Chopping It Up

It’s Halloween, so we’re chopping up 1988’s Night of the Demons. A group of teens throws a party in an abandoned funeral home, and the party goes very wrong. We talk about the old man with the razor blade apples, the surprisingly smart setups and payoffs, the practical effects, and that three-minute dance break. We also get into the movie’s shady Detroit release story. Sledd owned this on VHS (sort of), Joel can’t explain why he remembered one scene at age 11, and the machete ratings land in a very similar place. Watch it free on Tubi or Plex first.

It’s Halloween night, the kids are in bed, and the Chopping It Up crew is tuning in to a 1970s talk show gone very wrong. For this Prime Cuts, we chop up the 2023 found-footage hit Late Night with the Devil from Colin and Cameron Cairnes. A struggling host chases ratings with a psychic, a skeptic, and one very possessed teenager. Along the way we get into the Bohemian Grove, the Satanic Panic, a Faustian bargain, and the fan theory about the skeleton-looking guy in the audience. We also learn that nearly the entire cast is secretly Australian. Joel had seen it before, but for everyone else it was a first watch, and the meat cleaver ratings mostly landed at a solid four. Streaming now on Disney+ and everywhere else.

Jesse, Sledd, and Joel head into the backwoods for John Boorman's 1972 gut-punch Deliverance, paired with Sledd's long-championed pick, 1981 slasher The Final Terror — a film so obscure Joel couldn't find a single dollar figure for its budget or box office anywhere online. The crew spends a good chunk of the episode arguing over whether Deliverance even qualifies as horror or if it's social commentary wearing a thriller's clothes, breaks down Final Terror's surprisingly stacked cast (Daryl Hannah, a young Akosua Busia, and Joe Pantoliano in a performance Joel says carries the movie), and hands out a Franklin Award to the guy who packed a guitar wrapped in plastic for a river trip and still didn't bring a fishing pole. Two very different backwoods nightmares, one very real debate about where the line for "horror" actually is.

Chopping It Up chops up Curry Barker's Obsession — the $750K nothing-budget horror flick that somehow turned into a $510M monster (680-to-1 return, because apparently demons are great for ROI). Jesse goes scorched-earth on Nikki and Sled isn't having it — full-blown argument, receipts and all. We also get into the lawsuit drama nobody expected, the Andy Richter cold-call story that's funnier than it has any right to be, and a Franklin Award debate that might be the most annoying cast we've ever covered. Also: Sledd finally gets his Deliverance wish next episode. God help us all.

Grab your suntan lotion and a high-powered rifle — Chopping It Up is going underground this week with a double dose of "something's eating people from below the ground." First: 1980's forgotten cult oddity Blood Beach, where John Saxon and Bert Young investigate Santa Monica beachgoers getting sucked into the sand — a movie so thin it needed Ray Liotta AND Matthew Modine to almost play the lead before they settled on someone else entirely. Then: Tremors, the movie that made Kevin Bacon a Saturday-afternoon-cable legend, still just as fun 35 years later as Bacon and Fred Ward battle giant graboids in Perfection, Nevada. One of these earns a glowing rewatch. The other just made TV history — Sledd hands out the first-ever NEGATIVE meat-cleaver rating in show history. Guess which is which.

It's every axe murderer's dream: 1988's Edge of the Axe commits to exactly one weapon and never looks back. Jesse, Joel, and Jeannie welcome special guest Gareth "Slasher Trash" Morgan (creator of the Slasher Trash page and an upcoming feature-length slasher documentary) to dig into this Spanish-American slasher obscurity — small-town paranoia, a shockingly prescient "technology will ruin relationships" subplot, tonal whiplash between sitcom hijinks and pig decapitations, and a twist ending that has the crew split on who's actually swinging the blade. Plus: video nasty talk and a masterclass in gaslighting your way into slasher-sequel status.

A sewer gator raised on hormone-jacked lab dogs takes on a CGI crocodile that cost six times as much and looks half as real. The crew pits 1980's scrappy, John Sayles-penned Alligator against 1999's big-budget, Stan Winston-adjacent Lake Placid — practical effects vs. CGI, indictment of big pharma vs. crazy old lady feeding cows to a lizard, and a fight over crocodile biology the movie's own screenwriters apparently lost. Also: why is the lake in Lake Placid not named Lake Placid? Nobody in this movie can answer that, but we sure try.

Freddy's back, but this time he's not avenging anyone — he's just really into leather bars, apparently. The crew chops up A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), the film that's basically the poster child for queer horror whether the studio wanted it to be or not. We get into writer David Chaskin denying the gay subtext for 25 years (then admitting it — sort of), star Mark Patton's brutal real story, and why this rushed, chaotic sequel accidentally became one of the most beloved films in the genre. Pride Month respect paid, blowjob jokes mostly avoided.

References: Horror Queers Podcast A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) LIVE! feat. Mark Patton, Robert Rusler & Kim Myers

https://open.spotify.com/episode/31noqPrrc1EFk2S5vdMgU3?si=_8kK0RZUQayWI6bgR03RDg

Sledd's back from his self-imposed "sled season" break with maybe his most personal pairing yet: two movies about mothers who are, in his professional opinion, doing their absolute worst — and somehow still more sympathetic than the demon-summoning grandma in the attic. Jesse and Jeannie both watched The Babadook for the first time this episode and have feelings (mostly about insect chittering and never wanting to rewatch it). Joel attempts to defend Gabriel Byrne's parenting. Sledd defends his own questionable childhood relationship with a dead bird. The crew gets into grief-as-monster metaphors, generational curses, postpartum horror, and a Franklin Award debate that's not close (sorry, Samuel). Plus: the Babadook's design has a 1920s silent film ancestor, Hereditary made eight times its budget, and someone brings up Hack-O-Lantern unprompted.

Two heavy hitters, zero good parents, and a demon named Paimon who's just trying his best.

The crew couldn't resist the hype — this week on Prime Cuts, Jesse, Jeannie, Joel, and Sledd dive into Widow's Bay, the new Apple TV+ horror comedy series from Parks and Rec creator Katie Dippold. A cursed New England island, a hapless mayor, folklore that turns out to be terrifyingly real, and commercials that will genuinely unsettle you — it's a lot. Jesse's all in, Jeannie's calling it horror comedy (not comedy horror, there's a difference), Joel's hoping it gets the Penny Dreadful treatment, and Sledd gives it a 3.75 while explaining exactly how you should run over a sea hag with your car. Ratings are preliminary and contingent on how they stick the landing. We'll be back.