Spoiler Filled Film Conversation, Hooray!
A bunch of Welsh people talking about films and making stuff.
Well, this aint our first submarine movie so we’ll dispense with the usual jokes about things being long and hard and full of seamen. Shame this movie doesn’t dispense with the poor humour. You don’t see Kelsey Grammer in movies much, do you? Not unless he’s hairy and blue anyways. Down Periscope is a movie we have all seen before here at Spoiler Filled and we don’t remember a thing about it. And that’s saying something considering it ends with a Village People music video. Enjoy?
Some of us here at SFFCH LOVED this film when we only had small, not fully formed brains decades ago. Somewhere over the years, the memories faded and it was lost to obscurity. But this week, like a terrible repressed memory, this film claws it’s way back to the surface and we must deal with consequences it brings. Freddie as F.R.O.7 is a baffling animated film that dares you to try and comprehend some of it’s wacky decisions, decisions that include: an unexplainable anthropomorphic frog car that’s in love with the main character, a Loch Ness Monster musical number, the use of the worst pop songs available in 1992 and using more stereotypes in one film than we have ever seen before.
We all love racing films, right? Especially how they are all so different and don’t rely on the exact same climax in every film, right? Sarcasm aside, we’re sure there are some really good racing films out there, but Days of Thunder ain’t one of them, by our reckoning at least. We mean, if you’re looking for a very toned down Top Gun rip-off with cars then this is certainly the film for you, but we need to cling onto the oddities like: the weirdly misjudged romantic plot which might be a glimpse into the real lives of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, sugar packet demonstrations, threatening medical care with a baseball bat, the overuse of the term ‘Superbowl of’ and a whole lot of of angrily throwing your hat on the floor.
We just remembered that Billy Bob Thornton exists and that he’s great at all this acting malarkey whilst also being a very peculiar human being. And he also writes and directs stuff too! So how could we not set our twitchy sights over One False Move from 1992 and see who is the first to flinch. It’s a tense thriller that was much praised at the time, but does the Spoiler Filled Crew get on with this ponderously slow yet surprisingly violent film? Tune in to find out.
Before he helped Marvel take over the world as Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr had been kicking around Hollywood for a long time. We wanted to go back and see a fresh faced RDJ before the super-stardom and his ‘wilderness years’ shall we say. What we found was Heart and Souls, a supernatural comedy about 4 ghosts from the 1950’s tethered to a boy in order for him to fulfill their unfinished business. Like pretty all movies involving ghosts and a vague afterlife, this movie raises so many more questions than it intends to answer and sets up an interesting premise which it can’t quite pay off. But hey, at least we get to see RDJ pretend to be a black woman pretending to be RDJ!
Yar-Har and fiddle-dee-dee me hearties. Welcome to (hopefully) the start of our next batch of 100 discussions here on Spoiler Filled. We kick off on our road to 500 with Treasure Island from 1990, which purports to be the most faithful movie adaptation of the 1883 novel. The question is: is being totally faithful to the book the best move for a movie adaptation (although, who knows because none of us have read it, surprise surprise)? Up for discussion this time: a divisive Charlton Heston performance, an unrecognizable Christopher Lee performance, a ‘pat-on-the-head, didn’t-he-give-it-a-good-try’ Christian Bale performance, apple barrel tension, cheese deals, easily survivable explosions and Oliver Reed really stretching his acting chops by playing an aggressive drunk man.
It finally happened! We delved too greedily and too deep into the pits of moviedom that we ran out of them and awakened a foul beast: The Remake. So, from now on, be prepared for us to just simply re-do out entire catalogue, repeating the same old stuff whilst only adding superfluous nonsense that wasn’t needed the first time. If only we were doing a Disney live-action remake, it would have fit so well…
We’re only pulling your leg dear listener (or are we…). You’d think that after 400 episodes we would be running out of steam and anything to say about these oft obscure, mediocre, mixed tone movies that we call home. Well, we certainly haven’t and, in fact, we’ve even thought of more things to say about them than we would have liked. So just this once we’re gonna take quick trip to our past, right to the beginning in fact and let some of the crew who never had the chance join in on our discussion of Batman Forever and let them praise/eviscerate any aspect that they’ve been waiting a decade for.
Time to join the bandwagon pretty late again here on the podcast as we re-evaluate the career of Brendan Fraser (even though we don’t do too much of it) as we rediscover the under appreciated Airheads from 1994. We get: Adam Sandler probably at his least ‘Adam Sandler’, an unexpected and extended Die Hard parody, opening doors with tongues, a surprisingly stacked cast for such a forgotten film and some wonderful impressions from our own Jamie.
Get ready for the quickest tangent towards erections we’ve ever had here on Spoiler Filled as we jump into bed with Light Sleeper, a Paul Schrader crime drama from 1992. This time there is: bemusement at the weird middle-class drug dealer lifestyles, wonderings about what superheroes would be putting in their diaries, discussions about the differences between writer-directors and director-directors, anger at nobody actually eating anything and some major aversion for what this film tries to pass for sex talk.
This week the Spoiler Filled crew pull on their waders to explore the knee deep floodwaters of post-apocalyptic London in Tony Maylam’s sci-fi action movie Split Second. Listen now to hear why it’s better for everyone that this movie was never released in smell-o-vision and that Peter Weller and Rutger Hauer are in fact different people, much to Rich’s surprise. There’s also arcane mysteries that in every way defy understanding and an appreciation for the value of functioning fingers and thumbs. Enjoy!
Spoiler Filled Film Conversation, Hooray! 