Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them.
Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987.
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We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn't typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it's spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter, Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers), Herk Harvey made an extremely eerie and deeply paranoid movie that gets deeply under your skin and it's a shame that he never worked in features again.
What begins with a fatal car accident leads the lone survivor, Mary, on a trip to Salt Lake City where she will play organ for a church. But along the way she finds herself stalked by a phantom as she tries to fit into this new city, navigating new relationships that she's barely interested in in the first place. By the time the film closes Mary will uncover the truth about the phantom stalker and what happened that day during the car accident.
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This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore.
We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger.
Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter With Helen.
We wrap things up with Winter Kept Us Warm, the Canadian feature from David Secter. It's an important film in the history of queer cinema as well as Canadian cinema. It was the first Canadian movie to run at Cannes and influenced many Canadian filmmakers that followed.
Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: https://www.seanabley.com/store/
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We continue our Pride 2026 examination of queer horror with a look at a truly unique film, a movie that challenged us in every conceivable way. If you, the listener, can make it to the end of this one without being totally alienated, consider yourself a true Bring Me The Axe fan. Thundercrack! is the collision of underground filmmakers Curt McDowell and George Kuchar. McDowell, a truly horny underground filmmaker was known for his art films containing no small amount of explicit unsimulated sex and George Kuchar was known for outrageous, ugly send-ups of "women's pictures" and melodramas. Together they made an old dark house horror movie with no small amount of body hair and body fluids. There's no small amount of sex in this movie and man alive is it gross.
Thundercrack! is a hard movie to explain. It finds several pairs of strangers stranded at the home of a mentally ill woman, a house bursting at the seams with secrets. Each one of them brings their own secrets to complicate matters. There's Roo and Sash, a pair of ladies desperate for men they cannot have. There's Chandler and Bond, the former seeking vengeance for the death of his wife, the latter desperate to have sex with Chandler. There's Toydy and Bing, a man who just wants to get behind that locked door in the living room and a man haunted by a circus gorilla that he is deeply in love with. It is a long night of madness and sex culminating in every secret boiling over at the surface. We can confidently say that there is nothing like it anywhere. Thundercrack! is a true original, a puerile lo-fi nightmare that defies you to watch it.
Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: https://www.seanabley.com/store/
Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: https://www.bonfire.com/wickedqueeraxe/
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Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental and we go long on one of the most honest and authentic coming-out stories at a critical moment in the 80's just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum but right before the first reports of AIDS hits the news. It offers a remarkable alternative to contemporary portrayals of gay characters, casting off the well-worn tropes of swishy queens and terrifying leather daddies, Making Love gives you gay men who are simply ordinary men.
Making Love is about married couple Claire and Zach. Their life together is great. Except for one critical thing. Zach is gay and is finally coming to terms with it. He meets author Bart, an openly gay but aloof loner who loves them and leaves them and has his first sexual encounter with a man which sends his entire life into a spiral.
Get Physical Media Booklet Essay featuring Dave's Werewolf Women of the SS essay here: https://www.seanabley.com/store/
Get your own Bring Me The Axe! Pride shirt here: https://www.bonfire.com/wickedqueeraxe/
Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
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