Aileen Clark of Uy Que Horror is back to join us for a look at two truly unhinged scare films. In the 1960s and 70s churches occasionally produced low budget morality tales and scare movies to frighten their congregations into going back to church if they feel like they're slacking off. The problem is that they were made by people who didn't know how to make movies with casts of non-actors and extremely low budgets. They were cheap and terrible and everyone hated watching them. Along came Ron and June Ormond and their son Tim, the first family of exploitation, teamed up with Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, a charismatic fundamentalist preacher from Mississippi to adapt Pirkle's fire and brimstone sermon If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do that threatened easily frightened Christians with seeking out draconian churches that shunned anything looking like empathy and service in favor of a hard line position against all things communism. In the sequel, The Burning Hell, Estus Pirkle has decided that his last sermon didn't put enough terror in the hearts of Christians over going to hell so here's one that's literally all about how much hell sucks and how you definitely want to accept Jesus Christ into your heart so you don't go there. These fiery sermons are illustrated with scenes of trashy, gory violence that you definitely don't expect to find in movies meant for fragile, easily offended Christian people. They are completely weird and hilarious.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 looking at the arch-cult film from 1988, Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Its released was botched entirely by the distributor who were almost deliberately defiant in their unwillingness to screen the movie on much more than a few screens. It found its legs on cable and VHS where it was an instant hit and went on to launch a merchandising empire culminating in a video game and one of Universal Studios' most popular attractions at Halloween Horror Nights.When a UFO that looks an awful lot like a circus tent lands in Crescent Cove and aliens that look an awful lot like circus clowns wander into town with murder and mayhem in mind its up to a local cop, his ex-girlfriend, and her manchild boyfriend to stop them in their tracks and save Crescent Cove. Directed by the Chiodo Brothers, who were known for ambitious special effects, stop motion animation, and puppetry with credits under their belt like Elf, Critters, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure, it's a send up of 50's alien invasion movies with a plot that's almost one-to-one for the classic 1958 film, The Blob. We love it. You love it. Let's love it together. Have a listen.Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJBuy Bring Me The Axe merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we dive headlong into one of the most baffling 80's video store hits, The Wraith, in which Charlie Sheen is a ghost or an alien or a ghost alien who gets revenge on the wily gang of Arizona cretins that murdered him by running them over with his magic ghost alien car. The Wraith is a lot of things. Good is not one of them but it has a certain ineffable charm that makes it tremendously fun to watch in spite of its story being positively incidental to the rest of the movie. It casts the widest possible net to remind you of movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Death Wish 3, and The Road Warrior. Do you like cool cars? Do you like explosions? Do you like aliens, ghosts, or ghost aliens? Are you willing to let slide about a dozen totally unresolved plot points and completely ignore the fact that this movie leaves you with more questions than answers? You will probably love The Wraith.The soundtrack rules. Sheen seems completely unaware of the movie he's in. A pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn is doing her best with what she has. Clint Howard gloriously answers our question: is it a wig? All this and more in our exhaustive breakdown of The Wraith from director Mike Marvin.Want to try Bring Me The Axe premium content for a month at no charge? Be one of the first ten people to click this link. It's on us. Enjoy! https://www.patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod/redeem/66913Join 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 Mark Anastasio, program director for the Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston to cash checks and bite necks with a look at Werner Herzog's ambitious remake of the FW Murnau's 1922 not-Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu. Mark has first-hand experience with Herzog, having hosted him at the theater numerous times and regales us with stories that we've never heard about the man before. He also does a pretty good Werner Herzog impression.In this movie, Herzog is joined by his creative arch-frenemy Klaus Kinski in a unique existential twist on one of the genres most unimpeachable classics. Here, Count Dracula is bunched, broken old monster with no desire to live but no path toward death. He brings pestilence and horror from the old world to then-modern day Germany and meets his match with the one woman in the city with the knowledge and determination to destroy the beast. Featuring Herzog's stunning visual storytelling and a few utterly bizarre performances, Nosferatu is unlike any horror movie you've ever seen in spite of it being a story told and retold dozens of times since the dawn of film.Want to try Bring Me The Axe premium content for a month at no charge? Be one of the first ten people to click this link. It's on us. Enjoy! https://www.patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod/redeem/66913Join 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 shaking off the despair of a nuclear war one-two punch and staying in the made-for-tv mode for something incredibly dumb. Where Threads and The Day After are significant television events, this week's movie is anything but. It's a baffling riff on both popular haunted house movies of the era and classic gothic horror but that's about as coherent as the vision gets. Everything that follows is an exhausting exercise in early 80's made-for-tv drivel.Parker Stevenson, fresh off his run as Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys Mysteries is joined by Lisa Eilbacher, Joan Bennet, and Slim Pickens for a stay at a far-too-modern for gothic horror house in southern California. Either the house itself, or the extremely sophisticated security system is in love with Eilbacher's character. We can't really figure it out. Ultimately it doesn't matter because the charm lies in precisely how artless and strange this movie is. Also, you get a few musical numbers.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 dive back into the breach for another run at nuclear Armageddon with a look at the BBC's 1984 answer to The Day After, Threads. Where The Day After was a bleak movie about the end of the world as a result of nuclear it was still very much a movie. Director Mick Jackson provided an aggressive, bludgeoning alternative that gives it to you with both barrels, an unflinching look at precisely how bad nuclear war will be, backed by data. In this movie you get the specifics.Threads tells the story of an escalating confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in Iran that leads to World War 3 and the way that it affects the people of Sheffield, England through the eyes of young Ruth Beckett. In short, it'll be very, very bad. We will all die like dogs and it'll be painful and humiliating all the way to the end. Though not a conventional horror movie, Threads is very much appropriate for the genre.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/
Tonight! On a very special 99 Cent Rental we take a trip back to 1983 to take in the movie that shocked the 100 million Americans that watched in horror as the world ended in a nuclear fireball before their very eyes. As the 80's ground on and The United States and The Soviet Union were running out of puppet governments and proxy wars to fight the status of nuclear war became less a matter of if and more a matter of when. The ABC network sought to send a sobering message to the people of America who had been convinced that we could win a nuclear war by delivering an uncompromising made-for-TV epic that detailed what would happen after everything had been obliterated.A stacked cast of excellence paint a picture of a shattered America in the last days of humanity. The sheer scope of our nuclear weapons are put on the screen. We see an entire city in middle America blasted off the face of the Earth forever. We see the survivors of the blast struggling to stay alive in the face of hunger, sickness, and radiation poisoning. Dave is less than impressed with the movie and struggles with the political struggle that informed the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Bryan's feelings on the movie are much more complicated, having grown up within a few miles of two high priority nuclear targets as all this was going down.It's our longest episode yet and we have thoughts. There will be no survivors.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 step back to 1984 for a movie that couldn't possibly be anymore 80's if it tried. It's Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet starring Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney. Through shit luck two Valley Girl sisters miss out on the once-in-a-lifetime passing of a comet what's tail bathes the earth in deadly cosmic radiation, reducing people out in the open to nothing more than a pile of red dust and those who stayed in under less than ideal conditions to monstrous cannibals. A think tank of scientists, hidden in an underground base, are looking for a cure to the condition but at what cost? It's at one time a fun teen horror comedy and a movie that tries to get a couple of young women to tangle with the reality of being the last living people on earth and while it doesn't always land in one piece, it's a tremendously fun piece of cult. Dave loves this movie tremendously and makes a case for it being an unexpected piece of feminist horror and Bryan, never really taking it too seriously in the past comes out the other side a believer. Together, we both hate the movie's ending with a furious passion. 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/
We're coming at you with a bonus episode dedicated to the memory of the late, great, Ozzy Osbourne. Trick or Treat from 1986 is hardly a great movie and was almost forgotten as quickly as it entered theaters but what we find in this movie is a remarkably authentic portrayal of what it was like to be a metal head in the 80's. Satan was lurking everywhere and all of your friends' parents were convinced that people who listened to metal were all drug addict murderers or at least would become drug addict murderers if they kept listening to that Ozzy Osbourne character.We pay sweet tribute to Ozzy, talk about the satanic panic, and our own experiences growing up metal in the 80's and really get down with this utterly bonkers horror movie. We hope you enjoy.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/
Here's a freebie episode of our X-Files rewatch podcast, Do You Think I'm Spooky for all non-Patreon subscribers to let you know what you're all missing. Want more? We're nearly finishied recapping season one of the show along with a rundown of the headlines, box office and music charts, and TV shows for that week in 90's history. Subscribe the the Bring Me The Axe! Patreon today for more exclusive content!This week we see mega-creep Doug Hutchison return to the X-Files for a bit on an episode sequel as weirdo stretchy mutant, Eugene Tooms is released from the mental hospital to once again stalk the streets of Baltimore looking to eat just one more liver so he can hibernate and return 30 years on to continue his killing spree. Meanwhile, in 90's history, the times they are a-changing with another raft of forgotten sitcoms that didn't even make it to mid-season, a wild new appearance of pop songs, nothing particularly special happening at the movies, and the rise of American domestic terrorism.
This week Bryan and Dave take you back to the New York City of 1990 with a look at what might be Abel Ferrara's most focused movie, King of New York. With a dynamite cast of killers, including Christopher Walken at his best, Laurence Fishburne carrying practically the entire movie on his shoulders, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito, King of New York presents a morally gray crime movie where everyone, even the cops, are just the worst. Crime is the blood that keeps the city alive in this movie and an unreliable narrator is going to do his best to convince you that his crusade to run the criminal underground and thereby the entire city is just, good, and right. Stylish, slick, and kinetic, King of New York is like a Pixies song with loud, outrageous, and violent scenes of criminal carnage punctuated by quiet meditations on morality. It's bleak, nihilistic, and the brothers can't help but notice that this very-much American cops and robbers movie feels much, much more like the Italian Polizziotteschi reflections which makes the film's subtle social and political undertones feel that much more pronounced.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 Halle Kiefer, comedy writer and co-host of the podcast Ruined for another trip north to Canada for a look at the formative years of David Cronenberg. We're watching Rabid, starring Marilyn Chambers, famous for her appearance in the 70's adult film hit, Behind The Green Door. Here Cronenberg runs up against a minor moral panic when a film critic questions the government's willingness to fund his films. Marilyn Chambers pushes back against a studio system that can't find the courage to cast an actress from adult films in a major studio release. A woman receives an emergency skin graft that somehow transforms into a phallic proboscis in her armpit that feeds her like a vampire and spreads a new form of rabies which turns its victims into enraged zombies that will stop at nothing to kill everything that moves.Cronenberg is still figuring it out in this movie which despite its outrageous premise and lurid stunt-casting, could be seen as a meditation on the rise of second-wave feminism, his place in that world, and his impact on that movement as a man trying to navigate the changing world. 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 hanging by a thread as we take a look at one of the strangest, sleaziest movies we've done yet, Mad Foxes. A few movies in our past have driven us to the brink of madness but none so powerfully as this Swiss/German/Spanish co-production that was intended to be a sequel-in-name-only of the American action movie, Stingray. Music video director Paul Grau approached his producer friend Erwin Dietrich with an idea to produce a comedy and ended up with the assignment to instead produce a violent action movie and since the producer was also a big name in the world of European sexploitation the movie had a mandate to also be full of sex and nudity and man alive, did Paul Grau miss the mark. Starring Jose Gras, credited as Robert O'Neil, it tells the story of a man, his car, and the high cost of being so cool when Nazi bikers assault his lady and kill his parents. Again, because his car is just too cool.Somehow having four writer credits, this movie comes off like it was written by one twelve year old boy. Very little of it makes sense. A lot of it is maddening to behold and if you're not ready for it you're going to be surprised by precisely how many penises are in this movie.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're wrapping up our Pride 2025 series with a case study in camp. We're looking at Curtis Harrington's 1971 American gothic melodrama, What's The Matter With Helen starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters. Two mothers settle in Hollywood, trying to escape their reputations as the mothers of two nationally infamous murderers. It's all fragile emotional states and overacting as one mom marries up out of her station and the other goes quite insane. The first in Harrington's high-camp era, followed by movies like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind, Harrington's career would come to be defined by a series of high-camp misadventures that were squarely in the wheelhouse of gay moviegoers the world around and continue to be major influences on the wild, overwrought melodramas that came in its wake.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 Dave surprises Bryan with a movie with a title that is at once a good description and a terrible misrepresentation. They're going to Germany for a look at Martin Walz's very gay 1996 horror comedy, Killer Condom. Based on the comic of the same name (and the follow-up, Down To The Bone) by German cartoonist, Ralf Konig, Killer Condom (Kondom des Grauens) tells the story of New York City in the grips of terror as carnivorous condoms bite the penis off of the city's men left and right. It's also a touching love story as Detective Luigi Macaroni shakes his jaded feelings on love and comes to terms with feelings for the rentboy who keeps distracting him from his job.Distributed by Troma, Killer Condom was thrust out into the English-speaking world on the vague promise of the outrageous, politically incorrect comedy you've come to expect from the house that Toxie built but this sells the movie short as it's actually a very human love story and a not-so-subtle meditation on the AIDS crisis. Now, it IS a movie made in the 90's and hasn't exactly aged well but reckon with a little transphobia and racism and you find a terribly unique movie that was way ahead of its time.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 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/