Have You Seen This?

Jen and Tim host Bitter Karella, who is a witch, to discuss a very witchy cult horror movie, Eyes of Fire! Also, if you were dying to know Jen’s thoughts on Midsommar, they’re in there.Jen misidentified the actor who plays Will Smythe as “Douglas Lipscomb.” She of course meant Dennis Lipscomb.Severin Films included Eyes of Fire in their recently released All the Haunts Be Ours folk horror boxed set. If your interest in Eyes of Fire isn’t quite up to that $170 price tag, you can of course watch the film on Shudder’s excellent streaming service.For more on the genre, Folk Horror Revival offers a generous repository of knowledge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen assume the lotus position to study a leftover Bruce Lee passion project, the martial arts video essay Circle of Iron.The official Bruce Lee website If you’re not familiar with Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, just watch! The 17th century samurai, philosopher, and artist Miyamoto Musashi is considered a kensei— a “sword saint”— in Japan. Read a short Bruce Eder essay on the first installment in the Samurai trilogy of films, in which Toshiro Mifune played Musashi.If for whatever reason you crave more of what Tim’s smoking, visit the Patreon of the Mega Dumb Cast, or purchase a PDF of the Palladium game Ninjas and Superspies.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim enlist favorite guest Bitter Karella to explicate the inexplicable Dan Aykroyd/Gene Hackman buddy cop comedy, Loose Cannons!Not to get all fact check dot org on you all, but the Dissociative Identity Disorder website has science-based information on what was misrepresented as “multiple personality disorder” in the movie.Busy Inside is a compassionate documentary about people with DID.Read an article about the Southern California Sorcerers, a writer’s group which included future Loose Cannons scribe Richard Matheson and some other guys like Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. Excelsior!Hear the closing theme sung by Katey Sagal (!), ripped “straight from the uncompressed Laserdisc track.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen make hay out of the 1988 comedy Hot to Trot, which killed Bobcat Goldthwait’s career for two decades. The horse was unscathed.Hear the entire episode at our Patreon and get access to more than 50 other bonus episodes!Tim confused God Bless America with Red State (and Jen did not catch the error, shame on her) — the other movie from 2011 with a divisive title and middling reviews about a gun-toting ingenue.On his blog, script doctor Andy Breckman reminisces unkindly about working on the screenplay. Listen to the Q&A we discussed in the episode, in which Goldthwait puts the screws to the interviewer for opening with a question about Hot to Trot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim reflect on one of the great neo-noir films of Hollywood’s second golden age, Night Moves.Senses of Cinema has a thoughtful essay on the film by Bruce Jackson. We didn’t get a chance to talk about the film’s writer, Alan Sharp, who said his own screen work embodied “moral ambiguity, mixed motives and irony.” Matthew Asprey Gear describes the protracted gestation of Night Moves and illuminates some biographical details about Sharp in an article for Bright Lights Film Journal. Read Alan Sharp’s obituary at the Guardian. For more Melanie Griffith, check out our episode on Roar, the absolutely wrong-headed movie project inflicted on her by mom Tippi Hedren and stepdad Noel Marshall. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen welcome back Sean Morris to discuss one of Spike Lee’s most fascinating and controversial trainwrecks, Bamboozled.Per Sean’s recommendation, check out the official video for “Lovin’ It” from Little Brother’s “too intelligent” album The Minstrel Show.If you’re curious about the camera Spike Lee used to make Bamboozled, you can read a history of the Sony DCR-VX1000 here.In 2005, Dr. David Pilgrim wrote a powerful essay about the collection that became the foundation of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. In “The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects” he reflects on the emotional toll collecting exacted on him, as well as the anger and sadness the objects still inspire and the lingering stain of anti-black bigotry in the United States.Watch the Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans commercial directed by Spike Lee and starring…Rob Liefeld lol Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim are joined by Darren “Sebebe” Herczeg to reassess Michael Mann’s profoundly flawed fantasy/horror film, The Keep!Kit Rae’s exhaustive fansite may be the definitive document on The Keep at this point, but there’s also a documentary more than ten years in the making on the same subject. You can follow the filmmakers for updates on Twitter! Read Michael Mann’s original screenplay for The Keep!Watch the ending cut from the theatrical release and inexplicably appended to TV versions of the film.And after you’ve done that, watch Mann’s wonderful telefilm The Jericho Mile so Jen will finally shut up about it.When you're sick of The Keep, join Sebebe for the online I Swing, You Swing game. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen are overwhelmed by the raw charisma of Jacques from the Seeking Derangments podcast in a truly chaotic episode nominally about the chaotic 1977 film House!Via Senses of Cinema, read a retrospective on Nobuhiko Obayashi’s career that also serves as a defense of his filmmaking style.You can see a sampling of Obayashi’s commercial work on YouTube. Don’t miss the MANDOM spot starring Charles Bronson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Subscribe to HYST on Patreon for only $2 and get two bonus episodes every month! patreon.com/haveyouseenthis/Jen and Tim revisit an old favorite, Peter Hyams’s “High Noon in Space,” aka Outland!Jen is incorrect when she asserts that John Wayne was considered for the part of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon; Kramer and screenwriter Carl Foreman wanted a hot young star like Brando or Gregory Peck. Wayne, along with other Hollywood reactionaries including Hedda Hopper, did pressure Gary Cooper into withdrawing from a proposed production company headed by High Noon screenwriter and HUAC target Carl Foreman.The story of High Noon and Carl Foreman is told at length in Glenn Frankel’s book High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. You can read an excerpt on the Vanity Fair website.By the way, you can browse the Outland press kit! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen shred a selection of programs from awful neolib also-ran streaming service, Apple TV+!Have you seen…Tim’s website? Jen alludes at one point to the “Unicorn Killer,” Ira Einhorn. He claimed to have helped found Earth Day, but his account has been disputed. Conservatives still love to evoke him as emblematic of leftist depravity. He died in prison in 2020. Jen also touched on the much-muddied concept of "emotional labor," as originally described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Read Sharmin Tunguz's article on how the term has been misappropriated.When emotional labor has left the professional sphere and has entered the domestic realm; when it is used to describe a household list of domestic chores, whether or not those chores are done happily or grumpily, it has become diluted to the point of being in danger of losing its meaning. Yes, women do tend to shoulder more emotional labor in the workplace, and more attention on its health and professional repercussions m

Jen welcomes Julie once again to talk about the historical background of a phantasmagoric Ken Russell favorite, Gothic!The movie Jen fails to identify is, of course, Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell, starring Amira Casar and Rocco Siffredi.Thomas Dolby enlisted vocalist Timothy Spall (!) for a song inspired by the film Gothic, “The Devil is an Englishman”Hear Steve Hackett’s cover of “The Devil is an Englishman” from his 2003 album, To Watch the Storms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Get access to 50 bonus episodes for a pledge as low as $2/month at our Patreon!Jen and Tim talk about a movie that people still like to misinterpret wildly even twenty years later: Fight Club!Read Alexander Walker’s excoriating review from the Evening Standard.'The movie gradually makes its analogy with Nazi Germany even more overt. Pitt and Norton raid liposuction waste dumpsters at night, retrieving “the richest cream fat in the world”, that’s been siphoned out of the obese, and rendering it into red soap tablets they then flog to exclusive boutiques. It’s unbelievable any film would dare use, even as such a sick gag, a sequence reminiscent of that chapter of the Holocaust in which Nazi thoroughness rendered the Jews down into similar, no doubt less pricy soap bars. But Fight Club has no reticence, no memory, no shame.'The performance artist Tim mentioned is Emma Varker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matt Christman makes a triumphant return to the show to hold forth on the finest American film ever made, Nothing But Trouble!Want that feature-packed blu-ray? Get it at Shout Factory. You can also hear our earlier take on Nothing But Trouble with guest Bitter Karella aka @ bitterkarella on Twitter!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen welcomes Julie (@ chimericalgirl1 on Twitter) to celebrate an almost entirely forgotten erotic thriller with art house ambitions, Siesta, from 1987. This one’s quite overlooked in spite of a stacked cast that includes Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Jodie Foster, Julian Sands, Grace Jones, and Alexei Sayle.We admit, this one’s hard to track down unless you’re willing to hunt for PAL and/or bootleg DVDs, but you can hear some of the sultry Miles Davis/Marcus Miller soundtrack!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Subscribe to HYST on Patreon for only $2 and get two bonus episodes every month!Tim and Jen welcome show mascot Bitter Karella to talk about George Romero’s melancholy 1976 vampire masterpiece, Martin.Some exciting news that broke the day we recorded this episode— the 3-hour black-and-white director’s cut of Martin has been found!Check out Karella's satirical horror microfiction account Midnight Pals on Twitter, as well! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim discover two Arkansas originals: The Town That Dreaded Sundown from 1976, and indie film pioneer Charles B. Pierce!Amanda Squitiero, daughter of Charles B. Pierce, corrects some misconceptions about him in this fine article from Filmmaker magazine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen confront the most infamous mondo film of all time, Faces of Death!Faces of Death may be viewed in its entirety on Tubi.Echoing Jen’s experience in high school auto safety, two students were traumatized after their math teacher showed the film in class in 1985:“The people at the table,” says Forget today, “beat this monkey over the head with a hammer until it died. Then they cut the top of its head off and ate its brains.” As an animal-lover, she found the film deeply disturbing and asked to leave. Mr Schwartz said no and when Feese also tried to go, he forced her to sit down, grabbing her chair and spinning it aggressively towards the screen.Schwarz was disciplined, but with only a 15-day suspension without pay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim catch up on a definitive Nicolas Cage performance in the cult film and meme template Vampire’s Kiss!Read the evidence that Vampire’s Kiss writer Joseph Minion plagiarized much of After Hours at Andrew Hearst’s blog.https://andrewhearst.com/blog/2008/05/the-scandalous-origins-of-martin-scorseses-after-hours Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim and Jen struggle to make sense of one of the most persistent cultural artifacts of 9/11, Loose Change, as well as the lasting damage done by the Bush administration.View every edit of Loose Change (except the 2015 edition) at archive.org. Watch Screw Loose Change, an exhaustive response to the second edition of Loose Change, at YouTube.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen and Tim revisit the greatest unfairly-cancelled single-season sci-fi western TV series of all time: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.! If you thought we were going to say “Firefly” you have obviously never listened to our show before. Also Jen is finally able to air her feelings about Dixie for a mass audience. Spicy!Check DVDTalk for information on the complete series on home media.https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/22466/adventures-of-brisco-county-jr-the-complete-series-the/Whether you lived through it or not, you can peruse the 1993-94 prime-time television lineup for yourself.http://www.inthe90s.com/prim9394.shtml Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.