Casting The Net

There's been a ton of stops and restarts along the way, times when I thought it would probably be best just to shut the whole thing down, but we finally made it to 200 episodes of Casting The Net! And to celebrate this momentous occasion, we're talking about the sequel to The Guyver, Guyver 2: Dark Hero! Sean Barker is back, facing off against a new army of zoanoids that threaten a team of archeologists who have made a discovery that may provide him with answers to the origins of the Guyver unit. 

An early 90s anime adaptation starring Mark Hamill as a biomechanical suit wearing superhero?!!? NOPE!!! but the movie cover sure tried to trick folks into thinking that! Other than Mark Hamill NOT being the actual hero of The Guyver, this is one of those straight-to-video adaptations of a Japanese IP that comes courtesy of the folks behind films like Society, Re-Animator, and Faust: Love of the Damned. After finding an alien weapon sought after by the nefarious Cronos Corporation, Sean Barker is inadvertently turned into The Guyver, and forced to face off against Cronos' monstrous cohorts, the Zoanoids. 

The Fear Street Saga continues! Following up on the success of the Fear Street Trilogy from 2021, Fear Street: Prom Queen sees a new group of teens, this time in 1988, having to contend with a savage killer looking to slay the competition for Shadyside High School's Prom Queen. There's plenty of blood and mayhem to go around, but maybe we could have done with a few more dance routines? 

We're finally diving deep into Netflix's Fear Street Trilogy and it is long overdue. Beginning in 1994, we're introduced to the rival towns of Shadyside and Sunnyvale, as a group of high schoolers are being terrorized by ghostly spirits tied the legends of a vengeful witch from the towns' shared history, Sarah Fier. This eventually puts them in contact with a survivor from a camp massacre in 1978 who witnessed a similar attack, with their shared horrors tying back to the origins of Sarah Fier in 1666. We had plenty to talk about when it came to this adaptation of the works of RL Stine, from the music to the fashion, and the surprisingly graphic kills. From start to finish, the team behind these three films did not pull any punches!

I guess it was only a matter of time before we covered some good old fashioned Japanese splatterpunk on the show, as we discuss Psycho Gothic Lolita this week. Led on a path for revenge by her father, Yuki hunts down an assortment and formidable foes, dispatching them in increasingly absurd and gory fashion, all while dressed to the nines and carrying a handy parasol. 

Gone far too soon, Val Kilmer recently passed away at the age of 65, and we thought it only fitting to  cover one of his most underrated performances in the David Mamet-directed film Spartan. After the president's daughter is abducted, military instructor Robert Scott is called in to investigate, leading to a series of events uncovering possible corruption within the Secret Service in addition to stumbling upon an international network of human traffickers.

We've been threatening to cover the Netflix film Uglies for month, and now it's time to make good. Based on the YA dystopian future novel, Joey King stars in this film where all teenagers get operations on their 16th birthday to look more physically attractive and be elevated to a higher societal status, and not be deemed "ugly". But there are those who choose not to have the operation and live out in the woods away from the cold conformist rule of the city. Thankfully, most of them are already ridiculously attractive even without the benefit of surgical enhancement. Trust me, we get into it with this one! 

Realized we had this one in the archives since last fall, but we're finally putting out our episode on Sophia Coppola's The Bling Ring, a dramatization of the true story of a group of teenagers who decided to break into the homes of a handful of young celebrities, seemingly out of sheer boredom. As you can probably guess, the recommendation to cover this came courtesy of the Adorable Lil' Hypebeast herself, who loves her a good "Be Gay, Do Crime" flick! 

So how does this straight-to-streaming reboot of the Dark Horse Comics character Hellboy measure up against its two previous theatrically released interpretations? I'm joined on the podcast by my good friend and Hellboy fan Will Austin to discuss Hellboy: The Crooked Man, as our favorite demonic paranormal investigator crosses paths with witches and demons in 1950s Appalachia. Teamed with a rookie agent from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, and a young war veteran, the trio will have to face off against a sinister entity known as The Crooked Man, and make no mistake, he is as creepy as he is crooked . . . 

In the wake of The Matrix, A LOT of virtual reality-themed movies went overlooked in the late 90s/early 2000s, but this week we're talking about one of the strangest which came courtesy of one of Canada's most certified freaks David Cronenberg. eXistenZ takes gaming to a new level, but when its game designer and her security detail are targeted by anti-virtual reality extremists, they'll have to go inside her game to find out the truth behind the attempt on her life. And because it's Cronenberg, there's gonna be a lot of weird stuff with orifices . . . just warning you right now!