Depot Devoid: A Movie Podcast for Dead People

Depot Devoid: A Movie Podcast for Dead People

by Matt Fagan

Comedy TV & Film

Season 1

Depot! The Genetic Opera

Ted was excited because he'd never even heard of Repo! The Genetic Opera. Matt had uncertain memories of a single viewing 17 years ago. Join the meandering Fagan brothers for a lively discussion about this musical - and other musicals! Is it true that the dystopian world of 2056 that we see in Repo! is actually the same world from The Apple, after all the good people got raptured in 1998? Will Ted learn horrifying truths about Sweeney Todd? Will Matt say some things about Stephen Sondheim that he can't take back? The answers to these questions and more, should you choose to accept them, can be found right here in DEPOT! THE GENETIC OPERA.

They Live, They Laugh, They Love

Recorded three years ago, and only now dragged screaming from the vault, the meandering Fagan brothers are here to discuss THEY LIVE! John Carpenter's unabashedly anti-Reagan science fiction picture is, sadly, even more relevant now. Laugh to keep from crying as we revisit one of our favorite flicks from the eighties.

Boys Are Gross (Boxing Helena Revisited)

Matt wanted to reassess this movie he watched thirty years ago, and decided to inflict it on Ted along the way. The debut film from Jennifer Lynch, BOXING HELENA is plagued with problems. Uneven pacing. An indecisive relationship with reality. Julian Sands' haircut. But beneath all of that is a fascinating idea that could have worked, and it's an idea worth talking about.

Mirror, Father, Mirror (and other terrible things about Ghost World)

Who better to discuss GHOST WORLD - a movie about teenage girls navigating life after high school - than two middle aged men? Matt has loved it for over 20 years, but Ted requires some convincing.

At the Batmountains of Batmadness

Desperate to find a terrible introduction to the themes and stories of H.P. Lovecraft? Look no further than BATMAN: THE DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM - a lushly animated, lazily written pastiche of Lovecraftian themes, splattered across the Batman mythos without inspiration or reason. Guest voice Jeffrey Combs (an actor whose association with Lovecraft adaptations goes back to Re-Animator in the mid-1980s) is pretty much the only reason to be here, but here we are! The terrible men of the Depot Devoid have sat through THE DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM so you won't have to.

Dracula Goes Bananas

1979's "LOVE AT FIRST BITE" proved to be so aggressively forgettable that we completely forgot recording this episode a year and a half ago! But it's a perfect complement to our recent offerings, which featured Saturday the 14th and Pandemonium. Like those films, Love at First Bite seems to be something like a horror comedy, but never truly fulfills either mandate. An absurd Dracula in the form of George Hamilton, and a bumbling Van Helsing provided by Richard Benjamin, prove to be capable foils for the normal person (Susan St. James, as a human woman). It's a love triangle but who cares? Who was this movie for? The jokes are hackneyed, the performances baffling, and the box office success a stain on our collective human experience.

Thursday the 12th

In 1982, PANDEMONIUM tried to be a horror comedy, and couldn't. Put into production as THURSDAY THE 12th, but then beaten to the gag by Roger Corman's SATURDAY THE 14th, this misbegotten movie lost its way and never quite figured out what to be. In spite of a dozen familiar faces (Tommy Smothers, Carol Kane, Paul Reubens, Eileen Brennan, Eve Arden, Judge Reinhold, Phil Hartman, John Paragon, it just goes on!) most of the comedy falls pretty flat. But every once in a while, PANDEMONIUM serves up something truly strange and interesting, making you wonder what this movie might have been, in an alternate universe where SATURDAY THE 14th never happened.

"Damn Owls!"

Saturday the 14th was the very first horror comedy movie Matt ever watched, way back in the early eighties. Maybe not the most sophisticated film, but strangely influential to an impressionable youngster with a love of monsters! Matt drags this 1981 Roger Corman production into the Depot Devoid this week, and makes his little brother Ted watch it - something he hasn't done for about thirty years. It's a movie PACKED with jokes, and we appreciate it differently now than we did as children, but for all its many (many!) flaws, Saturday the 14th is still a pretty good time. Bonus: woke political discussion, because that's who we are, and this is our show!

Boxing Hellraiser

"So that was a Hellraiser?" Matt has been reading and watching the Hellraiser franchise for nearly forty years, but his brother Ted was an innocent. For this week's experiment, Ted had to start with the 2022 reboot starring Jamie Clayton as the hell priest. With nothing to compare it to, would Ted like the new Pinhead? Would he think the Cenobites were cool? Would he even know what the (ahem) Hell was going on? Join us in the Depot for Ted's first look at Hellraiser. As for Matt? He didn't open the box. But what was it last time? Didn't know what the box was? And yet we do seem to keep finding each other, don't we.

This is Not a Drill: The Slumber Party Massacre

It's rare enough that the Depot brings us a movie neither of the brothers has ever seen, but a genuine 1980s slasher movie? Unprecedented! Famously written as a parody of the slasher genre by Rita Mae Brown, but then rewritten and directed by Amy Jones as a mostly straight slasher, The Slumber Party Massacre is a curiously uneven Dead Teenager movie. Ted is not convinced that the murderer made the best choice of weapon, even though it was metaphorically necessary. Matt, being immune to the power of breasts, is able to assess the film with a clear head and a cold heart. But will that be enough to help them survive the Massacre?

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