Movie Oubliette

We're back! For our first episode of 2023, we're joined by our good friend Isaac Sutton, who invites us to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Guillermo del Toro's first feature film: the Christmas/New Year steampunk vampire tale, Cronos. As the great man explained, a director's first feature sets out their cinematic universe – and this is never more true than in this case. We have a mute central ch...

Simon Barber, co-host of the Sodajerker on Songwriting podcast, joins us for our festive finale to 2022: and it's a doozy! The producing team behind the original Superman: The Movie  (1978), its first two sequels and the spin-off Supergirl (1984) turned their attention to another origin story for a much-loved supernatural hero in 1985, and brought us  Santa Claus: The Movie . Featuring Dudley Moor...

Dan and Conrad venture into the deep dark woods of Ireland and explore Corin Hardy's  The Hallow (2015), where British conservationist Adam and his wife Claire come under attack from ancient faerie folk, parasitic fungus and – worst of all – unpleasant monosyllabic locals. It's a love letter to the director's favourite genre icons and delightfully practical in its execution, and was largely o...

Conrad and Dan are exposed to Elvira for the very first time in this Patreon's Choice episode, and watch with delight as the busty horror movie host scandalises the small, conservative town she visits in search of her past... and the money she needs to fund her Vegas debut.  Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) stars Cassandra Peterson as the irrepressible Elvira, E. Morgan Sheppard as her scheming...

Joe Lipsett, film critic and co-host of Horror Queers, joins us on the eve of the millennium for some  Strange Days  (1995) with Ralph Fiennes, who saunters about in leather trousers, Juliette Lewis, who wears nothing most of the time, Tom Sizemore, who sports a very unfortunate wig, and Angela Bassett who... well, just kicks ass frankly. It's a cyberpunk  Blow Out , with Fiennes' b...

Happy spooky season! Actor and producer Lotta Losten makes a welcome return to the oubliette for our Halloween Special and weaves some Practical Magic on us! This bewitching rom-com, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the enchanting Owens sisters, failed to cast a spell on the box office when it was released during this week 24 years ago (!), but has found a special place in the hearts o...

RetroBlasting's Michael French beams  Battle Beyond the Stars  (1980) out of the oubliette and forces Conrad and Dan to explore this sci-fi riff on  The Seven Samurai  (1954) starring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, George Peppard, John Saxon, Sybil Danning and Darlanne Fleugel. It's exploitation entrepreneur Roger Corman's transparent attempt to cash-in on the  Star Wars phenomenon, with a naive f...

Actor, filmmaker and theatre director Lars Henriks makes a return visit to the oubliette and plucks out Ken Russell's 1988 adaptation of Bram Stoker's  The Lair of the White Worm . And what a sight it is to behold: future timelord, Peter Capaldi, charms a vampire/snake monster by playing the bagpipes in regulation kilt; a pre-Four Weddings Hugh Grant chops a woman in half with a broadsword; a...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins us as we explore a wild time in New York City's history: the 1980s! Back then, real estate moguls and their fur-and-pearls-wearing wives were savaged in Battery Park by an unknown, monstrous assailant. Luckily, Albert Finney, Diane Venora and Gregory Hines are on hand to solve the case and uncover the secret of Wolfen  – a non-werewolf movie relea...

Oscar-winning special effects genius Tom Woodruff, Jr joins us and takes us on a whirlwind tour of his first steps into the wonderful world of monster movies via  The Thing With Two Heads  (1972) – a blaxploitation sci-fi adventure starring Ray Milland as a racist mad scientist hellbent on perfecting his head transplanting technique before he succumbs to a terminal illness, and Rosey Gri...

Mikey Neumann and Zoe Wells of FilmJoy join us as we scoop up Kevin Costner's sci-fi action adventure  Waterworld (1995) from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yes, it's the film that reunited him with  Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) director Kevin Reynolds and then, $175 million dollars and a box office bomb later, caused their second acrimonious split. But can a film with Dennis Hopper in a...

Conrad shows Dan the little-seen supernatural psychological drama,  The Sender (1982) – a British production starring Kathryn Harrold, Željko Ivanek, Shirley Knight and Paul 'Belloq' Freeman, and directed by Oscar-winning production designer Roger Christian. Ivanek plays John Doe 83, a mysterious young man admitted to a psychiatric hospital after walking into the sea with rocks in his pockets...

Dan and Conrad slip into some chunky knit sweaters and go underground to explore  City of Ember (2008), a post-apocalyptic science fantasy starring Harry Treadaway, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Murray and Tim Robbins. Based on a popular series of novels by Jeanne DuPrau, which became the focus of an intense bidding war when it came time for the film adaptation, the film seems to presage...

Matt Swaford of the Endless Bullets: The Action Movie Podcast  joins us for this special Iconicon 2022 crossover event, and brings with him a buddy cop zombie action movie we've never heard of: Dead Heat (1988). It stars Treat Williams, Joe Piscopo, Lindsay Frost and Vincent Price – yes, you read that right – is directed by legendary editor Mark Goldblatt (The Terminator) and written by Terry...

In a childhood nostalgia special, Dan revisits  Johnny Mnemonic  (1995) – the  other cyberpunk action thriller Keanu Reeves made in the 90s after hitting the big time in  Speed (1994). It's the one everyone forgets. Maybe our cybernetic implants were loaded with more than 320GB of data, like Keanu's black market data courier, Johnny? Directed by artist Robert Longo in his debut...

Melinda Mock of RetroBlasting  joins us to revisit one of her teenage favourites: Wes Craven's  Shocker (1989) – a bizarre attempt to create a new slasher franchise with The X-Files' Mitch Pileggi as psychotic serial killer Horace Pinker, who gains supernatural possession abilities after being executed in the electric chair. Future director Peter Berg plays a college football star player...

Dan and Conrad were spelunking in the oubliette's indoor pool and resurfaced M. Night Shyamalan's  Lady in the Water (2006), a fairy tale for adults starring Paul Giamatti as a melancholy caretaker in an apartment building who discovers a 'narf' in the community swimming pool. That might sound like a euphemism for something revolting, but it turns out to be an ethereal nymph-like creature pla...

For our 101st episode, we're covering our oldest film yet: 1955's  Conquest of Space , the speculative science fiction adventure from the producer/director team that brought us the seminal  War of the Worlds two years before. It's widely thought that George Pal and Byron Haskin's depiction of the first manned mission to Mars – crucially brought to the screen 6 years before we got off the...

Conrad and Dan strap on asbestos leggings and propel themselves back in time to 1991 for the nostalgic family action/adventure  The Rocketeer.  Set in the Art Deco glamour of 1938 Los Angeles, it stars Bill Campbell as the daredevil pilot who stumbles upon a prototype jetpack and puts himself and his partner, Jenny (the breathtaking Jennifer Connolly), in the crosshairs of a mob gang lea...

Heather Wixson, Managing Editor of Daily Dead and author of Monsters, Makeup and Effects – Volume 1 , joins us on a tour of Clive Barker's sophomore film  Nightbreed , a dark fantasy horror film based on his novella Cabal and starring Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, director David Cronenberg as a suave serial killer (!), Hugh Quarshie and Doug Bradley. The film notoriously flopped on release in 19...

Dan and Conrad don their tightest neon cycling outfits and strap themselves into a gyroscope to celebrate the 30th anniversary of  The Lawnmower Man . Directed by Brett Leonard and starring a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan as a neuro-scientist and Jeff Fahey as his gardener and unwitting lab rat, the film is most definitely  not based on anything written by one of the most famous horror authors...

Dan and Conrad retreat back to their comfort zone of 80s cheese, only to be confronted by the relentless exuberant strangeness of W.D. Richter's  The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). It has an incredible cast. Peter Weller stars the titular Buckaroo – a daredevil neuroscientist particle physicist new romantic rock star and secret agent – with none other than Jeff Gold...

We're delving into new territory, thanks to our Patrons' nominations of a wide selection of pre-80s films! In this episode, we're looking at Crypt of the Vampire – a 1964 Italian/Spanish gothic horror movie based on Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel  Carmilla  and starring the iconic Christopher Lee in a fetching dressing gown. It's got castles, thunderstorms, suits of armour, drippy candles...

Director Mark Pellington joins us to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of The Mothman Prophecies, a quietly disturbing supernatural thriller starring Richard Gere as a grief-stricken journalist who finds himself in a small West Virginia town helping a local police officer, Laura Linney, investigate a series of escalating unexplainable events. Based on a true account of a tragic disaster in...

We're celebrating the New Year with literal fireworks, re-igniting the smouldering embers of  Firestarter (1984). It stars a very young Drew Barrymore as a pyrokinetic super child on the run with her psychic 'pusher' dad (David Keith... definitely not to be confused with Keith David). They're trying to escape shady government types like Martin Sheen, reprising his role from  The Dead Zon...