This week we're doing David Lynch! We dissect his 2001 Hollywood nightmare, Mulholland Drive. David Lynch is one of our favorite filmmakers, period, and one of the greatest of all time and this may be his best movie. Originally conceived as a new television series for ABC, the network ultimately passed on it and Lynch was given the opportunity to repurpose the footage for a new feature.

This movie is about Betty, or maybe it's about Diane. Or hell! It may be about both of them. Are they same person? Perhaps. Following a terrible car accident, a mysterious woman finds her way into the life of Betty and together the two of them investigate the mystery of her amnesia. Someone was trying to kill her when she lost her memory. Who wants her dead? I guess we'll find out. Or maybe we won't. It's a David Lynch movie, after all. Everything goes apeshit in that typical David Lynch way and it turns out that this may have all been the fantasy of a deeply mentally ill woman named Diane Selwyn. Or maybe not. Who can say, really?

We break it down and subject it to our own interpretations and if you want to know what those are you'll have to listen to the episode.

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This week we abandon our original idea to cover the utterly insane 1987 Karate Kid ripoff Karate Warrior with something with a little more meat on the bone, Tentacles. The 70's was an embarrassment of riches, and in many case just plain embarrassing when it came to the animal attack cash-grabs that arose from the titanic success of Jaws. This is one such movie, a unique twist on American International Pictures' typical process of working with foreign films. Rather than import some cheap Italian movies they hired Italian producer Ovidio Assonitis to make a movie here in America with an Italian crew and a star-studded cast of Oscar winners who couldn't say no to a fast paycheck and a little bit of that California sun.

Starring John Huston, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, and more, this blatant Jaws ripoff treads water for 90 minutes, peppering its story with strange asides and bon mots, with characters who trot into each scene to ad-lib and keep their scene partners guessing until it comes time to take on the film's big bad villain, a giant octopus that can't keep its tentacles off anything that swims into its proximity. Is mankind to blame for its feeding frenzy? Maybe? Who can say, really? There's a rich industrialist whose underwater construction project may have something to do with it but this is AIP and it's asking way too much for anyone to answer any questions ever. Just go with it.

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This week we're joined by Tyler Hyde from the podcast That's Spooky to discuss the made-for-tv scare film, Mazes & Monsters. The film represents the first lead role for future superstar, Tom Hanks in a movie about the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons. No, I'm not making that up.

In the early 1980's as Dungeons and Dragons became a sensation of tabletops everywhere, it didn't take long for scolding parent groups to cry foul to every media outlet that would listen and raise a moral panic that rose in tandem with the moral panics around heavy metal music and horror movies. The disappearance of and tragic suicide of James Dallas Egbert III thrust D&D into the headlines and craven opportunists and sensational headlines ignored all the factors that drove him to suicide and placed the blame squarely at D&D, the one thing in his life that brought him joy and provided an escape from the pressures of being a child prodigy. His story informed Rona Jaffe's book, Mazes and Monsters, which led to the rapid development of this TV movie also starring Chris Makepeace and Wendy Crewson.

The story concerns four friends at university who play Mazes and Monsters, the legally distinct dungeon crawler role playing game that causes one player to lose his shit and fall into a psychotic delirium which leads him to murder, madness, and suicide. It is, without question, one of the most toxic movies we've ever seen with a message that seems to be: under no circumstances are you to use your imaginations. You should be thinking about a sensible career now. It's a real bummer, you guys.

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