this, and that, or it didn't.

You know, it shouldn't just be like, I didn't personally find it funny, therefore it's terrible. You know. But those types of movies, the ones you were talking about, was it, Seltzer Friedberg or whatever? Yeah. Somebody must find them funny because they've made, I don't know, God knows how many. I know.

I know. And I mean, they're millionaires, those people. We were talking about this on a recent podcast where it's like, you know, the Zaz movies where there are spoofing movies and TV shows, but it's not the whole joke. The joke is actually separated from that. It's not just we're doing a scene from The Matrix, therefore that's funny.

It is another layer of humor on top of that. And stuff like that, when you're referencing a very specific pop culture thing, like The Matrix or whatever, they'll just date your film. And it's something that I don't really, that doesn't really happen with, like, airplane or top secret or naked gun.

You know, there's a kind of timeless quality to those where it's like those, date movies or superhero movies, whatever the hell. And also, like something like Nirvana, the band, The Show is filled with like 90s references. And that's a part of the style. It also matters how it's worked into the plot. For sure. It matters how it's worked into what you're doing.

And it also matters how it's presented in terms of how egregiously obvious it is or how subtle it is. you know, if you can still get some sense of satisfaction out of recognizing something, especially, you know, if it's nostalgic. Yeah. But if it's literally, I mean, the Friedberg insults or things were just like, ha ha, this is Paris Hilton. Yeah. And that's the foundation of all the comedy in it.

Yeah. There's nothing else going on. You have to have like a character. That's like the family guy thing. Yeah. You have to have a character. Like Seinfeld did movie references all the time. but they're like putting their characters into these scenes and situations.

And they tie into the bigger episode as well. Yeah. Where it feels like a kind of natural thing where it's not just sort of cutting, you know, reference. Here's just a scene from a movie with those exact characters. Like that's not funny. Yeah, I think of like the BBC comedy, the thick of it. The character, the Peter Cabaldi character, he's whipping out references left and right,

but it contextualizes something within the scene or adds like something funny within that moment, but it's not like the core of the humor. Like there's still so much else surrounding it. It's just a little bit of seasoning. It's not the main course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool, I guess, I guess that's it.

I guess we did it. That's good. Fine. That was awesome. Thank you for staying so long also. Thank you for making this one epic hypercube of an episode. Yeah. Episode 150, Halloween, everything just worked out perfectly.

And, yeah, before I do like all the podcast outro stuff, where can people find you? You want to plug some stuff? What link should we include in our description and everything? Well, you can find us where podcasts are found. So we're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Google Play music. And we have a YouTube channel as well where we just post, you know, the audio uploads of our podcast.

Once again, it's called No Such Thing is a Bad Movie. And we're on Twitter, Blue Sky and Instagram at No Such Thing Pod. And if you'd like to support us on Patreon, we're on patreon.com slash no such thing is a bad movie. And we mentioned earlier that if you're on the $2 level and up, we can be submitted to pick a movie for. a future episode. And if you're on the $5 level, we record a little bonus episode every two weeks. So our podcast is biweekly and then on the off week. We record an episode where we talk about newer movies that are coming out and things that we're watching. And yeah, should I plug my own socials as well? You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Blue Sky at April

at Manske. You can find me on Twitter, Sergeant Zima, S-G-T-Z-I-I-M-A. Z. What's a Z? Z-I-M-A. Make me feel at home. I think the same on Instagram, but whatever. He doesn't know his own Instagram. It might be the same.

All right. I don't know. I just post cat pictures on Instagram, so there you go. Of course. And I guess it's my turn to recommend a film for the first time in what feels like forever, because we had two. We had two guest episodes in a row, and one before that you recommend. and I don't even remember what happened before that.

It feels like it's been forever. I was struggling here. I was like, fuck, what do we? Oh, before I recommend it, Alex,

do you know if you're, is Killers of the Flower Moon coming out for you soon? I'm seeing it next week. You got your tickets? Okay, so we will be talking about that in the next episode too. Good. I'm going to recommend something to help the overall title,

something with a shorter title. birth by Jonathan Glazer I haven't seen it haven't seen it it's the only one of his that I haven't seen Good I thought you hadn't seen it either Yeah yeah yeah so My love for Mr. Glazer has increased

With every film I've seen And this is the only one I haven't And so I'm just I'm very excited to check it out Even if it's not his best I'm sure it'll at least be interesting So if you don't want to get spoiled for birth Nicole Kidman directed by Jonathan Glazer came out 2004. If you don't want to be spoiled for it,

watch it before the next episode. These episodes come out every two weeks. You can support the show by going to sardonicast.com, signing up for premium. It's only $2 a month. You'll hear these earlier as they're edited. And also, patreon.com slash sardonicast will do you the same thing. It will get you the same thing at the same price.

We also got merch. Link in the description. That design is going to disappear. We're going to have new designs at some point. We're very busy. I know we keep talking about these things. Also, we're going to start doing, you know, ad reads and shit. We will.

Don't think I didn't warn you. You want to get on the premium in the Patreon if you don't want to hear ads. Okay. So do that and feel good about yourself, please. Please, it's almost Christmas. Buy me a Patreon, $2. Okay? Think about me.

Okay. Did I forget anything? Oh, yeah, Sardonicast Highlights Channel on YouTube. You can subscribe to that. Hit the bell. Hit the bell on the regular. channel as well. And I believe that's it.

Thank you so much for joining. That was awesome. That was a lot of fun. Always great talking to you. Yeah, thanks for having us on. Thank you for having us. It was a lot of fun. Have a happy HyperCube and a merry new

thousandth planet. Happy HyperCube. Bye, everybody. Bye-t-tta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tta-tta-t. Bye. Bye.