Have You Seen This?

Jen and Tim welcome returning guest Darren Herczeg to go to bat for an almost universally loathed Netflix feature, Blonde. Naturally, the trio revel in the film’s grotesque and overt misogyny while twirling their mustaches. Jessica Kiang’s review of Blonde over at Film Comment sums up the critical reaction well : Dominik’s film is a technical marvel, but it’s cold and not a little sinister. It’s a...

Tim and Jen try and fail to recall the name of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps as they discuss Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas’s sole feature film, Gymkata. Jen’s half-assed inaccurate anecdote about Phelps being considered to play Tarzan is actually true, albeit not the way she told it. Producer Jerry Weintraub (no relation to Gymkata producer Fred Weintraub) believed that he’d found the new Johnny...

Jen and Tim welcome Speed Racer evangelist Paul Jay to talk about, uh, the 2008 flop Speed Racer. Over at culture blog The Sundae,  Dean Buckley makes a case against Speed Racer as “art film”  and for the Wachowskis as purveryors of schlock (in a positive way). Agree or disagree, it’s a thoughtful piece. The Daily Beast has  details of Emile Hirsch’s attack  on a Paramount exec...

They just can't stop witchin'! Tim and Jen continue the unending spooky season with a franchise entry that pleased no one, Halloween III: Season of the Witch! Chris Evangelista defended the movie over at SlashFilm , as part of that site's The Unpopular Opinion series. Let’s all thank Sean for his partial preservation of hotep public access show Spearman’s Addiction . Watch Barbariana on Youtube! &...

Jen and Tim attempt to purge the lingering memory of a certain occult-y art film with a viewing of an early George Romero work, Season of the Witch. In case you had no idea what he was getting at, Tim’s latest thing is calling Chantal Akerman’s feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles “the Jean Teasdale movie.”   Marxist art critic John Berger’s analysis of wester...

Your hosts range widely and freely on the topic of horror: specifically, found footage horror. The films discussed are The McPherson Tape, The Blair Witch Project, Backrooms, and Horror in the High Desert. Watch The Backrooms short we talked about here on YouTube. Director Dean Alioto talked with the Found Footage Critic  about UFO Abduction and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, aka T...

Tim and Jen are dumbfounded by a universally praised and vacantly pretty auteur statement, The Love Witch! Rotten Tomatoes shows The Love Witch to be a darling of critics with a rating of 95% (audiences were more lukewarm, with their rating sitting at 61%). One of the few negative reviews calls it “dawdling, hollow and kind of awful, really:" Some of the movie comes close to camp or just falls in,...

Jen and Tim enjoy a silly 1990 comedy with startlingly good practical effects, Spaced Invaders! Director/writer Patrick Read Johnson’s long-gestating nostalgia trip, 5-25-77, will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on November 22, 2022. In the meantime, you can read Karina Longworth’s review of a cut of the film in 2008 from the now-defunct Sprout Blog . The director left a comment rebutting some of h...

Tim and Jen start spooky season early with a shockingly dark release from Disney, Return to Oz. Jen forgot to mention that the main reason the film does not resembles the MGM film from 1939 apart from the Ruby Slippers™ is because all of the trappings of the MGM version were and are copyrighted. In fact, Disney had to shell out to use that plot device in the film. Hence, while Walter Murch’s desir...

For their one hundred and fiftieth episode (!), Jen and Tim welcome animation expert Jerry Beck to talk about the worst cartoons ever made and the Monkees’ super freak out, Head! Visit Jerry’s website for all the animation news and discussion you can eat. You can watch Two Wet Bears and Sam Bassett, Hound For Hire on YouTube, if you dare. You can also see the first episode of Jerry and Frank Conni...

Jen hosts the delightful Jane Altoids of Pacino Pod to perform an autopsy on one of the worst vanity projects ever made: Give My Regards to Broad Street! Director Peter Webb’s BAFTA-winning short Butch Minds the Baby is up at the Internet Archive. Give it a watch so Paul McCartney’s cinematic abortion doesn't define Webb's onscreen legacy. I couldn’t dig up the Macca/Siskel interview Jane mentione...

Tim and Jen defend a movie you either love or hate, Darren Aronofsky’s mother! See  crybaby Kyle Smith’s review of mother! at the world’s worst magazine  if you want to know what kind of thing gets your hosts into a theater to see a movie. Jen whiffed the explanation of the bad blood between Satoshi Kon and Darren Aronofsky. The situation is way more complicated than the latter purchasin...

Subscribe to HYST on Patreon to hear the full episode and get two bonus episodes every month! patreon.com/haveyouseenthis Jen and Tim finally tackle one of their shared albatrosses— the Robocop before Robocop, R.O.T.O.R.! Isadora Fox wrote a piece in memory of actress Margaret Trigg for New York magazine back in 2004. The article details her struggles with disordered eating and poor mental health,...

Tim gets a little treat this month— we talked about one of his personal favorites, Gaspar Noé’s trippy version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Enter the Void! Read  an interview at Den of Geek  with a voluble Noé about Enter the Void. Towards the end, the weird trip turns into a bad trip, like sometimes mushroom trips or acid trips turn into bad trips. But a bad trip can be very rewardi...

Jen and Tim marvel at the cursed, ill-conceived, bloated sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes. Errata: Jen was wrong and Polanski fled the country in February of 1978, not 1977. The Two Jakes derailed the Robert Towne/Jack Nicholson friendship, which had been forged in the early 60s while both worked for Roger Corman, for at least a decade. Towne admitted as much in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Ragi...

Tim and Jen host Jacques of the Seeking Derangements podcast so they can hold forth about a personal favorite: Fatal Beauty starring Whoopi Goldberg! Jacques somewhat confused the timeframe of Whoopi’s brief relationship with Ted Danson. They had an affair on the set of the 1993 film Made in America, and the infamous Friars Club blackface bit occurred in the fall of that same year. Ted and Whoopi...

Jen and Tim fight to a standstill over a comedy that flopped in theaters, Wet Hot American Summer. Tim incorrectly identifies co-writer Michael Showalter as director. It was David Wain, not that Tim gives a fuck. The five episodes of sketch comedy show The State produced by MTV have been preserved on the Internet Archive!   The children’s TV special Jen struggled to name is The Night Dracula...

Tim and Jen welcome Doug Waugh of B-Movie TV and the Slashers podcast to discuss an overlooked Australian heist film that’s heaps good: Money Movers! Purchase Umbrella Entertainment’s blu-ray of Money Movers at their website!   Urban Dictionary has a detailed entry on the Australian slang term “toecutter,” if you’re curious. The “Barge Arse” clip Tim referred to may be viewed here.   Hos...

No truer words were spoken about this movie than “So Fucking What.” Jen and Tim welcome Bryan Quinby of Street Fight Radio to talk about a justly forgotten 90s something-or-other called S.F.W. Trace the history of the beer ball!   If you want to revisit that scene we mentioned from Sleep With Me, watch it here.   Jen was wrong about Juliet, incidentally— she was intended to be about 13 o...

Tim and Jen scratch their heads over an incest-filled nightmare of a David Cronenberg movie, Maps to the Stars! Hey remember that Mysteries and Scandals show on E!? They did an episode about Jon-Erik Hexum! (Whatever happened to A.J. Benza?) The poem by John Cooper Clarke that so moved Tim, “Evidently Chickentown,” may be heard here.   Jen pointed out a mention of another poet, Anne Sexton, i...

Jen and Tim welcome back Josh of  The Worst of All Possible Worlds podcast  to discuss the Oliver Stone version of the Eric Bogosian play, Talk Radio from 1988. Subscribe to HYST on Patreon and get two bonus episodes every month! patreon.com/haveyouseenthis/ Jen got the date of the crash of Air Florida flight 90 wrong— it happened in January of 1982. “The comment that brought Howard Ster...

Tim and Jen get locked in with a raw adaptation of Miguel Piñero’s sensational play, Short Eyes!  Go here for a bio of Piñero , the trailblazing Nuyorican playwright, as well as a list of his works.  BTW, there’s a documentary called The Survivor’s Guide to Prison that is slick, well made, and narrated by Danny Trejo as well as many other cultural icons. You can watch it for free with ad...

Jen and Tim take a look at an exploration of trauma anchored by an incredible Jennifer Jason Leigh performance, Heart of Midnight! The writer/director, Matthew Chapman, wrote the screenplay for Color of Night, but don’t hold that against him! See some of his unproduced material at The Blacklist.   The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is an excellent treatise on what we know about t...

Subscribe to HYST on Patreon and get two bonus episodes every month! patreon.com/haveyouseenthis/ Tim holds forth on the mind sickness that led to short-lived streaming service Quibi before diving into a review of short-form horror anthology 50 States of Fright. Jen just tries to keep up! This AV Club article is pretty emblematic of the unkind response to the first episode of the series, “The Gold...

Have You Seen…All Possible Worlds?! Tim and Jen team up with Josh and Brian of The Worst of All Possible Worlds podcast to discuss a wretchedly stupid British horror film starring Roddy McDowall called It! No, not that one. This one came out in 1967 and involves a golem that looks like a wet trash bag. Listen to The Worst of All Possible Worlds wherever you listen to us, or  at their website!...