This week we reach the terminal point for giallo in Italy. This is it, the bottom of the barrel, the definitive end, a bloated vanity project by director Al Festa to showcase his wife, Stefania Stella who ostensibly plays herself in this murder mystery in the style of old gialli.

In Fatal Frames we find music video director Alex Ritt, haunted by the recent murder of his wife, drawn to Rome to direct a blockbuster music video for Italy's hotted pop star, Stefania Stella. When he arrives, however, violence follows him as the bodies pile up and he is the prime suspect in the police investigation. But he's not killing these women. So who is? Why are they so focused on Alex? How does Stefania Stella fit in to all this nonsense?

Sporting a cast chock full of Italian movie legends and a few American horror favorites like Donald Pleasance, Linnea Quigley, and Angus Scrimm, Fatal Frames is an absolute shit show, a tremendously convoluted giallo that doesn't work as a giallo and definitely doesn't work as a showcase of Stefania Stella's talents. Not to be mean or nothin', but the lady has none to speak of. But this movie is a worthwhile watch. It's a baffling series of weird decisions and bad acting.

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This week we're diving in (get it?) to one of the most successful and well-known of the disaster epics of the 1970s, Irwin Allen's first disaster feature: the Poseidon Adventure.

Taking place on New Year's Eve, an old cruise ship is on its last voyage to port in Athens when a sudden rogue wave hits the ship and capsizes it, sending most of the passengers and crew to their deaths. A ballroom full of passengers manage to survive and make a plan to climb the ship and reach the thinnest part of the hull in hopes of being rescued but each one of them brings their own complications to make this the adventure of a lifetime.

Starring an ensemble cast with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, and more, this movie took the model set by 1970's Airport and expands the scope and ambition for a truly suspenseful but clunky story with maybe too many characters for its own good.

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This week we're back in Roger Corman territory with an early Joe Dante feature for New World Pictures, Piranha from 1978.

When a pair of teenage hikers go missing in the Texas wilds, a bounty hunter will have to team up with a reclusive alcoholic weirdo to find them. Their search takes them to a secret research facility where they accidentally release a large number of genetically modified piranhas into the local river system where they will wreak havoc on a summer camp and a lakeside resort full of people just begging to be nibbled on by voracious carnivorous fish. Along the way our hapless heroes will have to outwit the cops and a military coverup.

Piranha is an extraordinarily silly monster movie that is obviously doing everything it can to snatch some of that precious Jaws money the very same year that Universal released the much-anticipated Jaws 2. A lawsuit nearly stopped this movie in its tracks but were it not for Steven Spielberg himself, we might not have ever seen this highly enjoyable trainwreck of an exploitation movie.

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If you're not listening to our sister podcast, Laughing in the Dark, an Are You Afraid of the Dark rewatch podcast here's your chance to check it out with Season 3, Episode 4: The Tale of the Dollmaker.

This week it's Aileen's turn to tell the 9:30 Society all about the fifth episode of the third season of Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This episode hits us with some AYAOTD classic tropes. You get a kid abandoned by their parents for a time, a complete lack of anything that you could call a dollmaker, and people being real weird about trauma. In this episode we find Melissa spending some time at her aunt and uncle's place. She's eager to hang out with their neighbor, a girl her own age but is shocked to learn that this friend of her vanished mysteriously and no trace of her was ever found. What's worse, her parents were so broken up about it that they packed up and moved away and no one will talk about the lingering horror of this disappearance. They just keep pushing it down. But because it's Are You Afraid of the Dark, Melissa keeps breaking into the empty neighbor house and discovers some really weird stuff going down in that attic.

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This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now!

The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals liberally from George Miller's 1981 sequel to Mad Max, The Road Warrior. We find Mike Brady lookalike, Scorpion driving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, on the run from his former gang, the genocidal Templars. Mike's dedication to the loner lifestyle is put to the test when he rescues a mysterious injured woman from the Templars and he'll be called on to protect a colony of survivors when the ghosts of his past return to settle an old beef.

New Barbarians leans into the spaghetti western overtures that inspired Mad Max while stealing from the same movie but on a significantly smaller budget. Italian Mas Max ripoffs are already a cheap, threadbare affair but this movie, the very first of many more to follow, starts off from an even cheaper, more threadbare position and it's quite frankly amazing that this movie proved that ripping off a high-flying Australian stunt spectacular with the crappiest cars and wasteland punks you've ever seen.

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This week we're taking on one of the weirdest horror movie misfires of the 80s. It's an explicable mess of a movie that statistically shouldn't have been a loser ad yet here we are.

A series of brutal murders and rapes rocks a small New England town. The medical examiner, the chief of police, and a local newspaper reporter team up to solve the crimes but the evidence doesn't make any sense. Is this the work of a gang of people or one man? The latter seems to be the case but how could that even be possible given the loads and loads of evidence (that joke will make sense when you listen to the episode) left behind. In the end, shadows of the town's ugly past resurface and the perpetrator of these crimes may not even be human!

Starring iconoclast and independent film mastermind John Cassavetes, Incubus sports a script written by Amityville Horror's Sandor Stern with heavy rewrites from Cassavetes himself. The remaining movie is a mystifying parade of the most deranged dialog you've ever heard. In any other case this is a forgettable piece of 80s horror garbage but the utterly insane chatter makes it a truly unique horror movie.

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This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make a movie. But when scripts vanished, the cast and crew had to make a movie based on their broad memories of the original story and we'd be lying if we didn't think they did a pretty good job of it. Severin Films bent over backwards in 2025 to recover what materials they could find and released the best possible scan of the last remaining 35mm prints of The Shark Hunter, a movie that was dangerously close to disappearing forever.

In The Shark Hunter we find a sun burned and bloodshot American expat living seaside in Mexico, making a living by leaping into the ocean to kill every shark he sees, which happens to be a lot of sharks. But this is just a cover for an operation to recover a sunken safe in a crashed airplane. He teams up with a local buddy and will have to outsmart a gangster and a rival special forces dude if he plans to get his hands on all that sweet, sweet cash.

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We're joined by our friend, drag legend Love Connie for a look deep into the abyss. We watched Giulio Paradisi's unhinged 1979 shit show, The Visitor, and found that the abyss stares back. This is not an easy movie to explain. It is stacked with some of Hollywood's heaviest hitters in the cast: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Mel Ferrer, Sam Peckinpah, and Glenn Ford and no one can explain why that is. It's not even clear if any of these people even know what's happening. They're just happy to be here. Meanwhile, an American TV writer who is lucky enough to be fluent in Italian struggles to translate ideas from the director and producer into something that makes sense and ultimately gives in to their nonsensical demands as the director's vision for The Visitor is a series of images in his head that he thinks are cool and a producer's vision to rip off as many horror movies of the 1970s as possible in a single movie. In the end, nothing makes sense, the movie looks amazing, features a killer score, but just kind of meanders through hammy performances, nonsense dialog, and a psychedelic ending that does absolutely nothing to tie up whatever passes for a plot. In spite of all of this, The Visitor is mersmerizing train wreck of a movie to behold.

If The Visitor is about anything, as near as this writer can summarize, it concerns a struggle between cosmic forces of good evil who wage a secret war. One side wishes to birth a pair of children who will come together to resurrect an ancient evil alien who will destroy everything. The other side opposes them, seeking to save the life of an innocent girl who commands the powers of evil and is destined to usher in a dark age for the universe. That is nominally what this movie is about. What happens in this movie is another matter entirely.

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You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them.

Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987.

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We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn't typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it's spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter, Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers), Herk Harvey made an extremely eerie and deeply paranoid movie that gets deeply under your skin and it's a shame that he never worked in features again.

What begins with a fatal car accident leads the lone survivor, Mary, on a trip to Salt Lake City where she will play organ for a church. But along the way she finds herself stalked by a phantom as she tries to fit into this new city, navigating new relationships that she's barely interested in in the first place. By the time the film closes Mary will uncover the truth about the phantom stalker and what happened that day during the car accident.

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