Bring Me the Axe is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.
We take a step back in time 80 years to take a look at the lesbian paranoia of Jacques Tourneur's magnificent, moody Cat People as our Pride series continues for the month of June. You're going to learn all about producer Val Lewton and his unique approach to horror as the high age of Universal gothic horror disappeared into the rear-view mirror of history and diminished. Your Frankensteins and Wolfmans were diminishing by way of smaller budgets and younger audiences into Sons of Frankenstin and Sons of Wolfmans and dragging down their A-list talent with them. But along came Lewton, newly promoted to the head of RKO's horror unit, with his trusted creative partners from the MGM days to take on small budgets with B-movie expectations only to crank out tense and arty movies deep in the throes of existential dread that contemporary movie audiences could take seriously and gay audience members could immediately recognize and relate to. Lewton's career is regrettably short but in just six years he managed to put horror back in a respectable light and prove to studios and audiences alike that horror still had power.In Cat People Lewton and Tourneur weave a deeply non-conformist tale about a woman cursed by the evil of her village's past sins to turn into vicious, bloodthirsty cats when their emotions were roused and use it to signal to gay viewers that you could also have your movie stand in for the internal struggle of gay audiences trying to be themselves in a world with a strict, rigid expectation of men and women and their expressions of love.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
It's Friday the 13th and you know what that means. We're continuing our critical look at our favorite of the slasher movie franchises, Friday the 13th. Jason is back, wouldn't you know it? He has, without explanation, endured an axe wound to the head and made his way back to his home turf of Crystal Lake for another round of murder and mayhem. By 1983 the slasher movie wave crashed and by 1984 it was receding but the kids just couldn't stay away as The Final Chapter promised one last showdown for the ages. Little did they know about the fuel that moves the Hollywood machinery and the effect that a solid box office return can have. Chop Jason up into little pieces all you like, they'll always find a new way to bring him back for another movie.This movie holds a special place in Bryan's heart but then again, so did part 2. The Final Chapter may be the most cynical of the Friday the 13th sequels. How does it hold up to Bring Me The Axe scrutiny? You'll have to listen to find out!Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
As our Pride series continues we drop the first 99 Cent Rental episode looking at the extremely complicated history of William Friedkin's gay leather giallo Americano, Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino. Dave's research and history expertise about this period of urban gay culture comes in handy as we contrast Friedkin's attempt to provoke and shock against the reality of gay night life at leather bars, BDSM bars, and the cruising scene in the days before apps and the internet made casual encounters in the park obsolete. We also look at the organized movements to protest Cruising and convince theaters not to show the movie, explore whether or not Friedkin was exploiting the gay BDSM scene for cheap shocks, and whether or not this is a good movie. Did Cruising do more harm than good? Does it get anything right? The answer, as always, is: it's complicated.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
We kick off our regular Pride series for 2025 with a camp classic that was embraced by gay audiences almost immediately upon release. Warner Brothers brought together two legends of Hollywood, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, introduced the world to Victor Buono, and put it all under the careful, deliberate direction of Hollywood iconoclast, Robert Aldrich for a movie that spawned a cultural obsession with movies about older ladies losing their god damn minds. It's the psycho-biddy, hagsploitation nightmare of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?We'll explore what it is about this movie that was so immediately appealing to gay audiences of the 1960's and beyond. We'll talk about the simmering, mostly made-up feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and Crawford's petty, bizarre stunt at the 35th Academy Awards as payback for the perceived slight of Bette Davis getting all the attention. And we'll break it all down in our usual fashion to tell you exactly why this movie is so god damn good and why it persists in the world's imagination as we celebrate Pride all month long with a series highlight and celebrate queer film and filmmakers.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're going down under for a look at the 1989 post-apocalypse sports movie, Blood of Heroes starring Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen. Also known as Salute of the Jugger, it's a late entry into the Maxploitation wave of the 80's but rather than being the usual quest for water or women, it's an underdog story about a team of misfits who play a violent future sport involving a dog's skull instead of a ball. What's a jugger? Don't worry about it, baby! Will they climb the ranks out of their place beating up on village and peasant teams? Will they make it to the big city and win it all when they face the pros? Probably. I mean, it's a sports movie at heart and that's what usually happens in those movies.Blood of Heroes sports a significantly better cast than you're probably expecting with Hauer, Chen, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Delroy Lindo all slumming it. The production is also executed by a surprising cohort of filmmakers who we have to thank for the original Mad Max movies which explains why it's so competently made and looks so authentically post-apocalyptic from the people who brought us the subgenre in the first place.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we dust off our dancing shoes and head back to 1980 for the Canadian slasher classic, Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. It's a wild whodunnit with a billion misdirects that thinks its pulling one over on you even though it's pretty obvious who the killer is from the get go. You get a great cast here that elevates to the movie to a higher class than it probably deserves. It's a beautiful portrait of a time long gone and we love it.Originally conceived as a killer doctor horror movie it instead eschews the popular notion at the time to set a slasher movie during a holiday in favor of something more relatable to young audiences, proms. It also bends over backwards to convince you that the songs being played at this prom are popular disco hits of the era without actually being popular hits of the era.Prom Night also sparked the first moral outrage of the 80's, the public backlash against horror movies and we're going to tell you all about it.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week Bryan and Dave take a trip down south to Orlando, Florida for a look at the utterly baffling but thoroughly charming martial arts movie from Grandmaster YK Kim, Miami Connection. This one's got it all. You get a rock and roll band that's also a bunch of taekwondo black belt vigilantes, a scummy gang of coke dealin' rednecks, ninjas on motorcycles, and a battle of the band that is a little more literal than you might be expecting. Along the way you'll learn a thing or two about how great taekwondo is and the power of friendship and family.Utterly trashed upon release and rejected by nearly every distributor that saw it, Miami Connection nearly ruined YK Kim but his sheer force of personality saw it through and the good folks at AGFA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin saw a sincerity in it that its contemporaries utterly lacked. It's because of this that Miami Connection roared back into life and lives comfortably in the hearts of all who see it. We love it so much that Grandmaster Kim graces our own podcast art.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're joined by one of our favorite guests, Alaina Urquhart from the massively popular podcast Morbid to take a trip back in time and bask in the warm nostalgic glow of 1998's The Faculty from director Robert Rodriguez. Along with our usual exhaustive break down of the movie you'll hear about the unusually violent high school that we attended (and also was home to Pam Smart), that time Bryan and his girlfriend sat in on a Heaven's Gate presentation at the local library, hosted by Marshall Applewhite, and how Bryan and that same girlfriend were hoodwinked by members of the Church of Scientology into taking their Oxford Capacity Analysis test.It's tales of peril and high strangeness, sandwiched between a love letter to an underrated gem of 90's horror, made possible by a talented and passionate director and his extremely photogenic cast. Sure, the end of this movie sucks but if you shut it off before the heinous Breakfast Club coda you end up with a ton of fun and no better way to kill 100 minutes.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This week we slog it out through another Gansa and Gordon filler episode. Scully's ex gets gunned down during a bank robbery and is somehow resuscitated with the spirit of his killer inside him. He's out to find his lady and the whole thing is a little exasperating if we're being honest. We're positively exhausted by the repeated attempts to fill in Scully's backstory with nothing but daddy issues, deadbeats on the dating scene, and in this case, a wildly inappropriate and unlikely scenario where foxy Dana Scully shacked up with one of her instructors, a suitably dumpy bureau guy who couldn't possibly have landed a fine lady like Specia Agent Dana Scully.We also run down the headlines, talk about the inexplicable success of Mrs. Doubtfire, and marvel at the rising tide of booty jams and sweaty silk-shirt R&B tracks on the radio.
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our Millennium Edition episodes as well as our X-Files rewatch and 90's history podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky?, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This month we're taking a big step back into the 2000's for a look at a movie that somehow manages to typify the entire decade in a single package. You get: heinous mall fashion, a cast of WB/CW soap actors, a Hot Topic-ready soundtrack of all the hottest nu-metal acts, Paris Hilton, and the last gasps of casual misogyny and homophobia in the days before social media. House of Wax is a soulless, artless, remake in the high holy days of the horror movie remake.Dave asks the question: does the culture owe Paris Hilton an apology? Bryan asks the question: Is this actually a remake of the Vincent Price House of Wax? It seems to be a remake of Tourist Trap. Collectively they ask: Is this all Millennials had to look forward to? House of Wax is the worst of all possible outcomes and we're going to tell you all about it.
Heeeeeeeere we are! Born to be kings! We're talking immortals, sword fighting, decapitations, Queen! It's 1986's cult classic, Highlander, an absolute mess of a movie that somehow, against all odds, has amassed a worldwide following of super fans. It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, just a mishmash of nerdy tropes thrown together and somehow working together in a way that made every twelve year old boy a megafan.Christopher Lambert plays a brooding Scottish guy who must fight a crazy evil heavy metal black knight while Sean Connery chews scenery. It's all sword fighting all the time and a soundtrack provided by Queen that is easily as memorable as the entire movie. Russell Mulcahy is out here putting his music video filmmaking skills to work on a stylish action adventure that endures as an unstoppable cult movie item that Bryan and Dave are at a loss to explain.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're joined by Chris Haskell of Punk Vacation, Mondo Macabro, and They Live By Film as we continue our series of high-class horror movies. We're talking about the divine black and white Swedish torment of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf. Bergman is one of the all-time film making greats and you can see his fingerprints on the weirder corners of American film. In the case of Hour of the Wolf you can draw a direct line from this deeply introspective movie to the work of David Lynch. With Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman, Hour of the Wolf is a movie about a lot of things. It's about an artist's place in his own work, what it means to own a piece of art, it's about guilt and regret and the damage left in your wake when you're constantly following your heart. Ingmar Bergman is a filmmaker who seemed to be constantly going through something and this is one of the results of a man living in his head 24/7.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This week we take a look at the first episode of The X-Files to be directed by Rob Bowman, the second-most prolific creative force on the show after Kim Manners. It's a potentially thorny episode about killer Amish people who can change their gender at will that ends up surprising us both with its restraint. When stepping back into a decade like the 90's you get used to a certain insensitivity and still, Gender Bender surprises us.Also, it's a wild week in pop culture as we take a look at the headlines and try and remember some of these absolutely forgettable top 40 songs.
This week we're getting real stupid with it and looking at Cannon Film's ultimate ninja festival, American Ninja from 1985. This one hits all the high notes for the 80's. Michael Dudikoff makes his starring debut playing an American soldier with a mysterious past who must fight evil ninjas to stop an arms dealer from selling missiles to communists in Central America or maybe it's Angola. Who can say? We also break down the dubious political conditions of The Philippines and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that made so many cheesy low budget action movies, the intense, apocalyptic conditions of the late Cold War, and the wild abandon with which Cannon made jingoistic action movies for the American market.This absolutely ridiculous movie is one of the dumbest movies we've watched so far and we cannot resist its stupid allure. It's got just about everything a twelve year old boy could want in an action movie. They're ninjas! And they're freaking out!Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're classing the place up a bit by taking a detour down under for a look at the movie that the Australian Film Board considers the greatest Austrlian movie ever made. We're watching Peter Weir's 1975 piece of magical realism, Picnic At Hanging Rock. When three girls and their teacher vanish without a trace under strange circumstances during a school picnic in 1900 the mystery becomes an obsession for those left behind. This dreamy, lyrical piece of cinema is as unconventional as a horror movie gets. It's vulvacious! Let us tell you all about it.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our Millennium Edition episodes as well as our X-Files rewatch and 90's history podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky?, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This month's Millennium Edition takes a look at 2008's Lake Mungo, from Australian director Joel Anderson. This extremely affecting mockumentary sets up a promise that it can't possibly deliver on but the first hour that it sets up is a deeply moving and relatable document of loss and grief. The entire affair is a terribly frustrating affair that leaves you wondering: Why didn't Anderson direct anything after this? He's clearly a very talented filmmaker.
Grease up your pompadours and get your switchblades ready. This week we're taking a look at Walter Hill's 1984 rock and roll fable, Streets of Fire. Coming in hot off the back of the 1982 smash hit buddy cop picture, 48 Hours, Hill and co-writer Larry Gross could write their own checks and dictate their own destinies and sold Hill's dream project, a retro nostalgia vehicle about tough guys, femme fatales, bad guys, and pop music but when the movie landed in the screening rooms at Universal they knew they had a problem. Streets of Fire is weird as hell and out of step with what movie-going teens of the summer of 1984 were looking for. So dire was the outcome that Streets of Fire ended up getting killed in its opening weekend against one of the weakest Star Trek movies and then the following week Ghostbusters dropped and until Beverly Hills Cop came out it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about.In the years that followed Streets of Fire gained a cult following that appreciates what Hill was trying to do. It's an upgrade from The Warriors in many ways and the sound track, paired with powerhouse performances from Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe in early roles, delivers a wildly entertaining, deeply silly action movie with an enduring legacy. Let us tell you all about it.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we take a look at Lamberto Bava's first official director's credit with the incredibly tasteless and disgusting piece of southern-fried necrophilia, Macabre from 1980. It's one of those movies that makes you really work for the goods since the worthwhile parts of the movie lie almost entirely in the final third after a lively and berserk setup. It'll make you wonder precisely how long you could preserve a severed head in your average consumer freezer. Everyone's insane in this one, including the horrible little girl and you'll be hard pressed to find an actor more deeply committed to overacting than Bernice Stegers. Keep a barf bag handy.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This week in X-Files history we take a look at the monster-of-the-week episode, Fire, in which Scully has to do all the work to stop a serial killer who is somehow burning members of the British parliament and nobility class alive. Mulder is too busy to help, being mopey about the reappearance of his English ex-girlfriend, a psychotic Scotland Yard agent who adds a solid dose of misogyny to an otherwise okay episode. We also take a walk down memory lane as we look at the headlines and pop culture notes for December 17, 1993. It's a real desert of music, TV, and movies and the contemporary events of the day aren't so hot, either.
We're joined this week by Eli Bosnick of the God Awful Movies podcast to talk about the infamous Hong Kong Category III exploitation movie, Story of Ricky. One man enters a corrupt private prison in near-future China and faces down the evil warden, his assistant, and four villains with terrible strength and magical martial arts prowess. Along the way just about everybody gets their guts kicked out or their head punched off in this extremely gory spectacle.We also discuss the dawn of the Category III rating in Hong Kong, how great it was to trade video tapes in the mail with total strangers in the 90's, and Eli tries to get Bryan to cop to trading horror movies for weird porno movies in what is easily one of our most inappropriate episodes yet.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're joined by our friends Johnny Cann and Tyler Hyde from That's Spooky as we celebrate women's history and women in horror with a look at the last movie you'd think would be appropriate for such an occasion. Slumber Party Massacre, from 1982, is a sleazy, lurid spectacle with an unexpected background. Written in 1978 as a spoof of slasher movies by radical feminist icon, Rita Mae Brown, it ended up in the hands, of all people, of Roger Corman, who turned it over to his editor, Amy Holden Jones as she set her sights on directing for the first.Full of gratuitous nudity, gore, and people making a lot of bad decisions it's a remarkably entertaining piece of slasher horror with a wild production history that ultimately caused the second wave of feminism to turn on Rita Brown in a really unfortunate way. Do check it out!Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJSupport Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This week we go back to December of 1993 for a look at the monster of the week episode, Eve, which pits Mulder and Scully against a pair of evil girl clones. As usual we look at the headlines and have a real morbid laugh at what was going on back then. It's not good, folks. At least The Simpsons was on top of the world.
We're getting really bloody this week as we take a trip to feudal Japan for the 1972 samurai movie that set the pace for violent sword fighting movies to follow. This is not your father's samurai movie. This is not Akira Kurosawa. This is Kenji Misumi's epic starring Tomisaburo Wakyama and his wonderful, weapon-laden baby cart.Adapted from the extremely popular manga by Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub tells the story of wandering assassin, Ogami Itto and his son, Daigoro as they walk the demon way in hell. The evil daimyo, Yagyu Retsudo wants them dead but it's going to take an army if they intend to get the job done.Utterly ridiculous and bloody, Sword of Vengeance sets the tone for the five movies that follow and is a tremendously enjoyable movie. Let us tell you all about it.Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon!https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
We celebrate two years of Bring Me The Axe! with this good long look at the movie that changed everything. Initially dismissed as drive-in schlock and the copyright was botched upon release, Night of the Living Dead would eventually find its way to spotlight as the horror movie that set the pace for horror in the 1970's and introduced the world to what is, arguably, the most popular movie monster of all time: The Romero Zombie. We look at the production history, the players, it everlasting legacy, and the social conditions of the 60's that informed its extremely grim outlook. Produced in 1968 by George A. Romero and John Russo at the same time that they were producing commercials for Calgon and Heinz as well as eduational shorts for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, Night of the Living Dead was a compromise meant to raise money more effectively to make not the movie that they wanted to make, originally, but any movie, period. The world is richer for having it. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go toPatreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show.This week we get a nice little course correction from writers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. After the series worst episode, Space, and some notes from Fox, Gordon and Gansa got to work on bringing the episode back into focus as Mulder goes rogue and infiltrates a UFO crash site that's being recovered by a covert army operation. When he's inevitably caught he meets UFO enthusiast and fellow paranoia enjoyer, Max Fennig, as the pilot of the downed UFO sneaks around the crash site, killing soldiers, while waiting for the mother ship to arrive and pick them up.Not exactly a mythology episode but not exactly not a mythology episode, Fallen Angel brings the series back into paranoid focus to remind everyone that it's about UFOs, aliens, and conspiracy.We also break down this week in pop culture and the news as usual.
This week we take a look at Bryan's favorite movie of all time, John Carpenter's tough guy action dystopia that definitely shook the Disney off of Kurt Russell and reintroduced him as a premier action movie star for the 1980's. We track the entire trajectory of this movie's production, we'll tell you why everyone thinks Snake Plissken is dead, you'll find out about all the other guys that the production company wanted over Kurt Russell, how director of photography, Dean Cundey engineered an entirely new anamorphic lens just to see the movie at night without sacrificing all the awesome lighting. It's a once-in-a-lifetime action movie that set the pace for the decade and inspired everyone to try their hand (and mostly fail) at making their own version of the movie.Carpenter had access to more money than he'd work with before and still had to stretch a dollar to make the movie and he managed to knock it out of the park on every front. The cast is stacked. The production design is second-to-none, and the soundtrack is just perfect. Listen in and learn all about it.Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon!https://www.patreon.com/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we take a look at one of the standout features of the 70's blaxploitation age, William Crain's seminal vampire movie, Blacula, starring William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, and Thalmus Rasulala. Blaxploitation is a troubling topic to take on as the bad movie outnumber the good movies three to one and definitely play up the worst black stereotypes but for a little while there blaxploitation movies and their arty cousin, the LA Rebellion, pushed forward black power narratives and power fantasies that spotlighted black talent and provided black audiences with great characters that reflected their values and dreams.Blacula as a horror movie is also a standout picture, being every bit as riveting and spooky as Hammer's best outings. William Marshall absolutely dominates the screen as doomed Prince Mamuwalde and Vonetta McGee is hard to take your eyes off of. Give this episode and listen and do chill out. Bryan realized too late that yes, All The Colors of the Dark is a Sergio Martino movie and What Have You Done To Solange was by Massimo Dellamano.Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon!https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepodBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week's episode is a look at the egregious ripoff of The Thing (or the novel Who Goes There, depending on who you ask). It's the first in a series of episodes resulting from the power trio of director David Nutter, and writers Glenn Morgan and James Wong. This episode sees Mulder and Scully accompany a team of scientists to a remote arctic science outpost in Alaska to investigate the sudden disappearance of the team that was conducting ice core drilling there and unexpectedly released something ancient, deadly, and likely from another planet.
This week Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Rome to check in with Enzo G. Castellari and Mark Gregory on their sequel to the 1982 action movie that exploited the popularity of The Warriors. This time they're exploiting the popularity of John Carpenter's outstanding, Escape From New York. We get more Trash and more Bronx gangs but this time we're joined by the absolute massive screen presence of Antonio Sabato and the movie's appeal rests entirely on the outrageous shoot-y, burn-y, explode-y violence that ups the ante and cranks the volume. Escape From The Bronx has practically zero plot to speak of and is an incredibly dumb movie at heart but it's a lot of fun and some of the best action that Italy had to offer in the twilight of their once-great exploitation movie industry. Let us break it all down for you. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week Bryan and Dave take a look at a nasty little indie from New Jersey that can't help but get a little on ya. Alfred Sole's Alice, Sweet Alice is a vicious movie with a real bone to pick with the Catholic church. Following his actual excommunication from the church having, Alfred Sole pulled together every resource he could, with a script co-written by Rosemary Ritvo and heavily, heavily inspired by Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, it pits a community of deeply repressed middle-class Catholics against a killer who brutally murders a child in a church. Is it the deeply disturbed problem-child Alice? All signs point to yes but it's complicated, of course. Perverse and dark in the extreme, Alice, Sweet Alice stands alone in the 1970's as a truly original, truly mean piece of horror with a hell of a cast and some seriously nasty special effects. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week's episode is a look at the egregious ripoff of The Thing (or the novel Who Goes There, depending on who you ask). It's the first in a series of episodes resulting from the power trio of director David Nutter, and writers Glenn Morgan and James Wong. This episode sees Mulder and Scully accompany a team of scientists to a remote arctic science outpost in Alaska to investigate the sudden disappearance of the team that was conducting ice core drilling there and unexpectedly released something ancient, deadly, and likely from another planet.
Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way! This week Bryan and Dave take a good long look at the abyss and the abyss stares back when they watch the movie that launched The Cannon Group into the American imagination, a movie musical so poorly received that it nearly drove its director to leap from his hotel balcony at the premier. The Apple is what happens when a producer knows that he wants to make a big musical that's sure to capture some of the excitement that Grease generated but without really knowing what makes a musical work. It's a movie so profoundly bad, with bad acting, bad characters, and the worst thing a musical can have: bad music. Nothing about this baffling movie works and it is plainly obvious for anyone to see. It's simply amazing that the director, Menahem Golan was so caught off guard by its failure. Some movies are so bad that they end entire careers. This one almost ended Golan's life. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week Bryan and Dave find themselves comfortably back in the pocket with 1980's high-gothic haunted house picture where we're expected to believe that old man George C. Scott was also a father to an 8 year old girl. Based on the extremely dubious "true story" of the film's writer, The Changeling is a frustrating experience that combines compelling haunted house filmcraft with a clumsy script that can't decide where it's going or what it's trying to do. Held aloft by horror fans for years as a truly spooky and unsettling haunted house/ghost mystery movie, we break it down and find that it may not be the movie that we remember. That said, is it good? Does any of this mess work? You'll have to listen to find out! Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. In yet another dog of a Gansa/Gordon episode, Mulder and Scully are called in for a hail Mary play by a lousy past-colleague Mulder's faces down a killer smart home system. This being the 90's and the writers having no idea how computers work, it ends up wobbly as their last outing, Conduit. We also take a look at what was happening around Halloween in 1993 and the headlines and pop culture hits are every bit as weird as you likely don't remember. Take a trip back in time with us as we tackle it all!
This week Bryan and Dave celebrate one year of 99 Cent Rental with the mother of all cult movies. Get it? It's a drag queen's dream come true. In 1977, reeling from being written out of her mother's will for reasons well-known to her, Christina Crawford, daughter of Hollywood legend, Joan Crawford published a vicious hit piece of a memoir about the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and Hollywood couldn't wait to snatch up the option and transform it in a motion picture. Paramount came calling and took a book full of dubious claims and turned it into a movie full of even more dubious claims and a tone that shifts wildly from massively understated to flying dangerously off the handle. If a crazy story wasn't enough, the troubled production, made even more difficult by Faye Dunaway's horrible diva behavior on set and the meddling of celebrity husbands pushed the studio and producer Frank Yablans to the brink. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
2024 was a banner year for horror movies and Bryan and Dave are going to run you down the list of the best, worst, and most-okayest horror movies of the year. Where do your favorite titles drop? What did we think of Maxxxine? How about Terrifier 3? Longlegs? It's all in here and then some, a giant-sized episode to address 25+ titles. Our opinions are sure to make you mad. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Bring Me The Axe: Millennium Edition, and Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week we look at the second Morgan and Wong joint of the season, the first of their tendency toward egregious ripoffs of horror movies you've probably seen. In this episode, Mulder and Scully investigate a series of deaths surrounding a woman who had a terribly unhealthy relationship with her boss, whose spirit might still be hanging around her, thwarting an Islamic terror cell and the corporate stooge who's supplying them with unspecified parts with which to carry out terror. It's all a little too much like The Entity but who are we to complain? In a wobbly first season, desperately trying to find its legs, it's one of the better early episodes.
This week Bryan and Dave wind down the year and celebrate the holiday season with a look at a movie that can only be called horror in the most charitable of terms. Christmas Evil is the tale of two parties: Lewis Jackson, a director whose ideas were too weird for commercial Hollywood and a wall of exploitation producers who saw potential in his weird little character movie to be exploited in the wake of Halloween. The result is a movie that's more like Taxi Driver than Friday the 13th, a comedy so black that most people miss the goofs. But it's a wonderful piece of Holiday weirdness carried almost entirely on the shoulders of its star, Brandon Maggart. It is a movie so well-made and off-beat that it's a real shame that its director became so disenfranchised from the film making experience entirely that he never returned. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week, Bryan and Dave take a trip back to 1984 for a look at one of the top box office draws of 1984 and one of the most toyetic pictures of the decade, Gremlins. It's one of Chris Columbus's first movies produced and Joe Dante's first feature with Steven Spielberg. It's got adorable little cuddly guys, nasty little monsters, Phoebe Cates, gleeful puppet carnage, and a powerhouse score from Hollywood's musical swiss army knife, Jerry Goldsmith. In a year packed with some of American pop cultures most enduring classic titles, Gremlins is among the most iconic of the decade. It's not all fuzzy feelings, though. As much as it's a lot of Loony Tunes fun and mayhem it's a movie that hasn't exactly aged well and we'll tell you all about it; the good and the bad. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
As another Friday the 13th dawns we bring you another bonus episode looking at our personal favorite slasher franchise. This time around Jason Voorhees stalks some kids who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as he seeks to convalesce after getting hacked in the shoulder with Ginny's machete. We'll tell you all about why, of all the movies Paramount could have chosen to revive the 3D craze, they chose an r-rated body count movie like this one. We'll wax romantic about Richard Brooker's performance as Jason. We'll be blown away by the production's choice to have their final girl fight back against the killer tooth and nail. We'll get downright pedantic about the origin of the hockey mask. All this and more as our tradition of covering Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th continues! Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week we take a trip back to October 8, 1993, for a look at the fifth episode of the first season of The X-Files as Mulder takes it to the streets of Atlantic City in search of a murderer who might be the legendary cryptic of New Jersey but is actually a family of feral humans living in the wilds of the Jersey Pine Barrens, bumping up against the edge of civilized society. We have lousy witness sketches of the killer, Scully's magnificent fashion sense and social life, and a rundown of what was happening in America in October of 1993.
This week Dave and Bryan marvel at what is ostensibly the most egregious horror movie sequel of all time, a movie so lazy, so craven that it's hard to believe that it exists at all. When a greedy producer got his hands on the sequel rights to the original Silent Night Deadly Night he intended to have an entire movie made by simply editing the original into something new but director Lee Harry, a professional editor just couldn't make it happen. Because that's an insane and very stupid proposition. The compromise was to shoot insert scenes as a wraparound story. Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 still manages to compose half of its running time, including the credits, from the original movie but it's not without its charms. After all, this is the movie that gave us garbage day! Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
Bryan and Dave go north for a look at The Christmas Martian, an utterly deranged Quebecois children's movie about unsupervised children in a remote Quebec town and the adult man from Mars who in any other context would be understood to be grooming this brother and sister. It's a film that was intended to be whimsical and zany but being the product of Tales For All producer, Rock Demers, it all just comes off as creepy and unsettling. Though, not quite as upsetting as The Peanut Butter Solution, a film we covered in 2023, it's still off-putting in a way that begs the question: who was this movie for? Produced by prolific Canadian producer, a man on a mission to make the lives of children genuinely better, Rock Demers, directed by one of the National Film Board's most talented cinematographer, Bernard Gosselin, and written by an author so-treasured by his native Canada that one of his works of fiction is quoted on their money, Roch Carrier, The Christmas Martian is remarkably artless and weird and we're going to tell you all about it. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and subscribe at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Radio Free Haddonfield our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week we take a trip back to October 1, 1993 for the fourth episode of The X-Files. Mulder and Scully face off against the shadowy forces of the National Security Agency while searching for a missing teenager who may have been the victim of a UFO abduction. Meanwhile, a little boy is seemingly receiving binary data transmissions from his television. Is this kid a threat to national security? Was that girl taken by aliens? Could this small-town sheriff be any shittier about women?These questions and more will be answered on this week's episode.
Bryan and Dave go Belgian this week for a look at the extremely artsy vampire sleeper, Daughters of Darkness. Where Jess Franco and Jean Rollin both released signature lesbian vampire movies in 1971, Harry Kumel snuck in and delivered his own interpretation of sleazy euro-trash horror through the lens of The French New Wave. The film stars the absolutely radiant Delphine Seyrig and her many outrageous costumes. We break down the film's attempt to make a statement about the gender dynamics between men and women in a patriarchy and Dave goes to great lengths to illustrate the ways in which gay women are treated differently than gay men. In the process you get a crash course in radical feminism and, more specifically, radical lesbianism and the two of us do a lot of lousy cartoonish French accents. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
Bryan and Dave take a look at one of the deepest of cult movie deep cuts, The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris, a story about fame, guilt, and Olivia Newton John. It's the story of a chance encounter with a strange young man one day in Beaver, Utah in 1979 that came to determine the entire trajectory of its director's life. For reasons that we'll dig into in the episode the movie is a document of the natural human inclination to seek fame, the natural human inclination to consider how our actions impact the lives of others, and maybe how we become our own worst enemies in the absence of answers. Harris, obsessed with the subject of his own work but unable to speak to him, works out his issues and tries to fill in the blanks as he remakes his own documentary twice with the help of Sean Penn and then again with Crispin Glover. It all culminates in a one-of-a-kind hybrid of documentary and scripted drama that you're most likely going to become obsessed with. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
To unlock the full episode go to Patreon and sign up at the $5 level to unlock all of our X-Files episodes as well as Radio Free Haddonfield, our bi-weekly DJ and music show. This week we look at the first proper X-Files monster of the week episode which pits Mulder and Scully against Eugene Tooms, a man who can squeeze his body through seemingly any opening in order to commit the cannibal murders which sustain his impossible physiology. It's an amazing home run for such an early entry in a long television series. As usual we also walk you through a brief history lesson of the week this episode aired and man... it's a doozy.
Take a trip back in time with Bryan and Dave this week as they go black and white with this unassailable classic of the golden age of horror. It's Paramount's remarkably gritty pre-code horror movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a movie meant to capitalize on and compete with the sudden popularity of Universal's 1931's horror movies, Dracula and Frankenstein. Paramount, however, takes things a bit further with a movie movie more explicitly sexy and violent than you're probably expecting from the 1930's. It's a dynamic, kinetic movie shot on elaborate sets and featuring powerful performances from both Fredrich March and Miriam Hopkins and it makes use of a brilliant in-camera trick to transform Jekyll into Hyde before your very eyes. Learn all about it and more in this episode. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing. Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over as a viable box office draw and positions him to be the prime action movie star of the 90's. It also represents the final death rattle of Cannon Films after a decade of bad business practice finally caught up with them. Featuring a performance from Robert Guillaume that this movie clearly does not deserve, it's also full of side characters that are every bit as magnetic as JCVD. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
Here's a taste of our Patreon-exclusive podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky, an X-Files Rewatch. Bi-weekly episodes (plus more goodies) are available to subscribers at the $5 tier. Subscribe today at: https://www.patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Our inaugural episode looks at the spark that started a wildfire. The X-Files is among a treasured few TV shows from the 90's that came to define the entire decade. We look at the very beginnings with this one, a pilot episode that defied the odds. In this episode Mulder meets Scully and together they investigate a case of alien abductions, missing time, and sinister human experimentation. Dave prepares the listeners for his hardline skepticism and Bryan assures them that things will certainly get weird. Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
Bryan and Dave are joined by their friends Jonny and Aileen from the Uy Que Horror podcast to cap off their month-long October spooky season rundown with a look at the utterly baffling horror movie misstep, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. It's what happens when a nobody really wants to make a movie but they have to anyway. John Carpenter and Debra Hill agreed to get involved but only if it didn't involve Michael Myers. Joe Dante quit the director spot to go work on another movie leaving it in the hands of Tommy Lee Wallace. Nigel Kneale, the original writer quit when Dino De Laurentis demanded more gory violence in the movie. The whole thing is a mess, really, with Tom Atkins playing a functional alcoholic and Stacy Nelkin playing a young woman in her prime suffering from severe daddy issues. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
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