The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
Tim and Jen aren’t scandalized by infamous teen gross-out comedy Porky’s, it just kind of makes them scratch their heads.
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Someone compiled every Siskel and Ebert review of a Bob Clark film from Murder By Decree to one we actually covered on the show, Loose Cannons. Only the Judd Nelson-starring From the Hip is missing. Maybe they didn’t bother.
Tim and Jen host the freakiest guest they know, the lovable Bitter Karella of Midnight Pals fame, to chat about one of the freakiest movies she knows, Dr. Caligari!
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Screen Anarchy has a wonderful gallery of Caligari director Stephen Sayadian’s work, going all the way back to his earliest days as an editorial illustrator. Included are some reminisces about Dr. Caligari!
Read a 2024 interview with Caligari co-writer Jerry Stahl, in which he speaks candidly about sobriety and being an artist in a world ruled by money.
Jen and Tim unearth one of the most famous unproduced screenplays of all time, Clair Noto’s dark sci-fi tale The Tourist.
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Read the Clair Noto interview that reminded Jen that this screenplay exists!
Read the screenplay itself at the Internet Archive— highly recommended.
You can watch the BBC Moving Pictures segment on The Tourist, featuring the screenwriter herself, on YouTube.
See more of Giger’s concept art for The Tourist at the charmingly Web 1.0 official Giger website.
Jen and Tim swab the deck with a hygiene film straight from the U.S. Navy, The Story of D.E. 733: Ship of Shame. Actually, turns out it’s pretty good, even with all the sores!
See the film in two parts (first reel and second reel) over at the Periscope Film YouTube channel, but be warned that it contains insert shots of male genitalia with symptoms of sexually transmitted infections. Wrap it before you tap it!
Jen says Mike Pence was governor of Iowa when she should have said Indiana. As she is a lifelong coastal elite, the states in the middle of the country just merge into a big blur when she looks at them. Anyway, the HIV outbreak started when Pence balked at funding needle exchanges for injection drug users.
See photos from the wartime U.S. Naval Photographic Services Depot, which produced The Story of D.E. 733.
The song the sailors are singing at the beginning of the film is “Bell Bottom Trousers,” which was adapted from an extremely saucy folk ballad called “Rosemary Lane.” Wikipedia has the original spicy lyrics.
Tim and Jen brave the crowdfunded sequel to Showgirls, a mindbogglingly lengthy auteur statement called Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven.
The entire thing is the work of bit-part Showgirls (the original) actress Rena Riffel, who wrote, directed, edited, and starred in…this. Please don’t be mad at us Rena we love you.
See Rena’s pivotal appearance in Tim’s beloved Fishmasters, the low-budget but charming San Luis Obispo-area TV show mentioned in the episode.
Geeks of Doom had some hilariously wrong information about the film when the first trailer and crowdfunding appeal droppped:
[T]he film is “about stripper who died from a dose of contaminated cocaine. Her brother comes to Frankfurt to find the responsible and revenge.”
We’ve seen it, and it’s not that. Luna Guthrie at Collider treats the movie much more kindly than we do, if you want a different take.
Finally, please watch Jen’s video mashing up R.O.T.O.R. with Midi, Maxi, and Efti, and follow us on YouTube if you’re not sick of us already!
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!
Tim and Jen head back to the pre-prestige-TV cable well with a failed spinoff of Tales From the Crypt called Perversions of Science. Throughout, you can really tell that your hosts would rather be watching a certain Canadian/German co-production.
For just $5 a month, hear it and over 80 more episodes on our Patreon!
Jen was slightly off when she said that HBO has existed since “the mid-to-late 70s”—it launched in 1972.
Mic mentions the Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown kerfuffle in this article about depictions of abortion on American television. And then there’s Maude!
In 1992, Vanity Fair covered the speculation around the circumstances of the death of Hitler’s niece. (Jen thinks he did it.)
If you love Skinemax Farscape as much as we do, listen to our Lexx episode!
Jen and Tim welcome @bitterkarella to talk about a tWisTeD comic book movie, the Spawn before Spawn, Faust: Love of the Damned!
Hear the whole episode at our Patreon and get access to more than 80 other bonus episodes!
Read an interview with director Brian Yuzna to learn more about Fantastic Factory, the production company that brought you that titty inflation scene. He also talks about The Guyver!
If you found yourself confused by our reference to ”Two Wet Bears,“ you can watch it on YouTube. It’s an attempt to pass off a pencil test as a finished animated short, and features almost every year at Jerry Beck’s Worst Cartoons Ever panel at Comic-Con. (Also listen to our episode with Jerry about the Monkees’ sole feature, Head!)
This is the Sara Matthews Bitter Karella was talking about, by the way. Apparently she was uncredited in Repossessed, in spite of her memorable appearance. For shame!
Too much of a pussy for this xXxtreme anti-hero? Why not enjoy our episode with tons more pussy, Cats on Park Avenue!
Tim and Jen remain in the 90s for a look at a dire courtroom drama leavened with gauzy sex scenes, the 1992 Madonna vehicle Body of Evidence.
There are no page numbers in Madonna’s book Sex, but it doesn’t take long to flip through on the Internet Archive if you want to see her eating pizza in the nude!
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers beat Jen to it with a panoply of fake erotic thriller names during the credits for Outlaw [of Gor], episode 519. A personal favorite: “Murder Most Moist.”
Jen and Tim welcome returning guest Darren Herczeg to go to bat for an almost universally loathed Netflix feature, Blonde. Naturally, the trio revel in the film’s grotesque and overt misogyny while twirling their mustaches.
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Jessica Kiang’s review of Blonde over at Film Comment sums up the critical reaction well:
Dominik’s film is a technical marvel, but it’s cold and not a little sinister. It’s also an utterly heartless hoodwink.
There’s no word on whether or not the French documentary that revealed the identity of Marilyn’s biological father will screen in the US. However, according to Variety, an English-language version exists and has been sold to international distributors.