The Kulturecast
byWeirding Way Media
HistoryTVFilmReviews
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. PerlmutterKulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie MeltdownChangeover, with Mike White of The Projection BoothNew episodes weekly.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYu...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Season 1 - Episode 7
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...
Published: Oct 23, 2026Duration: 1h 38m 19s
Kulture Meltdown: Godzilla Minus One (2023) — "Is your war finally over?"
Godzilla has been a nuclear metaphor, a wrestling heel, a children's hero and a Hollywood franchise player, but it took 70 years for him to win an Oscar. Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One returns the monster to postwar Japan, where Ryunosuke Kamiki's Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who didn't fly his final mission, comes home to a ruined Tokyo, an improvised family with Minami Hamabe's Noriko, and the creature he failed to stop once before. Made on a reported budget of under $15 million, it won Best Visual Effects and became the highest-grossing Japanese live-action film ever released in the US.<...
Published: Oct 22, 2026Duration: 1h 46m 31s
Kulture Meltdown: Crystal Lake (2026), Episodes 3–4 — "It's like someone put a curse on this town."
Camp Crystal Lake is open for business again. We dig into episodes 3 and 4 of Crystal Lake, where a bear hunt goes wrong, Pam settles a score on Grace's behalf, a crew of hippies reopens the camp, and Jason's flashbacks make the franchise's monster a kid worth mourning. Is Argonaut a government experiment, a super soldier, or something older in the woods? And once the show asks you to cheer for Pam as an avenging angel, is it still Friday the 13th?The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle...
Published: Oct 21, 2026Duration: 1h 31m 8s
Kulture Meltdown: Crystal Lake (2026), Episodes 1–2 — "I don't wanna heal. I wanna find my son."
Before Jason, there was Mom. We head back to camp for the first two episodes of Crystal Lake, A24 and Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel series, with Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees a year after her son goes under the water. Two fake state troopers at the door, a bear that takes the blame, and a secret called Argonaut. Is this the Pam of 1980 with a backstory bolted on, or a show free to build its own mythology the way Hannibal and Bates Motel did? Two episodes in, it plays more like Dexter than a slasher, and that might be...
Published: Oct 21, 2026Duration: 2h 1m 57s
Changeover: Jailer 2 (2026)
At 75, Rajinikanth is still the biggest draw in Indian cinema, and Jailer 2 is a reminder of why. Nelson Dilipkumar's sequel to his 2023 hit picks up with "Tiger" Muthuvel Pandian laying low after the events of the first film, until a new family of villains, Vidya Balan among them, comes calling. It's loud, long and gleefully over the top, with tonal swings from dark comedy to slow-motion carnage and a parade of cameos including Hrithik Roshan and Jackie Shroff. Even so, it can't quite recapture the father-son story at the heart of the original.The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the D...
Published: Oct 21, 2026Duration: 1h 35m 43s
Season 1 - Episode 6
Required Viewing 06: The Eiger Sanction
A spy spoof written by a film professor, played dead straight by Clint Eastwood, with a mountaineering film inside it that cost a man his life. This week on Required Viewing, we rope up for The Eiger Sanction (1975), Eastwood's fourth film as director, which casts him as Jonathan Hemlock, an art-history professor and retired government assassin blackmailed into one last "sanction" on the deadliest face in the Alps — where one of the climbers on his team is the target.We get into Trevanian, the pen name of a University of Texas film professor who wrote a parody and wa...
Published: Oct 16, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 0s
Three Days of the Condor (1975) — "They'll print it."
The Doctor of Podcasting is joined by Karl Mamer and Dr. David D. Perlmutter for Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford's Joe Turner is a CIA "reader" who steps out for lunch and comes back to find his whole office murdered. He spends three days running from his own agency, with Faye Dunaway as his unwilling ally and Max von Sydow's Joubert as the assassin who may be the most honest man in the film.The conversation covers Pollack's paranoid New York, the post-Watergate distrust that drives the story, Dave Grusin's score, and that ending...
Published: Oct 14, 2026Duration: 1h 23m 1s
Season 1 - Episode 5
Required Viewing 05: Contagion
It opens on Day 2, with a cough in the dark. This week on Required Viewing, we put Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) under the microscope — the cold, procedural pandemic thriller that spent a decade as a well-made what-if, then climbed back up the rental charts in the spring of 2020 as the whole world's homework.We get into Soderbergh's refusal to dramatize (he dispatches one of his Oscar winners inside the first ten minutes), Scott Z. Burns' script that treats a virus as a logistics problem, and a camera that teaches you to fear a door handle before anyone explains the sc...
Published: Oct 9, 2026Duration: 1h 10m 55s
Kulture Meltdown: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025) — "All of this is going to go horribly wrong."
We'll be honest; neither of us expected the AI apocalypse to be fought from a diner booth. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, Gore Verbinski's first film in nearly a decade, sends Sam Rockwell's ragged Man From the Future into a Los Angeles diner for his 117th attempt to recruit the world's least likely resistance. Bryan had a blast; Chris found it more uneven, a film with more ideas than it knows what to do with. However, we agree on the man at its center: Rockwell is unhinged, hilarious and the best reason to buy a ticket for this particular...
Published: Oct 8, 2026Duration: 2h 7m 58s
Changeover: Digger (2026) — "When all else fails, you hit 'em with the truth. Hit 'em with the hard truth."
We'll be honest; it's fashionable to hate Tom Cruise, and neither of us ever has. Digger, the latest from Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron racing to prove he's the only man who can fix the catastrophe he set in motion. Chris loved it; Mike walked in ready to damn it with faint praise and talked himself around by the end. However, we agree on what it is: heavy-handed, badly sold, and somehow both the least Tom Cruise movie in years and the most Tom Cruise movie either of us can think of...
Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 2h 10m 30s
Kulture Meltdown: Primetime (2026) — "You see how this looks, right?"
We'll be honest; we both spent a good chunk of the 2000s watching grown men sit down at a kitchen table they'd regret, and neither of us thought much about the man holding the clipboard. Primetime, the narrative debut from Ren Faire documentarian Lance Oppenheim, does — casting Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the Dateline correspondent who turned sting operations into appointment television. Bryan found it a mess; Chris found it a compelling one. However, we both left asking the same question: what does it tell us about predators, or the man with the clipboard, that the show didn't tell us fi...
Published: Sep 30, 2026Duration: 2h 17m 28s
Season 1 - Episode 4
Required Viewing 04: Jaws
You're gonna need a bigger boat. This week on Required Viewing, we wade into Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) — the film that invented the summer blockbuster, emptied the beaches of an entire generation, and pulled it off precisely because the shark wouldn't work. We get into the happy accident at the center of it: a malfunctioning mechanical fish that forced a 27-year-old Spielberg to hide his monster, turning technical catastrophe into pure Hitchcockian dread — that, and two notes from John Williams.We dig into the real horror beneath the horror (a town that keeps the beaches open for the money), the...
Published: Sep 26, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 30s
Kulture Meltdown: Resident Evil (2026) — "You're hiring a glorified Postmates driver to hand you the cure, are you dumb?"
Video game movies rarely earn high expectations, and the Resident Evil franchise alone had offered seven reasons to keep them low. However, Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, has done the unthinkable: he throws out Leon, Claire and the games' plots entirely and sends Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan (no relation) into Raccoon City for one very long night, with Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry among the Umbrella scientists caught in the outbreak. The result is a lean, nasty, genuinely scary horror film, and for the first time in the franchise's history, the game isn't the better...
Published: Sep 25, 2026Duration: 2h 56m 24s
Season 1 - Episode 3
Required Viewing 03: Barry Lyndon
Is it even a movie? That's the question Barry Lyndon has provoked since 1975 — three hours of scenes so composed they look less like cinema than oil paintings that happen to breathe. This week on Required Viewing, Dr. David D. Perlmutter — "the Prof" — drags Stanley Kubrick's most beautiful, most divisive film to the table: the one even Kubrick devotees can't agree is a film at all.We get into the candlelight Kubrick captured with lenses built for NASA, a production that had to invent its own tools to exist, and a static, painterly style that would ripple forward into The Fa...
Published: Sep 19, 2026Duration: 1h 4m 27s
Halloween II (2009) — "Man was meant to eat meat. We, all of us, have a little bit caveman in us."
If you missed last week's Rob Zombie goes to Haddonfield edition of the show, this one will make about as much sense as watching this movie without having seen the first. Part two of our look at the Zombie reboot series takes on Halloween II, his 2009 sequel, which picks up with Scout Taylor-Compton's traumatized Laurie Strode, Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis cashing in on the massacre with a book tour, and a Michael Myers haunted by visions of his mother, played by Sheri Moon Zombie. Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro returns to keep digging into Rob Zombie's foray into mainstream horror.<...
Published: Sep 16, 2026Duration: 2h 25m 53s
Season 1 - Episode 2
Required Viewing 02: Waterworld
It was the most expensive movie ever made, the punchline of a thousand headlines, and a flop so infamous it got its own nickname. This week on Required Viewing, we bail out Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's Waterworld (1995) and study it from every angle — separating the film that's actually on screen from the runaway-budget legend that swallowed it whole.We get into Mad Max on the open ocean, the world-building that still holds up, Dennis Hopper chewing more scenery than the Smokers could ever burn, the environmental anxieties it was early to, and why a movie everyone "knows" wa...
Published: Sep 10, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 33s
Halloween (2007) — "Behind these eyes one finds only blackness, the absence of light. These are the eyes of a psychopath."
The last thing the world needs in 2026 is another Halloween film, but to be fair, the last thing the world needed in 2007 was another Halloween film, especially one directed by Rob Zombie. Given that it does in fact exist, we kick off an oversized two-part look at the Zombie reboot series with his remake of John Carpenter's classic, which spends its first act on young Michael Myers' troubled childhood before Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis, Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie Strode and Tyler Mane's towering Michael take over Haddonfield. It's Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro's first time on the Kulturecast, and the conversation covers...
Published: Sep 9, 2026Duration: 2h 32m 16s
The End of Oak Street (2026) — "God's not gonna let us die here."
From suburban horror to the back end of the Cretaceous, the American genre picture keeps finding new ways to burn down the cul-de-sac. The End of Oak Street, the latest from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, is a studio tentpole carrying an arthouse thesis, offering Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as a marriage coming apart at the seams while something much older comes down the street. Along with a fleet of dinosaurs shot without an ounce of reverence, it takes to task suburban rot, willful ignorance, and the family unit under pressure, to largely successful effect.Mike...
Published: Aug 29, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 36s
Season 1 - Episode 1
Required Viewing 01: Sideways
Two guys, a week in wine country, and a whole lot of avoidance. This week on Required Viewing, we uncork Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004) and study it from every angle — why a shaggy road-trip comedy about a failed novelist and a fading actor became the defining midlife-male-sadness movie of its era, and what it's really pouring underneath the pinot.We get into Payne's gift for making you laugh at people you'd never want to be, Miles as a portrait of self-sabotage dressed up as good taste, wine as the film's central metaphor (yes, that merlot line), and how a sm...
Published: Aug 29, 2026Duration: 1h 16m 16s
Required Viewing 00: Syllabus
Every film says more than whether it was good. Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study is a brand new sub-feed within The Kulturecast, where we take one film, TV series or pop culture topic each Thursday and look at it from every angle: theme, craft and cultural fallout, with the star ratings thrown out entirely. On this Episode Zero: Syllabus, the good doctors lay out the thesis behind the show, what it takes for something to earn the label "required viewing", and what you can expect to hear in the episodes to come.Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter a...
Published: Aug 14, 2026Duration: 56m 31s