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The Kulturecast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Weirding Way Media
The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way Media. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Three series live inside the feed: Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
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- 2 days ago1h 45m
Kulture Meltdown: Crystal Lake (2026), Episodes 7–8 — "These woods are ours now."
Before Crystal Lake, there was Bellflower. The final two episodes of A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel flash back to 1959, where Linda Cardellini's Pamela marries into a corporate clinical trial and gives birth to a son on Friday the 13th, then bring her husband, Hamish Linklater's Elias Wittering, to Crystal Lake to take Jason back. The season answers how Jason survived the lake and puts mother and son on screen together before it ends.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Bellflower and its Operation Paperclip echoes, Jason's origin and the bag over his head, Mike Flanagan comparisons, remakes that actually reinvent, whether the series should become the new canon, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 2 days ago1h 21m
Kulture Meltdown: Crystal Lake (2026), Episodes 5–6 — "Kill them, Mommy."
Camp Crystal Lake reopens for the summer while bodies keep turning up in the woods. Episodes 5 and 6 of Crystal Lake, A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel, push Linda Cardellini's Pamela Voorhees past killing in self-defense toward something closer to relish, as Sheriff Levon Brooks and his sister Briana close in on a conspiracy, the camp's hippies mourn one of their own, and Hamish Linklater arrives as the man who knows exactly who Pam used to be.Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Pam as an antihero in the line of Dexter and Tony Soprano, Grace's place in the story, David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy, why the show works without knowing the films, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 2 days ago1h 29m
Timeline (2003) — "Then history will change."
Michael Crichton spent his career turning big science ideas into page-turners, and Timeline was supposed to be the next Jurassic Park. Richard Donner's 2003 adaptation sends a group of archaeology students, led by Paul Walker and Gerard Butler, back to 14th-century France through a quantum device built by a tech company, to rescue their professor, played by Billy Connolly, from the middle of the Hundred Years' War. The film had a troubled production and a rough reception, but it's an interesting case of a Crichton story that didn't make the jump to the screen.Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Mark Stachiw join Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Michael Crichton, Richard Donner, time travel, medieval warfare, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 3 days ago0 min
Changeover: Wag the Dog (1997) — "This is nothing."
Some satires age because the world moves on. Wag the Dog aged because the world caught up with it. Barry Levinson's 1997 comedy, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, sends Robert De Niro's spin doctor and Dustin Hoffman's Hollywood producer to stage a fake war with Albania and bury a presidential scandal days before an election. It opened weeks before the Lewinsky story broke. Nearly thirty years on, is it still satire when real life has gone further than the movie ever dared?This one goes out on Election Day for a reason: it's a movie about voters being treated as an audience to be managed. So if you haven't already, go vote. The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and The Projection Booth's Mike White meet for Changeover to talk Barry Levinson, Bob Roberts, Man of the Year, the art of spin, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 1 weeks ago1h 26m
Required Viewing 08: All About Eve
Fasten your seatbelts. This week on Required Viewing, we take our seats for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), the backstage drama that earned 14 Oscar nominations, won six including Best Picture, and gave Bette Davis the role of a lifetime as Margo Channing, a Broadway star watching a devoted young fan, Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington, take a little too much interest in her life.We get into Mankiewicz's razor dialogue, George Sanders' Addison DeWitt as the critic who sees everything, the film's view of ambition and aging for women in show business, an early Marilyn Monroe appearance, and why a movie about the theater still feels like the sharpest movie ever made about fame. Ambition, envy and the price of the spotlight, from every angle.Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, are joined by Susan Lambert of 80's TV Ladies to take it from the top.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 1 weeks ago2h 25m
Kulture Meltdown: Clayface (2026) — "They stole everything from me."
DC goes full body horror, and the Kulture Meltdown asks whether a superhero movie can ever go far enough. Clayface (2026), directed by James Watkins from a Mike Flanagan story, follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a rising Gotham actor whose ruined face is rebuilt by an experimental treatment that won't hold. Is it baby's first body horror next to The Fly, Videodrome and The Substance? What was lost when Flanagan's script went to another writer and another director? Did this story need a whole movie, or fifteen minutes at the top of a Batman film? The talk also takes in the movie's place in James Gunn's DCU, word that Clayface was once headed for The Batman Part II, Werewolf by Night getting dumped on streaming, the Zack Snyder fan wars, a Batman cameo that never comes, and Two-Face in The Dark Knight.The Doctor of Podcasting, Chris Stachiw, is joined by Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown for this crossover between The Kulturecast and Movie Meltdown, recorded after the film's October 23 theatrical release.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 1 weeks ago1h 38m
Event Horizon (1997) — "Hell is only a word."
It was pitched as a haunted house in space, rushed into theaters with only weeks to edit, and cut down from around two hours to 96 minutes before audiences could see it. Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon sends Laurence Fishburne's rescue crew and Sam Neill's Dr. William Weir to recover an experimental starship that vanished seven years earlier and has returned from somewhere it was never meant to go. It flopped in the summer of 1997 and has spent the decades since becoming one of the great cult horror films, with a reportedly lost longer cut that fans still hunt for.Flick Attack's Rod Lott joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Paul W.S. Anderson, space horror, lost footage, and so much more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
- 2 weeks ago0 min
Required Viewing 07: The Maltese Falcon
It's the stuff that dreams are made of. This week on Required Viewing, we go after John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett's novel and the one that stuck, turning Humphrey Bogart into a star and handing a first-time director the keys to what many call the first great film noir.We get into Bogart's Sam Spade, a detective whose code is hard to tell apart from self-interest; the gallery of grifters played by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet; the Production Code pressures shaping what the film could say; and how a black bird that turns out to be worthless became one of cinema's great MacGuffins. Greed, loyalty and the birth of noir, from every angle.Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, are joined by The Projection Booth's Mike White to chase the bird.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.———The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.New episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
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About The Kulturecast
The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way Media. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Three series live inside the feed: Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
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