This week we're returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in the Atlantic as the feral, violent denizens of lost Atlantis arise from the silent depths of the ocean to reclaim the world. Or something to that effect. It's a desperate fight to survive against wave after wave of road warrior freaks, an race against time to translate an ancient tablet that will restore the ancient civilization, and an endless series of violent gun battles and if I'm being honest, I'm working overtime to make this movie make sense. It's 90 minutes of high-flying nonsense but somehow it ends up being a lot of fun.

Shot against the backdrop of Italy's exploitation film industry struggling to find an alternative to the declining horror and giallo markets, it capitalizes on the then-extremely popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs but also tries to tap in to the world's hunger for high-adventure by way of cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoffs only to realize that Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly hard to copy on budgets laughably smaller than Raiders. At the same time, the Marcos regime in the Philippines is desperate to draw filmmakers to Manila and as Deodato finds out, it's hard to say no to a totalitarian dictatorship.

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This week our Black History Month series continues with a look at the 1974 blaxploitation martial arts mashup, Black Belt Jones, starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. Kelly was coming in hot off of his run in the legendary Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon and with Bruce dead and a public appetite ravenous for more martial arts movies it just made sense to spin off one of its stars to their own martial arts movie. Hendry was coming in off her turn as a Bond girl in Live and Let Die and a string of excellent blaxploitation movies like Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem.

In this absolute cartoon of a martial arts movie, the mafia has bought into a valuable city project to build a new civic center in South Central Los Angeles but the only thing holding up the development is one holdout, a karate school that refuses to sell out. The mafia calls up a local loan shark to put the pressure on the school and when they accidentally kill the school's owner it's up to Black Belt Jones and the owner's daughter to team up, rip off the gangsters and get justice. Things get a little blurry between the beginning and the end but in spite of it flying by the seat of its pants and barely making any sense, the movie is a hell of a good time.

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This week we take a trip back to 1985 for a movie of such staggering stupidity that we can hardly believe it. Death Wish 3 is the continuing adventures of Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson and where the first movie is a pretty solid action movie and the second movie is dopey and mostly boring, Death Wish 3 commits to absurdity in a way that'll really make you think. It's a movie of such moronic prowess that the filmmakers had to go out of their way to achieve such heights of idiocy. See a crowd of children literally jump for joy over the bodies of bikers dead in the street. Marvel at a doctor doing everything he can to not break character and laugh while telling a husband that his wife died from a broken arm. This movie is truly an achievement in a year already crowded with dumb movies from Cannon.

As it happens, Paul Kersey is back home in New York City to visit an old friend but he arrives in time for the man to die in his arms when the local street gang of giggling maniacs beats him to the edge of his life. Kersey will team up with a cop to put the gang on ice in a film that was literally rushed into production to capitalize on the headlines about a subway vigilante in New York City that injured three and left one man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Truly, only Cannon could produce such an entertaining gem.

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In this episode we take a trip to Italy for a look at Massimo Dellamano's 1972 giallo, What Have You Done To Solange? This Italian/German co-production was intended to capitalize on both the popularity of giallo in Italy and krimi in Germany, casting an array of English and German actors familiar to fans of krimi and Italian stars of the time for those who can't get enough giallo. A fairly grim entry into the canon, What Have You Done To Solange is a strong starting point for horror fans looking to go beyond the well-known giallo titles from Dario Argento and Mario Bava. We go over the history of giallo, the people who made it, and the economic conditions in Italy which led to its proliferation.

In the story, Enrico Rosseni, a horn-dog gymnastics coach comes under suspicion in a series of brutal murders. The victims are all schoolgirls from his team and to make matters worse, his teenage girlfriend, witnessed one of the murders. He'll team up with the police and his severe German wife to crack the code and discover the real murderer, their motive, and learn the identity of the mysterious Solange, who seems to be at the center of all this.

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This week we celebrate two years of 99 Cent Rental with one of the most enduring cult movies of the 80's. It's the breakdance epic from Cannon, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. When Cannon's million dollar dance movie pulled a huge profit in the summer of 1984, they rushed a sequel into production to capture the momentum and mere months later released Breakin' 2 with a bigger budget and a significantly smaller box office return. Breakdance fever was over but this outrageous, extremely colorful sequel stuck out in the cultural memory thanks to its ridiculous name and silly premise and we love it.

Months after Special K, Ozone, and Turbo proved to the stuffy world of white people dance competitions that breakdance is dancing too, Kelly returns to Venice to catch up with her friends and finds out that everyone in Venice is now hanging out at a community center called Miracles where they all learn to dance, box, and do mime stuff. Wouldn't you know it, though? Here come some white people with designs on tearing down the community center so it's up to the TKO Crew to rally the community to raise the money they need to save Miracles. They'll overcome all obstacles with the power of breakdance.

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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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