Our second film for this year will also be our second dip of the toe into the filmography of Lucio Fulci (see episode 158 for our take on Conquest, his bonkers fantasy adventure, with our special guest Vincenzo Natali).

Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un paperino, 1972) is remembered as one of the most unsettling and thematically ambitious entries in the Italian giallo cycle. Its premise is deceptively simple: a series of brutal child murders shatters a seemingly idyllic community, prompting an investigation led by journalist Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian) and local police. Suspicion falls quickly – and tellingly – on society’s outsiders: a reclusive “witch” (Florinda Bolkan), a mentally vulnerable man, and anyone who doesn't conform to the village’s rigid moral order. As the mystery unfolds, the film reveals a gallery of compromised adults whose piety and respectability mask repression, misogyny, and latent violence.

Should Don’t Torture a Duckling be released from the oubliette and re-examined like an uncomfortable truth finally brought to light, or left buried with Maciara's baby? Find out!

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Happy New Year! Michael French of RetroBlasting joins us for an exciting trip with Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), directed by John Hough (of Watcher in the Woods and The Legend of Hell House fame). It's an ambitious and eccentric British fantasy-adventure that attempts to translate W. E. Johns’ imperial-era aviation hero into the idiom of 1980s blockbuster cinema. Produced by Rusty Lemorande (writer of Electric Dreams), the film has since acquired a reputation less as a failed franchise-starter than as a cult curiosity. It stars Alex Hyde-White as a contemporary New Yorker, Jim, who is randomly pulled back in time to the Western Front of the First World War, where he becomes entangled with the dashing Royal Flying Corps ace James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, played with the essential stiff-upper-lip earnestness by Neil Dickson. Peter Cushing also appears in one of his final screen roles.

Should Biggles: Adventures in Time be sprung from the movie oubliette to soar again like its hero looping bravely back into the fray, or grounded permanently like a 'time-twin' displaced forever in the wrong era? Find out!

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Happy holidays! Our festive special this year focuses on The Curse of the Cat People (1944), directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise (of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Haunting fame), and produced by Val Lewton for RKO – a sequel that daringly abandons the horror conventions of its predecessor in favour of an atmospheric, psychological fairy-tale. The story follows young Amy Reed (Ann Carter), the sensitive and lonely daughter of Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and Alice (Jane Randolph), whose imaginary friend manifests in the form of the serene and spectral Irena (Simone Simon), the tragic figure from Cat People (1942). With its expressionistic visuals, gentle pacing, and Lewton’s characteristically suggestive storytelling, should this film finally be released from the Movie Oubliette to flourish like Amy finding a true festive friend, or left to linger in the shadows like the fading spirits of Christmas past? Find out!

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