Retro Spectacles

Retro Spooktacles concludes One Building, One Nightmare with Mitcz’s pick, Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic where Ellen Ripley’s insistence on basic quarantine protocol turns out to be the best advice nobody follows. The Nostromo crew just wants to finish its job and get paid, but company orders and one disastrous decision leave them trapped in deep space with something they barely...

Retro Spooktacles enters its final theme, One Building, One Nightmare, with Teddy’s pick, Hush, Mike Flanagan’s 2016 home-invasion thriller that makes a persuasive case against living alone in the woods. A remote cabin, walls of windows, and nobody close enough to help turn the appeal of solitude into a serious liability. Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the film with Flanagan, stars as Maddie, a deaf no...

Retro Spooktacles continues Wrong Place, Wrong Time with Teddy’s pick, Creep, Patrick Brice’s 2014 found-footage horror film that asks how long you can keep giving a stranger the benefit of the doubt. A $1,000 Craigslist gig brings a videographer to an isolated cabin, where every awkward joke and crossed boundary makes staying harder to justify. Patrick Brice stars as Aaron, hired to film Josef (M...

Retro Spooktacles moves into Wrong Place, Wrong Time with Mitcz’s pick, Fire in the Sky, the 1993 sci-fi thriller inspired by Travis Walton’s reported 1975 alien abduction in Arizona. Its reputation rests on one of cinema’s most terrifying extraterrestrial encounters, but most of the film plays out as a small-town mystery about what happened to a missing man and whether his friends are telling the...

Retro Spooktacles continues Rich People Are F'n Evil with Mitcz’s pick, Land of the Dead, George A. Romero’s 2005 return to his zombie universe. Twenty years after Day of the Dead, the wealthy are still living comfortably behind the walls of Fiddler’s Green while everyone else struggles to survive. Apparently, even the apocalypse can't kill the class divide. Dennis Hopper plays Kaufman, th...

Retro Spooktacles enters Rich People Are F'n Evil with Teddy’s pick, Would You Rather, David Guy Levy’s 2012 psychological horror thriller about a wealthy philanthropist who turns financial desperation into dinner-party entertainment. Everyone is promised a chance to change their life, but only the host gets to make the rules. Brittany Snow stars as Iris, a young woman desperate to secure trea...

Retro SPOOKtacles continues The Monster Is People theme with Teddy’s pick, The Strangers, Brian Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion horror film built around a terrifying possibility: sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you has no reason at all. Where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre finds horror along the back roads of rural Texas, The Strangers brings it straight to the front door. Liv Tyler and Sco...

Retro Spooktacles moves into The Monster Is People theme with Mitcz’s pick, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s groundbreaking 1974 horror classic that helped establish the blueprint for modern horror. More than fifty years later, its documentary-style realism, relentless atmosphere, and surprisingly restrained onscreen violence remain as unsettling as the generations of slashers it helped...

Retro Spooktacles continues its Halloween Classics theme with Mitcz’s pick, Beetlejuice, the bizarre 1988 horror comedy that proved Tim Burton’s strangest instincts could work on a mainstream scale. The movie became a genuine hit, helped establish Burton’s unmistakable visual identity, and gave Hollywood enough confidence to hand him Batman shortly afterward. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin star as B...

Retro SPOOKtacles begins with the Halloween Classics theme and Teddy’s pick, Practical Magic, the 1998 witchy romance that took the long road from critical dismissal to seasonal staple. Mitcz watches it properly for the first time expecting to be skeptical and instead discovers why generations of viewers keep returning to the Owens family every Halloween. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman star as s...

After Season 6 pushed Black Mirror toward crime and supernatural horror, Season 7 brings the series back to technology and finds reality uncomfortably close to catching up. Across six episodes, medical care becomes a subscription, memories become interactive, artificial lives demand recognition, entertainment becomes increasingly synthetic, and reality itself becomes something that can be rewritte...

Retro Spectacles reaches the season where Black Mirror starts deliberately stretching beyond its reputation as a technology dystopia. Joan Is Awful and Beyond the Sea still build their nightmares around emerging technology, while Loch Henry, Mazey Day, and Demon 79 push the anthology toward true crime, horror, and the supernatural under the shadow of Charlie Brooker’s proposed Red Mirror experimen...

Retro Spectacles closes out its inaugural YANST (You Ain’t Never See This) pairing with Mitcz’s pick, Walter Hill’s 1984 “rock & roll fable” Streets of Fire. What begins like a lost cult classic in the making quickly turns into something stranger: a movie with an incredible soundtrack, striking imagery, and enormous ambition that never quite becomes the film its opening promises. Michael Paré...

Retro Spectacles launches YANST (You Ain’t Never Seen This), a new series where Mitcz & Teddy each pick a movie neither of them has ever seen and find out whether there was a good reason it slipped through the cracks. Teddy’s selection is Righteous Kill, the largely forgotten 2008 crime thriller built around the long-awaited prospect of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sharing an entire movie as c...

Retro Spectacles continues its Black Mirror deep dive with the compact three-episode fifth season. Striking Vipers, Smithereens, and Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too tackle virtual intimacy, addictive technology, and artificial companionship, but Teddy and Mitcz find the season increasingly more interesting on paper than what ultimately makes it to the screen. Striking Vipers stars Anthony Mackie, Yahy...

Retro Spectacles closes out Black Mirror Season 4 with the episode that proved too loaded to squeeze into Part 2. Black Museum turns the series itself into a roadside collection of technological nightmares, using three interconnected stories to revisit one of Black Mirror’s favorite questions: what happens when human suffering becomes something that can be packaged, sold, and consumed? Letitia Wri...

Retro Spectacles continues its Season 4 deep dive with Arkangel and Crocodile, two stories about what happens when technology turns private life into something that can be watched, recorded, and ultimately used against you. Black Museum proved substantial enough to earn its own episode, so the Season 4 discussion continues next time. Directed by Jodie Foster, Arkangel follows a mother who uses exp...

Retro Spectacles begins its Season 4 deep dive with USS Callister, Hang the DJ, and Metalhead, three episodes that push Black Mirror deeper into simulated consciousness, algorithmic relationships, and autonomous technology. With the season proving too loaded for one episode, Mitcz and Teddy are splitting the six installments in half before returning to Archangel, Crocodile, and Black Museum. USS C...

Retro Spectacles enters the Netflix era with Black Mirror’s expanded six-episode third season. A larger budget, an international cast, and a broader canvas take Charlie Brooker’s anthology from Channel 4 cult favorite to global phenomenon without abandoning its central question: what happens when technology amplifies fear, shame, grief, violence, and humanity’s worst impulses? Nosedive stars Bryce...

Retro Spectacles continues its Black Mirror deep dive with the 2014 special that closes the show’s original Channel 4 era. Built around three interconnected stories, White Christmas brings the ideas, technologies, and moral questions of the first two series together for one ambitious final nightmare before Black Mirror’s move to Netflix. Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall play two men sharing Christmas in an...

Retro Spectacles continues its Black Mirror deep dive with Series 2, the three-episode Channel 4 run that pushes Charlie Brooker’s anthology into darker, more emotionally punishing territory. Be Right Back, White Bear, and The Waldo Moment move from grief and artificial companionship to public punishment and political collapse, testing just how bleak the show can become before its final Channel 4...

Retro Spectacles begins a new deep dive into Black Mirror with Series 1, the original Channel 4 run that introduced Charlie Brooker’s bleak, funny, horrifying vision of modern technology staring right back at us. Before the Netflix era, before San Junipero, before the show became shorthand for “this terrible thing is basically a Black Mirror episode,” there were three brutal opening swings: The Na...

Retro Spectacles continues "Good, Good for Its Time, or Good for My Time?" with Mitcz's pick: The NeverEnding Story. Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 fantasy is remembered as a whimsical childhood staple, but a rewatch reveals something much heavier. This is a movie that opens on a grieving, bullied boy and spends 90 minutes putting its heroes through loss after loss. The practical effects hold up better...

Retro Spectacles kicks off a new series, "Good, Good for Its Time, or Good for My Time?" with Teddy's pick that also doubles as a Fourth of July celebration: The Sandlot. Mitch saw it for the first time a month ago with zero nostalgia attached. Teddy grew up watching it on cable until it felt like he owned it. The question: does a beloved coming-of-age classic hold up when you strip the nostalgia...

Spoiler warning: this episode goes deep into every plot point, twist, and ending of Toy Story 5. Retro Spectacles closes out the Toy Story franchise deep dive with a full spoiler review of Toy Story 5. After weeks of deepening skepticism across six movies, both hosts walked in expecting to be underwhelmed. Pixar pulled it off again. Jessie takes center stage in the franchise's most parent-oriented...