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162 – Body of Evidence

Tim and Jen remain in the 90s for a look at a dire courtroom drama leavened with gauzy sex scenes, the 1992 Madonna vehicle Body of Evidence.

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There are no page numbers in Madonna’s book Sex, but it doesn’t take long to flip through on the Internet Archive if you want to see her eating pizza in the nude!

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers beat Jen to it with a panoply of fake erotic thriller names during the credits for Outlaw [of Gor], episode 519. A personal favorite: “Murder Most Moist.”

the Julianne Moore face Tim was talking about

161 – Virtuosity

Russell Crowe menaces a hapless TV technician with a gun against a blue background in Virtuosity (1995)

Jen and Tim nineties nineties nineties nineties Denzel Washington nineties nineties virtual reality, nineties Russell Crowe nineties, nineties nineties nineties Virtuosity nineties!

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Read the AV Club interview with Kelly Lynch where she describes Denzel’s motive for doctoring the script for Virtuosity, as mentioned in the episode.

Per Tim’s recommendation, you could do a search on the World Wide Web, or you can check out an article about Kai’s Power Tools if you’d like to see some screenshots of that bonkers interface! 

Also, if you missed it the first time around, listen to our episode about The Lawnmower Man, another cheesy 90s film from the director of Virtuosity.

159 – Blonde

Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik's Blonde (2022)

Jen and Tim welcome returning guest Darren Herczeg to go to bat for an almost universally loathed Netflix feature, Blonde. Naturally, the trio revel in the film’s grotesque and overt misogyny while twirling their mustaches.

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Jessica Kiang’s review of Blonde over at Film Comment sums up the critical reaction well:

Dominik’s film is a technical marvel, but it’s cold and not a little sinister. It’s also an utterly heartless hoodwink.

There’s no word on whether or not the French documentary that revealed the identity of Marilyn’s biological father will screen in the US. However, according to Variety, an English-language version exists and has been sold to international distributors.

Darren previously appeared on the show to talk about the film Michael Mann refuses to talk about, The Keep!

158 – Gymkata

That guy isn’t even American!

Tim and Jen try and fail to recall the name of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps as they discuss Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas’s sole feature film, Gymkata.

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Jen’s half-assed inaccurate anecdote about Phelps being considered to play Tarzan is actually true, albeit not the way she told it. Producer Jerry Weintraub (no relation to Gymkata producer Fred Weintraub) believed that he’d found the new Johnny Weissmuller in Phelps. However, the swimmer’s appearance on SNL in 2008 immediately disabused him of that notion, as Phelps appeared to Weintraub as little more than a “goon.” 

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz has only five minor credits on IMDb, incidentally, none of which involve starring in a feature film. In case you were wondering.

You can hear our interview with martial arts superstar Cynthia Rothrock here!

156 – Halloween III: Season of the Witch

A child claws at the pumpkin mask he's wearing in a scene from Halloween III: Season of the Witch

They just can’t stop witchin’! Tim and Jen continue the unending spooky season with a franchise entry that pleased no one, Halloween III: Season of the Witch!

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Chris Evangelista defended the movie over at SlashFilm, as part of that site’s The Unpopular Opinion series.

Let’s all thank Sean for his partial preservation of hotep public access show Spearman’s Addiction.

Watch Barbariana on Youtube! 

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.

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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

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!

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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

Spaced Invaders key art

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

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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!

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.!

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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?