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EP 84: Stopmotion | Meat Puppets and Maggots

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Good Morning!!!

This week we watched a film called Stopmotion (2023), and wholly regretted it. It's a gory horror movie that makes very little sense. Watch where you step and try not to break an ankle in one of the many plot holes.

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Bridget:

Good morning.

Wendy:

Good morning.

Bridget:

I'm Bridget.

Wendy:

And I'm Wendy.

Bridget:

And this is Flickin Beans. Can I already. Wendy, I really had a problem with this movie. I don't even want to talk about the coffee, but it's delicious. Thank you.

Wendy:

You're welcome.

Bridget:

It is delicious.

Wendy:

It's Caramel macchiato creamer. It's is the secret now.

Bridget:

What is macchiato?

Wendy:

I don't know.

Bridget:

Okay. I don't either.

Wendy:

I think it's something about the way they do the milk. It's different than a latte.

Bridget:

I want to. I want to imagine it's chocolate, but that would be chocchiato.

Wendy:

Yeah. Okay.

Bridget:

Okay. Listen, listen, listeners. Listen, Linda, I texted you after I watched this movie, and I was like, I hate you. I may have been having a few beers, but that. That reaction was legit. Do it.

Wendy:

What we watched. Okay. Stop Motion, for whatever reason, makes me think of that song that's like, oh, I like it like that. She working that back. I don't know how to act. Stop motion for me. Stop Motion. There you go. Your morning jingle.

Bridget:

Oh, my God.

Wendy:

And it is a kind of recent 2023 or something.

Bridget:

I don't know why I was just looking at you, like, super blank, but. No, I'm sorry.

Wendy:

No, it's okay. And it's about a stop motion artist and so much more.

Bridget:

Okay. First off. Oh, it was stop motion. And I was thinking back to, like, Coraline, and I love that medium, but this b**** had a lot of plot holes. A lot. Right away, it's Ella and her mother, and her mom is the master stop motion artist. I got the impression. Well known.

Wendy:

Yeah. People are constantly commenting like, I love your mom's work. She's my hero to her.

Bridget:

Yeah. Because she has so many friends who also do stop motion.

Wendy:

Right.

Bridget:

Come on. And her boyfriend's a musician who works in an office, so at least there's that. At least they're showing that he has to make money some other way besides music, as they so often do. And we know as well she has.

Wendy:

A little jab for him at one point towards the end.

Bridget:

Because she is crazy.

Wendy:

Yeah, she's wild. But she says, you're not a musician. You work in an office. It's made as a dig because he's telling her she needs to get her s*** together.

Bridget:

Right?

Wendy:

What? I'm a real artist. There's a lot of that. Like, pretension.

Bridget:

Right. Okay, so back to how we are introduced to her.

Wendy:

Yes.

Bridget:

The mom is in the background and directing her to move this cyclops Puppet head. You know, one millimeter take the shot, half millimeter take the shot, and you see her wringing her hands behind her. And at first I thought that was in her imagination, that it was like the voice of her long dead mother or her mentor or whatever. But no, she's real. She just can't use her hands anymore. So she wants this film to be finished before she dies. Spoiler alert, she dies. Here's where the movie goes wrong, number one.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

And here's the biggest question in my mind. What are these supposed demons that she's battling from her past? Because that's the thing. And she f****** fractures her whole brain. She is cracked. The only demon I saw her having is that it bothers her that she hasn't been able to come up with her own ideas. She doesn't maybe really feel connected to that film her mom's making with the Cyclops couple. So she gets set up with the help of her boyfriend into a different studio apartment. And there's the little girl.

Wendy:

Yeah. Which I kind of recognized pretty close off the bat that that little girl wasn't real.

Bridget:

Right.

Wendy:

You kind of quickly find it out that they show you for real that it's just her imagination. I kept thinking that little girl was representing the trauma. Telling her to act out the trauma with the guy because he's like, night one, he comes or whatever. I was expecting it to go in a situation like maybe her father abused her. She was abused by somebody in her childhood. The guy, the man.

Bridget:

Ash Man.

Wendy:

Ash man.

Bridget:

Ash hole.

Wendy:

Yeah. There's like some symbolism there that they show her boyfriend putting cigarettes out. When the bedroom shakes, it goes back to the cigarettes. Is that a nod to Ash man, or am I looking into it too much?

Bridget:

I like that theory. And I bet that's something that they were going for, but they didn't really elaborate.

Wendy:

It should have come back to whatever that trauma was so you could understand what was happening. If they had just added that piece in a lot of it, more of it would make sense.

Bridget:

Yeah. Because it. It just doesn't make sense. Okay.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

So, yeah, I saw the little girl as basically her inner child. It's weird for me that this little girl didn't make an appearance until after her mom died.

Wendy:

This girl isn't real for sure at that part.

Bridget:

And she's a rude little b**** when she mic drops that juice box.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

I was like, okay. And when she runs into her apartment and grabs puppets and I'm like, wait, you little. You know how long it took me to get it in that position.

Wendy:

I know I just moved at half a millimeter.

Bridget:

And I know her mom's film idea was kind of weird and dark.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

But hers is worse. Far worse. I'm just gonna tell you this. Sometimes I hand write my notes, but I had my laptop open, and I was just typing as I was watching it. After a page, page and a half, I'm all caps. All caps. So the little girl is kind of like we said, her inner child, her trauma, her id, Maybe. I don't understand why it gets so dark. I mean, I know her mom said this medium, like you're bringing something dead to life, but right off the bat, you should use meat. Meat. So they're wrapping the meat around the armature.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

It is vulgar, disgusting. And then that's not even enough. She's being led along by this little girl to finish this story.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

So the little girl is like, don't you want to know what happens next? And she's just humoring her. It does seem at first it's just a kid in the building who's curious. There really is a lot of raw meat in their world.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

There's that scene where she's cutting up the steak for her mom. A steak for breakfast. I mean, people do it. Yeah, but it was always the same kind of steak. Thin and floppy.

Wendy:

They made sure it was the grossest cut. I think a big goal of this movie is to just really gross you out because there's some real gag moments.

Bridget:

Yes, a lot of disturbing quote gag moments. I definitely wanted to gag. I did find a fun fact. Using real me for stop motion is an actual technique used by stop motion legend. And I'm gonna mispronounce this. Jan Svankma.

Wendy:

Using the raw meat in stop motion made me think of Bob's Burger episode where they use hamburger and make a little film with this hamburger man. And then he starts turning gray.

Bridget:

Well, that happens in this too. There's just so much. I mean, I don't necessarily even need to focus on how gross these puppets are becoming. But the little girl is egging her on. First it's use this mortician's wax.

Wendy:

Yeah, gross.

Bridget:

And then the little girl's like, no, it doesn't look real enough. And she's like, what do you mean you need real skin? You should put teeth and a tongue on the ash man. And he comes to her door three nights in a row as he comes to Ella's door as well. And you hear that pounding on the door. And I'm like, holy f***, I would not even look through that peephole. No.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

No. I guess we just watch her crumble through this process. You're right. It's like the tortured artist.

Wendy:

It is a lot like that. They could have went further with the mother because if they're trying to portray that she has all this childhood trauma, it doesn't come up again. You sense that she resents her mom. She resents that everybody loves her. We don't get much of their personal relationship. I was thinking that maybe that would be the other thing that they would come back to, is that her mom was some kind of monster. But they don't. Her mom dies, and then you, like, never see her again.

Bridget:

I got the impression that her mom was pretty overbearing.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

Maybe had been that way her whole life.

Wendy:

She said some messed up stuff to her, but I think that was in a dream. I'm not sure. It's really.

Bridget:

I'm not sure what all was real.

Wendy:

Going back and forth. And then they lead you to believe that she's on acid at one point, but then later you find out she never took it. Very confusing, what's real and what's not. She calls her puppet, but she does later tell her she's nothing but a puppet. And if I'm not pulling the strings, somebody else is.

Bridget:

Puppet caught in your own strings. That's such a good visual, taking the acid. Is this trying to tell us that urban myth where you're gonna go insane if you do acid?

Wendy:

She's obviously has some mental illness going on that's very clear, but it's just not clear what it. What's causing it. Is it childhood trauma? I think that's what they're trying to say.

Bridget:

She went from 0 to 100 in a couple days.

Wendy:

Do you think that she purposely ignored her mom having a stroke? Because when sitting at the breakfast table, she puts the food down for her and she didn't cut it. And I thought that was sort of like a f you to her mom because it's hard for her to use her hands. But then her mom couldn't even pick up the knife. So I wasn't sure if that was just because her hands were that bad or she was already, like, having the stroke. The daughter just doesn't even look at her. And then she keeps having the stroke when they're working on the film and finally falls over.

Bridget:

Well, I think you're right that she's pretty resentful. And so she's a little bit of a f*** you. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of doing your bidding.

Wendy:

Being a caregiver is tough enough on its own, but if it's also like, your job, she's telling you how to do your job, too. That's a lot.

Bridget:

When she's in that club, supposedly tripping her t*** off, as her friend called it. A lot of weird s*** happens there.

Wendy:

Yes.

Bridget:

There's a clown ventriloquist dummy head.

Wendy:

Yes.

Bridget:

That's talking to her. That later is the little girl with clown makeup on her face standing there. She has sex with her boyfriend.

Wendy:

Yeah, that part's weird.

Bridget:

It was weird. And did you see all the pinching?

Wendy:

Yeah. What were they trying to say there?

Bridget:

I was like, please don't make a puppet out of your boyfriend.

Wendy:

I thought that's where it was going later.

Bridget:

It does.

Wendy:

Oh, that's true.

Bridget:

When I say pinching, it wasn't pain pinch. It was like a. When you would go, can you pinch an inch? Just kind of between your thumb and forefinger. And it was a lot of shots of that.

Wendy:

Why were they in the club doing it? None of that made sense to me.

Bridget:

The next thing that happened was somebody got cracked over the head with a beer bottle. We have no explanation. We don't even know these characters. But she goes up and sticks her finger in the bloody wound. I did read some about the makeup artist that, you know, he was like, I had to create some kind of pocket so that she could appear to dig her fingers. And I'm gesturing right now so it could appear that it was, you know, a deep wound that she could get at least her fingertips in there. There's a scene where she's lying in her bed and that f****** puppet climbs up there. No, no. And rips her leg open. I don't know why things had to be more bleedy.

Wendy:

She has to put herself in her art.

Bridget:

Then they find her wandering out outside of her apartment with a nasty cut on her leg. An emergency room cut. Six or eight stitches. We don't know how that happened.

Wendy:

Puppet cuts are there. So that's what I thought the cut was from. Okay. But now I'm going, wait, the puppet's not real.

Bridget:

But the. Well, because there was so much mishmash mangled between reality and Crazy Cakes, the movie that she's making, egged on by the little girl. And there is an egg thing, too. That was weird.

Wendy:

Yeah, I was going to bring that up. What was up with the blue egg?

Bridget:

I don.

Wendy:

The movie starts at the blue egg, and later on it cracks open at the End.

Bridget:

Do you remember when. First night, the ash man sees her the second night, he touches her. Yeah, touches her, but he's got this jaw and, like, long tongue. That thing falls out of his mouth and then she ingests it.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

Okay.

Wendy:

Why? And it's not completely clear. Like, I didn't realize that was the egg until Joel pointed it out. Makes as much sense as anything else.

Bridget:

I said it looked like one of those tainted nuggets from. That makes sense.

Wendy:

No, it was all just an outbreak. She just has the flu.

Bridget:

Kind of making puppets out of meat and fat and roadkill. No foxes were harmed in the making of this movie. It had to smell so bad. So bad.

Wendy:

I wonder, like, the maggots, they were real, or do you think they CGI'd some maggots?

Bridget:

Good question. It's gotta be somebody's job. And they're very proud of it. I am a maggot. Ralph Jungler, hire me for your death scenes.

Wendy:

That's true. There probably is a pretty big market for that in horror films.

Bridget:

Just like for dwarf doubles. Oh, yeah. It says here on my notes, omg maggots. Right after. Oh, Wendy. Why, why? Why?

Wendy:

I knew that it was going to be creepy from the preview, but had no clue this is what it was going to be like at all. You got the impression that her stop motion was going to come to life, so I figured it was like a haunting of it. That's not really what this was.

Bridget:

Yeah, we were talking about the cut on her leg. And she gets back from the hospital and basically tears it back open again. Just digging in. No, I don't want to know what's in there.

Wendy:

It is none of my business.

Bridget:

Right. You stay in your lane, inside body. I will stay out here. At one point, she's had enough of this little girl, like, you are f****** with me. So she tries to choke her. Oh, awesome. I actually wrote, choke that kid. Choke her. And at one point, the ash man, who's all made of meat, I was like, fry that master. Put him in the skillet.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

Oh, my God. But yeah, killing the little girl doesn't do anything. She pops up right behind her and says, you feel better now? You got. Got that out of your system like, you little. This is why I don't have kids.

Wendy:

People don't like it when you murder your kids.

Bridget:

We liked it in cooties. But anyway, so I agree with you is what I thought was coming was that the puppets were gonna be demonic and come to life, which is absolutely one of my biggest fears. Yeah, legit. I am terrified of all dolls. And yet I found myself musing I should make a little puppet. Oh, man, if I could have the patience for stop motion, that would be so much fun. Until you lose your mind.

Wendy:

Yeah. I think the whole process of stop motion is designed to make you go insane. I don't think I could do it.

Bridget:

It wasn't about the creatures coming to life as much as it was about her trying, trying, trying to make it better and better and better. Could have made it cuter and cuter and cuter.

Wendy:

Instead of a meteor.

Bridget:

Did you see the end coming?

Wendy:

No, not exactly.

Bridget:

I was like, oh, great. Her friends showed up and they're gonna, you know, haul her off to the psychiatric ward because they've caught her, you know, almost passing out from blood loss. And she comes up, monster. They did a really good job showing her. Crazy eyes, dirty, sweaty. Good job, good job. Whoever's spritzing her, they did great. So you think that she's about to be rescued and I would have enjoyed that the movie ended that way. No, I.

Wendy:

It would have been better than this.

Bridget:

They're trying to drag her out against her will for obvious reasons, medical help. And she grabs a hold of her whole camera tripod and dragging that behind and then proceeds to bash her friend in the head with it and stab her with it. To her credit, that friend stole her ideas.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

So I don't know if she deserved to be. Yeah. Stabbed in the neck.

Wendy:

Yeah. With the tripod.

Bridget:

And then dug something out of there again. She reached in and pulled something out. Meanwhile, that scuffle had knocked her boyfriend down the stairs. He's like, help me. And she plugs his nose and kills him. Earlier you saw a little teaser of that move. They had fallen asleep. So she pinches his nose closed and he.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

And she's like, he. He. I have to go back when she was a normal person.

Wendy:

Yeah.

Bridget:

All right, that's. Here we are. Suddenly she's got giant tarps and is dragging both of their bodies into her apartment. F****** little girl in the corner. Oh, this is much better. Oh, I also wrote, she can't stop the motion. Where are we found?

Wendy:

Currently streaming on Humu Hoo Boo Hoopo.

Bridget:

Currently on my moomoo.

Wendy:

All right.

Bridget:

Did we do it?

Wendy:

I think we did it. We flick some beans. Okay, love you. Bye.

Bridget:

Bye.

Wendy:

Party all night long, Sam.

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Bridget

Co-host
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Wendy

Co-host