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Button eyes, a suspiciously perfect mother, and a tunnel that definitely should have been left alone. This week we riff on Henry Selick’s stop-motion nightmare-fuel masterpiece, in which a bored kid discovers that the grass is always greener in the Other World, mostly because it’s being grown by a soul-eating arachnid with a sewing hobby. We cover the things the movie asks us to ignore: why Coraline’s parents have apparently never heard of a “work-life balance,” how the Pink Palace Apartments passed any kind of inspection, and why no adult in this film ever says “maybe don’t go into the creepy door.” We also pay tribute to the Other Father’s surprisingly catchy musical number, and to the cat, who is the only competent person in the entire cast. Grab your key, avoid anything made of buttons, and join us for a movie that proves childhood was never as safe as we remember. How will Coraline hold up? Directed by: Henry Selick Screenplay by: Henry Selick, based on the novella by Neil Gaiman Studio: Laika, released by Focus Features (2009) Music by: Bruno Coulais, with songs by They Might Be Giants Voice cast: Dakota Fanning as Coraline Jones Teri Hatcher as Mel Jones / The Other Mother John Hodgman as Charlie Jones / The Other Father Keith David as The Cat Robert Bailey Jr. as Wybie Lovat Jennifer Saunders as Miss Spink Dawn French as Miss Forcible Ian McShane as Mr. Bobinsky

This week on Myopia Movies, we accept an invitation to Auntie’s house, which is a mistake, because Auntie’s house is hungry. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 Japanese horror-comedy follows Gorgeous and her six schoolmates (Kung Fu, Prof, Fantasy, Melody, Mac, and Sweetie, because subtlety was not on the call sheet) as they head to the countryside for a summer getaway. What awaits them is a sentient house, a murderous piano, a possessed cat, a watermelon with a secret, and special effects that look like a kaleidoscope fell down a flight of stairs. The film was conceived in part with Obayashi’s young daughter, which explains a lot about the logic, and nothing about the ceiling lamp. Is it a horror film? A comedy? A fever dream assembled from the contents of a 1970s Toho prop closet? Yes. Join us as we riff through one of the most gloriously unhinged movies ever made, where the editing has no rules and the plot has no brakes. Bring snacks, but keep a close eye on them. They may be sentient too. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How does House hold up? Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi Main cast: Kimiko Ikegami as Gorgeous (Oshare) Kumiko Ohba as Kung Fu Yōko Minamida as Auntie Miki Jinbo as Prof (Ōtsuka) Ai Matsubara as Fantasy Eriko Tanaka as Mac (Kuinshiru) Masayo Miyako as Melody Mieko Sato as Sweetie Kiyohiko Ozaki as Mr. Togo Saho Sasazawa as Gorgeous’s father (Mr. Gorgeous) Haruko Wanibuchi as Gorgeous’s stepmother

Something is rotten in Middleton, and everyone thinks it’s Frances. Pranks are piling up across town, the adults are furious, and the only person who believes her innocent is a childhood imaginary friend who has shown up unannounced with some alarming news: the Boogeyman is real, he’s loose, and he’s framing her. This week we revisit a Disney Channel Original Movie from the golden age of tweens, slumber parties, and a weirdly high number of adults who refuse to listen to teenagers. We riff on the logic of the Boogeyman’s master plan, the town’s astonishing lack of due process, and why nobody ever just checks under the bed. Grab a flashlight, keep your feet off the floor, and join us. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Don't Look Under the Bed hold up? Directed by Kenneth Johnson Starring: Erin Chambers, Ty Hodges, Robin Riker, Steve Valentine, Stephen Tobolowsky, Jake Sakson

A whole town has vanished. Snowfield, Colorado, is empty except for a few corpses, a ringing phone, and a vibe that says "don't touch anything." Naturally, we touch everything. This week we riff on Phantoms, the 1998 adaptation of Dean Koontz's horror novel. Two sisters (Joanna Going and Rose McGowan) roll into town and find it deserted. Then they find Sheriff Ben Affleck, who is very serious about all of this. Then a scientist (Peter O'Toole, who is clearly there for the paycheck and the vibes) shows up to explain that the answer is an ancient shapeshifting horror from beneath the earth. Liev Schreiber is also here, to remind us that this was a very strange moment in everyone's career. We discuss: Why every small-town sheriff in a horror movie takes "the entire population is gone" so calmly Peter O'Toole delivering exposition like he's reading the Magna Carta to a hostage A monster that is part Lovecraft, part Play-Doh, and part "the effects budget ran out" Where Phantoms sits in the great late-'90s tradition of horror movies that want to be Scream but can't commit Grab your snacks, check that your phone line isn't dead, and join us for another round of riffing. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Phantoms hold up? Directed by Joe Chappelle Starring: Peter O'Toole, Joanna Going, Rose McGowan, Liev Schreiber, Ben Affleck, Clifton Powell, Nicky Katt, Michael DeLorenzo

Six women charges with murder in Cook County and somehow they're the ones putting on the show. This week we're strapping ourselves into fishnets and existential dread for Rob Marshall's musical about murder, media, and the sweet, sweet payoff of celebrity homicide. Renée Zellweger discovers that shooting your boyfriend is basically an open mic night, Catherine Zeta-Jones proves prison is just improv with worse lighting, and Richard Gere spends two hours doing legal tap-dancing — sometimes literally. Queen Latifah runs the cell block like a landlord who takes cash only, and every single musical number is somebody's fantasy sequence because apparently nobody in 1920s Chicago can process trauma without a spotlight. We're riffing courtroom theatrics, jazz-hand justice, and a plot that boils down to "fame forgives everything." All that jazz, none of the remorse. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Chicago hold up? Directed by: Rob Marshall Starring: Renée Zellweger Catherine Zeta-Jones Richard Gere Queen Latifah John C. Reilly Christine Baranski Taye Diggs Lucy Liu

Nomi Malone wants to dance. She wants it so bad she'll claw, thrust, and pool-vomit her way from a Vegas diner to the top of the Stardust Casino's marquee show — and we're along for every glitter-caked, oddly joyless step of it. Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas set out to make the ultimate NC-17 spectacle and instead produced one of the most gloriously, bafflingly bad movies ever released by a major studio. We're talking about the lap dances that look like seizures, the dialogue that sounds like it was translated into and out of three other languages, and a steak dinner scene that has somehow entered the pop-culture canon. Join us as we dissect Showgirls — a film so committed to its own vision of sleazy excess that it looped back around into something like camp genius. Is it satire? Is it just bad? Is Elizabeth Berkley giving the bravest performance of 1995 or the most unhinged? We riff, we argue, we never quite agree. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Showgirls hold up? Directed by Paul Verhoeven Starring: Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera, Lin Tucci

A movie about a songwriter who is too shy to sing, solved by putting her on a bar in wet jeans. Violet Sanford flees New Jersey for Manhattan with a demo tape and roughly nine dollars, gets robbed, gets hired at a saloon whose entire business model is "hydrate the patrons against their will," and discovers that the cure for stage fright is a crowd of drunk men chanting. Meanwhile her father drives down from the Garden State to yell about it, and Adam Garcia keeps showing up like a Australian golden retriever who learned to make omelets. Bruckheimer looked at Flashdance, said "what if less plot and more hose," and cashed a check. We're here for the fire code violations, the LeAnn Rimes of it all, and the moment John Goodman quietly outacts the entire soundtrack. Also: nobody in this bar is ever served a drink. We counted. Can you fight the moonlight? Findings inside. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Coyote Ugly hold up? Directed by David McNally Starring: Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, John Goodman, Maria Bello, Izabella Miko, Tyra Banks, Bridget Moynahan, Melanie Lynskey

We're digging into the vault for this one. The Plastics are back, Gretchen is still trying to make fetch happen, and so are we. Join us as we revisit our take on the 2004 teen comedy that somehow became both a cultural touchstone and a Broadway musical — because Hollywood ran out of ideas and humility. Does Mean Girls hold up? Is Regina George actually the hero? Why does a grown adult math teacher have this many emotional breakdowns? We had questions in 2014. We have more questions now. Remastered for clarity. The opinions are messier than ever. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Mean Girls hold up? Directed by Mark Waters Starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Bennett, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rajiv Surendra

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a full moon coming up! We watched Ginger Snaps, where a Canadian teenager gets bitten by a werewolf on the same night she gets her first period...turns out puberty was always kind of a horror movie, we just needed the claws to make it official. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Ginger Snaps hold up? Directed by John Fawcett Starring: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Moss

Two California teens dig a hole in the backyard looking for a swimming pool and instead unearth a frozen Neanderthal, thaw him out with a hair dryer, and enroll him in high school. It works about as well as you'd expect. Brendan Fraser grunts his way through his big-screen debut as "Link," Pauly Shore is somehow the film's moral center, and Sean Astin plays a guy who just wants everyone to respect the Pleistocene. We dig into the movie's truly deranged internal logic (nobody calls the Smithsonian?), the early-90s obsession with turning "weird outsider" into "coolest kid at school" in under 90 minutes, and whether this counts as anthropology if you squint hard enough. Bring your own hair dryer. How will Encino Man hold up? Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! Here are the film credits for Encino Man (1992): Director: Les Mayfield Cast: Sean Astin as Dave Morgan Brendan Fraser as Link (Linkovitch Chomofsky) Pauly Shore as Stanley "Stoney" Brown Megan Ward as Robyn Sweeney Robin Tunney as Ella Michael DeLuise as Matt Wilson Mariette Hartley as Joan Morgan Richard Masur as Ed Morgan Rick Ducommun as Mr. Morris

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a candy-coated murder cover-up coming up! We watched Jawbreaker, where three impossibly glamorous high school mean girls accidentally kill their best friend with a birthday prank gone wrong and then spend the rest of the movie handling it with all the grace and subtlety you'd expect from teenagers who peaked in the "Flawless" clique... turns out 1999 had a lot of feelings about popularity, and somehow all of them involve Judy Greer stealing every scene she's in. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Jawbreaker hold up? Directed by Darren Stein Starring: Rose McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, Julie Benz, Judy Greer, Rose Marie, Pam Grier

This week on Myopia Movies, we got a yearbook coming up! We watched Can't Hardly Wait, where a lovesick teenager spends an entire graduation party trying to work up the nerve to talk to his crush...turns out 1998 had a lot of feelings about the last day of high school and a surprising number of them involve Jerry Springer references. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Can't Hardly Wait hold up? Directed by Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan Starring: Ethan Embry, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Seth Green, Jerry O'Connell, Melissa Joan Hart

Before he was terminating cyborgs or governing California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was just a well-oiled Austrian oak with a plan and a truly alarming amount of confidence. This week we strap into George Butler and Robert Fiore's landmark bodybuilding documentary, where men in tiny shorts pursue "aesthetics" with the single-minded devotion usually reserved for religious orders. We'll be riffing on the sun-baked psychodrama of the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition, Arnold's genuinely unhinged mind games against poor Lou Ferrigno, and a supporting cast of quads that deserve their own screen credit. Expect commentary on 70s masculinity, the pageantry of competitive posing, and the sneaking suspicion that this whole film is just performance art that forgot to tell anyone. Pump up, tune in, and don't skip leg day — or this episode. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Pumping Iron hold up? Directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore, Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Franco Columbu, Mike Katz, Ken Waller, and Serge Nubret

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a value meal coming up! We watched Super Size Me, where a documentarian eats nothing but McDonald's for 30 days straight...turns out "would you like to supersize that" was less of a question and more of a warning. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list! We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Super Size Me hold up? Directed by Morgan Spurlock Starring: Morgan Spurlock, Daryl Isaacs, Bridget Bennett, Don Gorske, Lisa Ganjhu, Alexandra Jamieson

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a kill screen coming up! We watched The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, where a middle school science teacher sets a record against a hot sauce magnate on a standee arcade machine...millennials, eat your heart out.  Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list!  We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters hold up? Directed by Seth Gordon Starring: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Mark Alpiger, Adam Wood, Walter Day, Steve Sanders, Steven Krogman, Robert Mruczek