This week on Episode #158 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, the gang wades into the warm, cursed waters of Jaws 4: The Revenge, the film that effectively harpooned the Jaws franchise into the bottom of the ocean nearly four decades ago. The episode plays less like a review and more like a marine investigation conducted by four people who cannot believe what they are seeing but are nevertheless delighted by it to a certain degree. Bryan, Preston, Dan, and Chelsea attempt to locate anything resembling a coherent narrative inside a movie where a shark appears to possess not only a vendetta, but apparently GPS coordinates, emotional memory, and the reasoning skills of a mid-level slasher villain.

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This week on Episode #157 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, we found ourselves tumbling headfirst into the glittering, bewildering cosmos of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. To call it a movie feels almost impolite. It is, instead, a kind of cinematic music video stitched together at the exact moment Michael Jackson ceased to be merely human and became something closer to folklore. He's half man, half melody, and half very expensive special effect for 1988.

The post Episode #157 – Moonwalker (1988) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

In Episode #156, the group turns its attention to Murder by Numbers, a 2002 relic starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling, and Michael Pitt. It's a film most people remember the way one remembers a locker combination, which is vaguely, and with no real confidence it was ever correct. The hosts reopen the case file to determine whether the film has aged into something worth defending or remains a curious artifact of its era, like low-rise jeans or un-ironic faith in landlines.

The post Episode #156 – Murder By Numbers (2002) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

There are episodes of a podcast that arrive with the breezy confidence of a brunch invitation. It's light, convivial, and gone before the coffee cools. And then there is episode #155 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, which arrives more like a subpoena. The subject, as it turns out, was Song of the South (1946), a Disney relic so thoroughly tucked away that it has achieved the status of cinematic folklore in the United States.

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Episode #154 finds the panel wading into the tiara-strewn chaos of Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), a mockumentary so dark it occasionally feels like it’s whispering its jokes from the trunk of a car. With a cast that reads like a particularly unhinged reunion, including Kirsten Dunst, Allison Janney, Denise Richards, Amy Adams, Kirstie Alley, Brittany Murphy, and a cheerfully bewildered Adam West, the film chronicles a small Minnesota town whose high-school beauty pageant appears to double as a low-stakes homicide ring. It is civic pride with a body count.

The post Episode #154 – Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

On episode 153, the gang attempts to escape The Island, Michael Bay’s glossy 2005 action curio, which arrived sandwiched between the pyrotechnic bravado of Bad Boys II and the toy-store industrial complex known as Transformers. The film itself behaves like three movies crammed into a trench coat: dystopian sci-fi meditation, glossy chase spectacle, and existential identity crisis, all sprinting toward the same helicopter explosion.

The post Episode #153 – The Island (2005) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

On the show’s 152nd episode, Bryan and Preston head back to campus with The Rules of Attraction, the 2002 collegiate fever dream starring the late James Van Der Beek alongside a parade of early-aughts luminaries. Adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, yes, that Bret Easton Ellis, of American Psycho infamy, and directed by Roger Avary, the film follows a semester in the chemically enhanced lives of morally unmoored college students. It plays, at times, like Stanley Kubrick wandered onto the set of Animal House and decided to dim the lights.

The post Episode #152 – The Rules of Attraction (2002) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

For their 151st episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, the gang ups the ante, literally, with Malibu 151 and revisits 1994’s Milk Money, that improbable artifact in which Melanie Griffith and Ed Harris (in one of his rare turns as a gentle, flustered dad rather than a granite-faced authority figure) anchor a plot that hinges on middle-school boys pooling allowance money to hire a sex worker for research purposes. Yes, that one. It was the nineties. We were unsupervised.

The post Episode #151 – Milk Money (1994) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

Certain milestones demand champagne. Others demand a collective cry for help. For our 150th episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, the four of us, pestering podcasters marooned in Texas, chose the latter and marked the occasion by revisiting the 1997 cinematic curio The Pest.

The post Episode #150 – The Pest (1997) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

By the time we arrived at Episode #149 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, Gerarduary, the sacred month in which we collectively reflect on the brawny altar of Gerard Butler was breathing its final, heroic breaths, we chose to close it out not with subtlety or restraint, but with Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003). This is a movie whose title alone sounds like it was generated by shaking a box of rejected Dan Brown novels. This is not to be confused with Cradle 2 the Grave, a distinction worth making if only to reassure listeners that Jet Li will not be drop-kicking anyone through a stained-glass window.

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