Really Awful Movies: Ep 200 – Really Awful Movies retrospective

On this episode, the Really Awful Movies 200th episode!

We look back at our jangled nerves when recording our first episode, how we began chatting about Yor: Hunter from the Future, and very basic mic setup we had for our first show.

We talk about our backgrounds growing up in Richmond Hill, Ontario. And how the (pending) legalization of marijuana has affected the show.

We started out as a blog, ReallyAwfulMovies.com. We talk about how the blog (and subsequent podcast) came to be named. Has the name helped or hurt our cause?

The Really Awful Movies Podcast has become a success!

The name has caused some issues. Some horror luminaries have taken umbrage with the name, as it seems pejorative. We talk about meeting and speaking with Robert Englund, A Michael Baldwin, Tom Savini, Victoria Price and many more!

Tune in, and check out our next 100 episodes! Now with much better sound quality!

 

Really Awful Movies: Ep 199 – Army of Darkness

We’re into Evil Dead in a big way. Here, the third film in the trilogy, Army of Darkness, starring The Chin himself, (screw you, Quagmire and Bob Hope) Bruce Campbell.

Ash is transported (along with his iconic jalopy Oldsmobile) to the 14th century, and instead of finding the Black Plague, he comes across an impossibly sunny landscape of Anglia (which resembles southern California, where this was filmed).

He has to find THE BOOK, in order to get back to modernity. That tome is Necronomicon, and an incantation must be uttered to get back home (naturally, Ash screws this up, and is doomed to hanging around the Middle Ages for a bit longer than intended, battling undead hordes).

The film was nearly called Medieval Dead, or Medi-evil Dead, but this Dino De Laurentiis production went through a slew of changes, many of which were vehemently opposed by Mr. Campbell.

So, how does it hold up? If it were made independently of The Evil Dead, would it be more heralded? On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, a discussion of the tone of the film, Deadites, the production process, viewing films through the lens of nostalgia, and much much more.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 198 – Rabid

Part outbreak / contagion / zombie / vampire movie, Rabid is a wonderful little nugget of exploitation horror Canadiana.

On this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we examine David Cronenberg’s masterpiece, starring ex adult film star Marilyn Chambers as Rose, a young woman who’s involved in a motorcycle crash and who undergoes life-saving experimental surgery at an oddball clinic.

It’s at this clinic (the Keloid Clinic) where she’s given a skin graft for burns. And when she’s in a coma, she starts experiencing strange side-effects. When her friend Lloyd visits, Rose comes to, biting him and penetrating him with an underarm dart (hey, if that sounds weird, we’re in Cronenberg’s wheelhouse, remember) and then biting him. Lloyd starts having odd symptoms.

Before you know it, both have left hospital and are spreading something weird, something untoward, something that’s a lot like…rabies! Hence the film’s name.

This a gross-out tax shelter movie, the kind we LOVE to watch. Seriously, there are a lot of Canadian exploitation fare that people should check out (Siege, AKA, Self Defence, Search and Destroy, Black Christmas to name a few. Please listen to our Black Christmas podcast!).

So, we have an outbreak, and the government has to crack down on it. And there’s lots of sexual subtext (not the least of which being the casting of Chambers), and even some gallows humor. And there’s also the Cronenberg gross-out trademark, and some spectacular kills.

Take a listen!