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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Aileen Clark of Uy Que Horror is back to join us for a look at two truly unhinged scare films. In the 1960s and 70s churches occasionally produced low budget morality tales and scare movies to frighten their congregations into going back to church if they feel like they're slacking off. The problem is that they were made by people who didn't know how to make movies with casts of non-actors and extremely low budgets. They were cheap and terrible and everyone hated watching them. Along came Ron and June Ormond and their son Tim, the first family of exploitation, teamed up with Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, a charismatic fundamentalist preacher from Mississippi to adapt Pirkle's fire and brimstone sermon If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do that threatened easily frightened Christians with seeking out draconian churches that shunned anything looking like empathy and service in favor of a hard line position against all things communism.

In the sequel, The Burning Hell, Estus Pirkle has decided that his last sermon didn't put enough terror in the hearts of Christians over going to hell so here's one that's literally all about how much hell sucks and how you definitely want to accept Jesus Christ into your heart so you don't go there.

These fiery sermons are illustrated with scenes of trashy, gory violence that you definitely don't expect to find in movies meant for fragile, easily offended Christian people. They are completely weird and hilarious.

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This week we're looking at the arch-cult film from 1988, Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Its released was botched entirely by the distributor who were almost deliberately defiant in their unwillingness to screen the movie on much more than a few screens. It found its legs on cable and VHS where it was an instant hit and went on to launch a merchandising empire culminating in a video game and one of Universal Studios' most popular attractions at Halloween Horror Nights.

When a UFO that looks an awful lot like a circus tent lands in Crescent Cove and aliens that look an awful lot like circus clowns wander into town with murder and mayhem in mind its up to a local cop, his ex-girlfriend, and her manchild boyfriend to stop them in their tracks and save Crescent Cove. Directed by the Chiodo Brothers, who were known for ambitious special effects, stop motion animation, and puppetry with credits under their belt like Elf, Critters, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure, it's a send up of 50's alien invasion movies with a plot that's almost one-to-one for the classic 1958 film, The Blob.

We love it. You love it. Let's love it together. Have a listen.

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This week we dive headlong into one of the most baffling 80's video store hits, The Wraith, in which Charlie Sheen is a ghost or an alien or a ghost alien who gets revenge on the wily gang of Arizona cretins that murdered him by running them over with his magic ghost alien car.

The Wraith is a lot of things. Good is not one of them but it has a certain ineffable charm that makes it tremendously fun to watch in spite of its story being positively incidental to the rest of the movie. It casts the widest possible net to remind you of movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Death Wish 3, and The Road Warrior. Do you like cool cars? Do you like explosions? Do you like aliens, ghosts, or ghost aliens? Are you willing to let slide about a dozen totally unresolved plot points and completely ignore the fact that this movie leaves you with more questions than answers? You will probably love The Wraith.

The soundtrack rules. Sheen seems completely unaware of the movie he's in. A pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn is doing her best with what she has. Clint Howard gloriously answers our question: is it a wig? All this and more in our exhaustive breakdown of The Wraith from director Mike Marvin.

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