The 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?This one goes out on Election Day for a reason: it's a movie about voters being treated as an audience to be managed. So if you haven't already, go vote. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and The Projection Booth's Mike White meet for Changeover 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

It's the stuff that dreams are made of. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett's novel and the one that stuck, turned Humphrey Bogart into a star and handed a first-time director the keys to what many call the first great film noir. Bogart's Sam Spade is a detective whose code is hard to tell apart from self-interest, up against a gallery of grifters played by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, all chasing a black bird that turns out to be worthless and became one of cinema's great MacGuffins. Greed, loyalty and the birth of noir, from every angle.Dr. David D. Perlmutter and The Projection Booth's Mike White join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk John Huston, Dashiell Hammett, the Production Code, 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

Godzilla has been a nuclear metaphor, a wrestling heel, a children's hero and a Hollywood franchise player, but it took 70 years for him to win an Oscar. Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One returns the monster to postwar Japan, where Ryunosuke Kamiki's Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who didn't fly his final mission, comes home to a ruined Tokyo, an improvised family with Minami Hamabe's Noriko, and the creature he failed to stop once before. Made on a reported budget of under $15 million, it won Best Visual Effects and became the highest-grossing Japanese live-action film ever released in the United States.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro and The Projection Booth's Mike White join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Takashi Yamazaki, Toho, survivor's guilt, 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 is open for business again. Episodes 3 and 4 of Crystal Lake bring a bear hunt gone wrong, Pam settling a score on Grace's behalf, a crew of hippies reopening the camp, and flashbacks that make Jason, the franchise's monster, a kid worth mourning. Is Argonaut a government experiment, a super soldier, or something older in the woods? And once the show asks its audience to cheer for Pam as an avenging angel, is it still Friday the 13th?Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Grace's rise, the Jaws DNA, Stranger Things comparisons, 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