Movie Oubliette

Event Horizon arrived in cinemas in August 1997 as the third feature from Paul W. S. Anderson, a British director fresh off the surprise success of Mortal Kombat and, evidently, determined to prove there was more to him than adapting a fighting game, so naturally he followed it up with a haunted-house movie set on a spaceship, from a script by first-time writer Philip Eisner that had been quietly sharpened by Se7en 's Andrew Kevin Walker along the way. Rushed through post-production so Paramount could clear the release calendar for a certain iceberg-based prestige picture later that year, it stars Laurence Fishburne and the late, much-missed Sam Neill as, respectively, the no-nonsense rescue captain and the scientist whose grip on reality is doing considerably worse than his ship's hull integrity, sent to reclaim a vessel that vanished 7 years earlier testing an engine nobody fully understood, and which has now come home with a great many unanswered questions and, as it turns out, appreciably worse manners than it left with. But does it deserve a return trip from the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre , the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt , so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait. Pierre-Yves Cardinal ( Tom at the Farm ) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after cancer surgery and already fraying at the edges from sheer boredom, when Darius (Bilel Chegrani) gets wheeled into the other bed following a shooting. He's supposed to be in a coma, but Stan can hear him making threats... Is it the cancer? The drugs? Or something else? It's billed as visceral and darkly comedic, which is festival-speak for "someone's grip on reality is about to slip and we'll enjoy watching it happen." We'll grant this one honorary genre status even though it's shelved as a comedy thriller rather than straight horror, because two men trapped in a room while one of them slowly convinces himself the other is trying to kill him is a premise we're all familiar with. Besides, there's graphic surgery footage! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lexi Amoriello, creator of Movie Recs by Lex , visits the Oubliette and returns with Seconds – made in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, fresh off the Cold War fever dreams of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May , and here pairing up with the great James Wong Howe for one last, extraordinary black-and-white swan song apiece. Seconds is the sort of film that genre fans tend to discover a decade after everyone insists it was always a classic, largely because it wasn't: it was booed at Cannes, quietly dumped by Paramount, and left to rot for 30 years before Criterion and the National Film Registry got around to correcting the record. Adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely's 1963 novel, it asks a disarmingly simple question: what if you could buy a second life, no strings attached? With a truly game Rock Hudson doing career-best work as the walking punchline to that question, the film spends the rest of its runtime methodically proving that there is, in fact, always a string attached. But does it deserve a second chance beyond the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King 's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the third screen version of Burnett's 1905 novel after outings for Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, follows Sara Crewe, a wealthy, warmly imaginative girl deposited at a New York boarding school while her father serves in the First World War — and what happens to both her fortunes and her sense of self once the money, and the news from the front, turn bad. It bombed at the box office on release in May 1995, picked up two Oscar nominations anyway, and quietly became the film Cuarón has called his personal favourite of everything he's directed. But does it deserve to let out of the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive , returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Catherine Valmont, a wealthy young woman two years in her grave, who reconnects with her devoted childhood friend Hélène while working out exactly what a person in her condition needs to survive – but the execution is unmistakably his own: unhurried, melancholic, and considerably bloodier than anything he'd attempted before, landing somewhere between a slasher movie and a tragic romance without ever quite settling on which one it wants to be, which is, frankly, half the fun. But, crucially, does it deserve wander dreamily out of the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam ( The Burning ) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner with the unfortunate name Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), chasing a heart-eating killer that may not be entirely human. All shot on a shoestring in condemned East End warehouses standing in for a drowned metropolis, with Kim Cattrall as the guilt-ridden love interest, Split Second has Blade director Stephen Norrington's monster effects, a script by then-unknown Gary Scott Thompson (long before he struck gold with The Fast and the Furious ) from a spec script that began life as an entirely different, present-day occult thriller. But is it a little seen future noir treat that deserves more attention, or is it a soggy assemblage of other, better films? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row , joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, where memory, guilt, and desire take physical form in ways that are equal parts sci-fi premise and emotional trap. It's a studio movie with art-film discipline, a romance wrapped inside an existential problem, and an example of the marketing department losing a fight it never fully understood. It underperformed badly at the box office and has largely served as a footnote to discussions of the Tarkovsky original, in the "oh yeah, that happened" vein, but does it deserve to be reassessed on its own merits? Find out! Alex prepared a special treat for listeners over on Seventh Row: a suggestion for an ideal sci-fi comedy film to watch next after Solaris in which the genders of the main characters are swapped. What to find out more? Head on over to http://seventh-row.com/oubliette to find out more! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hollywood's penchant for revisiting failed franchises this summer has awakened a number of 80s oddities in the oubliette! This time, Amanda Jane Stern joins us to revisit the Salkinds' 1984 attempt at a Superman spin-off: Supergirl , featuring Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee, Faye Dunaway as the witchy Selena, and Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, Marc McClure, and others filling out a very British, very prestige-flavoured comic-book fever dream. Much like Masters of the Universe (1987), it's a film about a missing macguffin, a displaced hero from an alien world navigating 80s America, and the familiar fantasy of inherited power being folded into an Americana quest narrative – all while trying to look serious enough to justify its budget and strange enough to justify its existence. Should Supergirl be set free to soar into heroism, or should it be locked away in the Phantom Zone? Find out! Check out Amanda Jane Stern's projects at www.amandajanestern.com Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For our 200th episode, we're revisiting the film that inspired our podcast name! David Goelz of The Muppets joins us as our very special guest to celebrating the 40th anniversary of Labyrinth. The film paired Jim Henson’s creature-shop with a Terry Jones screenplay, George Lucas producing, Brian Froud's world-building, and David Bowie doing what only Bowie could plausibly do: play a goblin king as if he were headlining a particularly sinister school dance. Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah, annoyed beyond reason at being asked to babysit, spends the film crossing a maze filled with sarcastic puppets, impossible architecture, and a villain who seems to believe charisma and a Limahl fright wig is a substitute for governance. It recouped less than half its budget at the box office, but is the lighter companion to The Dark Crystal (1982) a delightful adventure that rightfully found a devoted audience on VHS, or should it be locked in its own oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To mark the release of the new Masters of the Universe film, Matt Swaford of Reklaimer's Vintage Toys joins us to revisit Cannon Films' notorious attempt to launch the cinematic branch of Mattel's toy franchise in 1987. Featuring an all-star cast of Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, James 'Mr Strickland' Tolkan, a pre- Voyager Robert Duncan MacNeill, and pre-almost everything Courteney Cox, the film is most remembered for disappointing fans of the sword and sorcery sci-fi mash-up by setting most of the action in a school gymnasium on present day Earth, and replacing Orko and Battle Cat with the more budget-friendly Billy Barty in an orange troll make-up. But is it an unfairly maligned hidden gem or a best-forgotten example of 80s genre excess on the cheap? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Legendary actor and creature performer Doug Jones and independent filmmaker Derek Maki join Dan and Conrad to reminisce about Bug Buster (1998), a late-90s horror-comedy in which a quaint lakeside town is terrorised by mutant insects. The incredible cast combines a pre- Knocked Up Katherine Heigl with Randy Quaid, Star Trek alumni James Doohan and George Takei, Meredith Salenger, and – of course – Doug Jones as the big bad: Mother Bug! The movie sits squarely in the era when creature features were increasingly living on video rather than in theaters, and it builds its appeal from ecological panic, practical-effects goo, and the deliciously overripe promise that a “former military man” might somehow sort out an insect apocalypse with enough swagger. You can follow and support Derek's documentary on Doug's incredible career by visiting www.getmedougjones.com and adding it to your watchlist on imdb . The Kickstarter campaign kicks off on Monday 18 May. Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan is back from vacation and treats us to Phenomena (1985) – a supernatural giallo from Dario Argento that features a pre- Labyrinth Jennifer Connelly in a star-making lead as an insect-loving teenager who arrives at a Swiss girls’ school only to sleepwalk into a serial murder case that only becomes more bizarre as the story unravels. Released by New Line Cinema in the U.S. as Creepers (shorn of 30 minutes of its running time), Phenomena emerged in Argento’s most-celebrated period, with the director producing and co-writing with Franco Ferrini, Donald Pleasence as the obligatory learned eccentric, and a soundtrack that behaves like it's had one espresso too many. But is it an under-appreciated piece of Italian art, or an excessive and unruly misstep? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RetroBlasting 's Melinda Mock stands in for Dan as animation auteur Ralph Bakshi's Cool World (1992) bursts out of the oubliette and threatens to overwhelm us with its incoherent plot and haphazard melange of visuals. Starring a post Batman Kim Basinger as femme fatale Holli Would, Gabriel Byrne as murderous cartoonist Jack, and a very young Brad Pitt as by-the-book Cool World detective, Frank, Cool World is a very 90s live action/animation crossover with a remarkable soundtrack. Tonally the film tries on noir, erotica, satire and straight-up fever dreams, and then leaves the dressing room without checking the mirror. It’s flashy but confused, but never dull. But does it deserve to be pricked by the spike of power and be released from oubliette, or should it be sucked back into the author's pen and forgotten forever? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this Patrons' choice episode, we're exposing ourselves to Cure (1997) – the film that announced Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of the most unsettling voices in modern horror. Set in Tokyo at the tail end of Japan's "lost decade", it follows weary detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) as he investigates a string of seemingly connected string of murders... with apparently different perpetrators. Victims keep turning up with the same grotesque X carved into their necks, and the killers – usually found standing nearby in a daze –have absolutely no idea why they did it. Just when things seem bleak enough, Takabe encounters a mysterious drifter, Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) – a soft-spoken young man who asks everyone the same simple question: Who are you? Should this early progenitor of the "J-horror" phenomenon be released from the oubliette… or would it be safer if we all forgot we ever saw it? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Released in 1990, Hardware is the abrasive feature debut of cult filmmaker Richard Stanley. Starring Stacey Travis as sculptor Jill and Dylan McDermott as desert drifter Mo, the film begins with a romantic gesture that – through the entirely avoidable gift of salvaged military hardware – turns into a claustrophobic battle with a self-repairing government robot determined to follow its programming to the letter. Emerging at the tail end of the VHS-era cyberpunk boom and somewhere in the industrial-grime lineage between The Terminator and Mad Max 2 , Stanley’s film quickly carved out a reputation as a cult object: equal parts grimy dystopian satire and mechanical slasher movie. But is this often hard-to-find rusty curio a gem that deserves to be given pride of place in your lounge, or is it best left in the desert? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By popular demand, we're celebrating the release of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! by taking a look back at Franc Roddam's The Bride (1985). This mid-80s take on Mary Shelley’s mythic creation project tellingly got the budget of a period romance, but likely only because it had a new romantic pop star in the lead role and the production design of an Adam Ant music video. The result is a Gothic fable where baroque laboratories collide with heartfelt journeys toward independence. The monster – dubbed Viktor by his diminutive travelling companion, Rinaldo (David Rappaport) – is played by Clancy Brown, presumably because he strayed from casting sessions for Highlander. Flashdance 's Jennifer Beals’ Eva reinvents the notion of “the bride”: she’s bright, terrified of cats, and slightly too lucid for a world full of overlong candlelit discussions about autonomy and creation. Sting’s Baron Frankenstein embodies euro-aristocratic obsession with a bemused smirk, and spends most of his time leaning on something while holding a book. Should this experiment in misunderstood Gothic romance finally earn its freedom? Or is it a well-dressed atrocity that should be hurled off the nearest tower? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Writer Octavio López Sanjuán joins us as we discover Monster in the Closet (1986), an affectionate pastiche of atomic age monster movies from Troma Entertainment. A string of baffling murders in wardrobes draws a plucky San Francisco obituary writer (Donald Grant) into the most terrifying assignment of his career. He’s soon joined by a biology teacher (Denise DuBarry) with more theories than common sense, her boy genius child (an early appearance from Paul Fast and Furious Walker!), and an assortment of moustachioed authorities who all take turns trying (and spectacularly failing) to make sense of a creature that would put even your most irrational childhood fears to shame. Should Monster in the Closet be released to let its freak flag fly, or should it be crammed back in there to wallow in its shame? Find out! You can buy Octavio's Spanish-language book on Monster in the Closet on Amazon ! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our second film for this year will also be our second dip of the toe into the filmography of Lucio Fulci (see episode 158 for our take on Conquest , his bonkers fantasy adventure, with our special guest Vincenzo Natali). Don’t Torture a Duckling ( Non si sevizia un paperino , 1972) is remembered as one of the most unsettling and thematically ambitious entries in the Italian giallo cycle. Its premise is deceptively simple: a series of brutal child murders shatters a seemingly idyllic community, prompting an investigation led by journalist Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian) and local police. Suspicion falls quickly – and tellingly – on society’s outsiders: a reclusive “witch” (Florinda Bolkan), a mentally vulnerable man, and anyone who doesn't conform to the village’s rigid moral order. As the mystery unfolds, the film reveals a gallery of compromised adults whose piety and respectability mask repression, misogyny, and latent violence. Should Don’t Torture a Duckling be released from the oubliette and re-examined like an uncomfortable truth finally brought to light, or left buried with Maciara's baby? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy New Year! Michael French of RetroBlasting joins us for an exciting trip with Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), directed by John Hough (of Watcher in the Woods and The Legend of Hell House fame). It's an ambitious and eccentric British fantasy-adventure that attempts to translate W. E. Johns’ imperial-era aviation hero into the idiom of 1980s blockbuster cinema. Produced by Rusty Lemorande (writer of Electric Dreams ), the film has since acquired a reputation less as a failed franchise-starter than as a cult curiosity. It stars Alex Hyde-White as a contemporary New Yorker, Jim, who is randomly pulled back in time to the Western Front of the First World War, where he becomes entangled with the dashing Royal Flying Corps ace James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, played with the essential stiff-upper-lip earnestness by Neil Dickson. Peter Cushing also appears in one of his final screen roles. Should Biggles: Adventures in Time be sprung from the movie oubliette to soar again like its hero looping bravely back into the fray, or grounded permanently like a 'time-twin' displaced forever in the wrong era? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy holidays! Our festive special this year focuses on The Curse of the Cat People (1944), directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise (of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Haunting fame), and produced by Val Lewton for RKO – a sequel that daringly abandons the horror conventions of its predecessor in favour of an atmospheric, psychological fairy-tale. The story follows young Amy Reed (Ann Carter), the sensitive and lonely daughter of Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and Alice (Jane Randolph), whose imaginary friend manifests in the form of the serene and spectral Irena (Simone Simon), the tragic figure from Cat People (1942). With its expressionistic visuals, gentle pacing, and Lewton’s characteristically suggestive storytelling, should this film finally be released from the Movie Oubliette to flourish like Amy finding a true festive friend, or left to linger in the shadows like the fading spirits of Christmas past? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok , YouTube , Instagram and Bluesky . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.