A little over 10 years ago, back in the Fall of 2012 my best friend Paxton and I began brainstorming an idea for a podcast that would come to be known as the Cult Film Club. We went back and fourth on names and ideas for the show, but things really started to gel when we reached out to our first choice for a third co-host, Jaime Hood, a blogger and friend of ours that helped to make the show a reality. After recording our movie conversations for over 10 years, we tackled almost 100 movies, been guests on a handful of other podcasts and generally have just had an absolute blast talking about the weird movies we love to death.
Recently there was an astounding moment of kismet concerning the Cult Film Club that I wanted to record for posterity; a convergence of small events that kind of blew my mind. The first event happened at the beginning of February and was completely innocuous consisting of Paxton picking the next movie we were going to cover for March, the 1987 Blake Edwards romantic comedy Blind Date (staring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger.) The second event was a couple of weeks ago, at the tail end of February, when I was going through my flat files looking for Monster Squad ephemera and I stumbled upon an HBO/Cinemax guide from March of 1988. I only own a couple of these guides, this one and the August edition (because that’s when Monster Squad debuted on the cable channel) and I had completely forgotten I had it. On the back cover of the guide was an advertisement for Blind Date making it’s HBO debut the next month. That coincidence was fun, and I remember texting Paxton and laughing that these two events fit perfectly together.
But then things got a little weirder today when a mutual friend of ours, Jason of The Retro Network and Rediscover the 80s, was thrifting and he found a blank VHS with three films (Back to the Future, The Wraith and Blind Date) that had been recorded off of Television back in March of 1988 (the tape was notated with 3/12/88.) While messaging back and forth we all figured that the flicks were probably taped off of HBO, and then it reminded me of the HBO guide I’d just unearthed, the March 1988 edition. So I pulled it out and wouldn’t you know it, to prove our point there were showings of Back to the Future on the 1st and 9th of the month, as well as a one-time showing of The Wraith on Cinemax on the 10th. Of course Blind Date wouldn’t debut until April, but it’s clear that we could pin down almost exactly when the movies were recorded using my copy of the guide.
But here’s the icing on this VHS cake, the first film we covered on the Cult Film Club 10 years ago was none other than The Wraith! So our friend found a tape that had not only our first CFC movie, but also our latest movie, and it just so happens to coincide with the exact copy of the HBO Guide I own and stumbled upon within the last couple of weeks. The tape is also 35 years old, almost to the exact days it was recorded. Like, what does this mean? I feel like I need to be unconsciously creating a sculpture of a VCR out of a mound of mashed potatoes or something. Just such a perfect coinciding series of events that it hurts my head when I think about it.
Maybe this means it’s time to cover Back to the Future on the show soon…