Neon Maniacs (1986)

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Next to you'll be swaying so come on, sing along. Welcome to another episode of Horror Movie Night. This week we're watching Neon Maniacs, as picked by Scott, which Brian messaged us in the group chat and just said, so that was sort of a movie. So, and that's the best way I could describe it too.

Scott, what made you pick Neon Maniacs? The cover? I'd never seen it before, and I knew it came out in 86 and it had rubber suit monsters, and that's pretty much all I need to know to pick it for Horror Movie Night. Well, since this is an unfinished movie, according to every website that I read, we needed to bring in some reinforcements to get through this one.

So, we are joined by Mike James of Five Second Films, who you know that we fucking love because we end at the year just praising Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 this year. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us and watching this piece of trash, known as Neon Maniacs. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for having me.

I watched it last night, and I have to be honest with you, I had a great time. I actually, my girlfriend and I actually really liked it. I thought it was fun. So, I made notes and I'm really ready to get into it.

Alright, so the movie kicks off with this weird intro that sounds like a mix of Vincent Price's Thriller speech and the intro to the Haunted Mansion. I can't say enough about the music in this film. I loved the music from the opening title credits. I'm only doing the Smooth Jazz L-ound.

I'm doing the music performance. I love the fans. I mean, it kept on hitting for me. The pedal of the fans was like watching a live action Emmet Otter, where you just have this one really clean cut band, and then you had the Nightmare City rock band.

Yeah. Yeah. That's all the way to the movie. The last third of this movie, where there's no rubber suit monsters, is the best part of the film.

You know what? It feels like watching better off-ted. It absolutely feels like a problem. This is not even really a horror movie.

It's like a romantic comedy. I don't know. It would be like if you try downloading a John Hughes film, The Warriors, and then Extra Online and something went wrong and they all just kind of download it together in one file, that's like with Neon Maniacs. I have a note here where the lead actress laughs way too much at dumb jokes for someone who saw all of her best friends.

What the hell is the killers on the loose? I feel like the movie has a really bad memory of like, who's forgot that all of her friends were murdered in front of her. And then also the movie in general forgot to be a horror. Yeah.

When in time it was like, oh wait a minute, we're supposed to have like scary stuff happening. Sorry about that. So here's the fun thing about this movie. They shot half of it, lost all of their funding for a year, and then continued to film.

But if you look at the closing credits of all the maniacs, most of them were played by two or three different people, because when they shut down the first time, they couldn't get a lot of the original actors back and just had to throw different people into the costumes. So yeah, they did forget what they were making for about a year. That explains why the middle of it is just a rom-com because they were like, we can't pay for rubber suit monsters. Yeah.

So the line that made me laugh probably more than it should have, but there's an actress in this movie who plays the character of Paula, who is way too cute for someone who's never been in another movie, but it's awkward, because she's like 30 playing a 12-year-old throughout the entire movie. Yeah. Yeah. Were there her hat-cut moving?

But the first time you see her, and I don't know why this made me laugh, but the mom's like, what are you doing awake? And she's like, I'm testing out the makeup. And I wrote, what makeup? You've got plastic things in the cave.

I want to love this movie. And I feel like there are some scenes that are just fantastic. But Paula is the only person in this movie that realizes that she's in a horror movie. He's trying to make it monster squad, and everybody else is trying to do better off dead.

So she's fun, though. As dumb as this movie is, her room is fucking tight. Oh, yeah. She's got all sorts of prosthetic heads and stuff.

I was like, man, that room is, I want that room. He's making a documentary. The thing that I kept getting confused about is, are you investigating something? She's like Nancy Drew throughout this movie.

But once again, she forgets. Like, I really feel like I had a story arc if only I could remember one part. Hey, hey, wait a minute. This reminds me of another film that I really liked called Deep Break Party Massacre 3.

It was like, but my investigation. But my investigation, you cannot know how often I make that, I reference that on the show and off the show in my real life. It's unfair to my wife and co-hosts. Yeah, Scott, Scott quotes that movie, I think the most out of the three of us.

And it's great every time. Anytime I make a mistake, Scott hits me with, do you think you're better than me? Because you're a high-end job. That's probably one of the best improv lines.

I just really love tropes. I really love stuff where you're just like, ubiquitous, but you can't exactly put your finger on what movie that is. It's just a thing that's just like, I know that a million movies have done the exact same thing, and I'm not sure exactly where that comes from. You mean like the blowjob decapitation that I've seen thousands of times, but never as lazy as that's one?

I love the world. The decapitation of Dude Bro, it's not quite a decapitation, but if you're going through a big girl's head, see Trumps head actually. It's an opener. Yeah, exactly.

Like I just think there's something really funny about super familiar tropes. Like I think Battle of the Bands and the Third Act is all. You know what band, the metal band, reminded me of, it sounds exactly like sorcery from Rock-t-Ober blood. Oh, I said beef.

They remind me a little bit of like beef in the undeads. Well, so I didn't get beef. I got, what are they called? Oh, I have a note.

Shadow from Near's Evil. They look like Shadow that did the theme for Near's Evil, but they sound like that song sounds like I'm Back by sorcery in Rock-t-Ober blood. But they're described as some bad mothers. Yeah.

Who's the romantic male lead in this is such a pooper. What bothers me about this movie and Hard Rock zombies, and they do this a lot, even Rock-t-O-Luff does this, is I've been to Battle of the Bands, and if you're at a Battle of the Bands, and it's just like a bunch of like metal bands competing, and then jars of clay gets up to play their song, they're not winning. They're not winning. They're not going to be the first one out.

The other part from that that I really loved was the security guard of the basement, because it's like, what are you guarding? Like what sense does that make of like, I love it when there's a random security guard guarding nothing just watching TV. Like makes so much more sense. It's like, this is just a squatter that has a new entertainment.

I think it'd be way funnier just than to show it as is, as opposed to, and cut to a security guard guarding nothing, he's got to be the first to die. All right, trouble's coming. My favorite, like, it was like these four different things happened back to back to back, and it made me laugh so hard, is Paula's doing her like little Nancy Drew investigation, and this cop grabs her, and she gets scared, and she runs, and she's fucking running. For so long, and so far, and the camera just liggers on her running, and I'm like, man, how many takes the day after two of this poor girl running, but then it cuts to the cop writing her bicycle.

It's like, what are you going to do kids? But then she makes a pig joke, but it's so monotone when she just rides off and goes, I'm going, I'm going, and the cop does this weird like throws up his fist, like he's about to fight, and then immediately goes to like 80 sitcom opening credits where he just shakes his head like, oh, that kid. I don't, I don't, that really, I wanted to throw my shoe at the television. That was really good.

The quality of the costumes and stuff is so dramatically different every single shot to like, there's like the, the, the Andrew Thaw guy from like the wide shots just looks like a dude in a loincloth, like they didn't have any prosthetics on his face, and then they got these close-ups, and it's like a pretty decent mask. I kind of wanted to talk about the assembly of mutants because it was really kind of like the village people of, yeah, yeah, it was, was samurai, I mean, samurai, I mean, it was like favorite. There's one, do you remember the one specific shot where it was like two of the maniacs take off going, and then the samurai guy is like, well, I'm not going that way. So yeah, I just like, I like the progression of budget in the maniacs where, you know, this guy, it's like, oh, nice, this is like straight Hellraiser.

I was like, okay, let's do the samurai. Let's do like, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers villain. All right, let's do Dr. Jack O'Mr.

Hyde from the 1920s, and let's just paint an Indian space on it. All right. But the doey hand looks, oh, there's like a gooey hand, it looks so good. Yeah, well, no, that, that's the, there's so many questions that are never answered in this film.

They could have got better makeup if they would have been smarter people to defend these villains. Like, think about how much money, because this wasn't a big fucking company budget. So those fucking water guns added up. They could have just got a bucket of water, A, in the movie, it would have defeated the monsters much easier than a squirt gun.

And B, you could have bought some makeup. Yeah, some music. You know what's really blew my mind about this movie, this unfinished film. You know what the writer did after this movie, Scott?

I don't know, I have no idea. He wrote Pumpkinhead. Sounds, I get it though. Like, in head is kind of a mess too.

That's like James Gunn going from Romeo and Juliet to Slither. Like, it is a dramatic upgrade from this in the Pumpkinhead. That's not, no, no, no. James Gunn, no.

Like, I love James Gunn and I love Slither, but let's not put Pumpkinhead on Slither like level, because Pumpkinhead is great. Pumpkinhead too is better. That's not the fuck up. So Scott, I'm not sure if you wrote a note about this, but for once again, in almost every 80s hard movie we've watched, someone complains that they could be home watching Dynasty.

Yes, I had that. No, that's happened. Now that's a trope. It's like eight movies this past year where someone's like, I can be home watching Dynasty.

And they're serious. I have so many notes and I haven't even touched them. Like, oh man, so there's this, so the main male lead, he's like running after his dog, and then the dog goes up to the van full of all the kids that get killed except for the female lead. And I don't, I didn't write any of my names down.

I mean, male lead and female lead are basically what they are. Oh, Natalie is the female lead. So she, the dog comes up and they call him pasta breath. I'm guessing he works on a telling restaurant.

And that's a death one for him. Like, I just, I don't know. I don't really give a shit about anybody in this film, which is fine because most of them don't even last 10 minutes. But I think that somebody does a defensive burp.

Like, I don't know if he does it at the male lead or if he does it at one of the maniacs, but I do have to give this movie props because this first scene when six kids get murdered by the maniacs for no reason is really fun. Dude, the leg twist all this. It's got some moments. It's definitely that's like a highlight for the movie for sure.

So the maniacs and in the battle to dance. Yeah. Well, here's a question. So the maniacs turn to green goo when they are exposed to enough water.

But they come back every time. Is that what I'm gathering? Is like the samurai because like all of them are out in the park murdering kids. And all that's left is the green goo at the at the end of that scene because it starts to rain.

But you see those characters, you see those maniacs again. So is it like they're just spawn? Is it like we're watching Magic the Gathering being played and somebody's playing a Black deck in under the Golden Gate Bridge and somebody's fighting them with a Blue deck? Is that what I'm getting?

It's so, Scott, again, this movie was never finished. So I feel like that was a lot of stuff that would have been answered. And like everything I read about it was like even the screenplay writer can't remember where the origins of these creatures were. He's like, I don't remember what their origin are, but we had it.

There's a lot of coke, all right? There's we normally don't like point out continuity errors in our movie. Okay, yeah. But there's this chase scene on the train where the order in which people are in the chase changes with every cut.

I was getting so stressed because I was like, oh, God, what's going to happen? Yeah, like the girl would be in the back and then we'd cut and she suddenly in front of everybody and then we'd kind of get him. She was behind the guy like, I was like, this is nuts. Like, are they doing this on purpose?

Just to be like, yeah, we'll fuck with them. I think my favorite part of the train scene is when it cuts to the maniac driving the train and you can bounce it with the lights. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm making it so happy. It's like, I'm killing kids with such a stressful job. So I don't know if because I had, I found a DVD, like someone gave me a box of DVDs and it was in that box that I watched. So I didn't watch the YouTube version.

The version that I had, the train sequence happens. Some more stuff happens. And then it just cuts to the guy driving the train for a couple of seconds out of nowhere and then continues the rest of the movie. Do you think that happened on the YouTube version?

Yeah. That was the YouTube version. It was a weirdly amount of like, first off, the conductor gets killed and kind of cool. He gets like electrified.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he was electric mutant, I guess. Yeah.

Electric maniac doesn't make any sense though because how could you be, when electric maniac gets, when he gets murdered, when he gets killed by the water on the stairs in the high school, he gets electrified. He doesn't melt. So there's no internal consistency with these maniacs at all. Yeah.

So you watch this on YouTube? Me? Yeah. Yeah.

You watch it on YouTube. I watched it on Prime and I was so amazed that it was all on Amazon Prime. I didn't even look for it on Prime. I just looked for it on YouTube and I posted it in our, in our Trello.

I was like, here, it's on YouTube. I didn't even like, look, I didn't even look on Prime because I was like, no, wait, is this on Prime? So I just had a thought guys, as we've been talking about this movie and it's electric maniac and it's Sam Rene. It's Gremlins.

I know. It's Gremlins too, the new maniacs. Yeah. I wasn't going to make that joke because I thought that it was not going to hit at all.

Well, I took that hit for you and anyway, it was a smart move. And it was a smart move. I just want to mention one more thing about the Battle Band because I have so many notes about it. The first song that they sing probably should suck more than it actually does.

No, the first song is one song. But the second song is trash except for the saxophone. Oh, God. I'll defend the music in this film to the death.

I really, I'm going to look it up on vinyl. If I had this on vinyl, I would be shocked. We had enough song, man. That's all this shit.

Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be stuck in my head all day. But then there's also, so the maniacs attack the Battle of the bands.

Everyone's got their water guns and they're clean in house like it's the end of Bordello Blunt. And there's like this spot where it just kind of seems like they're implying a random sex scene happens. Thank you. They bang in the science lab and I'm like, wait, what?

You're getting chased by maniacs. It's not a good time to fuck. Bridget, there was a poorly placed sex scene was when we watched The Brain. Oh, it's so much better in the brain.

So I think that that's Stephen King trope though. Because in like Christine, the guy, not the movie, the books, I haven't watched the movie in a long time, but in the book, like the guy can't walk. And so they have magic sex and then he can like continue to fight the evil car. It happens all the time.

Stephen King books. I mean, trash can man gives hand jobs to every dude in the post apocalypse in the stand. Whoa. Somebody got a booty call from trash can man apparently.

Sorry about that. No, leave it in. So I mean, I know Scott said he hasn't really tackled but his nose. But I mean, I got through all mine right now.

How? And I'll tell some additional stuff. Oh, man. So we're not even talking about the pacing of this movie really blows.

But that makes a lot more sense that it was not a Finnish movie. But the one scene that I like so like Matt makes these super cuts for his Halloween parties. And I'm requesting that Matt do a super cut edition where the maniac that falls in the puddle like a fucking goober and then it's like in a tan melts and it looks like a mountain at the end of Gremlins. That's that's so it's it's surprisingly competent.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's a lot of moments where like, wow, that was hilarious and actually really well done. What happened there? So that's like, it makes sense that there was a lot of this thing got passed around like a hot potato and then dropped.

That's like, whoever did that seem? Why did they get fired from the side? Yeah, because they couldn't pay him. But this movie is great that it has one of my other favorite trips.

If we're talking tropes, the male lead did spend an afternoon studying at the Institute for fighting and animate objects because my friend fights the disembodied arm on the bus. And then there's another body mill. Oh, when Paula, the 30 year old goony, she she has like a super soaker and the knife wielding maniac gets turned into a goop in her bathroom like she's so lucky that she has just a bathtub right there. Because like cleaning that up otherwise would have been disgusting.

Oh, it really grows. I mean, but any kind of goo interactions are normally really gross. I know that bathtub placement before the attack. Okay, so what I'm not understanding here is that they were under the assumption.

Well, so they figured out that the maniacs are susceptible to water. So there first of all, why is the school continuing with the battle of the bands, even though there are six missing kids and no one cares. It's just like that's a real question. We don't get an answer.

So Paula knows that they're going to come after them. She's got a water gun. She's standing right next to a fire hose. But then Natalie is like shocked and she's like trying to get the lead singers attention.

She's like, hey, hey, they found us. But like, why doesn't he have like a super soaker behind his guitar or something? Like that would have made so much more sense that they armed the entire school at the Battle of bands. And it's one I thought that was an implication.

That should have been an implication, right? Like they had right before it. And then it just doesn't happen because I guess they filmed the scene where they implied that that's what they were going to do a year before. And then they forgot.

Now they they they look, this movie's got a lot of faults, but they were consistent with that one because when everyone is running out of the gymnasium, he's screaming at the mic to use the guns. But it still doesn't make sense because he's singing his third ballot of the night against like a glam rock band. And also I've played a lot of battle of bands in my time as a musician. And I have never ever heard of one where there are two bands.

It's not a battle if it's two bands. That's a bigger. That's a bigger band. It's a spirited conversation.

And you can't just be a ballad band. You can't have every rose has a storm without nothing but a good time. You can't just play straight ballads and call yourself a band. I mean, 1986, you can't.

No, no, no, you can't. Yeah, imagine dragons as I'm writing the same fucking song. Goddamn, I knew that you were making imagine dragons. So how unless there's anything else that you guys want to talk about, I want to talk to Mike a little bit about how the five second films become a thing and do Bro Party Massacre a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, I talk about your new film too. Yeah, for sure. I can do all of the things. My second films was created way back in the early days of the interwebs of 2008 by Brian Ferrenzi at USC.

And they launched the site like soon after he graduated USC, I think it started with he did a film festival competition at USC where it was a, I think it was like a some sort of short film. It was like an under 30 second type of thing. And so he just had the idea of like, oh, what if I can do a film in five seconds? And I'm going to end up winning that short film competition.

And so that idea, he then took over to Michael Ruslay and a few other guys in there like, hey, let's do this. And they launched the site. They did the site, I think it launched in Halloween of 2008. And I moved out to LA.

I'm from Indiana, Indianapolis originally, and I moved out after I graduated from college here in Indiana in 2008. And I moved out. I was just doing stand up and sketch comedy. I was doing sketch comedy with a group called Brevity TV and was performing at UCB, the Bryce Citizens Brigade.

And then we had similar friends and they were like, hey, have you ever heard of five second films? And I was just like, fuck yeah. And they're like, we should come hang out. They're like, we're going to go over to their place and hang out while they film.

And I showed up with a case of beer and just started moving sea stands and stuff. So this would have been spring in 2010 when I first went over to the house. And I seriously was the greatest day of my life. I was just like, I felt like I found the architect or something.

But you didn't get melted. No, I didn't get melted. I kind of, well, it did kind of melt my face, actually. I was obsessed.

I was like, you guys are my new best friends. And this is happening. And they were like, oh, clinger. I felt the thing is I just kind of kept going.

I was not invited back. It was the thing is like, I know where you live now. Yeah. And I literally just kind of said, I'm just going to keep showing up with beer and just see what happens.

And like, no one noticed. We can like beer without liking you. But I just kept going back week after week and like moving shit around and bringing beer in their such an insane group. They're just like, so I guess that guy is here now.

Sure. And so I think like I moved into the house in like 2011. So it's like a couple of years, 2012, I think somewhere around there. And we started writing, dude, bro, I think, some of their like, maybe summer of 2012, I think, June, July, something like that.

And that was just the most insane experience in my life, right? And like how we did it. Well, first it was like deciding on like, all right, so we're going to make a movie. But like, what the fuck do we do?

Like we've got a dozen people and everything is insane. And like, you know, are we just, there was like a going thing or just like, we need to just put four people in a room, make it low budget, simple, an independent film that we can execute. And it's like, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so it's like, well, what would we do? And what we would do is essentially every single rule that there is for making your first film, then we broke all of it. But like, yeah, I think it does like so many locations, so many things. And it really kind of, it was a Frankenstein script where we kind of wrote the outline together where it's like, well, this happens and then this happens and then this happens.

And then we divvy up the scenes amongst each other and we would go write them in pairs or by ourselves. And then we would come back as a group and patch all the scenes together. So it's essentially kind of like a bunch of sketches or like kind of the idea in a lot of ways was like, it's a whole bunch of independent sketches that are then stitched together to form like a whole movie. And that was made it just fucking insane.

The first few drafts, I mean, I'd actually, we had thought of her while just releasing the first early drafts of Dude Broke because it's so fucking hilarious because we have characters walking into a room and then the next scene, that same character would walk into the room again. And like, just because we like, we've written together so much and like know each other's heads like so intimately, we would like write, but like, I'm going to set Alec up for a joke. I know Alec is writing the next scene. So I'm going to tee one up and then, sooner or not, it would end up like paying off without us actually talking to each other.

So there's a lot of like set up and callbacks and like really random stuff that stayed trying to think of like, the, the, the, the breaking of the space time continuum. That was an early part of the draft joke. There's a lot of jokes in there that, I mean, that we were like, this serves no purpose whatsoever. I mean, unless it hurts too bad to let it go and I'm always going to miss it.

So, you know, it's not a thing. So yeah, writing that script was pretty insane and Alec Omen just did an incredible job of finally like raining it in and of like buttoning it up and making it make somewhat sense. And then we shot it in 2000, end of 2012 2013, up at Big Bear in California and then also outside of Los Angeles and then also at our house. Like a lot of it, I would say probably almost like 40% of the movie was just filmed at our house and like in our backyard.

Is that where you guys, did you guys crush some of my fucking beers like for real? Yeah, yes and no. We were like, at least me, I was pretty nervous about it. That was like the first time I was acting in a movie, you know, being in the scenes.

Like when we were making 5SS, we're fucking crushing beers at races. It's not really like a five second walk. As long as you get the camera pointed in the right fucking direction, you get it out and do it. But it's like all of a sudden when there's like a big crew in like real lights and there's like people running around with Wabi Toggys.

It's like, oh man, this is real grown up. I kind of feel like we should go smoke somewhere else. I guess I don't even mean drink the beers, but like were those real beers? Like at the beginning when there's the slow-mo of you guys by the pool, you just like flip and beer everywhere.

That was that real beer? That was right. That was right. Yeah, I forget exactly.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that they were just labels put on spry cans. None of the beers were actual real beers because we had pretty much already figured out how like basically smelly and sticky that was again. So it was there was a concern to effort not to use water as often as possible because our house would just get so fucking sticky. Like really you don't want that.

And then for my latest project I can talk about with the soda cans, I also dealt with large amounts of soda. So it's like I've learned so much from Dune Pro and my last short about having to have high volumes of cans from. You motherfuckers better ever cycle. Yeah, oh no absolutely.

Thank goodness. I was about to disavow. Five cents a day. Oh well, I mean yeah, I know if I was a good fellas we go through a lot of aluminum.

You gotta get that five cents back. Yeah, we have a lot of cans. In fact there was a guy, there was a homeless guy on our street in in moment that knew when it was time to like take the recycling out. And if we were being lazy, if we hadn't he would bang the trash can.

And I'd walk and be like, HAAAAAAH! You're like, oh, you gotta take the cans out and like, oh okay. And they come out there like, hey sorry man. Argh, argh, argh, argh.

Because there was such high volume of beer cans going out the door that was like our house was prime a whole whole territory. So what's the new, what's the focus of the new short? So the short I did and I had filmed it in 2017 and last year had its film festival circuit. It's called Smiley's and it's about a college student that becomes obsessed with a soda machine in the middle of nowhere.

And he kind of basically drinks too much of the soda and goes completely crazy and like loses his mind and a bunch of freaky stuff happens. That sounds like a peat and peat episode. Yeah, so it's based off of a true story of like when I was in college where we would go to smoke weed was just drive around because I'm from rural Indiana. And so there was a pot machine that was almost an exact amount of distance it took to smoke one joint.

At the end of that joint there was just a 25 cent potluck pot machine at the end of the rope. And you put 25 cents in and you got a random soda. The game was you would like go up the machine and you'd yell out, give me root beer and then you put your coin in and then you hit it and you'd be like, ah, fuck a diet's coke, that sucks. That was like the game you played and so I did a short based off of that.

And I'm going to be releasing it soon. In fact, by the time this comes out you guys should have a leak to be able to have it publicly. Awesome, very excited. Ever feel the need for more?

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I love this place. Do you remember when you could just look at the walls of covers? We had to choose just by looking at the cover and reading the crappy synopsis. It was you were leaving with one.

And the only way to know what new movies were coming out is you actually had to watch the trailers instead of skipping them. Right, we didn't have the internet to look it up. We had one guy named Todd behind the counter that would tell us what was good or not. Todd's strangely like way too many romantic comedies.

Yes, but you always knew when the movies were coming because Todd made sure. Oh, and remember all the awful CG we had to put up with in the mid 90s? We talk about that a lot, don't we? Join us on analog Jones and the Timbo film where we talk about VHS tapes.

And we waxed nostalgia like none other. Now it's the last part of our show. What would you guys watch as a double feature with Neon Maniacs? Scott, you pick this one.

How about you go first? Oh god, I don't even know. This is a weird one because quick little preface to my pick here. This was my first time watching Neon Maniacs as I think I mentioned earlier.

There was when I was very young, I saw a trailer for a film where it looks like these punks were eating their fingers made out of cheese. It was like really, it really freaked me the fuck out. I asked around on Reddit, I want to say, right when I joined Reddit like a decade ago. And people were like, that's repo man.

And I'm like, I don't think it's repo man. And I'm because I've seen repo man and I re-watched repo man, you know, maybe a decade ago. And I didn't find it in there. And I was like, maybe it's Neon Maniacs because, you know, I just assumed from the cover.

It's not. But because of that, these two are inexplicably joined in my, in my brain. So I would start with Neon Maniac. No, I would start with repo man because it's an actually good bonkers film.

And then do Neon Maniacs to wind down possibly fall asleep. So for me, I'm going to take the Battle of the Bands and a bunch of crazy people showing up in the high school gym. I'm going to go with idle hands as my double feature with Neon Maniacs. All right, Brian, what do you got?

So the woman who played Natalie, she was in a movie called The Harvest with George Clooney, who was an out of sight with Michael Keaton, who wasn't people. So there's my sixth degree. Oh, more buddy. You're getting so close.

I know. I pair this with Chud, too. But the Chud, all right. Starring beef from Phantom of the Bands.

All right, Mike, I don't remember if I told you that we do this, but just in case, what's your double feature? Uh, yeah, I was just racking my brain. It's a little bit of a combo. It is kind of, uh, it really reminds me of Phantom of Paradise, Phantom of Paradise.

Awesome. The music of movie that I really love. But the whole, there wasn't enough mutant stuff really. It could have been a little more bodyboard, but it was kind of street trash-ish.

Oh, yeah. It does have that street trash kind of feel to it. Yeah, a little bit. So I don't, either one of those two, I feel would work well with it.

Well, that was Neon Maniacs from 1986. If you hit up the Facebook page, I'm sure we will have a link to Mike's newest short Smiley's up there for you to check out. We will be back. Well, actually, Monster Maniac is right around the corner.

Motherfucker, so get ready for that. That's, that's the big thing. Get prepared for us to be at Mania. It's going to be a great time.

We cannot wait. And I'm trying to remember what we're going to talk about next week. Tune in next week when we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to go down on that.

Yeah, yes, we do. What happened? If you're going to go down there, see some marsupials, then I have a good time. It's going to be life-changing.

So tune in next week to find out what's going on there. And in the meantime, hit up us on all the social media, visit our website at hmnpotcast.com. Go ahead and review us on iTunes and all the other ways that you listen to the show, and hit up our Patreon account at patreon.com. Backslash hmnpotcast.

And if you go over there right now, you will find a bonus episode of me, Brian Scott, and Mike just talking about some of the VHS covers that we remember from our childhood, but never really got around to renting until we were adults. So stay tuned for that. Thanks for listening, guys. You're listening to the Geek Steve Network.

We're here to entertain you. We'll sing your song. Hey there, are you obsessed with things that happened before your time? Well, if you are, join me, the host of Before My Time, Gelsie Laurie, to discuss the wonders of the yester years that we weren't around to enjoy ourselves.

You can find us on all podcast platforms. The next line's a plan. Soon you'll be swaying so come on sing along. You're listening to the Geek Steve Network.