Chopping It Up

Jesse, Sledd, and Joel head into the backwoods for John Boorman's 1972 gut-punch Deliverance, paired with Sledd's long-championed pick, 1981 slasher The Final Terror — a film so obscure Joel couldn't find a single dollar figure for its budget or box office anywhere online. The crew spends a good chunk of the episode arguing over whether Deliverance even qualifies as horror or if it's social commentary wearing a thriller's clothes, breaks down Final Terror's surprisingly stacked cast (Daryl Hannah, a young Akosua Busia, and Joe Pantoliano in a performance Joel says carries the movie), and hands out a Franklin Award to the guy who packed a guitar wrapped in plastic for a river trip and still didn't bring a fishing pole. Two very different backwoods nightmares, one very real debate about where the line for "horror" actually is.

Chopping It Up chops up Curry Barker's Obsession — the $750K nothing-budget horror flick that somehow turned into a $510M monster (680-to-1 return, because apparently demons are great for ROI). Jesse goes scorched-earth on Nikki and Sled isn't having it — full-blown argument, receipts and all. We also get into the lawsuit drama nobody expected, the Andy Richter cold-call story that's funnier than it has any right to be, and a Franklin Award debate that might be the most annoying cast we've ever covered. Also: Sledd finally gets his Deliverance wish next episode. God help us all.

Grab your suntan lotion and a high-powered rifle — Chopping It Up is going underground this week with a double dose of "something's eating people from below the ground." First: 1980's forgotten cult oddity Blood Beach, where John Saxon and Bert Young investigate Santa Monica beachgoers getting sucked into the sand — a movie so thin it needed Ray Liotta AND Matthew Modine to almost play the lead before they settled on someone else entirely. Then: Tremors, the movie that made Kevin Bacon a Saturday-afternoon-cable legend, still just as fun 35 years later as Bacon and Fred Ward battle giant graboids in Perfection, Nevada. One of these earns a glowing rewatch. The other just made TV history — Sledd hands out the first-ever NEGATIVE meat-cleaver rating in show history. Guess which is which.

It's every axe murderer's dream: 1988's Edge of the Axe commits to exactly one weapon and never looks back. Jesse, Joel, and Jeannie welcome special guest Gareth "Slasher Trash" Morgan (creator of the Slasher Trash page and an upcoming feature-length slasher documentary) to dig into this Spanish-American slasher obscurity — small-town paranoia, a shockingly prescient "technology will ruin relationships" subplot, tonal whiplash between sitcom hijinks and pig decapitations, and a twist ending that has the crew split on who's actually swinging the blade. Plus: video nasty talk and a masterclass in gaslighting your way into slasher-sequel status.

A sewer gator raised on hormone-jacked lab dogs takes on a CGI crocodile that cost six times as much and looks half as real. The crew pits 1980's scrappy, John Sayles-penned Alligator against 1999's big-budget, Stan Winston-adjacent Lake Placid — practical effects vs. CGI, indictment of big pharma vs. crazy old lady feeding cows to a lizard, and a fight over crocodile biology the movie's own screenwriters apparently lost. Also: why is the lake in Lake Placid not named Lake Placid? Nobody in this movie can answer that, but we sure try.

Freddy's back, but this time he's not avenging anyone — he's just really into leather bars, apparently. The crew chops up A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), the film that's basically the poster child for queer horror whether the studio wanted it to be or not. We get into writer David Chaskin denying the gay subtext for 25 years (then admitting it — sort of), star Mark Patton's brutal real story, and why this rushed, chaotic sequel accidentally became one of the most beloved films in the genre. Pride Month respect paid, blowjob jokes mostly avoided.
References: Horror Queers Podcast A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) LIVE! feat. Mark Patton, Robert Rusler & Kim Myers
https://open.spotify.com/episode/31noqPrrc1EFk2S5vdMgU3?si=_8kK0RZUQayWI6bgR03RDg
 
 

Sledd's back from his self-imposed "sled season" break with maybe his most personal pairing yet: two movies about mothers who are, in his professional opinion, doing their absolute worst — and somehow still more sympathetic than the demon-summoning grandma in the attic. Jesse and Jeannie both watched The Babadook for the first time this episode and have feelings (mostly about insect chittering and never wanting to rewatch it). Joel attempts to defend Gabriel Byrne's parenting. Sledd defends his own questionable childhood relationship with a dead bird. The crew gets into grief-as-monster metaphors, generational curses, postpartum horror, and a Franklin Award debate that's not close (sorry, Samuel). Plus: the Babadook's design has a 1920s silent film ancestor, Hereditary made eight times its budget, and someone brings up Hack-O-Lantern unprompted.
Two heavy hitters, zero good parents, and a demon named Paimon who's just trying his best.

The crew couldn't resist the hype — this week on Prime Cuts, Jesse, Jeannie, Joel, and Sledd dive into Widow's Bay, the new Apple TV+ horror comedy series from Parks and Rec creator Katie Dippold. A cursed New England island, a hapless mayor, folklore that turns out to be terrifyingly real, and commercials that will genuinely unsettle you — it's a lot. Jesse's all in, Jeannie's calling it horror comedy (not comedy horror, there's a difference), Joel's hoping it gets the Penny Dreadful treatment, and Sledd gives it a 3.75 while explaining exactly how you should run over a sea hag with your car. Ratings are preliminary and contingent on how they stick the landing. We'll be back.

Slasher Season is back, and we're going all the way in on the greatest horror franchise of all time — no, Joel, you don't get a say in that. Jesse pairs Friday the 13th Part III and Jason Takes Manhattan as the alpha and omega of the franchise: the movie that gave Jason his hockey mask, and the movie that sent him packing to the Big Apple. Jeannie watched both for the first time and would like her life back. Sled considers eight the last real Friday the 13th. Joel pulled out a map of New Jersey trying to figure out the geography. And Jesse has been freestyling over that disco opening since COVID. Hockey masks, heroin injections, biker gangs, Franklin Awards, and the hotly debated Mount Rushmore of horror — all that and a body count you have to respect.

This week on Prime Cuts, the crew watches a forgotten slice of early Oliver Stone — The Hand (1981), starring a very committed Michael Caine as a comic strip artist who loses his hand in a car accident and slowly loses everything else. His marriage, his sanity, and apparently several people in his vicinity.
Jesse, Jeannie, Joel, and a special guest who definitely watched Conan the Barbarian instead break down the film's double-swerve ending, hand-POV cinematography, the very real question of whether Oliver Stone cast himself as a bum with a missing hand, and whether Michael Caine has ever actually seen any of his own movies.
Body horror, messy divorces, and at least one prosthetic hand squeezing raw hamburger meat. You know, a chill one.