Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the third screen version of Burnett's 1905 novel after outings for Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, follows Sara Crewe, a wealthy, warmly imaginative girl deposited at a New York boarding school while her father serves in the First World War — and what happens to both her fortunes and her sense of self once the money, and the news from the front, turn bad. It bombed at the box office on release in May 1995, picked up two Oscar nominations anyway, and quietly became the film Cuarón has called his personal favourite of everything he's directed. But does it deserve to let out of the Oubliette? Find out!

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Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive, returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Catherine Valmont, a wealthy young woman two years in her grave, who reconnects with her devoted childhood friend Hélène while working out exactly what a person in her condition needs to survive – but the execution is unmistakably his own: unhurried, melancholic, and considerably bloodier than anything he'd attempted before, landing somewhere between a slasher movie and a tragic romance without ever quite settling on which one it wants to be, which is, frankly, half the fun. But, crucially, does it deserve wander dreamily out of the oubliette? Find out!

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Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam (The Burning) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner with the unfortunate name Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), chasing a heart-eating killer that may not be entirely human. All shot on a shoestring in condemned East End warehouses standing in for a drowned metropolis, with Kim Cattrall as the guilt-ridden love interest, Split Second has Blade director Stephen Norrington's monster effects, a script by then-unknown Gary Scott Thompson (long before he struck gold with The Fast and the Furious) from a spec script that began life as an entirely different, present-day occult thriller. But is it a little seen future noir treat that deserves more attention, or is it a soggy assemblage of other, better films? Find out!

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Hollywood's penchant for revisiting failed franchises this summer has awakened a number of 80s oddities in the oubliette! This time, Amanda Jane Stern joins us to revisit the Salkinds' 1984 attempt at a Superman spin-off: Supergirl, featuring Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El/Linda Lee, Faye Dunaway as the witchy Selena, and Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, Marc McClure, and others filling out a very British, very prestige-flavoured comic-book fever dream. Much like Masters of the Universe (1987), it's a film about a missing macguffin, a displaced hero from an alien world navigating 80s America, and the familiar fantasy of inherited power being folded into an Americana quest narrative – all while trying to look serious enough to justify its budget and strange enough to justify its existence. Should Supergirl be set free to soar into heroism, or should it be locked away in the Phantom Zone? Find out!

Check out Amanda Jane Stern's projects at www.amandajanestern.com

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Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row, joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, where memory, guilt, and desire take physical form in ways that are equal parts sci-fi premise and emotional trap. It's a studio movie with art-film discipline, a romance wrapped inside an existential problem, and an example of the marketing department losing a fight it never fully understood. It underperformed badly at the box office and has largely served as a footnote to discussions of the Tarkovsky original, in the "oh yeah, that happened" vein, but does it deserve to be reassessed on its own merits? Find out!

Alex prepared a special treat for listeners over on Seventh Row: a suggestion for an ideal sci-fi comedy film to watch next after Solaris in which the genders of the main characters are swapped. What to find out more? Head on over to http://seventh-row.com/oubliette to find out more!

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For our 200th episode, we're revisiting the film that inspired our podcast name!

David Goelz of The Muppets joins us as our very special guest to celebrating the 40th anniversary of Labyrinth. The film paired Jim Henson’s creature-shop with a Terry Jones screenplay, George Lucas producing, Brian Froud's world-building, and David Bowie doing what only Bowie could plausibly do: play a goblin king as if he were headlining a particularly sinister school dance. Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah, annoyed beyond reason at being asked to babysit, spends the film crossing a maze filled with sarcastic puppets, impossible architecture, and a villain who seems to believe charisma and a Limahl fright wig is a substitute for governance.

It recouped less than half its budget at the box office, but is the lighter companion to The Dark Crystal (1982) a delightful adventure that rightfully found a devoted audience on VHS, or should it be locked in its own oubliette? Find out!

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To mark the release of the new Masters of the Universe film, Matt Swaford of Reklaimer's Vintage Toys joins us to revisit Cannon Films' notorious attempt to launch the cinematic branch of Mattel's toy franchise in 1987. Featuring an all-star cast of Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, James 'Mr Strickland' Tolkan, a pre-Voyager Robert Duncan MacNeill, and pre-almost everything Courteney Cox, the film is most remembered for disappointing fans of the sword and sorcery sci-fi mash-up by setting most of the action in a school gymnasium on present day Earth, and replacing Orko and Battle Cat with the more budget-friendly Billy Barty in an orange troll make-up.

But is it an unfairly maligned hidden gem or a best-forgotten example of 80s genre excess on the cheap? Find out!

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Legendary actor and creature performer Doug Jones and independent filmmaker Derek Maki join Dan and Conrad to reminisce about Bug Buster (1998), a late-90s horror-comedy in which a quaint lakeside town is terrorised by mutant insects. The incredible cast combines a pre-Knocked Up Katherine Heigl with Randy Quaid, Star Trek alumni James Doohan and George Takei, Meredith Salenger, and – of course – Doug Jones as the big bad: Mother Bug! The movie sits squarely in the era when creature features were increasingly living on video rather than in theaters, and it builds its appeal from ecological panic, practical-effects goo, and the deliciously overripe promise that a “former military man” might somehow sort out an insect apocalypse with enough swagger.

You can follow and support Derek's documentary on Doug's incredible career by visiting www.getmedougjones.com and adding it to your watchlist on imdb. The Kickstarter campaign kicks off on Monday 18 May.

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