The Cult Section

This week on The Cult Section, our hosts discuss Brian DePalma's 1974 portfolio of visual dazzlers "Phantom of the Paradise," starring William Finley, Paul Williams and Jessica Harper. It's another Very Special Benisode (TM) with a different Ben! Join the Seths and our special guest - verified cinephile, cult film aficianado, and A&B Video alum Ben Davis this week, as we throw ourselves into the murkey seas of cinematic strangeness after a near-fatal record pressing accident in search of validation and success - at any cost! We'll answer such questions as "what if a classic movie monster was reimagined as a weepy edgelord?" and "why use only one dark classic source text when you could roll in THREE?" Along the way, we'll expose some early Seth lore, question Randy Newman's motivations, and contrast golden outfits. It's one for the books - but is it one for The Section? 

Did you like the new "Dune" films, but wish Paul Atreides held more TED talks in them? Would you be excited for a sitcom called "My Eight Dads" featuring a young Muad'Dib and his bevy of helpful mentors? We have the film for you! Join the Seths this week as they dig deep into the desert sand, staying wary of wormsign in this week's feautured film, David Lynch's controversial (mostly to Lynch) 1984 production of "Dune," starring... everyone! This absurdly star-studded cast includes early-career Kyle MacLachlan, Virgina Madsen and Sean Young, a pre-Trek Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, José Ferrer, Jürgen Prochnow (guess who's back? back again?), Max Von Sydow, Sting and dozens more professional actors at the top of their game. So...what went wrong? Trying to fit a thousand-page, gloissary-festooned sprawling novel into a three-hour film? Content so disturbing it challenges even a contemporary threshhold for depravity? We'll figure it out together this week on The Cult Section!

Hail to the king, baby! King Campbell, that is - Bruce Campbell - in what might just be his career-defining role, that of Ash Williams in the third installation of the triply-retconned Evil Dead series, Sam Raimi's 1992 deliberate schlockfest, "Army of Darkness." Join the Seths and special guest Ben Tracy, noted chronologist and haitline arbiter, as they explore dimensional rifts, shot-up supermarkets, medieval sword battles, and anachronistic car chases through fields of animate skeletons this week on The Cult Section! Will we add this unbridled celebration of teenage masculine power fantasy into the section? Or will we blast it back to the stone age with the boomstick of rejection? Or a secret third thing? Or even a FOURTH thing? 

On The Cult Section this week, dessert eats you! When a mysterious ice-cream-like substance is found to be irresistably delicious, it's rushed to market where an ignorant and all-too-eager public greedily devours it with a fervor that's out of this world (or...within it?) in Larry Cohen's 1985 tongue-in-cheek takedown of consumerism and fad culture, "THE STUFF," starring Michael Moriarty, Scott Bloom and Andrea Marcovicci. This is a truly wild one that likely flew under the radar of many moviegoers, but what it lacks in budget it more that makes up for in style, craft, and ambition, as well as a slew of cameos from screen legends like Garrett Morris, Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino. Join the Seths as they follow corporate spy "Moe" Rutherford and a ragtag band of misfit anti-stuffies through a labyrinth of boat-bound boardrooms, hastily-assembled factories, flaming hotel rooms and libertarian militia-run radio stations in a quest to avert global dessert-based disaster. You won't be able to get enough of...The Stuff.

Join the Seths as they learn How To Get Ahead In Advertising from absolutely delightful lunatic Richard E. Grant, along with Rachel Ward in the 1989 Bruce Robinson-helmed film of the same name. Follow us into darkened boardrooms, deliberately trashed kitchens, cardboard boxes, speeding trains and expansive meadows as we watch Bagley (Grant) descend ever deeper into madness (or into sanity...for the first time?) when his seemingly unstoppable advertising career collides with a strange new growth on his neck that may just have a mind of its own. Body horror mingles with madcap satirical farce in this incredibly unique film. There's so much packed into this fast-moving, bizarre yet masterfully stylized film. So let's get into it!

We'll show you the Life of the Mind this week, as the Seths tackle the Coen Brothers' 1991 perhaps-most-off-kilter entry, "Barton Fink," starring John Turturro and John Goodman. Follow Fink as he, bolstered by some success on the New York stage and emboldened by his irrepressible ego, makes the unlikely move to Hollywood where he hopes to make it big telling highly intellectualized stories of the working class. As he knows it. But the promise of early success starts to slip away as Fink must deal with manic studio bosses, jarring meetings with former heroes, a mysterious murder, a suspiciously decaying hotel, sweaty wrestlers and invisible mosquitoes. Critics loved the film, but audiences were perplexed by its subtle satire and oddly placed humor within an otherwise darkly dramatic exploration into the soul of an artist, and the struggles inherent to bringing personal work to the public eye. 

Bug out with the Seths and Sonic as they jump into a fururistic war against giant space insects against the backdrop of (fictional) militarized fascism in the 1997 classic Paul Verhoeven film, "Starship Troopers," starring Casper Van Dien and Dina Meyer, Denise Richards and Michael Ironside. Packed full of Verhoeven's signature satirical world-building TV snippets, newsreels and bizarre advertising spots, Starship Troopers is a deceptively dark take on militarism and the dangers of blind adherence to fascist ideals. Or is it? Explore the dark reaches of space with your hosts as we dodge pincers, bullets, and demented dialogue in their cinematic quest to determine this film's place (or not) in The Section.

Hey, friends! It's time to relive your childhood nightmares - or make new ones (its never too late!) as we Return to Oz with the 1985 Walter Murch classic of the same name. Rejoin a perplexingly younger Dorothy as she paradoxically recovers from the Oz trauma she lived out in the course of the tornado that left her Kansas homestead half-destroyed and her guardians dismayed. Fairuza Balk dazzles us with her big-screen debut, doiung great credit to the character of Dorothy as she begins new Oz adventures starting in a cozy ol' Sanitarium! Is it all a dream, or is young Dorothy going back to find old friends and make (in one case literally) new ones in a quest to end the reign of a wicked queen and a mysterious mountain king? No need to click your heels, you're safe with the Seths and Sonic as we dive back in to L. Frank Baum's demented world of imagination. 

This week, the Seths discuss John Carpenter's divisive 1994 apocalypse trilogy-topper "In The Mouth of Madness," starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen and Jürgen Prochnow. Does it portend a dark fate for humanity in a post-fact age? Is it horror, noir, or something in between? Does it match Lovecraft's notoriously hard-to-film imagination? And most importanly - is it scary? Join the Seths and producer pal Sonic as they dive deep into the Eldritch realms in search of ancient (1990's) knowledge.

Welcome to The Cult Section (with Seth & Seth)! Join the Seths and producer Sonic this week on our premiere episode, focusing on one of our favorite cult films of all time, Alex Cox's 1984 cinematic debut "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez (in his breakout role) and Harry Dean Stanton. This totemic anthem to the dark underbelly of the American Dream, set against the seemingly contemporarily-apocalyptic backdrop of Cold War-era Los Angeles, the film is chock full of quotable lines, abstract political commentary, conspiracies, obtuse federal agencies, unique characters, and doses of masculinity both toxic and touching. In each installment, we'll be examining a film we love, one we've stumbled across, or one recommended by an occasional guest - or one recommended by YOU, the viewer / listener! So come on in to our very own Video Store of the Mind, and and help us build out its most glorious shelf, The Cult Section!