This week, Bryan and Dave take a trip back to 1984 for a look at one of the top box office draws of 1984 and one of the most toyetic pictures of the decade, Gremlins. It's one of Chris Columbus's first movies produced and Joe Dante's first feature with Steven Spielberg. It's got adorable little cuddly guys, nasty little monsters, Phoebe Cates, gleeful puppet carnage, and a powerhouse score from Hollywood's musical swiss army knife, Jerry Goldsmith. In a year packed with some of American pop cultures most enduring classic titles, Gremlins is among the most iconic of the decade.

It's not all fuzzy feelings, though. As much as it's a lot of Loony Tunes fun and mayhem it's a movie that hasn't exactly aged well and we'll tell you all about it; the good and the bad.

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Bryan and Dave go north for a look at The Christmas Martian, an utterly deranged Quebecois children's movie about unsupervised children in a remote Quebec town and the adult man from Mars who in any other context would be understood to be grooming this brother and sister. It's a film that was intended to be whimsical and zany but being the product of Tales For All producer, Rock Demers, it all just comes off as creepy and unsettling. Though, not quite as upsetting as The Peanut Butter Solution, a film we covered in 2023, it's still off-putting in a way that begs the question: who was this movie for?

Produced by prolific Canadian producer, a man on a mission to make the lives of children genuinely better, Rock Demers, directed by one of the National Film Board's most talented cinematographer, Bernard Gosselin, and written by an author so-treasured by his native Canada that one of his works of fiction is quoted on their money, Roch Carrier, The Christmas Martian is remarkably artless and weird and we're going to tell you all about it.

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Bryan and Dave take a look at one of the deepest of cult movie deep cuts, The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris, a story about fame, guilt, and Olivia Newton John. It’s the story of a chance encounter with a strange young man one day in Beaver, Utah in 1979 that came to determine the entire trajectory of its director’s life. For reasons that we’ll dig into in the episode the movie is a document of the natural human inclination to seek fame, the natural human inclination to consider how our actions impact the lives of others, and maybe how we become our own worst enemies in the absence of answers. Harris, obsessed with the subject of his own work but unable to speak to him, works out his issues and tries to fill in the blanks as he remakes his own documentary twice with the help of Sean Penn and then again with Crispin Glover. It all culminates in a one-of-a-kind hybrid of documentary and scripted drama that you’re most likely going to become obsessed with.

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99 Cent Rental returns from its Halloween hiatus with a Van Damme good time as we drill down to the core of the spirit of this podcast with a look at a movie so patently ridiculous and offensive that we can't fully understand how it's simultaneously so entertaining and appealing.

Death Warrant represents some firsts and lasts. It's ostensibly the first movie to truly put Jean-Claude Van Damme over as a viable box office draw and positions him to be the prime action movie star of the 90's. It also represents the final death rattle of Cannon Films after a decade of bad business practice finally caught up with them.

Featuring a performance from Robert Guillaume that this movie clearly does not deserve, it's also full of side characters that are every bit as magnetic as JCVD.

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Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a director who stradfastly refused to let it be purely horrifying, instead putting the focus on high-flying visual style and storybook production values. You've never seen so many matte paintings. It's a real challenge to talk about a movie so rich in visual aesthetic but we're going to do our best to break it all down.

We close out our two part examination of the Godzilla/King Ghidorah beef with a close look at the Heisei era movie where Americans from the future presume to travel back in time and destroy Japan with a monstrous weapon and then force what's left over to conform to their political and economic interests. This time around the America/Japan relationship is bopped real hard on the nose. We also discuss the cultural and social conditions of Japan at the time which made American attitudes toward Japan so weird and more than a little racist. Don't worry though, there's plenty of chatter about Godzilla, King Ghidorah and the peerless thrill of big, loud, Japanese special effects movies.

Join us this week as we take a trip to Japan to talk Godzilla. This is the movie that introduced the world to Godzilla's arch-nemesis, Ghidorah, the floppiest golden dragon the world has ever seen. We also get short changed on Mothra, are delighted by those little fairy ladies who summon her, and can't help but talk shit about Rodan, one of the least compelling Godzilla monsters out there. You'll learn about Kaiju, Bryan will struggle to pronounce some Japanese words, and we'll tell you all about the several eras of Godzilla. We assure you nothing less than good time.

This week, Bryan and Dave are joined by Jonny Atkinson of Uy Que Horror to talk He-Man as they take a real deep dive into the movie that drove the final nail into the Cannon Group's coffin, Masters of the Universe. We discuss the movie's enduring status as a cult film against all odds, the intense nostalgia high of a movie that seems to have gotten better with age, the utterly bonkers history of the Cannon Group, a production company that flew too close to the sun, as well as run down the troubling allegations facing the film's director, Gary Goddard.