Third Eye Cinema / Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine podcast

Weird Scenes Week 88 (8/25/22): Satan in the 70’s (a discussion of satanic cult films)

The 1970s.   A turbulent and important time, marked by the decline and fall of the hippie movement that took the world by storm with the 1966 "summer of love" and introduced several generations to alternative religions and new age spirituality...often enough landing on some spectrum of the occult.  

But the spirit of Woodstock and the ethos of peace, love and music had been subverted by a violent reaction from conservative forces, and together with a few grim and headline grabbing reality checks (Altamont, the Manson Family, the Weathermen and the iconoclastic discovery that so many of their new heroes and gurus bore feet of clay) combined with later disillusion brought about by political scandals, the seemingly endless (and ultimately failed) war in Vietnam, a plethora of self serving and destructive religious cults, drug casualties, the emergence of the serial killer and the failure of the idealistic commune lifestyle led to a very different tenor to the decade from the one that preceded it.  

In short, the Age of Aquarius had revealed itself as the Aeon of Horus (if not the dawn of the Kali Yuga) in no uncertain terms, and with a shocking suddenness.

As a reflection of the times, a widespread interest in Witchcraft and Satanism were all the rage, and cinema, from mainstream blockbusters like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and the Omen series straight down to the level of adult film and even (if not most especially) the TV movie marketed to housewives and youngsters weekday afternoons, spoke to a new preoccupation with occultism.  

So prevalent was all of this obsession with all things dark and dangerous that it very much defined the decade, far moreseo than any that preceded or followed.  

Join us, as we delve into some of the best examples of what ultimately became a tidal wave of satanic terror, specifically limited to those centering on literal, if oft self styled cults of devil worshippers and their works...

Week 88: Satan in the 70’s (a discussion of satanic cult films)

https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1
https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)
https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044

https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast

Weird Scenes Week 87 (8/11/22): Paranoia, Decadence and Dissolution – The Films of Roman Polanski

Born in Paris in the early 1930s, Roman Polanski lived a life marked by many tragedies. 
 

From seeing both parents taken away to the camps during the Nazi occupation of Poland and forced to live with a series of clandestine foster families to a later youth under the equally horrific oppression of Communist Russia and the Poland of the Iron Curtain, he came to the attention of the film community with his debut film Knife in the Water, quickly moving on to a series of British and American successes.

But even then, tragedy struck, with his new wife and future child murdered viciously by the Manson Family, with all these experiences feeding into his grim, fatalistically existential narratives onscreen.  Later (rather compromised) court matters led to his being scapegoated and rendered fugitive, forced to continue his directorial endeavors in a handful of European countries not subject to extradition laws (a matter that returned to public attention in the early millenium.)

His is a cinema marked by both Decadence and doom, grimly determinist and Kafkaesque regardless of genre or subject, from Hitchcockian narrative to spy thriller to outright horror.  

Oft feted and nominated (and winning) laudatory awards both domestically and abroad (in England, France and Europe per se) and much discussed in critical circles, he nonetheless remains something of a controversial figure, most often due to circumstances entirely out of his control or driven by self-serving accusatory figures in the media, courts and even public opinion.  But do these accusations paint as clear cut a condemnation of the man as it may seem?

Join us as we discuss the life and films of Roman Polanski, and decide for 
yourselves...

Week 87: Paranoia, Decadence and Dissolution – The Films of Roman Polanski

https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1
https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)
https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044

https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast

State of the Disunion - Guns n’ Russians and the Neverending American Horror Story

Hail Hydra!  Immortal Hydra!  Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place!

No, we're not doing another superhero cinema and television show, but making an apt metaphor about the neverending horror story that is MAGA and the pernicious spread of Trumpism in the corridors of American power.   

Despite effectively cutting the hydra off at the head in the 2020 election, the movement continues unabated, aided, abetted and energized if not driven by a stonewalling collective of 51 malfeasants who, like a bunch of cut rate dimestore Gandalfs, declare "you shall not pass!" to any and every bill the American people demand, or that may actually alleviate all the financial crises and domestic terror incidents that beset us on an increasingly regular basis.  

Why?  In the name of power.  At any and all costs, including the future of this country.

Defaming the Constitution and the principles our Founding Fathers and a few foresight blessed men (like Teddy Roosevelt, with his muckraking and trustbusting Square Deal, FDR with his social program creating New Deal and Johnson's Great Society, which gave us such things as social security, medicare and medicaid, fair housing, integration and more), these atavistic corporate owned plutocrats stoop to one new low after the next, distracting, dividing and using every dirty trick in the book just this side of legality (and often not) to rig the game in their favor.  A minority seeking total control - including the right to your own body and destiny, romantic or otherwise - over the will of the majority.  

And we remain apathetic, fighting amongst ourselves over petty "wedge issues", while the American conservative of old seemingly vanishes into history, and a literal cult of death and "burn it all down" nihilism driven by false narratives, false "theocratic" support, propaganda and social division-fomenting "talking points" takes its place.  

If you're not part of the cult, whatever direction your politics lean, you have to know this is wrong, not to mention completely unAmerican.

And Covid, "monkey pox", an ongoing invasion of Ukraine and longstanding supply chain issues resulting from the aforementioned (and a drunken ship captain clogging up the main sea based global shipping route for weeks on end), not to mention trying to clean up the dumpster fire the Trump "Presidency" has left us with, have given a new leader the most difficult year and a half in office in living memory, with no feasible route to correct it all.  

Because of 51 selfish puppets, dancing to their masters' tunes and denying any corrective measures in the hopes of regaining total control...and ending the "Grand Experiment" our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us.

Add in a rash of hate crimes around the nation, hitting one group or demographic after another, with and without military-grade hardware, from senior citizens to children, from malls to concerts to protest marches and 10K runs, right down to schools.  Even walking the streets of our cities, in broad daylight.  The body count rises, and they refuse to take action or allow anyone else to.  

All in the name of power, and the nihilistic urge to "burn it down".

After our Marlowe show a few weeks back, here we rejoin the audience with another impromptu get together, talking these and many other pressing issues afflicting the state of the union, and suggest what should be some simple solutions everyone can enact, to hopefully turn this sinking ship back on course...and away from this road to certain destruction and a resurgent fascism, not to mention a return to serfdom for all not among their ranks in power and riches.

Then we'll wrap it all up by decompressing with some good laughs and banter about this, that and the other...

Weird Scenes Season 11 Episode 2: State of the Disunion - Guns n Russians and the Neverending American Horror Story

https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1
https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)
https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044

https://open.spotify.com/show/ 4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast

Weird Scenes Week 86 The Hard Boiled Exploits of Philip Marlowe

Tonight, we’re doing something different.  Rather than tackling a genre, director or actor, we’re actually going to take on a fictional character as represented in film.  

Raymond Chandler was a dual citizen of the UK and US who turned to writing when he lost his job as an oil exec in the Great Depression.  In addition to co-scripting Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, Strangers on a Train with Alfred Hitchcock and writing The Blue Dahlia which starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, he wrote 7 ½ novels in his lifetime, and most of them were turned into film…some several times.  And the character?  Philip Marlowe.

Some of these films were produced under different titles, or in established B-picture film series revolving around established radio detectives like The Falcon and Michael Shayne, others became much celebrated entries in the noir and neo-noir genre and high points in the filmography of big names like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Elliott Gould.  And with directors like Howard Hawks, Edward Dmytryk, Robert Altman and Michael Winner, we’re not exactly talking programmers here…

Join us as we talk the films of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 86: The Hard Boiled Exploits of Philip Marlowe

https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1
https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)
https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044

https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast

Weird Scenes Week 85 (12/9/21): Go Ape! The first major multimedia craze and how it disappeared into the vaults of time

We’d talked the early, more progressively minded SF of Charlton Heston in a recent show, and the life and career of the ubiquitous Roddy MacDowall not very long ago.  One series of films notable for featuring both iconic actors in primary roles remained glossed over, however, despite spurring a personal revisitation of the original 5 film run after the MacDowall chat.  Unaddressed, that is, until now.

Marked by a then relevant if somewhat naïve by modern standards allegorical exploration of race relations and nuclear brinksmanship, the series was a true cause celebre in its heyday, resulting in all sorts of spinoff items: MEGOs, action figures, comic magazines, paperback novellas, a popular book and record series, games, jigsaw puzzles and plastic models, even a short lived TV series.  Like the later Star Wars, the Apes were inescapable throughout the early to mid 70’s…then, just like that?  Utterly forgotten.

Despite a post millennial attempt to revive the series in a disturbingly far lesser CG based trilogy of films, the Apes films seem locked in time, a 70’s concern that left a huge mark only to disappear, seemingly without trace.

What happened?  How did such a force of culture defining cinema, rivaled only by the Bond series, smaller scale works like the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman franchise and the brief popularity of blustery stuntman Evel Knievel for its sheer broad impact, simply drop off the radar, seldom if ever to be referenced again?

And then, seemingly out of the blue, comes that 2011 reboot series…

So join us tonight as we pick some nits off each other, and speak once again of those hoary days before Spielberg and Lucas turned cinema into a wasteland of brainless popcorn fare, and realize that 40 plus years back, this was about as lowbrow and brainless as things were ever likely to get.  

My, how things have changed... 

Week 85: Go Ape! The first major multimedia craze and how it disappeared into the vaults of time

 

https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1
https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)
https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044

https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast