Movie Oubliette

Conrad's TIFF dispatch rolls on alongside special guest Joe Lipsett as they venture into the neon-soaked underworld of Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo – the latest chapter in cinema’s most unlikely franchise, helmed by legendary Japanese auteur Takashi Miike (Audition). Moving the rogue-cop template from Abel Ferrara’s gritty New York and Werner Herzog’s post-Katrina New Orleans to the streets of Japan, the film stars Shun Oguri as a drug-addicted detective drowning in Yakuza debt while investigating a series of gruesome murders. When his path crosses with an ambitious FBI agent played by Lily James, the investigation spirals into a chaotic web of vice, violence, and Miike’s trademark gonzo style. Does this wild neo-noir spin live up to the cult legacy of the Bad Lieutenant moniker, or is it more of a Tokyo drift?
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Happy Spooky Season! Mikey Neumann, the creator of FilmJoy, joins us for our Halloween special with something he found in the back of his freezer: Jason X (2001)! Ten films and 22 years after a machete first found its way into a camp counsellor, Friday the 13th finally arrived at the setting every tired franchise eventually reaches when the well has truly run dry: outer space.

Directed by Jim Isaac, a Cronenberg effects alumnus making only his second feature, and written by then-newcomer Todd Farmer under a New Line regime still working out how Scream's self-aware humour ought to be applied to a decade-old slasher icon, Jason X cryogenically freezes Jason Voorhees at the dawn of the 21st century and thaws him out four and a half centuries later, aboard a research vessel that has returned to a long-abandoned Earth.

It is, in the plainest possible terms, Alien with a hockey mask, a film happy to wear its influences on its sleeve while asking, not unreasonably, whether an unstoppable killer is any less unstoppable once you've made him some sort of cyborg. But, as we reach the film's 25th anniversary (!), can we finally decide if it deserves to escape the Oubliette? Find out!
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Bonus preview time again: for this special, spoiler-free episode as part of our TIFF 2026 coverage, we're joined by Joe Lipsett of Horror Queers to dig into A Talent for Murder. Directed by Anton Corbijn from Joanna Murray-Smith's own adaptation of her play Switzerland, the film imagines a fictional Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren, all barbed wit and Swiss seclusion) visited by a young literary agent, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), sent to persuade her into writing one final Ripley novel... persuasion that curdles into something considerably more sinister. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson round out the cast. The film is due for release in US cinemas on 23 October, with reports pointing to a UK release on 20 November.
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The next film to emerge from the Oubliette is Basket Case (1981): the debut feature of Frank Henenlotter, a New York exploitation obsessive who spent his youth in the grindhouses of 42nd Street and, with producer Edgar Ievins, put roughly $35,000 of mostly their own money into turning a title he liked into a film he never expected anyone to see.

Shot on 16mm over about 6 months of spare weeks and weekends, in the last years of Times Square as the Deuce, it follows a wide-eyed young man (Kevin Van Hentenryck) who carries his formerly conjoined and decidedly ill-tempered twin around town in a wicker basket on a revenge tour of the surgeons who split them apart.

It arrived in 1982 amid the slasher boom, with a first distributor keen to trim the blood, before a Texas midnight show, Joe Bob Briggs and a long run at New York's Waverly turned it into a midnight staple and, after a well-timed $19.95 VHS, a fixture of fans' bedrooms. It has since been restored by the Museum of Modern Art, which might be the strangest plot twist in the whole saga. But does the film, which has been on Dan's watchlist since we started the podcast, deserve a place in the world outside the Oubliette? Find out!
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Conrad's TIFF adventure with special guest Joe Lipsett continues with Kick On – the sophomore feature from Nick Kozakis, who cut his teeth directing music videos before making Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism. It follows Eden and her three friends, who decide to "kick on" after a big night out, ending up at the opulent, drug-stuffed lair of a mobster's son. Every genre fan knows this is a bad idea. What starts as a party quickly spirals into a siege, with Markella Kavenagh, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Ras-Samuel and Nikita Chronis caught in a web of paranoia, violence and betrayal that critics have been calling an Australian riff on Green Room. But is it worth seeking out?
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