Movie Oubliette

We're delving into Disney's Dark Period in the late 70s/early 80s in this childhood nostalgia episode on none other than the cult curiosity The Watcher in the Woods. Directed by John "Legend of Hell House" Hough and featuring Bette Davis in scowling hag mode, this tale of an American family experiencing spooky goings on in an Olde English house is surprisingly effective and perfect gateway horror for 80s kids. But it was also a tro...

Writer/director and cryptid enthusiast Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins us for a expedition into previous unexplored territory for Movie Oubliette: 1950s Hammer Horror! But The Abominable Snowman (1957) isn't a gothic horror or even a monster movie. It's an atmospheric thriller starring Peter Cushing as a sweetheart botanist with a thing for yetis who foolishly joins a brash American expedition into the Himalayas to fi...

The spice must flow! And we have a feeling all kinds of spices were flowing during the making of Dune (1984), David Lynch's first faltering steps into the Hollywood mainstream. An ambitious attempt to realise Frank Herbert's seminal science fiction novel as a baroque, epic, intelligent, space opera, blockbuster yielded some indelible images – Sting naked except for a winged codpiece springs to mind – and flounders in the uncanny va...

Rob Hill, author of The Bad Movie Bible, joins us on a medieval adventure into the solo directorial debut of Terry Gilliam: Jabberwocky (1977). The comedy fantasy features a veritable 'who's who' of British comedy: three Pythons, music hall star Max Wall, Harry H. Corbett of 'Steptoe and Son', John Le Mesurier of 'Dad's Army', Warren Mitchell of 'In Sickness and In Health', and Carry On's Bernard Bresslaw. It also has everything yo...

Dan and Conrad are invited to join Roddy McDowall's live action role play of 'Donkey Kong' – complete with homicidal primate and princess at the top level – as they check out Shakma (1990), thanks to our patrons' choice nomination! In it, McDowall plays a professor who experiments on baboons with mind-altering substances by day, but stages elaborate LARP-ing sessions with his students in the college building by night. In their late...

We're back at last! And what better way to start the year than being reunited with FilmJoy's Mikey Neumann and Zoe Wells for another Kevin Costner apocalypse movie? This time it's 1997's The Postman – the tale of a travelling one-man-and-one-mule Shakespeare company who, after his acting partner is killed and turned into paste by a roving fascist militia, accidentally starts a religion around a basic infrastructure service that bri...

Happy holidays! Writer Dan Wells joins us for our festive finale for the year to discuss the adaptation of his novel I Am Not a Serial Killer. The film stars Max Records as John Wayne Cleaver, a serial-killer-obsessed teenager who works in his mother's mortuary and has been diagnosed with sociopathy, and Christopher Lloyd as Bill Crowley, John's gentle old neighbour... who harbours a dark secret. When a killer terrorises John's sno...

Isaac Sutton guest co-hosts with Dan (while Conrad is on vacation!) to talk all things underworld related in Highway to Hell (1991). We follow lovers, Charlie and Rachel, as they try to escape the clutches of the merciless Sargeant Bedlam, grotesque girlfriend doppelgangers and Ben Stiller's entire family. It's a movie for the whole family! Strap in for Anarchy, Armageddon and Annihilation with the Satanic Mechanic. You're in for a...

Dan and Conrad resurrect an ancient wizard from a screaming coffin of tomato soup, hoist their triple-bladed shootin' sword and set off for the swashbuckling, headsplitting adventure of The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) – the late Albert Pyun's directorial debut, featuring Lee Horsley, Kathleen Beller, Simon MacCorkindale, Geroge Maharis and Richard Lynch. It's your standard orphaned son of a murdered king returns to avenge his fat...

Chris McKay, director of the thrilling horror comedy Renfield, joins us for our Halloween special for a tour of one of his favourite haunted house movies: The Legend of Hell House, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It features a rag-tag group of psychics and physicians investigating a notoriously evil abode once inhabited by a deranged megalomaniac whose hobbies included bestiality, necrophilia and "a gamut of sexual...

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins us for a spooky season double-whammy spectacular. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the late William Friedkin's classic horror The Exorcist (1973) and the release of David Gordon Green's apprehensively anticipated rebootquel, The Exorcist: Believer (2023), we've scrabbled around in the oubliette and fished out not one but two Exorcist prequels: Renny Harlin's The Exorcist: The Beginn...

In this Patron's Choice episode, we're venturing into the territory of sword and sorcery master Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane (2009), M. J. Bassett's largely forgotten action adventure film starring James Purefoy as the brutal privateer turned Puritan avenger on a quest to rescue a young pilgrim girl from an evil sorcerer. This one vanished without a trace after a bungled release in the US, where it was held up by legal issues, s...

We're revisiting the big budget adaptation of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher at long last! Not only is the film celebrating its 20th anniversary, it's also a movie Dan's been wanting to cover since he started reading the book 5 years ago when we started this podcast! He's finally finished it, despite a canine mishap midway through, so here we are... And what a spectacle it is. An isolated snowy landscape, an alien invasion, possession...

The incredible Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube, Splice and In the Tall Grass, joins us to explore Paul Verhoeven's final Dutch-language film before he launched his Hollywood career: The Fourth Man (1983). It's a visually stunning, darkly erotic thriller, with a Hitchcockian blonde, eye-popping and leg-crossing effects, and some subversive religious imagery. But is this hard-to-find tale of a drunken writer encountering a sultry w...

Dan and Conrad find themselves itching compulsively while padding around in a tinfoil-covered motel room searching for aphids. Yes, we're revisiting Bug (2006), the late William Friendkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts' play starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Lynn Collins and Harry Connick Jr. It's an intense psychological thriller set largely in a single room focusing on two lonely outcasts who go crazy in love... literally. Or m...

Melinda Mock of RetroBlasting and Dreamland guest co-hosts and, while Dan is away, leads Conrad into the weird fairytale horror of Troll (1986), Empire Pictures' second-highest-grossing b-movie, which has since been overshadowed by the internet memes of its largely unrelated and famously awful sequel. Featuring Noah Hathaway (The NeverEnding Story), Michael Moriarty (The Stuff), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (!) and Sonny Bono (!!!), it tell...

Manika Dulcio of the 'I've Been Meaning to Watch That' podcast visits us with a dusty old board game from 2005 called Zathura: A Space Adventure, and before we know it, we're thrust into a wild sci-fi adventure with meteors, dinosaur aliens and frozen older sisters! Jon Favreau's first big effects movie has been eclipsed in popular culture by the first adaptation of a Chris Van Allsburg children's book, Jumanji – with which it bear...

Avast, ye space mateys! Con and Dan haul anchor and set sail for the 80s yet again for a slice of semi-spoof space operatics in the form of The Ice Pirates (1984), which stars Robert Urich, Mary Crosby, Michael D. Roberts and features early appearances from Anjelica Houston and Ron Perlman. Set in another galaxy far, far away, where water has become a rare commodity, the film starts out as a heist caper, then takes a weird left-tur...

Dan and Conrad join the ranks of the best and the brightest (and bored billionaires) as they blast off into low Earth orbit with Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, Tate Donovan, Larry B. Scott, Kelly Preston and a Leaf-like Joaquin Phoenix (yet to fully bloom in this early role). Yup! Our Patreons forced us to sign up for SpaceCamp (1986), the sci-fi adventure whose release was timed to capitalise on the teacher-in-space excitement of the...