The Nextlander Watchcast

Our Halloween slate continues, and this week's dark temptation is the somewhat resistible Stephen King adaptation, Needful Things! Join us as we cackle together at this looney tale of regular folk driven to homicidal madness by the kindliest grandpa demon anyone's ever run afoul of. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 195: Needful Things (1993) (00:00:20) - Intro. (00:08:15) -...

October is always one of the best months for the Watchcast, if we do say ourselves, and for this month of dark temptations we've got one of the goopiest movies of the '80s in Clive Barker's Hellraiser! Join us as we meet Pinhead and the gang for the first time, compare the film against Barker's original novella, and ponder just how tempted we'd be to solve the Lament Configuration. CHAPTERS: (00:0...

Star Trek Summer: Extended Edition is officially on hiatus for a couple of months after this week's Watchcast, and for our final batch of episodes until December, we've got Lee Merriweather as a tormented fembot in That Which Survives, followed by the rare Scotty romance episode The Lights of Zetar! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 193: Star Trek: That Which Survives and The...

This week's Watchcast brings us to a famous (or infamous) episode from Star Trek's later run in the blunt-as-a-hammer racism parable Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. Also this week is The Mark of Gideon, which is an episode of Star Trek, and that's about the most you can say for it. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 192: Star Trek: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and The...

We're over the halfway hump in Star Trek's third season, and the campy nonsense hits a fever pitch in this week's episodes. First up is the Taming of the Shrew riff Elaan of Troyius, and then we're onto the simultaneously overheated and under-baked Whom Gods Destroy! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 191: Star Trek: Elaan of Troyius and Whom Gods Destroy (00:00:15) - Intro. (...

We've officially hit the halfway point of Star Trek's final season, and while Wink of an Eye and The Empath aren't exactly series (or season) highlights, at least we get to watch some guest actors ham it up in wildly differing ways. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 190: Star Trek: Wink of an Eye and The Empath (00:00:08) - Intro. (00:03:47) - Staring straight into the confus...

This week's Watchcast brings us to one of the few bright spots in this final Star Trek season in The Tholian Web. Also this week is Plato's Stepchildren, a historically significant episode that is certainly unpredictable, if nothing else. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 189: Star Trek: The Tholian Web and Plato's Stepchildren (00:00:21) - Intro. (00:01:44) - Starting things...

For this week's Star Trek journey we've got a pair of episodes absolutely chock full of cardboard swords and ridiculous alien misunderstandings in the Klingon-heavy donnybrook Day of the Dove, and the generation ship disaster For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 188: Star Trek: Day of the Dove and For the World Is Hollow and I...

After the extraordinarily low lows of last week's Star Trek episodes, this week's batch feels like a welcome respite. Up to bat this week is previously-seen guest star Diana Muldaur in the psychedelic ugly alien freakout Is There in Truth No Beauty, followed by the good ol' fashioned wild west romp Spectre of the Gun! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 187: Star Trek: Is There...

Star Trek Summer is officially back on the menu, folks! We're once again joined by our compatriot Brad Shoemaker to continue our journey through the original series' third season soldiers on. And this week that journey meets one of its toughest challenges yet in the execrable episodes The Paradise Syndrome, and And the Children Shall Lead. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 18...

For this week's special guest Watchcast animator and game developer Scott Benson takes us on a tour of the creeper corners of Depression-era West Virginia in Charles Laughton's singularly strange thriller, The Night of the Hunter! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 185: The Night of the Hunter (1955) w/ Scott Benson (00:00:21) - Intro. (00:12:39) - How we came to this movie in...

For this week's Special Guest Watchcast we've got none other than Austin Walker joining the show to tell us all about a seminal work of cyberpunk anime (that just happens to coincide with a new revival hitting the airwaves very recently) in the 1995 adaptation of Ghost in the Shell! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 184: Ghost in the Shell (1995) w/ Austin Walker (00:00:26) -...

The Watchcast rises from hiatus to sparkle for all of you once again, and while our friend Brad is out on leave, we've got a few guests lined up to take us through some of their favorite films. First up is Abby Russell with the movie she's been determined to make us watch for months now. the equally baffling and entertaining YA vampire romance, Twilight! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watch...

One season is all that stands between us and our years-long goal of completing Star Trek: The Original Series. Yes, that season might be uniquely bad by series standards, but we are determined to push through any deep hurting that may result in order to achieve our goal. First up, an all-timer dumb-dumb episode in Spock's Brain, and the surprisingly solid The Enterprise Incident. CHAPTERS: (00:00:...

We've got a one week break coming up before Star Trek Summer begins again in earnest, but before that happens we've got one more documentary to serve our Watchcasting listeners in Trekkies! Join us for some nerd archeology as we dig through this doc that's chock full of superfans of all flavors and stripes, and marvel with us at how quaint it all seems compared with our extremely fandom-oriented p...

Nothing brings people together like a good old fashioned space mission, and for this week's Watchcast we've got a documentary about the goodest of old fashioned space missions, Apollo 11! Join us as we marvel not just at the unbelievable human achievement this story represents, but also the ludicrously high quality footage they managed to capture 50-plus years ago. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextl...

This week's Watchcast takes us on a trip down to Harlan County, U.S.A. as we tackle Barbara Kopple's gripping (and Academy Award winning) documentary about the 1973 miners' strike against Duke Power. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 179: Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) (00:00:57) - Intro. (00:07:38) - Geography lessons with the Nextlander gang. (00:12:53) - On Bloody Harlan, an...

We're filling out May's Watchcast schedule with a trio of documentaries that have been on our respective lists for a while now, and first up is Vinny's pick, Class Action Park! Join us as we recount our own memories of weirdo theme parks of yore, marvel at the brazen lawlessness of this whole operation, and wonder aloud if we aren't just living in Action Park all the time now. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00)...

We close out our slate of Coens comedies with their 2008 spy thriller farce, Burn After Reading! And joining the crew as we unravel this sordid tale of idiot spycraft is none other than our friend and yours, Austin Walker! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 177: Burn After Reading (2008) (00:00:16) - Intro. (00:01:02) - Our guest this week is Austin Walker, and our movie is Bu...

The third film in our Coens Comedy Classics lineup is an all-time favorite of Alex's, and a genuine screwball hall-of-famer if you don't mind such bold proclamations. We are, of course, talking about Raising Arizona, a movie chock full of yuks that still has a genuine heart that cannot be denied. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 176: Raising Arizona (1987) (00:00:22) - Intro...

Our journey through some of the wackier Coen Brothers capers continues this week as we take on The Hudsucker Proxy, a star-studded, over-the-top affair that is equal parts His Girl Friday and Roadrunner cartoon, and is every bit as ungainly as that description makes it sound. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 175: The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) (00:00:20) - Intro. (00:01:28) - Ou...

After an unexpectedly long odyssey that delayed the Watchcast's scheduled arrival, we're finally back to our movie watching ways, and launching into our month of Coen Brothers comedies, starting with the duo's southern-fried take on one of the great Homeric works in O Brother, Where Art Thou?! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 174: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) (00:01:04)...

It's our last Watchcast before we take a two week hiatus, so Alex wants to send us off on a high note, and to do so he has hand selected the 1984 Talking Heads concert extravaganza Stop Making Sense! Join us as we experience together the myriad pleasures of great music, cardiovascular exercise, and enormous suits. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 173: Stop Making Sense (1984...

Brad has made his pick for the month, and he's decided to take a trip down south to Alex Garland's Annihilation, where a funny kind of Shimmer has got everyone all confused and refracted and dead. Join us as we discuss at length the phantasmagoric scenes that await our scientific adventurers, the human drama that plagues them both in and out of the zone, and just how how messed up that bear really...

With our March schedule being on the shorter side, we've decided to once again each pick a movie we felt like watching, and first up is Vinny with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Join our party as we adventure through this tongue-in-cheek spin on tabletop storytelling, tell our own tales of DnD adventures, and say the name Jarnathan every chance we get. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Next...