A Cure for the Common Craig Common Craig

If you're like me, you love a good road trip. The open road, listening to your favorite music, chasing suspected serial killers, picking up sinister hitchhikers, making sadistic enemies on your CB radio, taking the backroads to hell. Good times!

Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis are the token Americans, obsessed with the pursuit of a driver in a green van, who they suspect may be a homicidal maniac, in the Australian trucker suspense classic Road Games (1981).  C. Thomas Howell makes the terrible mistake of picking up kill-crazy hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer, and then becomes the prime suspect for his crimes in The Hitcher (1986). A young couple eloping to Las Vegas, leave the interstate, only to end up in a struggle to escape the underworld on the Highway to Hell (1991). And then from there, a CB radio prank becomes a nightmare for two brothers, who are targeted by a psychotic trucker out for revenge in Joy Ride (2001).

A very Tall Man. Deadly, flying silver spheres. A Lady in Lavender. Jawas? Okay, technically not Jawas.

Two brothers and their pal, an ice cream man by trade, attempt to unravel the mystery of what is happening to the bodies of the dead at Morningside Cemetery.  Of course, snooping around manages to incur the wrath of The Tall Man and his minions, and leads them to discover a portal to some otherworldly locale. It's time for a 45th anniversary celebration of Phantasm (1979)!

Time to pay another visit to the Dungeon of Directors, and unleash a variety of cult horrors. Writer, director, producer, Larry Cohen just had a knack for taking ideas and fleshing them out. Making something that sounds ridiculous, much more compelling and fun than it has any right to be.

The Davis family is expecting, and the pregnancy seems so perfect. Until the baby is much more monstrous than expected, and goes on a crawling killing spree in It's Alive (1974)! A series of murders in New York City, committed by people who seemingly have no connection, all provide the same response when asked why they did it: God Told Me To (1976). And then from there, are you eating it, or is it eating you? There's a new dessert treat craze sweeping the nation, but it seems to have a mind-altering effect on those who consume it. Enough is never enough of The Stuff (1985)!

The Winter of Folk Horror is not yet ready to let 2024 go. Cozy up with the comfort of witches, as we discuss three very different witch movies. Dueling witches, a witchy cousin, and a town filled with bigots. Welcome to the Witchy Winter Wonderland!

When a skeptical college professor demands his wife stop practicing protective conjure magic, he opens himself up to be the victim of an opposing force in Burn, Witch, Burn (1962)! A young woman loses her parents in a deadly crash, moves in with her cousin, Linda Blair, and proceeds to ruin her life, in the Wes Craven TV movie, Summer of Fear (1978)! And then from there, the residents of a small town believe that three new arrivals are reincarnations of witches that invoked a 300-year-old curse in The Devonsville Terror (1983)!

Adorable animals return! And at least some of them are back for the attack. Hopefully, our cat children were not negatively impacted during our viewing of these features.

The bodies from a local cemetery are used to develop a new taste sensation for cats in The Corpse Grinders (1971)! An alien cat arrives on Earth, in need of repairs to his spacecraft, while trying to avoid the military, spies, and gambling debts, in Disney's The Cat from Outer Space (1978)! Lucio Fulci brings us his freely adapted film version of the Edgar Allan Poe classic, featuring a really pissed off cat who loves to shred human flesh in The Black Cat (1981)! And then from there, Hong Kong brings us three knights from outer space (two humanoids, one cat), pursuing some kind of grotesque space...thing, and a must-see cat versus dog junkyard brawl in The Cat (1992)!

We've covered the more obvious directorial efforts of George A. Romero over the years. But, there is unseen by most, an underworld of Romero films. Movies that are just as real, but not as well-known. We crack open that creaky Dungeon of Directors and unleash these lesser-known Romero films.

The residents of a rural Pennsylvania town are accidentally exposed to a bioweapon, transforming them into The Crazies (1973)! A young man by appearance, may be an 84-year-old vampire, or in reality just a serial killer, in the ambiguous Martin (1977). A peek behind the curtain of the lives of a motorcycle-jousting, traveling troupe of renaissance faire-style performers in the cult oddity, Knightriders (1981)! And then from there, a service monkey develops an unhealthy attachment to a quadriplegic man in Monkey Shines (1988).