Movie Memory Machine

Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) set out to dazzle audiences with a lush film-noir vision of ambition, deceit, and carnival grit, so why did it vanish almost as quickly as it arrived? Truman Capps and Landen Celano climb into the Machine to find out how a star-studded prestige remake could be both immaculate and strangely unmemorable.

A remake of the 1947 noir classic, Nightmare Alley follows ...

The Machine pulls Truman and Landen back into the dream realm with five films that share In Dreams’ fascination with psychic visions, prophetic nightmares, and reality slipping sideways. From Stephen King to cryptids, remakes to cults, this is a guided tour through cinema’s strangest dreamscapes.

• The nightmare that connects Neil Jordan’s In Dreams to the Nightmare o...

Annette Bening’s throwing computers, Margo Martindale’s scolding patients, and Robert Downey Jr. might be Bluetooth-paired to a printer across town. The Machine’s latest Mini-Transmission dives into the surreal dream logic of In Dreams (1999) — with plenty of scuba, psychic sync-ups, and badly rendered CGI fish.

• Truman’s confession: he just wants Margo Martindale to...

In Dreams (1999) is a psychological thriller that opens in a fairy tale and ends in a flood of glass, apples, and psychic bleed-through. Directed by Neil Jordan and starring Annette Bening, this dark fantasia tried to rewire genre expectations, and nearly drowned in the process.

In Dreams is a 1999 psychological thriller where a New England illustrator begins having vivid, terrifying visions of a serial ...

What happens when the Machine pulls five films bound by voodoo, hypnosis, and the horror of losing yourself?

In this “5 For” episode, Landen and Truman unlock the eerie lineage that connects The Skeleton Key to haunted consciousness and body-swapping mayhem.

• How I Walked with a Zombie (1943) shaped modern horror, colonial guilt, and the invention of th...

Landen and Truman start with a simple question: what kind of man truly earns his Panama hat? From there, the Machine drags them back into the bayou for a delirious round of riffs about body-swapping, drumming ghosts, and one very misleading trailer for The Skeleton Key (2005).

Somewhere between hoodoo law books, trumpet-player jowls, and a fanny-pack confession, the spooky dimension gets louder than ever...

The Skeleton Key (2005) promises Southern Gothic chills but locks its story inside a swamp of twists and hoodoo lore. Nearly forgotten in the decades since its release, the film invites us back to Louisiana to ask whether its spell still holds.

Set in the shadowy bayous of Louisiana, The Skeleton Key (2005) follows Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a hospice nurse who takes a job caring for an elderly man in...

What do Alex Winter mutants, Tim Burton fever dreams, and Macho Man in a cage match have in common?

They’re all freaky detours on the strange, slimy, transformation-heavy road paved by Cirque du Freak.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• Five films connected by freaks, transformations, and uncanny communities

• A genuine love–hate rant about Basket Case 2

• Sp...

The Machine delivers a vampire movie that doesn’t suck… it punches.

In this Mini-Transmission, Truman and Landen unpack Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant with confusion, frustration, and a deep dive into a freak show that left them feeling personally attacked.

What You’ll Hear:

• Is Darren Shan fanfiction or middle school fiction?

• The...

Released at the height of Twilight fever, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) tried to launch the next big YA franchise — and fell flat on its face. We’re going back to the circus to ask why this fantasy oddity vanished into the shadows.

Based on Darren Shan’s bestselling YA novels, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) follows teenager Darren, who stumbles into a hidden world of va...

A dystopian hotel, a crime gone wrong, and one very dumb movie with a basketball death match.

This week, the Machine delivers five thematically entangled transmissions for Hotel Artemis — from siege thrillers to pop culture-saturated criminals.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• Five thematically related films that echo Hotel Artemis’ dystopian setting, crime-laden plot, o...

In near-future Los Angeles, the Hotel Artemis treats wounded criminals — but our hosts are more concerned with countdown etiquette, 3D-printed weapons, and where Jeff Goldblum keeps his tiny hand bomb.

What you'll hear:

• Heist etiquette, countdown anxiety, and why masks should stay on — even in your sleep

• Sci-fi tech that makes no ergonomic sense (looking at you, jade...

What if your health insurance got you shot?

In Hotel Artemis (2018), Jodie Foster runs a secret hospital for criminals in riot-torn Los Angeles — but despite ten unbreakable rules, nobody seems to follow any of them, including the movie itself.

Set in the not-so-distant future of 2028, Hotel Artemis follows a covert Los Angeles hospital for criminals operated out of an abandoned art deco ho...

The Machine wrests control of the list and serves up five films that echo, challenge, or outshine Body of Lies (2008). From Cold War shadows to desert firefights, these movies test the limits of trust, tension, and espionage on screen.

• A black-and-white classic spy story with Richard Burton and moral fallout

• The beard-to-weight Oscar conspiracy of Syriana

• Why Spielbe...

Leonardo DiCaprio side-sips a beer. Landen sprays beer out his nose. Somehow, that’s still more memorable than anything in Body of Lies.

This Mini-Transmission spirals from forgettable marketing into prop comedy, actor auditions, and the least effective interrogation techniques ever recorded.

• Why Body of Lies has one of the most boring posters and marketing campaigns imaginable

What happens when you take a CIA thriller, strip it of personality, and add brown contact lenses? Body of Lies (2008) is the rare war-on-terror drama that forgets itself while you’re still watching it.

Released in 2008 by Warner Bros. and directed by Ridley Scott, Body of Lies stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a CIA operative running ground operations in Jordan and Russell Crowe as his remote, micromanaging sup...

What do Brazilian fight scenes, video game sound cues, and a referee with a whistle have in common? This Mini-Transmission dives into the sonic mayhem of The Rundown (2003), plays the easiest Trailer Game of all time, and ends with a cryptic new clue from the Machine.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• A spirited debate over whether a jungle fight scene is secretly reffed by a whistle-h...

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s first big shot at movie stardom came in The Rundown (2003) — a jungle action-comedy from a studio that couldn’t decide what it wanted.

This week, Movie Memory Machine digs into the awkward birth of a blockbuster franchise that never was.

In The Rundown (2003), Dwayne Johnson stars as Beck, a bounty hunter sent to the Amazon to retrieve his boss’s ...