Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

This week we're looking at Larry Cohen's bizarre sequel to Tobe Hooper's hit TV miniseries, Salem's Lot which was based on the novel by Stephen King. While the studio bent over backwards to convince video renters that this movie was also from the mind of Stephen King and also had that cool Kurt Barlow vampire, Cohen's movie bears very, very little in common with the original.

When anthropologist Joe Weber is called back to New York to deal with his delinquent son, he /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355760

This week we abandon our original idea to cover the utterly insane 1987 Karate Kid ripoff Karate Warrior with something with a little more meat on the bone, Tentacles. The 70's was an embarrassment of riches, and in many case just plain embarrassing when it came to the animal attack cash-grabs that arose from the titanic success of Jaws. This is one such movie, a unique twist on American International Pictures' typical process of working with foreign films. Rather than import some chea /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355765

This week we take a step back to the golden age of the slasher movie, 1982, for a look at a movie that misses the mark by a significant margin and yet it still remains strangely compelling. Starring Bill Paxton in one of his earliest roles, Mortuary attempts to cash in on the slasher boom but can't quite figure out what it is about Halloween and Friday the 13th that makes them so successful. Hint: It's their simplicity. Mortuary can't help but complicate matters with numerous inexplicable sub /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355770

This week we're joined by Tyler Hyde from the podcast That's Spooky to discuss the made-for-tv scare film, Mazes & Monsters. The film represents the first lead role for future superstar, Tom Hanks in a movie about the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons. No, I'm not making that up.

In the early 1980's as Dungeons and Dragons became a sensation of tabletops everywhere, it didn't take long for scolding parent groups to cry foul to every media outlet that would l /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355775

This week we watch a movie that takes several hundred episodes of the seminal gothic soap opera and condenses them to 90 brisk minutes of vampire melodrama in a way that is confusing and frustrating in ways that few movies are.

Dark Shadows, for all its cheesiness and cheapness is one of the most important contributions to horror in the way that it added a dimension to vampire media that hadn't really been explored yet. Without Barnabas Collins you do not get Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. No Buff /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355780

99 Cent Rental returns after our October break with a listener request. Since we just did Don Coscarelli's 1979 debut, Phantasm, a movie made on tiny, sub-500k budget, we thought it made a lot of sense to see what happens when you break through and Hollywood heaps cash on you to make a proper movie. The result is... very Coscarelli-ish. There's no question whatsoever that Don is well-read on matters of fantasy and science fiction and these being the days before Peter Jackson's Lord /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355795

We close out our Halloween Hootenanny series of all Bring Me The Axe episodes all October with an episode dedicated to a listener who really made our year. This year's series caps off with a look at the gloriously frantic, unfocused shit show that is Dario Argento's Phenomena. Falling very early in the acting career of American movie star, Jennifer Connelly, it's kind of amazing that she finished this production and continued to act given that her finger was literally separated from her body /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355800

This week we're looking at 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It took three movies to make Freddy Krueger Freddy as we know him today. An empire of horror was launched off the back of this movie: toys, comic books, video games, masks, everything. Dream Warriors dropped at a critical moment for A Nightmare On Elm Street, after the critical failure of Freddy's Revenge the IP ended up on the chopping block at New Line. If this movie didn't perform the studio plann /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355805

This week we go back to 1979 for a look at Don Coscarelli's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness horror movie that introduced the world to The Tall Man, Reggie The Ice Cream Man, and the mirror-plated Sentinel Spheres. It's Phantasm! Is this a horror movie? Well, yeah. Of course it is. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? Also yes. Though the movie is a bit of a mess and an exercise in that moment when a struggling young filmmaker decides to take the easy to road to success through chea /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355810

This week we take on another made-for-tv movie -- another British made-for-tv movie -- as we take in the notorious BBC Halloween stunt, Ghoswatch. In 1992 the BBC set out to make a movie about a paranormal investigation gone horribly awry. The kicker is that it's cast with real BBC personalities and was kinda/sorta presented to the English TV watching public as a real investigation. A portion of the viewers were deeply affected by the movie and it resulted in a minor public panic that result /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355815

This week we take a trip back to 1991 for a real video store oddity. It's a rape/revenge movie that also capitalizes on the popularity of Robocop. Written by an Emmy-award winning TV writer, starring a two-time Tony winner as the villain and chock full of kill scenes that are so creative and strange that they could only have been produced for a straight to video exploitation movie. And so deeply committed to its video tape format was it that this movie's preferred aspect ratio is 4:3.

Starr /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355820

This week we celebrate Latin American Heritage Month with a look at a horror movie out of Mexico that is very hard to put into words and so we try anyway and sound like complete lunatics. Falling toward the end of the Galindo family film dynasty, Vacation of Terror 2: Diabolical Birthday (Vacaciones de Terror 2: Cumpleaños Diabolico) sees Galindo cousin, Pedro Galindo III with a surprisingly stunning cast of Mexican movie stars. Pedro Fernandez turns up in yet another movie for the Galindo' /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355830

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355835

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355840

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 th /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355845

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355850

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 Stevenso /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355855

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355860

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355865

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 t /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355870

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 mur /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355875

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 toda /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355880

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 /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355885

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 willin /episode/index/show/f92a3cbd-11c8-4ac8-a6f8-16c382e7de9a/id/39355890