Reserved Recommendations

01/08/2025

This episode I chat to Dr Lewis Tennant (lately the host of Verbal Highs, and also the brains behind the annual NZ Podcasting Summit) about an era of reggae music from the 1990s, exemplified by artists like Sizzla and Capleton. We go deep on the history of the music, its underlying philosophy, and the factors that give this specific era its unique sound.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/resrec-81-sizzla_and_capleton and get older episodes at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved!

18/07/2025

"Phenomena" (1985) is a movie that is hard to describe without sounding insane. Jennifer Connelly (aged 14, one year out from breaking through in "Labyrinth") stars as a high school girl with the mysterious ability to commune with insects. When she is sent to an exclusive Swiss boarding school for girls, she becomes embroiled in a series of gruesome murders of students which she must investigate with the aid of an eccentric entomologist played by Donald Pleasance and his assistance chimpanzee. The chimpanzee is significantly more important than you'd expect.

The movie was directed by incredibly prolific Italian director Dario Argento (best known for hallucinatory fever dream giallo like "Suspiria" and "Deep Red") and is significantly more chaotic than his usual style.

Morgan Davie, last heard discussing "Under The Skin" way back in Episode #7, joins the show to talk through this very strange, kind of fascinating movie.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-80-phenomena and get more at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

20/06/2025

Nightbreed (1990) is an absolutely fascinating movie. It's Clive Barker flexing his muscles after the massive success of Hellraiser (1988) and really letting loose with an elaborate dark fantasy full of implications about complex mythology and cosmology, a gorgeously-stylised world, and many MANY weird little guys. It's also an incredibly ambitious movie that never quite manages to realise its ambitions, and a tortured project that was compromised and undercut by executive meddling.

There's a lot in here that shares DNA with other dark/Gothic fantasy/horror projects of the 90s like The Crow, or the more adult works of Tim Burton - so why are those things cult hits, and this is a cult failure? Shaun Duke of The Skiffy and Fanty Show (https://skiffyandfanty.com) joins the pod to discuss this strange and powerful film!

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-79-nightbreed, and find past episodes via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

15/05/2025

Hey! No new episode of the show tomorrow, but I had the excellent good fortune to guest on the newly resurrected Postingcast with John Palethorpe, who you might remember from talking about Dune (1984) and whose husband Ross you ought to remember from talking about The Wasp Factory only a couple of episodes ago. This was a hell of a lot of fun to record, so I hope it's also fun to listen to!
https://postingcast.podbean.com/e/makeartbecauseyouexist/

02/05/2025

What happens when Dan Aykroyd at the absolute peak of his popularity as both a comic powerhouse and a dramatic actor gets a vast budget, and more or less total creative control to make a movie? He makes "Nothing But Trouble" - an ambitious, star-studded, and (to be charitable) tonally-confused horror comedy which flopped at the box office and is more or less universally panned to this day.

A pair of yuppies played by Chevy Chase (having possibly the worst time of his life) and Demi Moore fall foul of a deranged 106 year old judge (played by Aykroyd himself under some impressively vile prosthetics and makeup) and hi-jinks ensue.

Returning guest Bitter Karella is one of this movie's few defenders, and joins the show to talk us through what the hell is going on here.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-78-nothing_but_trouble, and find more via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved!

Find most things Bitter Karella at www.midnightpals.com, and her new book "Moonflow" at www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bitter-karella/moonflow/9780316581936 (or wherever you get books on the internet!)

25/04/2025

New eps are in the works!

But not ready yet, so tonight we have a replay of my ANZAC Day episode with Scott Hamilton.

Reserved Recommendations is a podcast series about problematic faves, great trash, and difficult relationships with art and culture. This is the fifty fifth ...

04/04/2025

On tonight's show I chat to Erin McLean about "The Fly" (1986), a weird gloopy 80s body horror movie that is also an oddly poetic tragedy about watching someone you love succumb to something awful and inevitable, and a character study that follows a sympathetic oddball's transformation into an absolute monstrosity.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-77-the_fly and find older episodes at mpr.nz/show/reserved (or on Youtube!)

14/03/2025

Scottish author Iain Banks is probably best known (under the name Iain M. Banks) for his iconic "Culture" novels, which had a titanic impact on far-future and "space opera" science fiction. His debut novel, 1984's "The Wasp Factory" is significantly less well-known, partly because it's incredibly divisive.

You can love or hate it (the original edition opened with four full pages of both glowing and damning reviews) but once you read it, "The Wasp Factory" is not a book you can be neutral about. It's a taut, economical, deeply gnarly bit of Gothic nightmare that operates on a sort of evil fairytale logic.

Ross Palethorpe rejoins the podcast to talk about our common experience of reading this book for the first time as teenagers, and our thoughts as we've revisited it over the subsequent decades.

CW for (not especially detailed) discussion of murder, animal abuse, child abuse and neglect.

Listen direct here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-76-the_wasp_factory or find older episodes via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

28/02/2025

On tonight's episode I ruminate on useful ways to think about one's enemies' motives, prompted by considering the obscure horror movie "Jugface" (2013) in contrast with other depictions of fictional "death cults".

Listen direct here: https://bit.ly/resrec-75-a_better_death_cult or find older episodes at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

31/01/2025

"Hair metal" is, right off the bat, a disputed term.

It began as a way of disparaging the pop glam metal of the 80s in comparison with the more "authentic" grunge movement that was becoming more fashionable in the early 90s, but was embraced by some fans of the genre as a catch-all term for groups who wouldn't necessarily have considered themselves part of the same scene at the time.

However you slice it, hair metal was much MUCH bigger than you remember it, and its demise was far less total. Elana Levin (Graphic Policy Radio, Deep Space Dive) and returning champion John Cecil join the show to school me on an era and genre I know shamefully little about.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-74-hair_metal or check out www.mpr.nz/show/reserved for older episodes!

17/01/2025

Hey, we're back! Wild.

This is another shorter solo minisode, where I run down very briefly my reasons for coming back (vanity, mostly) and then talk a bit about some thoughts I had prompted by the passing of David Lynch, and That Vulture Article on the Gaiman situation.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-73-rip_david_lynch or wherever you get your podcasts.