Podcasts
Lady Scientists and a Mutant Bear in Alex Garland’s ‘Annihilation’ [Horror Queers Podcast]
Refraction action.
After closing out April with a look at the hagsploitation classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, we kicked off May with a deathly serious look at Gus Van Sant’s pseudo-Columbine adaptation Elephant. Now we continue the month with a look at Alex Garland’s dense and trippy 2018 film Annihilation.
Annihilation sees Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist and former soldier, join a mission to uncover what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac) inside Area X — a sinister and mysterious phenomenon that is expanding across the American coastline. Alongside a team of four other women comprised of paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and geomorphologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), Lena discovers a world of mutated landscapes and creatures, as dangerous as it is beautiful, that threatens both their lives and their sanity.
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Episode 231: Annihilation (2018)
Get ready to mutate because we’re heading into the weird, wonderful and terrifying world of Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018)! Joining us for the conversation are Alma and Dalia of the Nightmare on 5th Street podcast!
Join us as we try our best to analyze this admittedly dense film, with discussions on how it works as an adaptation, the casting controversy, the likability of certain characters and (of course) that weird as hell climax.
Plus: refraction action, horrifying mutated bears, cancer metaphors and one giant soap bubble.
Cross out Annihilation!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re checking out the ridiculous camp of the 1994 dinosaur romance Tammy and the T-Rex!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for more than 243 hours of additional content! This month we’re going all in on Evil Dead with an episode on Evil Dead Rise, our thoughts on the whole Evil Dead franchise, and an audio commentary on the original 1981 film. Plus: we’ll have episodes on Amazon Prime’s queer as fuck Dead Ringers series, and the Lulu Wilson-starring The Wrath of Becky.
Aaliyah Innocent.
May was a busy subgenre-switching month. After kicking things off with disaster “slasher” The Poseidon Adventure (listen), we watched American Giallo The Fan (listen), then wrapped things up with Vincent Price’s horror comedy Theater of Blood (listen).
Now, in honor of Pride Month and the return of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (renamed The Vampire Lestat for S03), Trace and I had to check out the straight-washed second attempt to bring Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles to life.
Back in 2002, director Michael Rymer pitched Hollywood on his vision for Rice’s second Chronicle book, The Vampire Lestat. Instead, the suits opted to adapt the third book, Queen of the Damned (likely due to the ancillary opportunities of the soundtrack, written entirely by Korn frontman Jonathan Davis).
In the film, Lestat (Stuart Townsend) awakens from slumber to reinvent himself as a leather-pant-wearing rocker. Lestat’s very public vampire persona attracts the attention of Talamasca novice Jesse (Marguerite Moreau), as well as the vampire’s maker Marius (Vincent Perez). But the nu-metal has the greatest impact on Akasha (Aaliyah), who awakens and promises to take over the world if her old foe Maharet (Lena Olin) doesn’t stop her.
Whose side will Lestat join? Will Marius help his fledgling or abandon him to public sacrifice? And does anyone actually care about Jesse? (Please note: that last question is rhetorical.)
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 389: Queen of the Damned (2002)
Practice your Egyptian accent and bare that midriff because we are talking the troubled “adaptation” of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned (2002).
Directed by Australian Michael Rymer, this one was doomed by the suits before it was even greenlit (which happened AFTER all of the songs were written by Korn frontman Jonathan Davis). It’s a bit of a clusterfuck.
Plus: praising everything Aaliyah (RIP); critiquing everything Stuart Townsend (aside from his abs and leather pants); a soft queer reading of Marius; and bemoaning boring protagonist/audience surrogate JESSE.
Cross out Queen of the Damned!
Coming Up Next: We’re tackling Ben Stiller’s horror-adjacent dark comedy The Cable Guy (1996), in anticipation of its 30th anniversary!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 495 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Hannibal Season 3 Episodes 5 & 6, Backrooms, Passenger, Leviticus, an audio commentary on the original Scary Movie (2000), and the return of our Requel Tier as we begin our episode coverage of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat.