Cinema Death Cult

As returning guest and investigative journalist Alexander Zaitchik researched the twisted history of the pharmaceutical industry and big pharma's approach to patenting medicine for his book OWNING THE SUN:A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines, a movie kept coming into his mind: Brain Candy, the Kids in the Hall's 1994 cult comedy about the devastating life cycle of a fictional cure-all psych med. He discovered that while the Kids in the Hall had set out to make a comedy broadly satirizing the widely prescribed '90s mood boosting drug Prozac, they'd accidentally created a comedy nightmare with surprising bearing on the real life practices of drug manufacturers.

Brain Candy is an unheralded, rare example of perfect comedy. It's as dense with jokes as Airplane that ties together those hundreds of jokes into a tight, original story with a coherent argument. It was made at a time when the Kids in the Hall were estranged from each other and suffering from a range of crippling personal losses. It was critically lambasted, ignored by audiences and quickly dumped by its studio. I'd include a link for where you can stream it legally but, hey! Guess what? There's no such link. You can buy it on Blu Ray or DVD (and maybe find it and watch it, hint hint) but you can't legally stream it.

This episode is a long time coming. Alex and I are both longtime Kids in the Hall fans and have been talking about doing a CDC episode about Brain Candy for years. Our dawdling worked out well. Our plan was to devote an episode to a largely forgotten cult movie. Little did we know that the Kids in the Hall would release a new sketch show on Amazon Prime that opens with a sketch about Brain Candy and features characters from the movie in several sketches.

Guys, this one's huge. Gotta break out the bullet point machine for this one.

Jim Knipfel returns!

It's the first-ever Brian De Palma movie discussed on CDC!

The sound is terrible!

So it's a terrific episode, despite some less than perfect audio. Jim's the best. I probably talk too much. Remind me to rewrite this description. Join Jim's patreon here.

Watch Paul Williams on the Brady Bunch Variety Hour here.

The trailer from Suspiria is here.

And here's Paul Williams giving Daft Punk's Grammy acceptance speech.

This is "Touch," the song Paul Williams sings for Daft Punk. Maybe not for everybody but I love it.

Paul Williams wrote we've only just begun. Here's the Carpenters doing it and here's Grant Green doing a nice mellow jazz guitar instrumental.

On this episode of Cinema Death Cult I talk about the terrific 2021 comedy Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar, written by and starring Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo, the writers of _Bridesmaids. _

I don't want to give any details away about _Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar _.This movie took me completely by surprise. From its trailer, I expected a mediocre comedy with awkward characters acting out some thin premise padded by direction-less improvisational riffing and awkward, cringe-inducing set pieces. But the movie threw curveball after curveball at me. It’s an absurd masterpiece.

Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar is the best comedy I’ve seen in a long time. But I think it’s getting ignored. I think the trailer is to blame. The trailer withholds a lot of the tone, plot and characters from the movie which is great because it lets the actual movie sneak up on you. But it undersells how good the movie is. In a world of streaming content with a billion other options it makes this diamond in the rough comedic triumph easy to skip. And that sucks because it’s really good! I want to hype it up. But at the same time I don’t want to say too much about it because almost from the start it does things I didn’t expect.

Here’s the trailer, which does an OK riff on the Netflix show Stranger Things and does a poor job of representing how great this movie really is.

If the actor Jamie Dornan is reading this, I’m sorry I misstated your name as Jamie Dorner. But I call you “the handsome fella” several times, so your feelings shouldn’t be too hurt. Also, I’m sorry I forgot which actress played Star and which played Barb and resorted to saying Annie Mumolo’s name over and over. If Annie Mumolo is reading this, great work!

This week, Jeff Koyen joins me to dissect George Miller’s 2015 apocalyptic action Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the Mad Max film series, following Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (often simply called The Road Warrior) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Unlike its predecessors, Fury Road was made in a modern, computerized film production landscape. The three original films were scruffy independent productions made in the ‘70s and ‘80s featuring visceral actions with real people doing incredible—and seemingly real—stunts. The decades-later sequel Fury Road miraculously retains the scruffy and kinetic feel and spirit of the original films while taking full advantage of the tools and possibilities of modern movie-making, overlaying a bold sense of color, speed and scale.

Fury Road was a singular masterpiece of pure cinema. However, it fizzled at the box office, coming in second to Pitch Perfect 2 on its opening weekend. While Fury Road was embraced by an enthusiastic cult of fans, its impact on filmmaking was sadly negligible. It showed the grand possibilities of CGI filmmaking and the general public said “no thanks” and bought a gazillion tickets for gray Marvel movie sludge instead.

Mad Max super-fan Jeff Koyen joins me to celebrate_ Fury Road_. Jeff is a brilliant editor and journalist whose career spans the legendary '90s ‘zine Crank, the iconoclastic alt-weekly_ New York Press _(where he was my boss), the NFT artwork site the Boggz Project and numerous other publications and projects.

It’s a great conversation and I don’t want to give too much away. But the scene from the original Mad Max with the rumored stunt death is here (don’t worry–the guy didn’t die; he was just walloped by a motorcycle tire real good). Also, someday I'm going to do a full-throated defense of Beyond Thunderdome but I don't really get into it here.

I'm joined by Thomas Edward Seymour, film professor in CUNY system working at Laguardia College and director of 2016's VHS Massacre and 2019's VHS Massacre, Too, a pair of documentary about the last stand of the American exploitation film. The first VHS Massacre installment explores the immediate fall-out of the post video store era, arguing that media consolidation led to the censorship and near death of the independent and exploitation film industry. The follow-up documentay movie follows the trajectory into the streaming age and takes viewers on an adventure leading from the last Blockbuster video store in Bend Oregon to Troma Entertainment in New York.

Tom's a friend back from my days as an alt-weekly reporter in Connecticut where I covered several of his independent film projects for my paper The Hartford Advocate. In our conversation for the podcast, Tom catches me up on what's been going on with independent filmmakers, exploitation films and physical media in a post pandemic, post movie theater, streaming world and gives a full throated defense of the need for exploitation films in a world of corporate entertainment.

VHS Massacre, too is available for sale as a Blu Ray here.

Troma's streaming service is here.

Tonight I’m examining the film “On the Silver Globe.”

Where to start? Oh: special thanks to my guest host Agatha Bulger who handles the intro this week.

But on to “On the Silver Globe.” The Polish science fiction film is a stunning, mind-bending and unique work of pure cinema. But its backstory is almost as intriguing as the film itself "On the Silver Globe" began multiple locations in the Soviet bloc in the mid 1970s, with the film crew traveling from Mongolia to the shores of the Baltic Sea and plumbing the depths of a disused salt mine which stood in for an alien underground temple.

An adaptation of the landmark Polish science fiction series The Lunar Trilogy by Jerzy Żuławski, the grand uncle of “On the Silver Globe” director Andrzej Żuławski, was funded by the communist Polish government and planned to be a showcase for the possibilities of Polish cinema. However, officials shut down production about 70 percent through the shooting citing budget issues.

Years after filming ended, when the sets were destroyed and the costumes had rotted away, Żuławski edited the footage together, filming unrelated street scenes with narration describing the parts of the story that went unfilmed and premiered the film at the 1988 Canne film festival.

Since a 2016 restoration, appreciation for the film has grown, illustrated by the recent release of the European behind-the-scenes documentary “Escape to the Silver Globe.”

Vice magazine called "On the Silver Globe" the greatest science fiction movie never made. While the final result is not the film Żuławski set out to make, the film is a visually striking and elusive work of art. It's a one of a kind movie that defies not just categorization but description.

East European film scholar Daniel Bird joins me to explore "On the Silver Globe," "The Lunar Trilogy" and Zurawski’s unique and expressive approach to filmmaking. Daniel Bird is co-founder of the post-production and production company Acid Pictures, through which he has co-produced restorations of Jane Campion’s "Peel," Stephen Sayadian’s "Dr. Caligari" and Peter Weir’s "Picnic at Hanging Rock." He directs the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, through which he has produced Temple of Cinema, an installation featuring outtakes from Sergei Parajanov’s "The Colour of Pomegranates," Parajanov Triptych (a programme of restored shorts from Armenia, Ukraine and Georgia), and a restoration of Maria Saakyan’s "Mayak." He is also the co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, which recently worked with MUBI to distribute a restoration of "Brief von Paris."

"Fresh" is a new original horror film streaming on Hulu starring Sebastian Stan.

He goes on a date with a lady, then drugs and imprisons her to sell her body for meat. But he keeps her alive because the people who buy the body parts want their body parts fresh. That's why the movie is called "Fresh."

It would have been cool if it was called "Fresh for Frankenstein." But I guess it would have to be a Frankenstein movie for that to work.

Alas. This is a short review of a movie I didn't really like. Sebastian Stan also stars in "Pam & Tommy," another Hulu original. With so many Sebastian Stan products they should have a section called tomb of the winter soldier.

That probably wasn't a good joke. I'm trying to type as much as I can as fast as I can.

They play the '80s synth pop song "Obsession" by Animotion. Great tune, in my opinion. Fun video if you've never seen it. It's like they got a bunch of free costumes and decided to just "make it work." Also, they do the "white people dance" Eddie Murphy made fun of in "Delirious."

image courtesy searchlight pictures.

The movie Deep Water _was released last week on the streaming platform Hulu. Starring Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas, the movie is based on a 1957 psychological thriller by the same name penned by _Talented Mr. Ripley Author Patrica Highsmith. The plot follows a married couple locked in a loveless marriage characterized by jealousy, suspected infidelity and possibly…

…murder? (imagine the camera just zoomed into my face and I have my finger to my bottom lip, Dr. Evil style)

Another thing about this movie that’s important to know is that it sucks. It sucks through and through. It looks washed out, the camera work is pedestrian at best, the acting alternates between flatness and unconvincing hysteria. I was pretty miserable watching it and only made it through 43 minutes before giving up.

Deep Water was directed by an Englishman named Adrian Lyne who once upon a time was a veritable hit movie making factory, helming box office smashes like Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Jacob's Ladder _and _Indecent Proposal (I copy/pasted that list from wikipedia. It’s a good website. Lots of facts). And he was not only a maker of popular films but also a celebrated craftsman, earning an Oscar nomination for Fatal Attraction, which was the second top grossing film of 1987 after _Three Men and a Baby. _

And yet, despite the box office success and film industry accolades, there’s a 20-year gap on his resume. After directing Unfaithful in 2002, he didn’t yell “cut” or “action” even once, presumably, until _Deep Water. _Hope he was having fun during his long holiday from Hollywood. Perhaps he spent some time with his brother, a classics scholar who died in 2005 (again, Wikipedia comes through with facts).

Will Dodson and Kristopher Woofter, co-editors of American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper join me to talk about Texas, chainsaws, massacres and the career of TCM director Tobe Hooper. The far-reaching conversation touches on politics, film techniques, history and the disputed authorship of the Hooper directed/Steven Spielberg produced blockbuster Poltergeist.

Learn more about their excellent book at its University of Texas Press page and check out Woofter's horror research hub The Hauntologist.

The original TCM is streaming on Shudder here.

The Tobe Hooper-directed Peter, Paul & Mary Doc is here.

Hooper's early short film The Heisters is here

I believe that this is the Hooper/Funhouse interview Kris mentioned.

Evidentally Hooper's name is pronounced "Toby" and I look like a total idiot in front of these two eminent horror movie scholars.

Will Dodson and Kristopher Woofter, co-editors of American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper join me to talk about Texas, chainsaws, massacres and the career of TCM director Tobe Hooper. The far-reaching conversation touches on politics, film techniques, history and the disputed authorship of the Hooper directed/Steven Spielberg produced blockbuster Poltergeist.

Learn more about their excellent book at its University of Texas Press page and check out Woofter's horror research hub The Hauntologist.

The original TCM is streaming on Shudder here.

The Tobe Hooper-directed Peter, Paul & Mary Doc is here.

Hooper's early short film The Heisters is here

I believe that this is the Hooper/Funhouse interview Kris mentioned.

Evidentally Hooper's name is pronounced "Toby" and I look like a total idiot in front of these two eminent horror movie scholars.