The Really Awful Movies Podcast

Halloween is approaching. Here’s a bit of a twist: My Top 20 Favorite Horror Movies . What will appear on the list? There are just so many a seasoned viewer can possibly choose from. Will we see the likes of The Exorcist? That one really gets under the skin of Catholics and rightly so. What about Get Out? Jordan Peele is a real up and comer and someone to watch. Perhaps The Last House on the...

On this episode of the really Awful Movies Podcast, some more Jack the Ripper fodder! Today, it’s Murder by Decree . And we invite interested parties to check out our accompanying podcast we recorded while visiting London, Hands of the Ripper . This one is a fictionalized account of what it would’ve been like if Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigated the infamous Whitechapel murde...

Let’s just call Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile the Ted Bundy movie, k? What a mouthful of a title. But unlike other depraved lunatics, for some reason Lady Killer and The Campus Killer never stuck with Terrible Ted the way that similar monikers have to BTK, The Green River Killer, Jack the Ripper, etc. Any way you slice it (not a pun as that was not his MO) this falls into the su...

Our second TV series Really Awful Movies Podcast episode, after You. This episode focuses on the thrilling UK TV series, The Stranger , currently available on Netflix. This one is non-stop action, and all based on the tagline / premise that “we all have secrets.” And these secrets are being exploited by the title character, a woman in a ballcap and a track suit who appears to unsuspect...

Look out, Sorority House Massacre, stand aside, Splatter University, watch out Graduation Day…you get the gist. Here comes Sorority Row , a middling remake of the underrated House on Sorority Row from the slasher Golden Era. Like the orginal, Sorority Row is propelled by an accidental death, one of those sorority / frat pranks that went a little too far. And someone has to pay! That means, t...

A remake of the 1982 video nasty ‘ Unhinged , ‘ which we podcasted in an earlier episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast. In this one, four best friends, young women, decide to take the back roads travelling to a wedding in the English countryside, much to their peril. Dah da dum! The foursome is off to enjoy fun and frivolity, but finds anything but at a local gas station, where a...

Directed by the team behind the reboot of Pet Sematary, Starry Eyes (Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) is an ambitious fantasy horror offering about a young starlet and part time waitress at a tacky restaurant, who gets a big break in a role of a lifetime – provided she does something unseemly first. Set in LA, and featuring a bunch of Hollywood wannabes in competition with one another, there...

On this week’s episode of the podcast, a short podcast for a short movie! The Slumber Party Massacre has a speedy run time of 76 minutes, a lean, mean stalk-and-slash machine. The plot isn’t actually Chinatown. It’s pretty straightforward. I mean, the title says it all, right? There’s a girls’ basketball team and they decide to throw a slumber party one night and to e...

This week on the podcast, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral . Unlike most virus / outbreak / contagion films, where there’s a security breach at a lab and the virus gets loose, turning the populace into rampaging drooling creatures, the horror in Antiviral comes from a rogue employee who is smuggling out pathogens to sell on the black market. And the viruses in question are ones derived f...

On this week’s episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, the underrated, quiet contagion/outbreak film, Containment . Though lost in what was a banner year for horror (The Witch, Bone Tomahawk, Tag, We Are Still Here) there’s enough to commend Containment to give it a watch five years later. The film is set in a dismal, concrete high rise housing complex in the Southern UK city of So...

On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. As you may gather, from the poster/marketing creative, this one is an ART FILM. So, caveat emptor…depending on your affinity for such things, in the horror realm, you’ll either dive right in or head for the hills for much more straightforward offerings (The Hills Have Eyes, perhaps?) Colin Farrell and Nic...

On this week’s episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, Stephen King’s The Mist . Much like John Carpenter’s The Fog, an inclement weather system has residents of a small Maine town perplexed. Residents witness a parade of military trucks heading into town, and soon they find the weather enveloping them all. A few of the townsfolk end up hunkering down in a local grocery store...

This week on the Really Awful Movies Podcast, a solo effort! This is a first (and probably a last, but you never know). On this episode, an underwhelming flick that had a lot of promise and a lot of potential – Pathology. Forensic pathologist residents are doing their rounds. Or is it interns? Always get those two confused. Anyway, they are a boisterous, hard-parting group….and utterly...

This week on the podcast, another foray into one of our favorite horror sub-genres, Italian horror! The Wax Mask is an olive branch of sorts, extended from one rival to another, Dario Argento to Lucio Fulci, towering giants of Italian horror. The latter was in ill health, so Argento along with long-time Fulci collaborator/effects guru Sergio Stivaletti executed this one for him. A re-imagining of...

On this episode of the Really Awful Movies podcast, the directorial debut of Neil Marshall (The Descent) and what a debut it is! Dog Soldiers . Six British soldiers are carrying out a training mission in the wilds of Scotland, and they come across a Special Forces Op with severe gashes to his torso. What could have befallen him? The crew, under the watch of one Sergeant Wells (the outstanding Sean...

This week on the Really Awful Movies Podcast, the film that launched a somewhat inexplicably popular franchise, kinda like Subway Restaurants… Final Destination !  Hey, that’s not quite a slight…every now and then, a meatball sub hits the spot, right? A bunch of kids are boarding a plane for France (or, pre-boarding, the phrase that really irked the late, great George Carlin). On...

Episode 300. Can’t believe we made it this far. On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we tackle the Arnie muscled classic, PREDATOR! A SWAT team descends on a mythical Central American banana republic to rescue some politicos. The force is led by none other than the Guvernator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with another governor, Jesse “The Body” Ventura. The...

We’re BAAAAAA-CK. We had a brief book-related hiatus and are back to our regularly scheduled programming. So, here goes. Poltergeist.  The Tobe Hooper-directed (with lots of help from Steven Spielberg) effort from the early 80s is one many of us hold in very high regard, despite it being from a horror sub-genre that’s personally not our cup of tea. It’s undoubtedly memorable, esp...

On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast: Mortuary ! This is an underseen 1983 quasi-slasher starring a young Bill Paxton. There’s a mortuary (duh) and two young guys start poking around. One of them goes missing. The other? He goes to the roller rink to ask where he might’ve gone. Ah yes, seeking answers from the oracle that is the disco roller rink His girlfriend’s fa...

Marina is a social outcast at a made-up California university. She sits in the back of her psych class and pulls her hair out, and wears a hoodie and is gothed up – so you know she’s messed up. She’s at the heart of Friend Request, this being just an expression as this is a movie with no heart, or soul, or passion for that matter. What we describe as “aggressively mediocre....

Is it Lethal Weapon? Is it Die Hard? More like, tries hard. Crackerjack is a spirited knock-off action flick, complete with a German uber-villain (played by Christopher Plummer, of all people). First off, biases aside, we LOVE Crackerjack III , one of the wackiest, bonkers action flicks of all time. And like that effort, the first installment in the unrelated series, does not disappoint. A hard-bo...

You’re in the bucolic redwood forests of Northern California/Oregon on a camping trip. What could possibly go wrong? The Final Terror answers that question and more… A bunch of forest rangers (including the wonderful Joe Pantoliano) and some gal pals (including Daryl Hannah) are getting away from it all. And is par for the course for these kinds of films, regale one another with scary...

Slaughter Hotel (in Italian: La bestia uccide a sangue freddo and also known as Asylum Erotica and Cold Blooded Beast) is a 1971 Italian giallo horror film directed by Fernando Di Leo and starring the incomparable Klaus Kinski. The film, a hybrid of exploitation, giallo and slasher, follows a masked killer murdering female patients in a sanitorium. So yes, the title is a bit of a misnomer. Directe...

Now the weather outside is frightful, but 80s teen horrors are so delightful. Join us, as we dive headfirst into Nightmare Beach (also released as Welcome to Spring Break), an American-Italian slasher directed by the incomparable Umberto Lenzi and Harry Kirkpatrick. This might be the fourth Lenzi flick we’ve talked about here on the Really Awful Movies Podcast. He’s just so darned ente...

On this episode of the podcast, the shaggy dog horror, MADMAN. Yes, it’s a rather paint-by-numbers “maniac in the woods movie”. There are campers. There are counsellors. There are woods. There are tales of things lurking in the shadows. Urban legends. Some unique kills. Still, there’s enough to commend this silly effort, which has drawn unfavourable comparisons to the likes...