199 – Singapore Sling

You’ll need a stiff drink after this one

Jen and Tim discover the work of Nikos Nikolaidis through his magnum opus, the twisted noir grotesque Singapore Sling. Bring a bucket!

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The director’s official site provides a great deal of valuable context for his work, which has been little seen in the United States. Among others, you can purchase an HD digital download of Singapore Sling. 

Related: Jen asserted that the film was “coming soon” to blu-ray, but it turns out it already made it to a special edition German blu-ray back in 2013. That edition appears to be out of print, but the film can be found if you know where to look.

For more visionary sicko shit, listen to our episode about David Cronenberg’s Crash! 

198 – Our Worst Favorites, Episodes 1-100

Tim and Jen wrap up their look back at the first one hundred episodes of the show by listing their worst favorites! Yes, you read that right!

Hear about the movies we actually liked in our last episode, in case you missed it.

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The lamentable fan film The Return of the Ghostbusters (aka “The Denver Ghostbusters,” in the same vein as “Terrifier the Clown”) shows no signs of disappearing from YouTube. Your time might be better(?) spent on primo schlock like Godfrey Ho’s Crocodile Fury, or the wildest Florida Man story ever shot on video, Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness. And of course there’s Romeo and Romeo!

The Doomsday Machine is way more enjoyable when it’s riffed by Cinematic Titanic— highly recommended! Watch it free on Tubi. 

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 worst 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!

196 – L.A. AIDS Jabber

Next up: LA Collagen Jabber!

Tim grudgingly assents to a discussion of a shot-on-video thriller from the crusty lower depths of Tubi, 1994’s L.A. AIDS Jabber.

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Of course you’re going to want to rush right over to Tubi in order to enjoy all 78 action-packed, low-resolution minutes of L.A. AIDS Jabber. It’s free (with ads)!

Over at The Body, Mathew Rodriguez wrings some thoughtful musings on AIDS stigma and the inversion of the white male savior trope out of the movie.

Rafe Oman interviews director Drew Godderis for Scare Magazine in honor of the blu-ray release of L.A. AIDS Jabber. Can you believe he had never directed a movie before?!

For shot-on-video shlock Tim is actually enthusiastic about, listen to our episode about Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness. 

195 – That One Amazing Movie

It isn’t.

K. Thor Jensen makes a triumphant return to the show to help Jen and Tim make sense of a nice young man’s three-hour-long passion project, That One Amazing Movie!

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See the movie for free with ads on Crackle, or rent or even buy it on Amazon!

Watch Deception on Demand, a short documentary laying out several grievances against Adler &Associates Entertainment, the entity which distributed That One Amazing Movie.

“The true story of how the grifters and con artists from Adler & Associates Entertainment hired O.J. Simpson’s lawyers, and spent a small fortune, futilely trying to intimidate, harass and rip-off a very determined filmmaker. “

Hear Thor talk about Sass Girls X, the novel (!) from the auteur who brought us That One Amazing Movie, on the I Don’t Even Own a TV podcast.

Listen to Thor’s first appearance on our show, to discuss a movie just as baffling as the one we talked about in this episode, Wonder Boy. 

194 – The Adventures of Ragtime

Ragtime or bad time?

Tim wisely goes absent with leave as Jen invites Bitter Karella to the necropsy of a dire children’s film from 1998, The Adventures of Ragtime.

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Should you wish to self-harm, you can watch the full movie (with helpful timecode) at Showcase Entertainment’s channel on YouTube.

Is it crass to post this screenshot of Shelley Long from the movie? Yeah, probably. Has that ever stopped us?

See photos of Ragtime at a very Web 1.0 site that his caregivers appear to have left up as a memorial to the tiny stallion.

For some more grown-up yet still juvenile horse content, listen to our Hot to Trot episode! 

193 – Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

BREAKING: new evidence for the historical Great Pumpkin

Tim and Jen enlist the help of Bitter Karella to wade through the 22 minutes of treacle that is the forgotten faux-Peanuts special, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.

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See this slab of gelatinous treacle for yourself at the Internet Archive. 

William Conant Church, brother of Francis Church, did indeed help found the NRA in 1871, in an effort to improve marksmanship amongst the broader American militia. He and brother Francis co-founded several news publications, including the New York Sun, and he also co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Additionally, Frank Church was not the volcel depicted in the Yes, Virginia special— he was married to a woman named Elizabeth Wickham. In spite of Tim’s joshing, it appears that Church did not have a severe yet shapely assistant who browbeat him into publishing the editorial addressed to Virginia O’Hanlon. The O’Hanlon letter was passed on by Edward Page Mitchell, the real-life editor-in-chief of the Sun.

Mike alluded to the “Season’s Greetings” meme drawn from Douglas Dixon’s Man After Man, a kind of speculative art book about possible evolutions of Homo sapiens. If you want to see more of the weird art, the book is free to browse at the Internet Archive. 

Finally, if you want to pretend that it’s 1974 again and you’re spinning some 45s, you can hear the theme song for the special sung by a piercing li’l Jimmy Osmond.

Want more weird cartoons? Check out Tim & Jen’s riff on the animated short “Eveready Harton” from 1975’s Self Service Girls, or one of our other episodes on trauma-inducing animation.

192 – Promising Young Woman

“I’m here to check your… PRIVILEGE!”

Jen and Tim are doing misogyny again! They DO NOT support women…filmmakers who make bloodless, smarmy takes on rape-revenge flicks. Kind of like Promising Young Woman!

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Abel Ferrara talked with Rotten Tomatoes a while back about the superior Ms. 45 when it made the rounds of revival houses.

And of course, don’t miss our gleeful takedown of another helping of plastic feminism: listen to our episode on The Love Witch.

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.

190 – Magical Mystery Tour

Would it be so bad if Paul was a dead man

Jen and Tim suffer through the half-baked hippie whimsy of the Beatles’ first major creative cock-up, Magical Mystery Tour.

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If you’re curious, you can watch the Pet Shop Boys’ head-scratcher of a longform music video, It Couldn’t Happen Here, at the Internet Archive. It looks like it was ripped from someone’s VCD copy of a Hong Kong laserdisc, but it still has plenty of bops!

The Anton Corbijn-directed Strange (A Black and White Mode) incorporates all those songs that Tim says you know from Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. You can watch it right now on YouTube, but a restored DVD and Blu-ray release will arrive in December. 

Still mad at Paul McCartney? Listen to our Give My Regards to Broad Street episode with special guest Jane Altoids.