This week we abandon our original idea to cover the utterly insane 1987 Karate Kid ripoff Karate Warrior with something with a little more meat on the bone, Tentacles. The 70's was an embarrassment of riches, and in many case just plain embarrassing when it came to the animal attack cash-grabs that arose from the titanic success of Jaws. This is one such movie, a unique twist on American International Pictures' typical process of working with foreign films. Rather than import some cheap Italian movies they hired Italian producer Ovidio Assonitis to make a movie here in America with an Italian crew and a star-studded cast of Oscar winners who couldn't say no to a fast paycheck and a little bit of that California sun.

Starring John Huston, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, and more, this blatant Jaws ripoff treads water for 90 minutes, peppering its story with strange asides and bon mots, with characters who trot into each scene to ad-lib and keep their scene partners guessing until it comes time to take on the film's big bad villain, a giant octopus that can't keep its tentacles off anything that swims into its proximity. Is mankind to blame for its feeding frenzy? Maybe? Who can say, really? There's a rich industrialist whose underwater construction project may have something to do with it but this is AIP and it's asking way too much for anyone to answer any questions ever. Just go with it.

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This week we're joined by Tyler Hyde from the podcast That's Spooky to discuss the made-for-tv scare film, Mazes & Monsters. The film represents the first lead role for future superstar, Tom Hanks in a movie about the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons. No, I'm not making that up.

In the early 1980's as Dungeons and Dragons became a sensation of tabletops everywhere, it didn't take long for scolding parent groups to cry foul to every media outlet that would listen and raise a moral panic that rose in tandem with the moral panics around heavy metal music and horror movies. The disappearance of and tragic suicide of James Dallas Egbert III thrust D&D into the headlines and craven opportunists and sensational headlines ignored all the factors that drove him to suicide and placed the blame squarely at D&D, the one thing in his life that brought him joy and provided an escape from the pressures of being a child prodigy. His story informed Rona Jaffe's book, Mazes and Monsters, which led to the rapid development of this TV movie also starring Chris Makepeace and Wendy Crewson.

The story concerns four friends at university who play Mazes and Monsters, the legally distinct dungeon crawler role playing game that causes one player to lose his shit and fall into a psychotic delirium which leads him to murder, madness, and suicide. It is, without question, one of the most toxic movies we've ever seen with a message that seems to be: under no circumstances are you to use your imaginations. You should be thinking about a sensible career now. It's a real bummer, you guys.

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99 Cent Rental returns after our October break with a listener request. Since we just did Don Coscarelli's 1979 debut, Phantasm, a movie made on tiny, sub-500k budget, we thought it made a lot of sense to see what happens when you break through and Hollywood heaps cash on you to make a proper movie. The result is... very Coscarelli-ish. There's no question whatsoever that Don is well-read on matters of fantasy and science fiction and these being the days before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies mandated that all fantasy features be epic, high-fantasy blow-outs, Coscarelli reaches back into the pool of gritty sword and sorcery for something as characteristically weird as you'd expect from authors like Poul Anderson, Fritz Lieber, and Robert E. Howard. Is it good, though? Well...

The story concerns the hunky, flaxen-haired Dar, the last of his people, who sets out across a dusty landscape seeking vengeance on Maax, the head of a wicked cult in the city of Aruk who will be killed by the son of King Zed. By some unexplainable power, Dar can speak to animals and forms a party of two ferrets, a tiger, and a hawk to have his revenge. Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, and Rip Torn, The Beastmaster lands heavily in the middle of the 1982 surge of fantasy movies that brought us Conan The Barbarian and managed to carve out a sweet cult of fans in spite of its tepid box office performance.

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This week we take a trip back to 1991 for a real video store oddity. It's a rape/revenge movie that also capitalizes on the popularity of Robocop. Written by an Emmy-award winning TV writer, starring a two-time Tony winner as the villain and chock full of kill scenes that are so creative and strange that they could only have been produced for a straight to video exploitation movie. And so deeply committed to its video tape format was it that this movie's preferred aspect ratio is 4:3.

Starring Stacy Haiduk as the meddling courtroom sketch artist who is obsessed with solving a series of murders that she has no business investigating in the first place, as well as Bruce Davidson who is horny for revenge. They're both going up against Broadway sensation Michael Cerveris who chews so much scenery that there's not much left for his co-stars. This bizarre revenge plot is aided by a series of extremely ambitious special effects and one scene that blew our minds by how incredibly weird and unique it is.

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Aileen Clark of Uy Que Horror is back to join us for a look at two truly unhinged scare films. In the 1960s and 70s churches occasionally produced low budget morality tales and scare movies to frighten their congregations into going back to church if they feel like they're slacking off. The problem is that they were made by people who didn't know how to make movies with casts of non-actors and extremely low budgets. They were cheap and terrible and everyone hated watching them. Along came Ron and June Ormond and their son Tim, the first family of exploitation, teamed up with Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, a charismatic fundamentalist preacher from Mississippi to adapt Pirkle's fire and brimstone sermon If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do that threatened easily frightened Christians with seeking out draconian churches that shunned anything looking like empathy and service in favor of a hard line position against all things communism.

In the sequel, The Burning Hell, Estus Pirkle has decided that his last sermon didn't put enough terror in the hearts of Christians over going to hell so here's one that's literally all about how much hell sucks and how you definitely want to accept Jesus Christ into your heart so you don't go there.

These fiery sermons are illustrated with scenes of trashy, gory violence that you definitely don't expect to find in movies meant for fragile, easily offended Christian people. They are completely weird and hilarious.

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This week we dive headlong into one of the most baffling 80's video store hits, The Wraith, in which Charlie Sheen is a ghost or an alien or a ghost alien who gets revenge on the wily gang of Arizona cretins that murdered him by running them over with his magic ghost alien car.

The Wraith is a lot of things. Good is not one of them but it has a certain ineffable charm that makes it tremendously fun to watch in spite of its story being positively incidental to the rest of the movie. It casts the widest possible net to remind you of movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Death Wish 3, and The Road Warrior. Do you like cool cars? Do you like explosions? Do you like aliens, ghosts, or ghost aliens? Are you willing to let slide about a dozen totally unresolved plot points and completely ignore the fact that this movie leaves you with more questions than answers? You will probably love The Wraith.

The soundtrack rules. Sheen seems completely unaware of the movie he's in. A pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn is doing her best with what she has. Clint Howard gloriously answers our question: is it a wig? All this and more in our exhaustive breakdown of The Wraith from director Mike Marvin.

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This week we're shaking off the despair of a nuclear war one-two punch and staying in the made-for-tv mode for something incredibly dumb. Where Threads and The Day After are significant television events, this week's movie is anything but. It's a baffling riff on both popular haunted house movies of the era and classic gothic horror but that's about as coherent as the vision gets. Everything that follows is an exhausting exercise in early 80's made-for-tv drivel.

Parker Stevenson, fresh off his run as Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys Mysteries is joined by Lisa Eilbacher, Joan Bennet, and Slim Pickens for a stay at a far-too-modern for gothic horror house in southern California. Either the house itself, or the extremely sophisticated security system is in love with Eilbacher's character. We can't really figure it out. Ultimately it doesn't matter because the charm lies in precisely how artless and strange this movie is. Also, you get a few musical numbers.

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Tonight! On a very special 99 Cent Rental we take a trip back to 1983 to take in the movie that shocked the 100 million Americans that watched in horror as the world ended in a nuclear fireball before their very eyes. As the 80's ground on and The United States and The Soviet Union were running out of puppet governments and proxy wars to fight the status of nuclear war became less a matter of if and more a matter of when. The ABC network sought to send a sobering message to the people of America who had been convinced that we could win a nuclear war by delivering an uncompromising made-for-TV epic that detailed what would happen after everything had been obliterated.

A stacked cast of excellence paint a picture of a shattered America in the last days of humanity. The sheer scope of our nuclear weapons are put on the screen. We see an entire city in middle America blasted off the face of the Earth forever. We see the survivors of the blast struggling to stay alive in the face of hunger, sickness, and radiation poisoning. Dave is less than impressed with the movie and struggles with the political struggle that informed the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Bryan's feelings on the movie are much more complicated, having grown up within a few miles of two high priority nuclear targets as all this was going down.

It's our longest episode yet and we have thoughts. There will be no survivors.

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