Advertise on podcast: Movie Oubliette

Conrad's TIFF dispatch rolls on alongside special guest Joe Lipsett as they venture into the neon-soaked underworld of Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo – the latest chapter in cinema’s most unlikely franchise, helmed by legendary Japanese auteur Takashi Miike (Audition). Moving the rogue-cop template from Abel Ferrara’s gritty New York and Werner Herzog’s post-Katrina New Orleans to the streets of Japan, the film stars Shun Oguri as a drug-addicted detective drowning in Yakuza debt while investigating a series of gruesome murders. When his path crosses with an ambitious FBI agent played by Lily James, the investigation spirals into a chaotic web of vice, violence, and Miike’s trademark gonzo style. Does this wild neo-noir spin live up to the cult legacy of the Bad Lieutenant moniker, or is it more of a Tokyo drift? Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy Spooky Season! Mikey Neumann, the creator of FilmJoy, joins us for our Halloween special with something he found in the back of his freezer: Jason X (2001)! Ten films and 22 years after a machete first found its way into a camp counsellor, Friday the 13th finally arrived at the setting every tired franchise eventually reaches when the well has truly run dry: outer space. Directed by Jim Isaac, a Cronenberg effects alumnus making only his second feature, and written by then-newcomer Todd Farmer under a New Line regime still working out how Scream's self-aware humour ought to be applied to a decade-old slasher icon, Jason X cryogenically freezes Jason Voorhees at the dawn of the 21st century and thaws him out four and a half centuries later, aboard a research vessel that has returned to a long-abandoned Earth. It is, in the plainest possible terms, Alien with a hockey mask, a film happy to wear its influences on its sleeve while asking, not unreasonably, whether an unstoppable killer is any less unstoppable once you've made him some sort of cyborg. But, as we reach the film's 25th anniversary (!), can we finally decide if it deserves to escape the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bonus preview time again: for this special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage, we're joined by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers to dig into A Talent for Murder. Directed by Anton Corbijn from Joanna Murray-Smith's own adaptation of her play Switzerland, the film imagines a fictional Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren, all barbed wit and Swiss seclusion) visited by a young literary agent, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), sent to persuade her into writing one final Ripley novel... persuasion that curdles into something considerably more sinister. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson round out the cast. The film is due for release in US cinemas on 23 October, with reports pointing to a UK release on 20 November. Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The next film to emerge from the Oubliette is Basket Case (1981): the debut feature of Frank Henenlotter, a New York exploitation obsessive who spent his youth in the grindhouses of 42nd Street and, with producer Edgar Ievins, put roughly $35,000 of mostly their own money into turning a title he liked into a film he never expected anyone to see. Shot on 16mm over about 6 months of spare weeks and weekends, in the last years of Times Square as the Deuce, it follows a wide-eyed young man (Kevin Van Hentenryck) who carries his formerly conjoined and decidedly ill-tempered twin around town in a wicker basket on a revenge tour of the surgeons who split them apart. It arrived in 1982 amid the slasher boom, with a first distributor keen to trim the blood, before a Texas midnight show, Joe Bob Briggs and a long run at New York's Waverly turned it into a midnight staple and, after a well-timed $19.95 VHS, a fixture of fans' bedrooms. It has since been restored by the Museum of Modern Art, which might be the strangest plot twist in the whole saga. But does the film, which has been on Dan's watchlist since we started the podcast, deserve a place in the world outside the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Conrad's TIFF adventure with special guest Joe Lipsett continues with Kick On – the sophomore feature from Nick Kozakis, who cut his teeth directing music videos before making Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism. It follows Eden and her three friends, who decide to "kick on" after a big night out, ending up at the opulent, drug-stuffed lair of a mobster's son. Every genre fan knows this is a bad idea. What starts as a party quickly spirals into a siege, with Markella Kavenagh, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Ras-Samuel and Nikita Chronis caught in a web of paranoia, violence and betrayal that critics have been calling an Australian riff on Green Room. But is it worth seeking out? Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here's another special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage – and it's particularly apt as we start the countdown to spooky season! Conrad is joined live in the Toronto Metro Convention Centre by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers and Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures to talk about Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series that finally answers a question nobody actually asked: what was Pamela Voorhees up to before she started decapitating camp counsellors? Linda Cardellini takes on the role, playing Pam as a grieving single mother, unable to move past the drowning of her son Jason months earlier, whose fragile routine is upended when two strangers turn up and start digging into her past. Created by Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry) and produced by A24, the eight-episode series streams on Peacock in the US from 15 October, with Sky and NOW bringing it to the UK and Ireland later the same month. Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back with another bonus preview from TIFF 2026, and this one's got a title we're not going to be able to say on some podcast directories. Everybody Wants to F**k Me is the feature debut of writer-director Jonathan Schey, and it stars Taron Egerton as Adam, a London softboi running the full nice-guy playbook: love-bombing, performative sensitivity, and then ghosting women the morning after. Then a night with a mysterious stranger flips the premise on its head, and every woman he meets suddenly wants him, inescapably and with mounting menace. Literally. Jessica Henwick, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Charly Clive and Sophie Simnett round out the cast, and the film slides from sex comedy into paranoia thriller and briefly body horror along the way. It picked up strong word of mouth out of Toronto and sparked early reports of a bidding war, though as of our last check nobody's actually bought it yet. Studiocanal already has the UK, with a 2027 release pencilled in and no firm date. This one's going to sit on the shelf a while, but we wanted to get our thoughts down before Toronto fades from memory. And it's one you should have on your radar. Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Serge Bodnarchuk of Cold Crash Pictures joins Conrad on this episode for a spoiler-free bonus review of Mike Flanagan's new eight-part streaming series adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, which lands on Amazon Prime on Friday 7 October. Flanagan is no stranger to King adaptations, having tackled Gerald's Game, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck, but it seemed an odd move to take on the author's first novel – one that already yielded a celebrated Brian De Palma film in 1976, as well as several less-than-celebrated remakes. The new production features Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, Samantha Sloyan as her doomsday prepper mother, Margaret White (you'll remember Sloyan from Flanagan's Midnight Mass – probably with a shudder), Siena Agudong as schoolmate Sue Snell, Alison Thornton as the bully Chris Hargensen, and Matthew Lillard as the school principal. We all know roughly how prom night goes, but from episodes 1 and 2, we're mostly excited about how much Flanagan will find to say on the way there... Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Odd Thomas (2013) was Stephen Sommers' first film in 4 years and his first outside the studio-blockbuster machine since 1998's Deep Rising, a curious pivot for the man who built The Mummy franchise and Van Helsing on the twin pillars of CGI and momentum. Adapting Dean Koontz's bestselling 2003 novel, the first of what became a 7-book series, Sommers wrote the screenplay entirely on spec, gambling that it might be the only way to win over an author famously sceptical of what Hollywood tends to do to his work, and secured the late Anton Yelchin as his lead. The result is less monster-movie spectacle than small-town ghost-whisperer romance with a body count: Odd is a short-order cook in the fictional desert town of Pico Mundo who can see the dead... as well as the invisible creatures that flock to scenes of impending violence. When those harbingers of doom start swarming a stranger in unprecedented numbers, Odd and his girlfriend Stormy have to work out what's coming before it arrives. Where the story goes from there, in a film so preoccupied with fate and free will, is best left for you to find out. But does the film deserve to escape the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Event Horizon arrived in cinemas in August 1997 as the third feature from Paul W. S. Anderson, a British director fresh off the surprise success of Mortal Kombat and, evidently, determined to prove there was more to him than adapting a fighting game, so naturally he followed it up with a haunted-house movie set on a spaceship, from a script by first-time writer Philip Eisner that had been quietly sharpened by Se7en's Andrew Kevin Walker along the way. Rushed through post-production so Paramount could clear the release calendar for a certain iceberg-based prestige picture later that year, it stars Laurence Fishburne and the late, much-missed Sam Neill as, respectively, the no-nonsense rescue captain and the scientist whose grip on reality is doing considerably worse than his ship's hull integrity, sent to reclaim a vessel that vanished 7 years earlier testing an engine nobody fully understood, and which has now come home with a great many unanswered questions and, as it turns out, appreciably worse manners than it left with. But does it deserve a return trip from the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre, the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt, so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait. Pierre-Yves Cardinal (Tom at the Farm) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after cancer surgery and already fraying at the edges from sheer boredom, when Darius (Bilel Chegrani) gets wheeled into the other bed following a shooting. He's supposed to be in a coma, but Stan can hear him making threats... Is it the cancer? The drugs? Or something else? It's billed as visceral and darkly comedic, which is festival-speak for "someone's grip on reality is about to slip and we'll enjoy watching it happen." We'll grant this one honorary genre status even though it's shelved as a comedy thriller rather than straight horror, because two men trapped in a room while one of them slowly convinces himself the other is trying to kill him is a premise we're all familiar with. Besides, there's graphic surgery footage! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lexi Amoriello, creator of Movie Recs by Lex, visits the Oubliette and returns with Seconds – made in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, fresh off the Cold War fever dreams of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, and here pairing up with the great James Wong Howe for one last, extraordinary black-and-white swan song apiece. Seconds is the sort of film that genre fans tend to discover a decade after everyone insists it was always a classic, largely because it wasn't: it was booed at Cannes, quietly dumped by Paramount, and left to rot for 30 years before Criterion and the National Film Registry got around to correcting the record. Adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely's 1963 novel, it asks a disarmingly simple question: what if you could buy a second life, no strings attached? With a truly game Rock Hudson doing career-best work as the walking punchline to that question, the film spends the rest of its runtime methodically proving that there is, in fact, always a string attached. But does it deserve a second chance beyond the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the third screen version of Burnett's 1905 novel after outings for Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, follows Sara Crewe, a wealthy, warmly imaginative girl deposited at a New York boarding school while her father serves in the First World War — and what happens to both her fortunes and her sense of self once the money, and the news from the front, turn bad. It bombed at the box office on release in May 1995, picked up two Oscar nominations anyway, and quietly became the film Cuarón has called his personal favourite of everything he's directed. But does it deserve to let out of the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive, returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Catherine Valmont, a wealthy young woman two years in her grave, who reconnects with her devoted childhood friend Hélène while working out exactly what a person in her condition needs to survive – but the execution is unmistakably his own: unhurried, melancholic, and considerably bloodier than anything he'd attempted before, landing somewhere between a slasher movie and a tragic romance without ever quite settling on which one it wants to be, which is, frankly, half the fun. But, crucially, does it deserve wander dreamily out of the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam (The Burning) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner with the unfortunate name Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), chasing a heart-eating killer that may not be entirely human. All shot on a shoestring in condemned East End warehouses standing in for a drowned metropolis, with Kim Cattrall as the guilt-ridden love interest, Split Second has Blade director Stephen Norrington's monster effects, a script by then-unknown Gary Scott Thompson (long before he struck gold with The Fast and the Furious) from a spec script that began life as an entirely different, present-day occult thriller. But is it a little seen future noir treat that deserves more attention, or is it a soggy assemblage of other, better films? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.