Movie Memory Machine

Fresh off their reluctantly festive detour into 2004, Truman and Landen return to tie up loose ends from Surviving Christmas—a film so aggressively seasonal that the Machine still smells faintly of plastic tinsel. They revisit the leftover questions, stray observations, and mid-2000s oddities that didn’t quite fit into the Main episode. And as always, they play The Trailer Game, trying to guess which c...

Truman and Landen are once again thrust into the time-machine, this time careening into October 22 2004 — the release date of Surviving Christmas. What happens when a lonely millionaire decides he’s so desperate for a family Christmas that he cash-offers a stranger household to play his relatives for a week? Strap in for awkward holiday hijinks, celebrity cameos, and a studio that seemingly forgot how to sell a Christ...

A tour through five films that share the cons, capers, twists, and tonal oddities that surfaced while discussing The Brothers Bloom. Truman and Landen follow where the Machine leads, comparing the quirks and energies these movies share with the main film’s con-artist DNA.

What You'll Hear

• How all five films connect through cons, capers, farce, or twist-driven character...

A joy-drunk Cat Stevens montage sends Truman and Landen spiraling into a conversation about silent-movie acting, fruit-stand catastrophes, and which posters for The Brothers Bloom actually make sense. This Mini-Transmission also brings the full Trailer Game breakdown—complete with explosions, vents, visors, and a surprisingly accurate set of guesses.

What You'll Hear

• A...

The Brothers Bloom (2008) sends Truman and Landen into a con-artist story that turns out to be far stranger, warmer, and twistier than they remembered. This week, the Machine drops them into a film that blends sincerity, trickery, and sibling chaos in ways that still surprise them.

Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom follows two lifelong con-man brothers whose latest scheme leads them into a globe-spanning...

Step right up for five tales of trickery, karma, and carnival deceit.

From silent-era psychics to freak-show morality plays and a little Japanese horror for good measure, the Machine pulls five films that echo Nightmare Alley’s twisted sense of fate.

• Why The Prestige feels like the supernatural version of Nightmare Alley

• The morality pl...

After six months of secret preparation, Landen unveils a mind-reading experiment that goes wildly off the rails. What begins as a crystal-ball séance turns into one of the strangest on-air pranks in Movie Memory Machine history.

• Landen’s elaborate attempt to “mentally program” Truman into naming a specific actor

• How a single Jennifer Connelly guess derails months of...

Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) set out to dazzle audiences with a lush film-noir vision of ambition, deceit, and carnival grit, so why did it vanish almost as quickly as it arrived? Truman Capps and Landen Celano climb into the Machine to find out how a star-studded prestige remake could be both immaculate and strangely unmemorable.

A remake of the 1947 noir classic, Nightmare Alley follows ...

The Machine pulls Truman and Landen back into the dream realm with five films that share In Dreams’ fascination with psychic visions, prophetic nightmares, and reality slipping sideways. From Stephen King to cryptids, remakes to cults, this is a guided tour through cinema’s strangest dreamscapes.

• The nightmare that connects Neil Jordan’s In Dreams to the Nightmare o...

Annette Bening’s throwing computers, Margo Martindale’s scolding patients, and Robert Downey Jr. might be Bluetooth-paired to a printer across town. The Machine’s latest Mini-Transmission dives into the surreal dream logic of In Dreams (1999) — with plenty of scuba, psychic sync-ups, and badly rendered CGI fish.

• Truman’s confession: he just wants Margo Martindale to...

In Dreams (1999) is a psychological thriller that opens in a fairy tale and ends in a flood of glass, apples, and psychic bleed-through. Directed by Neil Jordan and starring Annette Bening, this dark fantasia tried to rewire genre expectations, and nearly drowned in the process.

In Dreams is a 1999 psychological thriller where a New England illustrator begins having vivid, terrifying visions of a serial ...

What happens when the Machine pulls five films bound by voodoo, hypnosis, and the horror of losing yourself?

In this “5 For” episode, Landen and Truman unlock the eerie lineage that connects The Skeleton Key to haunted consciousness and body-swapping mayhem.

• How I Walked with a Zombie (1943) shaped modern horror, colonial guilt, and the invention of th...

Landen and Truman start with a simple question: what kind of man truly earns his Panama hat? From there, the Machine drags them back into the bayou for a delirious round of riffs about body-swapping, drumming ghosts, and one very misleading trailer for The Skeleton Key (2005).

Somewhere between hoodoo law books, trumpet-player jowls, and a fanny-pack confession, the spooky dimension gets louder than ever...

The Skeleton Key (2005) promises Southern Gothic chills but locks its story inside a swamp of twists and hoodoo lore. Nearly forgotten in the decades since its release, the film invites us back to Louisiana to ask whether its spell still holds.

Set in the shadowy bayous of Louisiana, The Skeleton Key (2005) follows Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a hospice nurse who takes a job caring for an elderly man in...

What do Alex Winter mutants, Tim Burton fever dreams, and Macho Man in a cage match have in common?

They’re all freaky detours on the strange, slimy, transformation-heavy road paved by Cirque du Freak.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• Five films connected by freaks, transformations, and uncanny communities

• A genuine love–hate rant about Basket Case 2

• Sp...

The Machine delivers a vampire movie that doesn’t suck… it punches.

In this Mini-Transmission, Truman and Landen unpack Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant with confusion, frustration, and a deep dive into a freak show that left them feeling personally attacked.

What You’ll Hear:

• Is Darren Shan fanfiction or middle school fiction?

• The...

Released at the height of Twilight fever, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) tried to launch the next big YA franchise — and fell flat on its face. We’re going back to the circus to ask why this fantasy oddity vanished into the shadows.

Based on Darren Shan’s bestselling YA novels, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) follows teenager Darren, who stumbles into a hidden world of va...

A dystopian hotel, a crime gone wrong, and one very dumb movie with a basketball death match.

This week, the Machine delivers five thematically entangled transmissions for Hotel Artemis — from siege thrillers to pop culture-saturated criminals.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• Five thematically related films that echo Hotel Artemis’ dystopian setting, crime-laden plot, o...

In near-future Los Angeles, the Hotel Artemis treats wounded criminals — but our hosts are more concerned with countdown etiquette, 3D-printed weapons, and where Jeff Goldblum keeps his tiny hand bomb.

What you'll hear:

• Heist etiquette, countdown anxiety, and why masks should stay on — even in your sleep

• Sci-fi tech that makes no ergonomic sense (looking at you, jade...