Movie Oubliette

Joe Lipsett joings us to celebrate the imminent release of Tron: Ares by taking a look back at the original Tron (1982), a sci-fi action adventure arguably remembered best for its groundbreaking visuals and concepts rather than its storytelling and characters. Starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan and David Warner, the film takes us inside an alternate reality within the rapidly emerging and little understood digita...

Isaac Sutton takes on guest hosting duties with Dan to explore Charlie McDowell's The One I Love (2014) – an offbeat romantic mystery starring Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss, with the director's step-dad, Ted Danson, in a small but pivotal role. Shot largely at a single location over 15 days, it follows a troubled married couple who retreat to a secluded estate for therapy — only to discover a bizarre phenomenon that presents them...

John D. Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) is a moody, low-budget psychological horror shot in Connecticut, emerging at the uneasy dawn of the 1970s when American genre cinema was shifting toward ambiguity and dread rather than monsters and gore. Starring Zohra Lampert as the fragile Jessica, supported by Barton Heyman and Mariclare Costello, the film follows a small group retreating to a rural farmhouse where whispers o...

Dan returns to explore The Hidden (1987), a sci-fi horror directed with slick B-movie flair by Nightmare on Elm Street 2 veteran Jack Sholder! An alien parasite with a love of fast cars and automatic weapons is jumping from body to body in the neon-lit streets of L.A., pursued by Kyle MacLachlan's eerily blank FBI agent. Flashdance love interest Michael Nouri plays the increasingly confused detective trying to make sense of explodi...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins Conrad to take on guest co-hosting duties while Dan goes on vacation – ironically, when we pull an Australian 80s sci-fi movie out of the Patreons' Choice nominations! It's another day, another ridiculous sci-fi bra for Carrie Fisher. The Time Guardian (1987) is an Ozploitation oddity directed by Mad Max (aka The Road Warrior) co-writer Brian Hannant, featuring a giant time-travelling d...

In this clip from our Patreon exclusive episode this month, we review the direct-to-video (DTV) sequel to The Secret of NIMH – often referred to as the worst sequel to an animated film and "every NIMH fan's worst nightmare" – and explore the DTV trend of the 90s.

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Zoe Wells and Mikey Neumann of FilmJoy join us to revisit Tim Story's superhero sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007). Released 2 years after Fox's surprising box office success with the original, the film marks a transitional moment in superhero cinema. Neither beloved or entirely dismissed, it's a sequel that manages to improve on its predecessor with world-ending stakes while still feeling oddly weightless and ...

Jonathan McIntosh, creator of the excellent Pop Culture Detective Agency, joins us to uncover The Secret of NIMH (1982). Often remembered as an example of the surprisingly dark and sombre animated children's films of the 70s and 80s, alongside Watership Down (1978) and Disney's own The Black Cauldron (1985), The Secret of NIMH lacks musical numbers, but is filled with striking imagery, glorious hand-animated effects, memorable char...

In this clip from our Patreon exclusive episode this month, we continue our Superman coverage by making Dan watch Superman II (1980), which he only vaguely remembered from childhood! Does it hold up? How does it sit with Superman Returns (2006) as an intended sequel? And why are there two cuts of it? We discuss all of this and more in our 1-hour bonus episode.

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Oliver Harper joins us to celebrate James Gunn's reboot of the Superman franchise by looking back at Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006), which tends to get lost in the mix when discussing previous attempts to revive the DC superhero. It boldly attempted to pick up the thread of the Christopher Reeve/Richard Donner era Superman and act as a sequel to Superman II (1980), with the charming (then unknown) Brandon Routh channeling R...

Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo joins us to revisit his standalone sequel to Danny Boyle's iconic post-apocalyptic horror film. 28 Weeks Later (2007) focuses on the challenges of rebuilding a family and a society in the wake of the rage virus outbreak, while upping the stakes and the scale of the infected onslaught. In a sense, we get to see the things Jim slept through in the original. But despite a strong box office performance ...

Pascal Laugier's follow-up to Martyrs (2008) is a Canadian-French horror/thriller, set in a small, poverty-stricken town in Washington where local nurse Julia (Jessica Biel) gets caught up in a string of child abductions, which the townsfolk blame on a legendary boogeyman figure, The Tall Man (2012). The result is a twisty, turny tale full of surprises and stinger-highlighted jump scares. But is it an underrated classic of sociolog...

For this bonus episode, we take a look at Warwick Thornton's new film The New Boy, in which an Aboriginal child with mysterious powers disturbs the delicately balanced world in a remote monastery in 1940s Australia. Starring the always marvellous Cate Blanchett as the renegade nun, Sister Eileen, and Aswan Reid as the new boy, Thornton's story of spiritual struggle gets a theatrical release this Friday and will be on digital the fo...

In Looker, Michael Crichton warned us of a future in which computer-generated thirst-traps manipulate unwitting consumers through the media, all at the behest of powerful tech moguls. In 1981, this all seemed a bit ridiculous – especially as performed by a stodgy Albert Finney chasing around with an Atari lightgun trying to rescue Playboy models. Not surprisingly, it only hacked $3.3 million out of the box office against an es...

Rob Hill, author of 'The Bad Movie Bible' and creator of the fabulous accompanying YouTube channel, joins Conrad and surprise guest host Melinda Mock of RetroBlasting to explore a notorious naked space vampire film that turns 40 this year. On paper, Lifeforce (1985) has everything you could possibly want for an epic cosmic horror British disaster film: an adaptation of a popular Lovecraftian novel by Colin Wilson, co-scripted by Al...

Arachnophobia scared up only $53 million at the box office when it was released in July of 1990, thanks to stiff competition from Ghost, and has largely been overlooked in the annals of monster movie horror comedies. All this despite a fine cast, including Jeff Daniels and John Goodman, and a Spielbergian pedigree. With a Christopher Landon remake in the works, we thought it was time to celebrate the original's 35th anniversary... ...

Isaac Sutton joins us for our first venture into Japanese anime! Takeshi Koike's visually dazzling animated sci-fi racing spectacle Redline failed to find its audience upon its release in August 2009 despite critical praise. Does it deserve the cult status it's been cultivating on physical media since then, or is it all rev and no substance?

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Continuing our theme of exploring sequels to films we cover in the main feed, it was only natural that we'd want to follow the surprisingly good Psycho II (1983) with the surprisingly bad Psycho III (1986) in our Patreon feed. On paper, it looked like a slam dunk: Anthony Perkins was returning to his iconic role as Norman Bates and taking up the director's chair for the first time; the writer is Charles Edward Pogue, who was simult...

Belated sequels to monumental, genre-defining classics always walk on a knife edge! They can be a worthwhile elaboration upon the original, recontextualised for a new era, or they can be cynical cashgrabs forever consigned as a footnote to cinema history. Australian director Richard Franklin's Psycho II (1983) benefits from returning cast members Vera Miles and, of course, Anthony Perkins, a twisty turny psychological mystery scrip...