Bryan and Dave take a look at one of the deepest of cult movie deep cuts, The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris, a story about fame, guilt, and Olivia Newton John. It’s the story of a chance encounter with a strange young man one day in Beaver, Utah in 1979 that came to determine the entire trajectory of its director’s life. For reasons that we’ll dig into in the episode the movie is a document of the natural human inclination to seek fame, the natural human inclination to consider how our actions impact the lives of others, and maybe how we become our own worst enemies in the absence of answers. Harris, obsessed with the subject of his own work but unable to speak to him, works out his issues and tries to fill in the blanks as he remakes his own documentary twice with the help of Sean Penn and then again with Crispin Glover. It all culminates in a one-of-a-kind hybrid of documentary and scripted drama that you’re most likely going to become obsessed with.

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99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing.

Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over as a viable box office draw and positions him to be the prime action movie star of the 90's. It also represents the final death rattle of Cannon Films after a decade of bad business practice finally caught up with them.

Featuring a performance from Robert Guillaume that this movie clearly does not deserve, it's also full of side characters that are every bit as magnetic as JCVD.

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Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a director who stradfastly refused to let it be purely horrifying, instead putting the focus on high-flying visual style and storybook production values. You've never seen so many matte paintings. It's a real challenge to talk about a movie so rich in visual aesthetic but we're going to do our best to break it all down.

We close out our two part examination of the Godzilla/King Ghidorah beef with a close look at the Heisei era movie where Americans from the future presume to travel back in time and destroy Japan with a monstrous weapon and then force what's left over to conform to their political and economic interests. This time around the America/Japan relationship is bopped real hard on the nose. We also discuss the cultural and social conditions of Japan at the time which made American attitudes toward Japan so weird and more than a little racist. Don't worry though, there's plenty of chatter about Godzilla, King Ghidorah and the peerless thrill of big, loud, Japanese special effects movies.

Join us this week as we take a trip to Japan to talk Godzilla. This is the movie that introduced the world to Godzilla's arch-nemesis, Ghidorah, the floppiest golden dragon the world has ever seen. We also get short changed on Mothra, are delighted by those little fairy ladies who summon her, and can't help but talk shit about Rodan, one of the least compelling Godzilla monsters out there. You'll learn about Kaiju, Bryan will struggle to pronounce some Japanese words, and we'll tell you all about the several eras of Godzilla. We assure you nothing less than good time.

This week, Bryan and Dave are joined by Jonny Atkinson of Uy Que Horror to talk He-Man as they take a real deep dive into the movie that drove the final nail into the Cannon Group's coffin, Masters of the Universe. We discuss the movie's enduring status as a cult film against all odds, the intense nostalgia high of a movie that seems to have gotten better with age, the utterly bonkers history of the Cannon Group, a production company that flew too close to the sun, as well as run down the troubling allegations facing the film's director, Gary Goddard.

Bryan and Dave conclude their John Carpenter double feature with a look at his first proper feature, Assault on Precinct 13 a movie so egregiously ripped off by other action movies that it hardly matters that Carpenter ripped it off of other action movies. Seeking to make a proper western in the style of his favorite Howard Hawks movies but pressed by budget, Carpenter lifted moves from his then brand-new Escape From New York script with Nick Castle and turned in the independent action movie that would come to redefine the modern siege movie. Is it any good? Well, yeah. Of course it is. Could it be better? Absolutely. Precinct 13 is wobbly as hell, with fairly serious pacing problems but every shot, every scene, is a preview of the best that John Carpenter has to offer the world. Listen for our usual deep analysis and historical context relating to the absolutely rotten state of things as it relates to the Los Angeles Police Department.

This week we're getting sloppy and erotic as we break down David Cronenberg's 1996 antithesis to the 90's erotic thriller, Crash, a movie about how people can't get off unless they're about to die horribly in a car accident. Adapted from J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name, which was an extension of his short story in the collection The Atrocity Exhibition, the film stars James Spader doing his best to look like making sweet, sweet love to a woman's leg wound is something he's really into. It also bring us Elias Koteas in his second appearance on the pod steaming up the windows with his menacing sexuality and Holly Hunter, taking the strange journey into the world of sexy death.

Sound strange? Maybe more than a little off-putting? You have no idea. Listen to the episode for the full scope of the struggle.