Season 1 – Episode 4
Airdate: October 29th, 1988
It’s weird that Freddy Krueger was such an iconic character of the 1980s. I would put him in the same category as E.T., Optimus Prime, or even Alf. Freddy had board games, a talking doll, he even did a music video with the Fat Boys.
Season 2 Episode 5
Air Date: October 27, 1985
I’ve been watching a lot of Tales from the Crypt lately. So it was weird to take a break and revist its less celebrated predecessor. You see Crypt was a high budget HBO series with all star directors and A-list talent like Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, and Tom Hanks. While Darkside had guests like… Jerry Stiller, I guess? Darkside was never a big show. Nor a great show. But you can’t deny that it beat Crypt to the punch by six years and has surely earned its spot in horror TV history.
Air Date: October 29th, 1976
I think I only picked this special because it was mentioned in an episode of Family Guy. It was that episode where Peter and Lois went to Kisstock. They run into Dave and Dotty the nudists and Peter and Dave face off in a Kiss trivia battle. Hey, why am I explaining the scene when I can just post it right here?
Season 3, Episode 7
Original Air Date: November 24th, 1978
Hey! Why isn’t the goddamn Muppet Show on Disney+? I did some digging and the best answer I could find is that Bob Iger thinks the Muppets are dumb. The Muppets being an acquisition by Iger’s predecessor Michael Eisner, Iger hasn’t been interested in integrating the Muppets into the Disney brand post-90s. That means I had to go to the deepest darkest depths of the internet to find this episode. Thanks, Bob.
Hello Boils and Ghouls and welcome to Shocktober! A month-long celebration of the mysterious, the spooky, and the altogether ooky. This year’s theme is “TERRORVISION!” which means we’ll be reviewing thirty-odd days of Horror/Halloween-related TV shows.
Halloween Variety Specials? We got it. Halloween episodes of sitcoms? We got it. Made-for-TV 45-minute Disney movies with Richard Masur? Well, we got that too. From the Flintstones to Frasier, we got more shows than you could shake a stake at. So sink into that couch, grab a big bowl of candy and let the terror take over. For the next month, we will control all that you see and hear.
It begins…
This is my last entry for this year’s Criterion Month. Can you believe it? I’m finally free. No more being confined to my arthouse movie prison (the prison bars are subtitles). I can finally go back to watching the bad kinds of movies I usually watch. I’ve had Hostel: Part II burning a hole in my queue all month. But real talk, I’m glad we do this month of celebrating more intellectually and emotionally challenging films. I’m glad we do this because if I’m being honest, I wasn’t chomping at the bit to watch this movie.
On our Criterion Draft podcast it was mentioned that Y tu mamá también was “kind of a sexy” but I wasn’t prepared for this kind of sexy. Right off the bat this movie hits you with back-to-back explicit sex scenes. I had to stand guard by my remote all night to avoid the embarrassment of someone coming into the room and thinking I was watching porn. A lot of dicks too. The film was rated 18+ in Mexico also known as MX-C which would be the equivalent to the USA’s NC-17 Rating. Which is usually the kiss of death for a film’s success.
