Show Notes
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. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord server and chat it up with Bryan and fellow listeners: https://discord.gg/DSZXWGdZfE Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
More from Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast
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. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord server and chat it up with Bryan and fellow listeners: https://discord.gg/DSZXWGdZfE Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
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. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJ Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're wrapping up our round-up of Latin American movies with maybe the deepest cut we've done yet. We're watching Muerte En La Playa from director Enrique Gomez Vadillo. In this movie we find young David returning home from school on break following the temporary closing of the school after the murder of one of the professors. David's mom, hyper-glam Sonia Infante, and her boyfriend make several attempts to hook David up with one of the local girls but he couldn't possibly be any less interested in them. David is gay and all the people prying into his personal life keep bugging the shit out of him so he pushes them off cliffs, out windows, and even resorts to jamming a spear in a dude's butt. Who can stop his rampage? Perhaps his stepfather-to-be with a plot to catch him in the act with another man will expose David. Who can say? Tonally impenetrable, Muerte En La Playa is an overwrought Telenovela melodrama of cartoonish proportions. Nearly all of the movie takes place in or around a swimming pool. Vadillo luxuriates in filming all of the toned, chiseled young men. The director, Vadillo, himself is a hard man to track down. He's a ghost, a cipher even among Mexican film directors. It's a hard movie to quantify and deeply, deeply weird. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJ Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
This week we're joined by our good friend and Laughing in the Dark co-host, Aileen Clark to talk about Brazil and Coffin Joe as we look at Brazil's first-ever horror movie, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. In this movie Coffin Joe is the local undertaker, a nightmare man in black with a top hat and cape to match. He's also an atheist who is on the hunt for the perfect woman who will bear him a son and continue his bloodline. But here's the thing, Coffin Joe is a huge jerk and everyone hates him but they're also afraid of him because he's a libertine who adheres to no apparent moral code. He'll kill his way through the community when things don't go his way, and as the bodies pile up he'll have to kill even more people to cover up his crimes. He should have listened to local witch when she issued him a dire warning. The spirits of the dead will rise up at midnight and take his soul. Jose Mojica Marins was propelled to superstardom in Brazil with the release of this movie in 1964. He immediately set the pace for horror movies to come and used Coffin Joe as a mouthpiece to criticize the fascist military junta that was running Brazil at the time. It's decades later and some time since the passing of Jose Mojica Marins but the legacy of Coffin Joe lives on. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJ Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/
We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is. El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to God or it'll win him the love of the strange woman he abandoned his son for. Who can say? It's all so murky. When the final gunfighter outsmarts him, he dies and finds himself trapped in a cave with a community of cave people and vows to dig them all out on his new search for enlightenment. Take a listen and learn about the sort of family life that creates a filmmaker who is constantly making movies where the main character is desperate for a father's love but buries it under layers upon layers of gnositicism and hermetic philosophy. Join the Bring Me The Axe Discord: https://discord.gg/snkxuxzJ Support Bring Me The Axe! on Patreon:https://patreon.com/bringmetheaxepod Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/