Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
This week, Alan risked the wrath from villagers and… older powers in order to bring us a Six Damn Fine Degrees post about folk horror, touching on recent movies Starve Acre, Fréwaka and I Saw the TV Glow.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
In the 1980s and 1990s, video game adaptations of films and TV series were a staple of gaming – or, more precisely, they were a staple of bad gaming. Especially in the ’80s, a video game adaptation usually didn’t look, sound or play much like the movie it was adapting, other than a tinny, chiptune rendition of the main theme. (Sometimes we got lucky, as with Ghostbusters, which would shout a scratchy sampled “Ghostbusters!” and laugh maniacally at the player in the same scratchy voice.) And the gameplay? It’d just be a basic take on a genre that was easily imitated: the side-scrolling shoot’em up or the platformer. Those pixels looking faintly like a human being? They’re Arnold Schwarzenegger killing bad guys. That blocky car-looking thing? That’s your Ferrari Testarossa, you’re Sonny Crockett, and the other cars you’re pursuing in a crude top-down depiction of a city supposed to be Miami, they’re the drug dealers you’re trying to catch. ‘Drive’ your ‘car’ into their ‘cars’ and your score goes up. You’re living the life of a screen hero.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
They’re a beautiful family, the Paivas: father Rubens, mother Eunice, and their five children. They live in a nice house, they have nice friends, they obviously love each other. They enjoy days at the beach. Looking at their lives, you would almost not notice that they live in a military dictatorship – almost. They comfort each other when, after the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, the country becomes more threatening – though the oldest daughter, Vera, is sent to London along with friends of the family. Just because you’re safe doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions.
And then Rubens is arrested. And that is the last they’ll ever see of him.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
What comes to your mind when you hear The Lord of the Rings and the name “Ian Holm”? For most, it’ll probably be Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – but for Alan, it’s the BBC radio adaptation from 1981. Sadly, there are generally no trailers for radio shows, definitely not for ones that are 44 years old, so let’s instead do one better – and link to the actual episode. Enjoy!
It’s a conundrum: this late in Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set, I didn’t expect to find a film I’d like as much as And the Ship Sails On – but at the same time, I ended up finding it more frustrating than many of the films I liked considerably less. There is a lot I love about And the Ship Sails On – but it feels like by the time Fellini made it, he had mellowed with age, and in this case I wish he hadn’t. The film is too loving and mild as satire, when the themes it addresses would have required a sharper sensitivity, one that isn’t averse to drawing blood… and this shortcoming is much more obvious in 2025 than in 1983.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a conventional yuppie who, if you look at him from the right angle, reveals a streak of disaffection with his life bumps into a free-spirited young woman. She introduces him to the wild side of life, and they embark on a whirlwind romance. All together now: can you say “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”?
If you rolled your eyes at this, rest assured: that was pretty much my first reaction to Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild – so much so that after about half an hour I ejected the Blu-ray and watched something else instead. For those first 20-30 minutes, I felt more and more that I really didn’t need yet another take on that particular well-worn cliché. Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Lulu (Melanie Griffith), as she calls herself to begin with, weren’t endearing to me: I found them and their idea of what breaking free from convention looked like grating. It’s one thing to watch teenagers who believe they’re the first ever to break free from the bonds of social mores; it’s quite another to watch two supposedly grown-up people behaving like those teenagers. There’s something to it that is smug and self-satisfied and, frankly, a bit boring.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 