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DC goes full body horror, and the Kulture Meltdown asks whether a superhero movie can ever go far enough. Clayface (2026), directed by James Watkins from a Mike Flanagan story, follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a rising Gotham actor whose ruined face is rebuilt by an experimental treatment that won't hold. Is it baby's first body horror next to The Fly, Videodrome and The Substance? What was lost when Flanagan's script went to another writer and another director? Did this story need a whole movie, or fifteen minutes at the top of a Batman film? The talk also takes in the movie's place in James Gunn's DCU, word that Clayface was once headed for The Batman Part II, Werewolf by Night getting dumped on streaming, the Zack Snyder fan wars, a Batman cameo that never comes, and Two-Face in The Dark Knight. The Doctor of Podcasting, Chris Stachiw, is joined by Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown for this crossover between The Kulturecast and Movie Meltdown, recorded after the film's October 23 theatrical release. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

It was pitched as a haunted house in space, rushed into theaters with only weeks to edit, and cut down from around two hours to 96 minutes before audiences could see it. Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon sends Laurence Fishburne's rescue crew and Sam Neill's Dr. William Weir to recover an experimental starship that vanished seven years earlier and has returned from somewhere it was never meant to go. It flopped in the summer of 1997 and has spent the decades since becoming one of the great cult horror films, with a reportedly lost longer cut that fans still hunt for. Flick Attack's Rod Lott joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Paul W.S. Anderson, space horror, lost footage, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

It's the stuff that dreams are made of. This week on Required Viewing, we go after John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett's novel and the one that stuck, turning Humphrey Bogart into a star and handing a first-time director the keys to what many call the first great film noir. We get into Bogart's Sam Spade, a detective whose code is hard to tell apart from self-interest; the gallery of grifters played by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet; the Production Code pressures shaping what the film could say; and how a black bird that turns out to be worthless became one of cinema's great MacGuffins. Greed, loyalty and the birth of noir, from every angle. Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, are joined by The Projection Booth's Mike White to chase the bird. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Godzilla has been a nuclear metaphor, a wrestling heel, a children's hero and a Hollywood franchise player, but it took 70 years for him to win an Oscar. Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One returns the monster to postwar Japan, where Ryunosuke Kamiki's Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who didn't fly his final mission, comes home to a ruined Tokyo, an improvised family with Minami Hamabe's Noriko, and the creature he failed to stop once before. Made on a reported budget of under $15 million, it won Best Visual Effects and became the highest-grossing Japanese live-action film ever released in the US. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown, with The Projection Booth's Mike White joining in, to talk Takashi Yamazaki, Toho, survivor's guilt, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Camp Crystal Lake is open for business again. We dig into episodes 3 and 4 of Crystal Lake, where a bear hunt goes wrong, Pam settles a score on Grace's behalf, a crew of hippies reopens the camp, and Jason's flashbacks make the franchise's monster a kid worth mourning. Is Argonaut a government experiment, a super soldier, or something older in the woods? And once the show asks you to cheer for Pam as an avenging angel, is it still Friday the 13th? The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Grace's rise, the Jaws DNA, Stranger Things comparisons, why TV takes the risks film won't, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Before Jason, there was Mom. We head back to camp for the first two episodes of Crystal Lake, A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel series, with Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees a year after her son goes under the water. Two fake state troopers at the door, a bear that takes the blame, and a secret called Argonaut. Is this the Pam of 1980 with a backstory bolted on, or a show free to build its own mythology the way Hannibal and Bates Motel did? Two episodes in, it plays more like Dexter than a slasher, and that might be the point. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk grief as a motive, the gore, Cardellini's Pam, whether Jason even needs to show up, binge drops versus weekly TV, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

At 75, Rajinikanth is still the biggest draw in Indian cinema, and Jailer 2 is a reminder of why. Nelson Dilipkumar's sequel to his 2023 hit picks up with "Tiger" Muthuvel Pandian laying low after the events of the first film, until a new family of villains, Vidya Balan among them, comes calling. It's loud, long and gleefully over the top, with tonal swings from dark comedy to slow-motion carnage and a parade of cameos including Hrithik Roshan and Jackie Shroff. Even so, it can't quite recapture the father-son story at the heart of the original. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and The Projection Booth's Mike White meet for Changeover to talk Rajinikanth, Nelson Dilipkumar, seeing Indian cinema in American theaters, and so much more. Want the one that started it? Chris and Mike's episode on the original Jailer (2023) opens the relaunch of Bollywood Cinema Club on Wednesday, December 9: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bollywood-cinema-club--5655384 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

A spy spoof written by a film professor, played dead straight by Clint Eastwood, with a mountaineering film inside it that cost a man his life. This week on Required Viewing, we rope up for The Eiger Sanction (1975), Eastwood's fourth film as director, which casts him as Jonathan Hemlock, an art-history professor and retired government assassin blackmailed into one last "sanction" on the deadliest face in the Alps — where one of the climbers on his team is the target. We get into Trevanian, the pen name of a University of Texas film professor who wrote a parody and watched Hollywood miss the joke; Eastwood climbing Monument Valley's Totem Pole himself and hanging off the Eiger without a double, in the same production that killed a young British climber on its second day of shooting; John Williams' only score for Eastwood, written the same year as Jaws; and Perlmutter's question of what it means when the Western's last icon climbs in John Ford's Monument Valley for a spy picture. Three movies in one — which one is the real one, and is the climb the only part that holds up? From every angle. Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, cut the rope. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

The Doctor of Podcasting is joined by Karl Mamer and Dr. David D. Perlmutter for Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford's Joe Turner is a CIA "reader" who steps out for lunch and comes back to find his whole office murdered. He spends three days running from his own agency, with Faye Dunaway as his unwilling ally and Max von Sydow's Joubert as the assassin who may be the most honest man in the film. The conversation covers Pollack's paranoid New York, the post-Watergate distrust that drives the story, Dave Grusin's score, and that ending outside the New York Times, plus whether "They'll print it" lands differently fifty years on. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

It opens on Day 2, with a cough in the dark. This week on Required Viewing, we put Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) under the microscope — the cold, procedural pandemic thriller that spent a decade as a well-made what-if, then climbed back up the rental charts in the spring of 2020 as the whole world's homework. We get into Soderbergh's refusal to dramatize (he dispatches one of his Oscar winners inside the first ten minutes), Scott Z. Burns' script that treats a virus as a logistics problem, and a camera that teaches you to fear a door handle before anyone explains the science. We dig into what the film called correctly — the spillover, the contact tracing, the race for a vaccine — and what it badly underestimated: us. Jude Law's blogger selling a fake cure looked like a subplot in 2011; it reads like the main event now. Science versus rumor, the system versus the people it serves, and a film that only got more required the longer we waited — from every angle. Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, wash their hands and trace it back to Day 1. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

We'll be honest; neither of us expected the AI apocalypse to be fought from a diner booth. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, Gore Verbinski's first film in nearly a decade, sends Sam Rockwell's ragged Man From the Future into a Los Angeles diner for his 117th attempt to recruit the world's least likely resistance. Bryan had a blast; Chris found it more uneven, a film with more ideas than it knows what to do with. However, we agree on the man at its center: Rockwell is unhinged, hilarious and the best reason to buy a ticket for this particular end of the world. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Verbinski, Rockwell, the robot apocalypse, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

We'll be honest; it's fashionable to hate Tom Cruise, and neither of us ever has. Digger, the latest from Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron racing to prove he's the only man who can fix the catastrophe he set in motion. Chris loved it; Mike walked in ready to damn it with faint praise and talked himself around by the end. However, we agree on what it is: heavy-handed, badly sold, and somehow both the least Tom Cruise movie in years and the most Tom Cruise movie either of us can think of. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and The Projection Booth's Mike White meet for Changeover to talk Iñárritu, Cruise, the billionaire class, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

We'll be honest; we both spent a good chunk of the 2000s watching grown men sit down at a kitchen table they'd regret, and neither of us thought much about the man holding the clipboard. Primetime, the narrative debut from Ren Faire documentarian Lance Oppenheim, does — casting Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the Dateline correspondent who turned sting operations into appointment television. Bryan found it a mess; Chris found it a compelling one. However, we both left asking the same question: what does it tell us about predators, or the man with the clipboard, that the show didn't tell us first? The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Oppenheim, Pattinson, To Catch a Predator, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

You're gonna need a bigger boat. This week on Required Viewing, we wade into Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) — the film that invented the summer blockbuster, emptied the beaches of an entire generation, and pulled it off precisely because the shark wouldn't work. We get into the happy accident at the center of it: a malfunctioning mechanical fish that forced a 27-year-old Spielberg to hide his monster, turning technical catastrophe into pure Hitchcockian dread — that, and two notes from John Williams. We dig into the real horror beneath the horror (a town that keeps the beaches open for the money), the perfect Brody–Quint–Hooper triangle, Robert Shaw's Indianapolis speech, and how one problem-plagued shoot rewired Hollywood's entire business model in a single summer. Man versus nature, man versus man, and the blockbuster's original sin — from every angle. Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, go in the water. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Video game movies rarely earn high expectations, and the Resident Evil franchise alone had offered seven reasons to keep them low. However, Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, has done the unthinkable: he throws out Leon, Claire and the games' plots entirely and sends Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan (no relation) into Raccoon City for one very long night, with Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry among the Umbrella scientists caught in the outbreak. The result is a lean, nasty, genuinely scary horror film, and for the first time in the franchise's history, the game isn't the better version. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Cregger, Capcom, survival horror, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support. ——— The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY. Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast