We kick off our regular Pride series for 2025 with a camp classic that was embraced by gay audiences almost immediately upon release. Warner Brothers brought together two legends of Hollywood, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, introduced the world to Victor Buono, and put it all under the careful, deliberate direction of Hollywood iconoclast, Robert Aldrich for a movie that spawned a cultural obsession with movies about older ladies losing their god damn minds. It's the psycho-biddy, hagsploitation nightmare of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
We'll explore what it is about this movie that was so immediately appealing to gay audiences of the 1960's and beyond. We'll talk about the simmering, mostly made-up feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and Crawford's petty, bizarre stunt at the 35th Academy Awards as payback for the perceived slight of Bette Davis getting all the attention. And we'll break it all down in our usual fashion to tell you exactly why this movie is so god damn good and why it persists in the world's imagination as we celebrate Pride all month long with a series highlight and celebrate queer film and filmmakers.
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This week we're going down under for a look at the 1989 post-apocalypse sports movie, Blood of Heroes starring Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen. Also known as Salute of the Jugger, it's a late entry into the Maxploitation wave of the 80's but rather than being the usual quest for water or women, it's an underdog story about a team of misfits who play a violent future sport involving a dog's skull instead of a ball. What's a jugger? Don't worry about it, baby! Will they climb the ranks out of their place beating up on village and peasant teams? Will they make it to the big city and win it all when they face the pros? Probably. I mean, it's a sports movie at heart and that's what usually happens in those movies.
Blood of Heroes sports a significantly better cast than you're probably expecting with Hauer, Chen, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Delroy Lindo all slumming it. The production is also executed by a surprising cohort of filmmakers who we have to thank for the original Mad Max movies which explains why it's so competently made and looks so authentically post-apocalyptic from the people who brought us the subgenre in the first place.
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This week we dust off our dancing shoes and head back to 1980 for the Canadian slasher classic, Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. It's a wild whodunnit with a billion misdirects that thinks its pulling one over on you even though it's pretty obvious who the killer is from the get go. You get a great cast here that elevates to the movie to a higher class than it probably deserves. It's a beautiful portrait of a time long gone and we love it.
Originally conceived as a killer doctor horror movie it instead eschews the popular notion at the time to set a slasher movie during a holiday in favor of something more relatable to young audiences, proms. It also bends over backwards to convince you that the songs being played at this prom are popular disco hits of the era without actually being popular hits of the era.
Prom Night also sparked the first moral outrage of the 80's, the public backlash against horror movies and we're going to tell you all about it.
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This week Bryan and Dave take a trip down south to Orlando, Florida for a look at the utterly baffling but thoroughly charming martial arts movie from Grandmaster YK Kim, Miami Connection. This one's got it all. You get a rock and roll band that's also a bunch of taekwondo black belt vigilantes, a scummy gang of coke dealin' rednecks, ninjas on motorcycles, and a battle of the band that is a little more literal than you might be expecting. Along the way you'll learn a thing or two about how great taekwondo is and the power of friendship and family.
Utterly trashed upon release and rejected by nearly every distributor that saw it, Miami Connection nearly ruined YK Kim but his sheer force of personality saw it through and the good folks at AGFA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin saw a sincerity in it that its contemporaries utterly lacked. It's because of this that Miami Connection roared back into life and lives comfortably in the hearts of all who see it. We love it so much that Grandmaster Kim graces our own podcast art.
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This week we're joined by one of our favorite guests, Alaina Urquhart from the massively popular podcast Morbid to take a trip back in time and bask in the warm nostalgic glow of 1998's The Faculty from director Robert Rodriguez. Along with our usual exhaustive break down of the movie you'll hear about the unusually violent high school that we attended (and also was home to Pam Smart), that time Bryan and his girlfriend sat in on a Heaven's Gate presentation at the local library, hosted by Marshall Applewhite, and how Bryan and that same girlfriend were hoodwinked by members of the Church of Scientology into taking their Oxford Capacity Analysis test.
It's tales of peril and high strangeness, sandwiched between a love letter to an underrated gem of 90's horror, made possible by a talented and passionate director and his extremely photogenic cast. Sure, the end of this movie sucks but if you shut it off before the heinous Breakfast Club coda you end up with a ton of fun and no better way to kill 100 minutes.
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This week we slog it out through another Gansa and Gordon filler episode. Scully's ex gets gunned down during a bank robbery and is somehow resuscitated with the spirit of his killer inside him. He's out to find his lady and the whole thing is a little exasperating if we're being honest. We're positively exhausted by the repeated attempts to fill in Scully's backstory with nothing but daddy issues, deadbeats on the dating scene, and in this case, a wildly inappropriate and unlikely scenario where foxy Dana Scully shacked up with one of her instructors, a suitably dumpy bureau guy who couldn't possibly have landed a fine lady like Specia Agent Dana Scully.
We also run down the headlines, talk about the inexplicable success of Mrs. Doubtfire, and marvel at the rising tide of booty jams and sweaty silk-shirt R&B tracks on the radio.
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our Millennium Edition episodes as well as our X-Files rewatch and 90's history podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky?, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.
This month we're taking a big step back into the 2000's for a look at a movie that somehow manages to typify the entire decade in a single package. You get: heinous mall fashion, a cast of WB/CW soap actors, a Hot Topic-ready soundtrack of all the hottest nu-metal acts, Paris Hilton, and the last gasps of casual misogyny and homophobia in the days before social media. House of Wax is a soulless, artless, remake in the high holy days of the horror movie remake.
Dave asks the question: does the culture owe Paris Hilton an apology? Bryan asks the question: Is this actually a remake of the Vincent Price House of Wax? It seems to be a remake of Tourist Trap. Collectively they ask: Is this all Millennials had to look forward to?
House of Wax is the worst of all possible outcomes and we're going to tell you all about it.
Heeeeeeeere we are! Born to be kings! We're talking immortals, sword fighting, decapitations, Queen! It's 1986's cult classic, Highlander, an absolute mess of a movie that somehow, against all odds, has amassed a worldwide following of super fans. It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, just a mishmash of nerdy tropes thrown together and somehow working together in a way that made every twelve year old boy a megafan.
Christopher Lambert plays a brooding Scottish guy who must fight a crazy evil heavy metal black knight while Sean Connery chews scenery. It's all sword fighting all the time and a soundtrack provided by Queen that is easily as memorable as the entire movie. Russell Mulcahy is out here putting his music video filmmaking skills to work on a stylish action adventure that endures as an unstoppable cult movie item that Bryan and Dave are at a loss to explain.
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This week we're joined by Chris Haskell of Punk Vacation, Mondo Macabro, and They Live By Film as we continue our series of high-class horror movies. We're talking about the divine black and white Swedish torment of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf.
Bergman is one of the all-time film making greats and you can see his fingerprints on the weirder corners of American film. In the case of Hour of the Wolf you can draw a direct line from this deeply introspective movie to the work of David Lynch. With Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman, Hour of the Wolf is a movie about a lot of things. It's about an artist's place in his own work, what it means to own a piece of art, it's about guilt and regret and the damage left in your wake when you're constantly following your heart. Ingmar Bergman is a filmmaker who seemed to be constantly going through something and this is one of the results of a man living in his head 24/7.
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This week we take a look at the first episode of The X-Files to be directed by Rob Bowman, the second-most prolific creative force on the show after Kim Manners. It's a potentially thorny episode about killer Amish people who can change their gender at will that ends up surprising us both with its restraint. When stepping back into a decade like the 90's you get used to a certain insensitivity and still, Gender Bender surprises us.
Also, it's a wild week in pop culture as we take a look at the headlines and try and remember some of these absolutely forgettable top 40 songs.
This week we're getting real stupid with it and looking at Cannon Film's ultimate ninja festival, American Ninja from 1985. This one hits all the high notes for the 80's. Michael Dudikoff makes his starring debut playing an American soldier with a mysterious past who must fight evil ninjas to stop an arms dealer from selling missiles to communists in Central America or maybe it's Angola. Who can say? We also break down the dubious political conditions of The Philippines and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that made so many cheesy low budget action movies, the intense, apocalyptic conditions of the late Cold War, and the wild abandon with which Cannon made jingoistic action movies for the American market.
This absolutely ridiculous movie is one of the dumbest movies we've watched so far and we cannot resist its stupid allure. It's got just about everything a twelve year old boy could want in an action movie. They're ninjas! And they're freaking out!
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This week we're classing the place up a bit by taking a detour down under for a look at the movie that the Australian Film Board considers the greatest Austrlian movie ever made. We're watching Peter Weir's 1975 piece of magical realism, Picnic At Hanging Rock. When three girls and their teacher vanish without a trace under strange circumstances during a school picnic in 1900 the mystery becomes an obsession for those left behind. This dreamy, lyrical piece of cinema is as unconventional as a horror movie gets. It's vulvacious! Let us tell you all about it.
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This month's Millennium Edition takes a look at 2008's Lake Mungo, from Australian director Joel Anderson. This extremely affecting mockumentary sets up a promise that it can't possibly deliver on but the first hour that it sets up is a deeply moving and relatable document of loss and grief. The entire affair is a terribly frustrating affair that leaves you wondering: Why didn't Anderson direct anything after this? He's clearly a very talented filmmaker.
Grease up your pompadours and get your switchblades ready. This week we're taking a look at Walter Hill's 1984 rock and roll fable, Streets of Fire. Coming in hot off the back of the 1982 smash hit buddy cop picture, 48 Hours, Hill and co-writer Larry Gross could write their own checks and dictate their own destinies and sold Hill's dream project, a retro nostalgia vehicle about tough guys, femme fatales, bad guys, and pop music but when the movie landed in the screening rooms at Universal they knew they had a problem. Streets of Fire is weird as hell and out of step with what movie-going teens of the summer of 1984 were looking for. So dire was the outcome that Streets of Fire ended up getting killed in its opening weekend against one of the weakest Star Trek movies and then the following week Ghostbusters dropped and until Beverly Hills Cop came out it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about.
In the years that followed Streets of Fire gained a cult following that appreciates what Hill was trying to do. It's an upgrade from The Warriors in many ways and the sound track, paired with powerhouse performances from Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe in early roles, delivers a wildly entertaining, deeply silly action movie with an enduring legacy. Let us tell you all about it.
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This week we take a look at Lamberto Bava's first official director's credit with the incredibly tasteless and disgusting piece of southern-fried necrophilia, Macabre from 1980. It's one of those movies that makes you really work for the goods since the worthwhile parts of the movie lie almost entirely in the final third after a lively and berserk setup. It'll make you wonder precisely how long you could preserve a severed head in your average consumer freezer.
Everyone's insane in this one, including the horrible little girl and you'll be hard pressed to find an actor more deeply committed to overacting than Bernice Stegers. Keep a barf bag handy.
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This week in X-Files history we take a look at the monster-of-the-week episode, Fire, in which Scully has to do all the work to stop a serial killer who is somehow burning members of the British parliament and nobility class alive. Mulder is too busy to help, being mopey about the reappearance of his English ex-girlfriend, a psychotic Scotland Yard agent who adds a solid dose of misogyny to an otherwise okay episode.
We also take a walk down memory lane as we look at the headlines and pop culture notes for December 17, 1993. It's a real desert of music, TV, and movies and the contemporary events of the day aren't so hot, either.
We're joined this week by Eli Bosnick of the God Awful Movies podcast to talk about the infamous Hong Kong Category III exploitation movie, Story of Ricky. One man enters a corrupt private prison in near-future China and faces down the evil warden, his assistant, and four villains with terrible strength and magical martial arts prowess. Along the way just about everybody gets their guts kicked out or their head punched off in this extremely gory spectacle.
We also discuss the dawn of the Category III rating in Hong Kong, how great it was to trade video tapes in the mail with total strangers in the 90's, and Eli tries to get Bryan to cop to trading horror movies for weird porno movies in what is easily one of our most inappropriate episodes yet.
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This week we're joined by our friends Johnny Cann and Tyler Hyde from That's Spooky as we celebrate women's history and women in horror with a look at the last movie you'd think would be appropriate for such an occasion. Slumber Party Massacre, from 1982, is a sleazy, lurid spectacle with an unexpected background. Written in 1978 as a spoof of slasher movies by radical feminist icon, Rita Mae Brown, it ended up in the hands, of all people, of Roger Corman, who turned it over to his editor, Amy Holden Jones as she set her sights on directing for the first.
Full of gratuitous nudity, gore, and people making a lot of bad decisions it's a remarkably entertaining piece of slasher horror with a wild production history that ultimately caused the second wave of feminism to turn on Rita Brown in a really unfortunate way. Do check it out!
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This week we go back to December of 1993 for a look at the monster of the week episode, Eve, which pits Mulder and Scully against a pair of evil girl clones. As usual we look at the headlines and have a real morbid laugh at what was going on back then. It's not good, folks. At least The Simpsons was on top of the world.
We're getting really bloody this week as we take a trip to feudal Japan for the 1972 samurai movie that set the pace for violent sword fighting movies to follow. This is not your father's samurai movie. This is not Akira Kurosawa. This is Kenji Misumi's epic starring Tomisaburo Wakyama and his wonderful, weapon-laden baby cart.
Adapted from the extremely popular manga by Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub tells the story of wandering assassin, Ogami Itto and his son, Daigoro as they walk the demon way in hell. The evil daimyo, Yagyu Retsudo wants them dead but it's going to take an army if they intend to get the job done.
Utterly ridiculous and bloody, Sword of Vengeance sets the tone for the five movies that follow and is a tremendously enjoyable movie. Let us tell you all about it.
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