Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

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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This week we're heading north to the 51st state of Canada for a listener request. It's Curtains, the 1983 slasher film from producer Peter Simpson who last brought you the smash hit Prom Night. Directed (partially) by cinematographer Richard Ciupka, Curtains is a gigantic mess of a whodunnit that had ambitions to be a North American riff on the movies of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, an arty, very European approach to a violent murder mystery in the giallo style. Unfortunately, this was not what the producers expected and Ciupka bailed on the entiree project leaving it on the shelf for a year before Simpson himself took it down and dragged it across the finish line.

In Curtains five young women gather at the home of director John Stryker, a megalomaniac auteur director with designs on producing a film called Audra but not that long ago he was planning on producing it with his muse, Samantha Sherwood who had herself committed to a mental hospital for research. While inside, Stryker moved on from her but now she's out and pissed off. But what's this? A mysterious killer is knocking them all off one by one. You think you know who the killer is, but do you really?

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We're just full of surprises, aren't we? We're hitting you with a bonus episode for April Fool's Day where nothing is what it seems. Who can you trust? What's real? Is all of this just one big set up for an unexpected outcome? It's a listener request, no less, and Dave is just more than happy to take us through one of his favorite genre movies.

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This week we're joined by our friend Jon Lee Brody of the That Was Pretty Scary podcast for a look at John Carpenter's last movie of the 1980s, They Live. In this evergreen social commentary, Carpenter presents a world very much like our own where the only class distinction is rich and poor and as it would turn out, the rich aren't even human.

In They Live a homeless man with no name drifts into Los Angeles looking for work and stumbles into a conspiracy by an underground of the underclasses to fight back against the elite wealth class which rules the world with fantastic technology that keeps humanity asleep while hidden aliens loot the earth of its resources, leaving the rest of us poor and at one another's throats for what crumbs they afford us.

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