Unwatchables with Marc & Seth

Ron Ormond was a B-movie exploitation director before a near-death experience inspired him to start producing some of the most bizarre and gruesome Christian films ever made. We're joined by Cinematary’s Michael O’Malley to discuss two of his surreally morbid collaborations with Baptist preacher Estes Pirkle: 1974’s nightmare vision The Burning Hell , and 1971’s anti-communist screed If Footmen Ti...

Experimental filmmaker Harmony Korine burst onto the independent film scene with his screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids , but it's his own grotesque, alienating, and often shocking films that turned him into a cult figure. Unwatchables is joined by author, musician, and Korine superfan Marzi Margo to discuss two of the director’s most notorious provocations: his 1997 directorial debut Gummo , and 2...

Today we’re joined by Marya E. Gates, film critic for sites like http://RogerEbert.com and creator of both #Noirvember & #AYearWithWomen , to discuss one of the most daunting of classic films. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman is a 200-minute minimalist art film that recently topped Sight and Sound’s poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, unseating titles like Vertigo and Citizen Kane— and pis...

Unwatchables kicks off Season 2 with special guest A.A. Dowd, former film editor of The AV Club and current culture editor at Chron. This week’s films challenge us to identify with main characters whose repellent behavior stretches the definition of “protagonist”: Mike Leigh’s blistering character study Naked , and Neil LaBute’s immersion in toxic masculinity In the Company of Men . We discuss the...

Unwatchables closes out the year (and season one!) with film critic Keith Phipps, former film editor of the AV Club and The Dissolve, co-host of The Next Picture Show, and author of Age of Cage. In the spirit of the season, this is a special REVERSE episode: two heartwarming family films from directors who usually specialize in the Unwatchable. First up is David Lynch’s G-rated Disney drama The St...

This week we’re joined by Filmspotting’s Josh Larsen— author of Fear Not , an upcoming book taking a faith-based look at horror— to discuss one of our most skin-crawling provocations yet. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a seminal text of both body horror and Japanese cyberpunk, an experimental horror/superhero film that’s as surreal as it is disgusting. We discuss the film’s nightmarish...

Who better to help us close out our month of high-profile misfires than THE Nathan Rabin, author of My Year of Flops and The Joy of Trash ? On the table are two wildly ambitious passion projects whose disastrous Cannes premieres threatened to end their directors’ careers: Richard Kelly's 2006 gonzo sci-fi satire Southland Tales , and David Robert Mitchell's 2018 absurdist noir Under the Silver Lak...

This week’s Unwatchables features Matt Singer, film critic, author, and editor of ScreenCrush.com , to help continue our month of high-profile misfires (or are they?). His pick is one of the most foolhardy cinematic experiments ever released by a major studio: Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho . It’s not a reimagining, a reboot, or even a legacy-quel— to use a phrase that our...

Unwatchables is devoting November to the biggest flops, misfires, or— possibly?— misunderstood gems of the past few decades. Kicking off the month are two mega-budget failures that were widely mocked for assuming the worst of their audiences: 2019’s ill-fated adaptation of Cats , and 2021’s celebration of intellectual property Space Jam: A New Legacy . We’re joined by podcaster Emily B. to discuss...

Takashi Miike has made over a hundred feature films, but for our super-sized Halloween episode we’re tackling his two most notorious: 1999’s stealth extreme horror film Audition , and 2001’s ultra-violent yakuza thriller Ichi the Killer . To help us out, we welcome back one of our favorite guests, Kay (aka govnaim), who previously brought their expertise to our discussion of Salò . Topics include...

Big thanks to Paul Keelan from Cinematic Underdogs for joining us for this wide-ranging discussion about two art films whose explicit— and often un-simulated— sexual content caused some to cry obscenity: Nagisa Ōshima’s 1976 erotic true crime story In the Realm of the Senses , and Tsai Ming-liang’s 2005 surrealist romance The Wayward Cloud . We discuss their wildly different yet similarly frank ap...

We’re thrilled to welcome professional critic Mike D’Angelo—aka “The Man Who Viewed Too Much,” staple of The AvClub, The Dissolve, Las Vegas Weekly, and now Alternate Ending , among others (as well as a thriving Patreon )— to Unwatchables. Mike personally witnessed hundreds of people flee the Cannes premiere of 2002’s Irreversible , and to this day considers it the most painful to watch of all gre...

Unwatchables welcomes artist Jared Gonzalez to help us discuss Ralph Bakshi, whose profane, controversial animated films helped pave the way for everything from The Simpsons to South Park to Adult Swim. First up is 1972’s Fritz The Cat , the first X-rated feature-length cartoon; followed by 1975’s incendiary racial satire Coonskin (aka Street Fight ). Topics include how Bakshi almost singlehandedl...

Who’s more preoccupied with the Unwatchable than Todd Solondz, one of the leading misanthropes of the 90’s indie scene? Seth and Marc try to parse out whether his dark, button-pushing comedies have anything meaningful to say about sexual dysfunction and human cruelty… or if the joke’s really on us. First up is 1998’s infamously disturbing (and almost unreleaseable) Happiness , followed by 2004’s e...

This week’s Unwatchables tackles perhaps the most controversial film by one of our most controversial directors, the master of body horror David Cronenberg. Helping us out is Andrew Swafford— one of the founders of Cinematary and its long-running weekly podcast— as we discuss 1996’s ode to car-wreck fetishists Crash . We dive into J.G Ballard’s original novel, whether the film merits a queer readi...

Unwatchables is thrilled to welcome Chris Gillotte, aka Letterboxd’s Ziglet_mir , for our “Horrors of War” episode. Both of this week’s films filter the atrocities of World War II through the traumatized eyes of a child: 1985’s nightmarish Soviet classic Come and See , and the 2019 adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s scandalous The Painted Bird . We discuss the films’ opposed stylistic approaches, the...

This week’s Unwatchables is all about “The New French Extremity,” a wave of brutal horror films whose focus on bodily harm led directly to the torture porn era of America horror. (Depending on whether you like Hostel or Saw, you can give them either credit or blame.) Our aptly-named guest Zach Butcher joins us to discuss the only example to hit U.S. theaters, followed by the most notorious of the...

Special guest Sinead Lynch joins us from Ireland to lend her expertise and cultural perspective to a discussion of some of the bleakest depictions of nuclear holocaust ever committed to film - 1984's harrowing, docu-realistic nightmare Threads and 1986's gut-wrenching animated heartbreaker When the Wind Blows . You can hear Sinead's podcast "Crackpot Theories" at https://open.spotify.com/show/0Wv0...

Unwatchables is taking a couple weeks off for summer break, so to close out the final week of Pride month, we're unlocking a recent Patreon-exclusive bonus episode where Marc and Seth discuss their favorite LGBT films. If you're interested in hearing more episodes like this one, consider supporting the podcast by subscribing on Patreon . Unwatchables is hosted by Marc Dottavio and Seth Troyer, pro...

Unwatchables is excited to welcome Jetta, otherwise known as Letterboxd’s “theironcupcake,” to this week’s episode! Our guest brings her considerable expertise to discuss the “Golden Age of Porn,” that bygone span of the 1970’s where theatrically released hardcore films enjoyed commercial and even critical success. We start with 1973’s The Devil in Miss Jones , Gerard Damiano’s follow-up to Deep T...

This week’s Unwatchables is proof that neither animation nor talking animals mean you’re not about to have your soul shredded. Animation expert Aaron Reese joins us to discuss two very adult cartoons where all dogs (and cats) really do go to heaven: Martin Rosen’s bleak heartbreaker The Plague Dogs, and Michael Schaack’s graphic feline noir Felidae. Aaron helps guide us through the animation techn...

For our first non-arthouse horror episode, who better than Rob Zombie to drag us into the grindhouse muck? There’s nothing “elevated” about the musician-turned-filmmaker’s sadistic, blood-drenched aesthetic, including his two cult endurance tests: 2005’s grisly horror Western The Devil’s Rejects , and 2009’s singularly brutal Halloween II . We discuss Zombie’s very specific obsessions, how hard it...

You may know John Waters as the goofy, pencil-moustached TV personality, or from his mainstream successes like Hairspray or Cry-Baby. But his unlikely career started with some of the most transgressive and outright repulsive cult films of the 1970s, including one of the most Unwatchable© films we’ve yet tackled. Waters superfan Robin Guiler joins us for an appropriately rowdy episode about the fir...

It’s Darren Aronofsky week on Unwatchables, featuring two very different gauntlets of suffering from opposite ends of his career: 2000’s grueling drug cautionary tale Requiem For A Dream and 2017’s gloriously bonkers (and receiver of the coveted “F” Cinemascore) mother! . Special guest and author James Jackson takes a break from work on an actual high-profile film production to discuss his Aronofs...

On this week’s “Experimental Edition” of Unwatchables we welcome Tim Peyton, the manager/director of Rubicon Cinema in Akron, OH, to help us dive into some of the most alienating corners of avant-garde filmmaking. First up is Stan Brakhage’s 1965 experimental touchstone Dog Star Man , followed by E. Elias Merhige’s 1989 gruesome horror curiosity Begotten . We discuss how non-narrative films challe...