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.
Do vampires get jealous that Dracula tends to hog all the attention? In this month’s espresso episode, Matt and Julie try to make up for this; after the most recent podcast featured not only one but three Draculas (in some cases under a different name, for copyright reasons), we’re returning to the pulsating vein of vampire fiction to talk about some other stories with a bite that deserve as much attention as the Count. (The impaling one, that is, not the one who’s into numbers and stuff.) From Jim Jarmush’s Only Lovers Left Alive to the ultra-’90s British series Ultraviolet (featuring a pre-True Blood Stephen Moyer) via the likes of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and Cronos, we explore the crypts and mausoleums where those endowed with big fangs go right for the jugular. Join us – and don’t forget to pack some garlic and a crucifix
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Among the many ways popular American blockbusters have been commercialised and marketed, the theme park ride at locations such as Disneyworld, Universal or Warner Studios literally made rollercoaster rides out of movies designed to shake and thrill their audiences at cinemas to begin with. Jaws (1975), considered by most to be the first true summer blockbuster, still has its legendary spot in Universal Studio City, which I was able to witness this summer going back to L.A.: somewhere along the studio tour and just after passing the original Bates Motel does one drive by remnants of Amity Island, mostly small houses and a pond, in which a scuba diver gets suddenly and unceremoniously eaten in front of visitors’ eyes, just before ‘Bruce’ the shark himself unexpectedly pokes up his mouth out of the water for a quick but intense fright.
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.
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
I’ve been to the Europapark with my favourite daughter, and she had the good idea to go take the Valerian ride because she sort of liked Cara Delevigne in the Luc Besson movie. It’s with a virtual reality ride with a sturdy yellow helmet, but it is basically the Eurosat ride inside the silver globe, so that was a great ride for slightly nervous older geezers like me. It was also Luc Besson who co-wrote the series of Arthur and the Minimoys, and he was consulted for the park ride of the same name. It’s for the kids, but it was a pleasant change from the panic-inducing hellride called Blue Fire.
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.
Halloween is still a few weeks away, but October’s a good month for scary films. Are long-running franchises that basically repeat the same basic story over and over again really scary, though? Matt has some doubts in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.
Aside from Frankenstein’s creature perhaps, is there another movie monster as iconic as that most famous of vampires: Dracula? At the same time, has familiarity turned Dracula into something less than a monster? Is the famous count with the two pointy teeth still capable of instilling fear, or has he become too much of a cliché, even a cartoon? For our spooky October episode, Sam, Julie and Matt have packed their stakes, crucifixes and garlands of garlic and are heading to deepest Transilvania to look in on three versions of the Count, ironically starting with the one who isn’t even called Dracula: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), in which the wonderfully named Max Schreck played the famous vampire with the serial numbers filed off. Then there’s Christopher Lee, the tall, dark stranger, in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was called in the US); and finally, we check out Francis Ford Coppola’s self-proclaimed return to the original novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in which Gary Oldman chews scenery at least as much as he nibbles on the necks of nubile Victorian ladies. How do these three films succeed at bringing the famous vampire to life (or should that be undeath)?
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
When Alfred Hitchcock made Psychoin the late 1950s, did he ever consider that his film, that most classic of slasher movies, would spawn four sequels (one of which would ignore its two predecessors to then be ignored in turn by Psycho IV), a shot-by-shot remake, and a five-season TV series focusing on the young Norman Bates? Then again, in the world of horror movies, that’s not all that impressive: there’ve been six Scream films to date, and a seventh is in the making. There’ve been three Exorcist films followed by two versions of the fourth film (one by Paul Schrader, one by Renny Harlin, obviously two directorial peas in a pod), and a new trilogy is about to launch in a week or so with The Exorcist: Believer. Everyone’s favourite homicidal doll Chucky got his murder on in eight films so far. Freddy Krueger has ruined teenagers’ dreams nine times so far. Bad, bad things have happened to vulnerable bodies ten times in the Saw franchise. Michael Myers (no, not that one!) has folded, spindled and mutilated the folks of Haddonfield and beyond in (wait for it) thirteen films. (Okay, that is not 100% correct, but that is something for another post, and probably not one written by me.)
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.
Last week saw us looking back – or squinting, more likely – at Psycho II, so this week Alan took us back to the Anthony Perkins-directed Psycho III, a sequel that isn’t as bad as you’d expect… but does that make it a good film? Read this Friday’s Six Damn Fine Degrees to find out!
I only discovered the Coens and their films in 1996, with Fargo – a film that I loved the first time I saw it, and that I’ve only come to enjoy more and more every time I rewatch it. Which kinda messed up my first viewing of The Big Lebowski; I don’t know what exactly I expected, but I definitely didn’t expect this shaggy dog story of a Raymond Chandler parody. I have revisited the film repeatedly, though, and I’ve come to enjoy it a hell of a lot. Still, even though I bounced off of The Big Lebowski the first time around, I still tried to get my hands on some of the Coen brothers’ other films (possibly still on VHS at the time). One of the films I watched was Miller’s Crossing.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 