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Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House yesterday and the late-night hosts have weighed in on his selection following a long, dramatic process from Republicans.

On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon noted that the Republicans finally elected someone after three weeks of delays. “Yep, they found someone just in time,” Fallon said. “If the job had stayed open any longer it would have automatically gone to Ryan Seacrest.” He added, “Republicans said Johnson is their first choice… after the first 10 choices lost. Then him.”

On Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Kimmel...

Something almost beyond comprehension is happening on October 31st… and two men want to do a couple of podcast episodes about it. This is the Halloween Parade… volume 1.

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Click here, and be sure to indicate The Movies That Made Me in the note section so Josh can finally achieve his dream of showing Mandy to his wife!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Exorcist (1973) – Oren Peli’s trailer commentary

Wait Until Dark (1967) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The House On Skull Mountain (1974)

King In The Wilderness (2018)

Sugar Hill (1974)

World War Z (2013)

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

White Zombie (1932) – Mick Garris’s trailer commentary

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – George Hickenlooper’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Blacula (1972)

Blackenstein (1973)

The Flesh And The Fiends (1960) – Charlie Largent’s two reviews

Road Rebels (1964)

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Perks Of Being A...

Slave of the Cannibal God

Blu ray

Code Red

1978/ 99 min.

Starring Ursula Andress, Stacy Keach

Cinematography by Giancarlo Ferrando

Directed by Sergio Martino

At the same moment the Korean War was ending and Eisenhower entered the White House, illustrator Samson Pollen found his niche; illuminating the fever dreams of suburban dads for action magazines from Man’s World to Stag. He enjoyed a long career and in 1978 he was handed an assignment right up his alley, a garish montage of anacondas, he-men and nearly-naked women. But his art for Slave of the Cannibal God turned out to be far from his best work. Blandly composed and indifferently executed, Pollen’s movie poster works best as a critique of the film itself.

Directed by Sergio Martino, this travelogue-cum-horror movie stars Ursula Andress, a paragon of beauty who built her brand on a supernatural physique and a come-hither gaze that might have inspired...

The Flesh and the Fiends

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1960 /95 min.

Starring Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, George Rose, Billie Whitelaw

Cinematography by Monty Berman

Directed by John Gilling

The Flesh and the Fiends lives up to its name and then some. The setting is Scotland but the squalid streets and charnel houses suggest Dickens’ London at its bleakest. Everything is for sale here, the fleshy whores of the cathouses and the fiends who haunt them. On the other side of the tracks lives Robert Knox, a respected anatomist at Edinburgh University who pays for his flesh too – the bodies necessary for his livelihood are in scarce supply and grave robbers William Burke and William Hare are ready to deliver.

Venerated by his students while castigated by old guard medicos, the forward-thinking Knox is a formidable presence at the podium with only one thing to mar his handsome profile, a blind eye.

After a few relatively quiet weeks to wrap up June’s home media releases, July comes roaring back with a slate of titles that genre fans will definitely want to add to their Blu-ray and DVD collections. Arrow Video has been staying extremely busy as of late, with three different releases coming out on Tuesday: Black Rainbow from Flash Gordon director Mike Hodges, Zombie for Sale, and Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture. Criterion Collection is also celebrating an all-time sci-fi classic this Tuesday, The War of the Worlds, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out on Shudder, Belzebuth is headed to both Blu-ray and DVD this week as well.

Leomark is showing some love to the Godfather of Gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, with their Blu-ray presentation of Bloodmania, and Kino Lorber is resurrecting The Flesh and the Fiends for a Special Edition Blu this week,...

This bona fide classic may be, as Gregory Mank says, the best American horror picture of the 1940s. The teaming of Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell is sensational. Producer Val Lewton gives the players career-best characterizations and dialogue, and director Robert Wise adds tension and chills. Bela Lugosi is in for a supporting part. Icing on the grave-robbing cake is a new 4K scan from the original negative — we can forget the dull and dark prints seen in the past.

The Body Snatcher

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1945 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 77 min. / Street Date March 26, 2019 / 29.99

Starring: Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Bela Lugosi, Russell Wade, Edith Atwater, Rita Corday, Haryn Moffett, Donna Lee.

Cinematography: Robert deGrasse

Film Editor: J.R. Whittredge

Original Music: Roy Webb

Written by Philip McDonald, Carlos Keith

Produced by Val Lewton

Directed by Robert Wise

Here’s a picture that we never expected to see in such good condition…...

The Plague of the Zombies

Blu ray

Shout Factory

1966 / 1.66:1 / 91 Min. / Street Date – January 15, 2019

Starring André Morell, John Carson, Jacqueline Pearce

Cinematography by Arthur Grant

Directed by John Gilling

Propping up one of Hammer Studios’ more visceral double-bills, John Gilling’s The Plague of the Zombies was released alongside Terence Fisher’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness in January of 1966. Fisher’s film was a briskly bloody chapter in the vampire’s long career but Gilling’s melancholy thriller packed a considerably gloomier punch.

The London-born Gilling was a writer/director with a taste for provincial settings, class conflict and horror – social commentary with a gothic twist. That formula was put to the test in his distinctly odd bit of sci-fi agitprop, 1957’s The Gamma People, a cold-war fable about a sinister doctor and an army of mind-controlled juvenile delinquents.

In 1960 Gilling turned that story on its head with The Flesh and the Fiends,...

Gurus of Gold the latest Best Picture chart along with Globe predictions. I went out on a limb or two for fun because the Globes usually do at least one weird thing with winners.

Variety Guy Lodge on the foreign film finalist list 

Variety on the Peter Cushing visual fx in Rogue One and performers rights to their image after death (I suppose we should talk about this eventually but I am still really weirded out and uncomfortable about it)

Jezebel in case you missed the brouhaha about Tilda Swinton's conversation with Margaret Cho about whitewash casting in Doctor Strange 

Tracking Board Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig to headline a new musical comedy Everything's Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals

The Gothamist loves Netflix's mystery series The Oa [Spoilers] from the pair that brought us that eco-terrorist thriller The East (Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij), remember that one?...

Meredith Burdett is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

The recent release of the two Peter Cushing Doctor Who films from the 1960’s featuring a human Doctor and, of course, the Daleks, has created quite a bit of interest...

The post Dalek Movies Mania, 2013-Style appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.

The astute patron of horror cinema may take a quick glance at the pitch-black Burke and Hare and feel a strong air of familiarity, one that says "Hey, do I really need to see another version of the fact-based tale that was already covered in The Flesh and The Fiends (1960), The Doctor and the Devils (1985), and I Sell the Dead (2008)?" And in many cases the answer would be "nah," but there are actually some rather interesting components at work here. The director is John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London), and it's been a very long time since we've seen a feature from that guy; the writers are the team behind the popular St. Trinian's series; and the cast is... well,...

Burke and Hare

Written by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft

Directed by John Landis

UK, 2010

There have been several films about the infamous true-life grave robbers William Burke and William Hare, including Freddie Francis’s 1985 The Doctor And The Devils and John Gilling’s 1959 The Flesh and The Fiends. Perhaps the most famous is Robert Wise’s 1945 classic The Body Snatcher, which starred both Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi. You can now add John Landis’s Burke and Hare to the list.

Burke and Hare marks Landis’s first feature theatrical release in twelve years, the last being 1998′s Susan’s Plan. Thankfully the director who gave us such classics as Animal House, An American Werewolf in London, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and The Blues Brothers still has a trick or two up his sleeve. Admittedly his latest feature pales in comparison to his earlier work, but Burke and Hare...

This isn’t the first time the grisly true-to-life exploits of Burke & Hare have made it to the big screen. In 1960 Donald Pleasance and George Rose were the bumbling duo in John Gilling’s vintage terror treat The Flesh and the Fiends – a film that headlined the illustrious Peter Cushing as a medical doctor who requires corpses for research endeavours. Then in 1972 came the undeservedly forgotten Vernon Sewell version ‘Burke & Hare’ which also played the horror elements dead straight. Now, under the revitalised Ealing Studios banner, John Landis‘ has reinterpreted the infamous West Port Murders of 1827-1828 as a comedic caper staring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the deadly duo who go into a potentially lucrative body snatching business venture – which involves supplying cadavers to Tom Wilkinson’s esteemed medical professor.

It must have been an intriguing proposition; working at a revived Ealing Studios in an attempt to honour...

British film producer Robert S. Baker teamed with Monte Berman to produce, and occasionally direct, a handful of Gothic horror and science fiction films in the late 1950s. The duo produced the classic 1958 terror tale Blood of the Vampire (1958) starring Sir Donald Wolfit, and the cult sci-fi thriller The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror) (1958) starring Forrest Tucker. They produced and directed the 1959 gruesome recounting of Jack the Ripper (1959), and told the tale of the bodysnatching team of Burke and Hare in 1960’s The Flesh and the Fiends (aka Mania, The Fiendish Ghouls) starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence. They also produced the period thriller The Hellfire Club (1961) and the horror comedy No Place Like Homicide! (aka What a Carve Up!) (1961).

Baker was born in London on October 27, 1916. He served in the Royal Artillery in North Africa during World War II, before being transferred to the Army Film and Photographic Unit.

The truncated third Us release (after earlier tries as "Mania'", then "The Psycho Killers'") of John Gilling's 1960 retelling of the Burke and Hare story that formed the basis for Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher". Cut by a reel and a half and aimed at the lowest of brows, this version ends with Donald Pleasence getting a torch in his face.