“Get your stinkin’ paws off of me you . . .” (well, you remember the rest)

And of course you do, just like we all remember that line and gorillas on horseback and one of the most iconic twist endings ever filmed. But what we tend to forget is just how well-made The Planet of the Apes is. Despite a premise that honestly sounds extremely silly when you really think about it, a group of highly skilled people got together and put everything they had into this movie. The make-up, the set design, the soundtrack, the script (clunkier moments aside), the editing—all elements are top notch and help sell the crazy world depicted in the movie with utter conviction.

As just one example, I’ll hand it off to our friend Steve and an excerpt of his analysis of the final scene:

“Then they have this beautiful cut from the explosion to a shot of the shoreline and the water on the shoreline moving and you hear—it’s an audio cut—you can hear the explosion over the moving ocean, water on the beach, and then the Jerry Goldsmith music comes back, and it gets quiet again and there’s no dialogue, and you have a long shot of Taylor and Nova on horseback, and then they have cut to almost the final shot, and they’re on the right side of the screen, the music cuts out, all you hear is the water, and then you have the crown on the left side, and you can watch that shot over and over again and it’s always a shock when the sharp edges of the crown come in on the left side of the screen. It’s almost seems like an experimental film because it’s just these sharp angles cutting across the screen. It’s a great, great shot.”

To hear the rest and everything else we have to say about this classic, give our episode a listen.

Some Shine and Some Don’t

Horror is one of those things—you just know it when you see it. Yet two podcasters holding themselves up as specialists in the genre should at least attempt a cohesive definition. So I will boldly suggest that horror as a film genre requires viewer identification with characters who are assaulted by mysterious, inscrutable, or unknowable forces. The first part of that definition and the highly problematic distinction between victim and villain identification is something we will probably get into at later points in our podcasting journey. For now let’s take on the second part.

In my opinion, the best horror resists over-explaining the motives or even the identity of whatever malevolent force is attacking our protagonist. Halloween offers some basic psychological explanation for Michael Myers’s murderous impulses, but the Shape remains a blank slate masking inexplicable bloodlust. Black Christmas ends without any clear identification of the killer and his fraught relationship with the unseen Agnes. The Exorcist seems to conclude with demonic evil subdued but leaves us with the unsettling feeling that the full scope of hell’s powers remains to be unleashed. Any successful horror film that offers a convenient explanation (“You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!”) saves it until the very end.

And then we have The Shining, newly explored for you on our Terror Sonic podcast. Shreds of explanations abound—Indian burial ground, a former caretaker’s murders, some places are like people—but these puzzle pieces never quite fit together to create a satisfying picture. Once you try to put them together you find yourself struggling to make sense of it all. If the murdered girls are the Grady daughters, why are they twins? How are Charles and Delbert Grady related if at all? And what is with that last image of Jack in the picture?

The only real explanation is that no explanation is fully satisfactory. We cannot definitively conclude whether the malevolence in the film resides in the toxic psychology of an abusive man, the psychic energy of a hotel steeped in a history of brutality, or both. Perhaps it’s one reason why The Shining is widely acknowledged as one of the most unsettling horror films ever made. We cannot understand the evil, yet we know that it exists both within and without, and our rational selves are caught somewhere in the middle, our mouths shocked into frozen, voiceless screams.

One Possible Future

I can recall having hypothetical discussions on whether I would immediately agree to serve our robot overlords or join the resistance once the inevitable takeover by the machines happened. That was in 1984 when movies like The Terminator felt like fun sci-fi fantasies. Since then we’ve made a number of advances in AI, everyone seems to be throwing around terms like “technological singularity,” and we’re talking to computers that obligingly (for now) respond to our every command. Suddenly it all feels more real and a good time to discuss The Terminator on The Future Sucks.

On the Anti-Seminal front, look out for our analysis of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album, set to be posted soon.

What an Excellent Day for an Exorcism

Finally, our Terror Sonic episode on The Exorcist is up. We admit this one took a while simply because once you start closely examining this film you uncover all sorts of thematic and symbolic elements. Our recording ran so long that Walt needed some time to edit it down to a decent length, but we finally have an episode we’re happy to share with everyone.

Meanwhile, on Anti-Seminal you can find our episode on the first album by Killing Joke. If you haven’t listened to this one in a while it’s worth checking out.

Fury Road

The course of artistic expression is seldom smooth, but it can sometimes be surprising. How did a movie franchise launched in 1979 with a low budget car-smash exploitation flick manage to stun the world in 2015 with an epic that is widely hailed as feminist action film? Whether the movie truly deserves the title is a subject of debate on our latest episode of The Future Sucks, devoted entirely to a discussion on Mad Max: Fury Road.

Meanwhile, you can find our exploration of the early slasher movie Black Christmas on Terror Sonic, and The Exorcist will be coming up soon.

Anti-Seminal is still plugging through the alphabet. Look for our episode on Judas Priest’s album Stained Class. Our episode on Killing Joke is in the editing phase, and we expect to record and post Kiss soon.

Happy New Year from Useless Info Inc

We’ve just completed our first full year of podcasting and feel pretty good about our output to date. We’ve picked up a lot of new listeners, so we’re thankful to all of you who have chosen to come along for the ride.

Also, our one-off episode on the film Halloween was successful enough that we have decided to officially call it Episode 1 of a new podcast series we’ve dubbed Terror Sonic, an exploration of some of the finest expressions of horror cinema. Of course, we still only have so much time on our hands, so we will likely keep to our schedule of releasing one film podcast episode per month and alternate between Terror Sonic and our flagship podcast The Future Sucks. Given the holiday season, the next episode to drop will be on the iconic slasher film Black Christmas, and then we’ll get on with taping the promised Mad Max: Fury Road episode a little later in the new year.

Meanwhile, Anti-Seminal is chugging along through the underrated staples of hard rock and metal. Expect Stained Class by Judas Priest to be posted soon.

Terror Sonic for Halloween

We know we promised you The Purge: Anarchy as our next film on The Future Sucks, but we got inspired by the Halloween season and decided to sneak one of our favorite horror films in here. That film happens to be Halloween—no reboots, no sequels, just the original from 1978. We’re considering this one a pilot episode of a new podcast series we intend to call Terror Sonic. So if you want more horror films, let us know and we’ll be happy to oblige.

Finally, We’re on Facebook

Yes, we’ve created a Facebook group page for our operation. We’ll use the posts for notifications of new episodes as well as assorted bits that come to us. Naturally, it’s also a convenient place for everyone to discuss our episodes and whatever hot topics we may have stumbled upon.

For new episodes out this week, check out Blade Runner 2049 on The Future Sucks and Faith No More’s Angel Dust on Anti-Seminal. And take a look at the Facebook page for some extra content and links.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Elf (wait, who?)

We’ve just posted our latest Anti-Seminal episode, dedicated to the final album by the band Elf. I know, you probably haven’t heard of them. We admit that we found it challenging coming up with a proper metal or hard rock band to cover under the letter “e” until we realized we had a good opportunity to put out a prequel of sorts to our episode covering the band Dio.

Here’s the story. Long before he fronted his self-titled band, Ronnie James Dio started a band called The Electric Elves, and just remember this was 1967 so a name like that was actually pretty hip. They had shortened the name to Elf by the time they released their first album in 1972 and came out with just two more albums while regularly opening for Deep Purple. At this point they caught the attention of Deep Purple’s guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who was dissatisfied with the musical direction of that band and ready to move on. Elf promptly ceased to exist as Blackmore incorporated all of the members minus the guitarist and percussionist into his new band Rainbow.

So given the long shadow cast by Rainbow, Dio’s stint with Black Sabbath, and the band Dio, where does Elf fit in? Quite an interesting place, as it turns out. On these albums you can hear a band exploring hard blues and boogie-woogie while offering tantalizing hints of the performer Dio would become.

Meanwhile, on The Future Sucks we’re covering a certified dystopian classic: Robocop.

Anti-Seminal Busts Out of Pocket

All right, we’ve been called out. Anti-Seminal is a podcast series devoted to underrated albums by hard rock and metal bands, but some of our fans have pointed out that certain artists we’ve covered don’t exactly fit the definition (ahem, Bowie and The Doors). So we’ve decided to codify our cheatin’ hearts and start doing supplemental episodes devoted to off-genre bands. If hard rock and metal are firmly in our pocket, these episodes will be strictly out of pocket, hence the name. And we won’t be going in alphabetical order, except our first band under this imprint is Depeche Mode, which is almost in alphabetical order, but don’t get used to it.