Casting The Net

The Mark Dacascos Retrospective continues this week, as we discuss the anime/manga adaptation Crying Freeman. In the directorial debut of French director Christophe Gans, Dacascos stars as Yoh, a brainwashed assassin who sheds a tear after every kill. Tasked with killing a young woman who's witnessed his latest contract, Yoh instead falls in love with her, and hopes to evade his enemies as well as those who are controlling him...

For the first time since Clarissa (aka The Adorable Lil' Hypebeast) joined the podcast, your intrepid hosts have finally recorded an episode in person, to kick off 2026 right! We tried to hit up as many Philly cheesesteak spots as we could in the city of Brotherly Love, but we quickly learned our eyes were bigger than our stomachs. 

In any event, we're starting the new year by doing a series on the direct-to-video classics...

We're closing out 2025 with a Netflix original film, as director Guillermo Del Toro brings Mary Shelley's science fiction/horror masterpiece Frankenstein to life like you've never seen it before. Oscar Issac stars as as the titular mad scientist, obsessed with creating life from death, only to succeed and ultimately regret his choices, while Jacob Elordi plays his creation, who wrestles with having no choice but to l...

Covering a movie that surprisingly didn't have a wide release when it came out 20 years ago, we're talking about a movie instrumental in Robert Downey Jr's comeback, and the directorial debut of the screenwriter behind Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. After barging in on a movie audition to escape the police, New York City burglar Harry Lockhart is flown out to LA and paired with a private detective to learn the c...

Remember when the director of all those Saw sequels directed a dystopian sci-fi/horror nu-metal musical starring Paul Sorvino, Bill Mosley, Sarah Brightman, Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and PARIS HILTON?!?!? 

This week, we're talking about Repo! The Genetic Opera, a fitting movie given our current healthcare woes, as the story posits a future where countless citizens suffer from organ failure, and have to get replacemen...

The week, we're discussing the maybe-controversial Japanese action thriller from 2000, Battle Royale. Based on the novel by Koushun Takami, a group of high school students believing they're on a class trip are instead taken to an evacuated island and forced to engage in a brutal game of survival over a three-day period. Loyalties and friendships are tested as the classmates must fight each other to the death, for the priv...

You have to hand it to the trailer for War of the Worlds informing audiences of its quality by including the line, "It's worse than you think." We finally got around to discussing one of the most talked about streaming releases of the year, and that talk has not been good, as Ice Cube stars in the latest adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic science fiction tale, as aliens descend upon our planet. Clearly shot durin...

Cast aside by Sony Pictures and rescued by Netflix, we're talking about the monster hit that is K-Pop Demon Hunters, bringing together vibrant animation, surprisingly catchy k-pop tunes and . . . a supernatural battle to protect the souls of all mankind from a horde of demons?!?! K-Pop superstars Rumi, Mira, and Zoey split their time between selling out stadiums and taking don't demons when they're faced with a whole...

Our resident Adorable Lil' Hypebeast Clarissa has us venturing back to Tubi to discuss the 2009 "horror" anthology film, The Telling, starring former Playboy Playmate Holly Madison and produced by fellow Playmate Bridget Marquardt. Forced to change their rules after the suicide of a previous pledge, a vain and vapid sorority forces their current pledges to tell them a collection of scary stories to see who will be wo...

There's been a ton of stops and restarts along the way, times when I thought it would probably be best just to shut the whole thing down, but we finally made it to 200 episodes of Casting The Net! And to celebrate this momentous occasion, we're talking about the sequel to The Guyver, Guyver 2: Dark Hero! Sean Barker is back, facing off against a new army of zoanoids that threaten a team of archeologists who have made a di...

An early 90s anime adaptation starring Mark Hamill as a biomechanical suit wearing superhero?!!? NOPE!!! but the movie cover sure tried to trick folks into thinking that! Other than Mark Hamill NOT being the actual hero of The Guyver, this is one of those straight-to-video adaptations of a Japanese IP that comes courtesy of the folks behind films like Society, Re-Animator, and Faust: Love of the Damned. After finding an alien weapo...

We're finally diving deep into Netflix's Fear Street Trilogy and it is long overdue. Beginning in 1994, we're introduced to the rival towns of Shadyside and Sunnyvale, as a group of high schoolers are being terrorized by ghostly spirits tied the legends of a vengeful witch from the towns' shared history, Sarah Fier. This eventually puts them in contact with a survivor from a camp massacre in 1978 who witnessed a...

Gone far too soon, Val Kilmer recently passed away at the age of 65, and we thought it only fitting to  cover one of his most underrated performances in the David Mamet-directed film Spartan. After the president's daughter is abducted, military instructor Robert Scott is called in to investigate, leading to a series of events uncovering possible corruption within the Secret Service in addition to stumbling upon an internationa...

We've been threatening to cover the Netflix film Uglies for month, and now it's time to make good. Based on the YA dystopian future novel, Joey King stars in this film where all teenagers get operations on their 16th birthday to look more physically attractive and be elevated to a higher societal status, and not be deemed "ugly". But there are those who choose not to have the operation and live out in the woods ...

Realized we had this one in the archives since last fall, but we're finally putting out our episode on Sophia Coppola's The Bling Ring, a dramatization of the true story of a group of teenagers who decided to break into the homes of a handful of young celebrities, seemingly out of sheer boredom. As you can probably guess, the recommendation to cover this came courtesy of the Adorable Lil' Hypebeast herself, who loves...

So how does this straight-to-streaming reboot of the Dark Horse Comics character Hellboy measure up against its two previous theatrically released interpretations? I'm joined on the podcast by my good friend and Hellboy fan Will Austin to discuss Hellboy: The Crooked Man, as our favorite demonic paranormal investigator crosses paths with witches and demons in 1950s Appalachia. Teamed with a rookie agent from the Bureau of Para...

In the wake of The Matrix, A LOT of virtual reality-themed movies went overlooked in the late 90s/early 2000s, but this week we're talking about one of the strangest which came courtesy of one of Canada's most certified freaks David Cronenberg. eXistenZ takes gaming to a new level, but when its game designer and her security detail are targeted by anti-virtual reality extremists, they'll have to go inside her game to...