Movie HighLow

About Movie HighLow

Movie HighLow is a movie review and film analysis podcast about the best, worst, and weirdest movies cinema has to offer. Each episode, we revisit iconic films, cult classics, Hollywood disasters, bad movie masterpieces, and misunderstood flops to find the HIGHS, the LOWS, and the moments that deserve a second look. Some movies are great. Some are terrible. Some are both. From iconic classics to fascinating disasters, we’re here to figure out why. Film analysis • Movie breakdowns • Movie reviews • High vs Low • Film podcast

Publisher

Movie HighLow | Movie Reviews & Film Analysis

Category

arts · tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

14 Jan 2020

Latest episode

23 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

34 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Oct 2026

   THE SHINING (1980) | Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and the Perfect Adaptation (High)

   We went High on The Shining, and this is not just a High because it is one of the most famous horror movies ever made. For us, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a masterpiece because it understands something essential about fear: the scariest place in the world is not always the haunted hotel. Sometimes it is the family you are trapped inside. That is the central argument of this episode. Kubrick takes Stephen King’s novel, strips away explanation, changes the characters, changes the ending, and turns a supernatural story into something colder, stranger, and more psychologically suffocating. This is not adaptation as transcription. It is adaptation as transformation. Kubrick understands that sometimes respecting the source material means knowing exactly when to leave it behind. In this episode, we finally check into the Overlook Hotel and talk about The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance, Danny Lloyd as Danny, and Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran. This is one of Dom’s favorite horror movies, favorite Kubrick movies, and maybe favorite movies, period. It is the kind of film that feels less like something you simply watch and more like something you enter. We begin with the opening aerial shots, because the movie announces itself immediately. The music is dissonant and ominous, the landscape is massive, and the car looks tiny against the mountains. Before anyone says anything scary, the movie has already told us we are going somewhere wrong. A major part of the episode is the difference between King’s novel and Kubrick’s film. King’s version is warmer, more emotional, and more explicit about Jack Torrance as a man being corrupted by the Overlook. Kubrick’s version is colder. His Jack feels dangerous before the hotel ever gets its hooks into him. That has always been one of the big criticisms of the movie, but we argue that it is exactly why this version works. Kubrick is not telling a story about a good man who becomes evil. He is telling a story about a resentful, volatile man who is already standing at the edge and only needs a little push. We also dig into the idea that Jack may have the Shining too. Danny clearly shines. Halloran clearly shines. But Jack’s relationship with the hotel suggests that he may also be receptive to its energy, only he does not understand what he is receiving. Danny and Halloran know there is a signal. Jack mistakes the signal for himself. That may be why the Overlook gets to him so quickly. He is an open door that does not know something is passing through it. One of the biggest Highs is Shelley Duvall as Wendy, a performance that deserves far more respect than it has historically received. It is easy to reduce Wendy to someone who spends the movie crying and terrified, but that misses what Duvall is actually doing. Her Wendy is fragile, yes, but she is also deeply human. She is a woman who has spent years managing Jack’s rage, trying to hold the family together, trying to stay cheerful, trying to keep Danny safe, and slowly realizing that the person she has been protecting the family from is inside the family. We talk about how much information is buried in Wendy’s early conversation with the doctor. Jack injured Danny years earlier, but he has only been sober for five months. That detail tells us everything. This is not one isolated mistake. This is a pattern. Wendy is not naive because she does not know who Jack is. She is exhausted because she knows exactly who he is and has been trying to survive him. Jack Nicholson is, of course, one of the movie’s defining forces. His performance is huge, funny, terrifying, theatrical, and completely iconic. From the first interview with Ullman, Jack Torrance feels wrong. The smile is too wide. The charm is too forced. The resentment is too close to the surface. By the time he reaches the Gold Room and talks to Lloyd, it feels less like a man suddenly going insan

2. 

   13 Oct 2026

   DREAMCATCHER (2003) | A Stephen King Mixtape Gone Wrong (Low)

   We went Low on Dreamcatcher, but this is a very particular kind of Low. This is not a boring bad movie. This is a wildly overstuffed, deeply strange, completely unfiltered bad movie that somehow has talented actors, a major Stephen King source, Lawrence Kasdan directing, William Goldman on the screenplay, a reported $68 million budget, and an alien that crawls out of somebody’s ass before Jason Lee fights it with a toilet brush. That is the central fascination of Dreamcatcher (2003). It often feels less like a new Stephen King story and more like somebody fed all of Stephen King’s previous work into a machine and asked it to generate the ultimate Stephen King mixtape: childhood friends, Maine, psychic powers, bullies, aliens, body horror, military quarantine, Derry, snow, telepathy, trauma, and alien ass monsters. In this episode, we revisit Dreamcatcher, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and based on the novel by Stephen King, as one of the strangest studio horror failures of the early 2000s. The movie stars Thomas Jane as Henry, Damian Lewis as Jonesy, Jason Lee as Beaver, Timothy Olyphant as Pete, Donnie Wahlberg as Duddits, Morgan Freeman as Colonel Curtis, and Tom Sizemore as Owen Underhill. That is a real cast. There is real money on screen. There are real filmmakers involved. And somehow all of that talent produced a movie where the phrase “shit weasel” becomes central to the mythology. The setup is not bad. Four lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woods. Since childhood, they have shared a mysterious psychic connection tied to Duddits, a boy they defended from bullies when they were young. This year, something is different. A sick, disoriented stranger stumbles into their cabin, the woods go under military quarantine, and soon the group is dealing with alien parasites, telepathic possession, and an entity called Mr. Gray taking over Jonesy’s body. The first High is that the first act almost tricks us into thinking this might be a good movie. We meet each of the guys separately and immediately understand that something unusual connects them. Henry is using some kind of psychic ability with a patient. Jonesy shows empathy toward a student who cheated because he can sense there is more going on. Pete uses his strange gift to help a woman find her keys and tries to turn it into a date. Beaver is writing “SSDD,” same shit, different day, which becomes one of the movie’s repeated psychic signals. There is a real sense that something cosmic is pulling these guys back together. The cabin material also works better than it should. The guys irritate each other in believable ways. They have history. They talk like middle-aged friends who have been repeating the same jokes and rhythms for decades. There is a version of Dreamcatcher that stays with these four guys reconnecting in a cabin while something supernatural slowly closes in, and I would absolutely watch that movie. The biggest High, though, is the memory warehouse. Once Mr. Gray takes over Jonesy’s body, Jonesy retreats inside his own mind, which the movie visualizes as a warehouse filled with files, drawers, rooms, and stored memories. That is a genuinely cool idea. Jonesy is not gone. He is trapped inside the architecture of his own brain, watching Mr. Gray pilot his body from the inside. The movie suddenly becomes a psychological possession story, and for a little while, it feels like it has found something original. And honestly, we have to give Dreamcatcher credit for having no shame. Timothy Olyphant almost gets bitten by an alien that crawled out of a woman while he is writing his friend’s name in the snow with his own piss. There is something admirable about a studio movie this expensive being this weird. The biggest Low is obvious: shit weasels. The moment the movie reveals a monster in the toilet, everything changes. The first bathroom sequence is staged like horror, with Beaver holding the toilet lid shut while waiting for J

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   THE BABADOOK (2014) | The Monster You Keep In The Basement (High)

   We went High on The Babadook, because this is the kind of horror movie that gets scarier the more you sit with it. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) is not just about a monster in a top hat with long fingers and a creepy children’s book. It is about the thing you lock in the basement, the thing you refuse to name, and the thing that gets stronger the longer you deny it. That is the central argument of this episode: there is the thing coming for you, and then there is the thing coming from you. The Babadook works because it collapses those two horrors into one. If you want to watch it as a literal boogeyman movie, you can. But for us, it becomes much scarier as a psychological horror story about grief, parental rage, resentment, exhaustion, and the terrifying thoughts good people are not supposed to admit they have. In this episode, we revisit The Babadook, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, starring Essie Davis as Amelia and Noah Wiseman as Samuel. Released in 2014, this is a movie that critics embraced but audiences have always seemed split on. We understand why. This is not comfort horror. This is not a funhouse ride. This is a movie that asks you to sit inside a house with a mother and child who are both drowning in grief, fear, loneliness, and emotional neglect. The story follows Amelia, a widow still haunted by the death of her husband Oscar, who died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. Six years later, Amelia is barely functioning. Samuel is intense, imaginative, loud, frightened, and obsessed with building weapons to fight monsters. Then a disturbing pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears on their shelf, and once they read it, the thing that has been buried in the house starts clawing its way out. One of our biggest conversations is whether the Babadook is real or whether it is inside Amelia. Our answer is basically yes. The movie is powerful because it refuses to make that separation clean. There may be a supernatural force in the house, but the monster also represents everything Amelia has spent six years refusing to feel: grief, anger, resentment toward her child, exhaustion, guilt, and the taboo thoughts that motherhood does not allow her to say out loud. We talk a lot about Jennifer Kent’s vision and how specific it feels. There is a lesser version of this story that could have been a straightforward domestic drama about an overwhelmed widow on the verge of hurting herself and her child. Instead, Kent gives that internal horror the shape of an old silent-film nightmare: the top hat, the cloak, the long fingers, the stop-motion movement, the German expressionist look. The Babadook feels like something ancient, like a monster that has always existed because the feelings it represents have always existed. The children’s book is one of the movie’s smartest choices. Amelia and Samuel do not buy it. It is not gifted to them. It is just there, sitting on the shelf like it was always in the house. That is the metaphor. The grief was already there. The rage was already there. The book just opens it. The biggest High of the movie is Essie Davis, who gives one of the great modern horror performances. In the first half, she is performing “good mother” with every ounce of strength she has left. She is gentle, patient, soft-spoken, and clearly decaying underneath the mask. We can see the effort it takes to keep the monster down. As the movie goes on, that mask starts cracking. Her line readings become sharper. Her face changes. Her body changes. There are moments where she feels like she is channeling Jack Nicholson in The Shining, especially once the Babadook is fully inside her. But the performance never becomes empty horror-movie madness. It stays rooted in the terrible truth of the character: Amelia loves Samuel, and she is also furious at what his birth is tied to. That contradiction is the movie. We also defend Noah Wiseman as Samuel, because the criticism tha

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

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