Movie Oubliette

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...

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...