Required Viewing 08: All About Eve

Two years after Godzilla Minus One, Japan's war still isn't over. Takashi Yamazaki's sequel returns to 1949, where Ryunosuke Kamiki's Koichi Shikishima and Minami Hamabe's Noriko are raising a daughter in a country still clearing its rubble, until King Ghidorah tears through Matsumoto City. With the Cold War powers circling the Pacific and an American military pursuing its own ends, the only answer to a three-headed dragon may be the monster that nearly destroyed Tokyo. Yamazaki again writes, directs and supervises the effects, and the result is the biggest, bloodiest swing of his Godzilla run.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro and The Projection Booth's Mike White join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Takashi Yamazaki, King Ghidorah, the MonsterVerse, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Two brides in matching red veils board the same crowded train in 2001, and only one of them gets off at the right stop. Kiran Rao's Laapataa Ladies (2024), produced by Aamir Khan and India's official Oscar submission, turns a village mix-up into a comedy of mistaken identity: Sparsh Shrivastava's Deepak goes looking for the wife he lost, Nitanshi Goel's Phool waits on a railway platform for someone to come and find her, and Pratibha Ranta's Jaya quietly makes the most of becoming someone else, with Ravi Kishan's police inspector never far behind.Dr. David D. Perlmutter joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk watching a film from another culture to learn from it, mistaken identity as a core comedy principle, why Indian cinema has no small parts, Hindi remakes of Hollywood films, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Ridley Scott has spent nearly fifty years imagining how the world ends, and The Dog Stars is his look at what comes after. Adapted from Peter Heller's novel, it follows Jacob Elordi's Hig, a pilot who, after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, holds the line at a small, isolated community alongside Josh Brolin's hard-edged Bangley. When a stray radio signal pulls Hig past the edge of his map, he finds Margaret Qualley's Cima and her father, played by Guy Pearce, and has to decide whether surviving is the same thing as living.Dr. David D. Perlmutter joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Ridley Scott, Peter Heller, post-apocalyptic cinema, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Before Crystal Lake, there was Bellflower. The final two episodes of A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel flash back to 1959, where Linda Cardellini's Pamela marries into a corporate clinical trial and gives birth to a son on Friday the 13th, then bring her husband, Hamish Linklater's Elias Wittering, to Crystal Lake to take Jason back. The season answers how Jason survived the lake and puts mother and son on screen together before it ends.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Bellflower and its Operation Paperclip echoes, Jason's origin and the bag over his head, Mike Flanagan comparisons, remakes that actually reinvent, whether the series should become the new canon, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Camp Crystal Lake reopens for the summer while bodies keep turning up in the woods. Episodes 5 and 6 of Crystal Lake, A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel, push Linda Cardellini's Pamela Voorhees past killing in self-defense toward something closer to relish, as Sheriff Levon Brooks and his sister Briana close in on a conspiracy, the camp's hippies mourn one of their own, and Hamish Linklater arrives as the man who knows exactly who Pam used to be.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Pam as an antihero in the line of Dexter and Tony Soprano, Grace's place in the story, David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy, why the show works without knowing the films, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Michael Crichton spent his career turning big science ideas into page-turners, and Timeline was supposed to be the next Jurassic Park. Richard Donner's 2003 adaptation sends a group of archaeology students, led by Paul Walker and Gerard Butler, back to 14th-century France through a quantum device built by a tech company, to rescue their professor, played by Billy Connolly, from the middle of the Hundred Years' War. The film had a troubled production and a rough reception, but it's an interesting case of a Crichton story that didn't make the jump to the screen.Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Mark Stachiw join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Michael Crichton, Richard Donner, time travel, medieval warfare, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Some satires age because the world moves on. Wag the Dog aged because the world caught up with it. Barry Levinson's 1997 comedy, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, sends Robert De Niro's spin doctor and Dustin Hoffman's Hollywood producer to stage a fake war with Albania and bury a presidential scandal days before an election. It opened weeks before the Lewinsky story broke. Nearly thirty years on, is it still satire when real life has gone further than the movie ever dared?The Projection Booth's Mike White joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Barry Levinson, Bob Roberts, Man of the Year, the art of spin, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

Fasten your seatbelts. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950) is the backstage drama that earned 14 Oscar nominations, won six including Best Picture, and gave Bette Davis the role of a lifetime as Margo Channing, a Broadway star watching a devoted young fan, Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington, take a little too much interest in her life. With Mankiewicz's razor dialogue, George Sanders' Addison DeWitt as the critic who sees everything and an early Marilyn Monroe appearance, it is a look at ambition and aging for women in show business, and a movie about the theater that still feels like the sharpest movie ever made about fame.Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Susan Lambert of 80's TV Ladies join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Bette Davis, the price of the spotlight, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

DC goes full body horror, and the question is whether a superhero movie can ever go far enough. Clayface (2026), directed by James Watkins from a Mike Flanagan story, follows Tom Rhys Harries' Matt Hagen, a rising Gotham actor whose ruined face is rebuilt by an experimental treatment that won't hold. Next to The Fly, Videodrome and The Substance, is it baby's first body horror? What was lost when Flanagan's script went to another writer and another director, and did this story need a whole movie, or fifteen minutes at the top of a Batman film?Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk James Watkins, Mike Flanagan, James Gunn's DCU, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast

It was pitched as a haunted house in space, rushed into theaters with only weeks to edit, and cut down from around two hours to 96 minutes before audiences could see it. Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon sends Laurence Fishburne's rescue crew and Sam Neill's Dr. William Weir to recover an experimental starship that vanished seven years earlier and has returned from somewhere it was never meant to go. It flopped in the summer of 1997 and has spent the decades since becoming one of the great cult horror films, with a reportedly lost longer cut that fans still hunt for.Flick Attack's Rod Lott joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Paul W.S. Anderson, space horror, lost footage, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast