99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing.

Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over as a viable box office draw and positions him to be the prime action movie star of the 90's. It also represents the final death rattle of Cannon Films after a decade of bad business practice finally caught up with them.

Featuring a performance from Robert Guillaume that this movie clearly does not deserve, it's also full of side characters that are every bit as magnetic as JCVD.

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Here's a taste of our Patreon-exclusive podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky, an X-Files Rewatch. Bi-weekly episodes (plus more goodies) are available to subscribers at the $5 tier.

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Our inaugural episode looks at the spark that started a wildfire. The X-Files is among a treasured few TV shows from the 90's that came to define the entire decade. We look at the very beginnings with this one, a pilot episode that defied the odds.

In this episode Mulder meets Scully and together they investigate a case of alien abductions, missing time, and sinister human experimentation. Dave prepares the listeners for his hardline skepticism and Bryan assures them that things will certainly get weird.

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Bryan and Dave are joined by their friends Jonny and Aileen from the Uy Que Horror podcast to cap off their month-long October spooky season rundown with a look at the utterly baffling horror movie misstep, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. It's what happens when a nobody really wants to make a movie but they have to anyway. John Carpenter and Debra Hill agreed to get involved but only if it didn't involve Michael Myers. Joe Dante quit the director spot to go work on another movie leaving it in the hands of Tommy Lee Wallace. Nigel Kneale, the original writer quit when Dino De Laurentis demanded more gory violence in the movie. The whole thing is a mess, really, with Tom Atkins playing a functional alcoholic and Stacy Nelkin playing a young woman in her prime suffering from severe daddy issues.

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This week Bryan and Dave are joined by author and queer horror historian, Sean Abley for a look at a stone-cold classic of 80's horror, Poltergeist. It's out second Tobe Hooper movie in October, alone, and our third overall for 2024. Bryan talks about how this movie was a pivotal moment in his horror movie adolescence. Dave maps the paranormal investigators in the movie to their real-life paranormal investigator counterparts, and Sean has a bone to pick with the ending. We'd also be remiss if we failed to mention the so-called Curse of Poltergeist. We'd also be derelict in our duties if we didn't bring up the elephant in the room: How much of this movie did Steven Spielberg direct? For years rumors and nasty innuendo have swirled that Hooper may have been picking up an easy paycheck on this one in order to allow Spielberg to sidestep some studio deals he made that prevented him from working on it while he made ET. Is there any truth to it? The answer, as usual, is complicated.

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This week Bryan and Dave get real weird with it as they take a deep dive into a movie that defined not only Wes Craven's career but Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund's. Just when everyone thought that the slasher movie was dead on arrival, along comes Freddy Krueger to give it a powerful shot in the arm. Where slashers of the past felt like hangovers of the 1970's, pretenders to the Michael Myers legacy, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the first slasher movie that feels properly 80's. It lands at a crucial moment in American pop culture and just as Last House on the Left gave direction to the flagging horror movies of 70's and Scream gave direction to the flagging horror movies of the 90's, Nightmare and Freddy come to define the shape of horror movies to come in the 1980's. It's a hat trick of horrifying proportions and we can't wait to tell you all about it.

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This week Bryan and Dave kick off their Spooky Season '24 series with a look at one of the all-time greatest horror movie heavy hitters, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from director Tobe Hooper. Dave counts the human cost of making movies on a tiny budget, going over the notoriously rancid production history of a movie made in the dog days of a Texas summer on a set using real food and animal carcasses. You do the math on that one. Meanwhile, Bryan presents a wobbly thesis that, more than other horror movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a fairy tale in the style of The Brothers Grimm. They'll also answer the question: Is Leatherface the cutest franchise killer of them all?

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Take a trip to Italy with Bryan and Dave this week as they put a little garlic on it and talk about Michele Soavi's ambitious, absolutely mesmerizing but ultimately frustrating, Cemetery Man (also known as Dellamorte Dellamore). Adapted from the novel by weirdo Italiano extraordinaire, Tiziano Sclavi, Cemetery Man is also a backdoor adaptation of the wildly successful comic book series, Dylan Dog. It's top to bottom unreliable narrators, naked women, and zombies, headed up by a man so handsome it'll make you angry, Rupert Everett.

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Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a director who stradfastly refused to let it be purely horrifying, instead putting the focus on high-flying visual style and storybook production values. You've never seen so many matte paintings. It's a real challenge to talk about a movie so rich in visual aesthetic but we're going to do our best to break it all down.

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Bryan and Dave are joined this week for their episode celebrating Latin American History Month by Dracula enthusiast, Michael Varrati! Long thought of as a lost movie, the fully restored version of Dracula, produced in tandem with Tod Browning's version with Spanish-speaking actors, the movie is practically the same film with some key differences which have, since its restoration in the 90's, caused many people to declare it the better version of Dracula. Is it? Well, it's complicated. We're going to give you all the facts and tell you all about it in this episodio.

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It's Friday the 13th so here's a bonus episode about Friday the 13th... Part 2. In this episode Bryan struggles with his conflicted opinions on this movie and Dave turns him to the dark side with his position that Friday Part 2 just isn't a very good movie. It IS the movie that gave us Jason despite that part of the story making any sense and it also has a heaping spoonful of 80's misogyny. Great things are to come for fans of Jason and the Friday the 13th franchise but right here, right now, they're still figuring out what they're trying to do with this movie and unfortunately, it just doesn't shake out.

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