We continue our Pride 2026 examination of queer horror with a look at a truly unique film, a movie that challenged us in every conceivable way. If you, the listener, can make it to the end of this one without being totally alienated, consider yourself a true Bring Me The Axe fan. Thundercrack! is the collision of underground filmmakers Curt McDowell and George Kuchar. McDowell, a truly horny underground filmmaker was known for his art films containing no small amount of explicit unsimulated sex and George Kuchar was known for outrageous, ugly send-ups of "women's pictures" and melodramas. Together they made an old dark house horror movie with no small amount of body hair and body fluids. There's no small amount of sex in this movie and man alive is it gross.

Thundercrack! is a hard movie to explain. It finds several pairs of strangers stranded at the home of a mentally ill woman, a house bursting at the seams with secrets. Each one of them brings their own secrets to complicate matters. There's Roo and Sash, a pair of ladies desperate for men they cannot have. There's Chandler and Bond, the former seeking vengeance for the death of his wife, the latter desperate to have sex with Chandler. There's Toydy and Bing, a man who just wants to get behind that locked door in the living room and a man haunted by a circus gorilla that he is deeply in love with. It is a long night of madness and sex culminating in every secret boiling over at the surface. We can confidently say that there is nothing like it anywhere. Thundercrack! is a true original, a puerile lo-fi nightmare that defies you to watch it.

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Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental and we go long on one of the most honest and authentic coming-out stories at a critical moment in the 80's just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum but right before the first reports of AIDS hits the news. It offers a remarkable alternative to contemporary portrayals of gay characters, casting off the well-worn tropes of swishy queens and terrifying leather daddies, Making Love gives you gay men who are simply ordinary men.

Making Love is about married couple Claire and Zach. Their life together is great. Except for one critical thing. Zach is gay and is finally coming to terms with it. He meets author Bart, an openly gay but aloof loner who loves them and leaves them and has his first sexual encounter with a man which sends his entire life into a spiral.

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This week we kick off Pride 2026 with a look at the sapphic doom of Dracula's Daughter, the sequel to the landmark horror movie, 1931's Dracula. The 30's was rough on everyone being that we were smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression so taking wild chances on vanity projects was bad for business. Not to be outdone in the realm of bad business decisions, Universal Studios took on two ill-advised projects that put the future of the studio in jeopardy. With the Laemmle family out of the picture, the studio committed to a sequel to one of its biggest hits of the decade and put it in the hands of the horniest writers in Hollywood who asked what if our movie's vampire was also haunted by her desire for women?

Dracula's Daughter finds the titular woman in London immediately following the destruction of her father by Abraham Van Helsing. She steals his body, ritually destroys it, and then finds herself still unable to resist hunting London's young women. Desperate, she turns to a psychiatrist to free her from her diabolical curse, being a lesbian.

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Last week we took on the landmark Ridley Scott movie, Alien, a movie that closed out the 1970's with a bang. This week we're taking on James Cameron and his follow-up to the explosive 1985 smash hit, The Terminator, Aliens. Cameron knew he wanted to make an Alien sequel the moment he first saw the original movie and when the opportunity arose he had to fight tooth and nail, struggling against 20th Century Fox's bad business and legal woes, against apathetic executive who had no interest whatsoever in making another Alien movie, against a production crew that couldn't stand him or his producer Gale Anne Hurd. When all was said and done and the movie hit theaters, Cameron proved to everyone what absolute losers they all were with his clear vision of an explosive action movie that set the pace for the second half of the 80's and set an extremely high bar for action movies to come. Hollywood would never be the same and with the inclusion of the Colonial Marines, Cameron set the entire Alien legacy on a new path.

Following the tragedy of the Nostromo disaster Ellen Ripley finds herself waking up 57 years in the future. Her bosses are pissed that she blew up one of their space ships and ban her from flying another mission. An opportunity to get back on a starship comes around when an executive from Weyland Yutani hires her to return to LV-426 to advise a unit of Colonial Marines on a rescue mission of missing colonists who may have come into contact with the same crashed alien ship that doomed her own crew so many years ago. She had enough trouble dealing with one single xenomorph. What happens when the Colonial Marines encounter dozens of them?

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On the podcast no one can hear you scream. This week we're taking a look at the horror movie hingepoint in 1979, Alien. Before Star Wars there wasn't a studio on earth that wanted to make an expensive science fiction movie and after Star Wars they couldn't find enough scripts to get expensive science fiction movies into production. Alien was one of the first ones to come out of the gate that wasn't a cheap ripoff of George Lucas's masterpiece. It was worlds apart from the recent space movie hits. It featured no highly competent astronauts traveling to Jupiter and no dashing heroes in star fighters, wielding light sabers. Instead, Ridley Scott delivered a quiet, slow-moving horror movie featuring blue collar characters just trying to get by on a commercial tow vessel. At the same time, they delivered one of the most suspenseful horror movies with one of the strongest casts and one of the most iconic monster designs by world-class artists. It is truly one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

Alien sees the crew of the Nostromo rerouted to a planet nearby where a crashed alien vessel sends out a radio signal that they interpret as a distress call. By the time the ship's computer figures out that it's not a distress call but a warning it's too late and the ship's XO finds himself with a horrifying alien creature stuck to his face, laying its egg inside him. When the egg hatches by exploding out of his chest it unleashes the perfect killing machine, a biomechanical alien that stalks the ship's crew and kills them off one by one.

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This week we're taking a look at David Lynch's fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch's disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch found himself patronized by 80's super producer, Dino De Laurentiis, a producer who believed in Lynch's gift at a time when no one else would and were it not for Dino, we're not sure that we get the rest of the movies Lynch is so well known for. Realizing that Blue Velvet was commercially radioactive but supportive regardless, De Laurentiis transformed his entire company to also accomodate film distribution just for Blue Velvet and when the movie dropped it struck critics and viewers in such a way that they knew they were seeing something grotesque and special at the same time.

Blue Velvet sees Jeffrey Beaumont, a young resident of the sleepy small town, Lumberton, drawn into a world of violence, sex, and obsession when he finds a severed ear in a field which leads him to the city's underworld, a place occupied by dangerous people living a desperate existence. He falls in love with the femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens, runs afoul of drug dealer Frank Booth, and struggles to free her from Frank's grasp. The descent into the city's dark side reveals uncomfortable truths about Jeffrey and by extension, all of us.

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Just in time for Beltaine we're dropping in on the merry residents of Summerisle for a look at Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man from director Robin Hardy. This 1973 horror movie is a pivotal feature in the folk horror tradition and presents a daring departure from common horror movie tropes, choosing to set the movie in broad daylight with a color palette of primary colors and lush greens instead of the flashing thunder and shadows of night. The air of constant menace is replaced with a cast of common rural people who seem to be having the time of their lives in the pagan paradise of a community that celebrates the old gods. Starring Christopher Lee at his most charming and charismatic, The Wicker Man is a triumph of weird horror and is a May Day tradition in the house of Bring Me The Axe!

The story follows Sgt. Howie, an English cop who drops in on the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a the disappearance of a young girl but he finds the strange community of heathens uncooperative in his investigation and suspects that she may have been a victim of human sacrifice. There's a sacrifice, alright, but Howie has no idea to what lengths these people will go to in order to secure a healthy harvest.

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This week we take on George Romero's Martin from 1977. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe if you squint at it just right. Martin doesn't fit neatly into any genre and for that we're at a loss to properly define it. But one thing is for sure, this is our favorite non-zombie Romero movie. It's a very weird, very European movie with artsy tendencies and a good idea of where George Romer's career may have gone had he not been repeatedly dragged back to the zombie well.

In Martin, the eponymous young man drifts from house to house, a ward of a highly superstitious family who pass him around as a burden that must be contained lest his bloodlust lead him to mayhem and carnage but here's the problem: Martin doesn't seem to actually be a vampire. He walks around during the day, holy symbols and vampire wards have no effect on him. But he is no less monstrous, being an actual serial killer. The question remains, does Martin kill because he's been told for so long that he's a monster?

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This week we're bringing it home to Boston for a look at the 1981 slasher movie also-ran. Night School. Similar to the many, many slasher movies that dropped that year, Night School struggles to commit to the stalk and slash body count mayhem that was dominating box offices and instead lands closer, remarkably closer to an Italian giallo. When it's not shamelessly stepping on Psycho's toes it reminds us a little too much of What Have You Done To Solange and What Have They Done To Your Daughters.

In Night School a killer stalks the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, decapitating women. Their targets all share one thing in common, they're all students at the same night school, sharing the same head hunter obsessed anthropology professor who is busily seducing each one of them. It's up to smarty pants Boston PD detective Judd Austin to put the pieces together and crack the case before the killer strikes again!

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This week we take a look at what is arguably Godfrey Ho's magnum opus as far as that director can have such a thing. We're watching Ninja Terminator from 1986, just one of scores of cheap, trashy martial arts movies made in the 1980s by Godfrey Ho in order to capitalize on the western appetite for all things ninja. Ho is famous for a technique of cut and paste filmmaking where he would cut out all the good parts of an Asian action movie, shoot some wraparound footage with western actors, and dub the whole thing over with a new audio track to make a new movie. Sort of. Plus ninjas.

In this one, Ho casts Richard Harrison as Master Ninja Harry who, along with some friends, absconds with three pieces of a statue sacred to the Ninja Empire. When one of them are killed and the Ninja Empire recovers one piece, the other two ninjas conspire to keep the pieces away in order reform the ninja empire. Maybe? Harry enlists his friend Jaguar Wong to seek out the missing piece and a whole lot of crazy bullshit happens in the meantime.

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