Hellraiser (1987)

Matt (00:00:21):

Hello and welcome to 1-Week Rental: A Movie Podcast. We spent the last seven days with Hellraiser, 1987.

Laci (00:00:28):

Oh, it’s so sexual.

Matt (00:00:30):

And we have such sights to show you. We’re going to tell you all about Hellraiser. My name is Matt Stokes. And

Laci (00:00:35):

I’m Laci Roth, his betrothed, his wife. I can say what I want, do what I want.

Matt (00:00:39):

And no funny business with you and my brother, right? You promise. The week before our wedding.

Laci (00:00:45):

Is that what that was? Was it a week

Matt (00:00:47):

Before? Oh yeah.

Laci (00:00:48):

Okay. I couldn’t totally track it.

Matt (00:00:50):

Yeah. Every week on this show, we spend the week with a movie researching it, reading interviews and stuff. And if it’s based on a novel, we read the novel. We watch the movie a bunch of times. We are here to now unload it all onto you. Two components to every episode, the history section and then the movie discussion. History segment’s the only part you get in video. Lick in the link. Lick in the link. Look.

Laci (00:01:13):

Lick my link litter.

Matt (00:01:15):

Look in the episode description to get links to hear the full show or subscribe or watch it on YouTube. You don’t know what I’m saying.

Laci (00:01:21):

It gets rowdy and better. We’re just more composed during the history because we’ve got things to get to and to say that are not our own words, but then things get wild.

Matt (00:01:33):

That’s true. But things-

Laci (00:01:34):

In a good way. They stay on track and they’re wild and insightful and hopeful and plentiful. Concise.

Matt (00:01:43):

Consensual. Which is very important in this month of April, which is sex month and so- Sex month. We are talking about Hell Raiser. I love my horror franchises, right? Yeah. Hellraiser’s like, I don’t love it like I love Friday the 13th and Nightmare and I’m straight in all of that. I’ve only seen this movie five times. I love this movie though. Laci has never seen it.

Laci (00:02:03):

Until yesterday and then today.

Matt (00:02:06):

Yeah.

Laci (00:02:06):

Yeah.

Matt (00:02:07):

And I think for a lot of people our age, before they get to see Hellraiser, what they say is so many people say this. I saw that at the video store and it’s the video box that torments them, this iconic poster we’re looking at. The series

Laci (00:02:25):

Fucking thing ever.

Matt (00:02:25):

Of Pinhead.

Laci (00:02:26):

I had no idea it was this. How could I have? His name is Pinhead and this is called Hellraiser and he’s got a fucking box.

Matt (00:02:34):

Is that Hell is in the title and you’re like, oh, I think can they do that?

Laci (00:02:38):

I wouldn’t. There’s no way. My mom would not, if she saw it, she’d be like, how dare you?

Matt (00:02:44):

So the movie that lives in your head is like so much scarier than what this is. What’s funny is either when people watch it for the first time or you just tell them what it’s about, they say, “That’s what Hellraiser is

Laci (00:02:55):

About. ” Yes. There’s no way to put it together. Plus he’s blocking his nipples here. It wasn’t until someone requested a Hellraiser or Penhead specifically coloring person that I looked up cinnabytes and realized there’s a lot of nipple stuff in their outfits when you start looking. I’m like, “Something else is happening here.” Some other kind of Mad Max, that guy, Big Joe, what’s his name?

Matt (00:03:19):

In Morton Joe. In

Laci (00:03:19):

Martin Joe.

Matt (00:03:20):

No, there’s a more Nipular guy. I forget his name. Nippler. Mechanic. I forget what his name is, but yeah, who’s way more nipple. And in the most inferioroso, he’s constantly tweaking his own nipple. Yeah. I feel like that’s very … Hell raiser Mad Max, kind of a continuity between those two franchises I have.

Laci (00:03:39):

Maybe the realm where Hell Razor does their Hell Raising is the Mad Max realm.

Matt (00:03:45):

Maybe.

Laci (00:03:45):

We just don’t ever go outside.

Matt (00:03:47):

I truly have no idea what Laci thought of this movie. And I kept telling her ahead of time, “You’re not going to like this. You’re going to hate this. There’s bugs.”

Laci (00:03:55):

And you warned me about the wrong fucking thing. I mean, yeah, I always have trouble when there’s actual roaches that you see in real life. The roaches where it’s like they’re huge and Beatle-like and the Madagascar one and I’m like, give me a break. I don’t care about that. But when they look like the kind in my house, and I particularly have a hard time with maggots, thanks for not talking about that. But the number one rule this fucking movie broke and it broke it at a time that almost made me turn it off. I was seriously getting disturbed. Do you know what it is?

Matt (00:04:28):

Roaches?

Laci (00:04:29):

No.

Matt (00:04:30):

What?

Laci (00:04:31):

Baby crying.

Matt (00:04:32):

Oh, I totally forgot about that. Gary is

Laci (00:04:34):

Sex dungeon. This child who is a recent adult who just got by her uncle basically is walking through a sex dungeon to the sound of not a baby, like a toddler crying. What does that imply?

Matt (00:04:52):

There’s a lot going on.

Laci (00:04:54):

Frank even implies that you have to get … Implies that he was abused, right? You do have to get-

Matt (00:05:01):

You have to go through the pain to get to the pleasure. Oh,

Laci (00:05:04):

My child. I can see that you’re scared. You do have to go through the pain to

Matt (00:05:08):

Get to the

Laci (00:05:09):

…

Matt (00:05:09):

Oh, there’s so much going on. Everything’s credible. And her uncle saying, “Come to daddy and her uncle wearing her father’s skin, but I’m also going to fuck my daughter.” There’s a ton going on. My

Laci (00:05:21):

Wife is into it. Okay. All right. Okay. This is going off the wheels road.

Matt (00:05:27):

And so I was like, listen, you have to understand this is all from a guy who, when you learn about him, you’re going to like him. And I think you’re going to find all of the people who made this movie very wholesome. And oh, Doug Bradley’s like the number one con guy, just beloved by millions of people worldwide. You’re going to like all that stuff. I almost wish you could have heard all of this before you actually saw the movie.

Laci (00:05:47):

It’s almost like you should have had a conversation with me. So to make my viewing pleasure, pleasurable.

Matt (00:05:51):

I tried to tell you.

Laci (00:05:52):

I did look up pictures because I was trying to see the photographs that she looks through when she takes photos out of Frank’s trunk when she first goes into the house, into his squatting area. We’ll get to the pictures, but try to look that up. Pictures from Frank’s trunk. Pictures from like, there’s no way because it’s all just scenes from the movie and back behind the scenes stuff. That did make me like it more because you’ve just got Kirsty just kissing the Frank with all the goo and kissing. Oh God.

Matt (00:06:24):

The reason horror fandom is the best kind of fandom in my head, in my mind, is they’re the ones who take it, who have the most sincere love and are not freaking snobs and weirdos about it and are just there to celebrate their love and the community that they find in it. So I’ve been lurking on the Hell Raiser subreddit just to see like, all right, what are people’s opinions about like all the different entries? Mostly though the subreddit is just here’s me with Doug Bradley, here’s me with Ashley Lawrence. Here’s me with Doug Bradley and Ashley Lawrence. Is Ashley

Laci (00:06:53):

Lawrence

Matt (00:06:53):

The daughter? Girsty. Yeah.

Laci (00:06:54):

Once I sunk into it, I mean, because the pacing’s fine, but the line delivery is so odd. And you probably can’t go back to the first time that you saw it and really feel those … It’s not just one character. It is every person they introduce has these off-putting way of speaking that I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t bad acting.” We’re in a different dimension.

Matt (00:07:23):

Yes, yes. Part of the magic.

Laci (00:07:26):

It’s like Beetlejuice. I could tell this is probably something I need to watch twice to truly appreciate it and a hundred times to love it.

Matt (00:07:34):

So we have to, in the history segment, we’re going to go all into- But for now,

Laci (00:07:37):

I’m just going to open this box.

Matt (00:07:40):

Into Clive Barker, the man responsible for all of this, a man who had never directed a movie-

Laci (00:07:46):

You don’t say.

Matt (00:07:46):

… and then directed this movie and a movie that is so special that it overcomes his limitations as a director, but also some of its mystique is because he probably didn’t know what he was doing. And then things like the studio made him dub over a bunch of the actors. That’s why they sound so weird.

Laci (00:08:01):

Okay. Well, do you mean when I text you or call, I shout it out. It’s like, Matt, Hellraiser, stop. That’s the first one, right? Hellraiser, then nothing after. That’s number one, yeah? Because the first two scenes, that seems like a huge jump in time, or not time, but were they supposed to tell us what’s happening? I know

Matt (00:08:27):

What you’re saying. Every time I watch this movie, and I think it’s because Clive Warker’s not an experienced director, every scene feels like it or every location feels like it’s from a different movie.

Laci (00:08:37):

Yeah, that and where they go from Dirty Nails Man giving over the box and Dirty Nails Man receiving the box, and he walks away after paying him dirty money, literally dirty money, and the Dirty Man salesman says, “It was always your bucks.” Then Smash Cut, he’s in an altar fucking being pulled apart. So that’s why I was like, wait, should I understand …

Matt (00:09:02):

Yeah.

Laci (00:09:03):

But now I will expect it. That’s how it works when you watch a movie.

Matt (00:09:08):

Yeah.

Laci (00:09:09):

Okay. This is the history segment.

Matt (00:09:11):

Going to cover Clive Barker and the history of Hellraiser and his novel, Hellbound Heart, and ask what it all means. In the history segment, if you are just interested, if you’re listening to this on the podcast feed and you’re just interested in hearing us review the movie, look at the episode description, you’ll see movie discussion, timestamp, and just skip to that part. Otherwise, here we go, history of Hellraiser.

Laci (00:09:31):

Matt, I will give you one role. You get to say penetration twice.

Matt (00:10:05):

This all starts with Clive Barker, and we’re going to start here with something he said in 1989. “I once asked Stephen King why he never had any sex scenes in his books, and he told me he was embarrassed by it. I don’t think this is unusual among horror writers. They actually believe it is a metaphor rather than a confrontation. They think it only works in horror stories if it’s subtextual. “That’s nonsense. If it’s going to be sex, let’s damn well see them go to it. I don’t want sex in my work to be relief from the horror. I want it to be part of it.

Laci (00:10:33):

Oh my. Mission accomplished.

Matt (00:10:35):

In 2017, he told the guardian, “I worked as a hustler in the 1970s because I had no money. I met a lot of people you’ll know and some you won’t. Publishers, captains of industry, the way they acted and the way I did, to be honest, was a source of inspiration later. Sex is a great leveler. It made me want to tell a story about good and evil in which sexuality was the connective tissue. Most English and American horror movies were not sexual, or co-kedishly so, a bunch of teenagers having sex and then getting killed. Hellraiser, the story of a man driven to seek the ultimate sexual experience has a much more twisted sense of sexuality.

Laci (00:11:08):

I will hover point out that everyone that has sex in this movie is killed. So did you turn change things much? I don’t know.

Matt (00:11:15):

I think Kirsty has sex with that boy.

Laci (00:11:18):

He’s asleep on the floor.

Matt (00:11:19):

He wakes up

Laci (00:11:19):

On a palette.

Matt (00:11:20):

I think she kicked him out of the bed afterwards.

Laci (00:11:23):

She tells him he’s a prude. They kiss a little bit and then he wakes up on the floor asking her how her nightmare’s going.

Matt (00:11:28):

Subtextually, it really seems like she has lost her virginity and now this world of adulthood is opening up to her. The movie is so like a-

Laci (00:11:38):

Fucking 18.

Matt (00:11:38):

… like a fairytale or just like a classic Gothic novel because it’s like it’s an old house. It’s haunted.

Laci (00:11:44):

Yeah. I want to know more about this house.

Matt (00:11:46):

It’s such a weird thing that the movie studio said this has to be set in America and the story is so English. It’s filmed in England. All but two of the actors are English or other national … The guy who plays Frankish German. And that’s why there’s the weird … Why Frank sounds like that. Curster. Oh,

Laci (00:12:06):

Okay. I just thought because it sounds when you fucked all kinds of different ways. Cursed ah.

Matt (00:12:13):

If you’re in Europe where it’s not unusual for a house to be hundreds of years old, you’re in a house and you’re like, there’s been so many lives lived in this house and so much shit has happened in this house.

Laci (00:12:25):

And it’s big, but it’s inconvenient. To go to the bathroom, these people have to leave their bedrooms. I’m just pointing that out. And sometimes they have to go up the stairs and down the hall. There’s not a bathroom on every floor. No surreal, Bob. And there’s plenty of rooms, but do you want the one on the third floor? It’s funny how huge this house is and not at all. It looks like a boarding school.

Matt (00:12:51):

Doesn’t it? I mean, just though the idea of the woman had an affair with her brother’s husband, that itself seems like so British, like a drama about manners. Oh,

Laci (00:13:00):

You Brits?

Matt (00:13:00):

Yeah.

Laci (00:13:00):

About Manners.

Matt (00:13:02):

Find

Laci (00:13:02):

Your Manners.

Matt (00:13:02):

That’s Bad Manners. Don’t do that. Or

Laci (00:13:04):

Like the Manner.

Matt (00:13:06):

No, Manners with an E-E-R. Yeah, British. That’s bad manners. Don’t do that, but sometimes you got to, because you’re so repressed because you’re so British. When

Laci (00:13:14):

They walk through the door and they’re the rudest asshole to you, that’s when you know. Okay, please just tell me more about that. I have so many questions.

Matt (00:13:22):

All right. So Clive Marker, born in Liverpool in 1952, said he has a lifelong fascination with blood and it’s because he’s one of these people who claims he remembers his birth

(00:13:31):

And that it was a difficult C-section. And so his whole life, he was fascinated by blood and also anatomy. This famous 16th century book called Dehuman Eye Corporus Fabrica shows these very famous drawings of skinless people and he was obsessed with them. He said, “They’re very meticulous, neoclassical, and these are very beautiful. And these are very beautiful etchings in which you get flayed men and women standing in classical poses or leaning against pillars. The whole atmosphere of these pictures is cool and elegant and beautiful.” I’ve only read The Hell Bound Heart, the novel that this movie was based on, but reading about all of his other fiction, it seems like it is so about the body and I’m the kind of person, and maybe Laci you are too, of like, I don’t want to think about bodies. It’s not about business. I don’t want to know-

Laci (00:14:20):

Whatever’s under this layer of skin that I see the most, none of my business.

Matt (00:14:24):

If I start to think about what’s going on under there, it can make me have a panic attack.

Laci (00:14:28):

It can get all existential crisisy about it. And I feel like a sack of meat that is meant to expire. And having a baby or having any surgeries at all where they just do what they have to do to your body and they don’t care that they’re bruising you or like when they have to stuff a fucking pack an abscess with … It’s like, this is just what you have to do, but you’re ruining me just meat, meat to mold.

Matt (00:14:59):

The part where Uncle Frank first opens the box and first is given the pain and pleasure from the Senebytes, the way it’s described in the novel. I recommend reading the novel, but it does, it still makes me go, ooh. It describes the sensory overload of suddenly being aware of everything happening in your own body and like hearing and smelling your bowels. Oh, you know what I’ve always hated is if you close your eyes and you can see the inside of your eyelids, ugh, you can feel like dust mites contacting your skin. Okay. No, thank

Laci (00:15:32):

You. A step

Matt (00:15:33):

Too far. But you know the part of life where you are most aware of yourself as a body is when you have sex. And that’s one of the reasons it’s such a big part of his work. He also had a grandfather who worked on a ship. Apparently this was the 1600s on a ship and he would go to the far east of Asia and bring back exotic gifts such as a puzzle box for young Clive. And then in school, he excelled in art and writing that he

Laci (00:15:59):

Has a grandfather from the 1600s.

Matt (00:16:01):

No, I was joking. It’s just that he had- I don’t know

Laci (00:16:04):

How British people work.

Matt (00:16:05):

I know. Well, I mean, if you’re like six years old in the 50s, your grandfather’s like 70 years old.

Laci (00:16:11):

From the 1600s because you’re

Matt (00:16:13):

Bridging. There you go. He excelled in school in writing plays and art, and he would write and produce his own plays with his troop of friends who he co-founded a theatrical company called The Dog Company. And it also included his good friend, lifelong friend, Doug Bradley, AKA Bend. Also Peter Adkins who would go on to write the screenplays for the first three Hellraiser sequels, but they did a lot of weirdo plays and then he transitioned into writing prose, writing short stories, horror short stories that were published in the anthology called Books of Blood.

Laci (00:16:48):

Is part of his art making that he likes to make these sculpt … Does he have anything to do with the special effects? It’s so artistic.

Matt (00:16:56):

Only in the capacity as director. I mean, I’m sure he was hands on, but I mean, he’s not credited with doing the special effects, but there’s concept art that he did himself for the Synobites and the Synobites are very vividly described in the novel. Pinhead himself is like a pure creation of the effects designers on the movie.

Laci (00:17:15):

Oh.

Matt (00:17:17):

He supported himself financially by working as an escort during this time. In 2015, he told Grantland, “It was humiliating many times. It was stultifyingly boring much of the time, and it’s bad sex mainly, but you can’t have everything. It kept me in bread and cheese through a bad time in my life fiscally.” So he’s writing these short stories, getting some success- While

Laci (00:17:39):

Being an escort.

Matt (00:17:40):

Eventually does not have to be an escort anymore. But

Laci (00:17:42):

I mean, as he’s authoring these things,

Matt (00:17:44):

He’s

Laci (00:17:44):

Still an escort.

Matt (00:17:45):

And obviously that goes on to inform everything he will ever write is just … I’m a gay man in Britain in the 70s doing sexual favors for all these wealthy people in scary old London. It does

Laci (00:17:59):

Change the bowel movement thing though a little bit for me. What do

Matt (00:18:02):

You mean?

Laci (00:18:03):

Well, play with fire. Butt stuff leads to poop stuff. I’m

Matt (00:18:07):

Sorry. It just

Laci (00:18:08):

Does. It can. It has. It will.

Matt (00:18:10):

Well, and which-

Laci (00:18:11):

Especially with a stranger.

Matt (00:18:12):

He would say correctly like, “Yeah, we’re bodies that’s going to happen.” Get over it.

Laci (00:18:16):

Keep talking, Clive. This is interesting.

Matt (00:18:17):

Everyone’s born, everyone dies in between, everyone poops. The three facts of life.

Laci (00:18:23):

And taxes, today is the 15th of

Matt (00:18:26):

April. Oh, fuck. Hope you filed that six month extension,

Laci (00:18:30):

Everybody. I shit in the mailbox so that you’ll find that instead.

Matt (00:18:34):

Included in these short stories is one called The Forbidden, which would in 1992 be adapted into the movie Candyman. So Clive Parker is the creator of both Hellraiser and Candyman.

Laci (00:18:43):

Okay. Wow. All right.

Matt (00:18:45):

His first experience in the movies was having his short stories adapted into feature films, Underworld in 1985 and Rawhead Rex in 1986. And both of these turned out very badly and he was sort of cut out of them creatively. We see this over and over again of writers who never thought they would become directors, but have such a bad experience being the writer of a movie or having their work adaptive. They’re like, “Fuck it. I’m just going to have to direct myself.” Though he did have … Now he directed plays. So he did have experience. He just did not have any experience directing movies.

Laci (00:19:19):

That makes sense why each part seemed like a vignette from a play. Now we moved to this scene and now we changed to this scene. When you’re doing plays, you don’t have a lot of … There literally aren’t transitions. I mean, there’s just the way … You just move the people off stage in scene. Literally that’s from plays. So things just jumping from scene to scene in the movie makes perfect sense.

Matt (00:19:41):

Yeah. And when we cut to a bar at a hotel or a pet store, it feels so jarring. What not this movie? No.

Laci (00:19:51):

No. Why is there going to be chickens in this now? And what’s with this man? Well, there’s just so much unexplained in this movie. And what I can’t tell is it was just hard to adapt from the book or is it setting up a two? Was there always intended to be another one? The man turning into a dragon at the end seems like this big reveal, but is it? Is it? So …

Matt (00:20:18):

That is the thing that for how many times I’ve seen this movie, I’ll always forget that’s in the movie. Man turns into a dragon at the end. Yeah, the homeless guy’s the element that I really wish didn’t exist in the movie.

Laci (00:20:31):

I mean, I assume he’s the person that delivers the box to the band and the orient or whatever that’s going to then wait for the guy who really wants this box. You got to have a pigeon or something. It’s more economical to have a man that turns into a dragon.

Matt (00:20:44):

He told Fangoria in 1986, “I want to direct. I directed in theater and I like working with actors. I like community projects. So we’re putting a project together from a novella I wrote called The Hell Bound Heart. I did a screenplay from it, which I hope to be directing this year. We’re going to call the movie Hail Raiser.” So this novel- Ooh,

Laci (00:21:02):

All the art is actually two things on the last page and on this one of this PowerPoint you got here.

Matt (00:21:08):

Yeah, on The Hell Bound Heart and previously on Books of Blood.

Laci (00:21:13):

Yes.

Matt (00:21:14):

So 1986, the Novella The Hellbound Heart is published as part of the Knight Visions anthology series, which was known today for having been edited by George R.R. Martin. Something funny. Even George R. Martin has some involvement with Hellraiser, kind of. This is the basis for Hellraiser, but let’s talk a little bit more about Clive Barker and sexuality. Please. All right. 1987, he says this in an interview, “I’m confident in my own complexity, and that really interests me because of the ambiguities of sexuality. The ambiguities of metaphysics and the metaphysics of sexuality are things which usually influence what I write. So there are gay characters in my fiction who haven’t really appeared in horror fiction before, except for the occasional lesbian vampire. And there are sexual transformations in my fiction.” Just a second, just a note. It is strongly suggested in the novel that Pinhead, who is not named Pinhead in the novel, either has no gender or is a trans woman.

(00:22:17):

You can read it either of those ways. And then when they remade Hell Raiser a few years ago, Pinhead was played by a trans woman.

Laci (00:22:25):

This makes perfect sense because infatuation with bodies as they actually are, the functionality of them, to always be thinking of bodies as the muscles and organs and things that get you where you’re going rather than all the stuff that you put on top of it, society puts like, “Oh, I see. On the inside, you look like a man or a woman. On the outside, you’re coded as one or the other.” And so to be thinking of bodies without genitalia because you’re always thinking of what’s on the inside of them, it does seem very stupid that one sex should have sex with another one when there’s orifices on both and it’s all constructed from exterior shit because literally on the inside of us, there was no intention as to what can and will go in this body.

Matt (00:23:15):

Right. And yeah, a woman has a uterus and a man does not, but it’s all made of the same shit. It’s just cells clumping in one way and not another. It’s all the same handful of Play-Doh that God lovingly crafted us from.

Laci (00:23:28):

Thank you, Lord.

Matt (00:23:29):

In the book, the synovites are doing things like surgically creating their own orifices in different parts of their bodies. “Horror fiction, fantastic fiction as a whole hasn’t taken on board sexual radicalism whatsoever. There’s no sense that the sexual in all its ambiguities and complexity has a place in fantasy. I think as kids, we are polymorphously perverse. We see the world as being full of tactile and potential sensual experiences, which are at root sexual, but also about pleasure and all its diversities. We get educated out of that. We get told that it has to be this way or that or preferably this. And then what happened for me was that I discovered in imaginative fiction, you can construct scenarios in which all of those barriers are broken down again.

Laci (00:24:08):

“All of them? Age ones?

Matt (00:24:13):

Assume no. Assume no what they age. I want to assume

Laci (00:24:16):

No.

Matt (00:24:16):

I mean, he would definitely say no. He should only talk about consenting enthusiastic adults. On Loveline in 1986, he told Dr. Drew and Adam Carol,” I had much older girlfriends right through my childhood, my adolescence. When I was 15, I had a 19-year-old girlfriend, which was a big deal when you were 15. The issue of the kind of openness of your sexuality at that time when you were just looking at possibilities, and one of the things that happens is your possibilities start to narrow and you start to become very specific as you get older. I think of sexuality as being this incredibly malleable, protean, changeable, wonderful, flowery thing. I don’t think that it is about saying I am this and I will always be this. I think that it is about being aroused by the world and finding the world sexy. I mean, do I still look at beautiful women?

(00:24:57):

Absolutely.

Laci (00:24:59):

He uses flowers several times in this movie and his infatuation with them. Now that I know that it’s a metaphor to him and it’s the first time it’s occurred to me, everyone always says the thing about late bloomers and blossoming, all this, but the way they talk about it makes it sound like it happens one time, but that’s not true. Flowers bloom all every year. They reinvent themselves. They come back. Sometimes they die, but sometimes they bloom over and over and over again.That is way more realistic to what life really feels like. You’re not evolving, you’re the same person, but you can come back slightly different or just as vibrant or completely new.

Matt (00:25:41):

And you can discover things about yourself, which is what this month has been all about. And as Laci said, everybody- I

Laci (00:25:47):

Learned to masturbate. Just kidding.

Matt (00:25:49):

“Everybody needs a kink,” she famously said.

Laci (00:25:52):

Everybody needs

Matt (00:25:53):

A- Needs a kink.

Laci (00:25:55):

It’s kind of-

Matt (00:25:56):

That we all think.

Laci (00:25:58):

It’s more like everyone should know themselves enough in a sexual way, in a fun sexual way. And if had enough sex, that was their decision that they were really into that was consensual and safe and all the things that they discovered they like something odd. I think that’s lovely. It just means you’ve had time to think about these things. It’s not like, “Oh, because I got run over by a car when I was small, so I just love tires fucking them,” or whatever it is.

Matt (00:26:31):

Donald Chestnut. It’s

Laci (00:26:32):

Not something that comes from trauma or whatever it is people think. It can, but it doesn’t have to. And you can figure it out as late in life as you need to.

Matt (00:26:42):

Did you think it was notable that Clive Barker, like Christian Gray, had an older Dom woman as his sexual tutor? Who the

Laci (00:26:51):

Fuck is Dom in

Matt (00:26:52):

This movie? I’m injecting that myself. Oh, Clive Barker, the author said when he was 15, he had a 19-year-old girlfriend.

Laci (00:27:00):

Oh, okay. I was like, “What’s the woman’s name in this movie?”

Matt (00:27:03):

Julia.

Laci (00:27:04):

Her name’s Julia. She’s … Hey, I’m

Matt (00:27:07):

Julia.

Laci (00:27:08):

She’s insane.

Matt (00:27:10):

She’s so awesome.

Laci (00:27:11):

Okay. She’s

Matt (00:27:11):

Awesome.

Laci (00:27:12):

She freaks me the fuck out. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. She’s complicated, but then I hardly know anything about her and she seems like she’s making choices she wants to do, but I’ve never seen a woman tremble more in a movie.

Matt (00:27:32):

I think she’s so sexually repressed and is with this fucking loser husband who’s like, “Oh no.” How’s he a loser? I get blood on my finger. And then he’s so cucked that the movie guys come in and they’re like, “Hey buddy, how about getting me a beer?” And he’s like, “Yeah, okay. I guess I will.” You got to watch it again. I

Laci (00:27:52):

Did watch it again, but I thought he was giving her shit. Yeah, I guess I’ll get it. It’s not like I have anything else to do.

Matt (00:27:57):

No, but that’s the point that he will do it because he’s such a pushover. Meanwhile, he has this brother, this fucking magnetic Fox. He

Laci (00:28:04):

Confuses to stand in the rain.

Matt (00:28:06):

Fucking

Laci (00:28:07):

Bitch, let me in the house.

Matt (00:28:08):

Yeah. Arrives in the … Hey, I’m Frank. What’s

Laci (00:28:11):

Going on? Just with pockets of maggots and he goes and fixes cereal and he just sprinkles them everywhere.

Matt (00:28:17):

And this is her blossoming into a flower suddenly realizing, oh my God, this is what sex actually is. And it’ll make me do insane things because I’ve never had good sex in my life.

Laci (00:28:27):

It involves your finger rubbing slowly on my bottom lip. Then you cut my expensive negligee and then we have missionary in the daylight.

Matt (00:28:36):

Well, it’s a movie. You got to get an R rating for it.

Laci (00:28:39):

All right. Every time I try to fucking-

Matt (00:28:41):

Come on. You like him cutting her … That’s

Laci (00:28:43):

Hot. No, I don’t. Come on. No. We don’t know how expensive that was. She’s going to wear that

Matt (00:28:46):

On a

Laci (00:28:46):

Wedding. Well, it’s a stupid point.

Matt (00:28:49):

So the novel is pretty similar to the movie. Some differences. Kirsty is not Larry’s daughter. She is their friend who has a crush on Larry. And Larry’s name is not Larry. It’s Rory, which is the British version of Larry. Okay. And the box is called the Le Marchand configuration, not the lament configuration. All right. So they’re going to make a movie out of this novel. Most recently on Can’t Hardly Wait, we saw that a way for people to get a green light to direct a movie for the first time is you got to pitch a very low budget movie that takes place in a very limited number of lookings. But you’re

Laci (00:29:25):

Going to say you have to get a reputable producer.

Matt (00:29:27):

Well, that helps too. It does. He did meet this guy, Christopher Figg through a friend, Christopher Fig, who had worked as a crew member on David Lean’s A Passage to India. There are a lot of experienced people working on this movie who are working the job up from the job they’re used to working in. And that’s another smart way of making a movie in an economic way is I’m getting the special effects. The special effects supervisors worked under other special effects supervisors now gets to take the lead for the first time, stuff like that.

Laci (00:29:57):

Right. And now the resume says that they are this position And not the other one, and I’ve just given them all opportunities.

Matt (00:30:02):

Right. He says to Christopher Fig, “What budget do I need to be able to pitch to a studio where they’ll say, yeah, you can direct it? ” And quote, said, “Under a million dollars, you just need a house, some monsters, and pretty much unknown actors. My novella, the hellbound heart, which took place mostly in one house, fitted those parameters.” And then he’s also told, “This is the ’80s and horror movies are all the rage, but you need something that just looks iconic. You need the Jason Mask or the Freddie Krueger face and hat and glove. So let’s come up with something.” And so he thinks about his time at S&M Clubs and he gets very inspired. It was the first time I saw people piercing each other for fun. Okay.

Laci (00:30:47):

That was just the first time.

Matt (00:30:49):

This led to Panhead’s look. He also says he didn’t know anything about directing and was bluffing his way into getting the job as director. So once it was green lit, he then went to the library to see if there were any books about directing. There was only one, but it was checked out. But he said, “It was a great time shooting, “The cast treated my ineptitudes kindly and the crew were no less forgiving.” So they’re shooting the movie and the studio, this tiny studio, which gave them a budget of a million dollars, they’re very hands off. They figure this is going straight to video, but about halfway through production, they get a sense that this thing’s going well. And from Clive Barker, quote, “Robin Vigen, my director of photography said, I’ve seen this a million times. They see something they like and they want to take charge.” Three of them come over, he means three like suits from the studio, come over all a new Burberry coats.

(00:31:42):

Robin and I had changed the schedule so we were doing something incredibly bloody. One of them may have gotten their Burberry splashed and they fled after 15 minutes.

Laci (00:31:53):

Burberry’s very expensive.

Matt (00:31:55):

So that’s how you make the suits go away is do something gross and they might get something on their coats.

Laci (00:31:59):

Just like if somebody wants to take you in the second location, you throw up and pee and poo.

Matt (00:32:05):

That’s what you do.

Laci (00:32:06):

You make it gross.

Matt (00:32:07):

But they do demand to change. This has got to be said in America, not England.

Laci (00:32:11):

Wait, they had already started production?

Matt (00:32:13):

Yeah, yeah.

Laci (00:32:14):

And they already are in England?

Matt (00:32:15):

They’re in England. This is all happening in England.

Laci (00:32:17):

Oh.

Matt (00:32:18):

The cast-

Laci (00:32:18):

Fly over some Americans, won’t you?

Matt (00:32:21):

Yeah, they’ve already shot it. They’re like, “Yeah, but can we say this is America?” It’s like, “But all the actors are British. All right. Well, we’re going to need to do some dubbing then.”

Laci (00:32:29):

What? Wait, what actors … Well, who else was British?

Matt (00:32:33):

Okay. So of the cast, Andrew Robinson, Andrew Robinson’s the best known actor in the cast. He is American. He plays the dad. He’s known as the Scorpio killer from Dirty Harry. He will go on to be a big part of Star Trek Deep Space nine. And then Ashley Lawrence is Kirsty, she’s American. So in the story of the movie is this American guy and his daughter moved over to England, and now everyone they’re

Laci (00:32:56):

Talking to- Which makes way more sense because they’re talking about while we’re back here at campaign, worse than New Jersey or wherever they were, Brooklyn, whatever the fuck. You’re back where she’s going to feel comfortable and fit in and have the only accent? What? That doesn’t make any sense.

Matt (00:33:12):

So Julia, they let her keep a British accent, but for other people, most notably Frank, they have to dub over. And I’m doing this James Bond podcast with Wade and there’s so much dubbing in the early James Bond movies. And dubbing really is one of those underrated things that can just totally take you out of a movie.

Laci (00:33:27):

Yeah.

Matt (00:33:28):

And it’s a thing that studios do because it’s cheap and it’s like, ah, no one’ll notice. But especially if you’re listening with headphones, you will just get taken right out.

Laci (00:33:35):

Well, then that must be the uncanny thing that is happening in multiple scenes, especially the dinner scene and the one with the movers. Everything’s extra cruel and unsafe and unloving. And there’s no warm and fuzzy anything. Nobody in this movie seems safe. And the boyfriend character seems like such a throwaway thing. In fact, he’s acting unsafe during the … I don’t know how to explain it, but there needs to be somebody on Kirsty’s fucking side. Everyone seems to want to fuck her. And the stupid shit at the dinner table, and I can’t have another drink, girl. I won’t be able to stand. Why don’t you lie down? And the entire fucking adult group, “Ha, funny, what’s the fuck you want? “

Matt (00:34:22):

So if they said all the same stuff, but it was British, it would just seem classy and like, “Oh, cha party.”

Laci (00:34:31):

Yeah. We go have a lie about.

Matt (00:34:34):

But I think with Frank, it adds to this other worldliness that I really like. Yeah,

Laci (00:34:38):

That’s fine. I don’t mind him. Even in the flashbacks, he’s talking like no one I’ve ever heard, but the dad is just so shit. Honey, let me … Oh, would you like something? And then she walks away broodingly. Shit. It’s all so … I love it. Unmeasured. There’s no middle. It’s just, oh yeah, you want this, don’t you?

Matt (00:35:05):

I love how much she does not respond to her husband.

Laci (00:35:07):

Or anyone.

Matt (00:35:08):

Yeah, it’s so great. And

Laci (00:35:09):

There’s so many shots of her menacingly staring at Kirsty. And it’s like, why is she doing that? Is she even looking at Kirsty? It’s in the very beginning because she greets her really sweetly and then she looks up drunk, I guess. Kirsty’s drunk and she’s looking upstairs and she notices Julia and Julia’s like this staring down at her and she’s like, Julia’s so weird. No, she’s haunted. She’s haunted. That woman sits

Matt (00:35:39):

In it. This is supposed to be like Cinderella or like something or like Beauty and the Beast. It’s literally, not Beauty Beast or Snow White, just a fairy … Literally the evil stepmother has taken the place of my angelic mother in my life. Okay.

Laci (00:35:51):

I guess.

Matt (00:35:52):

And is here to yell at my dad for being a cook. So all right, to fill out the cast, Barker turns to his old pal, Doug Bradley, and he’s like, “Listen, you’ve never been in a movie before. Now, I could put you in the movie. You can play one of two rules. You could be one of the guys who carries the mattress in, or you could be like the lead cinebite.”

Laci (00:36:16):

Okay.

Matt (00:36:17):

And you can be well employed and comfortable for the rest of your life playing this guy over and over and then going to. They don’t let you

Laci (00:36:24):

Go to the con if you’re the guy with the mattress that pins the child against the wall and tries to have sex with her.

Matt (00:36:30):

He has to have been at some con though.

Laci (00:36:33):

That guy?

Matt (00:36:34):

Yeah. He brings

Laci (00:36:35):

A mattress.

Matt (00:36:35):

I think everyone from any of these movies.

Laci (00:36:37):

You have to bring a mattress with you so they can in context understand.

Matt (00:36:40):

You don’t know who I am. Does this help? And the fucking audience explodes and like no sleep till Brooklyn plays as he carries it.

Laci (00:36:48):

Someone standing behind the person behind the mattress with a nail. Let’s do the thing. God, that buildup, that scene of her fucking Frank, while with every thrust, the mattress is being thrust and you see the nail and you’re like, “What’s going to happen to his hand?” And it is a bad fucking injury. And honey?

Matt (00:37:11):

It is bad. It’s blood.

Laci (00:37:14):

I’m like that. I don’t want to look. He doesn’t want to see what’s on the inside. That’s a great little moment of Clive expressing that people don’t want to know what’s inside.

Matt (00:37:24):

That’s true. They

Laci (00:37:25):

Don’t want to look.

Matt (00:37:26):

But it is actually like a really bad injury, but he’s doing a good job of having these things happen simultaneously. And so you can see why she’s with this primal force of man. And then a very understandable injury happens to her husband, but you think it’s disgusting now. You’re so pathetic. Frank would never care that his hand was opened up violently by a nail.

Laci (00:37:48):

Frank is opened up.

Matt (00:37:50):

And he doesn’t complain.

Laci (00:37:51):

He doesn’t know. Fucking Lint’s getting stuck to him.

Matt (00:37:55):

So here’s what Doug had to say. “For a split second, I had an actorly conversation with myself because Hellraiser was my first movie. I thought it might be a good idea to be seen on screen as myself, but it was a brief conversation. There was no doubt in my mind that this unnamed guy with the pins in his head had a certain that a mattress delivery guy didn’t. The makeup took five or six hours to put on at first, though they got it down to three or four. The first time I wore it, I sat in front of the mirror trying to make friends with this new face, playing some lines and seeing where they took me. Most of my decisions about playing pinhead were made there and then I had a sense of power, of majesty, of a kind of beauty. His threat is implied.

(00:38:34):

Look what I did to myself. Now imagine what I can do to you. No, it

Laci (00:38:37):

Never occurred to me. Did that to himself.

Matt (00:38:39):

In the novel, he’s called The Hell Priest. He’s not called Pinhead. Pinhead is just like what the crew would refer to him as on set. And then this movie became a sensation and everybody called him pinhead, so they have to work that into the canon of the series. To this day, Clive Parker doesn’t like calling him pinhead.He calls him always.

Laci (00:38:56):

Is so much better.

Matt (00:38:57):

Never acted in a movie before, Doug Bradley. He was a classically trained theater actor. So this is brand new to him. He said,” Clive was very excited to have his creations walking and talking around him, but he gave me one note. He said, You have no idea how amazing this looks on camera, but do less. “So I would take things down a notch and he would say the same thing again. He was leading me to realize that the makeup was so powerful. I didn’t need to sell it to the audience. It’s difficult as an actor because you feel as if you’re just standing still and saying words. End quote. Yeah.

Laci (00:39:25):

And you’re

Matt (00:39:26):

Very involved in theater right now, Laci. I mean, live theater is project to people who are far

Laci (00:39:31):

Away from you. Okay. But this is true. When you’re playing a character like Shrek, that’s the music we’re in, and you’ve got Donkey, right? In your head, both of these are comedic roles, but they’re very, very different from each other. And actually Shrek is a super understated character when you look at the two. You got Eddie Murphy and you’ve got … When you think of Austin, what is his name? Mike Myers as being just as vivacious, but you can’t be. You can’t have both of them being rowdy. So then on the stage, the person who is playing Shrek in our version of the play is more like a donkey. He’s always cracking jokes, always … So he keeps, in the beginning, was kept getting the note of you’re the straight man. You have to make less faces. And once he fucking got it done, it was like, how this makes a difference because you’re not competing.

(00:40:20):

It’s funny how little he’s doing. But when you don’t think of yourself as a person who can be funny while doing nothing, it’s hard. It’s acting.

Matt (00:40:30):

And I don’t know anything about acting. So I always like when actors talk about like, I grew up on the stage. First time I got in front of a camera, I realized this is an entirely different thing. The camera’s going to pick up. I’m acting for the camera. I’m not acting for a person. Little micro twitches of my face are what it’s actually about, not me delivering to a live audience. But they knew like, all right, this guy looks fucking awesome. They make him the poster. Even though I think he’s in eight total minutes of the movie, I assume- He’s just the

Laci (00:40:59):

Lead cynobite it seems.

Matt (00:41:02):

Yeah. He’s credited in the end credits as lead synabite. There’s four synabites. You got your core four cynibytes. You got chatterer.

Laci (00:41:10):

One of them’s a real throwaway.

Matt (00:41:11):

You got Butterball.

Laci (00:41:12):

Puddle of fucking … Why has he got blues glasses on? Oh,

Matt (00:41:16):

So good.

Laci (00:41:17):

No, it’s not good.

Matt (00:41:18):

And then you got, of course, female senibite.

Laci (00:41:20):

There’s

Matt (00:41:21):

A

Laci (00:41:21):

Female?

Matt (00:41:21):

Yeah, the one with the big swoops.

Laci (00:41:24):

Who?

Matt (00:41:25):

She’s female synabite.

Laci (00:41:26):

What swoops?

Matt (00:41:28):

She’s got a big fucking …

Laci (00:41:30):

The chest open.

Matt (00:41:31):

She has a big hole in her throat.

Laci (00:41:33):

Yeah, that’s the trachea open. That’s a woman. But the swoops? You mean the giant circle opening the trachea?

Matt (00:41:39):

You know, I don’t know things. Yes,

Laci (00:41:41):

The swoops.

Matt (00:41:42):

Shut up, Laci.

Laci (00:41:42):

That one I think is the coolest looking one.

Matt (00:41:45):

But I assume you watch the movie and think like, where are the synabites going to get here?

Laci (00:41:52):

Yeah. Because

Matt (00:41:52):

This movie is mostly just about this family.

Laci (00:41:55):

Right. But that’s the problem. It’s the poster, right? I just think it’s all about they’re driving this. The synabites are going to be the way it starts and ends. It’s going to be the big battle. And it’s nothing. It’s this family fighting itself. And it’s like, well, duh, that’s all horror. All horror is … It’s just family life sucks. Here’s what it actually feels like. My sex life sucks. I can’t imagine how it’d be good. Here’s something. It’s just like, take everything to a fantastical extreme.

Matt (00:42:28):

And at the core, this is just a story of the Faustian bargain. The evil is the decision you made. The devil came in and facilitated you doing evil, but you made the decision.

Laci (00:42:40):

Well, what’s the other choice to just let a pile of goo be in your addict? She didn’t make the decision to feed him the daddy blood. No, but she made the

Matt (00:42:51):

Decision to start bringing in victims.

Laci (00:42:53):

Yeah, but seriously, what do you do with the Frank upstairs? And if he’s mad at you, then he surely tells your brother y’all fucked before the wedding, right? She’s kind of in a predicament. Plus she’s like, “I’d really like to fuck you again. Also, if just a couple of splashes of blood got you this far, surely it’ll only take one victim.” That’s what’s fucking me up the whole time. I’m like, come on. Three tops. Three tops. You got all the way to muscle with the first, I saw tendons.

Matt (00:43:22):

He’s never done this before. There’s going to be some waste.

Laci (00:43:25):

Fine. Well, he’s dripping all over the fucking place.

Matt (00:43:28):

So they didn’t know that … They knew this character looks awesome. They put him on the poster, but they don’t have Doug Bradley doing any publicity for the movie. But the movie comes out and it’s a big hit, $33 million on a $1 million budget.

Laci (00:43:40):

Wow.

Matt (00:43:41):

It’s a sensation, as far as these things can be. But Doug Bradley said he didn’t know until two years later, he went to a convention. There was a line outside the hotel. And then when he stepped out and they mobbed him, he realized they were literally in line to see him. And at that point, Clive Barker- Look

Laci (00:44:00):

At him. He looks like Mike from Fucking Breaking

Matt (00:44:02):

Bail. It does. He does look like Jonathan Banks. So these two guys, Barker and Bradley kind of diverge because Barker, he writes the story for the second movie, but then his involvement with the franchise ends. He will also say, these movies suck. I don’t like them, these sequels.

Laci (00:44:19):

Barker?

Matt (00:44:20):

Yeah. While Doug Bradley is like the ultimate team player, he plays pinhead eight more times or seven more times, plays him eight times total, does all of the cons. He might be like the con guy,

(00:44:32):

Always making the exact same face, holding the lament configuration like the buster. In all of these movies, Clive Barker, yeah, he stops being involved with the franchise, but he does write a sequel novel in 2015 called The Scarlet Gospels. And in the publicity for that novel says, “I’m killing Panhead. I’m killing the hell priest in this novel.” And he said to Grantland in 2015, “This book is a way for me to say to many of the people who made very bad Hell Raiser movies and some of the people who acted in them, get out of my way.” I’m a little over some of the bad stuff that was done. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. How

Laci (00:45:08):

Did he lose access to …

Matt (00:45:11):

Sold it. He sold it to get this movie made. I’m a little over some of the bad stuff that was done. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I just want to get on with new stuff. New worlds to conquer and a few old ones to piss on. And

Laci (00:45:25):

What did he end up doing? You said the Candyman movie.

Matt (00:45:29):

He directed two more movies. Neither of them was successful. I wish I could have time to watch them. Me

Laci (00:45:36):

Too.

Matt (00:45:36):

But he mainly focused on writing. After that writing novels, he wrote young adult novels. He wrote graphic novels. He wrote novel novels.

Laci (00:45:45):

Young graphic adult.

Matt (00:45:46):

But yeah, Hellraiser two was rushed into production, comes out the next year. Most of the cast is back. And I think Hellraiser two, neck and neck with Hellraiser one for the best in the series.

Laci (00:45:57):

Oh.

Matt (00:45:57):

And

Laci (00:45:58):

Then it comes- That’s the rare rushed movie that actually lives up. Didn’t have a high bar. And there’s so much left unknown that the movie, it’s telling you, it sets up … Tell me what’s going on here.

Matt (00:46:12):

And it’s a series that never nails down. So what is actually going on? And it’ll just change it for whatever the movie needs. The rules. It definitely stops being about a guy dies and his blood lives in the floor and you need to resurrect. There’s no more of that. And okay, so they get a sequel in 1992 and then another one in 1996, Hell Laser Bloodline.That’s the one where Hell Razor goes to space. Also Adam Scott is in it. And then after that, it’s just straight to video. And I’ve only seen five and six, numbers five and six. And these are-

Laci (00:46:46):

One, two, five, and six?

Matt (00:46:47):

I’ve seen one, two, three, four, five, six. Of the directive video ones, I’ve only seen five and six. I watched them the past two nights. They’re bad. They are so obviously start life as not Hellraiser scripts and then have Hell Rayser inserted into it. And it’s so awkward. And there’s even less pinhead. It’s just like in the last 20 minutes, oh, there’s pinheads. Hello. So they make a ton of direct to video sequels in the 2000s. Doug Bradley is in all of them up until a point, and then they go on without him and recast someone else’s pin head. He is a steadily working actor in movies and TV. Sometimes it’s stuntcasting like, look, we got pinhead to play this guy. But he’s like Robert England that way.

Laci (00:47:31):

Does this open?

Matt (00:47:32):

I’ve never tried. I don’t want to.

Laci (00:47:33):

Oh. I’m sorry. I’m fucking around with the lament configuration.

Matt (00:47:39):

Then in 2022, there’s a remake on Hulu originally intended to be a TV series. Instead they just make a movie. Transactress Jamie Clayton plays Pinhead. Pretty good movie.That’s Hellraiser.

Laci (00:47:50):

Okay. Look at his little face.

Matt (00:47:53):

Yeah. Looking at a picture of Doug Bradley and Ashley Lawrence with a fan. Ashley Lawrence.

Laci (00:47:57):

She

Matt (00:47:57):

Plays Kirsty. That Kirsty

Laci (00:47:59):

On the end there?

Matt (00:47:59):

On the con circuit. Yeah. Kirsty, God bless her. I think maybe the weakest part of the movie, but she’s doing what she can.

Laci (00:48:08):

I think she … I’m very let down in the beginning and then I’m like, “Okay, okay. I’m rooting for

Matt (00:48:13):

You. ” I think all the other actors are so great. She’s like a-

Laci (00:48:17):

She’s better than Steve.

Matt (00:48:18):

Well, yeah, except Steve.

Laci (00:48:20):

Natural guy.

Matt (00:48:22):

She’s got to be a final girl and embody sort of just pure goodness.

Laci (00:48:27):

I think they do a good job with that, especially Amy. They put her in a hospital. That’s sad. She’s always getting wet or blood sprayed on her. Her new mom’s not nice to her. It’s good stuff.

Matt (00:48:42):

So we are going to discuss and review Hell Raiser 1987. I’m going to see what Laci actually thinks of this movie. I think she likes it.

Laci (00:49:23):

Do you think you could describe this movie to somebody who’s never seen it in a way that would make them want to see it? This movie’s so much about vibes. I don’t know that you could even have them understand why it’s like hypnotic … You’re not going to not finish this movie once you start it. And that’s not because it’s gray. I don’t know. It’s just captivating and weird and it’s hard to explain. Really, how would you explain this?

Matt (00:49:51):

It’s a combination of creepy, creepy vibes, incredible practical effects.

Laci (00:49:56):

No.

Matt (00:49:57):

Sexy. The practical effects are incredible.

Laci (00:50:00):

They are, but I don’t know. What I literally mean, like walk someone verbally through this movie. For the people who are going to tune into this and listen without having seen the movie, will they understand what we’re … You know what I mean? It’s plot light and heavy. It’s plot adjacent. Yeah. It is just a ride. He’s a mood more than anything. It’s a mood. It’s a mood. It’s a mood. Where other mood movies, you can describe what is happening. It makes sense. But when I’m telling you most of this movie hinges on the way this one actress looks into the camera and how her makeup looks and her off-puttedness toward everyone and everything, even the things she’s really into. That’s Julia.

Matt (00:50:42):

Yeah. And it involves the forces of hell, but hell being kind of a neutral force. We’re here kind of as process servers more than anything. Well, don’t

Laci (00:50:53):

Touch the cube, man.

Matt (00:50:54):

You signed a contract we’re here to collect. They even have the … Yeah, we had to hear him say his name. Now we can … Get them, get them.

Laci (00:51:01):

Well, they’re like the ultimate, my hands are tied. This is policy.This is a child, a freshly 18-year-old person who accidentally touched the cube. Must we apply this to her?

Matt (00:51:14):

Well, but that is a thing that might scare me more than anything, is not hail demons, but going up against a system that is so rigid, there’s nothing you can do. Your deed is done. That’s it. We’re taking you forever. They

Laci (00:51:27):

Seem very just, but it’s not really justice. It’s rigid rule following.

Matt (00:51:33):

And with these guys- And he’s miserable. You think the whole thing is like, well, okay, they have the letter of the law and they make a deal. Kirsty says, “I’ll get you Frank.” And they’re like, “Far.” Right. “We shall not collect you. ” Not true. But then she gives them to him and they still try to- not

Laci (00:51:50):

True. The lead sent a bite pinhead says, “And maybe.”

Matt (00:51:54):

That’s true.

Laci (00:51:55):

Maybe. He says maybe two times. He truly is just … We’ll see. Maybe you can have sleepover. We’ll see.

Matt (00:52:02):

And it seems like the female synovite is taking the lead on like, “I really want Kirsty though.”

Laci (00:52:07):

I mean, I’m kind of sick of all the men, the dirty, dirty men buying this cube.

Matt (00:52:12):

I mean, I think that that is a pet speaks to over a hysterical reaction to somebody having sex, especially a young woman having sexes. This is what’s going to happen to you next.

Laci (00:52:27):

You open this door, you’re playing with fucking fire young lady. You want to see what it’s really like?

Matt (00:52:31):

Yeah.

Laci (00:52:32):

Nipples.

Matt (00:52:33):

There’s a lot of nipples.

Laci (00:52:34):

Nipples flying off of you, off of your person.

Matt (00:52:38):

Let’s get into the movie.

Laci (00:52:39):

Okay. Look, you’re showing scene one and scene two

Matt (00:52:42):

That happened

Laci (00:52:43):

Immediately.

Matt (00:52:44):

So what are you talking about?

Laci (00:52:45):

Okay. So it opens with, of course, this is the time in American movies where anything mystical has to come from a country we don’t belong to, like the fucking Exorcist and Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, whatever starts the bullshit comes

Matt (00:53:03):

From- Gremlins. That’s the specific one. I was like, you do not remember that movie starts in the basement of a Chinatown shop where a merchant.

Laci (00:53:10):

At least that’s in America. This is

Matt (00:53:12):

Clearly- Okay, it’s from a Chinese merchant.

Laci (00:53:14):

I’m with you. I’m with you. So it’s just a simple exchange, but a very heavy focus on both of these people being very dirty. I’ve never seen such dirty fingernails on a person who didn’t climb through the grave they were buried in. That’s the only other time you see hands like that.

Matt (00:53:31):

Yeah, on Frank. It’s like they put a Sharpie.

Laci (00:53:33):

Both of them. Both of them. No, no, no. They caked … It’s real. They caked underneath his nails. Makeup put him in mud.

Matt (00:53:40):

And he’s

Laci (00:53:41):

Sweaty. And you notice his money is dirty and wet. What kind of sex has he been having?

Matt (00:53:48):

I think this is all such great at establishing- I’m not

Laci (00:53:51):

Picking it

Matt (00:53:51):

Long. I know you’re not. See, it’s interesting. And this is a podcast about the movie, not the book, but since I just read the book and so much more is explained in the book that this being- Sounds right. He’s a drug smuggler and just kind of going around the world doing shitty things.

Laci (00:54:05):

He is?

Matt (00:54:06):

Just chasing his whims and using drug trafficking to fuel his- And

Laci (00:54:11):

He hears tale of a box of infinite pleasure, I guess.

Matt (00:54:15):

Because he’s exhausted all of Earthly’s Earth’s pleasures.

Laci (00:54:19):

We’ll get to that.

Matt (00:54:21):

This merchant shop though, right away we have this weird cognitive dissonance where this is a Chinese merchant, but everything else is Arabic about the atmosphere.

Laci (00:54:29):

And I’ll say that’s the 80s for you. I’ll say that everything gets lumped. Do you think that anyone was ever very careful during this time about how to show other cultures?

Matt (00:54:37):

Some people are careful. But if it’s

Laci (00:54:39):

Just for the window dressing of this is an ancient artifact, they’re just like, whatever. Just make it look like they’re sand. Make him in some kind of a garb that you can’t buy here. Those aren’t jeans. I

Matt (00:54:49):

Don’t know if it’s intentional or not. I’m saying the effect is to be a little unmoored. Where am I? Is this earth?

Laci (00:54:56):

It’s like Casablanca or something. It’s like a collective of misentropes who’ve found a place to just kind of live life, not doing the hard stuff, but doing kind of the sleazy stuff.

Matt (00:55:08):

And I believe canonically this is Morocco, which is where Casablanca is. Always

Laci (00:55:12):

Is. So is Indiana Jones?

Matt (00:55:14):

Indian Jones never went to Morocco, I don’t believe.

Laci (00:55:16):

Two. The second one.

Matt (00:55:17):

No, that’s India.

Laci (00:55:18):

Told you. Morocco. All right. Well, okay. So a very little dialect, a lot of hands. And just like I want to buy the box or she says something about it. And as he walks away, the man who sells this box over and over again, I thought there were more than one. I think there might just be one. It’s like, it was always your box. But then just give it to.

Matt (00:55:39):

Take it. It’s yours. It always was.

Laci (00:55:42):

I do want to know why. Why

Matt (00:55:44):

Was it always his

Laci (00:55:45):

Box?

Matt (00:55:45):

I think that the movie concludes with the homeless man turning into a dragon and then returning the box here, assuming-

Laci (00:55:51):

Carrier pitch.

Matt (00:55:52):

The dragon is the devil. This guy’s an agent of the devil and they exist out of space and time. And

Laci (00:55:58):

Dragon is not the devil.

Matt (00:55:59):

Well, he’s working with a devil lieutenant.

Laci (00:56:01):

Right. He’s just one of those angels with wings on their heels.

Matt (00:56:05):

One of those angels with wings on their heats.

Laci (00:56:07):

You know what I mean?

Matt (00:56:08):

No.

Laci (00:56:08):

It’s a God. A god that has … Athena, what’s the one with the one that’s a messenger that’s got the-

Matt (00:56:13):

Hermes.

Laci (00:56:14):

This one. Yep. Hermes the messenger. It always was

Matt (00:56:20):

Your boss.

Laci (00:56:21):

This is when I asked Matt, “Hey, am I watching the right movie?” Because either I thought the movie jumped ahead or I was just already supposed to understand what this meant because it is smash cut to the dirty man. I mean, we assume even that’s not, because he’s looking down, he’s in completely different lighting. His shirt’s off. So if we were supposed to know it was him by the necklace he’s wearing in the first scene and the wife, Peter, two very specific things. If you’re about to have some kiky sex shit, you taking off your necklace, it’s hot to just keep it on, whatever. He’s kneeling. He’s in some sort of wooden floored room, Munoz, surrounded by a square of candles. So he is totally aware of what ritual he’s supposed to do while holding this box, or this is just part of how he is so bored.

(00:57:03):

He’s like, “I got to add fire to this. ” But yeah, I buy the box and now I know exactly what to do with it, except for he uses it and fucks himself up immediately.

Matt (00:57:13):

The idea here is he buys the box in Morocco, flies back home to England.

Laci (00:57:18):

Do it in the hotel, man. You got the box.

Matt (00:57:20):

Goes to his mother’s house that’s empty where he can squat, but he makes himself up nicely. He cleans his fingernails, lights a bunch of candles and just expects he knows that he’s going to be summoning the Cenabytes, but doesn’t know what that means.

Laci (00:57:37):

Okay. So he knows these are creatures that can give him experiences he’s never had and they are meant to be sensual, whatever that means. Yes. It’s interesting. Yeah, because he would’ve had to be pre-squatting at his mom’s house. And I don’t know if it’s just because they want to gross us out, but the maggots, the rotted food. I mean, this is like the movie … I have a stutter. The movie seven quality, disgusting kitchen moment. So it might just be a horror thing of like, because there’s no real other point unless they want to give us some indication that, oh, he’s been squatting for months, but who fucking cares? I don’t know anything about Frank. Who

Matt (00:58:14):

Cares? It ties into all the movie’s ideas about the body and it changes and decomposes and it decays.

Laci (00:58:21):

Yeah, because it’s a basket of fruit. Someone like Frank who’s squatting, interesting he went to the store, bought some apples and bananas. You’re thinking he’s a spaghettios guy. I guess we should just assume he’s been here a while, but there’s lots of bedrooms and beds, not for Frank. Frank goes into the attic and makes a nest and he’s got a trunk full of his treasures. That’s how Frank travels. A trunk isn’t great for a hobo, but he’s got muscles.

Matt (00:58:50):

Opens the box. The box, unclear exactly how you open it, how complicated is this? Are you supposed to befuddle you and you’re never supposed to be able to-

Laci (00:59:02):

Those who

Matt (00:59:03):

Can’t

Laci (00:59:03):

Handle it, I assume. It almost seems that there’s magic here. I was trying to figure out, does it depend on who touches it, determines how it opens and what configuration it makes? Or is it whatever configuration that person figures out is the sex treatment they get? Because look at the … We have a replica of it and depending on what way you sort it, it creates a different picture, a different scene. I would assume a different sex act.

Matt (00:59:33):

Okay. So whichever one you come up with, they’re customizing a plan for you.

Laci (00:59:37):

Right. Maybe they need to feel you before they know exactly what configuration to give you because it’s quite complicated.

Matt (00:59:43):

It’s like going to healthcare.gov and they’re like, “Which prescriptions do you need? We’ll tell you which plans meet your needs.” That kind of thing.

Laci (00:59:49):

Right. And they always seem to not be manipulating the box very much. It’s kind of manipulating itself, but you know you done did it once certain different colors spark Works fly out of it.

Matt (01:00:01):

I love all of this has a dream logic. The box, the box opens the portal. Why does the box open the portal? I don’t know. That feels like something that would happen in a dream and it’s right. And he just kind of caresses it and it shoots lightning and now all kinds of creepy shit is happening.

Laci (01:00:16):

Okay. But if where he’s going is a place where there’s so many things you’ve never experienced and yet somehow they are pleasurable even if they’re painful. It’s like going to a different … The multiverse concept, right? Where anything can be. So I mean, the box is important because it sets their fate. It picks the thing. What I’m saying is there’s so many options, just like in cabin in the woods, that they have to select the item in the cellar so that even the people in charge know what to give them. There has to be some kind of element of like, no, you chose to regress and your regression, this is fair because you regressed and picked this one. So now it’s not terrible if we put hooks and every part of you explode your body instead of giving you a beautiful, beautiful blowjob.

Matt (01:01:05):

Okay. You’re saying there is a world in which you can choose right and get good stuff.

Laci (01:01:09):

That’s what I understood.

Matt (01:01:11):

I have always thought of the cinebites as like foodies. And you take a normal person who’s, you take a Matt Stokes who’s like, “I want a cheeseburger every day for the rest of my life.” And you

Laci (01:01:22):

Force them those

Matt (01:01:22):

Deals. Exactly the same way. And then some guy who loves food is like, “Hey, I love eating.” And I’m like, “I love eating too.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah.”

Laci (01:01:29):

You think you love eating?

Matt (01:01:30):

Do you thou wish to eat deliciously? And I’m like, “I guess so. ” And then he’s just feeding me all this exotic food with crazy flavor profiles that like, yeah, I’m sure this is technically good, but it’s offending my palate, my little baby palate. And that’s what I think the synabites are. We are so advanced in sensory exploration that it’s all the same, that having your limbs ripped apart is so good and bad at the same time because really there’s no difference.

Laci (01:01:59):

And I’m saying, just like they get hot and cold, at some point they feel the same. And I’m saying Frank is a foodie and he’s traveled the world and had all the food combinations. He’s the right person for the box. You’re not the right person. You are Kirsty. You’re not ready for the box. You’re like, “I just want missionary in the dark.” That’s not you, but that’s her.

Matt (01:02:20):

Yeah. But what kind of person would they reward?

Laci (01:02:25):

I think it’s truly, they are just. They are rule followers. It is the role of the dice. It is the role of the limit configuration.

Matt (01:02:32):

Okay.

Laci (01:02:33):

It’s all the same to them. It’s going to make the person … I don’t know that they’re getting any pleasure out of doing these things to anyone. I think they’re the most Epstein of it all. They’ve truly seen it all that’s like, just come on, we’ll do stuff to you.

Matt (01:02:46):

The chains. The chains come out. Chain’s a big hallmark of the series.

Laci (01:02:49):

I wonder how many people they get per year, because it’s just the one box.

Matt (01:02:53):

Painhead says, “We’ve done this many times.” Right.

Laci (01:02:57):

But I built many websites. It’s still probably just 34.

Matt (01:03:01):

Let’s say a million.

Laci (01:03:02):

No, I don’t think so. I think that they are bored most of the time down there. Oh, that’s interesting. They’re down there like the barbarian monster just like, “Come on. “

Matt (01:03:13):

Come on.

Laci (01:03:15):

Keep watching cable. Well,

Matt (01:03:16):

That’s why they need their salesman up at the surface. They need their merchants in this.

Laci (01:03:20):

It’s not much of a salesman. He’s just waiting there.

Matt (01:03:23):

His body wants those bucks. They rip him off bar. Rip all of his limbs apart. And the movie, this all looks amazing.

Laci (01:03:30):

Okay.

Matt (01:03:31):

This all looks amazing.

Laci (01:03:33):

It’s so cheap. Yep. Yep.

Matt (01:03:35):

And his parts end up pierced on a rotating pillar. And then Pinhead, you see the synabites very, very early. You see Pinhead very, very early, a very good idea of the movie to show them right away, show the guy from the poster, and then he’s not going to come back for a long time.

Laci (01:03:49):

Right, right, right.

Matt (01:03:50):

So that he’s kind of built up as this legend in your mind when he finally returns. I’m

Laci (01:03:56):

Sorry. I did find it interesting that by the end of the movie, I don’t think of them as the bad guys.

Matt (01:04:00):

They’re not.

Laci (01:04:00):

They’re not.

Matt (01:04:01):

He collects the pieces of Frank’s face and Frank is still alive. Whatever life-

Laci (01:04:06):

That I did not understand when he was doing it.

Matt (01:04:10):

I

Laci (01:04:10):

Was like, “This is just a gross out movie. They’re just thinking of as many things as possible to make me not be able to eat this piece of chicken that I brought with me.

Matt (01:04:18):

” All right. Then some time passes and Larry, Andrew Robinson and Julia Claire Higgins arrive at the house. She’s yelling at … Well, they’re trying to get into the house and she’s yelling at him about not being good at opening doors. Oh, oh bother. Oh, open the door. Oh, oh.

Laci (01:04:34):

She hates you.

Matt (01:04:35):

She hates him so much. It’s so awesome. And they go into the house and she’s like, “I suppose it has a certain charm.” And he’s like, “My crazy brother Frank must have been here at a certain point. You know Frank. Can we move in? “

Laci (01:04:49):

Oh, I know Frank. I know Frank Frank.

Matt (01:04:52):

What do you think about moving in? And she’s like, “I suppose it’s better than Brooklyn.”

Laci (01:04:56):

You guys traveled all this way. What do you mean what about moving in? What was your other fucking plan?

Matt (01:05:01):

Well, he’s like, “We’re back on your turf. Come on. ” And so-

Laci (01:05:05):

I do sound like I’m from this American area.

Matt (01:05:07):

Yeah. You’re from new England. I mean, some sort of thing has happened between them, I think, that they’re not- Right.

Laci (01:05:17):

They’re hinting.

Matt (01:05:18):

They’re not a dressing.

Laci (01:05:19):

They’re hinting to some kind of-

Matt (01:05:21):

Infidelity or something.

Laci (01:05:23):

Maybe or just like she didn’t fit in. He took her out of her element and she barely fit in her element. There’s a certain kind of sense of humor, certain kind of proprietary … She’s got these manners. I think she thinks a lot of things are uncouth, if I had to guess. Yeah. So I think she was brought to a place she thought was beneath her. There’s so much stuff about class in England that you’re just cooked in it. Even the way you cut your toast is class versus low classes upper class. It’s baked into her pie and he brought her to Brooklyn.

Matt (01:05:52):

The filthiest place of all.

Laci (01:05:54):

Brooklyn.

Matt (01:05:55):

She

Laci (01:05:55):

Doesn’t want pizza. She wants fucking beans on toast or whatever and she wants to drive.

Matt (01:06:00):

To salute the queen four times a day. Yeah.

Laci (01:06:03):

Yeah. Pray in the direction of the queen.

Matt (01:06:05):

That’s what they do. Yep. But it also seems like Kirsty is tied into this kind of unspoken family trauma or argument because she calls her dad and he’s like, “Hey, baby.” And she seems very unsettled and she’s like, “I came all this way.” And he’s like- They

Laci (01:06:19):

Talked her into moving to … That’s interesting, right? Yes. She’s

Matt (01:06:23):

An adult.

Laci (01:06:23):

Why not stay in Brooklyn?

Matt (01:06:24):

But it seems like … And he says you made the gesture. So it’s like moving over here meant something to him, but why is any of this- To

Laci (01:06:34):

Julia. I think that is the … We don’t know how fresh this marriage is. She looked pretty damn close to how she looks now when she was fucking frank. So it’s probably a newish marriage. The mom is dead, I guess. So I think it’s just been hard going, but getting Christie to buy into-

Matt (01:06:54):

To this cold fucking woman.

Laci (01:06:57):

Well, it’s bonding with her, but it’s been put on Kirsty when it seems like it’s Julia who’s the problem, who’s hard to buy in. So he needed this big gesture of her moving all the way to a different country just to keep them as a family should be all that is necessary for Julia to quit being such a cold bitch. That’s my read.

Matt (01:07:17):

There’s maggots and roaches and stuff eating all the food because the food has just been left out. And Frank or Larry is just like, huh, get a little this. And he even says to Julia, “We can’t touch anything until Kirsty sees this. “

Laci (01:07:30):

But I thought that was before. I don’t think he was proud of the mess, right?

Matt (01:07:37):

There’s a room that’s decorated funkily. Wait,

Laci (01:07:41):

Kirsty gets a load of this.

Matt (01:07:42):

No, but this is a man child. He doesn’t know his daughter’s role. He’s telling his daughter like, “Hey, can you talk to my new wife and make her more nice and sane?” The rules are all fucked up here.

Laci (01:07:54):

If I had to guess the mom that died was the glue to this situation. They had a very happy household. She tragically dies and he’s trying to recreate that. And he very much wants his daughter to live with them, even though she’s of age to be out of that house doing her own thing. He’s trying to recreate what he lost is my guess.

Matt (01:08:17):

Julia goes into the room, which was Frank’s room and sees his jerkoff station and his sexy Polaroids of him doing all kinds of lewd acts with women who have their breasts out.

Laci (01:08:27):

Can I name the ax?

Matt (01:08:28):

Yes.

Laci (01:08:29):

Okay. From the front, from the standing, from the back and hugging a black woman, those are the pictures. Wow, he really has done all of it. And she’s looking through these and she finds the one … Oh, but there’s masks on the women. That’s how you know it’s crazy. So she finds the only picture of him where it’s just his face and she rips like, “Oh, she hates him. She’s going to rip up this photo.” No, she wants that man so bad. She wants to put his photo in her pocket.

Matt (01:09:03):

I love later in the movie, I think she tears the photo in half so that the other woman isn’t in it. She does it

Laci (01:09:08):

Right then.

Matt (01:09:08):

Oh, that’s

Laci (01:09:10):

Right

Matt (01:09:10):

Then? Yeah. They move in. They have the two movers who are helping Larry carry in the mattress and they all get stuck and they’re like, “Well, hey, Mista, go get us a beer. Why don’t you? ” And he’s like, “Well, care assholes. I’ve got nothing better to do. ” And then Kirsty arrives at the house and they see her and they’re like, “Hey, it’s our lucky day.”

Laci (01:09:28):

And trap her with the match. They push her up against the wall with the mattress so she’s stuck talking to them. That is neat. But

Matt (01:09:36):

She makes it over to her dad and he’s like, “Say, Kirsty’s damn fine to see you, honey. Why don’t you go make some coffee and then go talk to Julia, but be nice.” And then they kiss on the lips. And

Laci (01:09:47):

She calls him daddy.

Matt (01:09:48):

Daddy.

Laci (01:09:49):

Stop.

Matt (01:09:50):

Yeah.

Laci (01:09:50):

Please stop.

Matt (01:09:52):

But then we flashback and see the beautiful tale of Julia

Laci (01:09:56):

And Frank. What chemistry of this fucking bipolar man who decided to walk in the rain and is mad at everybody else for it? You got to fucking invite me in or what? Is he a vampire? If it’s his house, I feel like they’re in the house right now, right?

Matt (01:10:11):

No. In

Laci (01:10:11):

The mom’s house?

Matt (01:10:12):

This isn’t their house, no. You’re

Laci (01:10:13):

Positive?

Matt (01:10:14):

Yeah, I’m positive. I always think it’s the house, the main house, but no, this is Julia and Frank’s old house. I

Laci (01:10:19):

Mean, I guess for set purposes

Matt (01:10:21):

Probably. Or Julia and Larry’s. It probably

Laci (01:10:23):

Is.

Matt (01:10:24):

There is an article I linked to in the description about the queer influences of Hellraiser. I believe it’s there that they said that many, many gay porns start this way of a man arriving and being like, “Hey, what’s going on? “

Laci (01:10:38):

Right. I’m super masculine and mad that I’m here, but you’re going to let me in, really confrontational.

Matt (01:10:44):

Yeah. And the person who answers the door is not so certain at first, but wants to be, wants their trepidation to be overcome. And that’s Julia right here. I think all of us have this within us of like, oh God, what if someone like was so powerful that I couldn’t do anything about it?

Laci (01:11:00):

Am I the only one wondering like, okay, but like when did I take a bath last?

Matt (01:11:05):

Yes, you are. Because a part of the fantasy is that you overcome these other things. You’re not thinking about anything except this.

Laci (01:11:15):

What if you hadn’t brushed your teeth?

Matt (01:11:17):

You’re not thinking about that.

Laci (01:11:20):

Talk about girls.

Matt (01:11:22):

Hey.

Laci (01:11:22):

He’s going to finger her with those fucking fingernails.

Matt (01:11:25):

Hello. I’m Brother Frank. Oh yes, my bloody old husband told me about you. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, my brother did. Aren’t you going to invite me in? “

Laci (01:11:37):

Don’t you want to make me some milk and cookers?

Matt (01:11:40):

And he comes in and she is just, this is almost like silent acting. Yeah. She’s just heaving and trembling in his presence.

Laci (01:11:49):

I’ve never seen a Trimble actor. I’ve seen a neck one, a neck actor. This pure Trimble.

Matt (01:11:56):

We’re cutting between the past and the present. Julia is in the frank room and she’s just like-

Laci (01:12:00):

That’s why I thought she was living this, reliving it, that they met in this

Matt (01:12:06):

House.

Laci (01:12:06):

They fucked in this house,

Matt (01:12:08):

This

Laci (01:12:08):

Mom’s house.

Matt (01:12:09):

They didn’t. Then

Laci (01:12:10):

Why walking through the room? Oh, because-

Matt (01:12:12):

Because he’s in there. She doesn’t know that, but she’s literally absorbing his essence. And that’s making her flashback. And this is the only time they ever had sex.

Laci (01:12:21):

Wait, you think what we saw was one sex act?

Matt (01:12:24):

Yep, that’s it. At least that’s what it says in the book. And the movie gives you no reason to think that’s not the case.

Laci (01:12:31):

Yeah. That’s the problem with the movie though. There’s cut scenes and you would not be blamed for thinking they jumped in time because sometimes they have. And sometimes it’s literally the next moment.

Matt (01:12:43):

And they’re naked, so not like you can track their clothes. He

Laci (01:12:48):

Just cut the one strap. He’s

Matt (01:12:50):

Always got a knife. Afterward, they’re naked and they’re in the bed.

Laci (01:12:53):

No, I know.

Matt (01:12:54):

Okay. And so in the present, she’s going through this room and she’s feeling frank, but she doesn’t know that and she’s putting her finger in her mouth and the score is going to. And in the present, she’s basically bringing herself to orgasm while at the same time her husband gets a bobo on his hand. And he’s like, “Oh no, my little hand.”

Laci (01:13:13):

It is a gruesome injury. They really build it up and it is fucked up when it happens.

Matt (01:13:20):

As we said in the history section, it’s great that it can play it both ways because this is a gruesome injury, but you’re on Julia’s side of being like, “You fucking idiot, you fucking lose her.” Because he comes in and he’s like, “I can’t look at it. ” I’m never. “You’re going to have to take care of me. ” That’s all you,

Laci (01:13:36):

Baby. I’m on his side. I also can’t look at it and I think she is a fucking creepy, mean woman. I

Matt (01:13:43):

Think that if a certain ex- husband of yours was acting this way, you wouldn’t have sympathy for him.

Laci (01:13:48):

Depends on how he was acting that day.

Matt (01:13:52):

Kirsty’s there, so Julia is like, “Kirsty, take your bloody folder.” Can you

Laci (01:13:56):

Drive him? But she goes with, they all go together. It’s just that she sits with him like he’s a child. “Can you drive? “And she sits in the backseat with him.

Matt (01:14:05):

Yeah. But crucially, Larry goes into the frank room and bleeds some of his blood and it gets absorbed into the floorboards. And so now we have just an extraordinary, I mean, right up there with the thing of one of the great special effects, creature effects, and stop motion and time lapse and all that shit, special effects here by Bob Keen of Frank reconstituting himself into this crazy legless monstrosity thing.

Laci (01:14:32):

And it makes you think about one of the cinnabites down in the cinnamite area, which I assume is a cinnabit. You see it twice. It’s like almost like this scorpion C-shaped thing, like the letter

Matt (01:14:43):

1. It’s a penis with a stinger. That’s what it is.

Laci (01:14:46):

Fantastic. I’m not having seen the movie, don’t know if that’s what’s coming out of the ground because it’s also very gooey and fleshy and misshapen. But then you’re also like, I wonder if someone did get reconstituted enough just like to come a penis with a stinger down there. They just didn’t rise up. No. We’re all just meat, meat in different formations. Sometimes penis stinger.

Matt (01:15:11):

So now it’s later and it is the saddest dinner party I’ve ever seen.

Laci (01:15:15):

But they are having the time of their fucking life. What kind of animal has a dinner party the day you move in? Do you know what we’re like when we move into something? We can’t even be parents on that day.

Matt (01:15:29):

That’s true.

Laci (01:15:30):

What the fuck? There’s candles. They cooked. They’re going to do dishes later.

Matt (01:15:34):

They’re back in England with all their English friends. And again, I know the movie canonically is not in England, but okay, they’re back in their old haunt. It’s the

Laci (01:15:41):

Most English.

Matt (01:15:42):

It’s all their old haunt friends. And this guy, Steve, who Kirsten gets with, is the most British looking motherfucker I’ve ever seen.

Laci (01:15:49):

I think he looks Jersey, but that shit, I didn’t know what this was

Matt (01:15:53):

Meant to be. And what does it mean to look British? I don’t know, but you know it when you see it. But yeah, so Larry’s just like- It’s like

Laci (01:15:59):

Bruce Springsteen. He looks like he’s from fucking New York.

Matt (01:16:03):

Larry is holding court telling them all the riveting story about visiting the doctor today.

Laci (01:16:07):

Wow.

Matt (01:16:08):

And he’s like, and my hand was cut and the doctor, I should sue that doctor because he did something. I don’t know. But there’s the thing where … Okay, so there’s this teenage boy, Steve, I guess he’s the son of one of these people, is like going to go to refill Kirsty’s glass of wine and she’s like, “If I have anymore, I won’t be able to stand up.” And he says, “So then lie down.”

Laci (01:16:26):

And every adult laughs

Matt (01:16:29):

Like,

Laci (01:16:29):

“Oh, that’s funny about raping you. ” Good show old boy.

Matt (01:16:34):

Well, it’s more like a, “Oh, that was a good line. Good one kid.”

Laci (01:16:39):

He’s the son of one of them. She’s the daughter of the guy at the head of the table and that’s like appropriate manners.

Matt (01:16:47):

That’s fucked up. You shouldn’t do it.

Laci (01:16:49):

It is strange. I’m saying this whole scene is one of the strange … And this is saying a lot. It’s

Matt (01:16:53):

One of the strangest- He is really

Laci (01:16:55):

Strange. Look at the carcass on the table. They have eaten an entire lamb to the extent that it’s ribcage is just on the table.

Matt (01:17:02):

Oh my God. Yes.

Laci (01:17:04):

Everything about this is about being cannibals and about being animals and about … This scene is uncouth, isn’t it? It’s like, yeah, but they’re just saying slightly weird things. That’s why this movie is so special. And we’re all freaking out, or I am. And it’s like, but we just devoured a lamb. So I don’t understand your morals. You’re upset about they might have sex and two 18 plus year olds are talking kind of sexually in front of their parents. You ate a body.

Matt (01:17:32):

That’s the magic of this movie is the first time you’re seeing it, you could be told at this point, and now they reveal their

Laci (01:17:39):

Cult.This is cult lighting.

Matt (01:17:41):

And instead, it is supposed to just be read as like, well, normal domestic stuff.

Laci (01:17:45):

Right. It’s like the first time you watch cereal mom, you’re like, “What? What? This feels normal, but what? “

Matt (01:17:51):

But Julia gets up and is like, “Well, I’m afraid I’m right tired.”

Laci (01:17:56):

And Kiss is so … She doesn’t seem like the kind of person that would kiss you goodbye. And kisses two of them, but not the other person. Well, you’re on my way. So Smoochies-

Matt (01:18:09):

I realize now what this is, is she is standing up and saying, “I am tired. I’m ready to go to bed.” And one guy says like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, we’ll be getting … This is her signal. All right everybody, goodbye now. Everybody leave.” And her dumbass husband doesn’t pick up on it. And he’s like, “Aw, please.” And so the party keeps going. And I also would be furious at my husband for doing this.

Laci (01:18:31):

I mean, it’s been a long day and she’s in a silk shirt, so clearly she moved lots of things probably. He’s just holding court. People think he’s funny. I can’t imagine people think he’s funny. And Kirsty’s in a whole other movie, has had a whole other dad. He is demented and insane in this scene. And she’s sitting there like, “Oh, daddy. Oh,

Matt (01:18:52):

You’re so

Laci (01:18:52):

Wholesome.”

Matt (01:18:53):

So that’s why Julia, why she hates him so much is she’s probably like, “I live in the cult of Larry where people like this dork.”

Laci (01:18:59):

Right. Right. Your charm is working on everyone but me. And I’m telling you, “Hey, I’m tired.” And maybe, “Hey, let’s go Chris in the bedroom.” And you’re like, “No, let’s lever let this night die. We’re going to live forever.” Meanwhile, there’s maggots in the fucking sink that you still didn’t clean up and somehow made her fucking lamb.

Matt (01:19:19):

So she goes up to Frank’s room just to absorb the essence. And what do you know he’s there? The legless monster. “Don’t lay off. Don’t look at me. Joe lay off.

Laci (01:19:27):

“This makeup is something. I mean, it is gross, but you could still look at it. It’s very recognizable what it is, but I will, sorry, I will be bothered with how much that little bit of blood from just one injury on a live person was able to do. The fact that they jumped to, ” I now need entire bodies that are dead rather than let’s all just go give a pint of blood to uncle fucking Frank. Let’s do a blood drive. “You didn’t have to do this.

Matt (01:19:57):

All right. Well, thank you, plot hole, detective. It’s

Laci (01:19:59):

Not a plot hole. It’s a strange jump. It goes to the depravity of Julia. She wants to be corrupted. She wants to live in a world where for some reason someone like Frank would actually be … Because after they have sex, and she’s so fucking into it, I’m sure she did nothing while he did everything. He gets up ball naked and goes,” It’s not enough. “And in your head you’re like, ” Oh, is this when he goes to find the lament configuration? Because even sex with my brother’s wife wasn’t the craziest thing I ever done. I need a box. “But what it seems like is you’re not enough.You’re just you. Why would this hold my attention? So now she’s needed by him. He can’t live without her, literally.

Matt (01:20:47):

Yeah. In the scene where in the flashback, they have sex, then they’re laying naked in the bed and she’s just glowing like the moose. And it’s probably just he fucked her hard and she’s just never been fucked that way. And she’s worshiped like Uma Thurman and Kill Bill looking up at him playing his pan flute. And then he goes,” Yeah, it’s never enough. “Which yes, both she’s boring and instantly going to get sick of her, but also just he’s so obsessed with sex and sex can never actually quench what he needs. Right.

Laci (01:21:22):

He’s clearly a sex addict or has some sort of personality disorder. He’s just undiagnosed and he’s miserable and he’s just going to cause violence and harm and havoc every place he goes. And I’m telling you, he brought the maggots with him. She’s like, ” Maggots, magic is max.

Matt (01:21:40):

“He has pillowcases like Oogie Boogie Man just in his chest. Yeah. And he gets up to leave and she’s like, ” No, please, please don’t. I’ll do anything.

Laci (01:21:51):

“You had sex with this man once.

Matt (01:21:53):

That’s enough because she’s never been right fucked.

Laci (01:21:57):

I can’t imagine the kind of fucking it would take. I cannot imagine. I think he’s just attractive and doesn’t want her. And Larry is okay looking and doting and they ended up together and she settled and she forgot,” Oh yeah, I like bad boys because I’m a bad girl.

Matt (01:22:16):

“Well, the subtext reading is, or the queer reading is like finally I had the sex that aligns with who I actually am or if they’re straight, it’s like finally I had good … I just had good sex.

Laci (01:22:29):

I was under the impression all sex was melbitosin.

Matt (01:22:31):

I didn’t know.

Laci (01:22:32):

Yeah.

Matt (01:22:33):

I didn’t know this was possible. It’d be

Laci (01:22:34):

Exciting.

Matt (01:22:35):

This changes everything.

Laci (01:22:36):

I can be super turned on and want to pursue the sex.

Matt (01:22:42):

The book The Transformation has to happen more slowly over a longer period of time. The movie has to get too full. It has to fit a man

Laci (01:22:50):

In it though. Well, and also they have to fit a man in the outfit, right? So he couldn’t just be see through.

Matt (01:22:55):

Right.

Laci (01:22:56):

It

Matt (01:22:56):

Wouldn’t- I really like the scene in the novel where she goes into the room and the drop of blood mixed with some of his semen that he had left there earlier had brought just like a-

Laci (01:23:07):

His dick back?

Matt (01:23:08):

No, no, just brought something back. Something that you can’t even see, but just some essence of him- That

Laci (01:23:13):

Can speak

Matt (01:23:14):

To her. Saint enough to say like, ” Help. “And that makes her keep going back, but-

Laci (01:23:19):

That is sweeter, because then she’s doing it on faith. She is so compelled by this guy.

Matt (01:23:25):

Goes back and doesn’t even know, am I crazy? There’s nothing in here, but I feel like-

Laci (01:23:29):

She feels alive for the first time in a long time and missed him, forgot that feeling. That’s why she nearly orgasms herself just thinking about it. And she’s so attracted to this room and now this room is talking to her. It’s just so interesting later in the movie, Larry’s like, ” I don’t know what’s going on with Julia. She doesn’t even want to leave the house. She’s just so …

Matt (01:23:52):

She’s a 13-year-old boy who started mastery.

Laci (01:23:56):

She’s touching her dick on the doorknob.

Matt (01:23:57):

Nothing.

Laci (01:23:58):

She’s turning on the light switch with her hard dick. What can I touch with this?

Matt (01:24:02):

You’re always in the shower for like 90 minutes. What is that? Lot

Laci (01:24:05):

Holes dirty.

Matt (01:24:06):

I’m just very dirty.

Laci (01:24:08):

I sat in a puddle. Have you seen my nails? Geez. I

Matt (01:24:12):

Mean, yes. He gets something of a body very quickly and then tells her she’s like ” And he’s like, “That’s Frank. Got my blood.” As all of this is going on, Kirsty is stumbling around the house and goes upstairs to the only bathroom where she sees Julia.

Laci (01:24:27):

That’s why this place is like a boarding house, not like a mansion.

Matt (01:24:30):

And Julia just gives her the death stare.

Laci (01:24:33):

She does, but it’s still disconnected that I didn’t know if Kirsty’s looking up and Julia’s just kind of looking into nothing with that look on her face or if she’s looking

Matt (01:24:43):

At Kirsty. Yes.

Laci (01:24:45):

It’s unclear.

Matt (01:24:46):

Kirsty leaves the party with Steve. They’re walking around this town, this American town, and well, they pass this creepy homeless guy. I’m like, “Don’t worry about him.” They go down into the tube station.

Laci (01:24:57):

More moral deprevity, right? That’s what this is. You guys are so stuck up and weird about sex. What’s okay? What’s not okay? What’s moral? What’s immoral? And these totally white bread, love these kids to fuck, walk by a homeless man and are grossed out by him. Why? Do

Matt (01:25:15):

They see him right there?

Laci (01:25:16):

Yeah, she does. She turns and she’s like creepy. Oh

Matt (01:25:18):

Yeah.

Laci (01:25:19):

Yeah, they see him. And that maybe is why she deserves the cube because your morals are fuzzy too, young lady. Why is this okay?

Matt (01:25:28):

You’re a frank to be. We’ll check in with you in like 20 years.

Laci (01:25:32):

This dream sequence is, they have her … Anyway, this actress, it’s interesting how easy it was to make her not look like herself. I guess it’s the eye makeup, but I didn’t even know it was her. It took a minute.

Matt (01:25:43):

Well, she and Steve go and start kissing hard in the tube station.

Laci (01:25:49):

After she calls him a prude, you won’t do it. You won’t fuck me. You mean the man asking to fuck you at the dinner table?

Matt (01:25:57):

Well, she’s like something about like, oh, Julia, she’s so rigid and stern. And Steve says something and then she’s like, “You’re just like him. You’re so prude.” And I don’t know, there’s not much here, but the kiss- It is odd. Yeah. And so this dissolves and we’re looking at Julia awake in her bed at just so miserable as her dumb husband’s in the fetal position, just like having night terrors. And I’m on her side like, yeah, he’s annoying as shit. Even in his sleep, he’s annoying.

Laci (01:26:26):

He would do great on a play date with fucking Anastasia.

Matt (01:26:31):

They’re just a

Laci (01:26:32):

Couple of growing

Matt (01:26:33):

Babies. It just does together. They

Laci (01:26:34):

Need tummy time together.

Matt (01:26:35):

Turn on Ms. Rachel and let him go.

Laci (01:26:37):

I think so.

Matt (01:26:38):

So she gets up out of her bed and she goes to the frank room where Frank the monster is and she’s like, “Oh, I tell her, do it because I’ll get you more bodies.” Because he is … Go kill people, please. She’s like, “Oh no, that’s not right. The Lord God disapproves.” But one night in bed with her husband is enough to change her mind.

Laci (01:26:58):

So the chicken sex dream is the first time there’s baby crying. And I don’t need it. I’m sorry. And for it to never be explained where there’s a baby involved, what does it mean that there’s baby crying? All it is is a person underneath a sheet on the dinner table they just ate from that there’s feathers all over the place and it just turns to blood. What?

Matt (01:27:23):

Yeah. Okay. So my read of this, this is her dream. This is Kirsty’s dream and she will wake up from this dream in a room that Steve is in. They probably had sex, but now he’s sleeping on the floor on a palate, as Laci said.

Laci (01:27:37):

That was her way of being like, “We can fuck, but we can’t sleep in the same bed.”

Matt (01:27:43):

It’s like

Laci (01:27:43):

Mormon loophole.

Matt (01:27:44):

Right. So if that wasn’t literally her losing her virginity, this is some sort of Freudian symbolism of, “I have lost my virginity.” Okay, pillows have exploded.

Laci (01:27:56):

Pillows.

Matt (01:27:57):

And feathers are everywhere.

Laci (01:27:59):

She’s in white and it turns to red.

Matt (01:28:00):

Yes.

Laci (01:28:01):

Right.

Matt (01:28:01):

And the virgin color now getting corrupted.

Laci (01:28:04):

Well, and the idea of a girl gets their period, like in Carrie, a girl gets their period because they’ve been sexually active. They take on the hardships of a woman because they’ve decided to become one, which is fucked up because you don’t get to choose.

Matt (01:28:19):

On the dinner table is a white cloth and there’s a body under it. And you hear the baby crying. And I think the baby crying is like, this is the death of the child.

Laci (01:28:28):

Oh, I thought it meant like now you might have a child out of wedlock. I thought it was another moral thing.

Matt (01:28:33):

It could be that. I think it is more- Or

Laci (01:28:35):

This might lead you to an abortion because you know you’re not ready for a child. Are you ready to kill a child for your sexual deprevity? Where are your morals?

Matt (01:28:43):

I think it is more supposed to be. The child is dying because she’s now a woman.

Laci (01:28:48):

Okay.

Matt (01:28:49):

This is symbolically the girl becoming the woman by having had sex.

Laci (01:28:52):

Got it. I thought it was chickens, but this is pillows. That makes more sense.

Matt (01:28:56):

And now entering into this world of depravity that somehow involves her uncle, even though this dumb guy pumping into her three times and then coming on her leg is … How is that anything like what Frank does? I don’t know. It’s the same thing somehow.

Laci (01:29:11):

It’s all leading to the same place. And also Frank is a young, not that much older, but he’s so advanced in his sexualness because the subtext I think is that he was molested. He was early sexualized, early brought into this awareness of his body. He hints that he was hurt and that it’s all

Matt (01:29:33):

Part of it. She makes up in her room and Steve is there and she’s like, “Hey, babe, you okay?” And she’s like, “I need to call my daddy.” Call my daddy.

Laci (01:29:40):

And the phone’s in the hall. Phones are in weird places in this damn place. And it makes sense if it’s England because houses are ancient.

Matt (01:29:48):

Yeah. It’s in the phone room, which is three stories down. So the phone’s ringing at the old Larry house. She seems

Laci (01:29:52):

Like she’s in it. Well, she did say she got a room. So she really might be in a dorm type kind of thing. She got a room. She keeps saying, “I got a room, not an apartment.” Yeah. So she’s living in some kind of boarding house thing.

Matt (01:30:03):

Yes. And that boarding house is- For sluts. The rules are you can fuck someone, but you can’t sleep in the bed with

Laci (01:30:08):

Her. I don’t even think it’s that. I really think him on the palate was just to make her seem a little more innocent and to give some ambiguity. Man, do she wake up sweaty. Her eye makeup is down to her nose.

Matt (01:30:20):

But she’s also wearing this really, really big t-shirt to sleep. So it’s not like she’s sleeping in a sexy garb.

Laci (01:30:27):

Unless it’s his T-shirt, that’s sexy.

Matt (01:30:28):

That’s sexy. But yeah, calls her daddy and her dad goes down to answer the phone and he’s like, “Hello? Daddy.” Kay’s like, “Oh yeah, baby. Nava bada, navi.”

Laci (01:30:38):

Just walked down three flights of stairs, still not awake and thank you for calling. And then even goes upstairs to say what had happened, had a bad dream. Talking like her like she’s a little kid in the next room.

Matt (01:30:50):

He

Laci (01:30:51):

So wants that to be the case.

Matt (01:30:52):

Yes. Anne does the thing parents do, which is Julia calls down to, because as he’s walk upstairs, Julie calls. What was that or what was that or who was that? And Larry says she had a bad dream. And Julia says, “Who?”

Laci (01:31:05):

Right.

Matt (01:31:07):

And that’s what parents do is you just refer to your kids by their pronouns without ever establishing, “I’m talking about my kid now.” But

Laci (01:31:13):

A phone was-

Matt (01:31:14):

Because who else would you be talking about?

Laci (01:31:15):

A phone was used to get that information to him, but he’s acting like he went to her room. He is in this fantasy. He wants this fantasy.

Matt (01:31:25):

Who? Kirsty.

Laci (01:31:26):

The

Matt (01:31:26):

Only other

Laci (01:31:27):

Little kid living in his house.

Matt (01:31:29):

Frank peers out of his room and hears. He just has a room in the house and he goes, “Kirsty.”

Laci (01:31:35):

Oh, her name has the word curse in it. Not spelled.

Matt (01:31:38):

If you’re Kirsty, just be Kristy. Come on. So now-

Laci (01:31:42):

I thought it was like an English thing, like a Britain thing. No?

Matt (01:31:45):

It’s a Britain thing.

Laci (01:31:47):

This is something.

Matt (01:31:48):

What about Kirsty Alley?

Laci (01:31:50):

She’s fourth British. Okay. So these outfits, these outfits get real 80s. I love the big giant star earrings. Okay. So now Julia needs to get her seduction garb on and she goes to the same … She’s not good at permitting crime because she keeps going to the same place to pick up these men who never return. That’s fine. And it shows you, it’s like what men will do for sex. If this were flipped, if this were a woman, she would not be going upstairs to this third. And they get more and more resistant as it goes. I mean, these are not men. They’re not trusting their instincts because they are so driven by this sex. They’re saying they’re careful. They’re saying they’re just lonely. But at the bottom line is, I can tell you’re married. And this is like sex we’re having covertly, but I’m still so driven to stick my dick in you that I’m going to do all these risky things.

Matt (01:32:44):

Especially this first one. And she is so clumsy and awkward. And there’s no chemistry with this guy she meets in the bar who’s just like, “I thought we could drink together.” Why is he

Laci (01:32:54):

Jack from fucking … I say you came to the overlook.

Matt (01:32:59):

Oh yes. I suppose why not? And they have one drink and then he’s like, “We’re going to go fuck in the overlook.” And she’s like, “Let’s go back to my college.” And they go back to the house and she’s just standing there and he kisses her. This is like right when they walk in the door and she’s just trembling. She’s not playing it cool at all. And he’s like, “I mean, can’t we just go ahead and get on with it? You’re not going to change your fucking mind, are you? ” Yes. He’s

Laci (01:33:23):

Very Jack. Whoa.

Matt (01:33:25):

As soon as he says that, he’s like, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” And she’s like, “Let’s just go upstairs.” Well,

Laci (01:33:30):

Because you think the movie’s setting up this moral thing where it’s like, “Oh, okay, he’s a jerk. Now it’s okay if he … ” We’re okay he dies. But then she gets less moral moral as it goes and it’s just like this just random fine guy, whatever. And then the next one’s just like, “I’m just lonely.” So you’re sad for him. And he survives the longest too and it’s sad. So I do feel like it’s showing you an escalation and a downward shift of her, like what she thought she held dear.

Matt (01:33:59):

And as she does it, she’s framed to look more badass and way more confident as she does it.

Laci (01:34:05):

But then goes and trembles outside.

Matt (01:34:08):

So this first guy, she takes him up to Frank’s room and he looks at her and, or he’s like, “There’s no bed in here in it? ” And she’s like, “Well, what’s wrong with the floor?”

Laci (01:34:18):

I’ve always liked the floor.

Matt (01:34:19):

Okay, I guess. Yeah. And we see Frank watching them and then we get like from Frank’s perspective camera on the floor looking up at them as this guy takes his pants off and just has the saddest, tidy whities on.

Laci (01:34:31):

And his little rippled ass.

Matt (01:34:32):

And it’s just one of the movie tricks that it can make you on Frank and Julia’s side of like, this guy’s so pathetic. All right, just put him out of his misery, dear. Come on. And he’s like, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Really? And she’s like, “Oh, quiet.” And then she just beats him with a hammer.

Laci (01:34:48):

I really thought Frank would take it from here, but she’s like, “Okay, I guess I’ll do everything.”

Matt (01:34:53):

And as she’s beating him with the hammer, you can see something awakened in her. She kind of likes it. And then Frank comes out and he’s like, “Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me. ” A

Laci (01:35:02):

Thank you would be nice. Whatever.

Matt (01:35:04):

So she has to leave the room as Frank has to absorb his essence. She comes back in and now he looks so good. No,

Laci (01:35:11):

He does not. He’s just a little less

Matt (01:35:13):

Flashy. I think has a special effect I’m saying. Has a costume and makeup job. He looks incredible, but he’s still goopy and mucusy and pussy and drippy.

Laci (01:35:22):

There had to be a spray person on set just to make everything so wet.

Matt (01:35:26):

Yeah, but now played by a man with makeup.

Laci (01:35:28):

He was that before too, right? I think once he’s in man form, he’s a man. I don’t think that stop motion.

Matt (01:35:35):

I think it was a puppet earlier. I

Laci (01:35:36):

Think stop motion in puppetry just happens when he’s not in man shape yet. He’s in man shape once he’s holicking to Julia.

Matt (01:35:43):

That’s true. Yeah. But now he can stand up and walk around and stuff. I mean, he looks like those 16th century illustrations that Clive Parker was obsessed with. And Julie is now freaking out and he’s like, “Come here. Come there, man. God damn you. ” Touch me,

Laci (01:35:58):

Let me touch you. Come here, booby.

Matt (01:35:59):

And then he says his catchphrase, “Come to Datti.” She’s scared. She doesn’t want to, but he grabs her and he’s dripping with mucus and she’s suddenly like, “Oh, he’s got that Frank cotton charm that I love so much.” Let me

Laci (01:36:10):

Do my signature move. Do you like my bottom row of tea?

Matt (01:36:14):

I do. I do. Oh, damn it. My dorkest husband has arrived downstairs and he’s like, “Hello, Julia, are you here?” And she’s in the bathroom and he keeps calling for her. And this is another just insane, weirdly, just, I don’t know what this is. He knocks on the door and he’s like, “Julia, are you in there?” And he’s holding a nil away for her and he’s like, “Do you want a cookie little girl?” And I don’t know, I can just feel her going like, “Oh my God.” This is a tempt. It’s like, “I’m feeling ill darling. Go away forever, please.” He’s like, “I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen.” She’s like, “Get me a Brandy and turn on some music, please.” Okay.

Laci (01:36:53):

Because I need to carry a carcass into another room. So she just knows what to do. Why shouldn’t she expect that he’s going to devour the whole thing? Or this is already the gross frank room. Just keep the gross body in it. No, no, we’ll put this in the storage. Me and my little outfit, I’m going to carry this fleshy sack.

Matt (01:37:12):

She at the very least needs to clean up. She’s covered in blood and pus.

Laci (01:37:15):

No, I got that. But why carry the body from one room to another room? It’s the only time you ever see her do that. Just

Matt (01:37:21):

Any of the other bodies. Yeah, because the body, rather than taking it to the dumpster or something.

Laci (01:37:26):

Well, I get that she … I don’t know why she thinks that he’s any more likely to go in the frank room, that he’d be in the storage room, but maybe she just wants to keep the frank room sexy, doesn’t want reminders

Matt (01:37:37):

Of it. That’s true. That’s what it is.

Laci (01:37:38):

Yeah.

Matt (01:37:39):

That’s what it is. In Christian Gray’s playroom, you don’t want to have your kids Roblox on the floor. Roblox are toys, aren’t they? So she goes back to Frank’s room and Frank’s like, “I’m hurting. My nerves are regenerating and they hurt. We need more bodies. Please come on. ” She’s like, “Oh, why do we need bodies?” And he’s like, “I need three or four more bodies, please. And we got to hurry because they’re going to find me. ” The synabites. Don’t

Laci (01:38:06):

You tell me who they are? They sound delicious.

Matt (01:38:09):

I must get away from them and she does not ask a single follow-up question about any of this. All right. Kirsty has gotten a job at the pet shop that sells monkeys. That’s a monkey.

Laci (01:38:19):

Okay.

Matt (01:38:20):

Damon, I meant to look up, could you actually go to a pet store in England in the 80s and find monkeys?

Laci (01:38:24):

With teeth.

Matt (01:38:26):

And this lady with a bird is yelling at her for not knowing anything about pets. Okay,

Laci (01:38:31):

But also this lady is like a stand-in for the fucking audience. She’s the only one reacting correctly to how weird everyone

Matt (01:38:37):

Is in this movie.

Laci (01:38:38):

She’s like, “Hello? I’m new. I guess I’ll need the manager.” Okay. Well, you said that four minutes after I asked my first question and just stared blankly, I think you’re on drugs. Don’t people usually

Matt (01:38:49):

Respond to other things? I’m cursing.

Laci (01:38:54):

Right. I’ve got things on my mind.

Matt (01:38:57):

Now the scary unhoused gentleman comes into the pet store and goes to the aquarium full of crickets. And reaches his hand here. Because

Laci (01:39:06):

He’s a lizard, don’t you see, Matt?

Matt (01:39:07):

That’s

Laci (01:39:08):

Why he’d eat the crickets.

Matt (01:39:09):

But I know that. But God, I love this so much. I’m sorry,

Laci (01:39:12):

Matt. The audience doesn’t know that.

Matt (01:39:14):

You’re right. I love so much that he reaches in, gets all these crickets on her hand and she’s like, “Hey, give those back.”

Laci (01:39:22):

You’re right. And

Matt (01:39:24):

Then he eats them and she’s like, “What the fuck?”

Laci (01:39:27):

Those are five cents per cricket. That’s coming out of my till. And

Matt (01:39:30):

She kicks him out of, “Get out of the store here.”

Laci (01:39:34):

That’s the reaction. Or you’re going to make a beard of bees next?

Matt (01:39:38):

And she watches him run away and then it cuts and shows her and we hear a monkey screech at the exact same time as Steve enters the frame and he’s like, “Hey babe, I thought that I’d find you at the pet store.” I guess because we’re all monkeys.

Laci (01:39:52):

Sure.That’s

Matt (01:39:53):

What Clive Barker is saying is we’re all just monkeys. Well,

Laci (01:39:55):

Also, lady, you’re here to do a job. Can you please assist the woman who needs help with understanding what’s in her cage? She doesn’t know it’s bird. You

Matt (01:40:04):

Want expert opinion.

Laci (01:40:05):

She’s like, “I’m going to have to get a manager to figure out what’s in your cage.” Well, can you get a manager? No, I’m going to go stare at a man who’s eating crickets and then ask him nice to leave. When we get to our

Matt (01:40:15):

Sex advice portion of the show later, there will be a lot of questions that are … Can you identify this organ on my body, please?

Laci (01:40:24):

It’s a genital wart.

Matt (01:40:25):

Okay. Julia’s bringing more victims home. She’s getting more confident. She and Frank at this point, they’re couple’s goals. Okay. They are enjoying their kink together. And there’s this incredible shot that I didn’t notice until watching it for the fifth time. She is just sitting regally on the sofa, holding a drink with two hands and the camera just swoops around her and she looks like a goddamn empress. And then she just gives a little evil smirk. She is turning so evil.

Laci (01:40:52):

Frank can wear clothes now. It’s wearing

Matt (01:40:54):

Clothes.

Laci (01:40:55):

And Larry’s like, “Where’s my nice white shirt? I can’t find it.

Matt (01:40:59):

” And now Julia goes in to see him and she’s like, “You promised me an explanation.” And he’s like, “I’ll explain. The lament configuration that opens doors, doors to the pleasures of heaven or hell. I didn’t care which. The sonobites gave me sensations beyond my mouth.” And so we flashback again, seeing him be suspended upside down on chains, the bloodletting.

Laci (01:41:21):

That’s how you

Matt (01:41:21):

Do it. And Julia’s like, “Oh no, sounds dreadful awful.”

Laci (01:41:25):

You’d never understand. You can’t give me what I need, but I do need bodies, so can you give me what I need?

Matt (01:41:31):

They won’t take me back. And she’s like, “No, they’ll never find us, not in the whole wide world.”

Laci (01:41:37):

Right. Okay, Julia, where’s this confidence coming from?

Matt (01:41:40):

We’ll see you later. They are kind of stupid and easy to evade.

Laci (01:41:43):

Yeah, but- She doesn’t know. And she’s totally bought in by this. You’re being used. Who else is going to stumble upon this attic and bring bodies? You fucking idiot? And also, oh, do you know when you’ll grow your penis? She’s just waiting for that body to fill in that hog.

Matt (01:42:00):

So Larry later, Larry is the dumb husband.

Laci (01:42:04):

His face.

Matt (01:42:05):

He

Laci (01:42:06):

Said I could have a cookie, mommy.

Matt (01:42:08):

He’s watching boxing and he’s shadow boxing along with him.

Laci (01:42:11):

I’ve never … Is that a thing?

Matt (01:42:13):

I don’t know.

Laci (01:42:14):

Ooh. Oh. And he’s boxing too hard and she thinks it’s uncouth. And so she gives him a look of like, oh, you would punch. And he’s just like, shit. Or whatever.

Matt (01:42:25):

Because he knows he’s a loser and he’s just repressing all of that, but it’s coming out. He has this dumb male aggression and all he can do is shadow box and then his wife gives him a disapproving look. But then he’s like, “Hey, why are you here watching this with me? I thought that this kind of stuff made you sick.” And she says, “I’ve seen worse,” and he doesn’t follow up on that. Upstairs, there’s a thunderstorm and Frank is just up in his room just stomping around.

Laci (01:42:49):

Frank’s scared of thunder. He’s like a dog. You got to go give him one

Matt (01:42:52):

Of those little treats. And put a pressure vest on him.

Laci (01:42:56):

The hug.

Matt (01:42:57):

And so Larry’s like, “I’m going to go check that noise out. ” And Julie’s like, “Oh no, stay with me. “

Laci (01:43:03):

Oh, this is all of my energy spent in one day. Don’t do it.

Matt (01:43:07):

I’m so scared of the thunder.

Laci (01:43:09):

I’m ever so frightened you’re trembling.

Matt (01:43:11):

He’s like, oh my God. Okay. So they go up to have sex because Frank is now in their bedroom and is just standing above their marital bed, skinning a rat.

Laci (01:43:24):

Like chunking it, not even skinning it, just like, “Here’s a chunk of red.”

Matt (01:43:29):

Like

Laci (01:43:29):

An apple.

Matt (01:43:30):

Ma’am, I asked, what kind of animal is this? Is this a rat? And he is- Show

Laci (01:43:35):

Me its insides. I’ll let you know.

Matt (01:43:37):

So because Frank is being this brazen, all Julia can do is continue to pretend to want to have sex with her husband so he won’t turn around and look, but she’s disturbed by the rat cutting. Well, she

Laci (01:43:47):

Also doesn’t want Frank to kill Larry. That’s

Matt (01:43:50):

What

Laci (01:43:51):

She’s saying. But he’s all over her kissing her tits

Matt (01:43:55):

Like this. That makes more sense than what I said. Yeah. Don’t kill that rat.

Laci (01:43:59):

Yeah.

Matt (01:44:00):

Because I think there was a moment where he’s like, they’re having the conversation like, “Just let me kill Frank or let me kill my brother.” She’s like, “No, so no.”

Laci (01:44:09):

Well, right. But she’s still grossed out by Larry and he’s kissing her and all over her chest when she grosses me out for some reason. And then she’s, “Stop it. Oh, I can’t stand it. “

Matt (01:44:19):

I can’t bury

Laci (01:44:20):

It. She’s saying all this stuff while he’s just still going at her. He

Matt (01:44:23):

Doesn’t stop.

Laci (01:44:24):

He goes at her for too long. It’s weird.

Matt (01:44:29):

But then he does stop and he’s like, “I don’t understand you.

Laci (01:44:32):

You’re all over me and then you don’t want it.

Matt (01:44:36):

” Women.

Laci (01:44:38):

I mean, honestly, she’s the frank to his Julia.

Matt (01:44:43):

So he’s having a parallel movie. Hurt

Laci (01:44:44):

People hurt.

Matt (01:44:45):

He is just lusting after his wife so hard and she won’t notice me. But Larry has lunch with his daughter at a Chinese restaurant and he’s like, “My wife’s being weird, Kirsty. Can you help me? ” She’s like, “Yeah, I guess I can stop by the house and talk to her sometime.” Well, she goes to the house sometime while Frank is getting a new victim and- Now

Laci (01:45:07):

He’s got a coat. Doesn’t just have a slimy shirt. He’s got a coat now.

Matt (01:45:12):

He’s just acquiring more and more stuff and maybe a watch next time. And Kirsty sees Julia escort a man into the house and so she realizes, oh, that’s why she never wants to leave the house is because she’s always having sex in the house with strange men and my dumb, naive father doesn’t understand.

Laci (01:45:26):

I guess. But it’s like she’s so platonic with this man, just like, “Oh, Chuck, come on in for your session.” Oh, Julie is a crisis counselor. Oh, that’s why they’re screaming.

Matt (01:45:39):

So this guy’s being beaten to death with the hammer and Christie can hear it from outside. And she goes into the house and just creeps upstairs and the victim stumbles out of the room and grabs at her. And then Frank comes out and gets him. And then Frank says to Kirsten like, “Kirsty, don’t worry. It’s okay. I’m your uncle Frank. Come to Daddy.” And she’s like, “No, don’t touch me. ” And then he corners her in the bloodletting room and he says, “You’ve grown. You’re beautiful. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I used to kid myself. I used to kid myself that I was dreaming all the pain, but you have to endure the pain.” See? That’s what makes the pleasure so sweet. That’s what he’s

Laci (01:46:23):

Talking about. He would pretend while at night he was being assaulted as a child that it was a bad dream.

Matt (01:46:29):

But

Laci (01:46:29):

If he had just endured it then, he could have gotten quicker to the pleasure. It’s fucked up. This is fucked up, especially because this is followed with a scene when she turns the box into stuff of her walking down to whatever is her fate while other people are serving and getting their fates. And it’s a screaming pained cry of a toddler. It’s not a baby crying because babies cry. It is a kid that doesn’t have to cry crying. It’s fucked up.

Matt (01:47:00):

It’s not okay. He shouldn’t do this.

Laci (01:47:03):

It just was really, I almost turned it off. It’s fucking gross.

Matt (01:47:07):

So she makes him leave her alone by squeezing his innards. Got your inners. He’s like, oh. You

Laci (01:47:12):

Shouldn’t wear these on the outside.

Matt (01:47:14):

But he continues chasing her and then she sees the laminate configuration on the ground and she picks it up and he’s like, “Don’t touch that.

Laci (01:47:19):

” Oh, you want it, don’t you?

Matt (01:47:20):

Yeah.

Laci (01:47:21):

You like it in a box.

Matt (01:47:22):

You want it? Go get it. And she hurls it out the window. There’s

Laci (01:47:25):

No way I would’ve been able to get it through the glass.

Matt (01:47:30):

And she runs out. No. And she runs outside.

Laci (01:47:34):

That was fine. Like you’re in a fucking secluded cottage. Just go out the door, Frank. Go get your box.

Matt (01:47:39):

Nope. She beats him to it, grabs the box from the ground and then runs off and just like, “I’m so frightened and confused.” I think she

Laci (01:47:46):

Plays this well.

Matt (01:47:47):

I agree. This

Laci (01:47:48):

Is the best acting because you would be in shock. This is crazy shit that just happened to you. You run far enough as your adrenaline will take you and then you just pass out because you just slowly sit down. I think that was the most realistic part of the

Matt (01:48:00):

Movie. I agree. I agree. And then she wakes up in the hospital and you have her weird nurse watching just footage on TV of a flower blooming.

Laci (01:48:09):

Over and over and

Matt (01:48:09):

Over again. Flowers, we’re doing this whole month because the flowers are blooming, flowers are fucking, the birds are fucking each other. The birds are fucking the flowers. Flowers

Laci (01:48:17):

Are constantly reinventing themselves.

Matt (01:48:19):

And the doctor comes in and he starts interrogating her. What is this box?

Laci (01:48:24):

Why do I look like Gus Fring?

Matt (01:48:26):

And he sounds a little bit like Gusfring. He’s talking in that very deliberate-

Laci (01:48:30):

Accent. Yeah. I’m concealing an accent and using a different one.

Matt (01:48:35):

But I was thinking, they’re treating her like an accused criminal. Why? And I wondered, is Clive Barker had some sort of experience where he got hurt doing sex work and went to the hospital and was sort of treated this way of like, “You make me sick. I know what you were trying to do out there. I guess I have to take care of you, but … “

Laci (01:48:57):

Well, the police need to speak to you. All she did was faint in

Matt (01:49:00):

The

Laci (01:49:00):

Street.

Matt (01:49:01):

But it’s like the universe knows once she had sex with Steve.

Laci (01:49:06):

They did a rape kit on her and found that she had been penetrated by something.

Matt (01:49:10):

So they’re

Laci (01:49:10):

Like, “Well…”

Matt (01:49:11):

The police will want to speak to you, don’t know about what we’re going to lock you here into your room. She’s like, “Dang it. All right.” So she starts playing with the puzzle box and she gets very enchanted by it. And then boom, a door opens to hell. Now my favorite part of this series is doors opening to things they shouldn’t and just the rules of physics ending and just walls opening up and now there’s corridors and I love all of it.

Laci (01:49:36):

Well, it’s another dimension.

Matt (01:49:38):

It’s just

Laci (01:49:39):

A wormhole. Yeah. You know I’m at wormhole. It’s this. I just did the Dr. Strange circle with my hand.

Matt (01:49:46):

And so she walks into this corridor and in this corridor she hears the screaming of the child and then this big old penis monster with a stinger. So it’s a penis that will chase you and it’ll sting you because she shouldn’t have had sex with Steve. I’ve

Laci (01:49:58):

Got venereal disease. Sting sting.

Matt (01:50:00):

And she’s simultaneously freaking out. Ashley Lawrence is very good here, freaking out and also playing the wonder of all of this. And so she runs back to her hospital room. Phew, I escaped that dimension. Oh no, the synabites. The synabites have arrived in all their glory. We get our four classic synabites, the chatterer first who sticks his big old fingers in her mouth and then came in. That’s how he communicates. And then Butterball and then Lady Cenebite. And she’s like, “What the

Laci (01:50:26):

Hell?” Everyone gets a cool name and she’s Lady Synabyte. Lady like that.

Matt (01:50:31):

Female Synabyte. Sorry.

Laci (01:50:32):

Oh, even worse.

Matt (01:50:34):

Well, again, Pinheads is just called Lead Synabite, but he’s lead position of authority.

Laci (01:50:39):

Well, look how high up his nipples are. That’s how you know he’s royalty. Why are they so high up?

Matt (01:50:44):

This is the first time we hear him speak, I believe. “The box. You opened it. We came.”

Laci (01:50:51):

Now y’all going to come. Blood.

Matt (01:50:53):

Who are you? Explorers in the further regions of experience, demons to some angels to others. And she says, “It was a mistake. You solved the box. We came.”

Laci (01:51:08):

She’s right. I didn’t seek this box out. I was fucking full. I had nothing else to do. This flower show’s boring.

Matt (01:51:15):

You were in the car with your friend who had an eighth of marijuana. Prison for you. Come with us. Taste our pleasures. And as he’s sang all this lady sound bites, rubbing her throat clit. So Kirsty’s like, “Wait a minute.”

Laci (01:51:31):

Ew.

Matt (01:51:32):

Don’t take me. I want to make a deal. Now, Laci, it is a hallmark of the Hell Razor series that the final third of the movie is someone makes a deal with Pinhead.

Laci (01:51:40):

Deal with the devil.

Matt (01:51:41):

Yeah, that’s what he’s there for. He’s like, “What she got?”

Laci (01:51:44):

You deal in these things because it’s your job. You were assigned this and rules are rules, but everyone knows the devil. He’s a businessman. You can negotiate with the devil. He takes contracts, things. Yeah.

Matt (01:52:00):

Getting to now watch Pinhead and watch the Synabytes, what do you think?

Laci (01:52:03):

What do you mean? After I see them in action, I think they were probably a little bit more grand in my mind. It’s just the problem of having the marketing come before the experience. I’m not sold on them being scary. The dungeon is scary. The screaming, the not knowing what’s around the corner, all that. They seem vulnerable. They don’t seem not beatable. I don’t know. I want to understand their lore. Do they have feelings and do they have morals and what …

Matt (01:52:38):

Well, good. There’s 12 movies you can watch, so get started. But yes, there’s nothing scary about them in this movie. I think there are scary moments in this movie, but it’s just classic haunted house stuff or just slash her hiding from the killer in a closet stuff.

Laci (01:52:56):

Well, yeah, put your hand in the haunted house mystery bowl. And it’s guts, but it’s really macaroni. This whole movie is just how fucking gross can they get and how wet.

Matt (01:53:08):

I think they transcend horror. It’s art. Yeah. There’s nothing like this because they don’t fall onto a antagonist protagonist axis. It’s the

Laci (01:53:19):

Matrix mixed with Texas Chainsaw Ossacre. Because the mask of the man being put back together is very leather face. There’s a lot of gore, there’s a lot of pieces of things, a lot of butchery, a lot of hooks. So yet they knew they needed a iconic look. So that did drive them to be way more inventive than maybe they would’ve been if they were just going off the book. So I mean, it’s high art, but there’s something organized about it where with other slasher movies, the killer isn’t really in control of why he’s doing what he’s doing. And here you have ultimate control, which goes to the whole BDSM culture, a kink culture. This is all about contract. This is all about black and white. This is all about you signed up for this. You requested this configuration. Now, she should be able to get out of it if she wants, but their outfits are very much signaling kink.

Matt (01:54:16):

Yeah. And Clive Barker said, went to an S&M club and was like, okay, I’ll use that and that and that and that and that.

Laci (01:54:22):

The typical outfit, the latex is literally called the wet look. And there’s not a wetter movie than this fucking movie. It’s so wet. Okay. Water world.

Matt (01:54:34):

I’ll make you a deal. Do you know a man called Frank Cotton? He escaped you. He what? Thinhead does go, he what?

Laci (01:54:42):

Yeah. Of course I know Frank Cotton.

Matt (01:54:43):

They didn’t know that he escaped. They’re kind of inept. Hey, what? I can lead you to him. You could take him instead of me. It’s like, okay.

Laci (01:54:52):

Mary Berry.

Matt (01:54:53):

But if you cheat us. No, the woman’s synabite says, “But if you cheat us, we’ll tear your soul apart.” The synabites could have not been in the movie. Okay? The plot would have functioned exactly the same. I’m so grateful that they’re in the movie. There’s nothing like this. They’re what bumps this up to an all- time classic, I say.

Laci (01:55:15):

I don’t know what the fuck this movie would’ve been without. Sorry. Something needs to explain what’s going on with Frank.

Matt (01:55:21):

Yeah, I know, but it’s not like you need to see these mysterious creatures. “I made a fucking deal with the devil now. I look like this.

Laci (01:55:29):

Matt names these slides, so I react to them and then he gets mad at me for reacting to them. And the slide title here is, ” It’s me, your normal father. “He’s so bloody.

Matt (01:55:39):

Back at home, Frank-

Laci (01:55:40):

Had a bad face lift.

Matt (01:55:42):

Had a bad face. Frank says to Julio,” Julia, we need to lie. But get me skin first. Larry, Larry, got to kill Larry. “She’s like, ” Fine, I’ll kill Larry. “And Larry comes home, comes in through the front door, and Julia’s standing on the stairs is like, ” Julia, what is it? “And she’s like, ” I don’t know where to begin. “And it is like she’s about to open a dramatic, I had a fair conversation. And instead we cut the next time we see them. Larry’s dead, they killed him and ate him up, ate his brains.

Laci (01:56:09):

I don’t know where to begin, so I think we’ll just end. But that sucks, man, because she was hoping that this was literally building to a Frank looking kind. Now I got to just fuck Larry. Just stupid husband. Now I got to mean Larry. Great.

Matt (01:56:21):

Right. And Frank is now wearing Larry’s skin and he and Julia fuck.

Laci (01:56:27):

Do they fuck?

Matt (01:56:28):

They do fuck. She’s like, ” Oh, you’re fucking me. Oh, so I’m fucking you. Do you like it? Hey, Mary. “No, he speaks with Larry’s voice now. My

Laci (01:56:37):

Dick’s full of cricket.

Matt (01:56:39):

This Andrew Robinson performance is incredible because he is playing two different characters. He’s playing the biggest dork of all time and he’s so scary as Frank Larry. And the makeup here is incredible because he’s like 90% there.

Laci (01:56:52):

And Kirsty is not an observant lady. Your dad’s ear is the shape of an unborn gerbil. You think that he’s looking normal right now?

Matt (01:57:01):

Daddy, you’ve got ooze and puss coming out of your scalp, but no, doesn’t point it out.

Laci (01:57:05):

Dandruff.

Matt (01:57:07):

She comes in and she’s like, ” What’s happening? “And he’s like, ” It was Frank, baby. Frank was here. We had to put him out of his misery like a dog.

Laci (01:57:16):

“I don’t believe you. I must see him.

Matt (01:57:18):

No, take her. Take her to Frank.

Laci (01:57:20):

Just take it. Go on. You fucking minion.

Matt (01:57:24):

So they go into Frank’s room with the desiccated corpse of her father. Well, no, no.

Laci (01:57:30):

It’s Frank. She still thinks it’s …

Matt (01:57:34):

Yeah. Yeah. She believes Frank is her father and told her go check out the room. You’ll see Frank’s dead body. She sees the desiccated corpse, can’t tell who it is, assumes it’s her dad. And now the synabites arrive. And they’re like, ” We want the man who did this. “And she’s like, ” No, that’s my father and you can’t have him. “So she runs downstairs, runs up to her dad who she thinks is her dad’s like, ” We got to get out of here. “And he’s like, ” Oh no, come to Dagi. “She’s like, ” Oh God, no, you’re my fucking uncle, aren’t you?

Laci (01:58:03):

“Now here’s more good acting by her. Got to give credit words due. She is dealing with better than most movies, especially from this time, dealing with the horror of what she’s seeing and the coming to terms with her dad is dead. You see all that. She is mourning her dad until Steve gets there and then she’s just like, ” Hey, Steve. “And it’s like, wait, what happened?

Matt (01:58:26):

No, I was probably a little cruel, dismissive of her earlier. I’m comparing her to Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Langenkamp and Amy Steele, all the unstretched, but this is a way more complicated thing she’s having to process.

Laci (01:58:42):

Yes.

Matt (01:58:43):

Than just a guy in a mask is chasing me. Oh no.

Laci (01:58:46):

A guy wearing my dad as a suit means my dad is dead and just my pervy uncle is. That means that my pervy uncle doesn’t just want to fuck me as my uncle now. Now it has to be my dad looking guy.

Matt (01:58:56):

And God is real, I guess.

Laci (01:58:58):

I mean, Satan is and dragons.

Matt (01:59:02):

Come to daddy. Oh my God. He pulls out his knife and he’s like, ” Okay, so much for the cat and mouse. Shit. “And he is now determined to assault her, sexually assault her. Fuck

Laci (01:59:15):

Killer.

Matt (01:59:16):

He has totally moved on from Julia who does not understand this.

Laci (01:59:19):

Well, now Julia’s like Delaine and she’s like, ” Well, I know I’m not exactly your type anymore, but can I be a part of this configuration? “And she’s like petting Kirsty’s hair. That is the grossest part. We’re like, ” Oh, look, now we’re that family that you wanted, but we’re all going to fuck.

Matt (01:59:34):

“I know. It’s the only physical contact she has with Kirsty in the whole movie and it’s so evil. She’s

Laci (01:59:39):

Petting one strand of hair.

Matt (01:59:40):

She’s

Laci (01:59:41):

Barely touching her, but I’m

Matt (01:59:42):

Like, ” Ah, ah. “Frank accidentally stabs Julia and then he’s like, ” Sorry, baby, nothing personal. Then he drinks her blood. “At Kirsty-

Laci (01:59:49):

Well, no, but Julia says something like, ” Julia, this is good acting here too. She’s like, Not me. “She’s like, ” No, I did all this. Not me.

Matt (01:59:59):

“You were so No disposable. Kirsty now goes, I think this is such effective horror filmmaking here. She goes and hides in the house. There’s no score here.

Laci (02:00:07):

Oh yes. I love the little scooting around the room thing.

Matt (02:00:09):

Yeah. And you hear the steps and everything. She’s hiding in this terrifying house with its Jesus statues and stuff. It’s like hiding in your grandparents’ house.

Laci (02:00:18):

Oh God, a covered plastic couch.

Matt (02:00:20):

Oh God, a hummel.

Laci (02:00:22):

A what?

Matt (02:00:23):

Those little figures.

Laci (02:00:24):

Oh.

Matt (02:00:24):

Oh, got a plate with a rooster on it. Okay. He finds her and chases her into the corpse room and he’s like, “Julia, come on. It’s me. It’s Frank. Your dear old uncle, Frank is here. We’re going to have so much fun.” But then the synabites pop in. “He said it. It’s Frank. Get him. He said he was Frank because their process are their bill collectors. They’re like, ” We need to just confirmation you’re the right guy. Okay. He said it. Okay. Yes, now we can collect. This is Frank. Goodbye. We’re here. Frank. “And he’s like, ” No, you betrayed me, you bitch. “The chains get him. And Pinhead says to Kirsty like, ” You don’t want to see this, Kirsty. Get out of here.

Laci (02:01:02):

“But then she keeps looking and it’s like, ” Kirsty, you’re writing your own fucking fate here. He is telling you you’re too innocent to see this and you’re watching. “That’s true. So make up your mind. Are you a part of this or not? This is why they pursue her after, because she stays. You’re too curious, young Kirsty.

Matt (02:01:18):

I think the panhand is going to stick to what he said, but he can’t control the other sendobites. They want. I don’t

Laci (02:01:22):

Think that’s true. I think she fucks up here.

Matt (02:01:24):

Well, they’re stretching his skin. These infects look incredible. And Frank just looks at Kirsty and he goes,” Jesus wept. “And he explodes.

Laci (02:01:36):

That’s fucking crazy. I was like, ” All right.

Matt (02:01:39):

“But the synovites still want Kirsty and their chase singer around the house and she picks up the lament configuration and can solve it multiple times and each time she zaps a synabite away. And Pinhead is approaching her and he’s like, ” The most famous line of the movie, we have such sights to show you. “And she’s like, ” No. “And laments him away. “No, don’t do that. ” And then her stupid boyfriends. Yeah, because she

Laci (02:02:06):

Has to be saved.

Matt (02:02:07):

I’m here too. Oh God, the penis stinger guy, but they close the box again and they escape.

Laci (02:02:13):

Does the movie end with them having escaped? Yes. And then they go burn it and then fucking-

Matt (02:02:17):

They go into the … Hey, there’s a yard with tons of bonfires.

Laci (02:02:20):

Right. This isn’t where the homeless are.

Matt (02:02:22):

Throw the box into it, but then the homeless guy approaches and they’re like, “What the fuck?”

Laci (02:02:26):

Well, you came to his house. You’re in the hobo fire area.

Matt (02:02:29):

And then maybe Georgia R. Martin, this is where he got the idea because he edited this novel. The homeless man steps into the fire to retrieve the box, like herd Danny going into the fire to get the eggs and then turns into a dragon, huh? Yeah. A dragon and then he flies away and they’re like, so that happened. He flies now. Yeah, he flies. Freeze frame. And I mean, basically, because he flies away with the box and we zoom in onto the puzzle box and now we’re back at the merchant store in Morocco who has a new man and he’s like- And it

Laci (02:02:59):

Continues.

Matt (02:03:00):

Yeah. Such and such and so.

Laci (02:03:02):

See, but the whole ordeal with Frank, that took a long time. He had the box that

Matt (02:03:07):

Whole

Laci (02:03:07):

Time. So that’s why I’m saying I think they’d do, I don’t know, like six a year.

Matt (02:03:11):

These guys do, but this is just one unit.

Laci (02:03:14):

Says fucking who?

Matt (02:03:15):

That’s what I say. There’s units all over the world. And on other

Laci (02:03:17):

Planets too. All over the world. They’re in a different dimension.

Matt (02:03:21):

Well, all kinds of dimensions.

Laci (02:03:22):

They’re just in their dimension, man. I know more about this than you.

Matt (02:03:31):

All right. Sex advice here. Oh, and we have a guest in the room, Pinhead. Pinhead’s going to help us answer some questions.

Laci (02:03:37):

Someone’s got an infected belly button piercing.

Matt (02:03:40):

Oh, my bellyopachon.

Laci (02:03:42):

Your pins are extra with long today too. Wow.

Matt (02:03:45):

All right. I bet those

Laci (02:03:46):

Get caught on things.

Matt (02:03:47):

These questions were all- How does

Laci (02:03:49):

That man put on a shirt?

Matt (02:03:50):

These questions were all submitted to Slate’s How to Do It Sex Advice column, okay?

Laci (02:03:54):

Okay.

Matt (02:03:55):

Okay.

Laci (02:03:55):

We’ll tell you how.

Matt (02:03:56):

All right. This question says, “My husband and I recently finished house sitting for some friends, Alex and Amy, who had been away on an international vacation.”

Laci (02:04:05):

Don’t name them. You’re about to say the sex toys you found in their

Matt (02:04:07):

House. She put them in and she put their names in quotes.

(02:04:10):

These are pseudonyms. And I’m afraid we’ve created a mess for Alex. My husband and I had sex during the time we stated Alex and Amy’s. The condom we used got tossed in the trash in the bathroom of the bedroom, and we didn’t think anything of it. The trouble is that Amy spotted it when she was dumping the garbage several days after they returned. She and Alex don’t use condoms and now thinks Alex cheated on her. My husband and I tried explaining to Amy that it was ours, but she thinks we’re trying to cover for him. We’ve been friends with Alex since college. Alex is now staying with us while Amy is contemplating divorce. Is there anything we can do short of a lie detector to prove his innocence?

Laci (02:04:43):

No. Amy doesn’t want to be married to him. If that’s all it takes, we all live in beautiful denial. And when you give us such a pretty package of an explanation, if we want to stay with that person, we stay. They just went on a trip. Alex annoyed the fuck out of Amy on this trip. He blew it. This is what she wanted. She wanted to find the bra in the car, man.

Matt (02:05:02):

Yep. As soon as I read it, I thought nothing … She wants a divorce. Yes.This doesn’t

Laci (02:05:07):

Make sense. This is not a person off here.

Matt (02:05:08):

This is not your problem. Not your problem at all. Get

Laci (02:05:11):

Alex out though. That sounds like a lot.

Matt (02:05:12):

Yep.That one’s easy. Okay. This one’s a little trickier, Laci, okay?

Laci (02:05:16):

Okay. Try me.

Matt (02:05:17):

All right. I’m 20. Four months into my first relationship with another woman, so this is a woman, which is somewhat of a long distance relationship. We can see each other about a week or two a month. I wanted to surprise her. So I showed up waxed, but she freaked out on me and said that this was an example of internalized patriarchy that represents the idealization of young women as sexual partners. She then said she was icked and refused to go down on me. I never thought about it, but it feels right. I was curious about your thoughts on that. Is there a way to help undo the damage of a waxing?

Laci (02:05:50):

What? Grow it back. What?

Matt (02:05:53):

I mean, she’s saying like, now my girlfriend-

Laci (02:05:57):

Okay, fine with

Matt (02:05:58):

This. Never wants to do this again because-

Laci (02:06:00):

That’s dumb. I think she just doesn’t want to go down on her until it’s grown back, and that’s fine. I think as long as you guys had a healthy conversation and both see each other’s side, like, “Hey, I didn’t think about it like that. I didn’t mean it like that. And as long as now I understand what you’re saying and that that grosses you out, that I won’t do that again,” then they should forgive and forget, grow the hair back and resume.

Matt (02:06:28):

Is there a way to undo the damage? Yes. Let time pass and the stuff will grow back.

Laci (02:06:32):

And if she still refuses to go down on you, well then she’s the problem.

Matt (02:06:35):

There’s a deeper issue here though for the writer, which is that her girlfriend sounds like an asshole. I mean, you’re going to embarrass somebody like that and you’re going to dress it up in your fucking gender studies language about internalized patriarchy. Sexual attraction, it can be rooted in things like the patriarchy and things that are not okay. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t still do them or enjoy them. You can understand that like, oh, I like a shaved, I like a woman who is shaved and that may be for misogynistic reasons. It doesn’t mean I still don’t like it. You

Laci (02:07:11):

Still have a preference. Right. And that’s the first time your girlfriend saw you this way. Maybe she thinks you’re implying that she should also look this way and maybe by you doing this to yourself, this is like an underhanded way of you saying, “Now, can you please get your shit taken care of? ” Now, I understand that. And then flipping it and be like being embarrassed and then making her embarrassed in response.

Matt (02:07:37):

Okay, that’s more understandable because I’m reading it when she says like, “I never thought about it like that, but I guess it feels right.” What I’m reading into this is that her girlfriend’s off taking all these study, all these classes, but anyone who dresses up in this academic language immediately raises my cackles and makes me think this woman is chewing out her girlfriend all the time for transgressions against polite society. Well,

Laci (02:07:59):

We can’t know that. And if that’s true-

Matt (02:08:00):

Can’t know

Laci (02:08:01):

That. Right. This sounds like a preference and if they each can come to the decision that they’re willing to compromise on this preference, fine, move forward. But if she keeps bringing this up or embarrassing you about it over and over again, she’s an asshole.

Matt (02:08:17):

Right. And even if you could get a jury to say like, “She’s right, this is because of internalized hatred.” Who gives a fuck?

Laci (02:08:24):

Your girlfriend is naked and vulnerable in front of you and you just made fun of her pussy. That’s fucked up.

Matt (02:08:28):

Exactly. Yes.

Laci (02:08:29):

So you guys need to have a nice talk about it. You need to go down her anyway because it’s her and you love her like you want her to still not be embarrassed. Don’t punish her until it grows back. That’s mean. It takes weeks.

Matt (02:08:43):

Right. Yeah. And

Laci (02:08:45):

You only see each other twice a week, twice two times a month or whatever, asshole.

Matt (02:08:50):

It’s the first time she’s ever been in a relationship, but just I hope she understands that maybe this girl’s a little mean and there’s nicer ones out there. All right. Last question. My husband and I went over to his parents for the Christmas holiday. His mother has never been particularly respectful of boundaries, but we thought we were safe to go at it at nearly 3:00 AM. There’d be no way she’d be upright, wrong. My mother-in-law decided there was something she just had to ask us that couldn’t wait until the next day and walked in on us. Things were rather awkward in the morning, but I thought it was just one of those dumb things and that would be the end of it. Instead, it’s been the end of our sex life, namely the fact that my husband hasn’t been able to get it up since the incident.

(02:09:29):

I’ve tried everything. Pussy shaving, sexy lingerie, sucking is dick, nothing works.

Laci (02:09:34):

Okay. Your husband has serious repressed issues with his mom. She is a serial boundary invader. He needs to go to therapy because if his dick isn’t working, it is not you. It is that awoke something in him that reminded him he doesn’t feel right and he doesn’t feel right sexually in terms of how that relates to his mom. For whatever fucking reason he needs therapy, it isn’t you. I

Matt (02:10:02):

Am not as reflexive as Laci at saying go to therapy usually because … Well, if you’re writing into Slate, you can’t afford therapy. But you’re exactly right because almost all of our advice is going to be one of two things, grow up or get over it. Well, those are the same thing. Grow up and get over it. Oh, your mom walked in on you. Who gives a fuck? Just get over it. No,

Laci (02:10:19):

Grow up and look into it.

Matt (02:10:21):

But if you’re told that and then say, “But I can’t,” well, then it’s like, well, then you’ve got an issue and you need to go look into it. Because I think this is about kids walking in on their parents too. People have sex and if somebody else walks in on you, it’s embarrassing and life goes on and you’re all going to forget about it or you’ll joke about it one day and it’s okay. If you can’t, then you need to get therapy. And if you won’t get therapy, then you need to ditch this loser.

Laci (02:10:46):

Yep.

Matt (02:10:47):

He’s a Larry.

Laci (02:10:48):

Yeah. Yep.

Matt (02:10:49):

Ditch Larry, get with a frank.

Laci (02:10:50):

He’s got fucked up mom stuff and he needs to … Or sex shame stuff. And that’s on him.

Matt (02:10:57):

Pinhead, thank you for … You got anything to add? Fuck Davil. Thanks, buddy.

Laci (02:11:04):

My dick is a joy shape.

Matt (02:11:25):

Final thoughts and star ratings for Hell Raiser 1987. I’ll go first, Laci. Five stars for this movie, I think it’s one of the great horror movies ever made. Some of the best practical effects. Oh, what we lost. I mean, they did this for less than a million dollars in 1987 with people who weren’t that experienced. You could do it again. This movie looks incredible. There’s nothing like this movie. It’s a special movie, Five Stars. It’s not a perfect movie. There are some flaws, and yet they make it seem more special, more special of an object, five stars with a heart. What do you think, Laci? Four and a half.

Laci (02:11:58):

Matt, shut up. I think this is a movie that has to grow on you. I don’t know that I’m going to give it the time to do that or the opportunity. So for me, it is 3.5. I don’t find this movie all that compelling to explore more unless I really feel like I’d find out a lot of things I don’t know yet. And I know you are way less hung up on that kind of thing. I don’t need to understand everything. I just need a better put together plot to watch another version of this movie or a further. I don’t know that I would go to Hellraiser two, is what I’m saying. And I don’t know. If a movie can’t even compel me to watch its sequel, I think it’s done something not good enough for me. I’m sorry, but it’s still artful. A cultural icon.

(02:12:47):

I respected for what it is. I’m not a through and through horror person, so I’m never going to be as connected to this kind of thing. I love that this guy’s nice. I love the horror community. I love the con community, all that stuff. I do feel a little bit like an outsider, so all of it’s going to feel like it’s not totally for me, but I kind of wish that it were.

(02:13:10):

So it’s not yet. And so for that reason, I have to be honest with the 3.5.

Matt (02:13:14):

I mean, I kind of had the exact same reaction the first time I saw the movie. But

Laci (02:13:17):

I feel this way with lots of horror movies. I feel like it’s an in- club. People have been saturated in it. They understand why it’s good and they’re not looking at it on the standards of which you would look at a movie that was made right now. And horror was a huge blind spot for me growing up. I watched all these movies alone. I wouldn’t have watched something. I already had insomnia. I wouldn’t have watched something that truly scared me. That is why it is my favorite scary movie because the kids are vindicated and they become empowered in the movie. This is different. The baby crying alone, the roach alone, I would have never watched this by myself and I won’t watch it again probably.

Matt (02:13:56):

Yeah.

Laci (02:13:57):

But I’ll draw it.

Matt (02:13:58):

Yeah. I mean, my reaction when I first saw it is like, I know this movie is doing things to me. I don’t understand.

Laci (02:14:04):

Visceral.

Matt (02:14:04):

The craft is top notch and I know it’s like a legendary object. It was multiple viewings that made it click for me, but yeah, movies should not require multiple viewings, but sometimes that’s how it works. Next week, Sex Month concludes. Very sad that sex month is over. No more sex after this. But Show Girls. Paul Verhoven’s Showgirls, his- Love it. One

Laci (02:14:25):

Of my favorite movies.

Matt (02:14:28):

And so Showgirls, everybody, tune into Showgirls next week and tune in to Laci on YouTube. She does her coloring videos link to that in the description. Makes characters morph into other characters.

Laci (02:14:42):

I am like a fucking artist at this point. I’m doing my best shit ever. So this is kind of underselling it.

Matt (02:14:47):

She’s kind of an explorer of hidden pleasures. I’m

Laci (02:14:50):

Just trying to evolve.

Matt (02:14:52):

Check us out on Letterboxd, won’t you? Matt Stokes nine for me, loadbang Laci for Laci. We are on the social medias. If you are listening to this podcast, you can watch us on YouTube. You can check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Twitter, TikTok. And my band, Rural Route nine, does the music for this show, including the song you’re hearing right now. We have such sights to show you, but that’ll have to wait for next time. Thanks. Okay.

Laci (02:15:19):

I love you. Goodbye.