The Last Podcast
There have been a lot of horror films in the last few years featuring podcasters, influencers, youtubers, vloggers, etc – pretty much 98% of them feature wholly obnoxious online folk who deserve to suffer horribly (and do), to the extent that I’d expect someone to start a podcast about what horrible shits people who make low-budget horror films are and featuring examples of how terrible things happen to them.
Written and directed by Dean Alioto, this smart, spooky black comedy doesn’t go against the grain – Charlie Bailey (Eric Tabach), host of the Paranormalcy podcast, is happy to be described as an obnoxious asshole so long as the reviewer also finds him amusing and is willing to like, subscribe and contribute to Patreon – but strings things out in an interesting way, allowing for some shading and a 21st century take on the Faustian bargain plot hinge (epitomised by Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors) as a fallible, basically well-intentioned guy finds that he has to commit more and more crimes to get what he wants (here, fame is measured in subscribers and sponsors).
Charlie’s show is devoted to aggressively debunking the supernatural, so he’s naturally keen when academic Duncan Slayback (Gabriel Rush) – a soft-spoken guy who specialises in fungi – gets in touch offering to give scientific disproof of ghosts on the show. Duncan shocks Charlie by reasoning that he knows ghosts aren’t real because his fiancée, the victim of a hit and run, hasn’t appeared to him … then offers to repeat the experiment by shooting himself in the head, and not haunting Charlie. Only they’re both wrong about the way the world works and Duncan appears, silent and decaying, to Charlie, eventually coming on as co-host and driving up subscribers with tips on where valuables are hidden. This comes in handy since Charlie’s girfriend Brie (Kaikane) is pregnant and worried about not being able to afford a baby and to finish her degree – especially since she thinks Charlie isn’t quite reliable enough to help her through with it, what with always being distracted by phone alerts about his bloody podcast.
Things inevitably get darker as Duncan starts to ask for favours in return, starting with revenge against his fiancée’s killer, and Charlie’s apparent rise to wealth and fame is challenged by a rival podcaster (Charlie Saxton) who’s even more obnoxious and claims to have his own ghost co-host. It’s very well acted, with talkative Tabach and silent Rush playing wonderfully off each other – a comedy duo which takes a nastier turn the more we find out about who the dead guy is and how far the live guy is willing to go. It’s mostly dark comedy but has its moments of horror in the effective climax. Mick Garris pops in as a bartender.