99 Cent Rental

This week we take a look at Bryan's favorite movie of all time, John Carpenter's tough guy action dystopia that definitely shook the Disney off of Kurt Russell and reintroduced him as a premier action movie star for the 1980's. We track the entire trajectory of this movie's production, we'll tell you why everyone thinks Snake Plissken is dead, you'll find out about all the other guys that the production company wanted over Kurt Russell, how director of photography, Dean Cundey engineered an entirely new anamorphic lens just to see the movie at night without sacrificing all the awesome lighting. It's a once-in-a-lifetime action movie that set the pace for the decade and inspired everyone to try their hand (and mostly fail) at making their own version of the movie.

Carpenter had access to more money than he'd work with before and still had to stretch a dollar to make the movie and he managed to knock it out of the park on every front. The cast is stacked. The production design is second-to-none, and the soundtrack is just perfect. Listen in and learn all about it.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

This week Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Rome to check in with Enzo G. Castellari and Mark Gregory on their sequel to the 1982 action movie that exploited the popularity of The Warriors. This time they're exploiting the popularity of John Carpenter's outstanding, Escape From New York. We get more Trash and more Bronx gangs but this time we're joined by the absolute massive screen presence of Antonio Sabato and the movie's appeal rests entirely on the outrageous shoot-y, burn-y, explode-y violence that ups the ante and cranks the volume.

Escape From The Bronx has practically zero plot to speak of and is an incredibly dumb movie at heart but it's a lot of fun and some of the best action that Italy had to offer in the twilight of their once-great exploitation movie industry. Let us break it all down for you.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way! This week Bryan and Dave take a good long look at the abyss and the abyss stares back when they watch the movie that launched The Cannon Group into the American imagination, a movie musical so poorly received that it nearly drove its director to leap from his hotel balcony at the premier. The Apple is what happens when a producer knows that he wants to make a big musical that's sure to capture some of the excitement that Grease generated but without really knowing what makes a musical work. It's a movie so profoundly bad, with bad acting, bad characters, and the worst thing a musical can have: bad music. Nothing about this baffling movie works and it is plainly obvious for anyone to see. It's simply amazing that the director, Menahem Golan was so caught off guard by its failure.

Some movies are so bad that they end entire careers. This one almost ended Golan's life.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

This week Bryan and Dave celebrate one year of 99 Cent Rental with the mother of all cult movies. Get it? It's a drag queen's dream come true. In 1977, reeling from being written out of her mother's will for reasons well-known to her, Christina Crawford, daughter of Hollywood legend, Joan Crawford published a vicious hit piece of a memoir about the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and Hollywood couldn't wait to snatch up the option and transform it in a motion picture. Paramount came calling and took a book full of dubious claims and turned it into a movie full of even more dubious claims and a tone that shifts wildly from massively understated to flying dangerously off the handle.

If a crazy story wasn't enough, the troubled production, made even more difficult by Faye Dunaway's horrible diva behavior on set and the meddling of celebrity husbands pushed the studio and producer Frank Yablans to the brink.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

This week, Bryan and Dave take a trip back to 1984 for a look at one of the top box office draws of 1984 and one of the most toyetic pictures of the decade, Gremlins. It's one of Chris Columbus's first movies produced and Joe Dante's first feature with Steven Spielberg. It's got adorable little cuddly guys, nasty little monsters, Phoebe Cates, gleeful puppet carnage, and a powerhouse score from Hollywood's musical swiss army knife, Jerry Goldsmith. In a year packed with some of American pop cultures most enduring classic titles, Gremlins is among the most iconic of the decade.

It's not all fuzzy feelings, though. As much as it's a lot of Loony Tunes fun and mayhem it's a movie that hasn't exactly aged well and we'll tell you all about it; the good and the bad.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

Bryan and Dave go north for a look at The Christmas Martian, an utterly deranged Quebecois children's movie about unsupervised children in a remote Quebec town and the adult man from Mars who in any other context would be understood to be grooming this brother and sister. It's a film that was intended to be whimsical and zany but being the product of Tales For All producer, Rock Demers, it all just comes off as creepy and unsettling. Though, not quite as upsetting as The Peanut Butter Solution, a film we covered in 2023, it's still off-putting in a way that begs the question: who was this movie for?

Produced by prolific Canadian producer, a man on a mission to make the lives of children genuinely better, Rock Demers, directed by one of the National Film Board's most talented cinematographer, Bernard Gosselin, and written by an author so-treasured by his native Canada that one of his works of fiction is quoted on their money, Roch Carrier, The Christmas Martian is remarkably artless and weird and we're going to tell you all about it.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠⁠

Bryan and Dave take a look at one of the deepest of cult movie deep cuts, The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris, a story about fame, guilt, and Olivia Newton John. It’s the story of a chance encounter with a strange young man one day in Beaver, Utah in 1979 that came to determine the entire trajectory of its director’s life. For reasons that we’ll dig into in the episode the movie is a document of the natural human inclination to seek fame, the natural human inclination to consider how our actions impact the lives of others, and maybe how we become our own worst enemies in the absence of answers. Harris, obsessed with the subject of his own work but unable to speak to him, works out his issues and tries to fill in the blanks as he remakes his own documentary twice with the help of Sean Penn and then again with Crispin Glover. It all culminates in a one-of-a-kind hybrid of documentary and scripted drama that you’re most likely going to become obsessed with.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠⁠

99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing.

Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over as a viable box office draw and positions him to be the prime action movie star of the 90's. It also represents the final death rattle of Cannon Films after a decade of bad business practice finally caught up with them.

Featuring a performance from Robert Guillaume that this movie clearly does not deserve, it's also full of side characters that are every bit as magnetic as JCVD.

Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠

Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠⁠

Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a director who stradfastly refused to let it be purely horrifying, instead putting the focus on high-flying visual style and storybook production values. You've never seen so many matte paintings. It's a real challenge to talk about a movie so rich in visual aesthetic but we're going to do our best to break it all down.

We close out our two part examination of the Godzilla/King Ghidorah beef with a close look at the Heisei era movie where Americans from the future presume to travel back in time and destroy Japan with a monstrous weapon and then force what's left over to conform to their political and economic interests. This time around the America/Japan relationship is bopped real hard on the nose. We also discuss the cultural and social conditions of Japan at the time which made American attitudes toward Japan so weird and more than a little racist. Don't worry though, there's plenty of chatter about Godzilla, King Ghidorah and the peerless thrill of big, loud, Japanese special effects movies.