Movie Oubliette

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row , joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, wher...

Hollywood's penchant for revisiting failed franchises this summer has awakened a number of 80s oddities in the oubliette! This time, Amanda Jane Stern joins us to revisit the Salkinds' 1984 attempt at a Superman spin-off: Supergirl , featuring Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee, Faye Dunaway as the witchy Selena, and Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, Marc McClure, and others filling out a very British...

For our 200th episode, we're revisiting the film that inspired our podcast name! David Goelz of The Muppets joins us as our very special guest to celebrating the 40th anniversary of Labyrinth. The film paired Jim Henson’s creature-shop with a Terry Jones screenplay, George Lucas producing, Brian Froud's world-building, and David Bowie doing what only Bowie could plausibly do: play a goblin king as...

To mark the release of the new Masters of the Universe film, Matt Swaford of Reklaimer's Vintage Toys joins us to revisit Cannon Films' notorious attempt to launch the cinematic branch of Mattel's toy franchise in 1987. Featuring an all-star cast of Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, James 'Mr Strickland' Tolkan, a pre- Voyager Robert Duncan MacNeill, and pre-almost everything Courteney Cox, the film...

Legendary actor and creature performer Doug Jones and independent filmmaker Derek Maki join Dan and Conrad to reminisce about Bug Buster (1998), a late-90s horror-comedy in which a quaint lakeside town is terrorised by mutant insects. The incredible cast combines a pre- Knocked Up Katherine Heigl with Randy Quaid, Star Trek alumni James Doohan and George Takei, Meredith Salenger, and – of course –...

Dan is back from vacation and treats us to Phenomena (1985) – a supernatural giallo from Dario Argento that features a pre- Labyrinth Jennifer Connelly in a star-making lead as an insect-loving teenager who arrives at a Swiss girls’ school only to sleepwalk into a serial murder case that only becomes more bizarre as the story unravels. Released by New Line Cinema in the U.S. as Creepers (shorn of...

RetroBlasting 's Melinda Mock stands in for Dan as animation auteur Ralph Bakshi's Cool World (1992) bursts out of the oubliette and threatens to overwhelm us with its incoherent plot and haphazard melange of visuals. Starring a post Batman Kim Basinger as femme fatale Holli Would, Gabriel Byrne as murderous cartoonist Jack, and a very young Brad Pitt as by-the-book Cool World detective, Frank, Co...

In this Patrons' choice episode, we're exposing ourselves to Cure (1997) – the film that announced Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of the most unsettling voices in modern horror. Set in Tokyo at the tail end of Japan's "lost decade", it follows weary detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) as he investigates a string of seemingly connected string of murders... with apparently different perpetrators. Victims keep...

Released in 1990, Hardware is the abrasive feature debut of cult filmmaker Richard Stanley. Starring Stacey Travis as sculptor Jill and Dylan McDermott as desert drifter Mo, the film begins with a romantic gesture that – through the entirely avoidable gift of salvaged military hardware – turns into a claustrophobic battle with a self-repairing government robot determined to follow its programming...

By popular demand, we're celebrating the release of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! by taking a look back at Franc Roddam's The Bride (1985). This mid-80s take on Mary Shelley’s mythic creation project tellingly got the budget of a period romance, but likely only because it had a new romantic pop star in the lead role and the production design of an Adam Ant music video. The result is a Gothic fabl...

Writer Octavio López Sanjuán joins us as we discover Monster in the Closet (1986), an affectionate pastiche of atomic age monster movies from Troma Entertainment. A string of baffling murders in wardrobes draws a plucky San Francisco obituary writer (Donald Grant) into the most terrifying assignment of his career. He’s soon joined by a biology teacher (Denise DuBarry) with more theories than commo...

Our second film for this year will also be our second dip of the toe into the filmography of Lucio Fulci (see episode 158 for our take on Conquest , his bonkers fantasy adventure, with our special guest Vincenzo Natali). Don’t Torture a Duckling ( Non si sevizia un paperino , 1972) is remembered as one of the most unsettling and thematically ambitious entries in the Italian giallo cycle. Its premi...

Happy New Year! Michael French of RetroBlasting joins us for an exciting trip with Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), directed by John Hough (of Watcher in the Woods and The Legend of Hell House fame). It's an ambitious and eccentric British fantasy-adventure that attempts to translate W. E. Johns’ imperial-era aviation hero into the idiom of 1980s blockbuster cinema. Produced by Rusty Lemorande...

Happy holidays! Our festive special this year focuses on The Curse of the Cat People (1944), directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise (of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Haunting fame), and produced by Val Lewton for RKO – a sequel that daringly abandons the horror conventions of its predecessor in favour of an atmospheric, psychological fairy-tale. The story follows young Amy Reed (A...

Our final patrons' choice episode for 2025 is the 1982 VHS relic The Flight of Dragons from TV special animation legends Rankin/Bass. Based loosely on the speculative science book by Peter Dickinson and the fantasy novels of Gordon R. Dickson, the film sends the author insert character on a quest to save a magical realm from the suffocating encroachment of mankind's science. Along the way, Peter w...

In the last of our series of early previews of forthcoming films, gleaned from Conrad's time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) under the wing of Toronto native and film critic extraordinaire, Joe Lipsett, we're looking at two gold-and-turquoise whimsical fantasies: Dust Bunny and Eternal Return . The former is Hannibal and Pushing Daisies showrunner Bryan Fuller's directorial debut...

Dead Birds (2004), directed by Alex Turner and produced during the early-2000s boom in grimy, low-budget horror, is a Confederate-era ghost story that alternates between jump scares for a slow rot of dread and bad decisions. It follows a group of Civil War deserters – played by E.T. 's Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Michael Shannon, and Isaiah Washington – who rob a bank and hole up in a derelict pl...

We're back with our penultimate pair of exciting early previews of forthcoming attractions, gleaned from Conrad's time with Joe Lipsett at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This time, the connection between them is simpler: they both feature one of Conrad's favourite actors, 1917 's George Mackay. The first, & Sons , stars Bill Nighy as a reclusive famous novelist who gathers his...

Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers joins Conrad again for another couple of advance previews of films at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and it's another case of spotting a couple of movies with a similar premise. In this case, it's women going to an isolated manor house for some form of wellness/recuperation exercise... only to discover things are not what they seem! Retreat is Ted Evan...

Seventh Son (2014), an overcooked fantasy-adventure directed by Sergei Bodrov and adapted loosely from Joseph Delaney’s 'The Spook’s Apprentice', was a troubled Universal–Legendary Pictures co-production whose delays, rewrites, and ballooning budget became as notorious as the film itself. Set in a vaguely medieval landscape of witches, knights, and prophetic farm boys, it stars Jeff Bridges (yes,...

Our fourth bonus preview of forthcoming attractions that Conrad and Joe Lipsett caught at TIFF focuses on two British thrillers with a similar theme: children being locked in basements! The first, Heel (it was called 'Good Boy' when we saw it, but they must have changed it to avoid confusion with the haunted house film told through the eyes of a dog), sees an aimless and hedonistic teenager (Anson...

Our TIFF coverage continues with two horror-inflected films centring indigenous characters, and using hauntings as a method of exploring generational and personal trauma. In Taratoa Stappard's Mārama , a Māori woman travels from freshly colonised New Zealand to a creepily gothic English manor in the Yorkshire moors to uncover secrets about her family's past. Meanwhile, Bretten Hannam's At the Plac...

Happy Halloween! Writer, actor and producer Amanda Jane Stern returns for spooky season to introduce us to Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999), the Disney Channel’s first real foray into horror. It was a made-for-TV Halloween treat that prompted a parental backlash so strong it was quietly buried after a few years, only to recently resurface on Disney+! Directed by Kenneth Johnson (the creator of the...

Our second preview of coming attractions from TIFF 2025 focuses on Genki Kawamura's psychological horror Exit 8, in which a commuter finds himself struggling to escape a seemingly endless loop of subway passages. Conrad joined Joe Lipsett, friend of the pod and co-host of the excellent Horror Queers podcast, in Toronto to discuss this liminal, time-loop terror, based on a popular video game. Suppo...

Horror Queers co-host and Toronto native Joe Lipsett joins Conrad for the first in a series of reviews of sci-fi, fantasy and horror films featured in this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). First up: Obsession , a darkly comedic relationship horror written, directed and edited by Curry Barker. It stars Michael Johnston as a hapless music store employee who makes a ill-fated wish t...