Movie Oubliette

Conrad Chambers and Daniel Goh
  • 4.9 (45)
  • Film History
  • Updated Biweekly

Intrepid film fans Conrad and Dan review obscure and forgotten horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies to decide whether they should be set free or thrown back into the oubliette to be forgotten forever! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

OUBLIETTE CADET

Listen ad-free

$1.99/month or $14.99/year

  1. 48m ago

    Odd Thomas

    Odd Thomas (2013) was Stephen Sommers' first film in 4 years and his first outside the studio-blockbuster machine since 1998's Deep Rising, a curious pivot for the man who built The Mummy franchise and Van Helsing on the twin pillars of CGI and momentum. Adapting Dean Koontz's bestselling 2003 novel, the first of what became a 7-book series, Sommers wrote the screenplay entirely on spec, gambling that it might be the only way to win over an author famously sceptical of what Hollywood tends to do to his work, and secured the late Anton Yelchin as his lead. The result is less monster-movie spectacle than small-town ghost-whisperer romance with a body count: Odd is a short-order cook in the fictional desert town of Pico Mundo who can see the dead... as well as the invisible creatures that flock to scenes of impending violence. When those harbingers of doom start swarming a stranger in unprecedented numbers, Odd and his girlfriend Stormy have to work out what's coming before it arrives. Where the story goes from there, in a film so preoccupied with fate and free will, is best left for you to find out. But does the film deserve to escape the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Odd Thomas

  2. Sep 15

    Event Horizon

    Event Horizon arrived in cinemas in August 1997 as the third feature from Paul W. S. Anderson, a British director fresh off the surprise success of Mortal Kombat and, evidently, determined to prove there was more to him than adapting a fighting game, so naturally he followed it up with a haunted-house movie set on a spaceship, from a script by first-time writer Philip Eisner that had been quietly sharpened by Se7en's Andrew Kevin Walker along the way. Rushed through post-production so Paramount could clear the release calendar for a certain iceberg-based prestige picture later that year, it stars Laurence Fishburne and the late, much-missed Sam Neill as, respectively, the no-nonsense rescue captain and the scientist whose grip on reality is doing considerably worse than his ship's hull integrity, sent to reclaim a vessel that vanished 7 years earlier testing an engine nobody fully understood, and which has now come home with a great many unanswered questions and, as it turns out, appreciably worse manners than it left with. But does it deserve a return trip from the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Event Horizon

  3. Sep 13 ·  Bonus

    L'Autre – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

    Joe Lispett joins Conrad for coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), kicking off with L'Autre, the third feature from Quebec's Alexandre Franchi, arriving 8 years after Happy Face and seventeen after his TIFF-winning debut The Wild Hunt, so he's clearly a director who prefers to make people wait. Pierre-Yves Cardinal (Tom at the Farm) plays Stan, laid up in hospital after cancer surgery and already fraying at the edges from sheer boredom, when Darius (Bilel Chegrani) gets wheeled into the other bed following a shooting. He's supposed to be in a coma, but Stan can hear him making threats... Is it the cancer? The drugs? Or something else? It's billed as visceral and darkly comedic, which is festival-speak for "someone's grip on reality is about to slip and we'll enjoy watching it happen." We'll grant this one honorary genre status even though it's shelved as a comedy thriller rather than straight horror, because two men trapped in a room while one of them slowly convinces himself the other is trying to kill him is a premise we're all familiar with. Besides, there's graphic surgery footage! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    L'Autre – Spoiler-free bonus review from TIFF

  4. Aug 31

    Seconds (with Lexi Amoriello)

    Lexi Amoriello, creator of Movie Recs by Lex, visits the Oubliette and returns with Seconds – made in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, fresh off the Cold War fever dreams of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, and here pairing up with the great James Wong Howe for one last, extraordinary black-and-white swan song apiece. Seconds is the sort of film that genre fans tend to discover a decade after everyone insists it was always a classic, largely because it wasn't: it was booed at Cannes, quietly dumped by Paramount, and left to rot for 30 years before Criterion and the National Film Registry got around to correcting the record. Adapted by Lewis John Carlino from David Ely's 1963 novel, it asks a disarmingly simple question: what if you could buy a second life, no strings attached? With a truly game Rock Hudson doing career-best work as the walking punchline to that question, the film spends the rest of its runtime methodically proving that there is, in fact, always a string attached. But does it deserve a second chance beyond the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Seconds (with Lexi Amoriello)

  5. Aug 17

    A Little Princess (1995)

    Thanks to a nomination from our patron, Eddie, we're getting locked in the attic with Alfonso Cuarón's Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess (1995) – his first English-language film, made with an unknown child lead, a script by The Fisher King's Richard LaGravenese, and a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who'd go on to shoot most of Cuarón's career alongside him. The result, the third screen version of Burnett's 1905 novel after outings for Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple, follows Sara Crewe, a wealthy, warmly imaginative girl deposited at a New York boarding school while her father serves in the First World War — and what happens to both her fortunes and her sense of self once the money, and the news from the front, turn bad. It bombed at the box office on release in May 1995, picked up two Oscar nominations anyway, and quietly became the film Cuarón has called his personal favourite of everything he's directed. But does it deserve to let out of the Oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    A Little Princess (1995)

  6. Aug 3

    The Living Dead Girl (with Marta Djordjevic)

    Marta Djordjevic, host of Rewind and Revive, returns to introduce us to The Living Dead Girl (1982), Jean Rollin's "gore film" that somehow smuggles in all his usual poetry about doomed love, decaying French châteaux, and women who exist somewhere between the living and the dead. The setup is disarmingly simple by Rollin's standards – some careless toxic-waste dumping accidentally resurrects Catherine Valmont, a wealthy young woman two years in her grave, who reconnects with her devoted childhood friend Hélène while working out exactly what a person in her condition needs to survive – but the execution is unmistakably his own: unhurried, melancholic, and considerably bloodier than anything he'd attempted before, landing somewhere between a slasher movie and a tragic romance without ever quite settling on which one it wants to be, which is, frankly, half the fun. But, crucially, does it deserve wander dreamily out of the oubliette? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Living Dead Girl (with Marta Djordjevic)

  7. Jul 21

    Split Second

    Directed by journeyman Tony Maylam (The Burning) – well, mostly... action specialist Ian Sharp apparently finished the job after a fraught shoot – Split Second makes Rutger Hauer feel right at home in a rain-slicked, neon-adjacent future. His chain-smoking, chocolate-fuelled detective Harley Stone wades through a permanently flooded near-future London, saddled with an unwanted rookie partner with the unfortunate name Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), chasing a heart-eating killer that may not be entirely human. All shot on a shoestring in condemned East End warehouses standing in for a drowned metropolis, with Kim Cattrall as the guilt-ridden love interest, Split Second has Blade director Stephen Norrington's monster effects, a script by then-unknown Gary Scott Thompson (long before he struck gold with The Fast and the Furious) from a spec script that began life as an entirely different, present-day occult thriller. But is it a little seen future noir treat that deserves more attention, or is it a soggy assemblage of other, better films? Find out! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Split Second

  8. Jul 6

    Solaris (2002) (with Alex Heeney)

    Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Row, joins us to explore a simulacra of Solaris – Steven Soderberg's remake of the Tarkovsky classic. Produced by James Cameron and led by George Clooney, the result is a lean, melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s most famous novel. It follows psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) to a failing space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris, where memory, guilt, and desire take physical form in ways that are equal parts sci-fi premise and emotional trap. It's a studio movie with art-film discipline, a romance wrapped inside an existential problem, and an example of the marketing department losing a fight it never fully understood. It underperformed badly at the box office and has largely served as a footnote to discussions of the Tarkovsky original, in the "oh yeah, that happened" vein, but does it deserve to be reassessed on its own merits? Find out! Alex prepared a special treat for listeners over on Seventh Row: a suggestion for an ideal sci-fi comedy film to watch next after Solaris in which the genders of the main characters are swapped. What to find out more? Head on over to http://seventh-row.com/oubliette to find out more! Support us on Patreon to nominate films for us to cover, access exclusive bonus content, and vote on the final verdict! Rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and tell a friend about us. Follow us on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Solaris (2002) (with Alex Heeney)
See All (226)

Trailers

4.9
out of 5
45 Ratings

About

Intrepid film fans Conrad and Dan review obscure and forgotten horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies to decide whether they should be set free or thrown back into the oubliette to be forgotten forever! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Conrad Chambers and Daniel Goh
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    226
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Conrad Chambers and Daniel Goh
  • Show Website
    Movie Oubliette
  • Provider
    Conrad Chambers

You Might Also Like