Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is
Speaker 1: Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And Oh, I
Speaker 1: feel a cool Pacific breeze ruffling the hairs on my
Speaker 1: forearm because it's time to find the Beast of the
Speaker 1: beaches in in Uh I stalled out there. We're doing
Speaker 1: a Hawaii movie, that's right. Um Now, when when we
Speaker 1: say Hawaii movie, what do you think of me? Maybe
Speaker 1: you think about classic Hawaii dramas or Elvis movies. Maybe
Speaker 1: you think of big budget films like Jurassic Park, where
Speaker 1: they need a lush jungle environment, maybe some flyovers, so
Speaker 1: they go to the Hawaiian islands. But you might be wondering,
Speaker 1: where are the b movies? Where specifically are the monster movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a really good question. So a lot of
Speaker 1: movies and TV shows are shot in Hawaii because it's
Speaker 1: a it's a convenient place to get a tropical looking
Speaker 1: jungle location, but they're not actually set in Hawaii. I
Speaker 1: was trying to think of movies that are set in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: especially in in our sort of wheelhouse, the closest. The
Speaker 1: first thing that came to my mind actually is do
Speaker 1: you ever see Big Jim McClain. No, but I think
Speaker 1: I think I remember a Mystery Science Theater jokes about it.
Speaker 1: It was a John Wayne anti communist propaganda thriller where
Speaker 1: he plays I think John Wayne is like an agent
Speaker 1: for the House on American Activities Committee, um, and he's
Speaker 1: just running around punching comy rats in Hawaii. Okay, No,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that, but that does sound part of
Speaker 1: the course in terms of the whole Hawaii movies that
Speaker 1: you find. Yeah. The other main thing in terms of
Speaker 1: Hawaii B movies, I was trying to think of Hawaii
Speaker 1: horror movies. There's almost nothing that came to mind except
Speaker 1: I think Snakes on a Plane begins in Hawaii. But
Speaker 1: the but the the thing that really comes to my
Speaker 1: with Hawaii B movies is not be horror or be
Speaker 1: sci fi, but be action movies. They're like seemingly a
Speaker 1: million action movies in the eighties set in Hawaii that
Speaker 1: are about drug dealers, and they're the sort of like
Speaker 1: Bikinian machine guns sub genre. Okay, yeah, yeah, the Bikinian
Speaker 1: machine guns genre being one that can basically take place anywhere.
Speaker 1: But it helps if it's a if it's essentially a
Speaker 1: vacation uh type environment, if it's tropical, if there's if
Speaker 1: their palm trees in the background right right. The bad
Speaker 1: guys always Dan Hadeia or somebody like that as a
Speaker 1: as a drug kingpin. Yeah, so I was. I was
Speaker 1: recently in Hawaii, and while I was there, I was
Speaker 1: pondering this because this is what I do on on trips,
Speaker 1: and I wonder what what kind of monster movie was
Speaker 1: filmed here? You know? And uh, I actually I found one.
Speaker 1: I found a good one, or a good selection for
Speaker 1: weird house cinema. It is a werewolf movie set in
Speaker 1: Hawaii and filmed excl elusively in Hawaii, entirely on the
Speaker 1: island of Kawaii. Wow. So I don't know if I'd
Speaker 1: go with you on good one, but it is a
Speaker 1: good selection. It gives us a lot to talk about, well,
Speaker 1: you know, being that I think it is the I mean,
Speaker 1: if you don't count snakes on the plane, and I
Speaker 1: don't really count snakes on the plane. Given that it's
Speaker 1: like the only monster movie, and given the wide um uh,
Speaker 1: the wide swath of quality that it could occupy, I
Speaker 1: feel like it lands in a comfortable place like it's
Speaker 1: it's watchable. Uh, it has decent actors in it, it's
Speaker 1: competently directed. Uh sort of said, yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's it's we'll discuss here. It's a TV movie, so
Speaker 1: it has that that TV competency to it, you know,
Speaker 1: like that there were network checks in place here. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like it. It passes the litmus
Speaker 1: test um and it it is I think the best
Speaker 1: Hawaii monster movie. I challenge anyone to show me a
Speaker 1: better one out of those Elvis movies count No, no, well,
Speaker 1: those are great examples. They they're not monster movies. But yes,
Speaker 1: two of of the Elvis Hawaii movies are of particular
Speaker 1: note here in Blue Hawaii in ninety six Paradise Hawaiian style.
Speaker 1: They were shot on the Isle of Kauai, specifically at
Speaker 1: Coco Palms Resort, which was a famous resort of the
Speaker 1: day with all sorts of Hollywood ties and controversy due
Speaker 1: to ancestral land claims by Native Islanders. Uh this, uh,
Speaker 1: this is actually the location the filming location of our
Speaker 1: movie today, our Wearwolf film was filmed at Coco Palms Resort.
Speaker 1: You see it almost all the time in the film.
Speaker 1: Um the ruins of it are still around the day
Speaker 1: because it was it was destroyed by Hurricane and Ikey
Speaker 1: in the most powerful hurricane to strike Hawaiian recorded history,
Speaker 1: and as of this recording, it has never been rebuilt.
Speaker 1: There have been some efforts and some plans, but nothing
Speaker 1: has come to pass, so it just remains ruins. This
Speaker 1: is funny because some of the bad Hawaiian action movies
Speaker 1: I've seen feature ruins of a multi story building that
Speaker 1: looks kind of like this. I wonder if those things
Speaker 1: were also shot here. Well, it's kind of like when
Speaker 1: we're talking about in our our Florida movie trilogy that
Speaker 1: you have, you have any kind of place that has
Speaker 1: a very um in a very hot climate, and you know,
Speaker 1: proximity to the ocean and a vacation industry, you're gonna
Speaker 1: end up with these kind of ruins there and and
Speaker 1: and that's just irresistible to filmmakers, especially if you're you
Speaker 1: need some sort of lonely location for your monsters or ghosts.
Speaker 1: I guess so. But but we should be clear that
Speaker 1: in this movie that we're talking about today, the resort
Speaker 1: is still active and intact. It is not it is
Speaker 1: not a ruin like this, it's a place with the
Speaker 1: golf course. In fact, it is that they show off
Speaker 1: many aspects of the resort, almost as if maybe the
Speaker 1: resort was was paying to be in the film or something.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually alleging that, but well, it's prominently featured
Speaker 1: in the credits. But but again, there were Hollywood connects
Speaker 1: and there. I think it was kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: a number of movies have been shot here, so clearly
Speaker 1: this was the place to shoot your movie. So this movie,
Speaker 1: I don't think we actually gave the top line yet.
Speaker 1: It is called Death Moon, and like many made for
Speaker 1: TV movies for the late seventies early eighties, this is
Speaker 1: a very title first kind of thing. We've we've talked
Speaker 1: about poster first type movies, title first type movies. This
Speaker 1: fits right in there. I am convinced that there was
Speaker 1: a title before there was a script. It was like,
Speaker 1: give me a TV movie called Death Moon, and the
Speaker 1: writers said, okay, boss, yeah, yeah, a TV movie. It
Speaker 1: originally aired. I looked this up May thirty one, seventy eight,
Speaker 1: in the nine pm time slot on CBS, following an
Speaker 1: episode of The Incredible hahul So this is a Wednesday
Speaker 1: night TV werewolf movie. Now, if you speak English but
Speaker 1: not Dutch, an easy way to make any film more
Speaker 1: amusing is to watch it with Dutch subtitles, which we
Speaker 1: did because the version that we found had had them
Speaker 1: from I guess maybe it was a Dutch TV broadcast.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but the but the great thing about
Speaker 1: Dutch is if you're an English speaker, you won't understand
Speaker 1: most of it, but you get a few cognates that
Speaker 1: are quite amusing. And so the first thing I learned
Speaker 1: upon watching Death Moon was that the Dutch translation for
Speaker 1: the English word workaholic is work beast w e r
Speaker 1: K b e E s T. I think technically would
Speaker 1: be like work based, but you know, work beast. It's
Speaker 1: what's for dinner. Yes, this this was very exciting for
Speaker 1: me as well, because on one level, it's it's perfect,
Speaker 1: Like if it's it actually makes the movie better to
Speaker 1: have the term work beast thrown in there, because it's
Speaker 1: about a workaholic who goes on vacation and turns into
Speaker 1: a werewolf. Uh so it's it's perfect to think of
Speaker 1: him as a work beast. Um, do you think it
Speaker 1: was trying to say something I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine, you know, when you translate a
Speaker 1: film and you do the subtitles, you have a certain
Speaker 1: amount of leeway, and maybe that was part of it.
Speaker 1: They were like, you know, we could they could have
Speaker 1: just gone with a straight translation of of Workaholic perhaps
Speaker 1: or some other translation, you know, but they realized work
Speaker 1: Beast was perfect. Uh so you know, you know, tip
Speaker 1: of the hat to whoever did these Dutch subtitles back
Speaker 1: in the day. Okay, so the reason you picked this
Speaker 1: movie out is because it's basically the only be monster
Speaker 1: movie that is set in Hawaii that you could find.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that's important to talk about with
Speaker 1: it is it's a It's a great example of a form,
Speaker 1: which is the late seventies made for TV movie. Like
Speaker 1: late seventies and early eighties made for TV movies are
Speaker 1: very interesting to me in a lot of ways. One
Speaker 1: that always comes to my mind when I think about
Speaker 1: other sort of prototype examples of this is the nine
Speaker 1: four Wes Craven directed movie Invitation to Hell, which is
Speaker 1: about a family who like moves to a planned community
Speaker 1: I think because the dad gets a new job and
Speaker 1: they try to join a country club, but it's actually
Speaker 1: run by eight. Okay, that sounds about right for you know,
Speaker 1: some of Wes Craven's work that was it at least
Speaker 1: got into a shallow amount of social commentary. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: uh and and maybe it's just me, I wonder what
Speaker 1: you think about about this. It seems to me that
Speaker 1: a thing that a lot of these late seventies early
Speaker 1: eighties made for TV horror movies have in common is
Speaker 1: that they are somewhere between a regular low budget feature
Speaker 1: horror film and one of those like social trend segments
Speaker 1: on sixty minutes and by the ladder. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to define, but they often have this
Speaker 1: element of a segment on sixty minutes that would be
Speaker 1: like you may have noticed more urban professionals moving from
Speaker 1: the East Coast to the Bay Area. That's because of
Speaker 1: a burgeoning new industry based on this known as a semiconductor.
Speaker 1: They're used in everything from calculators to clock radios, and
Speaker 1: you know, and like uh and and so that they
Speaker 1: base a movie around that, it often just feels like
Speaker 1: it has this ephemeral connection to some kind of trend
Speaker 1: of that people might be observing or talking about that week. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel I feel what you mean. And also the
Speaker 1: idea that this movie in particular came out on a
Speaker 1: Wednesday night, just you know, just out in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, and then it's gone. You know. It's very
Speaker 1: ephemeral in that sense. Yeah, yeah, And that they often
Speaker 1: feel like they've got some kind of very loose news
Speaker 1: peg or they often feel like, um, like they partially
Speaker 1: exist to educate you about a subject, like a particular
Speaker 1: place or you know, so in this example, it could
Speaker 1: be the Hawaiian island that's talking about. Though, I think
Speaker 1: whatever you would learn from this movie would be entirely wrong, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: About the only thing you could learn that would be
Speaker 1: correct is like, here's this resort. Like I'm actually looking
Speaker 1: at this resort, and I could at the time, I
Speaker 1: could travel there and see the same things that are
Speaker 1: werewolf sees. But like, if you're a credulous you could
Speaker 1: get the impression that this movie is may be teaching
Speaker 1: you something about like Polynesian religious traditions or something, which
Speaker 1: again I don't think it is. It absolutely is not. Um.
Speaker 1: I will say there are some some nice scenes of
Speaker 1: them driving around, uh that that at least a little
Speaker 1: bit give you an idea of the beautiful landscape there.
Speaker 1: And then also there's some neat there's some neat scenes
Speaker 1: of them walking around downtown in a little town there
Speaker 1: in Kauai, which, especially given that it's the late nineties seventies, uh,
Speaker 1: it feels like a time capsule, and ultimately, like this
Speaker 1: whole movie feels like a time capsule, especially when you're
Speaker 1: watching a VHS transfer from a like a Dutch or
Speaker 1: European VHS release, um, you know, from back in the day.
Speaker 1: Because I don't think we've stressed this yet. But I
Speaker 1: don't think you can get this film anywhere today legitimately,
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, the best you can do is
Speaker 1: you can find it where we found it on YouTube,
Speaker 1: where I think it's been uploaded since for people to
Speaker 1: to share and enjoy. But yeah, a DVD, a Blu ray,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's ever happy and I'd love, I'd
Speaker 1: love for it to happen, but yeah, I think this
Speaker 1: it remains this kind of echo from the past. Another
Speaker 1: thing that's extremely common about these late seventies early eighties
Speaker 1: made for TV thrillers is that they pretty much all
Speaker 1: have something like an elevator pitch that you could deliver
Speaker 1: very succinctly. There the what's the name for that format?
Speaker 1: It's like Dracula in Miami or something, you know, just
Speaker 1: like X in Y Yeah, and and and in that
Speaker 1: respect it fits nicely into um into a like a
Speaker 1: TV promo, you know, Uh, stay tuned after incredible, incredible
Speaker 1: hawk for Death Moon, what happens if a if a
Speaker 1: werewolf lands on a holiday in Hawaii, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And then you're watching the film and I will say
Speaker 1: I tried really hard to find such a clip to
Speaker 1: find like a network trailer for this movie, and I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I could not find anything. Uh So, if anyone out
Speaker 1: there has it on some like old VHS or something,
Speaker 1: I sent it to us because I'd like to hear it.
Speaker 1: So we couldn't find a trailer or promo of any mine,
Speaker 1: but maybe we can give you just a little bit
Speaker 1: of audio from the film. Let's do it. That was
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Court from the police. I wanted to know if
Speaker 1: I treading think during the night not a struggle? Did
Speaker 1: you now? I was out of it again? I crashed.
Speaker 1: Well are you all right now? I am? But what
Speaker 1: what is it? H? The lieutenant didn't tell me this,
Speaker 1: but I overheard a couple of his men talking in
Speaker 1: she was torn apart, torn apart. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you just heard, presumably something really enticing. UM uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be excited to find out what it was. But yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and get into the people who brought
Speaker 1: this film to life. First up, the director Bruce Kessler
Speaker 1: born Kesler. Really he has the late twentieth century TV pedigree.
Speaker 1: He directed episodes of The Monkeys, Mission, Impossible, Coultrack, The
Speaker 1: night Stalker, Barnaby Jones, Chips, night Rider, you name it,
Speaker 1: just just about any if you watched Mystery Science Theater
Speaker 1: back back in the nineties, just about any old TV
Speaker 1: show that the Joel or and or Mike would reference
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't know as a child what those shows were,
Speaker 1: but you laughed anyway. Like all those shows, Kessler had
Speaker 1: his his fingers in um. He even directed an episode
Speaker 1: of The Master Ak Master Ninja starring Levan Cliff, which
Speaker 1: there was like a movie cutoff that was featured on
Speaker 1: Mystery Science Theater, I think earlier in his career, So
Speaker 1: a lot of the TV work is in the seventies
Speaker 1: and the eighties, but earlier in his career he did
Speaker 1: a couple of exploitation films. Yeah, he directed the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight biker exploitation film Angels from Hell, as well
Speaker 1: as a film that I haven't seen, but it has
Speaker 1: a certain um uh, it has a certain mystique about it.
Speaker 1: Nine Simon King of the Witches, which starred Andrew Pine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen this either, but I've read about it.
Speaker 1: It is supposedly a kind of hippie culture expose that
Speaker 1: was promoted as like a Manson family type film to
Speaker 1: cash in on that panic. But but it wasn't really
Speaker 1: about that. It's just about like a guy who believes
Speaker 1: he can do magic and he ends up hanging out
Speaker 1: with hippies. Yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty much the vibe.
Speaker 1: But I was poking around in Bruce Kessler's career and
Speaker 1: found some some very interesting recurring themes. So one was
Speaker 1: that Kessler also directed a Christmas episode of the show
Speaker 1: t J. Hooker, remember the detective show starring um William Shatner,
Speaker 1: and the the episode was called Sleigh Ride s L
Speaker 1: A Y, which is the source of any images you
Speaker 1: may have seen of William Shatner in a Santa suit.
Speaker 1: I've attached one for you to look at here, Rob,
Speaker 1: he looks the Santa is not happy. Yeah, he's intense.
Speaker 1: And then in the same year, so these are both
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three, you mentioned that he did episodes of
Speaker 1: Night Right or his Christmas themed episode of night Rider
Speaker 1: called Silent Night k and I g H T. I
Speaker 1: was unable to discover if Hasselhoff ever dressed up as
Speaker 1: bell Snickel in this one, but he is he? In
Speaker 1: eighty three, he did two different Christmas episodes of cop shows,
Speaker 1: So I want to know the story behind that. Did
Speaker 1: he what did he? He's like, Oh, I've got a
Speaker 1: Christmas guy this year, you know, look up with all
Speaker 1: the Santa suits and everything you need. Or maybe he's
Speaker 1: just leaning into Christmas. Yeah, it's just like I'm in
Speaker 1: the I'm in the spirit. Give me some give me
Speaker 1: some Christmas episodes, right like he got ah, he ate
Speaker 1: a bad candy Cane and then he just couldn't stop.
Speaker 1: But in addition to Kessler's TV work and his early
Speaker 1: exploitation movies, it seems like in the late seventies he
Speaker 1: went on a minor binge of made for TV cinema.
Speaker 1: So this was like seventy seven seventy eight, including this
Speaker 1: beauty I came across called Cruise Into Terror from seventy eight.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read the IMDb synopsis and Egyptian stark
Speaker 1: cophagus that is, cargo on a pleasure cruise ship has
Speaker 1: a secret. It contains the son of Satan, and its
Speaker 1: effects start to make the ship's passengers behave Strangely, Now
Speaker 1: that that lines up rather interestingly well with our movie today,
Speaker 1: like vacation, like typical stereotypical American vacation plus classic movie monster.
Speaker 1: What do you know? I mean, you're right on the money.
Speaker 1: I looked this up, except that this movie looks even
Speaker 1: more dreadful than than than the werewolf in Hawaiian movie.
Speaker 1: Cruise Into Terror has on its side Ray Milan, who
Speaker 1: played the nasty old creep in Frogs, Remember the old
Speaker 1: man who's yeah yeah, yelling at frogs towards the end,
Speaker 1: ye right, And so in this movie. I found it. Also,
Speaker 1: this has been ripped and put up on the internet.
Speaker 1: So I was poking around and Cruise into Terror and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it just looks awful. But there was a very funny
Speaker 1: scene of Ray Milan yelling at a sarcophagus. Al right,
Speaker 1: well that at yeah, it's like I don't know if
Speaker 1: it doesn't look fully watchable. But the scenes towards the
Speaker 1: end where it's like a bad copy of the King
Speaker 1: tut sarcophagus and he's just you know, he's like holding
Speaker 1: an axe and being like you've haunted me for thirty years.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Alright, well, let's talk about the writers here briefly.
Speaker 1: J Benson and George Shank. Benson was mostly a career
Speaker 1: TV producer, and Shank did a lot of TV production
Speaker 1: work as well, but but wrote a lot more. And
Speaker 1: when I say he wrote, we're talking forty five episodes
Speaker 1: of n C I S which you may not watch,
Speaker 1: but somebody in your family watches it. I assure you. Uh.
Speaker 1: He also served as ep on in C I S,
Speaker 1: and he co wrote ninety six Future World, a sequel
Speaker 1: to Westworld, is in C I S. The one that
Speaker 1: has the it's like a lab and there's a goth lady.
Speaker 1: I think, so yeah, and it has um Oh, I
Speaker 1: can't remember his name. George Harmon said his name Mark Harmon.
Speaker 1: I think Mark Harmon's in it. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I know who that is. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know this show. I've only seen it on while visiting relatives.
Speaker 1: Is it about goths who solve crimes? No, there's just
Speaker 1: a goth on the team, on the tech team. There's
Speaker 1: one god. It is a team including a goth who
Speaker 1: solves crimes. Yes, okay, I think it stands for National
Speaker 1: Crimes in Space or anyway it exists. And yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a highly successful show, and and one
Speaker 1: of the writers of Of of Death Moon went on
Speaker 1: to be a part of it, so we know we're
Speaker 1: in good hands. Yeah. Well, shall we talk about our
Speaker 1: our actors then, right? Okay, So the main character in
Speaker 1: this movie is a work beast named Jason Palmer, and
Speaker 1: he has played by this guy, Robert Foxworth, who I
Speaker 1: don't think I was really familiar with. Yeah, he uh,
Speaker 1: you know, after I started looking into him and I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I totally know this guy. But when I first encountered
Speaker 1: our leisure suit wearing hero here, I wasn't sure i'd
Speaker 1: seen him before. He just kind of looked like some
Speaker 1: different people. But he's perhaps best known to modern film
Speaker 1: fans as the voice of Ratchet in the Transformers movies,
Speaker 1: which I don't even know what ratchet sounds like, so
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a good thing or a
Speaker 1: bad thing. Well, unfortunately, all this is doing is making
Speaker 1: me imagine other Transformers voice actors in this lead role,
Speaker 1: so like Peter Cullen, the guy who does Optimus Prime,
Speaker 1: or or oh you know that, you really could have
Speaker 1: gotten a good movie out of the guy who does
Speaker 1: the voice of Star Scream turning into a werewolf. At anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a major film, so good for for Foxworth, but
Speaker 1: also he uh for I guess for our older viewers,
Speaker 1: you might recognize him as the character Chase on the
Speaker 1: primetime soap opera Falcon Crest, which ran from one through seven.
Speaker 1: He also played Bernard at Chinawith on six Ft Under
Speaker 1: I don't think I watched enough six Ft Under two
Speaker 1: to catch him on that, and he also had a
Speaker 1: recurring role on The West Wing m but he also
Speaker 1: has on The West Wing um he was one of
Speaker 1: these characters that popped up for like three or four episodes,
Speaker 1: I think, so I'm assuming he played a politician or
Speaker 1: maybe a maybe a journalist, but I can't say for sure.
Speaker 1: Senator George Montgomery. Okay, I'm not all right, Okay, but
Speaker 1: he also has some strong TV genre credentials. He played
Speaker 1: Victor Frankenstein in the nineteen seventy three TV movie, and
Speaker 1: he guest starred in sequest DSV Babylon five, Star Trek,
Speaker 1: Deep Space nine, and Star Trek Enterprise. He was also
Speaker 1: in the film's Damien Omen two and was the lead
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine prophecy the Mutant Bear picture. Oh
Speaker 1: I never saw that one. Uh. And the thing the
Speaker 1: most recent thing that I definitely saw him in he
Speaker 1: was in a really fun episode of The Outer Limits
Speaker 1: from the nineties in which he played a bunker bound
Speaker 1: US president during an alien attack, like a very unpleasant
Speaker 1: US president, you know, it's very grumpy and demanding, uh,
Speaker 1: and he's trying to deal with the fact that the
Speaker 1: world is being attacked by aliens and you didn't know
Speaker 1: if you should trust the aliens, trust his advisors, etcetera.
Speaker 1: A fun episode. Uh. Well, I will say in this movie, Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know if this can really be chalked up
Speaker 1: to to Foxworth as an actor, but the character he
Speaker 1: plays in this film really has no identifiable vices or
Speaker 1: virtues except for the fact that he's a work beast.
Speaker 1: That's that's pretty much his entire personality. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: he he comes off likable without you know, a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of dimension to his character. But yeah, from it
Speaker 1: seems like a lot of times in I don't know,
Speaker 1: I guess you can go either way with a werewolf movie.
Speaker 1: Sometimes in a werewolf movie, the beset individual is just cursed.
Speaker 1: You know, they're in the wrong place at the wrong time,
Speaker 1: they're out on the moors, they get bit by a werewolf,
Speaker 1: and now they're stuck with it, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: not really a commentary on their vices, etcetera. Is just
Speaker 1: what they got. And I guess that's more of what
Speaker 1: we have here with the Jason character. But but in
Speaker 1: other cases, it seems like they you lean more into
Speaker 1: the idea of of caanthropy as as a as a
Speaker 1: as an overt physical manifestation of inner monstrosity. So in
Speaker 1: this he's uh, yeah, I think as an actor he's
Speaker 1: perfectly fine in this. He has amazing hair. Um, he's
Speaker 1: a great at conveying a sort of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: detached unraveling beneath his his style and he does. He's
Speaker 1: really rock in the seventies style on this because he's
Speaker 1: he's legitimately wearing a leisure suit, uh in in a
Speaker 1: number of scenes, which I feel like it is rare
Speaker 1: to really find in the wild in your cinema. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk of leisure suits, but you
Speaker 1: kind of forget what one looks like. Well, behold, here's
Speaker 1: Jason Palmer, our leisure suit wearing entertainment agent who might
Speaker 1: just be overworking himself. He's an entertainment agent. That's what
Speaker 1: his career is. I believe that's correct, or maybe I
Speaker 1: imagined that. I might have imagined that I thought he
Speaker 1: was in real estate. Oh wait, you're right, somebody is
Speaker 1: an entertainment agent in this right, I believe you, But
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong on that. Anyway, his
Speaker 1: there's not really you're not really given much to go
Speaker 1: on he has. I think maybe he does mention real
Speaker 1: estate once. But basically he is a stereotypical successful American
Speaker 1: business type. Yes, uh, with very very nice head of
Speaker 1: curly hair and uh. And I gotta say the main
Speaker 1: thing that I appreciated in this movie was the jiggle
Speaker 1: that he does when he starts about when he's like
Speaker 1: about to wolf out, you know, the moon cuts in
Speaker 1: between the clouds and the synth stings start happening, and
Speaker 1: then he just starts to jiggle and like, you know,
Speaker 1: his face kind of wiggles and his shoulders go up
Speaker 1: and down. He's getting into it. He's got his very
Speaker 1: expressive eyes, and his face was just like the right
Speaker 1: amount of doughey, you know, like it's not like he
Speaker 1: he had a his kind of a baby face without
Speaker 1: having like a full baby face, and it works well
Speaker 1: and scenes like this. It also gives him a sort
Speaker 1: of a boyish innocence despite the fact you know that
Speaker 1: he's you know, he's he's got a little gray hair
Speaker 1: in there, all right. So that's our lead. That is
Speaker 1: our that's our work beast. We'll come back to him
Speaker 1: at length. But then our second a character here who
Speaker 1: is I guess sort of a hero in his own right,
Speaker 1: is the character Rick Blaydon played by Joe Penny born
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six. He is the house detective. So I
Speaker 1: was trying so hard to understand what's going on here.
Speaker 1: He is a detective who works for the hotel. Yes uh,
Speaker 1: and I this was not on my radar as a
Speaker 1: thing at all. But but after we've initially talked about this,
Speaker 1: I looked into it a bit more and it seems
Speaker 1: like the house detective was actually a thing. Um. I
Speaker 1: guess it's kind of been replaced to a certain extent
Speaker 1: in modern times by more of like a full blown
Speaker 1: security coordinator and you have a lot more technology involved.
Speaker 1: But I was reading a piece for Travel and Leisure
Speaker 1: from two thousand nine by George uh Kylo Gerax, and
Speaker 1: basically the situation was you'd have an ex cop working
Speaker 1: at a hotel and doing a bit more than mere
Speaker 1: security guard stuff, so kind of overseeing, like overall security
Speaker 1: checking on, um, you know, anybody that was being a
Speaker 1: little bit fishy, uh, looking into into stuff that was
Speaker 1: going on in the hotel. And it apparently picked up
Speaker 1: a lot of steam in in noir works, specifically in
Speaker 1: the works of of Raymond Chandler. Now I've only read
Speaker 1: The Big Sleep, which was which was great, I loved it,
Speaker 1: but it looks like hotel detectives pop up in at
Speaker 1: least three works of his. So this is kind of like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like the Master at Arms on the Titanic,
Speaker 1: but for a Landlobb hotel. Yeah. Yeah. For example, in
Speaker 1: Um and Chandler is a The Little Sister from ninety nine.
Speaker 1: There's a bit where our main character is saying. He says, look,
Speaker 1: I said, you're gonna find this hard to believe, but
Speaker 1: I came over here with the queen idea that you
Speaker 1: might be a girl who needed some help and would
Speaker 1: find it rather hard to get anyone you could bank on.
Speaker 1: I figured you went to that hotel room to make
Speaker 1: some kind of a payoff. And the fact that you
Speaker 1: went by yourself and took chances on being recognized, and
Speaker 1: we're recognized by a house Dick. That's the house detective.
Speaker 1: House Dick Dick detective, you know, um, he continues, who
Speaker 1: standard of ethics would take about as much strain as
Speaker 1: a very tired old cobweb. All this made me think
Speaker 1: you might be one of those Hollywood jams that really
Speaker 1: mean curtains. Anyway, there's more to that, but basically, like
Speaker 1: there's an allusion here to a house detective, the the
Speaker 1: guy who is on the job looking out for any
Speaker 1: kind of illicit activity. And in some cases and in
Speaker 1: some stories, I think there's the idea too that there
Speaker 1: maybe they can be a little bit crooked. Um, but
Speaker 1: other times like they're there too, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: really strict and they're not gonna let any kind of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, unsavory business slide. Well. Yeah, so they're like
Speaker 1: a private detective, like a private dick, except they work
Speaker 1: for the for the hotel. Right. Yeah, and that's our
Speaker 1: character Rick here, he's he's the house detective. And you
Speaker 1: might be wondering, well, where have I seen Joe Penny
Speaker 1: for before? Well, if you ever watched Jake and the
Speaker 1: Fat Man from seven, Joe Penny was Jake opposite William
Speaker 1: Conrad's titular fat Man. Wait, was this the thing that
Speaker 1: was parodied on on the Simpsons with Wigham p I?
Speaker 1: I guess I don't remember Wigham p I offhand. Oh,
Speaker 1: it was on the episode the Simpsons spin off Showcase.
Speaker 1: It's where Chief Wigham and Seymour Skinner go to New
Speaker 1: Orleans and become private dicks. There their private detectives there
Speaker 1: in town. Um, that's that's probably what it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one with uh with the look big daddy
Speaker 1: it's regular daddy. Oh yeah, I do remember that line. Um,
Speaker 1: So Joe Penny He was also in some other TV
Speaker 1: shows of this era and the Law, also in the
Speaker 1: slasher film Bloody Birthday and in the night one sci
Speaker 1: fi film Lifepod. Have not seen them, but but they exist.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's Joe Penny. We'll we'll talk about his
Speaker 1: character Rick a bit more as we proceed. So question
Speaker 1: if you noticed this about Joe Penny in this movie.
Speaker 1: Occasionally he's supposed to be I think, kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of a slick hunk, Like he's really into fitness.
Speaker 1: He does a lot of pushups and exercise and stuff.
Speaker 1: But occasionally you'll get a certain angle on his face
Speaker 1: where his eyes look very Peter Lori. Yeah, yeah, he does.
Speaker 1: He's like a fitness buff Peter Lorii. Uh, to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, I think. Yeah. The fact that he's buff
Speaker 1: and can do one handed push ups on the beach.
Speaker 1: That's really one of his defining characteristics in this Like,
Speaker 1: we really don't know a lot about this guy except
Speaker 1: that he's really good at one handed pushups. He has
Speaker 1: a microscope in his office, which I thought was very funny.
Speaker 1: All right, there's a romantic interest in this picture, right,
Speaker 1: we work Beast falls in love because, of course, if
Speaker 1: you're a work beast, you go to Hawaii, you fall
Speaker 1: in love while you're there, and the lady he falls
Speaker 1: in love with is a character named Diane Yes, played
Speaker 1: by Barbara trentam And. Um, she was and she she's
Speaker 1: a interesting character. She would play Daphne in Ball. She
Speaker 1: wasn't in much else, but it's worth noting. She was
Speaker 1: a Monty Python member John Cleese's second wife from one
Speaker 1: through nine nine. So she's the mother of actress Camilla Cleice. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'll say she's perfectly fine in this role. She
Speaker 1: you know, it's a standard love interest role for the
Speaker 1: most part, but you also buyer is a highly successful businesswoman. Sure.
Speaker 1: I mean this is kind of a straight down the
Speaker 1: middle kind of role. She's just like, very earnest and
Speaker 1: very helpful and well meaning. Right now, there's a bit
Speaker 1: character worth noting in this, Uh, the character of Sherry
Speaker 1: played by um uh Debrayley Scott. Uh. She's basically just
Speaker 1: a stewardess slasher victim in this, but she's a comedic
Speaker 1: actress who popped up in a number of notable films
Speaker 1: of the day, and she was in nine American Graffiti.
Speaker 1: I think she plays uh Harrison Ford's girlfriend in that
Speaker 1: his character's girlfriend who was in UH seventy four Earthquake.
Speaker 1: She was in Police Academies one in three. She popped
Speaker 1: up on a number of TV shows, including Welcome Back Cotter,
Speaker 1: and played a corpse in Dirty Harry. Now there's another
Speaker 1: actor in this I wanted to mention by the name
Speaker 1: of Brandscomb Richmond born nineteen fifty five, who plays a
Speaker 1: character named Vince, who is I guess he's some kind
Speaker 1: of security guard at the hotel. He's dressed like a cop,
Speaker 1: but I guess that could just be a security guard outfit.
Speaker 1: He spends a lot of the a lot of his
Speaker 1: scenes in the movie chasing around a room thief who
Speaker 1: has been stealing from the hotel guests. But Richmond is
Speaker 1: actually probably to a lot of people, are gonna be
Speaker 1: very recognizable as a character actor and stuntman because he's
Speaker 1: been in a million movies, often playing a tough guy,
Speaker 1: a biker, a bar brawler, a villain's henchman in eighties
Speaker 1: action movies. According to his IMDb biography quote, he's been
Speaker 1: on the receiving end of the fists of Arnold Schwarzenegger
Speaker 1: in Commando gotten pummeled by Carl Weathers in Action Jackson
Speaker 1: and tangled with Steven Seagal and Hard to Kill. Uh.
Speaker 1: It seems like in reality, Uh, Richmond is a motorcycle enthusiast.
Speaker 1: I've dug up a few pictures from movies he was in.
Speaker 1: I think I found a picture or of him about
Speaker 1: to get punched by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. Um. You
Speaker 1: might also recognize him from Batman Returns as a violent
Speaker 1: crime clown who attacks Michelle Peiffer. Uh. He also apparently
Speaker 1: had a small part in Star Trek three The Search
Speaker 1: for Spock, where he played like a Klingon gunner. But
Speaker 1: he's definitely an oh that guy kind of actor. Like.
Speaker 1: You might not know his name, but you've probably seen
Speaker 1: him in at least a dozen movies, especially if you've
Speaker 1: watched action movies of the eighties. So we were trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to pronounce the name of the
Speaker 1: next actress in this movie, and I actually looked up
Speaker 1: an interview with her where a film historian who was
Speaker 1: interviewing her introduced her and pronounced her name with a
Speaker 1: with a French inflection, so he called her France New Yanky. Yeah, France,
Speaker 1: new Yn born nine and this she plays uh to
Speaker 1: a helpful witch. So for a film set in in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: we have I think virtually no Polini Asian actors, um,
Speaker 1: but she's the most prominent Asian actor in the film.
Speaker 1: She's a French citizen of Asian descent. She popped up
Speaker 1: in a number of titles before becoming a psychological counselor.
Speaker 1: Her first film role was in nineteen fifty eight South
Speaker 1: Pacific and she went on to appear in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three Battle for the Planet of the Apes. She was
Speaker 1: in the Joy Luck Club, and she appeared in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties Outer Limits as well, along with some classic
Speaker 1: track episodes and also Gun Smokes. So she was pretty
Speaker 1: impressive filmography. Yeah, so I was poking around in her
Speaker 1: filmography and h I found one thing that was quite odd.
Speaker 1: So she was in a nineteen seventy three TV movie,
Speaker 1: again made for TV called The Horror at thirty seven
Speaker 1: thousand Feet and it starred William Shatner and Chuck Connors. Now,
Speaker 1: if this is sort of tingling your brain in a
Speaker 1: strange way, maybe this will help make sense of it.
Speaker 1: There was also a classic Twilight Zone episode called Nightmare
Speaker 1: at twenty thousand Feet, which also starred William Shatner. But
Speaker 1: in that episode of the Twilight Zone, Shatner played a
Speaker 1: man who sees a grimlin on the wing of an airplane.
Speaker 1: And in this movie Horror thirty seven thousand feet, William
Speaker 1: Shatner is a priest who must confront a demon in
Speaker 1: a baggage compartment. It sounds great, yeah, uh and uh,
Speaker 1: and France new Yawn plays. And she's a passenger on
Speaker 1: the airplane who I think is supposed to be a model.
Speaker 1: I watched a funny scene where some guys trying to
Speaker 1: chat her up and she kind of gives him the
Speaker 1: cold shoulder. But from I was reading about this movie
Speaker 1: from the IMDb trivia quote, William Shatner described his character's
Speaker 1: demise in the movie as one of his unique ways
Speaker 1: of dying. Quote. I get sucked out of an airplane
Speaker 1: while carrying a lit torch into the airliner's baggage compartment
Speaker 1: to try to confront a druid ghost. Well there you go,
Speaker 1: a winning concept. Yeah, and I got some pictures for
Speaker 1: you to look at. Doesn't it look just gorgeous? It
Speaker 1: looks great. So the plane has stillactites. Am I seeing that? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the plane floating around. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: can't really tell. I think it is supposed to be.
Speaker 1: The plane is like morphing into a cave and it
Speaker 1: has stalactites in the bag and they're back. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: let's round things out here. Who did the music on
Speaker 1: this movie. It's Paul Hijara born Japanese American composer. He's
Speaker 1: who's been extremely prolific, composed a good one hundred film scores,
Speaker 1: and these include the likes of Corman's Death Race two
Speaker 1: thousand from nineteen seventy five, which was directed by Paul
Speaker 1: Paul Bartel, who we've we've mentioned on the show before.
Speaker 1: His score for Death Moon is mostly traditional, but but
Speaker 1: I think generally effective. And we also have this really
Speaker 1: weird electronic bit that plays when where wolf stuff happens,
Speaker 1: and I like that. Yeah, given the modulated stings you're
Speaker 1: supposed to, I think hear them and feel a little
Speaker 1: tingle or a shiver coming out of the moon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the lunacy uh striking you and the soul changing you
Speaker 1: into the wolf. Now, Rob, here's a question. Could you
Speaker 1: explain why the first thing we see in this movie
Speaker 1: is a view from the surface of the moon. It
Speaker 1: was a bold choice. You know, maybe this helped keep
Speaker 1: some viewers who were still hanging around after Incredible Hulk,
Speaker 1: who are thinking about going to bed early. And then
Speaker 1: they were like, WHOA, what's this? I thought there was
Speaker 1: some sort of a Hawaiian werewolf movie coming on. But
Speaker 1: now we're in space, right, we're in So we're in space,
Speaker 1: on the surface of the moon, the black, black horizon
Speaker 1: in the background, and then we get a text crawl
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it's significant that this was
Speaker 1: the year after Star Wars came out, but we get
Speaker 1: a yellow text crawl across the background of space which
Speaker 1: reads as follows wherever fearsome beasts have roamed. The legend
Speaker 1: of the werewolf persists even in the tropical paradise of
Speaker 1: the Pacific, where it is said and believed that when
Speaker 1: the shadow of the moon is cast, he who is
Speaker 1: cursed will be transformed from an ordinary man into a
Speaker 1: vicious beast. So, first of all, I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1: I do not think that there is a werewolf tradition
Speaker 1: in Hawaiian legend, though there might be some real world
Speaker 1: analogs that we could talk about later on. But second,
Speaker 1: it says that, so normally, how do you how do
Speaker 1: you turn into a werewolf? What happens some there's some
Speaker 1: kind of atmospheric phenomenon, or not atmospheric, some kind of
Speaker 1: celestial phenomenon, which is the full moon. Right, the moon
Speaker 1: is shining with its full disc down on your side
Speaker 1: of the Earth at night. This says when the shadow
Speaker 1: of the moon is cast. I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: Does that mean a solar eclipse? Because there are no
Speaker 1: solar eclipses in this movie. I think it's just ultimately
Speaker 1: what elegant variation where they just they didn't want to
Speaker 1: just say when there's a full moon, but then in
Speaker 1: trying to spice it up, they end up saying the
Speaker 1: wrong thing. Yeah, I think you're right. But anyway, so
Speaker 1: we're seeing this on the surface of the moon, like
Speaker 1: we're standing there, and then we see the Earth rise photos,
Speaker 1: so we see the Earth from the moon, and we
Speaker 1: get the title death moon one word not to and
Speaker 1: so immediately you're thinking, like why it was so, where
Speaker 1: are we going to space in this movie? Or they're
Speaker 1: going to be aliens? And ay, Nope, not at all.
Speaker 1: You never come back to the moon, never go to
Speaker 1: space again. We just for some reason see the Earth
Speaker 1: from space. But you immediately cut from the opening sequence
Speaker 1: after the credits to an echoe dreamlike vision of a
Speaker 1: ritual dance where music is playing and a man is
Speaker 1: dancing wearing a sort of wolf hat or some kind
Speaker 1: of monstrous head where where the face of the wolf
Speaker 1: is sort of on backwards. So when his head is
Speaker 1: turned and you look at the back of his head,
Speaker 1: you see the wolf's face. And meanwhile there is like
Speaker 1: a priestess chanting in the background, and then you see
Speaker 1: a guy who looks like he's dressed like a Catholic priest.
Speaker 1: He has a chin strap beard, So I was trying
Speaker 1: to think who he looks most like. You can kind
Speaker 1: of imagine former Surgeon General, see Everett Coope or somebody
Speaker 1: like like like if you picture David Letterman without a mustache,
Speaker 1: but with the chin strap beard, that's that's sort of close. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I believe this is Foxworth playing this character as well,
Speaker 1: just with a stick on beard, without a mustache, a
Speaker 1: post it note on his cheek that says beard. So
Speaker 1: something happens through this ritual the man doing the dance
Speaker 1: and the channing priestess. Basically they cause something to pop
Speaker 1: on the priests, the like guy dressed like the Catholic
Speaker 1: priest with the chin strap beard. Something pops in his
Speaker 1: neck and then blood sprays out of a hole in
Speaker 1: his neck. So it's like a cheaper version of Scanners,
Speaker 1: except it doesn't appear to kill him. He just spray
Speaker 1: his blood out of his neck, right, But it was
Speaker 1: all a dream. And then our hero and then he
Speaker 1: will learn his name to Jason. He snaps awake, gasping,
Speaker 1: clutching at his heart like oh like like he like
Speaker 1: he was having a heart heart attack, but he's wearing
Speaker 1: a vest and tie. He was sleeping in a vest
Speaker 1: and tie. That's just that much of a work beast,
Speaker 1: is that he's just working on stop and then you
Speaker 1: don't go to bed. You just collapse and you wake
Speaker 1: up and you work some more. I guess. So he
Speaker 1: was on a couch, I think. And then the very
Speaker 1: next thing, we're in his doctor's office and his doctor
Speaker 1: is almost has slightly kind of a grouch show marks
Speaker 1: sort of vibe. Uh, and the doctor is telling him,
Speaker 1: he's like, look, Jason, you're a work beast. You gotta
Speaker 1: ease up, you gotta light in the load. This is
Speaker 1: clearly a problem they've talked about before. Jason just it
Speaker 1: seems like he's working twenty four hours a day. He
Speaker 1: never sleeps, he never relaxes, and so and the work
Speaker 1: beastiness of his life is killing him. And so his
Speaker 1: doctors like, you know, you gotta take some time off. Uh.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, Jason what he wants is for his doctor
Speaker 1: to tell him what his dream means. But then he
Speaker 1: explains that he can't remember what he dreamed, and he
Speaker 1: never remembers his dreams, so I don't know. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then the doctor offers to recommend a psychologist. I had
Speaker 1: to write this down. He says, you know, someone into
Speaker 1: dream analysis, YOUNGI and stuff a lot of good ones
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. But the doctor anyway, he's like, no, look,
Speaker 1: work beast, you are too obsessed with hustling deals. You
Speaker 1: need to take a vacation. He actually gets out his
Speaker 1: prescription paper and he writes take a vacation on the paper.
Speaker 1: Uh so. Uh So Jason goes down to the lobby.
Speaker 1: He gets off the elevator. He looks at a travel
Speaker 1: poster for Hawaii. It has an illustration of a mask.
Speaker 1: The illustration of the mask scares him, and then we
Speaker 1: immediately cut to work beasts arriving at his hotel in Hawaii. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean basically, something other than work made him feel something,
Speaker 1: and he's like, oh, well, that's the sign I need
Speaker 1: to go to Hawaii. Right, So I would say somehow
Speaker 1: a major premise of this film is Hawaii is scary,
Speaker 1: which doesn't really work. Yeah, yeah, it when we'll get in,
Speaker 1: we'll get into more of that there. There's a lot
Speaker 1: to potentially discussed there. Uh and and I think ultimately
Speaker 1: there's there's some shallow exploration of some deeper topics in
Speaker 1: this film. But yeah, at any rate, he's he's drawn
Speaker 1: to Hawaii and yet at the same time he's a
Speaker 1: little afraid. But of course we we get to meet
Speaker 1: the fabulous resort where he is staying, which his room
Speaker 1: is not right on the beach. It looks more like
Speaker 1: it's sort of on a golf course and a swamp,
Speaker 1: but a really nice swamp, very very well manicured, yet
Speaker 1: very well. All the alligators have monocles. It would probably
Speaker 1: be interesting for for like Big Elvis Presley or Hawaiian
Speaker 1: movie fans to watch this film and like and and
Speaker 1: wonder if they see the same place. It's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where Elvis, his character got married in this film
Speaker 1: or whatnot. Yeah, he sang a song with the ukulele
Speaker 1: here and then, but that's where where Uh the house
Speaker 1: detective Rick is out for a job, hug so Jason.
Speaker 1: When he gets there, he meets a bunch of airline
Speaker 1: flight attendants who are staying at the resort, including one
Speaker 1: of them the character Sherry we mentioned earlier. And they're
Speaker 1: sort of walking around commenting on the poor quality of
Speaker 1: men at the resort. Uh, they don't seem very interested
Speaker 1: in work. Beast he's They're like, what about him? And
Speaker 1: they're like and then they're like, but there is always Rick.
Speaker 1: And then you just smash cut to Rick, who's like
Speaker 1: in short shorts running on the beach, showing off his
Speaker 1: his finally tuned physique. And I guess we're supposed to
Speaker 1: take away from this that like that, like Rick is
Speaker 1: hot stuff. And Rick, as we established earlier, is the
Speaker 1: house detective of the hotel. Yeah, which again, when when
Speaker 1: when I watched this as well, I had no idea
Speaker 1: this was a thing. So just like the idea, you
Speaker 1: have a guy like full time, like on staff, perhaps
Speaker 1: lives in the hotel, who just investigates crimes, like ongoing
Speaker 1: crimes in the hotel. But I enjoy being corrected in
Speaker 1: this way because it's one of those times where I
Speaker 1: was like, what this is so contrived, This lacks very similitude,
Speaker 1: And then I find out, Oh no, there, that's actually
Speaker 1: a real thing. I get, you know, And I was
Speaker 1: thinking to like, Okay, maybe this is only a thing
Speaker 1: in like big casino hotels where you know, there's a lot,
Speaker 1: maybe a lot more going on. It's just a bigger infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and you could you could make a case for needing
Speaker 1: something like this, but I don't know. It sounds like
Speaker 1: back in the day, you know, just a reasonably sized
Speaker 1: you know, I guess like a big city hotel, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of hotel where detectives are going to be
Speaker 1: popping up and showing up. You might need somebody in
Speaker 1: house to deal with situations. And I think also sometimes
Speaker 1: it's implied or or overtly stated to that you need
Speaker 1: somebody that is that's not the actual cops to get involved,
Speaker 1: particularly if it's an important client of the hotel. Right, well,
Speaker 1: I think we're Yeah, maybe that's where some of the
Speaker 1: crookedness comes in, because it's like, you don't want to
Speaker 1: necessarily have the law applied equally. You want some kind
Speaker 1: of discretion. That's really you know, you're sort of like
Speaker 1: at the service of your your wealthy paying guests. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, Rick doesn't sound Ricks just seems
Speaker 1: like this young guy like we were. And I think
Speaker 1: in real life the house detective would be like a
Speaker 1: retired police officer or hired detective. Not this this young
Speaker 1: hot guy running on the beach and doing two arms up,
Speaker 1: doing one arm up push ups, right, not not beach
Speaker 1: crime muscle boy. But so he's investigating beach crime because
Speaker 1: that's what he does. Apparently there have been multiple break
Speaker 1: ins at the hotel and uh, and so Sherlock Rick
Speaker 1: starts snooping around the hotel office looking for clues, and
Speaker 1: he finds something. I was trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: this was through the kind of large grain visuals of
Speaker 1: the version we saw. It looked kind of like a
Speaker 1: partially chewed up piece of carrot. But maybe that's just
Speaker 1: I don't know, Maybe maybe that's just my experiences with
Speaker 1: dogs coloring this. It looked like maybe it could be
Speaker 1: a cheese it. Yeah. It was something kind of large
Speaker 1: and orange. Yeah. And then meanwhile we we see what
Speaker 1: Jason's doing at the at the hotel. Here, he goes
Speaker 1: a lounging by the pool. He dozes off and starts
Speaker 1: having ominous dream visions. He dreams of a lady booming
Speaker 1: over him ominously, and you know, and I guess you
Speaker 1: wonder it's like maybe he should have just gone to
Speaker 1: that Youngian analyst and in Los Angeles. But uh, but
Speaker 1: then we cut back to Sherlock Rick, and he, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, has a microscope in his lab, and
Speaker 1: he does not a lab, it's just an office in
Speaker 1: the hotel, but with a microscope. When he's looking at slides,
Speaker 1: and he confers with his cop friend, I think this
Speaker 1: is Vince. I'm not sure if I remember right. I
Speaker 1: didn't make a note of who it was, but he
Speaker 1: has a a sort of cop buddy here, and Rick
Speaker 1: concludes that we're dealing with a professional room thief. Uh,
Speaker 1: someone who is like a a pro at working hotels
Speaker 1: and like making copies of keys to hotel rooms and
Speaker 1: then going in and stealing the things that belonged to
Speaker 1: the guests. Oh and this is where I think maybe
Speaker 1: this thing that we thought was the chewed up piece
Speaker 1: of carrot is like a piece of wax that would
Speaker 1: have been used in making copies of keys. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: that makes sense and then ultimately makes sense like if
Speaker 1: you if you have a big enough hotel, I guess,
Speaker 1: high profile clientele, it might make sense that you have
Speaker 1: at a house detective to deal with this sort of thing. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1: So later this night, we see Jason getting to know
Speaker 1: people who are vacationing there with him. Like he's hanging
Speaker 1: out with a couple of people watching a musical performance. Uh.
Speaker 1: And Jason's talking about his investments and he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm mostly into real estate. Uh. And It's like, I thought,
Speaker 1: you work beast. You cannot turn off your work beast. Right,
Speaker 1: he's here on vacation, he's still just talking about investments. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean he you know, he just got there. He's
Speaker 1: he's going to take a little time to turn it off.
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah. But in the background, we see another
Speaker 1: conversation where these guys are talking to a lady and
Speaker 1: they're like, we've got a prospectus. You can look at
Speaker 1: time is money and so it's just I think maybe
Speaker 1: the movie I couldn't tell if the movie knew it
Speaker 1: was trying to say something or not, but it seems
Speaker 1: like even on vacation, everyone's just trying to do business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's this there is part part of the Again,
Speaker 1: this shallow alchemy of this film I think is commentating
Speaker 1: in in part on like American work culture and uh
Speaker 1: and you know the degree to which it is poisoning
Speaker 1: us or was poisoning us, and it it's still poison us. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: to be I mean if this was true at the
Speaker 1: time in the seventies, it definitely seems true today that
Speaker 1: you know, for a lot of people with their work
Speaker 1: sort of is their life. Well, and you see that
Speaker 1: in like the term workaholic, right, we were talking about
Speaker 1: this a little off off Mike before we recorded here,
Speaker 1: Like which is a better term, work beast or workaholic?
Speaker 1: Because workaholic if you if you just actually look at
Speaker 1: the word it it implies, you know, it's espresisly states
Speaker 1: that like this is something that is harmful to you
Speaker 1: have an illness, Yeah, I have an illness. This is
Speaker 1: something that this is not good. I shouldn't be bragging
Speaker 1: about being or you know, patting myself on the back
Speaker 1: for being a workaholic. Um. Whereas work beast does sound
Speaker 1: more fun in some respects, but also does sound monstrous
Speaker 1: as well, something that just takes over your body, like
Speaker 1: like antherpy and you know you have to go out
Speaker 1: and slaughter the farmers, sheep herd or whatever. But I
Speaker 1: think I ultimately like work beast best. I think people
Speaker 1: should start using it in their job interviews and and
Speaker 1: you know, don't be afraid to tell your boss. Look,
Speaker 1: if if you can't handle me at my work worst,
Speaker 1: you don't deserve me at my work beast. Okay, I apologize,
Speaker 1: let's keeping no, no, no, that's fabulous. But anyway, so
Speaker 1: the lady who's got a perspect us on her way,
Speaker 1: this is Diane. This is who who, of course Jason
Speaker 1: is going to fall in love with. We can already
Speaker 1: tell just immediately when they need. They made eyes at
Speaker 1: the pool earlier, and they start chatting and she's like, well,
Speaker 1: I can tell you're on vacation instead of business, even
Speaker 1: though he's usually on business. And uh. And so they
Speaker 1: watch a musical number where the band plays a song,
Speaker 1: and this is one of those things, and it's very common.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this matches your experience. I think
Speaker 1: it's very common and made for TV movies of the
Speaker 1: late seventies to slightly pad out their run time with
Speaker 1: musical numbers. So like, what if we had characters go
Speaker 1: to a bar where a band was playing, and then
Speaker 1: we just watched part of a song. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it is a good way to to lengthen the film.
Speaker 1: I mean that it's pretty long because it contains two
Speaker 1: songs and it's in their entirety. Meanwhile, metal Storm the
Speaker 1: Destruction of Jared Sin a little on the short side,
Speaker 1: could have used some full musical numbers. I would I
Speaker 1: would definitely take some metal Storm songs. But this is
Speaker 1: one where the lyrics of the song also described the
Speaker 1: plot of the movie so far, so I wrote them down.
Speaker 1: The lyrics go, I was just minding my own business
Speaker 1: the way I always do. Nose to the Grindstone, heart
Speaker 1: to the floor, when you smiled at me, A smile
Speaker 1: that opened the door. Oh yeah. Like lyrically, it could
Speaker 1: be a Jackson Brown song, though when it's not a
Speaker 1: Jackson Brown song, I was trying to think of a
Speaker 1: to sing like doctor my Eyes. But it's about seeing
Speaker 1: these ominous visions. Yeah, it doesn't quite work, okay, especially
Speaker 1: he couldn't remember the vision, so that this is the
Speaker 1: thing that's not really making sense to me. He's being
Speaker 1: troubled by these dreams that he's having of this ancient,
Speaker 1: of this ritual. But he says that he can't remember
Speaker 1: his dreams. So how does he know that's what's troubling
Speaker 1: him or how does he like he It's implied that
Speaker 1: he doesn't remember what the dreams are when he wakes up,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like a very sort of question that
Speaker 1: would be posting the lyrics of Jackson Brown song. I
Speaker 1: have to say, um, but but yeah, he we have
Speaker 1: privileged information as the viewer. We see clips of his
Speaker 1: dream and but he clearly doesn't retain all of this
Speaker 1: except for some sort of vague feeling that, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Hawaii is attractive yet scary. I don't know, right, right,
Speaker 1: So Jason and Diane they get to know each other,
Speaker 1: talking about business, they talk about achievement. You know, they're
Speaker 1: they're like, they're like the big lebowskiter there. We are
Speaker 1: people who are able to achieve, and they talk about
Speaker 1: what schools they got into and becoming the executive vice
Speaker 1: president at work. Uh oh, while the camera keeps cutting
Speaker 1: to the moon, and every time it cuts to the moon,
Speaker 1: it plays this this little synthesizer sting that's like the
Speaker 1: finger of the moon coming down to touch you with
Speaker 1: a little tingle and uh and every time it sends
Speaker 1: Jason a little tingle, it makes it harder for him
Speaker 1: to pay attention to his conversation. And Diane starts sending
Speaker 1: like she's speaking from the bottom of a well, and
Speaker 1: suddenly Jason just gets up and runs away, clutching his chest.
Speaker 1: And then he turns into a werewolf in the bushes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is great because there's a couple who like hears it.
Speaker 1: They like, walk by this rat shaking bush and they
Speaker 1: hear this snarling and they go immediately report it to Rick,
Speaker 1: and Rick investigates and he finds wolf slashes in the
Speaker 1: palm tree trunk. So the next morning, Jason, of course
Speaker 1: does not remember what happened last night. I guess this
Speaker 1: goes along with him never remembering his dreams. But Rick
Speaker 1: is on the case. He's investigating, and uh, and we
Speaker 1: do then get some insight into what's going on with
Speaker 1: the room thief. I wondered if this would connect to
Speaker 1: the werewolf thing, but it doesn't at all. There's just
Speaker 1: a creep who's just stealing from the rooms. He's got
Speaker 1: a key cutter and he's making copies of keys, and
Speaker 1: at first it looks like maybe he's also making a
Speaker 1: silver her bullet, Like he's got a little casting thing
Speaker 1: and he pours some metal into it. But I think
Speaker 1: maybe he's just making keys. Yeah, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: there's any silver going on here, which ultimately yeah is
Speaker 1: we'll discuss. It's kind of a missed opportunity. There's nothing
Speaker 1: there's nothing really in the film about There's nothing special
Speaker 1: about the slaying of a werewolf or the detecting of
Speaker 1: a werewolf. There's nothing like that, be it silver bullets.
Speaker 1: There's some sort of uh, you know, um like Hawaiian tradition.
Speaker 1: Nothing right. So Jason goes to see a doctor. He's
Speaker 1: already been to a doctor once in the movie. He
Speaker 1: goes again and the doctor just thinks it's an anxiety
Speaker 1: attack that's the product of overworking, sun exposure and alcohol,
Speaker 1: and he's like, just you know, you need to chill out.
Speaker 1: You need to go on vacation. Yeah, he's like I
Speaker 1: I used to be a big city doctor and then
Speaker 1: I came out here and I just took it down
Speaker 1: a notch. You need to do the same, he says.
Speaker 1: I finally learned how to relax, But surely people can
Speaker 1: be stressed out in Hawaii to right. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I wondered if if that was part of like the
Speaker 1: genesis for this story. It's like somebody who who was
Speaker 1: experiencing vacation anxiety and and decided to explore it fictionally
Speaker 1: because you know, obviously that that is a thing like
Speaker 1: people who you know, it's just because you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're fortunate enough to get to go on vacation doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you you don't bring your your you know, existing
Speaker 1: anxieties with you. So and I'm wonder if that was
Speaker 1: a case where like one of the screenwriters had an
Speaker 1: experience like this and and did some you know, fictionalizing
Speaker 1: and and some some dream weaving around it. At least
Speaker 1: in the modern era. I find a very important way
Speaker 1: to avoid that is cutting off internet access. That is
Speaker 1: like key, yeah, yeah, Otherwise yeah, it's it's always lingering, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can always get a dose of anxiety as long
Speaker 1: as you have the password for the rooms of Wireless. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can feel bad no matter where you are. But
Speaker 1: so also on this outing, Jason and Diane end up
Speaker 1: going to an old church and we finally get a
Speaker 1: little bit of backstory. They go into of this church
Speaker 1: and they look at a picture of the guy we
Speaker 1: saw in the vision earlier, the guy with the chin
Speaker 1: strap beard, the priest, and we find out that that
Speaker 1: was in fact Jason's ancestor, who was a missionary in
Speaker 1: Hawaii in the eighteen seventies, which is a little I'm
Speaker 1: wondering if he's supposed to be a Catholic missionary, he's
Speaker 1: supposed to be a Catholic priest. Who is Jason's ancestor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. They gave him kind of an Amish
Speaker 1: beard though, like, like's if he's an Amish missionary. But
Speaker 1: I think maybe they went with that weird beard just
Speaker 1: so you could recognize his face to some extent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could see the resemblance between him and his ancestor. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back at the hotel, uh, we see a couple not
Speaker 1: Jason and Diane, and the other couple. I think the
Speaker 1: people who they were talking to about, I don't know,
Speaker 1: real estate investments earlier. Uh. They're watching a performance of
Speaker 1: what we are told is an ancient Polynesian ritual dance
Speaker 1: that was quote performed in secret until the altar was
Speaker 1: destroyed by missionaries in eight seventy eight. A curse, it
Speaker 1: is said and believed, haunts the descendants of the defilers.
Speaker 1: And she's like reading this from a pamphlet. So I
Speaker 1: should point out here that you know, this is obvious
Speaker 1: weird fictioning of Hawaiian culture, though at the same time
Speaker 1: the movie story is at least very shallowly acknowledging the
Speaker 1: destructive force of colonialism on Hawaiian culture. UM. I should
Speaker 1: also note that this dance sequence that we see here,
Speaker 1: and I think we see it again, there's this bit
Speaker 1: with the spinning dance with the mask on the back
Speaker 1: of the head that creates a transformation effect. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: actually pretty impressive. But I was wondering, like, where does
Speaker 1: this come from? I feel like I've seen this sort
Speaker 1: of dance before, but I I don't think i've seen
Speaker 1: it associated with UM with with Hawaiian dance. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's associated with any Polynesian culture
Speaker 1: or maybe it is. I don't know. I couldn't find
Speaker 1: anything about it, but it's impressive. This is one of
Speaker 1: the more impressive sequences in the film, where there's this
Speaker 1: dance and there's this this kind of bestial mask on
Speaker 1: the back of the head, and he creates this transformation
Speaker 1: effect and then of course we keep cutting to him
Speaker 1: freaking out over it, and that helps as well. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Jason wanting he's trying to say his good nights
Speaker 1: um to to Diane, but he immediately starts wolfing out again.
Speaker 1: We see the moon and and the synthesizer stings come
Speaker 1: in and uh, and of course it is the prelude
Speaker 1: to wolf ing out. He stares directly into the camera
Speaker 1: and he jiggles his body, and then there's a wolf attack.
Speaker 1: So Rick the house detective and Sherry the flight attendant,
Speaker 1: they're hanging out and then Rick has to go do
Speaker 1: some kind of security business and then immediately work wolf
Speaker 1: busts in Mall's Sherry. But it's one of those attacks
Speaker 1: where it's only an extreme close up of a wolf
Speaker 1: eye and a claw and you really don't see anything
Speaker 1: that happens. And then the next morning there's been a
Speaker 1: murderer and Rick is investigating. And first of all, Rick
Speaker 1: does not seem all that upset. He just seems kind
Speaker 1: of confused. And he says, uh, he says to the
Speaker 1: other person he's investigating with, she wasn't into drugs or
Speaker 1: anything wrong. So this doesn't make sense. And I was like,
Speaker 1: what do people people normally get mauled by wolves as
Speaker 1: a result of being into drugs. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: it's it's this is like a you know, psychedelic dark
Speaker 1: ages thing. You know, this is the idea of the kids.
Speaker 1: They'll they'll take the LSD, they'll take the mushrooms, and
Speaker 1: then they'll maul themselves to death. Yeah. I think this
Speaker 1: is just wor old fallacy, right, Like you you only
Speaker 1: get torn to pieces by a wolf if you're a
Speaker 1: bad person, must have done something. Clearly that is not true.
Speaker 1: Sherry Cherry, the flight attendant, did nothing to deserve getting work.
Speaker 1: Wolfed Um and the housekeeping worker, by the way, who
Speaker 1: says she discovered her. There's a scene where she's talking
Speaker 1: about it. She makes it clear that she was literally
Speaker 1: torn into pieces. She said that half of her was
Speaker 1: on the bed, half on the floor, and we don't
Speaker 1: see a drop of blood. I guess this is because
Speaker 1: it's made for TV, but it made me think about
Speaker 1: how it's interesting what is acceptable on TV that you
Speaker 1: can fully evoke the fact of a gruesome, gory dismemberment
Speaker 1: death if you describe it in words you, but you
Speaker 1: can't show any of it on the screen, uh, which
Speaker 1: I don't know. I suddenly had that moment of like,
Speaker 1: why is it like that? Like why why would TV
Speaker 1: standards prevent you from showing the fake blood but not
Speaker 1: prevent you from verbally describing a dismemberment. Yeah, because ultimately,
Speaker 1: like the irony with a film like this is that
Speaker 1: the description and then remembering what she looks like and
Speaker 1: remembering like the very you know, bubbly lifelike qualities of
Speaker 1: the of the actress, Like that's worse than anything they
Speaker 1: could have conceivably pulled off in the film, you know,
Speaker 1: any kind of effect they might have used with splattered
Speaker 1: fake blood or or you know, half torso effects, anything
Speaker 1: like that. Like, instead, the version that we have in
Speaker 1: our mind is actually pretty gruesome. Of course, as the viewer,
Speaker 1: we know that it was Jason in beast in beast form,
Speaker 1: but obviously, once again he doesn't remember any thing, and
Speaker 1: so the police arrived to investigate. They're sort of I
Speaker 1: think they're sort of competing now with with Rick versus
Speaker 1: this police detective who's sort of got a George C.
Speaker 1: Scott vibe, and they're they're having somewhat territorial dispute over
Speaker 1: who does this investigation. Well, I like how they're they're
Speaker 1: quick to remind Rick, Hey, Rick, you know you're not
Speaker 1: a real cop, right like I'm I'm the actual police here.
Speaker 1: Uh you're not, so please, you know, don't overstep yourself.
Speaker 1: And this is the point. I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: when I was taking a shower earlier today. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, what if all this werewolf stuff? This is
Speaker 1: the this is the fiction in reality, um Rick is
Speaker 1: the serial killer? Um because you know, you think about
Speaker 1: I can't remember to what extent this is a thing
Speaker 1: in the actual world, but I know that in various
Speaker 1: serial murderer fiction they often point that, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of times the murderer is drawn to the
Speaker 1: world of of law enforcement, and sometimes they'll take on
Speaker 1: a role that is, uh, you know, like a secure
Speaker 1: the personnel or something like they want to be a
Speaker 1: police officer, they want proximity to the world of crime
Speaker 1: and murder. But they you know, but they don't have
Speaker 1: it together enough to do that, so they end up,
Speaker 1: you know, being something like maybe a house detective, um
Speaker 1: and um. And then there's something like this version. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there'll be some more evidence for this hypothesis later. Okay. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: also we get Jason and Diane frawlinking around. You know,
Speaker 1: they're just running around on a beach, having a great
Speaker 1: time together. They're clearly falling in love. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: will say it's not the most convincing love story ever,
Speaker 1: but it's probably better at establishing it than Metal Storm,
Speaker 1: which once again I was just thinking about earlier today
Speaker 1: and was I was laughing at that with with Dojin
Speaker 1: and Kelly Preston in that movie, like absolutely nothing. They're
Speaker 1: just like, well, we're in love for some reason. Now
Speaker 1: we are they but we bind each other together. We
Speaker 1: have known each other for five minutes of screen time.
Speaker 1: Whereas yeah, and this, I think one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that this film ultimately you know, works as well as
Speaker 1: it does for me is that I do kind of
Speaker 1: buy into their their TV love. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's made for TV love. But you know it'll work,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're coasting after the Hulk, it's good enough. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so there's a part that again I think
Speaker 1: informs the backstory. Diane finds a birthmark behind Jason's ear,
Speaker 1: and Jason says, oh, something my grandmother told me about
Speaker 1: my great grandfather. She told me that he had a
Speaker 1: scar on his neck, just like my birthmark. Uh. So
Speaker 1: we think back to in the opening vision that he
Speaker 1: doesn't remember about where the chin strap beard guy it
Speaker 1: was spraying blood out of his neck. Ah, this is
Speaker 1: the mark. Okay, Yeah, anyways, nighttime again another full moon.
Speaker 1: Like in many Werewolf movies, this movie seems to think
Speaker 1: that you just get like a weak straight of full
Speaker 1: moons all in a row. Well, I guess there's there
Speaker 1: keeps being enough of a full moon. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't have to have like a full full moon, right,
Speaker 1: It's just you just have to be close enough and
Speaker 1: it's going to trigger the chain. Give us will do it? Um? Okay?
Speaker 1: So and oh and then also, uh, this is the
Speaker 1: first time in the movie where we really get anything
Speaker 1: like a a full peak at at work beast in
Speaker 1: wolf form. It's not great. I gotta say it's not great.
Speaker 1: He's just very, very hairy all over and has some fangs.
Speaker 1: And yeah, well I think we we do have to
Speaker 1: to be fair. Uh. First of all this the whole
Speaker 1: TV movie thing. But then also I think that the
Speaker 1: werewolf transformation and effects in this film are ultimately, you know,
Speaker 1: they're very old school. They're more in the vein of
Speaker 1: Lawn Cheney Jr. As opposed to the revolution in cinematic
Speaker 1: werewolf depictions that would come in the early eighties with
Speaker 1: films like An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, The
Speaker 1: Thriller Music Video, and so forth. If you think of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies werewolf films like stuff like stuff like Werewolves
Speaker 1: on Wheels, you know, they all the beasts must Die.
Speaker 1: I actually can't remember what the wolf was like in
Speaker 1: The Beast Must Die, but it may have been more
Speaker 1: of like a straight up wolf that they shot. Uh.
Speaker 1: But but for the most part, a lot of the
Speaker 1: werewolves of this era were still based on that old
Speaker 1: school idea of Lawn Cheney Jr. In a fur costume,
Speaker 1: you know, like that was your idea of what a
Speaker 1: werewolf was, and it was only in the eighties that
Speaker 1: we really moved further into this idea of a more
Speaker 1: loopine hybrid beast. That's right, Yeah, I was thinking about
Speaker 1: the same thing. You've got a couple of competing strains
Speaker 1: of werewolf morphology in the movie Cannon, and one is
Speaker 1: the one you're talking about, the lawn Cheney junior style,
Speaker 1: which is typically full humanoid body, fully by petal, but
Speaker 1: covered with hair, with claws and fangs, and often the
Speaker 1: hair on the head in this style forms a sort
Speaker 1: of rectangular shape, but it's basically a flat humanoid face.
Speaker 1: And then I would say the major differences with the
Speaker 1: more updated werewolf morphology that I think a really I
Speaker 1: don't think this was the first movie to do it
Speaker 1: this way, but it was really influential, was like you say,
Speaker 1: I'm Erican Werewolf in London, which came out in eighty one,
Speaker 1: and they're the big difference I think is that the
Speaker 1: werewolf has a long snout and a more dog like skull.
Speaker 1: That's that's the big difference. Yeah, and ultimately also a
Speaker 1: more ambitious bit of special effects creation here, I mean
Speaker 1: going beyond special effects makeup. Uh. So ultimately, if you
Speaker 1: had to create one, uh go and you don't have
Speaker 1: much to work with. The Lon Chaney junior direction is
Speaker 1: the is the way to go? Yeah exactly. I mean
Speaker 1: even most werewolf movies in the years since don't look
Speaker 1: as good as American Werewolf in London. So you know
Speaker 1: that that was a special, very special, unique achievement. But
Speaker 1: I will say as they don't show much of the
Speaker 1: werewolf and Deathman is especially at this point in the film,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a flash. It's kind of then close
Speaker 1: up on eyes, maybe teeth, and that helps it remain effective.
Speaker 1: Now this is mid movie some so they spend sometimes
Speaker 1: sort of waiting around in in some b plots, Rick
Speaker 1: ens up running around after the room thief. Like there's
Speaker 1: a chase scene that's almost Benny Hill like, uh doesn't
Speaker 1: quite have yakety sex, but it does have trombones. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to be too invested in the room
Speaker 1: thief scenario. I I mean I was staying in um
Speaker 1: essentially like a hotel room in y at the time,
Speaker 1: so I kind of thought about this a little bit
Speaker 1: of like what if there's a room thief? Now, you know,
Speaker 1: what if they're running around out there and there's a
Speaker 1: house detective chasing them. But really it's hard to get
Speaker 1: invested in this plot. What if there was simultaneously a
Speaker 1: room thief and a work beast, what would you be
Speaker 1: more concerned about? I mean, I guess ultimately the work beast,
Speaker 1: because the workbeasts will just straight up tear you in half,
Speaker 1: right there. Yeah, that's my point. So I think that
Speaker 1: the room thief subplot doesn't doesn't work super well. But
Speaker 1: but anyway, so we're back with Jason and he goes
Speaker 1: back to the doctor again. So the third time in
Speaker 1: the movie he goes to the doctor. He's just like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, doctor, feel bad and the doctor at
Speaker 1: this point, I think the doctor should just be like
Speaker 1: in I want to reference the Simpsons again, Sir, you
Speaker 1: need a quack, you know. But meanwhile, Rick is being
Speaker 1: assisted now by his criminology colleague Julie, and together they're
Speaker 1: looking for clues, and in fact, Julie finds a clue.
Speaker 1: She discovers traces of canine hair. I think it is
Speaker 1: at the crime scenes and Ricks like, but but we
Speaker 1: don't allow dogs in the hotel. And another thing that
Speaker 1: was funny is it's hard to hear the dialogue in
Speaker 1: the scene. It's like poor audio mixing where the phones
Speaker 1: ringing in the background are louder than Rick's lines. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so you know Jack and Diane, their romance is still developing,
Speaker 1: their hitting it off, and Diane is at her work conference.
Speaker 1: She's trying to close the big deal. But Jason reveals
Speaker 1: that he has made reservations for them as something called
Speaker 1: the Paradise Retreat, which, from what I can tell, is
Speaker 1: like a second order vacation. It's like, your vacation is
Speaker 1: not vacation enough, so you take a vacation from your vacation.
Speaker 1: Well that that sounds like a total work beast move, Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the vacation is not working, we need to take this
Speaker 1: to the next level. Yes, so they're going to leave
Speaker 1: the resort hotel and go to Paradise Retreat, which, uh,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I think he did explain that the
Speaker 1: major differences it's like they don't have TV and phones
Speaker 1: and stuff. So I don't know, maybe that's kind of
Speaker 1: like disconnecting the Internet like I was talking about earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's even more. Uh, it's like on the
Speaker 1: other side of the island or something, right, But before
Speaker 1: they go to that, there's one more night at the
Speaker 1: resort hotel. They're gonna leave for that the next day.
Speaker 1: H So of course we're gonna get yet another wolf
Speaker 1: out evening. So we at this point in the movie,
Speaker 1: I will say, is somewhat repetitive because it's just another night,
Speaker 1: another full moon due to tacks again. But this time
Speaker 1: we get work beast versus room thief that the streams cross,
Speaker 1: and it is not a close call. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: they should have made the room thief the Ava Empire, right,
Speaker 1: that would have been really that wouldn't or maybe even
Speaker 1: another werewolf. But it's just a guy who steals keys
Speaker 1: and makes copies of keys and then sneaks into rooms
Speaker 1: and steals stuff. So of course he just gets torn
Speaker 1: to pieces by our our wolf, right, and so people
Speaker 1: find him floating in the water the next morning, face down. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the room thief problem that is solved. But
Speaker 1: a thing that's funny is every morning we see Jason
Speaker 1: in a kind of days after, you know, he's like,
Speaker 1: what happened last night? I don't know. Usually he's in
Speaker 1: his bed, but in this case we see him wandering
Speaker 1: in a daze in filthy clothes where while like Moody
Speaker 1: Wolf for Morse music plays in the background, and he
Speaker 1: just stumbles past Rick early in the morning, doing one
Speaker 1: handed push ups and getting pumped up. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: even though his clothing is grabby, it doesn't look nearly
Speaker 1: as grabby as it should have been if he had
Speaker 1: torn a man to pieces just a few hours prior. Yeah, agreed,
Speaker 1: where's the blood? I guess they couldn't show that on
Speaker 1: TV right anyway, Diane and Jason they go off to
Speaker 1: their to their paradise retreat and so they're they're like
Speaker 1: on the road heading off to that place. But but
Speaker 1: but Rick is still on the case back at the
Speaker 1: hotel and he's hanging out in the lobby when the
Speaker 1: doctor who Jason kept going to arrives at the hotel
Speaker 1: inquiring for for work beast at the front desk, uh
Speaker 1: and I'm like, why didn't he just call on the phone?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but Rick overhears him and he wants
Speaker 1: to pick his brain. Absolutely no respect for medical privacy here.
Speaker 1: The doctor just explains to Rick that he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I've got his lab tests or or I can't believe them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so he explains that Jason's lab results came back
Speaker 1: and he needs to consult with a specialist on the mainland.
Speaker 1: And Rick says, what's wrong with him? Doc? And I
Speaker 1: thought the doctor was going to be like, it's the
Speaker 1: strangest thing. His blood was not human, it was work
Speaker 1: beast blood. But he doesn't say that. He just says like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just don't know. So that scene
Speaker 1: kind of fizzles out when it could have gone somewhere,
Speaker 1: but it's implied like the wolf, the blood is wolf blood.
Speaker 1: There's something wolfie about this blood, right exactly. But then
Speaker 1: Rick makes a very smart move. He's like, Okay, I've
Speaker 1: just been looking for clues. What I really need to
Speaker 1: do is go consult a wise sorcerer. Um. So instead
Speaker 1: he goes to to visit this wise and powerful witch
Speaker 1: named Tapulua, who is again the character played by France
Speaker 1: new Yawn. And she, of course, because of course, speaks
Speaker 1: about herself in the third person, so she's like, Tapulua
Speaker 1: knows everything and everyone on this island. And Rick thinks
Speaker 1: that she can tell him something about what's going on,
Speaker 1: and uh, and she she tells him first of all.
Speaker 1: This is a direct quote. She says, my powers are
Speaker 1: more powerful. She says they're they're rooted deeper, they're as
Speaker 1: old as the islands. But Tapulu ends up being cool
Speaker 1: with Rick because she says she's watched him and she
Speaker 1: knows that he has great love for the island. That's
Speaker 1: a quote. Again. Have we seen any evidence of this?
Speaker 1: Absolutely none that you know. There's only all we really
Speaker 1: know about Rick is that he takes his position as
Speaker 1: a house detective a little too seriously and keeps in shape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't see him, uh, you know, engaging in local
Speaker 1: politics or standing up for the native population. We don't
Speaker 1: see him particuting, being protective of the environment, or any
Speaker 1: other kind of spin you might take on it. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, even in just a film like this, uh,
Speaker 1: it ends up having this kind of almost dark place
Speaker 1: with Garth MARENGHI vibe to it where she's like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: you were you were the you know, you're a good
Speaker 1: Hawaiian citizen just because I say so. Of course you are.
Speaker 1: You're the hero of the film. But yeah, nothing is
Speaker 1: presented to back this up, and it's it's very I
Speaker 1: just graduated Harvard College, jail where I got an a yeah,
Speaker 1: so so yeah. I think there's ultimately a lot you
Speaker 1: could unravel there about the positioning of this of a
Speaker 1: character like this in a film like this, a film
Speaker 1: that again at least very shallowly is contemplating uh like
Speaker 1: the impact of colonialism on Hawaiian culture and uh and
Speaker 1: and the on the Hawaiian islands, um, but without really
Speaker 1: doing anything with it, like barely getting its toes wet.
Speaker 1: And then but then they prop up this character as
Speaker 1: as just totally okay, like nothing nothing problematic about Rick.
Speaker 1: I mean, she'll vouch for him, so I guess we
Speaker 1: just got to take her word for it. She she
Speaker 1: obviously saw something that we didn't see. She was she
Speaker 1: got to see the scenes that were cut. But this also,
Speaker 1: this supports my serial killer hypothesis because Rick has it
Speaker 1: seems like Rick has delusions perhaps not only not only
Speaker 1: a strong interest in the supernatural as well as law enforcement,
Speaker 1: but also has clear delusions about being like this, this
Speaker 1: kind of hero of the islands without any evidence to
Speaker 1: support it. Oh yeah, clearly, because when she's like, I
Speaker 1: know you're good because you have great love for this island, Rick,
Speaker 1: I think he says that's true. Uh, and she explains
Speaker 1: to him about the werewolf curse. Um. Not that there's
Speaker 1: much left to figure out for the audience, right, Like
Speaker 1: the audience is up to speed, but Rick is not.
Speaker 1: So she explains that work Beast had an ancestor who
Speaker 1: was a brutal missionary who destroyed the altar of the
Speaker 1: people who lived there, and they put a curse on
Speaker 1: him and his descendants so that if they came back
Speaker 1: to the island, they would turn into a werewolf. And
Speaker 1: that's what's happening and weirdly localized course curse ultimately, but yes,
Speaker 1: so it goes well, it's part of the curse also
Speaker 1: that he would be like psychically lured back there. Like
Speaker 1: it's not really ever explained that there's any good reason
Speaker 1: why he came, except that he knew he had an
Speaker 1: ancestor who was a brutal missionary here. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's yeah, it's not not very well supported.
Speaker 1: I guess he's kind of drawn back by that poster,
Speaker 1: but who knows. Well Anyway, Rick tries to go to
Speaker 1: the police detective, the George C. Scott type guy and
Speaker 1: explain everything to him, and he brings a book called
Speaker 1: The Legend and History of Like and thro Hopes, and
Speaker 1: the detective is not buying it. And again I liked
Speaker 1: how much crap the the actual police detective gives him
Speaker 1: over this. It's like, come on, uh, you you were ridiculous.
Speaker 1: You're not a real police officer, and you just brought
Speaker 1: me a book about werewolves. Again, I think this is
Speaker 1: this is a warning sign right here. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: would this would later on you would see an interview
Speaker 1: with this detective saying, yeah, we should have seen it
Speaker 1: coming because he was he was raving about werewolves. Um,
Speaker 1: and it turns out he killed all these people in
Speaker 1: this hotel and was blaming it on some sort of
Speaker 1: mythological beast. What's the name of the true crime podcast
Speaker 1: about Rick the uh, the room thief serial killer. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's called Paradise Retreat. Anyway. At the Paradise Retreat, Jason
Speaker 1: and Diane are like, Wow, it's so much it's so
Speaker 1: nice to get away from vacation. And they're giving each
Speaker 1: other back rubs and talking about what they're gonna do
Speaker 1: once the trip is over. I think, you know, they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're in love. Now, we've got to find a way
Speaker 1: to see each other. But then oh, the move fun,
Speaker 1: and Jason starts yet again his pro form a wolf out.
Speaker 1: He starts jiggling in the moonlight, and he dashes away,
Speaker 1: and Diane is like, Jason, what's happening? You know, are
Speaker 1: you undergoing some kind of hideous transformation? And she she
Speaker 1: chases him and he starts snarling, and I think at
Speaker 1: one point, while he's snarling and she's gasping, he actually says,
Speaker 1: I am a wolf now, because definitely the subtitles in
Speaker 1: Dutch say it been wolf. I'm I am a wolf. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean it been work beast, it's been wolf. I
Speaker 1: mean it's hard on vacation when you you know you're
Speaker 1: having to share a bathroom and occasionally you turn into
Speaker 1: a werewolf. It's everybody knows what that's like. It's really
Speaker 1: bad sharing a bathroom with a werewolf because the drains,
Speaker 1: the drains, i mean just just totally clogged. Oh and
Speaker 1: then finally we get to see a full transformation scene.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly what you call this technique. It's
Speaker 1: the kind that has match cuts where you're progressively more
Speaker 1: wolfy in each shot. Um and as he becomes a werewolf.
Speaker 1: One thing, I don't know if you notice the same thing.
Speaker 1: So his face of course becomes more here suit, but
Speaker 1: it also becomes more wrinkled. And I was wondering why
Speaker 1: why is he more wrinkly as a wolf? M yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He ends up he does end up
Speaker 1: looking older. I don't know if that was just part
Speaker 1: of the just part of the design or they, you know,
Speaker 1: if they put a lot of thought into that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he does look a bit a bit more aged as
Speaker 1: a wolf. But then, of course we're into the end
Speaker 1: of game here, so he turns into a wolf. He's
Speaker 1: got underbyte fangs, he's hairy now, and he morphs, and
Speaker 1: the question is is he going to kill his his
Speaker 1: beloved Diane, And he's not really himself anymore. He doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to recognize her, so he just runs around and
Speaker 1: then you think he's going to kill Diane. But then
Speaker 1: Rick arrives to save the day. Of course, so there's
Speaker 1: a chase scene involving the three characters that is extremely
Speaker 1: dimly lit. Uh and in the end Rick has to
Speaker 1: shoot the work beasts to save Diane. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: And he's not immediately dead he gets shot and then
Speaker 1: he starts wandering into a cave having vision visions of
Speaker 1: the ritual again and uh, and they kind of play
Speaker 1: it for pity. It's kind of sad, like, you know,
Speaker 1: poor poor beast um. And then he gets shot one
Speaker 1: last time and he turns back into Jason form and dies,
Speaker 1: and Diane just seems kind of confused. Now they do
Speaker 1: have a nice little bit at the end. It actually
Speaker 1: got me because he guns down the werewolf Rick does.
Speaker 1: He runs over and he's like, check doing that thing,
Speaker 1: would you always do? You know, check and see if
Speaker 1: the monster is dead. And then wolf Claw comes comes
Speaker 1: up from the ground and grabs him by the neck,
Speaker 1: and we get that synth music again. And I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness, they're gonna do it. They're gonna have
Speaker 1: him kill Rick and we're gonna have this dark ending
Speaker 1: on a Wednesday night on CBS Night. But now then
Speaker 1: he dies, then the hand falls dead and becomes a
Speaker 1: human arm, so that that would have been a good reveal.
Speaker 1: So he reaches up, he he strangles Rick, and then
Speaker 1: he revered olds that actually Rick was the killer the
Speaker 1: whole time. Yeah, I mean, I still kind of think
Speaker 1: it's the case that Rick's the real killer. But like
Speaker 1: I said, Diane does not, She doesn't seem all that said.
Speaker 1: She just seems like, what like she's very confused. And
Speaker 1: then uh, Diane and Rick walk away together and they
Speaker 1: stare at the moon looking at the moon like I
Speaker 1: know it was you. And then we see the dead
Speaker 1: Jason and his his eyeballs turn yellow for some reason.
Speaker 1: Do you do you understand what that? What that implies
Speaker 1: that he's not dead or the curse is not over,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's trying to be clever and saying like
Speaker 1: the curse is not just about Rick, it's about like
Speaker 1: a lot like it's about our our culture as a whole.
Speaker 1: It's about our our the way we handle work in America.
Speaker 1: I don't know, no time to hash it out. Roll
Speaker 1: credits yep, yep, and then we gotta we gotta cut
Speaker 1: to the local news. Oh man, and that this is
Speaker 1: this is so so made for TV. Yeah, yeah, absolutely
Speaker 1: it um clearly they had to they had to land
Speaker 1: this one in a certain amount of time. But I
Speaker 1: feel like they told up. They told a fun story
Speaker 1: for the most part. You know, it's very much at
Speaker 1: wearable story. By the books, there's not nothing really in
Speaker 1: this film that's surprising Death Moon, as we encounter again
Speaker 1: it's ultimately just a TV monster movie, But it is
Speaker 1: kind of interesting that it does seem to get into
Speaker 1: some very shallow treatment of um of of some some
Speaker 1: topics such as American work culture, stereotypical Hawaiian vacations, the
Speaker 1: legacy of colonialism, and cultural and inherited guilt. Like there
Speaker 1: seemed to be some of these ideas floating around in
Speaker 1: the script and in the final product that we have
Speaker 1: with Death Moon, they're just again very shallow, not not
Speaker 1: really explored. But the particles are there, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. You can almost see them on the horizon
Speaker 1: and you wonder if they're a mirage or not. Yeh.
Speaker 1: It's one of these moments where it's like, students, what
Speaker 1: is this movie almost but not quite saying? Or what
Speaker 1: is this movie? Students? What is this movie? Um almost
Speaker 1: but not saying about any of these topics? What is
Speaker 1: it almost confronting but then shying away from completely? Oh?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's actually one of my favorite things about
Speaker 1: sort of lower brow movies, B movies made for TV
Speaker 1: junk and all that is, sometimes they expose interesting kind
Speaker 1: of vague anxieties and awarenesses that aren't even really fully
Speaker 1: recognized by the creators. Yeah, and in and in other
Speaker 1: cases too. It's the kind of thing where you could
Speaker 1: make an argument that, say, a great artist could seriously
Speaker 1: contemplate these ideas in a film, but but maybe not,
Speaker 1: maybe not well or or you know, the bar would
Speaker 1: be so much higher to pull it off at like
Speaker 1: a at a like a you know, a high level,
Speaker 1: but at the low level of the B of B cinema. Yeah,
Speaker 1: almost anything is fair game. I got an alternate title,
Speaker 1: Work Beast goes Well Beast. Oh no, not very good. Huh.
Speaker 1: You mean like work Beasts goes west to the Hawaiian Islands,
Speaker 1: or are you proposing a sequel where work Beast comes
Speaker 1: back and goes on even further. I don't know, it
Speaker 1: goes to Japan or something else. Oh yeah, work Beast
Speaker 1: goes east and goes Uh. I mean work Beast takes Manhattan.
Speaker 1: There's so many directions you could go in. Um, well,
Speaker 1: work Beast is a great title. I want to see
Speaker 1: someone take it and run with it. Um so uh.
Speaker 1: You know, if if you're out there listening, go for it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And certainly I would love to hear from any listeners
Speaker 1: who uh you know with with with Dutch backgrounds, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know who can who can tell it it really
Speaker 1: fill us in about the work beast thing. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: also if you know about any notable Hawaiian or Polynesian
Speaker 1: horror movies or or other like be sci fi movies,
Speaker 1: anything like that that that we didn't come across, Yes,
Speaker 1: right us. So this is the point in the episode
Speaker 1: where we were going to have a section discussing the
Speaker 1: mere notion of were wolves in Hawaii, uh, the Hawaiian
Speaker 1: islands where there have never been wolves, uh, and get
Speaker 1: into a little related Polynesian mythology, because there doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be anything quite like a Western werewolf in Hawaiian
Speaker 1: folklore and mythology for a variety of reasons. However, there
Speaker 1: are human animal hybrids, there are animal transformations, there are
Speaker 1: heroes and gods that have hybrid qualities. There's there's a
Speaker 1: hog child. There, even the dog men, and even at
Speaker 1: least one quote unquote cannibalistic dog man that is from
Speaker 1: the work of early American folkloreist Martha Warren Beckwith So
Speaker 1: these are not Western werewolves. And to be clear, what
Speaker 1: we see in Death Moon is very much a classic
Speaker 1: horror movie Wolfman, you know, a wolfman born out of
Speaker 1: Western um were wolf beliefs and ideas. Uh So, anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a lot to break down here, and I kept
Speaker 1: adding information to the notes on really late did Hawaiian mythology,
Speaker 1: and Joe was digging up some stuff as well, and
Speaker 1: then we just realized it was getting a bit long,
Speaker 1: and this might be might be more appropriate for a
Speaker 1: future episode of stuff to blow your mind itself, either
Speaker 1: focusing on Hawaiian mythology and a broader sense, or doing
Speaker 1: a kind of survey of beast man myths in various cultures.
Speaker 1: So if that's the sort of thing you're interested in,
Speaker 1: let us know. Now for the rest of you, if
Speaker 1: you're wondering, well, where can I see Deathman there there
Speaker 1: there are three ways to go about it. One is
Speaker 1: find yourself probably a European VHS release of this. Uh
Speaker 1: you're not gonna find it on DVD or Blu ray,
Speaker 1: and then have a VHS player so you can watch it,
Speaker 1: I think, as far as I can tell. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the only way it was ever released to h to
Speaker 1: home audiences. Another way you can see this movie is
Speaker 1: by traveling back in time to and catching it on
Speaker 1: the Wednesday night line up on CBS, or you can
Speaker 1: simply go to YouTube, where again, there's been a rip
Speaker 1: of it with with Dutch subtitles on YouTube since so
Speaker 1: I imagine it's still around. Um, nobody seems to care.
Speaker 1: That's that's where you can watch it. Uh, and it's
Speaker 1: it's not a bad rip, It's not perfect. Ultimately, I
Speaker 1: think i'd love to see this film pop up on
Speaker 1: Blu Ray. Um, I'd love to see what I mean,
Speaker 1: if restored footage is even possible, I would like to
Speaker 1: see it. I think it's ultimately kind of a fun
Speaker 1: film that could do with a little more exposure. So
Speaker 1: shout Factory if you're listening, get on it. Give me that,
Speaker 1: Give me that that Deathman and Blu Ray the VHS
Speaker 1: cover for whatever release this was. I guess this. This
Speaker 1: may have been uh Dutch or Germany or something that
Speaker 1: says wolf smand this really gives the wrong idea about
Speaker 1: the movie. Yeah, it looks, uh, you know, very exploitive
Speaker 1: based on this VHS box art, I can imagine the
Speaker 1: disappointment of people who picked it up. All right, if
Speaker 1: you want to listen to more Weird How Cinema. You
Speaker 1: can find it in the Stuff table in your Mind
Speaker 1: podcast feed wherever you get your podcast. Weird How Cinema
Speaker 1: comes out on Friday's that's uh, that's our time to
Speaker 1: put the science aside and just focus on a on
Speaker 1: a weird movie. The rest of the time, we are
Speaker 1: a science podcast two season Thursdays, those are our core
Speaker 1: episodes in which we take on scientific, cultural, sometimes philosophic
Speaker 1: topics and then yeah, on Friday, we put we throw
Speaker 1: all that out the window and we just talk about
Speaker 1: bad wearwolf films and the like huge things. As always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
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