Bryan! (00:04.955) Hey, you're listening to Bring Me the Axe. I'm Brian White, the one in half of this morbid equation, and I'm joined by my cohost and actual brother, Dave White. Hey, Dave, how you doing?

Dave! (00:13.254) Oh, hi. I'm doing pretty well, pretty well. Still sitting around here, waiting on annual gift-giving man. And I've been watching all my Christmas movies this year. I've only got one left. Gotta watch It's a Wonderful Life. What do you got? What do you got Christmas movies?

Bryan! (00:28.067) I uh I you know what no go ahead you know I am honestly I am not much of a Christmas movie person I got a couple I'm really more of a Christmas music person

Dave! (00:41.532) Okay, weird.

Bryan! (00:43.175) I know it doesn't it doesn't seem thing, but like I love the I like for all the schmaltz and sentimentality of it. I love the kind of like old timey. Like silver screen Hollywood Christmas, so like if I do have a movie at all, like a Christmas story is the obvious one. I watch it all like every year and I've probably seen that movie. More than I've seen most movies because I remember when we were kids, we watched it to such a point that dad like you ended up hating it.

Dave! (01:13.784) It was weirdly ubiquitous in the 80s.

Bryan! (01:17.428) It was and it's still it still is I think USA still does that like 24 hour thing. Maybe it's them Yeah, but

Dave! (01:20.938) I think TNT does it, and I don't get, cause it is, it's a pretty dated movie. I mean, there are parts of that movie that are pretty offensive at this point. You know what I'm talking about.

Bryan! (01:30.868) Yeah, but it is it is objectively. No, it's not objectively the funniest movie ever. But for me, it's like the funniest, one of the funniest fucking movies I've ever seen. I still laugh at it. Like as though it's the first time. So there's that one. But also, I really love White Christmas. Yeah, yeah. Danny Kay and fucking Rosemary Clooney, it's a I don't know. I love that.

Dave! (01:50.722) Bing Crosby?

Bryan! (01:57.531) like that kind of image of Christmas with the, you know, fucking crooners and, you know, just schmaltzy sentimentality. That's, that's the sort of thing I'm into. But I, I honestly, I don't really get into Christmas movies that much.

Dave! (02:11.07) Here's what I've noticed. I am I try to force myself to enjoy holidays because I am curmudgeonly otherwise. So I really push myself to get into things. And because I watch so many Christmas movies and this year, in particular this year, Christmas horror seems to be. And maybe it's just because I'm paying attention to like social media, horror people or whatever. It seems like there is a shitload of them, but they all look like they truly suck.

Bryan! (02:19.303) Ha ha ha.

Dave! (02:41.482) Like they just look cheap and awful and like jokey in a way that's like, if you're not gonna take this seriously or at least be sincere about this, why should I?

Bryan! (02:41.692) So...

Bryan! (02:50.947) Yeah, that's a solid point. And I, you know, I'm a lot more plugged into social media than you are. And even I'm noticing it more. Then in the past, and maybe it's just because, like, in the last couple of years, like there has been a shitload of Christmas horror movies made. But just upon, you know, just from a surface glance, none of them really seem all that interesting to me.

Dave! (03:14.498) No, they're the same fucking movie over and over again. Santa Claus is a killer. Okay, well, I've seen that a hundred times now. Yeah.

Bryan! (03:20.76) or it's Krampus and there's like there's one really good Krampus movie but you know it's called Krampus but yeah I don't I don't know the rest the rest of them not terribly interesting to me the shit that came out of the 80s really weird nothing like stuff that's being released now and I think that it's very

Dave! (03:27.293) Hmm.

Dave! (03:39.158) Yeah, because it's really dark stuff. Like it's, you know, and they're not, it's not all, you know, there is Silent Night, Deadly Night, obviously, is the one where it's like, see, Santa Claus is a killer in this. That's fine. That's like the one. The rest of them though are like different stories, like Christmas evil. You just watch this guy fall apart for like an hour and a half and it's really weird and really dark.

Bryan! (03:45.787) Yep, yep. See our sound on it.

Bryan! (04:04.696) That one is probably my favorite of the bunch. I think I'm planting a flag on that one, is that Christmas Evil is my favorite Christmas-themed horror movie.

Dave! (04:12.094) It's pretty good, but they're also like, they don't, none of them are jokey about it. Like they're not really, with the exception of Silent Night, Deadly Night. That one is a little tug-and-cheek.

Bryan! (04:20.431) Yeah, some of them, they've, yeah, they've got to, they've got to, some of them have a sense of humor, but they're very oblique. It's not now where it's like in your face, we're being funny. It's just.

Dave! (04:29.538) Like, look, gingerbread men are killing people. I'm like, god damn it, does everything have to be a fucking trauma movie? And don't get me started. You don't you know how I feel about trauma movies. I cannot stand them. So.

Bryan! (04:34.69) Hahaha

Bryan! (04:39.59) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Charles Band is the ginger dead man guy, though.

Dave! (04:43.738) Okay, but Charles Bandit, and I don't like that movie either, but I have more respect for Charles Band.

Bryan! (04:50.644) I think I do too. So I got a question for you. Where did you put the baby?

Dave! (04:54.07) Mmm. What your mother and I must know is... Oh god, these fucking phone calls are awesome.

Bryan! (05:03.227) Ah, they're the best. I feel like we have been doing those lines at one another just forever now, but this is a movie that I came along to late. So yeah, here's the preamble. We practically grew up in neighborhood video stores and the steady diet of undergarbage those shops provided us with continues unabated to this day. There's nobody else I enjoy chopping it up with more about trashy Christmas movies than Dave.

Just before we get into it, here's a little housekeeping. If you wanna keep up with us between episodes, you can also find us on Instagram at bringmetheaxpod. And Dave's over there at that queer wolf. We've also got a sweet website now at bringmetheax.com. You can listen to all our past shows there and read the transcripts. You can also contact us directly at bringmetheaxpod at gmail.com with any questions, comments or suggestions. Do let us know if there's a movie that you love and would like to hear us give it the business. And lastly, if you like what you hear.

You can subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. We're on YouTube. What's it? Oh yeah, do that, definitely do that. We're also on YouTube now. You can search us by name and subscribe if you prefer to consume your podcasts that way. And you'd be doing us a favor by leaving us a five-star review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. So God damn it, get to it. Tis the season. If you do, if you do one thing for us this year, give us a five-star review on either of those platforms.

Dave! (05:59.086) Don't do that. Do that.

Dave! (06:15.926) That is your Christmas present to me.

Bryan! (06:24.687) And if you listen on YouTube, you do us a favor, give the episode a like and leave a comment. We love hearing from you guys. You know, we've been really kind of chatted up on Instagram lately with a whole bunch of you. And it's a lot of fun. You guys are the best. So just want to get that all out of the way, right at the top of the show because.

Dave! (06:41.046) Yeah, and that shit really matters apparently. I do not know anything about technology. I try to stay away from it at all times. But my understanding is that these, the algorithms enjoy when people engage. It's very important. It helps get the word out, so to speak.

Bryan! (06:51.475) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bryan! (06:57.543) Yeah, yeah, like it tells all of these sort of like mindless systems that like, oh, people like this thing, and therefore I should serve this to more people. So the more that you engage with us, the more people discover us. So like that.

Dave! (07:12.468) Yeah, technology, isn't it a great thing?

Bryan! (07:15.783) Sometimes it's a little terrifying. Like there are times when I'll sort of be served up something by the algorithm. And it is scary how well these systems know me sometimes. Like it's a little unnerving at times, but sometimes.

Dave! (07:30.434) Yeah, cause you're just like, you're just like sitting on your phone, you're like, you know what? I actually would like those shoes. Thank you, Amazon.

Bryan! (07:36.395) Yeah, so yeah, so yeah, it's it does us it does us a great service if you if you engage said and it's fun to like I some of you guys like I haven't chatted up with in our comments and just in instant messaging on, you know, the direct messages on Instagram, and y'all are a riot. So keep it coming. I love hearing from you. So now let's give you a taste.

Bryan! (10:13.535) Don't like it. I don't like it.

Dave! (10:15.144) Mmmhmm.

Dave! (10:22.274) Ding fries are done, ding fries are done, ding fries are done.

Bryan! (10:25.311) Would you like an apple pie with that? Oh.

Dave! (10:28.117) That's a really Claire focused trailer.

Bryan! (10:31.899) There's a lot of Claire in that one. Yeah. So yeah, that usually, you know, I think trailers are kind of tough on an all audio medium, which is why, like I'm always trying to pick out something that's got a lot of dialogue in it or some voiceover. That is not the original theatrical trailer, obviously because the music is super modern and stuff. But the original theatrical trailer for this movie is like almost five minutes long and it's mostly music and screaming.

and just did not really work out for this. So I found one by a YouTube username, Raffaella Raoho, who cut a trailer to Modern Standards, bit better for our purposes. I believe that one coincides with the 2019 remake. And so it's stylistically consistent with that one, but it's a little bit better. But it definitely gives you a sense of what this movie is about. And I think much better than the other one, because I had a really hard time paying attention.

Dave! (11:27.924) Have you not seen the remix?

Bryan! (11:30.571) No, no, I got notes about that. Like there's two, this movie's been remade twice. It was, I know, like, yeah. So this was remade in 2006 by X-Files guy, Glenn Morgan. And then it was remade again in 2019 as a Bloom House thing. I've not seen either of them. I'm not terribly interested in seeing either of them. They just...

Dave! (11:34.71) Which is kinda weird.

Dave! (11:50.614) Yeah, I'm not a remake person. And I just haven't seen them just for no particular reason. My understanding is that the last one she tried, the director, I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but she tried to really kind of overhaul it and make it a newer thing. The sense that I get is that did not go over well with the bros.

Bryan! (12:06.143) Ye-

Bryan! (12:12.311) Uh, yes. From what I read, the synopsis of it, and it sounds like a lot of, uh, it's kind of like how when we did 2018 Halloween, that one fell right in the middle of all of that Harvey Weinstein shit. And so, Me Too was really kind of on the mind, and that's another kind of like horror movie for that.

vibe, you know? It's about, I think the girls all kind of fight back. There's no, you know, it's not like a set them up and knock them down body count movie like this one is. It's a whole different thing. I don't know. I'm not terribly interested. This one really does the job quite well. I see no reason to remake anything, you know?

Dave! (13:01.098) Yeah, there's gotta be shitloads of people out there who are writing good stuff. Maybe make some of that?

Bryan! (13:06.447) Yeah, yeah. I mean, thankfully, we seem to have left that thing, you know, like they still remake movies, but just not as often. It seemed like especially when the first one, the first remake, so the 06 came out, it seemed like there was about 10 years where there was nothing but remakes.

Dave! (13:24.534) It was nothing but remakes. And remakes of weird movies.

Bryan! (13:29.019) Yeah, like there were a few obvious ones, but like, they remade The Hitcher, you know? So, yep. Which again, that's a great movie. Probably... I have not seen it through that light. Maybe we're gonna have to do that one then. But yeah. So, warning before we get rolling, we're basically gonna talk about this movie from beginning to end. Spoilers to follow. You have had...

Dave! (13:34.942) Yeah. You know, that old classic.

Dave! (13:42.346) It is a deeply gay movie.

Dave! (13:47.384) Oh, very much so.

Bryan! (13:58.435) since 1974 to see this one. So...

Dave! (13:59.146) Yep. You have had 50 years and if you haven't seen it, go out and see it. It is the greatest movie ever made.

Bryan! (14:05.371) Yeah, so yeah, Santa help you if you if you've not seen it. So let's do let's do some facts here. The year was 1974. Year of our Lord Jesus Christ. Other movies released that year, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, little known picture. Few people have seen it. Yep. Big deal. Kind of changed everything. Phase four also came out that year.

Dave! (14:16.529) 1974.

Dave! (14:26.338) Heard of it?

Dave! (14:35.294) Alien ants, giant killer ants.

Bryan! (14:36.239) Alien Ants. Yep. Very, very strange movie. Also that year, it's alive. So Killer Mutant Baby. Yep. And that's right, Bernard Harmon did that one. I believe it is weird how so many of these so many people go like they go out with their swan song being really bizarre stuff like Raoul Julius' swan song was Street Fighter. Yeah.

Dave! (14:46.864) Great score to that one, Bernard Herman.

Dave! (14:52.382) I think it's his last score.

Dave! (15:04.048) That's a hard one.

Bryan! (15:06.091) Also in 1974, Phantom of the Paradise. Love it to death. Probably gonna do it at some point. Not a problem at all. Just delightful from beginning to end. And rounded it out, the made for TV sensation, Bad Ronald.

Dave! (15:09.046) Yep, love it.

Dave! (15:13.981) Brian De Palma, bit of a problem. That movie, not a problem at all.

Bryan! (15:27.859) Bad Ronald. Yeah, I I've seen it once. I don't really remember much of it, except that it's about a kid who lives in a girl's wall, and it's got a really funny title, Bad Ronald.

Dave! (15:39.438) It's very interesting in the context of horror because this was at a time when Texas Chainsaw Massacre, well, The Exorcist was the one that really kicked off the modern horror movement, I guess. And because that was bringing younger people back to the theaters, the television industry was clamoring to find ways to keep people at home to watch TV. So they were like, hey, what if we made a bunch of kind of teen-focused horror movies?

And so you get these things that are a lot of them are adapted from novels, but they're really fucking weird movies and they're weird stories. That's why throughout the 70s, there's just a shitload of supernatural and horror movies made for TV movies. And some of them are kind of good. Some of them are very much not good. I love them all.

Bryan! (16:29.527) Yep. Yeah, that is, that's adequate. The 70s was a decade fueled by cocaine. And so there's a lot of really bad ideas on television.

Dave! (16:38.178) But it's like, it's fueled by cocaine and a desire, like a creative desire. Like that gets beat out of everybody by the 80s. The 80s pretty much destroyed America, but it wasn't dead yet in the 70s. So you've got people getting tons of money to do weird shit, but it also takes them like nine years to do it.

Bryan! (16:46.526) Oh yeah.

Bryan! (16:52.944) Oh, sure. Yeah, battle of the network.

Yeah, there's Battle of the Network stars and everybody there was everybody had a variety show. You know, it was a decade of the Osmonds. So yeah. Crazy shit. The 1970s was kind of awesome and kind of shitty. So let's talk cast and crew here. The director is a man named Bob Clark. It's a hell of a director with a ton of garbage on his resume.

Dave! (17:02.274) Mm-hmm.

Dave! (17:10.09) Yeah, also pretty terrible.

Dave! (17:18.331) Mmm, yeah!

Dave! (17:23.21) Yeah, he really, he kind of just stopped trying at some point.

Bryan! (17:25.939) At a certain point, like, I think everybody reaches a point where they're like, OK, I've made my statement, but I've still got to keep working. So they keep just like making crap, you know. But yeah.

Dave! (17:37.494) You've got to wonder though, like, is it a matter of the world had sort of moved on a little bit, but he hadn't? Like, you know, because he has he has made some sort of decade defining films, I guess, for lack of a better description. And and then by like, I don't know, 1985, sort of like, did the world audience shift away or did American audiences shift away from stuff like Porky's and Christmas Story?

Bryan! (17:51.439) Yeah. Oh, sure.

Bryan! (18:04.627) Yeah, you know what it was is it was the Steven Spielberg effect.

Dave! (18:09.157) Yeah, I can see that.

Bryan! (18:10.319) You know, they were still, they still made sex comedies like well into the 80s. But Porky's was the one that really kind of planted the flag. And it was definitely wasn't the first. There were, you know, there were sex comedies before that. But that was the one that I think really kind of sticks out in people's memory. It landed at a very particular time. But it fell out of favor very quickly.

Dave! (18:35.67) because it is deeply misogynistic.

Bryan! (18:37.923) Very, very much so, yeah. Which is interesting because it was made by Clark. You could say that this movie... Okay. But like it was based...

Dave! (18:46.082) He didn't write it though. And so, I mean, it's just a matter of people being like, it's a kind of institutional misogyny that you just don't notice. And then years later, you're like, someone was probably like, hey, Bob, about that movie. And he was probably like, okay, I guess I can see that. Actually, if it's Bob Clark, he almost certainly refused to see it. But he's pretty steadfast in his defense of his films, which, for better or worse, I guess. But it's one of those things where you just don't notice it until the world changes enough.

Bryan! (18:55.315) Yeah.

Bryan! (19:11.365) Yep, that.

Dave! (19:16.118) that you can be like, oh, I get it now. I see why you're all so upset about this. Sorry. It's just that it takes a long time to get.

Bryan! (19:19.695) Yeah.

Bryan! (19:25.815) Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. It's just that this Black Christmas came before Porky's, and it is remarkable in that it's a movie that's obviously it's a prototype for the slasher movie. But, you know, and again, like a lot of these slasher movies, the victim pool is majority women, in this case, nearly all of them. But there is a interiority to all of them. There is a

depth and dimension to all of the women in this movie that other slasher movies do not have. And it's very interesting that it has that sort of attention to detail. Because when Carpenter made Halloween, which has a lot of direct ties to this movie, he also made sure that the girls in that movie had the same dimension, but he made sure that Deborah Hill wrote it. And there's none of that in this. This is all

Dave! (20:20.439) Yes.

Bryan! (20:24.207) it's Clark and who's the other guy Roy Ward? Roy Moore. So yeah, it's a very interesting in that respect. Other movies, other slasher movies, other horror movies do not afford it's women the sort of same kind of range and depth that this one has.

Dave! (20:26.402) Write more.

Dave! (20:41.938) And it's a, I mean, it's a big gamble too, to take a movie that is, it's already gonna be a risky movie because this is, this is sort of like coming off of, Rosemary's Baby starts everything in 69. Then you get The Exorcist in 73 and that fucking breaks everything open. That's really what kicks off modern horror. Then you get Texas Chainsaw about, I don't know, six months or so before Black Christmas.

So there isn't a long line of things to draw from. And even this movie doesn't really draw from a tradition of horror. It really comes from a tradition of police procedurals, thrillers, mysteries, stuff like that. There's even sort of a love story element in here, this drama. It's not, it doesn't really come from a horror tradition, but he's taking an even bigger risk by really making a movie about women. Because that is what this is about. Your killer doesn't even have a name.

I mean, he theoretically has a name, but...

Bryan! (21:37.277) It's Agnes, it's me, Billy.

Dave! (21:39.126) Yeah, you just hear someone shouting names. You don't know if that's actually his name. I mean, you don't, there is, there was a backstory written for the purpose of the movie, but it's never included in the movie. But you get, so you get a movie that is basically about a bunch of women and their relationships, and eventually they start to get murdered, but.

Bryan! (21:47.515) Yeah. It's.

Dave! (21:57.634) And with regard to the newer one about like, oh, will they fight back? Well, they didn't fight back in this one because they didn't know there was a killer in the house. It's a lot like Halloween where it's like, well, she's the final girl. It's like, no, she's the only one who kinda knows something's wrong. Jess in this movie kind of knows something's wrong. That's why she doesn't end up getting murdered. She almost gets murdered, but she doesn't. The rest of them do because they have no idea that someone is trying to kill her.

Bryan! (22:03.741) Right.

Bryan! (22:09.308) Yeah.

Bryan! (22:20.953) Okay, so I don't want to blow it out blow it like the you know blow the ending right away But you think she comes out of the end?

Dave! (22:28.514) Well, she's alive.

Bryan! (22:29.699) Okay. All right. Well, okay. Yeah, we'll talk about that at the end. But getting back to Clark, personally, I personally think that he was a genius director, like a real, actual, like, film or really more of a storytelling genius in terms of like the sort of visual storytelling methods of making film, because he understands the power of subtlety.

Dave! (22:31.606) She lives to the end of the movie.

Dave! (22:48.557) Yes.

Bryan! (22:56.419) It has a diabolical attention to detail and you see it all over this movie. It was storyboarded like crazy, which is why so much of it sticks the landing.

Dave! (23:05.75) Yeah, he's also I think he was particularly proud of this movie because everything that he had tried to do up to this point, you can see little bits and pieces of what he's going for. But I think this is the first time he's like, I finally got I have the resources. I have the cast. I have the crew. I can finally do what I want. And he effectively does what he had set out to do, which is represent these women, tell this story. That's kind of a mystery. He really thinks this is like a fucking solid mystery. And I'm going to tell you right now, it's not.

But he really sticks to this, like, it's a real twisting, turning... And like, okay, buddy, it's a pretty transparent story, actually.

Bryan! (23:35.463) I

Bryan! (23:42.655) Yeah, when we when we get there, because there's a big misdirect throughout the movie that I am sure he thought Was great

Dave! (23:47.198) Yeah. He thinks it is brilliant. And it's like, you are overplaying your hand from the moment this guy shows up on screen. He is the reddest of herrings. But he does, I think he does feel like this was the first time he really got to see his vision through the way he wanted to.

Bryan! (23:59.451) Yeah.

Bryan! (24:08.323) Right, because this is definitely, this is somewhere, this movie lands, not in the middle, but towards the middle of his career actually, and before this...

Dave! (24:16.662) Yep. Because he had made before this, he's made Deranged. He had made Death Dream. Children shouldn't play with dead things. There's one more. I can't remember what it was.

Bryan! (24:26.235) Yeah, and those definitely, those are definitely consistent with low budget, sort of cheapo horror movies of the, of that era.

Dave! (24:35.694) I mean, Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things is like almost unwatchably bad. It's got some campy elements that are a little bit funny. The other two I think are, they're okay. They're not great.

Bryan! (24:39.395) Yeah, yeah. I find.

Bryan! (24:46.611) Death Dream, I like Death Dream in theory. In practice, I find it a little boring.

Dave! (24:52.95) Death Dream is really one of the, it's interesting because it's one of the first movies that directly challenges the kind of pro-America, pro-Vietnam position, because it is very much, it's the monkey's paw essentially, and these people get their dead son back from Vietnam, and he comes back to life, and the movie is really kind of a metaphor for the war and what happened with the fallout of the war, which is a bold thing to do in what, 1972 or something?

Bryan! (25:03.453) Yeah.

Mm.

Bryan! (25:18.142) Yeah.

Bryan! (25:21.582) Oh yeah, yeah.

Dave! (25:22.11) It doesn't make it fun to watch or easy to watch. It's still a bit of a slog. It's not a great movie, but it's significant and it's interesting for that reason.

Bryan! (25:32.199) Yeah, so here's some cast. Olivia Hussey. Uh-huh, dude. Burst out of the scene in 1968 in Franco Zaffarelli's Romeo and Juliet. She's the prototypical final girl, and she's still semi-active in Hollywood after nearly two decades of voice work. She's not as...

Dave! (25:36.63) Yep, Queens. Queens one and all.

Dave! (25:50.826) And if you grew up in the 1980s, you have absolutely seen Romeo and Juliet. It is like the fucking movie that always got put on in like when you had like a substitute teacher, which is weird because it has like a bunch of nudity in it. It's also just a really boring story. And Franco Zeffirelli was a creep. But yeah, they used to show this shit everywhere.

Bryan! (25:59.76) Oh yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (26:04.735) Hmm.

Yep. They absolutely did to me when I was in high school. They rolled the they rolled that video card into the into the classroom and I was like, ah, fucking awesome. I could just space out. So yeah.

Dave! (26:21.078) Just draw the Anthrax logo on my backpack over and over again.

Bryan! (26:26.267) So she apparently took this job because a psychic advised her that she would act in a Canadian film that would be very successful.

Dave! (26:32.822) And that is a good reason whenever a psychic tells you to do something, you should do it.

Bryan! (26:36.355) Yep, yep. So Black Christmas was a bit of a dud on release, but the psychic wasn't wrong in the long run. So it's just you gotta consider your timeline, I guess, Olivia. Taking up, picking up a little support on that. We got Margo Kidder. Iconic act. Everybody loves Barb.

Dave! (26:51.175) Awesome. My favorite character in this movie.

Cause she fucking nails it. She's so good in this.

Bryan! (26:59.607) Yeah, she is the iconic 70s actress for me. Like, there are many actresses who I very closely associate with the 70s, and it's her because of this movie and the Amityville horror and Superman. Apparently her drinking in this movie was intended to be received as comedic, but maybe it's just me? But there's something that's very tragic and painful about her character.

Dave! (27:24.91) I think that is one of the things that we can revisit a little bit later, but that's one of the sort of 70s things about it, is like, isn't it funny that she's an alcoholic? Well, no, not really. It actually contributes to the tragedy that is her life, because she is, I think, probably the most fleshed out character in this movie. You have the most information. Her and Claire, I think, are the ones you know the most about. And she's a very sympathetic, but she's also a monster to the end.

Bryan! (27:37.044) Cause

Bryan! (27:43.971) Uh, yes. Yeah.

Bryan! (27:55.083) all the way, she's a very, very bitter, very angry character who's... Nope. Yeah. But, I mean, in the same light, though, like Mrs. Mac's drinking, and Mrs. Mac, 100% alcoholic, that it...

Dave! (27:58.158) I mean, she's not like Judy in sleepaway camp, but like, she's pretty fucking mean.

Dave! (28:12.714) Because it's comical, Mrs. Max drinking is comical. It is done in a way that is like, it's goofy and she's like, you know, pulling bottles of booze out of the bookcase and out of the toilet tank. Barb is just drinking heavily through to the end.

Bryan! (28:27.835) Yeah. Uh so we've also got Andrea Martin who plays, yep, she plays Phil. So, so in the same way that when we did the house in sorority row and I had a favorite sorority girl which was Jeannie. I also yes, I uh no, that's no, that's your that Jeannie is the kind of bookish one. She's

Dave! (28:33.965) Also,

Dave! (28:45.922) the one from Bold and the Beautiful. The punk rock lesbian.

Dave! (28:55.822) Oh, isn't Jeannie the, uh, how do we know she is alive? Uh...

Bryan! (28:59.347) Nope. That's Morgan. Yep. Now, Jeannie, she's the one that the frat boys are going to throw into the nasty ass pool during the sort of drunk part. Yeah. So, yeah. Equally, and very similar in sort of theme and tone is Phil, who's like my favorite of the sorority girls in this one, too.

Dave! (29:07.615) Right, yes, yes.

Dave! (29:17.066) Yeah, she's like the middle ground. Like she's just not edgy. She's not getting drunk with Santa Claus, but she's not so naive either. She's just sort of like, well, she seems nice. I'd hang out with her.

Bryan! (29:28.079) Yeah, yeah, she's bookish. I think I have a type is what I'm saying. But yeah, still quite active actress. She's been on a lot of television.

Dave! (29:37.134) Yeah. She did a lot of stage acting as well. I think she has a bunch of Tony Awards for stuff. She that role was originally supposed to be played by Gilda Radner. Yep. Well, she didn't really turn it down. She Saturday Night Live came through and she was like, Oh, what am I going to do? And he was like, well, go do that, I guess. And so they had to kind of get somebody on the fly. And was Andrea Martin on SCTV at the time or was she still kind of relatively new?

Bryan! (29:41.699) Oh, yeah.

Bryan! (29:46.323) Gilda Radner who turned it down because she got picked up by Saturday Night Live.

Bryan! (30:03.44) I think, well see, I think SCTV came out after SNL, so...

Dave! (30:07.594) Yeah, it's like 77, 78.

Bryan! (30:10.679) Yeah, but uh, yeah, so here we go. Let's actually, let me look that up because that's interesting. Um.

Where are you? I don't see it. Oh yeah, so 76 to 81.

Yep. Yeah. But yep, Canadian actress. Is she Canadian? I think she is. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, right. Don't get my work Canadian than that. And then rounding it out, John Saxon. Exploitation movie every man. Dude couldn't say no to

Dave! (30:30.03) I think so. It's on SCTV.

Dave! (30:39.01) John motherfucking Saxon.

I mean, just any movie, just every movie, any movie you've ever seen probably has John Saxon in it. He's like Waldo, he might just be in the background somewhere, you don't know. Don't do it.

Bryan! (30:47.871) I could not say no to anything.

Bryan! (30:53.636) as a result, he ends up in some absolute classics like this one and the nightmare on Elm Street, but it really is just a numbers game when you take every roll past your way because he's also in Mitchell.

Dave! (31:03.37) Yeah, yeah. He's in Hellmaster and it is a terrible film.

Bryan! (31:07.815) Oh yeah, couldn't finish that one. And it's seldom that I just stop a movie and not finish it. So that's great job, Hellmaster. So here's some notes on this movie. So this movie was made on a budget of almost $700,000, which is the modern equivalent, about 3 million today. And unfortunately, it barely turned a profit, which is just too bad, because it is objectively a very good movie. But.

Dave! (31:23.566) Which is a lot.

Dave! (31:36.586) Well, it's production history is, it has like a sort of easy production history. It's when it came out that it was a problem because they released it. So it came out in Canada in like, I don't know, July or something like that.

Bryan! (31:45.86) Yes.

Bryan! (31:50.612) It was released in October, actually.

Dave! (31:53.218) So when it came out, it did, I think, pretty okay in like urban areas. So they release it in the States and they again give it limited release. And it does well enough that they're like, all right, we're gonna give it, we're gonna give it a wide release. And they do, and it just doesn't go anywhere to the point that like, I don't know if there was just a bunch of other shit that was coming out that same year around the same time that theater owners were like, fuck it, nevermind. We don't want it now because we've got other things.

Bryan! (32:12.361) Yes.

Dave! (32:22.55) So it just, it gets pulled pretty quickly.

Bryan! (32:25.116) Yeah, marketplace conditions probably had a lot to do with it. Who the fuck knows? I mean, the industry is a fickle thing. Yes, critics fucking hated it. Unsurprisingly, there was a writer for Variety who called it a bloody and senseless mess, which it is objectively not. White good.

Dave! (32:31.978) It was also pretty poorly received critically.

Bryan! (32:46.395) noted white knight, Jean Siskel says that it was indicative of the junk roles women were forced to play in movies. Making me

Dave! (32:52.682) Now I will tell you, I'm gonna tell you because we, we've talked about this off air, I guess, that I find Gene Siskel's, I mean, fuck Siskel and Ebert, those guys suck. Were they good writers? Sure, but they're also assholes. In a lot of his, I find problems throughout a lot of his criticism of horror and a lot of his behavior around it, but also in this case, this comment that he makes feels really misogynistic to me.

Bryan! (33:20.636) Well, yeah, so.

Dave! (33:20.886) Because he says Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder are reduced to playing mannequin-like coeds waiting to be stabbed, and that is not true of either one of them.

Bryan! (33:27.751) What the fuck? That is absolutely not true. So my think is he went into this movie because he just fucking hated horror movies. They, him and Ebert are charitable towards some titles, but like the vast bulk of horror movies are just dismissed by these guys outright. So I think that he went into this review just with his fucking, correct. But also to your point about the misogyny.

Dave! (33:48.418) Which is deeply unprofessional if you're a fucking critic.

Bryan! (33:55.207) That's kind of what lies at the heart of the whole online white night shit that was that popped up kind of when social media became a real mainstream thing like at the same time as it seems like there's a lot of men sort of standing up for women, a lot of what lies at the heart of it is these women are not living up to my expectations.

Dave! (34:11.757) Right, and that's what's happening here. This is, I think they should be playing better roles. Like they don't need, and it's like, well, okay, maybe, I don't know, but like they chose these or needed to do them for whatever reason. They act the shit out of them. They're interesting roles. Like it's just this idea of like, you should be making better movies, little lady. Like, oh, fuck you.

Bryan! (34:29.603) Yeah, yeah, yep. But I mean, there was, I mean, there was certainly an institutional misogyny towards like, attitudes towards women in Hollywood are notoriously fucking terrible. They still are, they've just transformed over the years. Like nobody's given anybody any diet pills and shit these days, or maybe they are, who the fuck knows? But like, it's an objective truth.

Dave! (34:41.815) Mm-hmm.

Dave! (34:54.422) Alright, I mean we don't give them diet pills, we just make them feel like they need to go have plastic surgery until they're fucking 70 years old and look ridiculous.

Bryan! (35:01.563) Yeah, it's an objective truth of the of the industry, but also what fucking Gene Siskel is doing is just as fucking bad. He's just a different part of the problem. Fuck that guy.

Dave! (35:10.582) Yeah, I mean, this is the same man who, what he gave out Betsy Palmer's address when Friday the 13th came out, because he was basically like, you should all tell her how you feel. And it's like, wow, you colossal asshole. See, he didn't think, yeah, I'm sure he was just like, oh, no, maybe someone will write her some letters. It's like, or someone will show up at her fucking door, you idiot.

Bryan! (35:18.789) Yeah.

Yep.

Bryan! (35:28.455) Yeah. My God.

Dave! (35:31.41) Some people did like it though. Like there were some, I did find some reviews because there were a lot of reviews of this movie. Not like some of the other ones we've done recently where it's like finding contemporary reviews impossible. But there were some good ones. The guy from Boston Globe, he kind of liked it. He liked the acting, he liked the writing. He's called it a taught exercise in terror. He did criticize Margo Kidder's acting. And I can kind of forgive that because I think if you...

you're looking at it in the 70s, it does come across as very hammy. I mean, even if you look at it now, it comes across as a little hammy, but I think it serves the movie because it sort of speaks to the character. But yeah, some people did like it, just not very many.

Bryan! (36:03.149) Yeah.

Bryan! (36:08.955) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, obviously it's been reappraised since, and it's now a piece of the classic canon. So here are some taglines for this movie. If this movie doesn't make your skin crawl, it's on too tight. Stupid, but I love it, absolutely. Here's another one. Christmas is coming early this year, and it's murder.

Dave! (36:28.203) Love it.

Dave! (36:39.562) They really leaned into the Christmas in the marketing of this, which is weird because Christmas is not really it takes place at Christmas. And it is it is relevant to the story, but it's not like Silent Night or Christmas Eve. It's like it's just the fact that it happens around Christmas. It would be like, you know, Fourth of July is coming early. It's like, well, the movie just takes place in the summer.

Bryan! (36:43.004) Which is crazy, because...

It takes place at Christmas, but it's not like Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Bryan! (37:02.311) I know it's Jaws you're talking about. Yeah, so here's another one. The sort of Christmas you don't dream of. Yeah, cuz you do you know you dream of a white Christmas get it.

Dave! (37:04.439) Yeah!

Dave! (37:12.553) I guess.

Dave! (37:17.706) Yeah, hey don't tell me what kind of Christmas I should dream of. You don't know me.

Bryan! (37:20.767) You know, he knows when you're sleeping. He knows if you're awake. He knows.

Dave! (37:26.655) Now see, I like that one.

Bryan! (37:28.919) Yeah, that one's not too bad because he definitely does. He definitely knows if they're sleeping. He knows if they're awake. He knows he knows if they're pregnant. Alright, so here's the last one. Black Christmas will rock you too.

Dave! (37:32.642) Yeah, he's in the house.

That is true. He definitely does.

Dave! (37:43.464) I don't understand. That sounds like, is that a German tagline? What is that?

Bryan! (37:46.639) I have no idea. It's definitely, it's like, it's like when we did Hellraiser and they had that Satan's done waitin' one. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna, I had to really dig to find a poster that had that tagline on it so I'm probably gonna have to really dig to find a poster that says, Black Christmas will rock you.

Dave! (37:53.318) I love that's my favorite one. That's my favorite tagline ever.

Dave! (38:04.098) There were some other ones that were like paragraphs long. Like this is not a tagline, this is just a summary.

Bryan! (38:07.139) Yes, not a tagline. Not a tagline at all. Way too long. That's why I left him off this list. So apparently this is Steve Martin's favorite movie. I love this. I love this for him. Steve Martin.

Dave! (38:22.478) Every now and then I learn things about Steve Martin and I'm like, you know what? I like this guy. I like this Steve Martin fella.

Bryan! (38:26.903) Yeah, he seems like a seems like an interesting character.

Dave! (38:30.166) Because it seems like the more we learn about men who are famous in the 70s and 80s, the less it's like, oh God, now I can't watch that movie anymore.

Bryan! (38:39.394) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you look them up. You pull them up in Wikipedia and you just scan the page for a controversy section.

Dave! (38:44.81) Yep, yep. But no, he seems like he's one of the few that sort of made it.

Bryan! (38:49.915) Yep, him and Martin Short, which is probably why they pair so well on that murder mystery show. So Olivia Hussey in interviews also states that this is one of Elvis's favorites, but I cannot confirm that. Seems a little outrageous, but the movie also drops right in the middle of Elvis's freefall, so maybe. But also, Olivia Hussey was convinced that she was going to marry Paul McCartney because a psychic told her. So who's to say?

Dave! (39:14.934) Again, you do what psychics tell you to do.

Bryan! (39:17.839) Yep. My God. So yeah, original title. Just sailing through life on the words of psychics. So, yeah, original title for this movie was Stop Me, which is an objectively bad title. But.

Dave! (39:21.956) What a weird life she's had.

Dave! (39:36.906) Yeah, because it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not a factor of the film either.

Bryan! (39:41.961) He says it on the phone once. One time.

Dave! (39:44.27) One time. He also says a lot. You could call this Agnes, you know, where's Billy? Look, yeah, like call it anything he says once or twice.

Bryan! (39:49.839) It's me, Agnes, it's me, Billy.

Bryan! (39:54.683) Yeah. So in some markets, this movie had an alternative title, Silent Night, Evil Night, which is something I wish these movies would stop doing. But it's fucking stupid. But

Dave! (40:04.182) Yep, that's fucking dumb. It was also, there was a TV cut of it that was supposed to be called Stranger in the House.

Bryan! (40:12.651) Uh alright. We got gets to the. That. Oh, because of Ted Bundy, that's right, yeah. Yep, so there is a fan film sequel called It's Me Billy that was produced in 2021 by a guy named David McCray and another guy named Bruce Dale. It's on YouTube. I've seen the trailer. I've not watched it yet. I probably will because it does look pretty good. But I'll link to that in the show notes.

Dave! (40:15.31) I don't, it never made it to TV though. And for, because Ted Bundy started killing, started killing ladies.

Bryan! (40:42.823) But yeah, so I am probably, I'm pretty confident about planting a flag in this movie as the first slasher movie. Because there's other movies, there's other movies before it that also.

Dave! (40:50.742) Yeah, I think it's fair.

Bryan! (40:58.107) have slasher flavors, but this is the one that really kind of says like faceless killer, body count, go. You know, like there's you can draw a direct line to Halloween from this one since Carpenter and Clark were actually like communicating and in some by some claims Carpenter picked up Bob Clark's idea for a sequel for this one and ran with it for Halloween. I don't know

Dave! (41:27.09) Yeah, you could tell, even when Bob Clark tells that story, you can tell he's kinda hedging a little bit. At some point someone was like, dude, you gotta stop saying that, this is not your movie. And he was like, okay, fine, I guess.

Bryan! (41:32.413) He-

Bryan! (41:37.111) Yeah, yeah, he says it, but it's on the Blu-ray in one of the extras where he actually explains that, but he kind of says it with a smirk, so I think, yeah. But yeah.

Dave! (41:46.27) Yeah. Because his idea, he had a very basic, this was the last horror movie he intended to make. And for, you know, because he just wanted to go and try other stuff. He was not, Bob Clark is one of the rare ones who started in horror because he liked horror. But he said that he, he did kind of, someone asked him if he had a sequel in mind or something. And he was like, well, if I was to do one, you know, they would find Billy and he would, you know, get put in an institution and then he would get out.

a couple years later or whatever, and he would go to a town and basically start doing it again. That's about as far as it goes. And like, that's pretty basic. That describes a lot of movies.

Bryan! (42:25.035) Yeah, yeah, it's broad enough that you could apply. You can say like, yeah, sure. I guess I can see that. But.

Dave! (42:30.634) Like I'm sure, you know, when John Carpenter and Debra Hill sat down to write Halloween, he's probably like, oh yeah, that's an, maybe I'll work some of that in there. Maybe that's a place to start. But there's no description in any of what of what Bob Clark says.

Bryan! (42:40.911) Yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (42:45.467) Yeah, it is an objective truth though that we do not have Halloween as we know it without this movie first. So, yeah.

Dave! (42:52.618) And even like this movie, it is pulling from Psycho. It is pulling from Peeping Tom. It's pulling heavily from Certain Jallow that were kind of out at the time because they probably would have seen some of them. Or at least, you know, they would have seen like the Bava movies.

Bryan! (42:58.079) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (43:01.831) Yeah.

Bryan! (43:08.268) Yeah!

Yeah, yeah, because this movie drops in the middle of the 70s, really at the absolute peak of Jallow's popularity in Italy. And so it does have some bits and pieces in common with Bay of Blood, which came out a few years prior to this one. But like a thing that I think we've kind of brought up in the past is like how exposed

Dave! (43:32.343) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (43:39.363) Italian movies were like North American filmmakers because like the it just it was everything was very in like siloed at the time. And so like we didn't have opportunities to take in foreign films in the same way that we do now, where like everything's available all the time.

Dave! (43:57.078) But they would have. So, you know, while the audience, you know, the sort of ordinary American would not have probably seen most of that stuff, unless you lived in like New York and LA. But filmmakers would have gone, you know, they would, they had to go to, you know, Cannes and pitch their shit to, like they would have traveled around and they would have just sort of been aware of what was happening in film broadly, because they still would have had to go and pitch things in, you know, to international distributors and stuff like that. So they would have seen stuff.

Bryan! (44:06.601) Yeah.

Bryan! (44:12.711) Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Bryan! (44:23.203) Yeah, yeah, that does. That does make a lot of sense, because, yeah, like, because, you know, when like George Lucas made Star Wars, like so much of that movie is based on Akira Kurosawa's stuff. So, like, obviously, these guys were seeing these movies and like very specialized houses in Los Angeles. So, yeah, but there is definitely a very heavy jallow flavor to this movie. Eventually, like it's I think it's. Yeah.

Dave! (44:48.666) The killer POV thing is a thing that they use pretty heavily in this.

Bryan! (44:53.455) Yeah, because it's really it's really by the time Friday the 13th comes out is when the slasher becomes like a very American thing. So yeah, in this part, it's definitely it's got bits and pieces of certain other cultures movies and this movie is.

Dave! (45:08.65) And it's also, I mean, it's just based on two, well, it's based on the babysitter and the man upstairs, the urban legend, but it's also based, the character of Billy is based on a real person. So it's loosely based on a real person. It was a kid named George Webster, he's from Montreal. He's 14 years old, it's 1943, and he murdered his mother with a baseball bat and tried to kill his brother and his sister and a woman who was just like staying, like a friend who was staying in the house with him. Like he went.

Bryan! (45:14.288) Yes.

Dave! (45:38.218) room by room with a bat and just like bash their heads in. The only person he killed was his mother. And so I guess when Moore was working on the story, he thought about that. I think I can't remember why he did. I think like he was pretty young when it happened. And so maybe he might not have even been born with 43, but yeah, he thought about that. Cause the guy, the kid gets put in an institution for a while and then he just gets out and that was it. Nothing bad ever happened after that.

Bryan! (45:41.247) Jesus Christ.

Bryan! (46:07.931) No shit. Ah, yeah. So the story, or rather, the character of Mrs. Mack was initially offered to Betty Davis, who turned it down, unfortunately. That would have made her a three-time star of Bring Me the Axe if she had done it. Oh yeah, no, we will never leave. We will explore her. We celebrate her catalog.

Dave! (46:08.694) That is the character of Billy.

Dave! (46:25.506) Oh, well, we're coming back to her. Don't you worry about that.

Dave! (46:31.519) Mm-hmm

Bryan! (46:33.627) So music is by a guy named Carl Zittrer, who set out to make a soundtrack that matched the killer's internal monologue. So there's all kinds of crap stuck in the strings of his piano. And once...

Dave! (46:44.366) He's basically just raking either his hands or something across the strings of a piano.

Bryan! (46:49.211) Yeah, because there's, in terms of music, there's Christmas music, but most of the score is...

Dave! (46:52.622) There's not a lot of music in this.

Dave! (46:57.674) And that's diegetic for the most part.

Bryan! (46:59.547) Yeah, yeah, it's mostly like howling wind and that sound of like something being dragged across a piano. And so once he'd record that, he dubbed it a second time and like placed, like put his finger on the tape wheels as it was recording to sort of warp the sound. And you could really hear that in certain parts and it is fucking awesome.

Dave! (47:22.698) And that's sort of that was his thing. Carl Zitterer worked with Bob Clark quite a lot and with a guy named Paul Zaza. They all kind of worked together on a bunch of stuff. And Paul Zaza was the one who did music. Like he would do standard film score stuff and his music is very good, also Canadian. And what Carl Zitterer would do is like the sound design, the soundscape kind of thing, where he would just create noise and he would fuck around with like.

Bryan! (47:34.844) Yeah.

Dave! (47:50.006) you know, early electronic stuff, and he was really into that. So he did all that stuff. But if you can listen to just the stuff he did alone, it's not the kind of stuff you want to listen to. Like, I have a bunch of these soundtracks. I've put them on maybe once or twice, and they're not listenable because it's just noise.

Bryan! (48:05.435) Yeah, yeah. But the sound design of this movie is doing a lot of work. And it's just another piece of this sort of Swiss watch that this movie is. Yeah. So shall we get into it?

Dave! (48:15.114) It is a character in itself.

Dave! (48:21.971) Yeah, I just peruse my notes here. Yeah, I think we're. Good to go.

Bryan! (48:31.279) So we open on the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house where a Christmas party is taking place. First Jess enters, but then we cut to the janky wobbly low angle POV of a man breathing heavily looking for a way into the house.

Dave! (48:45.57) So when I first saw this part, I was just like, why is he like that? Now I had to remind myself that a Steadicam did not exist yet. But also apparently Bob Clark, and I don't know if he's joking, I don't think he's joking when he says this, he says that this guy was always drunk, he'd show up to work drunk. And that's partially why he's so unsteady. And he was like, I had to fire him a couple of days later. And I can't tell if he's joking or not. I don't think he is.

Bryan! (48:51.836) Yes, yes.

Bryan! (49:10.195) No, because there's also, there's other things that they do. Like it's not just that it's all wobbly and shit, but like, yeah, cause it takes a few years for us to get the Panaglide, which is what Dean Cundy uses for Halloween, which is why the POV of that is so smooth. But this is definitely just a dude holding the camera in his hand cause it is jerky and crazy.

Dave! (49:33.406) And it's weirdly low. It's like if you're if you're doing killer POV, great. But also people don't walk like that.

Bryan! (49:39.515) No, it's almost like he was holding the camera at about waist level.

Dave! (49:42.41) Yeah, it's really low. It's very strange.

Bryan! (49:45.019) But also they use the lens on it is different. So like where everything else in the movie is shot with like the appropriate sort of lens you would use for the scene and the camera's either, you know, it's zooming, it's panning, it's on a track or whatever. This hand.

Dave! (49:58.562) The fucking camera moves so much in this movie. It is constantly moving.

Bryan! (50:01.295) Yeah, so the they use like a wide angle lens on all of these sort of Billy POV stuff because not only does it sort of tighten everything up, it kind of warps shit around the edges. So you are basically looking through the eyes of a very damaged individual.

And so, yeah, he eventually finds his way to the trellis, which runs all the way up to the top floor, and he starts climbing, eventually letting himself into the attic.

So meanwhile, at the party, we get to know the...

Dave! (50:33.486) Also, why is he gets in the attic? There's a rocking horse in there. Why is there a rocking horse in a sorority house?

Bryan! (50:38.127) Oh yeah, it's that attic is crazy as hell. There's a block of tackle up there for some reason.

So yeah, we get to lay the land. It's a crowded sorority, but we're going to be primarily concerned with our final girl, Jess, hard drinking Barb, bookish Phyllis and her boyfriend who looks like MC5's Rob Tyner and young, naive Claire.

Dave! (51:02.914) I will say the economy of this scene is incredible because we learn in such a short amount of time, we learn absolutely everything we need to know about all of these characters in such a subtle way that you're off, the movie is off and you're like, wow, I know everything about these people now. Just based on like four lines.

Bryan! (51:16.528) Yeah. Oh yeah!

Bryan! (51:22.299) Yeah, that is a thing that's that is a thing, a quality of this movie that struck me also the last time that I watched it was this movie runs about 98 minutes long, but it feels like a shitload. Like a way more should happen in this movie than is, you know, you would typically stuff into a 98 minute movie like it is it is very tight and gives you a lot to work with. But yeah, like you immediately get a high level overview of who each one of these girls are.

and what is going on in their lives. It's snappy, it's, god damn it, it's such a good way to get us into it. So the phone rings for the first time as the killer makes his way down from the attic and sneaks around. Now this is Barb's mom who drops bad news about where she's gonna be for Christmas and how Barb is not really invited.

Dave! (52:14.102) Yup, and then Barb says, you're a real gold-plated whore. You know that, mother? And I thought, that is an incredible line.

Bryan! (52:19.533) Yep. Yeah. So yeah, this clues us into the sad state of affairs between her and her mother and maybe the part of the reason why she drinks so heavily in this movie. And so yeah.

Dave! (52:31.734) Yeah, because her mother, I think, has a new boyfriend.

Bryan! (52:34.019) Yes, that's kind of what's implied if you're paying attention. So a little bit more, you know, party goes by, a little bit more killer sneaking around. And then the phone rings again, and it's the sound that you're going to learn to hate. But this time it's not Barb's mom.

Dave! (52:50.698) Yeah, the sound of the phone ringing becomes so menacing throughout the entire movie. It's really incredible.

Bryan! (52:56.911) Oh yeah. That by the time the movie ends, it's goddamn, does it hit? It really lands in the way that they, and they know it too, because they, the only thing that plays over the credits rolling is the fucking phone ringing. This time it's not Barb's mom. It's a caller that the girls have come to call the moaner. So they all gather around the phone to listen to him making all these crazy ass sounds and saying all this obscene shit. While the camera tracks across their horse.

Dave! (53:25.622) Well, the interesting thing about this part too, is that the fact that he has just snuck into their house, but they already know who he is. So he is not a newly escaped person. And we find that out a little bit later that he's been creeping around the town for a while. But I missed that initially.

Bryan! (53:31.837) Yeah.

Well, this is my-

Bryan! (53:41.187) Yes, yeah. So that was my thing is I was wondering, I was, I'd always, I kind of wondered about that is the moaner and are the, are the moaner and Billy the same guy or is it just okay because the character of this initial phone call is not like the rest of them because this is him just yeah because this is him just saying like nasty shit to him and then right before he hangs up he's like I'm going to kill you very calmly

Dave! (53:52.238) I believe so.

Dave! (54:00.007) Uh, well, it escalates.

Dave! (54:09.626) in one of the most chilling lines ever delivered in any movie, because he is, so the voice of Billy is done by three different people. It's Nick Mancuso, Bob Clark, and a woman whose name I can never remember. It's Anne Something. And so that's why it shifts back and forth and it sounds like different people from time to time. And it's really, it's used very well, but when that line comes, so, you know, Barb's on the phone and she's listening to all the nasty shit he's saying and the,

Bryan! (54:27.208) Yeah.

Dave! (54:39.362) camera is scanning from one woman to another. And this is another of that sort of the economy of this scene, because you're getting different reactions.

Bryan! (54:45.247) Which is a technically, yes, it is. And also that is a very technically impressive shot because he's, the camera movement is very, it's tight on their faces, but it's going from woman to woman. And it's not just like in a line, like it has to go up and then over and then down. So there's also a guy called a focus puller who's sitting there like drawing the camera's lens into focus for each one of them, because also.

Dave! (54:51.99) Yeah, he's like right in front of them.

Bryan! (55:12.019) They're not blocked the same. They're all like different, you know, distances from the lens. Technically very impressive if you're into that sort of thing. But again, yes, here we are meeting the sorority girls. And most of them are gonna go away. Like we're really primarily concerned with four of them.

Dave! (55:26.594) which is the only reason why Christmas is necessary for this story. You have to get all these people out of the house somehow for an extended period. That's the only reason why Christmas matters in this movie. But as it's scanning, you're watching them react. And then towards the end, you know, Barb is sort of egging him on and she's kind of prodding him and saying other shit to him. And then the act kind of the crazy wild guy act drops away. He just says, I'm going to kill you. And that's the end of the call. And it is like dead pan. It is really, really unnerving.

Bryan! (55:32.903) Yep.

Bryan! (55:50.184) Yeah.

Bryan! (55:55.579) Yeah, yep. So we learned from Claire that a local girl, a townie, was recently raped when Barb utters a real nasty phrase.

Dave! (56:04.97) Listen, I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it everybody. If you don't want to plug up ears, if you don't want to hear it, she says, "'Darling, you can't rape a townie.'" I know I shouldn't like that line, but Jesus Christ, it's fucking hilarious.

Bryan! (56:17.071) The way that she drops it is so fucking heavy and like it

Dave! (56:20.874) Yeah, it is nasty. It is a mean, mean thing to say. And that's part of this. That's her character. You know, you more inside into her character. This is like.

Bryan! (56:28.355) Yeah, but also like one of the things like when I was in high school, like we used to hang around and we were right up there by UNH. And that very much was an attitude of all of the like student body towards like the fucking psychos and weirdos who lived, who like lived there all the time. Like.

Dave! (56:46.53) Yeah, there's a weird issue of class in this that I don't really think they follow through on. It's sort of a thread they kind of drop and they don't, it doesn't deliver. But there is a question of class throughout this movie that we'll talk about a little bit later because one of the characters is kind of a signifier of that.

Bryan! (57:03.759) Yeah. So now, Claire, but also of all the girls, Claire is the one who is most moved by this. So, she goes off to pack for break and now enter Mrs. Mack, a walking vaudeville character, and one of my

Dave! (57:20.15) Well, she also, before that happens, what is Claire, cause again, Barb is kind of fucking with Claire. Like you can tell there's some animosity here, but she doesn't like her. She kind of bullies her a little bit. And then I think it's Jess or it's either Jess or Phil says to her, hasn't she had enough trouble fitting in here already? And this is another one of those things like, this could just be lazy writing or bad editing or something. But I think there's more, I think it's just a smart choice to imply.

Bryan! (57:30.781) Yeah.

Dave! (57:48.482) There's something about Claire that's not like the other girls. And we get more of that when her father shows up, but they never really take you there. They're just like, hey, you figure it out. Clearly, because she's gonna die in like five minutes anyway.

Bryan! (57:58.223) Yeah, that's the thing is, yeah, this movie definitely hits you with enough to sort of feed your mind and your imagination, but leaves a lot of shit off the, you know, the main screen, which

Dave! (58:11.626) in a way that feels intentional, not lazy.

Bryan! (58:14.467) Yes, and that's the thing that I was talking about, about the subtlety and nuance. Like, nowadays you couldn't do that. They would have to explain her entire backstory.

Dave! (58:21.45) Otherwise you'd have fucking 16 YouTube videos where it's like, Black Christmas explained. And I'm like, why is this even a thing?

Bryan! (58:27.58) Yeah, yeah, but suffice to say, like, she's just kind of naive. She's probably the youngest in the house. Like that's kind of the implication here. Barb is from

Dave! (58:36.962) She's very pure. She's very like naive and pure is the impression.

Bryan! (58:40.155) Yeah, Barb is from the city and she's kind of a tough chick. So that's their whole thing. Now. Now Mrs. Mack comes in. She's the house mother. And she's very fucking funny. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The and the girls give her a Christmas gift and it is just this like fucking ugly house coat. You can see it on her face. Not loving it.

Dave! (58:51.246) She's basically Shelly Winters. She is Shelly Winters from the late 70s.

Bryan! (59:08.323) but they all seem to get along and they all seem to love each other. It's a very nice thing. So, but she eventually kind of finds her way out of the movie. It's actually kind of sad. Up in her room, Claire pulls clothes off the rack, leaving a series of hanging dry cleaning bags behind. And the camera pulls in tight and you can barely make it out, but there's the face of the killer behind them, obscured by the bag, which...

Dave! (59:32.51) It's not even really a face, it's just a dark silhouette, kind of, and it could be anything.

Bryan! (59:38.211) chills me to the fucking bone every time I see it.

Dave! (59:39.93) I think this is one of the creepiest moments in any movie that I've ever seen, because she's saying, she gets that there's someone in the closet, and at first you would think, okay, someone's playing a prank or whatever, it's a joke, but the scene goes on far too long, and she's saying, who is that? Who's in there? And she's sort of stepping slowly towards the thing, and it's like, in what circumstance would you be doing that? Because there shouldn't be anyone in your closet.

Bryan! (59:43.967) Because, right.

Bryan! (59:57.392) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:00:04.567) Oh, yeah, like I'm actually.

Especially the fact that it's not just that there's a closet there is like a crawl space behind it So there could very well be somebody in there because what happens is she hears there's a cat a house cat named Claude

Dave! (01:00:18.654) except what she's hearing is not the cat.

Bryan! (01:00:20.935) No, she's hearing the killer making cat sounds. And so that's when she starts to step towards it. But there is a crawl space behind the closet where somebody very well could be hidden. And if we find out is fucking hidden.

Dave! (01:00:23.767) Yes.

Dave! (01:00:33.578) And that's the thing though, is that we know that he's there. She kind of knows that he's there and she's still going towards it. And it's the tension in this moment and then the way it explodes is really rough.

Bryan! (01:00:43.963) Oh sure, because I'm watching this and I'm doing that thing where I am audibly saying, oh, don't do that. Don't go there. Don't go over there. Is she gonna die?

Dave! (01:00:53.51) Is it? Don't tell me.

Bryan! (01:00:55.995) Yeah. So yeah, but it's also this is the very beginning of the way in which Clark treats the killer in this movie, because at no point do we ever really see him. We see his legs. We see his eye. We hear his voice a lot. Yeah. So you only ever catch him obscured. And I don't know.

Dave! (01:01:11.626) And even when you see his legs, that's like the most you're gonna see.

Dave! (01:01:21.334) And the use of space in general in this, the use of shadow, of noise, of space, because up until like the, I'm gonna say, a little bit more than half, probably three quarters of this movie, there is so much ambient noise. And I think the reason they do that is because when it drops out, then you really notice it. You know how alone you are.

Bryan! (01:01:38.684) Yes.

Yes, and the thing is that what they do is it's that Carl Zittler stuff, because it's when it does drop out and you become aware of that, it's howling wind. It's so, or the telephone.

Dave! (01:01:52.214) Yeah. Or the telephone. You know, it makes that phone, that stark sound of the phone really cut through that silence. And I think this is one of those moments where she's creeping towards the thing. You know it's coming. You know it's gonna come. This is a fucking horror movie. Of course she's gonna die. But the way he really explodes out of the closet and grabs her in that way that's like, it's a little bit like when Bob gets killed in Halloween where like, we know that Michael Myers is gonna come out of somewhere and he just.

Bryan! (01:02:10.363) He explodes out of it. Yeah.

Dave! (01:02:20.47) bursts out of this closet in a way that you don't ever see him move throughout the rest of the movie. He moves really quickly and rushes him and pins him to the wall. And that's kind of what happens here is he grabs her and wraps the fucking, you know, garment bag around her head. But he does it in this really aggressive, startling way. It is a genuinely upsetting moment that I do not find most things scary.

Bryan! (01:02:27.816) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:02:41.265) It's-

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that 100%. Like there are moments in this movie that, God, it hits all of the, I'm so fucking jaded when it comes to horror movies that nothing really scares me. And it takes a lot to really sort of shake me. This movie does it without really ever doing, without ever doing anything truly, truly horrible. Like it's a most...

Dave! (01:03:06.07) Mm-hmm. Because everything is happening just out, it's just like a little bit out of the frame. Like it's out of the corner of your eye you notice something. It's a shadow that passes. It's a phone call. Everything is just out of reach where you can't quite see it, but you know it's there.

Bryan! (01:03:21.283) Yeah. And the thing is, this is a mostly bloodless movie. There's a little bit, but really not much. It's so it is not really it.

Dave! (01:03:30.378) Which is why all those critics can eat a whole bag of dicks because they obviously didn't even watch the movie.

Bryan! (01:03:35.823) Yeah, you know, it's it is shocking in all of the best ways. God, yeah.

Dave! (01:03:41.482) And I think one of the, and Clark has said in one of the interviews that he wanted the house to feel like a character in the movie. And I think he's very successful, which is why the camera moves so much, because he wants you to feel this familiar place as well. But it also, like it's warm and inviting in that very 70s way. Like it has a lot of wood paneling. It's a lot of sort of like oak. It's like dark stained wood. It is warm and like as a fire going at one point, like it feels really warm, but it also feels very menacing because

Bryan! (01:03:55.144) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:04:04.125) Yeah.

Dave! (01:04:10.23) We know that there's someone in this house and we also now know because they move the camera so much, we know there are so many fucking crevices and shadows and like places where someone can jump out or hide that it is always going to feel unsafe even when it feels warm.

Bryan! (01:04:26.523) Yeah, yep. Good God. Easily one of the most tense moments in the entire movie. Never loses its impact. Like I am as moved by it today as I was when I first saw it. It's brutal, it's up close. It's very, very tight watching this fucking poor girl die.

Dave! (01:04:43.594) Yeah, everything. These are such tight shots and everything. There's always shit foregrounded to that other than the actor. It's like, you know, we'll we get a shot tight shot on Jess's face, but it's like through the banister or through the slats in the, you know, the windows or something like there's always something else between us and them.

Bryan! (01:05:00.067) Yeah. Good man. Yeah. So now actually I was a little ahead of myself. Now Mrs. Mac gets a gift as she says about it. I have about as much use for this as a chastity belt.

classy lady.

Dave! (01:05:14.282) Again, just imagine Shelly Winter saying that.

Bryan! (01:05:18.092) So, yeah, so upstairs we see the killer walking away from the top of the steps as the camera pans up. Then we only see his legs in shadow, and the slow pan around the hall and up to the attic hatch ominously closing. Which is going to be, yeah, so there's, um, that hatch is going to be a recurring motif, and you're going to fucking hate it every time you see it.

Dave! (01:05:31.251) He is carrying her body as well.

Dave! (01:05:41.23) The interesting thing about Claire, because she is now, we see her, she says like six lines or whatever, and then she is dead, but she never leaves the movie. I mean, you could argue that she is one of the stars of this film, even though she's just sitting there. Because her father becomes a big, just in the trailer you played, is very Claire focused. This is a lot for a character who's dead within the first 15 minutes of the movie, because we never forget that all of this is really about looking for Claire.

Bryan! (01:05:50.395) No, she keeps coming back. She's on the poster.

Dave! (01:06:09.666) They never really let us forget about that. And that is one of the bigger differences between later slasher movies and this one is that, that even though she dies, she's still a fully realized character who is there to move the plot along. We never get to forget about her. She's never gonna be disposable. Nobody in this movie is ever going to be disposable. We never forget them, even when they're dead.

Bryan! (01:06:09.853) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:06:29.615) Yeah, yeah. So Mrs. Mack, meanwhile, has booze stashed all over the house.

Dave! (01:06:37.007) in a very Scooby-Doo-esque way.

Bryan! (01:06:39.728) in a book, in a toilet tank, behind the, you know, at the bottom of the closet, it's everywhere. And it becomes like a running joke. Also.

Dave! (01:06:49.192) Bob Clark said that he based this on his aunt, who I guess had a similar drinking problem, and would hide, I'm guessing his aunt wasn't hollowing out a book to put, you know, alcohol in it.

Bryan! (01:06:52.626) Hahaha!

Bryan! (01:06:56.008) That's...

Bryan! (01:07:01.159) No, but that is that hiding alcohol over the house is like a key trait of an alcoholic, you know, as I learned so well. But on top of that, Jess is like a normal human being. Jess's sweater, by the way, is awesome.

Dave! (01:07:14.447) I just keep it in the refrigerator. That's where I keep it. Yeah.

Dave! (01:07:21.266) It is it is iconic and I was I was encouraged and heartened to see so many people wearing that sweater on social media this year.

Bryan! (01:07:30.147) Yeah, yeah, I've seen ads for it and I was like, I'd buy it but like I don't, I would never personally wear it because not really a sweater for men and I don't know anybody who would wear it so I'll leave it, I'll leave it to the fans. So the phone rings again and Jess and Phil brace themselves but

Dave! (01:07:51.586) So we already know like this, it's only the third call and in the house, the phone has only rung three times and it's already a source of fear.

Bryan! (01:07:59.995) Yeah, but it's just Jess's boyfriend, Peter. She's troubled. They need to talk in person. He's kind of a jerk and he's been practicing his piano shit for the last few days. He says, I love you, to which she replies, I know.

Dave! (01:08:14.346) I know. And again, this is that economy of language again, where it's like, we don't know anything about their relationship, and yet when she hangs up this phone, we know that something is wrong, and that we're going to learn more about it.

Bryan! (01:08:27.835) Yes. Yeah. Mrs. Mac, now brushing her teeth, searches for something to wash the toothpaste out with. Not not wanting water for some reason. This also makes me fucking recoil in horror. So she pulls a bottle of whiskey out of the toilet tank, which even though I know that the... What is it? Oh no. Oh yeah, that's so yeah, she's a... She's a real boozound. Oh god.

Dave! (01:08:34.691) Ugh.

Dave! (01:08:43.826) Oh no, that's not whiskey. That is pure sherry. Yep. That's the worst of the alcohols.

Bryan! (01:08:57.931) She pulls out another toilet tank. I know that the water in the toilet tank is clean water, but still

Dave! (01:09:05.693) Yeah, it's a hard one to shake.

Bryan! (01:09:07.944) No thanks, no thanks. So now Jess goes to check on Claire, but finds her room empty. That's because her body is currently rocking in a rocking chair in the attic by the window, with the dry cleaning bag still over her head. The bag inhaled.

Dave! (01:09:20.078) So this is a, yeah, she was a, what is her, I can't remember her name. She's in curtains too. Lynn, Lynn something. So she was, I guess, a, not a competitive swimmer, but she was a swimmer. So she is holding her breath because she is breathing it in. She's breathing the bag in so you can get that effect. And she just held her, held it like that.

Bryan! (01:09:27.371) Yeah, yes, I know you're talking about, let me look her up.

Bryan! (01:09:43.346) Ugh.

Dave! (01:09:46.082) for however long they needed to get the shot. And then they just keep coming back to that same shot, but it's really impressive.

Bryan! (01:09:46.511) Oh god.

Bryan! (01:09:50.255) Yeah, that is... Thinking of ways to die, being suffocated is one that really fucks with me. And yeah, that one, and just the way that it looks, because whenever we see her, and we're gonna see her a bunch, it's always like the bag is sucked into her mouth, and she's got this horrible, horrible look of terror on her face too, but yeah. But yeah, it...

Dave! (01:10:00.12) Biomaniac.

Dave! (01:10:14.19) And I think this is one of the weird parts where the movie doesn't quite work because if, you know, she just went upstairs like 10 minutes earlier, 15 minutes earlier, and for Jess to then go up and be like, huh, I guess she's gone, gone where? You're in the house, you would see her somewhere.

Bryan! (01:10:27.94) Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, but again, at the same time, she's nowhere to be found. So it does, I suppose, like, oh, she must have slipped out when I wasn't paying attention is kind of a... Yeah, but I'll-

Dave! (01:10:42.826) Yeah, there is a lot of chaos going on. But I still have always just kind of been like, wouldn't you be a little bit curious where she went?

Bryan! (01:10:50.783) Yeah, I mean, eventually she is, but in the moment, not so much. The killer, who we'll call Billy, sings a shrill sort of nursery rhyme as Claire's body rocks in the chair. And we find out something about somebody named Agnes, who's also going to play a little role in the proceedings. So the next day, set against a slow off-key church bell chiming a Christmas carol, Claire's father waits for a daughter who will never arrive.

Dave! (01:11:18.67) Claire's father is a strange character. I know what they're doing. He always reminds me of Les Nessman from WKRP. Yeah.

Bryan! (01:11:26.159) Oh, the humanity. Yeah. Uh you know who I thought of when I when I when I saw him was From silver bullet the old guy the young guy playing an old guy Yeah, so that's who I could I could shake it

Dave! (01:11:38.229) Yes.

Dave! (01:11:42.198) It's a strange, like I get what they're trying to do with this, Karen. They're trying to say he's very conservative. He's a very sort of tightly buttoned up guy, but he reads in this like really anxious kind of nebbish jumpy way where you're like, he seems too old to be her father for one thing, but he's like 70s old, so he could be like 42 for all I know. But he makes.

Bryan! (01:11:50.375) Stuffy. Yeah.

Bryan! (01:12:01.948) Yeah.

right, right. Yeah. He's a he's a spry 35.

Dave! (01:12:08.918) Yeah, he makes a lot of weird choices where it's like, he just seems pissed off from the moment he arrives in a way that I don't know. Like, it's like if a religious conservative sent their child to NYU and showed up and they're like, why do you mean you're in the theater department now? Like, it's a weird, like, it doesn't quite come across the way I think that they wanted it to. He's fine, but he just made, they make a lot of weird choices with this character.

Bryan! (01:12:22.64) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:12:26.575) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:12:35.516) Yeah, yeah, I could see that his whole thing is

Dave! (01:12:39.422) I don't, maybe they just don't have enough room to convey, you know, arch conservative in this way that they want.

Bryan! (01:12:46.875) Yeah, but yeah, so he's eventually he's struck by a snowball thrown by children. Then their chaperone comes over to apologize, directs him to the sorority house. The one he wrote.

Dave! (01:12:57.382) And then chaperone says, yeah, well, I said I was sorry.

Bryan! (01:13:01.183) That's right. Yep. You're gonna get a lot of that in this because about something like 65% of the cast had to be had to be Canadian actors in order to

Dave! (01:13:09.346) So they actually, he said, Bob Clark says that they, they wanted it to be neutral. They didn't want, like, there's an American flag at some point in this movie. Like they wanted you to think it's in the US. And he was like, I don't know how we were supposed to do that, we're in Canada. Like, and we're in, he's like, you know, out house, there's a fucking hockey scene. Like, like there is, yeah, it's, this movie is super Canadian.

Bryan! (01:13:17.705) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:13:24.175) Oh, and, and...

Bryan! (01:13:30.231) Yep. This is dudes on snowmobiles.

Bryan! (01:13:36.063) Yeah. So when he arrives, he a dude who really needs to chill the ** out, finds the place objectionable decorated with lewd hippie posters as Mrs. Mac assures him that it's all good. Uh and this is

Dave! (01:13:51.666) Even the posters feel a little bit, well, no, the one with the old lady giving him the finger, that feels very 70s. But a lot of the posters feel very, the way this house is decorated is very strange.

Bryan! (01:14:02.327) Yeah, because there's one that's really kind of present throughout all of it, and it must just because it's in the main room, but it's that astrology one that Barb always seems to be shot against. And then there's that one in that room, because it's not really clear whose room we're in, but there's that poster where it's like a peace sign by a ring of flowers and two people fucking in the middle of it.

Dave! (01:14:25.77) Yeah, I think that's Claire's room. And, but that's the one, it's like, a lot of this shit feels very 60s to me. I mean, it is 1974.

Bryan! (01:14:27.845) Okay.

Bryan! (01:14:31.995) Yeah, that, yeah. But that poster in particular, but I do love the old lady one. It's very funny. Cause I've seen that image before of her, like given the finger, but I have not seen the rest of the poster, which is like a series of like side-by-side shots of her sort of like getting to that point. It's very cute. So on her own getting ready to leave, Mrs. Mac Mitch is about his stupid, unrealistic expectations. She says,

These broads would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they could get up there. And then suddenly...

Dave! (01:15:04.77) Which I think is interesting to present them in this way because the moral purity of women in horror will become a big issue in the 80s, but this is part of real, like making them fully realized characters is like, yeah, they're women in college. They're probably having sex with people. We know that they all have boyfriends. Like it's again, it's a real, one of the things Bob Clark really wanted to do and was really important for him to do.

was to present them as realistic people. And I think he does. I mean, there are little bits, there are stereotypes of characters, like of personalities, because they each have like, you know, for the most part, a lot of people are pretty much just the fucking same. But these are each very distinct personalities. But I think beyond that, they are pretty realistic. And I think he did a pretty good job of it.

Bryan! (01:15:39.708) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:15:52.187) Yeah, yeah, it's like I think that it's natural as you're writing genre movies to sort of drive towards stereotypes, because like stereotypes don't necessarily have to be a bad thing. They're broad sort of characterizations of people and personality types that each one of us can kind of gravitate towards. And so even though they're stereotypes, each one of them.

does still have this like very well defined internal landscape. So like you know there's stereotypes but there's stereotypes with very rich backstories that are very skillfully communicated in ways that are not obvious but you still learn about them as the movie goes on. It's just it's

Dave! (01:16:36.938) And I would argue the one who's the least fleshed out is Jess. And that's probably because she is the protagonist and we're supposed to kind of project ourselves onto her. So she has to be a little bit blank in that way, just sort of like the way Laurie Strode has to be a little bit bland because we have to be able to project ourselves onto her. Whereas the other ones we don't, we're just supposed to enjoy them. And it's the same in this movie where it's like, these are all these characters. We can't really, I can't project myself onto Barb because she's a, you know, a.

Bryan! (01:16:46.61) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:16:54.641) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:16:58.173) Yeah.

Dave! (01:17:04.638) woman who's very angry and drunk all the time. Now, I am also sometimes a woman who's very angry and drunk all the time, but not all the time.

Bryan! (01:17:12.795) Yeah, yeah, to such a point there are barbs room has a Christmas wreath with like nips on it. They really want you to know she loves the alcohol. So yeah, as this is all happening, Mrs. Mack now hears the same cat sounds that Claire did.

Dave! (01:17:18.844) Yep.

Dave! (01:17:28.882) except it's even weirder now because they're in the house, but they're not obvious in the house. You can hear them, it's as though they're in the wall because they're in the attic. But you can tell that it's not, first of all, you can tell that it's not actually an animal. It's very close though. If you weren't paying that much attention, you wouldn't think about it. But they're very distant. Again, it's that thing of being, it's in the house with you, but you don't know where it is. And it sounds like there's something between it and you.

Bryan! (01:17:38.331) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:17:57.279) Yeah. Yeah. So at the conservatory, Jess tells her boyfriend Peter that she's pregnant. Peter is the biggest piece of ** My god. Of yeah from 2001.

Dave! (01:18:05.375) Hey everybody, Peter fucking sucks.

He is a giant baby and he is terrible. He is played by Keir Dullea. And apparently Bob Clark, he wanted, he kind of wrote this character for Keir Dullea because he wanted him, he liked him for his like robotic coldness. And he says that he really thinks he brought it, he did a great, great character. He brought a certain madness to the character. And it's like, ah, I think of all the acting in this, Keir Dullea is maybe the weakest because the character is so boring and terrible.

Bryan! (01:18:35.491) He's kind of the weak link. Yeah.

Dave! (01:18:38.614) Like he plays lunatic red herring. That is his role in this movie. And there's not a lot of latitude with that. So it's like, all right, I guess I'll just lean in and be like a mad villain with limits.

Bryan! (01:18:45.808) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:18:49.339) Yeah, the problem, mad villain. So the problem is that Clark really intends for this character to be a strong misdirect, but he does not work at all.

Dave! (01:19:01.846) And this is where you get into the weird pride of it all, where he's just like, he's so proud that, you know, if you pay attention, you know that, you'll know that Peter's not the killer. It's like, you don't even have to pay that much attention to know that Peter's not the killer.

Bryan! (01:19:13.015) Right. Like, thinking back on all the times that I've watched this movie, at no point, not even the very first time I watched this movie, did I fall for that. And it actually kind of struck me later on in repeated viewings that, like, oh shit, I'm supposed to think that Peter is the killer at certain points, but it just, it's so non-functional as a story component that it took me a while to realize that. So, yeah.

Dave! (01:19:37.662) And I think it's also, it's worth pointing out, as a lot of other people have pointed out, and people who are smarter than me, have pointed out that, you know, Peter, he might not be the killer in this movie, but he is probably still a killer. Like, you still, you never lose that feeling, even when you find out that it's not him, he still is a violent threat to her the whole time.

Bryan! (01:19:58.347) Right, because I'll save my observation for the ending, because that really comes through at the ending, that this guy is fucking unhinged too.

Dave! (01:20:03.114) Especially at the end, because it's bizarre.

Dave! (01:20:10.13) And he does, the things that I think Keir, Keir DeLay does do well is there is, he conveys a kind of narcissistic personality in which every, in every bit of dialogue he has, the whole thing is about him all the time. And as soon as she pushes back on him, like she does in this scene a bunch of times, he gets really nasty and aggressive with her. So he'll be like, no, we have to have a baby. A baby is a beautiful thing. And she'll be like, hey, Peter, shut up. I don't want a baby. And then he's like, why are you such a selfish bitch all the time?

Bryan! (01:20:32.317) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:20:40.124) Yeah.

Dave! (01:20:40.202) And it's like, wow, man.

Bryan! (01:20:42.511) Yeah, so yeah, he's excited about this. She tells him this, and he's excited, but she's like, immediately like, I want to have an abortion, which really upsets him.

Dave! (01:20:51.966) He loses his shit. And my interpretation of this character, but specifically this moment, is that he kind of gets, so you're to understand that he is reaching the end of his education, his formal education here, is going to be expected to present whatever you present to become a pianist, but also he then has to go out into the world. And as we learn, Peter kind of sucks at the piano. He's real shit at it. And I've always interpreted this as like,

He sees a baby as a way, as kind of an excuse to give up on school because that's what he eventually says is, no, I'm gonna quit, we'll get married. It's like, that just seems like an easy out for him because he's actually kind of a hack.

Bryan! (01:21:26.459) It's a yeah. Yeah, this.

Bryan! (01:21:32.359) This situ- this entire situation is a fucking parachute for him. So, yeah, but yeah, he's quite insistent that they have this baby, because as we said, Peter is a dick.

Dave! (01:21:45.782) And then she says, no. And he says, don't you ever think about anyone but yourself. And he turns on her so quickly. Like I know Keir DeWay is a decent actor, he's fine. But like there are moments in this where you're like, oh God, he's really creepy. But otherwise he's a little flat.

Bryan! (01:21:57.647) Yep. You know what it is? It's his fucking hair. I fucking hate that 70s shag thing. Like goddamn man. Apparently people just didn't know that you didn't have to have shitty hair. Anyway. At the PKS party for the underprivileged children's, Claire's father calls home. It is a crazy fucking party. Claire's father calls home to report that he hasn't found Claire while Barb on the other side of the split diopter lens gives a kid a glass of alcohol.

Dave! (01:22:01.934) Oh, it is bad. Yeah.

Dave! (01:22:09.655) Yeah, well.

Dave! (01:22:16.51) It is a wild party.

Bryan! (01:22:27.483) Not as first. She actually says, I think he's drunk or she says, I think he's schnockered.

Dave! (01:22:35.006) And meanwhile, Barb's boyfriend is playing Santa Claus and he is the most Jewish Santa Claus I've ever seen. Oh right, Phil's boyfriend.

Bryan! (01:22:40.463) Oh yeah, no, that's Phil's boyfriend. Yeah, but yeah, he's the guy that I keep saying is Rob Tyner because of that fucking afro he's got. So that night, Jess receives another call from the moaner, but this time it is seriously unhinged. Billy, Billy.

Dave! (01:22:56.262) And he starts to make noises at this point though, where it's like, and as it escalates, they get more chilling, but they're like weird animalistic sounds because these are three non-actors. I mean, I think Nick Mancuso became an actor and like a producer, but at the time I don't think he really was. And one of them is Bob Clark. And I don't know if it's because they're not acting or they're not trained actors, but.

Bryan! (01:23:06.556) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:23:11.88) Right.

Dave! (01:23:23.062) the performances they give and the sounds that they make and then the way those sounds are edited are so upsetting because they're so inhuman.

Bryan! (01:23:29.615) Yeah. But the thing, yeah, part of the thing is, is it's going back to the sort of the sound design of the movie is it's, this stuff is screamed over a phone. And so it is, it would be like if I were screaming into this microphone where it would be really, not just really loud, but it would be distorted and crackly and shit. And so on top of that, it's also the stuff that he's saying. What your mother and I must know is where did you put the baby? Like that kind of

Dave! (01:23:53.774) Mm-hmm.

And they're switching from one voice to another almost seamlessly. So it goes from being a man's voice to a woman's voice. And you don't notice that it's not the same voice. Now we do at the end and I don't like that part, but.

Bryan! (01:24:06.655) I see, here's the thing, I love that part. So I guess we'll talk about it when we get there, but yeah. So, but this is the thing is this is the part where we start to sort of, we never ever learned anything about Billy. We don't know if Billy is even a real person, but there is a story here that we're gonna get little bits and pieces of as Billy kind of like shrieks over the phone. And it's something.

Dave! (01:24:28.182) But you also don't know if it is it just crazy guy ranting or is this an actual story? That's part of why it's so genius is like, you just have to fill it in yourself. You can decide if this is the real, if this is actually the story. Now, the remakes, I believe they really lean into this, which is like, okay, way to ruin the whole fucking movie.

Bryan! (01:24:37.66) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:24:43.395) So yeah, Glenn Morgan's one has a whole like prologue that involves like Billy and what Billy did. So like, fuck that shit. I know. And I know that has got to be producer note stuff where some executive was like, it bothers me that we don't know who Billy is. We got to have, we

Dave! (01:25:00.114) Like that's the whole point of the character is like, what makes him terrifying? What makes Michael Myers terrifying is that you don't know anything about him really. He's just this faceless menace. So is this character. We don't, he's just a guy shrieking into a telephone. He could be talking about something that actually happened or maybe not. Maybe he's just screaming into a fucking phone. But that's what makes him such an awesome character and such an awesome villain because he is a faceless thing. So all we're ever gonna see is a foot in an eye.

Bryan! (01:25:06.077) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:25:25.551) Yeah, yeah. So, Barb, Phil, and Claire's father go to the police to report Claire missing, and the cops don't take it too terribly seriously, which is pretty consistent.

Dave! (01:25:36.254) This is a really interesting introduction of the police in this, because the police, and up to this point, Clark has made a lot of like commentary on things like Vietnam, or the sort of cultish behavior in Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. His opinion of police in this are very strong, but I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of them, because the character of Nash is the sort of bumbling sergeant.

Bryan! (01:26:05.095) Yeah.

Dave! (01:26:05.474) He's an odd comic relief, but it's not in a way that Barb or Mrs. Mack is comic relief. It's very different. He's very Keystone Cops-ish. And it's like, are you making a point about policing or is he just kind of here to make the character of Fuller, the John Saxon character? Is he just here to like prop him up a little bit?

Bryan! (01:26:16.399) Yeah, yeah, they're up.

Bryan! (01:26:28.847) I think that he's obviously, he's a little bit of comic relief. He's a little bit of that to sort of be a contrast to Fuller. But I have a, personally, I have a theory about this movie's sort of underlying theme and that it really is, it's a movie that is mostly about the ineffectiveness of men. It's about the failure of men and sort of the way that, that the illusion of sort of patriarchy.

just crumbles when applied to an actual sort of crisis because none of the men in this movie really ever get anything done and a couple of them are even really kind of wimpy and wussy like Claire's dad like faints at the end of the movie and the way that men are portrayed in this kind of I mean even with Fuller who is kind of the heart you know the sort of furrowed brow like we're gonna get it done like even he fails in the end so I yeah

Dave! (01:27:23.374) Can we hold on one second? I just need to go to the bathroom. You're right back.

Bryan! (01:31:22.623) Thank you.

Bryan! (01:31:29.52) All right, here we go.

Dave! (01:31:33.077) There. Oh, so the point about introducing, hmm?

Bryan! (01:31:36.531) Hang on, hang on, you're silent. This is on my end.

Dave! (01:31:42.478) Can you hear it now? Did you break something?

Did I break something?

Bryan! (01:31:54.607) Say something no god damn it all right let me Talk Okay, I can hear you that way I Talk there we go Yeah, that yeah, that was me okay, so let me get back to where I was

Dave! (01:31:55.607) You have an orange light on your.

Dave! (01:32:01.898) Yep, what?

Dave! (01:32:06.722) Terrible echo though. Alright.

Dave! (01:32:15.214) So we're the police. So the introduction of the police is interesting. But the gender politics of this movie are very strange to me. And it is, I think, maybe worth noting that this movie does not come up at all in Clover's book Men, Women, Chainsaws, which is an exploration of gender politics in horror movies.

And it would have been, because I don't think it really meets what, it's not, she probably had criteria for what she was looking at in this movie, I don't think meets it because it doesn't, it doesn't have that kind of misogyny, but it does have something else going on. Where we're supposed to really, we're supposed to interpret Fuller as this, he's very masculine, he's very, he's not quite dirty hairy, but he's the competent one in the movie.

Bryan! (01:32:45.863) Yeah.

Dave! (01:33:08.35) And even he, towards the end, he's like, he kind of gaslights her a little bit. He really talks over her a bunch of times. And it's just a really interesting thing. And this is another one of those things that they never really followed through on, especially the character of Nash, but it does again comes down to that thing of like locals and students, because they do keep saying, well, you know, this is what happens, like girls go missing and it's probably, she's just probably gone with her boyfriend or something. It's that like, you know, talking about

Bryan! (01:33:08.381) Yeah.

Dave! (01:33:38.026) the local people talking about the college people. And there's that weird class dynamic here as well that we don't really dig into, probably because it's not that important to the story. But.

Bryan! (01:33:41.533) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:33:48.379) No, but also knowing what I do about sort of like crime in the 70s, particularly when it came to like either women as murder victims or like children as murder victims. A lot of the time and for like a murderer like Dean Coral, who got away with it, horrible. I mean, one of the probably, my money, like one of the worst murderers of all time, like to have gotten utterly terrifying because what the cops did when the parents went to them.

Dave! (01:34:09.59) He's terrifying.

Bryan! (01:34:15.927) and told him like my child is missing was the cops were just like, ah, they probably just ran away. Kids run away all the time. And it's like, well, are you going to look for them?

Dave! (01:34:22.41) And some of that, yeah, we'll wait 32 days until they come back or whatever. Some of that is that I think a desire for. Well, it's a resistance to the idea that bad these types of bad things are happening, especially when it comes to children, like because some I mean, pretty much almost exclusively. The murder of children has a sexual component that people really do not want to talk about.

Bryan! (01:34:45.438) Yeah.

Dave! (01:34:46.106) And but it's the same, it's the same for women. Like sort of like, we don't want to believe that these bad things are happening to things because especially for men, especially men in law enforcement, it signals a failure to have protected women or something. And that is really, I think, what the character of Fuller is trying to do in this, is that he is here to protect her and he does it in a very patronizing way. Whereas like we can't give her all this information because you know.

she might blow it or something like that. And it's like, well, if you had, maybe she could have been more protected. So yeah, I think there is this really interesting, like every man in this movie is making bad choices. There is one who is not, but he's not a significant character really. Claire's boyfriend. But yeah, I think it's really, it is an overlooked thing that it's like, they're either Peter who is just outright terrifying, or they're sort of ineffective in all these different ways to the-

Bryan! (01:35:15.628) Right.

Bryan! (01:35:28.67) Oh, Claire's boyfriend. Yeah.

Dave! (01:35:43.062) to the point that they're putting them in further danger. And I don't know if that's intentional. It's not explicit. And I think he could have done a little bit more with that. But so this is another one of those moments where it just sort of falls a little bit flat.

Bryan! (01:35:46.516) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:35:55.323) Yeah. So, uh, yeah, getting back to it. When the, uh, when the cop asks for the phone number of the sorority house, Barb tells him, Felatio 2880. It's a new exchange. F-E, you see. Because back in the day, Yeah, phones, phone numbers used to have, uh, letters in them, which is why, if you look at the number pad, they've got letters on them. That wasn't just for fucking texting and shit. Uh, but yeah.

Dave! (01:36:08.746) Now, now children, here's a way phones used to work.

Bryan! (01:36:25.443) I do not personally that must have changed when like really. OK, because yeah, I have no memory of that whatsoever. Like we always had a seven.

Dave! (01:36:28.094) Oh no, that changed in like the 60s.

Dave! (01:36:34.412) Yeah, no, and it's very regional. They were it was they were broken down by like different, you know, where you lived essentially was where your exchange was.

Bryan! (01:36:41.011) Gotcha. Oh, it must have had something, must have had something to do with like the telephone infrastructure or something like that. Cause we always had like the fucking 10 digit phone number, you know? So yeah. So now...

Dave! (01:36:49.13) Yep. But then she says, was one of my favorite lines in this moment, because he says something to her, like, would you shut up? And she turns to him and she goes, you know, for a public servant, your attitude really sucks.

Bryan! (01:36:57.255) Ha ha ha.

Bryan! (01:37:02.063) Yeah. The cop being a moron just takes it down. So now Jess goes over to the hockey rinks. Yeah, to ask where

Dave! (01:37:12.815) This is the most Canadian moment in any movie.

Bryan! (01:37:15.431) Because every single one of them has hockey guy mustache. I love it to death. She has, uh, yes, yeah, they're, they're firing pucks at the, at the actor who's wearing a spooky fucking hockey mask.

Dave! (01:37:19.05) Yeah. Because this is like a real hockey team.

Dave! (01:37:29.75) Yeah, and that is Art Händel. He is in a lot of Hallmark movies. He's been in a lot of shit.

Bryan! (01:37:35.023) Yeah, but yeah, he hasn't seen her either. So now we're going to put a little pin in that because we're going to come back to it. Meanwhile, Peter performs his piano piece for a bunch of smug looking judges, and he's supposed to be having a hard time preoccupied by what Jess told him. But this is one of those deals where I can't tell if the music is supposed to sound this way, because it's like

Dave! (01:37:57.046) I think it's a very like John Cage-ian kind of like, it's avant garde because he is pounding on the fucking piano. And it's clear that he knows how, whoever's playing it knows how to play it, but he's obviously doing it in a very way, a way that is very distressed.

Bryan! (01:38:00.337) Yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (01:38:11.323) Yeah, yeah, because the look on his face is a lot of sweat and like hard concentration. But like that piece I'm like, is it supposed to sound this way? Like, is he fucking up?

Dave! (01:38:20.274) I don't think so, because they pan from one judge to the other, and none of them look terribly impressed.

Bryan! (01:38:26.939) Yeah. So back at the police station, enter Johnny Saks as a distrust, a distraught mother reports her 13 year old daughter missing. Claire's boyfriend bust in.

Dave! (01:38:38.638) This is another interesting moment though, because we learn this is the mother, her daughter's name is Janice. And even Janice has a sort of, not an interior, because she's obviously missing and we never actually see her, but she as a character is given dimension where we learn more about her. So when they do find her, we have that moment of like, oh, well that's terrible. And she's never, we never meet her, we never see her, even when she's dead, we don't see her. She is a, she's.

Bryan! (01:38:53.94) This is

Bryan! (01:39:00.19) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:39:03.527) Nope, nope, they find the body. We never see it.

Dave! (01:39:07.606) Yeah, she's an idea. So this is another example of like a woman being given a lot more dimension for the sake of the story.

Bryan! (01:39:16.539) Yeah. So Claire's boyfriend bust in, gives the cops a wicked hard time. That coat is awesome. I think even the extra on the Blu-ray, the interview with him, it has something to do with the coat.

Dave! (01:39:20.642) wearing the most amazing coat. He looks like a goddamn woolly mammoth.

Dave! (01:39:32.086) Fantastic. And so what is, what's super interesting about this moment though, is so we've got the women from the college and we've got the father who's sort of wimpy conservative guy. And they don't like, Nash sort of ignores them and he begrudgingly takes their information. Now, Chris, her boyfriend, comes storming into the police station and screams at Nash as though they know each other. And then he's the one who is, and this is more of that class stuff where like,

Bryan! (01:39:33.007) Yeah, it's a hell of a, it's a hell of a code. So.

Bryan! (01:39:56.824) rape.

Dave! (01:40:01.442) he's the one who's able to make this thing move because then Fuller comes out and he says something like, hey, oh, hey Chris, how's your dad or whatever like that. Like they obviously he knows them because they're all from town. And so it's unclear why this matters to the story but he's the one who actually gets the investigation because he yells at them.

Bryan! (01:40:11.784) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (01:40:19.559) Yeah. Yep. So now back at the sorority house, Barb.

Dave! (01:40:24.67) Oh, there's also, this is where there's an American flag on Fuller's desk. It's a little tiny American flag. Little tiny American flags for some, Abarsons for others.

Bryan! (01:40:29.227) It's definitely... and always twirling, twirling toward the future. So, yeah, Barb is now very drunk looking at a Playboy magazine, and she explains to Claire's father that there's a species of turtle that fucks for three days. This is supposed to be a funny scene, but there is something really tragic.

Dave! (01:40:52.054) I don't, I actually don't think this is, I think this is supposed to be an important scene, but I don't think it's supposed to be that funny. I think it is a little bit goofy because this is when she spills over, that anger and guilt and sort of shame that she feels, all spills over because she does, she tells this joke about watching the turtles fuck and she makes another kind of dumb joke. And you watch as Mrs. Mac, so Claire's father never looks impressed by any of this, and Mrs. Mac and Phil look a little bit amused, but then eventually you watch that amusement car like slip off their face and they start to get really uncomfortable.

Bryan! (01:40:57.215) Because it's.

Bryan! (01:41:02.91) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:41:19.803) Yeah, their faces fall at a certain point and it's like,

Dave! (01:41:23.966) And that's when she says, you think it's my fault, don't you? And she sort of launches into this like angry tirade about how they think that she drove Claire away and she just sort of starts shouting at them. And you realize like, she's really shouting at herself because she feels terrible about what she did. And this is more of that like, oh, she actually is a really tragic character. She doesn't like suck. She's not bad person. She's just a very angry person. And it really comes out here. And this is more like,

Bryan! (01:41:37.363) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:41:48.112) Yeah.

Dave! (01:41:52.466) Margo Kidder is just a great actor. I think that all of them are in this moment, but like they end up kind of yelling back at her. And it's just a really interesting moment where you watch it all kind of slip away and things are starting to get more serious because she's the first person who says, if she's dead, it's my fault. And that's where, this is the first time where anyone has raised the possibility that Claire is actually dead.

Bryan! (01:41:54.633) Yeah?

Bryan! (01:42:15.183) Yeah, yeah. So she goes upstairs to sleep it off. It's gonna be the last we see of her for a little while. So Peter now back at the conservatory dreams dash, I guess it was as bad as I thought it sounded. Apparently, he smashes up the piano because he's a gigantic baby.

Dave! (01:42:36.15) And I'm guessing they're just gonna bill him.

Bryan! (01:42:38.375) I know that's a very expensive piano. He's trashing. So, yeah, as everybody leaves to go search for Claire.

Dave! (01:42:44.758) It also feels a little less, that scene feels a little unnecessary to me. It's more of that like shunting you towards him as the red heron. It's like, you know what? Each time you do this, it just feels really obvious. Like, yeah.

Bryan! (01:42:52.336) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:42:55.783) It's a little forced. Yeah, so now everybody leaves to go search for Claire, and Mrs. Mac tells Phil that she might not be there when they get back because she's going to visit her sister. So, put a pin in that. Now, the police have organized a search party in the meantime to go looking for Claire. So, everybody's gonna go do that. And it looks like a really, really cold night in Canada.

Dave! (01:43:19.542) It is a very Canadian moment.

Bryan! (01:43:21.279) Yeah. So Mrs. Mac getting ready to leave. Here's the cat sound again, thinking that it's the cat Claude.

Dave! (01:43:27.182) And this is again where it's more in the, it sounds like it's in the walls.

Bryan! (01:43:31.375) Yes. Yep. So thinking he's up in the attic, she pokes her head up to look. She doesn't find the cat, but she does find Claire's body by the window and turns in time for Billy to swing a big hook on a block and tackle which catches her under the jaw and then uses the pulley to drag her body up into the attic.

Dave! (01:43:49.346) Which, I mean, this one feels like a bit of a stretch. Like, it would hurt, it might kill her, but I don't think it's gonna hook. It's not a hook hook, it's like a pulley hook. Like, it's not gonna rip into her head and then something he can drag her up on. It's just a little bit of a weird, it doesn't fucking matter, but people just sort of point to that as like, well, here's another, like this wouldn't work, and it's like, just shut up. Even me, just shut up.

Bryan! (01:43:52.253) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:44:05.147) Yeah.

No, no, it's, it's...

Bryan! (01:44:14.291) the fuck up and watch the movie. It's that it's nasty. So yeah, add another body to the pile. Billy goes berserk in the attic for some reason.

So now.

Dave! (01:44:25.73) Just knocking that rocking horse all over the place. Like a maniac.

Bryan! (01:44:28.216) Fuck that rockin horse cuz he too is like, what is this even doing here?

Dave! (01:44:32.15) Now he's like, this is a sorority house. Be better.

Bryan! (01:44:35.908) So the search party, meanwhile, finds a body. But it's not Claire, obviously. It's the body of the missing girl from the police station before. It seems like Billy is on a bit of a rampage.

Dave! (01:44:46.434) So this is the, if you're not paying attention, you would miss this, but he has attacked two other women prior to this. So he has sexually assaulted them. I think one of them might have died. And then this.

Bryan! (01:45:00.103) This is the one who dies. The other one is presumed to have survived.

Dave! (01:45:04.194) So then now we have this one. And there's this great moment where like, they find the body and people kind of come rushing over and like, you know, they look a little upset obviously. And then Janice's mother comes over and just as she's about to scream, they cut from her to the phone.

Bryan! (01:45:19.919) Yes, because the phone is ringing at the sorority house in time to pick up. It's, it's Jess. She's going to pick up another call from Billy and it's more of that.

Dave! (01:45:28.094) And this is where they start to get really wild. Like just unhinged screaming.

Bryan! (01:45:33.115) Yeah, yeah and all of it is all of it has a consistency to it. There's uh somebody named Agnes. There's a missing baby. There's some parents uh parents. Father and I must know what he did with the baby and Billy who is filthy, filthy Billy. We keep hearing about but we never ever get the full story if there even is a full story.

Dave! (01:45:43.49) Pretty Agnes.

Dave! (01:45:56.63) Well, that's because, you know, don't tell what we did, Agnes.

Bryan! (01:46:01.312) Agnes, it's me. Yeah. So. Just makes another call. The camera ominously pans left to show us a pair of legs coming down the steps.

Dave! (01:46:01.686) specifically says that.

Dave! (01:46:15.158) Real 70s looking shoes.

Bryan! (01:46:16.955) real 70s shoes with like the flared denim jeans. She turns to find that Peter has been in the house the whole time. So here's the beginning of the whole misdirect thing.

Dave! (01:46:26.294) Yeah, and she's like, she's like, what are you doing? You scared the shit out of me. He's like, well, I got tired of waiting and I had a little sleep. And I'm like, nobody says a little sleep. What are you talking about? Goddamn psychopath.

Bryan! (01:46:33.087) Yeah. Yep. So she's on the phone with the cops trying to find out what can be done about the phone calls. Guess who doesn't take her seriously. So here's the thing. Yeah, so Peter dreams of being a concert pianist dead decides that decides that he and Jess are going to get married. And that's just all there is all to it.

Dave! (01:46:44.196) Mm-hmm. So Sergeant Nash.

Dave! (01:46:55.762) And I, I'm just going to say, they cut to the Christmas tree in this house.

Bryan! (01:47:00.923) It is a fucking weird tree, right?

Dave! (01:47:02.794) This Christmas, this is why houses would catch on fire so often at Christmas. I mean, this thing is draped in what looks like a like fake spider webbing from Halloween. Yeah, like this thing is a it is a fire trap ready to go.

Bryan! (01:47:12.379) You know, like, wispy tinsel.

Bryan! (01:47:18.255) And this is in a time when literally everybody smoked indoors all the time. Yeah. So, yeah, here's the thing about this getting married thing. Just doesn't want to get married. She's got plans of her own. And a rationale for not wanting to marry this clown are pretty solid.

Dave! (01:47:21.384) Mm-hmm.

Dave! (01:47:32.81) Now we're never gonna find out what those plans are. It doesn't matter, but, I mean, you could have just thrown, she wants to be a journalist. You could have thrown that in there, I guess. Just, you know, give me a little bit more.

Bryan! (01:47:34.907) No, doesn't matter. But.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so now this dude is put out. So Johnny Sacks meanwhile realizes that the sergeant at the desk is a gigantic moron. And the fellatio joke from before comes back around to pay off in a way that's pretty funny.

Dave! (01:47:57.858) Well, this is when they realized that the girl has gone missing from the house that is getting these calls. This is when he puts it all together.

Bryan! (01:48:05.947) Yes. Yeah. And yeah, so meanwhile, like as this is all coming together, like one of the other detectives is in the scene, like cracking up in a way that seems like it's a very Bob Clark thing, because you see that all over a Christmas story as well. Like there's always something that happens that one person doesn't realize is like a goof while everybody else does. It's a stylistic thing that I think is really fucking funny. So now Jess kicks Peter out of the house when they fight.

given the nature of the phone calls having to do with a baby and all that. Peter being very upset about the abortion. This misdirect isn't half bad, but you know, it's pretty transparent that he's not the killer. You'll be sorry is what he says to her on the way out. Yeah. So the cops and a dude from the phone company dropped by the sorority house to check on the phone.

Dave! (01:48:44.342) Because he does say shit like, you're not having an abortion. Mm.

Dave! (01:48:58.934) Now there's an interesting thing that happens here though, in that they, Jess has already met him. They've already spoken at the police station. And I think this is a question of sequencing, like when they shot this stuff, because in this moment, they act as though they've never met.

Bryan! (01:49:11.539) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:49:15.739) Yeah. Also, the phone company guy is the guy who sells Ralphie's dad the Christmas tree in a Christmas story. That's the point that I just watched a Christmas story recently. So he taps the phone and the cops put a guy in a car outside the house.

Dave! (01:49:31.402) He also, this is one of the moments where you really notice that he talks over her a lot. Like the phone guy asks her a question and Fuller jumps in and talks over her to provide an answer.

Bryan! (01:49:36.345) A lot.

Bryan! (01:49:43.223) Right, and it's a very key detail because what we find out is that there are two lines in this house. There's the one that the girls keep calling on, and then there's a phone in Mrs. Mac's room that's on an entirely different line. But yes, Fuller provides that detail to the phone company guy, completely overlooking the fact that it's a possible vector for calling the girls. Although...

Dave! (01:50:11.382) Because it's not the same phone line. And that's, I think that's, I don't know if they make the point of saying that. Like if they just had two phones, if you have two phones in your house, you can be talking on the phone, I can pick it up and hear that conversation. If you have a separate line, I could call you on that.

Bryan! (01:50:25.243) Yeah, no, that's that is that is what he that's them sort of planting that seed is there is an eye there's an option in this house that they could be calling the house from the house. That's the whole thing there because I'm sure that in a lot of this was a really unusual idea for a lot of people at the time because like if you had multiple phones in the house at all at this time in particular, pretty unlikely telephones were wicked fucking expensive.

But yes, if you did it.

Dave! (01:50:54.826) These might be the ones that the phone company actually gives you. When you would get a... You'd get those big chunky blocky... Phones.

Bryan! (01:50:58.551) Okay, yeah, that's also a possibility.

Yeah, but yeah, at the time, like, yes, if there were two phones in the house and somebody was on one talking and you picked up the other one, you would hear the conversation. Like, that's how this worked. Like, you could not call your own house from a phone on that number. So that's them sort of saying, like, here's where the killer could be calling from, but they don't, obviously, that's not a possibility at the moment. It's just them going, we're gonna call back to this later on.

So, yeah, you know, they got the they got Peter lurking in the dark outside of the house as well. Look. Yeah. Look at cold as hell because he's just wearing that fucking cable knit sweater. Dead of Winter. Yep. Dead of Winter in Canada. So, Phil, who is now tired and kind of sick, she goes up to bed. And there's a bunch of quick cuts around the different locations to remind us what's going on.

Dave! (01:51:38.596) the normal thing guys do.

Dave! (01:51:43.358) Yeah, he needs one of those fuckin' wooly mammoth coats.

Bryan! (01:51:57.855) We're waiting for Billy to call so the phone company can trace the call. The cops are waiting too. And Jess is waiting by the phone and she's been given, uh, like a directive because they have to like, it's going to take a little time to trace where the call is coming from. She has to keep him on the line, which is a deeply upsetting prospect for her.

Dave! (01:52:15.67) But that is an awesome moment.

Bryan! (01:52:17.607) Yes. So Billy now comes down and he makes his way to Barb's room, fixating on some crystal decorations. Chief among them,

Dave! (01:52:26.646) We're gonna call it Chekov's Glass Unicorn.

Bryan! (01:52:29.395) She comes glass unicorn. Now, meanwhile, downstairs, Jess hears Barb gasping very suddenly and runs to check on her. Now, we're to think that she's being attacked, but she's actually having an asthma attack. So Jess gives her inhaler.

Dave! (01:52:43.242) This feels like a weird contrivance though. Is like, is it only because she had to make noise in order to get her attention? Is that the only real, like, why give her asthma? It seems unnecessary. It seems like a weird character thing that's like.

Bryan! (01:52:58.498) It's another misdirect. You're supposed to go, oh, he's getting her. And then, you know, Jess is.

Dave! (01:53:02.002) Right, so she has to do something that sounds like an emergency. And how else to do that but this way?

Bryan! (01:53:06.159) Yeah, so this gets right. This gets just to run to her. So, we go, oh, no, don't go in there. You know, she's gonna get killed but

Dave! (01:53:14.806) I think it would have been better if she would have drunkenly fell out of bed.

Bryan! (01:53:19.607) vomiting on the floor. So she thinks she had a nightmare. She dreamed that there was a stranger in her room. So now outside some carolers show up as Barb goes back to sleep. Jess is distracted by the carolers so Billy makes his move again. He whispers to

Dave! (01:53:37.718) The carolers are an interesting bit here because they are an element that is in sort of direct opposition to all of the chaotic noise.

Bryan! (01:53:46.615) Right, because it's, there's, it's of, they're good singers, it's a melody, it's a well-known Christmas song that they're singing.

Dave! (01:53:54.058) It's like one of the few moments you get actual music in them and it's pleasing to the ear. It's like she gives, because she has this kind of dopey look on her face as she's watching them. But it's also, this is like the first moment where she's not living in like absolute tension and terror.

Bryan! (01:53:56.979) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:54:09.871) Yeah, yeah, and so what they're gonna do with this is they're going to put the violence up against this because what he ends up doing is Billy gets into a room he whispers To her as if she's someone named Agnes He says it's me Billy and he grabs the unicorn and he raises it and this is one of the movie's most iconic scenes Billy is silhouetted against the background, but there is a single shaft of light on his left eye and he looks fucking frantic

Dave! (01:54:36.886) Which is amazing because it will also come back to that again later on. We are also only ever gonna see that same eye. And his eye, I don't know, you can sorta see it here. It might just be like the lighting and the color of his eyes because it looks red.

Bryan! (01:54:41.148) Yes.

Bryan! (01:54:44.507) Yeah. I don't know what the deal... I don't know what the deal with the eye is.

It looks red. Yeah, there's like a halo.

Dave! (01:54:55.434) And this is where you get a lot of that. You get that kind of jallow influence here where there is a lot of washing of red light in this.

Bryan! (01:55:03.812) Yeah, yeah, it's again, this is a movie that has like little stylistic flourishes like where in Italy, like the Jello is a wash in like crazy artistic, you know, operatic touches throughout that's what makes them Jello jelly. Here, like

Clark does it, but sparingly, and so each one of those has an impact. This is one of those moments. This is why some posters fixate on this shot. Certain products of merchandise fixate on this shot. It's very characteristic of the entire movie. If you've seen this, you know what I'm talking about. You can see it right now. I don't even have to describe it to you. But yeah, he stabs the shit out of Barb with Chekhov's glass unicorn while the children sing.

Dave! (01:55:52.77) Yeah, they're cutting, they keep cutting back and forth in this really kind of awesome way.

Bryan! (01:55:56.731) Yeah. And so now with Barb dead and the children ushered off, the phone rings again and they begin to trace it. Jess has to keep Billy on the line long enough for them.

Dave! (01:56:05.686) Well, the children are ushered away because they found a body in the thing. This is where Jess learns, because she didn't go with them to look for Janice. So this is where she learns that someone is now dead. And then as the children are being ushered away, she gives the woman money and the woman goes, your phone's ringing. And it's like in that moment, it's sort of like, oh, she doesn't want to answer it though.

Bryan! (01:56:12.72) Yes.

Bryan! (01:56:16.807) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:56:26.943) Yeah. Oh, yeah, she's avoiding it because that's fucking terrifying But now this is this is getting to the point where there's now a like the calls before have been fucking horrifying But now we're getting to that point where there are clearly several voices and a couple of times those voices Call out at the same time and so This is the part that you don't like personally. I like it because To me, it doesn't feel like a mistake or a misstep. It feels

Dave! (01:56:46.335) And that I don't like.

Dave! (01:56:55.03) I don't think it is a mistake.

Bryan! (01:56:56.195) It feels like there might be two killers, or multiple killers, or that there's two people in play. It's just, it's giving you a little bit more to work with.

Dave! (01:57:01.175) Yeah.

Dave! (01:57:07.238) I guess, I just, I find, even if that were the case, I find it hard to believe that two people could be talking at that same like fever pitch to one another. And also like, it just, it kind of blows it a little bit. Like the illusion is ruined for me a little bit because you can, they're clearly very different voices because one of them is a woman. And so when they blend and they start to happen at the same time, it's like either he is now, I don't know.

Bryan! (01:57:16.752) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:57:26.281) Yes.

Dave! (01:57:32.854) has two voices or it's this idea of like there's two people, but it doesn't work for me.

Bryan! (01:57:37.935) Yeah, but what really, there's a moment right now also where Billy shrieks something at her that Peter said to her earlier, which is you're talking about this baby like you're having a wart rem-

Dave! (01:57:51.702) It's just like having a-

Bryan! (01:57:54.159) Yeah.

Dave! (01:57:55.722) And what I don't like about this, and initially my understanding was this was a signal to the audience that this killer is in the house. This is when she should know that by that point. Because to me, the viewer, I never consider Peter the actual killer. Bob Clark intended this for us to be like, oh, maybe it really is Peter. And it's like, no, bitch, you have already proven to us that it's not. Like.

Bryan! (01:58:04.765) Yes.

Bryan! (01:58:10.351) Right, right.

Bryan! (01:58:17.563) No, the killers, the killers in the house and he heard you guys talking. Yeah.

Dave! (01:58:22.194) And that should be a revelatory moment that is awesome. And it's sort of like, oh, it's just, we're supposed to just think it's Peter again. Like stop trying to make Peter happen.

Bryan! (01:58:32.275) Yeah, like this, what this should have been like is this should have been like the moment in Halloween where Laurie finds Annie's keys on the floor.

Dave! (01:58:39.158) Yes.

Bryan! (01:58:42.471) So, unfortunately, Billy hangs up before the phone company can locate him.

Dave! (01:58:47.874) But this is what's great about this moment is you get to see how they actually used to do this. Because the little guy from the phone company is like running down the fucking stacks of whatever, I don't know, I don't know how phones work. I'm not a scientist, but he's like running through these like halls of phone equipment looking for the one that's ringing.

Bryan! (01:58:51.943) Yeah, he'd have to like-

Bryan! (01:58:58.627) Look, telephone equipment.

Bryan! (01:59:08.007) Yeah. And so, you know, they miss it. He's just he's almost there, but they don't get they don't quite get it. So Jack talks just talks to Fuller about the call that he shows. This is when like they're really started to lean into this Peters, the killer thing. So he shows the idea that killer, the killer might be Peter. He's definitely not doing himself any favors and dissuading us from the idea. But this is what I kind of go back to earlier when we're talking about sort of like the gender dynamic in this movie is.

From this moment on, Fuller becomes convinced that Peter's the guy. And this is when he starts, like, even she's like, I don't know, because she doesn't want to face up to that. Like, that's her sort of struggle from this moment on. And so he is going to very forcefully thrust this idea upon her, and she never really accepts it until the very end, even though she's wrong.

But yeah

Dave! (02:00:03.586) And that's one of the more frustrating moments is like, we end this movie as though Fuller was right.

Bryan! (02:00:10.495) Yes, yes. And so now Jess and Phil walk around, Jess filling her in on what happened while Billy watches from a crack in the door.

Dave! (02:00:19.122) So this part is really awesome though, because this is when I think they're sitting in the, they sit down in the living room at one point, and you can see, so they're, you know, they're in the foreground, they're talking to each other, and Phil says, you know, I don't like Peter, but I don't think he's a killer. And in the view, look in the background, you can see there's a shadow that keeps moving, but it moves sort of with Phil as she moves. It's only when Phil stops moving and you realize the shadow is still moving,

Bryan! (02:00:25.467) Yeah. Yes.

Bryan! (02:00:36.413) Yeah.

Dave! (02:00:47.97) that there's someone standing behind them. And I think that is one of the most awesome parts. You see it earlier on too, that he does the same thing a little bit earlier too, where it's like he's standing at a corner, but you don't realize it unless you're really looking at the corner.

Bryan! (02:00:49.523) Yes! Hahaha! Okay! The-

Bryan! (02:00:56.411) Yeah, you see.

Bryan! (02:01:01.091) Again, it's Bob Clark's attention to detail, and for whatever reason, he is one of like, fucking, a very small pool of filmmakers who understand that you can just do subliminal shit like this.

Dave! (02:01:14.89) I think it's because he actually cared about the genre. Like it's the reason why, even if you don't like Texas Chainsaw, because I'm not a huge Texas Chainsaw fan, I think it's a good movie, but like I'm not as big a fan as some people are. You know that these are people who wanted to make this movie and that is why it is such a good looking movie. They're also very talented. It's the same thing here. Like, you know, Bob Clark wanted to make this movie. This was like his crowning achievement. This was the one he really wants to like, this is what I can really do. And

Bryan! (02:01:18.087) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:01:32.391) Yeah, yeah, everybody who-

Bryan! (02:01:39.487) Mm-hmm.

Dave! (02:01:44.182) That's why I think it works so well. It's like they're paying attention to all this shit because they're not just like, hey, horror is a quick cash grab. Let's just do that cheap shit and get out of here.

Bryan! (02:01:52.339) Yeah, yeah, I mean, exactly, but it's got it is the thing that I always try to sort of articulate is the things that get under my skin are not scenes of horror that sort of beat you over the head with violence or special effects or anything like that. It's this these little things that you catch just quickly enough to realize that it's happening and it's a potent enough idea for me to ruminate on and sort of

Dave! (02:02:21.578) Yeah, I mean, like for.

Bryan! (02:02:21.855) fill in the blanks. This is that thing that people are always talking about where it's like, oh you know it's scary because your mind fills in the blanks but nobody fucking does that anymore. It's very seldom that I see that kind of subtle horror and I fucking love it so much. It's why I like this movie as much as I do.

Dave! (02:02:37.954) Well, that's also why, like one of my favorite moments in Halloween is when, my God, I can't remember, when Annie goes to get, she goes to open the door, the door is locked, she comes back. It doesn't occur to her when she just opens the door. That the door was, the reason you went into the house was to get the keys because the door is locked. Now the door is not locked and the windows are all fogged up. It's that type of shit. It's like, you know, in Rosemary's Baby, the worst part of Rosemary's Baby to me is when Charles Grodin calls her husband.

Bryan! (02:02:51.737) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:02:56.691) Yeah.

Dave! (02:03:07.998) It's these just tiny moments where you're like, this feels like a huge fucking betrayal. Because even the guy who's supposed to save you just sold you out. It's all these little things. And this only happens when you actually care enough to craft a good story. And you're not just trying to like, look at this, you know, as we run into all the time, a lot of these movies were made by people who are like, well, this shit's cheap and easy and fast. We can just get in, get out, you know, make a movie. Where they were like, no, we want to make a chilling horror movie.

Bryan! (02:03:36.091) Yeah, like those movies, evident by like the number of movies that we've covered, like many of them can, they could still be entertaining and fun and shit, but they're just not working on this level, which is a whole like a merit unto itself. It's just this movie is

Dave! (02:03:52.278) Because why bother? If you don't care that much to begin with, why bother with like subtlety and nuance?

Bryan! (02:03:57.659) Yeah. Yep. So yeah.

Dave! (02:04:00.606) And if he hadn't gone into this movie thinking, I wanna make a movie that represents young women as they actually are in this environment. If he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a movie where you have these really kind of like fleshed out three dimensional characters. Same with Halloween. You'd get Friday the 13th where it's like, I don't really give a shit about women in general. I'm just gonna make a movie where we watch them get hacked to pieces. Like is Friday the 13th fun to watch? Yeah, it is. It's an enjoyable movie. But is it anything like this?

Bryan! (02:04:08.525) Mm-hmm. Yep.

Bryan! (02:04:16.265) Yep.

Bryan! (02:04:23.261) Yeah.

Dave! (02:04:30.398) No, not even close.

Bryan! (02:04:30.939) No, no, this, this like this is that the filmmaker going the extra mile to really nail down and just communicate through little touches here and there. Like, it doesn't take much. It just you've got to be fucking smart in the way that you do it. And I think that Bob Clark is smarter than most filmmakers. He's definitely way smarter than your average horror movie filmmaker.

Dave! (02:04:55.766) Well, I think that's also why the sequels to Halloween in particular feel so awful, is that you have a movie that is clearly made by an auteur who is very, very good at what he's doing. He's incredibly talented. You have everything after that are just cheap knockoffs where they're trying to cash in on something. I don't think you feel that way. I certainly don't feel that way about Friday the 13th because you start off with that. You start off with like, this is basically just an exploitation movie.

Bryan! (02:05:00.988) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:05:20.349) Yeah.

Dave! (02:05:23.47) made in a particular genre and it's just gonna keep going that way so there is no standard where you're like wait a minute that last one was fucking incredible why are these such dog shit

Bryan! (02:05:33.583) Yeah.

Dave! (02:05:35.958) And I mean, that's probably would have had this movie been successful, that's probably would have gotten six sequels to it and they would have been fucking terrible.

Bryan! (02:05:44.304) Right, because none of them would have been written by Roy Moore or none of them would have been directed by Bob Clark.

Dave! (02:05:49.674) Yeah, the only reason there aren't sequels to this is because the movie did not do well financially. And it was funded in part by a studio.

Bryan! (02:05:58.735) Yeah. So the phone rings again while Phil and Jess are in the area, sort of the common room. But this time it's Peter and he's begging her not to have an abortion. Big old baby. I think what they're supposed to be doing here is he sounds kind of crazy, but not like Billy. So that's why this also doesn't really work for me and sort of putting forth the idea that Peter is the killer. But yeah, Phil.

Dave! (02:06:08.386) The big old baby.

Dave! (02:06:24.618) To your point, if there are two voices, they could have used that to this effect. To say, if there's more than one voice, there could be more than one killer. So even though, because what this essentially sets up is, it can't be Peter because Peter was either with them at one point or when the phone call came in, he was there for one of them. They don't even, they don't bother to use them when they could have.

Bryan! (02:06:30.175) Yeah, that's a good point.

Bryan! (02:06:46.287) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:06:51.227) Yeah. So now Phil and Jess go around locking the place down. Phil is on her own upstairs when she spots Barb's door closing. And the camera.

Dave! (02:07:01.962) Well, first we get the, oh wait, no, you're going there. You're getting there.

Bryan! (02:07:05.115) Yeah, the camera then ominously pans up to the attic hatch to show us that it's open. And then she goes in to check on her and all we hear is a whispered, Agnes, as the door closes. And she turns to look at someone. And that's about the last we're going to see a poor Phil.

Dave! (02:07:20.878) Ah, you skipped the goofy Canadians.

Bryan! (02:07:24.179) Oh, that's right. Yeah. That was also.

Dave! (02:07:27.318) Which again, it feels like another one of those moments of like the Hicks, you know, in opposition to the, you know, sort of more urbane college girls. Because it's like these two like country guys and the same with the cop or when they go to the police station too and he shot one of the cops. It's like, why are these moments stuffed into this movie? Like, what is he trying to say? Because Bob Clark very clearly has things to say and he is critiquing things throughout this movie.

Bryan! (02:07:37.39) Yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (02:07:54.844) Yeah.

Dave! (02:07:56.374) This feels a little bit like that, but it's like, but why are they here?

Bryan! (02:08:00.085) You know what it is, is I think that these are supposed to be moments of levity, because he definitely he has a very particular sense of humor that was very characteristic of the era, which is

Dave! (02:08:10.802) It's a little bit dark, it's a little bit edgy, but it's a little bit goofy kinda dad joke too.

Bryan! (02:08:15.247) what I see is about how I see it is it's all National Lampoon and Mad Magazine. Like it's that kind of it's snarky. Sure. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Jess is now the only living person in the house apart from Billy. She receives another call and it's built.

Dave! (02:08:22.87) but a little bit darker.

Dave! (02:08:34.274) This is when we start to notice that all of the noise is dropping out, not just because people are gone, but because it's getting very late. So there's not, you know, throughout the movie, there's even noise outside, like on the street. There's just ambient noise all the time. Now all of a sudden the ambient noise is just gone. It is very quiet. So when the phone rings, it is like a gut punch.

Bryan! (02:08:49.459) Yeah.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah, so it's that silence, because again, it's not silence. You could hear the wind blowing, and it gets louder, and it gets louder, and they even do it again towards the end, as the phone is just ringing and ringing, it gets louder and louder. I think...

Dave! (02:09:09.578) And there is, I think, there's something to the guys before too, when they say the goofy Canadian search party guys. One of them says, just keep those doors and windows closed and you'll be safe. And I wondered when he says that, I wondered, is that a kind of commentary? Because this is a moment when Americans in particular, but I think just North Americans probably in general, are starting to realize and have to confront the fact that there are people out there who will

Bryan! (02:09:20.457) Yeah.

Dave! (02:09:36.546) do harm to you and who want to for no other reason than they want to and they can and will. We're getting into that, we're entering that sort of serial killer era where people are starting to have to contend with the fact that it's not just a random one-off thing.

Bryan! (02:09:41.256) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (02:09:50.703) Oh, sure. Yeah. Like you hear that a lot in like true crime documentaries, serial killer documentaries, like, oh, boy, back in the day in this neighborhood, man, we used to leave our doors unlocked. You always hear that.

Dave! (02:10:02.794) Yeah. And I wonder like, I wonder about that, where it's like, just keep those, you know, and the joke in that is that it's too late. He's already in your house.

Bryan! (02:10:11.375) Yeah, and so that with the sound design, I think is very, as a very deliberate touch to sort of make us as Jess feel isolated because now we are truly isolated. The doors are locked and the killer is in the fucking house.

Dave! (02:10:27.738) And your only access to, you know, the people who will supposedly save you or can supposedly save you is also the thing that is a source of terror because he keeps calling her. So we know that, yeah, she can call for the police, but that same thing, that same line, that lifeline is also the thing he keeps, he uses to get access to her as well.

Bryan! (02:10:48.015) Yeah. So Detective Fuller, or rather, she gets another phone call, and it's Billy again with more Billy and Agnes stuff. Now Detective Fuller goes to the conservatory to find what's left of Peter's piano, and then they race back to the police station set to a soundtrack of Billy ranting, but this time they trace him, and we cut to see Billy hanging up the phone next to a bill for a vaudeville act of the Mack Henry sisters.

So now, yeah. So the cops tell Fuller where the calls are coming from the sorority house. Call is coming from inside the house. And so they try to.

Dave! (02:11:20.206) Their sweetness is back.

Dave! (02:11:31.03) Which always makes me think of that great Stuart Smalley bit. Paul is coming- it's your father and he's been drinking.

Bryan! (02:11:34.239) It's your father! It's... He's been drinking! Ah, wasn't that scary? .. So yeah, they try to alert the cop stationed outside the house, but we see that his throat has been slashed. And so now Jess runs to the steps looking for Phil when the phone rings again. This time it's the police. And they instruct her to leave, but she wants to get Phil and Barb too, because for all she knows,

Dave! (02:11:42.775) That was scary.

Bryan! (02:12:03.763) they're you know still alive and now the camera zooms in ominously on the steps just like

Dave! (02:12:10.826) This is an interesting moment though, because this is, Bob Clark says he got a lot of criticism for this and this is a thing that they kind of make a joke of in Scream is why doesn't she just leave? And he says, well, she doesn't just leave because her friends are still in the house. She doesn't want to leave her friends in the house with someone who could be a killer. Like she's, it's a heroic thing. And when he said that, I was thinking to myself, is this a little bit more of that, you know, the Siskel thing from before where it's like, well,

Bryan! (02:12:24.499) Yeah!

Bryan! (02:12:27.771) Yeah.

Dave! (02:12:37.558) We don't expect women to behave in this way. We don't expect women to be the hero of a story, especially in a genre for men, essentially.

Bryan! (02:12:42.415) Oh sure, they're fragile little flowers and she's just gonna react out of fear and run away.

But no, like here, her first thought is, oh shit, I've got to get my friends.

Dave! (02:12:58.13) One of whom is drunk and the other one is sick.

Bryan! (02:13:00.995) Yeah, but yeah, the camera is. They're both dead, yeah, but just like in Halloween, every good horror movie needs a staircase and this one is working overtime.

Dave! (02:13:03.01) Joke's on her though, because they're both dead.

Dave! (02:13:12.522) Because at the top of the stairs, the stair shot is actually really cool because the top of the stairs, it's nothing but shadow.

Bryan! (02:13:15.761) I love it.

Yes, yeah. So when Jess doesn't follow his instructions, he tells her that the caller is in the house, because that's a detail that comes late in this conversation. Right, he's not supposed to.

Dave! (02:13:26.87) because he's not supposed to. So Fuller tells Nash, do not tell her that the calls are coming from inside the house. And Nash is getting frustrated because Jess won't just leave. So he finally shouts at her, they're coming from inside the house, get out of the house. And she tries when she goes to the door, because another criticism is, well, what's wrong with the door? Why can't she get out the door? And it's a moment, the very beginning of the movie, where there's a problem with the lock on the door.

Bryan! (02:13:39.963) Yep. So.

Bryan! (02:13:50.559) there's a problem with the door. Yeah. So yeah, she goes, she tries to call Phil and Barb from where she is. And when they don't answer, she grabs a fire poker. She goes upstairs to get them. And that's what

Dave! (02:14:02.09) And this is her terror is really amping up in that moment because she starts shrieking to them.

Bryan! (02:14:07.399) There, yeah, there, and there's a lot of like slow zooms to fast zooms and like the camera work is also really helping ratchet up the tension here. And so she goes up she barges into Barb's room, and it takes but it takes some work. I love this. It takes some work to get the door open like she is put

Dave! (02:14:26.792) As if maybe something, something is behind it.

Bryan! (02:14:29.339) Yes, she has to like shove it open. And when she, we're about to find out why, but first in a nasty tableau that kind of sets the table for slasher movies to come, she finds her friends dead. But also someone.

Dave! (02:14:42.154) And this is kind of how you know this was an influence on Halloween, because you basically get the same scene.

Bryan! (02:14:46.851) Yeah, right, and everybody else does it too. Like, the final girl has to go and find all of her friends dead, like in very elaborate sort of setups. So, when she's in there, she's, she learns that someone is behind the door and it's whispering to her and she...

Dave! (02:15:05.814) Yeah, because she just looks sort of to her left and she all she can see is that same slit of eye. Like it's just his eye and he whispers... something. What? I don't... I think it...

Bryan! (02:15:16.081) Agnes, it's me, Billy.

Dave! (02:15:18.618) Agnes, it's me, Billy. And then she, this is one of my other favorite parts of the movie, when she pushes the door in on him, which, you know, it would hurt, but he starts shrieking like a wild animal. He is unbridled. Yeah.

Bryan! (02:15:20.627) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:15:30.767) Yes, he's howling like a herd animal. Because he chases her while howling and screaming like, too. Oh, man, but I don't know what it is about that shot of the eye because something is wrong with it. And I. Yeah, because you could see.

Dave! (02:15:49.35) It's the way that it's lit. And it makes it look like he has a weird red ring in his eye.

Bryan! (02:15:55.123) Right, because you could see like the pupil and stuff, but there's this like red ring to it that like it must just be reflecting something, but

Dave! (02:16:02.386) It is, I think it's just the color, because I stopped it, I was looking at it, I think it's just the color of his eye with the lighting and it makes it look like it's this kind of weird dark red. It's very unnatural looking. Yeah.

Bryan! (02:16:12.212) It makes him look like it makes him look like an animal which is probably the intention

Dave! (02:16:18.282) Because the fucking noises he makes from here on out are animalistic noises.

Bryan! (02:16:22.875) Yep. And so she still, she gets to the bottom of the steps and sort of turns the corner and grabs her by the hair. It's sort of.

Dave! (02:16:29.854) And that part's a little bit weak, because if you're paying attention and watching it in 4K, he grabs her very slowly and very gingerly. Right.

Bryan! (02:16:36.551) Because he doesn't want to hurt her. Poor Olivia Hussey.

Dave! (02:16:40.786) See, this is why you need Shelly Winter. She'll just grab a bitch right by the... Snatch a wig!

Bryan! (02:16:45.183) Snatch a wig right away from her. So yeah, he chases her, she gets away, but she runs and she hides in the basement. She locks the door behind her. And he tries for a while to sort of break it down, but then we hear him just stop and the noise and the animal noises stop and we hear him walk away and a door closes.

Dave! (02:17:04.234) And it is dead silent from then on.

Bryan! (02:17:06.663) Yeah, and so now the police are racing.

Dave! (02:17:08.63) The basement's an interesting thing too, because it's like, it is like the attic, it is just full of crap, and everything is so tight in there.

Bryan! (02:17:15.003) Yeah, I get the feeling like, I get the feeling like that's just what attics and basements used to be, is people just threw all their shit there. I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, my basement is just all the stuff I don't have a place for, so yeah, my attic is even fucking worse. But.

Dave! (02:17:23.542) That's what I put in my basement.

Dave! (02:17:32.906) I mean if they shot this in my house Jess would be hiding among tons and tons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys.

Bryan! (02:17:38.203) Oh yeah, boxes and boxes of comic books. Yeah, so outside the basement.

Dave! (02:17:43.062) But she lives in a sorority house, not the house of a gigantic nerd.

Bryan! (02:17:48.024) So outside the basement window, Jess sees a shadow of somebody looking in, and he calls to her, and she realizes that it's Peter. Now, like a normal person, he kicks his way through the window and lets himself in.

Dave! (02:18:01.674) Because she is very clearly terrified. She's clutching a fire poker. She's like crouched, cowering in the corner. And he's like wiping, and then she's like, well, you know what, let me let myself in. And he's, but he's talking. This is why it doesn't make sense because we have already established that he is not the killer. So why then does he break in through the window? Well, the door is locked, so I guess, you know.

Bryan! (02:18:08.903) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:18:25.667) Yeah, but still, but still.

Dave! (02:18:25.918) and she's not really answering him, but the way he comes in and he's just like, Jess, what are you doing? And it's like, you have been a fucking lunatic since the beginning of this movie. And I mean.

Bryan! (02:18:35.105) You literally just kicked your way in through a window.

Dave! (02:18:38.154) Yeah. And it kind of makes me wonder, they're leaning into, again, he's still a bad person. He might not be the killer, but he's still a bad person and he is still a threat to her. And in this moment, he feels very threatening, but to what end is he doing that? It doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Bryan! (02:18:49.277) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:18:56.499) Right, right. Yeah, yeah, so She hides from him and she and he finds her cornered and then we cut away And so when will the police finally arrive we hear her screaming from the outside of the house So when they find her we see that she is beaten Peter to death with the poker Nothing of value is lost

Dave! (02:19:15.778) But she is still holding him, like his head is in her lap. It's still like, I don't know, it's a very interesting way to end the shot. I think not showing this death was a smart choice because he didn't wanna make a bloody movie anyway. It's kind of like Halloween. That's not really what they're trying to do. But I think the fact that she's holding him in that way, that's very, it's intimate and it's kind of loving in a strange way. Yeah.

Bryan! (02:19:27.737) Yeah, yeah, right.

Bryan! (02:19:33.52) Yeah, the-

Bryan! (02:19:38.523) It's like she's comforting him, you know? So yeah.

Dave! (02:19:42.194) And like, if you didn't, if you weren't really paying much attention, you wouldn't even realize that he's dead.

Bryan! (02:19:48.031) Yeah, because he looks like he's just kind of resting, even though there's like blood on his on his head from his nose and stuff. But yeah, he is clearly dead, but it's just the way that it is framed is communicating a whole bunch of different ideas.

Dave! (02:19:50.346) Yeah.

Dave! (02:20:00.266) Yeah, I for one am pleased with his death. He's not the killer, but this character fucking sucks.

Bryan! (02:20:02.831) Yeah, fuck Peter. Yeah, the world is a better place. Because if it wasn't her, he'd be lording his power over some other poor woman. So yeah, now we cut upstairs, sedated. Jess is placed in her bed while the cops wrap up the case and set up a crime scene. And Claire's father passes out. The cops hurry to get him out of the room and they leave Jess on her own. They shut the light out as she leaves. So now Jess is on her own and the house is empty.

Dave! (02:20:12.174) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (02:20:32.915) camera pans around to show us the carnage and remind us of everything that happened. Like we see Barb's mattress is now stripped of everything, it's all bloody. So nearing the attic amid a soundtrack of howling wind and a ticking clock, we hear Billy laughing quietly. And then the camera pans up to the attic hatch and we hear him singing and the hatch opens. Now from the attic...

Dave! (02:20:39.918) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (02:20:56.967) We see the bodies of Mrs. Mack and Claire again as the camera zooms out slowly, showing us the outside of the house. The phone rings. Roll credits.

Unfucking real. What of-

Dave! (02:21:08.596) Fucking awesome ending because it is borderline nihilistic.

Bryan! (02:21:13.119) One of my absolute favorite fucking movie endings of all time. It's like, it's like we, we like, we've talked about it in certain episodes in the past. I do like a movie that, we talked about it in our wrap up also about Talk To Me. I love a movie that will commit to sort of dooming its main characters.

Dave! (02:21:34.326) Yeah, I mean, it's Night of the Living Dead, where you get to the end and you're like, Oh no, that's not what I want.

Bryan! (02:21:38.223) I love, like, I don't want, obviously, I don't want every movie to be sort of bleak and nihilistic like this, where the only, because the thing is, is what we've learned is, and I think, and Fuller says it, Billy makes a phone call every time he kills somebody. And so, with what we're, what we're only left to assume is that Billy is calling because he killed Jess. And so,

Dave! (02:22:04.447) May I guess?

Bryan! (02:22:06.628) That is that's all I can let he's she is left alone in a house with him He comes out and then the phone rings so Clearly he kills Jess in the end. That's how this how I've

Dave! (02:22:18.074) I mean, I just I like ending it on. That's it done. Like I've told you a story. That's how the story ends.

Bryan! (02:22:25.321) My interpretation of this ending is that he comes down and because she is completely unprotected, she's sedated, murders her, and then makes a phone call to let everybody know.

Dave! (02:22:36.61) So if you watch the commentary, Bob Clark kind of addresses, he doesn't really say, but it's basically just like, because he says people often said like, well, why wouldn't they search the rest of the house? And he says, well, it's the middle of the night. They think they know who did it already. So why would they search the house? They can do that tomorrow. That's why they don't find them. But I just like, and then he sort of talks about the, you know, what the sequel would have been. He doesn't ever say what happens to Jess, but I like that the end, it's like a dead stop.

Bryan! (02:22:50.811) Yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (02:22:55.324) They think they have their killer.

Dave! (02:23:06.71) where it's just like, who knows, who knows what happens? Maybe that's what happened, maybe not. Maybe the phone is just there. The phone is essentially like that kind of neighborhood shot at the end of Halloween where it's like, we just need something to end it on. And, cause I actually, when he starts talking at the end, I'm kind of like, I don't know if I needed that or the phone ringing, but I like that it just sort of ends with like, that's it, pure chaos, there you go.

Bryan! (02:23:06.781) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:23:18.727) Yes. Yeah.

Bryan! (02:23:26.426) Ha ha.

Bryan! (02:23:31.971) Yeah, I think it is. That's just, that's how I choose to interpret it. I, for some reason, I always had a memory of the movie ending a little bit differently where you don't hear Billy, but what you see is the hatch opening and then a light coming on for some fucking reason. Objectively, that is not what happens. I may be confusing it with something else, but I love that ending so much.

And so apparently, I mean, like, maybe it's just me, like, I'm the only person who sees it that way, because that fan film sequel that I mentioned before assumes that Jess survives.

Dave! (02:24:08.366) I think, I feel like we're just sort of left to believe that she does, but I think it's just as likely that she doesn't. That's what makes it so fucking great is like, it's like a lot of the other shit where it's like, well, you decide, you decide what's wrong with these people. You decide why he's crazy. What, you know, like.

Bryan! (02:24:11.932) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:24:19.323) Yeah. Clearly, clearly that ending works, because here we are with two vastly differing interpretations of the way that movie ends. But we.

Dave! (02:24:29.554) And yet we both experience the movie as the greatest thing ever made.

Bryan! (02:24:35.427) I don't know if I think it's the greatest thing ever made, but it's what it's definitely a movie that I hold in very high regard

Dave! (02:24:41.402) I don't think it's the greatest thing ever made. I maintain that it is my favorite movie of all time. I think it is brilliantly tense. I think it is, everything is executed so perfectly. There are bits and pieces that don't really work. The fact that he's trying to sell you a mystery when it is very clearly not a mystery, that's a little bit dumb, but those things are so forgivable when everything else is so beautifully done.

Bryan! (02:24:46.204) Sure. Yeah.

Bryan! (02:24:57.213) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:25:04.071) Yeah, like my whole feeling on the Peter thing is, you do, but with or without him, the movie is the same movie. It's just...

Dave! (02:25:08.842) You need someone to misdirect you.

Dave! (02:25:17.65) Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe not. I think he does do something. He does contribute to the sort of the critique of gender in this movie in general, because he is the extreme of it all. He is this domineering, controlling person who is literally trying to tell her what she can and cannot do with her. He's a Republican. He is the extreme of that, whereas Fuller is not too dissimilar. He's just a different presentation of it. He's another man. So I think he does...

Bryan! (02:25:22.299) Well...

Bryan! (02:25:26.251) Yes. Right.

Bryan! (02:25:35.808) Yeah.

Dave! (02:25:47.042) give something to the story, he's just not essential to the story.

Bryan! (02:25:51.511) Right, he like, I mean he's a key part of sort of like where everybody else kind of gets these little these little character beats that flesh them out in very rich ways He's Jess's version and that's the reason that we get more of that is just because Jess is the main character. So Yes

Dave! (02:26:09.63) And I mean, she needs something to stand up to, you know, vis-a-vis the abortion B plot. I mean, maybe he could have just, one gets the feeling that Bob Clark saw 2001 and was like, I wanna put that guy in something. I'm gonna put him in this. Like he just sort of got, he was determined to put him in this movie, even though he's not really all that nice. He could have been a voice on the phone.

Bryan! (02:26:15.837) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:26:24.463) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:26:32.923) Right, right. Which, that might have been an interesting storytelling touch since the phone is central to this movie.

Dave! (02:26:41.194) Yeah, he's just not all that necessary. But I do think he does bring something to that gender thing. And I mean, the critique of gender, I feel like is a little bit ambiguous because like most things, Bob Clark is a heterosexual man making movies in the 1970s. His worldview and his experience of the world in general is going to be that of a white straight man making movies in the 70s. He's very progressive in a lot of ways.

Bryan! (02:26:51.775) Mm-hmm.

Dave! (02:27:11.01) but I feel like some of this might be unintentional. That like after the fact, in retrospect, he's like, yeah, that was what I was trying to do, wasn't it? Because there are some ways in which Jess is kind of a wishy washy character. Like she's supposed to be this empowered young woman. At the same time, she has this shitty, abusive boyfriend. Now that's not to say that empowered young women can't and don't have shitty boyfriends, a lot of them do. But in terms of presenting this woman to us, he seems a little bit out of character for her.

Bryan! (02:27:19.018) Yeah, yeah.

Dave! (02:27:40.95) because she's so quick to be like, no, Peter, that's what I'm gonna do. And it's like, if you're with this guy all the time, then you would be having these conversations endlessly.

Bryan! (02:27:49.867) Right, right. She would probably be a little bit more conflicted, and maybe a little more easily manipulated, because he is very manipulated. Yeah.

Dave! (02:27:56.546) But she is so hard on like, no, I'm doing this. And like, you wouldn't have gotten to this point with him probably because she is such a sort of a self-possessed, you know, she has a lot of autonomy in this and agency in this, and she doesn't seem to have any trouble or reluctance in exercising that. And yet they keep having these, like at a certain point long before this, she'd be like, you know what, I think you need to fuck off. I'm gonna find a better boy.

Bryan! (02:28:03.592) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:28:21.491) Yeah.

Dave! (02:28:23.286) Because at no point is he charming, is he anything other than this kind of like controlling, menacing man. Like there's no insight into why would you be dating him to begin with? So she does come across sometimes as a little bit like, mm, I don't know, just a little like, a little wishy washy.

Bryan! (02:28:29.852) Yeah, that.

Bryan! (02:28:41.691) Yeah, yeah. What she needs is a boyfriend like Claire's boyfriend.

Dave! (02:28:46.366) Yeah, I mean, he is, he is, and that's the other part that is like a little bit unresolved. It's like, what is all the weird class stuff in this movie? And is it just, it's just like, this is a reality of campus and sort of small town college life. Is that it?

Bryan! (02:28:46.883) A hockey playin' man.

Bryan! (02:29:00.759) Yeah, like I don't I don't think that was ever really sort of intentional I think it's something that people have kind of picked up on because it's a tangible quality of the movie, but I

Dave! (02:29:08.406) But it is also, it's a constant presence. Like lines like, oh, hey Chris, how's your dad? Like, why would you put that in a movie if you're like, he's supposed to know them. And his presence is the thing that actually makes them take it seriously. Where, you know, he is a man. So that is another thing that they're taking it seriously. And he's one that is familiar to them. Whereas like Claire's father is a sort of like, a feet out of towner who kind of comes in and they're like, well, who's this queer? Like that kind of vibe. Whereas Chris is a hockey plan, you know.

Bryan! (02:29:16.925) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:29:23.71) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:29:31.132) Yeah.

Dave! (02:29:37.682) mammoth skin wearing beast from town. Like there is a little bit of that. It just seems like maybe this was supposed to go somewhere and it didn't. I don't know that the story is better or worse for it. I don't think it really matters that much. I think that brings us to this question is how relevant and how well does this hold up now?

Bryan! (02:29:44.84) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:29:56.307) This is another one of those movies like Halloween, like Jaws, that like, the more I watch it, the more I appreciate it. From here on out, like, I could see myself like making it like an annual thing out of this and just watching it at Christmas, because like, it's so fucking good. And giving it the sort of attention to detail that I did for this podcast really helped me see things that I have not seen before. And I've watched this movie a bunch.

Dave! (02:30:24.426) Yeah, I watch this multiple times a year, and every time I watch it, I see things in it that I have not seen before. And I think it is always impressive to me.

Bryan! (02:30:30.651) Yeah, it's, yeah, always it's very much on a level with Halloween. Like it's one of those movies that I just, I don't just enjoy it. I revere this movie. Like it's, you could write, you could write a book on, yeah, it's a fucking fantastic film. Just cream of the crop. Love it to death.

Dave! (02:30:45.61) Yeah, this is a true achievement.

Dave! (02:30:53.29) I think there's probably some aspects of it that younger viewers either won't recognize or wouldn't understand. I think a lot of the phone stuff is a little, would probably be a little bit weird if you didn't grow up with actual landline phones and know how they work. I think some of the gender and the sexual politics are a little bit, like they feel a little bit dated, but I actually don't think they're as dated as other people might think they are. I think a lot of the shit that is happening in this movie is still relevant today. The framing of it is a little bit different.

Bryan! (02:31:03.443) Yeah.

Dave! (02:31:21.726) I think the subtlety of the male kind of patriarchal gaslighting, the patronizing tones and the attitudes, that might feel a little bit odd. But I think for the most part, this is still a very relevant movie. I think maybe younger audiences are more used to having things explained to them. Then this movie leaves a lot of shit to ambiguity and lets you decide what is what's happening and what's not happening. And I think that's

where a lot of its genius is. But I think for people who are accustomed to having a full package presented like, oh, you didn't get it? Well, here, let me fucking hammer it home. Here's a 20 minute exposition dump at the end of the movie. Like you don't get a killer explaining why they're doing something. Like every now starting in the eighties, but then probably starting with Friday the 13th, you get the killer monologue about why they're doing what they're doing. You don't get that here. You don't get that in Halloween. You have Loomis to kind of fill in the gaps a little bit. Here, you don't have anybody.

Bryan! (02:32:03.516) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:32:19.552) Yeah. No.

Dave! (02:32:21.29) And I think it's brilliant, I think it's brilliant on Halloween too, but I think it's a brilliant choice to be like, I don't know, you decide, doesn't matter. Because that is really what it's about. Like, this shit doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who he is. It doesn't matter where he goes.

Bryan! (02:32:34.092) That's what really kind of lies at the terror of the sort of fascination with serial killers, is because they're impossible to catch, because they don't follow a sort of pattern of victimology. They choose people for reasons that are very specific to them, but not, or maybe no reason at all, and that is fucked up, and that is still very, very scary to think about.

Dave! (02:32:49.714) or maybe no reason at all.

Dave! (02:32:56.67) And I think that's what you see a shift in that in the 80s is that killers and serial slasher in the 80s in general, they do start to take that shape of like, oh, they're doing this because they're in this location. You know, uh, Betsy Palmer is killing people at Camp Crystal Lake because these kids are doing a specific thing. And I think I wonder to what extent does that appeal to people because it soothes those fears and anxieties over the fact that you actually can be killed by anybody at any time for no reason or any reason. Now that's

bit of an exaggeration, you're very unlikely to be killed by a serial killer. But that fear is still there because there is nothing you can do. These young women in this house didn't do anything to provoke this person. I mean, you know, Barb's poking him a little bit. He's already there. He's already going to kill him. So it's not like she's doing something like. And that's the thing is they didn't bring this on. And maybe that's the kind of thing that, you know, people like Gene Siskel are struggling with this, like, well, you know, I don't know how to package this because these are not.

Bryan! (02:33:42.043) Oh yeah, yeah.

Dave! (02:33:55.842) typical women, young women in thrillers. This is not a typical killer. I wonder if this movie did not do well because there was no precedent for it. It was something very new and it is presenting a story in a style that is narratively very different where it's just like everything's open-ended and that's intentional. So I think that some of that shit might not really sit well with younger audiences who maybe are more accustomed to having shit explained for them.

Bryan! (02:34:03.676) Mm-hmm.

Bryan! (02:34:14.535) Yeah.

Dave! (02:34:24.126) Not that's the case all the time now. I think there is a lot of shit that's still, creatively that is getting made that does do that. I think Talk To Me is one of the ones that did it. But I think that might be a bit of a stumbling point. It's like, there's just some stuff that, if you're not accustomed to filling in the gaps yourself with your imagination, it might feel a little bit like, wait, what? Like that kind of thing. But otherwise, I think this shit is brilliant.

Bryan! (02:34:31.291) Yeah.

Bryan! (02:34:46.555) Yep. Yeah. That's outstanding. 100%. I'm so glad that we did this. No, I it helps me really appreciate. Yeah. And we scheduled this one real early on, like when we first started to like really formalize this and put a schedule together, like this was one of the first ones that we stuck at the end of the at the end of the calendar. Oh, so speaking of calendars, what's coming up next?

Dave! (02:34:54.582) I'm waiting all year.

Dave! (02:35:10.09) Yep. Well, we are gonna be back with this shit in two weeks. We are doing the criminally under scene classic New Year's Eve.

Bryan! (02:35:20.043) years evil. You want to know something? Never seen it.

Dave! (02:35:23.419) It is a great movie. It has Pinky Tuscadero in it.

Bryan! (02:35:27.556) That's all good things are have.

Dave! (02:35:28.938) Yep. But before that, we are coming back next Monday, January 1st with the debut of our new show 99 cent rent.

Bryan! (02:35:39.399) 99 cent rental. We got two. We got a double feature, a double play coming at you. Two episodes are going to drop at the same time. And boy are they doozies. We're going to start some. If you have not heard the official announcement that we put out like a month ago, yeah, it's in there. We announced it, but we're doing, we're starting with Enzo G. Castellari's movie, 1990 Bronx Warriors, which is crazy fun. And then the baffling

Dave! (02:35:47.815) Yeah, wow.

Dave! (02:36:01.378) Super good.

Bryan! (02:36:09.147) bewildering sex comedy by Ken Handler, who's the namesake of Mattel's Ken doll. A sex comedy called Delivery Boys.

Dave! (02:36:18.762) Yep, and if you're wondering, I wonder what that episode is going to be like. Well, I'm going to tell you this. I apologize several times at the end of that episode for choosing that film.

Bryan! (02:36:23.963) It's, it's, it's a lot of us second guessing ourselves. So yeah, so yeah, it's, it's experience. It's a very exciting time for us because you know, you're gonna get, bring me the ax, we'll keep going for, you know, every other, every other week. And in the weeks that we would usually be off, you know, you can subscribe to us, to our other show.

99 cent rental, but also we're gonna have the first couple, like the first month's worth of episodes will just sort of be thrown into this feed. So you'll get them whether you want them or not. And then, but also, you don't want them because they're fucking great. But yeah, so you can look us up wherever you get your podcast, 99 cent rental. Subscribe there so you don't miss them. So yeah, we'll see you in a week with 1990 Bronx Warriors and Delivery Boys. And then in two weeks, we'll be back with New Year's Evil.

Dave! (02:36:59.522) So you want them. You want them.

Dave! (02:37:09.633) Hmm.

Dave! (02:37:20.351) Amen.

Bryan! (02:37:21.339) Amen.