2 Dads 1 Movie

Steve’s sleep paralysis demon looks exactly like Drew Barrymore, so the opening of Scream is less a horror movie for him and more a nature documentary. He picked it anyway. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s 1996 meta slasher is Steve’s pick to close out Shocktoberfest II: Electric Boogaloo, which is brave for a man who apparently sees Casey Becker every time he tries to sleep.

Neither dad came in a seasoned expert. Steve thinks he caught it once in college, maybe, and then forgot about it until Heather brought it up about a decade ago and he realized he’d never actually made it to the end. (He did, however, own the Scream 2 soundtrack. For the Dave Matthews Band song. Priorities.) Nic saw it in theaters in ‘96 and then went on a long horror sabbatical that only ended when this podcast dragged him back in.

What follows is a loving, slightly unhinged lap around Woodsboro. Barrymore reportedly asked to be the big star who dies in the first ten minutes, which has Nic wondering whether Steven Seagal made the same noble sacrifice in Executive Decision. (Sure. Famously generous guy.) Henry Winkler’s uncredited principal kicks off a whole Seagal-to-Winkler spectrum of movie-star ego, and his giant scissors get compared to the ones you’d use to open a new gas station. The “teenagers” are all ruled old enough to rent a car. Nic also has some genuinely useful life advice: buy a small house so the smoke alarm can do its job. And don’t expect your garage door to commit to a kill like that one, since his stops for a cardboard flap.

Then Steve, speaking as “an overweight, bald, funny guy,” figures David Arquette must be absolutely hilarious in person. Nic pictures poor Adam Duritz finding out that Arquette noodling on a campfire guitar got the same raves from Courteney Cox as August and Everything After. And by the end, the show officially needs a hashtag for CRT TVs to the face.

Lock the doors, check the closet, and for the love of God, downsize.

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A scientist teleports a baboon inside out, and somehow that’s the thing that gets the romance going. Welcome to David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), the third stop on Shocktoberfest and Nic’s pick. He caught chunks of it on TV as a kid (one arm-wrestling match in particular never left him) and wanted a proper Frankenstein-style monster movie with Jeff Goldblum front and center. Steve, a haunted house, possession and slasher guy, had never seen it and admits he’d been dodging it on purpose. Body horror is not his jam. The dads’ advice for first-timers: eat two hours before, nothing until two hours after, and keep a Dixie cup of water nearby.

Before the goo even starts, they get stuck on names. Nobody can get past a smarmy ex-boyfriend magazine editor named Stathis (Nic offers his respects to every Stathis listening, then just switches to “editor guy”), and Steve has a theory that “Brundle” was picked purely so “Brundlefly” would work later. Stathis also gets dragged for hanging onto the key to Ronnie’s apartment and for a Maserati with a vanity plate that just says PARTICLE, which sends Nic into a public service announcement about job security. Do not get your employer tattooed on your body, folks.

From there it’s a steady stream of grievances. Nic wants to know why Seth went straight to baboons when rats exist, and Steve points out a goldfish would have done the job. Steve realizes the telepod guessing its way through rebuilding a steak is basically how AI works. Seth punches chunks out of what is very clearly a load-bearing beam, which Nic notes is a great way to get a girl to stay. Nic shares the story of Mel Brooks producing the movie without a credit, so random that Steve honestly couldn’t tell if it was a bit. And the wives check out entirely: Nic’s wife Jeanie suddenly gets very into her crossword puzzle, while Steve’s wife Heather swears she’s seen The Fly and absolutely has not.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And maybe skip lunch.

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It’s not technically a horror movie, but as Steve says right out of the gate, it’s scary as fuck in so many ways. That’s Se7en, David Fincher’s 1995 trip through a rain-soaked, never-named city (“a shittier New York without any of the cool shit,” in Nic’s words), and it’s Steve’s pick for Shocktoberfest. He first saw it in college during a brief stint as a film major, when someone insisted it was the perfect introduction to Fincher. Nic caught it around senior year of high school, when the lucky households with HBO and Cinemax were dubbing their own VHS copies. For this episode he watched it twice, once to feel it and once with notes. Dedication.

Both dads agree the title, with that little 7 jammed in the middle, is impossible to say out loud. They also agree that in a movie stuffed with horrific imagery, the thing that sticks with everyone is a ceiling full of pine tree air fresheners. Nic still brings it up every couple of months whenever something stinks.

From there it’s a gleefully grim stroll through the sins. Morgan Freeman’s switchblade gets a Best Supporting Actor campaign, his bedside metronome gets declared psychotic, and Steve, who dabbles in screenwriting himself, swoons over the names Somerset and Mills, which sound like either a wine cooler or a law firm. A cop getting annoyed at a detective for asking questions spirals into “Where you going with that wrench, plumber?” Nic is personally offended by Mills rolling around with his dogs on a newspaper-covered floor in his work clothes. He calls Marquis de "Sade" the only joke in the whole movie and declares the home darkroom “the official hobby of creeps.” Steve puts his writer hat back on to ask why Tracy would tell her husband’s partner of two days that she’s pregnant, and Nic nominates that scene as your official Junior Mints and bathroom break. There’s even a detour into the FBI tracking library books, once the stuff of mid-’90s conspiracy nuts and now, per Nic, “prematurely correct.”

Seven sins, one switchblade, and about a thousand little pine trees.

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Tom Hanks has a week off work, a new neighbor who drives his garbage to the end of the driveway, and a firm plan to stay home and drink "a couple hundred beers." That's The 'Burbs (1989), Joe Dante's suburban paranoia comedy and the kickoff to Shocktoberfest II: Electric Boogaloo. It's Nic's pick, off a listener request from about a year ago (the schedule runs well into 2027, so get your requests in early), and he'd never seen it. Steve wore it out as a kid, a dozen or so viewings between ages 10 and 13, possibly on LaserDisc, and then didn't touch it for three decades.

Is it even a horror movie? Steve consults the official scale he worked out with his 8-year-old daughter: spoopy, spooky, scary, horror. This one mostly lands at spoopy, though the ice pick stuff left young Steve legit scared of the one sitting in a drawer at home.

From there it's a happy stroll down one very nosy block. Nic crowns the poodle the official comedy dog of the '80s (the chihuahua gets the '90s), and Steve's pretty sure this particular poodle is the same dog from The Silence of the Lambs. Nic's research turns up a writers' strike that left Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Rick Ducommun improvising a whole lot, plus the news that Bubbles the chimp was hanging around set, courtesy of Corey Feldman's friendship with Michael Jackson. Steve would like to know why nobody threw a little hat on him and found him a part.

Also on the docket: Nic's tip for talking your way out of a traffic stop (do not do this), Nic's dream where his landlord is Steve, a surprisingly thorough sardine debate in which Nic defends the fish and Steve learns something about fillets, and Steve's actual research into whether a basement furnace needs to go to 5,000 degrees. (A crematorium runs about 1,800. So, no.) And Nic lands on a real truth: the most inaccurate thing in cinema is how long it takes to dig a hole.

Does a childhood favorite hold up after thirty years away? What does a first-timer make of it? Pull up a folding chair. It's the best show on the block.

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What if a hitman went to his 10-year high school reunion? That's the entire pitch for George Armitage's 1997 action-rom-com Grosse Pointe Blank, and Steve thinks it's so perfect that nobody can ever make it again. It's his pick, and it comes with baggage: as a high school junior he took a girl to see it on a date. She was his junior prom date. She did not feel the same way. They stayed friends. Not everybody's for everybody. Nic saw it in theaters too, still owns both volumes of the soundtrack on CD, and came in honestly wondering whether 17-year-old Nic just had questionable taste or whether this thing is a classic.

John Cusack plays Martin Blank, a killer so committed to honesty that he tells literally everyone what he does for a living, and nobody believes him (Nic's daughter could not get over this). Nic calls Joan Cusack, as Martin's secretary, the Robert Horry of the movie, hitting every big shot. Steve's favorite gag is two feds faking out Dan Aykroyd's Grocer so he dives back into a bathroom stall for nothing.

The soundtrack gets its due. Steve calls the Live and Let Die cut to convenience-store muzak one of his favorite transitions in movie history, then mourns a Specials recording of "Pressure Drop" he can't find on any streaming service. Nic offers to burn him a CD. Steve isn't sure he still owns a CD player. Nic reminds everyone he doesn't understand the microphone he's talking into.

Elsewhere, Nic would happily trade one police tank for a Main Street radio station, and Steve names the one scene that popped him out of the movie (a therapist's answering machine blaring mid-session). He also admits that if a long-lost friend turned up standing over a dead body, he'd be gone. Dude, deuces. And Steve needs Nic to remind him that their own 20th reunion already happened. They literally hung out there together.

And Nic has a theory: Debbie dumps Martin, moves to Boston, tells Will Hunting all about her ex-assassin boyfriend, and that's how you get Jason Bourne. It's cinema.

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A guy's Jeep dies in the Arizona desert, his wife hops in a friendly trucker's cab to go call a tow, and then she just never comes back. That's Breakdown (1997), Jonathan Mostow's lean, mean Kurt Russell thriller, and it's Nic's pick by way of listener Matt DeLuna. Nic knows this one cold. He was working at Blackhawk Movies 7 in Danville when it opened, ducked into it on shifts, owned it on video, and quoted it endlessly with his buddy Todd. Steve had literally never heard of it.

He was sold before the credits finished, though, because the thing runs 93 minutes, and this show has turned both dads into true believers in the 90-minute movie. Then J.T. Walsh and M.C. Gainey pop up, which kicks off a tribute to the great initialed actors of our time. (CCH Pounder gets bonus points for having three.)

Steve goes hunting for plot holes and comes back with basically one: a Jeep that just drove in from Massachusetts with 245 miles on the odometer, somehow already needing oil. Nic figures Jeff is pouring in vanity oil so he looks like he knows what he's doing at a gas station. Then Amy's snack run goes on trial. Snowballs, Moon Pies, powdered donuts and a Yoo-Hoo in the desert heat, with not one salty thing in the bag. Steve is personally offended. Nic notes that an animal probably wouldn't eat a Snowball. Combos, Bugles and Gardettos are entered into the record, and the donut sweepstakes (win $90,000 or 90,000 donuts, your call) gets the full treatment, right down to the tax bill on a truckload of expiring pastries.

There's also a diner parking lot that looks like the cars were dropped from an airplane, a husband describing his missing wife by the brand of her sweater, a henchman who can't help freelancing while he plays dumb, and Steve's case for J.T. Walsh's quietly terrifying, totally ordinary evil. Steve calls it a one-note movie and means it as a compliment: ratchet, ratchet, ratchet, and then it just stops.

No epilogue, no six months later. Just a Jeep that deserved better and a bag of snacks that didn't.

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Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) is Steve's pick, and for him it's less a movie than a load-bearing wall. He caught it on TV before he was ten, spent high school and college watching theater kids quote it at each other, and counts William Goldman as a personal screenwriting hero. Nic got there later, in high school or after, having grown up in what he describes as a no-VCR, no-cable log cabin where his dad was busy typing up his manifesto.

What follows is a very happy stroll through Florin. Steve's daughter still calls the movie "Princess Buttercup," while his son, currently convinced Raiders of the Lost Ark is the greatest movie ever made, never really got into it. Nic clocks young Fred Savage's Walter Payton jersey, Steve spots the Fridge Perry poster, and the case is closed: this kid is a Bears fan. From there, grandpa and grandson are simply Kevin Arnold and Columbo. Steve decides Humperdinck's perm belongs to a lady who works the front desk at the local orthodontist. Nic shouts out Mr. Hoover, their old high school history teacher and Andre the Giant superfan. And Steve's Wallace Shawn impression gets so good that Nic starts openly dreaming of a copyright strike.

There's a surprising amount of real-life peril, too. Steve's high school production of the Scottish play, with actual steel broadswords, got canceled over safety concerns (he was Banquo, and at one point the corpse yelped). Years later, a friend set Steve's wool coat on fire in a Walnut Creek coffee shop. On set, Andre's enormous hand doubled as a hot water bottle. Cary Elwes woke up in the hospital, still in costume, after Christopher Guest stopped faking a knockout. And Mandy Patinkin bruised a rib trying not to laugh at Billy Crystal.

Meanwhile, Nic's wife Jeanie cannot deal with Westley's mustache. Nic calls the albino torturer the most in-need-of-Carmex person he's ever seen. And the dads both want in on Fezzik's hangover soup.

As Steve says in his mock promo for this very episode, it's inconceivable that you won't enjoy it.

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Seventy-eight episodes into a show about '80s and '90s movies, Nic realized they had never once done a Spike Lee. Then a buddy of his (white guy, mid-forties, Seattle) mentioned that Do the Right Thing was the movie he quoted most as a kid, and that settled it. Nic had seen it once in college and remembered liking it without it ever really sticking. Steve had never seen it at all, and watched it the day before they recorded, so you're getting a guy still slightly vibrating.

What they found is the hottest day in Brooklyn history and about nine things to argue about. Steve reads the whole movie as secretly Greek, with Señor Love Daddy on one end and the three corner guys on the other, a two-headed chorus that comments on everything and acts on nothing. He also slots it in as the second sweatiest movie they've ever covered, behind Predator, since Nic won't hear an argument against Bill Duke squeegeeing his own face with a disposable razor.

Then there's the pizza, which becomes its own subplot. Nic has grievances, numbered: the flimsiest box he's ever seen, a pie that looks like something the Ninja Turtles would eat, and the green can of Kraft parmesan, which he identifies as the cheese you use if you're racist against Italians. He would know. His Irish grandfather came home from the war that way. Steve, fresh off a pizza-making class on a work trip to New York, watches Danny Aiello bury the dough in flour and starts pleading with the screen.

They split on the Wall of Fame. Steve has zero sympathy for Buggin' Out's demand and total sympathy for the boycott. Nic points out that Buggin' Out is carrying the whole history of Black America on his shoulders, all day, every day.

And when it gets heavy, they let it. Steve teared up two hours after the credits, and his wife is the one who reframed it for him: despair is a luxury.

Hottest block in Brooklyn, worst pizza ever put on film, and nobody gets out clean.

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Kevin Smith followed Clerks with actual Miramax money, a whole mall, and Stan Lee, and thirty years later the result still splits every room it enters. Mallrats (1995) is Steve's pick, and he is not casual about it. He grabbed the VHS off a Blockbuster shelf around '96 purely because the cover art looked like a Star Wars poster, went straight from there into the rest of Smith's filmography, and dressed as Silent Bob for two different Halloweens in college, beard and wig and coat, pantomiming smoking weed and falling asleep if anyone asked him where Jay was.

Nic had never seen it. He's on record as not a Smith guy, and about halfway through the movie his wife Jeanie grabbed his leg and told him that for his own health he wasn't allowed to watch any more Kevin Smith films for a while. He says he spent the runtime feeling like Ethan Suplee in front of the Magic Eye poster, standing there unable to see what everyone else claimed was right in front of him. Fair warning: this ends up being the widest the two of them have ever landed apart, and it isn't close.

Which somehow doesn't stop it from being a great hang. They agree Shannen Doherty handles Smith's dialogue better than anybody else in the cast. Nic clocks Ben Affleck's enormous suit as the look of a Talking Heads cover band frontman. Steve has the entire DVD commentary loaded and ready, including the story of a network cropping a Coca-Cola cup out of a scene over a Pepsi deal, and the delicious fact that William Atherton passed on this as beneath him and then went and made Bio-Dome. There's a tangent about Magic Eye books as the official Christmas gift of relatives who don't really love you, a full defense of the stinkpalm as a small price to pay for the smiting of one's enemies, and genuine admiration for Brodie's ruling that the cookie stand is an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.

Steve says Kevin Smith makes movies you either love or hate, with almost nobody stuck in the middle. Exhibit A was sitting right across the table.

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Nic's wife Jeanie has seen A Few Good Men at least ten times all the way through, and she stops for it every single time it turns up on television, so when she leaned on Nic to make it his pick, he made it his pick. She also came along for the ride, becoming the first guest in the history of the show, and she immediately proved her worth by lodging a formal complaint about Tom Cruise eating an apple during a work meeting. Finish your apple before your interview. It's not complicated.

Nic caught the 1992 Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin courtroom machine in bits and pieces on cable in high school, back when an R-rated movie could air on TNT forever. Steve, a former stage actor and an unapologetic Sorkin guy who will tell you The American President is the best thing the man ever wrote, was thrilled to be made to watch it. He also shows up with a theory: Danny Caffey is just a nerdier Pete Mitchell, another Tom Cruise character with a dead, celebrated father whose exact job he now holds. Steve looked hard for a third example and came up empty.

From there it's the small stuff, which is the good stuff. Steve declares Cruise's softball swing dogshit and can tell from the mechanics alone that nobody's dad ever screamed at him on a Little League field. Nic wonders whether the Marine Silent Drill Platoon is a waste of a guy who could be doing something more useful, and gets briskly corrected about which branch he's actually thinking of. There's a run at "hella not guilty" as a legal strategy, a demand to see the line item for how much the military spends on custom yellow tape, and a three-way pile-on about the line where Jo explains that Marines stand on the wall so nothing's going to hurt you today. Nobody in the room can stand it.

Nic figures the whole thing should have ended with the cast holding hands and bowing. Steve has a word for that. It's a curtain call.

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Steve didn't fall in love with So I Married an Axe Murderer so much as marry into it. He caught the 1993 Mike Myers comedy in high school, thought "that wasn't bad," and moved on. Then he met his wife, who'd spent years trading quotes from it with her dad, and suddenly the whole thing landed. Two decades later, "negatory, good buddy" and "we've got a piper doon" are load-bearing phrases in his house. So yes, this one's Steve's pick. Nic shows up as a guy who knew every joke and had somehow never seen the ending, a casualty of what he calls the pregame movie, the thing playing while everybody gets ready to go out.

What they get is a tour of a San Francisco that no longer exists. Nic identifies Roads Cafe as the real-life Vesuvio in North Beach and pegs the crowd as the Gen X version of the Foot Clan lair from the Ninja Turtles movie, all skate ramps and free cigarette machines. Steve is certain these people and the people in Singles would have hated each other on sight, and separately declares the cappuccino tracking shot the second-greatest follow shot in cinema history, behind only Henry and Karen walking into the Copa.

Then the nitpicking, which is most of the fun. Steve cannot let go of the Band-Aid on Nancy Travis's finger, present in every scene, explained never. Nic diagnoses Myers's haircut as a pumpkin pie minus one slice, and objects to the "hello" bit on the grounds that he already has a hello guy in his life and it's Steve. Charlie dumped a woman for smelling exactly like vegetable soup, which triggers a full referendum on which soups a person could acceptably smell like. Nic clocks the honeymoon resort's name, Poet's Corner, as a neighborhood in Pleasant Hill. Steve gears up to nail the film on Bay Area geography and comes up empty, which visibly wounds him.

Plus Phil Hartman as Vicky, Charles Grodin politely declining to have his vehicle commandeered, and a rigorous physics debate about surviving a rooftop hatchet fight after taking one in the nuts.

Some movies you love on sight. Some you marry into.

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Every kid who ever fed quarters into a Street Fighter II cabinet owes something to Bloodsport (1988), a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie made for $1.5 million that pulled in $63.5 million and earned its star a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star — which he lost, to Ronald McDonald, for playing himself in Mac and Me.

Nic brought this one. He caught it in his young teens, back when it was getting passed around and there just weren't many movies about guys with wildly different fighting styles punching each other in a basement. Steve had never seen it, which is funny for a man who logged thousands of hours as a Ken player and once went eight or nine deep on a single quarter at a computer camp arcade — still, he says, the highlight of his entire life.

So the whole episode is Steve connecting dots in real time. Guile is Frank Dux. Johnny Cage's splits are Van Damme's splits. Chun-Li is right there in Chong Li's name, one vowel away. Along the way there's Bolo Yeung wearing a South Korean flag while playing a character named like he's Chinese, a handler in half-tint aviators and a gold chain that Nic immediately claims as his kind of guy, and a young Frank Dux who climbs through a window in a New York Giants shirt and a San Francisco Giants hat. Steve cannot name a single human being on earth who roots for both.

They clock the koi pond and blindfold training that get replayed later in case you forgot ten minutes ago. Steve counts the splits (five, contractually). He also calls Chekhov's dead best friend on Ray Jackson and stays mad it never fires. Nic maps out the kick where Frank boots a guy behind his own shoulder like a pirate punting his own parrot, which Steve figures would break your collarbone to maybe tickle the other guy's nose. Chong Li says brick don't hit back. He's not wrong.

And then the closing title card claims 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, so Steve did the math on how many entrants that would take. Seventy-two quadrillion. Roughly nine million Earths' worth of people.

Frank W. Dux: the elementary school kid who swore his dog was actually a wolf, except this one got a movie out of it.

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There's a certain kind of movie you watched a thousand times as a kid on a VHS tape you personally wore out, and then discovered nobody else on earth remembers. For Steve, that's Summer Rental — the 1985 John Candy vacation comedy directed, improbably, by Carl Reiner. Mention it to people and they say, oh, the one with Dan Aykroyd? No. That's The Great Outdoors. Nic had the same crossed wires: he saw this one as a kid and liked it, but somewhere along the way his memory fused the two, so he showed up half-expecting the giant steak. Lobsters in this one. Mr. Surf and Turf himself.

It's Steve's pick, and it takes Nic about thirteen minutes to sour on the protagonist. Jack Chester is an air traffic controller in 1985 Atlanta, which means, as Nic works out in real time, he scabbed through the 1981 strike. "I don't like Jack Chester anymore. Not a man of the people." Steve's response: let's go ahead and end it now.

They don't. What follows is a tour of a movie that's at minimum a delight to describe — the hard-boiled egg that detonates across a car interior, a dash-mounted cup holder Nic sincerely admires, an Alan Silvestri score Nic awards a Steve point, and Richard Crenna as Al Pellet, a man Nic pegs as the villain on captain's-hat evidence alone ("that good '80s butthole look"). Rip Torn's Scully runs a floating restaurant where the fresh grouper, sautéed to a golden brown with a teasing hint of Dijon, comes out of a freezer chest as fish fingers that Nic figures have been frozen since the Carter administration.

They split hard on the frisbee-to-the-groin gag: Nic considers it an insult to everyone involved, Steve shrugs it off as hacky. Plus detours into Nic's fishing charter nemesis who would not stop saying "a three-hour tour," Steve's Disneyland norovirus, and Steve's dad-brain snagging on a three-year-old aboard a racing sailboat with zero life vests.

Mint-flavored toothpicks to hold us over. Welcome to Citrus Cove.

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In 1997, Luc Besson spent $90 million on a movie about a New York cab driver, a supreme being in thermal bandages, and four elemental stones that spend the entire runtime in the wrong hands. It made $264 million. That's The Fifth Element, and it's Nic's pick, partly because the show had somehow gone this long without a Gary Oldman movie. Nic saw it several times in theaters in '97 because he worked at one, quoted it into the ground with his high school friends, and still remembers a buddy reading the poster tagline aloud as "it must five it be found." Steve saw it once, found Chris Tucker aggressively annoying, and only warmed up to it years later in college, roughly the same way he eventually made peace with the Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros. movie.

Most of the episode is two dads trying to describe things that resist description. The benevolent aliens are giant turtles, or possibly something Gary Larson drew, waddling around because their spacesuits won't let them raise their arms. The Mangalores are just the pig guys. Zorg wears a plastic plate on his head that covers no wound and serves no purpose, so it has to be fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier did the costumes, which explains the flight attendants but not the cops, who land somewhere between Judge Dredd and the sumo suits from a corporate team-building retreat. The background population of the future consists entirely of overweight cops and supermodels, a world Nic diagnoses as "the King of Queens universe."

Then there's the nitpicking, which is half the fun. Steve cannot forgive Zorg for flying away from Flohston Paradise without ever opening the case, and Nic points out that he doesn't leave a Taco Bell window without checking his bag. There is a phone book in the 23rd century. Human skin, according to the film's scientists, is grown by blasting a body with slightly greasy solar atoms. Nic's wife Jeannie clocked that the match meant to save all humanity had obviously already been struck, and this was after she watched the diva's concert dissolve into a firefight, turned to him, and said, "I'm sorry, I hate this."

Leeloo Dallas, multipass.

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In 1998 the Coen Brothers spent $15 million on a shaggy detective story where almost nothing happens, a rug gets peed on, and a middle-aged stoner named the Dude drinks nine White Russians while getting mistaken for a millionaire. That's The Big Lebowski, and it's Steve's pick, a movie he first caught the second it hit Blockbuster in college, when he showed up mostly for John Goodman and left with a lifelong favorite. He brought it to the pod half worried it might be a Boondock Saints situation, the kind of thing you loved as a teenager that curdles on rewatch. Good news: it held.

Nic, meanwhile, comes to this one with actual credentials. He reveals he's descended from bowling royalty, his great-grandfather Archie Walsh, a New England candlepin legend enshrined in a Hall of Fame that Nic estimates is roughly the size of an armoire in the corner of a Holiday Inn. Steve counters with his own dad's bowling trophy, the one topped by a little guy bowling backward through his own legs, awarded for finishing dead last.

From there it's a loving tour through everything that makes the movie tick. The dads marvel at how the Coens hand rich, pointless backstories to characters onscreen for three minutes, chief among them Larry's dad being a famous TV writer stuck in a steampunk iron lung, which sends Nic on a tangent about where exactly he'd like to be positioned in the house should he ever end up iron-lung-bound (spoiler: a back room, not the foyer). Steve offers up "Sobchaking," his personal verb for when you're not wrong, you're just an asshole, man. They clock Walter debating the tenets of National Socialism, the "say what you will" bit, purely to win a fight he's already lost, and both hold their breath through the second dream sequence, the two-minute bowling-porno-musical detour nobody needed and everybody is glad exists.

There's Larry's homework, a Folgers can, and a stranger who orders a good sarsaparilla. The Dude abides. So did the dads.

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In 1982, a drifter walks into a small Washington town looking for lunch and leaves it looking like a war zone. That's the setup for First Blood, Nic's pick this week, and the movie that gave the world John Rambo before the sequels turned him into a bow-and-arrow-wielding action figure. Nic came to the franchise backwards, through the bigger, splashier Part II, and only got around to the original years later. Steve, somehow, had never seen any of the Rambo movies front to back, just absorbed them by cultural osmosis, so this was a real first watch for him.

What they found is a much quieter, sadder movie than either of them expected. Rambo shows up in town just trying to find an old war buddy, gets run out by a small-town sheriff who takes real issue with the flag patch on his jacket, and things spiral from there into arrests, flashbacks, and a jailhouse meltdown that turns into a one-man guerrilla campaign in the woods. Steve and Nic both get a kick out of Stallone's specific brand of unintentional comedy, the overexplaining, the simpleton sincerity, and they spend real time on the film's inventory of found objects: a tarp poncho, a stolen jacket turned scarecrow decoy, and eventually a truck with a machine gun in the back, which both dads agree is the turning point where the movie really takes off.

Richard Crenna's Colonel Trautman gets singled out as the MVP, especially his opening monologue about what Rambo was trained to survive, and the dads dig into how much of the back half is really a two-hander between Trautman and Sheriff Teasle arguing about whether to let this man go or bring in two hundred body bags. They also trade theories on real-life Rambo inspirations, argue about how many rats is too many rats for one movie, and land in different places by the end: Nic still fully charmed by the character, Steve a little more skeptical once Rambo starts terrorizing a town that mostly just wanted him to leave.

Grab a torch, mind the rats, and enjoy the ride.

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The Birdcage is Steve's pick, and it's not close: this is a movie he and his wife Heather have been quoting to each since they first met, Steve having fallen in love with it as a theater kid in high school. Nic, on the other hand, had never seen it, despite a stated lifelong allegiance to who he now insists on calling "Bobby Williams" (a nickname that is, delightfully, sticking around for good).

The 1996 comedy sends the dads to a South Beach drag club where Armond Goldman (Robin Williams) and his partner Albert (Nathan Lane) have to butch things up fast when their son brings home a senator's daughter. Steve and Nic get a kick out of the crash course in masculinity that follows: pinky down, don't dribble the mustard, and please, for the love of God, walk like John Wayne (who, it turns out, walked hella gay the whole time). Hank Azaria's Agador provides steady comic relief, and one particularly unhinged batch of sweet and sour peasant soup nearly gets referenced as often as the mustard bit does.

Both dads agree Val, the son, is close to unbearable, though they land in very different places on the film as a whole this time around, more so than usual. Steve leans hard into the nostalgia, loving the parent-child dynamic even as he flags a couple of Robin Williams lines that hit differently in hindsight. Nic, watching cold and giving it his usual two-pass treatment, finds himself fighting a "Mrs. Doubtfire curse," where some of the best possible gags in this movie feel like they already happened in the other film few years earlier.

Wine tannins get a genuinely educational aside, Christine Baranski gets her due, and by the time everyone's in drag sneaking past the paparazzi, this one's earned its spot as a South Beach classic.

Come on, Gloria.

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Shelley Long struts through 1989's Troop Beverly Hills in a fur coat, a cigarette holder, and a Rolls-Royce convertible, playing a soon-to-be-divorced socialite who takes over her daughter's floundering Girl Scouts knockoff mostly out of spite and boredom. It's Nic's pick, a movie his wife introduced him and his daughter to during the pandemic, while Steve grew up on it, owned it on VHS, and hadn't revisited it in over thirty years until this episode.

Both dads geek out over the animated opening credits, designed, they discover mid-episode, by future Ren and Stimpy creator John K, and agree the original song "Cookie Time" is, against all odds, a banger. From there it's a parade of pure 1989: a rope bridge cut down by the cartoonishly evil troop leader Velda Plunder, a balance-beam rescue across a fallen log, a swamp full of water moccasins, and a cameo from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that prompts Nic to point out this is the fourth time the podcast has run into Kareem across 68 episodes, against zero Tom Cruise sightings.

Steve compares the movie's surprisingly restrained tailor character to Martin Short's Frahnk from Father of the Bride, while Nic marvels at the sheer volume of Beverly Hills cars on display and can't get over Velda referring to her victims as "little bimbesses." The two of them also build out a whole bit about Phyllis's pristine white mink coat being doomed the second it shows up on screen, debate whether the Lifesavers joke even works, and spend a solid stretch trying to figure out how anyone retied a rope bridge using nothing but rocks and good intentions.

Nobody's holding this one up as a misunderstood classic, but it's exactly the kind of fully committed, cookie-selling, snake-fearing nonsense that sticks with you from childhood.

Khaki wishes and cookie dreams, everybody.

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Tombstone (1993) is thirty-three years old, R-rated, and apparently the rare nineties western that's stayed alive the old-fashioned way, through pure word-of-mouth quotability, no memes or GIFs required (okay, except Curly Bill's "Well... bye."). That's Steve's pick, and it's personal. He fell for it as a teenager, rewatched it a couple times a year for most of his adult life, personally converted a few college friends into believers, and married into a household where his wife is every bit as obsessed (she made a childhood pilgrimage to the actual town of Tombstone, Arizona). Nic, somehow, had never seen it, despite owning half the dialogue secondhand through an early-2000s rap verse that turned out to be wall-to-wall Tombstone quotes. Twenty years of bobbing his head along to "smoke wagon" finally paid off.

What follows is a tour through one of the most stacked casts either dad has encountered on this show, and a healthy chunk of the runtime is just pointing at the screen going "wait, that's also..." Kurt Russell gets credit for what Steve declares the single greatest mustache in cinema history, right before Wyatt Earp introduces himself by stealing a man's chair, his ego, and a quarter stake in the local casino, all in one scene. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday turns into the unofficial MVP of the episode, one-liner after one-liner, including the dads' shared appreciation for "I've got a gun for the both of you" as a legitimately sound tactical philosophy. They debate breaking out the "missing or artificial limb" tag for the first time in a while over Virgil's ruined arm, and Nic spends a solid stretch lobbying for Powers Boothe to become a hereditary title, like the Dalai Lama, but with a better mustache.

Underneath the body count, though, both dads keep circling back to the quiet, weirdly tender friendship at the center of it, the kind neither expected from a movie this violent. Steve calls it a top-five all-timer. Nic, a lifelong westerns skeptic, leaves a convert.

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Twenty years of movies, twenty episodes, one final destination: a soul-crushing office park somewhere in generic suburban America. Office Space is Nic's pick to close out 2 Dads 2 Decades, and honestly, there's no better way to go out: a movie that gave an entire generation its workplace vocabulary before most of them had set foot in a workplace.

Both dads know this one cold. For Nic, it was the put-it-on-before-you-go-out movie, the kind of thing you'd seen so many times the early parts were automatic. Steve caught it the same way a lot of people did: Comedy Central, late night, dorm room, falling asleep to the DVD menu looping.

The conversation that follows is the kind you have when everyone already knows the movie and nobody needs the plot explained. Steve flags that Office Space might be the first film with an all-white cast and a completely sincere hip-hop soundtrack -- not ironic, not parodic, just what the characters actually listened to. They spend serious time on Gary Cole, who both dads agree is the secret weapon of the whole thing (Nic floats a case for listing him above David Herman in the opening credits and has a point). They argue, affectionately, about whether "no-talent ass clown" is a Mike Judge original or pre-existing slang, and land on Judge. Steve admits he has legitimately come around on Michael Bolton the musician, cites "Time, Love and Tenderness" as a genuine banger, and is not apologizing for it.

There's a lengthy detour about going to a county fair hypnotist with his daughter that Nic will never fully live down. John C. McGinley pulling taffy with his hands while Bob Slydell beams with excitement over a guy who does nothing. Lawrence and his bottle opener. The printer dying to "Still" in a field. The Jump to Conclusions Mat getting the contempt it deserves.

The federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison line? Yeah, they clock it. Doesn't hold up.

What does hold up is Peter figuring out he'd rather swing a shovel outdoors than update bank software. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.

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