Jen and Tim wicky-wicky-watch a mostly loathed tentpole film from 1999, The Giant Mechanical Spider Invasion, aka Jon Peters’ Wild Wild West (come on, it might as well have his name right above the title).
The editing is terrible! Tim and Jen howl at the moon, which is an ovoid shape, and critique the amateurish werewolf film Lycan Colony, at least when they can make out what’s onscreen. Take a drink every time Tim says the editing is terrible!
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See Rondo Hatton in The Brute Man, but let the MST3k crew accompany you through this murky noir.
The Cocoanut Grove fire has been widely covered in media. The Fascinating Horror channel has an excellent recounting of the disaster, in the dispassionate and non-sensationalized style of the best YouTube channels.
This 1979 BBC biography of Errol Flynn offers illuminating interviews with people who knew him, including David Niven, Olivia de Havilland, and his daughter Deirdre.
You can purchase a copy of the Traveller supplement featuring “Vehicle Handbook: Airships of the Imperium” by a certain Tim H. at DriveThruRPG. Intrigued by the endless possibilities of tabletop space travel? Find more resources Tim created for Traveller at his personal website!
Several Species of English Actors Gathered Together in a Cave and Hiding From a Pict
Tim and Jen enlist Gaius of the wonderful Tribunate channel on YouTube to help unearth a Romans-vs.-Picts historical epic that vanished like the Ninth Legion, Centurion.
If you perked up your ears when Jen mentioned Carry On Cleo, go check out our survey of the Carry On franchise, featuring the inimitable Bitter Karella!
Tim and Jen invite their favorite internet crank Bitter Karella to help them analyze a bewildering major release that no one liked, Argylle. It’s so confounding a project, it leads Karella to use the phrase “Brechtian distancing mechanism.”
Listen to our Apple TV+ episode, in which we rend the entire platform to filth. Fuck you, Tim Apple!
Read this Deadline article about the production and marvel at how out of touch these people sound. At the end, director Matthew Vaughn throws in an enthusiastic endorsement of the Apple Vision Pro.
For audiences clamoring for Star Wars, Sorcerer was a bridge too far
Tim and Jen finally give the departed William Friedkin a proper sendoff with a discussion of his once-maligned masterpiece, Sorcerer. Guest Darren Herczeg provides his usual able assistance.
To clear up an anecdote Jen related during the episode: she says that Paramount president Charles Bluhdorn freaked out when he spotted himself in the group photo of oil company executives in a scene from Sorcerer. The source of this story is screenwriter Walon Green, who describes Bluhdorn as having had a “shit hemorrhage” during the screening. However, a review of the offending scene reveals only other Gulf+Western execs, not Bluhdorn.
“To me, they looked like a bunch of thugs,” Friedkin said (as quoted in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls).
Catch the documentary Friedkin Uncut on Tubi, where the man himself evokes Hitler in the first five minutes. We’ll miss you, Billy.
Information wants to be free, but entertainment is $5/month.
Jen and Tim struggle to understand the newly-minted cult status of a flop from Keanu Reeves’ himbo era, the cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic. They also put on hazmat suits and delve into the horror that is the comment section on Dina Meyer’s website.
The doctor who pioneered sanitary practices in medicine was Ignatz Semmelweiss, although these ideas didn’t take hold until the time of Joseph Lister. Additionally, other medical men (like Oliver Wendell Holmes, for one) arrived at similar notions independent of Semmelweiss. The latter, in fact, refused to publish anything about hand washing because he believed these practices to be “self-evident.”
