PODCAST: DR. DEATH

PODCAST: DR. DEATH

We’re at our most vulnerable when we go to our doctors. We trust the person at the other end of that scalpel. We trust the hospital. We trust the system. Dr. Christopher Duntsch was a neurosurgeon who radiated confidence. He claimed he was the best in Dallas. If you had back pain, and had tried everything else, Dr. Duntsch could give you the spine surgery that would take your pain away. But soon his patients started to experience complications. And all they had to protect them was a system ill equipped to stop the madness. From Wondery, the network behind the hit podcast Dirty John, DR. DEATH is about a medical system that failed to protect these patients at every possible turn. Reported and hosted by Laura Beil.

MY VERDICT: This podcast is equal parts gripping and shocking, I don’t want to give too much away as I listened to this without knowing anything about it, which I think is the best way to listen to anything. What I will say is, don’t listen to this if you’re about to have surgery or know someone who is. And never let someone operate on you if they are the kind of person who loses their keys daily.

The podcast is short, concise, and the story is well told. I binged it in a few days, in part, because I couldn’t quite believe what I was listening to. This is a definite recommend.

Film 840: The Human Centipede

Trivia: Some scenes of the movie are so controversial, some people walked out during test screenings.

The concept of the film arose from a joke Tom Six made with friends about punishing a child molester by stitching his "mouth to the ass of a very fat truck driver."

Roger Ebert refused to assign this film a star rating for his review (not to be confused with giving it a zero star rating, which he hands out to the very worst films that he sees), saying it doesn't really matter whether the film is perceived as good or bad. He closes the review by writing, "[The film] is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine."

When the Toronto Underground Cinema showed this film, there was a "centipede deal" where if two tickets were purchased, the third one would be free.

Director Tom Six contacted a real surgeon for the medical human centipede design which grants the film the tagline "100% medically accurate".