This week, fellow Chicago film critic Jacob Oller joins us to unpack the pure-strain craziness of 1978's The Manitou ! When a woman finds a rapidly growing fetus-tumor on her back, her tarot card-reading boyfriend (Tony Curtis) and the Native American guy who hates it when you litter (Michael Ansara) join forces to exorcise an evil 400-year-old demon. Space lasers, noble savage stereotypes and earnestly goofy special effects abound, and we talk about it all with our custom cocktail and drinking ...
Nov 28, 2016•59 min
This week, we lean into the everlasting arms of special guest Adam Kempenaar of Filmspotting as we discuss the Expressionistic style and intriguing moral center of Charles Laughton's acclaimed 1955 noir thriller The Night of the Hunter ! ANNOUNCEMENT: For the month of January 2017, we'll be pre-empting new episodes of the podcast in favor of bringing you our long-awaited full-cast radio drama Indiana Jones and the Monkey King ! Don't worry, our spinoff shows Twin Cinema and Alcohollywood On Tap ...
Nov 17, 2016•57 min
This week, Theo Estes of our spinoff web series Twin Cinema (subscribe to our Youtube channel for new episodes every other week) joins us to get artsy with Todd Haynes' 1995 independent drama Safe, starring Julianne Moore! ANNOUNCEMENT: Look out later this week for the launch of our biweekly spinoff podcast, Alcohollywood: On Tap , which will cover new releases, independent films, and offer interviews and festival coverage! Subscribe on iTunes! (Thanks to our sponsor Cards Against Humanity as pa...
Nov 12, 2016•1 hr 6 min
This week, Allison Shoemaker of The AV Club , Consequence of Sound and Podlander Drunkcast joins us to talk the 1996 Sylvester-Stallone-in-a-tunnel thriller Daylight ! (Thanks to our sponsor Cards Against Humanity as part of the Chicago Podcast Coop !)...
Nov 04, 2016•1 hr 5 min
In our second minisode covering the Chicago International Film Festival, Clint tells Jared about the latter batch of films he caught at CIFF 2016, including Park Chan-wook's latest The Handmaiden (with help from Consequence of Sound 's Dominick Suzanne-Mayer), the Jim O'Heir-starring dark comedy Middle Man, and more! Also, Clint sits down for an interview with Kaleidoscope writer/director Rupert Jones about working with his brother Toby Jones, and the visual rhythms of psychological horror....
Oct 30, 2016•39 min
We finish out our month-long breakdown of 'versus' horror movies this week with Consequence of Sound 's Dominick Suzanne-Mayer, as we discuss the 1993 horror mish-mash Dollman vs. Demonic Toys ! A sort of half-movie cobbled from stock footage from three different movies in the Full Moon Entertainment catalog - Dollman, Demonic Toys, and Bad Channels - along with a bit of new footage, this film sees Lilliputian space cop Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson) and a human nurse shrunk down to 11 inches (Meli...
Oct 27, 2016•1 hr 9 min
This week, Grant of History Honeys and Chip & Ironicus joins us once more for Horror V. Octorbor, continuing our month-long breakdown of 'versus' movies with Alien vs. Predator ! Paul W.S. Anderson's limp, ill-advised match-up movie combining Fox's biggest sci-fi monsters forgets what made the other two series good in the first place, basically remaking Resident Evil in an ancient Mayan-Aztec-Antarctican(?) temple, complete with paper-thin characters and dated effects. Still, we have a good ...
Oct 20, 2016•1 hr 19 min
In this special minisode, Clint breaks down his coverage of the 52nd Annual Chicago International Film Festival for its opening weekend, including capsule reviews of A Quiet Passion, I, Daniel Blake, Paterson, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and his most anticipated films of the fest!
Oct 14, 2016•33 min
This week, we continue our month of 'versus' horror movies with the 2010 horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, along with special guest Matt Kubinski of CinemaJaw ! Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as a couple of rednecks who are mistaken for hillbilly killers by a group of college kids when they accidentally kidnap college girl Allie (Katrina Bowden), resulting in a gut-busting sendup of horror tropes centered around an adorable pair of comedic buffoons. Check out our episode, along with our ...
Oct 13, 2016•1 hr
All month, we're celebrating our fifth Horror Octorbor by taking on a slew of 'Vs.' horror movies! To start off, actor Andrew Saenz (of the upcoming indie film El Algun Lugar ) joins us to talk about Ronny Yu's 2003 sloppy horror mash-up Freddy vs. Jason. (Thanks to our sponsor Field Notes as part of the Chicago Podcast Coop !)...
Oct 07, 2016•1 hr 8 min
This week, Eric Garneau of the Nerdologues comedy group and the podcasts Your Stories and Blank Cassette (and the manager of the comic book/games store Pastimes in Niles, IL) slaps on his cape and cowl to discuss the 1993 DC animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm ! (Thanks to our sponsor Cards Against Humanity as part of the Chicago Podcast Coop !)...
Sep 29, 2016•1 hr 17 min
This week, returning guest Derek Jarvis rides with us as we ride into the sunset to watch the 1976 Clint Eastwood Western The Outlaw Josey Wales ! One of the more interesting revisionist Westerns of the 70s, Josey mixes up the white-hat do-goodery of the Old West with morally grey characters, vicious anti-heroes, and a frontier constantly beset with treacherous government officials and hordes of banditos who try to stop the titular outlaw (played by Eastwood) from just escaping the war and livin...
Sep 22, 2016•59 min
This week, Keith Phipps of Uproxx and The Next Picture Show comes back to the show to help us make sense of the 1970s John Boorman/Sean Connery mindscrew Zardoz ! Set in the year 2293, Zardoz tells the tale of Zed (Connery, wearing a red diaper and thigh-high leather boots, and nothing else) a brutish Exterminator who finds himself in an isolated community of decadent immortals who can't die, and suddenly want his seed to make babies. The whole affair is a series of big, bold choices, many of wh...
Sep 15, 2016•59 min
This week, we're joined by friend of the show (and Actual British Person) Ben Kaye to review one of our most frequent requests - Edgar Wright's 2007 action-comedy Hot Fuzz ! Wright's followup to Shaun of the Dead offers even more elliptical comedy and impeccably sharp visuals, as top cop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is transferred to a sleepy British hamlet that is more sinister than it seems. Take a listen as we sing the praises of Timothy Dalton and make a few too many swan puns! (Oh, and check...
Sep 10, 2016•1 hr 6 min
This week, Ele Matelan of WildClaw Theatre and Our Fair City joins us once again to talk about the Wes Craven home-invasion thriller The People Under the Stairs ! One of those rare socially-conscious 1990s horror movies, Stairs follows a young boy named 'Fool' as he tries to rob his price-gouging landlords, only to learn they're leather-wearing psychopaths with a horde of vampiric zombie hostages in the basement. It's a curiously fun mixture of camp and creeps, and we've got a custom cocktail an...
Sep 02, 2016•1 hr 6 min
This week, our friend Jane Dempsey joins us to talk about the notorious 1990 flop The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma and (inexplicably) starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis! An adaptation of the biting satirical novel by Tom Wolfe, Bonfire opts to dull the edges off any salient points it wants to make about the uncaring nature of the bourgeoisie and make it a big, campy comedy about rich, adulterous Tom Hanks trying to beat an assault rap against a poor black youth. Oh, and B...
Aug 26, 2016•1 hr 9 min
This week, it's Christmas in August as Grant of Chip & Ironicus (and the new history podcast History Honeys ) joins us once again to talk about another anime - Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers ! This hard-to-find holiday masterpiece follows a trio of charismatic hobos who stumble across a baby in the garbage, and the antics that ensue as they figure out what to do with it. The result is a fantastic blend of Kon's wry, dark humor and stunning animation, with a great big beating heart in the mid...
Aug 18, 2016•1 hr 12 min
This week, Consequence of Sound: Film editor Dominick Suzanne-Mayer joins us to break down the mind-bending time travel microbudget indie Primer ! Directed by auteur Shane Carruth with a budget of $7,000, Primer offers a twisty, inscrutable and compellingly sparse tale of two budding entrepreneurs who end up building a time machine, and the looping, branching timelines they inadvertently create with it as they increasingly try (and fail) to understand what they have constructed. It's one of the ...
Aug 12, 2016•1 hr 6 min
This week, Patrick O'Rourke of the Peaches and Hot Sauce podcast network joins us to talk about the independent timeline-jumping thriller Run Lola Run ! The breakout film of director Tom Tykwer ( Cloud Atlas ), the film features a twenty-minute ticking-clock scenario in which Lola (Franka Potente) has to wrangle 100,000 marks to save the life of her boyfriend. Whenever she fails, she just says 'No!' and starts again, creating a whole new set of circumstances she has to overcome. The result is fr...
Aug 04, 2016•1 hr 10 min
This week, returning guest Theo (whose film review webseries Twin Cinema will be coming soon to the Alcohollywood Youtube Channel !) joins us to disassemble the cinematic mind-screw that is Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo the Iron Man ! Somewhere between the surrealism of Lynch and the body horror of Cronenberg, Tetsuo follows a terrified salaryman as his body is slowly supplanted with strange metal growths. We chat about the film's striking 16mm photography, the surrealist plot, and drill-does, while...
Jul 28, 2016•1 hr 9 min
For our 250th episode, we take on one of the more insane films we've ever seen, as playwright Dusty Wilson and improviser Pat Niday joins us to talk 1981's Roar ! The infamously bloody animal drama is essentially a home movie in which Tippi Hedren's husband (the Charles Manson lookalike Noel Marshall) convinces his family to make a film about them hanging out with their menagerie of lions, tigers and other big cats. It goes about how you'd expect - 70 crew members were injured on set - but the e...
Jul 21, 2016•1 hr 4 min
This week, we rock out with returning guest, Consequence of Sound 's Nick Freed, to talk about the psychedelic 1975 rock opera Tommy ! The product of Pete Townshend's musical genius, Ken Russell's frenetic direction, and (presumably) a whoollle lotta drugs, Tommy tells the tale of a 'deaf, dumb and blind kid' in post-WWII Britain who endures abuse and torment before finding his calling as a pinball wizard and leading a spiritual movement. The songs are crazy, the design is goofy, and we just cou...
Jul 14, 2016•1 hr 18 min
This week, returning guest Derek Jarvis stops by as we break down the acerbic wit and tough-guy moralism of Martin McDonagh’s black crime comedy In Bruges ! After a botched hit, the twitchy Ray (Colin Farrell) is sent to the medieval Belgian hamlet of Bruges with his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) by their inscrutable, temperamental boss Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes). While there, they take in the sights, clash with the local populace, and occasionally gain an insight or two about the human condit...
Jul 10, 2016•1 hr 7 min
This week, we go dog-avenging with Mike and Jessica of Down in Front as we check out the 2014 Keanu Reeves shoot-em-up John Wick ! A straightforward but oh-so-stylish take on the action revenge thriller, the film follows Keanu's titular former hitman as he takes revenge on the mob family that unknowingly killed his dog and took his car. It's a ridiculous premise, but the pitch-perfect action staging and stylish direction make it a tremendously enjoyable bit of pulp, and gives Keanu a much-needed...
Jul 08, 2016•1 hr 23 min
Happy America, everybody! We're ringing in America's birthday with returning guest Blake Goble from Consequence of Sound, as we gawk at the strange neo-con kid's flick The Adventures of the American Rabbit ! Based on an obscure piece of 70s pop art, the film sees a young, wide-eyed rabbit turn into a star-spangled superhero and defeat thinly-veiled Communist stand-ins, advocate for American values of kindness and fairness, and...play piano in a jazz band? The whole thing's a crazy mess, and we d...
Jul 01, 2016•1 hr 14 min
It's Shark Week, folks, and Joshua Harris from the Chicago riffing group Down In Front joins us this time around to talk about the 2015 schlockfest Shark Lake ! Dolph Lundgren "stars" as Clint Gray, an ex-con exotic animal smuggler whose last-minute dumping of smuggled bull sharks into Lake Tahoe leads to a Jaws -like fracas that only he and stalwart policewoman Meredith can solve. Featuring shoddy CG sharks, beach-noir subplots that appear and disappear at will, and barely any Dolph Lundgren, t...
Jun 23, 2016•1 hr 2 min
This week, Jared and Clint embark on a mission from God with special guest Pat "Uber-Critic" McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com and Chicago Film Tour (and the podcast Lou Dickman Weekly ) as we check out the classic 1980 comedy The Blues Brothers ! Following Jake and Elwood Blues as they 'get the band back together' to save the orphanage where they grew up, John Landis' cult hit is a celebration of 1980s Chicago and the urban blues scene while being a great absurdist comedy in its own right. Check...
Jun 17, 2016•1 hr 18 min
This week on Alcohollywood, Keith Phipps of The Next Picture Show joins us to talk John Carpenter’s 1994 Lovecraftian mind-bender In the Mouth of Madness ! When grizzled/semi-New Zealander insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) is tasked with tracking down the missing horror writer Sutter Cane (get it? like Stephen King?), he finds himself in a metatextual nightmare where the lines between realty and fiction are intriguingly blurred. It’s a curiously effective mix of campy horror chills, ...
Jun 04, 2016•1 hr
This week, special guest James D’amato of the One Shot Podcast joins us to close out our dragon-filled May with the infamous 2000 flop Dungeons & Dragons ! This bafflingly cheeseball adaptation of the classic RPG features a ragtag party of thieves (including a smug Justin Whalen and mincing Marlon Wayans), dwarves, mages and elves who must stop the evil machinations of the scenery-demolishing Profion (Jeremy Irons) and his attempt to seize power from the sleepy Princess Savina (Thora Birch)....
May 26, 2016•1 hr 28 min
Our month of dragon movies continues with returning guest Julia and 2010's animated film How to Train Your Dragon ! Dreamworks' surprisingly solid kid's film follows awkward Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his quest to tame and train his newfound dragon pal Toothless. It's a surprisingly solid kid's flick, and we've got a drinking game and custom cocktail for it - check it out! (Thanks to our sponsor The Second City as part of the Chicago Podcast Coop !)...
May 19, 2016•1 hr 14 min
