Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Tron: Ares (2025), Good Boy (2025)

in Memoriam. Yes, I am tempted to throw that mournful Waif song on here as a joke, but there's no joking when you lose members of the family fans of our show. No Chris Statue, his pup, Nibbler, has passed to the great beyond. I had the distinct pleasure of hanging out with young Nibbler. He was super cool and irreplaceable, as is mister Puggles, my co host on A Little Old Lady got mutilated late last night, Paul Waller's longtime bestist of friends. Mister Puggles is off to terrify another

dimension with zoomies and grumbles. I was lucky enough to meet him once via zoom but anyone who's listened to Paul's show A Year in Horror has definitely heard mention of that young gentleman. And all of this is just more proof that we live in a horrifying and chaotic universe where joy, actual joy, is the rarest commodity in existence. I myself have lost a lot of family recently, in

addition to the human members of my Dwindling clan. Over the past few years, I've said goodbye to mister van Go, a fine orange tabby that loved to fetch and was always deeply embarrassed when I caught him sleeping in my bed.

on a sub atomic level. My introduction to Frankenstein was I was sitting outside reading a book, and he kept getting closer, sizing me up, and finally I started reading to him, and he jumped up next to me and stretched out, and that was that we were inseparable. I miss him, I miss all of them every day. Maintaining any kind of mental balance is difficult at the best of times. I can only imagine what Chris and Paul are experiencing. My sincere condolences. I am not gonna recover

when a certain someone kicks off. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about Foxy Brown. If you must know, no one is gonna cry when you. I can't even finish that fucking sentence. I almost cry trying to think of a seg way. Now there is none. Okay, Before we get to today's features, I wanted to introduce a new segment, a seasonal segment. It is the Halloween time now we're counting down the days. As such, it won't just be ghosts and goblins that will come scrambling out of the darkness,

so will the Halloween playlists. And they're all garbage, you know they are. So here's our segment. This is Halloween, every single playlist is gonna have Monster Mash every single one. When people were just making mixtapes, Monster Mash. Every novelty vinyl you got around this.

and Thoughts of Zombies. Add it the Halloween theme not a novelty song, but it's perfect. Add all the tracks from that soundtrack. That's what the randomizer is for. In between Ghostbusters and Monster Mash, you should hear the tense sounds of Lorie Strode realizing she's being followed. In fact, any torture's horror theme is welcome. Elm Street tales from the crypt Hell Raiser. All right back to the songs Adam's family theme. Of course, unless there's a hammer involved.

Anything from Rocky Horror is acceptable. Don't Fear the Reaper. Don't add this song. I get it. It's about suicide. It's featured perfectly in the opening credits for the original mini series of Stephen King's The Stand. It is, in fact, the only good part of that entire mini series. And it's in John Carpenter's Halloween, and it's tired, and all anyone is gonna think about is Will Ferrell's gut rejected Werewolves of London. Yes, bad Moon Arising, Yes, hungry like

the Wolf. No, I've heard it done before.

the pass though. Zombie by the Cranberrys. They're not talking about Daryl Dixon, They're not talking about Barbara at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, they're talking about Northern Irish bloodshed? Did you hear about that car bomb?

the Only Acceptable song from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Every other song is about how great Christmas is and how horrible Halloween is. Think about it and stop at it's a Christmas movie. There is plenty of unexplored Halloween material to choose from. Like what how about k Starr the Headless Horseman. You'll be tempted by the dulcet tones of

Bing Crosby's cover, but you must resist. K Star and her orchestra bring the entire holiday to life, and it's a classic, and everyone will think you've got taste.

coming soon hit the screen. We love dogs, We want to see dogs in movies, but we don't want to see dogs in peril, and we definitely don't want to see them harmed or killed. So the premise of the film is an intriguing one, but it's also kind of a dare.

up on. This dog puts in a performance. Maybe it's the Gary Cooper Steve a Queen kind of performance where Indy's just be in Indie, But I'd counter that the dog is way more expressive than either of those actors.

The film is nearly silent, and while the narrative is at times purposely confusing, Indy's place in it and his motivations, never are Indy the dog playing a dog named Indy is in fact director Ben Leonberg's pet, and I can't really envision another scenario where it would have been this effective unless you've trained dog from birth to do everything in a script. So the story is Indie's owner, Shane,

has a terminal illness, though it seems to be in remission. Shane, after his last hospital stay, has chosen to aescu city life and take up residence in his grandfather's secluded cabin in the woods. The electricity is shoddy, the weather is terrible, Shane is frequently in the grips of a nostalgic reverie or something much worse, and the sounds from the basement are nothing less than disturbing, and Indy has to deal

with all of it. There are scarce scenes that are super effective in this flick, and overall it's a beauty rendered film. You get used to the fact that our point of view is no higher than three feet off the ground for the entire film really quickly, as you do the fact that every human is basically just a set of legs or a silhouette. The atmosphere is killer, and there are moments of genuine shock, and yet something just doesn't quite hang. Everything individually is working like Gangbusters,

but as a whole it feels oddly disjointed. Those scare scenes that I mentioned as effective. They start out with slow and quiet setups with mounting dread, and at the end there's a good jump scare. But somewhere between setup

and payoff there's always an odd disconnect. It may be the filmmaker working against that central problem we don't want to see in any peril or panic, but somehow he's overcorrected, because as good as any individual scare or scene happens to be, you never get the sense that the dog is going to come to harm, and the film ultimately makes the same fucking choice that nearly every horror movie has been made lately. Horror is grief everybody in any event, you need to go see Good Boy. It's in the

theaters now. It deserves your money. I don't know how the filmmaker is gonna follow this up with something else, unless he's been making something with another pet of his for the past few years.

fifteen years ago. But there is one thing I did want to touch on about those previous films. The first film's world was the game Grid, and that was created and controlled by the MCP through Encom. The second film does not take place in that world. The second film is The Grid, and that was constructed by Flynn Kevin Flynn's program Clue, also at Encom. The new film, tron Ares takes place in neither of those. This one is a whole new grid under the control of the Dellinger Corporation.

Thus everything is red and not blue or white. That's David Dellinger's grandson running the show these days, so Dellinger and by extension, Sark and by extension, the MCP itself was played by David Warner. His grandson was hinted at in tron Legacy, with Killian Murphy playing the role. This film has Evan Peters from America Horror Story step into the part instead. Something tells me that Killian Murphy wouldn't have been quite so apoplectic in his portrayal. I'm not

saying Peters as bad. I love him, and I'm still holding out for a James Cagney biopic starring him. It's just that he does a lot of screaming. This is a sequel, not a reboot. The first film ended with Flynn brought back to the world and taking over Encom. The sequel ends with Flynn merging with the Grid to allow his son Sam and newly created organism Cora to get out and into our world, where they've both disappeared

entirely so. Tron Legacy began with Flynn's son, inheritor of Encom, who's always searching for his dad, doing some mad tech, and then base jumping off a skyscraper. Tron Aries begins with Eve Kim played by Greta Lee, who's inherited Encom from her sister who's gone missing. By that, I mean she's dead, but if there's a sequel, I bet we're going to get a digital version of her. We meet Eve snowmobiling down a treacherous mountain peak before engaging in

some mad tech and solving the film's central problem. A little dramatic mirroring is fun at all, but the last movie didn't exactly have a coherent plot line, so maybe don't do that. That central problem is that both Encom and Dellinger Corps are in an arms race for the Permanence Code. Instead of sending humans into the computer, they're pulling programs into our world, but they only last twenty

nine minutes. Before derezing. It makes sense for the company to be offering on demand weapons and soldiers to man them. From a storyline point of view, It's just that I don't give a shit to see them here. I know I've mentioned this before, but this is an Adams family situation. Wouldn't it be a who to see Gomez buying lettuce?

all was. And then the score kicked in and the film began, and I was hooked. God damn it. I've said previously, if there's any one thing that's unassailable across this franchise, it's the soundtrack. Each one is so goddamn perfectly attuned to the visuals. This is no exception. This

isn't a Trent resnor Aticus Ross soundtrack. It's nine inch nails and honestly, I can't think of the last time that the score was not only doing as much heavy lifting to create mood and atmosphere, but was actually succeeding like this one does. This soundtrack was a marvel. It made action more breathless, emotions more deeply felt, and it

added this indefinable gravitas to the whole thing. Side note, Ross and Resner, like Daft Punk before them, show up in the film Daft Punk where DJs at a club, Ross and Resner are fighter pilots trying to take down a recognizer. It helps that the whole thing is gorgeously shot. Every scene you can tell has been lavished with attention and care. That shouldn't be a point of discussion with a one hundred and eighty million dollar feature, but even

that isn't assured in the current Hollywood landscape. The action is superlative here, that's hand to hand as well as vehicular. I think the action here is actually stronger than it was in Superman. Now let's talk aries aries. The Ultimate Grid Warrior designed by Dellinger to not only be his standard bearer, but Aries is also the new MCP, although with rolls slightly reversed. In the first film, Sark and

a Dellinger answered to the MCP. Here the MCP answers to Dellinger and he can deres them in either world. Aries is basically Tron, the character Tron, if Tron had started out with a head full of bad wiring and eventually had to start making moral decisions and become the

blue boy scout we barely know and barely love. Isn't it hilarious that this whole film series is called Tron and he's only kind of in the first film and virtually not the second, and he is not at all in Aries anyway, Aries himself is kind of a fascinating character, and you're on the journey with him from the moment we meet him, because he is too He begins questioning his programming nearly immediately, and always without lines of dialogue. I don't know what your opinion of Jared Lado is.

All I hear is hate for him.

It's a cool story, and unlike the last film, you don't have to stare at CGI Jeff Bridges with such a detached horror that you have no idea what any of the scenes he's in are actually about. And I want to point out one sequence in particular. You know how every film's attempt for the past forty years to visualize cyberspace has been laughably terrible. Is this a spinning information cube? I see before me? It's handle turned toward

my obscenely pixeled cursor. Lawnmower man hackers, you remember, well, they give us a scene where Dellinger hacks into the Ncom mainframe. It's Aris in his team on a mission impossible style sequence, and it's fucking great. Special shout out to Jody Turner Smith as Athena. She's Airy's right hand and eventual arrival. I remember her as one of the best things from the Nightflyer series from twenty eighteen.

famous for screenwriting. It's like listening to a guidance counselor you think those fifteen minutes they met with you over a four year period qualifies them to put you on a path for the rest of your life. There are some genuine surprises to be had in tron Ares, none of which I'm going to spoil here, but there's a sequence that made me gasp multiple times, and the ending is set up for another sequel, which I'm sure we're

gonna get sometime in twenty thirty two. I didn't expect to like this movie at all, and now I want to watch it again. Sure, no, I'm not sneaking you in. We'll wait for streaming. That is going to do it for the weekly round up, tune in this Friday to midnight viewing. We've got the next two episodes of the final season of Tales from the Dark Side.

Paul Waller from A Year in Horror. We are taking a journey through the werewolf movies of past decades, starting with the granddaddy of them all, The Wolfman from nineteen forty one. Both those shows are available now, but if money's tight, and I know they are, you can do it. Was a huge favor just by liking the show or giving it five stars, or if you're an Apple, write a positive review. That would fucking open up so many possibilities for us, and it would be greatly appreciated. Until

next time. Here's a bit from Tron because the other film is mainly barking. Yeah, like that, extract.