Tara and Andrew Versus The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide

We’re back, sort of! To get back in the swing of things, instead of doing a regular episode this week we’ve chosen instead to talk about some of our favorite horror movies, classic* and otherwise. We’ll get back to our routine of watching movies that we’ve chosen randomly from The Guide in our next episode**, but for now consider this a calibration of sorts, so you can better understand what sort of degenerate garbage we’re into. You’ll note that we don’t discuss anything really recent in this episode— it’s not because we haven’t liked any horror movies that have come out in the last eight years, just more that you don’t need us to tell you that Get Out or The VVitch are great. We assume. If you did need us to tell you that, here you go— they’re good movies. You now have our blessing to watch them. You’re welcome!

Correction: In this episode Andrew states that the Dwight Twilley Band song that appears repeatedly in You’re Next is called “Looking For Some Magic”— it’s actually called “Looking For the Magic”. We understand if you feel like you can never trust us again. It’s pretty petty of you, but that’s a YP, not an OP.

Hey everybody, no new episode this week, but we did want to give you all a heads-up as to what was going on. This last Saturday, we had to say goodbye to our buddy Stanley, whose meows you may have heard in our last episode, and probably a few others as well:

Stanley “Stanlington Cat Coat Coatfactory Cat” Wagster, 2003 sometime — October 13th, 2018

Stanley was a great, great cat, who we both loved to death. Andrew adopted him from the pet shelter he was volunteering at back in 2004, and he was a loyal companion to both of us over these last fifteen-ish years.

Loungin’

There’s a lot of things that we’ll miss about him, from the way that he constantly, constantly was at the very least twitching his tail in a slightly pissed manner, to the way that he would meow impatiently the nanosecond before we would put his food on the floor, to his super loud purr that he was quick to get going when you started petting him, to the sort of smugly pleased expression he would get on his little face when we would tell him how handsome he was.

Stanley and Stanley in mug form

Every cat is great and unique in his or her own way, and we can say without a doubt that he was one of a kind, and we were lucky to have him in our lives for as long as we did. His decline happened incredibly quickly, and the decision we had to make to have him put to sleep was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done, but we at least can take solace in knowing that he was able to go peacefully before he had to go through too much discomfort. He loved us, and we loved him, and were able to give him a good long life of comfort, and really, that’s all anyone can hope for when it comes down to it.

Enjoying some yogurt, one of his favorite treats

Rest in peace, buddy.

With that incredibly sad stuff out of the way, we just wanted to let you all know that we’re going to take a few weeks off to take care of ourselves, but we’ll be back as soon as we can with a new episode.

Somehow, this was the best trailer we could find.

October! It’s our favorite month, not only because of it being the month that we got married, but also because it gives us a good reason to watch a ton of horror movies. Sure, technically we’re both adults and it’s highly unlikely that our parents are going to ground us for watching them, but we’ve found that people start to give you a wide berth when you tell them that you spent the weekend watching You’re Soaking In Her or the entirety of the Tool Belt Killer series in any other month. We’re just going to say that that’s why people give us a wide berth— please, humor us.

ANYway, this movie from 1964, directed by and starring Jose Majica Marins, was the first horror movie made in Brazil, and it’s about Zé do Caixão, a charming gentleman who works as an undertaker for the cemetery in a small village in Brazil. Sure, he espouses a desire to eat human flesh within the first five minutes of the movie, and yeah, he does murder his wife with a poisonous spider, but like that saying goes, let he who is without sin something something something. You know what we’re talking about.

Penultimately, we should mention that we screw up Marins’ name several times in this episode and refer to him just as Marin, singular— all we can say is:

and we apologize.

Last but not least, we talk about the really great web series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared in this episode. It’s great. GREAT GREAT GREAT! Here’s the first video in the series, and if you like it you will almost certainly like the other five:

(Or: “The Movie So Nice, We Had To Talk About It Twice, Mostly Because Andrew Forgot To Hit The Record Button The First Time Around”)

Boy oh boy, for someone who fancies himself to be a real computer-y, clever-y guy, Andrew sure messed up something really simple when we were trying to record this episode. If there’s any better example of a first world problem than forgetting to hit record when you’re starting an episode of your podcast, we don’t know what it is.

True Romance was one of the first screenplays that Quentin Tarantino wrote, and is one of the few pieces of work in his career that he wrote but didn’t direct, those duties in this instance being handled by Tony Scott, of Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II fame. And let us tell you, the negative connotation that can accompany the phrase “piece of work” is an apt bit of phrasing, because this movie has problems. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top, as Tarantino’s movies typically are, but some of the stuff in this movie just doesn’t (or shouldn’t) fly these days. We’re not saying Quentin Tarantino is a full-blown racist, but he sure does love dropping the n-bomb an awful lot, and anyone who does that maybe shouldn’t get the pass that he’s gotten over the years, regardless of how many black people have lived in his house. We’re just saying.

STOP THE PRESSES, MOTHERFUCKERS— Some Like It Hot is a good movie!

We’re breaking from our tradition that no one has probably noticed of us not trying to tip our hats as to our opinions about a movie in the blog post, because fuck it— this movie is great. Billy Wilder, whose The Apartment we found to be equally impressive back in episode 15, somehow managed to make a movie in 1958 about two guys dressing up as women that doesn’t make jokes at their expense. It’s a shoe that we were expecting to drop at any moment, and the fact that it never did impressed the hell out of both of us. Also, Jack Lemmon and everyone else in the movie are great. The end. Oh, wait— here’s a link to the very good BBC article about the movie that we reference in this episode. NOW the end.

When the time comes for us to seamlessly transition into talking about something we deliberately watched, as it always must, we discuss Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell?, Sion Sono is a weeeeeiiiiird guy. He made a horror movie about hair extensions, for fuck’s sake! Why Don’t You Play In Hell? isn’t quite that weird, but it’s great and everyone should watch it.

Lastly and most importantly, Tara was a guest on the Any Album You Like podcast, which is where Ben Mooney and his guest watch The Wizard of Oz synced up to a movie of the guest’s choosing— Tara picked Blackstar, by David Bowie, so check it out! And check out all the other episodes because the show is hilarious and great!

Holy shit, this movie is cram-packed (see what we did there? so clever) full of sexual activity between fifteen-year-olds, our discomfort levels during the watching of the movie and recording of the podcast were second only to where they were in our Pink Flamingos episode. Nico and Dani is from Spain and was released in 2001, and it's a coming of age story about two fifteen-year-old guys trying to sort out their sexual identities. The movie guide itself praises the movie for being raw, and man, they are not wrong about that. It's a fine-to-good movie, but it's also a movie that left us both kind of skeeved out at points.

Also in this episode, we talk a bit about Local 58, which is a really great horror channel on YouTube created by Kris Straub, and we provide you all with some downright scintillating live commentary that you can engage with by starting the video below at the appropriate time in the podcast. You might think you've been scintillated by things before, but trust us, this is going to blow that shit out of the water by comparison. One might even go so far as to claim it to be scintillating to the extreme. We wouldn't, but someone might.

Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto, is the directorial debut of Paul Schrader, who had built up some Hollywood clout after writing the scripts for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. He's written and directed a lot of movies since-- he wrote the screenplay for The Last Temptation of Christ, which the two of us both liked an awful lot, and he wrote and directed one of the later Exorcist sequels, playing both sides of the fence (although maybe not, given how The Last Temptation of Christ was received). Blue Collar, though, is a movie about three guys who work at an auto plant where neither the management nor their union seem to have any interest in doing right by them, so they plan to get theirs by robbing the union office. It's not spoiling much to say that things don't work out quite in the way that they hope it will, although it would have been a ballsy move to cut the movie short and end it on a freeze frame of the three of them delightedly jumping into the air clutching fistfuls of their ill-gotten gains, and then ROLL CREDITS. When we start making movies you'd better prepare yourselves for some abrupt and anti-climatic endings, is what we're saying.

Sooooooooo, musicals.

...

That's all we have to say about that, see ya next time!

Okay, fine. Funny Girl  is a biographic musical based on the life of Fanny Brice, a comedian/theater star from the early 1900's, detailing her rise to stardom and romance with some dickhead named Nick Arnstein. Seriously, he's a creep-- the first two-thirds of the movie paint him in a positive light, but as we discuss in the episode, the real life version of him was no Omar Sharif. Wait, was Omar Sharif an okay guy in real life? The real Nick Arnstein was kind of a piece of shit, is what we're getting at.

also, as mentioned in this episode's Seamless Transition (tm), here is a link to Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements, which we highly highly recommend you all watch. This is a very good episode, but the whole season is flat-out great.

Also also, it's our one year podcastversary! Hooray for us!

Elektra, My Love is a fucking weird movie. The plot itself isn't that weird, exactly, but just about everything else about it is to compensate. Made in 1972, it's a re-working / sort of adaptation of a 1967 play based on the story of Electra from Greek mythology, set on a plain in Hungary. There are murders and resurrections and pistols, you know, your typical Greek mythology stuff. It's comprised of around twelve different shots, each of which are several minutes long, a decision made not for any stylistic reasons, but because the director didn't like editing. Which like, we get it, but c'mon, man-- at least try to make it sound like it's an artistic decision! 

Hey, here's a "fun" fact about our recording process-- the lunatics that like to hang out in our apartment's parking lot and constantly yell shit make it pretty mandatory for us to keep our windows shut while we're recording an episode. Add to this the fact that we live almost directly above a spa, and you have a recipe for us overheating and losing our minds towards the end of every episode we record during the summer months. Believe you us, this episode is no exception to this equation-- if any incredibly rich listeners are interested in paying for us to relocate to Iceland, drop us a line!