Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

We resume our regular podcast programming with a look at one of the goriest pictures to come out of Italy at the height of the Italian horror wave, Dr. Butcher MD from director Marino Girolami, father of Enzo Castellari. Released in 1980 as Zombie Holocaust, the movie was picked up for American distributor by the notoriously sleazy New York distributor, Aquarius Releasing and was retitled and cut by 7 minutes as Dr. Butcher MD in the New York grindhouse scene. It has since achieved a certain amount of notoriety for its gore and is a regular source of samples for death metal bands.
Zombie Holocaust doesn't make much sense but what story there is begins in New York as the city's hospitals and morgues see a sudden rash of corpse desecrations. Body parts and organs are going missing left and right. An investigation in the city reveals that the perpetrators are from a tribe of cannibals on a South East Asian island chain so two doctors, their friend, and a plucky reporter charter a ship to that island to find out what's going and what's going on isn't terribly clear but there's a mad scientist and a lot of people get gutted and eaten. It's a riot. Also, there's zombies for some reason.
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This week we're joined by Josh Boerman of the podcast The Worst Of All Possible Worlds to talk about John Carpenter's recovery from The Thing with Christine, one of three Stephen King adaptations for 1983.
Christine finds Arnie, a mega dork, buying a 1958 Plymouth Fury as his first car. The car, nicknamed Christine by its original owner, harbors a terrible power. Before it was even off the assembly line it was responsible for a terrible injury and one death and now out on the road the spirit of this car, in love with Arnie, is evening the score with all the people around town that have wronged him. As the body count rises Arnie is also becoming evil, obsessed with his car. It's up to Arnie's best friend, the coolest guy in town, Dennis and the new girl in town to team up and stop the rampaging automobile before anyone else is hurt.
1983 was the key year for Stephen King as a brand. They were adapting his novels faster than he could write them and it was a mere matter of statistics that one of his scripts would end up in John Carpenter's hands. Is it any good though? Ehhhhhh....
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Our Haloween celebration of the work of John Carpenter continues for a third week with a look at John in the 90s. Arguably his rockiest period, a decade that saw a significant decline, John Carpenter in the 90s produced one movie that wasn't a fucking debacle and we think that it's In The Mouth of Madness.
In The Mouth of Madness finds John Trent (Sam Neill), a private investigator hired by a publishing company to find Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), the best-selling author in the world, a writer of particularly terrifying horror fiction whose novels drive its readers insane. Cane vanished in New Hampshire while writing his latest novel and the publishing company would very much like him and his manuscript found. What Trent finds, however, is weirder (some might say more confusing) than anyone could have imagined, hidden out in a forboding church in a pastoral New Hampshire town that doesn't exist. This fiasco leads John Trent to wonder, am I even a real person or am I a character in Sutter Cane's book? Is Sutter Cane even real, for that matter?
Carpenter crafts a pastiche here of HP Lovecraft and Stephen King half way through a decade that wasn't terribly great for horror movies.
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Our October marathon of John Carpenter continues as we find John returning to the world of independent film and total creative control. Perhaps John smoked a little too much weed and flew too close to the sun with this one. For all it's theoretical physics and spiritual nonsense it's still a fun little movie.
Prince of Darkness finds a Catholic priest discovering a hidden order of priests protecting a run-down church in Los Angeles that hides a terrible secret in its basement. For the last 400 years it has housed a strange, churning tank in its basement which contains the fluid essence of the devil. But now as conditions shift and the stars align, the tank is coming to life, manifesting in our world in order to pull an even older force of evil into ours from the abyss. A team of graduate students in the field of theoretical physics is gathered to study this phenomenon and ultimately stop it.
It doesn't make a lot of sense and it has a real mean sense of humor about it at time but we can't help but love Prince of Darkness. It's John Carpenter back where he belongs and fully producing movies that feel characteristically John Carpenter.
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This week Halle Kiefer of the fantastic horror podcast, Ruined, joins us for a three-peat as we kick off our Halloween 2026 series, a month-log exploration of the films of John Carpenter. We're starting strong with John's critically maligned The Thing, a movie that reviewed so badly that he lost an entire contract with Universal. Thankfully, in the fullness of time viewers have come back around and reassessed it, and recognize it as one of the greatest horror movies of the 80s and one of the greatest of all time.
The Thing finds an American scientific research station in Antarctica facing an unseen alien threat that absorbs its host and hides in plain sight. A Norwegian station nearby thawed a UFO out of the ice and woke up the frozen pilot after 100,000 years and now it has its eyes set on planet Earth. If it leaves the isolation of Antarctica, the entire planet is doomed. These men will drive themselves insane with paranoia as they narrow down who among them is The Thing and what will it cost them to stop it in its tracks?
The Thing is a frozen, paranoid nightmare of extraordinary imagination, with gross-out special effects from a very enthusiastic Rob Bottin.
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