Weirdhouse Cinema: Innerspace

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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lam, and today I have a returning special guest co-host. We're joined once more by David Streepy of the Talkin' Tofu podcast. Dave, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me back. And, uh, hello to all the stuffies. I think, I think we agreed that they're called. So hello again to all of you. Uh, glad to be back. That's right. We're going to be talking about the gate three, right? No, I wish. Oh my God. Would you imagine old man Terry?

Now instead, we were talking about like a handful of potential movies and we ended up going with the one, I think this one was probably the one that you brought up that was the most holiday friendly and I think might be a stealth holiday film because I did see a Santa Claus at one point.

That's all it takes to qualify really. And this did happen in California. So really, you're only cues that it is the holidays and a West Coast movie are from the decorations and not from climate or anything else that's going on. Yeah, we did have we had a bunch of really strong contenders for possibilities, but I think this one.

in addition to its appropriateness. It's a big one, but it kind of made a small splash and a big splash at the same time. It's really, really unique.

Yeah, I don't feel like Innerspace, the movie you're talking about, 1987's Innerspace. This is Joe Dante film. Got a great cast. I mean, starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg Ryan. I mean, it came out big summer special effects movie. Apparently made money. This was not a box office bomb by any stretch. And it

it amazed a lot of kids. I was one of those kids who watched this film multiple times. I guess I maybe saw it on TV the first time and then maybe just rented it a bunch of times after that on VHS, but I was super into this picture. I would make little Lego models roughly based on the two main submarine bots in the film.

Yeah, I think that you're right. This one definitely, I don't think it was a flop at the box office, but maybe had higher hopes given the pedigree of everybody involved. But I think it was a big render. It was a big VHS. I remember having a huge presence at the video store, both in cardboard cutout, but also the number of copies that were on the shelves, the availability of the copies that were on the shelves. This movie seemed to turn up quite a bit.

in sleepovers on trips where you would get five bucks to go to the video store and pick something out. I just remember seeing this movie a lot, a lot. But, and I think I mentioned this to you, I texted you this while I was rewatching recently. There's like a whole hour of this movie that I completely forgot about in the middle. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's easy to expect with an effects film like this. You have your big effects sequences. You have your big finale. Those are the ones that certainly stuck in my head the most. Also, some of the like the Martin Short over the top freak out moments, which I mean, if you're going to hire Martin Short, especially during the 80s or the 90s or, well, our subsequent decades, you're going to want to lose the little of that.

Or even now, yeah, I think that's still a stock in trade. And I think that, you know, what I kind of maybe tuned out and we'll get to it, of course, but what didn't really stick on my memory was all the work needed to move Martin Short around the board.

And upon a rewatch, it's pretty compelling stuff that's moving him around the board. But like you said, I'm more fascinated with what's going on inside his body, what the tech looks like, how he got there in the first place, and how he's going to get out of that situation. And there's a huge chunk in the middle of that sandwich that I wasn't really thinking about.

Yeah, it's a film that is constantly in motion. It keeps adding new elements, often wild elements on top of the show. New characters. Yeah, new characters. There's a whole cast of villains in this picture as we'll discuss. So it's never born. It's in constant motion. It is like Martin Short as a film. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Martin Short film, film modified.

Now this is, of course, a miniaturization film. I think everyone out there is familiar with this subgenre of science fiction by now with the classic example being Fantastic Voyage. This is essentially Fantastic Voyage through Martin Short.

I don't know that we've had a miniaturization film recently. It seems like more recently you tend to see it pop up like as a treatment on some sort of a science fiction show. I think Rick and Morty did a miniaturization episode years back and I don't know that we've had any kind of like big fantastic void style adventure recently.

I think the one that stands out to me, it's not a movie, but the Futurama episode where Fry eats an egg salad sandwich from a gas station. That's a great one. The parasites from the sandwich colonize his body and become super intelligent and have a whole civilization in there and they have to go inside to reconcile that.

Yes, that's a great one because it's fantastic voyage themed, but it is also a flowers for Algernon themed episode. So it has a fair amount of depth to it as well. And then just a lot of great jokes and there's the whole worm thing like, why people came over on the sandwich. Great stuff. All right, let's go ahead and listen to at least some of the trailer audio here. Let's let it roll.

Test pilot Tuck Pendleton wants to make history. Supermarket clerk Jack Putter needs a vacation. Lieutenant Pendleton is about to be miniaturized, placed into this needle and then injected into this rabbit.

But something went wrong and talks about to get a new destination inside Jack Putter. Give yourself a shot of adventure, inner space. All right, Dave, I see you had a note here about the music in the trailer, possibly the trailer we used here, but possibly another trailer, but still. This is a great point regarding the music.

Yeah, this is the music used for the Fratelli chase scene in Goonies. It's always great when a podcast guest just like hums a line, no, no, no for you. But it's really, really, it's the opening scene of Goonies, really iconic bit of music. Cool to see it here, but also a little bit strange to see it here too.

Yeah, it's like when you encounter a trailer where they're clearly using the aliens theme song. You know, it's like, that's great. You're really getting me amped up, but amped up for a different movie. Right. Just kind of dug through the drawer for it and got something that you knew I would recognize and knew would pull me in. I guess they still do this today, right? Because the music's not always together when you're putting together a trailer or you're just like, well, we have rights to better music. Let's sell this puppy.

Yeah, I think that's, you know, the marketing can be that detached from the actual production that unless you've got the Star Wars theme ready to go with your Star Wars trailer, you're going to take some liberties. And it really, you know, matches the tone of the movie in a way that if you weren't, again, hyper familiar with Goonies, the way that I was as a kid, that was the other video that I was renting.

The music fits the tone of the trailer, fits the tone of the movie really, really well. It's a wacky, wacky movie. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, so some of you might be wondering, well, where can I watch Inner Space before proceeding with the rest of the episode? Well, luckily for you, this was a major motion picture. It has not been entirely forgotten. It's maybe not as celebrated as it should be, but you can find streams of it, digital rentals and purchases. A Blu-ray edition is out there, and I do notice that it has an older director's commentary on it with director Joe Dante, producer Michael, Fennell, co-stars Kevin McCarthy,

and Robert Piccardo, and also a visual effects supervisor at Dennis Mirren. Obviously, an older director's commentary. I haven't listened to it, but I don't think I've ever listened to a Joe Dante commentary track, but he's one of those guys that's so knowledgeable. I bet it's pretty great. That's really interesting that Kevin McCarthy and Robert Piccardo would be the sit-ins on that commentary, and not Quaid or Short, or even Meg Ryan.

Well, you know, sometimes you can't get the big fish. They move on to other projects. I don't know. Their presence in the movie is pretty significant. These guys are not bit players at all. They're huge parts of the movie.

Plus with Joe Dante, you know that he loves like older actors, you know, from classic Hollywood pictures. So, you know, there's Kevin McCarthy. And then he loves to cast Robert Piccardo and put him in strange romantic situations, such as with the made up Gremlin from Gremlins 2. He's so weird in this movie. It is character. I can't wait to get into that character. Yeah.

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All right, well, let's talk a bit more about the people involved here, starting with Joe Dante, born in 1946. Joe and I have previously discussed Joe Dante on Weird House Cinema because we talked about Gremlins 2. One of the things that I pointed out, just sort of to try and sum him up, is that he's one of these guys that seems to have a foot in two worlds. Like on one hand, he's like a horror legend. And on the other hand, he's this obvious Spielbergian Amblin Entertainment guy.

And you see more of the second, but also a little of the first in this one. On the hard front, you have the likes of the Howling from 81, Piranha from 78. And then you get into that Gremlin Zone, which is kind of crossing the threshold. He directed the segment It's a Good Life in Twilight Zone, the movie from 1983. But then he also did things like 1985's The Explorers, 89's The Birds, 1993's Manatee. And this film especially is definitely in that Amblen Zone. It is an Amblen entertainment picture.

Yeah, he's definitely, you know, he's...

This sounds like a dig, but I don't mean it that way. He is like a ranch dressing of a director in that he can go in any direction. I think he's got strong horror chops, but he really shines when he's bringing a bunch of different elements to a bunch of different genres to the movie and creating something that's completely unique. He's eating gremlins 100% and you really see it here where the slapstick wouldn't work without the

spy espionage angle without the tech angle, without the sci-fi element of it, like it all blends together and creates something that is really his signature, you know? Yeah. And I would, I would argue that it even feels more cohesive than Gremlins. Gremlins certainly a better known film, but that's one that I always felt like it didn't completely know what it wanted to be. This film, I feel like it balances everything pretty nicely. You know, nothing feels out of step.

I agree. I think that he's having fun here. And not to say that Gremlins is not fun, but Gremlins feels like it's trying to send you a message as well. And I think there's no message here. The message is, what if this happened? Let's walk. Yeah. And let's keep upping the ante, yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I have a post-editing insertion to make here. You might have caught my mistake there. I just referenced the 1993 Joe Dante movie that I said was called Manatee. The film is, of course, Matinee. But I left the mistake in because I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly really fascinated with the idea of a 1993 Joe Dante film about Manatees.

Who knows what that would have consisted of. All right, let's get back into the episode.

Let's see, getting into the writers on this. Jeffrey Boehm of 1946 or 2000 has the, I believe the main screenplay credit here. Accomplished American screenwriter whose credits include 78 Straight Time, 83's The Dead Zone, 87's The Lost Boys, 89's Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, as well as a couple of lethal weapon movies. He also directed and wrote one episode of Tales from the Crypt, a kind of creep course. Wow. I mean, this is just home run after home run.

Yeah, yeah, he was involved in a lot of big projects. The other name on the screenplay, also story and co-producer, Credit Chip Prosser, born 1946, writer and director, probably best known for this film, but we also work in the screenplay for, to some degree, I'm not sure to what degree, with 1984's Ice Man. So is this a top-down prequel? No, it is an unfrozen caveman movie.

All right, now getting into the cast for interspace, it is pretty extensive with some great bit parts and cameos, which is pretty standard for Joe Dante. So I'm going to try to either go light on a number of them and just skip some as well and then also maybe come back just in passing to some of the cameos as they turn up.

But the star, I mean, really, this is a picture that has a trio of leads. But top build, anyway, is Dennis Quaid playing Tuck Pendleton. What a name. Yeah, the names are pretty good. You're Tuck Pendleton. As you can guess, he is like a test pilot. He would be at home in Top Gun.

Yeah. Yeah. He's definitely, look, Kidney couldn't get much cooler than this actor in this role. I mean, yeah, he, in all the worst ways too. I think as an adult, I'm a little bit repulsed by his demeanor, his swagger. But as a kid, this was 80s cool.

With a little bit of reflection, I can see what a rip on Tom Cruise. This delivery is, and it really seems like he's trying for a maverick type thing. Almost maverick and Iceman merge together to be a competent pilot who is also just a big jerk as well. Oh my goodness, I didn't even think about the Top Gun connection about putting a riff on Top Gun.

That's a film that kind of stands out of time for me. I don't necessarily think about it in connection to other projects. But now that you've pointed out, yeah, I can't unsee it.

I think that I made the mistake of using these films as cues for how to act in real life, which I think is a frequent 80s kid misstep. But because of the frequency of viewing of this interspace, Goonies, Top Gun, it created a percent that was very not organic to me and stuck out like a sore thumb whenever I would try to use it.

Yeah, I mean, he's not the worst role model you could latch on to as far as a lead character in an 80s picture. But yeah, he's right from the get-go. He's obnoxious. He's drunk. He clearly is a mess. But he's portrayed as a likable man, a lovable mess.

Yeah, it's a very, very kind and funny take on alcohol. Because he's drunk for a lot of the movie and alcohol is his motivation in a lot of cases. He will get to it, but designs a robot to pour a drink for him and does it poorly. One of his big orders of business for Martin Short is to pour some alcohol for him. He's really booze-centered.

Just drinking giant molecules of whiskey as we'll get back to. But yeah, Dennis Quaid, this is not an actor that we really need to introduce much. I think everybody knows who Dennis Quaid is, you know, famous leading man, brother of Randy. Credits go back to the mid 70s. And he's really been in all sorts of stuff. Like it's really weird to look through his filmography. Like just looking at 2024, he managed to star in the GOP cinematic universe film Reagan as Reagan.

And he played a major role in the body horror film The Substance. Oh, I have not seen The Substance yet. I'm excited to, though. Yeah, I haven't seen either of them yet. I probably need to do them back to back. But yeah, his career, though, is full of stuff like this. Like it's a mix of genre films and mainstream dramas and comedies, as well as biopics. I think he played Jerry Lee Lewis in a biopic at one point.

So yeah, it's kind of hard to pin him down. I think for my own money, when I think of Dennis Quaid films, though, I instantly think of 1985's The Enemy Mine, where it's Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossip Jr., a human and alien on a strange alien world. I was always very captivated by that one.

For me, it's this movie. This is the image that instantly comes to mind is his image from the poster, which is, you know, he looks very handsome. He's got a Joker Grand, a Jack Nicholson Joker Grand, that's maybe digitally enhanced to be a little bit bigger than it should be. And it just really sells his swagger, you know, that look on a space the way it's on the poster really sells who he is in this movie. Yeah, he's having a great time. Yeah.

All right, our other main character that Dennis Quaid's character is going to be inside of in a miniaturized form is the character Jack Putter played by Martin Short, born 1950. Another name that scarcely requires introduction, Martin Short is just a comedy legend.

Yeah, I don't know what, what to say about Martin Short. Uh, so sorry that you had me on your podcast, but, uh, he's just great. I mean, he's, he's been a part of my comedic sensibility since I was very, very young in every role that he's in from three amigos all the way to only merge in the building. He's just fantastic. And he is him. So he delivers every time. And he's a chameleon in appearance.

But his sensibility, his timing, his slapstick is always very, very Martin short specific. I think my favorite role of his has got to be Jiminy Glick, a huge Glick fan. And I was delighted this past year when he reprised the role and did a few more bits of him.

Yeah, I mean, he's one of those actors that when I think of Martin Short, I instantly think of those really, you know, over-the-top, high-energy characters, I think of Gallic, I think of Ed Grimley, of course, his character on Arrested Development, Jack Dorso, you know, and he's great at that. He's great at those like freak out performances in a way that there are very, I feel like there are very few actors I would even compare him to, like maybe, you know, compare him to the likes of, you know, Robin Williams or

or Jim Carrey even, where they can hit that level of intensity, comedic intensity. But then I would also compare him to the other two in that, especially when you look at some recent Martin Short performances, he's a really strong actor. He's really great in these smaller non-comedic roles or stretches as well. And I think you really see that on Only Murders in the Building.

Great TV series, obviously, comedic series. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and he's surrounded by great actors and actresses. But I am most frequently impressed by the smaller moments with his character on that show. Yeah, I think, especially in Only Murders in the Building, I think he does a really good job of representing not just the comedic bits, but the

the building itself and life in the building and what it means to be at that stage of your life in that building and getting on in years and what that means for your relationship with your family. And yeah, that's never, it's not never, it's rarely the focus, but when it is or when it turned to that, it doesn't seem out of character or a stretch for him to be believable in those somber moments.

Yeah. So I don't think we see as much from him along those lines in interspace, but again, certainly in other projects. He was also really good recently in the series The Morning Show. He had a small part as a disgraced director named Dick Lundy. And the name sounds like a Martin Short character, but it's like a really serious, like creepy kind of character, like charismatic, charming, sexual predator, sort of a guy.

Wow. Going back to comparing him with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey. I almost called him James Carrey. Jim Carrey, I think, you know, it's James now. He's back in Sonic. He's got that's right. That's right. I think he.

The roles, the characters that he creates, and I think this movie is a great example. You can't imagine anybody else being these characters, and that's true of Robin Williams and James Carey. You can't imagine somebody else doing the mask or Ace Ventura, you know?

I was reading somewhere, I don't know if this is true or not, but early versions of this movie were pitched as Michael J. Fox enters the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think it's a good one-two to show the difference in those characters in the movie.

Taking that literally, what a different experience that would have been, you know what I mean? And even assuming in that scenario that Michael J. Fox would be playing the Martin Short role, even if the miniaturization were reversed, it would have been a completely different read, completely different character. No shade on Michael J. Fox, of course, he's brilliant, but it would have hit completely differently than a completely different kind of movie. Yeah, I agree. Absolutely.

are I get into the rest of the cast here we have Meg Ryan playing Lydia Maxwell Meg Ryan born 1961 another huge name that I think most everyone's familiar with mostly known for I guess her biggest successes were a handful of just highly successful rom-coms of the eighties and nineties

89s when Harry Met Sally, 93s sleepless in Seattle, 98s, you've got mail. So pretty, pretty big deal. She's been in other things for sure. She was in 1983's Amityville 3D, for example, the one with the claw busting out of the VHS cover. Also in Top Gun, she plays Goose's wife. I think, kind of feel like this is a Top Gun episode, Rob. I'm going to do my best to turn this into a Top Gun episode.

Yeah, but again, yeah, she's great in this. We'll get into it. It's an interesting role. There is an interesting love triangle in this picture that I was totally lost on me as a kid, but watching it as a grown up is just it's deeply weird. It's strange that they ever even went for all of this. Even with all the restraint they show with it, it's a strange love triangle. Yeah.

but uh... that she's great she has great chemistry with everyone included in a squade who wish you would end up marrying after this picture that's right that's right

And spoiler, she marries his character at the end of this movie. So I got, I got a lot to say about that. That guest list is wild. Yes. Yes. It feels like a rap party. Have a look. All right. Now getting into the many, many villains of this picture, we'll start with the lead villain that we eventually are introduced to. And that is Victor Scrimshaw played by Kevin McCarthy.

who lived 1914 through 2010. American actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance in the 1952 adaptation of Death of a Salesman, but I think known to many out there for his just wonderful paranoid performance in 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original black and white one.

Also, perhaps known to many of you for his role in 89's UHF, I assume, I don't remember who he played in UHF. I'm assuming it was a villain, like a TV studio villain of some sort. Yeah, I don't recall. Maybe we'll do UHF next time, Rob. That's such a great movie that it's been way too long since I've seen.

Yeah. Clearly, though, Kevin McCarthy was a favorite of Joe Dante's because some of his other credits include The Howling, The Burbs, Piranha. He also pops up in 1991's Eve of Destruction. That's one that I never saw, but saw the trailers for all the time. It has like a killer lady terminator in it.

I remember him most specifically from the distinguished gentleman, the Eddie Murphy movie from 1992, where great premise Eddie Murphy runs for Congress using, he has the same name as a deceased Congress person, and uses the fact that nobody knows whether the Congressman died or not to get elected.

But I have never heard of this movie. Amazing premise. It's a pretty fun movie. It's part of that Eddie Murphy era with Boomerang in the early 90s, but another great movie. But Kevin McCarthy plays a

seasoned congressperson who knows the grift very well kind of takes uh... eddy murphy under his wing and and shows him how to how to grift in a in the right way which is to say the political way all right that sounds pretty fun after really slimy guy mccarthy plays him really well yeah he's he's really good at playing slimy villain

All right, other villains include his kind of partner in crime here is Dr. Margaret Kanker, Kanker, played by Fiona Lewis, born 1946, British actress, who we've discussed on the show before because she was in 1972's Dr. Fives Rises Again, starring Vincent Price, and her other credits include 67's The Fearless Vampire Killers, 73's Blue Blood with Oliver Reed, the 1974 Dracula starring Jack Palance,

75, Listomania, 77, Tintoria, Killer Shark, 78's The Fury, and 83's Strange Invaders. This was her last film role before her retirement.

I wasn't familiar with her, but I felt like I was. She looked so familiar. Her performance was so familiar to me, but I could not place it. Even through an IMDB, I couldn't remember what she stood out to me from, but fantastic role, fantastic performance, and just something, it's gonna nag me until the day I die, what I remember it from.

All right, the next villain, oh, this is one of the big ones, if not the biggest. And this is the one I think everyone remembers. This is Mr. Igo, played by, oh, they always intimidating Vernon Wells. Born in 1945, Australian actor, best known for playing heavies for that signature mug of his, and he's played some really iconic ones.

He's, he's bad news. He's, he's just in this movie in particular, the most fun kind of bad news, but, but menacing without. All right, there are a few, uh, tells that he had like really specific tells through the movie, but most of it is just the aura that he brings to the screen. He's, he's a menace. He's one to watch out for.

Yeah, and as we'll discuss, like his character is probably one of the better sort of Terminator-esque villains, like a spin on Terminator without going too hard on the Terminator-ness, you know? Like he's not really a cyborg, but he's got like this cool prosthetic hand. And I was always like, all in an unprosthetic hand villains at this age when I was a kid, you know? And this guy's got all sorts of cool gadgets.

He does feel like more of a little stinker in his actual actions than he is a Terminator that will end your life, even though that's always the threat whenever he's around.

Yeah, but he'll also just pop a clown's balloon for no reason except that he hates fun. So yeah, Wells Vernon Wells, he had some great roles. He played Wes, that's the Mohawk guy in 81's The Road Warrior. He was the Lord General in 85's Weird Science. Oh, and then a big one. He's been it the guy with the mustache and commando. Amazing. He's the one that he kills last because he likes him the most. I can never remember how that was. That's right.

uh... but yet his hostel young t.v. credits go back to the mid seventies and he's one of these guys that remains highly active in genre pictures you got like you know like three dozen upcoming projects that sort of cheese

so he's great but then we have we're not done with the villains we also have one more and it's another very memorable one and it is the cowboy played by robert piccardo born fifty three uh... frequently cast by joe donta in a variety of roles he gets to play a bad guy here though with plenty of comedic elements and i just have to say an accident of unknown origin i have no idea what they were going for here uh... it uh... i i think it's inoffensive because i have no idea like

what part of the globe it's supposed to be. I always thought he was maybe supposed to be Russian, but I don't know. I saw some write-ups online where people make arguments for other corners of the world.

You know, you're going to get mad at me, Rob, but this is exactly like the bad guy, MIG fighters and Top Gun, where they're from somewhere else. They're not going to tell you what country they're from because they don't want to get that country upset, but they're just kind of other, you know? I think that in Robert's case,

This accent is either super offensive or engineered to be as inoffensive as possible because it could not be real and could not harken to any specific existing accent. Yeah. And then on top of that, he has this old Hollywood cowboy persona that he has completely taken on. So he's always one of the cowboy boots, often the other bells and whistles as well. It's a fun and perplexing villain.

He's I kept having to remind myself that he was a villain. He doesn't seem villainous. Most of his scenes are pretty silly. And I keep I kept having to remind myself what he was there to do. Yes. And why they needed to stop him.

Yeah, he is. The plot gets fairly complex, but basically he represents a buyer for stolen technology. We don't know exactly who he's representing, but he's the the bag man, right? He was the guy with the money. Who's just going to go out and dance when he's in town?

Yeah, he's also going to party. He's up to sleep with any of the leads of the picture. It doesn't matter to him. But yeah, he doesn't really do anything bad. I don't think he tries to kill anybody, right? No, he's a pretty silly guy. Just good at his job, I guess. We don't really see that. But we're told that he's good at his job. And he seems pretty confident. All things considered, he's a pretty confident guy who

knows himself, knows what he likes, and pursues it. Yeah. Well, Pagardo is a familiar face, I think, to film and TV viewers in general, because on the TV front, he was on the Wonder Years, or he has some roles on the Wonder Years, I don't think it was main cast. He was on China Beach, Star Trek Voyager, of course, and Stargate. And then films, you know, we have The Howling, we all total recall, he was Johnny Cab in 1990.

And he's also part of the cast of 2016's Coen Brothers, the Coen Brothers film, Hail Caesar. But that has everybody in it, so I don't know that we really need to single him out for that. But yeah, he's always a terrific presence. Fun act. Yeah, I'm a big fan of his from Star Trek, and total recall, of course, probably my favorite movie of all time, but a role that was created for him, the Johnny Cab,

I believe was molded in his image before he was even signed on to the project. They wanted him to be the Johnny Cab that badly. You take Johnny Cab out of that picture. The whole thing falls apart. It really is the glue.

All right, and then the final main character, supporting character, I guess really, I'll mention is Wendy Shawl, who plays a character named Wendy. This is Jack's co-worker at the grocery. Born 1954, I'm mentioning her mainly because she was in creature from 85, an alien knockoff that

Joe and I discussed on Weird House Cinema here. She did a lot of TV, but her later film credits include, oh, 1987's Munchies. It's a Gremlins knockoff, a Gremlins movie. You got batteries not included, 89's the Berbs. And she did a lot of TV as well, X-Files, 6 feet under, Star Trek Voyager. And she's also done a lot of voice acting for a family guy in American Dad.

Great job here, too, being she does a lot with a little. Doesn't have a ton of springtime, but you really get a vibe of exactly who she is from very few lines and just kind of her presence and reaction to things. Yeah.

All right, now on the effects end of things, this was a big industrial light and magic special effects movie. So it involved just an army of talented professionals and it won an Oscar in 1988 for best special effects, beating out predator. So predator versus interspace, interspace wins clearly. So yeah, an army of people involved here.

It's no surprise. This is a really well done movie effects-wise in that you don't notice half of the effects that are happening. They're so organic, particularly for me. Anytime he's inside the body or we're seeing inside the body, I'm not even clocking that as an effect most of the time. There are a few set pieces inside of the body that are

Tremendous and and we got to talk about those but for the most part you just kind of believe that he's in this inside a body and that he's on the other side of of an ear or an eye and you know you don't you don't clock the amount of work or I don't clock the amount of work that's going into creating an effect like that.

Yeah, and I thought the effects held up really well. This was not a film where I felt like I saw any wires, any seams, you know, it all holds up extremely well. So, you know, well-deserving of that Oscar. Dennis Muren was the visual effects supervisor for ILM. And I'll also mention in passing that Rob Botin

Born 1959, a special makeup effects designer and creator on this picture. He was involved in a lot of squirmy and drippy, special effects pictures, the likes of squirm, the howling, the thing, Robocop, and Total Recall. So he made the worm face.

Yeah, he was involved in the worm face. I didn't get a chance to look up exactly what he did on this picture, but I highly suspect that it is the morphing, the face morphing sitting that we'll get into because that's one of those that is, it's not grotesque. Unless you stop and really look at it and then you start, really, oh, this is grotesque.

There's one that there are two big morph scenes that I have in mind, and one of them is a full blown. You can see that that is an effect set piece. Oh, that's the Remorph, I think. Yes, yes. The full head goes on for a long time, but

Just there are scenes with Martin Short's mouthwork, where it's just his mouth, and it's Martin Short. It's not a prosthetic. It's not, you know, a stand-in dummy head, where it's just remarkable how believable an effect like that is.

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All right. And then finally, the music, it's a Jerry Goldsmith score. They live in 1929 through 2004. Film, music legend, his other scores of course include the likes of Gremlins and Alien from 1979. Amazing. And great, great stuff here. I think even right from the jump, the synth and the opening credits is incredible.

Let's get into those opening credits because this, I did remember the opening credits from, because this one really blew my mind as a kid because you go into Inner Space, you're expecting all of that, you know, the beautiful inner wonders of a micro world. And that is where we are, but as we zoom out, we realize we've just been inside cocktail ice for the whole opening of the credits.

Yeah, it's a tremendous effect. I think it's really, really well done. And not really a trick either, because it shows you the molecular level of what a glass of ice would be. You're kind of entranced by the pre-science of it all.

And we realize that this cocktail ice is that some sort of a party, some sort of a formal get-together of military test pilots. There's cake, there are models of planes, there are a bunch of very top-gun-esque test pilot dudes. And then into the fray enters Lieutenant Tuck Pendleton. This is our main character. And he is, again, already completely wasted.

A big embarrassing scene follows where he falls through a table. He gets into a fight with the other flyboys in the kitchen. Clearly, he has a number of monkeys on his back here. Yeah. The one thing that stood out to me during this sequence is the fight choreography inside the kitchen. This is another thing. Like it didn't need to be a well choreographed fight, but it actually is well blocked. It's tight. There is interesting action happening here. It could just be

This drunk guy pushes off a couple of guys, gets subdued and Lydia takes him home, but it's more than that. It's an actual interesting action sequence that doesn't really have a lot of business in this movie. And you see that happening a few more times throughout the film.

Yeah, it's like the stunt team knew they weren't going to have many fistic off scene. So they were going to really sell them when they had them. So we also see Lydia Maxwell. This is Meg Ryan's character. She is his girlfriend, I believe, but she's also a reporter. I don't know if she is here as a reporter or as his girlfriend, but she kind of serves in both capacities. Yeah, it seems like there's an estrangement here. So I think it's a former girlfriend. I'm not sure how

recent the formerness is whether it's a fresh breakup or an on again off again relationship but this embarrassment her responsibility for him from this embarrassment maybe that's just a gesture of kindness to everybody else in the room of being I'm the one who can get him out of this situation or more of a responsibility of this is my date and I need to get him out of here

There's definitely a strong connection between the two and tuck. We see in the next scene kind of wishes that it were more.

Yeah, so she drags Todd back to his pad and this is, you know, is you're figuring out who these characters are. It becomes really apparent that this is his place. This is not their place because they're photos of SR-71 blackbirds on the walls. There's also all this bunny memorabilia that's going to make a lot more sense here in a little bit. There's a Santa Claus on the desk. So, you know, holiday movie confirmed or is this guy's pad just so sloppy that there's a Santa up year round?

Yeah, yeah. And right in the middle of the apartment on the table, huge 1980s robotic arm and anybody who was alive during the 80s knows exactly what this robot arm is. It's got one hinge and it's got a pincher as its hand. It's meant to pinch things, pick them up, move them somewhere else and release the pinch. Here he's got it built to pick up a bottle of booze, turn it over to pour it into a glass,

He does it poorly. Or whoever's controlling this robot does it poorly. Obviously meant to convey that Tuck's doing a bad job of it, probably because he's wasted. But somebody on this team is really good at articulating a robot, an 80s robot arm, because you see it happen a few more times throughout the movie. And it's done very elegantly every other time. Now, would this have been before or after the NES arm that played the little spin-top game?

Oh, so this would have been after the robotic operating buddy, Rob, for the Nintendo Entertainment System, where it's a similar thing. You had to use the controller to

make the robot pick up a spinning gyro and drop it onto either a red button or a blue button, which would affect the level on the screen that you were trying to play and allow your guy to pass through. A terrible game, terrible concept. But I think similar idea of, hey, we're supposed to be a robotic society at this point. We'd better start acting like it and developing all of these things that were just clunky executions of what a robotic society would do.

Yeah, so that energy is very strong in this picture, for sure. So they get settled in for the evening, and more or less we're picking up the next morning, because that's when Cabby Dick Miller frequently mentioned actor on Weird House Cinema because he pops up in everything. I think he has popped up in more films than any other actor.

that we've covered here on the show. But he's there as a cabbie to pick Lydia up in the morning. She is trying to sneak out, leave a note, and leave Tuck behind forever. And we get this, you know, comedic, but very, very hunky scene where Tuck comes out wearing only a towel. And he's going to try and talk her out of leaving. The towel gets stuck in the door.

Uh, cab rides rides off, towel goes with the cab, uh, full backside exposed. Um, yeah. So there's, there's a lot more beefcake in the picture than I remember. Yeah. It's, it's a really, really hunky scene. A lot of hunks in this movie, a lot of hunky activity. Um, and even Martin Short gets to participate in, and being a hunk a little bit later. Uh, one thing I think it's, it's important to point out here is that Lydia did try to leave the night before and a drunk tuck blocked her exit.

So, big red flag there. Does it casually, which shows, again, what a lathario this guy is and maybe gives a little bit of insight into his character. But he, either for concern for his well-being or because he is such a wooer, plays the old-timey song Cupid for Lydia, which I guess is their song.

that convinces her maybe to stay the night. I don't know that that's what does it, but to your point, we see her leaving the next morning and trying to get away for good. So at least satisfied what Tuck was trying to get at that night. But the song Cupid comes back into play a little bit later. Yes, that one will be important.

Now at this point we switch over to our other main character because here we have Jack Putter, played by Martin Short, in to see his doctor. And this is some pretty fun character work with the guy playing the doctor's William Schallert, who lived in 1922 through 2016. He did a lot of TV shows. But basically we catch on pretty quickly that Putter is a hypochondriac.

that's coming in all the time. It's clearly dealing with a lot of very serious anxiety issues regarding his work. And he starts telling the story about what this nightmare he keeps having that he's very concerned about in which he is hideously overcharging this woman at the checkout register at the grocery. Yeah, and the doctor's prognosis or prescription to this grocery store clerk

is you should simply go on a vacation. You should simply go on a lavish vacation, which how times have changed really that that's just that's the that's the direction. Yeah, this guy's having a mental health crisis. Like at this point, like he's he he is having a very hard time and just like here's a prescription for a trip to Mexico. Right. You can probably afford it.

All right, so at this point, OK, the main pieces are on the table concerning our protagonists. But then we've got to get into the real plot. How are we going to get miniaturization involved here? So we pick up with Silicon Valley dudes stuck in traffic, discussing a project. We have one of the guys from the Top Gun Academy graduation thing earlier.

and it's if they're he's like well who have you hired to pilot this prototype or whatever and I go we got tuck Pendleton we hear he's great and this dude's like that doesn't sound too great for me to me tuck Pendleton not a great get for whatever you do if we're doing here

And then we kind of like fast forward a bit. And then here's Tuck Pendleton getting ready to jump into the, we don't know yet. It's going to be a pod of some kind, but he's getting himself amped up with slaps to the face, as well as with a fair amount of inappropriate coworker flirting.

Yeah, it's really strange the way that he walks in, I believe, one of the scientists or tech workers kisses him on the cheek. He doubles back and does a full-blown mouth kiss with her, just a real, again, Lefario level of swagger coming into this test pilot job.

You know, while the Silicon Valley dudes were arguing in the car, he was defending Tuck as being somebody who did his homework and can do the job. And you see that. Like, that's the duality that we get with him is that he is a mess in every other realm of his life, but he's a good test pilot. He might be a drunk test pilot, but he's a good test pilot. And he reinforces that kind of on his walk in.

And once he gets into mind, he is down to business. He knows exactly the right questions to ask the right things to check. He's the voice of authority. And it becomes clear pretty quickly that what they're about to do is he's going to get in this pod that is pretty really cool looking. It looks like a cross between a submarine and a, like a, some sort of space ship and they're going to miniaturize him and inject him into a rabbit. Now, one would assume that this is, um,

there have been multiple phases before this, that they have test, you know, unmanned miniaturization, that they have tested manned miniaturization, and that they've also injected miniaturized objects into test animals, and that now we're only finally getting to the point where they're gonna send in a human being into a rabbit. But who knows, maybe they're just really having to push this project along, and this is just test number one, I don't know.

Yeah, and this is where we learned the reason that rabbits were so prominent in his apartment. And I get it, but all the rabbit stuff at his apartment was like a fan of rabbits, not somebody who's studying rabbits intensely. It's somebody who like Bugs Bunny is in there and things like that. And so this guy likes rabbits a lot more than he really needs to to perform his scientific role of being inside of a rabbit. Yes. He's researching at the wrong scale, I think.

Now, I do really love these scenes where he's getting into the cockpit of the pod. I feel like this is all really well done. It has a great textured and believable NASA feel to it, you know?

Yeah, it's a very busy, very 80s, in the sense that it feels cramped. There's so much machinery on top of itself. And the space is not, you know, a designer friendly lab, which I think you'll see a contrast to that later on in the movie. But here it just seems like

These guys are scientists, they're bleeding edge, R&D. And then once you see the space that the pot is in, it's mylar city in the best way. There's that gold NASA mylar wrapping the entire room. All of the reflections off of that mylar are heightening the effect. It's really, really perfect.

Yeah, you get a, and then inside and outside, you have like all these pixelated computer screens, video feeds. Um, I feel like there are more robot arms, whatever, robot arms are up to. Uh, so it, yeah, it all feels very real. Uh, love the look of all of this. And I feel like it's age really well in a way that, that's something that non analog wouldn't have, you know, if it was all touch screens and, you know, next generation stuff.

Yeah, there's a little bit of what you could arguably say is a hokier design tactic or effects tactic that has light superimposed on the pod while it's being miniaturized. It looks a little bit

inauthentic compared to all of the other effects work that's going on. But again, it works. It's in that mylar space. It's supposed to be crackling and electrifying, similar to how the DeLorean does right before it's about to jump through time. And so it works. It's just a little bit lower five than some of the other stuff we see.

And they seem to pull it off. They spin the thing around in a centrifuge. They shrink it down to size. Now the pod is this tiny spec inside of a syringe. They use a magnification effect to take a look at it. The lead doctor does. But you know that something is going to shake things up. And that takes the form of an attack by gas mask wearing goons. They come in with an acid key card to like short out the lock. And they're clearly trying to take over the operation.

Yeah, the thing I love about this takeover is that they got these gas masks, but they're not flooding the space with gas. They're using a fire extinguisher type device to point the gas at somebody, shoot a blast of gas directly at them so that only that person is knocked out by it, which is genius. Like, yeah, that's how gas warfare would be, should be. I am not advocating for gas warfare.

But it didn't work. That's how you would do it. They have a pretty nonviolent approach. Like they're clearly trying to cut down on casualties, though they do punch a few people, which seems uncalled for if you have those great gas cannons on hand, but still they quickly take over things. And this is where we first see Fiona Lewis's Dr. Kanker taking control of the computers there.

That's right. Clearly the bad guys have invaded this space. But it did occur to me at this moment. Were the other guys the good guys? I don't know what the purpose of this project was. They don't really state what they're going to do after they've successfully completed the rabbit project.

But we're just supposed to assume that their intentions were good. These guys' intentions were bad. And I think, you know, I mentioned that Gremlins was trying to tell you a message and this movie is not. Maybe this movie is trying to tell you a message about early Silicon Valley tech espionage and that it's really just bad guys versus bad guys. And it's a question of which one are you rooting for?

I did have a fun time trying to piece together the intended end point for this research and we can kind of feel it out a little bit by seeing the capabilities of the pod. So the pod allows the pilot to ultimately see and hear through the host

and or communicate with them, though I guess that that's not necessary, and then also deliver a powerful electromagnetic pulse that can like destroy electronics within a short-term radius. And so it seemed to me I was like, okay, I can imagine that this is building up maybe to having a human pilot a rat into a sensitive environment and then set off that pulse, or of course, ultimately to some extent like, you know,

planting a spy inside of a human being and potentially doing that electromagnetic pulse elsewhere. But then we see other capabilities that shake things up even more, which we'll get to later. Yeah, I think it's probably says more about me than it does about the movie, but every application of this technology I could think of was a really dark and depressing one that used another living being as a vessel to achieve something.

via a smaller human being inside of that vessel that might be small enough to escape whatever situation it's putting the larger vessel into. Yeah. I mean, they kind of they definitely allude to these espionage applications, but they never even once hint at a medical application. Not directly. I mean, there are a couple of jokes, but for the most part, yeah, the idea that you would have a little submarine inside a person is not even explored as a medical breakthrough here.

Well, Tuck casually turns putter into, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but he casually turns it into like a superhuman, just because it's convenient for that scene. So the technology is very easy to do once you're in there, apparently. Yeah, once you're inside at that scale, you can do anything you want, change faces up, cure diseases, I guess, but also make computers explode. And that seems to be the prime focus here.

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All right, so what happens, OK? So we have the miniaturized sub. It's in a syringe. They were going to inject it into the rabbit. But then all hell breaks loose. The doctor, the main doctor here, escapes with the syringe. And then our villain, Dr. Kanker, calls for Mr. Igo to chase after him. So we get this big carbite chase, a number of big chase scenes that take place in the picture. It all heads to the mall. And hey, that is where Jack is trying to book a relaxing vacation.

And I think, you know, where all this is going to come together. Yeah. And I just got to say, this car chase on the freeway, again, way more elaborate, way more action packed, way more elegant than it needs to be. It could have been a quick shot that gets you to the mall, but it's really fun. And there are convertibles. There are, this is actually happening on a busy freeway. It's really, really exciting.

Yeah, and then, yeah, we get to the mall, Mr. Igoes, he uses the finger gun, which I remember just thinking it was super cool when I was a kid. This crazy robot hand of his that he can make the finger guns and then actually fire the finger gun.

Yeah, it's very inspector gagity in the way that the tip of the finger kind of comes off to reveal the gun. But I mean, aside from that, like malls, this mall in particular, this is the height of malls in 1989. You get not just a really busy, active, vibrant mall. You get one that's got mascots walking around, giving away or selling balloons. A lot of strange things happening.

for the scientists and Mr. I go to disrupt from this chase. They're really knocking a lot of people out of the way, ruining a lot of these mascots days. One of the mascots is a penguin who's giving away balloons to a pair of nuns, which is a very, very funny visual throwaway gag.

Yeah, this whole sequence feels very jodante, like the bit where the doctor with the syringe, he ends up injecting Martin Short in the buttock and then falls into the arms of three or four different mascots and dies. And we get that hazy POV of him looking up at the mascots looming over him. Yeah, fantastic. So at this point, we have miniaturized Pendleton.

tuck inside of full-sized Jack Martin Short. And that, and we're off to the races. Like this is the, this is the plot. It's a good, we're going to get into this whole situation of how does Pendleton make Jack aware of his presence inside him? What kind of gadgets are going to allow that to happen? And then how are they going to figure out, you know, what sort of plot is going on and how they're going to maneuver their way out of it?

Yeah, I, you know, throughout this whole, basically from this point on, I have a tough time reconciling how big tuck and the pot are supposed to be inside of the syringe and inside of Martin George or putters body that

There are points at which the action is high and the pod is shaking around. So it's like, oh, so you must be big enough to be like moving to be moved along by the motions of the body. But then there are points where Tuck is so, so, so small that he can get through. He's at the atomic level.

to where he wouldn't be impacted by these other things. And this is me trying to apply my people outside, trying to unsuspend my disbelief and pick it apart. But they do lean on, he's just small enough, okay? They lean on you to just accept that fact and just go along for the ride, which I'm happy to do.

The pod is as small or as large as the plot requires it to be. Can it be grabbed with a pair of tweezers? Yes. Can it cut its way through the wall of an artery without causing any kind of trouble inside the body? Absolutely. Sorry.

All right, so at this point, we're going to proceed with like a little less attention to every little detail here. But we want to talk certainly in broad strokes about like the central piece of technology here, the pod. I definitely want to talk about the love triangle and the big finale and any other moments that stand out to us. But yeah, the big

The big thing about the pod, and this was something that I loved as a kid, is that we get this first contact between Tuck Pendleton and Jack, where you can use... Well, first of all, he uses a device. He fires a harpoon into the inside of his eye so that he can see out of his eyes, see what Jack sees.

And then later, he also uses some sort of a harpoon type device inside of his ear so that he can hear him as well. And then at that point, like,

Tuck Pendleton is just completely jacked into the whole system. He can do all sorts of things, as we'll see. He can adjust his adrenaline and then ultimately change his face. In addition to the electromagnetic pulse thing, shifting his face into the face of another person, that one really upped the ante here. It's like, wow, he can do anything in there.

that one is more okay i i feel like the the effects of

hooking into the eye looked painful. And that's a effect success as far as I'm concerned. Same with the ear, but those all seem like I can wrap my head around those. And then yeah, he changes his face, which it's like, I feel like you need outside pieces to do that. You're not just rearranging cells at that point. You're trying to take on an appearance and give a hair color and a hair consistency that he doesn't. Or I guess he had his original hair.

or he had Jack's hair still. But it just seemed like a huge leap of technology to be able to do that. And all of a sudden, Tuck knows how to do this. This is his first voyage, too, or maybe not. Was it his first

Well, he was planning for rabbits. So he should, if anything, he should be okay, but not particularly experienced with shifting rabbit faces around it, but a full blown Martin short face. That seems like a lot. Yeah, he should have been able to turn the rabbit into the cowboy, but not jack putter into the cowboy.

Yeah, because that's a very expressive face to change into another very expressive face. You need something a little plainer, I think, for your first big hurrah. Exactly, exactly. I think, you know, I blame this movie as a child for my impression that I still have today, where my instinct is that there's a lot of empty space in the human body. And you can travel between the organs with

You know, the same way that you're traveling between planets and the solar system, but there's just a lot of dead space there, which is not true. Anybody who's seen a diagram of what's going on inside a human body knows how just packed together, absolutely everything is. But my child mind saw the human body as spacious, well lit, lots of areas between your vital organs that you could just kind of hang out in and fly between.

Yeah, he's in her space, not in her goop. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. And the title, yeah, supports that, backs that up. I will say that I don't know how big or small this pod is. I'm ready to move away from that gripe, but he's able to get around that body real fast. Oh, yeah. Like he starts off in the buttock and is almost immediately at the optic nerve.

Maybe they cut something, but maybe he also, he is just like firing through those blood vessels. Yeah, he gets into blood vessels and somehow is able to, because it seems like a blood vessel is like a highway. Like the vessel goes to one part of your body and maybe has some off ramps on the way there, but you don't have full agency of where else to go in the body unless you careen out of that blood vessel, which you're going to start causing damage to your host at that point.

Yeah, he does make the host uncomfortable at times. There's some related symptoms. I'm shocked that Martin Short did not display any sort of existential. I mean, he had some existential dread at the beginning before he realized that there was a pod inside of him.

To me, that would have just heightened the existential dread that there's now something of actual thing inside of me that's talking to me and manipulating my body without me being able to stop it if I wanted to. Now some important plot stuff that we should mention too is that eventually, okay, well, first of all, character-wise,

Jack and Pendleton, Jack and Tuck, they come together. They end up bonding over things. It becomes a very close relationship, not only because one is literally inside of the other, but they're the only people who can talk to each other. They have this very intimate relationship, which I think the movie does a good job with, building this relationship between the two.

And then, of course, is ultimately going to introduce Meg Ryan's character Lydia. And then this is where we're going to end up with this love triangle, which I have to say is one of the stranger love triangles I've ever seen. Because again, we have Jack in large. We have Tuck in small. She is Tuck's ex. Tuck ends up essentially being like the romance whisper.

For Jack helping him to pursue his ex at the same time like he still has feelings for Lydia and they and also Lydia I'm sorry also Jack and Tuck end up kind of bunting butting heads over this as well It's it's bizarre and and and and at the same time Was completely lost on me as a kid, but it has to be one of the stranger love triangles. I've ever seen in a picture

Yeah, it's tricky because you don't really get a clear picture of what Jack's stakes are. And emotionally, and I mean, you get the idea of his physical stakes, but you don't know he's obviously attracted to Lydia, but

You he's characterized as somebody who does not need a lot of convincing to help tuck out and sure that's motivated by the fact that tuck is in his body and he and tuck needs him and maybe that is something that Jack wants as well as somebody to need him or need his help.

But he's pretty willing, both motivated by fear of the spies catching up to him, trying to get tuck out of him their way, which is going to be ugly, trying to find a better way to do that. But also trying to help him, like you say romantically, convince Lydia to trust him and to trust that tuck needs her help as well. It's really interesting and kind of puts

Jack in the middle in a way that supports kind of his warming, warming is not the right word, but the fact that people push him around on a regular basis. He's kind of being moved around as well, emotionally and not just physically the way that Tuck is doing to him with the pod. But I do think we've got a ticking clock here that we didn't speak about, which is Tuck's oxygen is running out. Oh, yes. Yes. That's the plot element.

Tuck's out, he's eventually going to die in there if he doesn't get out. Right. So you've got ticking clock A, which is there's these guys on your tail that you don't want them to catch you because they're happy to kill Jack to get tuck out of them if they need to.

B, if you want Tuck to succeed at, again, whatever he's doing, you need to get back to the good lab, quote unquote, good lab before Tuck's oxygen runs out and it gets real close. Um, and then you somehow have to save Tuck and Lydia's relationship. That's the seed ticking clock.

And we also learned that there are like two little chips that are involved in the miniaturization process. There are other groups out there who have been working on miniaturization, and they can miniaturize things. But apparently, relargifying things is the hard part, and that's where you need both chips, the chip that is out here in the full-sized world, and the chip that is now on that pod inside of Jack's body. And so that's what the bad guys want. They need to get that chip off of that pod. And as we'll learn, they'll do anything

in their power to do so. So that's where Robert Piccardo comes in as the cowboy, the agent employed to retrieve one of the chips. And their plan is to

appropriate the Cowboys face onto Jack's face and then infiltrate the meeting with scrimshaw to get that chip to take back to the quote unquote good lab right so that they can re-enlarge tuck and save him.

Right. But then at the same time, they've already had some run ins with the good lab where they've overheard the good scientist saying, you know, it's actually easier if we just let him die inside of Jack's body because nobody can get to that thing. It's miniaturized. Just let it go. You know, he'll get, I guess, you know, excreted one way or another from Jack's body and it'll just be lost to time and maybe that's easier. Yeah. I got to say, all things being equal, taking

humanity out of the equation altogether, which is what these scientists are doing. That's not a bad case. Yeah. And especially considering what Mr. Scrimshaw wants. We have a great later. So Jack gets abducted at least twice, I feel. Like he's constantly escaping and re-escaping and getting caught. There's one scene where Mr. Scrimshaw gets this great villain monologue about like

Nuclear weapons aren't the future, spaces in the future, it's miniaturization, so great villain monologue there. But then we get, well, we also get time and time again, a Pendleton tuck assisted escape by Jack. So Jack's not necessarily, he doesn't realize when he's been trapped or see the light of the escape route, but that's where tuck comes in. Tuck has this great gut instinct where he's like, okay, punch now, kick now.

jump out of the moving vehicle now. And so the movie stays in constant motion.

Yeah, Jack gets a lot of heroic stunt opportunities to really look like the hero, you know? And it's a lot of it's driven by Tuck, but he's the one doing it. It's not that Tuck's making his body move, Tuck's just guiding him through what to do. And that's kind of a dumbo feather to Jack, where he has the confidence to actually execute on a lot of those things, and he's successful at it.

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So at this point, I don't know which thread to follow. We have more of the love triangle plot that is propelling Jack ever closer to a sexual encounter with Lydia, it would seem. Though again, this is a PG film. So we're dealing in very broad strokes here and a lot is implied.

And then we have the whole scheme to figure out what cowboy is up to, to seduce cowboy and then take advantage of him. And then the morphing of the face, the infiltration of the baddies. And this is, of course, going to involve another round of chasing and escaping and everyone going after those chips.

Yeah, I think it, you know, just a quickly top line, the cowboy thread. I think they realized or they learned that the cowboy goes to a club in Ferno, whenever he's in town, because he loves to go dancing and meet women. So they go to club in Ferno as well. That's where Jack runs into Wendy from the grocery store. Wendy sees a new bad boy side of Jack that that piques her interest. But the long story short there is that

Lydia is able to seduce the cowboy, bring him back to the hotel. That's where they're able to knock him out and appropriate his face to go to the meeting with Scrimshaw. That disguise starts to fall apart in the middle of that meeting. I think that the cowboy has a gold tooth cap.

that falls out of fake cowboy's mouth, which tips scrimshaw off, gets all of the bad guys up in arms to capture Jack, which there's a great line in lieu of champagne. How about some real pain, propane?

I had to give it a lot of flowers for going past how about some real pain and add another pain to the line. We get some more inspector gadget shenanigans for Mr. Igo because he pulls out the blowtorch. That's right. A pendant. Or maybe the blowtorch is just always in there as part of his Swiss army hand. But they're going to, they're like, oh, you know, the cowboy is known for his incredible pain tolerance. So let's just get an example of that here.

That's right. And this is where the actual grotesque transformation scene from Cowboy Face back to Jackface happens. It freaks out everybody in the room, Scrimshaw's terrified, and rightly so, because it's a lot.

Yeah, it is, it's very well done because if you slow it down or watch it twice, you're like, oh, yeah, this is, this seems like boating material right here. Like this is the thing, but it is, but it's a, it's blurry and sped up in a very comedic Looney Tunes fashion. And that ultimately, like overwhelms the horrific aspects of it, but it's very well done.

Yeah, yeah. Another thing to point out, they obviously, you know, escape this scenario. Lydia helps them escape. Jack transfers Tuck to Lydia through a French kiss. Yes.

which again, I'm just gonna say, yeah, that works. You can do that first try. While that happens, Tuck is inside Lydia's body, sees that Lydia is pregnant, presumably with his child.

But the thing that gets me is that they then transfer Tuck back to Jack through another French kiss, which is like, I'm just this good at it that we can do this again. And it happened so quickly that it's like, I guess Tuck was just there at the mouth ready to go. Aren't you in this house? French kisses work. French kisses are a complete exchange of all saliva content of the mouth in esophagus, right?

That's what we were warned about when we were younger, yes. But again, the whole, the baby, the pregnancy, like this love triangle is very complex. One might even argue too complex for a picture that is just trying to be a big summertime explosion of special effects, but it's one of his charms that it's all there.

Yeah. And I think it does serve the function of while tuck is in Lydia's body. Jack's not necessarily aware of that yet. And.

He is still acting like a heroic fighter. He's knocking people out. He's doing all of the things that Tuck told him to do. Once he realizes that Tuck's not inside him is inside Lydia, he loses that. He loses that Dumbo feather and the confidence kind of quickly evaporates. Yeah, Dumbo feather. Exactly.

Yeah, so all that's really well executed. But I know that those of you who grew up watching Inner Space are, you've been waiting for us to get to the big showdown. The big showdown is twofold because, so basically they bring captive Jack back to the bad guy lab, which is super sleek and very military.

We'll describe their pod here in a minute. But of course, Lydia is able to take control. She pulls out a handgun. But after they have already injected a new villain into Jack's body, they'll wait at the same time.

Tuck is not in Jack anymore at this point. Tuck is in Lydia, but they inject Mr. Igo inside of just a frightening military combat pod with big claws, an amazing design here. They inject that into him to go after the original pod to get those chips and to kill Tuck.

That's right. This anime lab, it looks like the TV room from Willy Wonka's talking factory. It's just all white and tons of space in contrast to the other lab, which has just stacks of machinery on top of stacks of machinery. But yeah, this this Exo pod, it's a suit. Whereas.

the, you know, tucks in a little chair inside of a small room, it feels like this is a scuba suit that has attachments. It's a lot more menacing. Presumably this guy can whip around more quickly within the body and he is designed to cause damage. That's what the suit is for, you know, so pretty scary. Of course, it's all black compared to the silver white pod that tuck is in.

Yes, frightening. And you've got the one portal. So you can have Mr. Igo's face, like the horrifying mug of his like sneering through it and grinning. Yeah, terrifying pod, enemy pod here, like a fighter pod that they have now injected into Jack, miniaturized and injected. And we get a nice bit from Scrimshaw where he turns to Dr. Kanker and he's like, you know,

It's going to be easier if we just re-enlarge him inside Jack's body afterwards. We never see something like that happen in the show, but just by mentioning the idea, it does bring him about a certain amount of minutes. Yeah, I love that. Again, take the humanity out of it. These are as sound ideas as any other suggestion. At this point, Lydia gets tucked back into Jack with an intentional kiss to get him in.

That's where tuck can help jack fight off mr. I go Lydia also Forces all of the scientists scrimshaw and canker into the miniaturization pod Mm-hmm or into the miniaturization chamber and shrinks them all there's not shrink them all to a microscopic size 50% 50% that's right, which they are for the rest of the movie

Yes. So the big showdown then is twofold. In the world at large, we have Jack and Lydia driving down the highway in San Francisco and then Scrimshaw, miniaturized Scrimshaw and Dr. Kanker, attacked from the back seat.

So they're wrestling them in the front and back seat. Meanwhile, inside of Jack's body, on his esophagus, there is now a battle between the original pod and the new pod between a tuck and Mr. Igo. And this is just a really cool battle. I'm not saying it's like RoboCop, RoboCop 2 level, but it's pretty great.

with lots of gadget arms and cutting of robotic components. Some nice back and forth. Well, and it moves to the stomach for the final blows of the scene. And that is probably my favorite set piece of the entire movie. It's this raging sea of stomach acid at the bottom. Again, a ton of distance from the top of the esophagus where they enter the stomach to where the acid is. And Tuck has to

get Jack's allergies, a Chekhov's gun that was introduced earlier in the movie needs to get him. I forget what he's specifically allergic to, but needs him to activate his allergies to get his stomach acid going.

This is a great set piece for the finale here. The stomach is like this, like you said, there's a lot of space. It's very well lit. That's another thing about the inside of the body. You just go by interspace and fantastic void. It's like a well lit nebula in there, which works. It is interspace and so it should look like some of our most colorful visions of outer space. Whereas in reality, it's like that old saying like a man's best friend,

Outside of a book is a dog and inside of a dog. It's too dark to read. It's very dark inside. Well, and I misspoke. It's not his allergies that he needs to trigger. He stresses Jack out to the point where he gets reflux from. Yes. And that's what causes the turn to which.

The, the fight then leads Mr. I go down into the stomach acid where he is eating up down to a skeleton and I got, I got, I got bones skeleton, which is just a little and the remains the prophetic arm trying to drill through the portal of the original pod. That's right. So good. Great, great villain kill, quality kill here all the way. Yeah. Yeah. So they get back to the good lab. They

can't get tuck out or they can't quickly get tuck out. The oxygen is at zero at this point. They think they've lost all hope. Jack realizes that he's allergic to hairspray, which is the element that was introduced earlier in the movie is given some hairspray sneezes tuck out onto one of the scientist's glasses.

And then they tweezer it, they tweezer it, and they get it back into the chamber. They resize him, they re-enlarge him, and we get our big happy ending, which is, of course, a wedding in true Shakespearean fashion. We end with a lavish wedding, but who's going to be married? Well, we know who's going to be married. It's going to be talking Lydia.

It's Tucker Lydia. Jack is the best man, which again, just met these guys, but they've been through a lot together. So I kind of understand that. What I don't understand is why Wendy is at the wedding. I don't understand why Mr. Wormwood, the boss at the grocery store is at the wedding. What I don't understand is why the doctor who prescribed the vacation for Jack is at the wedding. This is not Jack's wedding.

Yeah, the jerky military guy is there, apparently with his son. The events of this film just brought everyone together into this tight knit community, this tight knit family in ways that are perhaps a little inexplicable. Yeah. And so it seems like a happy ending, but not quite. We see that the cowboy is the limo driver.

And that I believe Scrimshaw and Margaret are inside of the suitcase. Yes. They're being placed into the trunk. So they're driving off on their happy wedding honeymoon drive down a twisty mountain road. And Jack realizes that the job's not done and he needs to help them out.

That's right. Oh, and we also find out that Tuck has the chips. The very coveted dangerous technology chips are his cufflinks. So, so they, they set up a sequel here that of course never happened, but I remember at the time as a kid, I just thought, if you set up a sequel like this, it will happen. It's going to happen. Um, I feel like I spent spent a fair amount of time just assuming interspace to was, was coming right down the pipe and then it was, it was coming up next. Uh, never happened.

I kind of love the and then the adventures continued layer of it. I wish that more franchise films took that under advisement. I think it's okay to say Indiana Jones went on more adventures after this one and that you know what? I don't really need to show you what the last one is or the second to last one is or continue that storyline if I don't want to. Sometimes it's fun to just say and their lives continued to be that exciting. And so I agree with you. I think that there was

This left a door open to a sequel and there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for that. Maybe the, the mid box office return diminished that hope. Uh, but I kind of like it where it is where the job's not done. They're still going to have more fun. This guy's life has been inexplicably changed for and put on a different path that he didn't choose, but he's going to roll with it. You know, he's a different person now. And I kind of really liked that for him.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's great to have to set up these sequels that never happened as long as you told a complete story. You put everything on the table, then I'm fine with just sort of dreaming about what else could have been possible. And this is a film that does leave everything on the table. It busts out all of its tricks. So yeah, I don't feel like they held anything back with Inner Space. They just left that window open to potentially dream up Inner Space too.

Yeah, it's very straight. I mean, it's such a bizarre fever dream of an ending scene where all of the characters from the movie are invited to the wedding of somebody who most of the characters have never met. And then all of the bad guys are also at the wedding in disguise to attack these two characters after the wedding. What are they going to do to tuck? I guess they're going to think, I guess they know about the cufflinks. Yeah. Somebody's going to get miniaturized again. They're going to be shenanigans.

Yeah. Great time. Twist in the night away takes us into the credits. The credits are actually a pretty tight credit roll where you're not, it's not 10 minutes long. It's like a good three to five minutes credits. Twist in's playing the entire time and then you're out. Yeah. And that's interspace. Yeah. Fun, fun time.

Yeah, I really enjoyed revisiting this one. And I feel like it largely held up. Yeah. It was still very entertaining today. The effects were tremendous. Performances were great. You never know exactly what it's going to be like going back to a film from the 1980s, mid-1980s, and see how everything lands. But yeah, this was a fun one. Good pick. Yeah. Yeah. This one, for me,

Like we were saying at the top, it's stitched into my memory of being a certain age because of how much I saw it at that age. And even though I did drop out a significant chunk of it from my memory, a lot of it took me back into that spare bedroom at my grandmother's house, sitting and watching it on a tiny TV. And to that point, it's not just the nostalgia of that viewing. It holds up. It's fun. I'm having the same kind of fun that I was having back then watching it again.

All right, Dave, boys, we begin to lead out here. Let's talk talking tofu for a minute here. In case listeners don't remember from last time, tell us a little bit about what talking tofu is and tell us what has come out recently in the podcast and what's coming out in the future. Sure, yeah. So talking tofu is myself and my co-host slash wife, Becky Streepy, we're both vegans and we

felt like there's not a lot of fun vegan content out there. Some of the stuff that you see about being vegan can be kind of hard-handed in the way that it convinces you of the value and the virtue of adopting a different lifestyle.

Whereas we don't really think about that much on a day-to-day basis. We just have a lot of fun with it. We love food. We love eating food. We love trying new food. We love crusting out on junk food. And so our podcast is a lot of that. It's us trying new things, trying new foods. Usually each episode we'll talk about some takeout or a restaurant that we went to, whether it's in town or on one of our travels, we travel quite a bit. And we'll usually try a new snack on the pod.

And then we'll spend the other 70% of the time talking about whatever BS has happened to us this week, whatever show we watched that week, what movies we're into. We just talked about Wicked at length, which we both saw in the theater and loved it and has a very strong pro animal message unintentionally, I think.

But just a lot of fun. Some of the stuff that we've talked about lately, we just went to Disneyland recently and did a roundup of all the vegan snacks and food you can eat at Disneyland in and around those parks. We traveled to Vegas recently, did a couple of trips to Vegas and a few Vegas episodes. We are traveling this weekend to New York City, probably come out with a New York City roundup.

Um, obviously will not be comprehensive as there are lots of vegan options in New York city, but just kind of a rundown of what we did while we were up there. And again, we're just having fun and keeping it light and showing that it's, it's fun to be vegan. Um, so yeah, that's, that's, that's what we're up to. All right. That's talking to that's T-A-L-K-I-N apostrophe tofu podcast. That's right. So look that up. You can find that wherever you get your episodes.

Yeah. Yeah. We've got to get you on there. Yeah. Anytime. All right. All right. We're going to go and close out this episode, but I'll just remind everyone out there that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about weird films on Weird House cinema. And if you want a full list of the movies we've covered over the years, you can find them on Letterboxed.

Our username there is Weird House. Got a nice list there, so you can just dive in there and see what we've shouted about in the past. As always, thanks to the great JJ Possway for producing and editing the show, stitching everything together, making it sound right. And if you want to reach out to me, to Joe, to JJ, or if you want to reach out to Dave, I'll shoot that on to Dave as well, but you can email us at contact at Stuff2BlowYourMind.com.

Stuffed below your mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no-really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum a failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer though to really no-really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead the really no-really podcast follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

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