Mixed Review

Okay, Halloween-heads and Michael Myers ... enjoyers! Three years after our autopsy of the Halloween series, we're back with the first of two addendums: Halloween Kills.

On this day, we celebrate Tom Hanks by viewing His scripture, Turner & Hooch, a movie in which He befriends an ugly dog and shoots people in a warehouse. Amen.

With our take on Gary J. Tunnicliffe's Hellraiser: Judgement, we say goodbye to a franchise that spanned space, time, heaven, hell, and the supermarket dollar DVD bin.

Six years after the release of Hellraiser: Hellworld, Dimension's Bob Weinstein discovered that the studio was about to lose the rights to the property. In three weeks, a skeleton crew of nobodies put together Hellraiser: Revelations, an ashcan copy for the ages.

In Hellraiser: Bloodline, Pinhead goes to space. In Hellraiser: Hellworld, Pinhead goes to ... cyberspace. Katheryn Winnick, Henry Cavill, and Lance Henriksen star in what is best described as "the eighth Hellraiser movie."

The Hellraiser series continues with a trip to Romania, where scream queen Kari Wuhrer opens the puzzle box, reducing her existence to a series of dream sequences and hallucinations ... and it spells doom for her character, too!

We return from sabbatical to discuss the sixth Pinhead movie and compare refrigerator prices.

The Hellraiser series goes straight to home video with this Scott Derrickson thriller hastily rewritten as a Cenobite vehicle. Pinhead is back, and so are his inane speeches, in this twisting turning fever dream of garbage. Burn on!

We've been to hell and back. Now, we journey onwards to .. SPACE! And 18th century Paris. And also 1996? Adam Scott stars, Alan Smithee directs, and we wonder why any of it happened in the first place.

Set in New York City and filmed almost entirely in Greensboro, North Carolina, this second sequel earns its place in the history books for introducing audiences to "CD Cenobite" and "Camerahead Cenobite." We're still waiting for the Happy Meal cross-promotion.

The Hellraiser series continues with more puzzle boxes, new and terrifying Cenobites, and a whole slew of intricate matte paintings as we join Pinhead, Chatterer and .. Female Cenobite? .. in 1987's Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

You summoned us. We came. And in the first of a series of ten Pinheadzapoppin' episodes, we discuss Clive Barker's original 1987 horror masterpiece, Hellraiser.

Social distancing means we're all spending more time at home, so it's a perfect time to watch a few movies about domesticity interrupted. In Hider in the House (1989), Gary Busey takes up residence in Mimi Rogers' attic and in The Vagrant (1992), Bill Paxton finds his new home to be insufficient protection against an evil drifter.

In times like these, it's good to remember the important things: Family. Friends. Mediocre Harrison Ford movies released in the late 20th century. This time around, we cover Six Days Seven Nights, co-starring Anne Heche, and What Lies Beneath, co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

In which we release our Christmas episode after the holiday is over but BEFORE the new year, so we’re technically not completely out of bounds. Anyway, Santa with Muscles is a bad movie starring Hulk Hogan and we watched it.

This Hanksgiving, we badmouth Joe Dante's cult favorite The 'Burbs and post the discussion online. I'm sure there's an audience for this!

Nightgowns, pillow fights, and power drills straight to the sternum! This is Halloween night, and we're huddled around the dinner table, flashlights lit underneath our chins, to extol the praises of the only '80s slasher franchise produced and directed by women: Slumber Party Massacre.

So it's come to this. Favreau vs. Black. Norrington vs. Mangold. Raimi vs. Watts. Titans clash. Franchises fall. Only one can stand above the rest. Will The Avengers win in a landslide? Can anything else possibly be as awesome as Blade? Wait, Iron Man 2 beat Black Panther? With only two no. 1 seeds remaining, the final battle has finally arrived.

The pain train goes from 0 to 60 when we eliminate some of the MCU's best movies in this chaotic round of 32. Will the Guardians move on? Will Blade continue to steamroll everything in its path? Can people shut up about Captain America: The Winter Soldier already? Will we ever watch a Marvel movie again?

As we continue our quest to crown the greatest Marvel movie of all time, we bully Blade: Trinity, demolish Daredevil, harass Howard the Duck, eviscerate Venom, and massacre the only two superhero movies Marc Webb will ever be allowed to make. Plus, we hand out a very special no-prize to the worst performance we witnessed along the way.

This it it - all 68 Marvel Movies, ranked, sorted, and tossed aside like so many cardboard Hugh Jackman movie theater standups. From X-Men to The Avengers, from The Incredible Hulk to just Hulk to The Incredible Hulk again, from The Fantastic Four to Fantastic Four to Fant4stic - this is every theatrically-released movie based on a Marvel Comics property - and then some - whittled down March Madness-style until we discover which adaptation bests the rest.

With the release of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and its retelling of the Manson murders dredging traumatic history back into the public eye, we sat down to watch three movies released in the decade following the horrifying and world-changing events of August 1969. Two of them are horror movies using Manson figures as catalysts for gruesome violence (I Drink Your Blood, Deathmaster) and the third is a made-for-TV retelling of the lengthy Manson trial that eventually indicted the hippie guru and his followers (Helter Skelter). Full episode credits can be found at mixedreviewpodcast.com

You will believe a shark can roar. You will believe Dennis Quaid can find gainful employment at SeaWorld. You will believe a shark is trying to kill every member of your immediate family for reasons only a shark can understand. In this episode, we cover Jaws (1975), Jaws 2 (1977), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

Ignored upon released, rediscovered on video, and blithely discarded in the trash bin of late '80s animation outliers, The Brave Little Toaster retains a cult following of grown adults swearing up and down its superiority to Toy Story, an actual cinematic achievement. But is there still something to be said for these anthropomorphized dumpster appliances? Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

It's about time one of these movie podcasts covered Showgirls. We're definitely the first to do so. Full episode credits available on mixedreviewpodcast.com

After the double successes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero returned to the salt mine to unearth an unholy vision of the American apocalypse: Day of the Dead. Roundly dismissed by critics in 1985, its offbeat charms have generated a whole new cadre of admirers. Does it deserve its new devotees? Or should it CHOKE ON EM? With Theron Seckington. Music:"News Theme" and "District Four" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"Walk to the Ritz/Sarah at the Ritz" by John Harrison, Day of the Dead: Original Movie Soundtrack

Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, released one year apart, star Juliette Lewis and feature a journalist attempting to document and define evil. One is a thriller, the other a barrage of images, a cacophony of sound, a prescient nightmare of oppressive finality. One is forgotten, the other too controversial to embrace. Drunk on shandies, we try to exhume the bodies and sift through the wreckage left in their wake.

Move beyond the lungs, peer past the kidneys, climb down the ribcage and behold ... there's a little man inside our livers! Telling us to drink more! A few of us become audibly intoxicated during a throaty discussion of three science fiction films that take place inside the following: a random Russian guy (Fantastic Voyage, 1966); Martin Short (Innerspace, 1987); and Bill Murray (Osmosis Jones, 2001).

In 1939, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None set a new standard for mystery novels. 60 years later, some beer-swilling Yanks  began producing Americanized retellings in the form of Identity (2003), Mindhunters (2004) and Sabotage (2014), three brainless thrillers featuring excessive gore, foul-mouthed arseholes, and absolute creative bankruptcy. Kevin and William spend far too much time answering one question: Why? Why in pluperfect hell would you pee on a literary masterwork?

Why, in the middle of the 1990s, did Sinbad happen? And why did he just as suddenly disappear? We struggle with these questions while discussing FIRST KID and SHAZAAM, two family comedies about sad little white boys who meet a big lovable goofball who unexpectedly turns their lives around.

Corbin calls in from Benson, Arizona to wax poetic over Michael Curtiz's Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Andre De Toth's House of Wax (1953) and Jaume Collet-Serra's House of Wax (2005). No previous episode can hold a candle to this one - you're about to get an earful! Because wax.

Whether it's cleaning up street scum with a harpoon gun, cleaning up street scum via vehicular homicide, or cleaning up street scum by proxy through Sondra Locke, Clint Eastwood makes it look cool as ice. In this extra-extra special 51st episode of Mixed Review, we drag our feet through the remainder of the Dirty Harry movies: Sudden Impact (1983) with Sondra Locke and The Dead Pool (1988) with Jim Carrey, Patricia Clarkson, and Liam Neeson.

Whether it's chewing a hot dog in DIRTY HARRY (1971), blowing up Hal Holbrook in MAGNUM FORCE (1973), or claiming that women are unfit for police field duty in THE ENFORCER (1976), Clint Eastwood makes it look cool as ice. In this very special 50th episode of Mixed Review, we immediately alienate the Dirty Harry franchise's core audience by denouncing what Pauline Kael called out as "fascism" in Eastwood's conservative fantasy of the Wild West that was post-hippie San Francisco.

It's a science fiction double feature when we experience twin rock operas: Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), each featuring outlandish characters and situations and each appealing to very different audiences.

On a very special extra-intoxicated episode, we take a look back at the death and failed resurrection of Harrison Ford's career as a leading man on the first, and hopefully only, Harrison Hate Watch. If you've ever wanted someone to explain the plots of Hollywood Homicide and Firewall to you amidst a smattering of giggles, drop everything and slam that PLAY button, you big weirdo.

In a marathon session scored by Luciano Pavarotti's 2021 comeback record, the gang discusses two movies that employ anachronistic soundtracks, A Knight's Tale (2001) and Marie Antoinette (2006).

There are many Christmas Carols. Some are good. Some star Jim Carrey. To find out which are worth you and your family's time this holiday season, Kevin and William took an ill-advised swim in the deep end, watching no less than nine Carols and duking it out March Madness-style to see which adaptations get buried with a sprig of holly in their heart and which go home with Tiny Tim's giant goose.

In celebration of the most commercial time of year, we visit the surprisingly libertarian utopia of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol by watching three adaptations: A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott, Scrooged (1988) starring Bill Murray, and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) starring Michael Caine and a whole bunch of singing Muppets.

Pour yourself a tequila and soda (Tom's favorite drink, naturally) and celebrate the most magical holiday of them all by reading from the Book of Hanks, chapters The Money Pit (1986), Road to Perdition (2002), and The Da Vinci Code (2006).

We had the time of our lives discussing Dirty Dancing (1987), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) and the 2017 made-for-TV musical version of the original. We compare performances, plots, and most importantly, dance montages that begin in hesitance and end in pure expressions of love, sex, and self. There are a lot of those.

Our series on the Halloween franchise concludes with our dissections of Jamie Lee Curtis' long-awaited returns to Haddonfield (Halloween: H2O (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Halloween (2018)) and a final word on the movies as a whole, including a rundown of which to seek and which to skip and a comparison to the Friday the 13th films.

Bad words and B-movie stars abound as director Rob Zombie is handed the keys to the franchise and quickly makes it his own, for better or worse, with Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009).

After each falling into a comatose state, the four of us awaken exactly one week later, tattooed with the Mark of Thorn, to discuss Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995).

In the first of a four-part series on the Halloween franchise, we discuss John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II (1981), and Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

Our interstellar travels bring us to John Carpenter's 1974 directorial debut, Dark Star, co-written by and starring future Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon.

This week, we gag on Jell-O shots and discuss John Hughes' 1985 movie Weird Science, a horny teen comedy (seemingly written by horny teens) starring Kelly LeBrock, who describes her character as "Mary Poppins with breasts." Indeed.

Corbin returns to the podcast to help hunt down Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk, a mishmash of heavy adult themes, lengthy CGI battle sequences, and Nick Nolte biting into a cable and absorbing all the electricity in San Francisco.

The movie made a bundle, the soundtrack won a Grammy, and Zach Braff walked away with indie cred. Only in 2004 could Garden State become a runaway success, and only in 2018 could it maintain such a deep critical divide: Some love it; some hate it; we drink to forget.

An attempt by directors John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller to update the classic TV series with 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie results in three accidental deaths and charges of manslaughter. 25 years later, we discuss how its legacy has changed Hollywood and wonder whether Spielberg should be imprisoned for directing "Kick the Can".

Kevin loses his composure, William loses his mind, and Silas is just lost as we run down Wayne Newton/Knight/Kramer's 2006 thriller Running Scared, starring the late Paul Walker and the early Vera Farmiga.