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Movie Oubliette

Should these forgotten fantastical films escape the oubliette?


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  • 209. Basket Case

    01:18:14||Ep. 209
    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!

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  • Kick On – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

    15:24|
    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?

  • Crystal Lake – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

    20:57|
    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.

  • Everybody Wants to F*ck Me – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

    16:46|
    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 Fuck 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.

  • Carrie (2026) – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

    15:34|
    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...

  • 208. Odd Thomas

    01:18:02||Ep. 208
    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!

  • 207. Event Horizon

    01:17:39||Ep. 207
    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!