Episode Collection: Year 10

A spoiler-free look back at all of Double Feature Year 10. New to Double Feature? Fuck it, start here! The best pairs, the best movies. A secret thing Eric is overly diplomatic about but needs to let loose on. Michael has feelings about 2018. Hang on to tomorrow because tonight the stars revolt! Do you believe and will you learn to scream..like me? There’s nothing to it. When stars revolt. They’re only doing what they’re told. Dun nun nun. Dun nun nun. What’s the mystery? The lights of death and fame. Shine. On. Invaders from inside can easily replace you now. Hang on tomorrow because tonight, the stars. You know. Target Earth for me because tonight, the stars. Sing your favorite song because tonight, the stars…revolt? Death to Double Feature, long live the new flesh. Continue reading →

Two Al Pacino films that tell us about humanity. Scent of a Woman as a film that was definitely of the time. Taking a stop down for the question of “how did this get made?” A prep school student needing money agrees to “babysit” a blind man, but the job is not at all what he anticipated. That’s right, Scent of a Woman is just The House of the Devil. In Simone, styled as S1M0NE – a producer’s film is endangered when his star walks off, so he decides to digitally create an actress to substitute for the star, becoming an overnight sensation that everyone thinks is a real person. How Simone predicts the 45th presidency and, perhaps more usefully, its supporters. Continue reading →

Yesterday’s movies with today’s progressive ideas. Two films that may have found an exploitation hook and used it for something socially positive. Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Glen or Glenda. LGBTQ politics from the 50s, as viewed today. An anthology film with several extra narrative devices and no short-form content. Repetitious stock footage and repetitious stock footage. Idea that think they’re clever and repetitious stock footage. The infectious enthusiasm and inspirations of a series of public failures. Who’s Afraid of a Black Hat? Not the Sundance film festival. Fear of a Black Hat and Public Enemies’ Fear of a Black Planet. The accidental dog whistle that keeps white folks dancing. Criticism that’s kept in-house. The case of public face and private face strikes again. How far can and should metaphor go? Continue reading →

Exploring two very different aspects of social media in modern society. Tragedy Girls as a commentary on branding. Set up a humorous device, overcome audience expectations. The narcissism potentially illuminated by social media as told through absurd extremes. Best of friends, stick together! Be your best self, even if that means stabbing your peers to death. Ok, maybe don’t do that. Ingrid Goes West, audience is hash-tag-blessed. The annoying sounds of Instagram. The evolution of the word “stalker.” Exposing the somewhat creepy Hollywood networking strategies no one is supposed to talk about. Begging to be literally followed. Society needs a stop-down two think deeper on wanted attention vs unwanted attention. Continue reading →

Violent cannibal films with female directors released in the spring of 2017. A reverse-meta sense of humor. Women-in-film retrospective: Eric makes a thing with Ama Lea for the Soska Sisters! The sensibility and wonderful icky-ness of Raw. Eli Roth’s problematic but still extremely useful term “chick-vision.” Normal is uncomfortable, cannibalism is home. Surreal imagery with a physical anchor. Who even wants to go to French-night? The family unit stand-in and horror film community. ZEF ZEF ZEF. Michael goes to the stunt ranch for some long-pig. Living the Dream, or whatever. Basically Die Antwoord the movie, part nine. Continue reading →

Human beings consumed by answers! An update on Double Feature’s status. The last critical moments that determine’s this podcast’s fate. First up in writer/director Taylor Sheridan’s film Wind River: a veteran tracker with the Fish and Wildlife Service helps to investigate the murder of a young Native American woman, and uses the case as a means of seeking redemption for an earlier act of irresponsibility which ended in tragedy. Then, in the 2006 mania of William Friedkin’s movie Bug: an unhinged war veteran holes up with a lonely woman in a spooky Oklahoma motel room. The line between reality and delusion is blurred as they discover a bug infestation. Mania, conspiracy, and so much more. Continue reading →

Deeper into the questions posed when making films with less than perfect humans. Exploring the magic, therapy, complexities, and baggage of making a movie through a fictional narrative. How Brigsby Bear turns the boy-in-a-bubble template into something new. Sidestepping predictable conflict-ends in favor or wonderment. Mark Hamill in his first of two major audience-challenging roles. Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond. Jim Carrey method acting Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton. Spending time with Jim Carrey terrorizing a set, making everyone really uncomfortable, and creating a really negative work environment by refusing to break character. Spending time with Jim Carrey showing how therapeutic his method acting was for those around him who knew Andy Kaufman, including Kaufman’s own parents. A director that won’t call the safe word. Set magic that the people watching movies never experience. Continue reading →

Spending a night with high society. Eat the rich. Fuck the rich. Eat yourself? Also: melting, death, fatalism, nihilism, and Double Feature gets a cold. Spending an hour making bad decisions. Two movies that were spoiled by their representation over the passage of time. There should be a joke about soiled food here but the hosts are too sick to write one. Enter Bryan Yuzna! Stuart Gordon, Reanimator, and a carefully told story that maybe isn’t real. Screaming Mad George’s name isn’t George. What do these fistful of slasher franchises have in common? This 60 year old Japanese guy. A movie with enough gastrointestinal foley to get into the Cannes film festival. Swell party, but where’s all the sex workers? A-B-C method faults back to A. An all vegan remake of La Grande Bouffee. Just kidding, but actually someone please make that. Continue reading →

Music culture through different filters. Country mets hip hop. How Nashville might be more about showbiz than about country western music. What the interpretations of Nashville say about the film (that Robert Altman won’t). How Wild Style was embraced by the developing rap scene in opposition to Nashville. What does it take to earn a communities support? When the artist goes pop. The similarity between hip-hop and horror cinema. Film’s simple, beautiful ability to empower through representation. Continue reading →

Separating ideas from personhood. The attempts and failures to separate Julian Assange from Wikileaks. An alternate angle of Citizenfour. Differentiating factors between Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Laura Poitras’ attempts and failures to separate making the documentary Risk from her own human life. The reluctant voice over. How The Matrix picked up the conversation started by Ghost in the Shell and ran with it. Embracing Ghost in the Shell’s post-sexuality, post-gender and most of all post-humanism. Moving past gender identity and perhaps past the very notion of identity itself. Humans crave identity, society eradicates identity. Forget “robot overloads” and AI pop-culture – the real unnoticed threat of autonomy, where it will strike first, and how much sooner it’s coming than anyone is acknowledging. Continue reading →

Two space films of completely equal merit and in fact equal in every direction and one of them is not total fucking nonsense. Hey, actually, maybe both of them or total nonsense? Wade through an existential crisis and find out. Jokes about the size of a Solaris. An entire Galaxy of Terror. Galaxy of Terror: larger than Planet Terror? Not an actual question anyone asked or cares about or even makes sense. The question Double Feature is most prepared to answer – what’s going on with all this monster rape? Seriously, what’s with the monster rape in Galaxy of Terror? And furthermore, why is monster rape even a trope? Can’t people just be naked in film? Is there a reason this happens? Will Michael’s Roger Corman impression Continue reading →

Southern hospitality as crime heads into the American, well, south. Blue Ruin, Green Room, and Double Feature’s other favorite colors. A man is naked. Why is this man naked. Wait, where is this man going. On no, that poor man’s head. Marilyn Manson is only in Let Me Make You a Martyr for about ten minutes, but because of the Hollywood advertising machine his face must be on every part of the film or no one will see it (and maybe that’s true). How to pitch Let Me Make You a Martyr a bit more honestly. Opening up the untold tales of the American opioid epidemic. If you haven’t heard of this thing called Shudder, you should go take a test-drive. Seriously, you’ll fall in love. Continue reading →

Social issue genre films. Trojan horsing social issues. How Get Out keeps it subtle by riding the elephant in the room. Having a conversation with the audience that’s actually showing up. Jesus Christ Get Out is scary, what the fucking hell. Cultural appropriation. Hey, you didn’t know it, but you’ve actually show up for a conversation about emotional manipulation. Welcome. Oh, don’t bother with that door, it locked from the other side. So glad you’re here. Why don’t you just have a seat? A seat. Sit. Down. Now, where to begin – were you paying attention to those monsters? Yeah, pretty complicated. Hope you don’t think you’re going to sit there thinking about trying to find science fiction plot holes in Colossal, there’ still this whole dump drunk you’re about to drown in. Hang on a second, let’s Continue reading →

Slash slash! Two films that take a departure from their initial advertised concepts. Spending the afternoon on Shudder. Halloween Phase 3, or as some call it, Xmas. Better Watch out is kind of a misleading title. Over-lit sets as the oxy-filled murder playgrounds of Chris Peckover’s mind. The lazy Sunday film hits modern day. Prevenge is kind of a misleading title. One woman, one vision! Director, writer, producer, star, host for human life. Prevenge as a filmmaking success story. Talking to Samuel Zimmerman, curator of Shudder. How to live deliciously. Continue reading →

Lady problems. Shudder update: Double Feature no longer has a promo code but you should check out Shudder anyways. Search online and maybe you can find one. The Beguiled is too morally clear, let’s add the confederacy! On Side A, Clint Eastwood is a lady problem. A genius use of flashback and unreliable narrator. What it takes to add a turn to the rape revenge film. Can rape revenge invert gender? On Side B, everything else is a lady problem. Thriller: A Cruel Picture: They Call Her One Eye. The mother of all exploitation films. Double Feature reaches for new levels of offensive. A notable eye-poke! Grindhouse cinema’s half-hearted revenge. A defense of Thriller: A Cruel Picture (but no one is going to defend “They Call Her One Eye”). Continue reading →

Impending doom and the humans who shall not be oppressed by it. Martin Butler and Bentley Dean bring Tanna to cinema and maybe cinema to Tanna. Is it possible to tell if actors are good in a movie if you couldn’t imagine what they would be like otherwise? Certain destruction hangs over us all. An incredible use for film as an empathic tool – The Benh Zeitlin film Beasts of the Southern Wild explains with art what logic fails to. Why do humans cling to their homes when their homes are so clearly bound for destruction? One engineer who doesn’t actually understand how levees work. There’s basically no reason for anything and seriously what’s even the point. Also, love. Continue reading →

A 90s-industrial-fueled burn-it-all-down double feature. The carnage both finally clocking out and ending a hiatus to clock the fuck back in. Two action films that are more subtle than they really know what to do with. Is the lead of Falling Down an anti-hero? Does the film think he’s an anti-hero? And are those two questions necessarily linked? Falling Down is sampled throughout the 90s industrial album Millennium by Front Line Assembly. Break neck edits in a long form narrative. The symbolism, intentional or not, in Man on Fire. Who is the real man on fire? Ok, no one really asks that. How the 2004 film relates to the 90s industrial scene through Nine Inch Nails’s “Fixed” EP. The void in cinema left by Tony Scott’s suicide. Continue reading →

If it’s almost still October, it must almost still be Saw, again. Plus: Chucky, the unbeatable. First up, not everyone is Jigsaw. Tobin Bell and company walk the red carpet, but some one does not proceed to the latest Saw film. John Kramer is both dead and committing crimes, how can this be!? The Curse of the Chucky. Everyone is Charles Lee Ray. Not really but actually kind of or whatever. Finding a compelling story this late in a franchise. Don Mancini is just so so good. Where other franchise sell out, Child’s Play doubles down. Continue reading →

Why art? Bad art, tasteless art, controversial art. Should some art not exist? Racism and dystopia. A poorly timed double feature – thanks, American. Soul Man, a movie that should probably be seen before heard. Seriously, do it. Double Feature can’t be responsible. Order is in debate. Straddling a thin line for an impossible amount of time. One man’s historic atrocity is another man’s first black steps on the moon. Once indefensibility is exhausted. It Happened Here – and it totally can, and actually sort of has. 2016’s Nazi-Sympathizers are 2017’s Nazis. Collaboration in the United States of America. The place dystopian literature earned in cinema. Why paint cruel words? What can be gained from brutal fiction. Playing devil’s advocate to the even less defensible. Continue reading →