Episode 102: Hellraiser - Cinema Release For Some, Straight To DVD For Others

The Hellraiser series is an odd duck. A film series that has, over the years, churned out movies featuring that most iconic demon/angel with a love of S&M who cares not for the 'safety word' as he carries off for torture any who have been foolish enough to solve a certain puzzle box.

The films have wavered in quality for arty reactions against the mindless slasher genre to patchwork visions of hell to actually being a mindless monster movie before becoming a property that while yearning for another 'Must see' entry in the canon seems to flounder every time and could be argued fares much better as something roughly jammed into a horror script that wasn't even supposed to feature them.

And so a strange chain of 9ish movies stretching from our 80s home land and into more or less modern day lies before us, and while fan differ on exactly where the golden era exactly falls the jumbled sequence of largely unsynchronized films and DVDs seems to hang together as a body of work, where a wild and fascinating mythology seems to emerge between the cracks.

Realizing there's always safety in numbers the 80s kids have enlisted the aid of horror enthusiast J R Park to help as they navigate their way through one of the most fascinating franchises out there. Hellraiser films good and bad take us between ultimate pleasure and ultimate pain. To think... we hesitated... Incidental Music by incompetech.com

Direct Link: https://archive.org/download/102Hellraiser/102%20-%20Hellraiser.mp3

Episode 31: 1987 - The Beginning Of The End (Of The 80s)

It all starts off a bit masculine in this week's episode, how could it otherwise in a year that brought us Predator, The Running Man and Robocop? Before long though the discussion takes a distinct turn for the feminine as it behooves the present 80s Kids (Leo, Ian and Sue) to consider the wealth of female-oriented entertainment 1987 spewed out in bulk. And so goes the story of yet another proud 80s year.

There is a twist in the tale, however, for 1987 is where we first begin to detect the insidious presence of the 90s. 1987's failures were echoes of the cinematic wasteland to come. In addition we see the fading of such standards as the kiddie cast genre action movie in the sub-par Monster Squad (which is still a lot of fun but nowhere near the high point of the genre). Films such as Robocop and Wall Street told us our love affair with corporate excess and the free market was approaching its end and if Robocop signalled anything it was that the divorce would be messy.

On the other side of the coin the indie film-makers were sniffing around and the first signs of the massive indie explosion of the 90s were felt in titles like Hellraiser and Bad Taste. The winds of change had started to blow, but the 80s party is still far from over. Cling onto your neon lit, synthesizer scored rite-of-passage party, midnight is coming...

Direct Link: https://archive.org/download/0311987TheBeginningOfTheEndOfThe80s/031-1987-The-Beginning-Of-The-End-Of-The-80s.mp3