You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart and this sweet nostalgia bomb set down roots in a way no one was expecting. Dirty Dancing was among the most rejected scripts in 80's Hollywood, a movie everyone turned down for being too girly in an age where loud guy movies were all the rage. Along came the video distribution giant, Vestron Video, in the middle of a changing market, with designs on producing their own original movies and they gambled on this one for their first feature and boy, did it pay out big. Their first feature became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s and joined a pantheon of classic movie musicals. It's too bad Vestron couldn't recapture that magic as every follow-up picture tanked hard enough to take the entire company down with them.

Dirty Dancing takes place at a Catskills mountain resort in the summer of 1963, right before the violent cultural changes of the 1960s. Baby Houseman is on vacation with her family and falls in with the resort staff who dance the night away when the vacationers all go to bed. She falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle, learns to dance, learns to love, and finds herself at this magical summer retreat. It's schmaltzy. It's naive. It's just what the movies needed in 1987.

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We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn't typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it's spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter, Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers), Herk Harvey made an extremely eerie and deeply paranoid movie that gets deeply under your skin and it's a shame that he never worked in features again.

What begins with a fatal car accident leads the lone survivor, Mary, on a trip to Salt Lake City where she will play organ for a church. But along the way she finds herself stalked by a phantom as she tries to fit into this new city, navigating new relationships that she's barely interested in in the first place. By the time the film closes Mary will uncover the truth about the phantom stalker and what happened that day during the car accident.

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This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore.

We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger.

Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter With Helen.

We wrap things up with Winter Kept Us Warm, the Canadian feature from David Secter. It's an important film in the history of queer cinema as well as Canadian cinema. It was the first Canadian movie to run at Cannes and influenced many Canadian filmmakers that followed.

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