This week on Alcohollywood, we (along with Nick Freed of Consequence of Sound ) face our greatest challenge as we take on the aggressively weird, hyperkinetic 2011 high school horror meta-comedy Detention ! Music video raconteur Joseph Kahn (of Torque… fame?) self-financed this off-kilter, virtually indescribable tale of high school students, horror movie slasher villains, time travel, alien vegetarians, body swaps, man-fly hybrids, and Dane Cook in his most restrained performance. With its incr...
Jan 23, 2015•1 hr 22 min
This week on Alcohollywood, we strap on our bowler hats and grab our wobbly bamboo canes as we tramp it up with David Rheinstrom of Twenty Questions Tuesday with David & David and Our Fair City by watching the Charlie Chaplin silent classic City Lights ! In this delightful classic, our beloved Tramp (Chaplin) finds himself falling in with a comely blind flower girl and an eccentric millionaire, all while navigating the harsh world of the big city. Ambitious, timelessly hilarious, and heart-w...
Jan 16, 2015•1 hr 11 min
This week, we dive into the Fire Swamp, cross a Sicilian with death on the line, and get out our six-fingered gloves along with Geek Girl Chicago as we check out Rob Reiner's 1987 classic fantasy-comedy The Princess Bride! The ultimate loving homage to the trappings of sword-and-sorcery fantasy romances, this adaptation of the William Goldman novel is probably one of the most beloved comedies of all time, and for good reason: the performances and script are spot-on, and the few hints of sneaking...
Jan 08, 2015•1 hr 2 min
Happy New Year, listeners! We’re breaking in 2015 with 15 Minutes – a poorly-timed, mediocre cop thriller from 2001 starring Robert De Niro and Edward Burns. The two play a homicide and arson cop, respectively, who have to track down two crazy Eastern Europeans who commit a series of serial murders in order to cater to the Jerry Springer-heavy nature of American notoriety and fame. The movie tries to juggle Michael Mann-esque high-octane cop action with Network -like satire of media, but becomes...
Jan 01, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Merry Krampus, listeners! We’re celebrating Christmas by dipping back into the horror well with Daniel Lackey of The Nightmare Gallery and Ele Matelan of Our Fair City and WildClaw Theatre , as we dig into the Finnish horror flick Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale ! A micro-budgeted curiosity from 2010, Rare Exports follows the travails of a small rural community in Finland who runs afoul of the historical Santa - now a homicidal, mute old man who’s more Hannibal Lecter than Kris Kringle. From herd...
Dec 25, 2014•1 hr 14 min
Harry Connickuh, listeners! For our fourth celebration of O He With the Golden Voice, we (along with Kat and Michael of Burning Brigid Media ) bring you a drinking game, cocktail and perplexed review of 1995’s Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter as an agoraphobic psychologist and a cop trying to track down a copycat serial killer. Connick Jr. is in it way less than we thought, playing a grubby hick serial killer whose presence haunts Weaver and inspires the film’s main villain, b...
Dec 18, 2014•1 hr 26 min
Konnichiwa, listeners! This week, we take on our first Japanese anime (on the show) with Grant of Chip & Ironicus and James of Geekspotting with Satoshi Kon's Paprika ! This incredible, fascinating film follows the search for a stolen dream device, which is being abused to 'hack' into people's dreams and causing them to disappear and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. As the walls of the dream world begin to warp and collapse, it's up to the sprightly, powerful dream-warrior Paprika...
Dec 11, 2014•1 hr 32 min
This week on Alcohollywood, Mark Soloff of Blastropodcast and Ryan Bond of Our Fair City join us to slog through the three hour apocalyptic Western-y flop The Postman , starring/directed by Kevin Costner! In this follow-up to his other sci-fi flop Waterworld, Costner plays a rugged drifter in a desolate, apocalyptic Oregon, who takes up the mantle of “Postman” in order to deliver mail to these post-apocalyptic shantytowns and rebuild America. While there are some neat ideas behind it, the film’s...
Dec 05, 2014•1 hr 29 min
This week on Alcohollywood, Nick Ostrem joins us once more to talk the surprising cult film Samurai Cop , the recently-unearthed 1991 action-comedy starring Robert Z’Dar and Matt Hannon! The film tells the incomprehensible tale of bug-eyed karate cop Joe Samurai (Matt Hannon), his aloof partner (Mark Frazer), and their attempts to break down the evil Japanese Katana gang. Samurai Cop is a whirlwind of laughable acting, stilted dialogue, stunningly bad cinematography and more untouched boobs than...
Nov 27, 2014•1 hr 20 min
“A dingo took my baby!” is one of the most famous lines in film history, but how does the movie itself hold up? Theo joins us as we head to the Australian outback for the Meryl Streep/Sam Neill true crime drama A Cry in the Dark ( Evil Angels in Australia)! The film follows the infamous Azaria Chamberlain case , in which a months-old baby girl was tragically lost and killed out in the outback, and their parents, Lindy (Meryl Streep, in one of her many Academy Award-nominated performances) and Mi...
Nov 22, 2014•1 hr 16 min
Special guest Nathan Rabin of The Dissolve grabs his golden ticket, jumps through the movie screen, and joins us to talk 1993’s meta-action flick Last Action Hero ! In this ballsy, flawed, filmed-by-committee action-comedy, precocious movie buff Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) gets Houdini’s magic ticket and jumps into the movie world of clichéd 80s action movie cop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Though the film’s ambitions are high, Last Action Hero is definitely not without its flaws, inc...
Nov 13, 2014•1 hr 16 min
This week on Alcohollywood, we uncover a lost, forgotten cult gem with My Favorite Year ! Based loosely on the early writing career of Mel Brooks and his encounter with Errol Flynn on the variety show My Show of Shows , the film swaps those two for Mark-Linn Baker (Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers ) and Peter O’Toole as the hammy lothario Alan Swann. While this film is one of the few films to have a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, we had a bit more of a complicated time with it, as Jared and C...
Nov 06, 2014•1 hr 24 min
Happy AlcoHolloween, listeners! We (along with guest Julia) wrap up Horror Octorbor this year with Halloween III: Season of the Witch , arguably one of the most divisive Part 3s in horror history! Instead of following the Michael Myers formula, John Carpenter and director Tommy Lee Wallace chose to try to make Halloween an anthology series with this installment - here, an evil Irish corporation hatches a scheme to summon the forces of darkness through kitschy Halloween masks, with only a dorky M...
Oct 31, 2014•1 hr 11 min
This week on Alcohollywood, we strap cameras onto some oscillating fans and bring along Daniel Lackey of Forced Viewing and The Nightmare Gallery to talk Paranormal Activity 3 ! This third entry in the found-footage ghost/demon/whatever(?) series has all the thrills and spills you expect from the series: passive-aggressive bickering between couples, small noises in the night, time-lapse standing near beds, and so much more. Even still, we dig into the nature of found footage, especially this ser...
Oct 23, 2014•1 hr 19 min
HELL-o listeners! Justin Gerber and Randall Colburn of Consequence of Sound joins us as we continue our spooky look at the third part of different horror series with The Omen 3: The Final Conflict ! This time, baby boy Antichrist Damien Thorn is all growed up (and played by a smirking Sam Neill), in a position of political power, and all set to cement his rule over mankind by preventing the birth of the Nazarene. Standing in his way, of course, are a cabal of comically clumsy clergy, Damien’s du...
Oct 17, 2014•1 hr 28 min
"Hello, listener. I wanna play a game. All your life, you've wanted a custom cocktail and drinking game to one of the more insane entries to the Saw series. Today, this opportunity will be given to you. Clint and Jared of Alcohollywood (along with returning guest Dusty Wilson of Mercy Street Theatre Company ) continue their month-long exploration of the third entry in a number of horror series with Saw III , in which Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) offers another series of karmic rust traps for yet another ...
Oct 09, 2014•1 hr 13 min
Welcome to our third Horror Octorbor, listeners! For this third round of our comprehensive cacophony of creepy kinoscapes, we're taking on the third installment of a bunch of different horror franchises. This week, we're starting with Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors! Dream Warriors sees Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, all dead eyes and Susan Sontag hair) helping to defend a group of new teens/victims (including Patricia Arquette) from Freddy Krueger in a psychiatric hospital. Kat Evans and ...
Oct 04, 2014•1 hr 22 min
WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A DRINKING GAME? This week, returning guest Derek joins us to talk about WarGames! T he mid-80s Cold War-paranoid/video-game thriller follows David Lightman (a baby-faced Matthew Broderick), an enterprising hacker who accidentally prods a new supercomputer into starting preparations for World War III. The film is a perfect time capsule for so many cultural fears we had in the 80s, from the terror of nuclear annihilation, the distancing effect of technology on war, and the ...
Sep 25, 2014•1 hr 18 min
This week on Alcohollywood, we’re getting weird once again with special guest Nathan Rabin (staff writer of The Dissolve and co-author of Weird Al: The Book )! This time, we take on “Weird Al” Yankovic’s only feature film, 1989’s UHF ! The film is a distillation of Weird Al’s carefree, joyful, tongue-in-cheek parodic style, as slacker dreamer George Newman (Al) acquires a UHF station and fills it with all manner (or AL manner?) of off-the-wall programming. The result is messy, but delightful in ...
Sep 18, 2014•1 hr 6 min
This week on Alcohollywood, guest Theo helps us get in touch with our feminine, middle-aged side with Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer! When little Scarlett Johansson gets injured riding her horse, which itself becomes traumatized and aggressive, career-woman working mom Annie (Kristen Scott Thomas) takes both of them to ‘horse whisperer’ Tom Booker (Redford), who offers his homespun wisdom and chaste masculinity to this erstwhile city family. The movie’s gorgeous, but it’s also three hours ...
Sep 11, 2014•1 hr 20 min
This week on Alcohollywood, guest Theo helps us get in touch with our feminine, middle-aged side with Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer! When little Scarlett Johansson gets injured riding her horse, which itself becomes traumatized and aggressive, career-woman working mom Annie (Kristen Scott Thomas) takes both of them to 'horse whisperer' Tom Booker (Redford), who offers his homespun wisdom and chaste masculinity to this erstwhile city family. The movie's gorgeous, but it's also three hours ...
Sep 04, 2014•1 hr 26 min
This week on Alcohollywood, David Rheinstrom of Our Fair City joins us as we get out our magnifying glasses and take a closer look at the 1972 dramedy-thriller Sleuth ! Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine both got Oscar nods for their performances in this adaptation of the titular Anthony Schaffer play, in which an eccentric old crime novel writer (Olivier) invites his wife’s working-class new lover (Caine) for a Machiavellian game of wits they won’t soon forget. Both actors are in fine form, the...
Aug 28, 2014•1 hr 7 min
This week, we see into the future with Ryan Bond of Our Fair City and Geek Bar Chicago as we dive into the convoluted world of David Lynch’s 1984 flick Dune ! Because our listeners demanded, Jared and I watched the three-hour-long Alan Smithee cut of this adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert – somehow, this complex tale of political intrigue and religious prophecy 10,000 years in the future was both too complex and too over-explained. Still, we get into some great discussion o...
Aug 21, 2014•1 hr 20 min
Happy Shark Week, listeners! This time, Craig and Julia joins us to wear their shark-fin hats with the Renny Harlin shark shocker Deep Blue Sea ! A sea of 90s faces (Samuel L. Jackson, Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, LL Cool J) find themselves on the run from genetically-engineered sharks, whose brains have been artificially enhanced to find the cure for Alzheimer's. (Don't ask.) What results is an incredibly fun, but oddly goofy and fun flick complete with shitty character names (Carter Blake?), ...
Aug 14, 2014•1 hr 28 min
It’s our 150th episode, and Alcohollywood is bringing back Chicago-geek power couple Clayton Faits (of Our Fair City ) and Lauren Faits (aka Geek Girl Chicago ) to talk about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ! In honor of our very first episode, where we covered Crystal Skull , we decided to look back on the third Indy film! Here, the titular adventurer (Harrison Ford) must beat the Nazis to an historical religious artifact with great power – sound familiar? Along the way, though, he learns a ...
Aug 07, 2014•1 hr 39 min
This week on Alcohollywood, guest Nick of Three Brothers Theatre joins us to talk about yet another cinematic disaster – the 1994 film Clifford ! Released unceremoniously in 1994 after being filmed in 1990, this abortive problem-child film sees Martin Short playing a precociously violent and demonic 10-year-old whose parents dump him on the unsuspecting Uncle Martin (Charles Grodin), whose life is completely destroyed over the next 90 minutes. Short’s creepy mugging and overblown schtick meshes ...
Aug 01, 2014•1 hr 9 min
This week on Alcohollywood, Nathan Roebbel of the Right Brain Project joins us as we dig into the Disney archives to take a look at the long-forgotten animated flick The Black Cauldron ! The movie is an adaptation of an obscure Welsh-inspired fantasy book series following the adventures of a meek pig-keeper named Taran, who must fight off the Horned King (John Hurt) and destroy a magical cauldron that can create an army of the undead. Released in 1985 after a contentious production process, the ...
Jul 24, 2014•1 hr 4 min
This week on Alcohollywood, we’re staging an intervention by making a drinking game for a film about alcoholism! Returning guests Andrew and Julia join us to take on Billy Wilder’s 1945 classic The Lost Weekend , about an alcoholic writer (Ray Milland) who endures a rock bottom bender over the course of three days. The film takes an unflinching look at the morality and psychology of alcoholism, a first for a movie of this type. The film is helped along with some creative imagery and Miklos Rozsa...
Jul 17, 2014•1 hr 15 min
This week on Alcohollywood, returning guests and Kat and James (from fellow podcast Geekspotting ) join us to help us unpack the 1979 masterpiece The Visitor ! A strange Italian mix of Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and Star Wars , this crazy film follows the interstellar battle between good and evil, as represented by Old Space God (John Huston) and a petulant little hell child named Katy (Paige Conner). Featuring Lance Henriksen as a sadistic basketball team owner and Franco Nero as Space Jesus, t...
Jul 10, 2014•1 hr 25 min
Happy birthday, America! We’re celebrating the Fourth of July in style here on Alcohollywood, as we take on Roland Emmerich’s American Braveheart , aka The Patriot ! Returning guest Dusty Wilson comes back to indulge in this three hour long exercise in melodrama, Mel Gibson crying faces, and slow motion flag waving (and flag stabbing). With a giant ensemble cast, and a suitably bombastic John Williams score, The Patriot cements itself as one of the most American movies a German has ever made sta...
Jul 04, 2014•1 hr 13 min
