Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast
Bring Me the Axe is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.
info_outline
119: In The Mouth of Madness
10/19/2026
119: In The Mouth of Madness
Our Haloween celebration of the work of John Carpenter continues for a third week with a look at John in the 90s. Arguably his rockiest period, a decade that saw a significant decline, John Carpenter in the 90s produced one movie that wasn't a fucking debacle and we think that it's In The Mouth of Madness. In The Mouth of Madness finds John Trent (Sam Neill), a private investigator hired by a publishing company to find Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), the best-selling author in the world, a writer of particularly terrifying horror fiction whose novels drive its readers insane. Cane vanished in New Hampshire while writing his latest novel and the publishing company would very much like him and his manuscript found. What Trent finds, however, is weirder (some might say more confusing) than anyone could have imagined, hidden out in a forboding church in a pastoral New Hampshire town that doesn't exist. This fiasco leads John Trent to wonder, am I even a real person or am I a character in Sutter Cane's book? Is Sutter Cane even real, for that matter? Carpenter crafts a pastiche here of HP Lovecraft and Stephen King half way through a decade that wasn't terribly great for horror movies. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord server and chat it up with Bryan and fellow listeners: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/43349974
info_outline
118: Prince of Darkness
10/12/2026
118: Prince of Darkness
Our October marathon of John Carpenter continues as we find John returning to the world of independent film and total creative control. Perhaps John smoked a little too much weed and flew too close to the sun with this one. For all it's theoretical physics and spiritual nonsense it's still a fun little movie. Prince of Darkness finds a Catholic priest discovering a hidden order of priests protecting a run-down church in Los Angeles that hides a terrible secret in its basement. For the last 400 years it has housed a strange, churning tank in its basement which contains the fluid essence of the devil. But now as conditions shift and the stars align, the tank is coming to life, manifesting in our world in order to pull an even older force of evil into ours from the abyss. A team of graduate students in the field of theoretical physics is gathered to study this phenomenon and ultimately stop it. It doesn't make a lot of sense and it has a real mean sense of humor about it at time but we can't help but love Prince of Darkness. It's John Carpenter back where he belongs and fully producing movies that feel characteristically John Carpenter. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord server and chat it up with Bryan and fellow listeners: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/43254318
info_outline
117: The Thing w/guest Halle Kiefer
10/05/2026
117: The Thing w/guest Halle Kiefer
This week Halle Kiefer of the fantastic horror podcast, Ruined, joins us for a three-peat as we kick off our Halloween 2026 series, a month-log exploration of the films of John Carpenter. We're starting strong with John's critically maligned The Thing, a movie that reviewed so badly that he lost an entire contract with Universal. Thankfully, in the fullness of time viewers have come back around and reassessed it, and recognize it as one of the greatest horror movies of the 80s and one of the greatest of all time. The Thing finds an American scientific research station in Antarctica facing an unseen alien threat that absorbs its host and hides in plain sight. A Norwegian station nearby thawed a UFO out of the ice and woke up the frozen pilot after 100,000 years and now it has its eyes set on planet Earth. If it leaves the isolation of Antarctica, the entire planet is doomed. These men will drive themselves insane with paranoia as they narrow down who among them is The Thing and what will it cost them to stop it in its tracks? The Thing is a frozen, paranoid nightmare of extraordinary imagination, with gross-out special effects from a very enthusiastic Rob Bottin. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/43170918
info_outline
99CR 68: Muerte En La Playa (Death on the Beach)
09/28/2026
99CR 68: Muerte En La Playa (Death on the Beach)
This week we're wrapping up our round-up of Latin American movies with maybe the deepest cut we've done yet. We're watching Muerte En La Playa from director Enrique Gomez Vadillo. In this movie we find young David returning home from school on break following the temporary closing of the school after the murder of one of the professors. David's mom, hyper-glam Sonia Infante, and her boyfriend make several attempts to hook David up with one of the local girls but he couldn't possibly be any less interested in them. David is gay and all the people prying into his personal life keep bugging the shit out of him so he pushes them off cliffs, out windows, and even resorts to jamming a spear in a dude's butt. Who can stop his rampage? Perhaps his stepfather-to-be with a plot to catch him in the act with another man will expose David. Who can say? Tonally impenetrable, Muerte En La Playa is an overwrought Telenovela melodrama of cartoonish proportions. Nearly all of the movie takes place in or around a swimming pool. Vadillo luxuriates in filming all of the toned, chiseled young men. The director, Vadillo, himself is a hard man to track down. He's a ghost, a cipher even among Mexican film directors. It's a hard movie to quantify and deeply, deeply weird. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/43051683
info_outline
116: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul w/guest Aileen Clark
09/21/2026
116: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul w/guest Aileen Clark
This week we're joined by our good friend and Laughing in the Dark co-host, Aileen Clark to talk about Brazil and Coffin Joe as we look at Brazil's first-ever horror movie, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. In this movie Coffin Joe is the local undertaker, a nightmare man in black with a top hat and cape to match. He's also an atheist who is on the hunt for the perfect woman who will bear him a son and continue his bloodline. But here's the thing, Coffin Joe is a huge jerk and everyone hates him but they're also afraid of him because he's a libertine who adheres to no apparent moral code. He'll kill his way through the community when things don't go his way, and as the bodies pile up he'll have to kill even more people to cover up his crimes. He should have listened to local witch when she issued him a dire warning. The spirits of the dead will rise up at midnight and take his soul. Jose Mojica Marins was propelled to superstardom in Brazil with the release of this movie in 1964. He immediately set the pace for horror movies to come and used Coffin Joe as a mouthpiece to criticize the fascist military junta that was running Brazil at the time. It's decades later and some time since the passing of Jose Mojica Marins but the legacy of Coffin Joe lives on. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42970273
info_outline
99CR 67: El Topo
09/14/2026
99CR 67: El Topo
We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is. El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to God or it'll win him the love of the strange woman he abandoned his son for. Who can say? It's all so murky. When the final gunfighter outsmarts him, he dies and finds himself trapped in a cave with a community of cave people and vows to dig them all out on his new search for enlightenment. Take a listen and learn about the sort of family life that creates a filmmaker who is constantly making movies where the main character is desperate for a father's love but buries it under layers upon layers of gnositicism and hermetic philosophy. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42893755
info_outline
115: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
09/07/2026
115: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
This week we look at Phillip Kaufman's remake of Don Siegel's unimpeachable specimen of McCarthy era paranoia, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In this movie Elizabeth, an employee of the city health office becomes convinced that her boyfriend has been switched with someone else. All over the city of San Francisco people are waking up to find that loved ones have somehow changed. They express no emotion now and spend all their time busily working with other strangers on a sinister project. Elizabeth at first isn't taken seriously by her co-worker, a man who trusts the American bureaucratic machine with all his heart until it breaks down. Along with a few friends they'll run all night to do everything they can to avoid being made into pod people while also resisting the the invasion. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a stone cold classic. It stars Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldlum, Leonard Nimoy, and Brooke Adams in one of the best remakes of all time! Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42804615
info_outline
99CR 66: The Cars That Ate Paris
08/31/2026
99CR 66: The Cars That Ate Paris
Come with us to a land down under this week as we head back to Australia for a look at Peter Weir's first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris. Paris is a small town with a terrible secret. Cars roll off the road at an alarming rate. The drivers are often killed in the crashes or rendered brain damaged. What's going on there? Poor mild-mannered Arthur finds out the hard way when his brother crashes the car and he is the only survivor left to find his way in this town where the people lure drivers to their deaths and then loot what remains. Things were going so well but the youth are restless. They tear around town in cars cobbled together from bits and pieces, nightmare vehicles that threaten to consume the entire town in a demolition derby of mayhem if anyone in town tries to impose any kind of order on them. In many ways, Weir's movie is a forerunner for Mad Max, painting a picture of an Australia in crisis. Fuel is as hard to come by as work is. Everyone is on edge and the old order is desperate to hold onto its power. It's an odd movie that Dave loves and Bryan is conflicted over. Check out this episode to get all the info. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42616180
info_outline
114: Fatal Frames
08/24/2026
114: Fatal Frames
This week we reach the terminal point for giallo in Italy. This is it, the bottom of the barrel, the definitive end, a bloated vanity project by director Al Festa to showcase his wife, Stefania Stella who ostensibly plays herself in this murder mystery in the style of old gialli. In Fatal Frames we find music video director Alex Ritt, haunted by the recent murder of his wife, drawn to Rome to direct a blockbuster music video for Italy's hotted pop star, Stefania Stella. When he arrives, however, violence follows him as the bodies pile up and he is the prime suspect in the police investigation. But he's not killing these women. So who is? Why are they so focused on Alex? How does Stefania Stella fit in to all this nonsense? Sporting a cast chock full of Italian movie legends and a few American horror favorites like Donald Pleasance, Linnea Quigley, and Angus Scrimm, Fatal Frames is an absolute shit show, a tremendously convoluted giallo that doesn't work as a giallo and definitely doesn't work as a showcase of Stefania Stella's talents. Not to be mean or nothin', but the lady has none to speak of. But this movie is a worthwhile watch. It's a baffling series of weird decisions and bad acting. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42533740
info_outline
99CR 65: The Poseidon Adventure
08/17/2026
99CR 65: The Poseidon Adventure
This week we're diving in (get it?) to one of the most successful and well-known of the disaster epics of the 1970s, Irwin Allen's first disaster feature: the Poseidon Adventure. Taking place on New Year's Eve, an old cruise ship is on its last voyage to port in Athens when a sudden rogue wave hits the ship and capsizes it, sending most of the passengers and crew to their deaths. A ballroom full of passengers manage to survive and make a plan to climb the ship and reach the thinnest part of the hull in hopes of being rescued but each one of them brings their own complications to make this the adventure of a lifetime. Starring an ensemble cast with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, and more, this movie took the model set by 1970's Airport and expands the scope and ambition for a truly suspenseful but clunky story with maybe too many characters for its own good. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42457460
info_outline
113: Piranha
08/10/2026
113: Piranha
This week we're back in Roger Corman territory with an early Joe Dante feature for New World Pictures, Piranha from 1978. When a pair of teenage hikers go missing in the Texas wilds, a bounty hunter will have to team up with a reclusive alcoholic weirdo to find them. Their search takes them to a secret research facility where they accidentally release a large number of genetically modified piranhas into the local river system where they will wreak havoc on a summer camp and a lakeside resort full of people just begging to be nibbled on by voracious carnivorous fish. Along the way our hapless heroes will have to outwit the cops and a military coverup. Piranha is an extraordinarily silly monster movie that is obviously doing everything it can to snatch some of that precious Jaws money the very same year that Universal released the much-anticipated Jaws 2. A lawsuit nearly stopped this movie in its tracks but were it not for Steven Spielberg himself, we might not have ever seen this highly enjoyable trainwreck of an exploitation movie. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42374900
info_outline
BONUS: Laughing in the Dark
08/04/2026
BONUS: Laughing in the Dark
If you're not listening to our sister podcast, Laughing in the Dark, an Are You Afraid of the Dark rewatch podcast here's your chance to check it out with Season 3, Episode 4: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This week it's Aileen's turn to tell the 9:30 Society all about the fifth episode of the third season of Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This episode hits us with some AYAOTD classic tropes. You get a kid abandoned by their parents for a time, a complete lack of anything that you could call a dollmaker, and people being real weird about trauma. In this episode we find Melissa spending some time at her aunt and uncle's place. She's eager to hang out with their neighbor, a girl her own age but is shocked to learn that this friend of her vanished mysteriously and no trace of her was ever found. What's worse, her parents were so broken up about it that they packed up and moved away and no one will talk about the lingering horror of this disappearance. They just keep pushing it down. But because it's Are You Afraid of the Dark, Melissa keeps breaking into the empty neighbor house and discovers some really weird stuff going down in that attic. Don't forget to listen to Bryan and Dave on Bring Me The Axe! and 99 Cent Rental, Aileen on Uy Que Horror! and Mikie on The Rewatcher!
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42310520
info_outline
99CR 64: New Barbarians
08/03/2026
99CR 64: New Barbarians
This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now! The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals liberally from George Miller's 1981 sequel to Mad Max, The Road Warrior. We find Mike Brady lookalike, Scorpion driving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, on the run from his former gang, the genocidal Templars. Mike's dedication to the loner lifestyle is put to the test when he rescues a mysterious injured woman from the Templars and he'll be called on to protect a colony of survivors when the ghosts of his past return to settle an old beef. New Barbarians leans into the spaghetti western overtures that inspired Mad Max while stealing from the same movie but on a significantly smaller budget. Italian Mas Max ripoffs are already a cheap, threadbare affair but this movie, the very first of many more to follow, starts off from an even cheaper, more threadbare position and it's quite frankly amazing that this movie proved that ripping off a high-flying Australian stunt spectacular with the crappiest cars and wasteland punks you've ever seen. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42296485
info_outline
112: Incubus
07/27/2026
112: Incubus
This week we're taking on one of the weirdest horror movie misfires of the 80s. It's an explicable mess of a movie that statistically shouldn't have been a loser ad yet here we are. A series of brutal murders and rapes rocks a small New England town. The medical examiner, the chief of police, and a local newspaper reporter team up to solve the crimes but the evidence doesn't make any sense. Is this the work of a gang of people or one man? The latter seems to be the case but how could that even be possible given the loads and loads of evidence (that joke will make sense when you listen to the episode) left behind. In the end, shadows of the town's ugly past resurface and the perpetrator of these crimes may not even be human! Starring iconoclast and independent film mastermind John Cassavetes, Incubus sports a script written by Amityville Horror's Sandor Stern with heavy rewrites from Cassavetes himself. The remaining movie is a mystifying parade of the most deranged dialog you've ever heard. In any other case this is a forgettable piece of 80s horror garbage but the utterly insane chatter makes it a truly unique horror movie. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42223005
info_outline
99CR 63: The Shark Hunter
07/20/2026
99CR 63: The Shark Hunter
This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make a movie. But when scripts vanished, the cast and crew had to make a movie based on their broad memories of the original story and we'd be lying if we didn't think they did a pretty good job of it. Severin Films bent over backwards in 2025 to recover what materials they could find and released the best possible scan of the last remaining 35mm prints of The Shark Hunter, a movie that was dangerously close to disappearing forever. In The Shark Hunter we find a sun burned and bloodshot American expat living seaside in Mexico, making a living by leaping into the ocean to kill every shark he sees, which happens to be a lot of sharks. But this is just a cover for an operation to recover a sunken safe in a crashed airplane. He teams up with a local buddy and will have to outsmart a gangster and a rival special forces dude if he plans to get his hands on all that sweet, sweet cash. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42147810
info_outline
111: The Visitor w/guest Love Connie
07/13/2026
111: The Visitor w/guest Love Connie
We're joined by our friend, drag legend Love Connie for a look deep into the abyss. We watched Giulio Paradisi's unhinged 1979 shit show, The Visitor, and found that the abyss stares back. This is not an easy movie to explain. It is stacked with some of Hollywood's heaviest hitters in the cast: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Mel Ferrer, Sam Peckinpah, and Glenn Ford and no one can explain why that is. It's not even clear if any of these people even know what's happening. They're just happy to be here. Meanwhile, an American TV writer who is lucky enough to be fluent in Italian struggles to translate ideas from the director and producer into something that makes sense and ultimately gives in to their nonsensical demands as the director's vision for The Visitor is a series of images in his head that he thinks are cool and a producer's vision to rip off as many horror movies of the 1970s as possible in a single movie. In the end, nothing makes sense, the movie looks amazing, features a killer score, but just kind of meanders through hammy performances, nonsense dialog, and a psychedelic ending that does absolutely nothing to tie up whatever passes for a plot. In spite of all of this, The Visitor is mersmerizing train wreck of a movie to behold. If The Visitor is about anything, as near as this writer can summarize, it concerns a struggle between cosmic forces of good evil who wage a secret war. One side wishes to birth a pair of children who will come together to resurrect an ancient evil alien who will destroy everything. The other side opposes them, seeking to save the life of an innocent girl who commands the powers of evil and is destined to usher in a dark age for the universe. That is nominally what this movie is about. What happens in this movie is another matter entirely. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/42054020
info_outline
99CR 62: Dirty Dancing
07/06/2026
99CR 62: Dirty Dancing
You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them. Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41971695
info_outline
110: Carnival of Souls
06/29/2026
110: Carnival of Souls
We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn't typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it's spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter, Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers), Herk Harvey made an extremely eerie and deeply paranoid movie that gets deeply under your skin and it's a shame that he never worked in features again. What begins with a fatal car accident leads the lone survivor, Mary, on a trip to Salt Lake City where she will play organ for a church. But along the way she finds herself stalked by a phantom as she tries to fit into this new city, navigating new relationships that she's barely interested in in the first place. By the time the film closes Mary will uncover the truth about the phantom stalker and what happened that day during the car accident. Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41858055
info_outline
99CR 61: Pre-Stonewall Queer Short Film Round-Up
06/22/2026
99CR 61: Pre-Stonewall Queer Short Film Round-Up
This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore. We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger. Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter With Helen. We wrap things up with Winter Kept Us Warm, the Canadian feature from David Secter. It's an important film in the history of queer cinema as well as Canadian cinema. It was the first Canadian movie to run at Cannes and influenced many Canadian filmmakers that followed. Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41720430
info_outline
109: Thundercrack!
06/15/2026
109: Thundercrack!
We continue our Pride 2026 examination of queer horror with a look at a truly unique film, a movie that challenged us in every conceivable way. If you, the listener, can make it to the end of this one without being totally alienated, consider yourself a true Bring Me The Axe fan. Thundercrack! is the collision of underground filmmakers Curt McDowell and George Kuchar. McDowell, a truly horny underground filmmaker was known for his art films containing no small amount of explicit unsimulated sex and George Kuchar was known for outrageous, ugly send-ups of "women's pictures" and melodramas. Together they made an old dark house horror movie with no small amount of body hair and body fluids. There's no small amount of sex in this movie and man alive is it gross. Thundercrack! is a hard movie to explain. It finds several pairs of strangers stranded at the home of a mentally ill woman, a house bursting at the seams with secrets. Each one of them brings their own secrets to complicate matters. There's Roo and Sash, a pair of ladies desperate for men they cannot have. There's Chandler and Bond, the former seeking vengeance for the death of his wife, the latter desperate to have sex with Chandler. There's Toydy and Bing, a man who just wants to get behind that locked door in the living room and a man haunted by a circus gorilla that he is deeply in love with. It is a long night of madness and sex culminating in every secret boiling over at the surface. We can confidently say that there is nothing like it anywhere. Thundercrack! is a true original, a puerile lo-fi nightmare that defies you to watch it. Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41644590
info_outline
99CR 60: Making Love w/guest Sean Abley
06/08/2026
99CR 60: Making Love w/guest Sean Abley
Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental and we go long on one of the most honest and authentic coming-out stories at a critical moment in the 80's just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum but right before the first reports of AIDS hits the news. It offers a remarkable alternative to contemporary portrayals of gay characters, casting off the well-worn tropes of swishy queens and terrifying leather daddies, Making Love gives you gay men who are simply ordinary men. Making Love is about married couple Claire and Zach. Their life together is great. Except for one critical thing. Zach is gay and is finally coming to terms with it. He meets author Bart, an openly gay but aloof loner who loves them and leaves them and has his first sexual encounter with a man which sends his entire life into a spiral. Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41569375
info_outline
108: Dracula's Daughter
06/01/2026
108: Dracula's Daughter
This week we kick off Pride 2026 with a look at the sapphic doom of Dracula's Daughter, the sequel to the landmark horror movie, 1931's Dracula. The 30's was rough on everyone being that we were smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression so taking wild chances on vanity projects was bad for business. Not to be outdone in the realm of bad business decisions, Universal Studios took on two ill-advised projects that put the future of the studio in jeopardy. With the Laemmle family out of the picture, the studio committed to a sequel to one of its biggest hits of the decade and put it in the hands of the horniest writers in Hollywood who asked what if our movie's vampire was also haunted by her desire for women? Dracula's Daughter finds the titular woman in London immediately following the destruction of her father by Abraham Van Helsing. She steals his body, ritually destroys it, and then finds herself still unable to resist hunting London's young women. Desperate, she turns to a psychiatrist to free her from her diabolical curse, being a lesbian. Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41484270
info_outline
99CR 59: Aliens
05/25/2026
99CR 59: Aliens
Last week we took on the landmark Ridley Scott movie, Alien, a movie that closed out the 1970's with a bang. This week we're taking on James Cameron and his follow-up to the explosive 1985 smash hit, The Terminator, Aliens. Cameron knew he wanted to make an Alien sequel the moment he first saw the original movie and when the opportunity arose he had to fight tooth and nail, struggling against 20th Century Fox's bad business and legal woes, against apathetic executive who had no interest whatsoever in making another Alien movie, against a production crew that couldn't stand him or his producer Gale Anne Hurd. When all was said and done and the movie hit theaters, Cameron proved to everyone what absolute losers they all were with his clear vision of an explosive action movie that set the pace for the second half of the 80's and set an extremely high bar for action movies to come. Hollywood would never be the same and with the inclusion of the Colonial Marines, Cameron set the entire Alien legacy on a new path. Following the tragedy of the Nostromo disaster Ellen Ripley finds herself waking up 57 years in the future. Her bosses are pissed that she blew up one of their space ships and ban her from flying another mission. An opportunity to get back on a starship comes around when an executive from Weyland Yutani hires her to return to LV-426 to advise a unit of Colonial Marines on a rescue mission of missing colonists who may have come into contact with the same crashed alien ship that doomed her own crew so many years ago. She had enough trouble dealing with one single xenomorph. What happens when the Colonial Marines encounter dozens of them? Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41411970
info_outline
107: Alien
05/18/2026
107: Alien
On the podcast no one can hear you scream. This week we're taking a look at the horror movie hingepoint in 1979, Alien. Before Star Wars there wasn't a studio on earth that wanted to make an expensive science fiction movie and after Star Wars they couldn't find enough scripts to get expensive science fiction movies into production. Alien was one of the first ones to come out of the gate that wasn't a cheap ripoff of George Lucas's masterpiece. It was worlds apart from the recent space movie hits. It featured no highly competent astronauts traveling to Jupiter and no dashing heroes in star fighters, wielding light sabers. Instead, Ridley Scott delivered a quiet, slow-moving horror movie featuring blue collar characters just trying to get by on a commercial tow vessel. At the same time, they delivered one of the most suspenseful horror movies with one of the strongest casts and one of the most iconic monster designs by world-class artists. It is truly one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Alien sees the crew of the Nostromo rerouted to a planet nearby where a crashed alien vessel sends out a radio signal that they interpret as a distress call. By the time the ship's computer figures out that it's not a distress call but a warning it's too late and the ship's XO finds himself with a horrifying alien creature stuck to his face, laying its egg inside him. When the egg hatches by exploding out of his chest it unleashes the perfect killing machine, a biomechanical alien that stalks the ship's crew and kills them off one by one. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41328235
info_outline
99CR 58: Blue Velvet
05/11/2026
99CR 58: Blue Velvet
This week we're taking a look at David Lynch's fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch's disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch found himself patronized by 80's super producer, Dino De Laurentiis, a producer who believed in Lynch's gift at a time when no one else would and were it not for Dino, we're not sure that we get the rest of the movies Lynch is so well known for. Realizing that Blue Velvet was commercially radioactive but supportive regardless, De Laurentiis transformed his entire company to also accomodate film distribution just for Blue Velvet and when the movie dropped it struck critics and viewers in such a way that they knew they were seeing something grotesque and special at the same time. Blue Velvet sees Jeffrey Beaumont, a young resident of the sleepy small town, Lumberton, drawn into a world of violence, sex, and obsession when he finds a severed ear in a field which leads him to the city's underworld, a place occupied by dangerous people living a desperate existence. He falls in love with the femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens, runs afoul of drug dealer Frank Booth, and struggles to free her from Frank's grasp. The descent into the city's dark side reveals uncomfortable truths about Jeffrey and by extension, all of us. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41244135
info_outline
106: The Wicker Man
05/04/2026
106: The Wicker Man
Just in time for Beltaine we're dropping in on the merry residents of Summerisle for a look at Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man from director Robin Hardy. This 1973 horror movie is a pivotal feature in the folk horror tradition and presents a daring departure from common horror movie tropes, choosing to set the movie in broad daylight with a color palette of primary colors and lush greens instead of the flashing thunder and shadows of night. The air of constant menace is replaced with a cast of common rural people who seem to be having the time of their lives in the pagan paradise of a community that celebrates the old gods. Starring Christopher Lee at his most charming and charismatic, The Wicker Man is a triumph of weird horror and is a May Day tradition in the house of Bring Me The Axe! The story follows Sgt. Howie, an English cop who drops in on the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a the disappearance of a young girl but he finds the strange community of heathens uncooperative in his investigation and suspects that she may have been a victim of human sacrifice. There's a sacrifice, alright, but Howie has no idea to what lengths these people will go to in order to secure a healthy harvest. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41137830
info_outline
99CR 57: Martin
04/27/2026
99CR 57: Martin
This week we take on George Romero's Martin from 1977. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe if you squint at it just right. Martin doesn't fit neatly into any genre and for that we're at a loss to properly define it. But one thing is for sure, this is our favorite non-zombie Romero movie. It's a very weird, very European movie with artsy tendencies and a good idea of where George Romer's career may have gone had he not been repeatedly dragged back to the zombie well. In Martin, the eponymous young man drifts from house to house, a ward of a highly superstitious family who pass him around as a burden that must be contained lest his bloodlust lead him to mayhem and carnage but here's the problem: Martin doesn't seem to actually be a vampire. He walks around during the day, holy symbols and vampire wards have no effect on him. But he is no less monstrous, being an actual serial killer. The question remains, does Martin kill because he's been told for so long that he's a monster? Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/41026690
info_outline
105: Night School
04/20/2026
105: Night School
This week we're bringing it home to Boston for a look at the 1981 slasher movie also-ran. Night School. Similar to the many, many slasher movies that dropped that year, Night School struggles to commit to the stalk and slash body count mayhem that was dominating box offices and instead lands closer, remarkably closer to an Italian giallo. When it's not shamelessly stepping on Psycho's toes it reminds us a little too much of What Have You Done To Solange and What Have They Done To Your Daughters. In Night School a killer stalks the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, decapitating women. Their targets all share one thing in common, they're all students at the same night school, sharing the same head hunter obsessed anthropology professor who is busily seducing each one of them. It's up to smarty pants Boston PD detective Judd Austin to put the pieces together and crack the case before the killer strikes again! Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/40931745
info_outline
99CR 56: Ninja Terminator
04/13/2026
99CR 56: Ninja Terminator
This week we take a look at what is arguably Godfrey Ho's magnum opus as far as that director can have such a thing. We're watching Ninja Terminator from 1986, just one of scores of cheap, trashy martial arts movies made in the 1980s by Godfrey Ho in order to capitalize on the western appetite for all things ninja. Ho is famous for a technique of cut and paste filmmaking where he would cut out all the good parts of an Asian action movie, shoot some wraparound footage with western actors, and dub the whole thing over with a new audio track to make a new movie. Sort of. Plus ninjas. In this one, Ho casts Richard Harrison as Master Ninja Harry who, along with some friends, absconds with three pieces of a statue sacred to the Ninja Empire. When one of them are killed and the Ninja Empire recovers one piece, the other two ninjas conspire to keep the pieces away in order reform the ninja empire. Maybe? Harry enlists his friend Jaguar Wong to seek out the missing piece and a whole lot of crazy bullshit happens in the meantime. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/40823085
info_outline
104: Curtains
04/06/2026
104: Curtains
This week we're heading north to the 51st state of Canada for a listener request. It's Curtains, the 1983 slasher film from producer Peter Simpson who last brought you the smash hit Prom Night. Directed (partially) by cinematographer Richard Ciupka, Curtains is a gigantic mess of a whodunnit that had ambitions to be a North American riff on the movies of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, an arty, very European approach to a violent murder mystery in the giallo style. Unfortunately, this was not what the producers expected and Ciupka bailed on the entiree project leaving it on the shelf for a year before Simpson himself took it down and dragged it across the finish line. In Curtains five young women gather at the home of director John Stryker, a megalomaniac auteur director with designs on producing a film called Audra but not that long ago he was planning on producing it with his muse, Samantha Sherwood who had herself committed to a mental hospital for research. While inside, Stryker moved on from her but now she's out and pissed off. But what's this? A mysterious killer is knocking them all off one by one. You think you know who the killer is, but do you really? Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon: Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here:
/episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/40741235