Saturday Night Freak Show

Colin opens his copy of the Necronomicon to summon the Great Old Ones alongside Vincent Price in  The Haunted Palace  (1963), one of the big screen's earliest adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly the first time the name C'thulhu is uttered aloud in a movie. The movie was sold as an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, but we know better, don't we? Listen as we talk smoking jac...

Michaela gets into the Halloween spirit with the backwoods-folktale-monster movie  Pumpkinhead  (1988), in which a grieving father summons the demon of vengeance to hunt and kill the big city interlopers responsible for a family tragedy. Listen as we worship at the majesty of effects creator-turned-director Stan Winston, swamp witches, thick atmosphere, and more on this week's exciting e...

Holly tries to adapt to Ye Olde English and other rules of  The Village  (2004), the movie that effectively ended the promise of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, who predicates the entire enterprise on a revelation that brought scorn, dismay, and much head wringing from audiences everywhere. Listen as we go on a deep dive into a spoiler-filled analysis of the truth behind The Village...

Sean wanders into the bog of cheap-o 80's slasher films and finds  Offerings  (1989), a movie that rips off so much of Halloween that royalties might be necessary. You know the story: kids push a mentally challenged kid down a well; 10 years later he escapes from a sanitarium, disfigured but supernaturally empowered to seek out and murder each of them. But, have you seen it done in Oklah...

This week, Colin can't believe there's a vampire dog movie called  Zoltan: Hound of Dracula  (aka Dracula's Dog, 1978), a drive-in cheapie in which the titular vampire mutt travels to America in search of Dracula's last living descendant: a guy named Mike Dracula. You may think we're kidding, but we're not! Listen as we talk vampire puppies, Dracula Motors, flashbacks from the point of v...

Listen as we celebrate our 400th episode with Michaela's nostalgia pick of  Ghost  (1990), yes, the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore/Whoopi Goldberg romantic-comedy-fantasy-thriller which put a premium on at-home pottery kits and landed the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" on the Billboard Top 100. Listen as we tunnel through eight years of Freak Show history and lore and get appropriatel...

Holly doesn't know what's worse: that we've lost the nuclear weapon, or that it happens so often they call it a  Broken Arrow  (1996). John Travolta plays a crazy Air Force pilot who steals two of them; Christian Slater is the good guy who has to get them back. Current SAG-AFTRA president Samantha Mathis is a park ranger who helps him out. Ain't it cool? You know it is. Listen as we go a...

Sean discovers that "sometimes, the original is better" after a return trip to  Pet Sematary 2  (1992). The sequel finds a sullen Edward Furlong with mommy issues discovering the sinister power of a cursed Indian burial ground, while Clancy Brown stops around as a clownish undead sheriff. Listen as we talk dead kittens, zombie rape, dog-headed sex, pug taxidermy and more on this week's e...

Colin stops the movie to guess who the werewolf is in  The Beast Must Die  (1974), in which a wealthy hunter invites a group of suspects (including Peter Cushing and Michael Gambon) to his estate with the goal of adding a werewolf trophy to his collection. Listen as we talk a little history of England's Amicus Productions, casting German Shepherds as werewolves, and more on this week's e...

Holly puts on a ten gallon hat and takes on an amorphous puddle of alien goo in Phantoms (1998), a movie in which Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan and Peter O'Toole confront an ancient menace living beneath a quiet Colorado town. Listen as we talk about bad 90's horror movie posters, Liev Schreiber going off the reservation, talking computers, giant moths and squid men, all on this week's exciting episod...

Michaela goes yachting with the Russian nesting doll of killer cats with Uninvited (1987), a movie in which the aforementioned killer feline sneaks aboard a slimy rich guy's boat and starts killing the vacationing spring breakers aboard. Listen as we discover a movie - starring Oscar-winner George Kennedy - in which cats come out of the mouths of other cats to feast on the nubile flesh of bikini c...

Sean heads back to Texarkana to track down the Phantom Killer who terrorizes  The Town That Dreaded Sundown  (1976). Based on the real-life Moonlight Murders of 1946, a sleepy town finds itself under siege from a hooded killer while local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers set in to solve the crimes. Listen as we talk about independent drive-in moviemaking, prototypical slasher movies...

Colin bonds with the T-Virus to fight the Nemesis and tries to take down the Umbrella Corporation with  Resident Evil: Apocalypse  (2004), the second installment in the six-film series that loosely adapts the popular video game. This time, heroine Alice must escape the zombie outbreak in Raccoon City before the government nukes it, but a hulking, genetically-engineered bioweapon stands i...

Michaela becomes judge, jury and executioner of Mega-City One with  Dredd  (2012), the more-comic-accurate rendering of the classic  2000 A.D.  character, in which Karl Urban plays the angry chin with a fistful of guns who must fight his way up 1,000 levels of an apartment block controlled by a sadistic drug kingpin called Ma-Ma. Listen as we get facial cramps from trying to fr...

Holly puts her killin' days behind her but finds its all she's really good at in the wasteland of  Steel Dawn  (1987), a forgotten Patrick Swazye vehicle that's a cross between Mad Max and Shane. A retired swordslinger befriends a frontier woman and her son and finds himself pushed back into a life of murderin' when an evil baddie sets his sights on their land. Listen as we discover one...

Sean learns that people who live in ornate glass houses shouldn't throw stones at the  Thirteen Ghosts  (2001) housed within! Twelve of the creatures are trapped inside with Tony Shaloub and family, who must figure out how to stop an infernal machine, which is the clockwork house itself, from opening the dreaded Eye of Hell. Listen as we discuss the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright(!), bi...

Colin upchucks in his Upchuck Cup™ while watching the splatter classic  City of the Living Dead  (1980) from Italy's Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci. A priest hangs himself in a graveyard, thus opening the Gates of Hell, and only a clarivoyant medium, a dogged journalist, and a small town psychiatrist have any chance of stopping it. Listen as we describe vomit disemboweling, brain scoopin...

Michaela implodes along with Will Smith and M. Night Shyamalan with the sci-fi box office dud After Earth (2013). A gruff military dad and his son (Jaden Smith) are marooned on a hostile planet and have only each other to rely on as an extraterrestrial menace - which hunts by sensing their fear - stalks them. Listen as we plot the trajectory of Shyamalan's fall from grace, expose the subtext of Sc...

Holly goes on an adventure safari with an amorous, talking gorilla in Congo (1995). Based on the Michael Crichton novel, the movie finds 3 separate groups of people with 3 separate motives venturing into the jungles of Zaire and running afoul of rhinos, snakes, heat seeking missiles, and, ultimately, killer gorillas. Listen as we tackle implied bestiality, the criminal under-utilization of Br...

Sean learns the hard way that when man tampers with nature, he makes monsters in  Bug  (1975), the final film from legendary producer William Castle. A California earthquake releases prehistoric, firestarter cockroaches, and that's not bad enough - a mad scientist experiments with them to create an apocalyptic species of devil bug! Listen as we talk about burning down the Brady Bunch hou...

Colin finds the third time's the charm in bringing the Freak Show over to team Chuck with  Invasion USA  (1985). Chuck Norris is a one-man-army, a mythical being that rises from the Florida Everglades to open up a can of whoop ass on foreign terrorists who've invaded his territory: America. Listen as we reveal the secret origin of Chuck Norris Facts, get into the history of the man himse...

Michaela was cool with the big-screen version of DC Comics classic anti-hero  Jonah Hex  (2010) until he started talking to dead people and rode off into steampunk territory! Hex is a bounty hunter seeking revenge on the evil Confederate colonel who burned down his life, and Megan Fox is the feisty prostitute that he must save before the end of the movie. Listen as we talk supernatural s...

Holly finds out flesh is weak but metal is forever when she becomes a robot cyborg after watching Virus (1999), a haunted ship/Alien clone, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Sutherland as sailors who make the unwise move of investigating a derelict Russian science vessel with a killer alien robot on board! Listen to tales of yelling 'yar!' at cats, ommetaphobia, find out which mainframe is THE...

Sean couldn't get enough of  Spookies  (1986) the first time we covered it on our show, so he warps time and space so we can do it again (a Freak Show first)! It's true we watched Spookies before...on  December 19th, 2015 , to be exact...but Holly and Michaela weren't on the show then and missed out on this cinematic landmark. Listen as we talk farting muckmen, spider women, a menag...

Colin geeks out over Hammer Films' single wolfman movie  The Curse of the Werewolf  (1961), which finds future superstar and tabloid hellraiser Oliver Reed making baptismal fonts boil and howlin' at the moon as a young lad cursed with lycanthropy from birth. Listen as we do a super nerd deep dive on Britain's Hammer Films, fire stunts gone awry, monster makeup and more, all on this week'...