339: Constantine

Welcome to the Cult Classic Horror Show. conversations you've always wanted to have about the films you love. Shut up! distractions and prepare yourself You got a big surprise coming to you. You're not going anywhere.

Welcome, welcome everybody to the cult classic horror show. Danny Bonin here with you. Scotty Bonin with you guys. We are the Blood Brothers and Carmelo Chimera. Carmelo kind of voice. God bless you. Sadly missing the Rob again. He wasn't sure if he'd make it just like the last few times, but we'll still keep.

Hoping and keep him in our prayers. Thoughts and prayers to Rob O'Neill. Buccaneers lost tonight and Alabama lost. So he's probably very sad about this week. We're already whiskey deep from the pre-show conversations. Just so you all know, it might get a little wild and crazy. Talking about our next films. Yes. A lot coming down the pipe. A lot coming down the pipe.

And wrapping up our Name the Demon. The Blu-rays have been ordered, although they've been ordered. The money has been paid, but they haven't got back to me to verify the design yet. Hopefully that's not another bottleneck. It's like one freaking thing after another. Our distributor left us high and dry with this. Yeah, our distributor just basically, without getting into the details, made us wait for about three months.

four months for some answers and then ultimately came back to us saying, oh, we don't deal with that anymore. If you want bulk, you got to get bulk from somebody else. So we were like, if you had just told us that four months ago, this would all be over by now. Communication. Come on, man.

But they have been ordered. Now this company just needs to verify the files I sent them to make sure everything looks right. So I'm giving them the weekend. Tonight we're recording this on a Sunday. It's releasing on a Wednesday when you guys are hearing it. Hopefully by then, I know.

everything's in the works it's it's all gonna come to fruition yeah and uh it's probably a good it's never a good thing when rob's not here but he does not like this movie and i think we all love this movie yes uh we're covering constantine Keanu Reeves, 2005. It's just starting to get much better than this. Oh, God, this is great. Rob doesn't like this movie?

He does. That's what he said in the past. Oh, come on. He's played. Doesn't even remember it. Saw it back in 2005. Doesn't remember it. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember when this came out and.

So just on a whim, I watched it, I don't know, four months ago or something like that, just because I saw it on and was like, oh, I haven't watched that in a while. And then just today, I got the Blu-ray and watched it with director... producer commentary and i almost even though they were spouting interesting information the whole time i still just wanted to shut the up so i can watch the movie i was like oh i just want to watch this movie again i agree it's so good man

It's 20 years old. Those are my opening thoughts on the film. I don't know what you guys' history with it. Scotty, you want to go first? I mean, 20-year-old movie man still holds up. It's got the effects that are believable still. I mean, there's CGI, obviously. Yeah, of course. But it still holds up, and it's...

It's just Keanu Reeves is great in it, Rachel-wise. And I remember seeing it in 2005, I think, the year after we graduated. And I remember being blown away. And it still holds up. I was like... i was like in trance watching it the whole time i just watched it like i just finished it 30 minutes ago

And it's so great. I love it. I love everything about it. I think it's just written well. Carmelo's the script meister. And I think it hits a lot of beats. I think it's written well. It's extremely well written. Everything kind of comes back around.

You know, there's very few wasted details. And the thing that makes a movie like this remarkable to me is two things. One is the massive amount of exposition they have to give you. This whole backstory about angels and demons. and this is how possessions work in our world and these are the rules. That can really bog down a movie and make it boring as dirt. And this movie does it right where it's revealing the exposition through the action.

So you're not sitting there like, well, someone explains to you. You're experiencing the exposition as part of the story. The other thing it did is it has to combine all this lore from the comic books. right so you've got all this yeah you know history from a very very popular comic book and then trying to put that into something that people like is tough because comic fans uh are we can be persnickety

Yes, yes. He's the exact. I'd like to learn more about the comic book. With their comic book lore and their hygiene. Yes, they are very brisnickety with our hygiene. If you ever go to a Comic-Con, man, the people killing it there are the booths itself.

custom soap now. Did I bring you Old Spice? I'm going to start going to Comic Cons with Body Spray. I like more about the comic book though because I saw that it was based off of it. I knew it was but I just didn't... just seeing the movie you know it's like oh like the comic book lore is so more expansive you know yeah oh yeah and and he took elements of some of his stories of many of his different stories and then put those elements in here right so like well

talk about the the cancer you know when it comes up and that's like that's from one constantine comic book right so like they're all kind of um it wasn't just one story they adapted they tried to find elements from very popular stories are you familiar are you have you read them are you familiar with the constantine i read them in high school after i saw it so i saw this movie i was 16 when i saw this and it was amazing

It was amazing. I actually think I saw it. You were getting a handjob while just rubbing the hell out of a girl's leg in the movie theater. Just dry humping. Dry humping. What do they call it now? The Stoking? Oh, yeah. That's the...

That's the Mormon way to do it, right? That's the Mormon way. I'm sorry. Let it soak for a minute. So it's funny you say that. I think my first date was to see this movie, but after 20 years later, I'm still not sure if it was a date or not. Okay. You know who you are if you're listening to this podcast. If you could clear that up for me after 20. I mean, she obviously is because everyone listens to this podcast. Of course. It is the most popular media outlet.

Yeah, you get private messages on Instagram or whatever, Facebook. I mean, we're at like $17 a month on Patreon. The resources we have here. We should put our pregame talks on the Patreon, damn it. Yeah, so you know who you are. You're out there.

tell me, was it a date or not? Because I don't know anymore. But I think I saw the movie twice that weekend. It was so good. Because you didn't see it really... too much on the first time you went with it with with your it's because he was so busy contemplating putting his arm around her for like 48 minutes yeah

As you do. Or you're just fiercely rubbing her leg. Yeah. Fiercely rubbing her leg over and over again. You just rubbed her leg. That's it. Yeah, denim, not a good lubricant for them. Yeah, not a good lubricant.

Well, I like what you said about that. I know we're about to get into it, but director Francis Lawrence actually on the commentary talked about how there is so much exposition and. They tried to take this approach of, I'm trying to think of the metaphor he used, and I'm going to fuck it up, but not feeding the audience, but having the audience feed themselves from the story. That's cool.

Makes sense. Allowing them to pull the exposition out of the film as much as he could without people not knowing what the fuck's going on. So, and I don't know that this is really an example of exposition, but another interesting thing he talked about was some of the language between, for example, midnight and Constantine when Constantine busts in and wants to use the chair.

finally and there's these weird things that we maybe they're in the comics maybe they're not but that we don't know and probably will never know what they mean but it's it's two guys doing their job uh and bantering appropriately about that job uh what does he say it's like is the chair which way's east um yeah yeah uh what was when's the last time you surfed like we don't know what those things mean but that's right

they do and that's all that matters and uh francis said that um i don't know if he heard this or had read it or if it's just one of his own isms is that when an audience watches someone or two people do a job as part of the scene that they're very good at. then that's super entertaining. And we don't need to know all the details of that job and what happens, but if they mention that and are bantering about it, it's just entertaining. Yeah, that's spot on. It leaves your mind to wonder.

So, but yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, Carmelo, let's get a synopsis in case any of you guys haven't watched Constantine in a while. Yeah, yeah. So Constantine is about a... He's sort of a... kind of like a gumshoe detective figure but he's an exorcist really and and he and his his sidekick chas are are deep in this world of the occult and and there's this whole like underground society of angels and demons and half breeds Yeah. And they're kind of caught in the middle of it. Constantine has.

some psychic abilities that allow him to experience more than most people can, including visions of hell, which drove him to suicide as a teenager, which he survived. So he knows that when he dies, he's going to hell. And he's trying to exercise as many demons as possible to stave off this sentence and maybe earn his way back into heaven. Well, he falls in with this police detective, Angela, whose sister, twin sister.

killed herself they were both of them psychic and as as angela kind of gets into Constantine's world trying to figure out what happened to her sister, it turns out that the son of the devil, Maman, is trying to break into our world. actually needs the help of God Almighty. And it turns out that the angel Gabriel is a double agent who's helping Mimon break into this world and bring about Armageddon.

yeah these angels are like you know what fuck humans we're like these perfect creatures and then god made these like smelly monkeys and gave them paradise and you don't deserve it um And, you know, Constantine then pulls, you know, probably the coolest move possible and kills himself again because the rumor is that...

he's the only soul the devil himself will come to claim. And sure enough, the devil himself played by the just delightful Peter Stormare. Dude, so great. We're going to fawn over later. Oh, yeah. He shows up and he's like, yep, sure enough, I come to claim, you know, this is the only soul I wanted to claim. And Constantine's like, yeah, but also you're like kids in the next room trying to bring about Armageddon and overthrow you. Just to let you know.

yeah just by the way and so the devil like clears all that shit right up and uh then he's like all right constantine uh Well, you're going to come with me anyway. Constantine makes a deal to save the twin sister from hell. But in doing so, he actually does earn his place back into heaven. And so... The devil's like, no, fuck that. I'm not letting you go to heaven. So he actually cures Constantine of his cancer and rebuilds his slashed wrists and says, you're going to live longer.

just so you have the chance to fuck it up and end up in hell again. Yes. And that's constant. I love this movie. It's so awesome. And then at the very end, he pops, instead of taking a cigarette light, he pops in a piece of gum.

forever so great how did this do you have some numbers how do you have this film do yeah yeah i do this film did very well very well um i do got some numbers here um so yes Constantine opened in the United States on February 18, 2005, earning $29.8 million in its opening weekend and ranking second only behind Hitch. Hitch's second weekend. Okay. It ended its run on June 16th, having grossed $76 million in the United States and Canada and $154.9 million in other territories.

for a worldwide total of $230.9 million against a $70 to $100 million budget. Okay. So, yeah, pretty damn good. It's a pretty big budget, though, but this was a lot of CGI. But I want to say, have you seen those reels where it's like CGI was so much better early on and then got really bad and now it's probably better again, but...

I feel like this is maybe on the cusp where it's not bad. See, it's not horrible CGI. No, it's not. I mean, for 2005, it was amazing. Yeah, it still holds up pretty well. I mean, you can tell. You can tell there's all this added... smoke and stuff. Well, when he goes into the underworld and when he goes into hell, there's all that too, of course. I forgive that stuff a lot because it's so surreal. It's like a living painting.

It could be still portrayed that way today as a choice. And that could have gone way worse, too, CGI-wise. So... I don't think they overstepped, like, the boundary, like, when it's, like, so bad. Like, ah, no, I think it was believable, and you could tell it was believable. It wasn't Matrix 2, uh, Smith.

agent smith fight scene bad so that oh boy that yeah that scene with a thousand agent smiths it just became a cartoon it just became a cartoon it did it's hard to watch i think the only thing in this movie that's rough is like you can like when people are getting like the their heads blown off and you can like kind of see the holes that stuff is clearly like cgi yeah and that's kind of disappointing because that stuff they could have done practically yeah

It's not bad. It's just like you can just tell. The thing that's kind of rough is the vermin man, the demon that's like made of bugs. Yeah. And the thing that saves it is that it's all so dark that you don't get a good look at it.

But if you Google Vermin Man, you get a good clean look at him. It's not great. It's not great. But I'm being nitpicky about him. And this is like a thing about the whole era. there's a lot of cgi that holds up from that era spider-man and spider-man 2 both preceded this and they mostly hold up like 90 sure oh yeah the classics

The problem is when people get in, they got ambitious and the technology was not as ambitious as they were. And they pushed a little past the card. And they had the resources to do practical. Stan Winston did work on this. He did all the practical effects on it. they probably could have cut him loose a lot more. Was some of the practical, like, was the whole Balthazar face melt? Yeah, so Gavin's face was all practical. Yeah, so that was all practical. That was really good.

Whenever you see Rachel slash Angela dead, that's a Stan Winston dummy of her. It's like perfectly... I mean, you'd think they would just use her, but like in the pool where she... sees her that's when she sees her sister technically right she sort of pulls the hair out of the eyes and stuff and that's a that's a dummy that was great Winston dummy cold body just laying there

that was really good really good and they just just formed a mold of her of rachel yeah exactly angela yeah and did that a couple different times throughout the film so

uh well yeah let's let's jump into this dig into it we can talk about the movie a little bit too yeah well before we jump into it i want to carmelo mentioned something about uh you know loving this perfect circle video that was made from the oh yeah Jamon Huntsu's club, Midnight's Club. Is that what's playing in the background? Yeah, that's playing in the background. I actually watched – I got through half the music video before we got on this episode just so I could humor Carmo. Perfect circle.

I love that fucking song, the perfect circle song. It's the perfect song when you're like walking through like a fucking nightclub. I can't handle the singer and the badass. I don't know, man. I was never a perfect circle slash tool because they share members, right? I think so.

Oh, yeah. Maynard is the same. Maynard is the singer for Tool and the singer for Purpose. You know what? Band members are different. I have this memory of Scotty and I were in like eighth grade or something. We were listening to a lot. heavy it was when slipknot just came out and and the first corn cd maybe the second one and and uh you know system of the downs only self-titled had been out and we were listening to all this kind of music

Then Scotty starts dating this girl and all of a sudden loves Tool in a perfect circle. And I'm like, what is this garbage he's listening to? She got me into it, man. Well, here's all garbage compared to Slipknot. I had a... variety of music i listen to you were like all hardcore like i'd love that too but i like i i like expanded my horizons a little bit and listen to some other music but it was the girlfriend my first

Girl, I lost my virginity to. I thought it was another girl. It was Jessica Farnsworth. It was Jessica Farnsworth. It was a third girl. Now we're naming names on this podcast. If anyone knows her. I was nice enough to not name the girl. Yeah, anyways, yeah, so hopefully she's not listening. But I remember she did get me into it, and I got into it. I felt like the melodicness to it and stuff. But there'd be nights we'd just lay in my head.

bed and we'd play a perfect circle and it's just like spine chilling you know if you want milada you go like deftones or something you don't need perfect deftones yeah perfect circle it gets you in that mood you got your black light on it doesn't matter i'm You can make love to it. I'm so persnickety about the music that now I don't even listen to the bands I mention anymore. Slipknot. That's not even heavy enough anymore. So it's like...

You know, it's hilarious. So those of you at home know Danny and Scotty are in a band called Poolside at the Flamingo that is having a revival tour, you know, these last couple of years or so. And it is... Like the hardest metal you can listen to. I think what is it? Grindcore? Is that it? Yeah, Grindcore, Deathcore, yeah.

But that's not the funny thing. The funny thing is that Danny and Scotty and I have talked before about opening up a venue for parties where we would exclusively be crooning. There would only be Sinatra style. Only. old school crooning you have to have a jacket it's only suit jacket and tie attire that's right and and i've heard danny croon and he sounds like sinatra and i've heard scotty do like operatic disney songs their voices are like like angelic and yet the band that they're known for

It would make David Draymond's voice hurt just to listen to it. I'm not an in-between. I go from our band, and then I don't do the in-between. I don't sing-songy screamo. It's got to go, like, straight to Weezer or Nirvana and then on to, like, Sinatra. I fucking love Sinatra, dude. That's all I want to. Any kind of crooner age, like that 50s or a Dean Martin. Dean Martin. Dude.

No, you're right. I sing musical theater and grew up singing. My mom does voice lessons, and then I go scream in a band. Your rendition of Beauty and the Beast brings me to tears. Thank you, man. I play the Beast. I do a ballad song. It's gorgeous. I like Scotty. I like strong vocal melodies, even in my metal. Right. So I enjoy, I enjoy tool and, and pool, excuse me, tool. And of course I love poolside. and perfect circle i i love the death tones i love um

You know, there's bands I've tried to connect with Danny, and they're not hard enough for him. I like, like, In Flames, which I think is pretty hard. Yeah, I like In Flames. You know, there's some melodic stuff that's not. I like early Killswitch, and, you know, there's some...

Yeah, Poison. A lot of that stuff I used to listen to. That stuff's fine. I do like some melodic. You just got to be the right band. That's all. See? And I would get down on singing that in like a band, too. I could do some harmonies singing. You would nail it.

Yeah. So since we also give you the background on these things, a couple of fun facts about this song, deeply personal to the singer. If I remember right. and I didn't look this up before the podcast to refresh my memory, but as the story I heard, it was, it was about his abusive mother and she passed away. And the song is, so the song is about, you know, kind of.

seeing someone on the slab that you have unfinished business with you cold and dead as dead can be. And it's sort of like, after all this, you just kind of died. And now we're never going to, we're never going to square this. you're wow that's just so fucking disappointing like that you just get out from under this all the bad things you did by dying yeah and uh you know, that's like sort of the ultimate passive aggressive. And, uh, it's quite powerful. And, uh,

I like the song very much. Yeah. That almost is what happens in the movie too. When they made a video, if you guys haven't seen it, you can YouTube a perfect circle Constantine video and they made a It's like the official music video of the movie. It's really appropriate, perfect song for that scene too. It really hits home. Because the whole thing is passive aggressive, right? They're in this like neutral bar.

Yeah. Where all the angels and demons and half breeds can hang out and they all are like at war, but now they're all like, like they're all like fucking it's sort of like it's sort of like the club in john wick yeah right it's like yeah exactly it's not called the continental is it what is it or is it the hotel but he goes to more yeah and the hotel is

the neutral zone but he goes to more than one like club where they're all like wrangling and yeah this one they are too they're the it's it's the neutral club their eyes are glowing but yeah demons like fucking each other like yeah and you and like And freaking John and Constantine walks in there like a badass. Like, I'm going to send you guys all to hell if you try to...

Whenever I hear Continental, I just think of the old Christopher Walken SNL. The Continental. Yeah, exactly. So great. All right. Well, I'm going to jump into some things here. So as we talked about already, this comes from comic books.

Let's do a lot of things. So, yeah, I mean, really, it got to start in the late 90s. Film adaptation of DC Vertigo's Hellblazer comic began to take shape. Producer Lauren Shuler Donner is a she. Already a veteran known for shepherding hits like St. Elmo's Fire and Free Willy. I loved Free Willy when I was a kid. I was like, there was that line in it where it was like, They asked the kid a question, and he says, do dogs piss on brick walls? And I was like, yeah, that kid's a badass. But anyways.

Free Willy was a popular one in my household as a kid. We were the target. We were the target audience. I've completely forgot the whole movie now, but yes. Michael Madsen, man. Rest in peace. Okay, yeah, yeah. Well, so anyways, this producer, Lauren Shuler-Donner, who had... things to do with Free Willy, was introduced to the idea of Constantine movie by screenwriter Kevin Brodbin. In 97, Shuler Donner secured the rights, so back in 97, started developing it.

Um, you know, she envisioned this like supernatural horror film that would be quote classic and classy in the vein of like the exorcist. And yeah, at the time, she wasn't really a stranger to comic book adaptations. Shortly after Constantine, she would go on to produce Marvel's X-Men franchise. She had a hand in that. Yeah.

And then they had several heavy-hitting producers and creatives start to rally around this project in the early days. Longtime DC Comics adapters Michael Uslan and Benjamin Melnicker. Ah, interesting fellows. They were instrumental in bringing Batman 1989 to the screen. They signed on as executive producers. And then producer, what? Warner Bros. executive.

executive turn producer, excuse me, Lorenzo D. Bonaventura, who was famous for green lighting The Matrix during his studio tenure, also came aboard. as did Oscar-winning writer-producer Akiva Goldsman. Damn, I don't know. There's some heavy hitters behind this. And then Erwin Stoff. who was at the time Keanu Reeves' manager and was a producer on The Matrix and Speed, came on board as well. So that's sort of where I think he...

got it from. Oh, I love Speed. Cool Classic Action. I know. We should bring back the Cool Classic Action. Cool Classic Action. Patreon only. For the three people over there, we can get you some more Cool Classic.

action. Fuck yeah. That's how Carmelo found his way to the show, actually. That's right. It started with, I wanted to do the spinoff called Classic Action. And then we did a couple. We did a couple of complex actions and then we were like, hey. That's exactly what we should do. That should just be the Patreon. There's a whole second show only. There's some episodes in there. If you aren't patrons and you want to go check them out, we do have a back catalog of...

I don't know. It's eight to ten cult classic action episodes. We did like Rambo and Predator. If you want to see what it's like, there's a crossover episode. We did Terminator is technically both. And we put the cult classic action episode on this podcast. Oh, yeah.

Terminator is both. We decided. It's got its own nifty intro and everything. Yeah. And then I think we did part two as the action episode. That's right. We did Terminator as a crossover. So I've got some facts about. Michael Uslan, if you guys are interested. Yeah, sure. He's from University of Indiana, actually. And he... He made the news when he convinced them to let him teach a course on comic books. This is back in the 80s. And at the time...

The 80s were kind of a renaissance for comics to be taken a bit more seriously. And part of that was Usland. So he did his best to convince the school that there was scholarly merit to comic books. And famously, he was shot down by the universe.

over and over again until the university president, he met with him and he's like, look, you're never going to convince me comics are like a modern mythology until he pointed out to him just to wrap the story up more quickly. I won't repeat the whole thing, but he basically pointed out to him that the story of Superman. the story of moses it's like the same exact story oh wow and and when the president realized that he was like the course is approved that made the news

folks at DC Comics saw it and called up Usland, and they were like, hey, we like that you respect and appreciate comic books, and we're looking to make these things more seriously. And they had done Dark Returns and some other stuff. Michael Usland bought... the film rights to Batman. Really? So he's produced every Batman movie since then. You kidding me? Every single one. Even the Joker movies. He's the one who owns the film rights. Holy shit. Yeah. So...

He's the one that was instrumental in getting Batman 89 made and making sure that Batman was, like, done seriously and not, like, the campy 60s show. You know, which... It has its place now and it's fun, but it's not what they wanted people to take it seriously. And so ever since then, Michael Usland's been like this with DC in there. That's awesome. And he's rolling in the dough. yeah i'm sure that i'm sure that he is yeah i'm sure that he is and he he got he bought the rights to batman

Before or after this? Before. Because then he helped get 1989 on screen. That's right. The Michael Keaton Batman. Oh, so he was way back then. Okay, got it. Wow.

Yeah, so anyways, he had a hand in this as well. Yeah, they went through a couple different directors at first that were perspective. No real big names or anything. Warner Bros. even targeted Nicolas Cage to star as Constantine. Yeah, hope to start filming by 2002 at that time, which he probably would have done pretty good too, you know, back then especially. I can't... He would have done good, but I just can't see anyone besides Keanu Reeves now. Well, the funny thing is he's not...

a very close adaption of the comic book John Constantine. Sure. Keanu Reeves isn't or Nicolas Cage is? Neither. Constantine in the comic books is British. That was a big thing that fans of the comics had issue with this movie. The problem is, I've actually never heard anybody who...

loves the comics and hates this movie. I've only heard of people talk about how good this movie is. And I think for most people, it was their first exposure to him because the comic was an indie one called Hellblazer. And Constantine's just the main character. But he's portrayed a lot more as like a slick-talking con man. And he's very British, and most of his stories take place in and around London. Oh, wow.

like this is an americanized version obviously of um um of constantine and they did a constantine show maybe about 10 years ago now with um What was his name? Matt something. I think I remember that. I'll look it up right now. They ended up bringing that into DC's television universe after a while.

Matt Ryan. That's right. Now, the reason I mentioned all this is because if you ever watched that version of him, that's a lot more like what the comic book was like. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, I mean, in typical Hollywood style, right? And again...

this is a movie that turned out great. So like, I'm not bitching about it by any means. I have no special love for the comic book other than it's cool. But you know, what we know is we are putting a lot of films together these days and it's all about like getting the bankable name.

And nowadays, comic book movies, you don't even – you don't see that all the time anymore. Comic book movies are happy to underpay a nobody and make their career basically – and not nobody but a no-name because – the ips are so powerful right so like make like i don't know what david corn sweat did before superman but whatever it is doesn't compare in terms of the box office and now he's a household name

They greenlit that movie off Superman, not off David Korn's sweat. But in the early 2000s, Spider-Man had just come out, but that wasn't enough yet. And especially not for a lesser known comic book. That's why you see names like Nicolas Cage or Keanu Reeves. Sure. The studio could bank. And they set it in whatever, where they want to shoot the film in somewhere like New York. They didn't trust the content yet. Was this in New York?

No, no, this was in LA, actually. LA, yeah, duh. Because, yeah, there's a sign in LA. No!

Oh, my God. Christ, my tears are just bleeding. Speaking of L.A., man. Oh, God, that means it's time for the... Horror Halftime. Yeah. Wow. I'm not prepared for that. I know. It's back again. The Horror Halftime's here. It hasn't been around for a long time, but I'm happy. I'm happy to...

We're in the season of giving right now, and I'm happy to give back to the people. Oh, and you've got a great gift for them today, don't you? I've got a great gift today. All right, so today's gift for the Horror Halftime winner will be the special edition Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray.

of body melt. Vinegar syndrome. I'm holding it up on the screen if you're watching on YouTube. It's so generous of you, Danny. I know. It's so hard to part with this. I was really hoping it would stay in my family for generations to come. but you could have handed that because i love you guys i'm willing to part yeah i love the fans so uh this week's horror freak of the week is

Dan Dalton. Dan Dalton. Dan Dalton. Dan Dalton, you have won Vinegar Syndrome Special Edition Blu-ray of Body Melt, which has... commentaries. It's got a few, I mean, it's got a lot of shit on it. I'm not going to read it. So shoot me a message on either Instagram or Facebook cult classic horror page and give me your address. I'll ship it out to you. I'll post in the groups in case you're not listening to this, but yeah.

A long time listener. Good man. I think I speak for all of us when I say we love you, double D. And if no one calls you double D, they really should. They really should. Yes. And so those of you that want to win a Blu-ray, all you have to do. is submit a meme on social media that has to do with any one of our episodes, preferably this one or the last one or the last few. Sons from Constantine. Yeah. Any meme, anything, just submit it.

tag us at cult classic horror and use the hashtag horror halftime. And if we like your meme the best, you will be the winner and also the horror freak of the week. And I'll give you a Blu-ray from my collection of movies that I've been forced to buy to cover these. episodes with. You might keep the Constantine one, though. I think I'm going to keep the Constantine one. I had to sift through a little bit to find this one. You know, we've been giving away Blu-rays.

It's not always going to be a Blu-ray. I've said that. It might be a T-shirt. It might be something else. But we'll go with Blu-rays for now until I whittled it down a little bit. For sure, man.

All right, well, that concludes the horror halftime. So many cigarettes. some of these cigarettes he smoked some of these cigarettes he did smoke john constantine yes so we will jump back into it here um so yeah uh talking about coming that we still haven't been introduced to the director yet so um

Basically, there were some directors they let go. They didn't go with Nicolas Cage. That went out the window with another version of the script. Warner Bros., they wanted a fresh talent. They wanted a young, hip director. So they found Francis Lawrence, who was popular for doing music videos, which happens a lot. He had done Britney Spears and other rock bands and hip-hop stars, and they just thought that the material needed a...

Young, hip, cool dude. He didn't do any film directing before that? No, I think this was his first foray. Maybe some smaller stuff, but as far as anything notable, yeah. Now, initially, Ken Reeves... Yeah, no, no. So by then, Keanu Reeves was now a global star, thanks to The Matrix, and was pretty cautious about working with an inexperienced film director. Looks like just music videos. Yeah, really? Okay, yeah.

A lot of music videos, like a fuck ton of music videos. A ton, yeah. The other director direct us in the movie that did mainly music videos. Yeah, that was his first film he did, too, yeah. Cool guy. But Reeves had only recently finished shooting the back-to-back Matrix sequels Reloaded and Revolutions when the Constantine script came his way.

Intrigued by the story and the tormented character of John Constantine, Reeves signed on in 2002. So yeah, the day after he returned from filming The Matrix, Reeves met with Francis Lawrence, the director, to hear his vision for Constantine. And Lawrence, you know, he knew he was a little bit of hot water, so he came prepared. He pitched his ideas passionately and even showed Reeves a reel of his most striking music video work. And it worked. Nice. So he got the job. Yep.

And then from that point on, Reeves sort of became a champion of Francis Lawrence's and was later just praised him in interviews and things like that. And yeah, Rachel Wise too. She noted how well Lawrence transitioned from music videos to large film and was real collaborative on set. And so it... Ended up working out. Lawrence would later prove his blockbuster chops by directing I Am Legend and several Hunger Games films. So now he's no stranger to the limelight. Love I Am Legend.

Meanwhile, the screenplay evolved through the hands of Kevin Broadbent and Frank Cabello. Broadbent had been involved since the start co-writing story draft after having been a fan of the Hellblazer comics, like you mentioned, Carmelo. But yeah, Frank Capello was brought on to rework the script and steered the story toward a more personal character-driven conflict. Rather than like a typical save the world comic book plot, Capello drew inspiration from the Hellblazer stories.

Garth Ennis' Hellblazer story arc Dangerous Habits, which deals with Constantine's terminal lung cancer and his efforts to outsmart the devil. Oh, jeez. So that's sort of where the basis is. Were you familiar with that one, Carmelo? Have you read that? That is... I believe, I mean, at least from what I remember around people talking about this when it came out, that was the story he was most known for is that he's like.

dying of cancer so he like gets himself possessed and then basically forces the demon and sort of like Yeah, you're stuck in my body now, so you're either going to cure me or you're going to die with me now. Yeah, I'm dying soon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they had some characters that made it into the original comics. Papa Midnight's from the comics, I guess.

Yeah, Chaz is in the comics. Chaz, yeah. But yeah, it did require some significant changes. As Carmelo said, John Constantine is famously blonde British occult detective. This describes him as a chain-smoking Liverpoolian modeled after singer Sting. Okay. Sting should have just played him then. Yeah, you know, there you go. Look at that bleached blonde hair. Yeah, no. I like the black hair. No, they definitely did a good job of Americanizing him.

And yeah, I don't think people, as Carmelo said, no one's really complaining about it. Yeah. Yeah. So then another change was the film's title. Early on, the project was referred to as Hellblazer, like the comic, but to avoid confusion with Clive Barker's Hellraiser, of course,

The movie was retitled simply Constantine. That makes sense. I always wonder why they did that, and I thought they were just being little bitches about putting the word hell in the title. Hellblazer, Hellblazer, Hellraiser. I can see the debacle there, for sure. Notably, legendary comics writer Alan Moore, who created John Constantine as a side character in Swamp Thing.

wanted no association with the film. Is that how he started out? Was the side character in Swamp Thing? Yeah, so Alan Moore wrote a very famous run on Swamp Thing that was basically this like... existential horror thing you know swamp thing was always this like guy who died in a swamp and then like came back with swamp powers yeah and then alan moore introduced the idea that

it wasn't a man made of swamp. It was a swamp that thought it was a man. Oh, okay. His run on swamp thing is like legendary. And I guess Constantine spun out of that, but he, Alan Moore.

We could do a whole episode on him, but he fucking hates every film adaption. That's what my next note says. Really? It says he hates, like, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He just fucking hates them. Yeah, I think it was after League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where he... sued and insisted i just like never put my name on any of these movies ever again because that's his work that's like oh yeah and he's like this he's this like crazy like gnostic mystic who lives in like

fucking like mountains of england somewhere like somewhere on the island of great bridge he's a recluse he's just only comes out of hiding to say mean things about people who touch his shit but i can't kind of do a sequel to watchman or something he like appears to do a quote and like this fucking sucks. And then he like disappears. Oh my God. He's just, he's a really interesting guy in comics. Um, so there's, there's one comic he's super famous for called a miracle man.

And that's another subject of another story for another time. But he ended up being Miracle Man, ended up being out of print for like 40 years because it was a huge copyright. And when Alan Moore found out that he was caught in the middle. of a copyright thing and he felt like he had stolen someone else's work, he sued them to take his name off of it. So any copy of Miracle Man today, any reprinted one, book, graphic novel, whatever, it just says...

from the original author. Oh, Jesus. Really? No, it's written by the original author. Wow. So that's Alan Moore. Wow. Crazy, man. That is so crazy. But he's also like a fucking genius. He's written all these things. Everything he writes, like every indie book you've heard of, it ends up being him. I didn't even know he created Constantine.

Something new for me. Holy shit. Swamp Thing. I love Swamp Thing. I had a Swamp Thing figurine when I was like six. Oh, yeah. We loved it when we were kids. yeah i got i got it i guess like a seven eight foot eight foot eight inch a swamp thing action figure on a shelf now are you sure it's eight inches you seem to have trouble well you know you have to adjust the measurement obviously it's not the girth to length

You can count both. That's right. You can count both. Exactly. It might be skinny, but it sure is short. Yes. Or wide. Just how you like your action figures, obviously. Just Chody. Now, Keanu Reeves admitted he was not... very familiar with Constantine upon receiving, well, getting this role, but then he poured over it all, went sort of method with it, and didn't really feel totally in character until he got the coat.

The coat is what really clarified his role. Oh, like the trench coat. Yeah, nothing that... That's what made him the chain-smoking demon hunter. Oh, man. So, yeah, you had him anchoring the film first. Then you had Rachel Weisz come in as the LAPD detective. Angela, the twin. Yeah, who had, of course, had shot the mummy previous to this.

brought some serious acting chops. She, yeah, would shortly after win a Academy Award for the Constant Gardener after this. She did. Yeah. Oh, wow. So she added some credibility to it. Shia LaBeouf. Yeah, Shia LaBeouf, only 18 at the time, was cast as Chaz Kramer.

um the director said that keanu reeves at first was like i don't know if he's if someone that young is right but then he said after three minutes of talking with him he's like oh yeah constantine would hang out with this guy really for sure he's the perfect like sidekick that drives the car and kind of wants to be in the coattails of john constantine and

be the demon hunter and stuff that he's doing and then of course you have Tilda Swinton as Gabriel the Archangel yes she wasn't really of course mainstream yet wasn't really hadn't done her main stuff But director Francis Lawrence specifically wanted like this androgynous look for the archangel. And throughout the commentary, they often refer to Gabriel as like a he. But then when they're specifically talking about.

her playing the role they say she and so i think they wanted it to be sort of yeah well androgynous like you said so just whatevs you know um but the director also said in the commentary that She couldn't say a line wrong. No matter what you told her to say, it would sound as if she was quoting Shakespeare.

She's great. She has the British accent that comes in too. She's delightful. She's amazing. Actually, it says that Lawrence prepared these elaborate justifications to... pitch her to the studio you know but to surprise the studio immediately supported her casting with no pushback so she wowed them all

um another one i don't even have the name here i just remember from the commentary the lady who played the first possessed girl in the movie in the beginning uh francis lawrence said she famously sent him this basically 20 minute performance art possession video. She just, she sprayed her, she spritzed herself. She just went at it for like 20 minutes. She sent him this video.

Whoa, okay. Yeah, because couldn't show up in person for some reason or something, and they said that's what sold them. We thought she was fucking awesome. I got a Susanna Wang here. Yeah, that's who it was, Susanna. It was Susanna. Susanna Wong. said she was super intense and was super intense on set too. And even Keanu Reeves was like, she was just intense. She was great. What an opening. opening to like a movie it's a great opening when she's at and they did film that uh

He said that they started out, I forgot what the exact his words were, but something about, oh, they got right down to it. That was the first. They shot the film mostly in chronological order. and day one they shot that they had her in there and the producers showed up like two hours late and they were already like three shots in and the producers didn't even expect him to be started yet dude

That's badass. Yeah, and he said that her up in the corner of the ceiling, she's actually up in the corner of the ceiling on wires, and they did get rid of the wires and stuff like that. That's badass, dude. That's awesome. I mean, what an opening of the movie from the car smash with the guy finding the knife.

to yeah and actually i was gonna get through the casting and get into that because i have a lot of i have some stuff about that too but uh also the stan winston there was a dummy of her as well stan winston dummy um when Keanu Reeves puts his face close to hers. I think that's actually a dummy. I don't know why they did that. Something's going to happen here. Then, of course, you have Peter Stormare we talked about who just...

it's so amazing. Classic Lucifer. Oh, he's great. I've seen like reels on social media that said, you know, Oh, the perfect casting shows him doing that. And actually, director Francis Lawrence, he had a clear inspiration for this portrayal, and he asked Stormrare to channel Fagin from Oliver Twist. Oh, totally. Yeah.

Yeah, he was real picky about having Stormare 2 play this role. He just knew instantly that's who he wanted to play this role. Interesting. And the Satan character. And yeah, did a really good job. So, yeah, they began filming in 2004 on location in Los Angeles. They really wanted L.A. to sort of be like its own character in the movie. Yeah. The devil's going to come conquer out.

LA. Yeah, they did a lot of thought. They put a lot of thought into picking these locations and things like that. They wanted it to really reflect like the, I don't know, the LA, I don't know how you'd say it, but... The real L.A. The real L.A. Not just Hollywood. The real L.A. where there's underground bars full of angels and demons. Sex and drugs and...

Rock and roll, man. So they collaborated with veteran cinematographer Felipe Rusillat, an Oscar winner for A River Runs Through It. Yeah, so... yeah it was it was so la i mean they just had to some of it was in studio they did have there were times during the commentary it's like oh now we're entering our set uh just offhand i know that the room

In the initial first exorcism, that was on a set. The office where Gavin Rosdale gets his face punched in, that's on a set. So there were some sets involved in it, for sure. Legendary Stan Winston Studio was there to craft the film's demon and angel makeup effects. They built a lot of gruesome practical creature effects. The half-faced demon we talked about already.

Even Angel Gabriel's wings were actually sort of a blend of practical and CGI. So Stan Winston did a lot of that stuff. But yeah, they... They had a lot of veterans on this. Not the director so much, but everyone else. And a lot of them doing their own stugs too. Keanu Reeves was...

really game to do all his own physical stuff. He had just come off the Matrix, had all his martial arts training. Stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell called Reeves a godsend on set, noting that he would immediately participate in fight choreography and pick it up super quick. You know, whether he's being flung across the room, you know, he did a lot of it himself.

He was taking that shotgun that he has, and he's blowing demons off at the very end there. Oh, man. Yeah, Shia said he volunteered himself for the wire rig slingshot stunt when he goes up to the ceiling, which left him with... A couple real bruises. Wow, nice. Gavin Ross. Gavin Rosdale, who offhand, if no one knows, he's the singer of Bush, the band Bush. Yes. I did not know that. Oh, you didn't know that? You didn't know that? No. There you go.

I love that band, too. Yeah, Gavin Rosdale, who plays... Now I forgot his name already. The suit-wearing... Balthazar. Balthazar is the singer of the band Bush. He kind of has a Jude Law look. A little bit. And I don't know that he's even done anything since this. I wondered why I never saw that guy. He did a good job. I wonder. Yeah. He did a very good job on this. Yeah. So he said he, it says he performed his own stunts in.

the fight with reeves there too um yeah and and rachel wise too uh did the like the infinite infamous bathtub scene they they put her underwater and during the commentary actually i learned that that's great scene that they she couldn't go underwater facing up without nose plugs in she just couldn't do it and they put nose plugs in and then

cg item out and so the bubbles you see coming out of her nose was any air leaking past the nose plugs oh good well good thing it was because yeah yeah actually make it look real yeah uh that and they called that francis lawrence called that his what would have been the sex scene in the movie. It's like the right beat in the story and in the film where it would have gone to like a love scene, but instead they go to this bathtub scene.

right before he dunks her under it's still fucking cool and they never the producer during the comedy the whole time was like kiss kiss because they they have these tense moments and they never romantically engage in the film ever ah it's so close it's so much better that way i know it is yeah right on the cusp there

Yeah, John Constantine is too serious for that. He's not quite there yet. The director and producer said that them along with a lot of the crew will famously hold their own breath during the bathtub scene. Just to confirm that a human could hold their breath as long as it's happening. I do that sometimes when I watch movies. I'm like, oh, you know, I wonder if I can shit.

And both Francis Lawrence and the producer were like, and we can do it. We could take a couple deep breaths, you know. Yeah, yeah. We can do it. I like that scene, though, too. The first time Keanu Reeves goes in the water, you see him go to hell to find Isabel. And then when Rachel Weisz does it, the viewer never sees what she's seeing.

going into hell but she's being held down like what the fuck's happening let her go i liked how the time changes you know everything happens in an instant but it takes longer than hell of course totally um i I'm going to go away from these notes because there was a lot of cool things that I learned in just watching some of the commentaries. And for instance, the opening, the opening was supposed to be a lot bigger budget. There's a lot of things throughout this film that were...

If they had more money, they would have done differently, but not that it ended up being bad or anything like that. For instance, the opening sequence was going to be a prisoner in a Turkish prison digging his way out of the prison when... then coming upon this relic that is the Spear of Destiny. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, they couldn't get the money for the Turkish prisoners, and so they changed it to a scavenger in Mexico, and they figured that...

What was the lore behind it? It was like a Nazi flag. Yeah, and they didn't really mention why there was a Nazi flag around it. They did say, oh, this is supposedly... uh a church where they they grab the relic from wherever vienna and they have it in this church and and they buried it and then the church burned down and and this is where it's hiding now to this day and it's

I don't know if they were serious. They said supposedly the Spear of Destiny is hidden in a museum in Vienna or something like that. Wow. I don't know, I guess, where the real one is, but I... I get the idea of like after World War II, a lot of Nazis fled Germany stealing art and things like that. You know, famously the movie Metropolis, which is like.

the most influential sci-fi movie of all time is this like German silent film. It's incomplete. There's no, there's no complete version of the film that exists. But for, there was a while there where every like couple of years, some. some german person living in argentina would die and oh wow they happen to have like more footage from metropolis so like it is the thing to find like stolen nazi art like smuggled out of europe

for sure. Art or artifacts. That's cool. We move into after the scavenger scene, we sort of move into L.A. for the first exorcism. that he enters a set when he goes into the room and then anything you see out the window in the background is like a scrim. They did use a lot of scrim and mats in this movie, surprisingly, for this day and age still. Pruitt Taylor Vince couldn't get it done.

yeah john constantine damn he's awesome that's another that brings me to another fact i learned is sorry i didn't mean that you could no no no that's great it's right in line with it because this whole sequence of him

not thinking he's drinking alcohol, but he's actually drowning himself in liquor. That was such a cool scene. The original sequence in the script was that he was supposed to be gorging himself on food while getting skinnier and skinnier until he died of... of like hunger um or whatever malnutrition you know wow and they just they said they couldn't quite afford that because obviously it would have taken some cgi to make this man skinnier and skinnier until he dies

aka thinner you know steven king that was genius with the alcohol you don't see anything coming out but it's it's all going in yeah he's just trying because he got under the whatever he touched her her palm her her wrist and just The demon got it or what happened there? And that's a good example, I think, of CGI that still is unnoticeable. I mean, they obviously had to use CGI for these broken bottles and alcohol not coming out of them. The whole thing still plays great.

Oh, that scene is brutal to watch. Absolutely. Yeah, and of course, he has that amulet that was protecting him from these voices at first, and Constantine has to use it. Another little flub that probably no one notices is that... Later in the movie, he gives her the amulet and yet another tense moment where they almost kiss. And she famously leaves it in the car when she goes in to help him out.

But if you look at her when she drops her coat in the car and turns around to go, it's still around her neck. But then the camera pans down. to the amulet oh really oh i didn't notice that oh girl uh another couple tidbits the cigarette he puts down in the first exorcism uh in an artsy shot where it's in the foreground that's great is actually a...

drastically oversized cigarette to get the effect they wanted. I think he smoked it much further down. Then he set it down. It's like a full stick. Yeah. And the whole idea there was that this is so routine for him that he knows he's going to knock out this exorcism in 30 minutes. of course this is a good opener for the movie because he realizes this isn't a normal thing and this demon's trying extra hard to get into our world you know yeah um so so yeah there's there's just um

a couple of things like that. I'm trying to think there's another couple of scrim shots. There's like a downtown when they do the outdoor, the establishing shot of, I think it's her apartment. It's like right next to the main freeway in LA and there's no apartment complexes near that. So that was like a match shot where they compose two things next to each other. But another cool thing is that his apartment is very stylistic and different.

um they had this like the the windows all pop open and yeah they had this abandoned building downtown that the director really liked a lot and wanted to morph into his apartment somehow and so the way they described it at the end is that They ended up with this apartment that almost looks like an office space that was walled off a little bit into someone's apartment. Listening to the commentary and seeing it...

At the same time, it sort of clicked because there were some weird rooms and like separators and things that was like, oh, this doesn't seem like a normal apartment. But yeah, it's interesting. If you guys ever get the Blu-ray and the commentary is worth watching. Unlike the things like The Exorcist where Friedkin just narrates the whole fucking thing. We always say that.

It's very interesting. It's cool because you watch it. They talk about things. You can notice it right away. Things like on the fly. But, oh, hey, we cut to after the opening. At first, we weren't cutting to him.

a lone camera on his back in his apartment lone hero moment smoking a cigarette like it was supposed to cut into the there was this whole side story I don't know if you noticed when you see rachel wise and her partner for the first time he's got this cast on or a sling he's got a sling on and he has a sling on later on there's this whole cut scene where after the opening, it was supposed to cut right to Rachel and her partner in a park pursuing a gunman and the partner getting shot.

and like this whole that's why he's all cut yeah and they had this whole backstory of her um of a possible affair between her and him wow yeah That poor guy, his whole storyline got cut. I know. And now another one that she got even more fucked. I don't know if you noticed this, but in the very end, not very end, but towards the end... When they bless the sprinkler water and they set the sprinklers off and he just fucking mercs everybody. The first girl he kills is Michelle Monaghan.

Oh, yeah, I noticed that. That was her. Famous actress. You just see her for a second. She has the line that's like, holy water. And then he kills her. So they had this whole cut sequence. I recognized her.

She's there then because they have this whole sequence they cut in sort of the beginning of the film, all this establishing stuff about Constantine's character and everything where he actually... takes home a half devil escort to his apartment and bangs her and you wake up and it's like there's this whole sequence where It's post-coitus and she even has a devil tail under the covers.

Oh, my God. And that was her role. Michelle Monaghan played it. And then they cut the whole thing, but they left her in at the very end. Oh, my God. I would have been pissed. So I actually, because you listeners. should know that literally yesterday we were like, let's cover Constantine. And then, so I saw, I could overnight the blu-ray on Amazon. And then we had a Scotty and I had a Christmas get together today with some friends. And, uh,

I sort of rushed home from that to catch just a commentary. There's two commentaries, but I watched... The other one's probably not as great. But there is 18 minutes of deleted scenes that I didn't watch yet. that's one of them so these all exist on the blu-ray so you're saying there could be a director's cut of this movie yeah there is i want to see i don't know i don't know if it's all in the cut but you can get the blu-ray and see all the deleted scenes for sure no i mean

I wish they would make the director. I know. I know. Yeah. With all those scenes in there. I want to see Keanu Reeves with Michelle Monaghan. I know. So I need to watch. They actually tell you in the commentary, they bring it up like three times and the producer. each time is like, stop watching this now and go watch the Michelle Monaghan escort scene. I'm borrowing that Blu-ray.

What are you doing watching it? We had to start the show, but I'm still going to go back and watch it. But that was one of them. I'm trying to think. Yeah, so the partner was like all these deleted scenes. This Michelle Monaghan escort thing was a deleted scene. But that's why you see her for just a moment. I recognize her right away. I'm not even sure she's credited.

At least not a nine. Really? She is. Never mind. Okay. Is she? Yeah. That's nuts. Yeah. There's a few other deleted scenes too. So I think that. They also said in the conversation, oh, this scene went on for way longer. For instance, the scene where you first meet Gabriel, that scene went on for a lot longer. In the church. Yeah, in the church.

A few things, I think Shia LaBeouf had a little bit more stuff that they cut. Because actually, if you think about it, he's there in the beginning, and he pretty much disappears until the climax. Yeah, he's there at the beginning, and then the whole story with Rachel Weisz and Kenneth Reeves happens, and then when they go to kill them all, he appears again. Yep, yep. So, yeah, as we wrap this up, I'll see if I think of anything else. But that was a lot of the tidbits they had there.

So when he's in the church scene, he's trying to talk to Tilda Swinton there. That's one of the things, too, because he's going to hell because he tried committing suicide, right? That's the reason. I mean, he did commit suicide. Then they brought him back, the paramedics, basically.

and yeah he got a glimpse of hell in that time and yeah and he's pleading his case to her like hey i sent all these half breeds to hell yeah like doing my cause i should be able to get my ticket to heaven and she's like nope you're fucked

Yep, yep. So they envisioned this as a PG-13 blockbuster, but... The MPAA, to the producer's surprise, slapped an R rating on the film for its pervasive, quote, religious horror themes. I can see that. There's not any language. But director Lawrence Francis noted there's no single graphic element causing the R rating. It was just this overall intensity and occult content that they cited. That's dumb.

I mean, I get it. I think of this as an R-rated movie. And yet also, I think if they had known they were going to get an R-rated movie and committed to the rating... it would have improved a movie that i really love they probably could have they could have really raunched it up maybe a little more graphic a little more michelle monaghan i just been throwing it out there's a spitballing that would have been something uh you know just projectile blood

coming out of constantly would be dropping f-bombs left and right oh yeah there's for sure would be yeah him puking up blood there'd just be tons of yeah i could just get a lot gorier with some of it and you know But again, I think that would have been icing on a cake. That might have made the box office numbers go up a little more if it was a PG-13. It might have. Who knows? Get some more people in to see it. But yeah.

I guess that probably wraps it up for us. You know, I know in my head I'm a little angry because there's probably some more stuff in the commentary that I'm forgetting. But that was all, you know, the main shit. yeah it's great man i mean you know other worthless things like i know that rachel wise she did her own stunt where she fell into the pool iron cross style that's pretty cool

Yeah, that shot wasn't originally in the script, but they fought for it. The shot of her sister falling in, so that turned out really good. You know, Peter Stormer. it was his idea to have these oily feet that he had to soil the ground before he walked on it and all this stuff. So there's some cool stuff they had. Oh, I know that some of the deleted scenes comes from the back in the bowling alley. So like the bowling alley, they originally were going to have this extended.

So quote unquote locked and loaded scene where he builds that gun that he uses. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. They were like, Oh, he took apart a clock and used it. Then he used like part of a cane and blah, blah, blah. But they ultimately shifted to.

uh rachel's slash angela's um emotional journey with i think she was holding something that she was looking at during that while he was building the gun i forgot exactly what it was but she was going through an emotional thing at that time well she had the coin right she finds the coin yeah she like she's sort of

is or is channeling balthazar for a minute like becomes him for a second or is channeling him for a second she does the coin flip yeah but that whole thing was extended um there's just again 18 minutes of extra footage in the Blu-ray if you guys pick it up. It would be cool to cut that into a director's cut. I've got a couple other fun facts.

shotgun style. I was trying to make a boomstick round a thing and it never became a thing. I actually remember that and I love it. The boomstick round is awesome. There's ones that like... You feel like when you're narrating this whole episode, it almost isn't worth it to stop and be like,

oh, by the way, Rachel Wise jumped into the pool by herself. Yeah. Anyways. Right, right. But you can do that in a shotgun thing, you know? Do it at the very end, yeah. And the other thing is, for me, was always, like, we get on these, the fun conversations, which is, like, the whole, like...

the whole point is it's a fun talk, but also we wanted to give you guys some behind the scenes. So it seems like real quick, we'll catch up if we've been, if we've been enjoying the, especially a movie like Constantine where I could just.

talk for an hour about how cool it is yeah oh yeah uh so to throw a couple fast ones at you um Apparently, Keanu Reeves bought the shotgun prop after the movie was over and gave it to the director as a gift. Hell was based on like cities. disintegrating from a nuclear bomb that was the like the visual inspiration for that okay um the the um spear of destiny is the same one they used in hellboy in 2004 oh nice oh shit um

They've got... This is one from the commentary. The lore is that in the scene where there's the flying demons attacking them in the street and Constantine lights a... cloth on fire. It's the Shroud of Moses, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yep, yep. And, yeah, and I guess the one other one I had for you was the storyline. that this is based off of in the comic books not the whole thing it's called um

Ah, shit. I just had it. Let me sign it for you guys before we're done. You guys got anything else from the... I mean, that was it. I have surrounded what Scotty was talking about. I saw a couple things here. the holy hand grenades that were actually Christmas ornaments filled with water. Oh, nice. Yeah, that he smashed on his chest to get out of hell, basically. Yeah.

They are making a sequel, finally. I did hear that, yeah. Yeah, they are making a sequel. Oh, they are? They announced it right before. DC Comics did their big overhaul and kind of in James Gunn, we trust to do their movie universe. But he came on and said, We're still doing, that's not going to affect Constantine too. Okay. It's been a long time coming. I mean, they got it. It's Keanu again, right? It's got to be. Oh, it has to be. I mean.

It has to be. Oh, it is. It is going to be him. He's back. Yeah, exactly. Do you think this movie should have been made by now? I wonder... Finally. I know. It really shouldn't have been. Would it be James Gunn and not...

this Francis again? No, no. James Gunn is just sort of like the, he's like the Kevin Feige of DC. He's like overseeing the, the whole movie universe. So he's not going to direct it. Um, But, and I don't know that Francis Lawrence would come back. Sure. It looked like that as IMDb. And... But the whole thing was just like all their movies are going to be part of the same shared universe now. Except for conveniently the movies that are just really successful. The Batman 2 is still coming out.

He's never going to meet James Gunn's Superman, but that movie was so successful that they're going to let them do another one. Nice. Well, Francis Lawrence was talking about how... really this film was sort of is occurring after a possible prequel you know it's like Constantine's established already. We're just cutting into his life. Right, right. Dangerous Habits. That's the name of the storyline. Dangerous Habits. I think I had that early in the notes and I didn't say it, but yeah.

And if you're trying to read Constantine comics, there are 26 graphic novel trade paperbacks that you could read from the original run. Wow. They are... they're starting to reprint them as omnibuses, but they're doing the omnibuses like based on the writer. So they're actually kind of screwy. because they would jump writers sometimes, and they have not reprinted even half the series that way, so it would be hard to read. Okay, okay.

Well, yeah, I mean, finally, that's Constantine. We've talked about covering it for a long time. We've been wanting to do this one. Rob keeps shooting it down, so here we are without him doing it. Yeah, this is great. I'm glad we got that. I mean, it's a classic. It's horror. It's 21 years old.

now almost yeah yeah um you know gonna be make another one yeah yeah perfect perfect timing to re-watch this one to get ready for the second one yeah yeah all right guys uh let's move on to what did you watch and i'm i don't know what the dude i've been lately

Do you watch anything, Carmelo? Watch Christmas movies. I watch some Christmas shit, I know, with the family, right? Yeah, I always get in that Christmas run with the family. I did watch...

Wait, did I talk about this already? Did I talk about how I watched the new Hell House and it's not found footage? Did we already talk about it? Yeah, I think so. Okay, never mind. I won't read this. And did we talk about Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, I think? Yeah, I think we did, because I watched it too. Yeah, we talked about that. We're getting old and we're forgetting shit now. I saw Black Phone 2. Oh, yeah. How was that? I enjoyed it a lot. I think the first Black Phone is...

magnificent. The second one is not bad by any stretch and it does some cool shit that wraps around the first one. It's a great sequel. It's a great movie. The first one I just love that much. I think like the sequel was a good like seven or eight. The first one's a 10. It's hard to beat that first one. Yeah, it's hard. But they basically turned Ethan Hawke into like Freddy Krueger.

and wow yeah i would check it out it's kind of like isolation and kind of that cold yeah it's the cold the snow it's like how have they never done this with freddie or jason i do like that so do you think there's more to come then in the universe of

black phone god i don't know how i mean really like the like the whole point of the first one is just serial killer but you know there's ghosts and like spirits so it's not crazy to be like and he's now a ghost or a spirit in the second one but i i don't I mean, I don't know. I mean, if they wanted to. How are they going to do it? It would be a real stretch. It would be a real stretch. And that's never happened with any of the Freddy's or Friday the 13th.

Yeah, I mean, with them, they did the first movies and never again touched them. Yeah, that was it. I've never seen any sequels of those. Yeah, even though people have talked about it over the years. They logically just went from one to the other. Like they never ended it and then started it again. That's right. I mean, that's exactly what they'd have to do. They'd have to make Black Phone 3 and then just like pretend. This is a different type.

But it's like funny is like Freddy Krueger's a lot like that. Like only a couple of those Freddy movies like connect. Jason actually like, especially those first couple, they pick up right where the one before just leaves up. Yeah.

Yeah. We are going to revisit. We will revisit. We were actually maybe going to do that this week. Friday one. But I definitely want to make sure Rob can make that all four of us. We just want to start, we talked about this already, but we want to start going back around to cover some of the old ones we did like seven years ago that we need to just... give more to again. Our journalistic skill has increased a lot. Yeah, it really has. We've gotten a lot better as hosts, I feel.

So, yeah, I think I was just looking at my watch history on Prime anyways. I could have watched something on a different streaming network, but it was still the last thing I watched was like Hell House LLC or the newer one. uh, whatever else. So yeah, nothing in the, I've been doing some family Christmas movies, nothing really in the horror realm. I haven't watched like, like Krampus or anything or like, I know you don't watch Krampus.

Probably, if I look at the calendar here, I was thinking this in my head, but I didn't verify by looking at the calendar. I think we... would probably get one more episode in and cover a Christmas one, but maybe I'm mistaken. I would love suggestions for a Christmas one because I feel like we've done Navias, guys. So if we stick to the schedule, actually, and we could pre-record it like we do are right now, our next episode will release on Christmas Eve.

Oh, that's too good to... That would be sick. So we need to do a Christmas-related film, horror film. That would be great. We've done a few. We have done Krampus, but... Maybe we can revisit. Did you do Krampus for this, Carmelo? I can't quite recall. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was there for Krampus. We did Black Christmas, I think. You did Black Christmas. We did Silent Night, Deadly Night.

I don't know. I wasn't on that one. We did, though. I'm pretty sure. We'll scour for a Christmas movie, and we will supply that to you for your Christmas Eve at midnight listening. Yes. So while you're up putting together that fucking godforsaken dollhouse at midnight, which I've done, of course. Oh, yeah.

You can turn on our episode release and you can listen to it. Maybe we should do like the mean one or something like that. Did you see that? They did like a Grinch horror movie. Oh, did they? Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, we did. There's some newer ones. That one with David Arbor. Violent Night. I watched it last year.

That was great. Yeah, there's some good ones. Googling it, there's a couple that stand out, but the vast majority of them are dog shit. Yeah, we did a couple of corny, cheesy ones. Actually, there's a new... Silent Night, Deadly Night that just came out this year. And I only know that because a producer friend of mine helped produce it and was posting about it. I don't want to call him our buddy, but Jamie from...

97 minutes. Oh, really? Was a producer on the new Silent Night, Deadly Night. From the folks who brought you the Jeepers Creepers Reborn or whatever? Exactly. So I don't have a lot of high hopes for it. Now, I didn't... To be fair, I have not watched Jeepers Creepers Reborn, but I've also purposely not watched it. So I saw it like... In passing, and I just couldn't do it. It was pretty bad. Was it pretty bad? It was like unwatchably bad. Well, to be fair, we know the studio that did that Reborn.

We just don't like them at all. But I think the producer that we know, separate from that studio, did Silent Night, Deadly Night. So it might be better. And he's sort of a cool guy. So it might be better. That's good enough. We could do like... Did we ever have done Jack Frost? The one with... We might have done Jack Frost. He might have done that. I think like two Decembers, we hit all the classics. We did. One year we did like... Because we were doing it weekly.

every week and then i think like the next year we were still doing every week and we hit like there's there's not a lot more than like eight good classic slay We didn't do Santa's sleigh, the one with Goldberg in it. We didn't do that. I haven't actually seen that. There's a 1972 Silent Night Bloody Night. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, we'll bring you guys something. We'll bring you guys something. A little Christmas treat.

Well, thanks, guys. We had a great time, as always. Yeah, exactly. I think that concludes. None of us watch shit. Sorry about that. I've been watching Ted Lasso. I got a new... I changed my phone. my phone plan, and I got a new iPhone. They gave you free Apple Plus. They gave me free Apple TV, and I'm like, what do you watch on Apple TV? Dude, you got to watch C. Jason Momoa. C.

It's called just C-S-E-E with Jason Momoa. It's so fucking good. It's an Apple TV Plus original. It's his best thing he's ever done. He fucking slays it, man. You'll love it, man. You will love it. Yeah, thanks. But Ted Lasso's great. I want to milk it while I got it. You got to milk it, dude. See, it's like it's about far in the future when people have lost sight for like hundreds of years.

And they have one-sided person now. And it's awesome. It's fucking awesome. I like Ted Lasso, too. Liz and I watched that. I haven't watched Ted Lasso. I've got to watch it. It is just a feel-good... comedy just it is good time just it is if you're if you're down ted lasso can can lift you up for sure and and if you're not down ted lasso is still just it's still good

All right, guys. All right, guys. Appreciate you listening. Get your horror halftime memes in. Body Melt Blu-ray is going out to Dan Dalton. We really appreciate it. Oh, and I got another shout out that I almost fucking forgot. Again, I want to shout out to Jocelyn Rodarte. for joining us on Patreon. Thank you so much. She also is very active in the group, so really appreciate that, Jocelyn.

um we need to beef up our you know it's because of people like you that we're contemplating beefing up our patreon stuff again so we gotta do it i'd love to hear suggestions from people like what what do you want like if you are a patron tell us what you want and if you're not a patron tell us what would make you become a patron exactly yeah so what we have there already is whole nother show called the cult classic action show

where we just cover action movies in the exact same fashion that we cover horror movies. So that's already sort of there, and we could continue that if that's what you want. But if it's something else, I don't know. Maybe it's nudies of Carmelo. I don't know.

Could be. I paid for law school with CarmeloLove.org. Or our post-game or pre-game conversations that we have. Yeah, but those don't always happen, but sometimes they do. We can just press record when we... start our call yeah exactly there is there is sometimes so all right guys well yeah we'll get you something on christmas eve it'll be a good time we'll have a you know we'll give away another blu-ray so get those memes in for

from this week. And we appreciate you listening. Rate and review us if you can on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We appreciate that. And we'll catch you next time. Talk soon, guys. Don't you blame the movies! Movies don't create psychos! Movies make psychos more creative! There will be blood.