Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

This week we're back in Roger Corman territory with an early Joe Dante feature for New World Pictures, Piranha from 1978.
When a pair of teenage hikers go missing in the Texas wilds, a bounty hunter will have to team up with a reclusive alcoholic weirdo to find them. Their search takes them to a secret research facility where they accidentally release a large number of genetically modified piranhas into the local river system where they will wreak havoc on a summer camp and a lakeside resort full of people just begging to be nibbled on by voracious carnivorous fish. Along the way our hapless heroes will have to outwit the cops and a military coverup.
Piranha is an extraordinarily silly monster movie that is obviously doing everything it can to snatch some of that precious Jaws money the very same year that Universal released the much-anticipated Jaws 2. A lawsuit nearly stopped this movie in its tracks but were it not for Steven Spielberg himself, we might not have ever seen this highly enjoyable trainwreck of an exploitation movie.
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If you're not listening to our sister podcast, Laughing in the Dark, an Are You Afraid of the Dark rewatch podcast here's your chance to check it out with Season 3, Episode 4: The Tale of the Dollmaker.
This week it's Aileen's turn to tell the 9:30 Society all about the fifth episode of the third season of Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This episode hits us with some AYAOTD classic tropes. You get a kid abandoned by their parents for a time, a complete lack of anything that you could call a dollmaker, and people being real weird about trauma. In this episode we find Melissa spending some time at her aunt and uncle's place. She's eager to hang out with their neighbor, a girl her own age but is shocked to learn that this friend of her vanished mysteriously and no trace of her was ever found. What's worse, her parents were so broken up about it that they packed up and moved away and no one will talk about the lingering horror of this disappearance. They just keep pushing it down. But because it's Are You Afraid of the Dark, Melissa keeps breaking into the empty neighbor house and discovers some really weird stuff going down in that attic.
Don't forget to listen to Bryan and Dave on Bring Me The Axe! and 99 Cent Rental, Aileen on Uy Que Horror! and Mikie on The Rewatcher!

This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now!
The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals liberally from George Miller's 1981 sequel to Mad Max, The Road Warrior. We find Mike Brady lookalike, Scorpion driving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, on the run from his former gang, the genocidal Templars. Mike's dedication to the loner lifestyle is put to the test when he rescues a mysterious injured woman from the Templars and he'll be called on to protect a colony of survivors when the ghosts of his past return to settle an old beef.
New Barbarians leans into the spaghetti western overtures that inspired Mad Max while stealing from the same movie but on a significantly smaller budget. Italian Mas Max ripoffs are already a cheap, threadbare affair but this movie, the very first of many more to follow, starts off from an even cheaper, more threadbare position and it's quite frankly amazing that this movie proved that ripping off a high-flying Australian stunt spectacular with the crappiest cars and wasteland punks you've ever seen.
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This week we're taking on one of the weirdest horror movie misfires of the 80s. It's an explicable mess of a movie that statistically shouldn't have been a loser ad yet here we are.
A series of brutal murders and rapes rocks a small New England town. The medical examiner, the chief of police, and a local newspaper reporter team up to solve the crimes but the evidence doesn't make any sense. Is this the work of a gang of people or one man? The latter seems to be the case but how could that even be possible given the loads and loads of evidence (that joke will make sense when you listen to the episode) left behind. In the end, shadows of the town's ugly past resurface and the perpetrator of these crimes may not even be human!
Starring iconoclast and independent film mastermind John Cassavetes, Incubus sports a script written by Amityville Horror's Sandor Stern with heavy rewrites from Cassavetes himself. The remaining movie is a mystifying parade of the most deranged dialog you've ever heard. In any other case this is a forgettable piece of 80s horror garbage but the utterly insane chatter makes it a truly unique horror movie.
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This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make a movie. But when scripts vanished, the cast and crew had to make a movie based on their broad memories of the original story and we'd be lying if we didn't think they did a pretty good job of it. Severin Films bent over backwards in 2025 to recover what materials they could find and released the best possible scan of the last remaining 35mm prints of The Shark Hunter, a movie that was dangerously close to disappearing forever.
In The Shark Hunter we find a sun burned and bloodshot American expat living seaside in Mexico, making a living by leaping into the ocean to kill every shark he sees, which happens to be a lot of sharks. But this is just a cover for an operation to recover a sunken safe in a crashed airplane. He teams up with a local buddy and will have to outsmart a gangster and a rival special forces dude if he plans to get his hands on all that sweet, sweet cash.
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