Movie Oubliette

Bonus preview time again: for this special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage, we're joined by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers to dig into A Talent for Murder . Directed by Anton Corbijn from Joanna Murray-Smith's own adaptation of her play Switzerland , the film imagines a fictional Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren, all barbed wit and Swiss seclusion) visited by a young...

The next film to emerge from the Oubliette is Basket Case (1981): the debut feature of Frank Henenlotter, a New York exploitation obsessive who spent his youth in the grindhouses of 42nd Street and, with producer Edgar Ievins, put roughly $35,000 of mostly their own money into turning a title he liked into a film he never expected anyone to see. Shot on 16mm over about 6 months of spare weeks and...

Conrad's TIFF adventure with special guest Joe Lipsett continues with Kick On – the sophomore feature from Nick Kozakis, who cut his teeth directing music videos before making Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism . It follows Eden and her three friends, who decide to "kick on" after a big night out, ending up at the opulent, drug-stuffed lair of a mobster's son. Every genre fan knows...

Here's another special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage – and it's particularly apt as we start the countdown to spooky season! Conrad is joined live in the Toronto Metro Convention Centre by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers and Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures to talk about Crystal Lake , the Friday the 13th prequel series that finally answers a question nobody a...

We're back with another bonus preview from TIFF 2026, and this one's got a title we're not going to be able to say on some podcast directories. Everybody Wants to Fuck Me is the feature debut of writer-director Jonathan Schey, and it stars Taron Egerton as Adam, a London softboi running the full nice-guy playbook: love-bombing, performative sensitivity, and then ghosting women the morn...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins Conrad on this episode for a spoiler-free bonus review of Mike Flanagan's new eight-part streaming series adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie , which lands on Amazon Prime on Friday 7 October. Flanagan is no stranger to King adaptations, having tackled Gerald's Game , Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck , but it seemed an odd move to take on...

Odd Thomas (2013) was Stephen Sommers' first film in 4 years and his first outside the studio-blockbuster machine since 1998's Deep Rising, a curious pivot for the man who built The Mummy franchise and Van Helsing on the twin pillars of CGI and momentum. Adapting Dean Koontz's bestselling 2003 novel, the first of what became a 7-book series, Sommers wrote the screenplay entirely on spe...

Event Horizon arrived in cinemas in August 1997 as the third feature from Paul W. S. Anderson, a British director fresh off the surprise success of Mortal Kombat and, evidently, determined to prove there was more to him than adapting a fighting game, so naturally he followed it up with a haunted-house movie set on a spaceship, from a script by first-time writer Philip Eisner that had been quietly...

Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre , the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt , so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait. Pierre-Yves Cardinal ( Tom at the Farm ) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after...

Lexi Amoriello, creator of Movie Recs by Lex , visits the Oubliette and returns with Seconds – made in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, fresh off the Cold War fever dreams of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May , and here pairing up with the great James Wong Howe for one last, extraordinary black-and-white swan song apiece. Seconds is the sort of film that genre fans tend to discover a decad...

Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King 's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the...

Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive , returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Cath...

Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam ( The Burning ) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner wit...

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row , joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, wher...

Hollywood's penchant for revisiting failed franchises this summer has awakened a number of 80s oddities in the oubliette! This time, Amanda Jane Stern joins us to revisit the Salkinds' 1984 attempt at a Superman spin-off: Supergirl , featuring Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee, Faye Dunaway as the witchy Selena, and Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, Marc McClure, and others filling out a very British...

For our 200th episode, we're revisiting the film that inspired our podcast name! David Goelz of The Muppets joins us as our very special guest to celebrating the 40th anniversary of Labyrinth. The film paired Jim Henson’s creature-shop with a Terry Jones screenplay, George Lucas producing, Brian Froud's world-building, and David Bowie doing what only Bowie could plausibly do: play a goblin king as...

To mark the release of the new Masters of the Universe film, Matt Swaford of Reklaimer's Vintage Toys joins us to revisit Cannon Films' notorious attempt to launch the cinematic branch of Mattel's toy franchise in 1987. Featuring an all-star cast of Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, James 'Mr Strickland' Tolkan, a pre- Voyager Robert Duncan MacNeill, and pre-almost everything Courteney Cox, the film...

Legendary actor and creature performer Doug Jones and independent filmmaker Derek Maki join Dan and Conrad to reminisce about Bug Buster (1998), a late-90s horror-comedy in which a quaint lakeside town is terrorised by mutant insects. The incredible cast combines a pre- Knocked Up Katherine Heigl with Randy Quaid, Star Trek alumni James Doohan and George Takei, Meredith Salenger, and – of course –...

Dan is back from vacation and treats us to Phenomena (1985) – a supernatural giallo from Dario Argento that features a pre- Labyrinth Jennifer Connelly in a star-making lead as an insect-loving teenager who arrives at a Swiss girls’ school only to sleepwalk into a serial murder case that only becomes more bizarre as the story unravels. Released by New Line Cinema in the U.S. as Creepers (shorn of...

RetroBlasting 's Melinda Mock stands in for Dan as animation auteur Ralph Bakshi's Cool World (1992) bursts out of the oubliette and threatens to overwhelm us with its incoherent plot and haphazard melange of visuals. Starring a post Batman Kim Basinger as femme fatale Holli Would, Gabriel Byrne as murderous cartoonist Jack, and a very young Brad Pitt as by-the-book Cool World detective, Frank, Co...

In this Patrons' choice episode, we're exposing ourselves to Cure (1997) – the film that announced Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of the most unsettling voices in modern horror. Set in Tokyo at the tail end of Japan's "lost decade", it follows weary detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) as he investigates a string of seemingly connected string of murders... with apparently different perpetrators. Victims keep...

Released in 1990, Hardware is the abrasive feature debut of cult filmmaker Richard Stanley. Starring Stacey Travis as sculptor Jill and Dylan McDermott as desert drifter Mo, the film begins with a romantic gesture that – through the entirely avoidable gift of salvaged military hardware – turns into a claustrophobic battle with a self-repairing government robot determined to follow its programming...

By popular demand, we're celebrating the release of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! by taking a look back at Franc Roddam's The Bride (1985). This mid-80s take on Mary Shelley’s mythic creation project tellingly got the budget of a period romance, but likely only because it had a new romantic pop star in the lead role and the production design of an Adam Ant music video. The result is a Gothic fabl...

Writer Octavio López Sanjuán joins us as we discover Monster in the Closet (1986), an affectionate pastiche of atomic age monster movies from Troma Entertainment. A string of baffling murders in wardrobes draws a plucky San Francisco obituary writer (Donald Grant) into the most terrifying assignment of his career. He’s soon joined by a biology teacher (Denise DuBarry) with more theories than commo...

Our second film for this year will also be our second dip of the toe into the filmography of Lucio Fulci (see episode 158 for our take on Conquest , his bonkers fantasy adventure, with our special guest Vincenzo Natali). Don’t Torture a Duckling ( Non si sevizia un paperino , 1972) is remembered as one of the most unsettling and thematically ambitious entries in the Italian giallo cycle. Its premi...