If you’re in a movie and you live in a small town then you bet your ass you’re a waitress at an old timey diner. In the case of LAST STRAW (2023), the dinerest movie I’ve seen since LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY, it’s called the Fat Bottom Bistro, and it’s one of those cool looking ones with metal walls inside and out, like an Airstream trailer. According to IMDb it was filmed at two diners in New York, and I believe the exterior is one in Germantown that has been closed for a while and likely maintained specifically to rent to productions like this. I bet the old fashioned jukebox with disco lights really works. You always gotta get a shot of those records inside.
This one (which I found on Shudder) centers on Nancy (Jessica Belkin, American Horror Story), a young woman trying to decide what to do with herself after graduating high school, other than drinking hard at parties and working at the diner owned by her dad (Jeremy Sisto, CLUELESS). She just found out she’s pregnant, father to be determined, or not, because it’s nobody in her life. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her car breaks down on the way to work, so she has to walk until her co-worker Bobby (Joji Otani-Hansen), a nice guy who clearly has a crush on her, can pick her up on his bicycle. When she finally arrives her dad tells her someone’s sick and she has to work the late shift alone with Jake (Taylor Kowalski, MAXXXINE), who she hates. (read the rest of this shit…)
I swear I didn’t plan to be overexposed on podcasts this month, I just take them when I can get ’em and this is how it works out sometimes. When All ’90s Action, All the Time! invited me to come on this season I thought a great movie to talk about would be 
I found out there was a 2015 movie called DANCIN’ – IT’S ON!, so obviously I had to see it. Primarily for the title, secondarily due to my affection for modern dance-off movies, thirdarily because it co-stars Gary Daniels (
If DRACULA UNTOLD isn’t forgotten, then it’s kind of notorious. From what I remembered it was the start of the Dark Universe, the planned shared universe of action-oriented Universal Monster reboots. The public scoffed at that whole idea, then everybody (besides me) hated 
I watched EMILIA PÉREZ before the Golden Globes, because it was the movie with the most nominations. I figured that was a Globes-specific Netflix-is-good-at-marketing situation, because I’d only ever seen it trashed online, and not a single non-critic I talked to had even heard of it, even though it had been available on Netflix for months. But this morning the Oscar nominations were announced and it’s in the lead with 13 nominations, tying 
WOLF MAN is an event not just because it’s a new wolf man but because it’s the fourth movie directed by Leigh Whannell, the last two being 
I watched the 2023 Canadian film RED ROOMS (Les chambres rouges) on Shudder, but come to think of it it’s not exactly a horror movie. It’s kind of more harsh than that. It’ an extremely unsettling character drama, maybe a thriller, about the trial of a man accused of horrific child murders live on webcam. We thankfully don’t have to see any of the violence, but the images created in our mind are worse, described with a true crime bluntness rather than genre flair. I would not say this is a fun movie.
FLOW (Straume) is another one of those animated features I ask for sometimes, the type that respects the medium enough to do something one-of-a-kind instead of just making up some cartoon guys and grafting them onto one of the handful of available formulas. This one is from Latvia but there’s no dubbed vs. subtitled issue because (hey, kinda like 
