FEAR AND LOATHING IN CINEMA

This week, Bryan Kluger and Preston Barta willingly wander into M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which is a film so catastrophically misguided it briefly convinced audiences that one of Hollywood's most fascinating directors had misplaced his compass entirely. Before Shyamalan rediscovered himself by making horror movies on a shoestring budget, he somehow said yes to a blockbuster that ben...

On the latest episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, and Preston do what every middle-aged movie podcaster eventually must do. They stare into the sun of American masculinity and discover that it is wearing a tank top from a Miami gym. Their subject is Pain & Gain, which is Michael Bay's delirious 2013 true-crime movie, featuring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and what appears to...

On Episode #162 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, and Chelsea strap themselves to the wings of the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot and attempt to survive the turbulence. Starring Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, the film operates on the charmingly deranged belief that if one adventure-movie cliché is good, then twelve must be better. Deadly viruses? Certainly. Long-lost parents? Naturally. Wild an...

On Episode #162 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, Preston, and Chelsea crack their eyelids open for Wide Awake, the charmingly odd little comedy-drama that spent years gathering dust on a Harvey Weinstein shelf before escaping into the world as M. Night Shyamalan's first feature, long before dead people started chatting with Haley Joel Osment. The post Episode #162 – Wide Awake (1998) fi...

Naturally, Bryan, Preston, Dan, and Chelsea tackle the questions that Nolan either intentionally raised or accidentally unleashed upon humanity. What does Tenet actually mean? Why does every explanation somehow require a flowchart? Can human beings learn to invert themselves through concentration alone? And if time truly begins moving backward, are we prepared for the biological implications of ba...

On Episode #160 of the Fear and Loathing in Cinema podcast, Bryan, Preston, and Dan descend into the beautiful chaos of Reagan-era action mythology, unpacking why every hero in the '80s looked like he survived entirely on black coffee, Marlboros, and trauma. They discuss how Maverick belongs to that glorious lineage of cinematic lunatics, somewhere between John McClane and Martin Riggs. You know,...

Episode #159 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema finds Bryan, Chelsea, Dan, and Preston wandering deep into the crimson sands of John Carter, Disney’s enormously expensive attempt to convince the world that a shirtless Confederate soldier jumping around Mars was the future of blockbuster entertainment. The post Episode #159 – John Carter (2012) first appeared on Boomstick Comics .

This week on Episode #158 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, the gang wades into the warm, cursed waters of Jaws 4: The Revenge, the film that effectively harpooned the Jaws franchise into the bottom of the ocean nearly four decades ago. The episode plays less like a review and more like a marine investigation conducted by four people who cannot believe what they are seeing but are nevertheless delig...

This week on Episode #157 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, we found ourselves tumbling headfirst into the glittering, bewildering cosmos of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. To call it a movie feels almost impolite. It is, instead, a kind of cinematic music video stitched together at the exact moment Michael Jackson ceased to be merely human and became something closer to folklore. He's half man, half...

In Episode #156, the group turns its attention to Murder by Numbers, a 2002 relic starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, and Michael Pitt. It's a film most people remember the way one remembers a locker combination, which is vaguely, and with no real confidence it was ever correct. The hosts reopen the case file to determine whether the film has aged into something worth defending or remains a cur...

There are episodes of a podcast that arrive with the breezy confidence of a brunch invitation. It's light, convivial, and gone before the coffee cools. And then there is episode #155 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, which arrives more like a subpoena. The subject, as it turns out, was Song of the South (1946), a Disney relic so thoroughly tucked away that it has achieved the status of cinematic fol...

Episode #154 finds the panel wading into the tiara-strewn chaos of Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), a mockumentary so dark it occasionally feels like it’s whispering its jokes from the trunk of a car. With a cast that reads like a particularly unhinged reunion, including Kirsten Dunst, Allison Janney, Denise Richards, Amy Adams, Kirstie Alley, Brittany Murphy, and a cheerfully bewildered Adam West, the...

On episode 153, the gang attempts to escape The Island, Michael Bay’s glossy 2005 action curio, which arrived sandwiched between the pyrotechnic bravado of Bad Boys II and the toy-store industrial complex known as Transformers. The film itself behaves like three movies crammed into a trench coat: dystopian sci-fi meditation, glossy chase spectacle, and existential identity crisis, all sprinting to...

On the show’s 152nd episode, Bryan and Preston head back to campus with The Rules of Attraction, the 2002 collegiate fever dream starring the late James Van Der Beek alongside a parade of early-aughts luminaries. Adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, yes, that Bret Easton Ellis, of American Psycho infamy, and directed by Roger Avary, the film follows a semester in the chemically enhanced li...

For their 151st episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, the gang ups the ante, literally, with Malibu 151 and revisits 1994’s Milk Money, that improbable artifact in which Melanie Griffith and Ed Harris (in one of his rare turns as a gentle, flustered dad rather than a granite-faced authority figure) anchor a plot that hinges on middle-school boys pooling allowance money to hire a sex work...

Certain milestones demand champagne. Others demand a collective cry for help. For our 150th episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, the four of us, pestering podcasters marooned in Texas, chose the latter and marked the occasion by revisiting the 1997 cinematic curio The Pest. The post Episode #150 – The Pest (1997) first appeared on Boomstick Comics .

By the time we arrived at Episode #149 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, Gerarduary, the sacred month in which we collectively reflect on the brawny altar of Gerard Butler was breathing its final, heroic breaths, we chose to close it out not with subtlety or restraint, but with Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003). This is a movie whose title alone sounds like it was generated by shaking a...

On Episode #148 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, the four of us are still trapped in Gerarduary, which is our month-long cinematic endurance test disguised as a tribute to Gerard Butler. Texas, in solidarity, has chosen this exact week to become the Arctic. The power grid is nervous. We are bundled up. Spirits are high. Because if you’re going to freeze, you might as well do it with a Briti...

On Episode #147 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, we find ourselves still lingering in January of 2026, a month that has overstayed its welcome and thus demanded a rebrand. We now call it Gerarduary, a ceremonial observance devoted to Gerard Butler. He's the cinematic Spartan who has spent the last two decades shouting his way through global catastrophes with admirable lung capacity. The pos...

On our first Fear and Loathing in Cinema episode of 2026, we do what any sensible group of adults would do to welcome a new year. We consecrate January to Gerard Butler. Or, as it will now be known in perpetuity, Gerarduary. This is not a bit so much as a lifestyle choice. And what better way to kick things off than Dracula 2000, the movie that announced Butler to the world with the subtlety of a...

The end-of-the-year episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema has arrived, like a tipsy friend barging into your living room on December 31st with a notebook full of opinions and absolutely no intention of keeping them to themselves. This isn’t an episode devoted to a single film so much as it is a cinematic reckoning or a long look back at the movies we saw in theaters in 2025. The post End of Year...

Here we are again, gathered for our annual White Elephant episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, a tradition in which Bryan, Dan, Preston, and Chelsea select a movie and secretly foist it upon another unsuspecting co-host. Historically, this exercise has had a fifty–fifty chance of devolving into chaos of a nude and possibly indictable nature. But 2025, like so many strange years before i...

On Episode No. 145 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, we set out with the mild intention of having a civilized conversation and immediately abandon it. Bryan, Preston, and Chelsea welcome director Todd Rohal, making his inaugural appearance, and, if we’re lucky, not his last, just as his new film, Fuck My Son, is busy lodging itself permanently in the cultural memory. Or, depending on your dispositio...

On Episode No. 144 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, the three of us reunite like a ragtag crew of slightly overcaffeinated jewel thieves to conduct a meticulously unplanned heist of your ear holes. Our target? The 2018 film Ocean’s 8, that all-women-led sequel/spin-off/reheated-leftovers entrée of the Ocean’s Trilogy. The post Episode #144 – Ocean’s 8 (2018) first appeared on Boomstick Comics .

On Episode No. 143 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, we four self-appointed munchkins, each of us barely tall enough to see over our own opinions, link arms, step onto the yellow brick road, and march straight into the emerald wreckage that is Wicked: For Good. What follows is less a film discussion and more a group therapy session conducted at a brisk, panicked trot. The post Episode #143 – Wicked:...