I ORIGINS/MOOD INDIGO

A review for Hour of the Wolf, which airs on WBAI 99.5FM in New York.

What happens when your TV set can only bring signals from local station WEVL? Turkish director Orçun Behram explores the mayhem in the surreal, political body-horror film THE ANTENNA, and talks with us about how it came to be.

Death abides, but not often easily. In BURNING GHOST, a young man ferries lost souls to the afterlife, until love distracts him from his mission, while in A WHITE, WHITE DAY, a policeman investigates the possibility that his recently deceased wife was having an affair. Listen to the latest episodes of HOUR OF THE WOLF in the archives at wbai.org!

In a startlingly bold experiment for ToB, we've decided to take the first twenty minutes of the classic(?) Bela Lugosi horror(?) film, SCARED TO DEATH, and treat it to a daringly new concept in film analysis, one that's never been seen before and certainly has absolutely no connection to MST3K or CINEMATIC TITANIC or RIFFTRAX, or anything like that. (And if there appears to be resemblance, well, we came up with it first and our lawyers are going to be in touch with all of those guys in the morning, believe you me.)

A few notes:

• This was Bela Lugosi's only color film, not that it did him much good.
  
  
• Keep in mind that this is a video file. We've adjusted the compression to make it as small as possible, but it'll still take a bit longer to download.
  
  
• Because of the file size, the video quality will be a bit scrubby -- particularly on larger screens -- but should be good enough.

And we'd love to actually finish the rest of the film, so if you like what you see, give us a holler and let us know!

Some thoughts on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.

Review of Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings.

Let's not mince words about this: THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN is a goofy movie, a Mexican horror-fest with rubber bats, balsa wood coffins, poorly choreographed fight scenes, and a "hero" (the star of THE BRAINIAC, actually) who caps off practically every scene by coming close to wetting his pants. It also happens to be a surprisingly good-looking film, with cinematographer Victor Herrera ripping whole reams from the German expressionist playbook for his set up. Which makes for an unusual ToB episode in which Andrea Lipinski, Kevin Lauderdale, Orenthal Hawkins, and Dan Persons explore the paradox between production and content as much as they explore the film's copious flaws. Click on the player to hear the show, or right-click the link to download.

Ever wonder what your cats do when you're not around? Sorry to disappoint you, but likely they climb up on the couch and go to sleep. Ever wonder what kind of film Syfy runs when nobody's watching? Very likely it's ICETASTROPHE, a virtual non-entity of a natural disaster movie in which a meteor somehow manages to put an isolated mountain town under a deadly deep freeze and nobody, not even the people being frosted over, cares.

Come join the Temple of Bad team of Orenthal Hawkins, Andrea Lipinski, Kevin Lauderdale (whose formidable editing kung fu saved this show from slipping into the "Lost Episode" category), and Dan Persons as they slap themselves in the face (not to keep warm, just to stay awake), and take on a film that makes your basic snowman look like an icon of flamboyant excess.

Oh, sure, anybody can look at a ROBOT MONSTER, a BIRDEMIC, a XANADU and say, "Wow, that's stinky." It takes next-level insight to take on the likes of PATCH TOWN, an ambitious tale of a grown up Cabbage Patch doll breaking out of the gulag-like factory where he's enslaved to find the little girl who loved him many years ago.

In facing the German-expressionist production style of a Tim Burton, a Sovietesque mise-en-scene, a bit of Cronenberg body-horror, and lashings of Danny Elfman-like musical comedy(?!), the regular Temple of Bad team of Andrea Lipinski, Orenthal Hawkins, Kevin Lauderdale, and Dan Persons bring all of their kung fu to this admittedly impressive and frankly weird, weird, weird exercise in dark whimsy, and prove they are up to the challenge. 

Click on the player to hear the show, or right-click the title to download.