The Review Show

This is a special bonus episode looking back on the shows, movies, comics, and more that we covered this year on The Review Show. We discuss recurring narrative themes, favorite performances, dream dates, and give out the prestigious Skinboy Memorial Award for Supporting Players. Listen to Melissa's annual themed playlist here on Spotify ! Click here to watch a video of this episode. ★ Support thi...

Episode 187. For our final episode of the year, we watched the new HBO Max holiday movie 8-Bit Christmas! A young girl begs her dad for a cell phone and he tells her the story of the gift he wanted most when he was her age: a Nintendo Entertainment System. The dad narrates flashbacks to 1988 illustrating the antics he and his friends got into trying to obtain an NES for Christmas, and the impact t...

Episode186. We watched the new Netflix holiday-themed romcom Love Hard. Natalie is a blogger who writes about her perpetual bad luck with dating apps. When she starts talking to Josh, the first man she really likes, she flies across the country to surprise him for Christmas. The surprise is on her -- he's been using the photos of a more handsome friend to catfish her. Natlie agrees to act as Josh'...

Episode 185. We've finished all our Leftovers! When season three starts, it's almost the seven year anniversary of The Departure, and many people believe this is a special day that could either bring everyone back, or bring the end of the world. After the bizarre events that Kevin survived in season two, some of his friends and family now believe him to be a god. As Kevin considers his destiny, No...

Episode 184. We watched Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film Kiki's Delivery Service. Kiki is a witch, and when all witches turn 13, they leave home to live in a new town and practice their particular magical talent for a year. Kiki decides to put her broomstick to use delivering packages, but when a series of setbacks makes her lose confidence in herself, she risks losing the ability to fly too. Click here...

Episode 183. We read the DC comics event from 2011, Flashpoint, from Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert. Barry Allen knows the world where he is The Flash, where his mother was murdered, where he has friends in the Justice League. He wakes up one day in a world where his mother is still alive and he never became The Flash, and the familiar faces around him are behaving very differently. He'll have to con...

Episode 182. We're continuing our ongoing series on The Leftovers with season two, and look for our discussion on season three at the end of the month! We're introduced to Jarden, TX, the only town in the world where no one was lost to The Departure. Some people believe this place is magical, and flock to it like a holy site, disrupting the lives of its regular citizens. Kevin and his family move...

Episode 181. We watched the 1977 horror movie Suspiria from director Dario Argento, and its 2018 remake from director Luca Guadagnino. Both movies are stylistically and tonally very different but share the same initial plot: a young woman named Susie travels to study at a prestigious ballet academy in Germany, where she begins to suspect that the instructors are engaged in witchcraft and have sini...

Episode 180. We read the first two volumes of horror comic Something is Killing the Children by James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera. Children have been disappearing from the small town of Archer's Peak, Wisconsin, and those that have been found are reduced to gruesome corpses. Erica Slaughter comes to town because she is a monster killer, it is all she does because it must be done, and she team...

Episode179. We're covering a Halloween classic this week with Tim Burton's 1988 movie Beetlejuice. The Maitlands are a young couple living a quiet life in their small New England town, until they die. Then they have to learn the confusing bureaucracy of the afterlife and how to scare off the new owners of the house they still "live" in. They've seen ads for a man named Beetlejuice who promises to...

Episode 178. We watched the new Netflix show Brand New Cherry Flavor, a magical revenge thriller set in early 90s Hollywood. Young filmmaker Lisa Nova is trying to get her short film made into a feature-length movie, but when a producing partner takes advantage of her and signs a movie deal without her as the director, she swears to burn his life to the ground. She contacts a mysterious witch to g...

Episode 177. To kick off the spooky month of October, we watched the 2008 Australian film Lake Mungo. This mockumentary follows the Palmer family coping with the sudden death of teenage daughter Alice, and their investigation when they find photos and videos that seem to show Alice after her death. While they confront the possibility of the supernatural, the family also confronts the secrets Alice...

Episode176. We're starting another ongoing series covering one show to its conclusion, starting this month with season one of the 2014 HBO drama The Leftovers. Three years ago, there was a sudden unexplained event called "the departure" where 2% of the human population disappeared into thin air. Now, the rest of humanity struggles to find answers, closure, and purpose. We follow sheriff Kevin Garv...

Episode 175. To conclude our Shametember series, time travel nerd Kyle needed to watch Rian Johnson's 2012 film Looper. Joe works as a "looper," a hitman who only kills bodies sent back to him from criminals thirty years in the future. When his own future self arrives, Old Joe explains that the future has been taken over by a tyrannical genius and he's there to kill the child who will grow up to b...

Episode 174. Shametember is back! This is the chance for each of us to clear a movie off the "list of shame" of things we should've seen by now. Melissa named famous sequels she hadn't watched yet after seeing the first movies in those franchises, and this week we watched Aliens! This 1986 follow up to Alien sees Ripley awakening from her Nostromo escape pod a staggering 57 years in the future. Sh...

Episode 173. Alan and Ignacio are on the show this week to talk about The Digimon Movie. We watched the dubbed American release from the year 2000, and the three original Japanese mini-movies that were edited together to make this American version. We see the digidestined kids throughout their young lives as they encounter their first Digimon egg, try to stop a Digimon virus from destroying the in...

Episode 172. Join us for a Review Show first, as we read the prose novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Photojournalist Will Navidson and his family move into a new house, and soon discover a seemingly unending dark hallway that opens up where there was no door before. Will films every step of his exploration into the house, which is eventually edited into the documentary The Navidson Rec...

Episode 171. We watched the 2021 Netflix sci-fi drama movie Stowaway. Three astronauts are on a two-year mission to Mars. They've just left Earth hours ago when a stowaway falls out of a compartment in the ship -- a launch engineer who hit his head, fell unconscious, and was accidentally sealed into the ship before takeoff. They can't turn back. A resupply ship can't reach them. It's a race agains...

Episode 170. We listened to both seasons of the audio drama Passenger List, written and directed by John Scott Dryden and Lauren Shippen, and starring Kelly Marie Tran. It's been six months since Atlantic Flight 702 disappeared when traveling from London to New York City. The airlines declared that the missing plane was brought down by a bird strike, but college student Kaitlin Le refuses to accep...

Episode 169. Kyle is back on the podcast with Melissa to talk about the romance manga Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura. Tsukimi is a young woman obsessed with jellyfish who lives in an apartment building only for otaku women, with no men allowed. When a friendly girl helps Tsukimi bring her very own jellyfish home from the pet store, she's intimidated by the stranger's beauty and fashion se...

Episode 168. Friend of the show and brother of the co-host Jams Wilkinson is here to talk about the webcomic turned graphic novel series Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu. Eric "Bitty" Bittle is a freshman on his university hockey team, looking to show off his figure skating skills, feed these hockey bros some real home-cooked meals, and gain the confidence to come out as gay. He finds a welcoming team...

Episode 167. Friend of the show Jacq is back to talk about Maniac, the 2018 Netflix limited series from Cary Joji Fukunaga and Patrick Somerville. Owen and Annie, two lonely New Yorkers with their own unique traumas, enroll in an experimental psychiatric drug trial. They experience hallucinations where they're living wildly different lives but they're always connected to each other, an impossible...

Episode 166. Guest co-captain Audrey Stolze joins Melissa for a discussion on the graphic novel Folklords, from Matt Kindt and Matt Smith. Ansel is a teenage boy living in a medieval fantasy village who sees visions of our modern urban life. He's the only person in town wearing a suit and tie and using a handmade lighter instead of a torch. All kids his age must choose a quest, and Ansel wants to...

Episode 165. We conclude our time in Winden with a discussion on the third and final season of Dark! We see an alternate timeline where Mikkel never vanished, Jonas was never born, and Martha grows to become the Adam of her world, pulling the strings and following her own plan to try to set everything right. As we learn more connections between the generations, we also discover the origin point of...

Episode 164. We watched a live-action Japanese comedy show on Netflix called Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman. Kantaro is a sales rep for a publishing company, but his true passion is sweets. He only took this job so that he could sneak away from bookstore sales calls to visit his favorite cafes in the area and blog about the desserts he eats. Can he keep this a secret when his new co-worker read...