Pumpkin Pie Wars (GAM223)

## Hosts

Noah Lugeons

Heath Enwright

Eli Bosnick

***Pumpkin Pie Wars*** is the story of the bloody gang wars in Vanilla Plains, Ohio—Milquetoast, Ohio—between rival bakeries and their control of the world's pie economy. So, you know how *Gangs of New York* was great, but it was full of stuff that mattered... to the plot? They fixed it: they dialed everything from eleven down to three, then down to one, zero… then they made a movie about it. It's  *Meringues of New York*.

### **Opening Phrase**

Where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema, because I haven't quite sobered up since Eli suggested it.

### **How Bad Was It?**

Well, if you love the baking montages of The Food Network, but you hate how sometimes you have to watch multiple scenes in a movie to know what it's about, you will *love* this movie. It's tv for dementia—*You Don't Want Grandma to Lose the Plot, but You Also Don't Want Her to Have a Sixteenth Heart Attack: The Movie*.

### **Best Worst**

* Heath: ...generic brand movie.
* Noah: ...community entertainment.
* Eli: ...college product placement.

### **Notes**

* Thanksgiving-tacular!
* Julie Gonzalo is great on *Supergirl*.

### **Jokes**

* "Right, and mom's whole thing here is like 'Oh, if you don't win this bake off, our business will close and I'll have to start camming.' But you've *lost* three years in a row mom, but your business is still there. Oh, so the fourth year is the one that's going to deliver the fatal punch? Maybe you *suck* at baking and that's why she didn't want to start a bakery with you! No one *ever* says it, but *all* the evidence throughout this entire film is that this character's mother is a bad baker and should not bake! And this little town they live in—Vanilla Plains, Ohio—is insane, apparently: the town is dedicated to nothing but the outcome of bake offs. That's the entire thing that this town does. They have like this *radical* group of pumpkin pie fanatics, and pumpkin pie tourism of the world comes to Vanilla Plains, Ohio. So that is the stakes, but they're *huge*—these are huge." (19:00)
* "Ah, but we meet my favorite characters of the movie: desperately suicidal H.P. Lovecraftian pie host! 'Hi everybody. You know this shit, it's a fuckin' baking contest. I am so tired. Please free me from my torment.' And he ends with this amazing thing, he goes 'Remember, the best thing to put in a pumpkin pie…' and then everyone answers '...is your teeth!' What that means is 'bite a pumpkin pie', but I did not get that for *way* too long, and I was like 'Hell ya Hallmark, let's get into this Hellmark channel!' Like, tentacles start appearing out of the pies, the sun turns black with blood... And also what this means is that the entire town has been to this pumpkin pie contest *weigh in* event, that's not even part of the contest—the preliminary weight in—they've been to this like twenty years in a row, and they know the catchphrase lines from the announcer guy." (26:33)

### **Interstitials**

* *Pumpkin Cream Pie*, the porn script without sex (6:53)
* The 427th Annual Pumpkin Pie Bake Off (1:10:13)

### **Tropes**

* Disappointing [Hallmark] Celebrity
* Nothing Happens
* World Without Black People

### **Links**

* Episode on Audioboom
* Episode on YouTube
* Film on YouTube
* IMDB