Father Malone's Weekend Bonus - Send Help (2026)

Our repeated visits to the horror picture were certain laws that happened to apply to all horror pictures. The innocent must suffer, the poor sap who walks into the house has to be tormented. And then the next law came. We came to realize there was a second law governing all horror pictures, and that was the guilty must be punished. Whatever evil thing there is out there, whatever dark force there is.

The audience wants to see the hero lay into it pretty intensely. We found there was a third law, and that is that you must taste blood to be a man. You've got to go through this coming of age through this blood experience. Now, Joel and Ethan Cohne have mentioned that a fourth law exists that the dead must walk. We're still testing that law in our research labs to see if it holds true in all cases.

Welcome back, Midnight Viewers. Dig that theme song man. That is my co host HP if I haven't hammered home that fact. The name of the track, in case you're wondering, is top down, as in driving around in a convertible, which is the feeling I'm aiming for you to experience. A leisurely drive down a coastal highway at midnight with storm clouds swallowing the moon.

I'm your host, father Malone, and I couldn't in good conscious call this a weekly round up. This is more of a weekend send off. Plus Ripley is asleep in the sun outside, which is where I ought to be. Plus I've rounded the week up twice already. What more do you need?

But it isn't often I get an opportunity to review something day of, and I got laid off recently, so I've got a little extra time until I can rectify that situation, hopefully which I figure out a channel back into this here show. So this week is embarrassingly full and next week should be back to normal. Fingers crossed here we are. This will probably be shorter than a regular episode, but it's entirely focused on one film only anyone remembered this quote the most ferociously original horror film of the year that was in nineteen eighty two. The film is Evil Dead, and the quote is from Stephen King, who had just caught a screening at the cann Film Festival where he was promoting Creep Show.

King was a huge proponent of that first film at the time, calling it his fifth favorite horror movie of all time. A lot of great filmmakers come to the profession after detours in other areas of interest. It's not uncommon to hear someone in the world of fine art or music or animation who stumbled their way into the medium. I tend to think of filmmaking like poetry. With enough time and effort, everyone has at least one worthwhile ballad or sonnet within them.

Not free verse, though, fuck off into the sun with that beat generation bullshit. Filmmaking is a collaborative enough endeavor that with the right crew, basically anyone could make at least a watchable flick. And then there are those that are born with aspect ratios in their eyes. When you consider how many people have made films, the fact is there are only a handful of genuine savants. Kubrick and Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Sagitt Ray, Sergio Leoni, Spike Lee.

I'm gonna stop here and pause so every single one of you listening can say the name of the filmmaker that ends this sentence. I can't believe he didn't mention go ahead, he will try it another way. Oh my god, how could he forget? You're good? Moving on?

Every deck has a joker in this case. Straight from Detroit, USA, comes this seemingly least likely cinematic genius of all time, mister Sam Raimi. Raimi had a super eight film society going in high school and spent the nineteen seventies teaching himself how to make movies through a series of crude, ingenious short films and a feature. I'd like to point out It's Murder. Exclamation point is often lumped in with his early short films, but it's seventy minutes.

That's longer than most Corman films. All of those shorts are available on YouTube, including Its Murder, which is one of the rare early cinematic efforts that doesn't feature ladder Day, Vincent Price by way of Errow Flynn, Bruce Campbell. Instead. Raymi himself is the star, and you know what, he's a really good in it. The first Vangoria magazine I ever laid hands on was issue twenty three.

I bought it because it had a headline that read who really directed Poltergeist? It was Toby Hooper, by the way it says it in the credits, but the image on the cover didn't hurt in making up my mind about owning that particular periodical. It had Bruce Campbell, rivulets of blood covering his face, a chainsaw defensively held high, a screaming woman behind him, and on either side of the frame two skeletal hands reaching forward, meaning whatever it was attacking them was us. The headline there was evil Dead? Can they be stopped?

As it turns out, no, they couldn't. Thanks to a release strategy that included release in theaters and videotape simultaneously, I was able to get my eye gebby hands on the flick almost immediately, and I was floored immediately. It may have been the first time I felt like there was a definite voice behind a film, any film honestly as stylish or beautifully or economically or majestically made anything I had seen up until that point. This felt different. This felt conversational, and an idiosyncratic conversation at that and doing it in a genre that I already was in love with, without ever seeming to be embarrassed by that genre.

In fact, here was a filmmaker willing to go all the fucking way with the horror while leavining everything with humor, and that level of silly of the ridiculousness felt appropriate and not like it was winking. Can't you just tell when a filmmaker is slumming in the horror quote unquote, those horror flicks areek of. If it's great, I'll take the glory, and if it sucks, hey, it's only a horror movie. Who cares see Jennifer's body if you want to witness that phenomenon. Up until then, the only other flick I'd seen that walked the tightrope of humor horror was An American Werewolf in London, and that movie is tame comparatively.

Also, in one of the super great comedies that I had made, we had a point where there was a scare someone jumps out and grabs someone, and during the comedy, the audience really jumped and I thought, boy, this is great, this is kind of a new thrill. So I started writing horror stories as opposed to comedies, just because it was a different way to entertain people, and I had fun with him. That quote is from an interview given at the time of Evil Dead's release. The one you heard over the show's opening theme. That quote came from an interview REMI gave for a UK show called This Is Horror from ninety two.

I'll link it in the show notes, but this earlier interview from nineteen eighty two is the first interview I ever saw of him. I saw it around eighty four or eighty five on a compilation videotape I picked up through a tape exchange I had going with a guy I had met through Fangoria. He was kind enough to put that in a few other interviews with other horror luminaries. His quote about the relationship between humor and horror stuck with me. But more than that, more foundational in my cinematic world view was this quote.

The worst crime I think the filmmakers can make is to make a boring picture. If it's boring, then it's all over the audience. You've failed in entertaining them. You've committed a crime. Ask HP if I haven't been parroting that sentiment since high school movies are supposed to be entertaining.

Rami gave us the word, and then he backed it up over and over and over again. You might not like his films, You might not like the genres he plays in, which is a silly notion considering how far he's stretched as a filmmaker. He made a baseball movie might You'll never be bored and if you're not entertained, then that's on you. Rami's made a career as one half Barnum, one half vow Luton, and one half mow Larry, and curly I'm not a math person. He's followed his interest and managed to keep all of them idiosyncratic and interesting.

Obviously, Evil Dead two a flick I had to sneak into several times because it was unrated and therefore Verboten is a masterpiece. When he couldn't afford the rights to radio drama Stalwart The Shadow, Raimi created his own hero in Dark Man, an early salvo in what would come to define the superhero genre. When Rami entered the twenty first century. Along the way, he put out the aforementioned baseball flick for Love of the Game, the supernatural psychological thriller The Gift, and quite honestly, one of my favorite westerns of the past thirty years, is a wildly underrated The Quick and the Dead. I know that movie wasn't getting made without Sharon Stone, but if it were anyone else in the lead, I wouldn't have to bring it up, as if you'd never heard of it.

Not that he'd have any trouble getting anything made after two thousand and one with his trilogy of Spider Man films. You know what, The secret ingredient in those films is, just like all of his films, They're fun. In the midst of that nineties comic book Brooding Dark Revolution that spilled over into cinemas, Raymie was reminding us that it'd be pretty fucking cool to be able to run up the side of a building or swing from skyscrapers. He never forgot that comic book characters sprang from childhood wishes, not adult concerns. Since then, he's done quite a bit of television.

He's one of the most prolific produce users in Hollywood with his Ghost House pictures, and he managed to still make a huge epic in Oz the Great and Powerful, a film I need to see a second time. I remember feeling then that it was overstuffed and unwieldy, And when Marvel couldn't get a handle on the latest Doctor Strange flick on able to balance the comedy and drama and action and yes, horror. Ramy got back in the game and I love that movie. People have viscerated upon release, to which I say, the climax of the film involves our hero puppeteering his own corpse that's wearing a giant cape made out of swirling demons. The film I didn't mention is my favorite of latter era Raymie, and the one that most resembles the feature were discussing today.

Drag Me to Hell came out of nowhere, a simple race against time plot in which a mousey stepped over bank clerk takes the wrong opportunity to advance her career and pays and pays and pays. It is signature Raymie. Buckets of ooze, buckets of creepy Crawley's whippans, and jump scares, and the same underlying dread that courses throughout those evil dead. I know those are comedies, but I find those films deeply disturbing at their core, and that's laid bare with drag Me to Hell. Not to mention, Rami managed to turn an embroidered handkerchief into a credible threat.

That's some fucking talent. Brother, and that film came along at the exact right time, A not so gentle reminder that the man gesturing to the limitless horizon with your pal Spider Man was also a deeply talented merchant of doom sand hell. His latest is his first film in nearly thirty years that doesn't have a supernatural or super powered center. This is a real world drama, real being a relative term when Rami is involved, and it's a two hander, not something we've gotten from him previously. Let me just run the trailer.

I have next in line for VP, and Bradley takes over for his father Tomartin. Your father promised her a promotion Diddy as an executive. I see no value in you? Does that make sense? What we have?

The merger coming up? Croom me wrong Bringer and then we'll ship herround. Check this out. I'm Linda Little. I want to be the next Are there any others?

Have you tried making a distress signal or a bigger fire. Getting us out of here? It should be your focus, not being Susie homemaker. You do know you would have died out there? Yeah, how do you.

Think that would have worked out for you? Are you gonna hunt a board landa from a County. Strategy and planning. Actually you're runt. I think I like it.

How valuable to the company, am I? Now? No help is coming. This is how things are now. I'm not in the office anymore.

You are stuck with an asshole box, just like I was. On every mistake. My kindness through weakness. I don't think we should ever leave here. One of the bonuses of stepping into Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness, Hey, I'm the pizza Papa was inheriting that film's cast, more specifically Rachel McAdams.

Thank god he did. This is her movie. I'll get to Dylan O'Brien, but my god, McAdams is on fire. Everyone first got to look at her in Tina Fey's high school Touchstone Mean Girls, and she's essayed every kind of rule since, comedy and drama and tear jerker, every kind of role but horror. It was worth the fucking way.

Send Help is the most simple high concept plot for a film. Linda Little, played by mc adams, is a seven year veteran and a finance company who's been promised a vice president's job by the company's owner. On the eve of said event, the owner dies and his spoiled, rotten son has inherited, and he's much more interested in short skirted secretaries and promoting his golf bros. Than actually acknowledging effort and dedication from his employees. It's almost parallel to the opening of Drag Me to Hell, but that's where the parallel ends.

Linda is brought along on a flight to Bangkok in order to smooth over a merger she has intimate knowledge of, with the idea that once her usefulness is spent, she's going to be shown the door. That is, until we get to the first of an endless stream of scent pieces that are alternately horrifying, thrilling, and above all hilarious. I know the idea of a plane going down and all of its crew and passengers perishing isn't a laughing matter, but then you haven't seen this movie. I found myself cackling through the entire ordeal. And I'm a terrible flyer, by the way.

I'm one of the ones that Stephen King describes as keeping the airplane aloft through sheer power of my terror. And yet I was laughing all the while being reminded what a singular and interesting filmmaker Rami has always been. The film has been described as Misery meets Castaway, and that's fair, but imagine Misery from Annie Wilkes's perspective, and imagine Paul Sheldon is a total cocksucker who tries to screw Annie over at every opportunity. That's a bit closer because her boss, NEPO Baby personified Bradley played by Dylan O'Brien, is just that, an unrepentant manchild that continues to order her around despite the fact that they're stranded, and despite the fact that he has zero survival skills.

Not so Linda. In one of those great pans across someone's house that's the stock and trade of Robert Zemeckis, where the decorations and personal items describe everything we need to know about a character. We discover that Linda's library is entirely populated with nonfiction guides on nature and survivalism. You can see where this is going. It's an up ending of power dynamics.

Professional political engender dynamics aren't spared either, with the lack of civilization making Linda come to life and blossom and Bradley slowly wither away from the advertising. I expected this would be another ninety minute offering of Raymie's Just a Running Gun pot boiler of two characters trying to destroy one another, and that would have been great. But Rami has chosen to let the story and the characters breathe, so it's not as cut and dry as Who's Gonna kill who. The action slows as much as it ramps up, and what we get are exceedingly well defined characters who are constantly defying the audience's expectations. Your allegiance will shift, which is wonderful.

I had virtually no experience with Dylan O'Brien as an actor. I'd managed to avoid those maze Runner films, and the idea of a serious teen wolf was too much for me to bear wolf Bear, but I kept staring at him through the film because he seems so fucking familiar. Once they'd been on the island for a while and his facial hair started to grow, it fintally occurred to me he was one of the bright spots in that Jason Rerightman movie Saturday Night. Dilan O'Brien was Dan Akroyd in that flick he was fucking great. He is better here, Obviously he has been given a lot more to do, but Jesus I expected greatness from McAdams.

I was unprepared for O'Brien. The fact is I fucking hated his character, but he kept me riveted. Raymie dispenses with a lot of his signature moves here, no whippans or fish eye lenses, but it's no less kinetic or fascinating or beautiful. This is probably his most luxuriant film. The jungles are lush, the storm sequences are beautiful and harrowing, and there are genuine horror elements with nighttime fog banks and moonlit ghostly encounters and a couple of jump scares that I felt were totally legitimate, Oh and go.

He's never flagged in his dedication to characters spewing, vile and worse. So if vomit isn't your thing, this might not be your movie. As usual, I'm trying to go light on spoilers. The movie just came out, but as straightforward as the story is, that doesn't mean there aren't twists and revelations. Several times I heard myself gasp audibly, and while this isn't a spoiler.

I'm not giving you details. Ramie managed to work those three horror laws into the feature. The innocent must suffer check. The guilty must be punished check. The hero must taste blood to become a man.

Let's just swap in adult okay check. The jury is still out on that fourth law, that Cohen Brothers law that the dead must walk. I agree with them, but Ramie doesn't need it. Neither does send help. This is the most fun I've had at the movies in a long long time.

I always encourage you to get out to the cinemas, but I really mean it here. Rami isn't hurting or anything. He's got a bunch of projects in various states of production. But it's the film itself. It's an original thriller, no IP, no remake or reboot, a new feature from one of the titans of American filmmaking.

If we can't support that, then everything left is streaming. Thank you everyone for joining me on this special episode. Monday, Mike White is back to talk about Hammer House of Horror. That's the house that bled to death. If you want to lend me a monetary hand, I'm not gonna say no.

Patreon dot com slash father alone patrons get shows early and mega shows that aren't in the regular though. If you want to help and or as broke as I am, then do me a favor if you would please subscribe to the show on this in any podcasher and write some reviews. Tell your friends. I don't know until next time. Everybody, try to enjoy the daylight.

When I saw The Hills Have Eyes one of the most gut wrenching horror pictures I've ever seen in my life. They had a scene where these hill people come into this trailer. They completely massacre the people that were living in the trailer. They take a parakeet, they butt its head off and drink it like a glass of blood. And then they come across this baby and they wonder whether they should raise it as their own or eat the baby because baby is good meat.

And it's such a horrible scene that you're thinking eat the baby. Don't raise it as one of your own. Please don't do that. That's even more heenous. Anyways, after they leave and the people come back to this trailer, they see they view all the carnage, and one of the things they see is a picture of the Jaws poster the monster that's been ripped in half.

So I took it to mean that Wes Craven, the director of the movie, was saying Jaws was just pop horror. What I have here is real horror. It's ripped that baby in half. So as a joke and as an homage to Wes Crave and I took a Hills Have Ice poster and an Evil Dead I put it in the cellar one of the sets and I ripped it in half to say, no, Wes, your picture says pop horror. This is real horror, but just as a joke.

Of course. Now Wes Craven has responded in his picture by putting a clip of Evil Dead number one as a horror movie in a scene that a character is watching in his movie Nightmare on Elm Street. I guess as to say, no, your movie Evil Dead is just a horror movie. Nightmare on Elm Street is the real horror. So I'm not sure where I'm going to go from there, kind of running out of ideas, but we'll figure something out.