January 3, 2025 • 60 mins
Has a Tinder date with a screenwriter ever gone really, really badly? Do you enjoy yoga on a picturesque bluff? Have you ever been trapped in a phone booth, or a vicious dictatorship with oblivious media censors? If so, good news! We take a slow walk in the woods with In A Violent Nature (Canada, 2024) on Shudder, get vengeful - maybe? maybe not? - with Play. Pause. Kill. (France, 2020) on Shortverse and get trapped in an absurdist Terry Gilliam-ish nightmare with La Cabina (Spain, 1972) on YouTube. Also, we recall the unrepeatable sex appeal of David Bowie and highlight a singy Bollywood horror comedy dropping on Netflix and the Swedish Evil Dead on Screambox and Tubi.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
"LA CABINA · THE PHONE BOOTH | Antonio Mercero | Review · Analysis" by Kristonkino on YouTube
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Speaking of, did you get achance to watch, pause, play?
Oh, yes. Oh yes. Yes, I did.
It's very Melissa, little short, isn't it?
Yeah.
When I said that I was not beingsarcastic or trying to mislead between
the fact that you picked the movie andthe thumbnail and all of the blood on her
(00:23):
mouth, I was like, oh,
this is going to end exactly how Ithink it's going to end, isn't it?
(00:51):
So welcome to Imported Horror.
This is the podcast that brings youthe very best of freaky dream leg
night, Marish, phone booths,serial killers, walking very, very,
very, very, very, very,very, very, very, very, very,
very slowly through the woods,
and the most Melissa Short film you'llever see in your life that hass exactly
(01:15):
the way you think it will,
because Melissa picked itfrom Beyond the Shining Seas.
I'm Marcus.
I'm here with my intact co-hosts.
Melissa and Grady, andif we had two nickels,
wait,
if we had a nickel for every movie wereviewed on the podcast that ended this
(01:36):
way, I think we'd havesignificantly more than two nickels.
I know it's been more than two.
Yeah, no, it has been. It's a theme.
Melissa has a vibe. Youknow what I'm saying?
Yeah. She's from New Jersey.
To be fair, when I picked this short,I didn't know how it was going to end.
(02:00):
I only saw the words. No, listen,
I only saw the words Franceand Feminist, and I said, okay.
I suck at identifying languages.I thought this was German.
Either movie sense make of that.
What you'll.
I'm not completely sureit was all that feminist,
(02:20):
to be completely honest withyou, I think equating this,
if your definition of feministis how this movie ends,
then that that's howRepublicans win elections.
In a nutshell. That's howRepublicans win elections.
Okay. To be fair, I didn'tsay the word feminism.
That was one of thehashtags in short verse,
(02:42):
which is why I looked through the hashtagsand I was like, okay, let's do it.
Yeah. Okay.
Can anyone apply hashtags to movieson short verse and do they apply them
sarcastically?
I don't know. This is the topics for,
this is feminist revenge, colorful killer,
(03:04):
and female characters.
I mean, all of those are true iffor a certain point of view of,
I mean, it's.
Colorful revenge. It is very colorful.I will give it that. Well, we.
Don't know what the guy was doingbefore the movie started. Maybe
he's been just a horrendous assholeto her for years and years and is
(03:24):
blackballing her trying to get intothis French screenwriting industry,
and this is the culmination ofyears of planning. We don't know.
That's the beauty of short movies.
Well, I, I'm going tosay that you know what?
We'll get more into thiswhen we talk about it,
but I am going to say that ifyou think about the fact that
women on dating apps inviting men over,
(03:46):
there's a significantly higher chanceof the woman not making it out of that
situation than the man.
I mean, fair, sure, butthat doesn't, I mean, still
the numbers are still pretty.
This guy didn't doanything on camera. No, on.
(04:06):
Camera.
Who knows? It's beauty.
Of the Short movie.
If we're making.
We can make up our own stories to makewhat happened morally acceptable or not,
depending on how we're feeling.
Today. Well, I know how Melissa's feeling.She always picks this kind of movie.
Anyway, we've got, what was yours called,
(04:28):
Melissa?
Pray, kill, pray.
Kill, pause, play, kill, pause, play,
kill on short verse becauseMelissa's short. Get it. Get it.
Anyway,
then Grady got superexistential and political,
but also not politicaldepending on who you ask.
(04:50):
With Laina from Spain in 1972, that.
Does not translate towhat you think it does.
No, no. I was surprised.
I shouldn't be because I live in Texasand my Spanish should really be much
better than it is, but I was surprised,
and we've also got in aviolent nature because
Shutter was promoting it because ofNew Year's, and I get why they do that,
(05:12):
and I get why people like it, sortof, kind of. But it wasn't my jam.
That's from Canada and I'mgoing to talk about it,
and I think maybe you'veseen that, Melissa?
I have, yes.
Okay. Okay. That's whatI thought. All right.
First, I have not, but I'll ask dumband irrelevant questions throughout.
I challenge you because I don't know howmany dumb questions you can find with
(05:33):
this movie. Actually,it's kind of difficult.
And it was lackluster, but.
We'll talk about it. Iwasn't crazy about it.
But first we have thetriumphant return of our
coming soon.
(06:01):
Do you guys hear that too,or am I having a stroke?
No, I think you're having a stroke.No, I'm just kidding. I heard it.
It's creepy.
I figured out how to uploadmedia to Riverside to the
web remote podcasting thing we're using,
so I don't have to insertit in audition later,
which is going to makemy life a lot easier.
(06:22):
Nice.
So January is slow and it'susually a slow month for
movies. It's going to be slow around here.
The major highlight that I'm lookingforward to is a Nick Frost movie,
dropping on Shutter maybe next week,maybe the week after. I'm not sure,
but if you're thinking, who's Nick Frost?
He's the other guy from Seanof the Dead and Hot Fuzz and
(06:46):
all those movies with SimonPeg, but that's not this week.
So the first one we'vegot, I cannot pronounce.
This is on Netflix. Itdropped on the 2nd of January.
This is Bull. I am so sorry.
This is a Bollywood horror movie. Is.
Horror comedy this one of these we'veever talked about or seen a preview of?
(07:09):
Because it feels like it's somethingthat should be a lot more common than it
is.
I feel like either I misssomething in translation or I
miss something,
having not seen the first two moviesor even having heard of the first two
movies, maybe both. I don't know.
It did seem like we were expected toknow who a lot of these characters were.
(07:32):
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, yeah, this is apparently the third.
I wish we would've seen the firsttwo or heard of the first two because
this looks awesome. It looks fun.
Well, all three of them are.
On Netflix.
Got the Indian equivalent of that ladyfrom the second Beetlejuice movie.
There's a lot of stuff happening here.
(07:55):
Apparently. The first one was in 2007.
Oh, okay. That would partlyexplain why we hadn't heard of it.
So Han a fraudster posingas an exorcist takes on a
lucrative case at a haunted castleunraveling a sinister plot involving
mischievous priests, culminatingin a hilarious yet thrilling ride,
(08:15):
filled with unexpectedtwists and turns and scares.
Because I am reading myown notes. What I do know,
what I did recognize is that the trailermakes a big deal out of this opening
during Diwali, which is big, bigreligious festival celebration.
I hesitate to call it the Indian Christmasbecause there's so many different
(08:38):
theological differences thatfeels forced it. They're.
A big deal. Big thing that they do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this yearit overlapped with Halloween,
which was kind of neat.
My neighbors across the street had awhole bunch of multicolored lights and
everything else out there that was cool.
I don't know if you know this, butthere is a translation of the title,
(08:59):
and
it's interesting because the sametitle of this movie is a title of a
movie that from the late eightiesthat is getting remade that
should never be remade.
So can you guess thetitle starts with an L.
American movie.
(09:19):
The movie that's getting remade? I'mnot actually sure if it's American,
but I'm pretty sure it is.
English.
Yes.
Love. Actually,
I know very few movies that start with L.
I'm just going to kind ofgo through all of them.
(09:40):
No.
No.
A.
Horror movie. I take it,or not a horror movie.
Fantasy.
Lick My Ball.
Three, the Liquor. A lot of
young women built their fantasiesaround a character in this
movie.
Still sticking with myball. Read the Look. Okay.
Lord of the Rings was not from thelate eighties. We are not that old.
(10:05):
And I don't know what characteryou would think of there.
I'm talking like I'm talking.
Nuts for Orlando Bloom for ayear or two there, weren't.
They? Ew. No, no, no. I'mtalking about eighties. Yeah.
I don't like Orlando Bloom.
I'm talking about eighties quintessentialrock. I'm more of a gimley man myself.
I like Gimley a lot too, but I'mnot going to hate on leg loss. What?
(10:29):
Eighties QuintessentialRockstar starred in this movie?
Quintessential. Oh, no. Okay. Number one,that's not late eighties. Number two,
they're not remaking that.
Yes, they are.
No, you can't remake.
That. He's dead. I know. I know.
Love.
(10:51):
Labyrinth. David Bowie.
You can't replace David Bowie.That's not how it works. No.
Yeah, everybody's very upset about it.
That's not.
No,
the only way this will work is ifthey're casting Jermaine Clement as David
Bowie,
(11:12):
and they're just highlighting the factthat they should not be doing this.
Okay. That I would watch. Technically,it was late eighties. It was 86.
That's not late. It is the secondhalf of the eighties. I mean,
well, it's mid.
Fine, mid eighties. Okay.
Well, I was thinking like 88 or 89
(11:33):
we're pedantic today. Pedantic. Pedantic.
So the Bollywood Horror,
that is what that thetitle translates into.
Labyrinth. So.
It's Labyrinth one, two, and three.
Okay, that's cool. That's cool.
Did you know Pop QuizLabyrinth is the oldest word
(11:54):
in continual usage in English thathas meant the same thing throughout.
That is.
Interesting. Interesting.
That was a pop quiz I gave to my studentsyears ago, and they thought about it.
Then I told 'em, and it was, oh,okay. It wasn't English originally,
obviously,
but it's maintained it's original meaningfor thousands and thousands of years
(12:15):
at this point.
The thing about a labyrinth remake thatoffends me the most isn't the idea of
replacing David Bowie because I mean,
even though he's anintegral part of that movie,
and that's why the movieshouldn't be remade.
I get it if you have toremake it because he's dead.
But the thing that offends me the mostis they're almost certainly going to
replace the Muppets with CGI.
(12:39):
Yeah. And that.
Kind of is the other thing,other than David Bowie, that
that makes that movie.
Yeah. It's peak eightiespuppetry and creature feature.
You cannot do that with computers.
Well,
supposedly the director for itis going to be Robert Eggers,
(13:03):
the guy who just did Nosferatu.
And The Witch and, okay, all right.Okay. Okay. I'm no longer offended.
I'm still skeptical.
I'm incredibly skeptical.
The, okay, okay. I'm listening.
(13:24):
He did the Northman, he did theWitch. He did the lighthouse.
So he's going to make it weird.And I could see him going in a,
you can't possibly remakethis sort of direction.
Now. There is a fake poster goingaround, so I want to dispel any rumors.
There has not been a cast oranything selected for this.
There was a thing that was spreadingaround that Tom Hiddleston was going to be
(13:46):
in it, and I'm like, no,no, no. That's untrue.
So the only thing we knowright now is that in 2023,
it went through a bunch of scriptrewrites and that Robert Edwards has.
A.
Been.
I could see Jennifer Connolly comingback on board and it being like the next
generation or something like that.I can see that. But you've got to,
(14:08):
if not David Bowie,
you've got to have somebodywho's an actual rocker who
can sing, who has that same sort of aged
vintage cool.
I don't know who that would be.
I don't know.
(14:32):
I know. How could they doit? How could they do it?
And it feels like a trapbecause you know people aren't,
they're going to go into that moviethinking this is third thing that a me not
going to anywhere.
They are going to be too cowardly togive replacement. David Bowie a co piece.
Yes. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
(14:55):
This is not going to be the YoungGirls Fantasies of the eighties.
New No. And frankly, a lot of youngBoys, because David Bowie. Yeah.
That triggered some sexual awakenings.
Yeah, David Bowie can get it.
Even.
Debbie can still get it.
Completely hypothetically.
(15:17):
In other news sensor. Just hit Tubby.
We did that for the podcast before.That's from 2021. Great, great movie.
I really liked it. Oh,video Nasties in the UK
on shutter, a pair of Frenchextreme horrors have dropped,
and these have been around fora while, but there's a French,
(15:40):
new French Extreme or new Frenchextremity category on Shutter,
and they've got a reputation, so Ifigured we'd mention them. Say what?
I've got a new French extremity.
Oh, damn it. I deleted the sound effects.
The media that came with it. Oneof 'em was like a joke track,
(16:03):
but I deleted it. Sadly.
I will bring it back for next time.Anyway, ills or them is on there.
That's definitely got a reputation.
But the more interesting onefor us might be irreversible,
which is from 2002 asMonica Lucci and Cent Cael,
both of whom have been in everything.Cael was magnificent in Eastern Promises,
(16:26):
and I still claim that is a criminallyunderrated mob movie that might,
everybody talks aboutScorsese, but honestly,
Eastern Promises is on the samelevel as Goodfellas in Casino.
It might be better, maybe I'm notgoing to get into that argument,
but it's really good.
Was kind of thrown watching the trailerfor irreversible and having absolutely
(16:48):
no other context for it, whichI tried to do with these.
I watched these trailersas blind as possible,
and then just rely on y'all to fill inthe details and make up my own funny
conclusions for laughs. But
we basically had three and a half minutesof complete sensory overload and what
I can only refer to asaggressively mean techno.
(17:10):
And then it ends with a doorthat says Rectum above it.
And I know that we're a foreign movie,
and that couldn't possibly admit whatI thought it meant, but it's a big,
big boy that says Rectum over it.
It's French though.
So that could go either way.
(17:33):
It can go. Anyway. So I will admitthe trailer made me dizzy except.
In reverse, because it's irreversible.
We'll do actually. So that'sthe whole hook of the movie.
So the whole movie is shot in reverse,so you see the end of the movie first. So
yes, since Shutter also droppedwhat they called the Straight Cut,
which is the movie,
(17:56):
so the original 2002 version, yousee the end of the movie first,
and then it goes back to the endof the film is the beginning of the
story, which is the horrific attack.
So you see the revenge firstand the Triggering event.
Last.
And it's violent, it's French Extreme,
(18:19):
and I'm assuming it's got a whole bunchof those crazy camera angles for the
camera. Get some weirdangle looking up at the sky.
Yeah, that was basicallythe entire trailer. Yeah.
And I mean, maybe Ishouldn't give this away,
but do you want to know what thedoor with rectum above it was.
A door Door. I can't say.No, you can't leave us.
(18:43):
Hanging.
The DSM nightclub.
So yes.
It's actually a gay BDSM nightclub.
I kind of assumed thatbecause rectum, but yeah,
not the Guesses versions is just,
there's a certain mystique that thecombination of BDSM and the word rectum
(19:06):
has. And.
As the French might say,may we, which is, but yes,
so damn, I wish I had that, but I'm Shh.I'm going to have to bring that back.
Anyway, if you're feeling real. S Muddy,
I sent this to y'all before I readthe press release from Screen Box,
(19:29):
but a whole bunch of old school trashyJLo are dropping on screen box throughout
January, including stripnude for your killer,
which you don't even needto watch the trailer.
It feels like a parodyof Jello names. Yeah,
but it both is and is notbecause it's Italian horror
and fun story.
(19:50):
When I was watching the trailer onmy phone for strip nude for your
killer, I was watching iton my phone on the couch.
Roz was in front of me watchingDaniel Tiger on the tv,
and my phone popped up and said, Hey,do you want to airplay this to your tv?
And I said out loud.
No, this would be a really good wayto wane Ross off of Daniel Tiger.
(20:13):
No, it would not do this.Read the room iPhone.
No, I don't want to do that.
Or it would traumatize her into neverwatching anything other than Daniel
Tiger again for the rest of her life.
Yeah, good point. This would backfire.
Realistically, she just turned aroundand look at me like, bro, what the hell,
(20:37):
man? Because I get that look all thetime. The side eye slash stink eye.
And she was real happy with me today.
We went and played at Cheeky Monkeys andwe went and got Thai food and dah, dah,
dah. But you take away dt,there's no coming back for that.
You can't do that to her.
No, it's not. No, you cannot. Youcannot. So we'll talk more about that.
(20:57):
I think that one drops on January 17th.
The one that dropped on screenbox already is let pull it up here
with.
I'm just imagining Daniel Tiger splicedwith that scene from Fight Club.
Oh, that'd be so weird.
(21:19):
I both like and loathe Daniel Tigerbecause he makes it all about him
all the time.
And the physiology of this whole worldreally baffles me and makes me deeply
uncomfortable in ways that I can'texplain because owls are not that big.
They're just not. Let's,
let's save this for Marcus's secondpodcast Premiering Leader this month. Why?
(21:40):
Daniel Tiger is a whiny bitch.
Yes.
Yeah.
Anyway, wither, which is already allover. It's on two B, it's on plex.
It's on fum. I'm just lookingat it on IMDB. Anyway,
that hit screen box as well.
This is basically a Swedish evil dead Ida.
(22:02):
The makeup looks great.
Makeup looks fantastic.Yeah. Ida and Alban,
or maybe Ida and Alban are a happy couple.
They sit off to a cabin inthe vast Swedish woodlands to have a fun holiday with
their friends.
But under the floorboards waitsan evil from Sweden's dark past.
So the screen box publicity mentionedthis as like a Swedish evil dead.
(22:27):
I sort of assumed it was like thatJapanese one mu muscle, what was it.
Japanese? Wait, no, bodybuilding Muscle builder. And.
Hell yeah. What was that muscle?
I know it was body buildingand muscles and in inhale,
(22:48):
I just can't remember the exact.
Bloody muscle bodybuilder.Inhale. There you go. Which was,
that's what Japanese Fanfic of evil day.
Moderate.
Bloody muscle bodybuilder in Hell.
Love.
It. So I assumed this was sortof the Swedish equivalent.
(23:13):
The camera work looks maybe alittle bit on the low budget side,
but the makeup and the special effects,the practical effects look great.
And I think makeup canmake or break a movie.
It can. It can. And honestly, CG, I canbreak a movie. Maybe I'm just a snob,
but so of all movies, thiscame up during Gladiator two,
(23:35):
which my brother was like,
I don't want to go to the movie theaterand watch a two and a half hour movie,
man. I was like, okay. I kindof get that. That is long,
but also it's Gladiator, so I snuckoff. He and my sister-in-law left.
So it's good. I enjoyed it.
But the first one was almost entirelypractical effects and clever camera
(23:55):
angles.
I don't think the tiger was everactually that close to any of the actors,
but it was a real.
Tiger. There are specific OSHA guidelinesagainst that, so I would hope so.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This,
they just sort of made the baboonsand the Black Rhino and all the other
animals, including the sharks,just completely cg. And
(24:19):
I get that. I do, especially theBlack Rhino, because there's a very,
very small handful of those alive,
and they're guarded 24 7 bygigantic Kenyan dudes. Yeah.
They're not going to justlet Russell Crow punch one,
no matter how much Russell Crow wants to.
No, no, not at all. No.
But the first one was so rawand violent in a practical
(24:39):
effects way that it reallyunderscored all of its points.
And the CGI kind of took me out of it.It made it feel a lot more processed.
Still a really goodmovie, just, I don't know.
Yeah.
But I don't think that wither hadthe budget to have that problem,
so Fair enough.
(25:03):
It's going to be interesting.
I wasn't trying to cut you off,
but I realized that has massivecutoff potential. Where'd you go?
She just bailed. Oh, no, I'm righthere. Oh, well, your camera went.
Oh, is my camera gone now?
(25:26):
No, looking at the, you'rehere. You just, oh, no.
I thought I cut you off with the soundeffect, and you were like, well, fine.
I'm going to go, wait, me,me, me, me, me. No, no, I'm.
Here. I mean,
we could just make cutting oneof us off of the sound effect.
A regular way to end the Yeah, like that.
(25:46):
Exactly like that.
So anyway, all right, Melissa,
I don't have a sound effectfor how short you are,
but I feel like we haveto start with your short.
The reason I feel like you guys think weneed to start with my short is because
(26:09):
of how Melissa it was, how shortit was, and how Melissa it was.
So think about the most Melissathing you could possibly think about,
and that would be this horror movie.
So you have, oh my God,
I'm blanking again on the nameof it. Why do I keep doing that?
(26:33):
Hold on.
Hang on. I got a effect for this.
Oh my God. Are
okay. Funny.
It's play, pause, kill.
It's basic premise. Julie is a loner.
(26:55):
She spends her Saturday off at hometrying to write a new screenplay.
She keeps receiving messages fromsomeone who's just known as H someone she
might be interested in, andshe invites him over, and
it is a French horror movie,
(27:16):
and it really feels like
it's just a Tinder date, right? It'sa Tinder date. Guy's coming over,
he's bringing wine. He's like, Hey,you're writing this horror screenplay.
If you're writing this horror screenplay,
we should probably watcha horror movie together.
I was rather offended that he brought,I Know What You Did last summer,
(27:38):
because I got to tell you,
if I was writing a horrorscreenplay and somebody messaged me,
if I was in the dating pool and toldme that they were bringing over,
I know What you did last summer,
they might end up in the same positionas this guy did, because that's.
Not a horror movie you bring towatch. I know this may be why
she may not have been planning to do whatshe did at the end of this movie until
(27:59):
she learned what movie he brought.
I mean, it's a good movie.
It's not what you want to use toimpress somebody. I'm such a horror fan.
I watched, I know Whatshe Did last summer.
I'm such an action fan. My favoriteaction man is Steven Egal. Yeah.
Exactly.
What I do think is interesting is that,and I know what you did last summer,
(28:23):
and one of the characters init is Sarah Michelle Geller,
and that was who she mentioned inthis actual movie. She's like, oh,
everybody loves this SarahMichelle Geller movie.
What I think was interesting was SarahMichelle Geller in that movie played the
damsel that was running awayfrom the killer that the girl in
(28:44):
Trouble from this unknown entity.
And I'd like to think thatthey did that on purpose,
because this was basicallythat twisted around,
and I almost wonder if that was the
crust, the meat of the film.
(29:05):
Oh God.
I dunno why I use that phrase.I never use that phrase. I know.
Anyway,
but as a way to throw you off.
And honestly,
if you're a woman and you're watching ahorror movie and there is a girl and she
(29:28):
invites a guy over and there's some kindof suspense or horror that you think is
happening,
99% of the time that horror isgoing to be inflicted on the woman,
and the woman is tensein those situations.
And I know that we've gotten to the pointwhere there's a lot of female serial
killers now like that portrayedin movies, female evils,
(29:50):
but really that wasn't theway it was years ago. And so.
There's a lot of catching up to do fromyears and years of cinematic tradition.
Exactly.
And so while.
I.
Also, the feeling.
Yeah.
I got the feeling thisjust wanted to have fun.
It's not trying to makea big grandiose point,
it's just trying to have fun and invertyour expectations and kind of wink at
(30:12):
the camera a little bit.
Yeah, I agree with that.
But I also think that you canread a little bit deeper into it,
and that can be kind of fun too.It also gave me an eighties vibe,
and I don't know if that wasbecause it was foreign or not.
I know sometimes Italian moviescan give me an eighties vibe,
but that's because the eightiescame to Italy, like nineties.
I would pin it on the super aggressivetechno soundtrack throughout the movie.
(30:37):
Yeah, I did too. Yep. Yeah,
I think the synth wave gave itthe eighties vibes for sure.
I actually thought at the end may or may.
Not also be.
Why.
I thought it.
Was German.
Fair enough. I also thoughtit was interesting at the end,
I really thought that they were goingto kind of show that she used that as
(30:58):
inspiration for her screenplay,
or that was actually the screenplaythat she was writing. So I.
Amed it didn't go in thatdirection was for her pin,
and this is how she fills it.
I mean, that works too.
So I thought the ending,
they had fun with the ending and it wasopen-ended enough that you can take it
in a bunch of differentfun ways. I actually really liked the way they did that.
(31:22):
Yeah, it's fun. It is just, Ireally hesitate to call it feminist.
One of the characters happens to befemale and it's a dating thing sort of
thing, but maybe I can see how it'sfeminist. I can't see how it's revenge,
let's put it that way.
No revenge. I can't see. That'swhat it said. I can't see revenge.
(31:45):
I can see feminist though,
and I think that if you polla hundred guys and a hundred
girls, they would have very differentviews on whether it was feminist or not.
And I think that sayssomething about it too. There.
Are lot of things.
French Live action adaptation of Ms.Pacman got a lot darker than it needed to.
(32:09):
Now,
I do have to say that thedepiction of the appendage was.
Obviously a hot dog.
A lot less graphic than the depictionof the appendage in the other film.
That was Stalker, was it called?
(32:31):
Yes.
The one in the Elevator.
Yes. I was trying to place.
So I think Stalker hada much more visually
impactful appendage,
but this was also fun in the budget.
And another part of that is also,
(32:51):
and admittedly the short movieversus feature Link movie,
obviously this is going to be the case.
Stalker had a whole lotmore buildup to it and
context and still,
even though I didn'treally care for the movie,
still one of my favorite villainmonologues in any movie we've done for the
podcast.
(33:11):
Oh God, yes.
No.
It's such a good monologue. This.
Movie just kind of gets right to thepoint because it's got 14 minutes to bite
off this dude's wienerand it needs to get.
Stalker was like the Toby movieto end all Toby movies this.
(33:32):
And on the one hand, if you're not goingin expecting that, you're like, oh,
okay. Nera wasn't expecting that,
but there's no way we can talk around it.
Melissa picked it because a dude getshis wiener chopped off. No. Yeah,
fair enough. There's nobeating around the bush
(33:53):
anyway, biting.
Around the bush. No, that'dbe the other way around.
He can't beat around the bush becausehis beater's been bitten off. Exactly.
So anyway, Melissa's short.
(34:17):
I take it, you would recommend.
Oh, 100%. This was awesome.
It wasn't scary, but it was fun.
And I loved the blood asit's dripping down her giant
boobs, which is just such a great visual
aspect of this, a little short.
(34:38):
Normally we try to just summarize the tip,
but we couldn't do thatwith this short film.
I would love to know. So I can't find it,
but I would love to know whatit was that she had in her mouth
that depicted the appendage.
(34:59):
I would be willing to bet money that itwas a hot dog, but I'm kind of cynical.
It almost looked too stiffto be a hot dog and too pink.
Well, I mean, it was a prop.
I doubt that the prop that theymanipulated on the floor just enough
so you could see what it was,
but not enough that it would getbanned from YouTube or whatever. It.
(35:21):
Kind of made me want Laffy Cappy.
I want Laffy Cappy now Strawberry.
That is the.
First time anyone's ever said that.
Should we warn Dan about thismovie? We don't bro heads some.
(35:41):
I was going to say, you're right,Grady. It's funnier if you guys don't.
Well, Grady, do you want to talkabout phone booths or Sure, why not?
Should we talk about slow serialkillers? Okay. Phone booth.
Alright, so I did Laina,
which for those resting in yourSpanish translates to phone booth. Yes.
(36:03):
I thought it translated to the cabin too.
The IMB summary. Well,
a man gets trapped inside a telephonebox and nobody is able to free him.
The summary doesn't gointo a whole lot of detail.
In fairness, neither does theshark fell. I was going to say.
(36:27):
So it was written and directed by Antonio,
and it was part of just kind of this
broad counterculture
time in Spanish cinemathat I'm not able to
(36:49):
pronounce and won't go to and to becauseI won't be able to do it justice.
But the basic summary of
it is this is whenFrancisco Franco or Franco,
is it Francisco Francoor Francisco Franco.
I think Franco.
Franco. This is Fran.
Franco, dictator of Spain for a long time.
So things were ad
(37:15):
and media was heavilyregulated, heavily controlled.
So any satire against
pretty much anything,
but especially the less savory elementsof the Spanish government at the time
had to be very, very carefully coded.
Like say in a silly 30 minute short filmwhere a guy is trapped in a telephone
(37:38):
booth and people go to cartoonishlinks to try to rescue him.
And the entire first half of thismovie pretty much plays like a Mr. Bean
skit or
a funny thing directed by Terry Gilliam.
And then the government comes to pickup the foam booth with the guy still in
(38:00):
it, and things are still pretty funny,
but they gradually get darker andmore surreal like a Fran Kafka movie
or a Fran Kafka story or a sadmovie directed by Terry Gilliam.
That kind of juxtaposition is justwhat really made this movie work.
(38:20):
And it was
a huge hit in Spain.
I can imagine.
Affected pop culture morethan honestly. Makes sense.
There were parodies, there werereplicas of the phone booth.
There's one in some art museum in NewYork that's prominently displayed.
(38:43):
It got so popular, andadmittedly, this may be a rumor,
but I really want it to betrue because it's hilarious.
There was a rumor that thisactually scared people from getting
into phone booths in Spain badlyenough that the actor that played,
the guy that gets trapped in thephone booth, Jose Luis Lopez Vasquez,
(39:06):
yes. That's his entire name,
actually had to be the spokesperson forthe company that makes most of the phone
booths in Spain at that time. Like, look,see, I'm getting in this phone booth.
I'm not trapped getting out. Someonecloses the door. Just kidding. Look,
I can come out.
(39:29):
Commercial. Reallyinteresting that I find it.
Nice. I'll link.
To it. Oh God, I need to find it.I'll link to it. The show notes.
I find it really interesting that itbecame such a huge pop culture moment
there.
And the reason is because obviouslythese movies are nothing alike
the two movies I'm going to say,but it gave me the same vibe.
(39:50):
This movie gave me the samevibe as Soylent Green gave me.
I can see that. I can seethat. I can absolutely see.
That also. Yeah.
That weird, terrible mixof bleakness and absurdity.
Yes.
Yes. And Soylent Green also becamea big pop culture reference for
(40:13):
the same, not the same reasons,
but for political reasons aswell in governmental overreach.
And the fact that it sounds really funnywhen Charlton Heston screams that it's
made of people.
Well, so the whole time I'm watching this,
I was trying to remember when Franco died,
and I couldn't pull it up becauseI was watching it on my phone,
(40:35):
but he died in 75, so this wastoward the end of his tenure.
And the eighties in Spain were likethe sixties in the us everything
liberalized and democratizedin a real big hurry.
We talked about that some with,
I think we talked aboutit with Pan's Labyrinth.
I know we talked about it with Veronicabecause that early nineties period was
(40:58):
the same way people remember that era,
sort of the HW years in Spain,not because HW was president,
but that same time block where peoplereally look fondly on those years in
Spain.
It's something, I forgetwhere I heard this,
and they weren't talking about Spain,
they were talking about Japan just afterthe reconstruction after World War II
(41:21):
democracy without context.
Oh, I like that.
We're a country that wasn't ademocracy suddenly becomes one very,
very abruptly, and things get weird.
And if you've got the economicstructure to be able to handle that,
and by Franco's death,
(41:43):
Spain did then it's for the most part a
festive experience. But this was from 72.
Otherwise made the new boss same asthe old boss in a couple of years.
Basically. Yes, exactly. Yes.
But this was 72, so they had thatabsurdist sense of humor and everything.
(42:05):
There was movement in that direction,
but also the regime wasstill pretty strong.
And I don't think that Franco ofthe seventies was the same as Franco
of the forties or fifties or thirties,but it was still a dictatorship.
It was still pretty bad.
The media, media police werestill out in full force. Yes.
(42:26):
If you watch interviews during the time,
Antonio Mercer was just supercoy about it. Like, oh, well,
what do you think it means? And theninterviews from later in his life. Yeah,
it's about Franco. Of course.It's about Franco. Yeah.
I think that they hadall figured that out.
(42:48):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, dictatorshipsare all about plausible deniability.
If I can just make it seem, thennobody cares about accuracy.
They just care about appearancesand blame. Basically.
Saudi was the same way back whenI lived there in the nineties,
but this movie felt like a bad dream
(43:09):
in a surreal sort of, I'mdreaming and I can't stop this,
that it's just gettingworse and worse and worse.
And there's this epic soundtrackto it and I'm completely powerless.
And the sudden inexplicable appearanceof clowns at the three-fourths mark.
Just like any other baddrink. Yes, exactly. Yep.
(43:31):
So weird. I loved it.
So how would you rate this?
I would say
wavering between the two and a threeon the motion picture terror skill.
It does get dark,
but it's silly and absurd enough gettingthere that it maybe didn't really do
(43:56):
anything for me personally,
but I could see this really rubbingsomeone the wrong way if they went into it
blind. So I'd say two.
Not in the same way that Melissa's shortfilm might rub someone the wrong way.
We have so many of these.
I wish Sometimes it's rare,
(44:17):
but I wish we did video sometimesso that everybody could see my
grin. Pantomime.
You're smiling. Melissa'strying not to laugh.
I'm just glaring at youbecause you made a pun
be that's basically every episode atsome point. It's a once an episode,
usually more than once an episode thing.
(44:39):
We should all take pictures for quality,for enjoyment. That face of ours,
I could see that fivedefinitely for quality.
Well, especially gettingit past the sensors.
We don't fully appreciate that inthe States, but that's tricky. Yeah.
Maybe we should appreciatethat more now though. It.
(45:01):
Goes away. I wasn't going to bringthat up unless y'all did. But yeah,
some elements of this movie we may needto reference as a how to guide in a
couple of months.
Or weeks, depending on howquickly it guys move. I dunno,
I'm sort of on the,
it's all just going to go like a fart inthe wind at this point, but we'll see.
(45:23):
I mean, it's obviously goingto be a fart in the wind.
It's just we don't know what directionthat wind's blowing or how slow it's
going to be.
Or how wet the fart will be.
Truth, truth. I mean,
it's obviously going to be soggy,
but there are different levels ofsogginess that the fart can be.
(45:46):
Not if you're my2-year-old who is a farese.
That is fair. Ross is really good at that.
Well, and you look at herand you go, damn girl.
And then you control and or dragher back to her room and the
changing table and there's nothing inthe diaper and you weep for the future
(46:09):
because it's coming and you hope.
In about 10 or 12 years,
she's either going to be mortified thatshe inherited that from you or delighted
that she inherited that from you.There is going to be no in-between.
It could be both. It could be both. I'mbanking on both. It's circumstantial.
(46:29):
But you just hope that the stormbreaks right after Emily walks in,
which has happened before. It's very nice.
Anyway, so walking through thewoods, walking through the woods.
Slowly.
I watched slowly, painfully, slowly.
I watched in a violent nature acouple of weeks ago on Shutter,
(46:50):
and it was,
I hadn't watched a serious horrormovie in a while because as y'all have
probably gathered by now, Iam a two B garbage person.
And that was an accuratesubmission of your character.
And it works in many differentways. I am a tubi garbage person.
I like garbage on Tubi, but I'malso a tubi style garbage person.
(47:14):
Any way you break outthose adjectives, it works.
But I wanted to play around on Shutterand in a violent nature was one of those
that was really hyped coming out whenit dropped a couple of months ago.
When locket is removed from a collapsedfire tower in the woods that ENT
tombs the rotting corpse of Johnny,
(47:35):
a vengeful spirit spurred on bya horrific 70-year-old crime.
His body is resurrected andbecomes hell bent on retrieving.
They really hyped this up as a.
Johnny seems like an.
Revisable name for a vengeful.
Spirit. I can't quiteput a finger on Mark.
(47:57):
Well, they hyped it up as areally brutal neo slasher,
almost reinventing the genre.
And they made a big deal out of thecinematography is from the Killer's
perspective, that's notreally accurate. Accurate. Oh.
Yeah, I remember seeingprevious with this now.
Yeah,
I feel like most of the moviewasn't like first person.
(48:17):
It was like third person.So Les didn't even follow.
The conceit of its own movie of its own.
Not really. It was less half-lifeand more dead space where.
Every horror movie shows things from theKiller's perspective when the Killer's
about to kill things. That'sjust what horror movies do.
If you're not doing that all the time,you're not special and your trailer was.
(48:40):
Meaningless. Well,
there were moments where it was theopening sequence in Halloween where you're
literally seeing it from theKiller's eyes, but a lot of it,
it was a couple of feet behind thekiller and he's walking through the
picturesque Canadianwoods and he does it so
slowly. And the premise was interesting.
(49:02):
They clearly watched a lotof old school slashers.
They got the backstory and the ethosand everything really well done.
But it.
Sounds like the ingredients are there.
Just.
Not the execution.
Well, you can go two ways with Slashers.
You can make it funny andridiculous and absurd or you can try
to make it impactful and meaningful.And that rarely works with Slashers.
(49:27):
The whole point is these youngbeautiful idiots are doing
beautiful horny stupid things in thewoods and they die cartoonish horrific
deaths.
Yeah.
That's the whole point.But if they're not.
It's very difficult to make that uniquethese days. Scream as great as Scream.
Is it kind of poisoned that? Well.
It did. It did. And this,
(49:51):
it made the characters actuallykind of likable and kind of
enjoyable in a, okay,y'all are college kids.
I could see being fun tohave in one of my classes.
And maybe that's part of it because Ihave a hard time with dead teenager movies
for that reason.
But they weren't annoying enoughto justify horrific deaths
and the Bad Guy wasn't interesting enough.
(50:15):
It just felt mean like, okay,
they did a 20 something thingand okay, I like that one.
And that one's being kind of bitchy. Okay,
now I watch them die a horrible death.
It just felt mean.
And some of the kills they weretrying to make it so intense man,
but at least one of 'em. I just laughedout loud because it wasn't intense, man.
(50:39):
It was just kind of, okay, cool.
It just felt like it was trying too hard.
When they said that it was going to bethrough the serial killer's eyes or the
slasher eyes,
I thought we were going toget more of a inside his mind
(50:59):
type of situation and not justliterally seeing what he's
seeing. Okay, great. Been there,done that. What's the point?
Every horror movie does this.
It was just so lackluster.And the thing is,
is that they have done thingswhere you've seen behind
(51:22):
the scenes.
So Cabin in the Woods is a great exampleof that where they've taken that behind
the scenes horror and reasons whyit's happening and adjusted that.
And you're seeing it from the other side.
Pearl is another good exampleof that. Pearl Maxine X,
all of that where you're getting theother side of the story and you're seeing
(51:44):
it through somebody else's eyes.
This supposedly they hyped it up to be so
experimental and so differentand it just ended up being the
same shit that we've seen a hundredtimes over. So what was the point?
But not fun like that.
(52:04):
Exactly.
Practic either be.
Fun, the practical effects orhave a point. Ideally both,
but you have to atleast do one of the two.
Yeah.
Right. In the.
Practical effects. I always wish it was,
I almost wish it would've beenlike a choose your own adventure.
He saw three different weaponson the board and it was
like he was going through eachone. Which one should I use?
(52:26):
That kind of thing and make theteenage characters insufferable
so that you just want them todie. That would've been fun.
That would've been different.
That's what I'm until Dawn should havebeen, or at least like an extra mode of.
It.
But they weren't unlikeableenough for you to root for their
(52:49):
demise and you didn't know themwell enough to really be rooting for
them. It felt like it was two differentmovies. There was this awkward.
Doable to kill, not likable enough to die.
Right, exactly. Exactly. And therewas this not likable enough to.
Live. That's what I meant to say.
Yeah.
This sort of 20 something dramedy andthen a serial killer slowly walks up and
(53:12):
murders everybody. And because it was sosomber and it took itself so seriously,
you couldn't even really geek out aboutthe practical effects because the makeup
is really impressive. But when youhave really crazy impressive makeup,
it's supposed to be fun.That's the whole point.
So I dunno,
it was on my mind becauseShutter on New Year's Day,
(53:38):
it was talking about NewYear's resolutions and they had a post on threads,
new Year's resolution to work out more.Don't let a killer crash your routine.
And that's because the big famouskill from this is a yoga kill.
There's a woman doing yoga and
terrible things happen to her. And.
They really had the stretch tomake this related to New Year's.
(53:59):
And that's how they did it.
Yeah.
It just,
and that Kill Won the Ride inChainsaw Award for Best Kill of the
Year. I mean, just to tellyou where my headspace is,
I voted wrote in the Just Can'tGet Enough Kill From Cocaine
Bear, which is magnificent and fun. Ilove that. And objectively a better Kid.
(54:24):
I think so. I think so. But I also.
Holy crap. Can Bear came out this year?
Well, no, but it came outwithin the window. That.
Chain.
I keep forgetting that the JaneSAWawards are in a horrific time
loop from which there isno escape that now. Right.
Exactly. Yeah. And that's one where, yeah,
(54:46):
they used a lot of practical effects,but it was also ridiculous and stupid.
So you could have funwith it. I don't know.
It felt like it was trying too hard.
But I'm also not the super intensetype of horror fan where it has to be
brutal.
I'm trying to think of the last brutalmovie that I saw and actually thought was
brutal and I am coming up empty.
(55:08):
It didn't even need to be brutal though.It just needed to be good or different.
And it wasn't either of those.
And the thing is, it'sokay not to be that,
but then don't billyourself as an incredibly.
Yeah,
that's what I'm getting the most fromy'all's description of this compared to
(55:29):
what I remember with the trailer isjust false advertising or at least
accidental, misleading advertising.
That's exactly what it was.
And Overhype, I think is alot of it too. It was way.
Over was not great about that.
What kills me too is there were so manypeople that saw it and reviewed it and
(55:49):
said all this good shitabout it. And I was like,
were you watching the sameeffing thing that I was?
Have you never seen a slasher before?
Well, and
I think there's sort of a rushto be like any fan culture,
the true fans or the serious fans.
(56:10):
And so you double down to thepoint of overdosing and it's
difficult to tell how much of it'sperformative. Whereas if we say, yeah,
we like this movie, we'vegot nothing to prove.
And maybe we're all to begarbage people. But even so,
we're not trying to impressanybody by how hardcore we are.
(56:31):
And I think a fair amount of fans anda fair amount of reviewers and a fair
amount of movies do try to do that.
Yeah. It's like professionalbarbecuers versus regular,
just people trying to grill.
There's all these rulesthat professional horror,
horror movie reviewers look for in a goodhorror movie that doesn't necessarily
(56:52):
translate to what normalpeople want to watch.
Even normal people that like horror.
And it's the same thing about peoplewho go around and it's like, oh,
you like this singer name threeof their songs? Oh, shut up.
You either like the person or youdon't. You like the movie or you don't.
(57:14):
It's objective.
She's pretty, and.
She.
Wrote one song I like, shut.
Up.
Yeah, exactly.
There you go. There you go.
So there were a few moments that got me,
but I just felt kind of meanwatching this. So terra scale,
I'd probably put it maybe at a two.
I never actually put it on Letterboxedbecause I kept writing the review in my
(57:38):
head and then I got distractedand I'm falling asleep. And then.
Which I would probably put it,
which probably is the letterboxreview in and of itself. Yeah. I mean,
yes, true.
Actually. Yeah.
I can't focus enough on this movieto write a proper letterbox review.
That's pretty.
Scary. Yeah. I mean.
(58:00):
That.
Says something and yeah.
I felt mean watching it andgot distracted. Two stars.
So that's probably where I'd putit for quality and enjoyment.
Not awful, but I don't know.Not great. Could do better.
It wasn't for me. Yeah, it wasn't for me.
(58:21):
So I don't know.
But anyway, other good news, Ididn't get a chance to watch it,
but I did locate the JoeBob Briggs last drive-in
version of Nosferatu,
where he cuts into it Elvirastyle and that is on AMC Plus,
(58:41):
you might be able to getit on normal Amazon too,
depending on your subscriptionsand everything. But I.
Think I still haven't to watch that.Hasn't bothered to cancel my AMC Plus.
So I'll keep an eye out for that.
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to tryto watch that for next week.
I feel like it's a hundred year old movie.
I should really watch the originalbefore I watch the Eggers version.
(59:01):
But if I get a.
Feel, we're not talking for onewatch the one with the silly cut-ins.
Yeah, I.
What made that same judgmentcall with the Elvira episode on
the house that screamed. Yeah.
And that was a good judgment call.
That was a very goodjudgment call. So anyway,
(59:23):
if you're still listening,
leave us a review in Apple Podcastsor Spotify or wherever you happen
to be listening. Shoot us an email,drop us a line, follow us on threads,
tell your friends, tell yourhorror friends about us.
And we'll talk to y'all next week.
And I'm going to push the buttonfor the outro. I can do that.
Speaking of, did you get achance to watch, pause, play?
Oh, yes. Oh yes. Yes, I did.
It's very Melissa, little short, isn't it?
Yeah.
When I said that I was not beingsarcastic or trying to mislead between
the fact that you picked the movie andthe thumbnail and all of the blood on her
(00:23):
mouth, I was like, oh,
this is going to end exactly how Ithink it's going to end, isn't it?
(00:51):
So welcome to Imported Horror.
This is the podcast that brings youthe very best of freaky dream leg
night, Marish, phone booths,serial killers, walking very, very,
very, very, very, very,very, very, very, very, very,
very slowly through the woods,
and the most Melissa Short film you'llever see in your life that hass exactly
(01:15):
the way you think it will,
because Melissa picked itfrom Beyond the Shining Seas.
I'm Marcus.
I'm here with my intact co-hosts.
Melissa and Grady, andif we had two nickels,
wait,
if we had a nickel for every movie wereviewed on the podcast that ended this
(01:36):
way, I think we'd havesignificantly more than two nickels.
I know it's been more than two.
Yeah, no, it has been. It's a theme.
Melissa has a vibe. Youknow what I'm saying?
Yeah. She's from New Jersey.
To be fair, when I picked this short,I didn't know how it was going to end.
(02:00):
I only saw the words. No, listen,
I only saw the words Franceand Feminist, and I said, okay.
I suck at identifying languages.I thought this was German.
Either movie sense make of that.
What you'll.
I'm not completely sureit was all that feminist,
(02:20):
to be completely honest withyou, I think equating this,
if your definition of feministis how this movie ends,
then that that's howRepublicans win elections.
In a nutshell. That's howRepublicans win elections.
Okay. To be fair, I didn'tsay the word feminism.
That was one of thehashtags in short verse,
(02:42):
which is why I looked through the hashtagsand I was like, okay, let's do it.
Yeah. Okay.
Can anyone apply hashtags to movieson short verse and do they apply them
sarcastically?
I don't know. This is the topics for,
this is feminist revenge, colorful killer,
(03:04):
and female characters.
I mean, all of those are true iffor a certain point of view of,
I mean, it's.
Colorful revenge. It is very colorful.I will give it that. Well, we.
Don't know what the guy was doingbefore the movie started. Maybe
he's been just a horrendous assholeto her for years and years and is
(03:24):
blackballing her trying to get intothis French screenwriting industry,
and this is the culmination ofyears of planning. We don't know.
That's the beauty of short movies.
Well, I, I'm going tosay that you know what?
We'll get more into thiswhen we talk about it,
but I am going to say that ifyou think about the fact that
women on dating apps inviting men over,
(03:46):
there's a significantly higher chanceof the woman not making it out of that
situation than the man.
I mean, fair, sure, butthat doesn't, I mean, still
the numbers are still pretty.
This guy didn't doanything on camera. No, on.
(04:06):
Camera.
Who knows? It's beauty.
Of the Short movie.
If we're making.
We can make up our own stories to makewhat happened morally acceptable or not,
depending on how we're feeling.
Today. Well, I know how Melissa's feeling.She always picks this kind of movie.
Anyway, we've got, what was yours called,
(04:28):
Melissa?
Pray, kill, pray.
Kill, pause, play, kill, pause, play,
kill on short verse becauseMelissa's short. Get it. Get it.
Anyway,
then Grady got superexistential and political,
but also not politicaldepending on who you ask.
(04:50):
With Laina from Spain in 1972, that.
Does not translate towhat you think it does.
No, no. I was surprised.
I shouldn't be because I live in Texasand my Spanish should really be much
better than it is, but I was surprised,
and we've also got in aviolent nature because
Shutter was promoting it because ofNew Year's, and I get why they do that,
(05:12):
and I get why people like it, sortof, kind of. But it wasn't my jam.
That's from Canada and I'mgoing to talk about it,
and I think maybe you'veseen that, Melissa?
I have, yes.
Okay. Okay. That's whatI thought. All right.
First, I have not, but I'll ask dumband irrelevant questions throughout.
I challenge you because I don't know howmany dumb questions you can find with
(05:33):
this movie. Actually,it's kind of difficult.
And it was lackluster, but.
We'll talk about it. Iwasn't crazy about it.
But first we have thetriumphant return of our
coming soon.
(06:01):
Do you guys hear that too,or am I having a stroke?
No, I think you're having a stroke.No, I'm just kidding. I heard it.
It's creepy.
I figured out how to uploadmedia to Riverside to the
web remote podcasting thing we're using,
so I don't have to insertit in audition later,
which is going to makemy life a lot easier.
(06:22):
Nice.
So January is slow and it'susually a slow month for
movies. It's going to be slow around here.
The major highlight that I'm lookingforward to is a Nick Frost movie,
dropping on Shutter maybe next week,maybe the week after. I'm not sure,
but if you're thinking, who's Nick Frost?
He's the other guy from Seanof the Dead and Hot Fuzz and
(06:46):
all those movies with SimonPeg, but that's not this week.
So the first one we'vegot, I cannot pronounce.
This is on Netflix. Itdropped on the 2nd of January.
This is Bull. I am so sorry.
This is a Bollywood horror movie. Is.
Horror comedy this one of these we'veever talked about or seen a preview of?
(07:09):
Because it feels like it's somethingthat should be a lot more common than it
is.
I feel like either I misssomething in translation or I
miss something,
having not seen the first two moviesor even having heard of the first two
movies, maybe both. I don't know.
It did seem like we were expected toknow who a lot of these characters were.
(07:32):
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, yeah, this is apparently the third.
I wish we would've seen the firsttwo or heard of the first two because
this looks awesome. It looks fun.
Well, all three of them are.
On Netflix.
Got the Indian equivalent of that ladyfrom the second Beetlejuice movie.
There's a lot of stuff happening here.
(07:55):
Apparently. The first one was in 2007.
Oh, okay. That would partlyexplain why we hadn't heard of it.
So Han a fraudster posingas an exorcist takes on a
lucrative case at a haunted castleunraveling a sinister plot involving
mischievous priests, culminatingin a hilarious yet thrilling ride,
(08:15):
filled with unexpectedtwists and turns and scares.
Because I am reading myown notes. What I do know,
what I did recognize is that the trailermakes a big deal out of this opening
during Diwali, which is big, bigreligious festival celebration.
I hesitate to call it the Indian Christmasbecause there's so many different
(08:38):
theological differences thatfeels forced it. They're.
A big deal. Big thing that they do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this yearit overlapped with Halloween,
which was kind of neat.
My neighbors across the street had awhole bunch of multicolored lights and
everything else out there that was cool.
I don't know if you know this, butthere is a translation of the title,
(08:59):
and
it's interesting because the sametitle of this movie is a title of a
movie that from the late eightiesthat is getting remade that
should never be remade.
So can you guess thetitle starts with an L.
American movie.
(09:19):
The movie that's getting remade? I'mnot actually sure if it's American,
but I'm pretty sure it is.
English.
Yes.
Love. Actually,
I know very few movies that start with L.
I'm just going to kind ofgo through all of them.
(09:40):
No.
No.
A.
Horror movie. I take it,or not a horror movie.
Fantasy.
Lick My Ball.
Three, the Liquor. A lot of
young women built their fantasiesaround a character in this
movie.
Still sticking with myball. Read the Look. Okay.
Lord of the Rings was not from thelate eighties. We are not that old.
(10:05):
And I don't know what characteryou would think of there.
I'm talking like I'm talking.
Nuts for Orlando Bloom for ayear or two there, weren't.
They? Ew. No, no, no. I'mtalking about eighties. Yeah.
I don't like Orlando Bloom.
I'm talking about eighties quintessentialrock. I'm more of a gimley man myself.
I like Gimley a lot too, but I'mnot going to hate on leg loss. What?
(10:29):
Eighties QuintessentialRockstar starred in this movie?
Quintessential. Oh, no. Okay. Number one,that's not late eighties. Number two,
they're not remaking that.
Yes, they are.
No, you can't remake.
That. He's dead. I know. I know.
Love.
(10:51):
Labyrinth. David Bowie.
You can't replace David Bowie.That's not how it works. No.
Yeah, everybody's very upset about it.
That's not.
No,
the only way this will work is ifthey're casting Jermaine Clement as David
Bowie,
(11:12):
and they're just highlighting the factthat they should not be doing this.
Okay. That I would watch. Technically,it was late eighties. It was 86.
That's not late. It is the secondhalf of the eighties. I mean,
well, it's mid.
Fine, mid eighties. Okay.
Well, I was thinking like 88 or 89
(11:33):
we're pedantic today. Pedantic. Pedantic.
So the Bollywood Horror,
that is what that thetitle translates into.
Labyrinth. So.
It's Labyrinth one, two, and three.
Okay, that's cool. That's cool.
Did you know Pop QuizLabyrinth is the oldest word
(11:54):
in continual usage in English thathas meant the same thing throughout.
That is.
Interesting. Interesting.
That was a pop quiz I gave to my studentsyears ago, and they thought about it.
Then I told 'em, and it was, oh,okay. It wasn't English originally,
obviously,
but it's maintained it's original meaningfor thousands and thousands of years
(12:15):
at this point.
The thing about a labyrinth remake thatoffends me the most isn't the idea of
replacing David Bowie because I mean,
even though he's anintegral part of that movie,
and that's why the movieshouldn't be remade.
I get it if you have toremake it because he's dead.
But the thing that offends me the mostis they're almost certainly going to
replace the Muppets with CGI.
(12:39):
Yeah. And that.
Kind of is the other thing,other than David Bowie, that
that makes that movie.
Yeah. It's peak eightiespuppetry and creature feature.
You cannot do that with computers.
Well,
supposedly the director for itis going to be Robert Eggers,
(13:03):
the guy who just did Nosferatu.
And The Witch and, okay, all right.Okay. Okay. I'm no longer offended.
I'm still skeptical.
I'm incredibly skeptical.
The, okay, okay. I'm listening.
(13:24):
He did the Northman, he did theWitch. He did the lighthouse.
So he's going to make it weird.And I could see him going in a,
you can't possibly remakethis sort of direction.
Now. There is a fake poster goingaround, so I want to dispel any rumors.
There has not been a cast oranything selected for this.
There was a thing that was spreadingaround that Tom Hiddleston was going to be
(13:46):
in it, and I'm like, no,no, no. That's untrue.
So the only thing we knowright now is that in 2023,
it went through a bunch of scriptrewrites and that Robert Edwards has.
A.
Been.
I could see Jennifer Connolly comingback on board and it being like the next
generation or something like that.I can see that. But you've got to,
(14:08):
if not David Bowie,
you've got to have somebodywho's an actual rocker who
can sing, who has that same sort of aged
vintage cool.
I don't know who that would be.
I don't know.
(14:32):
I know. How could they doit? How could they do it?
And it feels like a trapbecause you know people aren't,
they're going to go into that moviethinking this is third thing that a me not
going to anywhere.
They are going to be too cowardly togive replacement. David Bowie a co piece.
Yes. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
(14:55):
This is not going to be the YoungGirls Fantasies of the eighties.
New No. And frankly, a lot of youngBoys, because David Bowie. Yeah.
That triggered some sexual awakenings.
Yeah, David Bowie can get it.
Even.
Debbie can still get it.
Completely hypothetically.
(15:17):
In other news sensor. Just hit Tubby.
We did that for the podcast before.That's from 2021. Great, great movie.
I really liked it. Oh,video Nasties in the UK
on shutter, a pair of Frenchextreme horrors have dropped,
and these have been around fora while, but there's a French,
(15:40):
new French Extreme or new Frenchextremity category on Shutter,
and they've got a reputation, so Ifigured we'd mention them. Say what?
I've got a new French extremity.
Oh, damn it. I deleted the sound effects.
The media that came with it. Oneof 'em was like a joke track,
(16:03):
but I deleted it. Sadly.
I will bring it back for next time.Anyway, ills or them is on there.
That's definitely got a reputation.
But the more interesting onefor us might be irreversible,
which is from 2002 asMonica Lucci and Cent Cael,
both of whom have been in everything.Cael was magnificent in Eastern Promises,
(16:26):
and I still claim that is a criminallyunderrated mob movie that might,
everybody talks aboutScorsese, but honestly,
Eastern Promises is on the samelevel as Goodfellas in Casino.
It might be better, maybe I'm notgoing to get into that argument,
but it's really good.
Was kind of thrown watching the trailerfor irreversible and having absolutely
(16:48):
no other context for it, whichI tried to do with these.
I watched these trailersas blind as possible,
and then just rely on y'all to fill inthe details and make up my own funny
conclusions for laughs. But
we basically had three and a half minutesof complete sensory overload and what
I can only refer to asaggressively mean techno.
(17:10):
And then it ends with a doorthat says Rectum above it.
And I know that we're a foreign movie,
and that couldn't possibly admit whatI thought it meant, but it's a big,
big boy that says Rectum over it.
It's French though.
So that could go either way.
(17:33):
It can go. Anyway. So I will admitthe trailer made me dizzy except.
In reverse, because it's irreversible.
We'll do actually. So that'sthe whole hook of the movie.
So the whole movie is shot in reverse,so you see the end of the movie first. So
yes, since Shutter also droppedwhat they called the Straight Cut,
which is the movie,
(17:56):
so the original 2002 version, yousee the end of the movie first,
and then it goes back to the endof the film is the beginning of the
story, which is the horrific attack.
So you see the revenge firstand the Triggering event.
Last.
And it's violent, it's French Extreme,
(18:19):
and I'm assuming it's got a whole bunchof those crazy camera angles for the
camera. Get some weirdangle looking up at the sky.
Yeah, that was basicallythe entire trailer. Yeah.
And I mean, maybe Ishouldn't give this away,
but do you want to know what thedoor with rectum above it was.
A door Door. I can't say.No, you can't leave us.
(18:43):
Hanging.
The DSM nightclub.
So yes.
It's actually a gay BDSM nightclub.
I kind of assumed thatbecause rectum, but yeah,
not the Guesses versions is just,
there's a certain mystique that thecombination of BDSM and the word rectum
(19:06):
has. And.
As the French might say,may we, which is, but yes,
so damn, I wish I had that, but I'm Shh.I'm going to have to bring that back.
Anyway, if you're feeling real. S Muddy,
I sent this to y'all before I readthe press release from Screen Box,
(19:29):
but a whole bunch of old school trashyJLo are dropping on screen box throughout
January, including stripnude for your killer,
which you don't even needto watch the trailer.
It feels like a parodyof Jello names. Yeah,
but it both is and is notbecause it's Italian horror
and fun story.
(19:50):
When I was watching the trailer onmy phone for strip nude for your
killer, I was watching iton my phone on the couch.
Roz was in front of me watchingDaniel Tiger on the tv,
and my phone popped up and said, Hey,do you want to airplay this to your tv?
And I said out loud.
No, this would be a really good wayto wane Ross off of Daniel Tiger.
(20:13):
No, it would not do this.Read the room iPhone.
No, I don't want to do that.
Or it would traumatize her into neverwatching anything other than Daniel
Tiger again for the rest of her life.
Yeah, good point. This would backfire.
Realistically, she just turned aroundand look at me like, bro, what the hell,
(20:37):
man? Because I get that look all thetime. The side eye slash stink eye.
And she was real happy with me today.
We went and played at Cheeky Monkeys andwe went and got Thai food and dah, dah,
dah. But you take away dt,there's no coming back for that.
You can't do that to her.
No, it's not. No, you cannot. Youcannot. So we'll talk more about that.
(20:57):
I think that one drops on January 17th.
The one that dropped on screenbox already is let pull it up here
with.
I'm just imagining Daniel Tiger splicedwith that scene from Fight Club.
Oh, that'd be so weird.
(21:19):
I both like and loathe Daniel Tigerbecause he makes it all about him
all the time.
And the physiology of this whole worldreally baffles me and makes me deeply
uncomfortable in ways that I can'texplain because owls are not that big.
They're just not. Let's,
let's save this for Marcus's secondpodcast Premiering Leader this month. Why?
(21:40):
Daniel Tiger is a whiny bitch.
Yes.
Yeah.
Anyway, wither, which is already allover. It's on two B, it's on plex.
It's on fum. I'm just lookingat it on IMDB. Anyway,
that hit screen box as well.
This is basically a Swedish evil dead Ida.
(22:02):
The makeup looks great.
Makeup looks fantastic.Yeah. Ida and Alban,
or maybe Ida and Alban are a happy couple.
They sit off to a cabin inthe vast Swedish woodlands to have a fun holiday with
their friends.
But under the floorboards waitsan evil from Sweden's dark past.
So the screen box publicity mentionedthis as like a Swedish evil dead.
(22:27):
I sort of assumed it was like thatJapanese one mu muscle, what was it.
Japanese? Wait, no, bodybuilding Muscle builder. And.
Hell yeah. What was that muscle?
I know it was body buildingand muscles and in inhale,
(22:48):
I just can't remember the exact.
Bloody muscle bodybuilder.Inhale. There you go. Which was,
that's what Japanese Fanfic of evil day.
Moderate.
Bloody muscle bodybuilder in Hell.
Love.
It. So I assumed this was sortof the Swedish equivalent.
(23:13):
The camera work looks maybe alittle bit on the low budget side,
but the makeup and the special effects,the practical effects look great.
And I think makeup canmake or break a movie.
It can. It can. And honestly, CG, I canbreak a movie. Maybe I'm just a snob,
but so of all movies, thiscame up during Gladiator two,
(23:35):
which my brother was like,
I don't want to go to the movie theaterand watch a two and a half hour movie,
man. I was like, okay. I kindof get that. That is long,
but also it's Gladiator, so I snuckoff. He and my sister-in-law left.
So it's good. I enjoyed it.
But the first one was almost entirelypractical effects and clever camera
(23:55):
angles.
I don't think the tiger was everactually that close to any of the actors,
but it was a real.
Tiger. There are specific OSHA guidelinesagainst that, so I would hope so.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This,
they just sort of made the baboonsand the Black Rhino and all the other
animals, including the sharks,just completely cg. And
(24:19):
I get that. I do, especially theBlack Rhino, because there's a very,
very small handful of those alive,
and they're guarded 24 7 bygigantic Kenyan dudes. Yeah.
They're not going to justlet Russell Crow punch one,
no matter how much Russell Crow wants to.
No, no, not at all. No.
But the first one was so rawand violent in a practical
(24:39):
effects way that it reallyunderscored all of its points.
And the CGI kind of took me out of it.It made it feel a lot more processed.
Still a really goodmovie, just, I don't know.
Yeah.
But I don't think that wither hadthe budget to have that problem,
so Fair enough.
(25:03):
It's going to be interesting.
I wasn't trying to cut you off,
but I realized that has massivecutoff potential. Where'd you go?
She just bailed. Oh, no, I'm righthere. Oh, well, your camera went.
Oh, is my camera gone now?
(25:26):
No, looking at the, you'rehere. You just, oh, no.
I thought I cut you off with the soundeffect, and you were like, well, fine.
I'm going to go, wait, me,me, me, me, me. No, no, I'm.
Here. I mean,
we could just make cutting oneof us off of the sound effect.
A regular way to end the Yeah, like that.
(25:46):
Exactly like that.
So anyway, all right, Melissa,
I don't have a sound effectfor how short you are,
but I feel like we haveto start with your short.
The reason I feel like you guys think weneed to start with my short is because
(26:09):
of how Melissa it was, how shortit was, and how Melissa it was.
So think about the most Melissathing you could possibly think about,
and that would be this horror movie.
So you have, oh my God,
I'm blanking again on the nameof it. Why do I keep doing that?
(26:33):
Hold on.
Hang on. I got a effect for this.
Oh my God. Are
okay. Funny.
It's play, pause, kill.
It's basic premise. Julie is a loner.
(26:55):
She spends her Saturday off at hometrying to write a new screenplay.
She keeps receiving messages fromsomeone who's just known as H someone she
might be interested in, andshe invites him over, and
it is a French horror movie,
(27:16):
and it really feels like
it's just a Tinder date, right? It'sa Tinder date. Guy's coming over,
he's bringing wine. He's like, Hey,you're writing this horror screenplay.
If you're writing this horror screenplay,
we should probably watcha horror movie together.
I was rather offended that he brought,I Know What You Did last summer,
(27:38):
because I got to tell you,
if I was writing a horrorscreenplay and somebody messaged me,
if I was in the dating pool and toldme that they were bringing over,
I know What you did last summer,
they might end up in the same positionas this guy did, because that's.
Not a horror movie you bring towatch. I know this may be why
she may not have been planning to do whatshe did at the end of this movie until
(27:59):
she learned what movie he brought.
I mean, it's a good movie.
It's not what you want to use toimpress somebody. I'm such a horror fan.
I watched, I know Whatshe Did last summer.
I'm such an action fan. My favoriteaction man is Steven Egal. Yeah.
Exactly.
What I do think is interesting is that,and I know what you did last summer,
(28:23):
and one of the characters init is Sarah Michelle Geller,
and that was who she mentioned inthis actual movie. She's like, oh,
everybody loves this SarahMichelle Geller movie.
What I think was interesting was SarahMichelle Geller in that movie played the
damsel that was running awayfrom the killer that the girl in
(28:44):
Trouble from this unknown entity.
And I'd like to think thatthey did that on purpose,
because this was basicallythat twisted around,
and I almost wonder if that was the
crust, the meat of the film.
(29:05):
Oh God.
I dunno why I use that phrase.I never use that phrase. I know.
Anyway,
but as a way to throw you off.
And honestly,
if you're a woman and you're watching ahorror movie and there is a girl and she
(29:28):
invites a guy over and there's some kindof suspense or horror that you think is
happening,
99% of the time that horror isgoing to be inflicted on the woman,
and the woman is tensein those situations.
And I know that we've gotten to the pointwhere there's a lot of female serial
killers now like that portrayedin movies, female evils,
(29:50):
but really that wasn't theway it was years ago. And so.
There's a lot of catching up to do fromyears and years of cinematic tradition.
Exactly.
And so while.
I.
Also, the feeling.
Yeah.
I got the feeling thisjust wanted to have fun.
It's not trying to makea big grandiose point,
it's just trying to have fun and invertyour expectations and kind of wink at
(30:12):
the camera a little bit.
Yeah, I agree with that.
But I also think that you canread a little bit deeper into it,
and that can be kind of fun too.It also gave me an eighties vibe,
and I don't know if that wasbecause it was foreign or not.
I know sometimes Italian moviescan give me an eighties vibe,
but that's because the eightiescame to Italy, like nineties.
I would pin it on the super aggressivetechno soundtrack throughout the movie.
(30:37):
Yeah, I did too. Yep. Yeah,
I think the synth wave gave itthe eighties vibes for sure.
I actually thought at the end may or may.
Not also be.
Why.
I thought it.
Was German.
Fair enough. I also thoughtit was interesting at the end,
I really thought that they were goingto kind of show that she used that as
(30:58):
inspiration for her screenplay,
or that was actually the screenplaythat she was writing. So I.
Amed it didn't go in thatdirection was for her pin,
and this is how she fills it.
I mean, that works too.
So I thought the ending,
they had fun with the ending and it wasopen-ended enough that you can take it
in a bunch of differentfun ways. I actually really liked the way they did that.
(31:22):
Yeah, it's fun. It is just, Ireally hesitate to call it feminist.
One of the characters happens to befemale and it's a dating thing sort of
thing, but maybe I can see how it'sfeminist. I can't see how it's revenge,
let's put it that way.
No revenge. I can't see. That'swhat it said. I can't see revenge.
(31:45):
I can see feminist though,
and I think that if you polla hundred guys and a hundred
girls, they would have very differentviews on whether it was feminist or not.
And I think that sayssomething about it too. There.
Are lot of things.
French Live action adaptation of Ms.Pacman got a lot darker than it needed to.
(32:09):
Now,
I do have to say that thedepiction of the appendage was.
Obviously a hot dog.
A lot less graphic than the depictionof the appendage in the other film.
That was Stalker, was it called?
(32:31):
Yes.
The one in the Elevator.
Yes. I was trying to place.
So I think Stalker hada much more visually
impactful appendage,
but this was also fun in the budget.
And another part of that is also,
(32:51):
and admittedly the short movieversus feature Link movie,
obviously this is going to be the case.
Stalker had a whole lotmore buildup to it and
context and still,
even though I didn'treally care for the movie,
still one of my favorite villainmonologues in any movie we've done for the
podcast.
(33:11):
Oh God, yes.
No.
It's such a good monologue. This.
Movie just kind of gets right to thepoint because it's got 14 minutes to bite
off this dude's wienerand it needs to get.
Stalker was like the Toby movieto end all Toby movies this.
(33:32):
And on the one hand, if you're not goingin expecting that, you're like, oh,
okay. Nera wasn't expecting that,
but there's no way we can talk around it.
Melissa picked it because a dude getshis wiener chopped off. No. Yeah,
fair enough. There's nobeating around the bush
(33:53):
anyway, biting.
Around the bush. No, that'dbe the other way around.
He can't beat around the bush becausehis beater's been bitten off. Exactly.
So anyway, Melissa's short.
(34:17):
I take it, you would recommend.
Oh, 100%. This was awesome.
It wasn't scary, but it was fun.
And I loved the blood asit's dripping down her giant
boobs, which is just such a great visual
aspect of this, a little short.
(34:38):
Normally we try to just summarize the tip,
but we couldn't do thatwith this short film.
I would love to know. So I can't find it,
but I would love to know whatit was that she had in her mouth
that depicted the appendage.
(34:59):
I would be willing to bet money that itwas a hot dog, but I'm kind of cynical.
It almost looked too stiffto be a hot dog and too pink.
Well, I mean, it was a prop.
I doubt that the prop that theymanipulated on the floor just enough
so you could see what it was,
but not enough that it would getbanned from YouTube or whatever. It.
(35:21):
Kind of made me want Laffy Cappy.
I want Laffy Cappy now Strawberry.
That is the.
First time anyone's ever said that.
Should we warn Dan about thismovie? We don't bro heads some.
(35:41):
I was going to say, you're right,Grady. It's funnier if you guys don't.
Well, Grady, do you want to talkabout phone booths or Sure, why not?
Should we talk about slow serialkillers? Okay. Phone booth.
Alright, so I did Laina,
which for those resting in yourSpanish translates to phone booth. Yes.
(36:03):
I thought it translated to the cabin too.
The IMB summary. Well,
a man gets trapped inside a telephonebox and nobody is able to free him.
The summary doesn't gointo a whole lot of detail.
In fairness, neither does theshark fell. I was going to say.
(36:27):
So it was written and directed by Antonio,
and it was part of just kind of this
broad counterculture
time in Spanish cinemathat I'm not able to
(36:49):
pronounce and won't go to and to becauseI won't be able to do it justice.
But the basic summary of
it is this is whenFrancisco Franco or Franco,
is it Francisco Francoor Francisco Franco.
I think Franco.
Franco. This is Fran.
Franco, dictator of Spain for a long time.
So things were ad
(37:15):
and media was heavilyregulated, heavily controlled.
So any satire against
pretty much anything,
but especially the less savory elementsof the Spanish government at the time
had to be very, very carefully coded.
Like say in a silly 30 minute short filmwhere a guy is trapped in a telephone
(37:38):
booth and people go to cartoonishlinks to try to rescue him.
And the entire first half of thismovie pretty much plays like a Mr. Bean
skit or
a funny thing directed by Terry Gilliam.
And then the government comes to pickup the foam booth with the guy still in
(38:00):
it, and things are still pretty funny,
but they gradually get darker andmore surreal like a Fran Kafka movie
or a Fran Kafka story or a sadmovie directed by Terry Gilliam.
That kind of juxtaposition is justwhat really made this movie work.
(38:20):
And it was
a huge hit in Spain.
I can imagine.
Affected pop culture morethan honestly. Makes sense.
There were parodies, there werereplicas of the phone booth.
There's one in some art museum in NewYork that's prominently displayed.
(38:43):
It got so popular, andadmittedly, this may be a rumor,
but I really want it to betrue because it's hilarious.
There was a rumor that thisactually scared people from getting
into phone booths in Spain badlyenough that the actor that played,
the guy that gets trapped in thephone booth, Jose Luis Lopez Vasquez,
(39:06):
yes. That's his entire name,
actually had to be the spokesperson forthe company that makes most of the phone
booths in Spain at that time. Like, look,see, I'm getting in this phone booth.
I'm not trapped getting out. Someonecloses the door. Just kidding. Look,
I can come out.
(39:29):
Commercial. Reallyinteresting that I find it.
Nice. I'll link.
To it. Oh God, I need to find it.I'll link to it. The show notes.
I find it really interesting that itbecame such a huge pop culture moment
there.
And the reason is because obviouslythese movies are nothing alike
the two movies I'm going to say,but it gave me the same vibe.
(39:50):
This movie gave me the samevibe as Soylent Green gave me.
I can see that. I can seethat. I can absolutely see.
That also. Yeah.
That weird, terrible mixof bleakness and absurdity.
Yes.
Yes. And Soylent Green also becamea big pop culture reference for
(40:13):
the same, not the same reasons,
but for political reasons aswell in governmental overreach.
And the fact that it sounds really funnywhen Charlton Heston screams that it's
made of people.
Well, so the whole time I'm watching this,
I was trying to remember when Franco died,
and I couldn't pull it up becauseI was watching it on my phone,
(40:35):
but he died in 75, so this wastoward the end of his tenure.
And the eighties in Spain were likethe sixties in the us everything
liberalized and democratizedin a real big hurry.
We talked about that some with,
I think we talked aboutit with Pan's Labyrinth.
I know we talked about it with Veronicabecause that early nineties period was
(40:58):
the same way people remember that era,
sort of the HW years in Spain,not because HW was president,
but that same time block where peoplereally look fondly on those years in
Spain.
It's something, I forgetwhere I heard this,
and they weren't talking about Spain,
they were talking about Japan just afterthe reconstruction after World War II
(41:21):
democracy without context.
Oh, I like that.
We're a country that wasn't ademocracy suddenly becomes one very,
very abruptly, and things get weird.
And if you've got the economicstructure to be able to handle that,
and by Franco's death,
(41:43):
Spain did then it's for the most part a
festive experience. But this was from 72.
Otherwise made the new boss same asthe old boss in a couple of years.
Basically. Yes, exactly. Yes.
But this was 72, so they had thatabsurdist sense of humor and everything.
(42:05):
There was movement in that direction,
but also the regime wasstill pretty strong.
And I don't think that Franco ofthe seventies was the same as Franco
of the forties or fifties or thirties,but it was still a dictatorship.
It was still pretty bad.
The media, media police werestill out in full force. Yes.
(42:26):
If you watch interviews during the time,
Antonio Mercer was just supercoy about it. Like, oh, well,
what do you think it means? And theninterviews from later in his life. Yeah,
it's about Franco. Of course.It's about Franco. Yeah.
I think that they hadall figured that out.
(42:48):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, dictatorshipsare all about plausible deniability.
If I can just make it seem, thennobody cares about accuracy.
They just care about appearancesand blame. Basically.
Saudi was the same way back whenI lived there in the nineties,
but this movie felt like a bad dream
(43:09):
in a surreal sort of, I'mdreaming and I can't stop this,
that it's just gettingworse and worse and worse.
And there's this epic soundtrackto it and I'm completely powerless.
And the sudden inexplicable appearanceof clowns at the three-fourths mark.
Just like any other baddrink. Yes, exactly. Yep.
(43:31):
So weird. I loved it.
So how would you rate this?
I would say
wavering between the two and a threeon the motion picture terror skill.
It does get dark,
but it's silly and absurd enough gettingthere that it maybe didn't really do
(43:56):
anything for me personally,
but I could see this really rubbingsomeone the wrong way if they went into it
blind. So I'd say two.
Not in the same way that Melissa's shortfilm might rub someone the wrong way.
We have so many of these.
I wish Sometimes it's rare,
(44:17):
but I wish we did video sometimesso that everybody could see my
grin. Pantomime.
You're smiling. Melissa'strying not to laugh.
I'm just glaring at youbecause you made a pun
be that's basically every episode atsome point. It's a once an episode,
usually more than once an episode thing.
(44:39):
We should all take pictures for quality,for enjoyment. That face of ours,
I could see that fivedefinitely for quality.
Well, especially gettingit past the sensors.
We don't fully appreciate that inthe States, but that's tricky. Yeah.
Maybe we should appreciatethat more now though. It.
(45:01):
Goes away. I wasn't going to bringthat up unless y'all did. But yeah,
some elements of this movie we may needto reference as a how to guide in a
couple of months.
Or weeks, depending on howquickly it guys move. I dunno,
I'm sort of on the,
it's all just going to go like a fart inthe wind at this point, but we'll see.
(45:23):
I mean, it's obviously goingto be a fart in the wind.
It's just we don't know what directionthat wind's blowing or how slow it's
going to be.
Or how wet the fart will be.
Truth, truth. I mean,
it's obviously going to be soggy,
but there are different levels ofsogginess that the fart can be.
(45:46):
Not if you're my2-year-old who is a farese.
That is fair. Ross is really good at that.
Well, and you look at herand you go, damn girl.
And then you control and or dragher back to her room and the
changing table and there's nothing inthe diaper and you weep for the future
(46:09):
because it's coming and you hope.
In about 10 or 12 years,
she's either going to be mortified thatshe inherited that from you or delighted
that she inherited that from you.There is going to be no in-between.
It could be both. It could be both. I'mbanking on both. It's circumstantial.
(46:29):
But you just hope that the stormbreaks right after Emily walks in,
which has happened before. It's very nice.
Anyway, so walking through thewoods, walking through the woods.
Slowly.
I watched slowly, painfully, slowly.
I watched in a violent nature acouple of weeks ago on Shutter,
(46:50):
and it was,
I hadn't watched a serious horrormovie in a while because as y'all have
probably gathered by now, Iam a two B garbage person.
And that was an accuratesubmission of your character.
And it works in many differentways. I am a tubi garbage person.
I like garbage on Tubi, but I'malso a tubi style garbage person.
(47:14):
Any way you break outthose adjectives, it works.
But I wanted to play around on Shutterand in a violent nature was one of those
that was really hyped coming out whenit dropped a couple of months ago.
When locket is removed from a collapsedfire tower in the woods that ENT
tombs the rotting corpse of Johnny,
(47:35):
a vengeful spirit spurred on bya horrific 70-year-old crime.
His body is resurrected andbecomes hell bent on retrieving.
They really hyped this up as a.
Johnny seems like an.
Revisable name for a vengeful.
Spirit. I can't quiteput a finger on Mark.
(47:57):
Well, they hyped it up as areally brutal neo slasher,
almost reinventing the genre.
And they made a big deal out of thecinematography is from the Killer's
perspective, that's notreally accurate. Accurate. Oh.
Yeah, I remember seeingprevious with this now.
Yeah,
I feel like most of the moviewasn't like first person.
(48:17):
It was like third person.So Les didn't even follow.
The conceit of its own movie of its own.
Not really. It was less half-lifeand more dead space where.
Every horror movie shows things from theKiller's perspective when the Killer's
about to kill things. That'sjust what horror movies do.
If you're not doing that all the time,you're not special and your trailer was.
(48:40):
Meaningless. Well,
there were moments where it was theopening sequence in Halloween where you're
literally seeing it from theKiller's eyes, but a lot of it,
it was a couple of feet behind thekiller and he's walking through the
picturesque Canadianwoods and he does it so
slowly. And the premise was interesting.
(49:02):
They clearly watched a lotof old school slashers.
They got the backstory and the ethosand everything really well done.
But it.
Sounds like the ingredients are there.
Just.
Not the execution.
Well, you can go two ways with Slashers.
You can make it funny andridiculous and absurd or you can try
to make it impactful and meaningful.And that rarely works with Slashers.
(49:27):
The whole point is these youngbeautiful idiots are doing
beautiful horny stupid things in thewoods and they die cartoonish horrific
deaths.
Yeah.
That's the whole point.But if they're not.
It's very difficult to make that uniquethese days. Scream as great as Scream.
Is it kind of poisoned that? Well.
It did. It did. And this,
(49:51):
it made the characters actuallykind of likable and kind of
enjoyable in a, okay,y'all are college kids.
I could see being fun tohave in one of my classes.
And maybe that's part of it because Ihave a hard time with dead teenager movies
for that reason.
But they weren't annoying enoughto justify horrific deaths
and the Bad Guy wasn't interesting enough.
(50:15):
It just felt mean like, okay,
they did a 20 something thingand okay, I like that one.
And that one's being kind of bitchy. Okay,
now I watch them die a horrible death.
It just felt mean.
And some of the kills they weretrying to make it so intense man,
but at least one of 'em. I just laughedout loud because it wasn't intense, man.
(50:39):
It was just kind of, okay, cool.
It just felt like it was trying too hard.
When they said that it was going to bethrough the serial killer's eyes or the
slasher eyes,
I thought we were going toget more of a inside his mind
(50:59):
type of situation and not justliterally seeing what he's
seeing. Okay, great. Been there,done that. What's the point?
Every horror movie does this.
It was just so lackluster.And the thing is,
is that they have done thingswhere you've seen behind
(51:22):
the scenes.
So Cabin in the Woods is a great exampleof that where they've taken that behind
the scenes horror and reasons whyit's happening and adjusted that.
And you're seeing it from the other side.
Pearl is another good exampleof that. Pearl Maxine X,
all of that where you're getting theother side of the story and you're seeing
(51:44):
it through somebody else's eyes.
This supposedly they hyped it up to be so
experimental and so differentand it just ended up being the
same shit that we've seen a hundredtimes over. So what was the point?
But not fun like that.
(52:04):
Exactly.
Practic either be.
Fun, the practical effects orhave a point. Ideally both,
but you have to atleast do one of the two.
Yeah.
Right. In the.
Practical effects. I always wish it was,
I almost wish it would've beenlike a choose your own adventure.
He saw three different weaponson the board and it was
like he was going through eachone. Which one should I use?
(52:26):
That kind of thing and make theteenage characters insufferable
so that you just want them todie. That would've been fun.
That would've been different.
That's what I'm until Dawn should havebeen, or at least like an extra mode of.
It.
But they weren't unlikeableenough for you to root for their
(52:49):
demise and you didn't know themwell enough to really be rooting for
them. It felt like it was two differentmovies. There was this awkward.
Doable to kill, not likable enough to die.
Right, exactly. Exactly. And therewas this not likable enough to.
Live. That's what I meant to say.
Yeah.
This sort of 20 something dramedy andthen a serial killer slowly walks up and
(53:12):
murders everybody. And because it was sosomber and it took itself so seriously,
you couldn't even really geek out aboutthe practical effects because the makeup
is really impressive. But when youhave really crazy impressive makeup,
it's supposed to be fun.That's the whole point.
So I dunno,
it was on my mind becauseShutter on New Year's Day,
(53:38):
it was talking about NewYear's resolutions and they had a post on threads,
new Year's resolution to work out more.Don't let a killer crash your routine.
And that's because the big famouskill from this is a yoga kill.
There's a woman doing yoga and
terrible things happen to her. And.
They really had the stretch tomake this related to New Year's.
(53:59):
And that's how they did it.
Yeah.
It just,
and that Kill Won the Ride inChainsaw Award for Best Kill of the
Year. I mean, just to tellyou where my headspace is,
I voted wrote in the Just Can'tGet Enough Kill From Cocaine
Bear, which is magnificent and fun. Ilove that. And objectively a better Kid.
(54:24):
I think so. I think so. But I also.
Holy crap. Can Bear came out this year?
Well, no, but it came outwithin the window. That.
Chain.
I keep forgetting that the JaneSAWawards are in a horrific time
loop from which there isno escape that now. Right.
Exactly. Yeah. And that's one where, yeah,
(54:46):
they used a lot of practical effects,but it was also ridiculous and stupid.
So you could have funwith it. I don't know.
It felt like it was trying too hard.
But I'm also not the super intensetype of horror fan where it has to be
brutal.
I'm trying to think of the last brutalmovie that I saw and actually thought was
brutal and I am coming up empty.
(55:08):
It didn't even need to be brutal though.It just needed to be good or different.
And it wasn't either of those.
And the thing is, it'sokay not to be that,
but then don't billyourself as an incredibly.
Yeah,
that's what I'm getting the most fromy'all's description of this compared to
(55:29):
what I remember with the trailer isjust false advertising or at least
accidental, misleading advertising.
That's exactly what it was.
And Overhype, I think is alot of it too. It was way.
Over was not great about that.
What kills me too is there were so manypeople that saw it and reviewed it and
(55:49):
said all this good shitabout it. And I was like,
were you watching the sameeffing thing that I was?
Have you never seen a slasher before?
Well, and
I think there's sort of a rushto be like any fan culture,
the true fans or the serious fans.
(56:10):
And so you double down to thepoint of overdosing and it's
difficult to tell how much of it'sperformative. Whereas if we say, yeah,
we like this movie, we'vegot nothing to prove.
And maybe we're all to begarbage people. But even so,
we're not trying to impressanybody by how hardcore we are.
(56:31):
And I think a fair amount of fans anda fair amount of reviewers and a fair
amount of movies do try to do that.
Yeah. It's like professionalbarbecuers versus regular,
just people trying to grill.
There's all these rulesthat professional horror,
horror movie reviewers look for in a goodhorror movie that doesn't necessarily
(56:52):
translate to what normalpeople want to watch.
Even normal people that like horror.
And it's the same thing about peoplewho go around and it's like, oh,
you like this singer name threeof their songs? Oh, shut up.
You either like the person or youdon't. You like the movie or you don't.
(57:14):
It's objective.
She's pretty, and.
She.
Wrote one song I like, shut.
Up.
Yeah, exactly.
There you go. There you go.
So there were a few moments that got me,
but I just felt kind of meanwatching this. So terra scale,
I'd probably put it maybe at a two.
I never actually put it on Letterboxedbecause I kept writing the review in my
(57:38):
head and then I got distractedand I'm falling asleep. And then.
Which I would probably put it,
which probably is the letterboxreview in and of itself. Yeah. I mean,
yes, true.
Actually. Yeah.
I can't focus enough on this movieto write a proper letterbox review.
That's pretty.
Scary. Yeah. I mean.
(58:00):
That.
Says something and yeah.
I felt mean watching it andgot distracted. Two stars.
So that's probably where I'd putit for quality and enjoyment.
Not awful, but I don't know.Not great. Could do better.
It wasn't for me. Yeah, it wasn't for me.
(58:21):
So I don't know.
But anyway, other good news, Ididn't get a chance to watch it,
but I did locate the JoeBob Briggs last drive-in
version of Nosferatu,
where he cuts into it Elvirastyle and that is on AMC Plus,
(58:41):
you might be able to getit on normal Amazon too,
depending on your subscriptionsand everything. But I.
Think I still haven't to watch that.Hasn't bothered to cancel my AMC Plus.
So I'll keep an eye out for that.
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to tryto watch that for next week.
I feel like it's a hundred year old movie.
I should really watch the originalbefore I watch the Eggers version.
(59:01):
But if I get a.
Feel, we're not talking for onewatch the one with the silly cut-ins.
Yeah, I.
What made that same judgmentcall with the Elvira episode on
the house that screamed. Yeah.
And that was a good judgment call.
That was a very goodjudgment call. So anyway,
(59:23):
if you're still listening,
leave us a review in Apple Podcastsor Spotify or wherever you happen
to be listening. Shoot us an email,drop us a line, follow us on threads,
tell your friends, tell yourhorror friends about us.
And we'll talk to y'all next week.
And I'm going to push the buttonfor the outro. I can do that.
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