Movie Oubliette

Duncan Skiles, director of The Clovehitch Killer , returns for our special festive episode, in which we review a yuletide tale of a plucky kid who uses booby traps to repel a home invasion. No – not  that one! It's the French horror/thriller  Deadly Games (1989) – also known as  3615 code Père Noël  and about a dozen other titles. It was released a year before  Home Alone...

What if the classic fairy tale were laced with complex psycho-sexual drama between the king, the stepmother and the child cosplaying as her dead mum? What if the dwarves were mostly full-sized, scarred outlaws fleeing religious persecution? What if it starred Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill and was full of 90s gothic intensity? We're about to find out as we explore 1997's Snow White: A Tale of...

In a special Patrons' Choice episode, we take a look back at  Starman (1984), John Carpenter's romantic sci-fi fable starring Jeff Bridges in an Oscar-nominated role as a visiting alien and Karen Allen as the widow whose husband he impersonates. Kicking off with a disturbing alien birth sequence that showcases the combined talents of Rick Baker, Stan Winston  and Dick Smith (yes, you rea...

Dan and Conrad are swept away by the 1993 science fiction mystery  Fire in the Sky , which is based on Arizonan logger Travis Walton's personal account of an alien abduction experience in 1975. Starring D. B. Sweeney ( Memphis Belle ), Robert Patrick (the T-1000 in  T2 ), Craig Sheffer  (Nightbreed ), Peter Berg (Wes Craven's Shocker ), Henry Thomas (Elliott from  E.T.  no...

Happy Halloween! Emmy-nominated actor Michelle Ang (The Tribe, Outrageous Fortune) joins us as we celebrate the spooky season with a look back at The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), a found footage possession thriller directed by Adam Robitel ( Escape Room ). In it, our guest plays a student, Mia, who gets more than she bargained for when she tries to make a documentary focusing on Deborah Logan (...

Meagan Navarro – Head Critic and Chief Content Creator for Bloody Disgusting – returns with a special treat for us to explore: the 1986 haunted house monster zombie horror film  Spookies . With three directors, two separate casts, a reshoot that accounts for more footage than the original film and a plot that defies explanation, it's fair to say the story behind the movie is more compelling t...

Director Bernard Rose joins us for a look back at his first theatrical feature film, the dark fantasy  Paperhouse (1988). It features Charlotte Burke as a British schoolgirl who, while bedridden with glandular fever (or 'mono' for those across the pond), finds herself experiencing recurring dreams in which she visits an isolated house she drew herself. She soon discovers that she can add addi...

Conrad and Dan are doing battle with dragons again, but this time it's in London during the fateful futuristic year 2020. Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale and Gerard Butler – possibly the manliest of manly line-ups cinema could produce in 2002 – are joined by ace helicopter pilot Izabella Scorupco in Reign of Fire . It's a post-dragon apocalypse and mankind is reduced to living in castles, ridi...

John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars  is celebrating its 20th anniversary today, and we're lucky enough to be joined by its producer, Sandy King-Carpenter of Storm King Productions, for a look back at the master of horror's sci-fi horror action extravaganza. It's got a kick-ass cast of Natasha Henstridge, Pam Grier, Clea DuVall and Joanna Cassidy, plus Ice Cube and a very young and strangely hairy...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins us to explore... New Zealand! Yes, Dan's homeland – but it's a bizarre alternate universe version of NZ, and not just because it's 1985. Zac Hobson wakes up naked in a motel bed to discover he may be the last man on Earth. He gets to engage in a few fantasies: driving a train, moving into a mansion, running rampant through a church wearing a nightie an...

Space botanist Bruce Dern murders his crewmates and hijacks his spaceship on a joyride through Saturns rings after he finds out his gardens are scheduled for destruction in Silent Running (1972), an eco-sci-fi film directed by special effects mastermind Douglas Trumbull. But will Dan and Conrad slip into a comfortable bathrobe and enjoy digging into this 70s cult classic, or will Joan Baez's vibra...

Melinda Mock and Aaron Harper of Dreamland, the RetroBlasting podcast, join us for the second half of our Iconicon crossover event! We're exploring one of the lesser-known underwater sci-fi epics released in 1989: Leviathan. It's directed by George P. Cosmatos (Rambo II), stars Peter Weller (RoboCop) and Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), has special effects by Stan Winston (Aliens) and a score by Jerry...

It's killer virus time again! Isaac Sutton, writer and film blogger, joins us as we explore  The Andromeda Strain (1971) – Robert Wise's adaptation of Michael Crichton's first best-selling techno thriller novel. It has all the ingredients of a great night out: a deadly epidemic from space; crotchety scientists in an underground lab; screen after screen of diagrams and data; and shocking amounts of...

Lars Henriks, filmmaker and host of the Mysterium Pictorum podcast, joins us to explore the first and possibly only horror film made in Russia during the Soviet era: Viy (1967). It's a retelling of Nikolai Gogal's classic but probably fake folktale, which also inspired Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and a recent Russian-Chinese CGI-fest that has a sequel starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie...

Neil Jordan's second and often overlooked venture into vampire lore, Byzantium (2012), features Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton as daughter and mum succreants who have been on the run from centuries. They settle on a dilapidated coastal town and quickly join in with local hobbies to blend in: daughter Ellie begins a romance with a waiter (Caleb Landry Jones) and takes up creative writing; mum Cla...

RetroBlasting co-founder and Dreamland podcast co-host Melinda Mock guides us through the red-tinged comet zombie apocalypse of  Night of the Comet – a 1984 cult sci-fi comedy horror written and directed by Thom Eberhardt and starring former guests Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney, with Robert Beltran, Mary Woronov and Geoffrey Lewis. But did these valley girls inspire many of the resource...

Dan and Conrad hit the crime-ridden streets of 80s New York, only to be menaced by a  Maniac Cop – an action/slasher hybrid starring Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree and Robert Z'Dar. With a screenplay by Larry Cohen, one might expect William Lustig's film to have a little more bubbling under the surface of this low-budget quickie about a zombie Dirty Harry menacing th...

Jonathan McIntosh, creator of the Pop Culture Detective Agency , joins us to explore Barry Levinson's 1992 fantasy/comedy  Toys , which features Robin Williams as the childlike son of an eccentric toymaker, Joan Cusack as his manic pixie sister, Robin Wright as his manic pixie love interest, Michael Gambon as his militaristic uncle and LL Cool J as his camouflage-obsessed cousin. This modern fable...

Brian Sheehan of TV Trivia Pod joins us for a dinner party in which four couples have to contend with a comet flyby, the fracturing of reality into multiple dimensions and... just a whisper of ketamine. It's James Ward Byrkit's surreal sci-fi thriller Coherence (2013), starring Emily Baldoni, Nicolas Brendon and Nicolas Brendon's twin brother, Kelly Donovan. But is it a pioneering, low budget/high...

RetroBlasting's Michael French joins us as we venture into Outland (1981), Peter Hyams' sci-fi thriller loosely based on High Noon and starring none other than the late Sean Connery and the great Frances Sternhagen. It's a tense tale of one man's fight against a corrupt system, laced with explosive decompression and enough blue-collar snark to fill a saloon. But is it a previously unmined gem or s...

Dan and Conrad go on a quest to rediscover Season of the Witch (2011), a supernatural medieval adventure starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman as crusaders with a conscience, charged with safely transporting a young Claire Foy to a monastery where she'll stand trial for witchcraft in general and causing the Black Death in particular. They're joined by a merry band that includes The Umbrella Academ...

Bloody Disgusting's Joe Lispett joins us to share his love of 90s erotic thrillers and revisit one of the most-overlooked entries in the genre: A Perfect Murder (1998), Andrew Davis's remake of Hitchcock's Dial 'M' for Murder  starring the obligatory Michael Douglas, the permanently gaslit Gwyneth Paltrow and steamy pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen. It's a twisty turny tale of sex, inheritances, Cherno...

We're getting all romantic this week, in honour of Valentine's Day, and celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Canadian slasher 'My Bloody Valentine' – a film that vanished into a deep dark mine upon its release, possibly thanks to the heavy hand of the MPAA in the editing room. It features a mining town cursed by a legendary tragedy, Moosehead Beer and a returning killer who's a cross between Da...

Le Matos, the musical masterminds behind the scores for Turbo Kid and  Summer of '84 ,  join us as we take a nostalgic trip back to the high school cyber crime scene of the mid-90s... on roller-blades, of course. Yes, it's  Hackers – the film that introduced us to viruses (of the electronic kind), pre-Trainspotting Johnny Lee Miller, pre-Scream Matthew Lillard  and pre-anything Angelina Jolie! But...

Happy New Year! Dan and Conrad start 2021 with something that feels like unbelievable fantasy: a movie in which someone travels to another country! It's Rogue – a 2007 monster crocodile thriller from director Greg McLean ( Wolf Creek ). It stars Radha Mitchell ( Pitch Black ) as the plucky captain of a crocodile river cruise in Oz's Northern Territory. She gives a boatful of tourists more than the...