Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

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78: What's The Matter With Helen? Jun 30, 2025

Show notes

We're wrapping up our Pride 2025 series with a case study in camp. We're looking at Curtis Harrington's 1971 American gothic melodrama, What's The Matter With Helen starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters.

Two mothers settle in Hollywood, trying to escape their reputations as the mothers of two nationally infamous murderers. It's all fragile emotional states and overacting as one mom marries up out of her station and the other goes quite insane.

The first in Harrington's high-camp era, followed by movies like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind, Harrington's career would come to be defined by a series of high-camp misadventures that were squarely in the wheelhouse of gay moviegoers the world around and continue to be major influences on the wild, overwrought melodramas that came in its wake.

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99CR 37: Killer Condom Jun 23, 2025

Show notes

This week Dave surprises Bryan with a movie with a title that is at once a good description and a terrible misrepresentation. They're going to Germany for a look at Martin Walz's very gay 1996 horror comedy, Killer Condom. Based on the comic of the same name (and the follow-up, Down To The Bone) by German cartoonist, Ralf Konig, Killer Condom (Kondom des Grauens) tells the story of New York City in the grips of terror as carnivorous condoms bite the penis off of the city's men left and right. It's also a touching love story as Detective Luigi Macaroni shakes his jaded feelings on love and comes to terms with feelings for the rentboy who keeps distracting him from his job.

Distributed by Troma, Killer Condom was thrust out into the English-speaking world on the vague promise of the outrageous, politically incorrect comedy you've come to expect from the house that Toxie built but this sells the movie short as it's actually a very human love story and a not-so-subtle meditation on the AIDS crisis. Now, it IS a movie made in the 90's and hasn't exactly aged well but reckon with a little transphobia and racism and you find a terribly unique movie that was way ahead of its time.

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77: Cat People Jun 16, 2025

Show notes

We take a step back in time 80 years to take a look at the lesbian paranoia of Jacques Tourneur's magnificent, moody Cat People as our Pride series continues for the month of June. You're going to learn all about producer Val Lewton and his unique approach to horror as the high age of Universal gothic horror disappeared into the rear-view mirror of history and diminished. Your Frankensteins and Wolfmans were diminishing by way of smaller budgets and younger audiences into Sons of Frankenstin and Sons of Wolfmans and dragging down their A-list talent with them. But along came Lewton, newly promoted to the head of RKO's horror unit, with his trusted creative partners from the MGM days to take on small budgets with B-movie expectations only to crank out tense and arty movies deep in the throes of existential dread that contemporary movie audiences could take seriously and gay audience members could immediately recognize and relate to.

Lewton's career is regrettably short but in just six years he managed to put horror back in a respectable light and prove to studios and audiences alike that horror still had power.

In Cat People Lewton and Tourneur weave a deeply non-conformist tale about a woman cursed by the evil of her village's past sins to turn into vicious, bloodthirsty cats when their emotions were roused and use it to signal to gay viewers that you could also have your movie stand in for the internal struggle of gay audiences trying to be themselves in a world with a strict, rigid expectation of men and women and their expressions of love.

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76: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter (Bonus) Jun 13, 2025

Show notes

It's Friday the 13th and you know what that means. We're continuing our critical look at our favorite of the slasher movie franchises, Friday the 13th. Jason is back, wouldn't you know it? He has, without explanation, endured an axe wound to the head and made his way back to his home turf of Crystal Lake for another round of murder and mayhem. By 1983 the slasher movie wave crashed and by 1984 it was receding but the kids just couldn't stay away as The Final Chapter promised one last showdown for the ages. Little did they know about the fuel that moves the Hollywood machinery and the effect that a solid box office return can have. Chop Jason up into little pieces all you like, they'll always find a new way to bring him back for another movie.

This movie holds a special place in Bryan's heart but then again, so did part 2. The Final Chapter may be the most cynical of the Friday the 13th sequels. How does it hold up to Bring Me The Axe scrutiny? You'll have to listen to find out!

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99CR 36: Cruising Jun 09, 2025

Show notes

As our Pride series continues we drop the first 99 Cent Rental episode looking at the extremely complicated history of William Friedkin's gay leather giallo Americano, Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino. Dave's research and history expertise about this period of urban gay culture comes in handy as we contrast Friedkin's attempt to provoke and shock against the reality of gay night life at leather bars, BDSM bars, and the cruising scene in the days before apps and the internet made casual encounters in the park obsolete.

We also look at the organized movements to protest Cruising and convince theaters not to show the movie, explore whether or not Friedkin was exploiting the gay BDSM scene for cheap shocks, and whether or not this is a good movie. Did Cruising do more harm than good? Does it get anything right? The answer, as always, is: it's complicated.

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75: What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Jun 02, 2025

Show notes

We kick off our regular Pride series for 2025 with a camp classic that was embraced by gay audiences almost immediately upon release. Warner Brothers brought together two legends of Hollywood, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, introduced the world to Victor Buono, and put it all under the careful, deliberate direction of Hollywood iconoclast, Robert Aldrich for a movie that spawned a cultural obsession with movies about older ladies losing their god damn minds. It's the psycho-biddy, hagsploitation nightmare of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

We'll explore what it is about this movie that was so immediately appealing to gay audiences of the 1960's and beyond. We'll talk about the simmering, mostly made-up feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and Crawford's petty, bizarre stunt at the 35th Academy Awards as payback for the perceived slight of Bette Davis getting all the attention. And we'll break it all down in our usual fashion to tell you exactly why this movie is so god damn good and why it persists in the world's imagination as we celebrate Pride all month long with a series highlight and celebrate queer film and filmmakers.

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99CR 35: Blood of Heroes May 26, 2025

Show notes

This week we're going down under for a look at the 1989 post-apocalypse sports movie, Blood of Heroes starring Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen. Also known as Salute of the Jugger, it's a late entry into the Maxploitation wave of the 80's but rather than being the usual quest for water or women, it's an underdog story about a team of misfits who play a violent future sport involving a dog's skull instead of a ball. What's a jugger? Don't worry about it, baby! Will they climb the ranks out of their place beating up on village and peasant teams? Will they make it to the big city and win it all when they face the pros? Probably. I mean, it's a sports movie at heart and that's what usually happens in those movies.

Blood of Heroes sports a significantly better cast than you're probably expecting with Hauer, Chen, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Delroy Lindo all slumming it. The production is also executed by a surprising cohort of filmmakers who we have to thank for the original Mad Max movies which explains why it's so competently made and looks so authentically post-apocalyptic from the people who brought us the subgenre in the first place.

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74: Prom Night May 19, 2025

Show notes

This week we dust off our dancing shoes and head back to 1980 for the Canadian slasher classic, Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. It's a wild whodunnit with a billion misdirects that thinks its pulling one over on you even though it's pretty obvious who the killer is from the get go. You get a great cast here that elevates to the movie to a higher class than it probably deserves. It's a beautiful portrait of a time long gone and we love it.

Originally conceived as a killer doctor horror movie it instead eschews the popular notion at the time to set a slasher movie during a holiday in favor of something more relatable to young audiences, proms. It also bends over backwards to convince you that the songs being played at this prom are popular disco hits of the era without actually being popular hits of the era.

Prom Night also sparked the first moral outrage of the 80's, the public backlash against horror movies and we're going to tell you all about it.

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99CR 34: Miami Connection May 12, 2025

Show notes

This week Bryan and Dave take a trip down south to Orlando, Florida for a look at the utterly baffling but thoroughly charming martial arts movie from Grandmaster YK Kim, Miami Connection. This one's got it all. You get a rock and roll band that's also a bunch of taekwondo black belt vigilantes, a scummy gang of coke dealin' rednecks, ninjas on motorcycles, and a battle of the band that is a little more literal than you might be expecting. Along the way you'll learn a thing or two about how great taekwondo is and the power of friendship and family.

Utterly trashed upon release and rejected by nearly every distributor that saw it, Miami Connection nearly ruined YK Kim but his sheer force of personality saw it through and the good folks at AGFA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin saw a sincerity in it that its contemporaries utterly lacked. It's because of this that Miami Connection roared back into life and lives comfortably in the hearts of all who see it. We love it so much that Grandmaster Kim graces our own podcast art.

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73: The Faculty w/guest Alaina Urquhart May 05, 2025

Show notes

This week we're joined by one of our favorite guests, Alaina Urquhart from the massively popular podcast Morbid to take a trip back in time and bask in the warm nostalgic glow of 1998's The Faculty from director Robert Rodriguez. Along with our usual exhaustive break down of the movie you'll hear about the unusually violent high school that we attended (and also was home to Pam Smart), that time Bryan and his girlfriend sat in on a Heaven's Gate presentation at the local library, hosted by Marshall Applewhite, and how Bryan and that same girlfriend were hoodwinked by members of the Church of Scientology into taking their Oxford Capacity Analysis test.

It's tales of peril and high strangeness, sandwiched between a love letter to an underrated gem of 90's horror, made possible by a talented and passionate director and his extremely photogenic cast. Sure, the end of this movie sucks but if you shut it off before the heinous Breakfast Club coda you end up with a ton of fun and no better way to kill 100 minutes.

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