FEAR AND LOATHING IN CINEMA

This week, on Episode #169, Bryan Kluger, Marc Ciafardini, and Sandi Glass are thawed from the Ice Age and dropped, somewhat irresponsibly, into 1992 California for Encino Man. You know, the movie that introduced Brendan Fraser to the world and gave Pauly Shore an entire dialect of his own. The post Episode #169 – Encino Man (1992) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

For this special bonus episode, Bryan Kluger and Marc Ciafardini welcome the legendary musician and film composer Randy Edelman, a man whose résumé is so packed with movies that there is a decent chance his music has been playing somewhere in your life without your permission. You may not immediately recognize the name, but you certainly recognize the sound in films like The Mask, Six Days Seven Nights, Ghostbusters II, Dragonheart, Twins, MacGyver, My Cousin Vinny, Billy Madison, and plenty more. Edelman has spent decades doing one of cinema’s strangest and most important jobs, which is making us feel things before we’ve quite figured out why we’re feeling them. The post Bonus Episode with Musician Randy Edelman first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

This week, on Episode #168, Bryan Kluger and Marc Ciafardini strap on their bulletproof vests and travel back to 1986 Chicago for Running Scared, which is the gloriously violent, ridiculously cool buddy-cop film starring Billy Crystal, Gregory Hines, Jimmy Smits, Joey Pants, and enough roller skates to qualify as a separate supporting character. The post Episode #168 – Running Scared (1986) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

This week on Episode #167 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan Kluger, Marc Ciafardini, and Sandi Glass do what any responsible adults in 2026 should do. They reconnect their old video-game consoles and revisit The Wizard. You know,  the 1989 film that has long been accused of being less a movie than a two-hour Nintendo commercial with a plot attached. The post Episode #167 – The Wizard (1989) With Luke Edwards first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

This week, Bryan Kluger, Marc Ciafardini, and Sandi Glass climb into the time machine, set the dial to 1987, and spend some quality time with Mannequin. You know the movie starring Andrew McCarthy, James Spader, Estelle Getty, and the one and only Kim Cattrall, who somehow manages to make being a department-store mannequin seem like a perfectly reasonable career choice. The post Episode #166 – Mannequin (1987) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

This week, Bryan Kluger and Preston Barta willingly wander into M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, which is a film so catastrophically misguided it briefly convinced audiences that one of Hollywood's most fascinating directors had misplaced his compass entirely. Before Shyamalan rediscovered himself by making horror movies on a shoestring budget, he somehow said yes to a blockbuster that bends everything except good judgment. The post Episode #165 – The Last Airbender (2010) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

On the latest episode of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, and Preston do what every middle-aged movie podcaster eventually must do. They stare into the sun of American masculinity and discover that it is wearing a tank top from a Miami gym. Their subject is Pain & Gain, which is Michael Bay's delirious 2013 true-crime movie, featuring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and what appears to be every stand-up comedian who happened to be wandering through Florida at the time. The post Episode #164 – Pain and Gain (2013) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

On Episode #162 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, and Chelsea strap themselves to the wings of the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot and attempt to survive the turbulence. Starring Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, the film operates on the charmingly deranged belief that if one adventure-movie cliché is good, then twelve must be better. Deadly viruses? Certainly. Long-lost parents? Naturally. Wild animals, ancient tombs, possible zombies, international conspiracies, and, for reasons known only to screenwriters in a panic, a bicycle courier weaving through city traffic? All present and accounted for in this Tomb Raider. The post Episode #163 – Tomb Raider (2018) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

On Episode #162 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, Bryan, Dan, Preston, and Chelsea crack their eyelids open for Wide Awake, the charmingly odd little comedy-drama that spent years gathering dust on a Harvey Weinstein shelf before escaping into the world as M. Night Shyamalan's first feature, long before dead people started chatting with Haley Joel Osment. The post Episode #162 – Wide Awake (1998) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.

Naturally, Bryan, Preston, Dan, and Chelsea tackle the questions that Nolan either intentionally raised or accidentally unleashed upon humanity. What does Tenet actually mean? Why does every explanation somehow require a flowchart? Can human beings learn to invert themselves through concentration alone? And if time truly begins moving backward, are we prepared for the biological implications of backward pooping? The post Episode #161 – Tenet (2020) first appeared on Boomstick Comics.