This week we're shaking off the despair of a nuclear war one-two punch and staying in the made-for-tv mode for something incredibly dumb. Where Threads and The Day After are significant television events, this week's movie is anything but. It's a baffling riff on both popular haunted house movies of the era and classic gothic horror but that's about as coherent as the vision gets. Everything that follows is an exhausting exercise in early 80's made-for-tv drivel.

Parker Stevenson, fresh off his run as Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys Mysteries is joined by Lisa Eilbacher, Joan Bennet, and Slim Pickens for a stay at a far-too-modern for gothic horror house in southern California. Either the house itself, or the extremely sophisticated security system is in love with Eilbacher's character. We can't really figure it out. Ultimately it doesn't matter because the charm lies in precisely how artless and strange this movie is. Also, you get a few musical numbers.

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This week we dive back into the breach for another run at nuclear Armageddon with a look at the BBC's 1984 answer to The Day After, Threads. Where The Day After was a bleak movie about the end of the world as a result of nuclear it was still very much a movie. Director Mick Jackson provided an aggressive, bludgeoning alternative that gives it to you with both barrels, an unflinching look at precisely how bad nuclear war will be, backed by data. In this movie you get the specifics.

Threads tells the story of an escalating confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in Iran that leads to World War 3 and the way that it affects the people of Sheffield, England through the eyes of young Ruth Beckett. In short, it'll be very, very bad. We will all die like dogs and it'll be painful and humiliating all the way to the end.

Though not a conventional horror movie, Threads is very much appropriate for the genre.

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Tonight! On a very special 99 Cent Rental we take a trip back to 1983 to take in the movie that shocked the 100 million Americans that watched in horror as the world ended in a nuclear fireball before their very eyes. As the 80's ground on and The United States and The Soviet Union were running out of puppet governments and proxy wars to fight the status of nuclear war became less a matter of if and more a matter of when. The ABC network sought to send a sobering message to the people of America who had been convinced that we could win a nuclear war by delivering an uncompromising made-for-TV epic that detailed what would happen after everything had been obliterated.

A stacked cast of excellence paint a picture of a shattered America in the last days of humanity. The sheer scope of our nuclear weapons are put on the screen. We see an entire city in middle America blasted off the face of the Earth forever. We see the survivors of the blast struggling to stay alive in the face of hunger, sickness, and radiation poisoning. Dave is less than impressed with the movie and struggles with the political struggle that informed the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Bryan's feelings on the movie are much more complicated, having grown up within a few miles of two high priority nuclear targets as all this was going down.

It's our longest episode yet and we have thoughts. There will be no survivors.

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This week we take a step back to 1984 for a movie that couldn't possibly be anymore 80's if it tried. It's Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet starring Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney. Through shit luck two Valley Girl sisters miss out on the once-in-a-lifetime passing of a comet what's tail bathes the earth in deadly cosmic radiation, reducing people out in the open to nothing more than a pile of red dust and those who stayed in under less than ideal conditions to monstrous cannibals. A think tank of scientists, hidden in an underground base, are looking for a cure to the condition but at what cost?

It's at one time a fun teen horror comedy and a movie that tries to get a couple of young women to tangle with the reality of being the last living people on earth and while it doesn't always land in one piece, it's a tremendously fun piece of cult. Dave loves this movie tremendously and makes a case for it being an unexpected piece of feminist horror and Bryan, never really taking it too seriously in the past comes out the other side a believer. Together, we both hate the movie's ending with a furious passion. Let us tell you all about it!

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We're coming at you with a bonus episode dedicated to the memory of the late, great, Ozzy Osbourne. Trick or Treat from 1986 is hardly a great movie and was almost forgotten as quickly as it entered theaters but what we find in this movie is a remarkably authentic portrayal of what it was like to be a metal head in the 80's. Satan was lurking everywhere and all of your friends' parents were convinced that people who listened to metal were all drug addict murderers or at least would become drug addict murderers if they kept listening to that Ozzy Osbourne character.

We pay sweet tribute to Ozzy, talk about the satanic panic, and our own experiences growing up metal in the 80's and really get down with this utterly bonkers horror movie. We hope you enjoy.

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Here's a freebie episode of our X-Files rewatch podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky for all non-Patreon subscribers to let you know what you're all missing. Want more? We're nearly finishied recapping season one of the show along with a rundown of the headlines, box office and music charts, and TV shows for that week in 90's history.

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This week we see mega-creep Doug Hutchison return to the X-Files for a bit on an episode sequel as weirdo stretchy mutant, Eugene Tooms is released from the mental hospital to once again stalk the streets of Baltimore looking to eat just one more liver so he can hibernate and return 30 years on to continue his killing spree.

Meanwhile, in 90's history, the times they are a-changing with another raft of forgotten sitcoms that didn't even make it to mid-season, a wild new appearance of pop songs, nothing particularly special happening at the movies, and the rise of American domestic terrorism.

This week Bryan and Dave take you back to the New York City of 1990 with a look at what might be Abel Ferrara's most focused movie, King of New York. With a dynamite cast of killers, including Christopher Walken at his best, Laurence Fishburne carrying practically the entire movie on his shoulders, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito, King of New York presents a morally gray crime movie where everyone, even the cops, are just the worst. Crime is the blood that keeps the city alive in this movie and an unreliable narrator is going to do his best to convince you that his crusade to run the criminal underground and thereby the entire city is just, good, and right.

Stylish, slick, and kinetic, King of New York is like a Pixies song with loud, outrageous, and violent scenes of criminal carnage punctuated by quiet meditations on morality. It's bleak, nihilistic, and the brothers can't help but notice that this very-much American cops and robbers movie feels much, much more like the Italian Polizziotteschi reflections which makes the film's subtle social and political undertones feel that much more pronounced.

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This week we're joined by Halle Kiefer, comedy writer and co-host of the podcast Ruined for another trip north to Canada for a look at the formative years of David Cronenberg. We're watching Rabid, starring Marilyn Chambers, famous for her appearance in the 70's adult film hit, Behind The Green Door. Here Cronenberg runs up against a minor moral panic when a film critic questions the government's willingness to fund his films. Marilyn Chambers pushes back against a studio system that can't find the courage to cast an actress from adult films in a major studio release. A woman receives an emergency skin graft that somehow transforms into a phallic proboscis in her armpit that feeds her like a vampire and spreads a new form of rabies which turns its victims into enraged zombies that will stop at nothing to kill everything that moves.

Cronenberg is still figuring it out in this movie which despite its outrageous premise and lurid stunt-casting, could be seen as a meditation on the rise of second-wave feminism, his place in that world, and his impact on that movement as a man trying to navigate the changing world.

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This week we're hanging by a thread as we take a look at one of the strangest, sleaziest movies we've done yet, Mad Foxes. A few movies in our past have driven us to the brink of madness but none so powerfully as this Swiss/German/Spanish co-production that was intended to be a sequel-in-name-only of the American action movie, Stingray.

Music video director Paul Grau approached his producer friend Erwin Dietrich with an idea to produce a comedy and ended up with the assignment to instead produce a violent action movie and since the producer was also a big name in the world of European sexploitation the movie had a mandate to also be full of sex and nudity and man alive, did Paul Grau miss the mark. Starring Jose Gras, credited as Robert O'Neil, it tells the story of a man, his car, and the high cost of being so cool when Nazi bikers assault his lady and kill his parents. Again, because his car is just too cool.

Somehow having four writer credits, this movie comes off like it was written by one twelve year old boy. Very little of it makes sense. A lot of it is maddening to behold and if you're not ready for it you're going to be surprised by precisely how many penises are in this movie.

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We're wrapping up our Pride 2025 series with a case study in camp. We're looking at Curtis Harrington's 1971 American gothic melodrama, What's The Matter With Helen starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters.

Two mothers settle in Hollywood, trying to escape their reputations as the mothers of two nationally infamous murderers. It's all fragile emotional states and overacting as one mom marries up out of her station and the other goes quite insane.

The first in Harrington's high-camp era, followed by movies like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind, Harrington's career would come to be defined by a series of high-camp misadventures that were squarely in the wheelhouse of gay moviegoers the world around and continue to be major influences on the wild, overwrought melodramas that came in its wake.

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