The Octemberfest Podcast

Mission Accomplished! Like Gee Dub at the start of the millennium, I haven’t really achieved anything, but I did what I set out to do this month. 101 years, 101 films, poured through my eyes and ears directly into my brainstem, pushing out useful information and filling my memory banks with additional useless facts and esoteric film trivia! Who needs to remember how to spell their name anymore? AI will assign us new names! Better names! Just ask Elon Musk’s children…

This week we close out the season with twenty seven movies from the third millennia: Rage monsters on Mars, zombies on trains, vampires… in…. SPAAAAAACE! We get a month of dark, two days on an angry ancient greenhouse, sixth months of house arrest in New Zealand! By the end we’re haunted and Endless and Glorious… I hope this doesn’t lead to Obesession…

I promise, this will make some sense if you listen to the episode… or maybe it won’t!

I need a martini.

Featured Films:

* 2000 - Dracula 2000

* 2001 - Ghosts of Mars

* 2002 - Eight Legged Freaks

* 2003 - House of the Dead

* 2004 - Dracula 3000

* 2005 - An American Haunting

* 2006 - Severance

* 2007 - 30 Days of Night

* 2008 - The Ruins

* 2009 - Zombieland

* 2010 - Black Death

* 2011 - The Tunnel

* 2012 - John Dies at the End

* 2013 - Odd Thomas

* 2014 - Housebound

* 2015 - The Lazarus Effect

* 2016 - Train to Busan

* 2017 - The Endless

* 2018 - Hell Fest

* 2019 - Velvet Buzzsaw

* 2020 - Host

* 2021 - The Night House

* 2022 - Glorious

* 2023 - No One Will Save You

* 2024 - Shelby Oaks

* 2025 - Abraham’s Boys

* 2026 - Obsession

This year’s genre journey has reached my personal favorite era, the heyday of direct-to-video madness. Pretty much anyone could and did make a movie during these decades, and while I didn’t watch anything shot on video this year (Things, anyone?) I did watch a whole lot of low-budget slop pushed out in plastic boxes with deceptive artwork and misleading titles primed to draw the eye of a passing future film nerd.

The 80s and nineties deliver the whole stack: good, bad, and boring, but mostly what the VHS decades provide us is weird.

This week I bring you kids broken by catching their parents getting freaky, the MTV generation’s answer to Willy Wonka, nightmares and lurking fears and just plain fears. Shadows and curses and evil genies and multiple books of the dead. It’s not just horror, it’s X-TREME! So grab your skateboard or BMX and do an ollie while slamming a Mountain Dew in day-glo shorts, ‘cuz we’re getting all the Gen X here.

Featured Films:

* 1980 - Nightmares

* 1981 - The Beyond

* 1982 - Mortuary

* 1983 - Of Unknown Origin

* 1984 - The Initiation

* 1985 - Day of the Dead

* 1986 - Neon Maniacs

* 1987 - The Curse

* 1988 - Killer Klowns from Outer Space

* 1989 - Leviathan

* 1990 - Arachnophobia

* 1991 - Cast a Deadly Spell

* 1992 - Spellcaster

* 1993 - Night Terrors

* 1994 - Lurking Fear

* 1995 - The Fear

* 1996 - Necronomicon

* 1997 - Wishmaster

* 1998 - Shadow Builder

* 1999 - Lake Placid

Censorship gives way to creativity in this era, and gods do I hate that there were times I missed the Production Code. Unshackled filmmakers go all out with the mind-warping madness as our time-travelling trial continues. The films are definitely more unique… mostly… even the one’s based on familiar stories.

This week we’ve got curse bloodlines, vicious vignettes, hauntings and horrors. We’ve got Poe and Lovecraft, Gogol and Glam-Rock Goethe. Cosmic horrors! Ancient Curses! Zombies! Vampires! Killer bats! A goddamn bed that fucking eats people! Stop reading and listen to me try and untangle all this mess already.

Featured Films:

* 1960 - House of Usher

* 1961 - Curse of the Werewolf

* 1962 - Tales of Terror

* 1963 - The Haunting

* 1964 - The Gorgon

* 1965 - The Tomb of Ligeia

* 1966 - Die, Monster, Die!

* 1967 - Viy

* 1968 - Night of the Living Dead

* 1969 - Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

* 1970 - The Dunwich Horror

* 1971 - The House That Dripped Blood

* 1972 - Vampire Circus

* 1973 - The Legend of Hell House

* 1974 - Phantom of the Paradise

* 1975 - Jaws

* 1976 - Creature from Black Lake

* 1977 - Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

* 1978 - The Evil

* 1979 - Nightwing

Our historic crawl through a century of cinema continues! Listen along as I watch an endless stream of movies starring the same people in the same roles with different names! Movies so original you’ll forget which is which… almost all of these involve an evil genius. I guess we’re not the only era that is afraid of science.

This week we see mad scientists making evil kites, trying to turn solicitors into supermen, and operating the least efficient eugenics program ever. We get things from other worlds, IT coming from outerspace and beyond the stars. Crab monsters, giant lizards, and invisible aliens. Also, I watched The Bat for the third time!

Featured Films:

* 1940 – The Devil Bat

* 1941 – The Invisible Ghost

* 1942 – The Boogie Man Will Get You

* 1943 – Dead Men Walk

* 1944 – Voodoo Man

* 1945 – Dead of Night

* 1946 – The Spiral Staircase

* 1947 – Scared to Death

* 1948 – Unknown Island

* 1949 – Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

* 1950 – Orpheus

* 1951 – The Thing from Another World

* 1952 – Ghost Ship

* 1953 – It Came From Outer Space

* 1954 – Godzilla (Gojira)

* 1955 – It Came From Beneath the Sea

* 1956 – Forbidden Planet

* 1957 – Attack of the Crab Monsters

* 1958 – It! The Terror from Beyond Space

* 1959 – The Bat

Octemberfest returns! This year we’re getting historic, crawling our way from 1926 to 2026 one movie at a time. Each week I’ll be watching about two decades worth of films, then regurgitating my thoughts into a microphone for posterity! Who knows, maybe in 100 years someone will listen to this as part of a series retrospective on the rise and fall of podcasting… I’m at least as well produced as some of the garbage I watch…

This week we’ve got bats, we’ve got cats, we’ve got ravens and wax. The early days were full of gaslighting and mysteries you’ll guess the ending of in about eight minutes, but what you DON’T get is sound for four years or color for pretty much the whole stretch, or one original film! Exciting stuff, right?

Strap in for a month of horror, twenty years at a time… well, fourteen this week, but whose counting.

Featured Films:

* 1926 -The Bat

* 1927 - The Cat and the Canary

* 1928 - La Chute De La Maison Usher (Fall of the House of Usher)

* 1929 - Seven Footprints to Satan

* 1930 - The Bat Whispers

* 1931 - Dracula

* 1932 - The Old Dark House

* 1933 - Mystery of the Wax Museum

* 1934 - The Black Cat

* 1935 - The Raven

* 1936 - Revolt of the Zombies

* 1937 - Love from a Stranger

* 1938 - The Lady Vanishes

* 1939 - Hound of the Baskervilles

To mark the passing of a strange cinema titan, I spent a weekend smashing Tim Curry films into my headholes. From the great to the good, the meh to the bleh, the talented Brit always upped the game. So come along and with him a fond “going home”.

This time we’ve got board game based murder mystery, puppet piracy, an example of why Sylvester Stallone shouldn’t do Shakespeare, a really bad cartoon that is probably responsible for James Cameron’s Avatar, alien cross-dressers traumatizing white kids, the scariest villain put to screen in a PG movie, and another reason to dislike Tom Arnold!

Featured Films:

* Clue (1985)

* Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

* Oscar (1991)

* FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)

* The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

* Legend (1985)

* McHale’s Navy (1997)

We all know the best part of comedy is when some know-it-all asshole breaks down how and why things are funny, right? Well, this month I’m that asshole!

Come and sit ‘round the fire while I rapidly move through a batch of spoof films, telling you which ones you should like and which should be cast into the sun along with all of the rest of the worlds’ evils!

Featured Films:

* Airplane! (1980)

* Top Secret! (1984)

* Hot Shots! (1991)

* Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)

* Scary Movie (2000)

* Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

* Disaster Movie (2008)

As if an episode on Independence Day wasn’t enough, I’m spoiling you all with a binge on real America movies, mostly produced by foreigners!

This month we’ll dive into 60s nostalgia by the man who ruined the childhood of generations, explore the complexities and inconsistencies in making a comedy about CIA black ops during ‘nam, experience ninja magic, marvel at Marvel before the MCU, shine a light on an overlooked gem of brain-washing entertainment, sing some inappropriate songs, and get real depressed about the fallout of 80s corporate capitalism!

Exciting stuff, right? Grab your sparklers and party hat and give it a listen!

Featured Films:

* American Graffiti (1973)

* Air America (1990) (Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, not George)

* American Ninja (1985)

* Captain America (1990)

* American Ultra (2015)

* Team America: World Police (2004)

* American Psycho (2000)

On this 250th anniversary of ‘Murika, we also celebrate 30 years of Roland Emmerich destroying the White House with a sky laser!

Come experience our madness as we attempt to remember how to do this whole podcast thing and talk about bad science, poor planning, extraterrestrial anatomy and how owning a dog can protect you from extinction level events.

Note, any audio disruption you experience is the result of an alien signal using our microphones to synchronize their devastating attack on miniatures of world landmarks.

This month’s Fest features two movies I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while, two movies that surprised me with competence, and three movies I don’t ever want to think about again… so I’m pushing all my pain on to you! You’re Welcome!

In this episode we have a telekinetic landscaper, a silicate-based android Natural Born Killer, the worst of the nineties, the videogame version of Needful Things, half of a movie with the grown-up and less charismatic incarnation of the kid from A Christmas Story, a robot aquatic rapist, and I honestly do not know.

Enjoy some raw techno-sewage from the finest pits of 90s sci-fi sludge!

Movies Consumed:

* Lawnmower Man (1992)

* Virtuosity (1995)

* Ghost in the Machine (1993)

* Brainscan (1994)

* Arcade (1993)

* Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

* Tank Girl (1995)