Movie Oubliette

Happy Spooky Season! Mikey Neumann, the creator of FilmJoy, joins us for our Halloween special with something he found in the back of his freezer: Jason X (2001)! Ten films and 22 years after a machete first found its way into a camp counsellor, Friday the 13th finally arrived at the setting every tired franchise eventually reaches when the well has truly run dry: outer space.

Directed by Jim Isaac, a Cronenberg effects alumnus making only his second feature, and written by then-newcomer Todd Farmer under a New Line regime still working out how Scream's self-aware humour ought to be applied to a decade-old slasher icon, Jason X cryogenically freezes Jason Voorhees at the dawn of the 21st century and thaws him out four and a half centuries later, aboard a research vessel that has returned to a long-abandoned Earth.

It is, in the plainest possible terms, Alien with a hockey mask, a film happy to wear its influences on its sleeve while asking, not unreasonably, whether an unstoppable killer is any less unstoppable once you've made him some sort of cyborg. But, as we reach the film's 25th anniversary (!), can we finally decide if it deserves to escape the Oubliette? Find out!

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Bonus preview time again: for this special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage, we're joined by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers to dig into A Talent for Murder. Directed by Anton Corbijn from Joanna Murray-Smith's own adaptation of her play Switzerland, the film imagines a fictional Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren, all barbed wit and Swiss seclusion) visited by a young literary agent, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), sent to persuade her into writing one final Ripley novel... persuasion that curdles into something considerably more sinister. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson round out the cast. The film is due for release in US cinemas on 23 October, with reports pointing to a UK release on 20 November.

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The next film to emerge from the Oubliette is Basket Case (1981): the debut feature of Frank Henenlotter, a New York exploitation obsessive who spent his youth in the grindhouses of 42nd Street and, with producer Edgar Ievins, put roughly $35,000 of mostly their own money into turning a title he liked into a film he never expected anyone to see.

Shot on 16mm over about 6 months of spare weeks and weekends, in the last years of Times Square as the Deuce, it follows a wide-eyed young man (Kevin Van Hentenryck) who carries his formerly conjoined and decidedly ill-tempered twin around town in a wicker basket on a revenge tour of the surgeons who split them apart.

It arrived in 1982 amid the slasher boom, with a first distributor keen to trim the blood, before a Texas midnight show, Joe Bob Briggs and a long run at New York's Waverly turned it into a midnight staple and, after a well-timed $19.95 VHS, a fixture of fans' bedrooms. It has since been restored by the Museum of Modern Art, which might be the strangest plot twist in the whole saga. But does the film, which has been on Dan's watchlist since we started the podcast, deserve a place in the world outside the Oubliette? Find out!

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Conrad's TIFF adventure with special guest Joe Lipsett continues with Kick On – the sophomore feature from Nick Kozakis, who cut his teeth directing music videos before making Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism. It follows Eden and her three friends, who decide to "kick on" after a big night out, ending up at the opulent, drug-stuffed lair of a mobster's son. Every genre fan knows this is a bad idea. What starts as a party quickly spirals into a siege, with Markella Kavenagh, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Ras-Samuel and Nikita Chronis caught in a web of paranoia, violence and betrayal that critics have been calling an Australian riff on Green Room. But is it worth seeking out?

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Here's another special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage – and it's particularly apt as we start the countdown to spooky season! Conrad is joined live in the Toronto Metro Convention Centre by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers and Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures to talk about Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series that finally answers a question nobody actually asked: what was Pamela Voorhees up to before she started decapitating camp counsellors? Linda Cardellini takes on the role, playing Pam as a grieving single mother, unable to move past the drowning of her son Jason months earlier, whose fragile routine is upended when two strangers turn up and start digging into her past. Created by Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry) and produced by A24, the eight-episode series streams on Peacock in the US from 15 October, with Sky and NOW bringing it to the UK and Ireland later the same month.

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We're back with another bonus preview from TIFF 2026, and this one's got a title we're not going to be able to say on some podcast directories. Everybody Wants to Fuck Me is the feature debut of writer-director Jonathan Schey, and it stars Taron Egerton as Adam, a London softboi running the full nice-guy playbook: love-bombing, performative sensitivity, and then ghosting women the morning after. Then a night with a mysterious stranger flips the premise on its head, and every woman he meets suddenly wants him, inescapably and with mounting menace. Literally.

Jessica Henwick, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Charly Clive and Sophie Simnett round out the cast, and the film slides from sex comedy into paranoia thriller and briefly body horror along the way. It picked up strong word of mouth out of Toronto and sparked early reports of a bidding war, though as of our last check nobody's actually bought it yet. Studiocanal already has the UK, with a 2027 release pencilled in and no firm date. This one's going to sit on the shelf a while, but we wanted to get our thoughts down before Toronto fades from memory. And it's one you should have on your radar.

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Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins Conrad on this episode for a spoiler-free bonus review of Mike Flanagan's new eight-part streaming series adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, which lands on Amazon Prime on Friday 7 October.

Flanagan is no stranger to King adaptations, having tackled Gerald's Game, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck, but it seemed an odd move to take on the author's first novel – one that already yielded a celebrated Brian De Palma film in 1976, as well as several less-than-celebrated remakes.

The new production features Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, Samantha Sloyan as her doomsday prepper mother, Margaret White (you'll remember Sloyan from Flanagan's Midnight Mass – probably with a shudder), Siena Agudong as schoolmate Sue Snell, Alison Thornton as the bully Chris Hargensen, and Matthew Lillard as the school principal. We all know roughly how prom night goes, but from episodes 1 and 2, we're mostly excited about how much Flanagan will find to say on the way there...

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Odd Thomas (2013) was Stephen Sommers' first film in 4 years and his first outside the studio-blockbuster machine since 1998's Deep Rising, a curious pivot for the man who built The Mummy franchise and Van Helsing on the twin pillars of CGI and momentum. Adapting Dean Koontz's bestselling 2003 novel, the first of what became a 7-book series, Sommers wrote the screenplay entirely on spec, gambling that it might be the only way to win over an author famously sceptical of what Hollywood tends to do to his work, and secured the late Anton Yelchin as his lead.

The result is less monster-movie spectacle than small-town ghost-whisperer romance with a body count: Odd is a short-order cook in the fictional desert town of Pico Mundo who can see the dead... as well as the invisible creatures that flock to scenes of impending violence. When those harbingers of doom start swarming a stranger in unprecedented numbers, Odd and his girlfriend Stormy have to work out what's coming before it arrives. Where the story goes from there, in a film so preoccupied with fate and free will, is best left for you to find out. But does the film deserve to escape the Oubliette? Find out!

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Event Horizon arrived in cinemas in August 1997 as the third feature from Paul W. S. Anderson, a British director fresh off the surprise success of Mortal Kombat and, evidently, determined to prove there was more to him than adapting a fighting game, so naturally he followed it up with a haunted-house movie set on a spaceship, from a script by first-time writer Philip Eisner that had been quietly sharpened by Se7en's Andrew Kevin Walker along the way. Rushed through post-production so Paramount could clear the release calendar for a certain iceberg-based prestige picture later that year, it stars Laurence Fishburne and the late, much-missed Sam Neill as, respectively, the no-nonsense rescue captain and the scientist whose grip on reality is doing considerably worse than his ship's hull integrity, sent to reclaim a vessel that vanished 7 years earlier testing an engine nobody fully understood, and which has now come home with a great many unanswered questions and, as it turns out, appreciably worse manners than it left with. But does it deserve a return trip from the oubliette? Find out!

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Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre, the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt, so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait.

Pierre-Yves Cardinal (Tom at the Farm) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after cancer surgery and already fraying at the edges from sheer boredom, when Darius (Bilel Chegrani) gets wheeled into the other bed following a shooting. He's supposed to be in a coma, but Stan can hear him making threats... Is it the cancer? The drugs? Or something else?

It's billed as visceral and darkly comedic, which is festival-speak for "someone's grip on reality is about to slip and we'll enjoy watching it happen." We'll grant this one honorary genre status even though it's shelved as a comedy thriller rather than straight horror, because two men trapped in a room while one of them slowly convinces himself the other is trying to kill him is a premise we're all familiar with. Besides, there's graphic surgery footage!

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Lexi Amoriello, creator of Movie Recs by Lex, visits the Oubliette and returns with Seconds – made in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, fresh off the Cold War fever dreams of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, and here pairing up with the great James Wong Howe for one last, extraordinary black-and-white swan song apiece. Seconds is the sort of film that genre fans tend to discover a decade after everyone insists it was always a classic, largely because it wasn't: it was booed at Cannes, quietly dumped by Paramount, and left to rot for 30 years before Criterion and the National Film Registry got around to correcting the record. Adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely's 1963 novel, it asks a disarmingly simple question: what if you could buy a second life, no strings attached? With a truly game Rock Hudson doing career-best work as the walking punchline to that question, the film spends the rest of its runtime methodically proving that there is, in fact, always a string attached. But does it deserve a second chance beyond the Oubliette? Find out!

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Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the third screen version of Burnett's 1905 novel after outings for Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, follows Sara Crewe, a wealthy, warmly imaginative girl deposited at a New York boarding school while her father serves in the First World War — and what happens to both her fortunes and her sense of self once the money, and the news from the front, turn bad. It bombed at the box office on release in May 1995, picked up two Oscar nominations anyway, and quietly became the film Cuarón has called his personal favourite of everything he's directed. But does it deserve to let out of the Oubliette? Find out!

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Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive, returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Catherine Valmont, a wealthy young woman two years in her grave, who reconnects with her devoted childhood friend Hélène while working out exactly what a person in her condition needs to survive – but the execution is unmistakably his own: unhurried, melancholic, and considerably bloodier than anything he'd attempted before, landing somewhere between a slasher movie and a tragic romance without ever quite settling on which one it wants to be, which is, frankly, half the fun. But, crucially, does it deserve wander dreamily out of the oubliette? Find out!

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Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam (The Burning) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner with the unfortunate name Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), chasing a heart-eating killer that may not be entirely human. All shot on a shoestring in condemned East End warehouses standing in for a drowned metropolis, with Kim Cattrall as the guilt-ridden love interest, Split Second has Blade director Stephen Norrington's monster effects, a script by then-unknown Gary Scott Thompson (long before he struck gold with The Fast and the Furious) from a spec script that began life as an entirely different, present-day occult thriller. But is it a little seen future noir treat that deserves more attention, or is it a soggy assemblage of other, better films? Find out!

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Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row, joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, where memory, guilt, and desire take physical form in ways that are equal parts sci-fi premise and emotional trap. It's a studio movie with art-film discipline, a romance wrapped inside an existential problem, and an example of the marketing department losing a fight it never fully understood. It underperformed badly at the box office and has largely served as a footnote to discussions of the Tarkovsky original, in the "oh yeah, that happened" vein, but does it deserve to be reassessed on its own merits? Find out!

Alex prepared a special treat for listeners over on Seventh Row: a suggestion for an ideal sci-fi comedy film to watch next after Solaris in which the genders of the main characters are swapped. What to find out more? Head on over to http://seventh-row.com/oubliette to find out more!

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Hollywood's penchant for revisiting failed franchises this summer has awakened a number of 80s oddities in the oubliette! This time, Amanda Jane Stern joins us to revisit the Salkinds' 1984 attempt at a Superman spin-off: Supergirl, featuring Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee, Faye Dunaway as the witchy Selena, and Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, Marc McClure, and others filling out a very British, very prestige-flavoured comic-book fever dream. Much like Masters of the Universe (1987), it's a film about a missing macguffin, a displaced hero from an alien world navigating 80s America, and the familiar fantasy of inherited power being folded into an Americana quest narrative – all while trying to look serious enough to justify its budget and strange enough to justify its existence. Should Supergirl be set free to soar into heroism, or should it be locked away in the Phantom Zone? Find out!

Check out Amanda Jane Stern's projects at https://www.amandajanestern.com/

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For our 200th episode, we're revisiting the film that inspired our podcast name!

David Goelz of The Muppets joins us as our very special guest to celebrating the 40th anniversary of Labyrinth. The film paired Jim Henson’s creature-shop with a Terry Jones screenplay, George Lucas producing, Brian Froud's world-building, and David Bowie doing what only Bowie could plausibly do: play a goblin king as if he were headlining a particularly sinister school dance. Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah, annoyed beyond reason at being asked to babysit, spends the film crossing a maze filled with sarcastic puppets, impossible architecture, and a villain who seems to believe charisma and a Limahl fright wig is a substitute for governance.

It recouped less than half its budget at the box office, but is the lighter companion to The Dark Crystal (1982) a delightful adventure that rightfully found a devoted audience on VHS, or should it be locked in its own oubliette? Find out!

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To mark the release of the new Masters of the Universe film, Matt Swaford of Reklaimer's Vintage Toys joins us to revisit Cannon Films' notorious attempt to launch the cinematic branch of Mattel's toy franchise in 1987. Featuring an all-star cast of Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, James 'Mr Strickland' Tolkan, a pre-Voyager Robert Duncan MacNeill, and pre-almost everything Courteney Cox, the film is most remembered for disappointing fans of the sword and sorcery sci-fi mash-up by setting most of the action in a school gymnasium on present day Earth, and replacing Orko and Battle Cat with the more budget-friendly Billy Barty in an orange troll make-up.

But is it an unfairly maligned hidden gem or a best-forgotten example of 80s genre excess on the cheap? Find out!

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Legendary actor and creature performer Doug Jones and independent filmmaker Derek Maki join Dan and Conrad to reminisce about Bug Buster (1998), a late-90s horror-comedy in which a quaint lakeside town is terrorised by mutant insects. The incredible cast combines a pre-Knocked Up Katherine Heigl with Randy Quaid, Star Trek alumni James Doohan and George Takei, Meredith Salenger, and – of course – Doug Jones as the big bad: Mother Bug! The movie sits squarely in the era when creature features were increasingly living on video rather than in theaters, and it builds its appeal from ecological panic, practical-effects goo, and the deliciously overripe promise that a “former military man” might somehow sort out an insect apocalypse with enough swagger.

You can follow and support Derek's documentary on Doug's incredible career by visiting https://www.getmedougjones.com/ and adding it to your watchlist on imdb. The Kickstarter campaign kicks off on Monday 18 May.

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Dan is back from vacation and treats us to Phenomena (1985) – a supernatural giallo from Dario Argento that features a pre-Labyrinth Jennifer Connelly in a star-making lead as an insect-loving teenager who arrives at a Swiss girls’ school only to sleepwalk into a serial murder case that only becomes more bizarre as the story unravels. Released by New Line Cinema in the U.S. as Creepers (shorn of 30 minutes of its running time), Phenomena emerged in Argento’s most-celebrated period, with the director producing and co-writing with Franco Ferrini, Donald Pleasence as the obligatory learned eccentric, and a soundtrack that behaves like it's had one espresso too many. But is it an under-appreciated piece of Italian art, or an excessive and unruly misstep? Find out!

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