This week we take a step back to the golden age of the slasher movie, 1982, for a look at a movie that misses the mark by a significant margin and yet it still remains strangely compelling. Starring Bill Paxton in one of his earliest roles, Mortuary attempts to cash in on the slasher boom but can't quite figure out what it is about Halloween and Friday the 13th that makes them so successful. Hint: It's their simplicity. Mortuary can't help but complicate matters with numerous inexplicable subplots that remain unresolved all the way to the end of the movie: Why is there a satanic cult? We'll never know.

Young Christie is haunted by a memory of her father's murder that she can't quite square with the known facts. Was he murdered or did he drown and why doesn't anyone believe her when she says she witnessed his murder? Meanwhile, a dude in a black cloak is stalking the night, killing randos while trying to get close to Christie. It's plainly obvious from the jump who the killer is since he's only wearing makeup and not a mask. There's a weird, unpleasant tone of necrophilia running throughout the movie and just about everyone sucks but hey! Christopher and Linda Day George are on the set together and that has to count for something. Honestly, Bryan's not sure why he put this one on the list.

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This week we're joined by Tyler Hyde from the podcast That's Spooky to discuss the made-for-tv scare film, Mazes & Monsters. The film represents the first lead role for future superstar, Tom Hanks in a movie about the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons. No, I'm not making that up.

In the early 1980's as Dungeons and Dragons became a sensation of tabletops everywhere, it didn't take long for scolding parent groups to cry foul to every media outlet that would listen and raise a moral panic that rose in tandem with the moral panics around heavy metal music and horror movies. The disappearance of and tragic suicide of James Dallas Egbert III thrust D&D into the headlines and craven opportunists and sensational headlines ignored all the factors that drove him to suicide and placed the blame squarely at D&D, the one thing in his life that brought him joy and provided an escape from the pressures of being a child prodigy. His story informed Rona Jaffe's book, Mazes and Monsters, which led to the rapid development of this TV movie also starring Chris Makepeace and Wendy Crewson.

The story concerns four friends at university who play Mazes and Monsters, the legally distinct dungeon crawler role playing game that causes one player to lose his shit and fall into a psychotic delirium which leads him to murder, madness, and suicide. It is, without question, one of the most toxic movies we've ever seen with a message that seems to be: under no circumstances are you to use your imaginations. You should be thinking about a sensible career now. It's a real bummer, you guys.

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This week we watch a movie that takes several hundred episodes of the seminal gothic soap opera and condenses them to 90 brisk minutes of vampire melodrama in a way that is confusing and frustrating in ways that few movies are.

Dark Shadows, for all its cheesiness and cheapness is one of the most important contributions to horror in the way that it added a dimension to vampire media that hadn't really been explored yet. Without Barnabas Collins you do not get Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. No Buffy The Vampire Slayer. No Vampire The Masquerade. In this episode we run it down in depth. Dave is a huge fan of the TV show and can't wait to tell you all about it and fill in the blanks where the movie fails because believe me, listeners, this movie fails big time.

The wealthy Collins family receives a visit from long-lost cousin Barnabas but he conceals a terrible truth. He is a 200 year old vampire, freed from his prison of a hidden locked coffin by the Collins family handyman. He stalks the people of Collinsport by night and falls madly in love with the Collins family governess, Maggie, when she bears a striking resemblance the woman he once loved. It's basically Dracula but with a lot of really weird zigs and zags as it does its best encapsulate over one hundred hours of soap opera storytelling into a short feature film.

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99 Cent Rental returns after our October break with a listener request. Since we just did Don Coscarelli's 1979 debut, Phantasm, a movie made on tiny, sub-500k budget, we thought it made a lot of sense to see what happens when you break through and Hollywood heaps cash on you to make a proper movie. The result is... very Coscarelli-ish. There's no question whatsoever that Don is well-read on matters of fantasy and science fiction and these being the days before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies mandated that all fantasy features be epic, high-fantasy blow-outs, Coscarelli reaches back into the pool of gritty sword and sorcery for something as characteristically weird as you'd expect from authors like Poul Anderson, Fritz Lieber, and Robert E. Howard. Is it good, though? Well...

The story concerns the hunky, flaxen-haired Dar, the last of his people, who sets out across a dusty landscape seeking vengeance on Maax, the head of a wicked cult in the city of Aruk who will be killed by the son of King Zed. By some unexplainable power, Dar can speak to animals and forms a party of two ferrets, a tiger, and a hawk to have his revenge. Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, and Rip Torn, The Beastmaster lands heavily in the middle of the 1982 surge of fantasy movies that brought us Conan The Barbarian and managed to carve out a sweet cult of fans in spite of its tepid box office performance.

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We close out our Halloween Hootenanny series of all Bring Me The Axe episodes all October with an episode dedicated to a listener who really made our year. This year's series caps off with a look at the gloriously frantic, unfocused shit show that is Dario Argento's Phenomena. Falling very early in the acting career of American movie star, Jennifer Connelly, it's kind of amazing that she finished this production and continued to act given that her finger was literally separated from her body thanks to an angry monkey that also actually slashed up the face of Argento's soon-to-be ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi. You have Donald Pleasance putting on a clinic for phoning it in and yet the entire movie manages to be charming and extremely enjoyable, one of Argento's most Freudian movies, for good or for bad.

When Jennifer, the daughter of an American movie star is shipped off to a Swiss school for girls she lands there at the worst possible time as a murderer is on the loose killing young women. Lucky for her, she has the incredible power to speak to and command insects and she uses this marvelous ability to crack the case since the cops are doing fuck-all to solve it, themselves. Along the way she teams up with a wheelchair-bound entomologist and his helper monkey to get to the bottom of things.

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This week we're looking at 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It took three movies to make Freddy Krueger Freddy as we know him today. An empire of horror was launched off the back of this movie: toys, comic books, video games, masks, everything. Dream Warriors dropped at a critical moment for A Nightmare On Elm Street, after the critical failure of Freddy's Revenge the IP ended up on the chopping block at New Line. If this movie didn't perform the studio planned on shelving future sequels. Boy did it, perform! This is our favorite entry in the series and this episode of Bring Me The Axe really makes it clear.

Ignoring the events of Freddy's Revenge entirely, Dream Warriors picks up where the original left off. Nancy Thompson is back to assist the teenage patients at a psychiatric hospital who find themselves hunted in their dreams once again by Freddy Krueger. Utilizing the special psychic talent of one patient, Nancy gathers the patients together where they reveal their special dream-world talents, talents that will come in awfully handy when the time comes to face their fears and take Freddy on once and for all, or at least until the following year when the next Nightmare on Elm Street sequel dropped.

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This week we go back to 1979 for a look at Don Coscarelli's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness horror movie that introduced the world to The Tall Man, Reggie The Ice Cream Man, and the mirror-plated Sentinel Spheres. It's Phantasm! Is this a horror movie? Well, yeah. Of course it is. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? Also yes. Though the movie is a bit of a mess and an exercise in that moment when a struggling young filmmaker decides to take the easy to road to success through cheap thrills it also hides a deeper dimension about loss, grief, and a boy entering adolescence, a time when the world suddenly becomes simultaneously more exciting but also more dangerous.

In this wild adventure, young Mike and his brother Jody find themselves in the crosshairs of a sinister entity masquerading as a mortician at a nearby funeral home when they stumble upon his terrible secret: The Tall Man is not of this world and is stealing the dead to resurrect them as little dwarf slaves for reasons? Aided by their guitar-playin' ice cream selling buddy, Reggie, they take the fight to the funeral home to stop what could be a full-blown invasion of Earth by an army of the dead, aided by their terrifying flying death machines, the Sentinel Spheres!

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This week we take on another made-for-tv movie -- another British made-for-tv movie -- as we take in the notorious BBC Halloween stunt, Ghoswatch. In 1992 the BBC set out to make a movie about a paranormal investigation gone horribly awry. The kicker is that it's cast with real BBC personalities and was kinda/sorta presented to the English TV watching public as a real investigation. A portion of the viewers were deeply affected by the movie and it resulted in a minor public panic that resulted in some actual diagnosed cases of PTSD for some viewers and one very tragic suicide. Since that time, Ghostwatch has lived in the imagination of British viewers who watched it and were either scared out of their fucking minds or were seriously entertained because there's no two ways about it, Ghostwatch is a good time.

Taking notes from the Enfield Poltergeist investigation of the late 1970's, Ghostwatch presents a family in trouble in some council housing in North London. The mother is at wits end. Her daughters are being harassed by a terrible spirit that they call Pipes. As the movie unfolds across 90 minutes, we learn more about the neighborhood, the old local legend of Mother Seddons and the terrible secret of Raymond Tunstall. Pipes The Ghost hides in plain sight among numerous shots and the whole comes together as all hell breaks loose and the TV broadcast accidentally lets a terrible force loose across all of England.

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This week we take a trip back to 1991 for a real video store oddity. It's a rape/revenge movie that also capitalizes on the popularity of Robocop. Written by an Emmy-award winning TV writer, starring a two-time Tony winner as the villain and chock full of kill scenes that are so creative and strange that they could only have been produced for a straight to video exploitation movie. And so deeply committed to its video tape format was it that this movie's preferred aspect ratio is 4:3.

Starring Stacy Haiduk as the meddling courtroom sketch artist who is obsessed with solving a series of murders that she has no business investigating in the first place, as well as Bruce Davidson who is horny for revenge. They're both going up against Broadway sensation Michael Cerveris who chews so much scenery that there's not much left for his co-stars. This bizarre revenge plot is aided by a series of extremely ambitious special effects and one scene that blew our minds by how incredibly weird and unique it is.

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This week we celebrate Latin American Heritage Month with a look at a horror movie out of Mexico that is very hard to put into words and so we try anyway and sound like complete lunatics. Falling toward the end of the Galindo family film dynasty, Vacation of Terror 2: Diabolical Birthday (Vacaciones de Terror 2: Cumpleaños Diabolico) sees Galindo cousin, Pedro Galindo III with a surprisingly stunning cast of Mexican movie stars. Pedro Fernandez turns up in yet another movie for the Galindo's with his magnificent curly mullet and easy cool. Teen pop star Tatiana shows up to sing her hit single Chicos Chicos as she ages out of the teen pop arena but just a few years prior to her ascent as one of Mexico's biggest children's entertainers. The whole cast is rounded out by a bona fide legend of Mexican film, Joaquin Cordero and I have to wonder if any one of these actors stopped for a moment and pondered what exactly they were doing in this movie because if we were any one of these actors we would be very confused and very concerned.

In this very loose sequel to 1989's Vacation of Terror the evil witch-possessed doll somehow escaped its fate of the previous movie and winds up as a prop on a movie studio. With a lot of questions probably best left unanswered, the doll hides under an elaborate birthday cake and transforms into a horrible slimy goblin creature and wreaks havoc on the movie lot as our heroic Julio and bouncy Mayra race against the clock to save the imperiled soul of her sister, Tania, before the sun rises and the slimy witch goblin steals her soul for good. Or something.

Look, just go with it.

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