The Cult Section

This week, the Seths implore you to remember when you heard this podcast once before... a year ago? Or the year before - either on this liminal platform or another - so many shows and episodes... episodes and shows repeating infinitely, like the hotel-based dreamspaces of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), directed by Alain Resnais and starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Abertazzi and Sacha Pitoeff. Joi...

The Seths pass out in a sensory deprivation tank filled with a mysterious truck-themed selzter and trip out into primordial versions of themselves as they watch Ken Russell's proto-walk-and-talk psychedelic journey "Altered States" (1980) starring William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid. Are psychedelics the true path to enlightenment? Will Edward Jessop defeat his own ego, the cri...

The Seths pull tarot and face dire consequences as they look at the celebrated (if not financially successful) 2016 indie darling from Anna Biller, starring Samantha Robinson, Laura Waddell, Gian Keys and Jeffrey Vincent Parise. Elaine is new to town, in a quest to escape her past and start again with hopes of finding love. But her means of pursuit have some tricky bits that land her in hot water....

This week on The Cult Section, we dig into an old graveyard to unearth the 1990 Clive Barker monstertpiece "Nightbreed!" It's a surprise sideways return to Cronenmonth as the Seths travel to a cursed Canadian "town" in search of answers to the REAL questions... Is everything true? Is Oz over the rainbow? Is God an astronaut? Is Midian where the monsters live? Only Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby and Dav...

This week on The Cult Section, we take a look at Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell's 1970 blood-soaked acid nightmare of crime, repression, and masculinity "Performance," starring Mick Jagger, James Fox, Anita Pallenberg, and Michele Breton. Banned for two years for extreme content before an underwhelming eventual release, the film's production was allegedly so dark and heavy, Fox took ten years of...

Warning - this week's film is so intense, it just might make your head explode! Join the Seths as they discuss David Cronenberg's first big US-market breakthrough and only film that opened at #1 at the box office, the 1981 game-changing, cranium-bursting paranoid thrillride "Scanners," starring Steven Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill and Patrick McGoohan! We'll try and hear each other's th...

This week on The Cult Section, our hosts discuss Brian DePalma's 1974 portfolio of visual dazzlers "Phantom of the Paradise," starring William Finley, Paul Williams and Jessica Harper. It's another Very Special Benisode (TM) with a different Ben! Join the Seths and our special guest - verified cinephile, cult film aficianado, and A&B Video alum Ben Davis this week, as we throw ourselves into the m...

Did you like the new "Dune" films, but wish Paul Atreides held more TED talks in them? Would you be excited for a sitcom called "My Eight Dads" featuring a young Muad'Dib and his bevy of helpful mentors? We have the film for you! Join the Seths this week as they dig deep into the desert sand, staying wary of wormsign in this week's feautured film, David Lynch's controversial (mostly to Lynch) 1984...

Hail to the king, baby! King Campbell, that is - Bruce Campbell - in what might just be his career-defining role, that of Ash Williams in the third installation of the triply-retconned Evil Dead series, Sam Raimi's 1992 deliberate schlockfest, "Army of Darkness." Join the Seths and special guest Ben Tracy, noted chronologist and haitline arbiter, as they explore dimensional rifts, shot-up supermar...

On The Cult Section this week, dessert eats you! When a mysterious ice-cream-like substance is found to be irresistably delicious, it's rushed to market where an ignorant and all-too-eager public greedily devours it with a fervor that's out of this world (or...within it?) in Larry Cohen's 1985 tongue-in-cheek takedown of consumerism and fad culture, "THE STUFF," starring Michael Moriarty, Scott Bl...

Join the Seths as they learn How To Get Ahead In Advertising from absolutely delightful lunatic Richard E. Grant, along with Rachel Ward in the 1989 Bruce Robinson-helmed film of the same name. Follow us into darkened boardrooms, deliberately trashed kitchens, cardboard boxes, speeding trains and expansive meadows as we watch Bagley (Grant) descend ever deeper into madness (or into sanity...for th...

We'll show you the Life of the Mind this week, as the Seths tackle the Coen Brothers' 1991 perhaps-most-off-kilter entry, "Barton Fink," starring John Turturro and John Goodman. Follow Fink as he, bolstered by some success on the New York stage and emboldened by his irrepressible ego, makes the unlikely move to Hollywood where he hopes to make it big telling highly intellectualized stories of the...

Bug out with the Seths and Sonic as they jump into a futuristic war against giant space insects against the backdrop of (fictional) militarized fascism in the 1997 classic Paul Verhoeven film, "Starship Troopers," starring Casper Van Dien and Dina Meyer, Denise Richards and Michael Ironside. Packed full of Verhoeven's signature satirical world-building TV snippets, newsreels and bizarre advertisin...

Hey, friends! It's time to relive your childhood nightmares - or make new ones (its never too late!) as we Return to Oz with the 1985 Walter Murch classic of the same name. Rejoin a perplexingly younger Dorothy as she paradoxically recovers from the Oz trauma she lived out in the course of the tornado that left her Kansas homestead half-destroyed and her guardians dismayed. Fairuza Balk dazzles us...

This week, the Seths discuss John Carpenter's divisive 1994 apocalypse trilogy-topper "In The Mouth of Madness," starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen and Jürgen Prochnow. Does it portend a dark fate for humanity in a post-fact age? Is it horror, noir, or something in between? Does it match Lovecraft's notoriously hard-to-film imagination? And most importanly - is it scary? Join the Seths and producer...

Welcome to The Cult Section (with Seth & Seth)! Join the Seths and producer Sonic this week on our premiere episode, focusing on one of our favorite cult films of all time, Alex Cox's 1984 cinematic debut "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez (in his breakout role) and Harry Dean Stanton. This totemic anthem to the dark underbelly of the American Dream, set against the seemingly contemporarily-apoca...