Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · October 4 · 1h 2m

There are many questions regarding Lance Oppenheim’s latest feature, Primetime. Why did the well-known documentary filmmaker (Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire) decide to make a narrative film, and one c...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · September 27 · 1h 3m

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · September 21 · 56m

For decades, Hollywood has tried to crack the code to a good Resident Evil movie. When Constantin Films bought the rights to the video-game franchise in 1997, it seemed like an easy win. The Resident Evil games started off as a play on George Romero’s zombie films but with puzzles and action-oriented combat sprinkled between

If you grew up in the Midwest, you may know the name Pulaski from streets, schools, or Pulaski Day celebrations. You probably know Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyła in Poland, and Marie Curie, bor...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · September 13 · 1h 10m

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · September 6 · 1h 20m

Horror movies have always attracted outsiders. In part, this is because the genre is frequently about outsiders: the weirdos, freaks, and monsters whose very existence is an intrinsic threat to the se...

Horror movies have always attracted outsiders. In part, this is because the genre is frequently about outsiders: the weirdos, freaks, and monsters whose very existence is an intrinsic threat to the se...

Director Bob Clark’s 1974 Canadian slasher film Black Christmas has acquired a prodigious cult reputation over the decades, in substantial part because it’s the most convincing contender for the title...

Although it remains a somewhat contentious subgenre, the rape-revenge thriller has a rich (if not exactly respectable) pedigree, extending back to seminal exploitation features like Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), and Ms. 45 (1981). Frankly if awkwardly feminist, such films appropriated violence from the male aggressor and directed it

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · August 30 · 1h 5m

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · August 20 · Bonus · 53m

I started reading Zadie Smith's 2000 novel 'White Teeth' a few weeks ago. It's a used, slightly yellowed paperback copy, a pre-pandemic book-store find that has been sitting on my shelf, mockingly unt...

"Break the code, solve the crime." As FBI Agent Dale Cooper, Kyle Maclachlan asserted this maxim with the G-man's typical rock-ribbed certainty during the first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's ...

David Robert Mitchell doesn’t not owe us an apology. His break-out horror film, the soon-to-be-sequel-ed It Follows (2014), jangled a few keys, attached to a Rubik’s-cube keychain, in front of its imp...

Despite any initial reservations one may have about Tony – the biopic/prequel about how Anthony became Bourdain that sounds like a for-hire job by an emerging filmmaker – the surprise is how perfectly...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · August 5 · 1h 2m

“It’s a time warp.”

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · July 31 · 1h 6m

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · July 26 · 1h 12m

Smile, darn ya, smile!

It’s fine. There are no gods, Ithaca has a population of like 30 guys, and Big Daddy O hangs dong.

A wordless – though scarcely silent – rail journey through the first half of the 20th century, the remarkable archival documentary Trains posits that the locomotive served as not just a revolutionary ...

With a filmography full of deconstructions of Great Men – whether they came from the pages of a comic book or have influenced geopolitical conflicts for the past century – it was inevitable for Christ...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · July 18 · 1h 20m

Raise your hand if you’re a history geek who did the Leo pointing thing when the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse were mentioned.

Simple. Miserable. Solid all the way through.

The original trilogy of Evil Dead films directed by Sam Raimi vary significantly in tone: The Evil Dead (1981) is an assaultive shriek of midnight-movie nastiness, Evil Dead II (1987) remixes the firs...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · July 12 · 1h 2m

Funny how this film’s big selling point as a work of blockbuster entertainment was its then-cutting-edge special effects — “You will believe a man can fly!”— which are still charming, but fairly dated...

Most horror fans: Sadako is everything. Creepy, demonic, iconic. Me: *sigh* Japan in the 90s was such a vibe

You know I’m something of a novelist / computer scientist / investigative journalist / whistleblower / hacker / psychic / visionquester / Chosen One / hit-and-run victim / mental patient / life coach ...

“What did we do to deserve this?”

If there’s one thing that Steven Spielberg continues to pursue throughout his career, it is the combination of the truth and the fantastical. Of course, he knows in reality these two modes cannot mesh...

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · July 5 · 1h 4m

RIP, Jean-Pierre Melville, you would have loved ‘The Wire’.

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · June 26 · 1h 11m

Truffaut putting on the Godard sunglasses when the mothership arrives… is this anything?

Podcast Episode · The Take-Up · June 19 · 1h 17m

She likes girls, she likes boys, she likes latex.

Find you someone who loves you the way that Christian Petzold loves an ambiguous, emotionally perverse dramatic situationship.

Amazon Prime "In town, you're the law. Out here, it's me." Spoilerish stuff below. A deeply idiosyncratic film that amplifies the the action-thriller components of David Morrell's 1972 novel into a pr...

The Backrooms invites interlopers to explore its endless passageways. In the years since an iconic photo of an under-renovation hobby store showed up in a 4chan thread, it has set the minds of interne...