Trylove

Featuring special guest Abbie Phelps ( https://twitter.com/goodhunterabbie)! DRIVE ANGRY is not a very good movie. In fact, it’s kind of a piece of shit. But like a lot of piece of shit movies, it’s far more charming, fun, and likeable than the sum of its parts would lead you to believe. Nic Cage is John Milton (yeah), a man back from hell who seeks revenge on cult leader Jonah King (yeah) for kil...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual violence and abuse. Neither Jodorowsky’s most remembered film nor his most surreal, SANTA SANGRE is still a horror-drama marked by its many allusions to faith, guilt, responsibility, and triumph of the self over evil. Fenix, a young circus performer, is left forever scarred when his father kills his mother and then himself. Years later, he gets what he thinks...

*** Note: This episode was originally recorded and released in June 2019 during a series on the films of Joel and Ethan Coen at the Trylon. We've republished it to coincide with the Trylon's showing of RAISING ARIZONA as part of the NIC CAGE: NATIONAL TREASURE series that screened in the summer of 2022. We didn't really know what we were doing with this show back then, but we're still pretty happy...

Featuring special guest Natalie Marlin ( https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt)! Screened only once at release before it was banned during the Iranian cultural revolution, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s CHESS OF THE WIND (aka THE CHESS GAME OF THE WIND) is still shocking after more than 40 years in obscurity. Focusing on the lurid power plays conducted behind the closed doors of an aristocrat’s mansion (inc...

With returning guest and Trylon volunteer Finn Odum (https://twitter.com/Finnematic)! Maybe the question isn’t whether CON AIR is ‘sincere’ or not. Maybe it’s more like “What’s it doing to leverage action tropes to comment on the American carceral state?” or “Is it possible to rehabilitate a whole society?” or “Is Steve Buscemi even real in this movie?” or “Why is John Malkovich in this movie?” Li...

With returning guest Sarah Huisken of the Cult Film Collective! THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE is plot-light but craft-heavy. Its French style takes inspiration from many eras and regions of animation to build a descriptive, sometimes unsettlingly detailed picture of a fictional city and its unique inhabitants. With Sarah, we pull apart what exactly the movie is doing with its technical achievements,...

A bunch of people in Virgil, Texas, are gearing up for the sesquicentennial celebration – the Celebration of Specialness – and in TRUE STORIES, David Byrne of Talking Heads is your guide to the lifestyles, traditions, and movers & shakers of the oddball town. In this episode, we discuss the kind of world Byrne and company imagined in TRUE STORIES, the assumptions its inhabitants make about the...

Featuring special guest Dan Nagan (@aDapperDanMan)! What is even going on in John Woo's FACE/OFF? The simplest conceit – swap badass criminal Nic Cage and sadboy cop John Travolta's faces for max irony – is stretched beyond its reasonable boundaries and into truly bizarre territory. How can two whole men live as half of each other? What do they become when united in flesh and singular purpose? Thr...

With returning guest Charlie Mackin (https://twitter.com/charliemander13)! Frank thinks he’s supposed to save lives. Frank’s got it backwards. Join us in discussing BRINGING OUT THE DEAD: number two in the Trylon’s Nic Cage summer series, one of the black sheep of Martin Scorsese’s filmography, and a stylized-but-intimate look at what motivates and depresses EMTs. Stick around for our takes on the...

Featuring the first appearance of writer, Trylon volunteer, Horrorthon body counter, and comms specialist Michael Popham! A direct sequel to the movie where Godzilla rips Mechagodzilla’s head off, TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA is a movie (written by newcomer Yukiko Takayama!) where Godzilla rips Mechagodzilla’s head off… and there’s a dinosaur… being controlled by aliens… who’ve teamed up with a disgrac...

MOONSTRUCK is a perfect film made in 1987 by Norman Jewison and written by John Patrick Shanley. Loretta (played by Cher), a neurotic Italian woman in her mid-30s, is set to marry Johnny (Danny Aiello), a neurotic Italian man in his mid-40s, even though she doesn’t really love him. She meets his brother Ronny (Nic Cage) and falls into a whirlwind romance that starts to crumble her idea of what she...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Featuring special guest Audrey Callerstrom ( https://twitter.com/schmaudrey)! CHERRY FALLS exists in the “sardonic horror-comedy” genre, but even at that, it’s somewhat more pessimistic than its contemporaries. A brutal serial murderer targets virgins with no clear motive, and the implications ripple throughout the East Coast town...

Like much of the GODZILLA franchise, GHIDORAH: THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER is more focused on the fun of watching giant monsters duke it out and the innate humor in their skyborne rivalries. While the story is less about Godzilla himself, it’s a superb example of what made mid-career GODZILLA movies so special and worth discussing: Like a great martial arts movie, it’s a case study in integrating hum...

The original GODZILLA is a lot more up-front about its mission statement than later entries would lead you to believe. It was concepted and written as a metaphor for Japan’s traumatic response to nuclear tragedy and fear of another, but it’s remembered more for its genre-defining special effects. But with a focus on a melodramatic love triangle and humans who can’t decide if they’re heroes or horr...

Emily Csuy of Stoop Kidz!: A Hey Arnold! Podcast is back behind the mic to kick off the Trylon’s Agnès Varda series with CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962)! Florence, who sings and performs under the stage name Cléo (short for “Cléopatra”), is reeling after she’s diagnosed with cancer. The movie picks up during a tarot reading that spells her imminent doom, and the rest of the film tracks the following two h...

THE CONVERSATION is remembered as one of the greatest films of all time, and it is. There’s so much to say about it, we welcomed Seth Zarate (https://twitter.com/snzarate) back to help us sift through our thoughts, hands on the dials, focusing on the juiciest nuggets from Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul is a man defined by his ignorance, believing he can observe and r...

Bob Rafelson’s third film, THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS, plays out differently than you may think. For the most part, it moves like series of disconnected examples, testing characters like David (Jack Nicholson) and Sally (Ellen Burstyn) as Jason (Bruce Dern), David’s brother, leads them on a doomed plot through post-settling, pre-gambling Atlantic City to get rich quick by buying an island off the...

Kelly Krantz ( https://twitter.com/kransekage_ ) is back to discuss a doozy of a movie: Iván Zulueta’s enigmatic, career-ending, post-Franco, quasi-horror film ARREBATO (also known as RAPTURE)! ARREBATO focuses on Pedro and José, two filmmakers seduced by art, heroin, history, and each other. As the mystery behind Pedro’s enigmatic naivete unravels – recurring “raptures” that maybe take Pedro out...

We’re getting both A) loosey and B) goosey on this episode covering a 35mm themed Trylon double-bill of teen comedy cult classics: DON’T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD (1991) and ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING (1987)! Tune in for a discussion of the conformist themes running through DON’T TELL MOM as well as the cutely naive, pretty problematic depictions of inner city Chicago in ADVENTURES! They reall...

We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on Kon at the ‘Lon! It was a dream to see these on the Trylon’s screen and to add to the conversation on these underseen anime classics. Our series closes with MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, Kon’s sophomore feature and co-winner – with SPIRITED AWAY (2001) – of the 2001 Grand Prize in the Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival. MILLENNIUM ACTRESS is a distillat...

In a body of work that defined a subgenre, Satoshi Kon’s PAPRIKA is something like a culmination. His final feature film realizes some of his longest-brewing concepts (identity, community, connection, division, reality, fiction) so well that it leaves others feeling somewhat unfulfilled – like the director’s own career after his death at just 46 years old. As certified Konheads, we discuss PAPRIKA...

Featuring special guest Finn Odum (https://twitter.com/Finnematic)! DIABOLIQUE’s gothic vibes, feminist undertones, iconic imagery, and twist ending are all great ways to remember this psycho-sexual-horror-noir classic. A husband’s murder by his wife and mistress goes off the rails, sending the killers spinning looking for an explanation when the body goes missing after the deed’s been done. The t...

Featuring special guest Seth Zarate (https://twitter.com/snzarate)! When three homeless people – aging dad Gin, trans self-exile Hana, and confused young Miyuki – discover an abandoned baby in the trash on Christmas, the stage is set to reunite the child with its real parents. Before that, however, the unlikely family learns more about each other through their threatened attempts to care for the c...

“Theft is good, actually.” – Cody FILIBUS is a 1915 Italian silent film directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by Giovanni Bertinetti. It features Valeria Creti as Baroness Troixmonde and the titular Filibus, an Italian sky pirate and infamous burglar. In an attempt to cast off suspicion after her recent heist of the International Bank, the baroness enters a competition to find the culprit and fr...

Cody’s away, so we spend like 10 minutes talking about video games at the top of this episode. The last of Kurosawa’s samurai epics, RAN recontextualizes King Lear, widening the scope of Shakespeare’s text to show the effect of karma on the world, not just its tragic players. In this episode, we discuss what it’s like to know this is one of the greatest films ever made while also knowing it’s not...