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