The Pink Smoke podcast

“Looks like his pecker was blowed off, Lydell.” Join hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs as they team up with film writer and podcast stalwart Stephanie Crawford for a journey down to Dasharoons, an idyllic Arkansas estate where you can expect scenic sunsets, Creole dishes and the occasional testicle explosion. That's right - for our annual October horror read, we delved into the pages of All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, a lyrical and trashy epic of 70's genre fiction written by John Farris! This southern gothic gets going quickly and doesn't stop barreling down its dark and twisted hill. A groom runs amok and slashes family members with a ceremonial saber at his own military academy wedding. A fingernail-less detective investigates a series of inexplicable lightning bombs. A traumatized WWII soldier might be possessed by the spirit of his decapitated father. Somehow it all involves magical vengeance and an ambidextrous Voodoo rainbow serpent-goddess (could it be otherwise?) It's all Crawford and our hosts can do to keep their heads above the putrid water of this book's strange, fascinating, tawdry world. You can get updates on Stephanie Crawford’s most recent publications and podcast appearances on House of a Reasonable Amount of Horrors: hoaraoh.com. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 
www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke Stephanie Crawford: twitter.com/scrawfish Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter:
 twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

For October's horror fiction pick, The Pink Smoke welcomes back Wendy Mays of the Pet Cinematary and Losers Pod podcasts to talk about the swarm of killer-cats-descending-on-rural-Long Island-community classic Feral by Berton Roueche. Among the topics discussed: if it's possible to sympathize with city couples who abandon kittens on the side of the road at the end of the summer, the right way to deal with cannibalistic strays who decide to add human flesh to the menu and whether or not a 1991 TV movie totally ripped off Roueche's novel. Snuggle up with your favorite feline and follow along! The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com/ The Losers podcast: https://theloserspod.podbean.com/ Pet Cinematary podcast: https://petcinematary.podbean.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/CFunderburg Intro & outro music by Marcus Pinn of Pinnland Empire.

“A guy wants to name his cock ‘Macho,’ it’s fine by me.” We’re joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss the latest film from Clint Eastwood, Cry Macho. Mr. Teck previously joined us to discuss Eastwood’s 2019 film Richard Jewell and remains our favorite person with whom to discuss the 91 year-old star-auteur. We place the film within the larger context of Eastwood’s complicated career and its nearing end. The film follows a deeply washed-up rodeo star who travels to Mexico City on behalf of his former boss to find the man’s teenage son. We discuss how the film takes on the gentle rhythms of its aged star’s physical movements, the sweetness and generosity of its approach, and how satisfying it is to watch Eastwood slowly pet animals that are clearly calmed by his presence. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Aleksei German month at The Pink Smoke kicks off with this primer spearheaded by Martin Kessler of the Flixwise: Canada podcast. Kessler is one of the English-speaking world's leading authorities on German - this episode is intended as an entry-point into the filmmaker's work, a titan of Russian cinema who remains surprisingly unknown outside of his native land.

Hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs dig into the work of the Belgian author Georges Simenon via his crime novel La tête d’un homme, featuring his wildly popular character Inspector Maigret. The ultra-prolific Simenon wrote 11 novels in 1931, the year that he wrote La tête, and rarely slowed down during his legendary career - even at the reduced pace of his later years, he would purportedly write a novel in 11 days. La tête d’un homme (also known as A Man’s Head or Maigret’s War of Nerves) begins with the story of a prisoner escaping from prison... with the unexpected help of Maigret. From there, it builds to a confrontation with a criminal whose manner & belief system disturbs the detective on a profound level. It’s a classic of detective fiction - we discuss its place in culture, the film adaptations, and how to approach Simenon’s work even as a total novice. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

How do you solve the aesthetic-philosophical problem of Michael Ritchie, the not-quite-auteur/not-quite-journeyman director of satirical social comedies like The Candidate and Smile and such eccentric comedy classics as The Bad News Bears and Fletch? Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs decided to go at it the hard way by diving into Prime Cut, Ritchie's sort-of second feature (it debuted a day before The Candidate) - hands-down his weirdest and nastiest movie. What on the page seems like an easy grand slam - a 70's crime thriller that pits an M76-packing Lee Marvin against Gene Hackman under the vast and gorgeous Kansas sky - is in practice more an outlandish curio with its scenes of mob rivals fed through a slaughterhouse, young naked women auctioned in pens like cattle and extended set piece featuring Marvin and rookie star Sissy Spacek running from a deadly combine harvester that threatens to harvest them. Is it a case of Ritchie tripping himself up, finding his sensibilities as a filmmaker at odds with the gritty material, or is there more to it than that? Join us in appreciating the clear merits and murkier demerits of this bizarre tale of meat and machine guns. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"Bright blazing intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind, swifter and more terrible than lightning, flashing over a landscape that seems clear in every detail. Then they go out, and there is only a greater blackness." Nothing is what it seems - unless everything is what it seems - in the account of an eloping couple's ill-fated voyage from New York to Vermont. What strange fate befell this Amish-raised lollapalooza and her gabardine suit-garbed coxcomb on a backroad in the Berkshires? And what does it have to do with a freckled-faced city surgeon, a refugee Basque surrealist artist, the author of an arduous text on psychopathology and the postmaster of Whippleville? Joel Townsley Rogers's The Red Right Hand is a cipher of crime fiction, a phantasmagoria of molds, tramps, ration books, brain surgery, eyeless houses, sawdust sinkholes, red-eyed rattlesnakes, prewar crepe-soled sports shoes and the beautiful dance of the corkscrew and the bottle. Confused? That's only to be expected when you make the turn onto the old Swamp Road and find yourself transfixed by the chimerical logic of what seems like a straightforward story of murder until it distorts and disorients the narrative into a truly unique reading experience. In this episode, Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs veer into this Bermuda Triangle of murky prose - is it all pulp and circumstance or a meticulously fathomless work of art? Together they wade through Rogers's curious cast of characters, casual allusions to alternative history and obsessive repetition of superficially trivial details to reach the elusive epicenter of this crazy book, the very definition of a cult classic. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs are joined by Professor of Sociology John Balzarini to discuss the latest installment in the Marvel Comics Universe.

“Don’t gush over the sea. It’s always been there.” It's a “Jean Gabin is getting too for this shit” double feature! On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss two unforgettable French crime films: Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Henri Verneuil's Any Number Can Win (1963), both starring the grandfather of quiet cool, M. Jean Gabin. Playing aging gangsters intent on making off with that last big score, the legendary leading man slipped into these late-career roles like a comfy pair of silk pajamas - and looked amazing in those pajamas, too. Eyeing longtime Pink Smoke favorite Grisbi like a coveted bar of gold, the guys question why it's so difficult to contextualize such an obvious masterpiece, its director's place in cinema history and what the movie is really about. They compare it to Verneuil's later film, which also features Alain Delon as a (gorgeous) young thug enlisted by Gabin to heist a seaside casino. Both movies are fun, sad, sexy and poetic as any great French crime film, but most importantly they help establish the difference between a gentleman and a pimp. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 
www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” 
Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”

“The more you struggle, the more new passages you make in the labyrinth, the more the box is like another layer of outer skin that grows from the body, and the inner arrangement is made more and more complex.” On this episode, hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg climb into a corrugated cardboard nightmare and explore Kobo Abe’s delightfully bizarre The Box Man. Best known for his work with Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptation of his novels (including The Face of Another and Woman in the Dunes), Abe was one of the most brilliant and original novelists of the 20th century. The conversation covers the book’s elliptical, elusive, free-flowing structure and evasive narrative truth, whether Abe is unfairly overlooked due to his association with Teshigahara, and where the book fits into the history of literature (in the context of Abe’s aggressive rejection of Japanese culture). Listen as Funderburg, a total Abe novice, discovers a new favorite author and Cribbs offers suggestions on how to approach Abe’s intimidating oeuvre. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” 
Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”