Killapalooza 34: Return of the Living Dead

Killapalooza 34: Return of the Living Dead

Return of the Living Dead films 1-5. What separates Return of the Living Dead from Night of the Living Dead. Glory be to Dan O’Bannon, legal action be to John A. Russo! Return of the Living Dead II as a redux. Look who’s talking too. Return of the Living Dead III as a meditation on self-harm as a coping mechanism. Expanding on the need for brains. Brian Yuzna lives deliciously. Midnight movies need not be devoid of intellectual content. Return of the Living Dead IV: Necropolis as a tax haven. The killapalooza phenomena of European back to back filming. Return of the Living Dead V: Rave to the Grave as a swell party. A film that definitely takes place in America which no one is questioning. Continue reading

Raw + The Bad Batch

Raw + The Bad Batch

Violent cannibal films with female directors released in the spring of 2017. A reverse-meta sense of humor. Women-in-film retrospective: Alice 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

Frost Nixon + Hearts and Minds

Frost Nixon + Hearts and Minds

The climax in the series of Presidents and Propaganda double features. In Ron Howard’s film Frost/Nixon – not to be confused with Japanese monster film Frost vs Nixon – audiences get a dramatic retelling of the post-Watergate television interviews between British talk-show host David Frost and former president Richard Nixon. Then, Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds documentary presents an examination of the conflicting attitudes of the opponents of the Vietnam War. Just what is propaganda? What are audiences looking for in a documentary? There are not two equal sides. The new role audiences can and must play in viewing both documentaries and news coverage. Continue reading

Wind River + Bug

Wind River + Bug

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

Heat + Training Day

Heat + Training Day

Cops, but first: it’s time to make an announcement in the dark days of Double Feature. Floating bad ideas. Up first in the Michael Mann film Heat: a group of no-fucking-around professional bank robbers start to feel the heat from police when they unknowingly leave a clue at their latest heist, while both sides attempt to find balance between their personal and professional lives. Also, can you believe who’s in this goddamn. movie? Then, in Training Day: on his first day on the job as a Los Angeles narcotics officer, a rookie cop goes beyond a full work day in training within the narcotics division of the LAPD with a rogue detective who isn’t what he appears to be. Continue reading

Brigsby Bear + Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond

Brigsby Bear + Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond

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

Society + La Grande Bouffe

Society + La Grande Bouffe

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

Nashville + Wild Style

Nashville + Wild Style

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

Risk + Ghost in the Shell

Risk + Ghost in the Shell

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

Mayhem + Brawl in Cell Block 99

Mayhem + Brawl in Cell Block 99

Midnight movies back characters into corners with disastrous results. Exploitation in all its promises and everything you thought it could never be. Climbing the tower of Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. An action movie with all the horror bits. Contender for highest concentration of satisfying payoffs. Promise office supply closet mayhem, over-deliver on office supply closet mayhem. The fucking corporate world and serious fucking need for more heavy metal face-smashing there. Here come the icons! An exploitation Brawl in Cell Block 99. Cell block? Cellblock? Spoiler, happy surprise party, here have this delicious torture porn. Breaking faces and the fear of more broken faces. Continue reading