Movie Oubliette

Happy holidays, listeners! As a little treat, we'd like to give you a bonus episode for the holiday season: a collection of interviews with the cast and composer of Disney's One Magic Christmas . It includes a full version of our chat with the lovely Elisabeth Harnois, who played Abbie Grainger, as well as new interviews with Rob Magwood, who played her older brother, Cal, and the celebrated compo...

To get a bit of festive cheer, Dan and Conrad explore Disney's  One Magic Christmas , which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. But this is from Disney's 'dark period', so they're in for a shock. A harmonica-playing stalking angel played by Harry Dean Stanton teaches depressed working mum Ginnie Grainger (Mary Steenburgen) to appreciate the holiday season by forcing her to live a nightmaris...

Dan and Conrad visit the strangely familiar world of  Starchaser: The Legend of Orin , a groundbreaking 3D animated sci-fi fantasy adventure celebrating its 35th anniversary this week! It tells the story of a callow blonde youth who discovers a magical sword and goes on a quest to free the galaxy from a tyrannical empire lead by a sinister man with a penchant for black capes and throttling people....

Scott Drebit, Senior Columnist at Daily Dead, joins us to share Burnt Offerings... which doesn't sound very appetising until you discover it's a 1976 haunted house chiller starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Frikkin' Davis and Burgess Meredith, and co-written and directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis. It finds your typical all-American family renting a suspiciously cheap, old dark house...

Happy Halloween! We're going into an extreme form of lockdown with special guest Meagan Navarro, lead critic at Bloody Disgusting, to revisit Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead , which celebrates its 30th anniversary this week! Starring Patricia Tallman and Tony Todd, this update remodels Romero's classic into a siege thriller for our times, with updated effects, a few twists and a ki...

Dan and Conrad take a trip to Ireland and learn all the customs of quaint village life in 1986: digging up ancient pagan demi-gods, burning their hands on tablecloths and urinating on vicars in graveyards. That's right – we're exploring Rawhead Rex, the first of Clive Barker's Books of Blood stories to be adapted for film. But is it a hitherto unrecognised saint or is it the spawn of evil? Find ou...

Conrad and Dan try not to get deja-vu as they watch a rag-tag bunch of futuristic soldiers on an alien planet battling bio-mechanical monsters, discovering a pre-pubescent kid clutching a toy is the only survivor, and getting to the escape ship only to realise there's one more monster to kill! No, it isn't Aliens – it's Screamers (1995). It stars Peter Weller as a grizzled philosophical man of war...

Dan and Conrad dose themselves up with Antiviral (2012), Brandon Cronenberg's debut film set in a near future in which celebrity illnesses are the latest must-have consumer product. Forget Gwyneth Paltrow's genital-scented candles, now you can get infected with the athletes' foot she picked up at her pilates class. Starring the fearless and riveting Caleb Landry Jones as a new breed of viral marke...

Conrad and Dan visit one of the scariest places in the world right now – a suburban grocery store – to check out a lesser-known horror thriller from the creative team behind The Evil Dead movies: Intruder (1989). The night shift staff of Walnut Lake Market are being picked off one by one by a bloodthirsty maniac, but is it the leatherclad bad boy ex-boyfriend of plucky final checkout girl, Jennife...

From the moment the star of the Resident Evil franchise stepped out of a blurry forest screensaver and announced "I am actress Milla Jovovich", Dan and Conrad knew that special guest Isaac Sutton had dredged up a real gem from the oubliette for us to enjoy. The Fourth Kind (2009) is a half found footage, half dramatised, all fictional tale of the innocent all-white townsfolk of Nome, Alaska being...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins us on an adventure to the world of Krull (1983) – a unique blend of swashbuckling fantasy and laser blasting science fiction starring Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony as star-crossed lovers whose wedding is cruelly interrupted by an alien invasion. Armed with the coolest and most impractical weapon ever, our hero teams up with robbers, inept wizards an...

Actor and producer Lotta Losten (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation and Shazam!) takes us on a tour of The City of Lost Children (1995), the unique science fantasy film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It's a surreal steampunk fever dream featuring a circus strongman, evil conjoined twins and hypnotic mechanical fleas, but does it deserve...

Robert Picardo joins us as we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Joe Dante's Explorers, the wistful and wild tale of three school friends who build a spaceship and set off for a close encounter of the Wak-y kind. Featuring the debuts of both Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, this sci-fi adventure also includes not one but  three  memorable performances from Robert Picardo. He shares his memo...

Conrad and Dan set their joy to 11, mount their BMXs and set off to explore the delicious 80s smoothie Turbo Kid, which unbelievably celebrates its 5th anniversary this year. With more retro references than you can shake a gnome stick at, inventive gore and a soundtrack that's screaming to be spun on vinyl, is Turbo Kid the best 80s kids' movie we never had or a relic of a nostalgic wasteland? Fin...

Dan and Conrad find themselves in the neon purple and green world of Vamp (1986), the often overlooked eighties vampire movie starring Grace Jones, Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler, Dedee Pfeiffer and Gedde Watanabe. Fortunately, they have an expert to guide them: Heather Wixson, Managing Editor of Daily Dead and co-host of its excellent podcast Corpse Club . Vamp features an indescribable performan...

Joe Lipsett and Trace Thurman of Horror Queers  dig up The Relic (1997) and drag us on a wild museum tour with two of the most unlikeable characters in monster movie history: Penelope Ann Miller, who's so entitled she shrieks about job losses in the middle of the office when someone has the gall to apply for a research grant, and Tom Sizemore as the superstitious cop wearing a raincoat big enough...

Jacob Gentry, director of The Signal and Synchronicity, returns with another 70s conspiracy thriller for us to explore: the little-seen, star-studded enigma Winter Kills (1979). It stars Jeff Bridges as the pampered younger brother of an assassinated president, sent on a wild goose chase by his domineering father (John Huston) to discover the identity of the killers. Along the way, he's helped and...

Duncan Skiles, director of 'The Clovehitch Killer', returns to discuss a popular source of childhood nostalgia: Disney's Flight of the Navigator (1986). It focuses on David Freeman, who falls into a ravine in 1978 and wakes up 8 years later to discover he hasn't aged, while his parents look like they've been in quarantine the whole time and his bratty little brother is now a 16-year-old hottie who...

To celebrate our 50th episode, Conrad and Dan explore a film that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year: Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. The Giallo maestro's first outing often gets overlooked in favour of his more supernatural and outlandish masterpieces, but there's a lot of fun to be had here. Highlights include a black-gloved serial killer, a painter who eats cats and th...

For a bit of escapism, Dan and Conrad watch a far-fetched science fiction film in which the UK falls victim to a deadly virus... oh dear. In Doomsday (2008), director Neil Marshall (The Descent) prepares us for what lies ahead: basically, a combination of 28 Days Later, Mad Max and Duran Duran's Wild Boys music video. With a dash of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But should it be given herd immu...

Dan and Conrad join Bill Pullman on a khaki-clad tour of Haiti in search of a powder that turns people into zombies, in Wes Craven's often overlooked dark fantasy thriller The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). It has everything you want in a travelog: candlelit processions to a cathedral of waterfalls, exploring a vibrant culture torn by revolution, and getting your scrotum nailed to a chair. Is it...

Conrad and Dan discover the first ever Marvel movie in the oubliette, and cannot believe their eyes as the screen is filled with naked feathered breasts, would-be rapists, a sex sauna and Lea Thompson seducing a wildfowl. Yes, it's Howard the Duck (1986) – George Lucas's next project after the Star Wars saga, and it's like an 80s cocaine-fuelled fever dream. But is it actually all that bad? Should...

In anticipation of Leigh Whannell's forthcoming horror film The Invisible Man, we take a look back at Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man, which unbelievably celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Kevin Bacon stars as the arrogant genius Sebastian Caine, who invents an invisibility serum and volunteers to be the first human test subject... only for it to drive him into a naked murder spree. How does t...

Something Ghoulish 's Anthony Derington takes us on a tour of our first ever non-English-language horror film: the original version of Shutter (2004) from Thailand! In it, a young couple is terrorised by the spectre of a creepy girl in white with wet black hair – so it may seem like familiar territory for Asian horror fans. But it has quite a sting in the tale... Is it a genre-defining classic or...

Sodajerker host Simon Barber takes us on a tour of his favourite House (1986), but it turns out it has a bad case of haunting, alternate dimensions in all the closets and cabinets, and Norm from Cheers lives next door. Norm! Is Steve Miner's first directing venture outside the Friday the 13th franchise ripe for renovation or ready to be condemned? Put on your deep, man cleavage-revealing v-neck sw...