In the moonwalking choreography of film podcasts, where takes arrive pre-ranked, pre-packaged, and often delivered by men who begin sentences with “actually” into microphones that cost more than their mortgages, there sits a small, agreeable outpost. Fear and Loathing in Cinema has fashioned something like a public bench for the movie-addled. It’s part salon, and part barroom dispute that lingers long after last call, mostly because no one is in a hurry to be right.
The show dabbles, as all such programs must, in nostalgia and critique, but its true gift is the affectionate autopsy. It exhumes films once booed offstage or quietly buried in the cultural yard and wonders over what one imagines is a well-earned drink, if we were a bit hasty in our condemnation. The tone is irreverent without being sloppy, and incisive without drawing blood. It laughs as it dissects, like friends revisiting an old yearbook photo and discovering that, against all odds, the haircut had a certain vision.
At the center is a quartet with the improbable chemistry of a dinner party that never quite tips into chaos. Bryan Kluger hosts with the calm satisfaction of a man who has struck a match and intends to enjoy the burn. Dan Moran, a lawyer, treats plot holes like hostile witnesses. Preston Barta mounts spirited defenses for the maligned. And Chelsea Nicole, with a sharp eye for horror and human behavior, reminds everyone that the joke is usually on us. Together, they occupy that rare air where criticism has a pulse, humor has a brain, and loving movies means being willing to put them, and yourself, on the stand.
This week on Episode #157 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema, we found ourselves tumbling headfirst into the glittering, bewildering cosmos of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. To call it a movie feels almost impolite. It is, instead, a kind of cinematic music video stitched together at the exact moment Michael Jackson ceased to be merely human and became something closer to folklore. He’s half man, half melody, and half very expensive special effect for 1988.
We talk about Jackson at his apex, a time when he could summon not just audiences but entire worlds into existence. This is a performer who didn’t so much star in a film as orbit it, bending narrative, tone, and, occasionally, physics to his will. With collaborators circling the project like planets, you begin to sense that Moonwalker isn’t disjointed by accident. It’s disjointed because cohesion would have required gravity, and Jackson, at that moment, had none.
Naturally, we linger on the great $64,000 question, Why didn’t the studio unleash this peculiar gift upon unsuspecting families in December in theaters? One imagines parents clutching their eggnog as their children watch a beloved pop star transform into a laser-shooting robot. It might have been the most honest holiday movie ever made, which is equal parts wonder, confusion, and the creeping suspicion that no one is entirely in control.
And then there’s the comedy of the film. We found ourselves asking whether the film knows it’s funny, or if it simply assumes that joy, in its purest form, looks like Joe Pesci shouting at children while Michael Jackson moonwalks out of danger. The tonal whiplash is not a bug, it’s the point, or at least it becomes the point if you surrender to it.
By the end of the episode, we circle the question that haunts Moonwalker, What was Michael trying to say? Beneath the spectacle, and beneath the morphing, the music, the almost aggressively earnest anti-drug messaging, there’s a flicker of something quieter, and even vulnerable. It feels, at times, like a plea for innocence in a world that had already decided what he was. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps Moonwalker is what happens when the biggest star in the world decides, for a brief and dazzling moment, to let you wander around inside his imagination.
Listen to the episode everywhere with your white socks, black shoes, and a well-tuned “Hee-Hee”.
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Thank you for listening.
WRITTEN BY: BRYAN KLUGER
Bryan Kluger is an entertainment critic, writer, and podcast host with a deep love for film, horror, and pop culture. His work has appeared in outlets such as Arts+Culture Magazine, High-Def Digest, Screen Rant, The Huffington Post, The Drudge Report, Fark, and Boomstick Comics. He hosts My Bloody Podcast and Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, along with a weekly radio show, where he brings sharp insight, humor, and an unabashed passion for movies to every conversation.
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