Episodes Archives - Page 8 of 23 - Have You SEEN This?

155 – Season of the Witch

In a frame from George Romero's 1973 film SEASON OF THE WITCH, actress Jan White sips from a cocktail while rocking frosty eyeshadow and an astonishing beehive hairdo — Female self-actualization = giant hair

Jen and Tim attempt to purge the lingering memory of a certain occult-y art film with a viewing of an early George Romero work, Season of the Witch.

Hear the whole episode and dozens of others for only $5/month!

In case you had no idea what he was getting at, Tim’s latest thing is calling Chantal Akerman’s feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles “the Jean Teasdale movie.”

Marxist art critic John Berger’s analysis of western media, Ways of Seeing, is available on YouTube. He casts a critical eye on the depiction of the female nude in European oil painting in the second episode.

Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look, or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing

154 – Found Footage Horror Party

A video shot of an empty yellow room with multiple exits, also known as the creepypasta staple the Backrooms

Your hosts range widely and freely on the topic of horror: specifically, found footage horror. The films discussed are The McPherson Tape, The Blair Witch Project, Backrooms, and Horror in the High Desert.

Watch The Backrooms short we talked about here on YouTube.

Director Dean Alioto talked with the Found Footage Critic about UFO Abduction and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, aka The McPherson Tape:

In 1989 Dean Alioto shot his first film, UFO Abduction, for a meager budget of $6,500—the master copy of the film was subsequently destroyed and thus the movie was never widely released. Ten years later Dean Alioto pitched UFO Abduction to Dick Clark Productions, who picked up the idea and gave Dean Alioto a $1.2 million budget to shoot a remake for television. In 1998, the remake was released entitled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (a.k.a. The McPherson Tape).

Over the years the names of these films has resulted in a great deal of confusion. Even to this day, both UFO Abduction and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County are referred to as “The McPherson Tape.”
Found Footage Critic

An explorer named Tom covered the tragic story of the Death Valley Germans at his blog, OtherHand.

153 – The Love Witch

Samantha Robinson as the titular character in The Love Witch (2016) — she’s got piss jars / she knows how to use them

Tim and Jen are dumbfounded by a universally praised and vacantly pretty auteur statement, The Love Witch!

Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!

Rotten Tomatoes shows The Love Witch to be a darling of critics with a rating of 95% (audiences were more lukewarm, with their rating sitting at 61%). One of the few negative reviews calls it “dawdling, hollow and kind of awful, really:”

Some of the movie comes close to camp or just falls in, as when Elaine is assaulted by former friend Trish (Laura Waddell in the film’s only genuine performance), whose husband Elaine has stolen. “Skank! Whore!” Trish yells, slapping Elaine while wearing a wig cap — the movie helpfully provides its own drag-show re-enactment. A sequence in which Elaine is confronted in a bar by a mob of superstitious goofballs (“Burn the witch!”) is frankly terrible and staged with incredible clumsiness. The Love Witch will be worshipped as a fetish object by a certain breed of film nerd who luxuriates in its DIY retro aesthetic, but it isn’t really a movie — it would have to move first, and the pacing is leadfooted. The plot’s pairing Elaine with a stolid detective (Gian Keys) just leads to a handfasting scene at a local ren faire that seems to go on for six, maybe seven years.

-Rob Gonsalves

Vomit TAG!

152 – Spaced Invaders

Jen and Tim enjoy a silly 1990 comedy with startlingly good practical effects, Spaced Invaders!

Hear the whole thing at our Patreon!

Director/writer Patrick Read Johnson’s long-gestating nostalgia trip, 5-25-77, will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on November 22, 2022. In the meantime, you can read Karina Longworth’s review of a cut of the film in 2008 from the now-defunct Sprout Blog. The director left a comment rebutting some of her criticism there (thank you, Internet Archive).

This Slate article sums up the probable facts behind the “War of the Worlds mass panic” myth quite well.

The song from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds that Jen was talking about is “The Artilleryman and the Fighting Machine.” Ulla!

151 – Return to Oz

Tim and Jen start spooky season early with a shockingly dark release from Disney, Return to Oz.

Jen forgot to mention that the main reason the film does not resembles the MGM film from 1939 apart from the Ruby Slippers™ is because all of the trappings of the MGM version were and are copyrighted. In fact, Disney had to shell out to use that plot device in the film. Hence, while Walter Murch’s desire to make a movie closer in spirit to the L. Frank Baum material is admirable, it most likely played second fiddle to the demands of copyright law.

Additionally, the movie finally made a profit from a 1949 re-release, not “like twenty years later” or whatever Jen glibly claimed.

Animator Doug Aberle made a video where he talks about his process for animating the demise of the Nome King. Plus, he includes interviews with the late Will Vinton.

If you want more details about the drama between Sarah Polley and Terry Gilliam, you can read an excerpt from her memoir here.

148 – mother!

Tim and Jen defend a movie you either love or hate, Darren Aronofsky’s mother!

See crybaby Kyle Smith’s review of mother! at the world’s worst magazine if you want to know what kind of thing gets your hosts into a theater to see a movie.

Jen whiffed the explanation of the bad blood between Satoshi Kon and Darren Aronofsky. The situation is way more complicated than the latter purchasing the rights to Perfect Blue (which never happened, incidentally). The Animation Obsessive Substack did a deep dive.

Looking for an exploration of the meaning of the pelican-in-her-piety from someone way more informed than Jen? The nice people at the St. Mary Magdalen School of Theology have you covered.

For more Aronofsky, listen to the episode where we compared Pi to an obscure British television series, Hammer House of Horror.

147 – R.O.T.O.R.

Brad Overturf as the titular character in R.O.T.O.R. (1987) — To quote Bill Corbett: “We…SEE…HIM!!”

Jen and Tim finally tackle one of their shared albatrosses— the Robocop before Robocop, R.O.T.O.R.!

Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!

Isadora Fox wrote a piece in memory of actress Margaret Trigg for New York magazine back in 2004. The article details her struggles with disordered eating and poor mental health, but also serves as a eulogy for a legitimately talented person gone too soon.

You can also watch an entire episode of Aliens in the Family, the unlamented sitcom Trigg starred in for 8 episodes. By the way, Aliens in the Family was co-written by everyone’s least favorite “satirist,” Andy Borowitz.

Like abysmal independent films from the 80s? Why not try our episode on Things?

146 – Enter the Void

Tim gets a little treat this month— we talked about one of his personal favorites, Gaspar Noé’s trippy version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Enter the Void!

Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!

Read an interview at Den of Geek with a voluble Noé about Enter the Void.

Towards the end, the weird trip turns into a bad trip, like sometimes mushroom trips or acid trips turn into bad trips. But a bad trip can be very rewarding, because when you come out of one, it’s like coming out of a bad dream where you get killed or something, and the moment you wake up, you still feel the presence of that reality and the dream, or the nightmare, is always real. But you feel so safe coming back to the real world, and some people said when they came out of this movie that they were still scared. – Gaspar Noé on Enter the Void

The Hype Williams-directed video Tim got so mad about is for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.” Honestly a pretty pallid copy of the title sequence Tim loves so much.

See Paz de la Huerta crash the shooting of Louis Theroux’s Scientology documentary.

For more transgressive cinema, listen to our episode about Lars von Trier’s divisive masterpiece Antichrist.

145 – The Two Jakes

Jen and Tim marvel at the cursed, ill-conceived, bloated sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes.

Errata: Jen was wrong and Polanski fled the country in February of 1978, not 1977.

The Two Jakes derailed the Robert Towne/Jack Nicholson friendship, which had been forged in the early 60s while both worked for Roger Corman, for at least a decade. Towne admitted as much in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. However, in a 2006 interview, Towne parries a question about the film thusly:

Well, in the interest of maintaining my friendships with Jack Nicholson and Robert Evans, I’d rather not go into it, but let’s just say The Two Jakes wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of us. But, we’re all still friends, and that’s what matters most.
Robert Towne

So, you know, awwwwww.

The History Channel website has the cold hard facts about Jack Nicholson’s 1994 road rage incident, in which he attacked another motorist’s car with a golf club.

A man kneels to push over the smallest domino in a line of dominos of varying size, the largest being taller than the kneeling man. The smallest domino is labeled "singer/songwriter gets wrong address" and the largest is labeled "Chinatown." — 🤪

144 – Fatal Beauty

Tim and Jen host Jacques of the Seeking Derangements podcast so they can hold forth about a personal favorite: Fatal Beauty starring Whoopi Goldberg!

Hear the whole thing at our Patreon, where you can also listen to Jacques’s guest appearance for House (1977), as well as more than 50 other bonus episodes!

Jacques somewhat confused the timeframe of Whoopi’s brief relationship with Ted Danson. They had an affair on the set of the 1993 film Made in America, and the infamous Friars Club blackface bit occurred in the fall of that same year. Ted and Whoopi dated until 1994; they moved on with Mary Steenbergen and Frank Langella(!), respectively.

Several stories exist on the origin of Whoopi’s stage surname, incidentally. The anecdote about “Goldberg” being her mother’s suggestion so she could appear Jewish enough to succeed in show business has not been confirmed. Hilariously, noted treat boy John Podhoretz once wrote an editorial for the New York Post demanding that she drop her adopted surname, in light of some wild-ass comments about the Holocaust Whoopi made on The View.

If you don’t recall the story of Big Lurch, we told it on our Disco Godfather episode.