Forbidden Cinema

What better mashup than the ET Guy and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. Surely that will work. Strangely it does and creates one of the best haunted house movies ever made. We go way back to 1982 and watched Poltergeist for the first time for either of us. We delve into what would be done with a forbidden film in our respective households. We talk about how much of a debt one of our favorite films, Ghostbusters, owes to this. We discuss the supposed curse and spend a moment reflecting on the real life tragedies that accompanied the cast of the film. We also talk about how much we love to see an adult couple in a film who seem to actually like each other, seems rare these days.

Join Zack and Jenny as we discuss what a remake of this lovely mess of a movie would look like. We go deeper and explore some of the unanswered question brought up in the main episode. And we dive deeper than any podcast into a Pennsylvania newspaper from the time of this film's release.

Join us as we go back to 1988 and go deeper on our unanswered questions from Scrooged. We try to figure out why Jenny's mom dislikes Bill Murray so much and go on a tangent about his random late night calls to writer Mitch Glazer. We take a look at the wacky budget for this film compared to others of the time. Zack finds an internal memo about the amount of service calls that Xerox attributes to butt copying. We look at the time of 1988, the end of the Reagan years. We look at the music charts and the headlines in the Observer Reporter. Also Zack deep dives the December 1988 issue of Playboy and goes on an unnecessarily thorough look at the resumes of the year's playmates.

The holidays are over and hopefully we all survived. We went deeper than should be expected on Christmas Vacation. We as the question, "Who is National Lampoon?" We talk about family gatherings, action figures, and 8mm porno. We talk about how ubiquitous racist depictions of AAPI are in holiday movies an how happy we are that this didn't have them... then we read the source material... frowny face... We take on squatters rights and bring the legislature of our home state to task for having extremely draconian laws about breastfeeding in public. We ask Alexa questions about human anatomy that she is not prepared to answer. We also have 2 surprises, a present for Jenny, and the opportunity to let fate decide our next film.

Come back with us to 1987 where an early example of the PG-13 movie first introduced a generation of children to the concept of men's magazines and a certain word starting with the letter F. We look back at how the world has changed in the time since the release and continue our path of nostalgia. We try to figure out who this movie was really for and what a 17 year old would reasonably be able to handle in a wacky night. We once again experience the trope of criminals escalating to mass child murder really quickly. Remember... Don't FOOL with the babysitter.