Junk Filter

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222: Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (with Will Sloan) Oct 17, 2025

Show notes

Will Sloan returns to the pod to discuss his new monograph Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, which provides fresh insight on the legendary “bad” director by considering his entire body of work.

For this episode we focus on the final frontier for Ed Wood fans, the pornographic films and books he produced in the twilight of his life.

We discuss in detail 4 of his XXX features: Take It Out in Trade (1970), Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love! and The Only House in Town (both 1971) and his final film, The Young Marrieds(1972). These films (most shot in vivid colour) reveal a dark truth about the Hollywood dream factory, reflecting both the desperation of Wood’s final years and his absolute commitment to his artistic vision no matter the circumstances.

Plus: RIP Diane Keaton.

Over 30% of all Junk Filter episodes are only available to patrons of the podcast. To support this show directly and to receive access to the entire back catalogue, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Will Sloan on Twitter and Bluesky and subscribe to his substack and his podcasts The Important Cinema Club and Michael and Us.

Will’s new book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (OR Books) is now available through the publisher or in fine bookstores.

AGFA trailer for the restored Take It Out in Trade (Ed Wood, 1970)

TEASER - 221: Prefab Sprout: Swoon (with Rob Stammitti) Oct 12, 2025

Show notes

Access this entire 109-minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/posts/221-prefab-swoon-141013448

Writer, filmmaker and co-host of the Box Office GROSS podcast Rob Stammitti joins me from Pittsburgh to begin a miniseries on the UK cult band Prefab Sprout, a critically acclaimed band that sold millions of albums and yet didn’t become as huge as they deserved to be. They were hard to categorize, barely toured outside of continental Europe and were somewhat out of step with prevailing trends in popular music in their day and still left behind a fascinating body of work that more people should be aware of.

In part one we discuss arriving late to the game in discovering Prefab Sprout and the long shadow Paddy McAloon casts on modern music before returning to the origin story in County Durham, England, their attention-getting early singles and then track-by-track on their 1984 debut LP Swoon (Songs Written Out Of Necessity). McAloon throws down the gauntlet here, combining post-punk with Bacharach and Broadway influences to create a stunning set at odds with the commercial trends of the era, songs about hard-to-express emotions presented in complex arrangements, which also served as a portrait of the artist as a young man and his declaration of intent, which included projecting an insane youthful self-confidence in his own greatness and great scorn for his contemporaries, wanting to be compared to Sondheim, not Spandau Ballet.

Along the way we discuss the importance of Wendy Smith’s voice, the Steely Dan factor, Paddy’s “Shots Fired” diss tracks, and some of our favourite moments from Swoon that we hope will Sproutpill the uninitiated.

Follow Rob Stammitti on Bluesky, subscribe to his Substack, visit his YouTube page and listen to his podcast with Brian Schmid, Box Office GROSS.

“Side by Side with Sondheim – Swoon and the Great American Musical”, from the Sproutology website, a great resource for the Sproutpilled.

Music video for Don’t Sing, Prefab Sprout, 1984

220: 28 Years Later (with Jacob Dallas and Lenore Olson of The Socialist Shelf) Sep 16, 2025

Show notes

CW: Spoilers for 28 Days Later and discussions of disturbing subject matter.

Jacob Dallas and Lenore Olson of the literary podcast The Socialist Shelf join me from Atlanta for a discussion of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later.

Set a couple of decades after the UK was consumed by the Rage Virus of the first film and is now a nation isolated from the rest of the world, 28 Years Later takes place on a small island community in Northern England that has in turn isolated itself from the mainland, and depicts the rituals of this broken society where the surviving men are the hunter gatherers and the women are the providers.

28 Years Later also operates as a metaphor for the UK in the shadow of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, with a society that has forgotten the details of the past but carries on. We discuss some of the provocative ideas 28 Years Later puts forward, including some sympathy for the infected, some contempt for the surviving human race, and the disturbing (and unexpectedly comedic) coda that marks this film as Extremely British, which may not have been clear to international audiences (and indeed enraged some British viewers), while setting up next January’s sequel.

Follow Jacob Dallas and Lenore Olson on Bluesky and visit The Socialist Shelf’s website.

Jacob’s upcoming novel They Called Her Rebel (Collective Ink) is now available for pre-order!

Trailer #1 for 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Trailer #1 for 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

219: Eddington (with Del Winters) Aug 28, 2025

Show notes

CW: Spoilers for Eddington and discussions of cinematic violence and sexual abuse.

The film writer Del Winters joins me from Philadelphia for a deep dive into Ari Aster’s contemporary Neo-Western/Comedy/Horror hybrid Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.

Set in a fictional small town in New Mexico during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eddington depicts a showdown between the liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal) who takes public health measures seriously and the town’s conservative sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) who resents the mask mandates and warps an existing personal grudge against Garcia into a campaign to defeat him in the upcoming election, spewing internet-borne conspiracy theories that pit neighbour against neighbour in an escalating situation that may threaten the planned construction of a new data centre.

Eddington has divided audiences along political lines, mirroring what the film has to say about how the pandemic exacerbated already existing problems in how we communicate with each other, how online communities have people now preferring to live in their own realities that reinforce their own beliefs, and the shadowy corporations that shape these divides through the use of technology and social media towards their own purposes.

Del and I discuss how Eddington has been mistaken by some as an “equal opportunity satire" or one with a centrist or even MAGA agenda, the skill in which Aster blends various genres of filmmaking and how it moves from reality to hyperreality, and our responses to some of the most provocative ideas Aster puts forward in this pitch-black satire about modern, broken America.

Follow Del Winters on Bluesky and Twitter.

More of Del’s film writing can be found at MovieJawn and the Absolute Reality blog.

Trailer #1 for Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)

TEASER - 218: The Fantastic Four: First Steps (with Adam and Liam Quane) Aug 21, 2025

Show notes

Access this entire 84-minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/posts/218-fantastic-136977726

My first twin guests for the show, the film writers Adam and Liam Quane, join the podcast from the Liverpool region for a discussion of the new MCU attempt to adapt the Fantastic Four for the big screen, but our conversation focuses on how blockbusters have used colour coding to convey ideological ideas, particularly in the last decade or so.

The Quanes think American electoral anxiety and an overall Hollywood Liberal fear of the future in the Trump era play a role in the blockbuster semiotic rules of Blue meaning “the good guys”, Red being “the bad guys” and Purple meaning “the bad guys who could potentially be good guys or at least have good ideas”.

We explore this idea by applying it to recent superhero movies in general and finally how it can apply to the new Fantastic Four, which has been a financial disappointment but like the new Superman, was more entertaining than the three of us expected it to be and despite some quibbles we may have about it, points the way to how to fix these endless comic book movie franchises.

Follow Liam Quane on Bluesky, Facebook and VERO.

Follow Adam Quane on Facebook.

Liam’s novel Road to Juneau (Beaten Track Publishing) is available in Kindle and paperback!

Original teaser for The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025) that briefly features John Malkovich (who was cut out of the finished film)

217: Superman 2025 (with Jessica Ritchey) Jul 29, 2025

Show notes

This episode contains spoilers for Superman.

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns for a look at James Gunn’s hard reset of the DC cinematic universe starting with his new Superman, starring David Corenswet as the Last Son of Krypton, with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor.

After a decade of Henry Cavill’s Übermensch Superman, Gunn has returned to the original idea of the Man of Steel as a kind and decent protector of the planet. incorporating elements of the character from the last 90 years of comic books, radio, tv, cartoons and cinema, while also plugging the idea of Superman into modern life, where real life supervillains like Trump and Elon Musk seem to have the upper hand. Gunn’s Superman contends with techbros and oligarchs who use other metahumans to inspire fear and social media to corrode the public discourse while running private prisons and engineering global conflicts for profit.

Jessica and I discuss what we appreciate about Superman as a light and goofy movie that holds up kindness as a virtue and goodness as a choice one can make, including the gentle rebuke of Man of Steel in the main plot twist, and how it has enraged the Snyder Bros and conservatives who confidently predicted this movie would fail, but we also eat our words about how sure we were this movie was not going to meet the moment.

Follow Jessica Ritchey on Bluesky, and support her work on Patreon.

Pre-release teaser for Superman (Richard Donner, 1978)

Trailer for Superman (James Gunn, 2025)

216: F1®: The Movie (with Sean Armstrong) Jul 22, 2025

Show notes

The veteran boom operator for film and television Sean Armstrong returns to the show for a deep dive into Joseph Kosinski’s new big budget sports drama F1®: The Movie starring Brad Pitt as former racing prodigy Sonny Hayes who returns to the Formula One circuit decades later at the behest of his old friend, APXGP team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to provide mentorship to his hot-headed young British rookie Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) and rescue the struggling underdog team’s season.

Made with the full co-operation of F1’s governing body the FIA, F1®: The Movie is propaganda for the sport where the screenplay takes a back seat to extraordinary action sequences as we follow the team through the back half of their circuit season all over the globe. Sean provides his full knowledge and understanding of Formula One to explain how this movie tries to serve two masters: fans of the sport and a general audience.

We also discuss the sport’s appeal to women and how F1®: The Movie sometimes lets this cohort down in terms of some sexist content, how this movie measures up to other racing films, Apple’s investment in the film biz (this being by far their most successful release, despite the gargantuan production cost). Plus how the stars have been using the high-profile publicity tour: Pitt hoping to whitewash his damaged personal image of the last few years, Bardem taking every opportunity to use this spotlight to bring attention to the genocide in Gaza and remind people of reality.

Follow Sean Armstrong on Twitter and Bluesky.

Final trailer for F1®: The Movie (Kosinski, 2025)

Cinerama trailer for Grand Prix(John Frankenheimer, 1966)

Trailer for Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin, 1971)

215: Star Wars: Andor, Season 2 (with Roxana Hadadi and Corey Atad) Jun 30, 2025

Show notes

In this Junk Filter sequel to our discussion of season 1 of Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars: Andor streaming series, the writers Roxana Hadadi and Corey Atad return to assess the second and final season, which compresses the four years leading up to the start of Rogue One into four sets of three-episode arcs.

On this episode we discuss the program’s political content and Gilroy’s refusal to play Culture War games during the promotion of the series. We cover the controversial first arc of the series which parallels the plans of the Empire with the Final Solution of the Nazi era, as they flood the galaxy with propaganda to demonize a planet they plan to colonize, and how a fascist regime uses sexual violence and unwitting dupes who think they’re serving a greater good through their collaboration. And we talk about the upsetting eighth episode of season 2 which depicts a massacre on the “French Planet” of Ghorman, clearly modelled on Nazi-occupied France in World War II, which of course has parallels both to Gaza and the Trump Era.

Plus: the fates of the show’s ‘Power Couple’ Dedra and Syril, the barnburning Saw Gerrara monologue, and Tony Gilroy’s illuminating interview with Ross Douthat, who is determined in their discussion to tag Andor (and Michael Clayton) as ‘left wing art’ and fails miserably.

Follow Roxana Hadadi on Twitter and Bluesky

Follow Corey Atad on Twitter and Bluesky and visit coreyatad.com

I Am High on Saw Gerrera’s Supply- by Roxana Hadadi, for Vulture, April 30, 2025

Andor Dared To Say ‘Genocide’ - by Roxana Hadadi, for Vulture, May 7, 2025

Print The Myth: A Few Words About a Star War - from Corey Atad’s Substack, May 14, 2025

Your Next Star Wars Addiction is Already Here - by Corey Atad, for Slate, May 23, 2025

Trailer for Star Wars: Andor, Season 2 (2025)

214: Lifeforce (with Meg Shields) Jun 18, 2025

Show notes

The film writer Meg Shields returns to the podcast from Vancouver for a show to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Tobe Hooper’s schlock sci-fi horror masterpiece, Lifeforce.

Cannon Films’ big swing for the fences, Lifeforce had an astronomical budget for the time, with huge practical sets, hundreds of extras and innovative special effects from the great John Dykstra including massive miniature work and cutting-edge optical effects, all in the service of a bonkers tribute to Hammer horror. The runaway production was a cocaine-and-Dr Pepper-fueled vision of naked space vampires hiding in Halley’s Comet (led by the beautiful Mathilda May) who arrive on Earth and unleash havoc on the city of London.

We discuss 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment and 1967’s Quatermass and The Pit, huge influences on John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, before diving into the madness of Lifeforce, rejected by audiences in 1985 and setting off the eventual collapse of Cannon Films. We also compare the two cuts of the movie (as the American distributor Tri-Star changed the title from Space Vampires and shortened their version by 10 minutes against the director’s will) and how this crazy movie has stood the test of time to become a cult favourite.

Follow Meg Shields on Bluesky.

Trailer for The Quatermass Xperimentaka The Creeping Unknown (Val Guest, 1955)

Trailer for Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967)

Teaser trailer for Lifeforce(Tobe Hooper, 1985)

Full trailer for Lifeforce

“Cannon Fodder: The Making of Lifeforce” documentary (Calum Waddell, 2013)

Billy Idol - Dancing with Myself music video, directed by Tobe Hooper (1981)

213: Joe Don Baker (with Brian Abrams and Will Sloan) May 27, 2025

Show notes

The film writers Brian Abrams and Will Sloan return to the podcast for a salute to one of our favourite screen presences, the great American character actor Joe Don Baker, who passed away this month at the age of 89.

We discuss the full arc of Joe Don’s career, thrust into leading man status in the early seventies playing Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser who waged war against the Dixie Mob in 1973’s populist smash hit Walking Tall, and the less financially successful followup with the same director (Phil Karlson), the brutal, sweaty noir thriller Framed, to the role that (like it or not) defined him for so many in the culture as a scuzzy cop in 1975’s Mitchell (immortalized on one of the funniest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000) to his comeback in the eighties in the masterful BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness (where he received the most acclaim he ever got as an actor), his several appearances in the Bond series (where he played both a good guy and a bad guy), and his notable supporting role in Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear.

Follow Brian Abrams on Twitter and Letterboxd.

Brian and Liz Charboneau have a new film podcast: It Gets Better.

Follow Will Sloan on Twitter and Bluesky and subscribe to his substack and his podcasts The Important Cinema Club and Michael and Us.

Will’s new book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (OR Books) can be purchased now!

“RIP JDB”, from Will’s substack, May 19, 2025

Trailer gallery:

Walking Tall (Phil Karlson, 1973)

Golden Needles (Robert Clouse, 1974)

Mitchell (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1975)

Checkered Flag or Crash (Alan Gibson, 1977)

Joysticks (Greydon Clark, 1983)

German trailer for Getting Even (Dwight H. Little, 1986)