We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody spends the week before Halloween watching demons and witches.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
THE MURDER PODCAST (2021)
Writer/director William Bagley’s horror comedy The Murder Podcast begins with a man – who is described as being both an avid gamer and an avid drinker – taking a hike in the woods. He finds an old coin on the ground and pockets it… which turns out to be a fatal mistake. This coin doesn’t belong to the legendary horror icon the Leprechaun, but there is another supernatural being out there who has made it their mission to kill anyone who possesses the coin. So by the end of the night, the guy has literally lost his head.
After that, we’re introduced to the lead characters, Chad Thadwick (Andrew McDermott) and his best bro Eddie (Cooper Bucha). Chad doesn’t do much with his life other than sit in the basement of the house that belongs to his sister Martha (Logan Mariner) and smoke weed, which causes him to bump heads with Martha’s boyfriend Stephen (Brian Emond), but he does aspire to something greater. With Eddie’s help, he records a podcast that’s all about reviewing different ramen noodle dishes. Unfortunately, Chad’s passion for ramen isn’t enough to draw in listeners. So he decides to take the podcast in a different direction: true crime. There’s a topic that gets listeners. And fortuitously, a headless body has just turned up in Chad and Eddie’s hometown. The corpse of that guy from the opening sequence. Police don’t suspect foul play, but Chad is certain that this fellow didn’t just trip so hard that his head popped off. So he – with Eddie tagging along – takes it upon himself to investigate the death. And record a podcast about it along the way.
Chad and Eddie are expecting to help the police force, primarily represented by Levi Burdick as Officer Stacheburn, capture a flesh and blood killer. Instead, they make themselves the next targets for the supernatural being that destroys anyone who has the coin.
The Murder Podcast is a very entertaining movie that was clearly made on a minuscule budget, but overcomes any limitations with the strength of its comedic writing and performances. The moments of explosive bloodshed were also much appreciated, and at times made the film come off like a mixture of stoner comedies and the Evil Dead franchise. Scenes where people get possessed venture into Evil Dead territory as well… and when Chad and Eddie go into battle armed with squirt guns, The Murder Podcast brings to mind the likes of The Lost Boys and From Dusk Till Dawn. Scenes are presented almost entirely in a comedic light, but Bagley and cinematographer Alex Allgood also drop in some good “wander through the dark house” / “the dark woods” sequences that verge on creepy.
Chad is the character who really drives the story forward, and McDermott gives a fun performance that took me a while to get used to. He speaks the character’s lines in a uniquely boisterous way that made it difficult for me to feel any emotion from Chad. It was like he was always excitedly welcoming listeners to another episode of a podcast. But as the film went on, I started getting used to Chad and saw that McDermott was bringing depth and emotion to the character after all. It helps that the story also gets deeper as the movie goes along, with Bagley revealing that the threat has some ties to Chad’s father, whose life got rather tragic when Chad was a youngster.
McDermott has a great supporting cast around him, with all of the actors mentioned in this review doing strong work in their roles. McDermott and Bucha make for a great duo, and it’s fun to watch McDermott bounce off all the other characters that are frustrated with Chad, which is pretty much anyone he ever crosses paths with. Including douchey newscaster Burn Nightly (Chris Mayers).
The Murder Podcast marks the feature debut of Bagley, who worked his way up to this by making short films. It’s a solid start to what will hopefully pan out to be a lengthy career, because this movie has left me anxiously waiting to see more from the writer/director. And if what’s next would happen to be another horror comedy featuring Chad and Eddie, I wouldn’t object.
WENDELL & WILD (2022)
About thirty years ago, director / stop-motion animator Henry Selick teamed up with Tim Burton to create a film that has been embraced as both a Halloween classic and a Christmas classic: The Nightmare Before Christmas. Now Selick has joined forces with genre filmmaker Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, etc.) to craft another stop-motion animated film that may not quite reach the level of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but is sure to earn its own solid fanbase. Based on an unpublished novel Selick wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman, the film is called Wendell & Wild – and it’s about a pair of goofball demons.
The lead character in the film is actually Kat Elliot (voiced by Lyric Ross), a young girl whose parents were killed in a car accident five years earlier. The Elliots were the owners of the Rust Bank Brewery, the heart of their hometown… but after they died and the brewery burned down, Rust Bank has become a ghost town. It seems the only place still functioning is the Rust Bank Catholic school. Which happens to be the school where Kat, who became a juvenile delinquent after losing her parents, is now enrolled. But she hasn’t been in the Catholic school for long before she discovers she is a Hell Maiden, assigned two personal demons. The Wendell and Wild of the title.
Voiced by Peele (he’s Wild) and his sketch comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key (he’s Wendell), Wendell and Wild are not the evil monsters you might expect demons to be. They work for a much larger and more powerful demon called Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), who torments the souls of the dead in the Scream Faire carnival that sits on his massive stomach. Wendell and Wild got in trouble for dreaming of making their own carnival – a Dream Faire, which would actually be fun for souls to visit, and now they’re forced to work Belzer’s hair farm with their horse-like creature Spark Plug, roaming Belzer’s scalp like it’s a field and making sure he has a fresh supply of vibrant hair plugs every day. Follicle by follicle, they supply Belzer with hair and hit each follicle with their hair cream… which happens to have magical properties.
Kat summons her demons into the Land of the Living with hopes they’ll be able to improve her situation, but Wendell and Wild get distracted by their own goal of building the Dream Faire and end up siding with the money-hungry Father Level Bests (James Hong) and the villains who have ruined Rust Bank in the last five years. Soon enough, there’s an army of the undead filling the streets of Rust Bank and Kat has to team up with nun Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) and her pal Raul (Sam Zelaya) to get her demons back under control. In the midst of this, screenwriters Selick and Peele dig into the story of Kat and her parents in a very touching way. And, as you would expect from Peele, they also work in a bit of social commentary.
The voice cast did terrific work in their roles, and Key and Peele made Wendell and Wild fun and amusing characters to watch even when their actions are not honorable. Tim Burton gets a lot of credit for the look and style of The Nightmare Before Christmas – in fact, a lot of people mistakenly call it a Burton movie. With Wendell & Wild, Selick continues to prove that he has his own dazzling style and imagination separate from the influence of Burton. The character design in this film is great, the animation is stunning. There are a lot of fun ideas (a demon with a fair on his belly and a hair farm on his head, desiccated corpses rising from their graves) that were excellently brought to the screen by Selick and his crew.
These visuals will appeal to horror fans and monster kids alike, and younger viewers will be rooting for tough Catholic schoolgirl Kat as she goes on this supernatural adventure. But while Wendell & Wild will be appealing to kids, parents should be warned that there is content in here that you might not want the youngsters to see. Wendell and Wild have trippy visions after ingesting the hair cream, there’s a murder, the first end credit song has some questionable lyrics… so you might want to check it out for yourself first before letting the kids dive in.
Wendell & Wild is a delightful little Halloween treat and another great artistic achievement for Selick, thirteen long years after the release of his previous feature film (Coraline). This may not be a new classic (or maybe it is, we’ll have to wait and see), but it’s definitely worth a watch.
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