Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The Conjuring Last Rites (2025), HIM (2025)

I have recently acquired a copy of the Necronomicon. It's the paperback edition, though the way I was giving my eternal soul for an original copy with the flesh binding. Anyway, even though it's pretty dense reading, I think I should be able to at least conjure Yank Satav or some man amphibian hybrids from the coastal waters. I'll keep you posted. We got some correspondents that can mean only one thing.

most musically inclined compadre. If you haven't checked out his show Noise Junkies, which is about music, you're doing yourself a disservice. But anyway, Tangerine dream episode is happening. Thank you very much, Andy. And this is from another patron,

this one from Jason Father Malone. Just wanted to say thanks for all you do. You Mike White, Chris Daisho and a couple of other folks have gotten me through some rough days. Really appreciate it and I wish I could do more to support you. But please know that your work means a lot to people. Just hearing the familiar voices of like minded, smart people can be a huge comfort in shitty times. By the way, I'm currently

listening to your heavy metal episode from last year. Excellent choice, and I'm reminded of seeing it at a midnight show sometime nineteen ninety or ninety one. A couple of Bill and Ted looking dudes walked in about five minutes late, and one loudly goes, ah, man, it's a fucking cartoon, suckers. Anyway, that is how you contact me, folks. That is correspondence.

Thank you so much, Jason. Also, we got a new communicat from our pal, Shane Mackey, and I mean pal like you're all my pals, you know, like the young guns meaning of pals. You get it. Anyway, haven't heard from you in some time, Shane, What say you? He writes, enjoying Alien Earth. But I have a hard time with the name boy Cavalier without hearing it with a John Lovett style flourish. I think that's something like this, Boy Cavalier.

I am intrigued on your theory that the Octoi will one day be the CEO of one of the Big Five. That will make for an odd company portrait. I'm impressed with your memory of media from our youth. I've got maybe a year or two on you, and some of those details escape me. But here's one. I'd catch this maybe once or twice on HBO, always around five am on Saturday. This short film about a battle between video game characters. I was probably around eleven or twelve at

the time. That hour of the week they would show some shorts that are probably now lost time, but I did find this one on YouTube. Finally, I find you an excellent swearer as you punctuate not pepper. Oddly that that last sentence may have been improperly punctuated. Enjoy your horror Convention car Show. I may be confused on the specifics. All right, let me take things in reverse order. The Nightmare in Vegas, horror convention and car show. You got

your car show in my horror convention. You got your convention in my car show. Mmm, it's both and it's happening October fourth and fifth at the Silverton Casino in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. It's America's playground. And if you're coming in from out of state, you picked the perfect fucking time. The seasons here in Las Vegas are spring, summer, fall, over and over again. Fuck you Winter. We've thrown in with heat Miser. He's most benevolent. It's gonna be a

fucking blast. They've got crazy guests there, like Miko Hughes. You know, gauge from pet Cemetery. And also Andrew Brenarski. That's the one I'm stoked for. You'd know him the moment you saw him. He was in Batman Returns. He's Christopher Walkin's son. No Dad, save yourself. Every horror person in the valley is gonna be there. There's gonna be tons of vendors, tons of food, and midnight viewing motherfuckers.

I will be there, and HP and Chris Stashue. We're gonna be raffling off some cool vintage horror shit and chasing people down with microphones. I should have a phrase or something. If you come up with me, I can give you something cool. You know what. I'll determine the prize. But if you come up to me, not HP, not Chris, me, and you say we're honoring murderers, you'll get that treasure and you'll get on the air.

half hour or the quarter hour. If a film ended at four eight pm, then the next movie would not begin until five pm and they had better part of an hour to fill and they'd show videos or electronic PRESSCT type behind the scenes. And thanks to a fucking flood of short films coming out of film schools in the US and UK, though really out of Canada, if you were a TV chunkie like myself, you were getting

an honest god film festival every day. I often sing the praises of the USA Network series Night Flight for introducing me to a cavalcade of short cinema, but if I'm being honest, HBO was dominating in that arena. I have linked the short that Shane mentioned in the show notes and just below that will be my favorite short film from the nether world of in between this on HBO. This one is called Recorded Live from nineteen seventy five.

It's about a recording engineer doing battle with a living role of magnetic tape of that film to be as formative as any horror I experienced in my young life. And because I'm talking about it, I just want to shout out its filmmaker SS Wilson. He's a fellow usclum. After that short, he'd go on to write the Robot on the Run feature short Circuit, and then Tremors. I love Tremors and he was one of the writers on Wild Wild West. Can't win them all, but I do want to talk to him, so I'm gonna try to

make that happen. Check out both those short films, and if you want to get in touch with me here, it's all in the show notes. Okay, close up the mailbag. Now, Ordinarily here would be Rip's pick with the music and me talking HP, but because she's asleep, I'm just gonna give you the broad strokes of her choice. I watched

the new Stupid Conjuring movie. I figured it was my horror journalistic duty. I've seen them all, all the extended Universe shit, the Controverse, and believe it or not, I have some association with this film series. However, Tangential.

was great. It wasn't just a hodgepodge of spook show conventions reconfigured and reassembled from the strengths of superior films, and the hagiography treatment of the Warrens is a bit much, but it had some good fucking moments, and that cast was superlative. I recommend that movie, and I happen to think the second one is even better. Dispensing with any ties to logic or reality, I think the family is stronger as protagonists and the scares are even better. That

film scared me into the trailer. Bravo. Now, it might sound like I really like this series, and I guess if it ended there, then yeeha, you made a couple of great paranormal plot boilers. But it didn't fucking end there, did it? Because even before Conjuring two came out, there was Annabell. Okay, I kind of like that one too, all right, if that was a trilogy, But then came Annabel Creation Horrible. The doll is not that scary, everybody,

It's not chucky. I'd be way more into it. Had they kept the original raggedy ann doll that Annabel actually was, that'd be fucking cool. Anyway. They followed that nightmare with the nun How many scares in it? None? And then Annabel comes home, which brings back the Warrens and their museum and their daughter. And I really liked that one. What's the tally? Now it's three to three, so there's still a chance that this can be a decent series. So if they would just stop, but they didn't. The

conjuring the devil made me do it. Oh boy, did I speak ill of those Annabel movies, those Nune movies. I apologize. This movie is garbage. No scares zero. The characters are uninteresting. The Warrens are uninteresting. This story was based on the case of Arnie Johnson. He was witnessed to an exorcism performed by the Warrens. About a month later, he stabbed his landlord to death and claimed demon possession as his defense in court. He was convicted of manslaughter.

The film, on the other hand, is about a body jumping demon that the Warrens are chasing all over the Northeast, including a depiction of Danvers, Massachusetts, which is where I went to high school. That is not my tenuous connection to the series. This is I was a tour guide at the Haunted Museum here in Las Vegas for about two years. Let's call the owner Frodo Baggins. You know, like in the books, Frodo bought the rocking chair that was in David Glanzill's room during the exorcism, when the

demon purportedly jumped into Arnie Johnson. Andy had a whole room built to showcase it in the museum. You'd hit a button and a door would open, revealing the chair in a room decorated to look like a child's bedroom, and then a recording of the actual exorcism would play.

The recording admittedly is disconcerting. Hearing guttural snarls coming from any human being is going to give you the willies, But that was the only real effect of the room, because otherwise you're just staring at a chair, which is not exactly the VW microbus doctor Kervorkian used on his euthanasia tour, although that is in the museum as well.

The only reason I bring it up, other than the conjuring connection, is that if you remember back to July of twenty nineteen, there were a series of earthquakes in California, the Ridgecrest quakes, and some of those shakers were felt as far off as Las Vegas. So one day I opened the door and the recording is playing, and the chair starts slowly swaying back and forth, and everyone gasps, and then they lean back against the wall. But that's shaking too. And then they all turned to me terrified,

and I say, it's an earthquake. Maybe we should go outside. Guess who was the skeptic on the tour guide staff. I was the head tour guide, by the way, I just want to point that out. Next up we had The Nune two. I won't recycle the joke, but this movie is fucking horrible as well, even though I like The Fermiga Girl. And then we got this The Conjuring Last Rites. Ed and Lorraine and their now grown daughter have to investigate a family in Pennsylvania that have been

terrorized by a mirror. The movie plays almost like a parody of the first Conjuring movies. Remember James Wand's camera slowly gliding through the new family home, giving us geography and subtle character points. Well, let's do that again, but really fast and never ending, just a swooping camera untethered by logic. Maybe it's the ghost point of view that would make sense as much sense as this convoluted plot

or plots. We're supposed to give a shit that the Warren's daughter is exhibiting the same gifts as her mom. All set against the backdrop of her upcoming wedding to a nondescript actor we're never going to see again, or some priest he's doing investigating on his own. We got to follow his story too. The movie does have one redeeming factor spoilers for the next thirty seconds. All of the characters from the previous films are in attendance at

the daughter's wedding. It's nice because it reminds you that this franchise once had promise and held your interest. You know, when they're doing reunions, it's time to hang it up. But then again, the movie made four hundred million dollars on a budget of fifty five. So you tell me if that's the last will here of Annabelle. Although that is the last film in the series, I'm going to be wasting my life on. There are more noble pursuits out there. Is football one of them. No, but that's

the subject of the latest from producer, producer. You hear that, not writer, not director, producer Jordan Peel.

I've attempted to become a spectator. I once chose a football team to follow for a season to try and drum up my enthusiasm. It was the Cleveland Browns. By the way, they did not stoke the fires of sports fanaticism within me. So I'm not the guy to talk to on Monday about the game if it's played on Sunday. I'm just assuming. But if you were to make a movie out of a sport, well that's a whole different ballgame.

Am I using that correctly? I love sports movies. I love sports documentaries, some the entire thing up for me, contextualize it. I'm all in, I love Slapshot, I love Fast Break, The Fish That Save Pittsburgh, Eight Men Out? Are you kidding me? How about The Longest Yard or North Dallas forty or all of those NFL films that George Romero directed in the seventies.

shadings of Satan. Him is the story of Cameron Cade, played by Tyreek Withers, who's already been in the remakes of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Don't Tell Mom, Babysitters Dead. But don't hold that against him. He's electric In this flick. Cam is an up and coming college quarterback whose pattern his entire life and potential career around Isaiah White, the quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. Of course, all the team names and leagues are made

up for the film. There's no way the NFL was going to sanction this. Hell, the XFL wouldn't sanction it. What I know about sports even if I don't care, Isaiah or Zay is nearing the end of his contract, having overcome some crippling injuries over the length of his career, crippling and the film is a week long trial as Cameron is put through his paces by Jay at a remote, poured concrete, brutalless training facility somewhere in the middle of the desert. If I had to guess, I'd say it

was New Mexico. I know deserts people. The film has some interesting things to say about the sports phenomenon, from the fanatics that worship the players like gods, to the willingness of sacrificing one's own body at the temple of winning, to the blind surrender to sports medicine that keeps it going, and of course, the cabal of rich white men that lurk in the shadows, pulling all the strings, and thanks to an early attack by either a mass arter or

just a lunatic, Cam has a swelling brain that may be causing him to hallucinate the demons and suck you by. He seems to keep seeing with increasing regularity. Then again, maybe not Zay. The current goat and the film's obi Wan Darth Vader rulled into one, is played by Marlon Wayns. He is the only Wayns I will venture to the theater and put money down to see. He is clearly the most talented actor in the family. Not stand up

that's Damon. Not comedic filmmaker, that's Keenan, though his stand up isn't bad and his films have been at least on par with some of Keenan's work. I just think he's great. Fucking Requiem for a Dream and White Chicks, He's good in both. Get out of Here, He's awesome here. The film is wal to wall Wayans, and I still wanted more. Also, the soundtrack tends to lean into classical, which is never a bad thing. There's plenty of cool

and interesting stuff by compos Bobby Kurlick. Fans of Drone Metal will know him as the Hacks and Cloak, but overall it feels like a yen toward Kubrick with all of the classical music, and I really admired that. Overall, though the film is a mess. For all the interesting avenues the film proposes we go strolling down, it ultimately settles on the weakest and most obvious one. In fact, they go for Catharsis at the end, and that's how

you know. Jordan Peel was producer and not creative because he understands that horror movies need to end terribly for everyone, even if the good guys win. But I do think him is worth a look. Performances are top notch, including Australian stand up Jim Jeffries as the team's physician. He's really good. The production design is killer, the editing is great, all the flights of fancy are so cool, and there's some really great stuff they're doing with team mascots here.

There's so much to recommend it except the ending. You know, people tend to crave satisfying endings. I know I do,

and that's going to be the end of this week's around. I do sincerely want to thank you all again for listening. This show had doubled in listenership about six months ago, and it's kind of done that again. I can't explain it other than the endless recording and advertising that I do. Thank you for listening overall. Tune in Friday. We've got a brand spanking new yahoucha fest. It's Predators Danny Trejo and Tofer Grace and Alice Braga versus a Planet full

of Predators. Well three anyway, that's Friday. If you want to hear it now or the next installment, that's Shane blacksfilm The Predator, go over to patreon dot com slash fatherm alone. Those patrons have been listening for weeks and you can hear the latest episode of HP Hates Me where HP made me watch the rock and roll comedy FM from nineteen seventy eight. I hated it, even with

an appearance by the Goddess Linda Ronstadt. Until then, I'm gonna be buckling down and trying to make this convention appearance happen. Wish me luck everyone for ripley Gen. I'm Father Malone. Here's a bit from him.