The 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...

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...

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 D...

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 wa...

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...

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 sc...

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...

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...

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 fi...

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...

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...

Is it even a movie? That's the question Barry Lyndon has provoked since 1975 — three hours of scenes so composed they look less like cinema than oil paintings that happen to breathe. This week on Required Viewing, Dr. David D. Perlmutter — "the Prof" — drags Stanley Kubrick's most beautiful, most divisive film to the table: the one even Kubrick devotees can't agree is a film at all.

We get into the candlelight Kubrick captured with lenses built for NASA, a production that had to invent its own tools to exist, and a static, painterly style that would ripple forward into The Fa...

If you missed last week's Rob Zombie goes to Haddonfield edition of the show, this one will make about as much sense as watching this movie without having seen the first. Part two of our look at the Zombie reboot series takes on Halloween II, his 2009 sequel, which picks up with Scout Taylor-Compton's traumatized Laurie Strode, Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis cashing in on the massacre with a book tour, and a Michael Myers haunted by visions of his mother, played by Sheri Moon Zombie. Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro returns to keep digging into Rob Zombie's foray into mainstream horror.
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It was the most expensive movie ever made, the punchline of a thousand headlines, and a flop so infamous it got its own nickname. This week on Required Viewing, we bail out Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's Waterworld (1995) and study it from every angle — separating the film that's actually on screen from the runaway-budget legend that swallowed it whole.

We get into Mad Max on the open ocean, the world-building that still holds up, Dennis Hopper chewing more scenery than the Smokers could ever burn, the environmental anxieties it was early to, and why a movie everyone "knows" wa...

The last thing the world needs in 2026 is another Halloween film, but to be fair, the last thing the world needed in 2007 was another Halloween film, especially one directed by Rob Zombie. Given that it does in fact exist, we kick off an oversized two-part look at the Zombie reboot series with his remake of John Carpenter's classic, which spends its first act on young Michael Myers' troubled childhood before Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis, Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie Strode and Tyler Mane's towering Michael take over Haddonfield. It's Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro's first time on the Kulturecast, and the conversation covers...

From suburban horror to the back end of the Cretaceous, the American genre picture keeps finding new ways to burn down the cul-de-sac. The End of Oak Street, the latest from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, is a studio tentpole carrying an arthouse thesis, offering Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as a marriage coming apart at the seams while something much older comes down the street. Along with a fleet of dinosaurs shot without an ounce of reverence, it takes to task suburban rot, willful ignorance, and the family unit under pressure, to largely successful effect.

Mike...

Two guys, a week in wine country, and a whole lot of avoidance. This week on Required Viewing, we uncork Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004) and study it from every angle — why a shaggy road-trip comedy about a failed novelist and a fading actor became the defining midlife-male-sadness movie of its era, and what it's really pouring underneath the pinot.

We get into Payne's gift for making you laugh at people you'd never want to be, Miles as a portrait of self-sabotage dressed up as good taste, wine as the film's central metaphor (yes, that merlot line), and how a sm...

Every film says more than whether it was good. Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study is a brand new sub-feed within The Kulturecast, where we take one film, TV series or pop culture topic each Thursday and look at it from every angle: theme, craft and cultural fallout, with the star ratings thrown out entirely. On this Episode Zero: Syllabus, the good doctors lay out the thesis behind the show, what it takes for something to earn the label "required viewing", and what you can expect to hear in the episodes to come.

Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter a...

From Train to Busan to the far-flung future of cloning and fascism, Korean cinema spans the genre gamut. Mickey 17, the latest from Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, adapts Edward Ashton's novel Mickey7 and casts Robert Pattinson in two roles, as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, a pair of disposable clones on an icy colony world. Backed by a cavalcade of character actors including Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie and Steven Yeun, it takes aim at fascism, biotech abuse and more, though in our view to unsuccessful effect.

Texas Tech's Dr. David D. Perlmutter and K-drama anthropologist Miranda join Chris...

As the MCU barrels toward its next ultimate crossover event, Avengers: Doomsday, we first check in on everyone's friendly neighborhood webhead. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, brings back Tom Holland for the fourth MCU take on Spidey, this time with 100% less multiversal madness, thankfully. Along for the ride are Jon Bernthal's Punisher, Florence Pugh's Black Widow and maybe even an X-Man or two, and we talk about all of them and how this Peter Parker stands on his own.

Mike White of The Projection Booth joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk...

Some sci-fi films vanish from the conversation almost as soon as they leave theaters, and Battle: Los Angeles is one of them. Jonathan Liebesman's 2011 film drops Aaron Eckhart's Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz and a Marine platoon, including Michelle Rodriguez's Technical Sergeant Elena Santos, into an alien invasion of Los Angeles, toeing the line between war movie and creature feature. In doing so, it does something few films since have managed: build a novel and compelling world for an alien invasion to unfold in. We talk war, aliens, and what happens when the two are combined.

Dr. David D...

It may be simplistic to say the BlackBerry died at the hands of the iPhone, but it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate. What a beautiful corpse it made, though: the device became so ubiquitous it earned its own nickname, the "CrackBerry". Matt Johnson's BlackBerry stars Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis and Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, tracing the Canadian company's rise and spectacular fall, and we dig into the film as well as the real history surrounding it.

Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Mark Stachiw join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk BlackBerry, Research in Motion, the...

Last year's Superman was a genuine surprise, especially for those of us who had soured heavily on the previous attempt at a unified DC Universe in Zack Snyder's Darkseriousverse, and the hope was real that James Gunn would point the ship in a new, more interesting direction. Unfortunately, Supergirl is not that. Directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El, with Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley and Jason Momoa's Lobo, it barely lives up to even the smaller successes of Superman while trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to broaden the universe.

Mike White of The Projection Booth joins...

Jackass has been a part of pop culture since the show first aired on MTV back in the pastoral days of 2000. Twenty-six years later, the boys are a bit older but still up to, for the most part, their old tricks. The crew has shrunk (and grown) over two decades, but the rambunctious stunts and pranks remain, even if Jeff Tremaine's Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and final main film, is effectively a glorified clip show at worst and a documentary-style goodbye at best.

Mike White of The Projection Booth joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting...

Sci-fi has taken many forms as a genre, and since it's one both Dr. Perlmutter and Chris have an affinity for, why not cover one of the true classics? Fred M. Wilcox's Forbidden Planet sends Leslie Nielsen's Commander Adams to a distant world where Walter Pidgeon's Dr. Morbius, his daughter Altaira and Robby the Robot are hiding a terrible secret, in a loose riff on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Those who saw it in theaters may not have realized it was merely an amuse-bouche for the more pop-culture-pliable Star Trek, but it's well worth talking about and reappraising from a modern-day...

Zombie films are a dime a dozen these days, for good and for bad; for every Shaun of the Dead there are a hundred Walking Deads, everyone's favorite show to hate-watch. There's no hate-watching with Train to Busan, however. Yeon Sang-ho's film traps Gong Yoo's workaholic fund manager, his young daughter and a carriage full of strangers, including Ma Dong-seok's unforgettable Sang-hwa, on a bullet train as a zombie outbreak tears through South Korea, and it's one of the finest examples of how to innovate the genre even after all of its ground has been trodden.

Texas Tech's...

At this point in his career, a Steven Spielberg film should be an event worth heading to the local multiplex for; should being the key phrase. Couple that with a return to aliens, and it seems like an equation for cinematic success... right? Disclosure Day, written by David Koepp from Spielberg's story, stars Emily Blunt as a Kansas City meteorologist and Josh O'Connor as a cybersecurity specialist who uncover decades of covered-up extraterrestrial contact, alongside Colin Firth and Colman Domingo. We dig into Spielberg's latest extraterrestrial entry and whether it holds up against his other alien films.

Mike...

Chris may not be a Gen-Zer, but he can most definitely get down with their brand of horror, if Backrooms is any indication of the quality and concept of their take on the genre. Kane Parsons' feature debut for A24, adapted from his own viral YouTube series, follows Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve into an endless maze of yellow rooms beneath a furniture showroom. Contrast that with Scary Movie, the Wayans brothers' horror-comedy franchise returning from a long, justified and much-needed absence, and you have a hell of a double feature, or at least two very apropos weekends at the...

We're running it back on some films we've already watched, starting with a Robert Eggers film that has become a modern-day classic: The VVitch. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin, who lives with her exiled Puritan family on the edge of the woods in 1630s New England, and that family may or may not be under the sway of a witch in the woods. Thomasin and her kin are doomed to find out whether the witch is real, and whether Black Phillip is just a goat.

Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Julie Brannan join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of...

We take a break from Mike White May to talk about the latest entry in the forever franchise that Star Wars has become: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Directed by Jon Favreau, it features Pedro Pascal, at least some of the time, under the helmet as Din Djarin, alongside Grogu, as the space western follows the pair's further exploits. Working for the New Republic, they take on a job to free Rotta the Hutt, the son of Jabba, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, with Sigourney Weaver along for the ride.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into The...

Mike White May has been all Sean Connery all month long, and now it must come to an end, which it does with a monk murder mystery in The Name of the Rose. Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel stars Connery as William of Baskerville, a thin facsimile of Sherlock Holmes, and Christian Slater as Adso, his young stand-in for Watson, as they investigate a series of strange murders at an abbey in northern Italy. Plus, star Elya Baskin, who plays Severinus, is interviewed about his time on the film.

Richard Hatem of Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf...

Mike White May continues with more Sean Connery, except this time it's fake news, and he's the one selling it. In Richard Brooks' Wrong Is Right, adapted from Charles McCarry's novel The Better Angels, Connery plays Patrick Hale, a globetrotting TV newsman who gets tangled up with every US letter agency in a satirical game of intrigue and murder, opposite Robert Conrad, Katharine Ross and Leslie Nielsen. It's less fun than it sounds, which is a real shame given the Connery of it all.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into Wrong Is Right, Sean Connery, Richard...

Before Yellowstone made him a household name, Taylor Sheridan wrote Sicario. Denis Villeneuve directs Emily Blunt as an FBI agent pulled into a cartel task force whose rules nobody will explain to her, while Benicio del Toro's Alejandro quietly walks away with the entire film. It's a thriller about borders, the ones on the map and the moral ones, and about finding out you were never the one making the decisions. We talk Villeneuve, Roger Deakins' camera, and the land of wolves.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into Sicario, Taylor Sheridan, Denis Villeneuve, and so much...

We take another break from Mike White May to travel back to Netherrealm, Outworld and everywhere in between (looking at you, Orderrealm) with Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to 2021's COVID classic Mortal Kombat. With the first tournament in the books, Simon McQuoid's follow-up shifts focus to Johnny Cage, played by Karl Urban, as he is thrown right into the latest struggle of wills between Raiden, Shang Tsung and the ultimate baddie, Shao Kahn.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into Mortal Kombat II, Karl Urban's Johnny Cage, video game adaptations, and so much more.

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We take a break from Mike White May to go to college, specifically Harvard Law in the early 1970s, with James Bridges' The Paper Chase. Timothy Bottoms, a future presidential look-alike, stars as James Hart, a first-year law student who runs into one of the true titans of cinematic academia: John Houseman's Oscar-winning Professor Kingsfield. We get into law school horror stories, how real the film is, and whether the ends justify the academic means.

Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Mark Stachiw, Esq. join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk The Paper Chase, Professor Kingsfield, law...

Mike White May continues with more Sean Connery, this time with an edgier, more facial-hair-forward demeanor, in yet another Sidney Lumet joint, The Offence. Adapted by John Hopkins from his own stage play, it stars Connery as Detective Sergeant Johnson, a British cop who's had one bad day too many and takes it out on Ian Bannen's suspected child molester, with catastrophic results. We get into Connery, noir, and the film's influence on '90s crime cinema.

Professor Spencer Parsons joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Sean Connery, Sidney Lumet, noir, and so much more.<...

Mike White May continues with yet another Connery and Lumet joint, this time an adaptation of Lawrence Sanders' novel of the same name. Connery plays John "Duke" Anderson, a burglar fresh out of prison who decides to rob the luxury apartment building where his latest squeeze, Dyan Cannon's Ingrid, lives, all while being inadvertently surveilled by a whole host of letter agencies. Martin Balsam, Alan King and a young Christopher Walken round out the crew.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into The Anderson Tapes, Sean Connery, surveillance-era heists, and so much more.

Become a...

It's Mike White May here at The Kulturecast, and we're talking Sean Connery all month long! We kick things off with one of the many pairings of Sidney Lumet and Connery, 1965's The Hill. With an ensemble cast including Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Ian Hendry and Ossie Davis, it follows a group of military prisoners held in a British Army "glasshouse" in the North African desert during World War II, where men are broken just for fun.

Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, digs into The Hill, Sean Connery, Sidney Lumet, and so much more.

Become...

We begin our mini-look at Taylor Sheridan's cinematic works with one of his more Western-facing screenplays, Hell or High Water. Directed by David Mackenzie, it stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers robbing branches of the bank that's foreclosing on their family's land, with Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham as the Texas Rangers on their trail. It's a sharp look at violence, poverty, and what one will do for family in the face of both.

Texas Tech's Dr. David D. Perlmutter, professor of media and communication, joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk West Texas...

It may not have won Best Picture or Best Actress at the most recent Academy Awards, but Bugonia was not only one of the best films of the last year, it was also one of the most thought-provoking. Yorgos Lanthimos' remake of Save the Green Planet! stars Jesse Plemons as a conspiracy-minded beekeeper who kidnaps Emma Stone's pharmaceutical CEO, convinced she's an alien. It's a character study and a musing on the state of the world and the way humans have left it.

Dr. David D. Perlmutter, professor of media and communication, joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of...