In this week’s episode, Todd and Craig delve into the 1982 Australian horror film, ‘Next of Kin.’ Directed by Tony Williams and praised by Quentin Tarantino as Australia’s answer to ‘The Shining,’ the film presents a gothic mystery that unfolds in an old house turned care facility.

While Todd appreciates its stylistic cinematography and slow-burn narrative, Craig finds the story less engaging. We duo explore the film’s plot, characters, and unique visual elements, discussing whether it’s a hidden gem or an overlooked oddity.

\Tune in for a thorough analysis and share your thoughts on this intriguing piece of horror cinema!

Episode #454, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast.

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, this week’s movie I chose and I can’t really tell you why. I stumbled across it a little while ago, and I think. I was entranced by the idea that this might be some eighties horror movie that we have overlooked. Quentin Tarantino has cited it as, uh, Australia’s version of The Shining and as extremely complimentary of it.

In fact, apparently based a couple shots in the one of its Kill Bill movies directly on some of the shots in this film. So we hadn’t done an Australian movie, I think in a while, if ever, I can’t remember. But, uh, this is actually an Australian film directed and written by New Zealanders, but it was filmed in Australia, and it is 1982’s, Next Of Kin.

Hadn’t seen it until now. How about you, Craig? Have you ever heard of this one?

Craig: No. I couldn’t even remember what we were doing when I was trying to get ready to watch it yesterday and I pulled it up and I saw next of Ken and I was like, surely not that Patrick Swayze movie. My dad was a big fan of Patrick Swayze’s, like.

Tough guy movies like Roadhouse and Next of Kin, and I thought, surely it won’t be that. And it’s not. And it’s not. I kind of wish it was, to be honest. Oh no. So you weren’t a fan, huh? No, I, I told I texted you. You did. I just don’t get it. And honestly, I, I was watching the movie and I was distracted. There’s a, I’ve got a lot going on, but I kept thinking I must be missing something.

I’m, I’m clearly, I, I looked away at the wrong moment. I’m missing something. And I finished the movie feeling that way, and then I went and read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I was like, no, I don’t think I missed anything. I just don’t get it. Like, as far as the, the narrative is concerned. I get it. I think it’s convoluted.

I just didn’t, you know, I’m a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. I think he’s a weird guy, but I think he makes. Really cool movies. Yeah. So I have a lot of respect for his opinions on film and I get it. Like it’s definitely got a grindhouse feel and it’s shot in such a way that I’m like, I see that, I see where Tarantino’s, you know, taking inspiration from that.

I don’t know, I just, I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get into it. Did you really feel this was grindhouse? Not grindhouse, just No, no, no, no. That’s probably the wrong word. I’d probably throw that word around to, because it’s not like super violent. Maybe just more seventies, the way that it’s shot. Like, yeah. I, I think maybe it’s more the cinematography than.

Any kind of particular genre, but it, it reminded me of other movies that we’ve done that have tried to emulate that, like House of the Devil. Mm. Or, or it reminded me of, I mean, ’cause it’s, it’s kind of, or at least at, at at points you think it is kind of a haunted house kind of movie. It, it kind of reminded me of burnt offerings.

It just had that very seventies feel to it, which. I think Tarantino tries to emulate. Right? He loves that and it’s cool and I like that. So I get where he’s taking inspiration there. As far as it, you know, I read probably the same thing that you did and he talked about it’s pacing and whatnot, and I just, I found the pacing to be really slow.

Sure, yeah. It’s a slow burn. Maybe that was deliberate and that’s fine. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it, but it, it just didn’t do a whole lot for me. I have a feeling you feel very differently. 

Todd: Yeah, I kind of do, but I did sit down. I have to admit, I sat down and watched it. I was already feeling tired, but I had to watch it for.

For us to be, to do this in the morning, and I’m, uh, I’m a little jet lagged as well, so I sat down to watch it and I watched the first hour and I was very focused on the movie. I was by myself. I had it mostly full screen while I was typing notes in on the other side. And after about an hour, in realizing I had about a half an hour left to go and the movie hadn’t really picked up.

You know, right at that point I said, you know what, I’m gonna have to, I’m falling asleep. I love, I liked it. I really was enjoying it, but I, because of the pacing, I was like, I’m gonna have to turn this off and finish it in the morning, which is exactly what I did, and I’m glad I did that because I think I probably would’ve missed things or, you know, or I might have fallen asleep because it doesn’t really kick in.

Until the very end. But you know what, that actually reminds me of a lot of films that we really like. I have, I was getting strong Gilo vibes from this. I think this movie definitely is pulling inspiration from Ello. I think it’s pulling inspiration from Kubrick. I do feel like there’s a lot of the shining inspiration in here.

I thought that the cinematography, and I think it was the cinematography and the style that really pulled me in at first because I was like, this is a really. Really well-made film. The color is gorgeous. The lighting is gorgeous. The camera angles and the way that they, it has a very dynamic camera that moves in very interesting ways, and I was pulled in by that alone.

And I sort of let that wash over me and as it was going on, I said, you know, this is almost, this is almost Susperia. Susperia follows a similar pattern of, it’s very stylish. We’re really in this woman’s head. For the majority of the film, it’s very gothic in scope and in a sense it’s very much like susperia where this woman, it’s about a woman who comes to an old house and creepy things are ha are maybe happening, but there’s not a lot of evidence that anything terribly sinister is going on.

But there’s just, you can tell she’s unsettled and you’re not exactly sure why. Where this is all going until the very end where it kicks into high gear and it turns out, yep, there was a mystery and there was a murder thing happening, and, and now she’s in trouble. And then it gets really intense for, you know, the last, uh, 10 or 15 minutes or so.

And I didn’t mind that at all actually, because, uh. I was really pulled in to the movie before that, just by the setting and the, and the pacing and just this feeling that there is probably something here going on that’s all gonna come together by the end. And did it. I. I think it more or less did. I’ve seen reviews online that said, one I had to pull out.

I think this was just some user review on IMDB, but this person said, next of kin is a slower than slow developing thriller with only a few worthwhile moments, but sadly, a whole lot of pointless filling and meaningless mystery building. I mean. I suppose this, that’s kind of how I feel about it. Frankly.

It’s a take, but you could take that same review and tack it onto The Shining, you know? 

Craig: I don’t know. No, I think The Shining was far more visually stimulating and there was just a lot more. Intrigue. Sure. There, there was a lot more going on and it was far more suspenseful. I didn’t really find this, all that suspenseful.

I, I think to compare it to Susperia as being very generous because I’ve seen Susperia exactly once, probably 20 years ago, but I remember it being highly stylized. And I remember so much going on with, you know, experimenting with color and, and, and, and you said something about the color in this movie.

Nothing stuck out to me in that really way. I mean, I didn’t think it was poorly shot. Wow. I didn’t think it was poorly shot. I just thought it was fairly typical. Oh God. I didn’t feel that way at all. No. Well, you are more of an expert on that kind of stuff than I am. I’m just your casual 

Todd: viewer. I don’t think you have to be an expert.

I mean, either. Either you felt something or you didn’t. I mean, it should be invisible. You know, I, I think there’s an argument that if, if the cinematography calls too much attention to itself, then it takes you out of the story, right? Like, 

Craig: yeah, that’s fine. You 

Todd: don’t want a movie where all you’re doing is, man, that’s a great shot, man.

That’s a great shot, man. That’s a great shot. Instead of just being engrossed in the, in. The film itself and, and letting the shots do their work invisibly. I don’t know. I just thought there were a ton of really amazing shots and it was an interesting use of slow motion. There was a lot of light and shadow play.

I thought that there were some just beautiful camera moves that we’ll probably talk about as we walk through the plot, but 

Craig: maybe you’ll have to. I, I mean, I’m not trying to be contrary, I’m just. Like, yeah, I know. Talking about the, the lighting, there were a couple of scenes that were so dark that I couldn’t see anything at all and I was watching it in the pitch black.

Todd: The sex scene. 

Craig: The sex scene, yes. And at least one other one too. I don’t know. We can, when, when we get to the sex scene, I still thought it was hot. ’cause we can talk about it later, but like, almost. Almost pitch black, at least that one. And then, and again, I’m, this, I’m not being critical. This is a thing that was very typical of these movies.

There were lots of day for night shots that were clearly day for night. Sure. Ew. So I just didn’t, I just wasn’t blown away by it. And I’m, I’m, I’m sitting here and I’m, I’m being critical. I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all. In fact, I think it’s a good movie. It just didn’t. Right. It just didn’t do much for me.

I’m sitting here thinking of the, the comments that I’m gonna get. Like, he’s so stupid. He just didn’t get it and he didn’t give it a chance. Like, I get it. You don’t have to come at me. You don’t have to come at me. You’re probably right. You’re probably right. It’s probably a masterpiece and I just don’t get it.

Well, but I don’t get. 

Todd: No, you’re not the only one that feels that way. So I mean, you know, don’t, don’t self-censor here, bud. We’re okay. I mean, I think, I think this is definitely, and I will say it straight out, I think this is a movie that’s definitely gonna appeal to some people and it’s gonna not appeal to others.

And I don’t think it’s quite as universal as The Shining, which just kind of everybody loves, because you’re right, there’s a lot more intrigue inserted in there. And this one is a far slower burn. There’s not a lot of mystery left at the end of the day. Whereas with The Shining, you know, you’re just kind of left with so many questions.

Craig: But with The Shining too, I feel like the source material is so good. Like it’s a, a really interesting, and, I mean, haunted houses aren’t original, but it’s a, a fairly original take on it. Yeah. And this story. Ultimately typical. It’s, it’s typical. And it’s also, I would say it’s more typical for film than it is for literature.

Maybe that’s a difference between the two also, but it’s convoluted. Like you can put all the pieces together, but ultimately it’s. Stupid. Now, wait a second. 

Todd: When you said this is more typical film than literature, I found this to be just a gothic tale through and through. I mean, 

Craig: come on, I’m talking very sp not, not necessarily in, so I’m talking specifically in plot and I, I guess you’re right.

I, I, okay. So the closest thing that I would. Compare it to, off the top of my head would be Jane Eyre. Yes. Where spoiler alert for Jane Eyre, if you care about, you know, Victorian literature. But it’s this romance between this girl and this handsome, wealthy, aloof man. And this girl keeps thinking, she’s like seeing this ghostly woman around.

And he’s like, no, no, you’re, you’re crazy. It’s nothing. And then finally she finds woman being kept captive. In the attic. Yep. And it’s his crazy ex-wife who he keeps locked in the attic. I would say that. In terms of story, this is somewhat similar. Like it’s kind of seems like it’s one thing for a while and then it, I don’t know.

I, I thought that the big reveal at the end I thought was just kind of 

Todd: corny. Well, woman gets a letter that now her mother is dead and the inheritance of the mansion that her mother owned is now hers. She goes off to the mansion out in the countryside. Lots of rain and storms and things like that.

There’s uh, some red, that location was gorgeous, by the 

Craig: way. It was, it was, it was, uh, man, this big Ivy covered tan brick mansion. It was, it was so cool. 

Todd: It’s funny, this is an Australian movie because this is not what you think of Australia, you know? This looks like an English countryside type manner or whatever it does.

And then comes and then it turns out her family has secrets. There’s history, there’s a diary that she discovers, you know, that she reads about her mother, which, uh, alludes to secrets in the family past. There’s like memories of hers as a child that are suddenly coming to the forefront based on things that she’s finding in.

There 

Craig: were those diaries lined up like encyclopedias. Labeled by year and printed on the bookshelf. 

Todd: And that was, I was, I’d like to think you could probably buy a blank, uh, diary that is printed and embossed with your name and the year on it, you know, that you could fill in. I suppose that’s a thing. 

Craig: I just loved the idea of them being like an like encyclopedia, like she’s pulling them down by year and apparently this woman wrote in her diary from the time she was very, very young because she, the, one of the first things that she reads is like.

Did she have a sister? She has a sister, right? Or 

Todd: something. Her mother or her. 

Craig: Her mother? 

Todd: Yes. Her mother has a, yeah, she has an aunt. That’s key to the whole story. Yeah. 

Craig: Right. But I was a little bit confused by that. But she talks about how she and her sister were talking about how they’d like to make the house an, I think they call it an old folks home, which is what I would probably call it too.

But that’s maybe not the nicest thing to say, and it is. So, so when she inherits it, it’s not just a big house for her to live in. It’s actually care facility, 

Todd: right? There’s still residents in there. Quite 

Craig: a few, yeah. But it looks like a nice place and it’s ran by this woman named Connie and some doctor.

And I didn’t write down anybody, any of the actors’ names ’cause they didn’t know any of them until I read the trivia because eventually, and this happens a little bit later, she gets established in the house. Kind of weird things start happening, but eventually she. Meets up with this guy that she knew apparently before she left Barney, who’s played by John Jarrett, who is from probably the only, or at least the biggest Australian horror franchise, the Wolf Creek franchise.

He’s the bad guy in that movie. It’s crazy. Yeah. He’s very young and very handsome. Here, but he’s good looking in those movies. I mean, that’s, that’s part of what makes him a good villain. Is he True initially comes across as kind of very charming. I, I feel like you’re not a big fan of those movies. I liked them.

Todd: I think. Yeah, you probably remember I said I, I absolutely hated the, I mean, we are gonna have to do at some point, and maybe I’ll revise my feelings about it after. 450 horror movies under my belt. Right. But I just remember thinking that was the most, um, just a brutal movie with just celebrated brutality.

And there, there was, didn’t have much else going for it. That’s, that’s how I felt about it. 

Craig: I disagree, but I think it’s a fair, or I think it’s a fair assessment. But, but what did I skip? I mean, the mom’s diary also, uh, new, a new resident shows up. 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. A new resident shows up and she’s a little creeped out by that, but you don’t really know why.

You know it’s just a woman being pushed in a wheelchair by a younger man who, uh, yeah. But weird 

Craig: stuff happens. Like, yeah, lightning strikes a tree that falls right in front of the car that’s bringing the new resident. I’m like, well, that seems ominous, by the way. How did that, how did they do 

Todd: that? I don’t know.

That was amazing. That was a straight on shot, no cutaways. A medium shot of this van pulling up and lightning strikes this tree and it falls down in front of it. It was so convincing and I, I just was just like, how did they do that? It’s not animated, I don’t think. It wasn’t, I thought it was cool. But Yeah, yeah, you’re right, you’re right.

I, I didn’t think about that, but yeah, that was a bad omen. And he pulls her out of the car and sticks a wheelchair out and pulls her outta the car, puts her in the wheelchair, but then they can’t get the wheelchair going. So then Connie just comes out with an umbrella, ushers her in with a, with a cane.

Right. 

Craig: But, but the other ominous thing that immediately happens is they. Somehow get locked out of the house. 

Todd: Oh yeah. 

Craig: Like the door slams and they get locked out and somebody has to come let them out from inside. Now, I don’t know if. They were going for this, but I mean, ultimately you could make an argument that it would make sense, like something is trying to keep them out.

Hmm. 

Todd: That’s a good point. Although, you know, this is kind of downplayed because we don’t really see much of, well we don’t really don’t see any of this woman again. 

Craig: No. 

Todd: We see the guy again. She’s just a very 

Craig: un she’s just an old woman in a wheelchair. Yeah, I, I thought her son. Seemed like a weirdo from the beginning.

I’m like, oh, who’s this weirdo? 

Todd: He’s like the first person I suppose that we can attribute to who is this strange figure that she keeps seeing. She keeps seeing this strange figure usually in silhouette, in the distance somewhere, maybe outside in the woods, maybe she sees figures in the, in the garden.

When she’s upstairs looking out her window, she sees a figure in the window at some point once or twice. So there’s this kind of idea she’s being watched 

Craig: or. That she’s crazy. Yes. Or that the house is haunted because her mom’s diary says that she has seen somebody wa seen and heard somebody wandering around the house, which when 

Todd: you think about it, I mean, it’s an old folks home.

I mean, like if there’s a whole bunch of people living in there, you know, it’s not like you’re by yourself and you hear. Creepy footsteps and things. Well, 

Craig: when people say that to her, like when, when she says to Connie or whatever that lady’s name is, like, you know, I, I heard somebody walking around. Well, yeah, that was probably Mr.

So-and-so, he walks around at night, like there’s another part where she walks into a bathroom and all of the faucets are running and the, the sink and the tub are overflowing, and that’s spooky or whatever. And Connie’s like, well. I guess it must have been one of the residents, like 

Todd: Yeah, 

Craig: it, it’s, it’s 

Todd: all easily explained.

Exactly, which I liked. I mean, I thought that was good. You, it’s subtle, but, but you know, then you can just say, well, not a lot happens, right? I mean, you’re either gonna be kind of creeped out by it or be a little intrigued by what could be going on, or you just be like, all right, well, show me the, show me the interesting stuff.

I, I think one of the more. Interesting things that happens is that at some point she gets in her car and drives away, and as she’s going down the road, that guy is leaving with the van, that young guy who had dropped off the resident and he pulls up beside her and it’s hard to tell if he’s like. Trying to hit on her if he’s trying to drop her off the road, if he’s just weird, but they exchanged some looks and he seems to be just wanting to ride alongside her for a while, and he’s giving her this creepy grin and eventually he just pulls ahead and disappears.

Craig: No, that that 

Todd: scene was ridiculous. 

Craig: I would’ve called the police. Like I don’t even know if I, I don’t care if that was my sister. Yes, he was. He pulled first. He ran right up on her in the back and then veered around next to her. Now I think, I may be mistaken, but I think this is a dirt road is around on dirt roads.

No. Yeah, and he’s in a huge van, a huge full size. Seventies rape van with the, like, I think the windows all blacked out. Right? And she’s just in a regular car and he’s not, I mean, yeah, he’s just kind of looking at her like, ha ha, isn’t this funny? But then he’s all, he’s veering towards her a little bit more than once.

I mean, it’s not a little bit like, oh, oh, just a little bit. Well, no big deal in his huge van on a dirt road going 40 miles an hour. He’s just veering towards her a little bit. That’s. Yeah. That’s funny. It’s hard to tell, but then she acts like, I don’t feel, I don’t think she ever mentions it again. Exactly.

Well, that was a weird thing that 

Todd: happened. Yeah. Well, one thing about this girl that I liked is that she’s kind of a blank slate like. You could maybe even say she was a flat character, but I would just say she’s an everyday person. She’s just kind of an ordinary gal, and there’s nothing wrong with that, you know?

In fact, maybe that’s a good thing because it gives her this credibility. We don’t have any real reason to believe she’s crazy. No, except for the fact that weird things are happening and. It could just be her, but there’s nothing to indicate that she’s got some, her, she herself has this weird past or whatnot, but she is having these dreams, right?

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: She’s having these dreams of, and that are getting more, more intense of her as a child. And so you solely start to realize that she’s had experience in this house as a kid. I thought it was interesting that, you know, she’s going through the house at one point, she goes up to the attic, she picks up a ball that’s like a, it’s like a red volleyball, and then seems interested in it, but then tosses it aside and you’re, I’m just kinda like, what’s that about?

And later in her dream we realized, or maybe she. Remembers for the first time, which is, I think what it is, is oh, maybe that triggered something in her memory, because as a girl, she played with that ball. Mm-hmm. 

Craig: There was some discussion that somebody in the mom’s diary it, it, it talked about who gave her that ball.

It was some man, I don’t remember who it was and I don’t know that it’s necessarily important, but yeah, we’re told about it and then we see it eventually. So like we see it a few times I feel like, but eventually, like, and it’s always just her in this hallway. This hallway in the house where she is now, and it’s exactly the same now as it was then.

But eventually she like ends up in the bathroom and the shower curtain is pulled, but she throws the ball into the tub and when she goes to retrieve it, she finds a bloated. Dead guy there. Yeah. But then that happens in real time too. 

Todd: We see that dream in pieces. We don’t see that she has actually discovered a bloated dead body until much later in the movie when other stuff has happened.

And so the idea is that this girl had some kind of trauma that was directly connected to this house when she was a girl. She just forgot about it. I mean, what’s kind of, what’s more gothic than that? You know? I mean, right. It’s something that haunts her and she’s, up until that point, she’s not quite sure.

Why she’s so afraid of the hallway and why these things that are just unsettling her so much until one of the residents that she’s kind of friendly with named Lance. I think she has a history with him too, right? ’cause she immediately, maybe 

Craig: he gave her the ball. I don’t know. You 

Todd: might be him, right?

Because what? She’s one of the first people we see. She has a fondness for him. Yeah. And he’s an older guy who’s getting along. Seems to be okay, but. There’s a scene later where he gets in the bathtub of, I guess this is a shared bathroom. Yeah. On this hallway. It must be. I think so. And he gets in the bathtub.

I thought this was a very creepy scene. Again, a little reminiscent of the shining in some ways. Yeah, it was creepy. He’s taking his clothes off and he goes to step in. By the way, shot for shot. This whole sequence was gorgeous. Like so Well done. 

Craig: Yeah, it, it looked really good. 

Todd: He steps into the tub and then we see underwater his foot step onto this bloated dead body.

Mm-hmm. Which was so shocking. That was creepy. And then we see it from above. And then there’s this immediate transition, which is. Incredible. From above where they are now. She’s not there. She’s off seeing Barney, but it’s, uh, Connie and, and a bunch of the other people, including this doctor who we haven’t mentioned yet, who, uh, is taking him out of the tub and checking his body so he’s dead.

So it turns out, as she’s reading the diary, this is not the first time someone had been found dead in the top. Mm-hmm. In fact, it’s not even like the third or fourth time. No.

So indeed that sent, I think, I think that event happening, pieced together with her, reading her mother’s account, completes the memory for her. And then we see that she, in fact, had discovered someone in the tub. That’s right. At first when she was a girl. So, uh, you know, that’s intriguing, right? So it’s starting to build towards something, but gosh, it takes a while to get there.

But it is dropping, you know, little bits and pieces in place so that, I think when we do get to that moment, I felt satisfied. I thought, oh, okay. Now we’ve, we’ve found out what the dreams are about. Now I understand the connection between this ball and why she. Freaked out. I guess I would be too, if I had repressed memories of finding a dead body while I was playing around in this house when I was a girl, I 

Craig: suppose.

I mean, that’s mostly the exciting stuff that happens in the beginning. I mean, more spooky stuff keeps happening, but then there’s a little interlude where she meets her man, I guess. Barney. Barney, 

Todd: yeah. 

Craig: John Jarrett, who, again, very handsome, very charming, 

Todd: favorite 

Craig: part of the movie. Um, yeah, and they, they hang out.

They. Go swimming. They visit the her mom’s grave and she says something like, my mom and I had a weird relationship. She had secrets. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Craig: Okay. So there’s some, there’s some kind of history with the mom, which also is very. To me ambiguous. Uh, I don’t know. 

Todd: Yeah, you do kind of wonder, well, what happened?

What, when did you not, did you just grow up and then move or, yeah. Like 

Craig: why did she leave? 

Todd: Yeah. Right. Like 

Craig: they, they make a big deal out of the fact that she left. I mean, people remember her, you know, she’s got this guy that she clearly has history with. Other people remember her from when she was young, but at some point she left and never came back.

And I think that they say like, she never even like called or like, yeah, she completely separated herself from it. Why, like, 

Todd: good question. 

Craig: I, I, I don’t think that’s ever explained 

Todd: true. 

Craig: And, and that’s fine ’cause it’s not really all that important. Whatever. She’s back now. But again, they’re hanging out and they’re just like traipsing through the woods and she thinks she sees somebody watching them.

And we do too. Are we seeing from her perspective, is this an objective perspective? We don’t know. But when she points it out to Barney, he doesn’t see anything and he goes and checks and there’s nobody there. Yeah. So again, there’s all these, I’m gonna go ahead and call them Mr. X, because I feel like we’ve already alluded to the fact that there is something going on.

Todd: Right. 

Craig: But up until this point, we don’t know. She could just be crazy. 

Todd: Yeah. Probably about halfway through the movie at this point, when everyone leaves on a, on a scenic tour somewhere, basically. Yeah, everybody, it’s convenient way to get everyone out. Mostly everyone outta the house, they’re, they’re all getting on the bus except for LANs.

This is weird. This is when things started to get really strange, right? 

Craig: I, yeah, I feel like, are you jumping ahead? ’cause I don’t feel like they all leave yet, but I thought you were just talking about how like Barney goes off to a party with another girl. 

Todd: Oh yeah, Carol, that’s true. There’s the whole Carol thing, which I don’t get.

Craig: And then there’s like Linda overhears, Connie, the woman who. Is kind of the head nurse or something, I guess. And, and the doctor who we haven’t talked about much, I mean he seems, he’s very friendly with her, with Linda and Nice. He doesn’t seem threatening or to have any agenda, but she overhears those two talking about some sh Should we tell her, 

Clip: shouldn’t we tell Linda at least what for?

It’s just a coincidence if you are sure. I was here then you weren’t 

Craig: trust me. So I again, ultimately I don’t really know what they were talking about. I do. Okay. Well then maybe you can reveal it at the appropriate time. Yeah, yeah. But it just seems very suspicious to her. And then she starts looking through records, like through a ledger, and she keeps seeing this name of like Dr.

Rb with like Rita in. Parentheses and I didn’t know, like did she already know who that person was? 

Todd: Yeah, she did, but we, we have no idea. That’s maddening. ’cause it takes a while for her to bring it up, I guess if we were really paying attention. She does refer to her Aunt Rita once or twice, I mean, early when she finds a diary, one of the first things she sees is a photo of her, her mom and her mom’s sister together as, as girls.

And some one or two lines that her mom references her sis. But that’s about it. You’re right. She sees that in there. And so we put a pin in that until later and this morning everyone goes on this tour bus and Linda can’t find Lance, 

Craig: you are, you are. So excited to get to that tour, and I’m not exactly sure why, but there, there was a whole series then of very, of spooky things that happened that ultimately nothing came of like there’s cat scares and she hears like she’s on the phone with Barney and then he gets cut off and she hears heavy breathing on the other line.

Yeah. 

Todd: And the in the water. Water in her bath, in her bathroom, I mean, 

Craig: right. She has another, the water in the bathroom, she has another dream where she sees like the naked guy outside her window, but like it’s water and he’s swimming and then, oh, that was cool. And then somebody actually does sneak into her room and you don’t know who it is, but it just turns out it’s Barney.

And that’s when they have that sweaty. Sex. Sex scene. 

Todd: Yeah. Okay. Can I, can I talk about the tour now? 

Craig: Well, I wanted, I, I wanted to mention the sex scene because it was so dark and I was all you could see, and to be, again, I’ll, I’ll admit I found it kind of sexy. All you could see was the glisten. Of their skin.

Yeah. And the fine glisten of the fur of his back.

And so it was just kind of like a, like silvery silhouettes, uhhuh. That you could see. But I was disappointed because it looked really sexy and I wanted to see more of it. But 

Todd: your mind filled in the blanks a little bit, I’m sure. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I’ll be on this. No, I did too. I wanted to see more of her and, and, and it’s funny, she takes her shirt off a couple times and takes some showers in here, but they’re very modest about the nudity.

I mean, there’s just like a little side boob once or twice, and that’s it. 

Craig: Yeah. She takes off her clothes a couple of times, wants to get dressed, and wants to get in and out of the shower, but I don’t think you ever see her from the front. No. I think, uh, she’s always shot from the back. 

Todd: It’s very tasteful.

You know, that kind of el I would say kind of elevates in a way the, not, not the tasteful movies can’t have nudity in them. Absolutely not. But, you know, you know. Right. Just kind of like separates it from Grindhouse there, for example. Fair. Yeah. I, yeah. Yeah. But okay. So yeah, you’re right. So all this happens and there’s these creepy things and stuff, and my point is, we’re halfway through the movie now, so it’s, it is a slow burn, but it’s not like a whole bunch of stuff doesn’t happen.

You know, before we get to the 45 minute mark, you know, which I’m just addressing, like that comment I read from. From online. I mean, either you’re intrigued by it, you’re happy to get these things dripped out to you and, and trusting that they’re all gonna make more sense later, or, you know, you’re getting impatient.

And I think I can feel that I would watch this movie in a different setting, maybe in a different mood, and I would maybe fall on the more impatient side. I can totally get that 

Craig: I was on the impatient side because it’s, you know, I just listed off a bunch of things that happen, but they all just seem random and ultimately they are Whoa.

Not really. I mean, you know, we, well, we, we keep, they all have a drawing comparisons to the Shining in, in, in the Shining, the things that happen. I don’t know, you know, I’m such a fan of that movie and I’ve seen it a bazillion times. Maybe if I was seeing it now for the first time, I would feel differently.

But it seemed like all of those things were connected, like they were all building. Towards something or 

Todd: they are in this movie too. But I just think The Shining is more focused because it’s just three people. Yeah, that’s fair. It’s three people in an empty house. It doesn’t bring in their family history real.

I mean, you know, it’s the alcoholism, whatnot. What is they? Yeah. But you know, aside from that, like that’s really not. There’s no mystery there to unpack. It’s just like this house is slowly getting to them, to this guy in its way. And, uh, you know, this I think is just, again, it’s just more of a gothic mystery where there’s a past and it’s coming back into the present to haunt this person, and it’s all gonna come to a head and, and become present, you know?

So, yeah, I just think it’s a different kind of narrative than the shiny, I guess. That’s fine. 

Craig: It does. I mean, it does all ultimately kind of tie together. I just think that the way that it ties together is silly. Like, 

Todd: okay, 

Craig: the person who. Or. Person, persons, whatever, who are responsible for all these weird things happen, just happen to be like bathroom obsessed generationally.

Todd: Right. 

Craig: They had a definite modus operandi, didn’t they? Okay, that’s fine. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, so then they, all the old folks get on a bus. 

Todd: You’re right. Thank you. Finally, Jesus, all the old folks get on a bus, but this is the whole reason I just wanted to jump here is because this is where everything I think starts to pick up and get even more strange.

And there’s some things here that I am not even sure I understand. Linda can’t find Lance since he discovered the body. I think he’s had a bit of a stroke and so it doesn’t seem like he’s gonna go on the trip, but he is. In the fountain and he fishes a red hat out of the fountain, which must be very important because there’s slowmo, there’s a nice bit of slowmo use in this movie that I really like.

But um, he fishes this red hat out of the, outta the fountain and she sees it and she’s disturbed by it. I was thinking, don’t look now right away. Yeah. Absolutely, and I was again later too. I have to think that this movie is just deliberately putting some nods towards that. I don’t know. I don’t, I still know what the deal was with that Red Hat.

I don’t know why there’s a Red Hat. I do. Was that supposed to be Connie’s? Carol’s? Carol’s? 

Craig: I mean, it was Carol’s. Carol’s, yeah. Carol Carol was the girl. She’s not even a character in the movie. She’s just. This girl who shows up and takes the boyfriend to a party. Oh, she was wearing it and she was wearing it.

Oh. And then soon after this, and I may be jumping ahead a little bit, but it, it connects it. Soon after this, Linda is in her room and she hears a car horn honk. She looks out out of her window and it’s. Carol’s red convertible, and Carol is in it, but somebody else is driving. The camera does not zoom in on it.

We only see it from the same distance that Linda sees it, but I thought it looked like Carol’s head was tilted way back and I was like, is is she dead? Oh, and Linda runs down, but as she runs down the car speeds away and then she goes and talks to Connie and she’s like, 

Clip: did you see who was driving Carol just now?

Was she here? Of course. She was here a be was in the pond this morning. Oh, there was someone in the house last night. Someone turned off the lights and all the taps in my room were left running. Why would she do that? She, you said Carol was here. It’s probably one of the old folk. 

Craig: Carol was dead in that car.

Todd: Oh yeah. 

Craig: I’m almost a hundred percent sure. And then later when she’s running around in the last part of the movie, she stumbles upon Carol’s dead body. In the fountain. 

Todd: Yeah. With 

Craig: its with her 

Todd: throat cut. That was real poetic. I don’t know why the killer decided to bring Carol’s body back here and, uh, throw it in the fountain at that particular moment.

I don’t either. I, I first thought that that was Connie actually cut. By the throat, because that was the only thing that made sense to me at the moment. But yeah, you’re right. It, it’s definitely Carol. Okay, so it’s, there’s a little premonition too. Yeah, it’s a little bit like, don’t look now in that way as well, I guess.

Yeah. Okay. So, but while she’s out there talking with Connie in the laundry, which again. Some very inspired shots here as well. You know, it’s very evocative of trying to work your way through a maze the way that they’re talking to each other. But there are these multiple lines of sheets hung up between them and they’re kind of walking in and amongst them, but never really in this.

Same. Mm-hmm. Line. You’re always separated. There’s this one point where it’s just made perfectly clear that there’s a wall between them, which I alludes to the psychological wall between I, I just thought that was such a great bit and Connie is like shady. Totally shady. Yeah. I mean, you could say maybe she’s not, but she feels really shady here and she asked Connie about Aunt Rita.

She says, why didn’t anyone tell me Aunt Rita was dead? Because she had just come from. Lance’s room, and she asked Lance about Aunt Rita. Do you remember Aunt Rita when she died? And Lance says, not dead. Uhhuh not dead. So now she’s confused. Is Aunt Rita not dead after all? And she asked Connie why did tell when?

And she’s like, well, she isn’t, she. And she is. Okay. So then she goes to visit the doctor about Aunt Rita. And the doctor too is, feels very shady about this. Um, but ultimately his explanation is just like Lance is just an old man and, and he’s confused and he is living in the past sometimes. But no, you know, your mother couldn’t cope because your aunt was a very, very sick woman.

And Aunt Rita had to be sent away to a home, and that’s where she died. She couldn’t handle her illness anymore. 

Craig: Right. 

Todd: And she’s like, but I saw that you, that even up till recently. In the ledger payments have been being made to her in your name, and that’s what you know was in the ledger. That’s where we finally figure out the significance of that, and the doctor’s just like, uh, yeah, I don’t know.

Now it’s starting to coalesce around this mystery of Aunt Rita. Maybe Aunt Rita’s not dead after all. And what does that mean? Is that the figure she thinks she’s seeing and all this stuff and immediately she pulls up to the house a little bit later and through her window blurred by a sprinkler. It’s funny, she stops in the driveway right where a sprinkler is going over her windshield and as it kind of swipes away in between the swipes, she looks and she sees, thinks she sees up in the corner of a window on like the second or third floor, I think in her room, a figure who was wearing a red coat.

Again, so much like. Don’t look now, and she runs up into the house and looks for it. I’m like, okay, we’re an hour in. Finally we’re getting somewhere. She goes in the room, looks inside, can’t find anyone, only Connie is there and she’s like, oh, it’s only, you know us. And Lance, Connie seems super shady. Mm-hmm.

Linda finally finds the red coat sitting there in the room and it’s on top of an open page in the diary. And what a cool transition this is like, she picks up this diary and she’s reading it, and this is referring to the events of. Of like 20 years ago. And there’s this cool bit where she’s reading the diary and the camera pans through the wall to the other room where Connie is standing there kind of pacing and looking out the window as well as she’s reading it.

And this is where the diary is explaining the strange noises in the house, lights going on and off. Doors opening and closing. You know, her mom’s able people dying in the 

Craig: bathroom. 

Todd: Yeah, she’s something is evil. And so then this is where we get that flashback to Linda as a child where we’ve realized that she has in fact discovered a body.

Dead when she was there. Three found dead in the bathroom in the past, I think. And so now Linda’s on a mission, right? She’s gotta figure out, is this happening again? Why? Why is it now happening again? What’s going on? So she runs into what I thought was the doctor’s office. Maybe it was, maybe it’s Connie’s office, I don’t know.

And while the doctor and Connie are occupied. In fact, they, they p she, she grabs like some records off the top. This is so typical, right? Going through old records and, uh, listing the different causes of death. She overhears the doctor telling Connie perhaps she found out I was lying. 

Craig: Yeah. It seems very conspiratorial.

Yeah. Like they’re conspiring against her somehow. Well, 

Todd: it very much 

Craig: is 

Todd: really in a way 

Craig: kind of, but I, I don’t even understand why I, I don’t understand what. Uh, they’re keeping something from her and I don’t understand why. 

Todd: Well, I’ll tell you why. Because the doctors listed these odd reasons for death here.

The doctor’s been covering up, okay? The doctor in the past has been covering up, and so he is still kind of covering up again, you know, to kind of. Save face for the family or to kind of brush things away for the family. 

Craig: Okay. And for the facility, I suppose? Mm-hmm. Okay. So all those people who died in the bathroom, he was making up fake causes of death.

Correct. Like 

Todd: coma. 

Craig: That makes sense. I mean, I guess it kind of, it kind of makes sense. I mean, ultimately. Ugh. Anyway, carry on. We’ll, we’re, we’re, we’re leading right up to it anyway, but go 

Todd: ahead. Well, this is great. This is where Linda freaks out, like she thinks she’s kind of sorted it. And so she runs out.

There’s this great sweeping shot. As she tears off outside of the, out of the house, there’s this great sweeping shot down the hall past the doctor, past Connie, up to Lance, peeking through the door. I mean, I would steal shots from this movie if I were to ever make another movie. I just thought this was so great.

She gets in her car, she runs to Barney, or who’s in this fire brigade meeting. It’s so funny that she can interrupt this meeting and they just kind of like talk over her. Carry on. Yeah. 

Craig: Like maybe that’s she and, and she is a mess. Like she’s filthy. Yeah. Like she, she’s just run through the woods. She’s run and she must have fallen several times because she’s just.

Covered in dirt and like there’s dirt all over her face and her hair is a mess. And she walks in and she’s acting crazy and they all just ignore her. 

Todd: Is this an Australian thing? Is this a cultural thing? We don’t get, you know, maybe the politeness of just like, you know, carry on and let the crazy person be crazy until it affects us.

Craig: I like that part, but doesn’t nothing come of it. Doesn’t he just take her back? That like. Well, this is the beginning of the end really. She’s like, something’s going on. And he’s like, okay, let me take you home. And like they just go back there, right? 

Todd: Yeah, yeah. She sends him in to collect the paper. He’s like, well, you know, we can get the papers.

And she’s like, they’re down there in the thing. And he is like, all right, let’s go. And she’s like, I would rather not go in. Can you just do it? So he goes in, you know, he’s being the calm. Reasonable boyfriend where she’s clearly having this panic attack. And then there’s just this beautiful sequence where she’s just outside and she’s kind of looking around and there’s this fountain there.

There’s this stream of water spraying up outta the fountain, and she’s looking at it, and then suddenly the stream of water turns red. And we look at the fountain and we see the fountain is covered with blood. And I thought she was imagining this. Mm-hmm. But somehow while she was standing there, apparently somebody slipped, slipped Connie’s body into the fountain right there in front of her, Carol.

Carol, sorry Carol. This is the typical, you know, run around and find the bodies at the end kind of deal. 

Craig: Yeah, I, I loved that, that that shot of Carol with her throat cut was beautiful. I mean, it was gruesome obviously, but it was a beautiful shot. But I love, this is an an old school thing too that I love when you see these kinds of practical effects on people, and she’s obviously meant to be dead and her heartbeat was so evident.

Yeah. Throat, well, 

Todd: like her 

Craig: throat 

Todd: was just pulsing. I thought she was just freshly dead. ’cause I saw the pulsing. I thought she was gonna run up and try to help her. And then when she keep, when she runs away, I was like, wait a minute. Wasn’t that woman like dying back there because I saw her, her neck moving.

Craig: No, she was for sure meant to already be dead. She was dead a long time ago when she was in the car. I’m pretty sure. Yeah. 

Todd: Now it makes sense. You had to explain that bit to me. I didn’t quite get all that. 

Craig: The, the next part that I found really surprising is because Barney doesn’t come out. She goes in and she’s like Barney and she’s looking all around and she is standing in one room and she looks across the room and there’s like an open door, but it’s dark in there so she can’t see anything.

But then a wheelchair comes rolling out at her really fast. With dead Barney in it. Yes. Like 

Todd: that was fast. I 

Craig: was 

Todd: shocked. I was too, I was shocked. And it that kind of hits the step or whatever, and flies up and over her. Oh my gosh. How didn’t we just recently see something where a body kind of improbably fell over somebody?

Oh, was the girl? I don’t remember. It was the girl in the basement of, of Dolly Dearest. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But yeah, she’s freaking out. See, this, to me, this was where I felt very susperia because the angles, the light, especially the color and everything, it just, it got very, very stylish, really, really fast. Here.

And I liked it. I thought there were a lot of red lights coming in with a little bit of blue and the, and the darkness and the shadows and, oh, I, I, I just love this bit. But yeah, this is the panic bit. And then she runs into Lance’s room and he’s still in there and there is somebody running after her in the hallway.

You, you can just hear the steps for sure. So she quickly barricades the door and somebody’s banging on the door and she ushers lance out the window slash fire escape 

Craig: and he gets away. I thought that was really sweet. Yeah, it was like she makes sure she gets him out of there. Mm-hmm. And he does. He goes down the fire escape.

We never see him again. Presumably he’s fire at this point. She’s running around, she’s getting chased. She runs into another room. This is when you see an old woman silhouetted from behind. 

Todd: Well, first. No, you were right. I think you were about to say she finds the key and locks the door. She does. Okay.

Because there’s still somebody out there pounding on the door and they try it again. And there’s this really, really suspenseful moment where she’s up against the door, she locks it, she’s trying to do it quietly. ’cause it sounds like whoever was chasing her was down the hall. But clearly they can. He they could hear it because there now there are slow steps toward the door and then somebody tries the, the knob.

And I actually, you, you could see the, the key turn a little bit. I thought maybe they were gonna unlock it from the other side. Oh, right. Yeah. But then you’re right. No, once it seems like she’s okay, she turns around and looks into the room and like you say, there is a silhouette of somebody in there. I was shocked by that.

I, that, that scared me a bit. Well, 

Craig: I don’t know. I mean, it was spooky, but I was like, okay. He, this is it. This is where we’re gonna find out what’s going on. And it is, but it was giving me very shoot psycho vibes. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking, who is the Norman Bates under this wig? 

Todd: Mm. 

Craig: And I would’ve rathered it been someone else.

You know, like I, I would’ve rather it have been more of a surprise, more of a shock. I would’ve rather it have been the doctor or Connie, or, I don’t know. It just ends up being Aunt Rita who. Was in disguise as that old woman who we saw brought in at the very beginning of the movie and never saw again since then.

Mm-hmm. Now we’ve read all about this history and the doctor said she was crazy and you know, we had to send her away. And if you, as you just did for me a couple minutes ago, if you put all the pieces together. Apparently it was Aunt Rita that was killing everybody and they were covering up for her, but to save face and to eliminate the problem, they sent her away.

But she’s pissed because she feels like this is her place too. And so now she’s come back with her son. Oh yeah. I wasn’t sure who this guy was. Maybe. Maybe. Or was this 

Todd: just some other loon that she like hooked up with at the loony van? That was the most frustrating part about this whole thing is we still don’t know who this freaking guy is.

Was he killing for her? You know, I, I just, 

Craig: I think so. 

Todd: In 

Craig: the past 

Todd: though, 

Craig: or just. No, probably not. I don’t know. Yeah. I’m just making this up in my head now. I like, I just kind of went along with it like, oh, she has a son. I, I, but they, I mean, the son was never mentioned by the doctor or by the diary and like it in the 

Todd: IMDB.

It gives him a name and says it is her son. Uh, okay. 

Craig: Well that’s fine. 

Todd: Kelvin. 

Craig: I would prefer to think that they put her away in a loony bin and she recruited some other loony to break her out and bring her here, but, 

Todd: mm-hmm. 

Craig: Whatever, who cares? They’re there and they’re pissed and they’re trying to kill everybody.

Todd: Well, he’s a loon because, you know, he’s got a hammer and he’s, he ends up getting in the door and he comes in and he’s more tormenting her than anything at first. Like she’s backed up against the foot of the bed and he’s like crouch in front of her, like, 

Craig: yeah. And he’s got like a mallet and he’s kind of like menacing her with it.

Todd: Oh, that’s so dumb. I, 

Craig: but yeah, he’s just crazy. 

Todd: Yeah. She overpowers him, ends up running into the bathroom and comes into the doc. I think both doctor and. Connie at this point are dead in the tub. Right? 

Craig: Oh, I only noticed the doctor, but you’re probably right. Yeah. But it’s very, it’s, it’s gross. It’s like, oh yeah.

A display like it, like a display of bodies. It’s disgusting. It looks fantastic. It does. 

Todd: I could, again, I couldn’t help but think black Christmas, there’s just so many things. Maybe we just see so many movies. Yeah. That there’s hardly anything original anymore. But this woman is looking through, you can see her eye looking through the keyhole.

I 

Craig: actually really liked this part, so Linda is standing. On one side of the door holding it, propping it shut with her body. And there’s that gross display of bodies on the other side of the room, like in the bathtub. And you hear crazy Rita say, I can see you. And Linda looks across the room and sees the bathroom mirror and I think through the bathroom mirror she.

See Rita’s eye in the keyhole. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. So 

Craig: she real quick covers the keyhole with her hand and scoots over to where she can reach a hair pick. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Craig: It’s like a comb with a pick on the other end. 

Todd: So cool. 

Craig: And, and she scoots back over and she just takes it and just stabs it directly into the keyhole. She has great aim, excellent aim.

That’s a real fol move there. Yes, and that was my favorite part. I loved it. And she pulled it out. It was all bloody, and then she opens the door and Rita like falls to the ground and is like clutching her eyes 

Todd: or whatever. At this point, I kind of felt like maybe she’s gonna be fine. The big mistake she made was like, she disabled the guy in the bedroom.

He, she like whacked him on the back of the head with a. Chair or something, which seemed to knock him out, but you don’t really know, man, if she had just finished a job, 

Craig: she barely hit him with like a little footstool. Like that was not a good, 

Todd: it 

Craig: was 

Todd: dumb. 

Craig: That was not good. Yeah. 

Todd: But there is this awesome, again, another awesome shot.

This shot of her running away. It, it, it all gets slowmo again and. There’s the sound of her running away from her and there’s this overhead shot down the hall and she’s running down the hall and almost everything except for the hall of the carpet just seems to fade into black. And her running down it, like she’s just going down this, this tunnel.

She goes down the spiral staircase and she runs out of the house. She gets in her pickup and speeds away, and I’m like, well, she’s fine now. Right? More or less. But she doesn’t think so she comes to that diner that she arrived at, at the very beginning of the movie. Everything Starts that we didn’t talk about at all.

We didn’t do 

Craig: the, the movie. The movie actually starts at the end. You see her all beat up at this cafe and like driving away from a cafe. 

Todd: That’s right. And, 

Craig: and then it flashes back and you see her like going to this cafe and she’s very friendly with everybody there, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, she’s going back there now.

Todd: This little kid, Nico lets her in because the Harry, his dad, who, who owns the, the diner is not there at the moment. She’s locked the door and she goes over to the pinball machine and waxs it open like, like we saw earlier. And then she just sits there and she’s just, she, they’re just waiting for Harry, but she’s like, get his gun.

Harry’s out rabbit hunting, apparently. She’s like, get his gun. And I thought this was so cute. Like she’s sitting at this table just staring off into space. And Nico is there dressed in military gear. He’s got a helmet on. He’s got like an army shirt on and he is got the, the rifle sitting there like he’s ready for it, but she’s just staring off into space.

She’s just. Broken 

Craig: building a giant pyramid of sugar cubes. Now the, the scene was interesting, but it was so weird as far as pacing is concerned because all of this huge fighting and stuff at the house, and then she flees and she gonna get away and she gets away and then she gets to the cafe and they.

Sit there and wait. Yeah. And the, the movie even tells you, like, they don’t make us sit there with them for a half an hour, but they tell us by showing that he has changed his clothes and they’ve barricaded the door and she has built an enormous pyramid of sugar cubes like they have been there. A while.

So the movie tells us that they’ve been there a while and then just out of nowhere, that black rape van bursts through the wall. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Nico tries to shoot the guy, but he’s clearly never shot a gun before because he doesn’t come anywhere close. But he does shoot the gas tank. Yeah, 

Todd: classic with 

Craig: a rifle, but somehow.

It. The gas tank gets hit with buckshot because it starts shooting out in a bunch of different directions. 

Todd: She stands up, grabs the rifle, walks right up to that thing and blows that guy’s head clean out. That’s right. That was cool. I, I don’t understand why she didn’t just keep driving down the road, honestly.

Yeah. I think she could have even gassed up there. Well, 

Craig: it is Australia. 

Todd: Yeah, that’s true. Drive for 

Craig: days. That’s 

Todd: true. You’re probably right. You’re probably right. I mean, there was probably a good reason why she was. Sitting there and waiting, I suppose, but I like that she just stands up and blows that guy’s head off and we are done.

That was a great shot too. It was really fast, but his head just explodes. Yeah, it looks really good. So then like she just kind of stumbles out and even the kids like, we gotta get going. We gotta get going. I mean, she’s still kind of not right in the head, but uh, he ends up pulling her out into the truck and like you said, this is the beginning.

This is what we saw in the beginning of her coming, and that was satisfying. I love a good bookend. 

Craig: Yeah, 

Todd: sure. She gets in the car and drives off. And now apparently this next shot, which blew me away, this next shot was apparently a total accident. This is all one shot. Like she gets in the car, she sits down, she starts it up, the camera’s like in the backseat, basically of the pickup from behind them.

They pull out, they drive down the road, and then she turns around and looks back and you hear an explosion. And I thought, Ugh, this movie couldn’t afford. To show us the explosion because there’s not even a flash of light or anything. But the camera pans sideways in just enough time to catch a flash of light come off of the sign that they pass.

They pass by this white sign and it continues to pan around and you see that it, the building is in the process of exploding. And I was like, oh my God. That was an amazing shot that they caught that light just in that moment. It turns out that was just a happy accident. The camera was supposed to turn around and then we were supposed to see it explode at that moment, but the special effects guy shot it off too early, but it’s way more effective that way.

The tension of just like hearing the explosion, turning around, suddenly seeing the flash, and then continuing around and you see it blowing up behind him. I was so impressed by that. Yeah, it looked good. Yeah. And I love the closing music. It’s, it’s immediate credits, it’s closing music. All the music through this whole thing was done by, um, Klaus Schultz, who is a, a German guy.

He was part of Tangerine Dream, which makes sense. It’s very evocative of that. It’s, it’s a synth score, but it’s a really nice synth score. And, uh, I really liked it. He’s done a couple movies. He did this one, he did, uh, horror movies. I mean, as a solo artist. He scored this, he scored Barracuda, which was kind of a jaw slash piha knockoff in, in the late seventies.

And I, and I, you know, I thought the music in the movie was very judicious. Appropriately judicious. But when it came on in some ways, again, uh, it was so giallo, it, it almost felt like, uh, the kind of thing that Goblin would’ve come up with if they were just a little more hy and sparse, you know, with the, with their arrangements.

But, uh, yeah, man, I don’t know. I, I, I, I really liked it. I don’t know what I was expecting. I don’t think I was expecting a big, uh, action pack slasher. I wasn’t exactly the shining either. As we talked about, but I walked away from there going, wow, like this movie. This is a movie I’m gonna remember. I really enjoyed it and I did wonder if you were gonna like it or not.

So 

Craig: yeah, no. As is often the case with these movies, it was a lot more fun talking about it with you than it was watching it for me. I don’t. Think that I will remember much of it. If anything, maybe that, that cool stabbing the eyeball part. Maybe a again, I, I would never, well, I would rarely intentionally steer people away from a movie.

It’s fine. It’s not bad. We’ve a hundred percent seen worse. It’s, as far as filmmaking is, is concerned. Well beyond competent, it’s, it’s good. In terms of filmmaking, I just didn’t particularly care for the story. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. I didn’t really care what was going on. I didn’t really particularly care about the characters, so it doesn’t get a strong recommend from me.

But if you’re curious. You could waste your time in far worse ways.

Todd: What a lovely way of putting it. I mean, I’m gonna go against you on this one. I highly recommend it, but obviously if you’re the kind of guy who just wants like an 80 slash or some kind of modern, very twisty, very action packed. Thing, it’s probably not gonna float your boat if you like, uh, the old Hammer horror films, if you like a slow burn, if you, uh, like a kind of a Victorian style gothic mystery and, and you know, can kind of sit through that, I think you’re gonna be rewarded with some beautiful imagery.

Haunting feelings. And uh, obviously if you’ve listened through this far, we’ve kind of spoiled the whole thing for you. Right. But, uh, you know, that being said, if you were watching this for the first time, I, you know, if you’re that kind of person, I think you would really dig it like I did. And I think certainly as far as filmmaking goes, man, when you consider this time period and what was going on, you know, in the world of horror around this time with a lot of cash grab movies, in fact, a lot of Australian cinema around this time was quite extreme and ridiculous.

This is a bit of a diamond in the rough. I think for that reason alone, I’m sure, I’m sure is, is a reason why Quentin Tarantino honed in on it so much and maybe gave it a little more prominence than it would’ve had otherwise if it hadn’t had him mentioning it a few times. 

Craig: Yeah. I just feel like if people go in thinking, oh, it’s, you know, Quentin Tarantino loved it, I, I feel like you may be kind of disappointed.

Todd: Oh, your expectations might be. A little different. 

Craig: Yeah, I, I just, I mean, yeah. And maybe that was the problem for me. Maybe I wouldn’t, maybe my expectations were too high. So, temper your expectations. Fair enough. Well, 

Todd: thank you guys so much. We’d love to hear what you think of this movie, if you’ve even seen it.

It’s definitely playing on streaming services now. I think you can watch it on Tubi. So, uh, check it out next of kid and let us know what you thought. Uh, you can leave us a [email protected]. You can find us anywhere. You know, just Google ‘two guys and a chainsaw podcast’. Leave us a message on social media.

You can speak to us directly by clicking Speak to us on our website and just record a quick 92nd clip that we will play on air and respond to if you choose to go that way. You can also get some private audience with us back on the Patreon page, patreon.com/chainsaw. Horror just. Five bucks a month. We have lively conversations going on there.

We have a book club back there where we read horror and horror adjacent books, our minisodes and short reviews, and all kinds of stuff we put back in patreon.com/chainsawpodcast. We love your support. Until next time, I’m Todd. And I’m Craig with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

This week, we pay tribute to Ed Gale and Mark Snow while diving into the 1991 horror film, Dolly Dearest. We discuss the notable careers of Gale, best known for his portrayal of Chucky in the Child’s Play franchise, and Snow, the composer behind iconic TV themes like The X-Files.

We review the film’s plot, characters, and special effects, while also reflecting on its place in the horror genre. Join us on this strange ride through the eerie world of killer dolls and indigenous devil babies that drink the blood of children. Don’t forget to leave your thoughts and comments; we’d love to hear what you think!

Episode 453, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, why don’t we just keep going with tribute episodes. You know, it’s not like we haven’t done three or four already this time we’re killing two birds with one stone. There are two people, one in the acting world, one in the composing world. Uh, ed Gale, who was probably best known for playing Chucky, you know, when he wasn’t a doll.

Yeah, in the Child’s play franchise and Mark Snow, who is a composer, you know, probably not everybody knows who he is, but you have heard his music all over the place. Starting from the mid seventies. This guy was, uh, composing from TV series like Starsky and Hutch and The Love Boat and Heart to Heart Dynasty Cagney and Lacey PeeWee’s Playhouse.

Eventually, uh, did every episode of Smallville and every episode of the reboot of the Twilight Zone. As well as the X-Files theme song. Oh, cool. That is the one of the most iconic songs. I, you know, I didn’t realize this, just that theme song for the X-Files hit like the billboard charts in several countries.

Like really, really well. I’m not 

Craig: surprised. 

Todd: It’s so iconic. 

Craig: Yeah, it was, uh, I remember it was on my Pure Moods cd. Do you remember Pure Moods? I 

Todd: do. I loved that cd. I listen to it all the time. It’s a genius song, and apparently it didn’t come easy to him. He landed the job because he lived near the show creator, Chris Carter, and they could communicate with each other pretty easily.

So Chris Carter kept rejecting earlier motifs that he had that were more loud and bold, and he accidentally placed his hand on a keyboard. When there was an echo sound effect that was programmed and this ethereal sound that came out was so intriguing that he ended up using it as a model for the rest of the theme.

Yeah, yeah. So it’s so cool. Yeah. But, but yeah, he’s done movies as well, including this one. This was one of just hundreds of movies that he scored. He also was. A roommate of Michael Cayman in college, also very famous, uh, composer who, uh, did diehard Lethal Weapon franchises. I remember him as Robinhood Prince of Thieves.

That was huge when we were kids. He did the music for that. But anyway, Mark Snow Dolly Dearest, one of the horror movies. Uh. Kind of midway through his career that he did, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to hear some of his stuff as well as see some of Ed Gale’s acting as the, once again killer doll in this once again Killer Doll movie that was definitely accused of being a child’s play ripoff, one of many, but this film is a 1991 and it had a very brief release in the Midwest in theaters, but mostly went straight to video.

It was produced by Daniel Katy, who was a longtime producer of exploitation and porn films, and the director and writer of this, this is Maria Lease. She started out her career as an actress in exploitation films. Did a little bit of acting in some porn movies in the late seventies, and then, um, went into directing.

Porn and soft core stuff, and this seems to be one of the first more mainstream ish movies that she’s done, even though, I mean, do you call this mainstream? I mean, it’s, it’s horror in the nineties, so right. Low budget horror in the nineties. Very interesting movie. I had never seen it before, but I think I pass by it on the shelves all the time, so I was anxious to get a chance to see this and see what it was all about and how it held up.

How about you have, had you seen this before? 

Craig: Uh, maybe. I don’t know if so. I didn’t really remember it. I, I do remember the box art and if I’ve seen it, I passed it over many, many times before I saw it, because I thought the box art looks stupid. Oh yeah. It looks, and I’m just recalling this from memory, I didn’t even look back at it, but it, it looks like.

Kind of a person, but with a doll face, like in a kind of slumped doll pose. And like, it’s supposed to be scary, but I just thought it looked dumb. And even looking at the back of the box, I think there was a picture of the doll, like with angry evil face, and I thought it looked cheap. And so I just. Wasn’t really interested.

And you know, now having watched it, having watched it again, if I have seen it before, I’m not really surprised that I don’t really remember much about it. ’cause it’s pretty forgettable. It 

Todd: really is. Although I was surprised to see some of the faces in here. Yeah. What is ripped, torn doing in this movie?

Like 

Craig: right, ripped, torn, sir. He is making big movies at this time and would go on to be in some of the biggest. Movies and, and biggest blockbusters. Ever. I mean, this guy, I, I think of this guy as a reputable actor. Yeah. And I couldn’t believe when I saw his name in the credits. And then he just plays a dumb part.

Like Yeah. And I, I was shocked by it. But again, we’ve. Said it a million times. A check is a check. A job is a job. So you know, more power to him. I was just, I was really shocked. 

Todd: Maybe he needed a new truck. You know, that’s probably, maybe, who knows? Denise Crosby is in this and, uh, she’s been all over.

Actually, most of these actors have a lot of credits and television. Mostly that’s true. 

Craig: Denise Crosby, I, I really only know her as the mom from Pet Cemetery. The, the. Original film adaptation, but I think she was big on like Star Trek or something like that. 

Todd: Yeah. The next Generation She was Tasha Ya, that’s where I remember her from.

I wasn’t a real Star Trek guy growing up, but later in life I, I did get into it a bit and the next generation’s a solid series and she’s all over it. So. 

Craig: And then the guy that, the guy that plays her husband was in something big too. A big war movie, right? Like Apocalypse Now 

Todd: or something 

Craig: like that. 

Todd: Yeah, apocalypse Now.

Sam Bottoms. Oh, he is in Sea Biscuit, the Outlaw. Josie Wales, the last picture show quite a few older movies and then kind of coming into this era, you know, of the nineties, and he’s taking these sorts of roles. I think that tends to be pretty typical of a most actors, right? They kind of have their moment, if they’re lucky enough to have a moment, you know, unless you just hit the gold mine, you know, you find yourself, uh.

Sure. Doing, working. Yeah, just doing, working. Exactly. There’s nothing wrong with it. We talk about this all the time. I, I dunno why people give actors a hard time for this kind of thing. There aren’t enough roles for everyone to be in big budget movies all the time once they’ve made one. You know? I know 

Craig: My favorite, my favorite is when people hit it big and then people, you know, dig back in their filmography and find some bad movie they did before and like.

Bring it out to like embarrass them. That’s so stupid. Like, who cares? Everybody starts somewhere. So few people just, you know, have lightning strike and they’re immediately amazing and doing amazing work all the time. Right? And even, you know, like. Like I said, you know, rip torn at this point has been successful.

He’s, you know, a good actor, big deal. Maybe he was going through a sleepy period. I’m certainly not giving him a hard time. I was just surprised to see him here. 

Todd: Well, and they’re, honestly, they’re all, they’re all fine in this movie. This, they’re fine, to be honest with you. This movie was more solid than I expected it to be.

It was just slow paced and boring. It was boring, especially the first half. Yeah, there just wasn’t enough action with the doll. The script tries really, really hard. To build up this mythology of where the doll came from and how they discover the secret to it all. And there’s this archeological side alongside all this stuff, and it’s like, you know what?

Just like we can establish that and, and get that done with. Yeah. Like I think we all came here to see a killer doll terrorizing a family and it hardly happens. In the second half it does, but in the first half. Yeah. 

Craig: I, yeah, I agree with you. It’s a lot of buildup. I, I feel like they’re doing a lot to try to establish tone.

Like, yeah, this is spooky and creepy. I’m like, okay, I get it. I don’t need an hour of it. Like, let’s, let’s get to it. Yeah. You know, I don’t think this movie was going for the exact same thing, even though it is so much like. The original child’s play. I mean, right. There’s a point late in the movie where the dad makes these dolls, like he has moved his family to Mexico so that he can, I guess, make these dolls on the cheap in a factory that is really just a shed.

Yeah, I don’t even understand what is happening. There, but whatever. There’s a point late in the movie where in the factory you just see the dolls, faces like disassembled from the rest of their bodies, and it’s almost indistinguishable from the Chucky doll. Like 

Todd: it, it kind of is, except as a girl. 

Craig: Yeah, well slap a long-haired wig on it and a dress, and it looks a little bit different, but when it’s just the face, it’s almost indistinguishable.

It’s crazy. I don’t remember what point I was trying to make. 

Todd: Well, the dolls themselves when they’re not moving, actually look pretty good. I could see this being a real doll that, you know, kids would want. You know, I think they did a pretty decent job of designing these dolls. 

Craig: It’s funny that you say that ’cause I think it’s hideous.

Like, I can’t imagine any girl would ever want this doll. Oh. Oh, it’s ugly. Um. 

Todd: It’s like an almost full size, you know, doll? No, I didn’t think so. I thought they were pretty, I think they get ugly when their faces start scrunching up and they start moving around. Obviously, you know, I just couldn’t 

Craig: match and, and, and again, I realize this was a, a slightly different time, but you know, this was when we were, you know, in middle school or whatever.

I don’t recall girls carrying around like old timey dolls me. Oh. Whatever. No, it’s like an American, not just, yeah, like an American doll, but like the size. It’s almost as big as the girl. It’s kinda like Chucky. 

Todd: But that was the whole appeal, right? Like the My buddy doll, which the Chucky one’s based off of, yeah.

Was an almost full-size boy doll. That’s supposed to be your companion. That’s the shtick, that’s the novelty. The American girl dolls kind of the same Well. Maybe they’re not so big, they’re small. But anyway, it’s kind of the same thing. You know, you, you got this doll that’s almost as big as you are, and so it’s kind of like your little friend.

And I thought they did a decent job with it, but I did feel like it became very low rent. Chucky the minute the doll start moving because it was very clear they only had like one model for all these. And it was, uh, you know, not, not the same team, let’s put it that way. That put all the effort into the Chucky special effects probably ’cause they didn’t have the budget for it.

It was reminding me a lot of the, the baby doll from demonic toys. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. It was evident when it was the doll and when it was the actor, because they’re pretty distinctively different sizes. Yeah. But the whole, you know, the doll running around and you just kind of seeing it, you know, in the background or you’re just seeing its feet.

It, it was, and I, I, I’m gonna keep comparing it to child’s play because that’s the one that’s. The most, like with the doll that size and they look so similar, but you know, all these dolls movies, that’s what you see. You just get glimpses of it. Like it’ll kind of run across a doorframe in the back or you’ll just see its little feet moving.

Yeah. Something that child’s play one did well was the mislead where you didn’t know. If the doll was really doing this stuff or if the kid was just crazy for a while. I mean, you find out, you know, halfway through the movie or whatever, but for a while there was that little mister act. This, you know, it’s the doll the whole time.

And you know, it’s possessed by. Okay. Not Satan, but not 

Todd: Satan, but pretty darn close. 

Craig: So it, it, well, so the movie opens up with some old guy excavating some ruins and he like, you know, I don’t know, opens up something and it lets out this evil red light show 

Todd: animation. 

Craig: Yeah. That like. I don’t know. Bolts around into the factory, I think.

Yeah. Into the factory. Mm-hmm. Which is right next door. It’s like red light rays, but it’s also like shrieking and Yeah, giggling and stuff. It’s weird. And then it goes to the title. Okay. So we find out at some point. This family, oh God, I won’t remember their names. Elliot is the dad. Marian is the mom.

Jimmy. That’s easy is the son I recognized, like he was so familiar to me. Yeah. But I, for the life of me, can’t remember what I recognize him from. Like, I, I, I looked at his filmography and I’m like, yeah, I think I’ve seen a couple of those movies, but I just feel like he’s so familiar. I know. 

Todd: I think he just had a similar look to another kid that’s right on the top of my tongue, but I couldn’t tell you who.

Yeah, I would’ve 

Craig: sworn that he was in clown house. I would’ve sworn that he was the middle brother in clown house, but I looked it up and he wasn’t. Anyway, they are moving to Mexico to like start over because it seems like they’ve been in financial trouble or something. And the dad has bought this factory and he’s gonna make these dolls.

And it just so happens that this factory is right next to the, these Mayan ruins that are being excavated and like archeologists are checking them out or whatever. 

Todd: Yeah. It’s like a tunnel. 

Craig: Yeah. And, and so you’ve got this, what we realized very quickly, this doll is possessed by whatever this is that comes from, it’s just such, I don’t wanna say lazy, it’s just so paint by number, like Yeah.

Oh, the house. The house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Like Okay. Like, huh? Sort of, yeah. So like the factory’s right next door to a Mayan thing, which ends up not being Mayan. It ends up. It. They call the people are like the Sania people. 

Todd: Sania, Sania, Sania. Yeah, I think that’s right. Sania, which means literally supposedly Satan on Earth.

Great. Which he just casually says. Yeah. It’s weird because like you say, being paint by numbers, we go into this knowing it’s gonna be a killer to all movie. We see the Mayan ruins thing. We see this family move in, the kids go to with their dad to this factory, and we see that it’s a shed, which was very disappointing.

But then the dad is also questioning the guy. Oh, it’s a great pleasure 

Clip: having handled this for you, Mr. Wade. It’s my first sale, Mr. Australia. The appraisal documents indicated the factory had been kept up. After Sonora DeLuca’s death? Yes, sir. We have been very careful to keep everything just as it was when no one ever comes to the factory.

Not for any reason. See, of course, in your, I understand that we need a little cleaning perhaps. The market projections, the inventory analysis, the assessments. Who prepared that material? I did that, Sarah. I copy from American Business Book. Nice work. 

Todd: To which the dad just sort of seems to shrug his shoulders like, okay, it seemed like this was a famous Mexican doll maker who passed away.

And so the dad was coming in and buying up the factory in hopes of starting that off again. And there already these dolls in there. There’s a whole lineup of ’em, and the girl takes one. So I guess a few days ago that ruins had broken open and those dolls had been possessed and they were just sitting up on the counter waiting to be.

Plucked. So she takes one and is like, oh, good night, Dolly. You’re gonna be my new playmate. You’re gonna be my only playmate. And as she’s falling asleep and the dolls on the chair in her room, it turns its head right. So boom, right away, first 10 minutes, it’s that. But then like, I don’t know, like you said, it’s just like they spend a lot of time just building and building and building, and we don’t really see the doll much.

Craig: No. Well, there’s a good 15, 20 minutes at least of the girl just carrying the doll around a lot and talking to it and, and there’s mm-hmm this dollhouse slash playhouse kid size playhouse in the backyard, and the girl just hangs out in there with the doll all the time. She starts getting bratty and talking back, and it’s obviously the influence of the doll, but as is always the case in these movies, the.

Parents, the mother attribute it to the stress of moving or blah, blah, blah, whatever. Yeah. But yes, this goes on for a long time and like we can hear the doll talking and at times it seems like the mom can hear the doll talking and like the girl is locking the mom out. And like I said before, like.

Talking back and being sassy, and it’s building towards something, but it builds so slowly, like we’re introduced to the housekeeper, Camilla. Mm-hmm. Very, very early on. And she’s a, I presume, very famous Latina actress because I. Recognize her from everywhere. She’s been all over the place. I don’t have her name in, I don’t have her name in front of me, but I remember her distinctly, the movie Selena, with Jennifer Lopez.

She played the woman who was her like friend and, and the woman who ended up murdering her salazar or something like that, I think. And she was 

Todd: very good. She’s Lupe, ROS. Remember the housekeeper in Goonies who comes in in the beginning and. They’re messing. Oh my God. That was 

Craig: her 

Todd: Rosata. Yeah, Rosata. Oh my God.

That was her. She has been in everything. Television, movies, you name it. She might be the most decorated actress in this, uh, in this whole show. It’s pretty cool. Oh yeah. 

Craig: Everywhere. And she’s good. Yeah. And I like her. She’s probably my favorite character. I may jump around a little bit in this. Beginning part because nothing really matters.

She thinks there’s something strange going on. The little girl like SAEs her and like, you know, knocks dishes out of her hands and then says something in a foreign language, and she’s like, oh, it’s the language of the sania. And she’s like, I gotta get outta here. But not right away. No, not right away. But she, but because she also, I guess, without the owner’s knowledge, brings a priest in to bless the house, which freaks out the girl.

The girl freaks out, like has a conniption, like screams. And you know, all of this is so obvious and stupid. 

Todd: Well, the problem is there is nothing new here it is checking. All the boxes because this is how these movies often go. There’s like no variation here. 

Craig: This scene is a carbon copy of that scene from the Omen when they’re taking Damien to church and he’s getting closer and closer and they’re doing tight shots on his face, and then they’re showing like the religious iconography and back to his face, and it’s the exact same thing.

It’s the quick 

Todd: cuts back and forth. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a direct call out, but I mean, they do a nice job with it. I’ll have to say. I mean, that’s just the problem. There’s nothing distinctive about it, but it’s nice. It’s fine. I mean, eventually mom get, starts to get a little more freaked out about the girl talking to the doll.

She thinks she sees two shadows moving in the dollhouse. You know, when they’re back there playing, she thinks she hears the doll talking. Of course she’s disturbed by her behavior change. There’s a moment where the lights go out or something and the wind blows the door shut. Camilla goes out to bring the girl back in from the dollhouse, but she can’t get back into the door.

So then, uh, she can’t get in the front either. She goes, ends up going to the cellar. Now we are 30 minutes into the movie and I was like, God, this better be a kill coming up. Something big needs to happen ’cause we’re already a third of the way through this. Yeah, she’s in the cellar. There are lots of doll parts down there and Dolly closes the latch and then we get one of quite a few doll jump scares where the doll just like springs over someone’s shoulder and goes, go

and wide-eyed mouth open just like shaking. And I laughed every time that happened. It’s just like, it is funny

and Knox are down the stairs, stabs are in the shoulder, yada, yada, yada then, and the music here, by the way, is all quite good. ’cause you know, we’re talking about. The composer here. I really liked the motifs that he had. I liked the intro music. I thought the music here was really nice and intense. I know it’s just a guy with a, a room full of equipment.

He didn’t tend to get his music played by, uh, orchestras and things like that, but it doesn’t sound like that at all. This isn’t your typical Cynthia score that you would get with a movie like this at this particular time, with this particular budget, and for that. I thought it was pretty nice. 

Craig: You know, it’s funny you told me to pay attention to the score ’cause we were gonna be talking about this guy and so in the very beginning I was really trying to pay attention to it and I was thinking this is something that I could put on in the background, like when I’m reading a scary book or something.

’cause I do that. But then it completely faded into the background. Like it, nothing really stood out to me. It didn’t stand out to me as being. Bad for any reason, but it just kind of faded into the background. And I suppose that’s, that’s good. 

Todd: I would say so. 

Craig: Yeah. I mean, that’s what you’re going for, I guess it.

Right. And in these moments. These spooky moments, these, you know, like Camilla’s death where she eventually gets pushed into some kind of tub in the floor, in the basement, and then the doll throws like an electrical wire in there and it electrocutes her, whatever. What was that? I could not, for the life of me figure it out.

It would be, I would say like. Three by three square in the floor of the cellar that was like full of water and it looked like there was a hose that was like draining into it. Whoa. Do you have any idea what that was? My thought was maybe some kind of sump pump arrangement. That was the only thing that I could think of.

I had no idea, but it was deep. Yeah. ’cause later the, the dad comes home, I get, I don’t know if they’re all at home. I think they come home and the electricity’s out. Yeah. And he goes down to, you know, check the. The fuse box or whatever. Mm-hmm. He eventually, you know, I, I feel like there’s cat scares ’cause there, there’s also a cat in this house and it scares people all the time.

More than one cat scare in this, uh, in this one there are a couple, like right after each other, like somebody gets scared by the cat, then they get scared by the cap again. Like it was really funny. But eventually he like is down on the floor, like, I don’t know if he trips or whatever, but he’s down on the floor by that pool of whatever it is.

Her body shoots out and it’s clearly not her body. It’s some kind of dummy, it doesn’t look anything like her, but it shoots out as though it were, you know, trying to grab him or something. Yeah. And, and, and as though it were standing fully erect. Four feet underwater and shot out. It’s so weird. I have no idea what was going on there.

It was weird, but, but even that, like you said, oh God, please tell me that we’re getting to a kill soon. We skipped a lot. Like to get, to get to her first. That first death takes a and it’s not really the first, the, the archeologist in the beginning died too. 

Todd: That’s true. That’s true. 

Craig: But that took a long time to get there.

There’s also like a side story with Rip Toren, professor Resnick, who, I guess he’s in charge of this excavation, but he’s been like, he’s a professor at a university, so he’s been like supervising it from afar. But now that there’s been this incident, he’s going there himself and he’s been looking at pictures from the excavation and he sees that though.

They thought it was Mayan, it’s not. It’s the Sania. Tribe or whatever, and they keep cutting back and forth to that. And they also try at some point to make a cute little buddy movie between him, Resnick and Jimmy, like, oh God, Jimmy’s very curious. He’s very curious and very smart and inquisitive, and he, you know, when he finds out that they’re right next to like a, a Mayan temple excavation, like he reads a huge book on the Mayan people, and he’s very interested and he’s like exploring the excavation.

And then so when Resnick shows up, he’s there and he’s very, he’s annoying. He’s annoying, but he’s like. He like, they’re going for short round is what they’re Yeah. You know, like he’s gonna be the funny young sidekick. I feel like he even makes a joke about that. 

Clip: How far back have you 

Craig: been in there? 

Clip: Uh, only by halfway, but I think Introduce you to the end.

Let me show you. I can do it. I can be like, your eyes and Airstream. What you think. Does your father know you’re down here? Sure he does. Uh, my father’s always looking ways to further my education, so, um, lemme crawl on top and take a look for you. I’ve done it before, but it’s 

Craig: kind of dark in there, if you know what I mean.

But that, that’s what he wants. He wants to help this guy. And of course, rip torn is. Crotchety older guy who doesn’t want anything to do with the younger kid, but they, they still kinda, yeah. They, they have this kind of relationship and they help each other out. And when that started, I was like, we were probably, I don’t know, at least 20, 25 minutes into this movie when they started to try to establish this relationship.

And I was like, no, I don’t have time for this. This is a different movie. Right, 

Todd: exactly. No, you’re right. It’s maddening because honestly, like we just need to get to the point of this excavation thing faster. It’s not interesting enough to keep us going back there and slowly drip feeding us little tidbits of information about this.

So we go back to him and Jimmy. And Jimmy helps him crawl in, and then they have some Byplay tells him not to help him crawl in, and then he goes in and then it gets. Scared out. And then he goes back in at night and goes in himself and he sees inside the crypt and is reading along the walls about it being a, it is a crypt.

Uh, and there’s skulls in bed in the walls and it’s inscriptions about the coming of evil on earth. And he looks down and says, ah, this must be the coffin that held the demon child. And. You’re not supposed to cross the threshold and oh, all this stuff, but I mean, it’s, it’s like bits and bits and bits and pieces coming.

I just wanted ’em to get in the fricking place, open up that stupid thing and be done with whatever they needed to do in there. 

Craig: From this point forward, there are two or three times where we get. Some pretty long exposition about these people and how they made a demon child and like, yeah, okay, we get it.

They fed it. The blood of children. It’s like so weird. Jimmy explains it at some point and then Resnick explains it to somebody else at some point, and I guess each time there’s maybe a little bit of extra information, but it’s totally unnecessary. We get it. They were evil. They worshiped Satan. They made a demon child.

It’s in the. Tomb. We get it. We know. 

Todd: Well, I was hoping that all of this would be building to something like The Dolls have a purpose, right? Instead of just running around killing people, the dolls are trying to like reestablish their rituals or whatever. Like maybe they’re drinking the blood of these things or they’re going after kids or, so, you know, something.

But no, it, it is just a, this is a big, bad, evil thing. And now somehow it’s in a bunch of the dolls and it wants the children. 

Craig: For what? I don’t know, but Right. We find out that that’s like, it wants the children and it will get to them anyway that it can. And so that’s why it’s getting to this girl. Well, it’s got the 

Todd: girl, I mean, it could do whatever it needs to do with the girl.

I mean, why is it killing the adults when it’s got the girl? Do your thing with the girl, do your thing with the boy. It, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. No, 

Craig: it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now the girl is continuing to be like, seemingly kind of possessed. Like at some point they say she cut her own hair, but she didn’t, they just curled it so it looks shorter curled it and more like more doll like.

And it does look more doll like at some point. You know, I think before Camilla died, she said something to the mom, or maybe it was immediately after Camilla died and the mom is getting scared or whatever. ’cause so she tries to take the doll away from the girl and the girl’s like, no, she’s mine in a devil voice.

And so like, which Jimmy comments on. Yeah. Like, yes, he totally notices. He’s like, whoa, what’s going on with your voice? Then the dad and the mom go out in the hall and the mom’s like, I’m really concerned, and the dad’s like, you’re crazy. And like, I didn’t think the mom was. Upset enough, right? This is not an appropriate reaction.

You just heard Satan speak through your child and she’s like, I’m a little worried. The dad’s like, you’re crazy. Uhhuh. 

Todd: Yeah, 

Craig: it’s nuts. God, it was stupid. So that’s happening. She’s, she’s getting more possessed, 

Todd: but she’s just becoming mean. That’s all you know, just mean like she’s not sabotaging the family.

Louis. Is this guy, I guess he’s a late night worker at his factory. Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. I could tell that they were 

Craig: setting up a death scene for him, but this is also movie because this is a new guy we’ve never seen before. Yeah, and and I, I was asking myself, I think the exact same thing that you were about to say, like.

Why, why him? What did he do? Right? He just seems like a nice guy. He’s not bothering anybody like I was. I wasn’t mad ’cause I didn’t care, but I was like, this is dumb. Why are you killing off Luis? 

Todd: He seems like a good dude. And I was kind of thinking the girl would be getting involved. Like, why is this doll okay?

I know, I get it. The doll wants the child. I don’t know what the doll, the doll wants. Uh, does the doll wanna kill the child? If the doll wants to kill the child, let’s just kill the child and let’s move on and kill the other child and do whatever it needs to do. No, the doll, the doll is grooming the child.

But to what end? I don’t know. Like the child isn’t helping the doll in any way. I thought this scene that. We would see the child like, I don’t know, unlocking the door of the factory for the doll or coming in afterwards. Sure. Or like helping the dolls with the, with this murder of Luis or whatever. But no, it just, it’s just the other dolls inside the factory are also possessed.

And there’s a bit of a scene in there where he’s cooking his meal and. Hears the noise and he goes outside and then comes back in, and then he gets tripped up by a doll and then he starts getting attacked by dolls and a cat scares him and then he runs away, but then he runs into a doll. Then we get another one of those dolls jumping out, 

Craig: which is, that’s so funny.

Jumping out, like he’s, he’s standing in front of some shelving and like there are boxes on the shelves and like the doll just pops out from behind the bus and like, it’s so funny. Like, it seems like a prank. Like it, yeah, it looks like something that you would see like on a prank show. Like, because it’s a, it’s not like it jumps out to attack him.

It’s like it jumps out to scare him. Oh my God. It is so funny. I laughed out loud. But this is the part where the movie started getting interesting to me because I still really have no idea ultimately what was going on. But this is the part where you realize that it’s not just that one doll that the girl has been packing around the whole time.

Right. She could have picked any doll off of that shelf. You know, they kind of make it seem like she picked a particular one. No, it doesn’t matter because apparently they are all haunted. They’re all 

Todd: possessed. Yes. 

Craig: By, by this thing. And. I enjoyed it. Then when there were a bunch of them and they were like talking to each other and like, let’s have some fun, but I am also thinking, what are you, because now they basically become like gremlins or something like mm-hmm.

They’re, they’re, they’re just having a good time. Terrorizing people. What are you and what is the point? Like what are you doing? 

Todd: Yeah, I don’t think the movie has answers for that. 

Craig: I’m having a good time watching it. It’s funny to watch these dolls, you know, several of them, you know, one will run across the screen in the foreground and then you’ll see one run across the screen way up in the background and, and I don’t even have any idea how many of them there are.

Probably not more than four or five, I don’t know. But like even the doll parts, like I said, and I feel like this happens later, I don’t remember exactly what it happens. Mm-hmm. But at some point Jimmy is in the factory. They’re like menacing Jimmy for a long time while he doesn’t know it. But Jimmy is in the factory with the dolls and there’s another cat scare.

The cat scares him, and then he walks up next to this rack of just the faces. Now mind you, this is supposed to be, this is supposed to be a factory, but as I’ve said before. It, it is not a factory like, and they do not make really any effort to make it look like a factory. Right? When the nice factory worker got killed, there was a great effect where his hand got put in a, uh, sewing machine, one sewing machine in this factory that is supposedly mass producing these dolls, like there’s no machinery in there.

It looks like a dirty. Abandoned warehouse. I have no idea what’s going on in this factory. It 

Todd: looks more like where you would be storing the dolls and, and not a very good place for it maybe. 

Craig: No, it’s, it looks horrible. But anyway, Jimmy walks up and he’s standing right next to this rack and just the faces is hanging on it and, and the faces are just.

You know, motionless for a second. Then all of a sudden one of them sticks out like a foot long tongue and goes like,

and his eyes kinda go crazy. Oh. And Jimmy sees that and then he’s scared. Oh my God. Did he see it or did he 

Todd: turn around and 

Craig: not quite catch it? I don’t, I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Oh, I 

Todd: laughed so hard at that, uh, that bit. 

Craig: But the dolls, they’re also talking like when they’re, I think it’s, I don’t know.

I think it’s. I don’t remember who they’re going after, but they’ll be like, surprise, we got you.

And like, now we’ll have some fun. Oh my God. It, it sounds funnier than it is, but Yeah, it really does. It is funny. It is funny, but it’s kind like funny because it’s so stupid 

Todd: and funny, but, and thank God there are these moments in there, because otherwise it would just be so tedious, you know? I mean, it still is tedious, but at least there, there are moments, you know, there are moments in here that I think are inspired and kind of nice like that bit.

It’s silly, but it’s cute. And I thought that, like you said, that whole effect, the whole, how he was taken down was pretty good and it was well filmed and everything. By the way, he tore open his shirt for some reason. Oh my God. Todd, what was that? Something was bubbling up in his chest right 

Craig: as he was falling down.

He very clearly intentionally opened his shirt. Now, when I say intentionally, I mean like he was directed. Yeah. As, as you’re falling down, make sure you accidentally rip open your shirt. And I’m like, yeah, why? Like, I, I thought that the dolls then would, you know, come stab him or something. But no, he just falls down on the ground.

And his chest starts bubbling and blood comes out of his mouth and he dies. I have 

Todd: no idea what that was supposed to be. I thought I was seeing things I had no, I, yeah, because later they just come and they, their conclusion is that he had an accident. I, I don’t even know what their conclusion is. They just know he’s dead 

Craig: and people are dropping dead all over the place and they just act like nothing happened.

Like, yes, they, they, they, they find, they find the maid in the basement dead. Unexplainably. You know, and now it’s time for new maid. Yeah. Her, yeah, her, her, the dad comes upstairs, like her family’s gonna take care of it. That’s it. Like they never, that’s it. Say anything about it again. Then this guy dies and they’re like, oh, an accent.

That’s terrible. Right? The kids go about their business, everybody goes about their business. It’s 

Todd: kind of funny. 

Craig: At, at, at some point, Resnick. Is, you know, excavating at night or something and he comes outside and somebody’s trying to set the site on fire and it’s a woman and she’s like, 

Clip: you must stop this.

Everybody will be killed if you do not stop this. What are you talking about? Who are you? You’ve brought their evil back with your peaks and your shovels. Close the tomb now and leave the are dead. He opened up the gate to hell and the killings began. There will be others. 

Craig: And he’s like, what? And then she just runs away and we never see her again.

Just these crazy, weird exposition things. My favorite exposition thing is when, earlier on Camilla or whatever the name’s the, the sisters, oh my god. The maid, whatever the maid’s name was. Oh yeah. She said that she had a sister who was a nun. And so after she’s dead and weird things are happening and the mom’s getting nervous, finally she’s like, I have to go see the sister.

Maybe she’ll be able to tell me something. And she goes there, and it’s a dumb scene. And it’s a like visiting the nun. Like, yeah. It, it’s, it’s either visiting a nun in a convent or visiting somebody who hasn’t spoken for years in the mental institution or, or whatever. Yeah. Just so. It can give some exposition and in this case, like it’s set up and it’s filmed exactly like you see these scenes every time.

Like she goes and she’s like, I need to see this nun. And they’re like, you can’t see her. She’s in seclusion. She’s like, it’s an emergency. I have to see her and they’re fine. Um, so they let her and, and she goes and she talks to the nun, and the nun doesn’t give, really give her any news that we don’t already know.

No, that there was no need for this. No, we already know. Now, maybe to, to be fair, maybe the mom hasn’t heard all of this yet, but we have, so it’s no new information for us. Evil, you know, evil child wants the kids, we’ll get to the kids, however, whatever. So then the mom comes out and, I don’t know, I was trying to set up, there’s some line where.

Somebody, I, I, I, I think it’s her husband maybe, is like, you’re gonna believe that crazy nun. And she’s like, I don’t know, like a bunch of people are dead and our daughter is acting like a crazy person and blah, blah, blah. How do you explain that? Fair enough.

Like the mom actually. For a moment towards the end becomes the voice of reason. Yeah. When her husband is like, ah, you’re crazy. She’s like, okay, well everybody’s 

Todd: dead so well, I mean, a husband is so useless in this. He really has no role. No, he has no purpose at all. Yeah. All he is is to just, uh, keep, keep, keep her from panicking when she should be panicking.

Otherwise, he, well, he’s also s when you think about it, he’s also barely in it compared to everybody else. 

Craig: Mm-hmm. 

Todd: But yeah, you would think that when he finds one of his workers dead in his factory, that he would’ve taken a bit more of a, of a role in all this. 

Craig: Is that the, is that also the part I feel, so I’ve got, the mom goes to visit Camilla’s sister in the convent.

Jess, the girl is now dressed. Like a Victorian doll, but they Right. It bothered me that they couldn’t be bothered to dress her just like the doll, I guess. Yeah, I guess that would be even sillier, like why would she have the exact same outfit as the doll? But she’s now in, you know, kind of a frilly dress and looks much like a doll and she’s acting super weird.

And then there’s that dumb nun scene, and I think at the end of it. The mom says, listen to me. I am not losing my daughter to a 900 year old goat head. I don’t even know where that came from. Like did they say that they made it with a goat head? I don’t even remember. 

Todd: No, God. Yeah. But 

Craig: she’s on a mission now, and she comes home and the house is seemingly empty and she’s looking around and she finds Jimmy hiding in the closet.

Yeah. And he’s like, I guess. Has he, I, I guess he’s been attacked by the doll. I don’t remember. She says, where’s your sister? And he’s like, they’re in their room. I, I, I heard them talking. The doll talks. Okay. So the mom walks in the room and the doll is just sitting in a chair and it is just straight evil looking.

It is like it’s gnarling at her. Oh yeah. 

Todd: It’s got this evil face. Uh huh. It, well, it’s just hilarious ’cause she comes in and it is just snarling at her and she just continues to stare at the doll. And finally she’s like, what have you done with her? And she’s like, uh, I have her now. You’ll never get her back.

And she belongs to me now. She’s like, no, that’s not true. And meanwhile, we see actually she’s just around the corner, hiding behind the curtains. She’s behind the curtain, hide the 

Craig: curtain 

Todd: listening, mom runs out, grabs a gun. And then. What they like run out of the house or something. Right. I like, why don’t you go back in after the, the doll?

They, they, oh, she does go back in after the doll, but the doll’s gone. 

Craig: No, they, they, they try to leave. The mom grabs the daughter. Right. And they try to leave, but Dolly blocks the door and then Dolly starts saying like, we’ll have some fun now, or something like that. And she tells the daughter. To attack the mom, and she does.

So like right the, the daughter’s attacking the mom and Jimmy grabs the gun that the mom had grabbed at some point and points it at Dolly and says, play with this bitch.

Todd: They’re going for a catchphrase here 

Craig: and shoots her. And, and the doll like, you know, blows back through the door 

Todd: outside. This is where it’s all coming to head. Because, yeah. At the same time, two other things are going on. 

Craig: Well, it just is back to normal. And then the only thing that I have next is terrible.

A DRI don’t, I don’t know why that was. I don’t know if they had to do, I don’t know what it was. Anyway. Yeah, go ahead. There’s several. Yes, it’s coming to a head. 

Todd: Yeah. One thing is that the professor is. Back excavating in the tomb. He’s been trying to open the coffin. ’cause he’s not a superstitious guy, so he’s at night.

’cause he for some reason is always trying to do his things at night, decides he’s gonna go back and open the coffin. It’s so interesting this excavation because you see him there during the day and it looks like a busy site with like multiple workers and things. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

But then whenever it’s nighttime, it’s just him alone in there doing like the most important stuff. Like in this case, cutting open the top of the tomb. He opens up the lid of the sarcophagus, sees that indeed there’s this, uh, mummified body of a little child with literal devil horns on. It freaks him out so much that he trips all over himself, running out of it, 

Craig: and he says, oh my God, it’s true.

What have I done? What I 

Todd: thought you weren’t superstitious anyway. So funny. And then the dad is for some reason just prowling around. Did he hear a noise or something? I dunno. He’s prowling around his factory. 

Craig: They’re looking for Jimmy because they can’t find him and they think that he’s probably there because he’s been showing up there to help out Resnick all the time.

Ah, so he’s, he’s looking for Jimmy. They couldn’t find him on the site, so he’s looking for him in the factory and all the dolls are there. 

Todd: Yep. And then this is the whole big, this is the big climactic scene where multiple dolls, they’ve, they’ve set up traps. They’ve got dad up at a by his legs at one point.

And I don’t know, there’s just some weird contraption thing that isn’t really explained. And this irritated me as well. It’s like the dad’s steps into a loop of string, like some Bugs Bunny cartoon and gets. His leg pulled tight and the doll start is dragging him across the floor, but then it lifts him up in the air when ano, when another doll is by the wall pulling on some pipe that doesn’t really look like it’s connected to anything and he’s getting lifted into the air at the same time, the professor comes running in and then he runs to a another pipe in another corner and tries to like.

Turn a valve, but it sparks, I mean, I was like, what is this weird thing happening? And then the dude’s getting lifted in the air and it almost looks like he’s getting dangled over a big vat of something. But we never really see what that is because he just kinda reaches up and unties himself. Oh, it’s, it’s just kind of clunky.

But the idea is that he narrowly misses getting dropped from a height or something, and the dolls are everywhere. Poking around from corners, popping their heads outta barrels, taunting them. The professor saves the day, grabs him and they leave. Well, they don’t leave somehow 

Craig: for, they’re outside, but they’re, yeah, they’re some, everybody somehow reunites right outside the site.

Like the whole family in Resnick are together. Right. 

Todd: Outside the door where they just left all these dolls inside who were all up in their faces. I, I just, I just don’t get these things like, come on, put the, keep the pressure on. Why aren’t those dolls running out after them? You know? Why are they, 

Craig: yeah.

Not confined in there. Like, no, I don’t know. But the, it, the, I thought it was kind of a funny scene when the two adult men. Are gonna go into the factory, or, I don’t remember if it was the factory or the site or both, I don’t remember. But they were gonna blow it up and they are conveniently have multiple bundles of stick.

Dynamite. Yeah. And, and they’re running around and they’re lighting the dynamite and they’re throwing it and the dolls are just running around behind them, putting it out. And I thought that was hilarious. 

Todd: That was really funny. They’re pulling it out. They’re like pulling the wicks out. They’re like pouring water over.

One. One of them grabs it, just tosses it after the kid. As he’s running out, it doesn’t look like this is gonna work 

Craig: well, and, and somehow Jimmy. Sneaks off and blows the shaft. I don’t know what the shaft is. I don’t know what that means, but he blows up the shaft and then a doll stabs the dad in the leg.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: It’s early 

Todd: on, you know? Yeah, 

Craig: yeah. And this whole thing, and then they’re thrown around the dynamite, all that blah, blah, blah. And so then I guess everybody gets out and the factory explodes and the two men like jump over an embankment and like this big action shot. It’s kind of funny. I 

Todd: guess it’s just like.

Some of the dynamite ended up. Working. You know, I, I guess there’s just not, there’s not like a twist or a big moment. There’s just a, they’ve been tossing this dynamite around, by the way, no dolls are attacking them while they’re doing this. No, they’re just running around putting the wicks out. It almost seems completely empty on the shots, but, and these guys also don’t seem to care and about, you know, they’re just running around like they’re doing business, not really looking left and right sneaking.

It’s just, uh, like the dynamite throw it, like the dynamite throw it. Dolls are putting out, dolls are putting out, dolls are putting it out. It just, it, it’s leading you to believe that the dolls are successfully thwarting them at every turn until they run out of there and it explodes anyway. Yeah, so 

Craig: I don’t know.

I guess maybe one or two of the dynamite bundles worked and that triggered the others. I don’t know. It also doesn’t make any sense, like you said before, why wouldn’t the dolls just run out? Like Yeah, leave. As far as we know, they’re not bound there. But anyway, the whole factory blows up and the doll spirits scream.

Now, I guess that’s how you kill evil. Dolls, like blow them up. 

Todd: Like, 

Craig: like 

Todd: I, it, it, it, where do the spirits go now? Exactly. And I mean, if they could possess dolls, they could possess anything. Right. Anything. 

Craig: Right. It it, what are the rules? Like how do you kill an evil spirit with dynamite? Like, uh, like it had to be bound, like it had to be bound in like this special tomb before and it lived there for thousands of years, but now you just blow up the factory and then the mom.

Looks at the daughter and says, honey, it’s over. And it is. That’s the end. Like that’s just the end of the movie. Yeah. Like, well, okay. I guess you win. 

Todd: I mean, thank God it is. I mean really. I don’t know if I could have seen much more of it, but it’s very anti climactic. Yeah. It was going for a big climactic action scene.

There is a giant explosion. It just emotionally it, I felt like it stumbled instead of landed, so yeah. It was, uh, it was interesting. I think it’s a movie you could enjoy with friends. It’s definitely something you could laugh at. It’s better, I think, than a lot of, I mean, there’s some truly unwatchable stuff that we’ve seen Oh, yeah.

In this era. Along the same lines that for one reason or another. 

Craig: Yeah. Some of the newer, is it Full Moon? Is that the company that does like all the demonic toys and stuff? Yeah, some of those newer ones, like there’s these newer like baby Oopsie movies that are super low budget and I think intentionally bad and there are people that are into that kind of thing.

I am not really one of those people. This isn’t intentionally bad. They’re, you know, they’re going for it. I just, you know, like especially the mom, whatever you said her name was, the actress, Denise Crosby, like mm-hmm. She is playing it a hundred percent sincere. She seems exactly the same as her character in Pet Cemetery.

Maybe slightly less bitchy, but other than that, almost exactly the same. True just the mom or whatever. But she is playing it with. Full sincerity and, and I think everybody is, which is a little odd because it feels like it should be campy. Yeah. And it’s really not as campy as you would expect. It plays it pretty straight.

I think I might have, I don’t know. I, you know, I, maybe I’m contradicting myself ’cause I just said, you know, there’s those, you know, goofy full moon movies and they are intentionally campy, but I, I, I could’ve. Done with a little more camp in this movie. Yeah. For me, it just fell a little flat. Like child’s play is better.

I, I’ve seen other doll movies. I like dolls better. You know, I’ve seen a lot of other doll movies that I like better. It’s okay. It’s not terrible. Like you said, I think that you could enjoy it with friends in the right context. I would also say you could skip it. And you’d be fine. 

Todd: Dolls has sort of that fairy tale ish type atmosphere and child’s play has the character of Chucky.

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: And those are the things that hold up those movies and make them interesting. This movie has nothing to really make it interesting. It’s checking all the boxes. Like we said, it’s so typical of these movies. It is a. A hundred percent paint by numbers script. They’re trying to have these goofy moments where the dolls are, he like, like, now we’re gonna have some fun, but they don’t really, it’s just a, a little flash.

Otherwise, it seems like they’re trying to be very, very sinister and the dolls are coming across as very, very sinister, but without really knowing what the potential end game is gonna be, besides just. Kill everybody. You come across, I guess, mischief and what their weakness is. None of that is really, is ever hinted at the movie.

Doesn’t have answers for those things. So there’s nothing to anticipate and look forward to. I don’t know. I just can’t, I can don’t know how else to explain it. It’s just, it’s not horrible. It’s just. It’s kind of basic. Yeah, yeah. That’s 

Craig: a good word for it. Yeah, it’s very basic. 

Todd: And I mean, what can you say about Ed Gale?

I mean, you don’t, you just see flashes of a, of the dolls and it’s clear in those moments that Yeah. Of him running around. 

Craig: But you know, when, when he passed, you know, it was news in the horror world because he’s been around for a long time and he’s done a lot of stuff. It, it was just kind of a coincidence that we were able to talk about him and what was the name of the composer?

Uh, Mark Snow. I thought it was kind of a nice coincidence that we could kind of talk about both of them at the same time because they are the kind of people who work all the time and are so integral to a lot of the films that we have enjoyed over the years, but they don’t get. A lot of acclaim. 

Todd: Right.

Craig: They’re, they’re, they’re not the, because they disappear, they’re in the background. Yeah. They’re not the face of the movie. Right. You know? Mm-hmm. They, you know, they, hidden figures is totally the wrong word, but, but they’re, they’re more behind the scenes. Now, of course, you know, ed Gale’s in front of the camera, but he’s always in prosthetics or a mask or something.

You. Next to never see his face. So it’s not like he’d be somebody that you would necessarily recognize except for his stature and with a composer. Music is such an essential element to film and television and, and art in general. And it can really. And you know, I don’t wanna say make or break, but it can really enhance a film.

Now, I don’t know. Like I said to you, this score kind of faded into the background to me, which I don’t think is a bad thing. It wasn’t anything that I would necessarily say was remarkable, but I appreciate that we can also give some flowers to those people who maybe don’t get them as often as some of the other people that we talk about.

Todd: Yeah, exactly. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and if you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can find us online, chainsaw horror.com, direct people there for all of our back episodes. We’re also on all the podcast streaming services. You can, uh, leave us a message, a voice message on our site when you click Speak to us and uh, record a quick file to get sent to us.

And if. And if we, if you do that, we’ll definitely play it on air and respond. We also have a newsletter, a weekly newsletter that you can sign up for that’ll let you know what’s coming up. And also a little bit of horror news and what’s happening with our patrons in the back. We love our patrons and we love doing special things for them.

We have a book club going on right now. We have mini SOS that are exclusive just for them, and of course, they also get our complete unedited phone calls that lead to these podcasts. That sounds like something you’d be interested in. Go over to patreon.com/chainsaw podcast. Sign up for just five bucks a month.

Until next time, I’m Todd. And I’m Craig with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

For this week’s tribute to Michael Madsen, we discuss one of his more famous movies, and among the roles he was most proud of. He finally got to play a good guy! We discuss Natasha Henstridge’s breakout role, H.R. Giger’s designs, silly 90’s thriller plots, a unique concept, and copious amounts of female nudity.

Episode 453, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Craig, it feels like for the last month or two, all we’ve done is tribute episodes. 

Craig: Well, and my goodness, we could do more. I mean, so many people have passed away in the last month or two. It’s insane. The last four 

Todd: or five days, 

Craig: I know just the other day I was in the.

Dentist chair, and Alan texted me that Hulk Hogan died. And I cried in the dentist chair that Hulk Hogan died. What? Why am I 

Todd: crying? You cried about Hulk Hogan. That’s hilarious. 

Craig: Well, I think I’m just a little emotionally raw. You know, I recently lost my dog. I’m serious. I recently lost my dog. And then I know you and I recently lost a mutual personal friend, you know, just this week.

And yes, Ozzy, uh, Theo, I mean, oh God. 

Todd: Gosh, it’s been a rough month. It has been insane. Yeah. At the time that we’re recording this, this has all just happened within the last few days. Michael Madson, who, uh, we are attributing in this episode, he passed away, uh, last month in July, just a day before July 4th, and just a few days before the 30th anniversary of this movie that we’re doing now called Species.

Craig: Isn’t that a wild coincidence? I read that too. 

Todd: It is a weird coincidence in this case because species seems to be one of his. Michael Madsen, by the way, has over 300 credits on IMDB. A lot of them are in movies that he says, literally, he says, look, a lot of people say are critical of the movies that I’ve been doing later in my career, but he is like, I got mouths to feed.

Yep. And my family of six kids expected a certain lifestyle around the time of species and Mulholland Drive and a couple of these other big movies that he was in. He said, there’s a lot of DVDs on the shelf that I’m in. 10 minutes of. But they bought my name to put on the DVD packaging for, and it feeds my family, and that’s what we do.

Right. I would do the same if I were him. Of course. Absolutely. Smart man. It doesn’t change the fact that this guy has had a really nice career. He has been in some big films. He was a favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s. He was in Quentin Tarantino’s debut. Debut movie. Mm-hmm. Reservoir Dog and, and he was an evil.

Evil guy in that one. 

Craig: Yeah. It’s one of his most iconic roles. I’ve shockingly, I’ve never 

Todd: seen that movie. You haven’t? Mm-hmm. It’s good. It’s a really good movie. It’s classic Tarantino. I mean, of course it’s his first one, but like he is a brutal, brutal guy who just gets off on torturing and killing people.

Right. That movie kind of was one of the earlier ones that really put Michael Madson on the map, I would say. And Species is another one that I think brought him right in front of our faces as well. These were highlights in his career for sure. He’s from Chicago. Did you know that? 

Clip: No. 

Todd: His mom was a filmmaker and author and at the urging of Roger Ebert, one of my favorite guys, he said, you know, you should, you should pursue your, your art.

She did. I think that was an inspiration to her son, Michael, who after he graduated from school in Chicago, started working at the Steppenwolf Theater Company there, and he was even an apprentice under John Malkovich. Hmm. And his first. Role in, in movies was a very small role in war games with, uh, was Matthew Broderick was in that right?

Craig: I think so, yeah. Uhhuh. So yeah, 

Todd: he kind of k kicked things off pretty strong, I would say. What, what? He was in Donny Brasco, he turned down the role of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. That’s the one that Tom John Travolta eventually got. Right. But you could totally see him in that role too. 

Craig: I 

Todd: totally could.

Craig: He said that was the biggest mistake of his career. Like he actually, uh, he turned down for various reasons, availability, whatever, several pretty iconic roles, and, and that was the biggest one. But everyone that he turned down, I was like, yeah, I could see him in that. Right. Yeah. He was a, a really cool actor, you know, tall, dark, handsome, brooding.

He played a type most of the time. He, well, he said. I, I was looking at quotes from him and he said some, something along the lines of, I’m a leading man trapped in a bad guy’s body, and I get it. He does kind of, and it’s interesting that you say that he’s from Chicago, because now that I know that, I’m like, that tracks like right.

He’s got kind of that Chicago tough guy. Air about him, and he is kind of a tough guy, you know? He mm-hmm. He was, I was really surprised. I just learned today that acting wasn’t his only art. He was also a, uh, a published and award-winning poet. I had no idea. So he had a softer side too, and he talks about how, you know, he encouraged.

In his sons to, he encouraged them to try to connect to their softer sides and their artistic sides. But he also said that he wanted them to grow up to be people who didn’t take shit from anybody. So he also taught them. Boxing and stuff like that, which it, it, it, it just, it makes so much sense. It just sounds so much like exactly the guy that I see on the screen.

It does, but it, it also, I mean, I just said I was surprised and I was surprised, but in considering it, I’m really not surprised to see. That he had that softer side, the poet side, because he does also have kind of a quiet elegance to him. Hmm. I remember him from a million things. I’m sure you know who we’re talking about if you’re listening to this, but if you don’t Google him and you’ll recognize him immediately.

He’s been in a million things. He was in free Willie. He was in Belman Louise. 

Todd: Yeah, he was the dad. That’s the 

Craig: one. 

Todd: He was the dad in. Free Willy, wasn’t he? I forgot that. 

Craig: And I liked that movie when I was a kid. I was a cute, but you, you mentioned Thelman Louise. I remember him from that. My sister and I watched that movie a lot when we were far too young to be watching that movie.

He got offered the role of the horrible rapist and didn’t take it, I guess, you know, as tough of a guy as he was. He was really kind of averse to violence. Mm. He wanted the role of. Susan Sarandon’s boyfriend, which was a small role, but I remember him from that. He was a tough guy, but there were so many bad men in that movie.

Right? And, and he was a good guy and he really stood out to me in that it just seemed to be a very well-rounded. Well respected guy. Remained friends with the people he worked with. He was a pallbearer at Chris Penn’s funeral. Just seemed like an all around cool guy. And the reason that I, I suggested we do this was because it’s probably, you know, one of his biggest horror things, but also because, you know, at some point in his career he said that this was one of his favorite movies that he had done because he was actually given an opportunity to play a good guy.

Yeah, I mean, it’s. You know, nineties B movie. Yeah. So it’s, no, it’s, it’s no masterpiece. But, but he’s good in it and it’s a fun ride. 

Todd: And this movie was big. Oh yeah. I mean, for a b movie, this, this movie was huge when it came out. This is smack dab in the middle of high school. My friends and I rented it as soon as it came out on video.

What I remember about it was, this is the movie with the boobs. Mm-hmm. Natasha Henstridge naked through most of the movie, and that’s about all I remember. Oh, and she’s playing an alien who’s trying to mate with people. That’s all I remembered about the movie Uhhuh. That’s all that teenage Todd cared about.

And it delivered, it delivered on those fronts. Yeah. I honestly couldn’t have. Recounted the plot to you before I watched it again, except for the fact that I know that I remember it being just this very basic film. It was almost typical. Mm-hmm. Really nineties sci-fi thriller type thing where it’s ultimately just kind of a chase movie where this gal is one step ahead of the people who are trying to track her down, and in the meantime she’s leaving a trail of bodies.

Uh, in her way. 

Craig: Right. There’s even a part where Michael Matson’s character, whose name is Press, I think maybe Preston, but they call him press for short after we are introduced to the whole alien thing, which we’ll get back to. There’s a meeting of what I ended up calling the team because they’re just kind of like this ragtag team of like a psychologist and an empath and a, a tough guy, and Ben Kingsley, who is the scientist.

Who is in charge of this thing explains what happened, and he explains that sometime in the recent past, they received communication from an intelligent alien species. 

Clip: There were two distinct communications. The first message turned out to be a superior catalyst for methane. We now have the potential to produce an infinite amount of energy from this clean burning fuel.

This convinced us that we were dealing with a friendly intelligence. The second message turned out to be a new sequence of DNA with a rather friendly instructions on how to combine it with ours. Here’s some technical data on the whole operation. You can get feedback on it from Dr. Baker. Basically, the new combined DNA sequence was injected into 100 human over.

Craig: He says it so seriously, like it’s just so matter of fact. But like I’m thinking, oh, that sounds like a great idea. Like Right. Even, I mean they, they send us the methane, so they must be friendly, right? So they, um, yeah. So they immediately do and they create this creature, which appears human. Ages at 

Todd: an incredibly advanced rate until the movie gets going, and then she freezes in time to a hot 20 something year old gal.

Pretty much she ages. It all only takes place over two days, right? But still, my impression was it was like three days max that she had gone from an embryo into this girl who ends up escaping. Am I wrong? And, 

Craig: uh, I don’t remember. I, I think it was days. Yeah. And, and, and then they were gonna try to destroy her, but she escaped and, and he’s, Kingsley is telling this whole story and then either he or somebody else kind of patronizingly asks Michael Matson the question 

Clip: as the, um.

Well, the non-scientist amongst us are, you would talk clear about what’s going on here. Well, I think so. You created a monster with some kind of formula you got from outer space. The damn thing got away and now you want us to hunt it down and kill it. Is that pretty close? 

Craig: And they’re like. Yeah, I, I guess that’s the gist of it.

Todd: That’s, that’s the movie in a nutshell. Just, yeah. And that’s, 

Craig: that’s it. And then it becomes a chase scene 

Todd: in case we are stupid. The nineties movies did this to a crazy degree where there would just be this point in the movie where somebody would lay out the movie premise for you. Just in case you hadn’t caught it by then.

I do feel like movies of this era, and this is a perfect example of them, we’re very much just like, we just think you’re all basic and we’re gonna give you everything upfront and we’re gonna spell it out for you. And anytime there might be anything that we’ve hinted at in the past, we will make sure there is a point where we spell it out for you later.

In case you didn’t catch it earlier. You know what I mean? I do know what you mean, and I say that because I’ve watching this movie, it just took me back to that era. I’m like, yeah, this is like the rock. This is like every nineties action movie. Out there really, except it just involves an alien. Or it could be a, you could call it a slasher.

Yeah, you could. It’s, it’s very familiar and I have no complaints about it. I really don’t. No, I mean, if, if you’re into this kind of thing, you’re into it. If, if you don’t wanna see it, then that’s fine. But I was, I was curious about the premise though. I, I thought the premise is really clever. We’ve seen a lot of movies that kick off.

You know, we recently did Predator, all these movies that kick off with a shot of earth. And you see this tiny little something, whether it’s a comet, whether it’s a spaceship, whether it’s a pod or something, fly into the atmosphere and you’re clued into, okay, aliens have landed. And that’s what the movie’s gonna be about.

This isn’t about an alien landing. An alien doesn’t visit the planet. The screenwriter picked up on an on, on an idea by Arthur C. Clark, a very famous, a sci-fi novelist. And just in case you guys don’t know, and one thing that he said was like, when you consider everything involved, the, the improbability of faster than light travel, the size of the universe, uh, and all these things, the idea that an advanced civilization would find us and visit us is almost.

Infinitesimally small. This takes the notion that, well, of course, so, so that doesn’t happen. But other aliens could be sending out signals like we’re sending out signals with Seti. 

Craig: Mm-hmm. 

Todd: And they used this way to plant themselves onto our planet. And I’d forgotten that aspect of this movie. And I thought, oh God, that’s really smart.

The screenwriter, by the way, 10 years before this, his very first produced screenplay was. Just one of the guide. 

Craig: That’s funny. I like that movie. 

Todd: How? How many times have you and I referenced that movie on this show? That’s a great movie. We loved it. Caught it on cable all the time in the nineties. Yeah, it was such a good one.

He didn’t do much. He did this, he, he did just one of the guys. He did The Golden Child, which was the Eddie Murphy movie. 

Craig: I like that movie too. It is good. And that kind of tracks that movie is a lot like this one in many ways with like creatures and like, you know, kind of a quest, kind of uhhuh. Narrative.

It makes a lot of sense. Very similar. That makes sense to me. 

Todd: Yeah, so he just picked up on those ideas from Arthur C. Clark. He had written a movie between the Golden Child and this one called Real Men that involved aliens and stuff, and, and he kind of wanted to do another one. And I think the script went through a lot of changes and revisions, both before it was accepted and during production as well.

Got a lot of, a lot of people had their hands in the pie. Frank Mancuso Jr. Who is the longtime producer of the Friday, the 13th franchise. Ended up picking it up and then pulled HR Geiger. Mm-hmm. To do a creature design. And I mean, you can tell ’cause it’s totally his style. Oh yeah. But it’s interesting to see how much he really tried to vary this from Alien.

So much so that apparently he was heavily involved in giving script notes, requesting changes to the movie and all kinds of stuff because he just did not want this to feel like another rehash of Alien. Because in many ways it really just does feel like that already. 

Craig: Well, and there are parts of it, particularly towards the end, that feel very, the, the final sequence feels very much like it.

Oh, yeah. You 

Todd: could list it out exactly. And I think he did, I think he wrote notes. He said the, these are the like six ways that this movie totally references alien. Can we have the creature die slightly different way in the end. So it’s not by flamethrower, which was what originally was in it, you know, stuff like that.

So, um, it’s cool to see a movie where everybody’s, you know, contributing and everybody’s allowed to contribute. That’s probably how this thing came together and became so successful. It’s just kind of a wild, fun ride. 

Craig: Mm-hmm. I 

Todd: don’t think it’s gonna win big awards. No. I think reviews on it are even kind of mixed, but mostly it’s just do you like this kind of movie or not?

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: If you’re not, then just watch something else. That’s kind of how, ultimately, maybe I’m skipping to the end here, but that’s ultimately my take on this movie. It’s a fun ride for what it is. Yeah, 

Craig: for what it is exactly. And I mean, that’s what most of the fan reviews say. Like if you look at IMDB, it’s got, I dunno, like a six or a seven or something like that.

Not, not. Super high ratings, but most people are like, it’s a pretty good B movie. You know, like, yeah, what do you expect from this type of movie? It is what it is. And you know, it’s, it hits lots of marks for a lot of people. You’ve got a sexy lady who shows her boobs quite a bit. You’ve got, you know, some.

Pretty big action sequences. You’ve got a cool designed alien. It moves pretty quickly. It stars a lot of people that you’re gonna recognize. Big names, Oscar winners and nominees and stars of stage screen and television. It’s got a lot going for it. I’m, I’m sure it had a big budget. 35 million. That’s, that’s pretty big.

Yeah, it’s pretty big for a B movie. Yeah. The only thing, and I’m not gonna say I’m gonna complain about it, but. In critiquing it from a 2025 perspective, the digital effects are, are pretty lacking. Yeah. The design looks great. I love the design, but it looks like a video game from 2000. You know what, 

Todd: it kind of reminded me a little bit of when we did the relic.

Yeah. Where the shots where you could tell it was practical. Because they did have some practical puppets and things like that in here, just like in the Relic. That was pretty good. But then it was immediately apparent when it would switch to CGI because it was, yeah, not complimentary at all. By today’s perspective.

By today’s perspective, and still, well, still fun. Not Leprechaun four bad, you know? No, 

Craig: no. I mean, it was still fun. Yeah. It just, it’s very clearly CGI. It’s not. Fooling anybody and that’s fine. That’s where we were in 1995. Mm-hmm. So whatever, everything else about it, I pretty much liked. I mean, I, I also think that it’s kind of a cool thing that the movie.

This, this alien human hybrid, I suppose is the antagonist of the movie, but to call her it the villain isn’t really fair. Uh, that’s right. This individual being didn’t ask to be created, didn’t, you know, whatever of her race of beings, whatever they are, you know, they intended this to happen. She’s still an individual and didn’t ask for it, and they.

Create her in a test tube, an incubator and everything, but it goes super, super fast. And I think they show her, I don’t know, they show a, a very small girl who looks like she’s maybe six or something and say, this is just three days. Three weeks. I don’t remember what they said, but it’s super, super fast.

And then she becomes a very young Michelle Williams. I didn’t look into this, but. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was one of the first things that Michelle Williams ever did. It must be, it’s definitely before Dawson’s Creek, which is where her career really took off. She’s very young in this, but very cute.

And what I was trying to get at was I like that. I think that the filmmakers are making an effort to endear us to this character. Before she starts killing people. So then ultimately, when she starts killing people, it’s exciting and I know that they have to catch her and she’s ultimately a very big threat because what she wants to do is reproduce, which is all just based on instinct again.

Yeah, it’s not malicious. Yeah. She’s, I, I don’t know the. Technical definition of an anti-hero, but she’s, she’s at, at very least a sympathetic villain. 

Todd: She is. And, and that strikes you from the very beginning. It’s clear they’re trying to do this, even as you know, she’s being gassed in that chamber because they decide, why do they decide they need to gas her?

Because what was it, he explains it later. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if it was just that she was growing too fast, that she was growing too fast, and they decided they needed to, to take their time with this and, and not, not maybe they had made a mistake. Or 

Craig: something. I guess she’s having weird 

Todd: dreams, but it’s not like they can tap into those, 

Craig: right.

I don’t know. And I don’t know if they know that she’s super strong. I don’t know. I think it, I think it’s just a matter of it’s, it’s happening too fast and it’s unpredictable and we don’t, we need to take a step back and do it more slowly. I think that’s all that it was. Yeah. But I mean, Ben Kingsley. I’m gonna probably just keep calling him that, but his name is Fitch.

In the movie, if I, if I call him that, he’s kind of the head scientist in charge and honestly I would think of him more as the villain, but he’s difficult to think of as the villain too, because he’s just strictly science. 

Todd: He is, and he is really not wrong. I mean, everything that he’s doing is actually kind of smart.

You know, there’s that classic scene where. There’s two of the team in a room and with the, with the experiment, uh, I may be jumping the gun here a little bit, but they decide for other reasons that they, they wanna go back and make her without the human part, right. 

Craig: So that they can better understand her nature.

And, and I thought that was actually a really clever idea. And it’s not even, I don’t remember Mark Helgenberger, what is her care, Laura? Yeah. Yeah. She is a molecular biologist. She’s on the team also. Like I told you, there’s this ragtag team or whatever, and she has the idea. Once the thing’s name is sill, it stands for something, but I don’t know what.

Once she escapes and they’re trying to find her, but they’re having difficulty finding her, mark Helgen Berger’s character says, why don’t we just create it without the human thing? So then we have more of an idea of what its nature is. And yeah, I’m thinking nobody thought of that before this, right? Like I might have thought, I don’t know, I’m no scientist, but I might have thought if an alien sends us its DNA and says, Hey, put it together with some human DNA, I might have thought, well, let’s see what its DNA is.

First, right before we start mixing it with things, since it’s clearly possible. I know, but, but science, I don’t know. In, in the wrong hands. Potentially. Even in the right hands can be reckless. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, we’re seeing that now. Well, and I, but we’ve always seen it, I mean, even, you know, with like atomic power and stuff.

True. Like sometimes risks have to be taken for progress. And so again, that’s why Ben Kingsley’s character. I am rooting against him. ’cause he seems mean, you know, he, it just, it feels to me as the viewer, very inhumane that he would gas this precious little girl who has no idea what’s going on. Who, who asked for none of this.

Who they’ve been keeping in complete isolation, like hooked up to wires and stuff from the time that she was born. You know, the empath of the group, Forrest Whitaker, Dan, when he’s being told this and he’s being shown videos, he’s saying she didn’t like that she didn’t like. Being confined. She didn’t like being alone.

She’s, she’s scared. Now, to be frank, I think that his character is really stupid. Oh God, yes. And a really stupid, stupid plot device. Yes. That’s the old i’ll, I mean, it’s a silly movie overall, but that is a, writing that character in is silly because he identifies as an empath. But the truth of the matter is he’s just psychic.

Yeah, I mean, he just knows everything. Like he’s just a human barometer of everything. Like he knows every move that everybody’s gonna make. He knows everything that everybody, including this alien being, he can sense 

Todd: when someone’s outside, you know, he could look at a photograph and be like, she was in pain and she felt this and this and this.

Like, come on. He’s just a way to move them. And almost every time too, which is also what’s annoying about this movie, is he is their way to move them from place to place, Uhhuh. Oh. And now I sense that she’s over here and that’s where they go, you know, in almost every circumstance he has a sense. That maybe she’s somewhere else.

And so that’s where they ended up going. And of course she was just there. 

Craig: Well, and in the final pursuit, he’s like a blood house. 

Todd: I thought of him. I thought of him as the meter and alien. That’s beeping, you know? Yeah.

Craig: Okay, fine, whatever. But early on in the movie, he tells us, oh, she’s scared, she’s unhappy, she doesn’t like this. So we feel empathy for her and we feel bad that this mean scientist, you know, tried to gas her. And, 

Todd: but even, even in that moment, I think they actually pull a little bit of a hat trick on you here.

Where he’s standing up tall, he’s lit from below. He, he’s got a very stern look on his face. He nods to order the gas to come in, and you can see that this little girl’s being gassed and she’s crying and she’s pleading and she’s pounding on the doors, looking up at him, and he just stands there staring down at her, but then a tear comes down his face.

And he says, I’m so sorry, which she sees him mouth and you, and you’re like, oh, wait a minute. Alright. He doesn’t wanna be doing this, but he’s making the decision that has to be made. Right. And I feel like that was his character and I think that’s what you’re getting at. That was his character throughout the whole thing.

Yeah. He’s not the stereotypical, he’s not the Paul riser of Alien, you know, who’s willing to kind of sacrifice everything for the, for the whatever, for science, correct? No, he actually. He has a lot of sympathy too, and I feel like most, most of the movie, he’s actually making all the right calls, even when, like I said, in that one moment where they go into the lab and they decide to create her without the human part of the DNA, and they have that classic scene, you know, it’s like the beginning of the rock with Nick Ca in there.

Now the scientists are trapped in the room with the bad thing happening and the people outside. Are unwilling to open the doors because if they do that, bad thing’s gonna get out and destroy everybody else and possibly the world. Right. You can’t really knock him 

Craig: for that, you know, in theory. Yeah. I, I, and I totally get it in theory, and, and it, it is the practical decision.

It makes more sense. Well, 

Todd: it’s the responsible decision. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Right. You, you, you know, you risk. It becoming uncontained and, and getting out. And it’s weird because the sill alien, you know, she, she appears human, but she eventually transforms. I’m, I’m not really sure if she can transform it will, or if this is just a continuation of her transformation.

I think it’s just a continuation of her transformation. But she ultimately looks humanoid, but very alien. And very hr, very HR Geiger. It’s very in keeping with his style. Yeah. Yeah. He, he does, uh, include a lot of sexuality and she’s voluptuous and like she can shoot tentacles out of her nipples that can, like strangle people and stuff.

I like that. It’s weird. 

Todd: Have you ever flipped through a Geiger, uh, his, any of his book, like Books of Art or anything like that? 

Craig: I know that I have, but it’s been a while. I, I basically, what I can remember is that, you know, his style is pretty consistent. Yeah. And it’s, it’s pretty consistent with the design of the Xenomorph and with the stuff that you see in this movie.

Yep. And, and you, there’s definitely, I mean, the XR. They had to get him to tone down the phallic nature of it. Yeah. It was initially, and it, and it’s still, it’s head is still pretty phallic. 

Todd: Oh yeah. His art is all just vaginas and phalluses and things going into mouths and stuff like that. I mean, uhhuh, every single bit of it, it’s super consistent.

So, uh, no, no big surprises there. No, it’s actually kind of a shock that it ever got that his heart ever got tapped for film. I know. I mean, you, it’s good art, but like, you know, again, you gotta tame it down considerably. For film and even then even the Zemo morph is just dripping with this stuff, you know, 

Craig: Uhhuh, literally, 

Todd: it’s 

Craig: funny.

But yeah, I mean, so Michelle Williams escapes and, and she’s young and she hops a train. It’s interesting, this alien adapts pretty quickly. She picks up basic language. She is observant and you know, can pick up on human behaviors in that if you trade this green paper. For things you can, you know, get stuff like, so she, she somehow acquires money.

I don’t even remember how, but she, and she starts, you know, giving people money for products and services and stuff. But on this train, she’s eating ravenously. We find out later it’s because she was like preparing for a metamorphosis and then she builds like, builds isn’t the right word, but forms this.

Cocoon in the train car that she’s in. And though again, she really never seems malicious. In fact, she can interact pretty well with people. She interacts with this train attendant, this, this lady who’s very nice to her and they have kind of a nice interaction. Yeah. But we’re always reminded that she is an evolving creature and that part of her evolution is to feed and to.

Kill in defense of herself or, or whatever. And though she does have a kindly interaction with this train lady, when the train lady comes back to check on her and finds this giant cocoon, a big tentacle, shoots out of it and, and kills her, and she leaves a trail of bodies throughout this movie, we, you don’t, we don’t even see, we see her kill multiple people.

Yeah. But we don’t even see every kill. Like the team just kind of follows this trail of bodies. 

Todd: They just, they’re always just like, just a little bit late to the party. 

Craig: Oh my God. There are like five seconds late every time. Which 

Todd: is also silly. It’s also silly how quickly they discover where she might be going next.

I mean, it’s the kind of movie you, you don’t want to. Think too much about, I think Roger Ebert said that in his mo in his review, he was like, you, you don’t, if you really stop to think about what’s going on, it all kind of falls apart because what leads them from one place to another place to another place.

The clues and things that they get, they’re so dumb. And again, most of it involve, revolves around this empath sensing things. So, uh, 

Craig: well, I mean, she does leave. I mean, even just what I’ve already said, the, the, the fact that. And somebody makes a joke at some point, they’re like, of course, Los Angeles is perfect for her.

It’s a city of the future. 

Clip: Anything goes totally mobile population. Everyone’s a stranger. Very little in this town, is taboo or 

Craig: unacceptable. Whatever she does, no one’s going to notice. Which to some extent I think is absolutely true, but it, you do have to kind of take a leap of blind faith to believe that she could acclimate so quickly.

You do. She, she learns how to drive. She uses a credit card. She goes shopping and buys a wedding dress and wears it around for a while. 

Todd: That was 

Craig: hilarious, but. She could have, Natasha Hinrich could have gotten away with walking around in anything she wanted to in 1995. Oh 

Todd: yeah. 

Craig: She was stunningly beautiful.

She looked like a fashion model. She was, no, I don’t think anybody would’ve batted an eye at her wearing that dress. No, not at all. I, 

Todd: I, she would’ve been the, one of the least weird people walking down the street, I think. 

Craig: But aside from figuring out that she was in la, which I don’t really remember, they, they get close because one guy she kills, she has his money, she uses it to check into a motel as an alien would do, I suppose.

Where, where she, uh, watches porn. 

Todd: Yeah. Well, everything she sees on the. TV ends up the TV, feeds her a lot of information, including the very specific bit of usefulness that will come to her later, which is you can dye your hair. Oh yeah. How many 

Craig: times. That’s right. 

Todd: Did we see the hair dyeing ad before that became relevant and then That’s right.

That’s funny. The stupid thing later is that one of the members of our team, and actually I think it’s Forrest Whitaker, sees the same ad on television in the motel, and that gives them the idea. Wait a minute. Maybe she changed her appearance. Come on. This entire team of supposed experts in all this, it didn’t cross their mind once that this would, that this would be a thing.

He had to see the same ad on television to get that idea. 

Craig: It’s, I mean, it’s silly. Whatever. It works. The only thing she does to change her appearance is dye her hair. She’s, she’s blonde naturally, and she dyes her hair brunette now, to be fair, they’ve never gotten a real good look at her. No, that’s true.

They’ve seen some kind of grainy footage of her from the motel where she used. A credit card. The guy at the, the desk was like, we have to have your credit card on file. So she gave the credit card. That’s how they initially got close to her. Right. And then from then on they were just kind of always just one step behind for one reason or another.

And again, it’s jumping ahead. We can jump back, but by the time. She dyes her hair. It’s not just a matter of them not recognize her because she like did the Clark Kent glasses type thing. They also think she’s dead. Yeah. And also, to be fair, they were skeptical of that and felt that they had been reassured.

So they were fairly reassured that she was dead. Natasha Henstridge is so striking. The, there’s no way I would be shocked. I would be shocked that even from just the grainy imagery that they’d seen of her, that they wouldn’t at least give her a second glance. Yeah. Because she’s just so, so striking. But whatever they don’t, it’s fine.

A lot of it, a lot of what we skipped. Is just them constantly on her tail and once she sees porn, that really gets her biological clock ticking. And then she’s on the prowl for men, so, so she asks the motel clerk. Who I was shocked didn’t just say like, well, I’m a man, 

Todd: right? I thought that would be the first thing.

He didn’t seem like the most up and up guy anyway. 

Craig: Right. Maybe she wasn’t his type. I don’t know. But he was far less skeevy than I would’ve expected from him, for sure. But he sends her to a club and she goes to a club and she kind of observe. People flirting and she sees this, well, a guy approaches her and she’s talking to him, and then another woman breaks in and drops some cheesy line and kind of steals the guy that SIL was flirting with.

So she follows this lady into the bathroom and kills her through the wall. Yeah, like the girl’s in the bathroom stall. And I’m, I’m not really exactly sure how this, how did that happen? And I 

Todd: don’t know, it looked like a Beetlejuice move, like just this weird hand kind of shot out of the wall from behind this girl.

Craig: From behind her, but it doesn’t even make any sense how she behind the wall. Yeah. How? Because she, she’s in the bathroom with this lady and they have a brief interaction and then the lady goes in the stall and Natasha Ridge leaves the room. So I guess she went what? Into the men’s restroom, into the utility closet on the other side of the wall.

And, and I don’t know. I don’t know, but she shoots like a tentacle through and it kills the lady. Yeah, it’s weird and it’s, it’s bloody and gross. And there’s, you know, these practical effects when she’s killing people, they, they’re gory and Oh 

Todd: yeah. The aftermath of that’s really pretty good too. 

Craig: And and they, it really doesn’t pull any punches.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty violent and gory and so if you’re into that kind of stuff and practical effects it, the movie’s probably worth it just for that alone. But she also takes off her top a lot. She sure does. If you’re into that, she takes a, I don’t know, I was gonna say a skeevy guy, but whatever.

She just hits on this guy and she gets in to take. Her home and it looks like she’s down to go. You know, like he says he’s gonna go take a shower and she follows him in there and you know, is kind of leering at his body and he comes out and tells her to take her clothes off and she does. And they start getting closer to one another when all of a sudden she’s just not into it anymore.

What was that all about? Did she sense something? Okay. Yes. I mean, it’s explained to us later, but in the moment it was so confusing because like she was so into it and we already know that she’s motivated to mate the Mark Helden Berger character has already told us that she’s developing, you know, she’s following her natural instincts.

Her natural life cycle, and at this point, you know her, her body would be telling her that it is time to procreate. And so we know that already. But then she has this guy in her grasp and he’s totally into it and she rejects him and then he gets rapey and she kills him. Yeah. Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah, she kisses him and kind of, you know, XR tongue shots through his, the back of his head.

Also like Alien? Yes. Very much. When the team arrives, three seconds later, they put all this together and they’re like, well, she had a guy right here. Why wouldn’t she be with him? And I think it’s Mark Helgenberger. It’s like, well, maybe. She could sense that there was something wrong with him. I think that she cites some other species that can do that.

Like they can, you know, sense desirable versus undesirable mates and they’re like, well, maybe there was something wrong with him, and they look around for two seconds and find that he has syringes and insulin. So he was diabetic, so he was a less than perfect specimen for her to mate with. She, she 

knows 

Todd: so much about biology at this point.

Do you remember how they got here, by the way, now that I remembered it? No. They ask like the club owner, 

Clip: blue eyed blonde, black leggings, pink sweater, five foot 10 inches tall. Who’d she leave with? 

Todd: Blue eyed blonde leaves with a guy, sadly. News 

Clip: around here, just named the top attractions. The regulars, no losers.

You should assume he’s socially aep. You’ll be hopping around. She’s in, we’re looking for a friendly guy, not a total asshole. I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Robbie left with a blonde that’s 

Todd: this owner, like keeps tabs of all of the people in this gigantic club that is just packed to the gills with bodies and is like, oh, yeah, yeah, there’s like six really nice ones.

And oh yeah, I happen to notice that he left with a blonde. How many people were leaving with blondes that night? Come on. Right. 

Craig: Like she was the only blonde in the club. Right. So stupid. I know. And it’s all like that. I mean, it’s all just very silly clues. Like she, so she steals the guy that she just killed, she steals his car and she, you know, she watched him drive once, so she knows how to drive now.

And she just drives it around and eventually it runs outta gas. Somewhere in la she almost gets hit. She does get hit. She gets to, she gets nailed by, like, she gets out of the car and she’s on the street and she gets nailed by this car and thrown through one of those glass bus stops. Like, yeah, a a, an actual human.

Most likely would’ve been killed. It would’ve been shocking for somebody to survive that. Oh yeah. And she is unconscious and some handsome guy in a red convertible pulls up and like tends to her and I guess somehow gets her to the hospital, whether he called the ambulance or whatever. We don’t see that.

What we do see is him standing at the nurses’ station saying, I don’t know her name. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. And the nurse is like, well. She has no ID on her and she has no insurance, and the guy’s like, oh, that’s fine. Just put it on my credit card. Like what? Nicest guy. This stranger in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she, she’s hot. There’s no question there. I get it. She’s certainly hot, but the only interaction that he’s had with her is her laying in a crumpled unconscious mess. Rubble. Sure. And getting her to the hospital, like I, I see checking in on her, but like putting her medical bills on your credit card, those would be some serious bills too.

And that’s fine, but it’s stupid. It’s just so that when she miraculously heals herself in front of a befuddled doctor, right. Who then just gets whisked away by his nurses and he’s like, wait a second. Did you see that? Yeah. Then so she comes out, she sees nice guy standing there and she’s like, can you get me outta here?

And he’s like, did the doctor say it was okay for you to leave? And she’s like, yeah, it’s cool. So they leave. So the whole reason for him putting his credit card there was so that the team could then follow that trail? Yeah. To Rich guy’s house. Where once again, like she’s, she’s seducing this guy and this guy apparently is fine.

Todd: He’s a nice dude too. He’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. Too fast, you know? 

Craig: Yeah. And she gets him in the hot tub and she’s really, you know, she’s trying to make stuff happen really fast. And like the team, at least Michael Madson and, and Mark Helgenberger show up while this is still happening. Yes. Like, like they are like knocking on the door and like, like snooping around while this is happening.

So because she’s interrupted, she pushes nice guy under the water and he’s drowning. But then this is when she transforms. And again, I, it’s unclear to me, I don’t know if it’s because she feels threatened. Because she does go back to human form after this. Yes. So I do think it must be kind of an at will kind of thing.

Yeah. But she turns into this alien type thing. She shoots tentacles out of her nipples, strangles the guy. But by the time the team, you know, get out there, he’s already dead. Like they’re just seconds too late. Like if you had just been a little faster, that guy could have been Okay. 

Todd: Well they’re so on the tail end of this that she is watching them.

As they’re investigating that, she has gone, she’s gotten a car, she’s driven it around somewhere. She’s gotten outta the car. She’s come back and she’s looking through the bushes and watching them as they’re examining the hot tub. 

Craig: And reading Ben’s Ben Kingsley’s lips, so she knows what their plans are.

Their plans are to scout the club, the same club they were at this night because he thinks she’ll go back there for some reason. That I don’t understand, but maybe he just thinks that 

Todd: she’s going to the club repeatedly to, to find another man. I don’t know. I mean, you’re right, it is. It is the most. Like, if I were on this team, I’d be like, nah, I don’t think she’s going back there.

Uh, 

Craig: well, he’s underestimating her. She’s clearly, she right. She’s clearly very resourceful and, and smart. Like it would be foolish of her to go back to the same place. Yeah. I don’t think she would have, I don’t know. Ben Kingsley is also acting very shady at this point. I don’t know. I don’t even really know what he’s trying to do, but anyway, she knows now for me, I can pretty much get down with everything that’s happened up until this point.

At this point, it really starts to get ridiculous. Yes, because she puts together a fucking James Bond spy diversion that surely would’ve taken years to plan and would’ve been nearly impossible. Ball to execute perfectly, and yet she executes it perfectly. She stages her own death in the most extravagant 

Todd: of ways.

It didn’t need to be this extravagant, but yeah, and also this is the point at which she starts to do very indefensible things as far as when we were talking about her just acting on instinct. I mean, of course, you know the whole thing is instinct, but she leaps naked again. She’s naked. Into a car with a woman who’s at a gas station and basically the says I’m in trouble.

Trouble, I guess, and drives off. The next thing we know, she’s got this woman tied up. Bound and gag her bed. She has this weird conversation with her. Like, do you ever have nightmares? I think this was supposed to be kind of, I don’t wanna say darkly humorous, where she’s asking this woman who’s bound and gagged next to her, do you ever have nightmares?

’cause she’s being plagued by these nightmares, uh, of, of herself or her nature or something like that. Mm-hmm. And this woman’s like, no, just let me go, let me go. And she’s like, huh, I, well, you know, I have these nightmares and they’re terrible. Anyway, she cuts her thumb off in front of this woman, which regenerates.

Puts it in her bag, then goes over to the woman, cuts her thumb off. 

Craig: Yeah, and I didn’t know what was going on. It was very strange. The, the thing about the, I, I felt like this was the writer’s attempt at kind of an existential moment. Like, ah, right. When she’s asking about those nightmares, she’s like, I have these nightmares.

And those, they’re so terrible. They’re so frightening because they show me who I really am. Ah, and again, that’s a little deep for this type of movie, but I think that it’s, it’s kind of her coming to terms with what she really is. It’s. Frightening. But it may also give her the ability to do these, like, like you said, these increasingly indefensible things.

This, this woman that she’s taken hostage, not only is she innocent, but she offered still help. Yeah. You 

Todd: know? Right. At the same sense. You’re still kind of rooting for her because like you just said, oh yeah, this scene just lays bare that she’s really not that bad. She’s just acting. It’s like any one of the animal attack movies, you know, that we’ve done like alligators.

Yeah, 

Craig: right. Are you gonna be mad at Jaws, right? Yeah. They just 

Todd: are what they are. It’s just doing what it does like, so you’re still kind of rooting for it. And I think in that way that’s how it’s a little different from Alien and, and a lot of these other films where you’re rooting for the good guys, you’re kind of rooting for her ’cause she’s not really a crazy bad person either.

You’re just interested to see where this goes, but it just gets increasingly ridiculous. Like you said, they’re at the club and Dan is still their secret weapon and he just feels something. Right. He goes outside, he touches the ground. I was like, what? What? I thought he was an empath. How is he like sensing things through the ground?

Two guys pop out of a dumpster. What were they doing in there? I was curious about that. Then there’s a car and uh, she’s there and she hops in the car and she takes off. Then there’s a big car and helicopter chase. And 

Craig: it’s all intentional. This is all a ruse. She, she exposes herself and she wants them to chase her because like you said, we got a whole big sequence where she was filling up these big drums of gasoline and we, she’s got this woman that she’s taken hostage, she’s got her tied up in the passenger seat.

And it was, at this point I was like, oh, this is stupid. But the reason she cut off their thumbs is because she is going to fake her own death. Oh, 

Todd: this is so stupid. 

Craig: And use this woman. Okay, so. She has them chase her in a car and, and like, I don’t know if it’s Mulholland, but it’s one of those, you know, highways right on the mountain.

Looks like she’s up by the 

Todd: Hollywood sign or something, you know, it’s just way up in the mountain. You’re 

Craig: right. So, so she, she intentionally drives off a cliff and then as the car’s going down the cliff, she jumps out of the car at the same time pulling the other woman into the driver’s seat, and the car hits something and explodes.

A huge explosion, massive, because of all the gas in there. Helicopters come in and like missile shoot the 

Todd: whole area, shoot missiles into this car. This car has already had a mushroom cloud explosion. Then two helicopters come and just for good measure, shoot two missiles at it, to which it explodes even more.

Craig: But she easily gets away. But the whole thumb thing where she’s like, oh, they’ll find the thumb, which they do, and then they do 

Todd: this, this, this cop comes running up to get Ben Kinsley and it’s like, oh, by the way, this is like. Maybe three minutes after the explosion. Yeah, he runs up to Ben Kinsley. It’s like we found this thumb in the door.

It’s probably like, you know, as she was trying to escape or something. Do you mean to tell me that there is anything left? This little chunk of severed thumb that she put in the door, they’re actually gonna find, 

Craig: and it’s, and it’s dumb, but you know, she was right to suspect that they would be suspicious, but they checked the DNA of the thumb and they’re like, oh, yep, that’s her.

She must be dead. So. They go to hang out at a hotel, she goes to dye her hair and then comes to the same hotel that they’re at. I don’t get this either. I think that we are intended to believe that she’s lusting after Michael Madson and maybe kind of Yes, intentionally following him around. There was 

Todd: a scene earlier Yeah.

Where she kind of saw him get into an elevator and got all hot and bothered. 

Craig: Okay. All right. So now she, they’re all there. She’s there. She’s brunette. She interacts with several of them and them recognize her. That’s funny. There’s also, they’re, you know, they’re setting up this romantic tension between Michael Matson and Mark Helgenberger and will they, won’t they?

Who cares? 

Todd: It’s kind of thrown in there. 

Craig: Yeah. They end up going upstairs to Laura’s room. Mark Helgenberger and Sil follows Michael Madson up there, but he goes in and then she just stands outside the door. Getting really horny, listening to them. Bang. Yeah. And then a maid comes around the corner, so she has to, she can’t just be, you know, hanging out in the hall, like rubbing her nub listening to these guys.

So, so she steals the maid’s keys and goes into the room next door, which turns out to be. Alfred Molina’s door. I don’t think that we’ve even mentioned him. No, but he’s on the team 

Todd: too. He’s here as well. He’s one of the most useless people on this team. But yeah, 

Craig: I think he’s supposed to be comic relief, but he’s not really there enough to really be all that funny.

He looks great. He’s very young and he’s handsome. Yeah, he’s fun. He just, we haven’t said much about ’em ’cause there’s not a lot to say. He goes in his door and she’s there and he’s like, what are you doing here? And she’s like, I saw you downstairs, but you were talking to other people. So I decided just to come up and wait for you.

And she starts taking off her clothes and he’s like, things like this never happened to me. And he jumps on the bed and takes off all his clothes and they start banging. Now he was, you know, he had been drinking and he was, you know, trying to meet a lady downstairs. This is a strange woman that. He’s never seen before.

Todd: Right? An odd resemblance that you probably wouldn’t have to think too hard. You know, it’s not a huge leap from those grainy motel, you know, videos. The other thing I think is a little unconvincing about this movie is how it’s a very solid point when Bing Kinsley is like, okay, she’s dead. Everything’s good, and almost everybody else in the team is like, eh, I’m not sure.

I don’t buy it. This is fishy. And then their secret weapon, Dan, is like, no. No, man, I don’t, I I, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Like the guy they’ve been listening to this whole time, and it’s been right every single time. They’re like, no, man, she’s dead. Don’t worry about it. Look, just drink some Long Island iced teas and forget about it.

Yeah. Come on in. In a better movie, this would’ve been a plot point where they would’ve all continued with their skepticism and that would’ve led them to discover that she is in fact still alive. But now all their guards are just down. It’s like a couple drinks and they don’t care anymore. 

Craig: Well, except for Dan, who can sense that she’s near and that she’s having sex.

So he goes, uh, to the room that SIL and that other guy Alfred Molina are in, and he listens in for a second, and then he goes right next door and knocks on. Michael Madson and, and Mark Berger’s door. And it’s like she’s alive and she’s in there and they’re banging. And Michael Madden’s like, no, she’s not.

And he’s like, yes she is. And he’s like, okay, I believe you. 

Todd: That’s literally how it goes down. 

Craig: So he takes as much time as he needs to get dressed and then they go. Over there. I 

Todd: love this bit by the way, 

Craig: before they get there, Alfred Molina comes and within 10 seconds she’s pregnant. Sil is like, I can feel it.

And he’s like, what are you talking about? And she’s like. New life. And he’s like, ha, that’s funny. And she’s like, no, seriously feel it. And she puts his hand on her stomach and he feels something moving around in there. And of course freaks out, realizes what’s going on. Too late she kills him and now the chase is on.

So it’s just the three of them now. It’s Ben Kingsley. No, not Ben Kingsley. No. Michael Madson. Mark Helgenberger. And. Forrest Whitaker. It’s just the three of them. How they know where she’s going. I don’t know. You know, they kind of see her and she leaves destruction, like she’s really strongly, she’s breaking down doors and stuff.

She even breaks through a steel door. Somehow they follow her into the sewer. Yes. And this is when it gets very alien because it’s very reminiscent of all, you know, all the dark hallways and pipes and steam. Tunnels. Yeah. Rivers of liquid and all that kind of stuff. She’s above them. She’s below them. Yeah, she’s in the water.

You know, she can move quickly under the water. She can, you know, watch them. They’re walking right underneath these pipes and she’s right above them and they don’t see her, but we do all this kind of stuff. Yep. It’s very alien. They’re following her around with a flame thrower. Yes, she is fleeing further and further into wherever they are because she’s also.

Gestated this entire pregnancy in a minute and a half. Yeah. And she ends up crawling through, you know, some big crack. They’re like, oh, this must have opened up, uh, when the earthquake happened. Yeah. And then they end up in some sort of cavern with a lake of oil in it. Yeah. What That’s weird. Are, are there lake lakes of oil under Los Angeles?

I, maybe there are, I don’t know, LaBrea tar pits type thing. I don’t know. I guess, I don’t know. So they, she’s in there, she gives birth. It seems like we only get a glimpse of it, but it seems like her birthing process is that her entire torso splits open. Yeah, and this thing comes out of it. She’s in full alien form at this point, by the way.

They get into that cavern where they think that she is the main guy. Michael Madson goes ahead and is like, watch my back or whatever. But Dan. Comes across the kid who is already like eight. Yeah. And just this naked boy covered kind of in gook, but. We quickly realized that he’s dangerous because he sees a rat and he reaches out to it, but he can’t reach it.

So he just shoots his tongue out of his mouth like a frog and eats the whole thing. That was cute. Yeah, it was funny. I thought it was funny. And then Dan finds him and Dan’s like, oh, I’ll be your friend. Everything’s gonna be okay. And he tries to shoot his frog tongue at him too. And Dan kind of falls over a ledge and is like hanging over the lake.

Doesn’t Michael Madson show up and kill the kid? 

Todd: Like immediately? Yeah. And then sills pissed. So sill runs over and then Michael Madson also kind of slips down through a cracker. Maybe she’s above him and her nipple tentacles come out and they grab him and, 

Craig: but he cuts it off. Yeah. He cuts the tentacle off and throws it aside.

Important for later? Yeah. Mark Helgenberger is there and she’s trying to help, but she’s not really doing anything. She’s stuck in the lake somehow. The entire lake of. Oil gets caught on fire. Yep. So, you know, they’re in this underground area. There’s fire everywhere. The whole lake is on fire. They end up somehow throwing sill into the fire and it seems like she’s dead.

And Michael Matson is trying to pull Dan up ’cause he’s still hanging over that ledge, over the burning lake and sill and engulfed in flames. Jumps up and grabs Dan’s leg and is trying to pull him down. But Michael Maxon pulls out like a. Bazooka. 

Todd: I don’t even know where it was, where that came from.

Craig: Anyway, it was some huge gun that he loads a huge round that looks like the size of a beer can into, and he blows her head off and she falls into the lake, presumably dead. They get Dan out and they’re all like, well, that was weird. And then they,

Todd: but. Then we get the inevitable, like Rat Co comes and grabs one of those nipple tentacles that have been severed and pulls it away and presumably eats some of it because, uh, the final scene I think that we get shown in the movie is this rat looks really, really mean and encounters another rat. And then it’s tongue like lashes out, like the kid’s tongue had lashed out and, uh, yeah, consumes that of the rat.

So, 

Craig: ha ha, 

Todd: ha. Its DNA is living on in these rats. Sure. And I haven’t seen Species two, so I don’t know if that literally carries through or if they took a different tack to continue the movie. 

Craig: I don’t remember. I think they take a different tack, but I don’t remember if the whole rat thing carries through.

I now, I could be totally misspeaking ’cause it’s been a while, but at the beginning of this summer, you know, when I had nothing to watch, species was on. Pluto, which runs, you know, stuff live. So you can just kind of channel switch. And I came to it, and when you go, you know it, it runs things live. But when you go to it, it gives you the option.

Of going back to the beginning, you can also stream it from them. So I saw that it was on, I hadn’t seen it in a long time, so I switched to it and I went ahead and, you know, sent it back to the beginning and watched the whole thing and then it just autoplayed the next one. So I just left it playing, if I remember correctly.

They make a new sill. Oh, still played by Natasa Hinrich. But it’s like Terminator two. Like she’s a good one. Oh, okay. And I think she like, helps ’em with stuff. Again, I could be misspeaking, I don’t know. And then there is a third one, and I, I wanna say in the third one, the alien hybrid is a man, but I don’t, I don’t even remember if I watched that one.

Neither of the sequels did. Well, they, you know, even Michael Madson said that he knew that the second one was crap, but it was a check. And why not? But yeah, I mean, this movie, it’s, it’s stupid. It’s dumb, but. But I like a lot of stupid 

Todd: movies. Yeah, it’s a fun one to just play, like, especially with friends, you know, just watch it.

And it’s a mindless action movie. There are a million of ’em. You know, there, there really are, and it’s, it’s one of the better ones, I would say. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. It’s very nineties. It’s got a very nineties feel to it, so if you’re nostalgic for that, 

Todd: I feel like the nudity was a big hook when this came out. Like that was a big I so big hook.

It was definitely played up. This was her first movie. She was already a successful model. She looks gorgeous. Mm-hmm. She’s topless in this a lot. As a teenage Todd loved this. T all of his friends did as well. I know that it, it was a huge box office success, even though it wasn’t a huge critical success.

And I’m, I mean, from $35 million budget, I think it made 113 million worldwide plus, you know, who knows what on DVD and all that stuff. It was, it was very successful in DVD and stuff as well, rentals. So, and, uh, Michael Madson, one of his favorite, uh, favorite movies to be in. And you can kind of see why.

Yeah. At least he could be a good guy in it. A GA, a good guy who’s a little shady, right? Like. He was the guy hired by the government to take care of things. 

Craig: Yeah. I mean, he’s still the muscle. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But he’s, he’s working for the good people. He’s painted as the hero Yeah. Of the movie. And, and he is, he lasts, he kills the bad person, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I, I wouldn’t say that this is a tour to force of his acting. I, I’m sure that you could, you know Sure. Watch, watch Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction or, 

Todd: oh, yeah. Reservoir Dogs, for sure. Uh, 

Craig: even, even, I mean, as, as small a role as he has, uh, I, I really loved him in Thelman. Louise, the guy is a really good actor.

I’m glad that he had fun on this movie and made money on it and had a, you know, a good time doing it and remembered it. Fondly. Probably not his best work, but who cares? It did well. It’s still fun to watch and he was proud of it. So yeah, kudos to him. We’ll miss him. 

Todd: Alright, well thank you guys so much for, uh, joining us on this episode.

If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. If you didn’t enjoy it, please share it with a. Fred. Anyway, we just love to have you spread the word a little bit. If you really like what you hear and want to support us even further, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com/chainsaw podcast. This five bucks a month gives you access to all kinds of behind the scenes stuff, the complete unedited audio of our phone calls.

You can get, uh, mini sos that we put out on a regular basis and reviews. We have a book club going all those things. patreon.com/chainsaw podcast. Please join our newsletter. You can just go to our website, chainsaw horror.com, and uh, click on newsletter, get dates about the latest episodes we have in a few select, uh, bits of news and trivia, what’s going on in the horror community that week.

Until next time, I’m Todd. And I’m Craig with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

This week, we’re paying tribute to the late Harris Yulin by diving into the 1988 horror film ‘Bad Dreams.’

We explore Yulin’s illustrious career, his significant yet underrated roles, and his impact on Hollywood. We also dissect the plot, discuss the film’s eerie similarities to ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ and reflect on its production and cast.

Don’t miss out on this deep dive into an overlooked 80’s horror flick and a talented actor’s legacy. Share your thoughts and comments below!

Episode 451, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, you know how I am about tribute episodes. Maybe I get a little more enthusiastic than you are. It depends on who it is. I mean, today’s tribute is to a man named Harris, Len. I don’t think that name is on the tip of too many people’s tongues when they’re asked to, uh, spout out, you know, 10 most famous actors they know, right?

If you see this guy’s face, you’ll be like, oh, that guy. Yeah. He died in June at the age of 87. And he has been in so much stuff. In fact, I think, uh, much like the last person that we did a tribute episode for, he was kind of one of those guys who enjoyed all of the big roles and probably the money and stuff of Hollywood without having to deal with the trappings of fame.

Mm-hmm. Because he was just shy of getting that, you know, one breakout role that would just kinda lift him up and sort of define his career. But the guy is very versatile, although he did tend to get cast in a lot of roles like this. Like he is in this movie. And the movie we’re doing, by the way, is Bad Dreams from 1988.

You know, like a psychiatrist or a police officer or a, a judge. Judge, yeah. Like a doer or serious government official or something like that. You know, it was fun to learn a lot, a little bit about him. But this is why we do this. It’s so good to have an excuse to learn more about some of these guys. It is 

Craig: kind of cool.

Todd: Right. Did so, did you look up, uh, some information about him? 

Craig: Just a little bit. I mean, I, I was mostly impressed that he really started in the theater and did some really amazing stuff and worked with really amazing people. When he was a, a younger man, he, he really didn’t get into. Film and TV until the second half of his life.

But, well, I don’t know. He, he lived to be pretty old, but like in his thirties, I think. Yeah, thirties and forties. But just, just looking at his theater resume was pretty mind blowing. Tons of Shakespeare and with huge people, I wanna say like Kevin Klein and James Earl Jones and like, 

Todd: yeah. Yeah, 

Craig: I, it was really, really impressive.

Todd: It’s insane. And then you go and look at his film when he did start getting into film, you know, he’s been in so much stuff. Scarface Ghostbusters two, I remember him from Clear and Present Danger. He had a pretty big role in that one. Rush hour Rush, rush Hour two, I think. Again, we could say all these things.

You probably wouldn’t know who we’re talking about until you saw his face. I know him. Anyway, a sort of middle aged looking guy with a very, very receding hairline and just, uh, like I said, almost always, just like a serious. Ish face on i I, when I was going through and reading about some of his filmography, I saw that he played, I think it was this Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, I’m not sure.

One 

Craig: or the other. Yeah. 

Todd: In a movie called Doc, uh, from 1971. And I actually pulled that up and started to watch it and said, okay, I’m putting a pin in this after we record our podcast. I think tomorrow I’m gonna watch that. ’cause it looks like a really cool version of that story. He looks young in that one.

Uh, he still looks like almost exactly the same. It’s like the same. Face, just fewer wrinkles. I mean, hopefully we could all be that lucky, but he’s got these big glassy eyes that were just so much more obvious when he was younger that, I mean, a lot of expression possible with big eyes like that. It’s, uh, a weird thing to hone in on.

But it was just really jumping out at me when, uh, when I saw him in that. Anyway, there were a couple ones we could have chosen. There was the believers, which has been requested a couple times, and we briefly considered doing that, but I skimmed through the believers and I realized he didn’t have such a big role in that one.

However, in this one Bad dreams, he has a fairly significant role. He doesn’t have a ton of screen time. Mm-hmm. But, uh, his role in the story is, is pretty significant. So I’m glad we chose this one, and I’m really glad that we had the opportunity to do this movie because I’ve been wanting to do this for the podcast for a while.

Uh, had you seen this before? No. 

Craig: I don’t think I had heard of it before. 

Todd: Oh, you’d never saw it on the shelves? 

Craig: Not that I recall, but my God, that’s been 30 years ago. Yeah. Back when we, I dunno, 

Todd: perused the shelves of video stories. Right. I, this one always reached out at me ’cause it’s got a very scared looking woman.

It’s just a closeup of her face. There’s a gross hand over her mouth and the reflection of a knife in it. And it’s kind of hard to miss. 

Craig: Is it in black and white? 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah, 

Craig: I bet that’s why I didn’t ever look at it. Oh yeah, I bet. I thought it was a black and white movie and just passed it by. But I’m glad we did it too, because it’s a really interesting movie.

I think it’s gonna be very interesting to talk about. But Harris Yulin would all say, I will anytime I see him, I think, oh, that’s the judge from Ghostbusters too. And he’s really mean, and he like yells at them at the top of his voice and for whatever reason, and it’s not like I know him from a lot of things, but anytime I see him he just kind of exudes some kind of like authority, like Yeah, he looks, he looks like somebody who’s in charge.

Yeah, he does. And, and he looks like somebody you don’t wanna mess with. Uhhuh. And he is not even like a big guy or anything at all. No. He just has a really commanding presence. He also played the, uh, head of the Watcher’s Council on Buffy, and I vaguely remember him in that. But it’s interesting what you said about him, you know, being the guy that you re.

Because I feel like this whole movie is cast entirely of those people. Yeah. Virtually everybody in this movie, you’re gonna be like, wait a second, who’s that guy? Or who’s that gal? Pretty much all of them. 

Todd: It is cram packed full of stars. 

Craig: I don’t know that I would necessarily call them stars. That’s what I was getting at.

What you said about him was he never really kind of hit that big movie star thing. And I was just talking to Alan about this last night ’cause I was telling him about this movie. I said, you know, these are the people that you see especially, and things are different now. I think, but back then there was this pool of actors.

It was a large pool, I’m sure, but that you just saw in everything. They were all over tv. They were all over movies in small roles. And like these people, some of them, I had a feeling I knew what they were from, but I wanted to double check. So I would go to their IMDB page and they just have pages and pages and pages of credits.

Oh yeah. 

Craig: And I said to Alan, I’m like, I think that’s what I would want to do. Mm-hmm. I would want to just work all the time, make a comfortable living, live comfortably and work all the time in these smaller things. Because being famous 

Todd: sucks. 

Craig: Kind of sounds good on paper, but No, it, it sounds horrible to me.

Yeah. Like you have no privacy. Everything you do is scrutinized. Everything you’ve ever done in your past is scrutinized. Like it just. Sounds like a nightmare. Mm-hmm. But to just be able to work acting all the time. I mean, I guess you kind of do that to an extent. 

Todd: I guess I have the reverse thing. I think that a lot of people have seen me and are probably super annoyed by me.

Craig: Yeah. Probably I am. Every time you pop up,

like, oh, Jesus got that guy again. 

Todd: But I’m hidden on the other side of the world. I don’t have the chance to walk down the busy streets of a, of a big city and and see if anybody recognized. 

Craig: I bet people would recognize you. That’s hilarious. I bet people really would. ’cause you kind of a distinctive, stupid look about you that I think that, I don’t 

Todd: know.

I have more of a feeling that PE I would just be on that edge of people, be like, that guy looks familiar, but I have no idea where, you know, it’d be one of those people. Yeah. 

Craig: Yeah, you’re right. 

Todd: I’ve only had one guy, it was a guy who worked at Universal Studios here in Beijing and I was hanging out with a couple of his buddies at a little party that they had had, and he was a new guy who had just come in.

A young guy. He came right up to me and he was like, oh my. God. And that was a weird experience, you know, like he wanted to talk my ear off. He’s like, I, I’m sorry, I just can’t get over this. I feel like I’m meeting like someone famous. And I was like, alright, I get it. I guess I get it. But like. Wow. It was a weird feeling for me.

And I would hate to have to live with that day in and day out. I, I would, yeah, it would, you’d get a charge out of it for a while. Right. Then it would become annoying and then Right. It would be scary. 

Craig: Right. But these folks, you know, just get to work all the time and do cool stuff and meet other cool people.

I, that sounds very appealing. 

Todd: Collect residuals. I mean, the more movies you’re in. Right, 

Craig: right. When residuals existed, I don’t think they exist anymore, but I mean, not for people who are making stuff now. ’cause everything streams. 

Todd: Yeah. The streaming thing’s a problem. 

Craig: Anyway. So Bad Dreams is directed by Andrew Fleming, who, I don’t know that name.

Kind of sounded familiar to me. And it wasn’t until I got mostly through the movie and I had already looked up all the actors and seen what they were in. I was like, I should check out and see. Oh. And in the trivia I had read that this was his first feature film directing. Right. So, uh, I looked him up and I saw that he directed one of my favorite movies, the Craft.

Which again, like we’re like 10 years into this podcast and I can’t believe we haven’t done that. It’s, it’s one of my favorite. Movies. 

Todd: It’s weird. We haven’t done that yet. 

Craig: He did a couple other movies. He did a movie called Threesome. I don’t remember when that movie came out. I want to say like, when I was in high school, ’cause that was very sexy for me.

And then he did a funny movie called Dick about Richard Nixon. And more recently people might know him from Emily in Paris, which I’ve never watched, but I hear is awful and also wildly popular. So yeah, 

Todd: I’ve heard the same thing. I, I just, I don’t need another series to keep up on and that didn’t really seem like my cup of tea anyway, so I’ve, I’ve been avoiding it.

Craig: But I love the craft and I, it’s not like I see the craft in this movie, but I see kind of inklings of his style and I like it. This movie is, is odd. It, it’s, it’s strange to me that I’ve never seen it because it, it seems very well made, it seems among the movies of its kind and of its time. It looks good.

Oh yeah. The acting is good. Tons of people that you’ve seen before. Personally, I think the story kind of falls apart a little bit at the end, but whatever I can get over that, I, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard. 

Todd: More about it. It’s weird that this one sort of fell off the radar and it did pretty quickly because this was a movie that was on the shelves that I passed by all the time, looked like it’d be pretty scary.

And eventually I rented, I don’t know, maybe 10, 15 years after I’d been passing by it. I think I was either in college or maybe in late high school when I finally watched this film. And when I did, I was like, oh. This movie’s good. Why is, does it only exist on the video store shelves? You know, and it’s got so many people in it.

It’s produced by Gale Lan Herd, James Cameron’s longtime producer. And, and she had done just, just come off of aliens and uh, I think aliens just before this, and the co-writer of the screenplay is Steven Dea. And he’s like a freaking god of screenwriters. He’s like, box Office gold. This guy, he wrote 48 Hours and a Commando, the Running Man Die Hard, diehard two, all of these big, big, big movies.

So like, there’s so many great names behind this. And it’s not a bad movie to kick off your career with as a director at all? No. In some ways it starts to feel a bit like one of those cable pot boilers, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like the movies you would see on cable TV that were more thrillers than anything else.

But it’s not because it’s got. Very definite horror vibe because so much of it feels like it’s ripping off of Nightmare on Elm Street at times. 

Craig: It does. You know, I, I read that like I was, I was watching it and I was like reading stuff about it at the same time, and I read something that like, it was often criticized as being a rip off of Nightmare on Elm Street, and it hadn’t really crossed my mind, but the second I read it, I was like.

Oh yeah. It really is. 

Todd: No, at first I was getting final destination vibes. I was like, okay, this is a woman who was supposed to die who didn’t, and now it’s gonna be about death, or in this case, this character coming to, to get her, but then be, as the character was killing off all the people around most of the movie, if not all of it, takes place in a mental institution.

And I always love me a horror movie that kicks off with a beautiful, confused young woman in a mental institution. It’s, it’s almost a trope, but it’s a very nightmare in Elm Street trope. 

Craig: It is. And, and there are so many other parallels to, I don’t want to get too into them before we introduce like, what’s happening.

Sure. Like it, it starts out with this man, just like. Looking out over a desert sunset, we find out that this guy’s name is Harris, played by Richard Lynch, who I don’t really know a whole lot about. He’s one of the people that I didn’t know much about, but he obviously leads this cult. And it’s a bunch of, I would say, 20 to mid, I don’t know, 

Todd: 20-year-old hippie people to 

Craig: hippie.

But it looked like there was some range, like twenties, thirties, maybe even early forties. I don’t know. But it’s led by this guy Harris, and it looks like he’s baptizing people. Yeah, he’s ladling liquid out of something and and pouring it over their heads. And this is, uh, I guess Cynthia, our main character, her initiation now Cynthia’s played by Jennifer Rubin, but not in this scene.

This is a younger actress playing the character, but again, Jennifer Rubin, who I remember well from Nightmare in Elm Street. Three. Yeah, the Dream Warriors, the Badass Chick, which. Also takes place in a mental institution. Right. 

Todd: And didn’t come out too many years before this. What was that, 86, I think. Yeah.

Craig: I don’t know. But anyway, it was evident to me like I didn’t know this, I hadn’t read it or anything, but I knew, I’m like, that’s not water. He’s like pouring gasoline on their head and they’re gonna, you 

Todd: did. You knew that? Oh yeah. 

Craig: Absolutely. A hundred percent. No question. What? I don’t know why, but I just did.

Then you don’t see what happens inside, but it cuts to the outside of the house and the house explodes, like zillion sticks of dynamite went off inside of it. 

Todd: Not before a baby cries. That was like, 

Craig: yeah, you hear a baby. That was a 

Todd: little gruesome, extra bit that didn’t need to be in there, but, okay. Wow. 

Craig: I, yeah, I mean, it is gruesome, but I also feel like that was, yeah, it like it’s a cult like these.

People don’t think that what they’re doing is bad or harmful. Right. You know what I’m saying? Like they’re they’re totally in it. Yeah. As is Cynthia apparently. But the news says that like 24 people died and, and Harris, the leader is dead, or whatever. I have next in my notes to mention the classic rock soundtrack because Yes, it’s great.

Th this particular song that they play right now, I, I’ve never heard before, but I presume the title is something like, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, which is a little on the nose for a movie called Bad Dreams, but it was a really good song. Is it the Rolling Stones song? It, it, I couldn’t remember and I didn’t look it up.

I should have looked it up. But Time, the, the song that repeats over and over and over again. 

Todd: There is one. Yeah. That keeps coming in a lot. 

Craig: Well, it becomes a major motif because 

Todd: time has come today. If that’s the one I, I think it, I’m looking it up right now. It’s the Chamber Brothers 

Craig: in the song. It just repeats.

Time. Time and it, it keeps doing that throughout the movie as she jumps back and forth. And it’s not a time travel movie, it’s like flashbacks or whatever, but it uses that time motif over and over again. But anyway, great. Classic rock soundtrack. I don’t remember. I got that Harris and the Cult. So this must be while she’s in a coma, she’s thinking, I don’t know.

They’re talking about how life and death are just different states and that they will all be one spirit and lots of other culty stuff. 

Clip: Scared of Harris. You can’t escape. Harris loves you, brother. If I kill you, it’s because I love you. Come to me, Cynthia. Now, now, now, now, now, now you know. I’ll find you.

Craig: And then it cuts to 13 years later. So big culty backstory to set up this girl waking up from a coma 13 years later. 

Todd: Yeah, from the mid seventies to the late eighties. I guess it’s a combination. I think of her flashbacks while she’s in a coma with some news reports. You know, this was a big story obviously, uh, when it, when it happened.

Yeah. But when she wakes up, the first thing we see is good old Harris Yulan, who’s, uh, her psychiatrist, whose name is Dr. Barford. Mm-hmm. And he’s standing over her, uh, they have a press conference and the whole nine yards. ’cause it’s a big deal that she’s woken up. And one of the very first things that they tell her is that, or that that has mentioned anyway, is that they have been very unsuccessful in locating any family or friends, which is just something that I think they just had to get outta the way at the beginning to keep things uncomplicated for the plot.

Mm-hmm. It is just a girl. It’s a girl. And it makes sense. It’s not uncommon, I think, for these commune type things for people to just disavow their families and their past and go into this new life. As far as we know so far, what happened was some kind of accident. You know, we don’t really know a lot about why there was a fire or the explosion, but she did survive.

Clip: It’s a psychiatrist. Well a psychiatrist is, uh. Psyche from the Greek, it’s, uh, means mind and theary is to heal. So, uh, psychiatrist is a mind healer. Anyway, that’s the idea. You’ve been out of touch for so long that, uh, more than your muscle tone that it needs exercise. Anyway, I have a, an assistant named Dr.

Carmen and he has a group therapy session that meets every day. I’ve enrolled you in it starting tomorrow. 

Todd: I like the way this kicked off because she sits in this group and this guy immediately introduces himself as Dr. Carmen. It’s a super young guy. As he’s talking, he starts to come onto her and that’s when the real Dr.

Carmen comes in, who’s played by Bruce Abbott. 

Craig: Yeah, from re animator. Yeah. Uh, and re animator too. The first guy that you were talking about, Ralph, is Dean Cameron, who Yeah. Did a lot of stuff, but I always remember him from summer school with Mark Carmen. Uh, that movie was so funny. And he was really funny in it, and he’s funny in this movie.

Yeah. Um, he brings a little bit of light. To otherwise pretty dark movie. 

Todd: He’s not the only comedian in this film, but he’s, he’s one of a few. And I think that, from what I read, he had actually improvised quite a bit of what he did. Mm-hmm. And I think that probably added a little more levity than was probably originally in the script.

I loved his character and I thought his portrayal was fantastic. I’m not gonna complain about anybody’s acting in this movie, really. No. Everyone is is fantastic. But one thing I really did appreciate about this movie as we’re coming in and we’re being introduced to all these different people in this group, is how this might be one of those few horror films that I think gets the whole psychiatric group therapy hospital or whatever, more or less, right?

It’s not a place full of crazies that are just wandering around moaning. It doesn’t seem like a desolate place where nobody cares about anybody. This seems like a busy, bustling. Hospital. Yeah. With people who are very serious about their jobs and very professional, everything’s well lit. We don’t have much for like spooky, weird areas or anything like that, and I believe that every single one of these characters could exist in real life.

Although this is a group of borderline personality disorder people, which covers a wide gamut, as is explained to us by Dr. Carmen. 

Craig: Right, right. You know, I don’t know. I’ve never been in a mental institution, so I don’t know. How accurate it is. But it seems like a more real, it seems more realistic even in like this, like you said, the staff are friendly, you know, they’re, they’re helpful.

Usually the staff are portrayed as menacing or whatever. Yeah. Um, so I like that too. And the people who knows if whatever they’re portraying is any way realistic, but the acting is good. And there was one of the other people in the group, her name is Miriam, played by Susan Rutten or Raton, who was also in Ghostbusters too.

I don’t even think she’s credited. I looked at her IMDB page and I don’t even think it’s on her list. She’s only in one little tiny scene. It’s in the very beginning when Bill Murray is interviewing people on TV about their encounters with aliens, and she talks about how she. Was taken up on a spaceship, but it looked like the lobby of the Holiday Inn down the street.

And a man approached her and like it’s a hilarious, hilarious scene. And I like her in this movie a lot. And then all of them looked somewhat familiar. There was one older lady that I couldn’t place and I looked her up. I think it’s just because she looked like Blythe Danner and I couldn’t get that outta my head.

But the other one that was really familiar to me was Lana. Mm-hmm. Who’s played by EG Daley. I really like EG Daley. I like her most from PeeWee’s Big adventure. But she’s also very familiar from friends and many other things. She’s cute. She’s this little tiny blonde, squeaky person. She’s sweet and cute in this movie, and sadly not in it very much.

Todd: Well, more than anything, she’s kind of a rock star voice actor. She was, uh, Tommy Pickles and, um, right. Rug Rats and Buttercup from the Powderpuff Girls, and pretty much any movie or TV show that’s, that’s existed. 

Craig: I forget about that because I don’t watch a lot of animation. But that’s, I I did know that You’re right.

She is kind of a rock star 

Todd: if you listen to her voice. She has a bit of that yearly Smith quality to it. It’s a little higher and a little more girlish. 

Craig: Yeah, she, but a little bit of gravel in her voice too. She’s a singer as well. She, uh, strangely enough, she auditioned for the Voice. I thought that was so weird to see EG Daly audition.

I’m like, what are you doing? Like, you’re famous, but whatever. Anyway, so yeah, they have this group and Cynthia is telling them about her cult and. How great it was. Like that was another thing that was funny to me. Like pretty much through the whole movie, she is like, yeah, I would really just like to get out of here and find more people.

Like from Unity Fields. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Which is, she really never gets over that. 

Todd: It makes sense. I mean she, you know, when she died she thought she was, well, we’ll learn later, but like she was in it a hundred percent. Why? Why would that have changed while she was having her, her coma, I suppose? 

Craig: Well, some, yeah.

Somebody says all the stuff that she says about unity and togetherness and blah, blah, blah. They say it’s bullshit. And Lana, who apparently hasn’t spoken for three weeks, says it’s not bullshit. It’s beautiful. Then we cut to another scene where the doctors are watching this. Now what they are watching is an extreme closeup of Lana’s face.

Todd: Like, who shot that? Who shot 

Craig: this? There were no cameramen in that room. 

Todd: Not that I saw. 

Craig: That was wild. 

Todd: It’s hilarious. But yeah, it’s Abbott and Dr. Carmen and Dr. Barford sitting there chatting. Well, look, Dr. Carmen says to Cynthia when she says she wants to find a place like Unity. He says, there are no places like that anymore.

You know, this is like old stuff. And now you gotta, you gotta start learning how to live in the eighties. But she starts having these visions of her old guru. Yeah, Franklin Harris. And she gets in the elevator with Dr. Carmen. This elevator is kind of known to have problems. I guess it flickers, the lights flicker a lot.

Like, come on, would you really like. Fixed, you know? Oh, right, right. Yeah. 

Craig: The old glitchy elevator, again, you know, hard, you’re 

Todd: the weather that’s packed with people’s, there are more people. This elevator that I’ve been in in a long time. Yeah. It’s full of people. And of course it breaks down and everyone’s like, oh, come on.

They’re banging on the doors and stuff. That is one of my fears is being stuck in a fricking elevator. Oh, it’s horrible. 

Craig: I got stuck in an elevator once, but it was a, uh, freight elevator, so it was open. So like, oh. After we stayed up there, it was just me and my uncle. And like we waited for a while to see if somebody would find us and they didn’t.

And eventually he just climbed out. 

Todd: Right? Right. But she freaks out because as the lights are flickering on and off, she sees one person in there and thinks she sees Harris. And it flickers between Harris, who already has a fairly scarred face. This is the actor, you know, Richard Lynch actually had a, a bad incident where he accidentally set fire to himself while he was on drugs.

And so he actually had a pretty noticeable, his face is a bit scarred, but uh, between that and, uh, his corpse makeup where he’s reaching out at him, and it reminded me a little bit of a creep show too. He, he’s just gross, you know, bloody, and his skin is sloughing off and his eyes are bugging out and 

Craig: Well, and I, I feel like we go back to group for a second.

Gilda, who is another girl in group who’s only purpose. Through the whole movie really is just to say really cryptic shit. Yeah. Like pointed at Cynthia. Very specific cryptic shit, 

Todd: like she knows things somehow. Yeah. 

Craig: You’ll never get away from him. He’ll always find you. We get that. Then we get Cynthia’s flashback to the day of the explosion.

As I suspected he was dousing people with gasoline and he lights the fire. I found this scene really fascinating and really well directed. Yeah. If you. Are in a cult and you believe that doing this is going to bring you together, how would you respond? And I thought that it was just really interesting in the acting like they, the people and and the effects were fine.

I thought they were fantastic 

Todd: actually. 

Craig: Yeah. I mean, as good as they could. As good as they could have been. Like I can’t imagine it didn’t look when the people were being engulfed in flames and you could still kind of see their faces and reactions. I wouldn’t say that it looked real, but I don’t know how you could have made it look any better.

Todd: Right. ‘

Craig: cause you can’t really set people on fire, 

Todd: sadly. 

Craig: Maybe someday. But it, but it was fascinating. Like lovers were clinging to each other and that baby, I don’t think we ever see the baby, but we hear it crying and it’s, you can imagine sitting there based on everybody else that, you know, it’s a family holding to one another eventually, because I’m sure.

Burning is probably the most excruciating thing you can go through. They start screaming out in pain and and whatnot. Then Harris says to her, you failed me, Cynthia. You failed us all. You made us wait while you slept. But the waiting time is over, and she screams and wakes up and tells the doctors all about that day.

But then it becomes, this is again the parallels to nightmare on Elm Street. First of all, you’ve got one of the stars of. Part three in the movie, which also takes place in a mental hospital, which also revolves largely around small group therapy. Now you’ve got a burned figure, stalking. All of these characters and picking them off one by one 

Todd: and, and appearing to her in her dreams.

Craig: Well, yeah. Is it her dream? Like I feel like she is just seeing him all the time, like, yeah, she doesn’t have to be asleep. No, it, it’s, it’s actually kind of interesting that they call this bad dreams because it’s not really dreams at all. 

Todd: That’s a good point. 

Craig: He appears 

Todd: daydreams. I don’t know. Yeah, 

Craig: it, it seems, I mean, it, it seems very much like Freddy because nobody else can see him and he’s just kind of stalking behind people.

Like people will walk past her door and she’ll see this guy Harris, you know, following them. And that’s how she knows they’re next. They’re in trouble and they are. And, and that’s what the movie becomes, and I don’t wanna gloss over it because I think each of the kills are interesting and set up an interesting way.

So I don’t wanna gloss over it, but that’s what it becomes. It just becomes picking people off at this in, in gruesome ways. 

Todd: I mean, it’s kind of mean spirited of this free love guy when you think about it like the, these other people had nothing to do with it, but this is, 

Craig: yeah, 

Todd: Freddy, it’s like he’s getting his punishment on her by killing off the people around her.

Like why didn’t you just take her like he took everybody else and be done with it? Right. I don’t think that this cult leader was ever made to seem like a nice guy. Even when one of the interview footages that we get earlier on, he’s kind of said some menacing things to the interviewer. 

Clip: Life and death are simply different states of being you just cross into the next state.

I could kill you right now, couldn’t I? You could,

Todd: but I won’t. So of course there’s that aspect to it. Like I said, I found us to be a little final destination because she would. See him, you know, she would have these premonitions just before something bad was about to happen. And the fact that, you know, it’s picking off people around her on its way to her.

But anyway, yeah, that’s what it, that’s what it is. And she was expected to die, but she didn’t. And now she’s haunted by fate and to a certain extent, I guess, a bit of guilt in that in a way, she’s responsible for this. And I also thought it was interesting because at first, I mean, there’s a turning point, but at first, like you said, she was all in on the whole situation.

It was a sort of an accident that she survived. It’s not like she got cold feet at the end and tried to run out. The explosion blew her out of the room and into a slightly safer room, and they managed to pull her out. There’s a struggle where she kind of believes this guy, but she’s not quite. Willing to just say, okay, I’m gonna kill myself.

Take me, right? I mean, did did you feel this? I, I don’t 

Craig: know. Like it’s, it’s frankly a little bit confusing because it seemed like she was there very willingly. Even in that opening scene. Some guy says, she doesn’t have to do this, and I don’t know, like, it, it seems like that’s true. She, she’s, she’s there very willingly and, and then when she wakes up, she still wants to get back to it.

Why is she so frightened of him? 

Yeah, 

Craig: I don’t know. Maybe, maybe. ’cause he is supposed to be dead and he is appearing to her. I don’t know. Sure. The first one is, this is one of the only scenes that bothered me. Sweet. Sweet. Lana. EG Daley comes up to Cynthia and says something really sweet, like there’s a hole in her heart.

And, and what Cynthia says about togetherness gives her hope and then Cynthia’s kind of a bitch about it. Yeah. 

Todd: Why? 

Craig: Like this sweet girl comes and is like, oh, I really like you and what you said inspired me. And she’s like, 

Todd: almost literally says that, yeah, 

Craig: I can’t even 

Todd: help myself. Okay. 

Craig: Yeah. And so Lana walks away crying and then Cynthia has a flashback to what I assume is her baptism, which looks more like a traditional baptism 

Todd: in the river.

Craig: But, uh, in the flashback, she, Cynthia, the actress, playing Cynthia turns into. Lana, then Harris holds her under until she drowns, and then they immediately find Lana drowned in the pool. 

Yeah. 

Craig: So again, like that it, that is so nightmare on Elm Street. 

Very, 

Craig: the way that you die in the dream. Isn’t literal, but it can be literally explained in the real world.

It is. I mean the like, I don’t even know if I hadn’t read that. I don’t even know. I mean, I’m kind of dense anyway, but I don’t even know that I would’ve put two and two together. But when you really scrutinize it, it really, really draws heavily from a nightmare on 

Todd: El Street. Yeah, I thought it was pretty.

Bold. It was interesting here because he and her flashback says, I warned you, Cynthia, I warned you someone else would take your place. So this, 

Craig: did he like what? 

Todd: I don’t remember if he did. It was more of a threat. Like, if you don’t combat, things will happen. Or like, go kill yourself and then everything will be fine.

You know? I mean, it’s easy to not go along with that because you don’t know if you’re crazy or not. 

Craig: I didn’t even get that. That’s what he wanted her to do. Like I, I, I didn’t understand. I think so. I thought, well, I, I do think so ultimately, but I didn’t get that at this point. I just felt like he was tormenting her and I, I didn’t really know what he wanted from her.

The very next thing that ha I mean, Gilda says something like, you are defenseless against him. She just pops in to say these things every once in a while. 

Todd: I know. And she was the most ridiculous character. Just every now and then, pops in. Like she’s got this direct line to God. It’s a trope too, right? As always.

That crazy. Or quiet or mysterious person. Sadly, almost always a black person too, who pops in to say something very pointed and direct, like they have this spiritual connection and then she just grabs her by the shoulders, turns around and sits her down to the chair and walks out. I thought that was funny, but uh, yeah.

You’d think the movie would make more of that woman. Gilda, you know? 

Craig: Right. It’s never explained. 

Todd: If you, if you were Cynthia, wouldn’t you be like sitting her in a room going, what? Do you know? You know? Okay. Did you come to you two? Okay, so 

Craig: Todd, now in thinking about it, I had, I hadn’t thought about it ’cause I only watched the movie one time.

In thinking about it, when we find out what’s really going on, couldn’t we just explain this by saying Gilda is just very observant. Oh. Oh, you’re right. I think she just may be very observant. I think Gilda may know what’s going on before. 

Todd: Oh, I never thought of that before. 

Craig: Anyway, the next one is Miriam, who again, I really liked, like they’re picking them off in my favorite order apparently, when she was not in the crazy ward, she was a reporter, but for like, some kind of like, not National Inquirer, but, and she says, you’ve got this great story.

I really wanna tell your story. We need to get out of here. And she’s, I’ll get us both out. And so they’ve got this plan, they’re gonna escape together. Cynthia’s all in. Uh, well, I think this is the 

Todd: turning point I was talking about. ’cause I was waiting for this moment because up to this point Cynthia’s still kind of troubled by everything and I’m not really sure what she is planning to do.

That woman asks her, you have to ask yourself, do you wanna live or do you want to die? And she looks at her and smiles and says, I want to live. And then she gets very, very happy. And I thought, okay, this is supposed to be her, her turning point. But then as she’s, the woman is walking away and she stands out in the hallway and she looks after and she’s smiling, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

It almost felt creepy like it did. Does she have something in mind? What is going on here? I don’t know if we were just supposed to believe she got a new lease on life and that’s just, it just came across weird. Or if she had something else in her head when she was, oh 

Craig: God. Again, when you find out what really is happening, you could almost explain her being kind of out of it and loopy and, yeah.

Inconsistent. Ah. She’s being drugged. Yeah, they’re all being drugged. Yeah. I can’t, I can’t keep it in any longer. 

Todd: You, you’ve made a valiant effort, 

Craig: but we don’t know that yet. We don’t know that. I mean, we know that they’re being medicated and, and obviously they’re being medicated. They’re in a mental health ward, but they’re being drugged.

Todd: There’s a character whose sole purpose is just to pop in every now and then and hand them cups full of pills. So that, that’s set up for later. Well, she sees Harris in the elevator with Miriam, so she freaks out and runs and, and can’t get into the elevator ’cause it’s already going down. So she runs down the stairs and trips and falls.

And then she gets to like the sixth floor, I think this was on the eighth floor. She gets to the sixth floor. She sees just Miriam’s bag stuck in the door and as she turns around, you see a quick shot of Maryanne flying out the window and Holy shit. That was rough. I mean she, that was quite a stun. She did, and I mean, we don’t actually see the hit, but we almost might as well have seen the hit because the way it is cut is just, and then blood splatter at glass.

Oh my God. I thought that was effective. You know, come to think of it, of all of the most gross, disgusting ways of people dying that we’ve seen in graphic detail, in horror movies, it almost seems like a person hitting the ground after falling from a height is still something that they just don’t show for whatever reason.

Craig: I don’t know, maybe I made it up, but I felt like I remember this being pretty graphic, but I, 

Todd: it’s, but, but it wasn’t, it, you don’t literally, you see Right. You see her fly out the window, you see her fall toward the ground, and then just at the moment of impact, it cuts to a closeup of the pavement next to her and there’s this big ass blood spray, and then the camera, you know, kind of comes out of the window from above and looks straight down.

And that’s classic too, right? Yeah. At the body down below. But yeah, it’s way bloodier than a lot of movies go with that. 

Craig: This is random, but I would also say that this is one of the few movies where the blood really kind of looks like real blood. Yeah. Like usually it’s super bright red and this, it looks more realistic.

It’s pretty gross. There are some pretty, 

Todd: there’s a lot 

Craig: of it. Yeah. There is a lot of it. There’s one scene where there’s a ridiculous amount of it. But Okay. So then they’re back in group. They keep coming back to group, to group every time somebody dies. Yeah. And it’s so funny, every time the doctor is just like, well, these things happen.

Like Dr. Bear. Yeah. They, they’re getting, or no, I think it’s even the other one. Carson, Carmen. Yeah. He’s like, well, you know, they, she was suicidal, you know, she was brought in here because she tried to kill herself like three times, and Lana had problems. She was depressed, you know? Yeah. Like they, they keep justifying it and they keep doing it even after, like, there’s only a couple of them left.

And, well, I mean, these things happen. Oh gosh. But in group this time, Cynthia says he wants us all with him, whether we like it or not. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you say so, eh, whatever. But then terribly burned, Harris appears to her and says, don’t make me take another friend. Keep your promise. Join us. Okay. So I suppose.

I should have figured out at that point she should kill herself, and then these bad things would stop happening. But yeah, she doesn’t, and this is when there’s an older couple, I haven’t mentioned them yet, but in the group, I couldn’t figure out if they were married and I couldn’t either. Both of them in the institution or she seemingly was married because there was a picture on her bedside table of her and a man, but I couldn’t tell if the man in the picture was also the man that she was fooling around with.

Todd: Right. It was hard to know. It 

Craig: doesn’t matter. They’re fooling around and because they’re trying to avoid bed checks, they go up to the attic. I, I don’t know. It looks like Freddy’s lair. 

Todd: Yeah, 

Craig: basically. 

Todd: It was so hilarious when they walked into this place and it was just Freddy’s boiler room. 

Craig: Right. It’s like, oh my God.

Todd: Oh. So on the nose 

Craig: they go through a fence to stand. Directly in front of an industrial turbine fan. And I am thinking, I, I wonder where this is going. I know, right? Gee, gee, I wonder. Oh, boy. And at this point, like, Cynthia’s walking around the hallways and even the score sounds like the nightmare in Elm Street score.

Yeah. It’s pretty bad. But they get chopped up in the turbine. 

Todd: Yeah. Like they’re missing. And like, she, she freaks out. She’s looking up in the vents, I guess, you know, uh, where the, the air circulation is down. Well, she hears them calling to her, like Cynthia join us and sees the face of Harris again up there in the vents, the burned out face.

And eventually blood and guts just start fall. Well, a guy who looked just like the dude from Alf Yeah. Goes to investigate. He wasn’t him, was he? But I don’t think so. But he looked like him. I don’t think so. Goes to, you know, fix things. He can’t get into the turbine room ’cause it’s locked from the inside.

So I guess he goes to the room below it and there’s a trap door. Now this was interesting, right? Like he goes to open the trap door and he can’t, the handle is stuck. So he gives up and he sits back and then the handle moves on its own. And I was like, wait a minute. So this really is supernatural. Now you explain that to me.

Now that we know what we know, 

Craig: I don’t remember that at all. You remember that? No, not a bet. It’s 

Todd: in your face. You must have been looking away from the screen. 

Craig: I, I guess so. All I remember is he like, opens a vent or something and finds like chopped up hands and feet and stuff. 

Todd: Yeah, blood and stuff comes falling down.

But at first he can’t open it. Like there’s a closeup of his hand on the thing and it’s like, lock, unlock and, and he’s struggling to open it. He can’t. And he’s like, well that’s weird. And he sits back. Then there is a closeup of it and it slowly turns. 

Craig: Yeah, 

Todd: I don’t remember that at all. And that is when he looks up and he is like, what?

And he, yeah. Opens it up and it’s, I don’t know why that that bit was in there. I don’t know how you can explain that if it turns out things aren’t supernatural. Right. But yeah, all this junk falls down on him like can and viscera and gross stuff. And I suppose because it was the turbine, whatever, it’s all very nebulous anyway.

Fence, right? I mean, I’m sure that thing led to the outside if it even existed at all, but somehow, right, there is blood now being sprayed on everybody because it’s coming through the bed of the ceiling on the whole floor, right? 

Craig: Like it’s ridiculous. I mean, movies do this all the time, but this is gratuitous like a human being doesn’t have that much blood in them.

Not even if you squeezed us out, like right. No, there’s just not gonna be enough blood to shoot out of like. Eight ceiling vents and just like 

Todd: raining, raining, 

Craig: raining, dowsing people covered in blood. I mean, it looks great. Oh yeah. Loved it. Yeah. And then funny Ralph, who has told us that he self harms, he just slams his hand down on a knife all the way through his hand.

Todd: Oh God. That was painful. 

Craig: Oh God. These special 

Todd: effects look really good. They do. I 

Craig: have no idea. I didn’t look to see what the budget was, but it feels like there was money behind this movie. Oh, yeah. And the effects and the soundtrack, 

Todd: oh God, we will get to that. 

Craig: And then he smashes a coffee pot over the guy who’s guarding him, I guess.

His head, and then he runs away and there’s a rock and roll cover of my way. I loved it. I loved the soundtrack. It was fantastic. 

Yeah. 

Craig: And he walks down the hall to Cynthia’s room and takes her down to the basement and starts freaking out. Yeah. Now, I’m not really sure why, but at some point when Dr.

Carmen realizes that they’re missing the floor nurse is like, oh, because of all the commotion that’s been going on, he didn’t get his meds. And he’s like, oh crap. If he doesn’t get his meds, he goes nuts. Okay. So he’s down in the basement, he’s freaking out, he’s throwing stuff around. He disables the elevator, and then he knocks over a shelf.

That spills out a box of scalpels. 

Yeah. 

Craig: I’m not a medical professional, but I would venture to guess that scalpels are not just packed unwrapped in large quantities in cardboard boxes 

Todd: on the shelves. On shelves in basement in this dirty, dusty basement. No, absolutely not. 

Craig: Alright, whatever. He grabs a couple, then Harris, the bad guy, starts talking through him again.

You can’t really. Explain this except for, uh, if it’s just the drugs, I guess. And then he kills himself by taking the scalpels and like stabbing himself in the lower abdomen and pulling them all the way up. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Oh boy. 

Todd: If it hadn’t already been established, this guy has no problem carving himself and, you know, he had scars all the way down his, his lower ab.

I mean, he was basically tracing the line of scars that he had there. That’s true. And plus he had said something about how whenever I feel bad, I cut a hole and then it all comes out and I feel better. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. But again, we find out soon that there’s a reason for that. Mm-hmm. This was a guy that was supposed to be on sedatives and he was actually getting amphetamines.

Yeah. So all of you know his symptoms are exacerbated. I mean, it doesn’t make. Real life sense. No, it 

Todd: doesn’t actually make sense, but, but in the, 

Craig: in, in the logic of the movie, it makes sense. So, okay, so then Cynthia says like, I guess she just resigns herself at this point. Bitch, you should have resigned yourself like four victims ago if you were just gonna, right.

So she’s like, uh. Yeah, I belong with him. Okay. Well they’re all dead now, except for the cryptic girl. She’s still alive for now. 

Yeah. 

Craig: And Dr. Carmen all of a sudden is very invested in Cynthia. 

Todd: Yeah. Like 

Craig: oddly invested in her. 

Todd: He’s really honor, I mean, to the point where there was one point where I thought, I was like, oh, what’s going on here?

There was one moment where he came into her room and he was like, on top of her, I, I knew that, you know, you needed Yeah. Company tonight. And I was like, what? You 

Craig: needed company. He’s, oh God, this is right. This is before crazy. Ralph comes and gets her and takes her down to the basement. But yeah, like he comes, like they’re gonna hang out and have a date.

Like he brings snacks and like he’s washing up in her restroom when Ralph comes and gets it, like, what is happening? Like, she is your patient. What is going on? He tells her he loves her later. Like this is, it’s very weird. 

Yeah. 

Craig: But he’s very invested in her in this at this point, and I don’t know what he’s so concerned about.

It seems like the police are escorting her away, like they’re gonna take her to jail, but they’re not. They’re just taking her to a different floor. But Dr. Carmen is freaking out and he’s like, I’ll release her into police custody so long as I can continue to be your doctor. And Dr. Barford is like, you’re fired.

Okay. 

Todd: This suddenly escalates in weird ways that, that we’re not projected because Burford and Carmen have an argument and Carmen says, 

Clip: the girl needs human contact connection. Isolation’s. The worst place in the world for the alternative is police custody. No. The alternative is a court order. There’s not a judge in the, you want this?

You want her on the edge. You’ve wanted it since the beginning. Alex, I know you’re fond of this girl, but you are out of line. I wanna see your theory played. Alex 

Todd: and I was like, theory, were we told about a theory that 

Craig: he had? Yeah, I had no idea. It just came 

Todd: outta left field and I’m like, whoa, where’s this coming from?

Anyway, I guess this is not the kind of psychiatric institution where you can come and go as you please, where you’re there of your own free will. ’cause it’s interesting, they’ve got these cops who are supposed to be guarding the rooms and keeping them in there, but they’re doing a really piss poor job of it.

This cop and this, I guess, orderly are walking her to her isolation booth or had whatever 

Craig: room basically, right? 

Todd: Yeah. But the scene kind of changes to where they are walking her up across the field to that house where that had burned down that she was in. Uh, by the way, I loved some of the transitions in this movie.

Were just me too. Really nice, me really skillful. This one was really cool. ’cause now we know, okay, now we’re in her head. Like she’s regressing back to that moment. This is where she is. And the transition too from the girl’s locker room into the baptism scene was just amazing. Just some really, really good filmmaking here.

Mm-hmm. So anyway, by, at this point, we’re like 20 minutes from the end and she is in her room having a conversation with Harris in the corner. Right. And the nurse is watching. 

Craig: Yes. And it looks like she’s talking to her. Self. Yeah. Which again, doesn’t make sense, but I suppose ultimately we’re to believe in that moment she is talking to herself.

I guess. 

Craig: I guess the other explanation could be that the person that she’s talking to is just out of frame. That’s possible. But I think at this point, if we are to apply what we know that they are being drugged. She is just hallucinating at this point. I don’t know. 

Todd: She is, what, what I didn’t understand is why the nurse said, who was looking at, I don’t know, eight or nine screens Yeah.

Of all these people in isolation doing all these weird things and all muttering and stuff, why she suddenly felt the need to go in and check on this girl who was also talking to herself. But she does, and she says, what’s going on? And then for some reason Gilda just suddenly walks into her room like, what?

Right. Why did Gilda get to drift into this isolation ward? And the nurse just turns around and rolls her eyes. Like, what? What kind 

Craig: of place did this become? Gilda says something like. Look to your heart, and then she leaves. And then this is interesting in light of knowing what is actually going on. Gilda is in her bed and there’s light shining in from the outside doorway and a shadow falls over her a a shadow of a person and she’s like, I knew you would come, but you won’t get me.

Todd: You’re too late. 

Craig: She drinks the formaldehyde that’s sitting on her bedside table in a bottle labeled formaldehyde to keep him from getting her. 

Todd: She says, I knew you’d come but you’re too late. I told her what to do. You won’t get her and you won’t get me again. I’m thinking, this is what’s guilt to tell her 

Craig: to do.

I don’t. I don’t, I don’t, 

Todd: I don’t care. I don’t know. It’s a lot real fast. Again, we’re thinking that this is really getting supernatural here. You know? At least I am. I’m thinking that this is the Harris figure, that she’s also hallucinating, that she’s known about this entire time. I don’t know. She’s like, I’m gonna kill myself before you kill me.

Craig: The next scene, I was like, what is happening? Dr. Carmen is all pissed off ’cause he is fired. So he goes outside and he throws all of his belongings that he packed up in a box. He throws them all over the parking lot and then he gets in his car and he sees Dr. Barford come out. Like he just intentionally.

Hits him with his car several times, like tries to hit him, misses, backs up, tries to hit him again, hits him, backs up, hits him again against the wall, like smashing him against the wall. 

Todd: It’s gruesome. 

Craig: It’s so gruesome, like blood is splattering all over the windshield. And I was like, what is happening?

Because this person has not been a crazy person that we’ve known up until this Wayland. 

Yes. 

Craig: And and then the car blows up with him in it and then he like wakes up behind the wheel and it was all a dream. Now I enjoyed that scene, but. What are you doing? Like 

Todd: now I know what, why at the moment I thought the movie had gone off the rails.

But you remember he pulls a pill out of his pocket and goes, well, I guess I’ll write a prescription for this later. And he takes it so he kind of drugs himself. Oh, ah-huh. And because he had that vision and he went a little nuts. He was like, what is going on with me? Oh, and that is what motivates him to go visit Mr.

Charles Fleischer. Yeah. The, uh, pharmacist, it took me some thought after the movie was over to put two and two together. There. 

Craig: Okay. That does totally make sense. And I do vaguely remember him taking that pill. That’s right. And, okay, so this, he goes and he pulls all the patient’s meds and he asks the Charles Fleischer, the pharmacist.

He’s like, what are these pills? And he’s like, holy shit. These are like crazy amphetamines. And this is like super, super concentrated THC. And this like, this will make people go nuts. So Carmen is like, oh, I know what’s going on. Barford is drugging them. And he runs away and it, it cracked me up that Fleischer takes the super, super concentrated THC and like sticks it in his pocket, right?

Todd: This, oh God, this scene was so funny, but it made no sense. Okay, so how is this working? He mentions, oh yeah, how does this work? He says, well, you know, I don’t fill the prescriptions. The doctor just comes in here and takes his stuff on his own and sets it all up in these cups. Really? 

Craig: Yeah. That’s not how that works at all.

The 

Todd: head psychiatrist at this hospital comes in every day and fills the prescriptions himself. That’s not how it works. And this guy has never once just glanced over at these pills that he knows by the back of his hand and goes, right. Wait a minute. These are all the opposite of what they should be.

Come on. Also, this nurse who passes them out, don’t make medical professionals look like idiots, right? They know What are these meds? There are checks and balances here. There’s no way that anybody could get away with this. And also it’s a ridiculous premise to be honest, that this doctor is giving them 

Craig: Well, and I don’t even really understand what he, he wanted them all to kill themselves.

I, I don’t, I don’t understand. I don’t 

Todd: get it either. To, to 

Craig: what end, what is he trying to prove? 

Todd: He’s trying to prove some paper he wrote. I mean, that he just kind of like, there’s a, there’s a bit of a line at the end on the big, uh, the big moment up on the roof. I mean, that’s, that’s what we’re coming to, right?

Carmen runs into Cynthia’s room. There’s no Harris. 

Craig: And, and what we are to believe at this point. Harris tells Cynthia to kill herself and leads her up to the roof, but what is revealed is that it’s never been Harris. It’s either been her hallucinations due to her memories or suggestions, or it’s been Dr.

Barford directly speaking to her. She has just envisioned Harris. 

Yeah, 

Craig: which is fine. I just, I don’t, I don’t know, like, it just seemed like kind of a lay ending. It’s kind of dumb. It’s, it’s, it’s fine, but whatever. So they all end up on the roof. And this is, this was so stupid. 

Todd: Oh God. This was dumb. 

Craig: They’re up on the roof and he’s like telling her to jump.

Carmen like shows up right before she jumps, but she does. And we’re to believe that she jumped and died, but she wakes up immediately outside of the cult house and starts walking towards it. But then it cuts back and we realized it was a fake out and Dr. Carmen had grabbed her by the hand. This makes absolutely no sense.

She is dangling off the roof. He is like kind of half on, half off and still she’s like, no, I wanna go. I’ll be with all of them. It’s Unity. She’s like, I don’t have anything here. And he’s like, you have me. I love you. What? What are you talking about? Oh my God. And this whole time I’m thinking, why doesn’t Barrister who is standing right there, just give Carmen a swift kick?

And they would both go off the side. 

Todd: Yeah. It wouldn’t take much. But what does he do instead? He pulls a syringe out of his. This guy who’s been so careful up to this point, 

Uhhuh 

Todd: again, could have just done that instead, pulls a syringe out of his pocket and starts stabbing this guy in the hand, his hand that’s holding onto the roof or whatever.

But then the cops swing up and they go, what’s going on here? And at first, uh, bears Bird tries to make it sound like it was karma who did all this, and he’s been drugging the patients and yada, yada, yada. But, uh, Carmen pulls her up and says, no, it was him. And the doctor Barford grabs one of the cops guns and it looks like he’s gonna shoot himself in the head.

Nope. Faked you out again and aims it at Carmen. But then Cynthia looks at him and sees Harris and she freaks out and she jumps after him and pushes him off the roof. And he falls and he dies. Yeah, very contrived. 

Craig: There’s one like last jump scare where. She kind of sees Harris like pull himself back up over the roof I think or something.

There’s one last jump scare, but then that’s it. It’s just them standing on the roof I think. 

Todd: Well, apparently there was a whole other ending bears for, doesn’t go for the cops gun. He’s not pushed. He jumps from the top of the building on his own to kill himself and then later. Carmine takes Cynthia to see the burned up house where they had their suicide.

For some reason, I guess she needs to go back and visit it to Clo fore closure. And she asks Alex to wait outside and then she goes into the house alone. And then she starts having visions of the cultus and you know her dead friends also from the asylum. And they ask her to join them by killing herself with a dagger that Harris presents to her.

And then he confirms that she is his biological daughter and that’s the reason why he wouldn’t leave her alone. Yeah. And then she seems to accept it and takes the dagger, but instead spins around and cuts and stabs him instead. And they all feel his pain and they all collapse. And this kind of ends her visions and she’s like, finally free.

But then there’s a jump scare as she and Carmen drive off back in the house. A skeleton hand reaches up and grabs the dagger. Yeah, that’s dumb. That would’ve been dumber. This, you know, tries to make it so there’s nothing supernatural about it at the end of the day for some weird dumbass reason that I still can’t wrap my mind around.

The psychiatrist was behind it all the time and wanted them to be pushed to the brink. I don’t know, you know, how do you even do this? Like, so say this plan went through and he publishes his paper or whatever. What do you list as proof? 

Craig: Well, and also congratulations. All your patients died like 

Todd: right under your care.

Craig: It is weird. And then it goes to the credits and the song over the credits is Sweet Child of Mine. 

Todd: I was blown away 

Craig: by Guns N Roses. I was too, I guess the, the song. Had not become a hit yet. 

Yeah. 

Craig: Maybe it hadn’t even been released as a single yet. That was 

it. 

Craig: I, I did read that initially when they did release it as a single, the music video was going to feature scenes from this movie, which was not at all uncommon in those days.

Youngsters, when these big songs would come out with movies, often there would be a tie in, in the music video to the movie. But I guess the Girl I, I, Axel Rose’s girlfriend objected ’cause it, the song was written about her and she didn’t want scenes from a horror movie in it. But yeah, it was kind of wild.

I mean, that’s a great, that’s a classic song. 

Todd: What a buzz kill. 

Craig: This movie is weird, mostly weird to me in that I’d never seen it before because it’s pretty good. Like, yeah, I wouldn’t, I, I wouldn’t say it’s, it’s great or amazing, but if you are a fan of these types of movies, like, I mean, even if you’re just a fan of like Nightmare and Elm Street, I think you’ll really like this.

I enjoyed it. I say the same things over and over again. I love eighties movies. And I always feel like I’ve seen all of them. And then when one comes along that I’ve never seen, and especially one like this where I actually enjoyed it and thought it was pretty good. I think had I seen this around the time that it came out when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I would’ve really liked it then.

Yeah. I’m glad that we did it ’cause I, I doubt that I would’ve seen it otherwise. And if you haven’t seen it, I a hundred percent. Recommend. It’s fun. 

Todd: It is a fun movie and it’s really great to see all these actors in there, right? They’re really all really good actors, honestly. And the filmmaking is just great.

Yeah. Like you said, I mean, it is a little, I don’t know, could I say it’s a little same samey, I, I did liken it to any number of sort of cable TV thrillers. Yeah. And I think it is kind of like that, except it’s elevated a little bit by the, the talent behind it. Yeah, 

Craig: it’s well made.