200 – Disclosure

Disclosure
What did you eat, woman?!

Tim and Jen welcome Alex Rancourt of the Saucer Cinema podcast to discuss a concentrated version of the political correctness panic of the 90s, Disclosure.

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If for some reason you need to subject yourself to the gross-out video Alex dropped in the chat while we were recording, here you go: Michael Douglas eats an oyster. 

From 1995, this Vanity Fair article about Michael Douglas covers some of the production of Disclosure. Also highlighted are Douglas’s personal struggles at the time, including a reconciliation with wife Diandra (who’d file for divorce later that year).

If you just can’t get enough 90s tech references, check out this history of SiliconGraphics, the company that created a lot of the computer imagery in Disclosure. It’s a UNIX system! You know this!

For more Michael Douglas (dunno why you want more, but you do you), listen to our episode about The Ghost and the Darkness! 

197 – Our Most Favorites, Episodes 1-100

Jen and Tim pick their top five favorite subjects from the first one hundred episodes of the show. It was supposed to be their most and least faves, but they just talk too damn much! Looks like they gotta record a whole other episode to air their least faves of the first hundred.

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If you watch just one episode of the (sadly few) remaining of the British series Dead of Night, “A Woman Sobbing” should be your pick.

Outsider art enthusiasts: walk, don’t run to catch Romeo and Romeo. It truly is something special.

Horror Express is pretty easy to find, but a lot of poor quality versions are out there. This one is quite nice, however. 

Threads has grown in reputation such that it often appears on streaming services like Shudder and Criterion Channel, but you can always find it at the Internet Archive. 

Ghostwatch, the show that scared an entire country so badly they put it in a lockbox for 25 years, may also be viewed on the Archive! 

Part 2, where we name our least favorites of the first hundred episodes of HYST, will be coming shortly, so stay tuned!

191 – Sorcerer

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.

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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.

Want to hear about another Friedkin flop? The Guardian very much fails on its own merits.

187 – The Guardian

Tree nymph gives local dad wood

Tim and Jen bring back one of horror’s heaviest (lol) hitters to talk about a movie William Friedkin couldn’t be bothered to mention after he made it, The Guardian!

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Tim’s quip about Q’s on Wilshire refers to a 2000 incident in which screenwriter and director Eric Red plowed his Jeep into a crowded bar following a fender bender, killing two people, then attempted to slit his own throat with a piece of glass. The linked LA Weekly article draws some tenuous conclusions between Red’s work and the bloody mess at Q’s, but as of 2023 he appears to have stayed out of trouble and written several novels.

KCRW memorializes Deirdre O’ Donaghue’s incredibly influential playlists with its Bent By Nature podcast. 

The ballerina clown of Venice remains in situ, where it has been since 1989. Presumably, it makes the CVS underneath it easy to find for out-of-towners.

Do you love Tim and Bitter Karella, but have had enough of Jen? Hear the former two discuss a beloved childhood favorite in our Ernest Goes to Camp episode!

184 – Clifford

Pure evil or sublime comedy? The two are closer than you might think.

Jen and Tim come to a tenuous agreement about a once universally loathed Martin Short comedy, Clifford. Also, Tim punches down ruthlessly on a twenty pound miniature pinscher [who could lose a little weight].

Reggie, an asshole minpin
This dog is an asshole.

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The Slate article about Martin Short that riled everyone up may be found here, but if you want to skip right to the synchronized swimming sketch from SNL, you can watch it on Vimeo. 

The Vulture oral history of the making, the release, and the eventual cult fandom around Clifford is as exhaustive a history of the film as one may be expected to tolerate.

DNA specialists identified the Boy in the Box as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, 65 years after his death (be careful if you search for info on the case; the police distributed postmortem photos shortly after he was found in an attempt to generate leads).

Tim is beside himself that Clifford is not this movie.

While Clifford is the exception, why not check out one of our several other episodes about traumatizing children? Or look at this awful little kid from Woodchipper Massacre?

181 – Shakes the Clown

“But…” cries the patient, “I am the writer and the director!”

Jen and Tim quibble over Bobcat Goldthwait’s directorial debut, the seedy comic tale of Shakes the Clown. Also, Jen drops some hard truths about Robin Williams.

Patton Oswalt tells his story about the world’s worst party clown to Conan O’Brien.

Are you new to Have You Seen This? Have you yet to hear the good news about Pervy the Clown? Tune your Roku to B-Movie TV every Friday at midnight!…if you dare.

Or, if you’re subscribed to our Patreon at $5 and up, direct your Pervy-related questions to your hosts in the show Discord!

Apropos of nothing, apparently the children’s show Little Clowns of Happytown was developed by Chuck Lorre, the guy who went on to runaway success with a bunch of sitcoms that Jen hates with every fiber of her being.

Can’t get enough clownin’? Listen to our episode about the Terrifier franchise! 

178 – Brainstorm

“Do I really sound like that?”

Tim and Jen review a film of great technical genius and great vacuity of story: Natalie Wood’s final film, Brainstorm. But Jen liked at least half of it. Also, please send Tim all of your uneaten candy corn.

There’s a rundown on the Showscan process originally intended for Brainstorm from Douglas Trumbull himself on YouTube. Too bad it’s in 360p. This fine Japanese documentary on Trumbull is in much higher quality, though.

If you’re super into the dialectic and want to go beyond Noguchi’s and Lambert’s account of the death of Natalie Wood, former prosecutor Sam Perroni has written a well-researched look into the case called…Brainstorm!

And if you want more mind-bending visuals that weren’t appreciated by the public at the time, listen to our episode on the Wachowskis’ update of Speed Racer!

175 – Cast a Deadly Spell

A disheveled Julianne Moore and Fred Ward from the climax of CAST A DEADLY SPELL (1991)
“I miss the graboids”

Jen and Tim try to say something nice about a pay cable attempt at Lovecraftian horror/comedy, Cast a Deadly Spell. Also, Jen tries and fails to remember the time she massively insulted Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid out of nowhere.

Jen is so dumb she forgot to mention who directed Witch Hunt, the sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell: Paul fucking Schrader. Will we watch it? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Tim confused Peter Scolari of Bosom Buddies with Mark Linn-Baker in Perfect Strangers, or maybe he was thinking of Bronson Pinchot. Does it matter?

Jerry Smith over at Certified Forgotten makes a fan’s case for the movie, so we’ll include it as a concession to an imaginary genre podcast Fairness Doctrine.

Finally, for more throwback horror, try our episode on the first Kolchak telefilm, The Night Stalker! 

172 – Gattaca

Gattaca
Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawk or maybe Jude Law

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Tim and Jen have a mild and cordial disagreement about Truman Show screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s flop first feature: Gattaca.

The Cinemaholic has an explainer for the ending, just in case you’re stupid.

The studio attempted to sell the film as a sci-fi thriller, going by the trailer. See it in 4K over at YouTube. Am I crazy, or is that Richard Kiley narrating for a touch of educational-television believability? Guess they spared no expense!

In an interview snippet, Gattaca cinematographer Slawomir Idziak talks about working on an episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s televised masterpiece, Dekalog.

Finally, if you want to hear our episode on George Romero’s Martin, it’s also free! (But first come to our Discord and talk to Tim about Traveller.)

166 – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Russell Crowe aboard the Surprise in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Tim and Jen discuss a beloved epic whose time has come, the Peter Weir masterpiece Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World!

The GQ article mentioned appears to be yet more proof of the widespread affection for this film.

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.”

If you want to read about Grover Cleveland getting surgery at sea and see some icky-yet-illumunating photos, the New York Academy of Medicine has a good blog post about it. If you want more, the book Jen mentioned is called The President is a Sick Man, and author Matthew Algeo answered questions about it in this C-SPAN presentation.

And finally, if you love Russell Crowe as much as we do, listen to our chat about an early starring role for him, Virtuosity!