This week we're joined by our friend Jon Lee Brody of the That Was Pretty Spooky podcast for a look at John Carpenter's last movie of the 1980s, They Live. In this evergreen social commentary, Carpenter presents a world very much like our own where the only class distinction is rich and poor and as it would turn out, the rich aren't even human.

In They Live a homeless man with no name drifts into Los Angeles looking for work and stumbles into a conspiracy by an underground of the underclasses to fight back against the elite wealth class which rules the world with fantastic technology that keeps humanity asleep while hidden aliens loot the earth of its resources, leaving the rest of us poor and at one another's throats for what crumbs they afford us.

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In this episode we look at the 1989 Jean Claude Van Damme movie that thrust JCVD into the limelight of 90's action movie super stars while simultaneously hammering the final nail into the Golan Globus coffin. At one time a Hollywood powerhouse, Cannon Films flew too close to the sun and found themselves undone by their own machinery. Cyborg was the ultimate result of this failure, a movie thrown together from the unused costumes and sets from unproduced movies.

In the not-too distant future, mankind is reduced to medieval state by some unspecified disaster and if that's not bad enough, the survivors are being killed off by a pandemic plague. Luckily, the last scientists on earth developed a cure but need some pieces of the puzzle brought back from New York City. They turn one of their own into a cyborg and send her to get it but evil pirates kill off her escort and strand her there. Lucky for her, here comes Gibson Rickenbacher, a slinger who can fight back against the pirates and get her back to her lab.

It's a real dumb good time.

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This week we're returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in the Atlantic as the feral, violent denizens of lost Atlantis arise from the silent depths of the ocean to reclaim the world. Or something to that effect. It's a desperate fight to survive against wave after wave of road warrior freaks, an race against time to translate an ancient tablet that will restore the ancient civilization, and an endless series of violent gun battles and if I'm being honest, I'm working overtime to make this movie make sense. It's 90 minutes of high-flying nonsense but somehow it ends up being a lot of fun.

Shot against the backdrop of Italy's exploitation film industry struggling to find an alternative to the declining horror and giallo markets, it capitalizes on the then-extremely popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs but also tries to tap in to the world's hunger for high-adventure by way of cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoffs only to realize that Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly hard to copy on budgets laughably smaller than Raiders. At the same time, the Marcos regime in the Philippines is desperate to draw filmmakers to Manila and as Deodato finds out, it's hard to say no to a totalitarian dictatorship.

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This week our Black History Month series continues with a look at the 1974 blaxploitation martial arts mashup, Black Belt Jones, starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. Kelly was coming in hot off of his run in the legendary Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon and with Bruce dead and a public appetite ravenous for more martial arts movies it just made sense to spin off one of its stars to their own martial arts movie. Hendry was coming in off her turn as a Bond girl in Live and Let Die and a string of excellent blaxploitation movies like Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem.

In this absolute cartoon of a martial arts movie, the mafia has bought into a valuable city project to build a new civic center in South Central Los Angeles but the only thing holding up the development is one holdout, a karate school that refuses to sell out. The mafia calls up a local loan shark to put the pressure on the school and when they accidentally kill the school's owner it's up to Black Belt Jones and the owner's daughter to team up, rip off the gangsters and get justice. Things get a little blurry between the beginning and the end but in spite of it flying by the seat of its pants and barely making any sense, the movie is a hell of a good time.

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This week we take a trip back to 1985 for a movie of such staggering stupidity that we can hardly believe it. Death Wish 3 is the continuing adventures of Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson and where the first movie is a pretty solid action movie and the second movie is dopey and mostly boring, Death Wish 3 commits to absurdity in a way that'll really make you think. It's a movie of such moronic prowess that the filmmakers had to go out of their way to achieve such heights of idiocy. See a crowd of children literally jump for joy over the bodies of bikers dead in the street. Marvel at a doctor doing everything he can to not break character and laugh while telling a husband that his wife died from a broken arm. This movie is truly an achievement in a year already crowded with dumb movies from Cannon.

As it happens, Paul Kersey is back home in New York City to visit an old friend but he arrives in time for the man to die in his arms when the local street gang of giggling maniacs beats him to the edge of his life. Kersey will team up with a cop to put the gang on ice in a film that was literally rushed into production to capitalize on the headlines about a subway vigilante in New York City that injured three and left one man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Truly, only Cannon could produce such an entertaining gem.

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In this episode we take a trip to Italy for a look at Massimo Dellamano's 1972 giallo, What Have You Done To Solange? This Italian/German co-production was intended to capitalize on both the popularity of giallo in Italy and krimi in Germany, casting an array of English and German actors familiar to fans of krimi and Italian stars of the time for those who can't get enough giallo. A fairly grim entry into the canon, What Have You Done To Solange is a strong starting point for horror fans looking to go beyond the well-known giallo titles from Dario Argento and Mario Bava. We go over the history of giallo, the people who made it, and the economic conditions in Italy which led to its proliferation.

In the story, Enrico Rosseni, a horn-dog gymnastics coach comes under suspicion in a series of brutal murders. The victims are all schoolgirls from his team and to make matters worse, his teenage girlfriend, witnessed one of the murders. He'll team up with the police and his severe German wife to crack the code and discover the real murderer, their motive, and learn the identity of the mysterious Solange, who seems to be at the center of all this.

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This week we celebrate two years of 99 Cent Rental with one of the most enduring cult movies of the 80's. It's the breakdance epic from Cannon, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. When Cannon's million dollar dance movie pulled a huge profit in the summer of 1984, they rushed a sequel into production to capture the momentum and mere months later released Breakin' 2 with a bigger budget and a significantly smaller box office return. Breakdance fever was over but this outrageous, extremely colorful sequel stuck out in the cultural memory thanks to its ridiculous name and silly premise and we love it.

Months after Special K, Ozone, and Turbo proved to the stuffy world of white people dance competitions that breakdance is dancing too, Kelly returns to Venice to catch up with her friends and finds out that everyone in Venice is now hanging out at a community center called Miracles where they all learn to dance, box, and do mime stuff. Wouldn't you know it, though? Here come some white people with designs on tearing down the community center so it's up to the TKO Crew to rally the community to raise the money they need to save Miracles. They'll overcome all obstacles with the power of breakdance.

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This week we're doing David Lynch! We dissect his 2001 Hollywood nightmare, Mulholland Drive. David Lynch is one of our favorite filmmakers, period, and one of the greatest of all time and this may be his best movie. Originally conceived as a new television series for ABC, the network ultimately passed on it and Lynch was given the opportunity to repurpose the footage for a new feature.

This movie is about Betty, or maybe it's about Diane. Or hell! It may be about both of them. Are they same person? Perhaps. Following a terrible car accident, a mysterious woman finds her way into the life of Betty and together the two of them investigate the mystery of her amnesia. Someone was trying to kill her when she lost her memory. Who wants her dead? I guess we'll find out. Or maybe we won't. It's a David Lynch movie, after all. Everything goes apeshit in that typical David Lynch way and it turns out that this may have all been the fantasy of a deeply mentally ill woman named Diane Selwyn. Or maybe not. Who can say, really?

We break it down and subject it to our own interpretations and if you want to know what those are you'll have to listen to the episode.

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