99 Cent Rental

Aileen Clark of Uy Que Horror is back to join us for a look at two truly unhinged scare films. In the 1960s and 70s churches occasionally produced low budget morality tales and scare movies to frighten their congregations into going back to church if they feel like they're slacking off. The problem is that they were made by people who didn't know how to make movies with casts of non-actors...

This week we dive headlong into one of the most baffling 80's video store hits, The Wraith, in which Charlie Sheen is a ghost or an alien or a ghost alien who gets revenge on the wily gang of Arizona cretins that murdered him by running them over with his magic ghost alien car. The Wraith is a lot of things. Good is not one of them but it has a certain ineffable charm that makes it tremendously fu...

This week we're shaking off the despair of a nuclear war one-two punch and staying in the made-for-tv mode for something incredibly dumb. Where Threads and The Day After are significant television events, this week's movie is anything but. It's a baffling riff on both popular haunted house movies of the era and classic gothic horror but that's about as coherent as the vision gets....

Tonight! On a very special 99 Cent Rental we take a trip back to 1983 to take in the movie that shocked the 100 million Americans that watched in horror as the world ended in a nuclear fireball before their very eyes. As the 80's ground on and The United States and The Soviet Union were running out of puppet governments and proxy wars to fight the status of nuclear war became less a matter of...

This week Bryan and Dave take you back to the New York City of 1990 with a look at what might be Abel Ferrara's most focused movie, King of New York. With a dynamite cast of killers, including Christopher Walken at his best, Laurence Fishburne carrying practically the entire movie on his shoulders, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito, King of New York presents a morally gray cr...

This week we're hanging by a thread as we take a look at one of the strangest, sleaziest movies we've done yet, Mad Foxes. A few movies in our past have driven us to the brink of madness but none so powerfully as this Swiss/German/Spanish co-production that was intended to be a sequel-in-name-only of the American action movie, Stingray. Music video director Paul Grau approached his produce...

This week Dave surprises Bryan with a movie with a title that is at once a good description and a terrible misrepresentation. They're going to Germany for a look at Martin Walz's very gay 1996 horror comedy, Killer Condom. Based on the comic of the same name (and the follow-up, Down To The Bone) by German cartoonist, Ralf Konig, Killer Condom (Kondom des Grauens) tells the story of New Yor...

As our Pride series continues we drop the first 99 Cent Rental episode looking at the extremely complicated history of William Friedkin's gay leather giallo Americano, Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino. Dave's research and history expertise about this period of urban gay culture comes in handy as we contrast Friedkin's attempt to provoke and shock against the reality of gay night lif...

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 instea...

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 tha...

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...

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 A...

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...

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...

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, L...

This week we take a look at Bryan's favorite movie of all time, John Carpenter's tough guy action dystopia that definitely shook the Disney off of Kurt Russell and reintroduced him as a premier action movie star for the 1980's. We track the entire trajectory of this movie's production, we'll tell you why everyone thinks Snake Plissken is dead, you'll find out about all the...

This week Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Rome to check in with Enzo G. Castellari and Mark Gregory on their sequel to the 1982 action movie that exploited the popularity of The Warriors. This time they're exploiting the popularity of John Carpenter's outstanding, Escape From New York. We get more Trash and more Bronx gangs but this time we're joined by the absolute massive screen presence of A...

Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way! This week Bryan and Dave take a good long look at the abyss and the abyss stares back when they watch the movie that launched The Cannon Group into the American imagination, a movie musical so poorly received that it nearly drove its director to leap from his hotel balcony at the premier. The Apple is what happens when a producer knows that he wants to make a big m...

This week Bryan and Dave celebrate one year of 99 Cent Rental with the mother of all cult movies. Get it? It's a drag queen's dream come true. In 1977, reeling from being written out of her mother's will for reasons well-known to her, Christina Crawford, daughter of Hollywood legend, Joan Crawford published a vicious hit piece of a memoir about the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her mo...

This week, Bryan and Dave take a trip back to 1984 for a look at one of the top box office draws of 1984 and one of the most toyetic pictures of the decade, Gremlins. It's one of Chris Columbus's first movies produced and Joe Dante's first feature with Steven Spielberg. It's got adorable little cuddly guys, nasty little monsters, Phoebe Cates, gleeful puppet carnage, and a powerhouse score from Ho...

Bryan and Dave go north for a look at The Christmas Martian, an utterly deranged Quebecois children's movie about unsupervised children in a remote Quebec town and the adult man from Mars who in any other context would be understood to be grooming this brother and sister. It's a film that was intended to be whimsical and zany but being the product of Tales For All producer, Rock Demers, it all jus...

Bryan and Dave take a look at one of the deepest of cult movie deep cuts, The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris, a story about fame, guilt, and Olivia Newton John. It’s the story of a chance encounter with a strange young man one day in Beaver, Utah in 1979 that came to determine the entire trajectory of its director’s life. For reasons that we’ll dig into in the episode the movie is a document of th...

99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing. Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over...

Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a di...

We close out our two part examination of the Godzilla/King Ghidorah beef with a close look at the Heisei era movie where Americans from the future presume to travel back in time and destroy Japan with a monstrous weapon and then force what's left over to conform to their political and economic interests. This time around the America/Japan relationship is bopped real hard on the nose. We also d...