A gold-plated chain gang, a snowbound death march, and a father hunting a killer who's already survived the trip: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent closed out his western career with Cut-Throats Nine (1972), still cited as the goriest Spanish western ever made.
Mike talks with Nick Schlegel and Heather Drain about how Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and daughter Cathy (Emma Cohen) end up stranded with seven condemned convicts after a botched bandit ambush, and how gold hidden in their chains curdles cooperation into betrayal, torture, and a murder mystery Brown never gets to solve. They trace Romero Marchent's late-career demolition of heroic western conventions, the film's kinship with (and possible one-upping of) The Great Silence, Luis Cuadrado's snowbound cinematography, and whether the film's notorious gore implicates the audience or just splatters it. Masterpiece, curiosity, or endurance test: is this the most nihilistic western ever made?
Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — said only one movie made from a Parker novel "got the feeling right." That's John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin, out of prison to find his brother murdered by the mob over a bank job. Rather than run, Macklin runs at them, hitting every vulnerable Outfit operation until they pay. Joe Don Baker and Karen Black co-star alongside a murderer's row of noir faces: Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.
Jedidiah Ayres and Gary Phillips join Mike to dig into Westlake's dual-track career, the Parker adaptations from Point Blank to Play Dirty, Flynn's flat-and-mean style, and the film's year-long crawl across America courtesy of MGM's "smiling cobra" James Aubrey. Released in celebration of Arrow Video's new Limited Edition Blu-ray — featuring a commentary track by Mike and Jedidiah.
Roland Klick's Deadlock (1978) strips the spaghetti western down to its bones — no horses, no heroism, just three men and a suitcase in the Negev. When the wounded Kid (Marquard Bohm) staggers out of the desert clutching stolen cash, Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) sees an opportunity. When the cold-eyed Mr. Sunshine (Anthony Dawson) arrives to collect, the triangle tightens. Klick shoots it all like a fever dream, backed by a Can soundtrack that makes the heat feel alive.
Jessica Shires, and Spencer Parsons join Mike to dig into this criminally underseen West German neo-western — its debt to Leone, its surreal humor, its nihilist gut-punch of an ending, and why it deserves to stand alongside the genre's best.
Vengeance never ends — that's the warning Manuel issues early in Robert Hossein's 1969Cemetery Without Crosses , and the film spends the next ninety minutes proving him right. When the widow Maria hires the black-gloved, spiritually exhausted gunslinger to avenge her husband's murder at the hands of the powerful Rogers family, she sets in motion a cycle of brutality that punishes the innocent alongside the guilty.
Mike talks with co-hosts Oren Shai and Professor Richard Edwards about this French-Italian-Spanish production, one of the most melancholy and formally rigorous Euro-Westerns ever made. Topics include Hossein's rejection by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd and his debt to fatalism, the Leone connection, Michèle Mercier's turn as one of the genre's strongest female leads, Scott Walker's haunting title song, and where the film belongs in the canon alongside The Great Silence and The Wild Bunch.
Western month begins here. Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966)) arrived in the wake of Django riding a wave of Italian genre fever, and it announced something different lurking inside the spaghetti Western: a director with a genuine appetite for cruelty. Franco Nero plays Tom Corbett, a gold prospector summoned back to a hometown now wholly owned by the Scott family — their name on every building, their violence on every street corner. Waiting for him is his brother Jeff (George Hilton), drinking himself to death, and Junior Scott (Nino Castelnuovo), a white-suited sadist with a bullwhip and nowhere near enough supervision.
Mike White, Spencer Parsons, and Joe Odber dig into Fulci's pre-horror career, Fernando Di Leo's crime-inflected screenplay, the film's feudal vision of capitalism, and the charged dynamics of the Scott family — Oedipal, theatrical, and deeply strange. They also trace Junior's lineage forward to a certain plantation dandy in a white suit.
Sci-fi month concludes with one of the great cinematic boondoggles of the '90s. Kevin Costner directs and stars in The Postman (1997), playing a wandering drifter who stumbles into a postal uniform and accidentally becomes the savior of a shattered America, restoring hope and democracy one undelivered letter at a time. Standing in his way: General Bethlehem (Will Patton), a Shakespeare-quoting warlord leading a militia of survivalist zealots called the Holnists.
Mike talks with Emily Intravia and Carol Borden about the film's tangled politics, its baffling sense of time, its surprisingly thin violence for an R rating, and why a nearly three-hour epic about restoring the mail somehow still feels unfinished scene to scene.
What kind of man doesn't drink, avoids women, and prefers the company of other strange men in the park? Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) plays the alien-infiltration premise with surprising melancholy and remarkable restraint for a film with such a lurid title. Mike, Bill Ackerman, and Ben Buckingham dig into the film's overlapping readings — Cold War paranoia, the Lavender Scare, queer coding, and a feminist critique the film simultaneously makes and undermines.
They also take on the 1998 UPN TV remake directed by Nancy Malone (with a clever cameo from the original stars) and Rand Ravich's The Astronaut's Wife (1999), tracing how the same essential story mutates across four decades of American anxiety.
Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Alex Proyas's Dark City (1998), the tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a Philip K. Dick nightmare, a Kafka story with a superhero ending, and a filmmaker's self-portrait: the Strangers as producers, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) as the compromised writer, and Murdoch as the protagonist who tears through the painted backdrop and seizes the apparatus.
The conversation covers the film's three screenplay stages and two finished cuts, the studio-mandated voice-over that Proyas spent a decade trying to undo, and Roger Ebert's role as the mechanism of the film's survival. Mike and the Robs also place Dark City within the remarkable 1998–99 cluster of simulated-world films — The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor — and examine what it means that Murdoch's triumphant ending leaves the city still a construct, still running on hidden machinery, with only the god changed.
Special Guest: William Dear Guest Co-Host: Aaron Carruthers
Mike and Aaron Carruthers kick off Sci-Fi June with William Dear's time-travel oddity Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982), in which motocross racer Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) accidentally blasts a century into the past and spends the entire film completely unaware that he's done it. That central gag — a fish out of water who doesn't know he's a fish — drives most of the conversation, along with the film's quietly clever bootstrap paradox, its improbably stacked character cast, and the eclectic score produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith.
Mike and Aaron dig into what makes Fred Ward's performance work, why Belinda Bauer's Claire registers as the true power center of her frontier town, and how Peter Coyote earns his villain credentials in a single scene. They also talk through Dear's resourceful low-budget filmmaking — shooting in desert locations, strapping cameras to bikes, hiring a second unit team for five grand — and the director's personal connections to early Sam Raimi and the Michigan indie scene, including The Northville Cemetery Massacre.
Mike welcomes Andrew Nette and Jedidiah Ayres back to dissect Dark of the Sun (1968), a brutal, kinetic men‑on‑a‑mission film whose pulp thrills sit atop a surprisingly rich political and historical foundation. The trio digs into the movie’s Cold War backdrop, its depiction of the Congo Crisis, and the real mercenaries who inspired characters like Curry and the sadistic Henlein — from “Mad” Mike Hoare to Siegfried “Congo” Müller, whose Iron Cross‑wearing exploits echo through the film. They explore Jack Cardiff’s muscular direction, the film’s obsession with logistics, its uneasy colonial gaze, and how Rod Taylor and Jim Brown anchor a story that veers from heist film to war movie to moral reckoning.
Chainsaws, trains, diamonds, and geopolitics collide in one of the wildest action films of the 1960s.
Every May, Chris Stachiw hands Mike White the keys to The Kulturecast and invites him to curate an entire month of episodes — a tradition that’s become equal parts film school, deep cuts, and controlled chaos. Mike White May 2026 turns its attention to the formidable, often surprising career of Sean Connery, moving far beyond martinis and shaken-not-stirred iconography to spotlight some of his most fascinating non-Bond performances.
This year’s lineup dives into the brutal military prison drama The Hill, the stylish surveillance thriller The Anderson Tapes with guest Cullen Gallagher, the harrowing psychological descent of The Offence featuring guest Spencer Parsons, the medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose with returning guest Richard Hatem, and the wildly eccentric political satire Wrong Is Right.
From Sidney Lumet to Jean-Jacques Annaud, from prestige dramas to forgotten curiosities, Mike’s picks reveal an actor who spent decades taking strange risks, chasing challenging material, and occasionally making gloriously bizarre choices. It’s a month dedicated to rediscovering the deeper corners of Connery’s filmography — one unexpected gem at a time.
Special Guest: Radu Toderici Guest Co-Hosts: Andrei Idu, Spencer Parsons
In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie completed his second film, Reconstituirea — known in English as The Reconstruction or The Reenactment — and, within a month of its 1970 release, it vanished. Not banned outright, but buried: withdrawn, never televised, never revived for nearly two decades. By the time Romanian audiences could see it freely in 1990, it had acquired near-mythological status. A 2008 critics' poll ranked it the greatest Romanian film ever made.
The premise is deceptively simple: two young men, Vuică and Ripu, get drunk at their graduation party, brawl with a bartender, and are offered a deal — reenact the fight for an educational film about the dangers of alcohol and walk free. What follows is a sustained, darkly comic, and finally devastating examination of what happens when institutional power turns a camera on the people it controls.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and Andrei Idu about Pintilie's deliberate subversion and why this film became the foundation for the entire Romanian New Wave. Guest interview Radu Toderici -- whose essay about the film will be featured as part of the upcoming book ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie.
Mike joins hosts Rob Spencer and Joe Odber of Caliber 9 From Outer Space for a hard-boiled double feature spanning two very different crime cinema traditions. First up is Across 110th Street (1972), Barry Shear's gritty portrait of violence and dread on the mean streets of New York. Then the conversation shifts to Milan for Gambling City (1975), directed by Sergio Martino.
The episode includes a Spoiler Territory section for both films. Listeners who haven't seen Across 110th Street can skip ahead to the 1:16:42 mark, and those avoiding spoilers for Gambling City can jump to 2:10:17.
Mike talks with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, whose work — spanning documentary, fiction, and experimental forms — is now collected on the Criterion Channel. Takesue grew up shuttling between Honolulu and Massachusetts, and that cross-cultural, biracial upbringing informs every frame she has made, from early shorts rooted in identity politics to acclaimed features documenting cross-cultural encounters in Uganda, Laos, and Hawaiʻi.
Her films, including Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, examine those encounters through an observational lens, tracing the power dynamics and unspoken tensions that emerge when tourists and locals share the same unequal terrain. Takesue discusses her practice of traveling without research or agenda, letting one thing unfold into the next, and how a devastating failed fiction project directly led to the making of Where Are You Taking Me? She also talks about the rhythm and formalism of Onlookers, the tension between aestheticizing beauty and critiquing the tourist gaze, the influences she only fully embraced later in her career, and her current work-in-progress following tour guides at Cambodian atrocity sites.
Orson Welles spent thirty-five years trying to put Sir John Falstaff on screen. Chimes at Midnight (1965) is the result: a film drawn from five Shakespeare plays — primarily the two Henry IV parts, with passages from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor — that lifts Falstaff from comic supporting player to tragic protagonist. Welles plays the knight himself, a lumbering, larger-than-life tavern dweller and unlikely father figure to Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), heir to the guilt-haunted Henry IV (John Gielgud). When Hal must choose between loyalty to Falstaff and the demands of the crown, the film becomes what Welles called a lament "for the death of Merrie England." Dismissed by critics on its 1966 Cannes premiere and barely distributed in the United States, the film spent decades trapped in rights disputes — finally reaching audiences properly through the Janus Films/Criterion restoration in 2016.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and David MacGregor about the film's three-decade gestation across stage and screen, the filmmaking ingenuity behind its legendary Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, the autobiographical dimensions of Welles's performance, and why Chimes at Midnight now stands for many critics as the greatest Shakespeare film ever made.
Special Guests: Lloyd Kaufman, Andrew L. Miller Guest Co-Host: Rob St. Mary
In 2025, New Jersey's favorite hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength returned — twice. Writer/director Macon Blair's big-budget reimagining, The Toxic Avenger (2023), finally received a wide theatrical release in August 2025. Peter Dinklage voices Winston, a terminally ill janitor at a corrupt pharmaceutical company who falls into a vat of toxic chemicals and emerges as Toxie — a mop-wielding mutant vigilante. Kevin Bacon stars as the company's scheming CEO and Elijah Wood as his security-minded brother, in a film that wraps its splatter comedy around themes of healthcare, corporate greed, and unlikely heroism.
Also in 2025, Troma's own Andrew L. Miller and Adam Peltier reconstructed The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989) and Part III (1989) into the single film they were always meant to be. Titled Mr. Melvin, the 127-minute cut restores the narrative logic Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz originally intended — following Toxie's post-heroic depression, a manipulated journey to Japan, and a Faustian deal with Apocalypse Inc. that turns him into a corporate sellout before the ultimate confrontation with the Devil himself.
Mike talks with Rob St. Mary about both films, and the episode includes interviews with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman and Mr. Melvin co-producer and co-editor Andrew L. Miller.
Special Guest: Lauren Lloyd Guest Co-Hosts: Heather Drain, Rob St. Mary
Comedy Month wraps up as Mike talks with Rob St. Mary and Heather Drain about Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Lauren Lloyd joins Mike for an interview about working on the film that was almost universally trashed on release.
Green wrote, directed, and stars as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist who heads to Hollywood to sell his drawings as an animated series. After a catastrophic pitch meeting, Gord retreats to live with his parents—long-suffering father Jim (Rip Torn), mother Julie (Julie Hagerty), and younger brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas). Also along for the ride: Marisa Coughlan as Betty, a wheelchair-using rocket scientist.
Closer in spirit to Dadaist provocation than anything else at the multiplex in 2001. Mike, Rob, and Heather dig into Green's career, the film's reception, deleted material from the trailer and behind-the-scenes footage, and the question of what Freddy Got Fingered is actually trying to do.
Todd Solondz's disowned debut finally gets its day. Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989) follows Ira Ellis (Solondz), a bespectacled, self-deluding playwright adrift in the last gasp of the East Village art scene — too busy pining after a performance artist named Junk to notice the woman who actually loves him.
Mike Sullivan and David Rodgers join Mike to dig into the film Solondz famously begged a friend not to rent, examining what makes it both a fascinating time capsule of downtown New York bohemia and an unmistakable preview of the tragicomic sensibility that would eventually produce Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse. They also make the case for why this orphaned debut — unavailable on any legitimate platform since its 1990 VHS release — deserves a proper restoration and re-release.
Special Guests: Timothy Galfas, Albert S. Ruddy, Gary Morgan, Elliott Gould Guest Co-Hosts: Cullen Gallagher, Mike Sullivan
Paul Gallico's 1970 novel Matilda told of a male boxing kangaroo who becomes an unlikely heavyweight contender, upending the worlds of sports promotion and organized crime. Producer Albert S. Ruddy, fresh from his Oscar-winning triumph with The Godfather, acquired the rights and brought the story to the screen in 1978, co-writing with Timothy Galfas.
The resulting G-rated family comedy stars Elliott Gould as Bernie Bonnelli, a small-time talent agent who discovers the boxing kangaroo and sees his ticket out of obscurity. Clive Revill plays Billy Baker, Matilda's devoted owner and former British boxer, while Robert Mitchum turns up as Duke Parkhurst, a manipulative sportswriter, and Harry Guardino heads the mob contingent scheming to control the outcome of Matilda's fights. The kangaroo himself was portrayed by Gary Morgan in a $30,000 suit.
Mike talks with co-hosts Cullen Gallagher and Mike Sullivan about the film, then brings in interviews with actors Gary Morgan and Elliott Gould along with two posthumously-released interviews with producer Albert S. Ruddy and screenwriter Timothy Galfas,
Special Guest: Noah Isenberg Guest Co-Hosts: Heidi Honeycutt, Keith Gordon
Comedy Month continues as Mike talks with co-hosts Keith Gordon and Heidi Honeycutt about Billy Wilder's Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959).
Chicago, 1929. Musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are barely scraping by when they stumble onto the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, witnessing Spats Colombo (George Raft) and his mob gun down a rival gang. With the killers on their tail, the two desperate musicians disguise themselves as women and join Sweet Sue's Society Syncopators, an all-girl band heading to Miami. Aboard the train they meet Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), a ukulele-playing singer with a weakness for saxophonists and a dream of marrying a millionaire.
Mike also talks with scholar Noah Isenberg — author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We'll Always Have Casablanca and currently completing a cultural history of Some Like It Hot for Norton — about the film's origins, its enduring legacy, and what it still has to say.
Guest Co-Hosts: Nicholas Schlegel, Heather Drain
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Special Guest: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Special Guest: 
Special Guests: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Special Guests: 
Special Guest: 
Guest Co-Hosts: 
Special Guests: 
Special Guest: