99 Cent Rental

This week we're wrapping up our round-up of Latin American movies with maybe the deepest cut we've done yet. We're watching Muerte En La Playa from director Enrique Gomez Vadillo. In this movie we find young David returning home from school on break following the temporary closing of the school after the murder of one of the professors. David's mom, hyper-glam Sonia Infante, and he...

We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is. El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to...

Come with us to a land down under this week as we head back to Australia for a look at Peter Weir's first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris. Paris is a small town with a terrible secret. Cars roll off the road at an alarming rate. The drivers are often killed in the crashes or rendered brain damaged. What's going on there? Poor mild-mannered Arthur finds out the hard way when his broth...

This week we're diving in (get it?) to one of the most successful and well-known of the disaster epics of the 1970s, Irwin Allen's first disaster feature: the Poseidon Adventure. Taking place on New Year's Eve, an old cruise ship is on its last voyage to port in Athens when a sudden rogue wave hits the ship and capsizes it, sending most of the passengers and crew to their deaths. A bal...

This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now! The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals li...

This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make...

You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head...

This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore. We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger. Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What...

Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized e...

Last week we took on the landmark Ridley Scott movie, Alien, a movie that closed out the 1970's with a bang. This week we're taking on James Cameron and his follow-up to the explosive 1985 smash hit, The Terminator, Aliens. Cameron knew he wanted to make an Alien sequel the moment he first saw the original movie and when the opportunity arose he had to fight tooth and nail, struggling agai...

This week we're taking a look at David Lynch's fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch's disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch foun...

This week we take on George Romero's Martin from 1977. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe if you squint at it just right. Martin doesn't fit neatly into any genre and for that we're at a loss to properly define it. But one thing is for sure, this is our favorite non-zombie Romero movie. It's a very weird, very European movie with artsy tendencies and a good idea of where George Romer&#39...

This week we take a look at what is arguably Godfrey Ho's magnum opus as far as that director can have such a thing. We're watching Ninja Terminator from 1986, just one of scores of cheap, trashy martial arts movies made in the 1980s by Godfrey Ho in order to capitalize on the western appetite for all things ninja. Ho is famous for a technique of cut and paste filmmaking where he would cut...

This week we're joined by our friend Jon Lee Brody of the That Was Pretty Spooky podcast for a look at John Carpenter's last movie of the 1980s, They Live. In this evergreen social commentary, Carpenter presents a world very much like our own where the only class distinction is rich and poor and as it would turn out, the rich aren't even human. In They Live a homeless man with no name...

In this episode we look at the 1989 Jean Claude Van Damme movie that thrust JCVD into the limelight of 90's action movie super stars while simultaneously hammering the final nail into the Golan Globus coffin. At one time a Hollywood powerhouse, Cannon Films flew too close to the sun and found themselves undone by their own machinery. Cyborg was the ultimate result of this failure, a movie thro...

  This week we're returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame. In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in...

This week our Black History Month series continues with a look at the 1974 blaxploitation martial arts mashup, Black Belt Jones, starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. Kelly was coming in hot off of his run in the legendary Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon and with Bruce dead and a public appetite ravenous for more martial arts movies it just made sense to spin off one of its stars to their own ma...

This week we take a trip back to 1985 for a movie of such staggering stupidity that we can hardly believe it. Death Wish 3 is the continuing adventures of Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson and where the first movie is a pretty solid action movie and the second movie is dopey and mostly boring, Death Wish 3 commits to absurdity in a way that'll really make you think. It's a movie of su...

In this episode we take a trip to Italy for a look at Massimo Dellamano's 1972 giallo, What Have You Done To Solange? This Italian/German co-production was intended to capitalize on both the popularity of giallo in Italy and krimi in Germany, casting an array of English and German actors familiar to fans of krimi and Italian stars of the time for those who can't get enough giallo. A fairly...

This week we celebrate two years of 99 Cent Rental with one of the most enduring cult movies of the 80's. It's the breakdance epic from Cannon, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. When Cannon's million dollar dance movie pulled a huge profit in the summer of 1984, they rushed a sequel into production to capture the momentum and mere months later released Breakin' 2 with a bigger bud...

This week we're doing David Lynch! We dissect his 2001 Hollywood nightmare, Mulholland Drive. David Lynch is one of our favorite filmmakers, period, and one of the greatest of all time and this may be his best movie. Originally conceived as a new television series for ABC, the network ultimately passed on it and Lynch was given the opportunity to repurpose the footage for a new feature. This m...

This week we abandon our original idea to cover the utterly insane 1987 Karate Kid ripoff Karate Warrior with something with a little more meat on the bone, Tentacles. The 70's was an embarrassment of riches, and in many case just plain embarrassing when it came to the animal attack cash-grabs that arose from the titanic success of Jaws. This is one such movie, a unique twist on American Inter...

This week we're joined by Tyler Hyde from the podcast That's Spooky to discuss the made-for-tv scare film, Mazes & Monsters. The film represents the first lead role for future superstar, Tom Hanks in a movie about the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons. No, I'm not making that up. In the early 1980's as Dungeons and Dragons became a sensation of tabletops everywhere, it di...

99 Cent Rental returns after our October break with a listener request. Since we just did Don Coscarelli's 1979 debut, Phantasm, a movie made on tiny, sub-500k budget, we thought it made a lot of sense to see what happens when you break through and Hollywood heaps cash on you to make a proper movie. The result is... very Coscarelli-ish. There's no question whatsoever that Don is well-read...

This week we take a trip back to 1991 for a real video store oddity. It's a rape/revenge movie that also capitalizes on the popularity of Robocop. Written by an Emmy-award winning TV writer, starring a two-time Tony winner as the villain and chock full of kill scenes that are so creative and strange that they could only have been produced for a straight to video exploitation movie. And so deep...