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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way...
show more
The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way Media. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other.
Three series live inside the feed:
Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter
Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown
Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY
Back the show → https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
show less
Three series live inside the feed:
Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter
Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown
Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY
Back the show → https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Support the Podcast
Episodes & Posts
Episodes
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Transcribed
9 OCT 2026 · It opens on Day 2, with a cough in the dark. This week on Required Viewing, we put Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) under the microscope — the cold, procedural pandemic thriller that spent a decade as a well-made what-if, then climbed back up the rental charts in the spring of 2020 as the whole world's homework.
We get into Soderbergh's refusal to dramatize (he dispatches one of his Oscar winners inside the first ten minutes), Scott Z. Burns' script that treats a virus as a logistics problem, and a camera that teaches you to fear a door handle before anyone explains the science. We dig into what the film called correctly — the spillover, the contact tracing, the race for a vaccine — and what it badly underestimated: us. Jude Law's blogger selling a fake cure looked like a subplot in 2011; it reads like the main event now. Science versus rumor, the system versus the people it serves, and a film that only got more required the longer we waited — from every angle.
Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, wash their hands and trace it back to Day 1. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
8 OCT 2026 · We'll be honest; neither of us expected the AI apocalypse to be fought from a diner booth. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, Gore Verbinski's first film in nearly a decade, sends Sam Rockwell's ragged Man From the Future into a Los Angeles diner for his 117th attempt to recruit the world's least likely resistance. Bryan had a blast; Chris found it more uneven, a film with more ideas than it knows what to do with. However, we agree on the man at its center: Rockwell is unhinged, hilarious and the best reason to buy a ticket for this particular end of the world.
The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Verbinski, Rockwell, the robot apocalypse, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
6 OCT 2026 · We'll be honest; it's fashionable to hate Tom Cruise, and neither of us ever has. Digger, the latest from Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron racing to prove he's the only man who can fix the catastrophe he set in motion. Chris loved it; Mike walked in ready to damn it with faint praise and talked himself around by the end. However, we agree on what it is: heavy-handed, badly sold, and somehow both the least Tom Cruise movie in years and the most Tom Cruise movie either of us can think of.
The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and The Projection Booth's Mike White meet for Changeover to talk Iñárritu, Cruise, the billionaire class, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
30 SEP 2026 · We'll be honest; we both spent a good chunk of the 2000s watching grown men sit down at a kitchen table they'd regret, and neither of us thought much about the man holding the clipboard. Primetime, the narrative debut from Ren Faire documentarian Lance Oppenheim, does — casting Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the Dateline correspondent who turned sting operations into appointment television. Bryan found it a mess; Chris found it a compelling one. However, we both left asking the same question: what does it tell us about predators, or the man with the clipboard, that the show didn't tell us first?
The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Oppenheim, Pattinson, To Catch a Predator, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Transcribed
26 SEP 2026 · You're gonna need a bigger boat. This week on Required Viewing, we wade into Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) — the film that invented the summer blockbuster, emptied the beaches of an entire generation, and pulled it off precisely because the shark wouldn't work. We get into the happy accident at the center of it: a malfunctioning mechanical fish that forced a 27-year-old Spielberg to hide his monster, turning technical catastrophe into pure Hitchcockian dread — that, and two notes from John Williams.
We dig into the real horror beneath the horror (a town that keeps the beaches open for the money), the perfect Brody–Quint–Hooper triangle, Robert Shaw's Indianapolis speech, and how one problem-plagued shoot rewired Hollywood's entire business model in a single summer. Man versus nature, man versus man, and the blockbuster's original sin — from every angle.
Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, go in the water. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
25 SEP 2026 · Video game movies rarely earn high expectations, and the Resident Evil franchise alone had offered seven reasons to keep them low. However, Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, has done the unthinkable: he throws out Leon, Claire and the games' plots entirely and sends Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan (no relation) into Raccoon City for one very long night, with Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry among the Umbrella scientists caught in the outbreak. The result is a lean, nasty, genuinely scary horror film, and for the first time in the franchise's history, the game isn't the better version.
The Kulturecast's Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, and Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro meet in the middle for Kulture Meltdown to talk Cregger, Capcom, survival horror, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Transcribed
19 SEP 2026 · Is it even a movie? That's the question Barry Lyndon has provoked since 1975 — three hours of scenes so composed they look less like cinema than oil paintings that happen to breathe. This week on Required Viewing, Dr. David D. Perlmutter — "the Prof" — drags Stanley Kubrick's most beautiful, most divisive film to the table: the one even Kubrick devotees can't agree is a film at all.
We get into the candlelight Kubrick captured with lenses built for NASA, a production that practically rebuilt a filmmaking industry to exist in 1975, and a static, painterly style that would ripple forward into The Favourite. We wrestle with Ryan O'Neal's passive, buffeted Barry, the narrator who condemns him before he can charm us, and a film so often called "beautiful but empty" — asking whether the emptiness is the whole point. Class as a cage, a scoundrel with no moral agency, and a technical achievement so singular it's a genre of one that simply couldn't be made today.
Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, take it apart from every angle. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
16 SEP 2026 · If you missed last week's Rob Zombie goes to Haddonfield edition of the show, this one will make about as much sense as watching this movie without having seen the first. Part two of our look at the Zombie reboot series takes on Halloween II, his 2009 sequel, which picks up with Scout Taylor-Compton's traumatized Laurie Strode, Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis cashing in on the massacre with a book tour, and a Michael Myers haunted by visions of his mother, played by Sheri Moon Zombie. Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro returns to keep digging into Rob Zombie's foray into mainstream horror.
Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Rob Zombie, Michael Myers, mainstream horror, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Transcribed
10 SEP 2026 · It was the most expensive movie ever made, the punchline of a thousand headlines, and a flop so infamous it got its own nickname. This week on Required Viewing, we bail out Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's Waterworld (1995) and study it from every angle — separating the film that's actually on screen from the runaway-budget legend that swallowed it whole.
We get into Mad Max on the open ocean, the world-building that still holds up, Dennis Hopper chewing more scenery than the Smokers could ever burn, the environmental anxieties it was early to, and why a movie everyone "knows" was a disaster has quietly floated toward cult reappraisal. Was it the trainwreck history says, or did we all just enjoy watching it sink? Let's find dry land.
Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, navigate this one. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Explicit
Transcribed
9 SEP 2026 · The last thing the world needs in 2026 is another Halloween film, but to be fair, the last thing the world needed in 2007 was another Halloween film, especially one directed by Rob Zombie. Given that it does in fact exist, we kick off an oversized two-part look at the Zombie reboot series with his remake of John Carpenter's classic, which spends its first act on young Michael Myers' troubled childhood before Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis, Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie Strode and Tyler Mane's towering Michael take over Haddonfield. It's Movie Meltdown's Bryan Renfro's first time on the Kulturecast, and the conversation covers the finer points of reboots, Rob Zombie, and a whole lot more.
Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown joins Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, to talk Rob Zombie, John Carpenter, reboots, and so much more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY.
Back the show: https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Join “The Kulturecast” Supporters Club
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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way...
show more
The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts, and a founding member of Weirding Way Media. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other.
Three series live inside the feed:
Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter
Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown
Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY
Back the show → https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
show less
Three series live inside the feed:
Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study, with media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter
Kulture Meltdown, with Bryan Renfro of Movie Meltdown
Changeover, with Mike White of The Projection Booth
New episodes weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kulturecast/id931361376
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/5wjxip9XVYapYuY12yEaGY
Back the show → https://www.patreon.com/cw/kulturecast
Information
| Author | Weirding Way Media |
| Organization | Weirding Way Media |
| Categories | TV & Film , Film History , Film Reviews |
| Website | www.spreaker.com |
| info@weirdingwaymedia.com |
Copyright 2026 - Spreaker Inc. an iHeartMedia Company
