EPISODE 171 - BAD TASTE AND THE FRIGHTENERS

The Podcast on Haunted Hill will contain spoilers and swearing.

I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's work. I saw this when I come.

Hello, and welcome to The Podcast on Haunted Hill, episode 171. Dan put a one finger up in front of my one head, but my two eyes, but my one brain pushed it through my one mouth and out my two lungs. Breathe in the words to you guys. Hello, everybody, my name is Gav.

I'm Dan. Wow, you blew my doors off for that intro there. Very good.

Yeah, I never know what's gonna happen when we, until the button's pressed.

I always get a bit scared when we do the countdown and you hit record. I always think, what the fuck is he gonna say?

Don't ever know what's coming out of the words, out of the brain, out of the mouth, out of the, oh, oh, oh, oh. How are you?

I'm very good, my friend, very good. Excited to be recording with you as always. I'm excited as well because it's our first director special of 2025.

Yeah, what a director to get into.

What a director. So there we go. So as you probably would know from clicking, we are going to be looking at the fantastic works of Peter Jackson. We are going to look at his back catalogue. Oh, no. We'll also have a quick chat about his bio. What we do with our director specials is we, for anyone who has not heard of us, do one before us. We pick two films, usually our favorite films from that director's career.

This is the second time, though, we've done Peter Jackson, isn't it?

No, it's the first director's special, but we have done it before.

Oh, we did Brain Dead.

Yeah, we did Brain Dead for my birthday about 10 years ago.

OK, because I wouldn't say these are favorites. Bad Taste, I love Bad Taste, but Frighteners is not so much.

Yeah, so we're doing Frighteners from 96, Bad Taste from 87. But the reason we picked those is because Bad Taste is the one that started it all. And it's going to be a fun chat.

And Frighteners is kind of what started the American productions.

It's like when Jackie Chan did Rush Hour. When Jackie Chan did Rush Hour, he started making loads of Hollywood movies. And when Peter Jackson did The Frighteners, that's when he was noticed more by Hollywood. And before you know it, he was Mr. Lord of the Rings. But we'll get into all of that when we cover off his career. But yeah, The Frighteners is quite a favorite amongst horror fans. It's a bit of a cult favorite. A lot of people only really discovered Peter Jackson with The Frighteners.

Because of the Hollywood nature and the marketing, which would have gone in towards that film, compared to his other films, you know.

But what's fun is if you didn't know who Peter Jackson was, and you watched The Frighteners, if you were like, I wonder what else he's done? If you went back and watched Brain Dead, or Dead Alive as it's called in some countries, or even Bad Taste, you'd be like, holy shit, what the hell?

Or Meet The Fables.

Meet The Fables or Heavenly Creatures, which I'm a huge fan of.

Heavenly Creatures, we're getting to it. That's a very indie film, but yeah, we're getting to it.

Beautiful film.

Thanks for coming along. I hope everyone is safe and happy in the world.

We didn't see it, Gav.

If you're returning this and that, welcome back. And if it's your first time, welcome front.

And if you'd like to just pop along now and again.

Side to side.

Come around the side. There's a little side entrance you can pop in.

Anyway, you like it. Anyway. Wow.

It's getting sexy already for Peter Jackson.

And next time we got a Valentine's episode, and that's when Dan and I could do it, oiled up.

Oh, P Diddy, baby.

It's going to be a P Diddy party, it's not.

A thousand body oils? A thousand baby oils. No, not going to be doing that because some crazy shit goes on. But yeah, we will be getting sexy for our next episode. But yes, so that's what this episode is. Peter Jackson, The Frighteners. And we're going to flip it. We're going to do The Frighteners first, and we're going to finish up the episode with Bad Taste, because we're both big fans of that. And we've got a lot to say about that as well.

Sheilas.

Yeah. Sheila is one of our listeners, and she reached out to us a couple of weeks back, obviously before we recorded, and sent us a really lovely message and a message that is really thought-provoking.

That would be incredible if you could have before saw her message in the future, because you said obviously after we recorded, like if she had sent a message in the future, and you can read it out now.

Yeah, it would be.

But that would fuck up the time-lapse a bit, because then Sheila is not going to think about it, or you're going to plant that thought in her head because you've sent the message to send, then she's going to send a message, so I'm confused myself. I was going to stay quiet.

Okay. Well, Sheila reached out to us on Facebook and said, as a person who is blind, I truly appreciate the descriptive way that you guys go through the scenes of the movies, because then I have a much better understanding when I watched the movie with others, which was a very short and straight to the point message, and made me think, wow, god, that is incredible.

Made our day, didn't it?

It really, really made our day, Sheila, because we haven't really thought about how we might affect somebody in that way, somebody who is, you know, sight impaired.

No, no, totally. I do find the podcasting really great for me to be able to look and do other things, sort of things. I understand where podcasts are very good for just tuning out when I'm working. It's good to listen to if you can go to sleep to or whatever. So I'm really great that we can, a blind person, amazing, absolutely amazing. I'm so happy that we can bring you entertainment and value and comical stuff.

Yeah, which makes me want to carry on doing the... Because we do, we do Deep Dive as one of our listeners once said.

We're just going to do it for you though, Sheila. We're just going to record episodes just for you.

All of this now for the next 12 years.

Just yours. Now, this is your podcast. You're basically not the CEO.

Sheila's podcast on Haunted Hill.

See? We're your slaves.

She also sent us a message a day or so later saying, I've been jumping around a bit in the different podcasts and I found the Ouija Board episode years ago. Well, yeah, she said podcast, but episodes.

Sorry, I'm not changing your thoughts, Sheila. If Dan says stuff, I can jump on Dan's back and start poking him with sticks. And you said wrong words, but no.

He likes poking me, but I don't often say the wrong words, do I?

That's me, actually.

It is. That's why you're here. Well, one of many reasons. But yeah, she said she loved the Ouija Board Halloween episode that we did. That was a long time ago. Which I've forgotten. Yeah, it's great that we did that. And she said she also said to us through a conversation that she sometimes finds it hard to get to sleep. She can't listen to it at night. And I thought before I finished reading that message, I thought, oh, is it because it's scary?

So it's a laugh and which is all right. That's funny, isn't it?

But Sheila, thank you so much for your support. Thank you for reaching out to us and thank you for legitimately making me realize that sometimes this podcast can can do more than just be something for somebody to listen to, you know. In the past, people have reached out to us and said that it's been lovely to hear us talk about random stuff while they're dealing with terrible mental health or whatever it might be.

So, yeah, just another fantastic thing for themselves. We can fucking talk shit and help someone with mental health or just give entertainment to someone visually impaired, then fucking roll on.

Yeah, so thank you so much, Sheila. I hope you continue to listen and support the show.

Yeah, thanks very much, Sheila. And I'll tell you what, if you want, why... I was going to think you could give us a film to check out, maybe. Yeah, or at least tell us. Something like, you may not have heard of it or description or no, but if maybe you've listened to a trailer or something, that would be really good. We could describe a film for you.

Yeah, or even give us your perspective on what's the best film for you as a visually...

Yeah, and we could maybe even do... Oh, that's an episode. We could do a double bill of two films which would work perfectly for you.

The reason that this message touched me so much is because it really got me thinking, like, wow, how does someone go about doing that? You know, and as she said, you know, she has someone with her, probably describes stuff that's happening. And obviously, you can have like, I can't remember what you call it now, where the audio description, that's what it's called, on a film as well. But I wonder, like, different films must mean so much more when you can't see them.

Well, yeah, because actually, because obviously you can get audio descriptive films in the cinema now, which is a brilliant idea. But yeah, there was a lot of stage, obviously, for films coming out of cinema, especially Hollywood ones, where the sound mixes is then it's like, especially in the action genre, sound mix is just crazy, crazy loud, so the dialogue is really, really quiet. I have to have subtitles all the time for my eldest watching films.

Okay, there we go. But yeah, thank you so much, Sheila, for your message.

Yeah, I appreciate that. It really did. Thank you for actually letting us know that as well because I'm rubbish. Quite often I'm like, I should message that podcast and no, no, no, I never do. So really thank you for taking the time and remembering to do it because it really appreciates it.

So talking of Sammix, then I'm just as a tangent to go straight into my first film that I've watched. I went to the cinema. I won't talk about it too much because you know, you're not a huge fan, but I watched the new Marvel film Captain America, Brave New World.

No, no, I don't. I'm not dissed. I've sort of just said negatively about them for it. It's because of just too many. Yeah, the first ones are like, I-

Well, it's like, it's like westerns and cowboy films. There were way too many of them by the time we got to the 70s, which is why they stopped making them.

I saw the first Avengers in the cinema. I went out my way to see them. You know, I owned the Avengers on Blu-ray. I liked all the first ones, but it's just where it got too many. But it's because of it's been so many, and then you had recently Deadpool coming out with the very meta and them knowing what's going on with Marvel and them digging themselves into a shithole, basically.

As I always say with comic book films, treat them like comic books, because as a kid, there's no way I'd read every single comic book ever, because that's impossible. However, I picked up one, I enjoyed that one. Oh, look, Spider-Man's popped up on page seven, and then helped out.

And that's really nice for the deep fans, absolutely. But for someone like myself who wants to be able to sit down and enjoy a superhero film because I'm a movie lover, and I like superheroes, do you know what I mean? It's nice to me. So the Deadpool one actually wasn't too bad. There is a couple of the Marvel films which I can just watch and go, yeah, I can just watch that and go, yeah, I'm quite happy with that.

Well, I enjoyed it. It obviously has been trolled before it even got released because that is the nature of the Internet these days. However, fuck you trolls because it's made money. My quick review of it before I talk about The Sound, which is where I was going with this, is it's fun. It wasn't blowing your doors off. It wasn't like Endgame or anything like that, but it was still a decent movie, lots of fun.

That was actually Harrison Ford as Hulk.

Yeah. Well, he's Red Hulk.

Yeah. I saw a picture and I was like, fucking it. I was scrolling through my phone, I saw that and thought, fucking, it just really quickly went past him. And I was like, Harrison Ford as Hulk? What the fuck? I figured someone did it at the CGI or some shit.

So he replaced William Hurt because William Hurt has played that character for the last few decades. Harrison Ford as Hulk. He went to Marvel, he went to Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios and said, I want to be in one of your Marvel films. Everybody I speak to tells me they have a lot of fun in them. And they were like, oh my God, William Hurt just died. Would you replace him as the president? It does mean you are going to get to Hulk and be Red Hulk.

Can you do it?

But you couldn't really hear it because it was just like, boom, explosions. And I'm just like in the cinema thinking, have they got the sign mix wrong in the cinema? I'm hoping they did because I don't think they'd release a film that had bad, especially a Marvel film that had slightly good.

I was about to say to you, I wish I had the resources they had for when they mix down their films. I have what I have right here and I can do what I can. So their sounds are so amazing. So I was expecting to just say how incredible it was. It might, yeah, it might have been the cinema might have just been having an issue, maybe. And some of the rear speakers were just a bit louder, so it overpowered the dialogue at the front, maybe.

Well, there we go. I've got a few films to rattle off, but I'll let you go next.

Well, I was also going to say very quickly, I know you're very passionate. You're a very passionate person, Dan. In the bedroom. I don't know about that.

In the bedroom.

No, with filmmaking, filmmaking films and stuff like that, as a film fan. Don't, the trolls have been here. They will always be here and they will never go away. They will always tell you a movie shit before it's even come out. So don't worry. Just go whatever and ignore it. You post it on Facebook. It really, it really annoys you.

The one that got me the most was when the Superman trailer released, which is coming out this summer.

And I thought that looked so wonderful.

And everyone was like, this looks terrible. It looks cheap. And I thought, it isn't cheap. Like it's going to cost millions to make. They wouldn't release a cheap film.

Yeah, but obviously you just go, yeah, just do what you're doing now. Just laugh and go, whatever. There's no point.

Well, my my my thing I always think in my head is none of these guys are actually in the business. So they can all say I could make a better film when my eyes closed. I wouldn't have cast that person. I would have used better effects, but they are sitting in their mum's basement.

Yeah, I've watched a few things. I've been watching a few things weekend. I was with Sarah. I've been really busy. I did watch a fairly all right movie the other night. They came on Amazon with Jude Law. It's not horror, but I find it quite interesting. It was called The Order about a third right type.

Yeah, I've seen that advertise.

Far right activist type neo-Nazi, you know, American History X type job. That wasn't bad. At the weekend, though, getting on to the horror tip, Saturday, I said, sir, it's raining and we cuddled up and we watched a movie and it was very nice. Watched a horror movie, but it was really funny. I just said, I saw this movie. I won't say it just yet. And she said, oh, I saw the second one, but I don't think I've seen the first. I said, oh, high five. I said, it's exactly the same as me as a kid.

Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that a long time ago.

That was just based on HG Wells, I think it was. Random As Hell film where these people, if you've not seen it, it's in the in the spate of the 70s, animal films. And it's where these animals attack, where these people just find in the ground, this stuff, it's kind of looks like porridge just coming out. And they're like, they decided just to go and feed it towards their chickens or whatever. Their chickens got a huge, like eight, nine foot high sort of thing.

Nice. Yeah, nice. Love a giant chicken, you know.

There's a rooster, actually. And the guy comes out, though.

He could have said it was a big cock and I wouldn't care.

It was a giant, big red cock. And the guy comes out the shed after killing the big cock. And he goes, Jesus, lady, does he kill it or no? Does he get away? I can't remember. Jesus, lady, well, how do you get them chickens from? No, no, no, no, no, no. Are you not shocked by the size of them? It's not just where did you get them from, but they're a bit bigger. Yeah, they're like nine, ten foot. The rooster's just been trying to eat you.

Nice, nice. Should also mention, and this will take me into my next film, that we sadly lost David Lynch recently. Yeah. A director who hasn't done a huge amount, and if you look at his back catalog, he's a guy who's into everything, music, art, painting.

I like the fact that it's Mel Brooks that found him. Found one of his films and gave him a chance to do Young Elephant. No, Elephant Man.

Young Elephant. Young Elephant.

I think of Young Einstein, aren't I?

Young Elephant Man. Eugene Wilder is the Young Elephant Man.

But David Lynch was one of the arts people who shouldn't have been allowed to make movies in the way the Hollywood standards. We were wanted to, but he shouldn't be allowed. He somehow snuck in a side door into the majors and had studios giving him money. And people were going to the cinemas and watching these mental movies. But they were like Hollywood stars set in Hollywood. And just like, what the hell is he doing this?

And he's just there going, don't worry about it. Smoking a cigarette going, don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

To impeach season three, he's incredible in that, isn't he?

But I did David Lynch's, I didn't really speak much about him when it actually happened. And I didn't put much thought into it, which is a weird thing, because sometimes for celebrities dying, I'm like really sad. But this time with this, I wasn't so much, but like I did his master class in filmmaking. And it was really interesting. I really got into his head.

I bought a T-shirt that says directed by David Lynch.

He did. I did really love the guy. I think the guy, you know, I don't know the person, but the general human being, he seemed like someone who just loved life and is just an artist that managed to, because he was all of a sudden a traditional artist, you know, paints, whatever. But he just broke the mold. He just got into Hollywood and he was like, how did you do that?

He was out there. And if you look at his films, they're all very different. You know, you mentioned The Elephant Man, you know, Twin Peaks.

I love Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks is an absolute masterpiece.

I love that series.

In television, you know, it was lost before lost.

Every once in a while, I go right and I stop Twin Peaks.

I've only seen it all the way through probably three times because the last time I did was when season three came out, which is good though.

I'm thinking, I think it's season one too. I know so well because I watched it a lot. I was watching it at school when it was on BBC2.

We never watched season two at school because we never had it. It never got shown on BBC. So we would only have seen season one at my school anyway. We loved it, but we didn't know it was season two.

When I was at school, it was on Thursday night on BBC2.

Oh, really?

Like nine o'clock on a Thursday night. And there's one guy who's actually a producer now, actually. He and me and him were the only people who knew it. And it was weird because I loved horror as a kid. And it wasn't right. There was something wrong with it. And that's what attracted me to it. And that's like David Lynch. He's not just right. He's not right. But the thing about him attracts me to him, you know.

He's completely off his head, isn't he?

Yeah, but what a lovely person.

Well, the reason I brought him up, obviously firstly, we should mention him because he's incredible. But so I watched the film. Yes, Rest In Peace. And I watched a perfect film, a 10 out of 10 film that he cameos in, David Lynch cameos in. That is Steven Spielberg's new film. I say new. It's not new now. The Fabelman's. I've only just got around to watching it. Spielberg is my favorite director.

He's directed it.

And he's directed it. But he's changed it from the Spielberg's to the Fabelman's. Otherwise, it would be too close.

It's got a weird thing to do in a way, isn't it? Make a movie. I know it's not an ego thing, because he's not that sort of person, but it's a really strange film.

Yeah, it just keeps it slightly removed from B2.

I would say that's his autobiography.

It is, it is his biography, his biographical.

But he's done it in a way that doesn't reach his film, rather than book.

And the story is incredible, because he's kept it hidden, his whole story about his parents breaking up and all the stuff that went on with that, until this film. And now you see this film, you understand firstly why he loves film. But secondly, his mum and dad's relationship, they really loved each other, but they couldn't stay together. I won't ruin it if you haven't seen it. I mean, it's true, you can Google what you want about Spielberg, you'll read about it anyway.

Yeah, I'm going to watch the film.

Gav, I bought it. You know, it was I knew I would like it because I'm a big Spielberg fan. But I think as a film maker yourself, you'll get such a kick out of it. You just but please, when you watch it, you need to dedicate the time to just fall into the film.

Yeah, okay.

You know, it's about two hours, maybe just over two hours long, but it's so worth it, especially because you know, everything in it is pretty much what happened. Great cast as well, really great cast and just fun stuff. So yeah, Faberman, Stableidge, that's where I was going with that. I've got a few more. I'm going to rattle them off because I'm aware that we've been chatting a long time and we want to get into some Peter Jackson goodness. So very quickly, I was ill last week.

Yeah.

It is awful.

I got descriptive texts.

Yeah. So while I was recovering, I decided what else to watch, but Ash vs. Evil Dead season one, two and three. I rewatched them because they're leaving Netflix at the end of February. So I thought I want to rewatch those. Really enjoyed them. However, what I will say is they do not work well if you do them back to back like I did. They're better as one or two episodes, leave it for a few days or a week. Because it's the same episode every time. It's Ash fighting a demon, blood everywhere.

Well, I started in October, I banged out of season one. I put it down as one of my ones, my 31. I just banged out of the season on the side and I really enjoyed it. But then I got into season two and I started watching. And then I did. I don't know if I forgot the season. I don't know because I just some reason just get bored.

I also find the guy that plays Pablo really, really annoying.

His forehead is, his hairline is.

He's got a kid and play hair, isn't he? He's got big hair.

I always look at that when he's on the screen.

It's good, though, if anybody, you know, depending on when you listen to this, if you've got time, it's leaving Netflix in the next couple of weeks. So get on it if you haven't ever seen it. It's definitely worth a watch.

I don't know why I always get bored. I'll play through and tap out. I don't know.

I also watched Werewolves from 2024.

Was this the one with Frank Grillo?

Fucking loved it.

Apparently a really hard person to work with.

So it's getting slated and I get that. But it kind of had everything I wanted from a werewolf film in it. It's got elements of the purge in it, elements of dog soldiers. It's kind of like the badasses taking on werewolves. It's completely unrealistic. Basically a super moon means that anyone who is exposed to moonlight becomes a werewolf. So once a month, everyone has to lock themselves in the house. Otherwise, you'll turn into a werewolf.

Very quickly, Night Of The Living Dead was literally when they did the poster, the artist forgot to put the C in the circle on the poster. That was literally it. And that fucked them up. But at the same time, it got the movie out there loads. So, I don't know. Anyway, carry on.

So Gav has gifted me this box set with a hundred horror movies in it. Some of which I'm sure are goddamn awful. Some of which are very old. Some of them are very poor quality. But I've already watched the first four. And what I'm gonna try and do for every episode is-

Mill Creek Entertainment, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

If you go on Amazon or Ebay or whatever and type in Mill Creek, they actually do different ones. They might do like a hundred martial arts. Do you know what I mean?

I think there's a western one I've seen. But there'll be low quality ones. But it's perfect. But I just want to quickly mention the four that I've watched.

As a horror fan though, sometimes it's all right just to check on some random. I'll tell you, Matanos, Hands Of Fight is in there.

It is, yeah. I'll get into that soon. Well, the first one I watched was the White Gorilla from 1945, which is basically like a white gorilla fighting other gorillas in the jungle. Men in suits. It looks pretty good, but it's 1945. It wasn't really a horror. I don't really know what's on there. Then I watched The Long Hair Of Death from 1964. Yeah. It was not great. I gave it three out of ten. It was all right.

I think I saw it.

And then the last one, which I only watched a couple of days ago, was quite a well known one. It's a bit of a giallo slash gothic wannabe. It's got a fucking great title. It's called The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, which is about a man who lost his ex-wife. She's dead. So he basically seduces redheads and prostitute redheads or lap dancers, whoever he can, to his big mansion and then kills them. And then the ghost of his ex-wife comes back through a seance and takes a revenge.

No. No, not really. No, I haven't really watched that much. So, no, it's fine. We can crack on with Peter Jackson talk.

Let's crack on with Jack on. Peter Jackson. So here we go, guys. Strap in. He's a sir now.

Is he?

Yeah, he's a sir. Knight of the realm.

Why is he a sir?

Because he got knighted.

Yeah, but why?

For his contribution to, because I think some of it was, he's solely responsible for bringing tourism back to New Zealand.

Oh, wow.

Which is fucking crazy. Also, he's, do you know, he's the fifth highest grossing film director of all time.

Oh, wow.

Which is crazy. His films have made 6.5 billion worldwide, collectively. Most of that was just Bad Taste. I'm joking. Yeah, no, he's a knight now. He was born in 1961 in New Zealand, as most people will know. His career, which we'll get into in a moment, skyrocketed from making films literally in his back garden on weekends, to suddenly being handed Spielberg projects or The Lord Of The Rings movies, which I consider the extended cuts of those to be... I love them.

There wouldn't be a Deadbolt Films.

There wouldn't be.

If it wasn't Peter Jackson. Yeah, because I was like, what is he? Wingnut? Nup? I need a Bolt, a Bolt, Deadbolt. Brilliant Deadbolt Films. And that was as simple as that. He is a massive influence on me. I didn't realize it at the time when I was watching Bad Taste and Brain Dead when I was younger, growing up. I didn't know I was going to get into making films. I don't think it's possible, really.

They're cut from the same cloth in a way, aren't they?

Yeah. And that's where I'll get to with Peter Jackson. And we'll talk about it when we did a Bad Taste review. Basically, he showed me you can do it. And he was like this nerd in New Zealand. And I could relate to be this nerd in England. And I read his book, and he was like, at weekends, he would go out, and he started making Bad Taste. And it took four years to make Shooting Up Weekends.

And that's why, going back to The Fableman, so I think you'll really enjoy that because you'll see Swilburne as a kid when he was putting tracks down and his dad was fully invested in his son's hobby, helping him out.

Well, the difference was, is because Peter Jackson was coming from New Zealand, and it feels kind of British in a way. Where Hollywood and America felt very detached from me, and there's no way I could ever achieve something like that.

And I discovered him and-

But Spielberg, I could never relate to Spielberg.

I've been watching Brain Dead for years, and one day on Channel 4, they showed Bad Taste, and then they showed the Bad Taste documentary, and I've still got that on a recorded DVD in the loft. And that was when I really discovered Peter Jackson, this guy that had done this Brain Dead movie that I'd been watching hundreds of times for the last couple of years. And it was around about the same time that I bought a book called The Making Of The Evil Dead by Sam Raimi.

Adam Wingard, Mumblecore, little indie horror movies to directing Godzilla's.

Yeah, so as I said, he was born in Wellington, which is where Brain Dead is based in New Zealand in 61, his parents.

Very, very quickly. I know we'll probably get on to it, but Weta, the effects company, he is ridiculously huge and does a lot of effects, like all the big Hollywood movies that you watch. They took it on and they were really ahead. You can still watch the Lord of the Rings now and be like, that looks incredible. That's old VFX. Often with VFX, you start watching them as you get on, you go, oh my God, that looks shit.

Indeed, yeah. So he's got parents Bill and Joan. They're very supportive of his hobby. So as a kid, he was a huge film fan, as you'd expect. His favorite people were anything by Ray Harryhausen. He absolutely loved those movies. King Kong, the original, is his favorite film of all time. He also loved the Thunderbirds and those kind of like movies, TV shows like that. Because obviously being in New Zealand, he would have got all the British TV.

Yeah, his parents, I was watching stuff on YouTube the other day. I was just refreshing my mind, I've seen it all before, but his friends were just saying, yeah, we'd sit there and just do the stop motion. Because he's very patient, well he is really patient, just sit there for hours and hours and hours, just doing it and taking it. And they'd show him doing it, obviously, because stop motion, you're still filming it, and he would be there just moving it and stuff.

And that's the dedication here, because he's nine years old when he decided to remake King Kong. So he built all the models himself and tried his best to remake King Kong at nine years old with stop motion, which is pretty crazy, really.

But it also, yeah, it's it's it's filming it on reels and then having to send that away to come back before you can see if it's exposed correctly.

Yeah, and he made a couple of short films with friends that he's put on DVDs now, like The Valley, Cold Finger, which is like a James Bond spoof. He went to college.

I've not seen them after.

He went to college, studied a little bit of film, that kind of thing. But he didn't, he's not really had any formal training yet. He learned about editing, special effects and make-up just through trial and error.

Yep, that's the way to do it.

As a young adult, he was really into JRR. Tolkien. And he watched that Lord Of The Rings 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon. Have you seen that one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is one I watched loads as a kid.

It's incredible, yeah.

I watched that when I was like 10 or 11. It used to be on Channel 4 once over Christmas.

So he followed his passion right through. When he was 16, he left school, started working as a photo engraver for a newspaper. And he worked there for seven years, just dabbling in his hobby on weekends and stuff like that. And then when he got enough money together, he bought a 16-millimeter camera. And that's when he got his friends together and said, let's make something called Bad Taste. Which, as you said, took him about four years. Four years over weekends.

Because he got divorced. So he came out and said, actually, I want my role back. So they put him out. And that's the guy in the soup.

It's so funny.

With Bad Taste, what happened was, he made a massive chunk of it. And then there's a couple of bits he just needed help with, which is kind of the ending bits, which is like the ending. And he went and showed it to the New Zealand Film Commission. And they actually looked at him and went, oh. You know, yeah, like, wow, okay, cool.

His influences are Martin Scorsese, George Romero.

Scorsese? It's not Scorsese, is it? Scorsese? Scorsese? Scorsese?

Scorsese.

It's not Scorsese.

Okay. George Romero, Spielberg, Sam Raimi, and he loves anything by Ray Harryhousen, as I mentioned. So that's kind of, you know, his influences really. Yeah, we'll get into his films in just a moment, but just to mention then, as you've already touched on, when they made Heavenly Creatures, they needed someone who was going to be able to produce these like dreamlike clay characters that would come to life. And so that is where they brought in someone who would help create WETA.

Which created WETA, which became a very, very big effects company.

Yeah, George Port was the guy that started WETA, and Jackson obviously brings him back on everything he does.

Yeah.

And now WETA is its own, you know, he makes money off of that. When he's not making films, WETA are out there doing these new Planet of the Apes movies.

That's the thing you might think, oh, I haven't seen a Peter Jackson movie for a while. Well, he might have his hand in the production of effects for big movies. So he is going to be still doing stuff. Very, very quickly on Heavenly Creatures, that's where he found Kate Winslet.

Yeah, her first role. You know, amazing stuff. WETA helped with things like Godzilla from 98 and stuff like that. Even, you know, they're doing stuff like that. That was quite early on in their thing. But yeah, that's another thing that he's done. And then obviously, yeah, we'll get into his films now, I guess, really is probably the best thing to do. But yeah, he's still working and we'll jump into his back catalog.

Did you say they did the role of Nemerick Godzilla from 97?

I think WETA was involved with some of that, yeah.

That's one of my guilty pleasures, that movie. That movie is dissed by a lot of people. I'll actually enjoy that Godzilla film.

We're covering it this summer for a summer blockbuster.

Yeah, and I think the effects actually are pretty decent in that, so.

So, moving aside his short films, the first feature he did was obviously Bad Taste, which was an indie film we're going to be talking about later on in this episode. So we'll skip over that. That was 1987. Two years later, he managed to make a dirty, dodgy, porno version of The Muppets with drugs and sex and...

I think the only way you're going to go, right, I'm going to make a feature fucking film with Muppets, which is like, oh, that's a bit crazy, to be honest with you. I suppose it's not too bad because once you've got the Muppets, I guess you're just carrying on shooting them. But that is quite a crazy thing to do. But it only comes from someone who does effects and knows what he can be doing. Do you know what I mean?

Meet the Feebles.

But yeah, what is it? Tell us what it's about.

Meet the Feebles from 1989.

Sexy.

It's a weird, sexy, porny, druggy. It's just a really dirty film about a lot of creatures. But that is his sense of humor coming through. This guy's got a wacky sense of humor.

I did say in the deadbolt WhatsApp group, I said, just about to go to a podcast now. I'm doing Peter Jackson so I can direct specials. I can talk about DIY filmmaking skills. And then Tom just went, meet the Feebles. Of course, Tom, of course you'd like that one.

I'm not a massive fan of it.

But I'm not really.

You've got to have seen it. If you're a Peter Jackson fan.

I've seen it, but I don't really care.

So that was 1989. It made money, especially on VHS. You know, enough money that he had a fairly decent budget then in 1992 to make my favorite zombie film of all time, Brain Dead or Dead Alive is it's called.

You can check our review of it, but if you haven't seen it, do watch it. There's a lot of blood.

It's probably my favorite Peter Jackson film. It is a splatter fast, isn't it? Really?

Yeah.

But really beautifully scripted and written because he writes all of his stuff, we must say.

With his wife, Fran.

With his wife, Fran. So yeah, Brain Dead 1992, that made money big time again, not so much in the theaters, but especially five, six, seven, ten years later on DVD. I'd love to meet him.

I'd love to meet Peter Jackson.

So he then, two years after that, 1994, he suddenly went left and made Heavenly Creatures, which is a true story about two women who killed their mother because they didn't want to split up as friends.

Well, interestingly, the true crime thing does actually come back again because he ends up producing the documentary about the three kids who got charged and put in prison for killing the three young kids in the woods. I'll come back to it. I'll have a look at it.

We'll probably come to it in a moment. So Heavenly Creatures, Kate Winslet's feature.

Yeah, look, keep an eye out, sorry. It will be him producing. Well, he might direct it. I'm not sure. Documentary. But yeah, let me know. Go for that.

But that was in 94, and that was obviously the birth of Weta, as we say. It's got some beautiful effects. And actually, this is where now you start to see The Lord Of The Rings films because some of the imagery in Heavenly Creatures, some of the characters and the fantastic creatures and monsters, they are kind of, you will see them come back later on.

Paradise Lost, I've just remembered it.

Paradise Lost, yeah, he produced that, he didn't direct it. After that, he did a TV movie called Forgotten Silver, which I don't really know much about. I think it's a spoof documentary, like a mockumentary.

Yeah, no, they had some stuff. I think he had some footage from a war possibly he could use. He did some other stuff and put some other things with it and made this kind of really weird thing. Yeah, yeah.

So every two years he's banging something out, because then in 96, he made The Frighteners. He brought Michael J. Fox back and they filmed back to the future.

Okay, not that he had worked with him before.

No, no, no, as in he was kind of, his Parkinson's was kicking in and he wasn't really interested in making feature films and actually he quit making films after this because he'd been away from his home too long.

Was this his last film?

Last feature film, Michael J. Fox did. After this, he did TV, like Spin City and stuff like that.

Yeah, so it's his last star in a feature film. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, he was too homesick making it and it was privately, his Parkinson's was becoming a problem. And you can see his character is always very fidgety. But that's because even in the first Back To The Future movie, you see some of the fidgeting he's got. And it was, you know, in his biography, which I've read, he's got three biographies. I've read them all weirdly. Michael J. Fox said, you know, even as a kid, I could tell something wasn't quite right.

And it's funny that New Line Cinema will be the ones to pick it up, pick up a tab because, and he shopped it around and I'm going to pick it up. And it's so funny because obviously, we know New Line is the house that Freddy Krueger built because that's the Freddy movies made that company money, enough money to be able to start making and distributing films and putting films out there, not redistributing.

Well, I mean, for a studio to say to him, okay, just, just go for it. We'll just chuck all the money out of you can. They did use that money.

Yeah, they did go.

But he's clever with the money, isn't he?

They did go over budget and stuff. Yeah, totally. But that's the thing, because he started making films at weekends with his passion, he actually knew what he was able to achieve. So, do you know what I mean? It's like Lord of the Rings. You must be able to read that and go, you know what? I could probably make this into a movie, but you've got to know what you can achieve. But yes, luckily, wetter, being as advanced as they were, all the stuff looks really good in that still.

And by all accounts, this is probably a good point to mention that he is an absolute sweetheart, a really lovely guy, kind, generous, and really good to work with. And the reason I'm saying that is because these Lord Of The Rings movies now, that would take up about seven years of his life. And he's working with, say, crew, cast for a lot of this, you know, because the first one came out in 2001, then it was 2002, then 2003.

Yeah, no, I remember.

So he was never stopping working, because he'd been wrapped for the day, but then he's like, well, even though that scene's probably not going to get put into the theatrical cut, I still want to finish the effects on that and do this and do that.

What was incredible with Peter Jackson was when he started doing... I think it was the first one, or the second Lord of the Rings, Two Towers. He was doing a video, live video a day, filming on the sets.

Yes, he did a video blog, didn't he?

Yeah, every day, just to be filming a little bit. I'm just here to say, and then it's like, whoa, man, that's fucking cool. But apparently, Peter Jackson, I've read in his book where someone would have said that how good... I love it, it's in his book, actually. Someone said how good he was. He took a phone call in amongst a scene of Lord of the Rings, which was a really technical thing. And he actually took a phone call. And it was a completely different movie and a very technical thing.

Yeah. Well, he wrapped up Return of the King in 2003, but 2004 was he was still working on the extended version of that. And that dropped at the end of 2004. I will only ever watch the extended versions of it. I think they're wonderful. I know they're very long.

I went to the cinema to watch The First Orderings. Didn't really know this is like kind of kind of a little bit pre-internet where you had a definitely had a smartphone in your pocket. Do you know what I mean? You weren't, it's kind of still word of mouth, word on the streets. And some friends are like, you're gonna go watch Lord Of The Rings movie. And I was like, Lord Of The Rings? Oh, I don't really know too much. And then, but I kind of did know the length of it.

I remember knowing it was a trilogy, I already knew that. And when it ends with Sam and Frodo, and it just says to be continued, everyone, loads of people in the cinema were like, what? And I thought, come on, it's a fucking piece of literature.

Like, yeah, but whatever. I'm glad it came out when it did come out. Like, I don't know if it'd be so good now, do you know what I mean? It was then a time when it was just like a big event sort of thing. It was a really great, everyone was talking about it. You had stickers, you had stickers in offices, which said Board Of The Rings, because people talked about it so much.

It was that time as well where the Harry Potter movies were coming out. So every year you'd get a Harry Potter movie and you'd get a Lord Of The Rings movie, and they were the two big fantasy things that people were like, oh, Harry Potter is here.

And a lot of the offices I worked in at the time, it was like that, stickers with Board Of The Rings and loads of pictures of the main hunky Lord Of The Rings guys, and loads of pictures on women's desks. And then I remember in Bond, Casino Royale came out and there's just loads of pictures of Daniel Craig and his trunks on people's desks. I saw it everywhere, all over the country.

I haven't watched it for about 10 years, so I'd love to go back to it sometime.

I've tried with Elijah, he just kind of gets bored. And so it's hard.

Now, after this, he made what I would consider his, my least favorite film, maybe because he rushed straight into it. 2005 King Kong, which I was really underwhelmed by.

It's weird, because after Lord Of The Rings, you kind of did think it was going to be like, well, him doing King Kong, that's going to be amazing. And it was kind of just dragged. And it's kind of a bit like, hang on, you've taken your free movie thing with Lord Of The Rings and kind of done, was it a two part King Kong? Or was it just one?

No, it's only just one.

Oh, maybe it's just really long. But yeah, I don't know. It's kind of really forgetful. I can't tell you anything. It happens in that movie.

Good cast.

But that doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything. It honestly doesn't mean anything. For it to tap into your brain, to fucking remember a movie, it comes down to a fucking good story.

He actually took then quite a big break for four years. Which I think was needed. And that's when he lost loads of weight as well. Because he was quite a retunned gentleman for a while. And he realized his health was...

Well, you can't stay on film, so it's working your ass off for hours and hours. I imagine it would be quite hard if you...

So he took a break. And then he dropped in 2009, he dropped The Lovely Bones, which isn't a story about my family.

Again, a kind of serial killer type thing.

It's about a child murderer who keeps children in a pit.

It's okay, but slightly frustrating because you don't... I don't want to spoil it. You don't really get to save people.

I do enjoy it.

But I hate the fact you couldn't save them, which is obviously the Hollywood way.

It's a 6.5 for me. It's great, but it's not amazing.

I've seen it. I don't know if you get Mark Wahlberg in there as a dad.

Then he decided to come back to The Lord Of The Rings world.

Yeah, he all of a sudden said he's going to do The Hobbit, and loads of people got pissed because The Hobbit is a shorter book and he's going to put it out for three movies. Again, I don't know if he needed to. I reckon two movies would have been fine.

No, I've never seen the extended versions, but he did turn it into three films. I saw all of them at the cinema. They were fun, but they felt like they were being stretched out. It was a studio, in my opinion, telling him, no, no, no, no, no.

You've done it before. Lord of the Rings, you've got to do it like you did. And it's all right. The movies are OK.

Yeah, they're OK.

But Lord of the Rings are just... Again, though, a whole bit, obviously, there's a slight story there, but Lord of the Rings, it's such a simple thing. It's a quest of these different type of people, have got different special powers, and the quest is just to put these rings in a fire. That's it. That's it. So it's so great just to go along with that as an adventure story, you know.

We should also mention that he...

They're probably his best films, aren't they? Obviously, I'm a horror fan. I love Bad Taste, Brain Dead, No Like Jams, but when you look at it, they're his best films.

Yeah, totally. We should also mention that at some point during all of this, he teamed up with Spielberg and helped produce...

So good.

Tintin.

Which currently, he is prepping to direct with Spielberg producing the new Tintin right now.

Yeah. So Spielberg directed it.

I really like that Tintin film.

Apparently, Peter directed some of the scenes. It's an animated film if anyone hasn't seen it, but he produced it. And you can really feel his influence in some of it. It's got Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in it.

And Nick Frost is the Thompson twins.

Yeah, brilliant stuff. But when he'd finished the next official film he directed, was quite genius in a way. He got hold of loads of footage from the war and made They Shall Not Grow Old. And he colorized a load of footage and put it together to show us what it was actually like during the war, because we've only ever seen it in black and white. Yeah, I've seen it. It's wonderful, it's moving, and it makes you think bloody hell.

You know, I went on a weird dark rabbit hole. It wasn't that dark, actually, I went on a rabbit hole. No, I was just going to bed and I ended up going to bed a lot later and I was sitting on YouTube looking into Hitler. I was just like the whole, I was just, all of a sudden I went into fascination, I was like, you know, how do you come to power and all this sort of stuff, and it's really random. One more time, you know? Over the wall, you're talking about the wall, that's why.

After They Shall Not Grow Old, he then got into The Beatles. He made the miniseries, Get Back, and he directed that about The Beatles. He also directed the rooftop concert of The Beatles as well, and he's got another music video he directed called Now and Then. So he's getting really into documentary stuff now, which shows, you know, he's, because I don't think Spielberg's ever done something like that.

You know, though, Secret Deep Down, that little kid in him probably wants to make another horror movie.

Brain Dead 2, imagine that.

I feel like, because Sam Raimi's just done a new horror movie. I feel like Peter Jackson, yeah. I feel like Peter Jackson should do a horror movie. Just one stand-alone horror movie. Just go to, come on, just do a horror movie, show it off.

Yeah, so his next film, as you mentioned, is Untitled Adventures of Tintin's sequel, Spielberg. He's actually directing it this time, and so they're switching. He's directing and Spielberg's producing.

Yeah.

And we'll have heavy input.

They always said they would do that.

Simon Pegg, I remember him saying how crazy it was his career. It got to the point that he was on set with Peter Jackson, who he's admired from Bad Taste because he's a nerd like us. That was Simon Pegg. But he also had Spielberg ringing him up going, hey, Simon, for this next scene. And he's like, what's going on? I've got Spielberg and Peter Jackson is on my phone, saved in my phone. This is crazy. So that's his back catalog. Don't forget, he wrote an absolute ton of stuff.

It gives me hope.

Just jumping straight up, up, up, up to Lord Of The Rings. You know, King Kong and then he's buddies with Spielberg is.

Yeah, I tell you what, I'm quite a chilled out person. That's not much stress. I don't think I could do Lord Of The Rings.

He's also really good buddies with GM. Aura del Toro as well, which is another director that we we have covered. And they're quite similar in a way, you know, horror and. Beardy, beardy, slightly retund. In fact, has anyone ever seen Peter Jackson and GM. Aura del Toro in the same room? I don't know.

No, they're the same person.

Maybe it is. But yeah, that's Peter Jackson in a wing nutshell. See what I did there?

Very good.

But he's wonderful. We love him. He is a guerrilla filmmaking.

He's an inspiration on me as a filmmaker.

Yeah. And we are going to be covering his mid 90s movie next. The Frighteners from 1996, which has got a cult following. It's a big one.

Should we have a trailer?

Let's have a trailer for it. Let's do this. There has been a destructive force unleashed on this town such as I. Oh, my God, I don't believe this is not happening.

We have got a boulder, guys. Okay, well, folks, I can do a clearance, but it's not gonna be cheap. Although I do offer a six-month guarantee. That fellow takes us totally for granted. Hey, Stuart, interact, huh? Frank Bannister had a remarkable ability... Psychic investigator?... to communicate with the dead. You can see spirits? Demonations are normally confined at cemeteries. You cannot push spirits around! Although they do escape. And an uncanny knack...

So, our first review is The Frighteners from 1996. Rated R. Obviously, directed by Peter Jackson. After a tragic car accident that kills his wife, a man, Michael Drew Fox, discovers that he can communicate with the dead, and he uses that gift to calm people. However, when a demonic spirit appears, he may be the only one who can stop it from killing the living and the dead. So, I saw this in the cinema. At this point, I was buying Empire magazine, and I was very aware of Peter Jackson.

Yeah, he's the chip off the old block.

And chip off the old Boosie. And horror legend, the reanimator himself, Jeffrey Coombs.

Oh man, this is, this is, I love Dr. West, but this is my favorite character that he plays in anything.

We also get the original Gomez Adams, John Astin in this, as the judge, who's a dead cowboy.

Makeup on him was by Rick Baker.

Who humps a mummy at one point. So we'll get into that. And we've also got Dee Wallace, the mum, everyone's eighties mum, Dee Wallace.

Oh, of course, it's Dee Wallace, isn't it?

As Patricia, of course.

So even Dee Wallace is a really good actor.

Fucking great. And a little cameo from Ah Li Emory, which people will know from Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, decent cast. It's a very HD movie, this place.

And a fact on him very quickly, he did a tour of Vietnam. He then chose to go out for two more tours.

Loved it because he loves the smell of I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

That's not that's not him, though. That's Robert DeVille.

Oh, it's Robert DeVille. Sorry. Yeah, I always get.

And it's really funny that role in my head. I always thought Robert DeVille was just I remember him as a hat, sunglasses and being a voice. I always thought of him as a really big, tough man. I watched, watched, watched that movie some years later and looked at him. And he's fucking puny.

OK. Cool. Cool. Well, anyway, that's the people.

I know my Vietnam films.

That's the people at the Rithys. This film, before we get into it, this is like a mix of kind of Ghostbusters mixed with it's really hard to describe really. It's an interesting story. A con man, you know.

My thoughts are really, when I first came out, I said, exactly the same as you. A draw was Michael J. Fox in a horror movie, but a kind of light hearted horror movie, which still possibly could have had a little bit of scares there. You kind of knew watching this, even if you hadn't seen anything else, whoever was making this movie was quite a skilled person, but they weren't there just yet. I think you can see that in a sort of way. But there was some definite stuff there.

Now, talking of, you can see a good craftsman behind the camera here, director, and I wonder if he did this on purpose or not, or if he was just doing what he thought was the best, or if this was even a studio's intervention. This film really feels like he's also trying to copy Tim Burton and Sam Raimi, because a lot of the camera angles are very Sam Raimi-esque.

I don't think he's trying to copy.

And the fact that you've got, what's his name, Tim Burton's music man, Danny Elfman doing the music for this. The opening of this feels like a Tim Burton film.

Actually, okay, I'll take that. Yeah, very much feels like it. I don't think he's trying to do that in any way. I reckon they probably, if you look up producers of Tim Burton films, or look up, I'm not gonna do it right now.

You're on the internet right now.

I am, I am. It's a possibility though, because you've got to look, like I was saying with David Lynch, finger jiggy, Burton is another person that's kind of snuck in to the Hollywood world with his way of looking at things, and a definite look, and a real artist, and got away with it and still managing to make big films like Batman movies, you know what I mean?

And I bet you it was like maybe some editors that worked on this, that had worked on Tim Burton films, that kind of thing. Because this is the way it's kind of shot. And I wouldn't be surprised if he was heavily involved in his editing as well, to be honest. But yeah, it definitely has that vibe, especially with the Tim Burton music. And to cut a long story short, I mean, we are going to get into the story in a moment, but it's an interesting idea of a man who can speak to the dead.

Come on, you know why? I don't know. I knew this anyway. I don't even know why Bob had done it. Robert Zemeckis produced this.

Of course, of course. Back to the future.

Robert Zemeckis, who framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, like you just said. Forrest Gump, Contact, loads of stuff. He definitely has a look. So basically, you're getting the look through him as a producer. He's putting his eyes on top of whatever Peter Jackson is directing with the look and the feel of the film. So that's what you're getting from that. So he's a very seasoned, well-versed director and producer. So he's doing that, and that's why you're getting what you're getting, I think.

And Michael J. Fox probably would have felt safe knowing Zemeckis was there as well.

What an incredible producer to have behind you.

Yeah. And for Peter Jackson, really, this is his first proper big-budget film. He's got Robert Zemeckis got his back.

You know, the other producers is basically him, his wife and two other guys who also did all the other films. So they basically, and he's even dudes with him. So probably came with him. So Robert Zemeckis is the only other producer involved in this. So that's not nice not to have so much interference.

And that's why it reminds me a little of Ghostbusters because of the con man aspect of it. You know, they're getting paid almost to blast ghosts.

The trouble is Michael J. Fox in this and his character is a con man. He's a cunt in this. He isn't really much of a nice person. The stuff that he does is actually quite despicable. He's basically got these two ghosts and he's going around conning people to get money. Yeah. And rather than use his power for good. And it's like, and at no point is that trying to redeem him. He still carries on being an asshole all the way through. And at the end, do we know if he carries on being an asshole?

He gets the woman whose husband got killed.

It didn't make me go, wow, I'm rooting for the asshole because I'm not.

But I do like that there's a darker undertone to this. You know, we've got serial killers, we've got ghosts, we've got a dead serial killer coming back to keep killing people. We've got Michael J Fox. We've got loads of silly stuff going on. So let's jump in.

But I do like Michael J Fox.

Who doesn't fucking love that guy so much?

Go for it, dude, go for it.

So yeah, as mentioned then, Danny Elfman, we can start off with some, you know, some text that looks like straight out of a Tim Burton film. A very spooky, rainy street, a house, get the credits. It's all very Burton-esque. We hear a woman screaming, and we get our first glimpse of the entity in the walls. Now this effect was very good in 96.

You got to...

No, no, no, no.

You got to think like... If you now look at that straight away, I'm just going, oh yeah, Peter Jackson of Weta and just his love of practical effects and effects and designing Weta and he's been on board with Robert Zemeckis. Robert Zemeckis loves his effects. Those two together, that's why they are together. That's why they're working. It's the love of effects. So they probably are trying a few things in here, which is a little bit pushing it a little bit more. Do you know what I mean?

And as I said, that creature in the wall, it definitely is an influence later on in all of the rings on those wraiths.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And it is at times a very good effect. There's a particularly a scene later where it jumps into a portrait and the arms of the portrait start grabbing a character. And, you know, it's just a frame with a picture inside it grabbing the person. It does look good for the most part.

Yeah, it's really good.

Like I said, it's 96, you know, and when we get to the ghosts as well, they look really good. It is all a bit like it's hard to keep. And you've got to have seen this film a few times really to understand what's going on, because there's so much going on at the same time, isn't there?

Speaking of them ghosts, I was getting a bit negative getting it. Speaking of them ghosts, how, how un-rubbishly cast are those two? Those two roles could have been so good. Those could have been, oh, do you remember the ghosts? Oh, the ghosts in that hat. And those characters can have been some really good character actors got really into this and been in that scenery up, chewed it up right up because they're so like forgetful. Do you know what I mean?

But they're just like, who are you? The only ghost that I really remember is the judge, John Aston really. He's the most memorable out of all the three ghosts that he's got living with Michael J. Fox.

Yeah. So like those two are just, do you know what I mean? It's really miscast. It's like, who are you? I don't know. I don't need to know, have a face I know before, but those could have been really like some good, funny jokes can come out of those things. And I just felt it's really lost, unfortunately.

So the opening scene basically introduces D Wallace's character, Patricia, who is when she was younger, she was in love with Johnny Bartlett, the serial killer, but she's older now. She lives with her even older mother, and the entity is in the house that she's in, chasing her around, lots of screaming, a shotgun blast, and then we get the Frighteners' title card come up and...

Then a shot of a town very much like the Goonies' town, if you know what I mean. Think of that sort of wet road, and the picket fences and all that sort of old sort of cars driving around a bit.

It's a Spielberg town, isn't it?

Yeah, and with the music score playing as well, yeah, it's kind of that sort of Spielberg feel.

And we get a little side story of a news reporter, a woman who works for the newspaper, who's reporting on a strange spate of deaths that's happening. Lots of people seem to be randomly dying of heart attacks in this little town that they live in, Fairwater, and they say, is the shadow of death come to Fairwater? Ooh, the shadow of death. And they're all wondering about that. You know, it is very strange.

I'm going to say that if anything negative is said about this movie, the strong point of this movie is I do love the whole town feel that they put across. It's really done really well. All the actors at this point are all really well cast. Everybody's great.

Did you look up where we shot, Gav? Because I got a feeling it might have been shot in New Zealand. Because it looks a bit like the town in Brain Dead as well.

I'm pretty sure you are correct.

It looks like Wellington, which is Peter Jackson's hometown, which is where they shot Brain Dead as well.

I'm going to say you're probably right.

I might be wrong. I might be wrong.

Because if they did that, yeah, Wellington. So you got to think they would have already had this set up, lots of computers, etc. He said that he started off when they first did some effects. I think Lord of the, for fuck's sake, Jurassic Park, very early on in wetter early days, they had like three computers or something. And he says that now they got like just this place here, we've got like 7,000, you know, because you've got so much stuff you have to have working continuously.

Every little hair on King Kong, et cetera.

Yeah, it all has to get rendered. But nowadays you can carry on editing while you do it. But if something like this affects heavy, you'd probably leave it overnight, I guess, that sort of thing, come back to it. But a lot of computers make lighter work, I suppose, at the time.

So this funeral is where we meet Frank Bannister, Michael J. Fox, and he is the love child of Detective Columbo and Peter Venkman. He wears a dirty old Mac.

Drives like a fucking idiot.

Drives an old man, I like that.

From what I've seen from his reviews, there's no redeeming features. It's really weird, because I remember going, I quite enjoy this, but then you watch it and you go, he's a bastard.

Yeah. Well, I think he thinks he can get away with anything because of his little con trick, which he tries to do to this guy.

So 30 million budget, by the way, and worldwide gross was 29 million.

Technically didn't quite, but it would have done well on VHS. Yeah. So Frank Bannister gets ejected from this funeral because he goes straight up to a few of the people who are grieving and says, I'm Frank Bannister, I can contact the dead for you. He gives them his card and he's known in the town as a con man. No one believes him and they know he's just praise on people that are grieving, you know, and they think because you're grieving, you're going to believe anything.

But see what I mean here. He's obviously like Peter Jackson and that. They obviously know that this character that they've written isn't a nice character. I don't think they're stupid enough to know, not see this in the slightest. They've made this character be this bit of a bastard because he's just basically nice. Like a hawk just coming in there and go, Oh, I can get in here and see what I can get. Scavengers. Oh, here's my card. Here's my card. It's he comes across as such a low life.

Well, he drives off in his old banger. And just like he does in Back to the Future, he crashes through someone's fence into their garden. And it's a guy called Ray, who is really annoyed with him and says, I'm going to sue your ass, buddy. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's my card, Frank Bannister. And he goes, and he rips it up and says, I don't want anything to do with you. I've got your license plate. I'm going to be suing your ass for this.

We will.

But Lucy, Lucy watches this documentary on TV and thinks, that's the woman who I'm examined today with the bruises on her throat. Interesting, interesting. And then Ray comes in and says, can you believe that idiot that drove over our fence?

See, I like, I kind of like this scene here because he's really well cast. He's not, see, that's the thing.

He's a good little actor, isn't he?

This is the funny thing. That guy there isn't a bastard really in any sense at all. He lost some money, but she hasn't told his wife later on, we'll find out. But he actually isn't a bunch of bastards. But this movie puts him out there as the bad guy. And it's still Michael J. Fox, who ends up getting with her at the end of the movie.

I mean, he's dead. I've described him in my notes as yuppie scum.

But boy, he's not scum. He doesn't actually do anything wrong. Michael J. Fox in this is scum. Oh, I like this.

Don't make me hate Michael J.

Fox, Gav. I'm only saying what I see.

Say what you see. So he comes in the bedroom and he's trying to seduce his wife. He's like, hey, honey. And he starts crawling on the bed. And then he finds Frank Bannister's card, strangely in the bed. He's like, what the hell? Why is this here? She's like, I don't know. I've never seen it. He's like, well, I ripped it up and threw it on the lawn earlier. I don't understand. The second that this happens, the poltergeist activity kicks in. Things start floating around.

He says, I don't want that con man in my house.

Yeah, I don't want him in the house. We all know he's a con man. Maybe this is just something we can explain this. And as he's saying, there's all the plates and the kitchen are floating around him. He does not want this guy in his house, but they call him. He's waiting for the call at home. And he arrives at the house straight through the fence again. Smash, crash.

What's all that? Why does he do that?

Come on, it's like in Home Alone.

It's actually very similar to Ghostbusters. It's the sort of thing they were doing Ghostbusters. They do a bit of damage and go like, oh, you need us. It's kind of Venkman's kind of attitude of life.

That's what I'm saying. He reminds me of Venkman a lot.

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

I see that. So he gets in the house straight away. He's like, yep, yep. Looks like you've got a really bad case of whatever it is. He gives loads of mumbo jumbo. He gets a little machine out and starts peeping through it. Then he gets out a big toaster type machine.

He just gets his random stuff out.

It's a toilet seat been banging up and down. Well, that didn't happen. He's obviously given his friends instructions.

You're correct. This is Vankman walking into Dana's apartment and going and playing the piano. Hear that? You know, stuff. That's very much. Yeah.

He's making out. He's, you know, doing his job. And he basically presses a button on this machine and then a little thing pops out, like a little sachet. And he says, I trapped five vengeful spirits in here.

Husband doesn't believe him.

And he's just there going, whatever. And he's like, this is going to cost you. It's going to cost you about $600. And the guy's like, sit. And he's like, or, or hear me out. We could just forget about the fence.

What? The fence that he just knocked over.

Yeah. You could just forget about it.

Cause he obviously did the other one. So he's basically, oh, okay. So this is why he runs that fence over this time around, second time around.

Cause he knows he's going to last a bit.

Because he's actually going there to do that. So he's like, fuck it. I'm just going to knock that fence over as well. Right. Now I've got in my notes, 450 or call the fence thing. And I've put comma, very Ghostbusters.

Yeah.

That is kind of sort of thing. So this is how much it could cost to get Slimer out of your dinner hall. But if you don't want to pay it, we can go put it back. Cause they charge like 30 grand or something, I think, in Ghostbusters.

I know.

For the first gig.

Whoa.

In eighties as well.

We must talk about Michael J. Fox's comedic skills. He is very good at sort of physical comedy.

There's a little packet that has the ghost in, and he pops it in the bin. It's like, oh my God.

And he makes little comments like...

It's like a coffee reel, he feels. It's like, yeah, he goes, oh, quick, get it in there.

He says, apparently, they can't fit in anything because they're already dead. I mean, who really knows for sure? But while he's doing all that, he pulls out a gun at one point, and Lucy's like, whoa, and he goes, it's all right.

It's just holy water.

And it's a water pistol with holy water in it.

It's just the stuff he's doing. But anyway, he looks at the husband who has 37, kind of in orange lights, kind of glowing on his forehead. So it's not actually what he's got on there. It's what he can see because he can see the dead.

And he looks at him like really freaked out.

And he's like, what are you looking at me for?

We find out the reason, and we find out that much later, but just to tell you guys now, the reason he's freaked out is when his wife was killed in the car accident, she had the number 13 glowing on her forehead. So this reminds him of his wife's death. And also it's weird that there's a number 37 on this guy's head. But obviously anyone in this film who gets a number on their head is going to be killed at some point by this entity in the wall.

But I do wish these were played by different characters, actors.

I know what you mean.

They're just kind of there. They do the job, but that's a shame because that job could have been done really well. Imagine you got like, not saying Dave Chappelle, but imagine if you got someone who could just riff off that totally. Chris Rock or something, or I don't know.

Bernie Mac would have been a good one.

Bernie Mac, you're perfect. Just really just gone for it and just pulled out some, and it would have been like improv, some stuff. Do you know what I mean?

This is a really good little bit of exposition now, because we find out, you know, this is one of many times they've done this. They were all arguing, they're going, Frank, why do you make us ride in the back of the car in the trunk? And he's like, because you get your ectoplasm all over my seats. And they're like, man, how many times are we going to run this con? You know, this is something that you've done over and over and over again.

But yeah, I reckon if that had been two other people, they could really all rift off that, all of them with Mark J. Fox. That would have been quite more enjoyable, because that's quite an enjoyable, fun thing. It's a lot of story going on there, basically saying, come on, we're all basically doing these con jobs. And it's just quite a fun play, because we're trying to put these, they're trying to put these across as nice characters, good characters, good people, should I say.

They complain about the way he treats them. Essentially, they're like slaves. He makes them do what he wants, but also he complains that they didn't bang the toilet seat and do all the things that he asked. You know, they're like, oh, we lifted up the bed. That really hurt our back doing that. We then meet a ghost dog that lives with Mark J. Fox, who's chewing on a jawbone, and we find out this is the judge's jawbone. It's quite, it's my favorite ghost character.

He is quite cool.

He comes and shoots his guns.

Yeah, totally. He's like, where's my face? So how does he find out he needs 15,000 really quickly?

I think that's just what he needs to finish fixing the house up.

No, no, he needs it quick for a reason. A situation comes along. I didn't write down the reason. He knew it very quickly. He's like, all right, we need this quickly. So we have to get a job. Is it? I don't know even now.

I can't remember. But he needs money basically to finish his house and whatever else. He sits down and has a conversation with the judge.

Maybe it is to get the house done.

The judge says, I'm getting too old for all of this. You know, I'm rotting away, even though I'm a ghost. You know, he's got his middle of his torso missing and his face keeps falling off. And he says, I think I'm firing blanks. This kind of stuff, you know.

So what Frank Bannister, Mark J. Fox's character does in this, he drives around to look for like the biggest house sort of thing, and then goes to that. What a wanker!

Because the next gig that they got is a big house with a woman in there who's got a nanny, and the nanny's looking after three children.

And then he got the, is it when he drives like he goes to the house when there's a funeral and it's taking too long. So he drives like a complete arsehole going around and beeping his horn.

Yeah, yeah.

Again, I don't understand how this character is supposed to be a nice character.

Well, there's a little scene now where the two ghosts, Cyrus and Stuart, pick up the children and float them around, trying to scare the mum and the nanny. And they obviously call Frank Bannister. But by the time he gets there and starts doing his whole, oh, you've got a class five Roma. This is terrible. I'll get my equipment out. They're going, Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank.

Yeah.

Um, so he's not getting paid. So Frank, Frank Leibs, his gig, he might, might have been rumbled here. He might not get many more of these con gigs. He has an argument with the reporter and says, why do you keep printing these stories about me? And she's like, because you're a con man. There's no way that there's ghosts and that kind of thing.

And she is right. And I remember thinking, what's this years ago and thinking, oh, she's a very nice sort of person. But she's, she's right. She's trying to say to people, you shouldn't be conning them and getting all the false hopes of their dead relatives are contacting them. Because it's such a mean thing to do. Because we've seen this in other films, haven't we? This sort of stuff just happens. What does it go?

Wolfie Goldberg does it in Ghosts? Yeah. Yeah. So he leaves the office and he starts seeing in a bit of a final destination where he starts seeing lots of signs of death to the point where there's an incredible stunt where Michael J. Fox is actually run over by a hearse. And it's actually him. He kind of flips on to the front of it, slides off of it and carries on walking like it was nothing. It's like, whoa, Michael.

You see, he almost walks into a punk and it's Peter Jackson.

Peter Jackson is the punk.

He says, asshole.

And apparently that was the day that all the press had to come to set him because he had spent ages having all the prosthetic piercings on him. All the press came to visit that day and talk to him about the new film he's making in Wellington. And he was dressed like a crazy punk with loads of piercings all over his face. Hi, I'm Peter Jackson. I'm the director of this. They're like, okay, you look nuts. It's always the day, isn't it? Always the day.

When did he die?

Well, he got killed by the creature. He tells him. So he sees him running out, and he thinks, what the hell? And he runs through Michael J. Fox and falls on the ground. Michael J. Fox pulls him into an alleyway and says, I hate to break this to you, Ray, but you're dead now. And he's like, how can I be dead? I'm really healthy. I play tennis. And I was on the treadmill, and then I suddenly got this pain in my chest, and I thought, I'm dead? What? How can this be?

If I ever meet Peter Jackson, I'm going to say, did you intentionally want to make Michael Jackson's... Michael J. Fox's character not nice?

Well, he tells Ray, you should have gone towards the light. You didn't. So now you've got about a year before the light will come back and you'll get a second chance. So you just kind of have to hang around there and haunt people, including your wife. Just watch things happen, really, and not being able to interact. And then Ray says, well, can you do me a favor and drive me to my funeral? Because I don't want to be late for it. So he drives into his funeral.

That would be weird, wouldn't it?

Being late to your own funeral. Yeah. When he gets to the cemetery, of course.

Well, not just being late, being at your own funeral as a ghost. That'd be weird.

It would be. Someone did it recently, didn't they?

It would make a good short film, make a good comedy.

About a year ago, somebody faked their own death so they could see what people said about them at their funeral. And they kind of jumped out halfway through and went, ah, I knew you'd all miss me. I'm not really dead. And everyone was like, oh my god, you're an asshole.

What? Well, we're not going to your funeral now.

Yeah. When you do actually die, you'll be on your own.

What a weird thing to do. What an egomaniac type thing to do.

So Frank and Ray head towards where this funeral's happening, but they have to get past all the other ghosts that are there, and Arley Emory's there saying, Get back in your god damn coffins right now. And he's sort of shouting them all. He's essentially playing the same character we've seen him play in every other film. Yeah, that's his character. Because they were going to cast somebody else, and they were like, we want someone like Arley Emory.

Of course.

They just got him. And this doesn't really matter, does it really?

No, you need him, definitely.

Yeah. So Ray's crying at his own funeral. Oh, it's such a tragedy. It's such a tragedy. And they're saying things like Ray wasn't the most generous of persons. He was he was I suppose he was kind in his own way. He certainly wasn't very generous. They're not being very nice about him at his funeral, but they're telling the truth. Lucy is really sad, obviously, and they're all shouting at Frank. And, you know, they see Frank now. Frank suddenly gets grabbed by the sheriff.

Well, yeah, fair enough. I think he shouldn't that way. But they go for this medieval dinner, don't they?

Yeah, because they're having a heart to heart. And a man goes, good day, my lady. Would you like some mead to drink?

Why go do that? What would you say your best theme would be 18 themed restaurant?

I don't know, but I've been to one of those medieval ones when I was in Budapest. I went to one where they're all dressed up like that and you drink out of wooden goblets and you throw your glasses and your food into the fire and stuff like that. And it was all very cool, but I felt like a bit of a waste of crockery and stuff for it. Yeah. But Ray also hears Lucy's true feelings about him, which was, you know, he wasn't a very nice man to me sometimes. He wasn't very generous.

A little bit. Yeah.

He says, you better watch your back, because I'm going to fuck you up. I'm going to come back and fuck you up.

Yeah. Well, he gets a bit annoyed because Mark Joe Fox holds her hand.

I know, in front of him.

And it's like, what are you doing?

Is she burying her husband today?

Yeah. But anyway, Mark Joe Fox goes to the restroom and there's a feather in there. He has 38 on his head.

Yeah. Well, he says to him, because he spilled some wine on his groin, doesn't he? So it looks like he's pissed himself. And the guy walks in and is like, hey, buddy, having a good night? The food's good here. And then he gets a bit freaked out because Michael J Fox sees the spirit, the wool monster come into the bathroom. So he's like looking in the bathroom, looking in the cubicles. And then the guy turns around and as you said, he's got 38 on his head, which means he's next.

It's quite cool though, isn't it?

Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. Lucy is questioned by the cops and they're like, oh, the FBI want to talk to you. I'll let you introduce this character.

Man, this is the icing on the cake. I would, one thing, this movie has to exist and if you haven't seen this movie, I'm going to give it a recommend to watch mainly. My main reason is Jeffrey Coombs' FBI agent who is so cool. He has what he class is as a body map of pain and his chest and torso is scarred and tattooed and cut and everything is from a different thing where he's been undercover or he's been like a rent boy type thing, like a male prostitute sort of thing.

He's got a lead vest he wears under his shirt.

Yeah, autistic as fuck. Like literally just like can't come very close. And if a woman starts shouting loudly, he needs to vomit, which is like, oh man, that is some deep rooted shit happened when you're younger of your mum. And it's an incredible character.

He's also got a hemorrhoid cushion, which he sits on in his car. He's got a Hitler haircut, which was Jeffrey Coombs' idea to have a Hitler haircut.

I absolutely adore this character.

And he wears dark, very, very dark brown, almost black contacts, which Jeffrey Coombs doesn't have that colour eyes, so that adds to the weirdness. He's like Fox Mulder. Fox Mulder was locked in a cult for 20 years.

Yeah, totally became absolutely paranoid and couldn't handle anything.

And yeah, exactly everything you've just described. As soon as he only speaks to them from outside the room.

And first he does. The show's like, Milton, come in, Milton. He must obviously know him.

And he says, I'm more comfortable outside the room. Thank you. And then she goes, what the fuck? What are you with? Yeah, he's really nuts, really unhinged. He's also got an Uzi. We find out later on.

He's just he's done some dark stuff. Like he said, that all of his is his chest. But I'll tell you what, it made me think that I would be suspicious if I was in some cult, like, oh, it's scratched this pentagram type thing or whatever it is into your body. And then he opens up and you go, hang on, you've got different cult injuries going on here. What is this? Even undercover cult agent, what's going on?

Yeah, he's basically the FBI agent that gets placed undercover and loads of cults. That's that's the story.

Yeah, he's like Fox Molder on Crack Xtreme x11.

Amazing. But they think, he reveals, I think Frank is doing this somehow. We don't know how yet. And he might be conning you, Lucy. You might even be in danger. And he then tells a little bit of a backstory, which we don't know how much, how exaggerated it is. But the backstory is that Frank used to be a real drinker back in the day, a real sort of yuppie. He had loads of money and he used to argue with his wife all the time. And one day he drunk drove them off the verge into some woods.

Stanley Knife from work with FB on it was found. Oh no, it was missing, wasn't it? Yeah.

And all of this is why Jeffrey Coombs believes that Frank is the one that's actually doing all of this. He just got to figure out how he's doing it. Maybe it's telekinesis, he's not sure. So that's quite a lot of an info dump, but a really fun scene with Jeffrey Coombs. And he's definitely probably the standout character of this whole film.

He absolutely is. See, that's what I'm saying. What you get, if you get the right cast and the right character, they can really, if you had other people done those, ghosts would have been perfect. He's also very kind of Jim Carrey like in this because Jim Carrey is a very physical actor, comedic physical actor, and he's doing it very well. And just the way he's doing his stuff and like, you know.

And where I mentioned earlier, there's some Sam Raimi stuff. The main times that Jackson uses the Sam Raimi cuts and Dutch, you know, shots and stuff is, is when Jeffrey Coombs is on screen. He really gets up in his face and does these strange angles and stuff like that. So imagine being on set. I'm just fantasizing in my head. Imagine being on set the day that, you know, you've got like Zemeckis is there just checking on everything.

I think they would work really well because he would, like you said, he came up with this sort of costume. I reckon he probably came up with stuff and he was probably like, yeah, go for it.

So we cut back to Frank Bannister's house and the ghosts are discussing this entity that they saw and they say it might be the soul collector. We've heard that in the ghost community of this thing called the soul collector who collects people's souls. Yeah, we'll have to keep an eye out for this. And while they're discussing it, they see another in the distance, another light going up to heaven and there's been another victim.

The judge then makes his joke about is not the only reason I'm the hanging judge. And then he goes to proceed to have necrophilia. Well, I don't know. He's already dead. So I suppose, I guess, I don't know.

He says, oh, she's a pretty girl.

Necrophilia.

All we see is the having sex with the mummy.

And he really gets into it as well.

But then there's a really dark joke when he gets out of it after and he gets, oh, I like it when they lash still like that.

Yeah, it's real. Yeah. It's really odd.

Then there's a bit of a shootout where the cops are trying to take down Frank. He manages to escape slightly. Cyrus and Stuart move the mummies to kind of distract the cops and they shoot at it. And then the judge is killed. He gets sliced in half by the sickle that the war monster... So actually, he can kill ghosts, this monster. And he cuts him in half and the judge is dead. And that's the end of that, really. So no one's safe now from this creature.

He arrives at the police station and he says, No, it's just when Geoffrey King's saying, you know, he's a devious one, this one. He won't ever hand himself in. You would be hard to find him. And as he's saying that, the sheriff kind of just pushes Milton over.

Yes, of course.

Because he just walks in and goes up to him, Hey, Frank.

Yes, he says something like he has means and methods of vanishing into the unknown and you'll never see him ever again.

He walks into the station.

It's really funny, actually. Sorry. Thank you for bringing that up. That was funny. And Frank basically, to protect Lucy, he just says to her, yeah, I conned you. Get away from me. Stay away from me. I'm a con man. I said it all just to get money from you. And he basically tells her a load of nonsense so that she'll never want to go near him again, therefore hopefully not getting killed by this creature.

Also Lucy, I'm an asshole. I drive like a bastard. I give my card out to people for funerals to try and get work. And then I try and take their women.

I smash your fence down.

And then I smash your back doors in.

Whoa, Gav went there. That is an expression in the UK people use. I'll let you guys use your imagination on that one. Smash your back doors in. Google it. So this is the interrogation scene there, where Jeffrey Coombs interrogates Frank. And he says to him, I know what you're doing. You're doing it with your mind. I've seen, you know, this is crazy. I don't know how you can do it. And he says, but I've seen a figure in a cloak.

He does tell the sheriff to get out as well. And he says, actually, I have jurisdiction over you. And the sheriff does not like this, but he does actually leave. So it's him and Frank.

He says, by the power invested in me, by the president of the United States of America, leave this room. So the sheriff has to leave the room. Michael J. Fox tries to explain, I've seen it's not me doing it. It's a figure. It could be death. He's got a sickle. I'm not really sure. And Jeffrey Coombe says, well, there's been 28 cases of crushed hearts in this time.

He says it tells the story of a woman who could stop the beat of a heart.

Of a frog.

Of a frog for a few minutes.

And Michael J. Fox starts having some kind of panic attack. He starts rubbing his temples and he's like hyperventilating. And he goes, oh my God, you're doing it now. You're trying to do it to me.

See, this is really funny here. See, this stuff's great with Jeffrey Coombe's in it. His stuff livens it totally. He starts going, and as he looks at him, he looks at him and his eyes just raise, get bigger and bigger. Jeffrey Coombe, she's like, oh, oh, panicking. Oh my God, you're trying to do it to me. You're gonna make my head explode. He says, well, it won't work. It's very funny.

And he rips his shirt open.

He's got a big iron chest plate on.

He's got a lead vest on, so telekinesis can't go through it. So he's already planned for it. Now, while this is going on, Lucy doesn't believe Frank. So she goes to his house to see, you know, where he lives and what's going on. She does a little bit of investigating. She doesn't know that Ray's with her in spirit.

It's a nice rainy day as well. Just wanted to say I love the, I love a good rainy setting.

And we do get a nice little insight into the nice part of Frank because even though his house is run down, he actually, his wife didn't want a basketball court. So he's paved over that and made a really lovely garden for his dead wife as a memorial, which Ray's like, why would he let his basketball court go to waste? You know, with flowers, whatever he says. And while they're there, the phone rings. And it's Dee Wallace's mother from the beginning of the movie.

Why is she going there?

Because she wants to, she thinks Frank's innocent. She suspects he's innocent. And she thinks he really has got psychic powers. It's a strange choice, though. So when they get there, Ray sees that the house itself is evil. It's vibrating. Evil.

Yes, evil.

So Ray's like, I don't really know if I want to go in that house. But they go in and they go in and they speak to Patricia, who is Dee Wallace's character, as we said, who lives there with her mum. She used to be with Johnny Bartlett. And she sneaks in and she says, she gets her up in her bedroom and she says, Dee Wallace says, my mum blames me after Johnny Bartlett was electric chaired. My mum blames me because dad killed himself a few years later because he was so distraught.

Well, Gary did have an accident.

Yeah, with cocaine and alcohol. Yeah. OK. So when she's hiding at one point in the cupboard, she finds Frank Bannister's knife. Yeah, the one that went missing. So that's a little Easter egg in there as well. And then the monster comes in through the wall and kills her husband, Ray, who's already dead. Kills him as a ghost. So that's another one now. And he's obviously he's topping up, he's trying to beat all of his favorite serial killers.

Yeah, that's true. I do really wish the other ghost that he has with him, Mug J. Fox's character, Frank Bannister's character, were with him a bit more, but were like helping him out a bit more. Do you know what I mean? If you had ghosts that were with you, like your buddies, they should be in it more. They seem to be so sort of kind of just thrown in at the last minute in the script almost, even though it's a part of his shtick.

If you had a ghost sidekick, You'd have it in the film, what would you?

But you, I'm asking you now.

Who would you have? You got Slimer, you got the guys from this, you got Patrick Swayze.

I've said ghost from a movie.

Yeah. Casper, who would be your sidekick that would sort of help you out and follow you around and chat to you? Who would it be?

He's got to chat to me as well. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, that is a good sidekick. You'd get everything done, wouldn't you? Gavin, use the Force.

I'll say, you use the Force, get the Hoover on it. Get the J. Edgar on there. Come on.

You've got Ben Kenobi Hoover in your house.

Don't remove the Force.

This is not quite what I was supposed to do.

You could have Yoda.

When I went to the light side of the Force, Yoda, I could have Yoda, couldn't I?

Yeah.

Or Anakin. Yeah. I think I wouldn't have Slimer, that's for sure.

What is that you're doing, Dan, with your hand in your pants?

If you had Slimer, it's just like your house would just be a wreck. All your food would be in...

I'm not sure you're supposed to do that, Dan.

Third time today, that is, you've done this. Now, I'd have Patrick Swayze as my sidekick.

You look all drained and dehydrated.

Patrick Swayze would be my sidekick. He'd be cool. He'd follow me around. He'd make me feel good about myself. He'd say cool things. Patrick Stewart? Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Patrick Stewart.

I don't know what Patrick Stewart does in the ghost world. Oh, I'm Patrick Stewart.

He's never played a ghost, has he?

I don't know. He has done in the Christmas Carol. He has done Scrooge.

Actually, talking to Christmas Carol, I'd have the ghost of Christmas present because he's a good laugh. He'd be my sidekick.

Yeah, but I'm kick keeping Obey.

You've got Obey. And I've got a big jolly fellow with a beard who says, come in and know me better, my man. Anyway, Lucy then goes to visit Frank in jail because Frank's currently in jail in the police station. She tells him, I went to visit Patricia and she says it wasn't her that did all the crimes. It was Johnny. I also found your knife in the house. He actually starts crying at this point and says like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what's going on.

Why did he give himself up in the first place? Because he thought it was a harm to other people.

Yeah, he thinks.

Being locked up. But then all of a sudden, she's come along and said, no, we need you. He's like, I'm not a harm anymore. I'm going to help bust myself back out of the place I put myself in.

Yeah, right. And Lucy helps him escape. She's as a fire extinguisher on Jeffrey Coombs.

Jackson kicks Coombs in the stomach. I'm glad he's playing around his plate, because I thought that was uncalled for.

Then Cyrus is killed. So he's lost all of his sidekicks now. The judge, Cyrus and Stuart have all been killed.

They were so thrown in last minute. Not memorable anyway, so. Did you get really bothered when they had died? I don't even have it in my notes because I think it was shit.

No, no, not really. I was surprised, I think, the first couple of times I saw this.

But it really is a shame.

At least they're at peace now. And actually, they do get a really memorable, really amazing scene later on.

Because that's the thing, they could really, really, you could, as an actor, you could have really taken that role on and just been like, you know, I'm dead, I'm back here doing this work. And this kind of sucks, you could really play with that.

I've just thought of something, and this is a spoiler because we're going to get to it in a minute, but he dies, Frank dies in this, he sacrifices himself, goes to heaven. And they say to him, no, no, no, your time isn't, this isn't your time. And they send him back because he sacrificed himself. So that's his redeeming feature, isn't it? He's been a bit of a bastard all the way through this. Because he's grieving, don't forget, he is grieving. So, yeah, maybe they meant it.

Well, that's what Peter Jackson did. You make that character bastard. I say, no, I made him a person that wasn't a bastard. But when his wife died, he just wasn't happy anymore.

And then he died and then he got sent back to Earth and he's fine because he's hooked up with a widow. Good. So Lucy and Frank run and he says, the only way to fight this is for me to shoot myself in the head. She's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm a doctor. Let's do Flatliners. So they go to the hospital. She injects him with something that slows his heart rate right down. Then she locks him in a freezer and says, once you die, you'll have about, what is it she says?

It's a good indie movie. My buddy did some effects and did a bit of color grading on Shadow of Death once upon a time, but I've recolored it since. He does the effects on it and it's an indie movie called Ghost Maker, I think it's called, and it's these three students make this coffin and kind of make it so like when you go into it, you can be a ghost and then you can go and do stuff. And it ends up one from going off and raping a woman, that sort of thing.

That sounds good.

Yeah.

So she kills Frank, she puts him in the freezer and he sits down and he waits to freeze and die, basically. Lucy's preparing all the defibrillation equipment outside, but then Jeffrey Coombs arrives and he pulls an Uzi out on her.

Of course he does.

And he's lost it at this point. He has. I don't know why he's, I mean, he never had it at the beginning.

No, he's really, I think that kick to his chest plate has really pissed him off.

So he confronts her and says, you know, I'm not going to let him out of there. Now, he basically wants Frank to die in there. And he thinks that now that Lucy's probably involved in some way as well. Now, while this is going on, Frank dies and his spirit leaves his body. He walks, the light comes down and he walks away from the light and he adjusts to gravity and being able to be corporeal and walk through things.

This is a bit where he says he's got a Nazi sword on his hand, but he's road map pain. And he says that he was for six months in a sex cult in a farm undercover. Naked for six months in his cult on a farm. What the fuck?

And he's pretty sweaty as it is. Imagine him in a six month sex cult, naked.

Undercover.

Under my covers. So he begins to do some kind of weird spell at this point. And he thinks it's working.

He thinks he's, again, he's the best one. He thinks his mind, for whatever reason, is driving the car. I'm doing this because the car's driving along with Frank Bannister. It's ghost, yeah?

Yeah. That's what I'd say.

I'm making this car drive.

Then, because they're in the graveyard, Emery is there and he sees the ghost come out and he goes, Sound off like you got a pair. And he pulls out these two massive machine guns, but slices him in half before he can do anything.

Yeah. Well, he's happy that he's there. He's like, finally at the funeral. Finally here. Oh, yeah. Nice. You're mine now.

Yeah. Frank grabs the machine guns and uses them on the monster and basically blows it to a pulp and Lucy manages to escape. Now, the ectoplasm that's left over, then as it's sliding, I love this effect, as it's sliding down the tombstone, it turns into Jake Boosie's face.

He goes, hey, she's going to be my number 41, Frank. Oh, yeah.

Turns into his dad a little bit. And he basically reveals that, you know, he's trying to beat all the serial killers that have ever been. Even in death, he's still killing people. And he says, I want to thank you. Thank you for helping me get to these people, Frank. And then it drips down into a crypt and he T1000s himself. By that, I mean, kind of morphs back together into the spirit thing that he was.

But he's got to be brought back at some point.

And Lucy brings him back to life. And the first thing he says is, Johnny Bartlett is back. And they're like, oh, my God, he must be hallucinating. And he says, no, no, we need to get Patricia out of the house because he'll come for her. So we're coming up on the last part now as they get to Patricia's house. Her mother protests at them letting her in. And then Johnny arrives and Johnny's in the house going, and you realize at this point that Patricia was in on the whole thing.

It's like a sous chef kind of thing.

Just marking, you know, that's number three. Can you mark number three on that one? No, not that one. That was number four. You're doing them the wrong way around.

Yeah.

It's pretty crazy. But she reveals he's been visiting her and she's totally in on it. Isn't Dee Wallace brilliant at acting?

Yeah, she's great. Yeah, she's really good.

You don't really see her act too crazy in other films. She's usually just a nice mom or a mom that's a bit stressed out because she's like a giant dog dribbling all over her car.

Brilliant acting in this.

And Johnny wants Dee to kill Lucy. And he says, you could do this one. Go and get a knife from the kitchen. Lucy goes upstairs to find that Patricia has killed her elderly mother. She's dead in the bed. So she's even killed her own mom. And this is where we get the carpet attack. So Johnny jumps into the carpet. Then he jumps into a picture. Really great effects with the use of that sort of CGI that we've discussed.

The daughter has right psycho vibes, by the way, in this house.

Yeah, they're very Norman Bates. You're right. Especially because she's got a dead mother in the bed now. And then it's revealed that the ashes in her bedroom weren't actually her dad's. They were Johnny's ashes, which is why he keeps visiting her, because she's still got his ashes. And basically...

She fingers them.

Well, remember that was the story I told you about World Of The Strange, about the woman that ate her husband's ashes.

And I said it's slightly romantic, in a way.

You did, you weirdo. Frank says, we need to get these ashes to sacred ground so that we can end this one.

Oh, chestnut.

Is there a church nearby? Yes, there is a chapel in the old, abandoned, insane asylum that Patricia and Johnny killed all those people in years ago.

Perfect.

Great. Let's go there.

Let's go there. That's obviously the best place to go.

So they get there. As soon as they walk in the door, Frank starts having flashback visions of what actually happened, what it was like to be there during.

Exactly.

Why go there?

He knows he's probably going to have that. It's like the worst place to go.

But they've got to get these ashes to consecrate the ground.

Like you stay here in the car and I'll go do it.

But Frank's the only one that can see the spirit so he can help fight it off.

But it doesn't help. He goes off and wander off.

We get really, really cool transitions between the past and present. I don't know if you like that as a filmmaker, but it goes from oldie times to now.

Yeah, it's very seamless.

Yeah, very good stuff. Peter Jackson again, working early Peter Jackson, but he's working on that magic.

This definitely comes with prepping and working out what you're going to do before you film, that's for sure.

Patricia grabs a shotgun. So Dee Wallace has got a shotgun and she's obviously blasting, trying to kill Frank. Whereas Jeffrey Coombs is chasing Lucy around because he's shown up now with his Uzi and they're about to throw the ashes into the church when Jeffrey Coombs grabs the ashes and just pours them all out like a bastard.

Yeah, this is a bastard moment.

He then shoots Frank with his Uzi. So Frank Bannister takes back three shots from an Uzi in the shoulder. Ouch. But Patricia blows his head off. Yep. And now he's a ghost. Frank remembers his wife, Death, a bit more remembers the number 13 and remembers she was the first victim of dead Johnny Bartlett. D tries to strangle, D Wallace tries to strangle Frank. They're trying to kill Lucy as well. Frank, Frank's ghost pulls Lucy's soul out of her body.

This film does fit a little while ago. I did feel like it was going on a bit at this point. Because I read this needs to be carved, but it's chopped a bit.

But I think I agree with you. I agree. But I think the moment that Frank pulls Patricia's soul out of her body, this is all much needed because it's a great payoff.

This is needed, I think. Early on, it's just whatever just needs to be a bit quicker.

Essentially, he's pulling her up to heaven with him because he's going up to the light. Johnny comes up with them. Then he grabs Patricia. Then he lets Patricia go. Frank lets Patricia go. And Johnny says, Ah, we've got more killing to do back on earth. See you later, Frank. And then they realize they're not going back down to earth. No, they're both going to hell. And they get swallowed by this crazy hell beast monster which then dives into the pits of hell with the fire.

How does that work, though? What if you went back down and thought, oh, fuck it. I'm going to commit suicide because I want to see my wife so much, which is very, very possible, surely.

Because his wife's the last thing.

They've been like, no, you can't. So then it turns into Groundhog Day for him.

Well, the last thing his wife says as he's flying back down to earth, his wife shouts to him, be happy. So he knows his wife wants him to be happy.

But he was just there and he can be happy up there with his wife.

Yeah, but she wants him to live his life.

Yeah, but I don't know.

All right. Is this what Obi-Wan says to you?

Obi-Wan should have told me that, to tell you that.

Jesus Christ. Well, anyway, the epilogue is that Frank and the widow Lucy are now together having a picnic. Sheriff shows up and says, oh, by the way, we found a load of Ouija boards in Patricia's house. So she was obviously talking to him and conjured up his spirit, Johnny Bartlett. Do you want to write a book on this with me? Frank's like, nah, I don't really want to write a book on this with you. So the sheriff says, all right, well, enjoy your picnic. I'm going now.

Yeah. And then we get doodoodoodoo, doodoodoo, doodoodoo, doodoodoo, doodoodoo, ah, but yeah, not done by Blue Ostrich Colt. It's like a cover, which is really bad. I went to say, oh my god, yeah, this is awful as fuck. Why didn't they just pay for the original? Weird.

Yeah, it's really bad. So Mecha is probably could have done that.

Yeah, they must have put, unfortunately, no money for score. We've put it all on visual effects, guys, for the composer, or the music artist, sorry.

So we're just going to cover.

Yeah, it's a shame, because it was terrible when. It goes on a bit. It's fine. If you've never seen it, I definitely recommend it, because it's quite a fun film. It does go on a bit. I've said my bad points. There is some amazing points. Jeffrey Coombs', it's thumbs up for Jeffrey Coombs.

Yeah, it's a thumbs up for me overall.

I'm glad he stays in it as much as he does and actually comes out towards the ending as well.

The plus points for this film are definitely Jeffrey Coombs, Michael J. Fox, the effects of the ghosts and the monster that's chasing everybody are great. It is a good story, definitely. Dee Wallace is wonderful in it as well. You're right, third act, as we always discuss in a lot of horror films, the third act is a little longer than it needed to be. There's a lot of running around that asylum. They could have trimmed, even trimming, two, three minutes out of that.

So it's like the second half of the second act going into the third act. And I'll tell you, from writing scripts, it's probably the hardest, always the hardest bit to go, right, we don't want to make this boring, we've got to keep this going. But we've been doing it for so long at some point, we do need to let it chill for a bit. So it is a hard point to write.

But it's a really good payoff. And actually discussing this with you has made me realize that A, yes, actually Frank Bannister is a bastard, but B, he does redeem himself by sacrificing himself.

Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, overall, what an interesting film for Peter Jackson to do.

I think it's a good tester for Hollywood for him.

Yeah. And it did well, particularly on DVD and The Rentals. It would have, and it probably still is doing well now. Yeah.

I remember my friends getting out and it's been like, it's a fun film to sit and watch.

Indeed, indeed. But yeah, that's it. Both of us give it a thumbs up. Gav, not quite so much as me, but still it holds up well, even for the aged effects. And talking of ghosts and Ghostbusters, Bill Murray's just walked in. Hey Bill, what are you doing there? You've got a tray of food for us to taste. What are these delicatessen? Oh, okay. I don't know what this is. Oh, he says all will be revealed in World Of The Strange. Okay.

Well, shall we get into World Of The Strange?

Bill, can you pop that tray down over there, please?

Yeah.

I know the flowers are still standing. Very good.

Okay.

Pop it down.

Thank you. Hi.

Welcome back to World Of The Strange. Thanks, Bill.

You sound a bit like a Dalek, then.

You did. We're here. And our next film we're going to be talking about is Bad Taste. So to celebrate that, I've got a list for you of some of the worst tastes you'll ever taste. Food.

Oh, no.

Yeah. Some of this is really out there.

I don't. I'm not very adventurous with my food.

So strap in. We'll start off in India with something, a product called Gomutra.

OK.

It's a drink. You ready?

Yeah.

Gomutra is cow urine.

All right.

If you drinking Gomutra has been practiced for thousands of years and it's usually consumed for therapeutic purposes, it's a medicine with health benefits. All cow urine is considered beneficial.

What are your benefits?

The urine of a pregnant cow is especially potent with hormones and minerals. What?

Because the hormones and minerals?

It's believed to treat psoriasis, leprosy, fevers, liver problems and cancer.

Really?

It's also used to clean floors in India. As well as drinking it, they clean floors with it.

Is your floor clean? It's fine. You can put your baby on it and he can just crawl around on it. It's fine. We clean cows urine.

In 2015, a large sophisticated cow urine refinery was opened by the makers of the popular cleansing fluid, Go Cleaner. People also drink it. See there, you know, clean your floor, have a little sip, clean your floor. Ha ha ha ha.

Oh, it worked. I forgot my fucking drink. Ah, I could drink the mop juice.

So apparently it is disgusting taste. Um, when you open the bottle, immediately the room smells like a dirty barnyard, apparently. And then it says the hardest thing to is, for people who've never had it, is knowing what they're drinking, which, you know, you know, you're about to drink cow piss. And it says when you drink it, it's such an incredible harshness if you're in, that your throat stings and you have an aftertaste that lasts for around an hour.

I suppose you're not wasting it.

Is that number one on the list?

That one too bad, that's fine.

OK. So the next one is from Ancient South Korea. It's another medicine, a drink.

Seafood.

No, no, it's worse. It's, I'll try and pronounce this, it's Song-Sul, which is a traditional Korean medicine with a 9% alcohol content. It's the poo of a human child between the age of four and seven that you refrigerate for three to four days, you mix it with water, you divide it into small pieces and you ferment it overnight. Oh, so it's got to be a child's poo.

Why? Because they have natural, they only eat natural things.

Still shit. Apparently, it absolutely, funny enough, smells of poo.

But you don't get anything from poo. There's no nutrients in poo apart from some sweet corn, but that's only going to pass through again anyway.

You just don't get anything from poo. The fermented poo and water is poured through a sieve and mixed with 70% non-glutenous rice, a little bit of glutinous rice and a little bit of yeast. And then you ferment it for a little bit longer. This kills off some of the bad bacteria. And then you leave it to ferment for another week in a clay pot wrapped in a blanket.

What a waste of time and effort. Absolutely, it's waste. It's the body's waste that can't be used. If it could be used by the body, it would still be in the body.

Now, if you haven't done it right and it's not fermented enough, it's incredibly dangerous to drink as well. Just to throw that in.

What a bunch of idiots.

But it's an alcoholic drink that's claimed to cure pain, broken bones, No it hasn't.

Give the same person a couple of bottles of whiskey.

My pain's gone. It cures epilepsy.

My epilepsy's gone too.

It looks like a combination, apparently, of sewer slime and vomit, especially because there's usually a few little pieces of poo still floating around in it. Apparently, the taste is very sour and tastes like rice wine. It has a faint smell of poo and makes your breath smell of poo for many hours after drinking it. And because of the high alcohol content, people get really drunk on it.

I don't like this anymore.

But this is no longer Dan. This is ancient Korea. This is like people.

Because one day, someone say, what do you want?

Why are we drinking children's poo?

No, we're not.

Okay. Well, let's move on to China. The name says it all, baby mouse wine. Oh, at least a dozen baby mice.

I thought a wine for a little baby mouse.

At least a dozen baby mice.

Imagine a little baby mouse with a really miniature glass of wine.

At least a dozen baby mice are drowned in rice wine. The mice used must all be blind and hairless. So it's got to be very like a day or old or two days old. And then you have to ferment it for a year and then drink it. It's drunk as a health tonic. Apparently it cures asthma and liver disease.

No, it doesn't. Dr. Gav says no.

These health claims have never been verified.

No, they haven't.

Apparently it tastes exactly like petrol.

How do you know that? How do you know that?

With the aftertaste of rotting animals.

Overall, brilliant.

Do you want to taste petrol but have the aftertaste of a rotting animal?

Let me guess, it costs tons of money as well, so it could be like ripped off.

Mouse wine is mostly drunk in southern China. It's among the liquids that have the misfortune of being one of the worst tasting in the world. Apparently, you cannot ever forget the taste if you've ever tried it. And apparently, there's parts of baby mouse skin still floating around in the wine, which people use chopped toothpicks for to pop out of their teeth. Oh, got a bit of baby mouse.

No, no.

It's recommended you sift it before drinking it.

Let's move on.

Okay.

Monkey brain. Monkey brain. That's right. I saw this in the Ad Jones.

Yeah. So these are all... Don't forget, this is a list of some of the worst tastes in the world. So monkey brain. Monkey brains consumed... Again, this is very, very old. It's got to be rotted monkey brains. And you can use it in many, many dishes. Now, they do eat a lot of strange food in the olden days in China, like bear claws and monkey bollocks and shark and goat's brains and stuff like that. But apparently monkey brain was a delicacy for a while.

We won! Has anyone got a cake?

I've got a cake, but I've got a monkey brain.

Yes!

Dan's got a monkey brain. Apparently, you have to kill a live monkey by hitting in the head with a very small hammer, like a toffee hammer, because the brain's got to be fresh when you eat it. It's not rotted, actually. I don't know why that's said that above. It's a horrific serving method, apparently, and many resources. It remains unclear whether it's a legend or something that was actually served, but there's talk of it in ancient texts.

Psst! Oi! Do you want some monkey brains?

There's a restaurant down there. Can I have a Big Mac monkey brain, please? Yeah. Do you want some nice mouse wine with that?

No, shh. Don't have that one.

All right. Well, there we go. Let's move on, then, to Virgin Boy Eggs.

Oh, I don't like any of all that.

Young boys urine is collected in schools and markets. This is China again. Young boys urine is collected in schools and markets around the city in buckets placed there by street vendors. Eggs are then boiled in the urine until they're hard. The eggs are then cracked and you continue to boil them to allow them to soak in the urine for an extra couple of hours. They then turn a golden color. The golden eggs smell strongly of piss, but the taste has been described as delicate, salty and addictive.

You haven't got different ones. You've got the old man eggs.

Well, I don't know. Let's get down the list in a minute. But apparently they go around schools collecting pit, right, get boys, boys.

It's the egg man. He wants his buckets of piss.

Piss in the buckets, please.

I'm the egg man. Give me my bucket of piss.

And apparently different people that sell these eggs. I know I work at that school. That's my school.

That's my school. Oi, Billy and all his mates are my property. Their piss is mine. You stick over there to Johnny and Frank and his crew.

It says there's no explanation why it has to be the urine of young boys, but it's just a tradition. And the myth says the eggs are good for your health, protecting against heat strokes.

No, it doesn't.

Promoting good blood circulation.

It doesn't.

And apparently the smell is unmistakable when someone's cooking them up. It just smells of hot piss and eggs. Jesus Christ.

What is up with them? That's the second delicacy, which is just not right.

A piss boy egg costs twice as much as a regular egg. And apparently, the Eurydice Boys with maple syrup is especially prized for a sweet taste.

No, the maple syrup's a sweet taste. Just stop it.

I thought you'd like that one. There is a cheese in Italy, Sardinia, in Italy, which is allowed to fill with maggots before it's eaten. It's called Casamossu. It's eaten with the living maggots inside it. So people often shut their eyes when they eat this cheese because they don't want to see the maggots wriggling around. It is risky to eat as the maggots can survive within your body and you can get intestinal worms. The smell of it burns your tongue. That's the smell, not the taste.

That doesn't seem good.

And apparently you can't taste anything for about three hours after eating it. So that's putrid cheese. Yeah. Not sure what the health benefits are for that, but yeah, that's that one. We've kind of talked about this at some point in the past, I believe. This next one is in Greenland. It's called Kiviak. A freshly disemboweled seal is stuffed with 500 small birds. They then sew it shut with seal fat to prevent flies from getting in.

That's what, when you said about the bear claw earlier, I started thinking about it and I was like, well, I guess if you boil it long enough, it goes soft.

Apparently, it tastes like Gorgonzola cheese, people say. Any of these that you'd like to try? I have all of these. Which would you try at gunpoint?

Mouswine? No, I guess it's... Oh, God, it sounds weird to say, though, isn't it? Little boy's eggs thing. I guess.

It's a hard one, isn't it? It's a hard one. Oh, boy. I'll see if I've got any others on the list.

Yeah, I'm not going to get for any of them, though. I'm going to puke up four.

Frog juice. Basically a frog smoothie in Peru.

I've eaten frog's legs.

Well, there's a in Peru, they make smoothies out of frogs. Just drink them. They just literally put a couple of frogs in a blender with some honey, some spices and a few leaves. And apparently it's one of the worst tastes you can ever have, but a really good aphrodisiac. Thank you. Now I can't get it up. Have you tried any frog juice? No, I haven't. What's that? Come here. I'll make some for you. Gramps a couple of frogs at the garden. Oh, my God. You just killed those frogs.

Drink this.

Drink this. You'll have a boner.

You got a frog boner.

Mongolia. Fancy a cup of sheep eyeball juice?

No.

It's called a Mongolian Mary. Pickled eyeballs of a sheep are placed in tomato juice.

I know Mongolian Mary.

You know Mongolian Mary, do you?

Yeah.

We all know Mongolian Mary. Apparently, it's one of the best hangover cures you'll ever have.

Mary is.

Genghis Khan used to drink it after.

Basically, it would be so worse than your hangover, you'll forget the hangover.

Well, it dates back to the time of Genghis Khan. Apparently, he used to drink it when he used to wake up in the morning after raping and pillaging villages. He'd be like, I'm really hungover. Someone would just hand him a Mongolian Mary.

I think he gets the count of the most people he's killed. I think he's 60 million.

Sheep's eyes contain poison, but pickled, they are safe to eat. You can boil them or have them rule, but apparently, the most pleasurable bit is when you finish the drink, and you bite into the eyeball. It bursts in your mouth, filling your mouth with all the eyeball juice.

Oh, like a grape.

Yeah. It's good, isn't it? Like that one?

Brilliant.

I don't know how many more I can stomach, Gav. Perhaps we'll do just one more.

Yeah, please.

You've heard of the coffee that's made out of poop, haven't you? You would have heard of that one.

I have now.

Okay.

Well, there's a type of coffee where you don't need to just go any more than just what you said.

The beans are swallowed by an animal and then pooped out and then they make coffee out of it.

But anyway, that bait, well, at least you could show me and tell me a bit of the process, which is quite interesting. They have a filtration system.

Well, the last one on the list then is, I mean, there's loads on here, but I'm not going to go through them all like tarantula and stuff like that. But the last one on the list is fruit bat soup. Okay. Apparently one of the worst tastes in the world.

Do you want to buy this? Is it good? No. It's one of the worst tastes in the world.

Perfect. Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Guam. Most commonly eaten bat is a fruit bat in this, and they make it into a soup. Again, lots of health properties, helps stop the amount of toxins burning up in your body, and it can help you with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. I mean, if this was all true, we'd all be drinking fruit bat soup, wouldn't we?

Yeah, yeah.

Apparently, the taste is absolutely disgusting, and best avoided all ranked.

It was basically like, what are we going to serve today? Dunno, go at the back, what is there? There's nothing, but there is some bats. What? Dead? No, they're live. Well, alright, make soup out of them, alright? Get Frank there to go and tell people, oh, have you tried the bat soup? It's good for bad eyesight.

You got some bat soup, don't you? I've skipped through, I have missed out ball penis.

You've explained enough.

The Rocky Mountain Oysters, you must have heard of that one.

No.

Which is, they call it oysters, but it's actually large testicles from a sheep, which are peeled, pounded flat, coated in flour and spice and deep-fried.

Oh, like a patty.

Crispy fried batter, and then you have a dipping sauce with it.

I would go for that one. I could get away with that. I could get away with that. If you've got a dip and it's in batter, put something in batter and give me a dip on there.

And to be honest with you, we eat sheep, so you've just got to pretend that what you're eating isn't, it's bollocks and then you're okay.

Yeah, that probably wouldn't be as bad. Anyway.

Actually, it's boll testicles, not sheep testicles, sorry. But it's still okay. Do you know what I mean? There we go. So that's what Bill's got on his tray. Thanks, Bill. We won't be eating any of that. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Bill.

I really appreciate you taking the time to source all of these, some of these 200 year old recipes. No. Some of them they don't even make anymore. What I will ask you, Bill, is where the fuck did you get loads of five year old boy piss?

Yeah, I don't.

We're not going to air that. We're not going to air that. Okay.

Okay.

Cool. Cool.

All right.

Well, that's World Of The Strange. Things that taste bad. Talking of things that taste bad, here is a trader for Bad Taste. Bill, take us out of here. We'll go into that trader.

Things that make you go, hmm. That's all the time we've got for this week on World Of The Strange. Next week, though, gimme iron. Hairless pets. We've got trouble. Right, we're on our way. What are we gonna do if we spotted Frank? Tis the real to-hit! That's the end of those wicked cowboys. What's up, Oz? You go on. I'm gonna go back and stop those thugs. God, Tye Kaws, put that thing down! Let's get in there and hit the leader. Bad Taste from 1987, rated 18. Nice, tidy, hour and 31 minutes.

Yes, I do. As I explained, I was a big brain dead fan for many years, and then I was probably about 17 or 18 when this film was shown on Channel 4, along with the documentary of The Making Of, which is very interesting. It's on the DVD as well. I watched it as I was recording it, and I couldn't wait to show this to my buddies, my two best friends, and they loved it too. And it became a staple Friday Night Watch for us.

So it fit his mum's oven. It's funny looking at the IMDb, the credits for it and stuff, just because I know it's a very independent film, like it's just him and his mates, so it's funny seeing. So I sort of see this stuff all the time, like I know a lot of independent filmmakers and their credits and stuff.

Yeah, he created a Steadicam, as you mentioned earlier in this episode himself, which cost $15.

$20, actually.

Oh, OK. $15 New Zealand dollars.

Yeah, he just did it. And it's rudimentary, but it done the job enough for him to be able to run with a camera.

I'm going to go on record as saying this is probably more guerrilla filmmaking than even Evil Dad was.

I was going to say, or even more guerrillas in the mist, more guerrilla than guerrillas in the mist.

You don't get much more guerrilla filmmaking than that. Yeah, it's pretty out there. In a nutshell, this film is about an alien invasion where they just want to turn us into fast food, but they want to take a few samples back before they fully invade. And this team, this crack commando team, AIDS is the pseudonym of the team, are chosen by the New Zealand government to go in and infiltrate and find out what's going on. They get involved in a big battle against them.

It's loads of stuff. It like when the house blows up at the end, it's obviously Mitch House, but it's just really nice just the way it's done. It's just, it's very, yeah, it's almost like in the way Ray Harryhouse house and films were, you know, just the way like all of a sudden you dip into that and that and this sort of does that a little bit of this. And I don't know, it's just such a great film. It was like you say, like this and Brain Dead in my head just were just the same movie together.

Something else that really stands out for me.

The Shadow of Death might not even exist if it wasn't for Bad Taste.

That's true, that's true. Something else that stands out for me is somehow, although it's very, very not novice acting in it, they're still... it's still funny. It's still got some really good quotes in it. It's good scripting. But also, some of the guys from the crew, the boys, they're quite funny and they act quite well. And it's all tongue in cheek and nobody is taking it too seriously.

It's definitely a humor that we can relate to as in Britain.

And it's got some really weird stuff in it, which I just kind of go with, like the Beatles car. I've never questioned what the fuck that is about.

Yeah, I questioned it for this. I didn't put it in a note. It's really good. But it is a bit like, what is going on with that? Like, that was an actual thing. Like, they were just like, we've got this. Let's cool, let's use it. What is it? I don't understand.

He's also done a really good job with the gun muzzle flashes.

Who wants to stand up to drive? That's just awful.

Yeah, the gun muzzle flashes are good as well. Which really sells the weapons. And again, when you watch the Fablemans, this was all what Spielberg was doing at a very young age, his friend's room. How did you make the guns look like that, Stephen?

He was putting pins in the film.

Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

All right, let's get into it.

So we kick off with a phone call reporting that there's been an alien invasion. Again, I don't understand why this guy's got a little finger on the end of a stick and then he uses another finger to light a cigarette.

It's also this bit, like this bit here, and the guy with the suit, like the boss kind of guy, it feels a bit for me when I was younger before, pre-interview before you're a bit more closed off. Felt very ospoitation like. Yeah, it felt kind of like the Australian type sort of films, some of the sort of random 80s ones, a little bit in that film with this guy and in a world you don't really understand.

Yeah, there are some things in this that are just so weird and it doesn't really matter. Yeah.

Question it unless you're reviewing it like we are.

But essentially they call in the boys as they call them. And here we go. So we get a Barry is our first member of the boys.

Good old Barry. Good old Bazaar.

And Barry is being chased by a blonde man with an axe who seems a bit of like a bit of a zombie. What's going on there? It's an alien guys. It's an alien.

All this is like the steady cam stuff. It's not bad. It's fine. I love the bit. There's a bit where he goes into is great. He goes into a shop and the camera goes to the crane that they've made. And so he goes into the shop and the camera just goes really high up. And it's just little things like that.

I've written that right here.

Little things like that just give it as they do. They just give your film so much more production value just to give it a scope. You just go inside and go, wow, there's something in here which is better than just that it goes in there. Then you cut to the next shot. Then it's just a little bit more force and effort's been put into it to try and make it like a proper film. And it works.

They use this crane, this shot, the crane for different things. Like there's a scene where he's on the edge of a cliff. And rather than just shoot from the side where it's safe, they put the camera around the other side of him. So it's like we're off the side of the cliff. And you can see the cliff drop below him. And then he's talking on his walkie talkie at one point. It's just like you said, some of these shots are quite majestic and sweeping.

They're just really... It's basically creativity, a budget. And someone really wants to make a film, has watched films and gone, okay, I can see, oh, this is like a James Bond movie. They might sort of do that. How'd they do that? I must have like a crane or something. Okay. And it's someone who's just spent a lot of time thinking about the art.

So Barry is chased on to the beach by this blonde guy with an ax.

He's all the audio in this ADR, do you think? Because it was a lot of this was going to be hard to get like good mic'd recording, especially on those cliffs with the wind. You know, you can have a big boom, like a fox thing with Jiggy. But at the same time, thinking of what budget he had then, he probably might not even have had a mic, so it would have been ADR later on, possibly.

I've never thought of that. Probably some of the outdoor stuff with the wind.

A lot of it sounds like ADR, but yeah, some stuff might be. A lot of it sounds like ADR, to be honest, yeah.

Well, he shoots the guy in the head. Nice head shot there, and he blows his head off. The effects.

Head shot is the only true stopper, says Derek.

Yeah, because Derek's on the walking tour. He's coming after you, Barry.

He's giving him a commentary.

Yeah, he's like, he's coming to get you.

He's coming to get you. He's going to get you. All right, all right, I'm just going to go over here. He's trying to get away from this guy. He's not saying anything, wondering along with an axe behind him with evil eyes staring at him.

He says, you're going to have to shoot him. A headshot is the only real game. I guarantee you whatever he says.

You know, he blows his brains out. He goes, oh, wow, look at that headshot, Barry. That's great. It's just you doing that and often just going back to it, with the impressions, it's just perfect, isn't it?

But it's not a headshot like you normally see. So to describe it, it's like from the top lip up is gone. So you've got a bit of like spinal column sticking out, that little bit of brain stem.

It's cool.

It looks good and the blood's pumping out. And he goes, Oh, Christ, I got blood on me strides. He gets a bit of blood on his trousers.

We get the title for Bad Taste.

Bad Taste. And yeah, Derek's been watching this whole thing through his binoculars like a pervert. He's very good. This is Peter Jackson as Derek. He's very good at playing that kind of nerdy, almost a bit of a pervert, wants to get his gun out at every opportunity. He's a bit of a liability. We get the credits, we get some silly music playing. And then we see that Derek's got a live specimen hanging on a rope, which he's got just hanging off a cliff, tied by its foot.

So Peter Jackson's got Peter Jackson hanging off a cliff, which Peter Jackson's filming Peter Jackson, having Peter Jackson hang off a cliff.

So he would have shaved his beard off for all the shots where he's Robert, the alien.

Well, filming him on different weekends. So he's done that and then grown a beard. Well, had the beard shaved, whatever way he did it. Oh yeah, then he shot all those bits. So yeah.

I can't notice any continuity errors.

And you got to remember, it's not on digital. He's not going home and just fricking, this is like 82, 83, he got the camera and it was like four years. He's not going home and chucking it on. He could probably go home, maybe and project it. Possibly, I don't know if he's actually, I don't know if it's 16 mil, he's got to go and get it sent away then come back. Or eight mil, probably eight mil. No, probably 16 mil. And then, but he's not watching it to see like-

16, 16 it was.

Okay, and he's not sitting there watching it going, I, oh great, so I did that shot. Okay, I need to then tomorrow just go that. He's having to possibly have a notepad and pen for like five months ago when I shot that scene there. How was I looking? Okay, I got that from the other side now. It's just really intricate to come up with this and do this, but it's been budget, no money.

Well, Barry discovers that the town is pretty much deserted. The aliens have seemed to have taken over the whole town. There's no other normal people around. And he's carrying on having this conversation with Derek over the radio. This is a really good way to shoot this, because you don't have to have these two actors on scene at the same time. You shoot their scenes separately.

Which you know very well.

Yeah, yeah, because one of my scenes in The Shadow Of Death, I never even met one of the actresses.

And you have a conversation.

We talk to each other. So they're discussing this alien invasion over the radio. We get a bit more of a backstory. And then we get a new character called Giles, a charity collector turn up. And he works for a charity called Bread, which stands for, I can't even remember what it stands for now.

And the town is totally deserted apart from our main protagonists and these crazy sort of zombie killers.

And he says to Derek, I'm hiding in this whole shed, which must be maybe a reference to Evil Dead, maybe not, I don't know. And Derek radios the other two boys.

I'll tell you what, they had a shed then, and they're like, put them in a shed, that's all that is.

And he says, Frank, Ozzy, and this is Frank and Ozzy, they're the two badass boys in vests.

These were in their Ford Capri, these were the guys, these are the badasses.

Yep, they're listening to Heavy Metal, and Derek radios them and says, look, the whole town has been deserted, there's just a few of these aliens left. And it's down to us, the Astro Investigating, Astro Investigation and Defense Service, AIDS. It's a bit of an old joke, doesn't really AIDS very well. And we're the only ones who can do do anything about it. It's up to us. And that's who they work for.

And he says, Derek, don't harm a prisoner.

He says, he says, I'm not going to do anything to him. Don't worry. There's no way I'm going to hurt this intergalactic wanker. And then as soon as he hangs up, you know exactly what he's going to do. Because Frank and Ozzie are like, Jesus Christ, it sounds like he's got a farmer. What does he look like? He said he's wearing denim and he's got messy hair. It sounds like you've got a farmer hanging off your cliff. It's like, just whatever you do, don't harm him. We're on our way.

Can I say, Peter Jackson's acting is pretty fucking decent playing both these two roles. There's different acting styles. I know he's not doing it on the same day and he's actually doing it with another actor there and then. And he would have shot them at different times. So it was easier to be in and out of those characters, but pretty impressive acting.

Well, Derek's been instructed.

He's great as Derek, isn't he?

Derek's been instructed not to. Oh, by the way, Derek is wearing a scarf. Which is going to Doctor Who like exactly because he, Peter Jackson, was a huge grown up in New Zealand. He would have had all the British TV. He's a huge Doctor Who fan and also later on, he says, do you think these aliens could have come to Earth in phone boxes or something? Okay, there's two Doctor Who references in this, but Derek's been instructed not to torture this alien that he's captured.

Derek likes to have fun and break the rules.

He grabs a hammer and he grabs a very long, almost like a sword, a machete, and he describes, he goes over to the alien and he climbs down the cliff a little bit, and he says, now, whether or not you know something or you're going to tell me something, it's not really, I don't really give a shit. All I know is I'm going to have a little bit of fun. So let's get the old ball rolling, shall we? And he starts tapping the machete into the sole of this alien's foot. Ouch. We'll cut away from that.

Barry basically does a commando. He's like a swarming oaken in a shed. And he looks around and sees what tools he can use. He gets a pitchfork. The door opens up and he goes...

Hang on, hang on, hang on. Before the door opens up. They're using a battering ram to batter the door in the other place.

Oh, with their mate's head.

They use their mate's head as a battering ram. How amazing is that? It's so funny. Because they're all a bit brain dead, these guys. And he's just...

He's got...

His head is just mashing into the door.

And they... Basically, he goes to the door, slams open, and he gets a pitchfork and he goes... Steps forward to stab this zombie character with a pitchfork. And he gets caught with a shirt behind him and goes... And then he goes back in the door, shuts the door, leaving the alien zombie character kind of just confused. Is he supposed to attack me or am I attacking him? I don't know. My brain cells are not there.

Yeah, it's very sort of...

It's quite comical. It's pretty... I'd say this is funnier than The Frighteners.

Yeah, this is funnier than The Frighteners, for sure.

It's really well done humor and horror, and human horror mixed together and done fairly well is a hard task.

No, sadly, because Derek has started torturing this alien hanging off a cliff, he then lets out a huge scream, which is like a signal to the other aliens, and they all turn around and they start heading towards Derek.

Leaving the fellow in the shed, able to get away because they all of a sudden just left. And they get... they all grab these hammers, except this one little tiddly, tiddly, tiddly, tiddly hammer, which is so small. And this guy goes, ooh, just get this out and this runs off. And he's going to use that to try and bash. And he uses... he bashes it in the mid-air.

They do remind me of some of the zombies in Braindead, the way that they act. And obviously that's Peter Jackson directing, but, you know, especially that biker zombie in Braindead. He's like... It's just so silly and so fun. So, Barry radios Derek and says, Derek, he's saying, Derek, Derek, whatever you're doing up there, they're all coming to you. They're all coming to you right now, but Derek's busy.

But he's not listening. He's having too much fun. So to get these other like ones, at least three of them come up to them. And it's like a sort of really great action sort of scenes here. And the camera work and the editing sells this so well. It's so done really well.

And we get that Peter Jackson trademark where some blood squirts onto his glasses. It looks really pussy and thick. And then he sees the aliens coming up through the woods towards him.

Derek s don't run.

Well, he pulls his gun out first of all. And it's not fully, I think the safety is on.

So he just fakes it for a laugh because he knows that they got no brain cells. He just goes, AAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAA. And he just pretends to do the sound effects of the gun. Yeah, and they go, AAAAAAAA, because they think they're being shot but they're not. And they go, AAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAA. Laughs at them and then trips over trying to put this fucking thing, my jiggy, into the gun.

His clip into the gun. Well, he eventually does get the machine gun. He slips in shit. That's what he does. He slips on a cow shit. And yeah, he's surrounded by these aliens, but he starts shooting at them. One of them keeps coming at him, even though he shot it, and his gun goes right through its stomach and out of its back. Well, he carries on shooting the other ones through the... I've never seen anything like that at this point.

It was pretty fucking cool, isn't it? It's done really well. I love the fact that they've got like... We've been doing it recently. We've been prepping for a new film where we're going to use a lot of assault rifles and handguns, and we've got a load of BB ones and just different type fake ones. And it's so cool. It just makes the character just absolutely... And these ones, they made them themselves. Peter Jackson made the guns out of wood and painted them black and stuff. And they're so good.

And he ends up shooting two more of them while his gun still stuck through this other alien. He manages to pull the gun out and he surrounded them by guys with sledgehammers. So he thinks, well, I'm going to have to climb down the cliff.

These shots with the crane and all this stuff looks so good. The way they've done it, so it looks like it's really fucking scary. Obviously, it would have been safe, but the camera's at an angle.

Well, you can tell as an adult now, I can tell that's not a very steep cliff, but the way they shoot it...

It's been cut together as well.

Yeah, the drop looks really steep. But as he's climbing down, he realizes the rope has been cut and the alien that he had tied up isn't there anymore. They start swinging their sledgehammers at him while he's hanging down this cliff. One of the guys swings his sledgehammer back and it slaps into the aliens behind him's head.

Yeah.

And then the arm comes off. So this one alien will come out with a sledgehammer in his head with an arm attached to it.

Where do you think his love, Peter Jackson's love, obviously like stop motion animation and stuff, where do you think he got this gore love from? What movies is it? Do you reckon Texas Chainsaw makes it there?

He likes Romero.

He's got to be Texas Chainsaw.

And he was a huge Romero.

But then Texas Chainsaw don't see anything.

Yeah.

So yeah, you've got to be Romero. It has to be the zombies in Romero's films. And basically Tom Savini. Tom Savini's gore is what he's going for here.

Yeah. Robert is actually the alien that he had tied up. He's actually hiding behind the bush. He jumps out and he kicks Derek off a cliff. We forgot to say the line. I'm a Derek. Derek's don't run. Which is a brilliant line. And Robert falls off the cliff and chases Mummy. And how good is the dummy?

How good does this look? And do you remember the last movie we watched last episode? And there's a bit where someone fell for so long. And I said to you, it's 13 seconds long. It's James Bond. That was awful. This is really, really good.

And what sells it is the dummy really looks so good. And then when it lands, it lands behind some rocks. And they obviously had like a blood splurge. Cause as it lands, then you just see this big, yeah, indicate, oh, yeah, it's really good.

And we can't not mention how good the fight is. Peter Jackson fighting himself on a cliff edge. It's so good.

Yeah. I want you to know, I mean, I didn't know any of this the first time I saw it. And then I watched the making of and that gave me an even, you know, an even bigger appreciation. Yeah.

They think Derek's essentially dead. Really?

Yeah. Frank and Ozzy are putting up roadblocks. They're basically barricading the town off so no more aliens can leave the town.

Basically, they work for this company, so they get their instructions. They all of a sudden, you know, they've had a couple of their guys that just been in this town have checking out and they've been on the outskirts or they were another job and they're getting to it. But they've been told, yeah, like Dan said, block up the roads and not let people in.

So Barry calls them on the radio and says, Frank, Ozzy, it's all gone to shit. Derek was torture in one of them. Then he's got into a big shoot out with them. Killed a bunch of them and then he's got kicked off a cliff and I think he's dead.

It's hilarious. It's kind of like all my life, I've been self-employed, going on to different sites and different places, doing different jobs. Every once in a while you have these sort of situations, you go, oh, for fuck's sake. And this is for them. This is just their job. Like today, this is this weekend or this week's job. You're just here for the next two days or just today. And oh, it's all gone wrong. Oh, for fuck's sake. That's so funny. Because it's a job. It's so funny.

Well, Giles, the charity collector, is wandering around the town and he can't find anyone. However, he finds Robert, Peter Jackson's alien character, eating someone's brains with a spoon. Just going...

Peter Jackson's mom and dad, who look lovely and sweet, must be like, Peter, where do you come up with these things? Is this what you've been using my oven for?

Is that why we had to get a takeaway again the other night? Yeah. So he chases Giles. Giles gets in his car and he flips him off like... But then the car won't start. And the window doesn't do up. It's an old winder window with a handle rather than electric, because this is early 80s. So Robert shoves his hands through the window and he gets his hands stuck and they drive off with his hands in the window. Eventually kind of falls off the car. Giles manages to escape, so that's that.

Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. And obviously he's taken total advantage of his settings of what we've got over the cliff edges and all the locations and everything you've got. And it just it works really, really well. It just comes across really good.

Yeah. And also Giles is heading up to that base as well, because he's escaped from Robert. Giles knocks on the door. This is your you're right. This is this scene now is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because he knocks on the door. There's no answer initially. And then a huge man appears who comes out of nowhere, cracks him in the head with a big hammer and drags him along.

Which is Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Exactly. So there is definitely some influence there. And again, Barry's watching all of this through the binoculars. He's seen this charity collector get smashed on the head and dragged to the side now. Yeah. Giles then wakes up in a cauldron with an apple in his mouth.

This is now he's got divorced. He's come back.

Yeah. Are you still making that film?

I know I thought it was too good for it before, but that's because my wife at the time was telling me I was too good for it. Then she's divorced me, so fuck that bitch.

Robert's in there in the kitchen with lots of aliens, and they're all looking at him going, Oh, basically saying we're going to eat you, but not. And then Lord Crumb comes in. Lord Crumb. Lord Crumb. Now, he passed away. He never got to see this film. He passed away just as they'd finished wrapping on it and then completing the film. He never got to see the finished film. The guy that plays Lord Crumb. And he was dubbed over because he didn't have a very good speaking voice.

Gave him a little role. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of works again. You know, me going back to the ground, it felt like a real exploitation sort of thing. This guy in a suit and the voice and that the fact that now you say, yeah, ADR voice on top of it. It really it just makes it more not completely right. Do you know what I mean? A little bit out there. It's a film for Sunday night, one o'clock in the morning, moving your voice going on.

Fever dream time.

Yeah.

And Lord Crumb basically says, you're a delicacy where I come from and we're going to eat you. So it's a bit like phantasm in a way as well. And he says, he's talking to the others. The others we can't understand.

Very Texas Jameson man.

Because all the others are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're all talking, but we don't understand them, but only Lord Crumb speaks English. So yeah, he says, we're going to eat you all basically. So that's what we're doing. We're boiling you in a pot and it's a delicacy.

When he's in that room in the pot, Peter Jackson's in there as the alien character.

And he's got a sweet look on his face.

Yeah, and the other guy, and the chef just looks at him and goes, ehh, with a finger across his neck saying, like, you're dead, walks out. Peter Jackson's got a knife, looks and goes, ehh, does it. And he slits his own throat. He doesn't actually kill himself though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's like a really sweet relationship between those two, where it's almost like the chef is his dad or his big brother, because they look after each other, don't they? Especially later on.

Those two could be a character. They are basically a lever phase, aren't they? Really? Yeah.

Well, we suddenly cut back to Derek, who seems to have survived the fall off the cliff.

He nuts a seagull. He literally headbutts a seagull. Then he goes, and then realizes, and he goes, he's in pain. There's a big flap, like a door opened up in the back of his head with some sprain matter have gone out.

This bit tries to push some more brain back in his head. Well, he picks up what he hopes is his own brain, but it's probably a piece of seagull brain.

See, the fact that this movie is so raw, I could see that those effects is not actually brain. I could tell that if this movie had been horror production, I would probably be gagging or puking watching some of this film, you know? Bad Taste, Brain Dead goes there, I guess.

So this is something that he'll do throughout the movie now. Whenever his head flap opens, he picks up whatever's around him, shoves it in. Later on, he shoves some alien brain in there as well, because he's just he's not thinking straight because his head. And every time that flap opens, he has kind of a bit of a spasm as well. And then he has to strap it. Later on, he puts a belt around it to keep the crack in his head shut. It's pretty fucking weird.

He goes to his car, which is this weird car, which is like has another layer of car, like it's got another level with windows. And it's got these massive Beatles. The whole members of the Beatles has cardboard cut out. And you stand to drive looking out the top window as they sit in the front window. It's the oddest fucking car. But this must have been Peter Jackson's car, because obviously he loves Beatles, because he's done a lot of Beatles stuff, hasn't he?

He puts the top hat on at this point. I don't know why he's got a top hat on his car.

But he's loving the Beatles.

Yeah, he must be.

It must be his car. So weird.

Now, Frank and Oz have teamed up with Barry now, and they are looking at the bass that he talked about, and they said, right, well, should we call for backup or not? Derek's dead already. So I think they radio somebody who says to them, it's time to go to town, because Ozzy says, it's open season on ETs. So they tool up. We get classic tooling ups now, where they're like, it's quite a good scene where they throw the guns without looking and catch it and loading up and stuff like that.

He just grabs a mop.

I love in the middle of this mission, he's like, someone could break their neck on it.

Break their neck? It's bloody hell. It's that lovely humor in it. This movie, Done Off Move, though.

It does, yeah.

It's really tight.

They hear the speech being given outside, which is essentially the plan that the humans are our fast food on this alien planet. But an alien comes in, so they kick his head off, or he punches his head off and kick it out of the window like a football and Ozzie kicks the head out. And he goes, I've still got the old magic. So he obviously used to be a football player or something back in the day. Frank says, well, I'll disguise myself. So I'll put his clothes on and I'll go out.

Thinking, well, well, they've just realized that all the town, whole town and cardboard boxes to be shipped off to the planet.

So while he's there, he's got this bowl and he wonders why this alien was carrying a bowl. But oh, I'll have a disguise now. I'm listening to the plan. And then Robert, he says, Robert, if you're Lord Crumb says, if you could come here, please. And Robert throws up into the bowl.

Which they made, Peter Jackson just did a copy of his head. And then they had a tube just going down through the mouth and just a pump.

Yeah.

And actually with the hand as well, you could with the mouth, you could put your hand in like a puppet and move the mouth up and down.

And he played a trick on his mum.

Did he?

He said, go and have a look in the oven. And his head was in the oven because they'd made a cast of his head in the oven. Jesus Christ. His poor mum, poor Joan.

That's not playing a trick, is that? Unless he's doing like, oh, wearing a big suit with his head not being shown. Mum, look in the oven. My head's in there.

That would have been a really good trick. Yeah. Well, anyway, Robert pukes into the bowl and fills it to the brim.

Because he says very quickly, just before this happens, he says basically, well, the plan is that they're going to have a fast food chain in their planet and humans basically the meat and they're coming down illegally, getting humans where they shouldn't do. It's like using a horse for a beef burger.

Well, he's taking this time back as a sample and he's hoping to get the go ahead to have a full on invasion. Okay. He wants full custody of the earth because other businesses. Yeah. And he doesn't want Burger King to find out about earth because he wants it to be just McDonald's.

So it's all about money.

So once he's filled up the bowl with his sick, Lord Crumb says, the gruel is ready.

Oh, a chunky bit, aren't I lucky?

He says, exquisite bouquet, Robert. He smells it. And then, yeah, he says, I got a chunky bit, aren't I a lucky one?

He passes this bowl of really green stuff. And as it's happening, Oz is...

And it's Frank that's there.

Frank's just slowly moving down the line to get into the last person he possibly can.

But they make him drink it too.

He gets it, he's like, oh no, and he drinks it. And he goes to drink it and he drinks a bit and he goes, hang on, that's fucking all right. He starts drinking more and they have to pull it away from him. And he's like, what the?

So Frank comes back into the kitchen with the others and he goes, oh, you'll never believe what I had to do.

Yeah, but he enjoyed it. So I remember thinking, you enjoyed it.

But his buddy says to him, did you have to drink some alien chuck? He's like, yeah, like, how did you know that? It's like, almost like this is something he's done on other missions. And they're like, let's guess you drank more alien chuck. Is that right? So they decide to leave. The lights go out and they rescue Giles. They untie him. But the places, they can't escape, because there's alien guards everywhere outside. So this is where we get a shootout, a really big, epic looking shootout.

It's like the action scene. As soon as that happens, music goes, it's like, let's go. And so I'm full on battle now.

It might as well be the 18 theme tune that comes in.

It's very, very 80s action. Very. This one, this I would actually say at this point in time, this is probably like making this stuff. This is the end of stuff. He's probably making this towards the end of it. So maybe like 85, 86. There's a prime 18, prime 18. Yep. Yep.

He would be watching 18 and MacGyver and whatever. Yeah. There's a really funny gag here where Frank is shooting and he gets shot. Someone keeps shooting at him and he looks and it's someone in a tree.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

He machine guns the tree.

It's loads of people.

And six people fall out, but they do it. The timing of it is so funny. It's like one, two, three, four, five. And then you think, wow, there was five people in the tree. And then a sixth one falls out at the end.

There's some really good gags in this. It's done really well.

Really funny.

I think if you watch this movie, you watch this and go, whoever made this is a filmmaker. What is it like if you give them some money?

You know, Lord Of The Rings. Then the chef attacks and it turns into a bit of almost like a Jackie Chan or Chuck Norris film where we get the chef swinging in a machete.

On the balcony.

There is a bit of Kung Fu thrown in as well.

Throws him over the balcony.

He throws him off the balcony.

Derek turns up at the house in his funny car.

His head wound reopens. He has another bit of a spasm. Giles almost gets killed, but he is saved. He's like, thank you so much. Derek uses the belt on it to keep his skull shut this time. Because Derek's don't run, Gav.

Derek's don't run.

So he keeps driving. He runs one of the guys over. He gets ripped in half, a bit like Robocop. When the melty guy gets hit by the car and he splats. It's a bit like that. But this was before Robocop.

Crazy.

He then grabs a chainsaw.

That's always good.

Here we go. And we get a really good half torso effect.

The dude, yeah. Oh, that's really good.

It's quite creepy, in the ground.

But it's so creepy.

And again, we've seen him do that in Brain Dead when that guy gets ripped in half. In fact, that back half Brain Dead, that party that Lionel starts tearing up, that is a showcase in Practical Effects, isn't it really?

Yeah, Brain Dead.

But you can see some of that already in this film. Lord Crumb runs outside, and more alien backup arrives, but it's instantly killed. There's a machete in someone's head. Robert gets a machete to the throat, and Lord Crumb starts mutating back into his human form. He flips them off, which is the poster for this movie that we all know of that image of the alien giving the middle finger. It's just so funny.

What, you never paused it when the adverts came on?

Well, I'd always pass forward. No, no, no, no, no. I didn't bother with that.

I was, when I first got into it as a kid, I had nothing bad to do. I'm watching the Predator or whatever it is, as soon as you have it, because I'm paused. And sometimes, because obviously I'm an editor, because I was there, like going really seamlessly, like having to get it. And sometimes I'll get it so perfectly, you wouldn't know it's even a trailer. And I'll be like, yes.

I have done it, but I, my family love watching old films that we'd recorded back in the day. And we'd always let the adverts play, because it reminds us of like...

Well, nowadays, nostalgically, yeah. But yeah, it was a pride of me to do that.

What you're talking about, I got really good at when I recorded the top 40 charts.

Oh, nice. You paused between the talking.

Yeah. Usually, the song would come to an end, and you get... And that was... And then it'd cut into the next song. And then... That's what you did though, didn't you?

Back in the day, that's what you had to do, because you couldn't afford the music, because you had to just record it off the radio.

Every...

Honestly, me and my sister, every Sunday, the same as filming a video, filming with a videotape, a movie which is playing on the TV.

Yeah. Oh, those were the days.

Yeah. Simplicity, man. Then getting that movie or tape and just listen to it over and over and over.

Well, Lord Crumb has now fully mutated and ripped out of his clothes, and it's great effects. Even his alien buttocks are sticking out of the back of his clothes. Imagine that. What are you baking today, Peter? Today, mum, we're just making some alien buttocks in the oven, OK? All right. Oh, that boy. I do worry about him. Hopefully, he'll do something with his time one day. Yeah, so the boys and Giles run off into the woods because they're chased by the aliens.

The boss turns into an alien.

Yeah, I've said that he mutates with his alien buttocks. Ozzy decides it's time for Rambo. He strips down to his vest.

Yeah, obviously, Rambo is the influence on this one.

He says, it's my turn for the Magnum, and he's a one-man army. He grabs the rocket launcher.

Ozzy goes and gets the rocket launcher.

Yeah. He waits for the aliens to get in the car, and they're all going, because they can't drive the car.

He's gutted, though. His mate's gutted though because he's like, oh, what? It's nice. It's a Ford Capri. In England, you occasionally see one of these still on the roads. They are cool looking cars.

They are. So he blows up that car with some aliens inside. Ozzy and Frank head back to the house at this point, and Ozzy blasts the house with a rocket launcher.

Which was a miniature, but it looks really good.

It really looks good. They enter the house, and they do some good hand to hand now, where they take out some aliens. Derek cuts a hole in the wall in perfect shape of himself. Very Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes cartoons. And he walks through it with a chainsaw. But I don't know why, we get a really extreme close up of the alien buttocks at this point now. It holds it for just a little bit too long.

Peter Jackson is like, I tell you what, it's been ages making those buttocks. You are going to watch them.

I want a three second close up of them, please.

Keep holding.

Longer. That's it. That's it. It's good. Derek slices and dices some aliens.

And he's putting random brains into his own head.

Yep. Not even his. Just alien brains.

I'm pretty sure he's going to get in an affection.

He cuts one of them in half right in front of Ozzy and Frank. And they're like, Derek's gone ape shit. Because he's just slicing them out. They're like, holy shit, Derek's gone ape shit.

They already needed Derek earlier on when they're getting coffee at morning breakfast before they're sent out on their job. But Derek was not feeling too right today. A bit hungover, a bit unhappy.

You can imagine when they got the memo, like who's on the team this week? Frank and Ozzy, they all went together. Oh, Barry, we worked with Barry before. Oh, that Derek guy's on it. Yeah, for fuck's sake. Yeah, he's a lunatic.

Yeah, so fucking Derek's lost it. Come on, let's get the fuck out of here.

Ozzy gets shot and the rocket launcher is fired, but it misses them and just blows up a random sheep in a field.

It does.

Boom, explodes.

Quite funny as well.

Lord Crumb starts the ship, which we find out the house is actually their ship. So he starts up the alien spacecraft and the house starts to transform and starts to lift off.

It starts to pull a lawn in, and Ozzy and Frank are just trying to crawl out of the lawn before they get taken up. It's quite nice little bit, actually.

It would have just been a bunch of guys pulling a green tarpaulin off camera, but it looks so good, doesn't it? Yeah, they almost get sucked in under the house, but they get away.

It's really well done and edited really well.

Frank saves Ozzy. The house blasts off with Derek on board and Derek wakes up and looks at the window and he sees Earth and distance and he's like, oh, fuck. And then he thinks, well, if I'm going out, I'm going out a hero. So he cuts through Lord Crumb from the top of his head, out of his ass with a chainsaw. This is again something we've seen in Brain Dead, where Lionel is sort of bursts out of the mum.

Really gory.

And then he gets, he picks up the phone to the alien planet and he says, my name's Derek. I'm coming to get you bastards to strap in. With all the seagull brains and alien brains mixed in with his own brains. Then he puts on, just when you think that is mental, he then puts on Lord Crumb's skin.

Yeah.

Because he's stripped him and puts on his skin and heads towards our planet to take out the aliens. And we end with the Beatles' carpool cutout car, with the survivors in the car driving off into the sunset. Yep. With a song called Bad Taste In My Mouth playing. Brilliant. And we've honestly torn through that. It's a 90-minute film, but once you press play, it's over in 10 minutes, it feels like. They packed so much into it.

It's really good.

Guys, if you've never seen Brain Dead, there's multiple reasons to watch this. If you've never seen it, go watch it. If you haven't seen it for a long time, go watch it, bearing in mind how cheap it was to make. If you're interested to know how Peter Jackson or any filmmaker gets their start, go watch Brain Dead. If you're interested in the guerrilla filmmaking or practical effects, go see this. See what can be done over to four years on a weekend, every weekend. It's incredible.

It's really good.

It's probably the best indie guerrilla film, really. It's not American. It's a Kiwi film as well. It's funny. It's so funny.

If this was like a more of a Hollywood production or something, even just some other people involved and stuff, you could see people have been like, Oh, don't do this. Do this. Change this. Change this. It's just all Peter Jackson's head. You know, it's great.

It's absolutely crazy. Here we go. All the dialogue in the film was dubbed in post-production. Part of the footage they shot didn't have any sound, so they were shooting with no sound a lot of the time. And once the New Zealand Film Commission funded the remainder of the film, he hired a sound camera. So they actually had a really decent camera. So you actually didn't have a sound camera for part of it, which is crazy really.

Great. Yeah.

So funny. Yeah, there's so many facts on this and stuff like that. You know, I'm not going to sit here and go through all of this. It's just a fantastic film.

Well worth checking out. Fingers, fingers, fingers, thumbs up. Fingers and thumbs.

Fingers and thumbs and alien bums up in the air wiggling around. But look, Peter Jackson, let's round up with him before we go into our outro. Peter Jackson started off with this film, and it just goes to show, if you want to be a filmmaker, and you've really got the heart and the time and the imagination, you can one day direct A Lord Of The Rings. There's obviously a little bit of luck in there as well. But this is a guy who has the drive to get to where he is now.

His drive and talent and skill.

There's only five directors that have earned more money than him in the world. It's crazy. James Cameron. It was...

check it out. Peter Jackson is fun. Let's get out of here. It's getting late.

Yeah.

Oh, we're back again, thanks for coming along and listening to us. Hope we've pleasured your ear holes with the sensual tones of Dan and Gav.

I always enjoy director specials, and I've been looking forward to really talking about Peter Jackson, but also really talking about Bad Taste. Fantastic thing, but yeah, there we go. So that was episode 171, Peter Jackson. What's coming next? I know what you're asking, so let me tell you. Our next episode, 172, is our sexy, love-filled Valentine.

I've actually seen one of the films already.

We're going to be covering, To Celebrate Valentine's and All Things Lovely and Sexy. We'll be covering 1995's Horny Alien Goes on the Rampage, Species. What a cast. Crazy stuff. Yeah. We'll also be pairing that up with something I've never seen from 2009. Gav's recommendation, The Loved One. The Loved Ones.

It was a recommendation from many years ago, so I hope you still like it. It's been a long time since I suggested it. So yeah.

Well, that's cool. Well, we're going to watch those two. After that, it's a Patron Pig. Episode 173, Matthew Godley, you son of a bitch.

Background, are we?

He's come back around and he's picked 1986's Spookies.

Which I don't know.

Yeah, it's a bit of a classic weird film.

I look forward to checking out because it's a movie which, even the name itself makes me want to watch it.

Yeah, it's cool. It's fun.

Spooky Dookies on your BMX.

But that will be a bit of fun because we'll be pairing that up with Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

I know. I know.

From 1971.

Jesus. Now, I think maybe I've seen it twice. I remember the first time watching it and just being like, the hell is this? Probably I was like 18. So I wasn't really the right age. It'd be really interesting watching it now.

Yeah. It's on a par with The Shining for me, for Kubrick's best films.

And famously pulled it, but we're getting to that. Yeah. Thanks to those dude for suggesting them.

Yes. And then after that, our 174th episode will be a actor special.

That's interesting.

We're going to be honoring someone who's been in a lot of our favorite horror films, and that is Mr. The Chin himself, Bruce Campbell.

Oh, okay.

And we're going to be covering, we've already covered Evil Dead 1 and 2. We're going to be covering Army of Darkness, Evil Dead 3, which is a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And we're pairing that up with the, oh, thank you very much, Bubba Holtip.

Oh, brilliant.

So we're covering, well, we will have a look at Bruce Campbell's career, his back catalog, what he's done. Why, what makes him so interesting?

Amazingly, because I discovered the Army of Darkness is the best ever gateway film to horror for children. Dan, I suggest you can let these kids, not yet, but this is really, really accessible and not scary because you can see it's not scary, but it has horror. It's really good for that. Honestly, I think it's the best gateway film in to horror for kids.

And for me, it's probably the funniest Bruce Campbell's been in a film. He's a funny guy, but in Army of Darkness, and they obviously had much more of a budget. He's just hilarious. Every line he says in that film.

Elijah probably enjoyed this. So if I say to him, I've got to watch that movie, I'll watch that and I'll explain, go, oh yeah, I'll watch that with you.

So that and Bubba Hoteb from 2002. So that'll be our Bruce Campbell special after that. So that's what's coming up. We've got Valentine's.

That's cool.

We've got Clockwork Orange and Spooky's, followed by a Bruce Campbell special. That's our next three episodes.

Bubba Hoteb, man, interesting.

Yeah, it's going to be cool, man. It's going to be cool. So before we leave and say our goodbyes and good evenings.

Again, kind of pre-internet, 2004, I think it was. It's not pre-internet, but it really was for accessibility, especially buying stuff. You know, I remember finding a blockbuster in San Francisco and just they had a bargain bin. I say, oh my God, shit that I can't get in England. And one of them was Bubba Hoteb. Oh my God, that's so cool. So I've still got my American copy, I think.

I got a feeling I went to see it at the cinema.

My blockbuster copy.

There was a limited showings of it in Bristol, so I went to see it.

I have to go check out if it's my blockbuster copy.

But let's do our housekeeping and all the legalities that we like to do at the end and then we'll say goodbye to the housekeeping nights. So, as always, thank you everybody for listening and supporting the show. We have been The Podcast on Haunted Hill. We are a proud member of Legion Podcasts Network. Been running for 11 years now. Been a member of Legion that whole time. We're also under the Deadbolt Media umbrella.

We will find you. We have a special set of skills and we will find you.

And we will kill you. No, we won't kill you.

We won't kill you. We will make you listen to us.

We're on Instagram. Our handle is The Podcast on Haunted Hill Insta. That's mainly used to promote the episodes when they come out. And then Deadbolt Films, which we mentioned earlier, is our production company. Deadbolt Media is the umbrella we will fall under. If you go to deadboltfilms.com you can find out more about the things we're currently working on.

Yeah, the website is going to get updates in hopefully. But yeah, we are doing lots of things as Devil Girl, Ben's own comic of his own, all drawings and story has just been funded. Issue one, so that's getting made and what's already been made actually, not produced, designed and drawn. That's been done. We've got some more comic stuff coming out. Amanda is now finished. We're just waiting for one actor's part, which I'm not going to say until I've got it. So I know I've actually got it.

Loved it. Told you. Loved it, especially that last shot at the end.

It's good, isn't it? We're going to drop that trailer probably in the next couple of weeks, I would have thought. I just need to get the IMDB page up, and then we're going to release Amanda as a feature found footage film on our YouTube channel for free within the next six months.

So when YouTube just searched Deadbolt films, you can find a lot of our shorts, as well as some of our features. Some of our features are available on Prime now. Shadow Of Death is free to stream on Prime. And if you want to pay to rent pre to natural, you can, but they're available on Prime now.

It's pretty natural. It's on YouTube on the found footage, possibly POV Horror YouTube channel, I think. Yeah, we've got other things on the pipeline. We've got some really cool shit on the go.

We've also done some music videos, as Gav mentioned. There's several comics now under our belt that we produced.

Lots of comics, actually.

As well as this podcast, Gav.

We've got a podcast as well called The Holy Strangest Podcast with my dearest Sarah, where we talk about weird shit. Just weird shit. We just last night recorded and released our Lost In A Jungle episode, which was fascinating to just talk about being lost in a fucking jungle.

No way. Everything wants to eat you in the jungle.

The worst is the fucking giant birds that run after you with massive claws.

Oh yeah.

That's the worst.

deadbotfilms.com, that is the website. YouTube channel is DeadBotFilms and Instagram we're on, which is called DeadBotFilms on Instagram.

Please follow, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, because like I say, we've got the trailer for Amanda coming out soon, and then the movie is going to be released on there. It's found footage. I'm quite proud of it, to be honest with you. I've been working on it for now six years, randomly.

Longer than Peter Jackson.

Yeah, it's supposed to originate. It's Dan and I going on a kind of adventure, and I was going to go to Stonehenge, do all this stuff. It's completely changed to a totally different thing, changed to a series, and that's some change now to another feature film. It's weird, but I'm quite proud of it, and it's all right, actually.

Yeah, it's evolved, hasn't it?

It really has. It's okay.

And finally, we are part of Patreon. So if you wish to support the show in a monetary fashion, you don't have to do this, but if you want to, we'd really appreciate it.

We really do appreciate it, though.

Yeah, for as little as a pound or a dollar a month, you can become a patron. The benefits to that are you get a t-shirt in one of three colors sent out to you wherever you are, with the Podcast on Haunted Hill logo on it.

We are getting low with stock, so after that...

Yeah.

You may say what you want, we'll say what we can give you.

I'll send you a medium. No, I won't. No, too late. I'll send you six XXXXXLs, is that all right? You also get a shout out at the end of the episode, which I will do in a moment. You also get exclusive access to our entire back catalog through Patreon and any other additional content and bonus content.

Most Docker T-shirts just down there. There's only a few left there.

I've got quite a few. That's good. You also get early access to some of our episodes as well, and you get to be a patron who picks. So that means every three episodes, it's a patron pick, which one of our patron picks two movies they want us to talk about. Hence, Spooky and Clockwork Orange coming up soon. You also can, if you want to, send us the reasons you chose them and a brief story you might have about them, first time you watched them, that kind of thing. It's fun. It's brilliant.

Thank you guys. You guys are the A-Team.

You are the A-Team.

You've been very, very strong supporters you guys have. Thank you.

Thank you to all of you. Thank you to everybody else for listening, supporting, sharing, being on the Facebook page and just doing all the things that you do. If you do get the chance to rate or review the episode or whatever platform you're listening to it on, please do so. We really, really would appreciate that. That's it from me and Gav. So it's a good night from Derek, because Derek's don't say good night.

They don't, do they?

No.

It's a good night from the judge. He's having sex with a dead corpse.

Oh dear.

That's why they call me the hanging judge.

And it's a good night from Robert. Exquisite bouquet, Robert.

I've got a chunky bit, aren't I, lucky boy? And it's a good night from Dan.

And it's a good night from Gav.

Good night.

Good night.

Thank you for listening to the Podcast on Haunted Hill. We will be back again real soon.