Episodes

Henrique and David examine All That We Destroy (2019), a Mother’s Day entry in Blumhouse Television’s Into the Dark that merges psychological horror, cloning science fiction and the mad-scientist tradition. Samantha Mathis plays geneticist Victoria Harris, whose son Spencer has a compulsion to kill. Rather than surrender him to justice, she repeatedly creates versions of his first victim, Ashley, hoping controlled violence will somehow cure the monster she refuses to confront. Director Chelsea S...

Henrique and David enter Blumhouse Television’s Into the Dark with Down (2019), a Valentine’s Day psychological thriller set largely inside one elevator. Natalie Martinez plays Jennifer, an office worker preparing to leave for a long weekend, while Matt Lauria appears to be Guy, an accountant stranded beside her when the car stops. With no signal and an apparently empty building, discomfort gradually becomes intimacy—until a carefully timed revelation transforms the situation into a story of sta...

Henrique and David answer a listener request with Tuff Turf (1985), New World Pictures’ unruly collision of teen romance, street-gang thriller, music movie and exploitation melodrama. James Spader stars as Morgan Hiller, a rebellious Connecticut transplant whose family has lost its money and moved to Los Angeles. His first bicycle ride through the neon streets disrupts gang leader Nick’s mugging scheme, catches Frankie’s attention and starts a feud that moves from school harassment to startling ...

Henrique and David take a stark turn into Blue Ruin (2013), Jeremy Saulnier’s independent revenge thriller about an ordinary man catastrophically unprepared for vengeance. Macon Blair plays Dwight Evans, a bearded drifter living in a battered blue Pontiac near the Delaware coast. News that Wade Cleland Jr. will leave prison pulls Dwight back toward Virginia, where an impulsive bathroom killing restarts a family feud and places his estranged sister and her children in danger. The hosts argue that...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer celebrate Valentine’s Day (2010), Garry Marshall’s Los Angeles ensemble romantic comedy. Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Jamie Foxx, Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Biel, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Shirley MacLaine, Queen Latifah, Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner headline a cast built around intersecting stories of romance, family, friendship and heartbreak. The hosts consider Marshall’s legacy, the pleasure of a genuinely star-packed...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer revisit Groundhog Day (1993), Harold Ramis’s time-loop comedy starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott and Stephen Tobolowsky. Murray plays cynical Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors, who travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, with producer Rita Hanson and cameraman Larry to cover the annual groundhog ceremony. A blizzard blocks their exit, the clock radio plays “I Got You Babe” again, and Phil discovers that February 2 will not end. The hosts trace P...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer examine Confessions of a Serial Killer (1985), the independently made Texas horror film credited to writer-director Mark Blair and released more widely in the United States years later. Robert A. Burns stars as Daniel Ray Hawkins, with Dennis Hill as Moon Luten and Berkeley Garrett as Sheriff Will Gaines. The movie is loosely inspired by the Henry Lee Lucas case, but the hosts are careful to distinguish its fictionalized murders from Lucas’s sensational claims, m...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer follow the bloody trail of Cold Pursuit (2019), director Hans Petter Moland’s American remake of his Norwegian thriller In Order of Disappearance. Liam Neeson stars as Nels Coxman, the respected snowplow operator of fictional Kehoe, Colorado, whose son Kyle is murdered and staged as an overdose. Laura Dern, Tom Bateman, Emmy Rossum, William Forsythe, Tom Jackson and Julia Jones round out a revenge story that combines grief, organized crime, mountain landscapes an...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer unpack A Simple Plan (1998), Sam Raimi’s snowbound Minnesota crime thriller adapted by Scott B. Smith from his novel. Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Bridget Fonda and Brent Briscoe play ordinary people whose discovery of $4.4 million inside a crashed plane destroys every promise of an easier life. The hosts praise the film as a restrained departure from Raimi’s more flamboyant genre work and a morally corrosive companion to Fargo, No Country for Old Men and cla...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer discuss Wind River (2017), Taylor Sheridan’s Wyoming-set neo-Western crime thriller starring Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham and Graham Greene. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker Cory Lambert discovers the body of Natalie Hanson on the Wind River Reservation. FBI agent Jane Banner arrives without adequate winter gear or local knowledge and asks Cory to help her navigate an investigation shaped by dangerous terrain, grief and limited institution...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer ring in the chaos of Get Crazy (1983), Allan Arkush’s cult rock-and-roll comedy starring Daniel Stern, Allen Garfield, Malcolm McDowell, Ed Begley Jr., Gail Edwards, Stacey Nelkin, Lee Ving, Lou Reed and Howard Kaylan. At the fictional Saturn Theater, Neil Allen and Willie Loman scramble to stage a huge New Year’s Eve concert after beloved promoter Max Wolfe suffers an apparent heart attack, while corporate rival Colin Beverly schemes to seize and demolish the ve...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer unwrap Krampus (2015), Michael Dougherty’s PG-13 Christmas horror comedy about a family whose holiday dysfunction summons the dark counterpart to Saint Nicholas. Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Allison Tolman and Emjay Anthony anchor a story the hosts regard as a modern Yuletide horror classic, balancing creature-feature scares, family comedy and a surprisingly sincere belief in the spirit of Christmas. Young Max Engel loses hope after a cruel family a...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer enter the icy Wichita, Kansas underworld of The Ice Harvest (2005), Harold Ramis’s dark Christmas crime comedy. John Cusack stars as mob lawyer Charlie Arglist opposite Billy Bob Thornton as Vic Cavanaugh, Connie Nielsen as Renata Crest and Oliver Platt as Charlie’s spectacularly intoxicated friend Pete. The screenplay by Robert Benton and Richard Russo adapts Scott Phillips’s novel into a Christmas Eve neo-noir full of mistrust, money and lethal bad decisions. C...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer revisit The Ref (1994), Ted Demme’s sharply written Christmas hostage comedy starring Denis Leary, Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey. Scripted by Marie Weiss and Richard LaGravenese, the film turns an affluent Connecticut family’s holiday collapse into a collision of crime, marriage counseling and acid one-liners. The hosts explain why this mid-1990s favorite belongs beside darker seasonal comedies rather than conventional Christmas comfort viewing. After a robbery goe...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer launch into The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Renny Harlin and Shane Black’s snow-covered Christmas action thriller. Geena Davis plays suburban teacher Samantha Caine, whose forgotten identity as lethal operative Charly Baltimore resurfaces after an accident. Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as private investigator Mitch Henessey, with Craig Bierko as Timothy. The hosts position the film as a witty, explosive alternative for viewers who have already memorized Die Hard. S...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer carve into Blood Rage (1987), John Grissmer’s cult Thanksgiving slasher starring Louise Lasser, Mark Soper and Julie Gordon. The year requires context: production took place in 1983, but the film’s theatrical release arrived in 1987. It also circulated as Slasher and Nightmare at Shadow Woods after beginning under the working title Complex, a tangled release history that helped this Florida-shot horror movie disappear before its restoration. The story opens at a ...

Henrique Couto and David Denoyer gather around What’s Cooking? (2000), Gurinder Chadha’s Los Angeles Thanksgiving ensemble drama, co-written with Paul Mayeda Berges. Joan Chen, Mercedes Ruehl, Alfre Woodard, Lainie Kazan, Julianna Margulies, Kyra Sedgwick and Dennis Haysbert lead four interconnected households: the Vietnamese American Nguyen family, the Latino Avila family, the African American Williams family and the Jewish Seelig family. Each prepares the same holiday through its own tradition...

Henrique and David celebrate their fiftieth episode with Dutch (1991), Peter Faiman’s Thanksgiving road comedy written by John Hughes. Ed O’Neill stars as Dutch Dooley, a working-class man who volunteers to collect his girlfriend Natalie’s son from a Georgia boarding school and bring him home to Chicago. Doyle is wealthy, furious at his parents’ separation and determined to make the trip unbearable, turning a generous gesture into a battle of wills. Ethan Embry, credited as Ethan Randall, gives ...

Henrique and David begin their Thanksgiving-film series with The Ice Storm (1997), Ang Lee’s adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel, scripted by James Schamus. Set in New Canaan, Connecticut, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, the drama follows the Hood and Carver families as marital resentment, adolescent experimentation and emotional isolation collide with a severe winter storm. The hosts see the weather as more than atmosphere: it is an indifferent force closing in while everyone focuses on private...

Henrique and David close their Halloween lineup with Satan’s Little Helper (2004), the darkly comic independent slasher written and directed by Jeff Lieberman. Alexander Brickel plays Dougie, a young video-game fan who meets a silent masked killer on Halloween and assumes he has found the real Satan. Dougie happily assists his new friend while the murderer turns an island community’s costumes and decorations into cover for increasingly brazen violence. Katheryn Winnick plays Dougie’s older siste...

Henrique and David revisit Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), Frank De Felitta’s made-for-CBS supernatural horror film. Larry Drake plays Bubba Ritter, a gentle, intellectually disabled man whose friendship with young Marylee draws the suspicion of local mailman Otis Hazelrigg. After Bubba saves the girl from a dog attack, Otis ignores the truth and leads three armed vigilantes to murder him. Charles Durning makes that self-appointed crusader frighteningly ordinary. The men conceal their crime ...

Henrique and David spotlight Scary Movie (1991), Daniel Erickson’s regional Texas horror-comedy—not the 2000 Wayans brothers spoof. John Hawkes stars as Warren, a painfully anxious teenager who joins friends at a small-town Halloween festival and becomes convinced that an escaped patient has entered the local spook house. Suzanne Aldrich plays Barbara, while Ev Lunning appears as Sheriff Pat Briggs in an all-Austin production built around one increasingly disastrous night. The film keeps Warren ...

Henrique and David take on Trick (2019), the relentlessly violent Halloween slasher directed by Patrick Lussier and co-written with Todd Farmer. Omar Epps plays Detective Mike Denver, whose pursuit begins after a masked teenager named Patrick “Trick” Weaver attacks a party. When similarly staged murders recur on successive Halloweens, Denver becomes convinced that the apparently dead killer is returning, even as colleagues question whether one person could survive so many encounters. Ellen Adair...

Henrique and David begin their Halloween-horror run with Cobweb (2023), Samuel Bodin’s feature debut from a screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin. Woody Norman plays Peter, an isolated eight-year-old who hears knocking and a girl’s voice inside his bedroom wall. His parents, Carol and Mark, insist that the sounds are imaginary, but their controlling behavior makes the house feel increasingly unsafe. Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr turn parental reassurance into something deeply unsettling. Peter is bu...