Episode 59: Aliens

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

Last week we took on the landmark Ridley Scott movie, Alien, a movie that closed out the 1970’s with a bang. This week we’re taking on James Cameron and his follow-up to the explosive 1985 smash hit, The Terminator, Aliens. Cameron knew he wanted to make an Alien sequel the moment he first saw the original movie and when the opportunity arose he had to fight tooth and nail, struggling against 20th Century Fox’s bad business and legal woes, against apathetic executive who had no interest whatsoever in making another Alien movie, against a production crew that couldn’t stand him or his producer Gale Anne Hurd. When all was said and done and the movie hit theaters, Cameron proved to everyone what absolute losers they all were with his clear vision of an explosive action movie that set the pace for the second half of the 80’s and set an extremely high bar for action movies to come. Hollywood would never be the same and with the inclusion of the Colonial Marines, Cameron set the entire Alien legacy on a new path.

Following the tragedy of the Nostromo disaster Ellen Ripley finds herself waking up 57 years in the future. Her bosses are pissed that she blew up one of their space ships and ban her from flying another mission. An opportunity to get back on a starship comes around when an executive from Weyland Yutani hires her to return to LV-426 to advise a unit of Colonial Marines on a rescue mission of missing colonists who may have come into contact with the same crashed alien ship that doomed her own crew so many years ago. She had enough trouble dealing with one single xenomorph. What happens when the Colonial Marines encounter dozens of them?

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Episode 107: Alien

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

On the podcast no one can hear you scream. This week we’re taking a look at the horror movie hingepoint in 1979, Alien. Before Star Wars there wasn’t a studio on earth that wanted to make an expensive science fiction movie and after Star Wars they couldn’t find enough scripts to get expensive science fiction movies into production. Alien was one of the first ones to come out of the gate that wasn’t a cheap ripoff of George Lucas’s masterpiece. It was worlds apart from the recent space movie hits. It featured no highly competent astronauts traveling to Jupiter and no dashing heroes in star fighters, wielding light sabers. Instead, Ridley Scott delivered a quiet, slow-moving horror movie featuring blue collar characters just trying to get by on a commercial tow vessel. At the same time, they delivered one of the most suspenseful horror movies with one of the strongest casts and one of the most iconic monster designs by world-class artists. It is truly one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

Alien sees the crew of the Nostromo rerouted to a planet nearby where a crashed alien vessel sends out a radio signal that they interpret as a distress call. By the time the ship’s computer figures out that it’s not a distress call but a warning it’s too late and the ship’s XO finds himself with a horrifying alien creature stuck to his face, laying its egg inside him. When the egg hatches by exploding out of his chest it unleashes the perfect killing machine, a biomechanical alien that stalks the ship’s crew and kills them off one by one.

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Episode 58: Blue Velvet

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we’re taking a look at David Lynch’s fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch’s disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch found himself patronized by 80’s super producer, Dino De Laurentiis, a producer who believed in Lynch’s gift at a time when no one else would and were it not for Dino, we’re not sure that we get the rest of the movies Lynch is so well known for. Realizing that Blue Velvet was commercially radioactive but supportive regardless, De Laurentiis transformed his entire company to also accomodate film distribution just for Blue Velvet and when the movie dropped it struck critics and viewers in such a way that they knew they were seeing something grotesque and special at the same time.

Blue Velvet sees Jeffrey Beaumont, a young resident of the sleepy small town, Lumberton, drawn into a world of violence, sex, and obsession when he finds a severed ear in a field which leads him to the city’s underworld, a place occupied by dangerous people living a desperate existence. He falls in love with the femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens, runs afoul of drug dealer Frank Booth, and struggles to free her from Frank’s grasp. The descent into the city’s dark side reveals uncomfortable truths about Jeffrey and by extension, all of us.

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Episode 106: The Wicker Man (1973)

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

Just in time for Beltaine we’re dropping in on the merry residents of Summerisle for a look at Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man from director Robin Hardy. This 1973 horror movie is a pivotal feature in the folk horror tradition and presents a daring departure from common horror movie tropes, choosing to set the movie in broad daylight with a color palette of primary colors and lush greens instead of the flashing thunder and shadows of night. The air of constant menace is replaced with a cast of common rural people who seem to be having the time of their lives in the pagan paradise of a community that celebrates the old gods. Starring Christopher Lee at his most charming and charismatic, The Wicker Man is a triumph of weird horror and is a May Day tradition in the house of Bring Me The Axe!

The story follows Sgt. Howie, an English cop who drops in on the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a the disappearance of a young girl but he finds the strange community of heathens uncooperative in his investigation and suspects that she may have been a victim of human sacrifice. There’s a sacrifice, alright, but Howie has no idea to what lengths these people will go to in order to secure a healthy harvest.

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Episode 57: Martin

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we take on George Romero’s Martin from 1977. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe if you squint at it just right. Martin doesn’t fit neatly into any genre and for that we’re at a loss to properly define it. But one thing is for sure, this is our favorite non-zombie Romero movie. It’s a very weird, very European movie with artsy tendencies and a good idea of where George Romer’s career may have gone had he not been repeatedly dragged back to the zombie well.

In Martin, the eponymous young man drifts from house to house, a ward of a highly superstitious family who pass him around as a burden that must be contained lest his bloodlust lead him to mayhem and carnage but here’s the problem: Martin doesn’t seem to actually be a vampire. He walks around during the day, holy symbols and vampire wards have no effect on him. But he is no less monstrous, being an actual serial killer. The question remains, does Martin kill because he’s been told for so long that he’s a monster?

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Episode 105: Night School

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

This week we’re bringing it home to Boston for a look at the 1981 slasher movie also-ran. Night School. Similar to the many, many slasher movies that dropped that year, Night School struggles to commit to the stalk and slash body count mayhem that was dominating box offices and instead lands closer, remarkably closer to an Italian giallo. When it’s not shamelessly stepping on Psycho’s toes it reminds us a little too much of What Have You Done To Solange and What Have They Done To Your Daughters.

In Night School a killer stalks the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, decapitating women. Their targets all share one thing in common, they’re all students at the same night school, sharing the same head hunter obsessed anthropology professor who is busily seducing each one of them. It’s up to smarty pants Boston PD detective Judd Austin to put the pieces together and crack the case before the killer strikes again!

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Episode 56: Ninja Terminator

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we take a look at what is arguably Godfrey Ho’s magnum opus as far as that director can have such a thing. We’re watching Ninja Terminator from 1986, just one of scores of cheap, trashy martial arts movies made in the 1980s by Godfrey Ho in order to capitalize on the western appetite for all things ninja. Ho is famous for a technique of cut and paste filmmaking where he would cut out all the good parts of an Asian action movie, shoot some wraparound footage with western actors, and dub the whole thing over with a new audio track to make a new movie. Sort of. Plus ninjas.

In this one, Ho casts Richard Harrison as Master Ninja Harry who, along with some friends, absconds with three pieces of a statue sacred to the Ninja Empire. When one of them are killed and the Ninja Empire recovers one piece, the other two ninjas conspire to keep the pieces away in order reform the ninja empire. Maybe? Harry enlists his friend Jaguar Wong to seek out the missing piece and a whole lot of crazy bullshit happens in the meantime.

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Episode 104: Curtains

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

This week we’re heading north to the 51st state of Canada for a listener request. It’s Curtains, the 1983 slasher film from producer Peter Simpson who last brought you the smash hit Prom Night. Directed (partially) by cinematographer Richard Ciupka, Curtains is a gigantic mess of a whodunnit that had ambitions to be a North American riff on the movies of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, an arty, very European approach to a violent murder mystery in the giallo style. Unfortunately, this was not what the producers expected and Ciupka bailed on the entiree project leaving it on the shelf for a year before Simpson himself took it down and dragged it across the finish line.

In Curtains five young women gather at the home of director John Stryker, a megalomaniac auteur director with designs on producing a film called Audra but not that long ago he was planning on producing it with his muse, Samantha Sherwood who had herself committed to a mental hospital for research. While inside, Stryker moved on from her but now she’s out and pissed off. But what’s this? A mysterious killer is knocking them all off one by one. You think you know who the killer is, but do you really?

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Episode 103: April Fool’s Day

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

We're just full of surprises, aren't we? We're hitting you with a bonus episode for April Fool's Day where nothing is what it seems. Who can you trust? What's real? Is all of this just one big set up for an unexpected outcome? It's a listener request, no less, and Dave is just more than happy to take us through one of his favorite genre movies.

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Episode 55: They Live

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we’re joined by our friend Jon Lee Brody of the That Was Pretty Scary podcast for a look at John Carpenter’s last movie of the 1980s, They Live. In this evergreen social commentary, Carpenter presents a world very much like our own where the only class distinction is rich and poor and as it would turn out, the rich aren’t even human.

In They Live a homeless man with no name drifts into Los Angeles looking for work and stumbles into a conspiracy by an underground of the underclasses to fight back against the elite wealth class which rules the world with fantastic technology that keeps humanity asleep while hidden aliens loot the earth of its resources, leaving the rest of us poor and at one another’s throats for what crumbs they afford us.

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Episode 102: The Lost Boys

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

This week we’re joined by the legendary drag queen Peaches Christ to talk about Joel Schumacher’s landmark 1987 vampire movie, The Lost Boys, starring Jason Patric, Corey Haim, and Kiefer Sutherland. The Lost Boys marked a radical new direction for vampires that took Tony Scott’s sexy goth approach in The Hunger and injected with the MTV sensibilities of late-80s teen culture. Paired with incredible night time photography and killer soundtrack, it is as close to perfect as a horror movie can get.

Brothers Michael and Sam Emerson are moved to the seaside town of Santa Carla, California with their mother. It’s your average boardwalk town with one mean exception: people go missing here at a much higher rate than most other places in the country. When Michael is brought into a group of wild weirdos that live by night it falls to Sam and the weirdo Frog Brothers to deal with Santa Carla’s real problem: vampires.

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Episode 54: Cyborg

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

In this episode we look at the 1989 Jean Claude Van Damme movie that thrust JCVD into the limelight of 90’s action movie super stars while simultaneously hammering the final nail into the Golan Globus coffin. At one time a Hollywood powerhouse, Cannon Films flew too close to the sun and found themselves undone by their own machinery. Cyborg was the ultimate result of this failure, a movie thrown together from the unused costumes and sets from unproduced movies.

In the not-too distant future, mankind is reduced to medieval state by some unspecified disaster and if that’s not bad enough, the survivors are being killed off by a pandemic plague. Luckily, the last scientists on earth developed a cure but need some pieces of the puzzle brought back from New York City. They turn one of their own into a cyborg and send her to get it but evil pirates kill off her escort and strand her there. Lucky for her, here comes Gibson Rickenbacher, a slinger who can fight back against the pirates and get her back to her lab.

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Episode 101: Jason Lives, Friday the 13th Part 6

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

He’s back! The man behind the mask! Friday the 13th is keeping us busy this year with two in two months and another on the way. This time we’re taking a look at 1986’s Jason Lives, the movie that canned the original plan to have Tommy Jarvis take up the machete and establishes Jason Voorhees as a lumbering, unstoppable killing machine from beyond the grave!

In this movie Tommy Jarvis skips the mental hospital he’s been confined at to return to Crystal Lake, since renamed to Forest Green in order to shake its horrible reputation. His mission: dig up the body of Jason Voorhees, who has haunted him since he was a little kid, and make sure that he’s dead. But when Tommy’s obsession overlaps with an electrical storm, a bolt of lightning strikes the body of Jason and brings him back from the grave once again to kill everyone in sight. Now it’s up to Tommy to face his fears and put Jason back in the ground for good.

When A New Beginning hit theaters it did characteristically well in box office but faced a significant problem with fans: They hated the new direction. They came for Jason and they left with Tommy and everyone hated it. So Frank Mancuso Jr., now a little preoccupied with his War of the Worlds and Friday the 13th TV shows, left the entire project in the hands of writer and director Tom McLoughlin with one clear directive: Do whatever you want but bring back Jason.

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Episode 100: The Exorcist

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

We’re celebrating 100 episodes of Bring Me The Axe with a cool bottle of Cheerwine and our friend Halle Kiefer from the podcast Ruined for a look at one of the all-time greats in horror, William Friedkin’s 1973 possession horror, The Exorcist.

When Regan MacNeil, the 12 year old daaughter of movie star Chris MacNeil begins displaying strange, aggressive, and obscene behavior, her mother takes her to a parade of medical professionals to diagnose her problems. But when they fall short and her behavior escalates to the downright paranormal and Chris MacNeil suspects that she may have murdered a friend she turns to Catholic priest Father Damien Karras. Karras, a priest facing a crisis of faith is dubious but when he meets the girl, physically transformed by demonic possession he brings in an experienced exorcist to drive the demon out.

A true rite of passage for horror fans, The Exorcist is a notorious exercise, a movie equally beautiful as it is hideous and obscene. Jam-packed with elevated performances from actors at the top tier of their profession, disturbing sound design, and incredible special effects, The Exorcist rules.

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Episode 53: Raiders of Atlantis

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we’re returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in the Atlantic as the feral, violent denizens of lost Atlantis arise from the silent depths of the ocean to reclaim the world. Or something to that effect. It’s a desperate fight to survive against wave after wave of road warrior freaks, an race against time to translate an ancient tablet that will restore the ancient civilization, and an endless series of violent gun battles and if I’m being honest, I’m working overtime to make this movie make sense. It’s 90 minutes of high-flying nonsense but somehow it ends up being a lot of fun.

Shot against the backdrop of Italy’s exploitation film industry struggling to find an alternative to the declining horror and giallo markets, it capitalizes on the then-extremely popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs but also tries to tap in to the world’s hunger for high-adventure by way of cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoffs only to realize that Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly hard to copy on budgets laughably smaller than Raiders. At the same time, the Marcos regime in the Philippines is desperate to draw filmmakers to Manila and as Deodato finds out, it’s hard to say no to a totalitarian dictatorship.

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Episode 99: Day of the Dead

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

Celebrate three years of Bring Me The Axe with us as we continue our annual tradition of a deep dive into the world of George A. Romero and his iconic living dead series. For our last two anniversaries we featured Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead so it only makes sense that close out year three with the highly divisive (and Bryan’s favorite), Day of the Dead.

Taking place late in the zombie plague, a motley crew of scientists and military take shelter in an underground bunker, researching the cause and a possible solution to the problem at hand: mankind being driven to the brink of extinction against a worldwide zombie holocaust. Tensions are high, supplies are low, and morale is lower as the operation cracks at the seams. One scientist thinks he has a solution, demonstrated by his domesticated pet zombie, Bub.

Released in 1985 as the third film in a three picture deal with United Film Distribution Company, Romero’s epic vision of a horror movie, “Gone With The Wind With Zombies”, to quote Romero, had to be scaled back significantly when Romero refused UFDC’s mandate for an R-rated movie, insisting instead on a hyper-violent, gory spectacle. The result is languid, talky character drama cast with wild over-actors and punctuated by grisly violence and zombie carnage. It’s Romero at his most conflicted but Tom Savini at his absolute best.

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Episode 52: Black Belt Jones

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week our Black History Month series continues with a look at the 1974 blaxploitation martial arts mashup, Black Belt Jones, starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. Kelly was coming in hot off of his run in the legendary Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon and with Bruce dead and a public appetite ravenous for more martial arts movies it just made sense to spin off one of its stars to their own martial arts movie. Hendry was coming in off her turn as a Bond girl in Live and Let Die and a string of excellent blaxploitation movies like Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem.

In this absolute cartoon of a martial arts movie, the mafia has bought into a valuable city project to build a new civic center in South Central Los Angeles but the only thing holding up the development is one holdout, a karate school that refuses to sell out. The mafia calls up a local loan shark to put the pressure on the school and when they accidentally kill the school’s owner it’s up to Black Belt Jones and the owner’s daughter to team up, rip off the gangsters and get justice. Things get a little blurry between the beginning and the end but in spite of it flying by the seat of its pants and barely making any sense, the movie is a hell of a good time.

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Episode 98: Friday the 13th - A New Beginning (Bonus)

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

It’s Friday the 13th and you know what that means! This Friday we’re taking on 1985’s great betrayal. They said they were done with The Final Chapter. The story was told. Jason was dead. No more Friday the 13th movies for you! But money moves all tides and you can’t stop Jason Voorhees so they found a way to bring him back for one more, and one more, and one more. You get the picture. Our good friend Aileen Clark from Uy Que Horror and our sister podcast, Laughing in the Dark, an Are You Afraid of the Dark rewatch pod, joins us for all the mayhem and carnage.

It’s five years later and Tommy Jarvis, badly traumatized by his encounter with Jason in the last movie is on his way to a half-way house after years of mental institutions. He’s still haunted and as we’ll see with the patients at this facility, maybe many of them aren’t ready to ease back into society. If it’s not bad enough that he still sees Jason everywhere he looks, a series of brutal murders happen just as he’s settling in to his new space. When the dust settles, it would appear that Jason Voorhees is back for more bodies but something’s up with this Jason. What could it be?

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Episode 97: Tales From The Hood

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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.

YES! We’re celebrating black horror for Black History month with a look at Rusty Cundieff’s truly underrated horror anthology, Tales From The Hood. The film’s stand-in for the Cryptkeeper, an unhinged mortician played full-tilt crazy by Clarence Williams III, guides three gangbangers through four tales of urban woe and in the process addresses police violence, domestic abuse, racism, and cycles of gang violence in a truly unexpected way.

In Rogue Cop Revelation, a black police officer is haunted by the spirit of a political activist whose murder he payed a role in covering up. Unable to rest, the spirit demands the souls of the cops who killed him.

In Boys Do Get Bruised young Walter lies awake at night, terrorized by a monster that stalks the halls of his home by night. In the day, his teacher notices bruises on Walter that can’t be explained by the usual schoolyard bullies. Walter’s imagination harnesses a terrible power to stop the violence taking place in his home.

In KKK Comeuppance, a racist candidate for governor in a southern state comes under attack by the spirits of restless dead slaves when he buys an antebellum plantation as a deliberate fuck you to the black community he’s campaigning in. They’ll get their revenge by way of animated dolls that house their spirits.

In the final episode, Hardcore Conversion, a gangbanger is given a second chance when he consents to a behavior modification program that reconditions his violent tendencies by confronting him with the consequences of his actions and equates it to the same violence committed on black people by white mobs. Will he change his ways?

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Episode 51: Death Wish 3

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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.

Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.

This week we take a trip back to 1985 for a movie of such staggering stupidity that we can hardly believe it. Death Wish 3 is the continuing adventures of Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson and where the first movie is a pretty solid action movie and the second movie is dopey and mostly boring, Death Wish 3 commits to absurdity in a way that’ll really make you think. It’s a movie of such moronic prowess that the filmmakers had to go out of their way to achieve such heights of idiocy. See a crowd of children literally jump for joy over the bodies of bikers dead in the street. Marvel at a doctor doing everything he can to not break character and laugh while telling a husband that his wife died from a broken arm. This movie is truly an achievement in a year already crowded with dumb movies from Cannon.

As it happens, Paul Kersey is back home in New York City to visit an old friend but he arrives in time for the man to die in his arms when the local street gang of giggling maniacs beats him to the edge of his life. Kersey will team up with a cop to put the gang on ice in a film that was literally rushed into production to capitalize on the headlines about a subway vigilante in New York City that injured three and left one man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Truly, only Cannon could produce such an entertaining gem.

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Support us on Patreon for 5 bonus episodes a month!

Join the Discord to talk movies with us and other listeners!

Get yourself a nice Bring Me The Axe! or 99 Cent Rental shirt or hoodie!