We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is.

El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to God or it'll win him the love of the strange woman he abandoned his son for. Who can say? It's all so murky. When the final gunfighter outsmarts him, he dies and finds himself trapped in a cave with a community of cave people and vows to dig them all out on his new search for enlightenment.

Take a listen and learn about the sort of family life that creates a filmmaker who is constantly making movies where the main character is desperate for a father's love but buries it under layers upon layers of gnositicism and hermetic philosophy.

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Come with us to a land down under this week as we head back to Australia for a look at Peter Weir's first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris.

Paris is a small town with a terrible secret. Cars roll off the road at an alarming rate. The drivers are often killed in the crashes or rendered brain damaged. What's going on there? Poor mild-mannered Arthur finds out the hard way when his brother crashes the car and he is the only survivor left to find his way in this town where the people lure drivers to their deaths and then loot what remains. Things were going so well but the youth are restless. They tear around town in cars cobbled together from bits and pieces, nightmare vehicles that threaten to consume the entire town in a demolition derby of mayhem if anyone in town tries to impose any kind of order on them.

In many ways, Weir's movie is a forerunner for Mad Max, painting a picture of an Australia in crisis. Fuel is as hard to come by as work is. Everyone is on edge and the old order is desperate to hold onto its power. It's an odd movie that Dave loves and Bryan is conflicted over. Check out this episode to get all the info.

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This week we're diving in (get it?) to one of the most successful and well-known of the disaster epics of the 1970s, Irwin Allen's first disaster feature: the Poseidon Adventure.

Taking place on New Year's Eve, an old cruise ship is on its last voyage to port in Athens when a sudden rogue wave hits the ship and capsizes it, sending most of the passengers and crew to their deaths. A ballroom full of passengers manage to survive and make a plan to climb the ship and reach the thinnest part of the hull in hopes of being rescued but each one of them brings their own complications to make this the adventure of a lifetime.

Starring an ensemble cast with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, and more, this movie took the model set by 1970's Airport and expands the scope and ambition for a truly suspenseful but clunky story with maybe too many characters for its own good.

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This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now!

The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals liberally from George Miller's 1981 sequel to Mad Max, The Road Warrior. We find Mike Brady lookalike, Scorpion driving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, on the run from his former gang, the genocidal Templars. Mike's dedication to the loner lifestyle is put to the test when he rescues a mysterious injured woman from the Templars and he'll be called on to protect a colony of survivors when the ghosts of his past return to settle an old beef.

New Barbarians leans into the spaghetti western overtures that inspired Mad Max while stealing from the same movie but on a significantly smaller budget. Italian Mas Max ripoffs are already a cheap, threadbare affair but this movie, the very first of many more to follow, starts off from an even cheaper, more threadbare position and it's quite frankly amazing that this movie proved that ripping off a high-flying Australian stunt spectacular with the crappiest cars and wasteland punks you've ever seen.

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This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make a movie. But when scripts vanished, the cast and crew had to make a movie based on their broad memories of the original story and we'd be lying if we didn't think they did a pretty good job of it. Severin Films bent over backwards in 2025 to recover what materials they could find and released the best possible scan of the last remaining 35mm prints of The Shark Hunter, a movie that was dangerously close to disappearing forever.

In The Shark Hunter we find a sun burned and bloodshot American expat living seaside in Mexico, making a living by leaping into the ocean to kill every shark he sees, which happens to be a lot of sharks. But this is just a cover for an operation to recover a sunken safe in a crashed airplane. He teams up with a local buddy and will have to outsmart a gangster and a rival special forces dude if he plans to get his hands on all that sweet, sweet cash.

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You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them.

Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987.

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This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore.

We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger.

Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter With Helen.

We wrap things up with Winter Kept Us Warm, the Canadian feature from David Secter. It's an important film in the history of queer cinema as well as Canadian cinema. It was the first Canadian movie to run at Cannes and influenced many Canadian filmmakers that followed.

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Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental and we go long on one of the most honest and authentic coming-out stories at a critical moment in the 80's just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum but right before the first reports of AIDS hits the news. It offers a remarkable alternative to contemporary portrayals of gay characters, casting off the well-worn tropes of swishy queens and terrifying leather daddies, Making Love gives you gay men who are simply ordinary men.

Making Love is about married couple Claire and Zach. Their life together is great. Except for one critical thing. Zach is gay and is finally coming to terms with it. He meets author Bart, an openly gay but aloof loner who loves them and leaves them and has his first sexual encounter with a man which sends his entire life into a spiral.

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