PLP – V3E72 – Horrorfest 2019 – Halloween ’78 & ’18

In this episode, Eric and returning guest Cameron Rice take a look at the 1978 and 2018 versions of Halloween!

As a reminder, we still have our Amazon affiliation so if you wanted to help out the podcast, you could either head over to our wish-list or you could support the show via a free trial from Audible.  Thank you for listening and join us next week when Eric and Cameron discuss the 1984 and 2010 versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street!

Plain Label Podcast Amazon Wish-List!

Facebook: Plain Label Podcast

Twitter: @EricWilliams79  @PlainLabelPod

Instagram: PlainLabelPodcast

Aisle of the Damned: 10/26/18- Like a Knife-Wielding Gun

Mike-Elle Meyers?

Trick or treat, Damned fans! This week Bryan and Kent take a look at three films to curdle your blood. First, there’s the Indonesian action orgy that just landed on Netflix, The Night Comes for Us. Then, Kent waxes about why the 70s and the 90s are more alike than people think while discussing Bad Times at the El Royale. Then, both of the boys tackle the chronological sequel destroyer, Halloween (2018). Do you have the guts to listen?

Probably. You probably do.

All this and less on Aisle of the Damned!

MUSIC:
The Aquabats- Stuck in a Movie!
Baby Horror- Halloween

AotD presents Blockbasterds: 09/21/18

Welcome to the first episode of Aisle of the Damned Presents Blockbasterds, where Bryan and Kent talk news, trailers, new home video releases and what they’ve been watching outside the theater, all from the comfort of their virtual video store. (Did we mention they both used to work in one of them at some point? Unremarkable, but true!) This week, there’s some big rumors coming out of Warner Bros., but far from anything concrete. The new Predator movie had a scene get chop-pahed. (Sorry.) Oh, and we continue our luddite ways in arguing about why we prefer physical media. Join us! Or don’t, but it’s your loss.

Aisle of the Damned: 06/15/18- Rowsdower!

Sillhouettes are Hip

This episode, we make our sad goodbyes to an iconic screen legend. We also look at Johnny Knoxville in Action Point, a bevy of actresses in Ocean’s Eight, and a guy who looks like Tom Hardy in Upgrade (which may be one of the summer’s biggest surprises.)

We also have a lot of trailers to discuss and some casting and production news, at least one piece of which makes us very unhappy Damned boys. All this and less on Aisle of the Damned!

MUSIC:
The Aquabats: Stuck in a Movie!
The Jud Conlon Singers with Bob Thompson’s Orchestra: Scene of the Crime

Aisle of the Damned: 11/03/17- A Firehose of Crazy

Happy post-Halloween, Damned fans! In this spoooooky episode, Kent takes a look at the time-loop horror flick Happy Death Day, as well as Adam West’s final Batman performance, Batman vs. Two-Face from Warner Bros. Animation.

Meanwhile, there’s some tricks, some treats, and Bryan reviews some seasonal fare!

All this and less on Aisle of the Damned!

MUSIC:
The Aquabats- Stuck in a Movie
Andrew WK- Ready to Die

Aisle of the Damned: 09/22/17- The Tomb Raider-Uncharted Continuum

 

It Title Card

Whelp, the ol’ Damned boys are in for it now; Stephen King’s It is in theaters and it’s not clowning around. So how does it fair? Is it scary? Is it good? Is it good AND scary? We’ll find out!

We also delve into the news surrounding Star Wars: Episode 9 and a few other little movies like Wonder Woman, Terminator, and Halloween (now with more Jamie Lee Curtis). Oh, and we discuss video game films, the new Tomb Raider being the latest example.

All this and less on Aisle of the Damned!

Music:
The Aquabats- Stuck in a Movie
The Sluts- Loser

Aisle of the Damned: 10/31/16- Patrick Stewart Eating from the Trash

Bryan Lip-crypts and Kent Holle-ween are having you set your podcast dial to spooky as we shamelessly jump on the bandwagon and give our Top 10 favorite horror films of the 21st century. Before that though, we talk about Ash vs Evil Dead, the new Magnificent Seven, Storks and Shin Godzilla. We also discuss the Logan trailer, a couple of major hits losing their directors for the sequels and the possibility of a third Cloverfield coming soon. Oh, and JACK FROST IS COMING TO BLU RAY.

All this and less on Aisle of the Damned!

Music:
The Aquabats- 
Stuck in a Movie
John Zacherle- 

Kent’s Damned Movie Reviews: Goosebumps

ER MAH GERR!

One has to give Goosebumps credit for not taking the easy way out.

I’m not saying it’s a great film, but compared to the lazy cash-in on 90s nostalgia it could be, it’s a somewhat novel film that takes a new direction on the material at hand.

Now I’m definitively not the audience for this film. Like Jurassic World, it seems to have been thought up as a way to get late twenty-something parents who came of age in the 90s down to the theater with their kids. I, however, am probably what one would consider an 80s kid. I was too old for the series when it came about. Like a lot of things that feature teenagers, the Goosebumps books were actually for ‘tweens and younger. This means I’ve never read one of the books. I also never saw the TV show of the same name. Honestly, I thought R.L. Stine was like the “author” of the Nancy Drew books, Carolyn Keene in that he was someone Scholastic made up to give continuity to an impossibly long book series. It’s hard to blame me seeing as how there’s somewhere around 10,000 of them. Now, seeing that nearly every monster and villain featured in the film is a take-off of an existing monster from a famous horror film, I guess I understand how it may not have been that difficult to push them out so fast.

One would expect a push to turn the series into a franchise with an adaptation of some of the more beloved individual stories or a Creepshow-style anthology film for the little ones, but that’s not what we get.

While the film isn’t terribly original (I found myself referring to it as “Spoop-manji,” as it’s impossible to escape thinking of it as a horror-themed remake of the Robin Williams vehicle), it’s certainly more than one would expect from a kiddie-lit franchise. It’s jumps into the same meta-flavored Kool-Aid that The Lego Movie occupied in terms of trying to be something better than it could be. And the result is enjoyable, slickly made and not insulting.

In fact, I could see it becoming like the Monster Squad was to a cult audience of my generation; something beloved to a gaggle of horror-loving youth as they get older, while those who see it over a certain age will view it as a not-unwelcome curiosity, but not get what all the fuss is about.

The basic premise is that a fictional version of Stine, played by a barely restrained Jack Black bring more ham to the screen than a movie about a Hawaiian pizza, has to keep his creations locked in their books, else they’ll come to life and terrorize the populace. The premise is as paper-thin as his typing paper as to the “why.” When a new kid moves next door for his brush with the supernatural, a la Joe Dante’s The Hole, he befriend’s Stine’s daughter and through a short series of mishaps, unleashes the author’s imagination on their unsuspecting ‘burg.

It’s all in the name of throwing the entirety of the series’ creatures at the audience at once and it has something of a “burn-the-house-down” feeling to it. Sure, one can’t completely dismiss a sequel being made of pretty much any film but Passion of the Christ these days, but it doesn’t feel like an attempt to jumpstart a franchise. In fact, it feels like just the opposite and it’s refreshing.

There are points where the film threatens to go off the rails as Black competes with Super 8’s Ryan Lee to see who can be the bigger weirdo, but fortunately it trucks along at a commendable pace and there are enough welcome character actors (Amy Ryan, Ken Marino…) and jokes for the grown-up horror aficionado to keep things from ever capsizing. (Yes, I realize I just mixed a train and a boat metaphor.)

The bottom line is, if you’re the afore-mentioned audience this film was made for, you should enjoy it, especially as Halloween draws near. If you’re not, you may still have fun, but you’ll be missing out on the inherent charm for fans and young ‘uns.

Three damns given out of five