Episodes

In this Patrons' choice episode, we're exposing ourselves to Cure (1997) – the film that announced Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of the most unsettling voices in modern horror. Set in Tokyo at the tail end of Japan's "lost decade", it follows weary detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) as he investigates a stri...

Released in 1990, Hardware is the abrasive feature debut of cult filmmaker Richard Stanley. Starring Stacey Travis as sculptor Jill and Dylan McDermott as desert drifter Mo, the film begins with a romantic gesture that – through the entirely avoidable gift of salvaged military hardware – turns into ...

By popular demand, we're celebrating the release of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! by taking a look back at Franc Roddam's The Bride (1985). This mid-80s take on Mary Shelley’s mythic creation project tellingly got the budget of a period romance, but likely only because it had a new romantic pop sta...

Writer Octavio López Sanjuán joins us as we discover Monster in the Closet (1986), an affectionate pastiche of atomic age monster movies from Troma Entertainment. A string of baffling murders in wardrobes draws a plucky San Francisco obituary writer (Donald Grant) into the most terrifying assignment...

Our second film for this year will also be our second dip of the toe into the filmography of Lucio Fulci (see episode 158 for our take on Conquest , his bonkers fantasy adventure, with our special guest Vincenzo Natali). Don’t Torture a Duckling ( Non si sevizia un paperino , 1972) is remembered as ...

Happy New Year! Michael French of RetroBlasting joins us for an exciting trip with Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), directed by John Hough (of Watcher in the Woods and The Legend of Hell House fame). It's an ambitious and eccentric British fantasy-adventure that attempts to translate W. E. Johns’...

Happy holidays! Our festive special this year focuses on The Curse of the Cat People (1944), directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise (of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Haunting fame), and produced by Val Lewton for RKO – a sequel that daringly abandons the horror conventions of its pr...

Our final patrons' choice episode for 2025 is the 1982 VHS relic The Flight of Dragons from TV special animation legends Rankin/Bass. Based loosely on the speculative science book by Peter Dickinson and the fantasy novels of Gordon R. Dickson, the film sends the author insert character on a quest to...

In the last of our series of early previews of forthcoming films, gleaned from Conrad's time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) under the wing of Toronto native and film critic extraordinaire, Joe Lipsett, we're looking at two gold-and-turquoise whimsical fantasies: Dust Bunny and Ete...

Dead Birds (2004), directed by Alex Turner and produced during the early-2000s boom in grimy, low-budget horror, is a Confederate-era ghost story that alternates between jump scares for a slow rot of dread and bad decisions. It follows a group of Civil War deserters – played by E.T. 's Henry Thomas,...

We're back with our penultimate pair of exciting early previews of forthcoming attractions, gleaned from Conrad's time with Joe Lipsett at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This time, the connection between them is simpler: they both feature one of Conrad's favourite actors, 1917 's Ge...

Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers joins Conrad again for another couple of advance previews of films at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and it's another case of spotting a couple of movies with a similar premise. In this case, it's women going to an isolated manor house for some form of w...