The MacGuffin

Another Top 5 segment from The MacGuffin. This time Allen and Brandi share their top 5 cliched but awesome moments.

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There is one movie in my life that has messed me up beyond all others, and it is , a 1986 two-part television miniseries about serial killer Ted Bundy. At the time it first aired, I was just about to graduate high school—about the same age as many of Ted Bundy’s victims—and lived in the Pacific Northwest, which meant hearing about serial killers all the time because we seem to breed them here. Everybody I knew watched this miniseries, and we were all totally creeped out by it. (Nobody seems to make very many good miniseries anymore. Which is unfortunate; it’s a good way to tell a longer story. The last one I really enjoyed was Storm of the Century, and I am looking forward to Bag of Bones coming out in December.)

Brandi Sperry: It is getting to the end of the month, and that time when, after weeks of gorging, a horror fan might either be looking to circle back around to the must-watch-every-year classics, or get a little out there and outside the box. (2002), a disturbing French film from writer/director Marina de Van, could easily be classified as outside the confines of horror. It is not meant to be “scary.” But the sense of apprehension in the viewer that it evokes, the atmosphere of psychological instability, and the sheer, gory ickiness of it, to me, provide so many of the trademark sensations that many horror films do that I can’t help but think of it that way

In honor of the release of The Thing (2011), The MacGuffin crew discuss , from director Christian Nyby and writer/producer Howard Hawks.

This episode can be played online via the flash player below or it can be downloaded from here. It is available on iTunes and Stitcher.

Let me just say this upfront: the new “prelude” to John Carpenter’s movie The Thing (hereafter known as The Thing (JC)) is not an abomination. The Thing, also the name of the new movie, is an adequate bug hunt movie. If you have never seen The Thing (JC) and you liked Aliens, and you don’t like movies with subtext, then you might enjoy this. It has lots of explosions, monsters jumping out at people, tons of CGI gore, and fire. The plot proceeds logically and somewhat makes sense. There is a place for this kind of movie, and what it severely lacks in originality, it kind of makes up for by being competently directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. If you have seen The Thing (JC), then you will realize that this is a middle-of-the-road remake (of a remake) that is pretending not to be one. It’s not offensively bad, but it is completely mediocre and you would be better off just watching The Thing (JC) again.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I love John Carpenter movies. Ok, not all of them, but I get excited whenever I hear a new Carpenter project is coming out. His last theatrical release was 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, which is not exactly at the top of my list of awesome John Carpenter movies. Just so you know where I stand, I place The Thing at the top of my list and Village of the Damned at the bottom (which I thought was even worse than the episodes he did for Masters of Horror, and those sucked). His latest film, The Ward, had a very limited release earlier this year and was released on DVD in August. There are a lot of his movies that I like even though I know they are bad (Escape from L.A. and Vampires), and I was worried that because of this movie’s nearly-straight-to-video release, this was going to be one of them. It is better than I thought it was going to be, but honestly, not as good as it should have been.

Tabloid

When I heard a new Errol Morris documentary was coming out, I squealed, which confused my husband, because I don’t normally make that noise. I remember seeing The Thin Blue Line on PBS back in 1988 and being amazed at how different it was than anything else I had seen before. Morris had used interviews, reenactments, and a Philip Glass score to tell the story of Randall Adams, a man who claimed that he was wrongly convicted of killing a police officer. The composition of the film was so unusual I had some difficulty wrapping my mind around it—and then promptly watched it again as soon as I could. Also, in my mind, Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is one of the most engrossing films ever made. So yeah, I may have squealed.

Spencer and John discuss Jennifer Aniston in advance of Horrible Bosses, share some directors they want to make comebacks and give their DVD picks of the week.

Another MacGuffin Film Podcast Top 5′s segment. This time Ben and John share their top 5 horror directors.

A look back on the sometimes tumultuous career of Nicolas Cage in honor of the release of Season of the Witch, a discussion of some of the best DVD commentaries, and DVD picks of the week.