Podcasts
‘The Forsaken’: Unintentionally Homoerotic or Just Plain Bro-y? [Horror Queers Podcast]
A Shitty Supernatural Episode.
After visiting the quiet, foggy town of Silent Hill last week, we’re now heading on a vampire-filled desert road trip in J.S. Cardone‘s dreadfully boring 2001 film The Forsaken.
In the film, Sean (Kerr Smith) is driving cross-country to deliver a vintage Mercedes, but does the one thing he wasn’t suppose to do — pick up a hitchhiker. From that moment on, his road trip is transformed into a surreal and terrifying nightmare. Sean’s new companion, Nick (Brendan Fehr), is not the laid back, aimless traveler he seems to be. He is a hunter. And his prey is a roving band of forsaken youths who feed upon hapless victims found in the dead of the night — in a word, vampires.
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Episode 123 – The Forsaken (2001) feat. Paul Etheredge
Protect your wallets from suspicious drifters because we’re ending April with a boring, unsexy vampire road trip movie: J.S. Cardone The Forsaken! Joining us for this torturous venture is Hellbent director Paul Etheredge!
Join us as we try to determine whether the film is unintentionally homoerotic or just plain bro-y. We’ll delve into Simon Rex‘s ’90s porn career, talk about some of our own porn preferences, and discuss the heavy vampirism-as-AIDS metaphor the film incorporates.
A discussion of The Forsaken can’t be had without discussing kinda-sorta lead actress Izabella Miko and how the film mishandles her character. (She’s nude in her introductory scene, has maybe five lines of dialogue and isn’t given a name until the end credits.) Yay, feminism!
Plus, title card titties, Johnathon Schaech giving a performance, new (terrible) vampire lore, waitresses really concerned about the coffee bill and just how many times can these characters run out of gas? Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.
Cross out The Forsaken!
Coming up on Wednesday: We move the clock back a few years to 1998 to revisit the staff of Herrington High school in Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi horror film The Faculty!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for tons of additional content! In May we’re doing a Ghosts ‘n Zombies theme with episodes on new films like Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead and Simon Barrett’s Seance, and episodes on “older” films like Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake and Mike Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil!
After kicking off July with discussions of Joe Dante’s seminal werewolf film The Howling (listen) and Ken Russell’s controversial erotic thriller Crimes of Passion (listen), we’re heading to Maine to dissect one of Stephen King‘s most misguided adaptations in Lawrence Kasdan‘s 2003 misfire Dreamcatcher!
Dreamcatcher sees friends Henry (Thomas Jane), Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Beaver (Jason Lee) reunite for their annual hunting trip in Maine. Their reunion is cut short when they find themselves caught in the middle of a war between a hostile race of farty-farty aliens and an elite US military unit led by Colonel Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), who has been driven mad after spending decades tracking the extraterrestrials. When Jonesy is possessed by one of the aliens, the remaining friends seek out their disabled childhood friend Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), who they believe has powers that can save Jonesy…and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, and RSS.
Episode 396: Dreamcatcher (2003)
Watch out for “ister gay” (oof), take some Gas-X and bite our bags because we’re talking Lawrence Kasdan’s baffling 2003 adaptation of Stephen King’s equally baffling novel Dreamcatcher.
Join us as we go all in on the farty-farty aliens populating this hilarious misfire that often feels like a bad Kevin Smith script. It’s a film filled with characters who get a single defining trait (if they’re lucky), played by respectable actors who are here for the paycheck (looking at you, Morgan Freeman).
Plus: blown-out assholes, using guns as telephones, pitying poor Donnie Wahlberg, and wondering why the hell this movie is called Dreamcatcher.
Cross out Dreamcatcher!
Coming Up Next: We’re going to be lounging around a posh Greenwich Village apartment as we check in on Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 513 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Forbidden Fruits, Saccharine, Evil Dead Burn, an audio commentary on Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (aka Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch), and the conclusion of our coverage of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat on the Requel Tier.