The Review Show

Episode 284. The Whatnauts answer the call to discuss all four movies under the Ghostbusters banner: the 1984 original, the 1989 sequel, the 2016 soft remake, and the 2021 "rebootquel" Ghostbusters: Afterlife. We discuss how the franchise has always appealed to children even when it wasn't made for them, how anyone can become a ghostbuster, city pride, spooky paintings, when do homages start to fe...

Join us for the 8th anniversary retrospective, which we've now declared will be called a Grand Prix! Just try to stop us!! Kyle and Melissa gather for our annual pizza awards banquet for favorite Review Show topics, best performances, biggest surprises, and for the first time ever, a two-time Dream Date winner. We also debut a new structure for the Review Show and Captain's Log starting in 2024! M...

Episode 283. Happy holidays! We're ending the year by watching a two-part Christmas special from the animated family sitcom Bob's Burgers: season 8 episodes 6 and 7, titled "The Bleakening." When the family's Christmas tree is stolen from a party at their restaurant, Linda and Bob search for the culprit to get their kids' handmade ornaments back, while the kids suspect an anti-Santa known as the "...

Episode 282. Somebody stop us! We're talking about the 1994 living cartoon that is The Mask. Stanley Ipkiss is a hapless pushover who discovers a mask that, according to the original DVD packaging, "brings his innermost desires to wild, screaming life!" We discuss the Looney Tunes antics, impossible pajamas, piles of loose cash, the discovery of Cameron Diaz, and the '90s and early 2000s run of pu...

Episode 281. We conclude our discussion on the original Hellboy comics, covering volumes 10-12, where Hellboy has to finally face his world-changing destiny and pay the ultimate price to stop others from using him in their malevolent plans. We discuss the one-shot stories bringing Hellboy to luchador matches in Mexico and the haunted woods of Appalachia, what the devil looks like if Hellboy has al...

Episode 280. We had an A+ time with this B-movie, Brendan Steere's 2017 bad-on-purpose creature feature The VelociPastor. After priest Doug Jones sees his parents die in a car fire, he travels to China to clear his head, and encounters a mystical artifact that turns him into a velociraptor. He decides to use this power for good, ridding his city of drug dealers and ninjas. We discuss the moments o...

Episode 279. We watched the puzzling 2019 neo-noir film Under the Silver Lake, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Sam is an aimless slacker who falls for a cute new neighbor, and after he finds her apartment suddenly vacated, he becomes determined to find the missing girl. A series of cryptic clues leads him through LA's hipster party scene all the way to a conspiracy in the shadowy up...

Episode 278.  We watched the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film Persona. A young nurse is hired to care for an actress who went mute after a breakdown. The two go to a secluded beach house to recuperate, with the nurse constantly talking in hopes of coaxing her patient out of this psychosomatic state, while the identities of the two women start to blur. We discuss the avant garde imagery, the unnervingly sp...

Episode 277. Happy "Helloween" as we continue discussing the adventures of our pal Hellboy, with volumes 7-9 from writer Mike Mignola and new artist Duncan Fegredo. Old foes return to strike at Hellboy, and he learns surprising secrets about the human half of his lineage. We discuss the introduction of mainstream King Arthur mythology into this series based on more obscure folklore, making out wit...

Episode 276. We watched season one of the 2017 Netflix crime thriller Mindhunter, based on true events. In 1977, the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit begins a groundbreaking study into serial killers, traveling the country to interview incarcerated murderers to learn more about their patterns and processes, in the hopes of identifying future killers and stopping them before they start. We discuss the...

Episode 275. We watched the 1998 horror movie The Faculty, from writer Kevin Williamson and director Robert Rodriguez. A mis-matched crew of high school students come together when they suspect their teachers are being taken over by aliens, and they need to use a popular new homebrewed drug to kill the alien queen and save those who have been infected. We discuss the twists on traditional high sch...

Episode 274. We watched the 2014 black and white Iranian skateboarding vampire romance A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour. In the lonely town of Bad City, Iran, a young man working to pay off his father's debt to a local drug dealer encounters a mysterious girl who stalks the city at night, preying upon its oppressors. We discuss the mix of genres from spaghet...

Episode 273. We're kicking off our annual all-horror October with 2013's Afterlife with Archie comics, from writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and artist Francesco Francavilla. Jughead's beloved pup Hot Dog has been hit by a car, and when he asks Sabria the Teenage Witch to bring him back to life, he comes back wrong. Hot Dog bites Jughead, starting a zombie apocalypse in Riverdale. Archie, Betty, Vero...

Episode 272. We're continuing our ongoing monthly series reading Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics, talking about volumes 4-6 in this episode. Hellboy continues to deal with arcane magic forces trying to use him to summon an apocalypse, as well as the BPRD treating one of his fellow supernatural beings as a disposable tool instead of a teammate. Fed up with being a pawn in someone else's plans, Hellbo...

Episode 271. It's back-to-back Giamatti as we watch 2004's wine nerd movie Sideways! Divorced and depressed Miles takes his buddy Jack on a bachelor's weekend to California wine country. Jack wants to score some action before his wedding, while Miles just wants to lose himself in the pinot noir, struggling to reciprocate the advances of a friendly waitress at a local restaurant he frequents on the...

Episode 270. To honor the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this year, we watched the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, about the founding of N.W.A. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren form the prolific rap group against the backdrop of their southern California town stricken by gang violence, hoping to bring catharsis to their community and control their own futures. The group faces censo...

Episode 269. We watched the self-contained first season of the anthology crime series True Detective from 2014. Detectives Cohle and Hart investigate a seemingly occult killing of a young woman in rural Louisiana in 1995, chasing down myriad leads and eventually taking down the killer -- or so they think. In 2012, after new clues are brought to light and the two retired detectives are grilled by n...

Episode 268. Our new monthly ongoing book club is reading Mike Mignola's original Hellboy comics from the 90s, three volumes a month until we've completed the series! Hellboy is a demonic being summoned by Nazi occultists in the 1940s, but adopted as a child into the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. He grew up traveling the world to investigate the supernatural and protect the innocent f...

Episode 267. We listened to season one of the audio fiction podcast Mockery Manor, from Long Cat Media. It's 1989 in England, and teenager JJ has a summer job at Mockery Manor theme park. She's joining her twin sister Bette, who's already settled into her job there and has developed her own alliances and romances with the fellow young workers, which doesn't help the tense relationship between thes...

Episode 266. Extra, extra! It's a Review Show first! We're covering a filmed production of a live stage performance with Newsies: The Broadway Musical on Disney+. It's 1899, and gangs of young boys are living on the streets and selling newspapers with the hopes of moving up in the world. When the publisher suddenly raises the prices the boys have to pay to get their papers, and refuses to compensa...

Episode 265. It's morphin' time! We read the first three volumes of the 2016 Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers comics from Boom Studios, written by Kyle Higgins and Steve Orlando. After Tommy was brainwashed into becoming Rita Repulsa's fearsome Green Ranger, he defected to the heroic Power Rangers and is still struggling to fit in and shake off these traumatic memories. Rita keeps launching destructi...

Episode 264. We've reached the fourth and final season of The Good Place! The team works on a new experiment to purposefully coach people in another simulation to reach the actual good place, struggling to replicate their own personal journeys in becoming better people. When our friends finally get to spend time in the good place, they realize that it poses its own challenges and that infinite hea...

Episode 263. In honor of the sci-fi animated series Futurama being rebooted on Hulu, we watched seven episodes from across its earlier seasons, giving us a sampler platter of the show's comedy, emotion, mathematics, and multiple kinds of time travel. We discuss Parasites Lost, The Luck of the Fryish, Roswell that Ends Well, The Sting, The Late Phillip J. Fry, The Prisoner of Benda, and the latest...

Episode 262. To herald the coming of Barbie, we watched another movie about a candy-colored retro icon forced to contend with the modern world: 1995's loving satire, The Brady Bunch Movie. The Bradys struggle to collect $20,000 to save their home, while their unscrupulous neighbor tries to sabotage them, hoping to sell their land to develop into a mini-mall. As the family faces their own individua...

Episode 261. We read the standalone graphic novel from Ram V and Filipe Andrade, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. When humans become immortal, the goddess of death is out of a job. Her "retirement" is to be reincarnated as a human, and she arranges to live in the same city at the same time as the future inventor of immortality, with plans to kill him and get her old job back. She finds herself in a...