219 – Our Worst Favorites, Episodes 101-200

Our Worst Favorites 101-200

Having spoken about their most favorite topics from the last one hundred episodes, Tim and Jen scrape the bottom of the barrel for their worst favorites.

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Lexx, Witch Hunt, and Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus may all be viewed at the Internet Archive.

The game Jen mentioned is indeed Warlords and you can play it online with those heart-stopping Atari graphics and everything!

Curious about our worst faves from episodes 1-100? Listen here, and find our favorites from the first 100 episodes here!

218 – Our Most Favorites, Episodes 101-200

HYST Most Favorite!

Jen and Tim reflect on the last one hundred episodes (holy crap, we made it to 200 and beyond!) and each chooses five favorites from the mixed bag!

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On YouTube, you can watch Penda’s Fen, The Jericho Mile, and Pavel Klushantsev’s delightful Planet of Storms.

Tubi has the taut thriller Money Movers, as well as the unjustly overlooked Heart of Midnight and George Romero’s feminist drama Season of the Witch.

We also chose our most and worst favorites for the first one hundred episodes— take a further look back with us!

217 – Phase IV

…it’s no picnic!

Tim and Jen invite Alex Rancourt of the Saucer Cinema podcast to marvel at Saul Bass‘s disquieting sci-fi dreamscape, Phase IV!

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View the alternate ending that should have been the theatrical ending to Phase IV on YouTube.

A couple of interesting side notes about the Oscar-winning faux documentary Alex mentioned, The Hellstrom Chronicle: it was conceived and executive produced by David L. Wolper, the TV stalwart who shepherded massively successful television miniseries like Roots and The Thorn Birds, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Additionally, Walon Green, the screenwriter perhaps best known for William Friedkin‘s sleeper masterpiece Sorcerer, co-directed and produced the film.

A quick web search proved that the busty wasp mentioned by Alex isn’t real, except perhaps in our hearts.

We alluded briefly to this article at Dennis Cooper’s blog discussing film treatments of LSD, with a fabulous collection of acid-related GIFs accompanying.

216 – Max Knight: Ultra Spy – Part 2

My god… it’s full of polygons!

Jen and Tim doggedly return to the remnants of Max Knight: Ultra Spy in hopes that it can be archived on a Zip disk and forgotten.

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Missed part one of our deep dive? Find it here! Wanna see the movie? “Log in” to the “Information Superhighway” and “point” your “browser” to the Internet Archive!

Too young to have purchased the Trainspotting soundtrack on CD? Even if you weren’t, we suggest decompressing from the episode with all 11 minutes of the remastered Born Slippy.

215 – Max Knight: Ultra Spy – Part 1

Hotter than a Pentium II trying to run Quake!

Tim gets the bit (or byte?) between his teeth and rants about the ’90s and the lost promise of the internet, and a little bit about cheapie TV movie Max Knight: Ultra Spy! Jen just tries to hold on as best she can! Oh yeah, and this is part one because we don’t know how to shut up!

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You can easily tell how white your hosts are by their lack of knowledge of UPN (not the only tell, if we’re being honest), which provided a home for black shows and showrunners alike. Or at least it did for a while, before a gradual whitewashing leading up to the network’s merger with the WB. The Hollywood Reporter provides a post-mortem.

[Former senior VP of comedy development at Paramount Pictures Television] Rose Catherine Pinkney believes the decision to merge UPN out of existence came down to ad revenue. “Ultimately, you want the most dollars that you can get for your ads,” she says. Though UPN’s Black-led scripted shows (which by the end of UPN’s run included Eve, All of Us, Everybody Hates Chris) were largely popular with audiences, advertisers were evidently less inclined to pay top dollar to support shows targeting Black viewers. Farquhar, co-creator of Moesha and The Parkers, recalls an advertising person saying, “We’re not interested in ‘downscaled demographics.’ ”

They still make Tamogochis, holy shit.

Can’t get enough of PCMCIA cards? Here’s a helpful explainer!

Popular Mechanics looks back at the V-chip 20 years after it appeared.

Want more 90s TV? Check out our episode on the show M.A.N.T.I.S. with special guest and superfan mugrimm!

214 – Centurion

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.

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Jen’s personal favorite video from Tribunate is this savage takedown of Cato, but this examination of Roman concepts of race and how radically they differ from ours is another great example of the high caliber of material from Gaius’s channel. Also the triggered reactionary crybabies in the comments are extremely funny. Finally, don’t miss this compilation of filthy Roman words!

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!

213 – Fight Ring

If you fight it, then you’d better put a ring on it.

Jen puts Tim in an arm bar until he agrees to talk about a backyard martial arts movie from a determined auteur: Fight Ring!

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Sean Gallimore had a successful animation career for many years, including many top-of-the-line films for Disney. See a gallery of his artwork, which includes expert 3D modeling work as well as his signature pinups.

See more Gallimore pinups here!

If you love outsider indie films as much as we do, don’t miss our episode on a towering work of queer drama straight from the trailer park: Romeo and Romeo.

212 – Argylle

POV: receiving a Bryce job

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.”

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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.

Read the incisive opinion piece Tim invoked when discussing the sexlessness of Argylle, R.S. Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” via Blood Knife.

211 – The Phantom

Slam evil! Faceplant at the box office!

Jen and Tim just can’t figure out why audiences were so lukewarm about this fun pulp adventure, The Phantom from 1996.

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Phantom creator Lee Falk enthused about the movie in a 1996 interview, singling out Billy Zane for particular praise.

As Tim mentioned, The Phantom struck a chord with the people of Papua New Guinea. See examples of war shields of the PNG highlands featuring the character.

210 – Hawk the Slayer

Jack… you are my number-one… eye.

Tim and Jen welcome Rifftrax stalwarts Bill Corbett and Sean Thomason to discuss a cheapie high fantasy film that thinks it’s a spaghetti western, Hawk the Slayer!

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Bill and Sean have brought their Ringheads podcast to a close, but if you crave some Silmarillon chat, find it on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform.

The Rifftrax version of Hawk the Slayer is free with ads on Tubi, or you can secure your very own copy at the Rifftrax website!

In the Realms of the Unreal does not appear to be streaming as of this writing, but you can find out more about outsider artist Henry Darger at the documentary’s official website.

Also, don’t miss Bill’s previous appearance on our show to chat about the 1979 TV movie version of Captain America, starring Big McLargehuge aka Reb Brown.