Big Daddy Dispatch: April 2024 (Patreon)

Dispatch Eighty Five March 29, 2024

Greetings WHM Family!

That’s right, it’s finally here! Because NO ONE demanded it! It’s ….Sheenpril! A rainy month dedicated entirely to Charlie Sheen films. Why, do you ask? Well…Just look at the art, it’s a ton of fucking fun! Also, we wish we could control whether or not we covered Charlie Sheen movies, but we used those parts to make our robot friends (Chris Cabin). We’ve recorded about half of these already and have been having a ball, this whole exercise is an excuse to talk about a diverse set of flicks from the 80’s and 90’s. Give in to the fun! It doesn’t mean you like Charlie Sheen, we do hate movies, after all.

Banner Credit: We Hate Movies Logo by Felipe Sobreiro

Image Credit: Sheenpril Cover Art by Felipe Sobreiro

WHM SPRING TOUR STARTS IN A FEW WEEKS

CAN YOU EVEN STAND THE WAIT? We can’t! We are just a few short weeks away from hitting the road again to play a murderer’s row of kick ass live shows in some great cities. Take a look below and get your tickets NOW before they sell out!!

Thursday, 4/25 we will be in Atlanta, Georgia at the City Winery talking Gerard Butler’s Gamer! Get Tix here!

Tuesday, 5/14 we will be going to Houston, Texas for the first time to do a show at the Houston Improv talking about Robocop 2! Get Tix Here!

Wednesday, 5/15 we’ll be finishing this leg of our 2024 tour by returning to one of our favorite cities, Austin, Texas, this time playing Cap City Comedy to do a We Love Movies episode on From Dusk Till Dawn! Get Tix Here!

You do not want to miss these shows, so get your tickets now!

LAST MONTH ON WHM

Episode 726 – Night Game

Batter up! Listener Request Month 2024 kicked off with the fellas heading out to Houston to help poor, old Roy Scheider hunt down a serial killer who slays according to how the Astros do. How did this cop end up engaged to his ex’s daughter? Isn’t this wildly similar to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective? Would the HPD be able to recover from a black eye of this magnitude? The first of two unplanned instances of hook-handed killers in this year’s Listener Request Month.

Episode 727 – The Fugitive (Patrons Only)

Ladies and gentlemen, our national nightmare is over: the fellas have covered The Fugitive. The gang headed out on the run with Dr. Richard Kimble to find out who killed Sela Ward and framed him for her brutal murder while simultaneously escaping the clutches of God’s most perfect marshal, Sam Gerard. Has the city of Chicago ever looked better or been used more effectively? Is this the best performance by Harrison Ford in any movie? Can this be called the most re-watchable American film of the 1990s? Prepare thyself for the Tommy Lee Jones impressions.

Episode 728 – Indecent Proposal

The boys were off to Vegas to see Robert Redford sweet-talk his way into a million-dollar deal to ball Demi Moore and save her husband’s plans to build his dream house. Why are we made to like Redford in this? Is the drama of Woody Harrelson’s character the fact that he’s not looking at jobs he’s overqualified for? How isn’t Demi leaving both of these chuckleheads in the dust after all of this? We await the break-off series about Seymour Cassel’s handler impatiently.

Episode 729 – Rollerball (2002)

Strap on your stupid helmets and your stupid body armor, it’s Rollerball time! Andrew, Steve, Eric, and Chris put on the roller-skates, said a few prayers, and headed out onto the course with Chris Klein and LL Cool J as they try to fix corruption and a murder plot going on underneath the grim spectacle of the titular future-sport. Is this one of the best examples of a remake totally missing the point of the original? What the fuck is with the night vision? How much Paul Hayman do you think you can handle? Cause this movie is going to triple that number, if not quadruple it.

Episode 730 – Young Einstein

The guys close out Listener Request Month 2024 with a time trip back to the height of Ozploitation, which allowed a man named Yahoo Serious to make an historical fiction comedy about Einstein making a shitty guitar, having the greatest beer recipe in the world stolen from him, and romancing Marie Curie. How many times did Eric watch this as a kid? Are we supposed to be laughing at this or just staring blankly with a dumbfounded smile? What was the thought process with ending this with an atomic bomb that has to be Rock-‘n’-Rolled back from detonation? The fact that we allowed this man to make three movies unsupervised is a painful and overdue condemnation on modern big-studio moviemaking.

WHAT ARE WE WATCHING?

(Kingdom of the Spiders, 1977)

This is a space for us to talk about some NON-We Hate Movies related content that we've shoved into our eyeballs in the last month: TV, Movies, Cartoons, and Sports (maybe?). Just about anything that isn't pornography.

Andrew:   

Here’s another grab bag’s worth of crap I’ve been stuffing in front of my eyeballs the last month:

The Cellar (2022) - A really not-great horror film the sees star Elisha Cuthbert tangle with a haunted basement. One of those newer horror movies that feels like they just kind of plucked a bunch of tropes out of thin air and taped them together to make this movie—disappeared kid, old house that came cheap, previous owner was into seedy shit, big monster creature, alternate dimension. Big time SKIP IT.

 Night Shift (2023) - Another DUD from the contemporary horror section of my streaming video store. I rented this because I’m a big fan of Lamorne Morris. His performance as Winston Bishop (a.k.a. Winnie the Bish) on the show New Girl is one of the best sitcom performances of the last 20 years. So, naturally, I was stoked to check this out. Well, don’t get excited Lamorne-heads, because my dude is barely in this thing. It’s basically a haunted motel movie that’s pretty dull in execution, contains few scares, is slowly paced, and has no atmosphere to speak of; by the time a movie-shattering twist happens, I had long checked out of this motel hell.

 Saint Maud (2019) - FINALLY! Some solid contemporary(ish) horror. Yes, it’s from 2019, but I totally missed it after the Pandy fucked its release. After seeing (and loving) Love Lies Bleeding, I had to check out Rose Glass’s previous work, and HOT DAMN. An incredibly solid and horrifying bit of religious horror that, wow, when I think about the fact that I just saw Immaculate last weekend… woof, night and day, folks! Definitely seek this out if you haven’t yet, or if you just saw LLB and were curious what else the director has done.

 Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) - So last month I wrote about watching Gary Busey in Act of Piracy, well, because I’m sometimes known to do this, I decided to head down a rabbit hole to try and check out every directorial effort of stunt-man-turned-director, John “Bud” Cardos. The next film of his I watched after the Busey yacht action-er was this film, a late-70’s B-monster movie starring William Shatner as a cowboy/veterinarian who tries to help an entomologist figure out why his small town is being besieged by thousands of deadly spiders. It’s an incredibly watchable little movie and Shatner is certainly putting on a show. Monsters killing people? Town in danger? You better believe old Bill tries to sleep with this woman right in the middle of it all! It’s floating around on Tubi if you’re curious.

 Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000) - I finally finished this SyFy (then Sci-Fi) Channel miniseries that you can find in-full on YouTube. It’s not without its moments, but I would say it’s only for the true Duneheads among us. It’s 4 1/2 hours long, it’s cheap as fuck, and it’s filled with actors no one knows, so you really have to be curious as to how they adapted it from the book—pretty faithfully, it turns out. Bonus points for Ian McNiece as the Baron—“Sorry for the delay, Emperor!” (Real heads get it.)

Chris:  

SPL 2: A Time for Consequences: In the middle of making his not-so-good Monkey King trilogy, the great Soi Cheang took a break to put his imposing talents for action, horror, and operatic emotional expression to work on the in-name-mostly sequel to Wilson Yip’s hugely entertaining SPL: Kill Zone. There are plenty reasons to see the original, not the least of which would be an early face-off between Sammo Hung and Donnie Yen, but Cheang’s unimpeachable instincts make the second one rank among the best action films of the 2010s. Ong-Bak himself Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, the star of the hyper-successful Wandering Earth films and the director of the Wolf Warrior films, are the heroes who find themselves at the center of two intertwined need-a-new-organ plotlines, one involving Jaa’s daughter and the other involving a ruthless crime lord’s attempt to literally steal his brother’s heart. It can swerve into egregiously convoluted terrain at times but its relatively easy to follow the contours if you’re interested. If you just want fights, simply sit back and enjoy a bit of mana from heaven. For my fight-movie people, also worth looking out for: Ryoo Seung-wan’s The City of Violence, which was shot on Super 16 and feels like the first post-Kill Bill South Korean action film, and Chang Cheh’s The Flying Dagger, a unique narrative and stylistic twist on the reliable wuxia formula from one of its greatest masters.

 The Ballad of Cable Hogue: Like Fred Wiseman and John Ford, Sam Peckinpah is a director I love so much that I try to take my time introducing myself to his entire filmography. I count Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Getaway amongst my favorite films ever made, and this one will make that three of his films to now carry that distinction. Jason Robards is one of my very favorite actors, and this may be his best film role ever, at least from what I’ve seen of his on-screen work. He plays the titular Wild West wanderer who builds a life for himself when he barely escapes death and unexpectedly founds a big watering hole for horses and travelers in-between two big cities. The late David Warner gives what may be his best performance as well as the opportunistic trickster in a priest’s collar that becomes Cable’s closest friend. There is a revenge plot involved, but that speaks less to Peckinpah’s loving depiction of criminality and disrupted catharsis and more to do with the shaggy, endearing view of the business of being human at a time when you are often pushed to forget that part of you that the director and Robards infuse the entire film with. Seek this out immediately if you are into Westerns. There are very few that are as deeply satisfying and organically moving as this one ended up being.

 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: I’ve been dipping in and out of Richard Fleischer’s autobiography for the last few months or so and have been making my way through his genre-hopping filmography at the same time. This last led me to his excellent daytime noir Violent Saturday, starring Victor Mature and Lee Marvin, and this past week, it led me to use my Disney Plus account for something besides The Simpsons reruns and X-Men cartoons. Namely, to finally watch their James Mason vs. Kirk Douglas adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The acting is excellent but there’s a bit of bloat on this puppy, especially when the writing turns towards matters of humanism with Douglas trying to convince Mason’s Nemo that the military can, in fact, be trusted with revolutionary technology that can be weaponized. If you can stop your eyes from rolling after these scenes, the rest of the film is rousing, tense, and genuinely funny in parts, and it’s quite clear that this was a major influence on one of the best films of the aughts, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It’s long, but worth the time, especially if you have kids who will love the sea-lion crew member and Mason’s damn-the-world attitude.

Eric:  
Breaking In (1989) - I was surprised by this one. It's a delightful 80's movie that has been seemingly lost to the sands of time. I hadn't heard about it and don't remember anyone bringing this into any conversation. It's really fun! Burt Reynolds plays a seasoned thief named Ernie who takes Casey Siemaszko's Mike character under his wing. Great ending too which I won't spoil here. Seek it out. 

 Fear City (1984) – It’s an Abel Ferrara film, so you know you're off to a good start, but this movie feels like it can never get fully into drive. It does have atmosphere up the wazoo, with great NYC grime, but I don't buy Tom Berenger playing Italian and that is kind of a problem. Cast rounds out with Melanie Griffith, Rae Dawn Chong, and of course the great Billy Dee Williams (personal friend of mine) who barks out anti-Italian slurs throughout which is a ton of fun to watch. 

 Alphabet City (1984) - Alphabet City resident Johnny (Vincent Spano) wants to get his sister and mother out of this neighborhood and their lives of prostitution. Kind of a sleepy movie but the back half where they're on the run, hiding out, and trying to escape is fun. Michael Winslow is also in this, which was a fun surprise. 

 I also recently rewatched these two stone cold classics as an Assassination Double Feature:

 The Parallax View (1974) - One of the best thrillers ever made. It's hard to top the era of 1970's paranoia movies like this and The Conversation. If you haven't done this one yet, do yourself a favor and get on board. Don't think Warren Beatty has ever looked better. Plus, Hume Cronyn is great in this. 

 In the Line of Fire (1993) - Clint Eastwood being old and trying to date around the office kinda gets in the way of a firecracker of a picture. John Malkovich is at the top of his mustache twirling game. I hadn't seen it in about 20 years and it did not disappoint.

 Steve:
Here’s a pair of flicks I specifically went out to see to talk about on Monday’s On-Screen Live, but wound up being too sick to do so:

 Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire: I truly didn’t realize how much Afterlife had eviscerated any good will and chummy nostalgic feelings I have for The Ghostbusters until I was fully seated for this one. It’s all gone for me, folks. Like, I’m sure I’ll still love the original when I watch it again (though it feels like we just did that for WLM so it’ll be a good while before that happens), but they really ripped the copper wiring out of the franchise last time. There’s nothing else to re-visit. So… maybe invent? They do in this one, kinda! It’s just an over-stuffed mess with at least five Ghostbusters too many (Podcast is back? OK!). The McKenna Grace ghost sexual awakening could’ve been interesting if they allowed it any room to be, but we don’t have a lot of time for it because Finn Wolfhard needs to sell you Cheetos ASAP! The villain looks cool, but can’t speak or possess anybody which, ya know, really limits the COMEDY that can come from those scenes. I’ve just never, ever cared about the Ghostbusters saving the day; make me laugh, folks, please! Please let this whole franchise die. I’m begging you.

 Immaculate: A slow burn to a kind of bonkers finish. I’d say it’s fairly watchable for the nunsploitation set (of which I count myself a charter member).  Sydney Sweeney is…not great, but I DO think she pulls off a difficult ending, which, along with her performance in last year’s Reality, makes me hopeful she’s got a great performance in her somewhere. Be warned though, this movie falls apart if you think about it for even 8 seconds.

 Oh, and also, check this out:

 When Evil Lurks (2023): Oh, fuck yeah! I found out about this movie by creeping on Chris Cabin’s twitter comments to friend of the show Josh Lewis and became intrigued. I say, go in as blind as you can and buckle the fuck up. This was a stone-cold delight (even though it’s a pretty grim flick), surprises abound, it has great set pieces, and an excellently fresh take on the whole demonic possession genre.

 PATREON MAILBAG LIGHTNING ROUND

(Southland Tales, 2006)

Here's a fun space where folks on Patreon get to ask us Questions directly.

This month's entry comes from Jeff, from Bloomington, IL who asks: “For better and for worse what movies have most changed your initial opinions upon a second or multiple viewings?”

Andrew:  I’ll do two: one where my opinion improves, and one where my opinion changes toward the less-positive. First, I think Reservoir Dogs is a movie that lost a lot of its shine for me upon repeat viewings. I can attribute this some to the film itself, but also to (not the fault of the film at all) the onslaught of Tarantino knock-offs it spawned. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive a movie for something like that. But I do think that as far as a breakout film, it’s of course deserving. I also just think QT got much, much better as the years and films went on.

 Now, the other side, I think a film that I got sweeter on the more times I watched it was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I remember seeing it as a kid and being (rightfully) bored by it, however as I got older and the repeat watches picked up, I began to enjoy it more and more. I really love it now and seem to find ways to enjoy it more with each viewing! Hmm, maybe a rewatch this weekend? 

 Chris: Not sure if I’ve covered this one before, but the first time I saw David Lynch’s Inland Empire, I thought it was hot garbage that got by through the herculean efforts of Laura Dern alone. To be fair, it is still relatively low on my Lynch ranking, but a second viewing alone at home a full decade after I first encountered it at the New York Film Festival, during my first time covering any fest as a professional critic, changed my mind. I blame some of my initial dislike on the brashness of being a young critic starting to get some respect from people you admire, but it’s most indicative of how I have changed as a viewer. In 2006, I was a year out of college and still was obsessed with Paddy Chayefsky and screenwriting first and foremost, an obsession that persisted until I read Jonathan Rosenbaum and David Bordwell and heard what Chayefsky said to Vanessa Redgrave. If you watch movies primarily for the pleasures of fine-tuned plot and story, Inland Empire will do almost nothing for you in a best-case scenario and will actively piss you off at worst. It’s a movie that you can only really understand through its visual and non-verbal elements, and only then does the liberative and furious delights of this insane movie, as well as the bottomless ingenuity of Dern’s performance, comes to light in a very ugly and dark-looking piece of work. Also highly recommend Amy Taubin’s Film Comment piece where she compares/contrasts this with another movie I love deeply and without qualification, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.

 Eric: One that springs to mind is Starship Troopers. I had been counting down the days until the theatrical debut and was expecting maybe the set-up of the next big sci-fi franchise. I was 14 years-old and clearly too dumb for it to click for me initially. I had all these prebuilt expectations. Now every time I see it, I dig it more and more. It really is a great movie. Although when the Fleet's big ship break apart - that's still some of the worst CGI I've ever seen. 

 And on the other end of things, Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace, I've come around on. You can hear more about that in our Redux episode from this past September! Also, I echo Andrew's sentiments on Star Trek: The Motion Picture and would add Generations. Wow, I somehow made this entirely about science fiction. 

 Steve: Ok, first and foremost, the BIGGEST turn I’ve ever had on a film belongs to Southland Tales. Not only did I “not like it” upon its initial release, I was a complete jerk about it and thought it was BEYOND STUPID and taunted my good friend Chris Cabin for liking it. Cut to about 15 years later in the middle of a world-wide pandemic and the movie’s critiques of the Bush era hit differently. All the satire hit, the boldness of it, the underlying anger, it’s all there and is probably one of the best critiques of the Bush era that we have. So yeah, I was wrong and CHRIS CABIN WAS RIGHT.

APRIL SCHEDULE

Say what? The schedule in advance?! It's the least we could do! By subscribing to this newsletter you get a sneak peek at what we're putting out in Sheenpril!

Episode 731 – Major League

Episode 733 – The Rookie (1990)

Episode 734 – Terminal Velocity

Episode 735 – The Arrival (1996)

Episode 735 – Men at Work

Patreon Episodes:

We Love Movies – Wall Street

Animation Damnation: Skeleton Warriors: “Flesh and Bone” (s1, e1)

The Nexus: TOS: “The Savage Curtain” (s3, 22), TNG: “Reunion” (s4, e7)

Gleep Glossary: Garik "Face" Loran

MelR0210: 90210 “Home and Away” (s3, e11), Melrose Place: “The Two Mrs. Mancinis” (s2, e25)

Too Old for This Shit: Episodes: 1.2: X-Men ’97: “Fire Made Flesh/Motendo” & “Lifedeath Part 1” and 1.3: X-Men ‘97 “Remember It” & “Lifedeath Part 2”

Once in a Lifetime: Just What the Doctor Ordered

PATREON RSS BUG

If you’re having trouble with the RSS feed updating or episodes not appearing in your app, Patreon has acknowledged this bug and they have a fix: "Try unsubscribing and re-subscribing via your app by re-entering the unique RSS feed you were given and is on our Overview section of the Creator page. Or try using a different podcast app or RSS feed reader." 

Please consult this page and contact Patreon Support if the problem persists. We apologize for any inconvenience you’ve experienced on Patreon and truly appreciate your continued support!

 UPCOMING NEWS AND PROMOTION

On Screen Live continues to kick ass apace each and every Monday at Noon (mostly)! We are back and better than ever, chatting it up about movie news, reacting live to trailers, and we’ve also got occasional guests! Check it out on our YouTube Channel!.

We also have all officially sanctioned VHS Trailer Game episodes up to this point. Eric has also put out great clip packages like WTF Exorcism with Marc Merrin, Dr. Loomis is the Worst Doctor, Dilf Den, George Bailey as Michael Meyers, John Wick-Mentary,  Toby Jones in Bee Movie, Sausage Claus, David!Muppet Hitchcock Presents, and many more! You can also watch the entirety of our Witchboardepisode! Complete with visual gags (most of which are almost funny.). You'll find all sorts of cool shit like Mailbags, VHS Trailer Games, Full Episodes likeRampage (2018),Any Which Way You Can, Bram Stoker’s Draculaand Saw III. Like we said above these are great for sharing and introducing folks to the show. There's so much content there we can't list it all here. Just go and subscribe already! 

Eric and Ben are back in the the blue and are talking about Turtle Races (?!), Pseudo Doctor Ruth Radio shows and WOMEN KILLERS, when they review “The Surrogate”  Listen here!

If you're a fan of the show and a fan of looking sharp, you should check out our merch on our TeePublic store! We have some hot off the presses designs by Felipe Sobreiro such as the Too Old For This Shit and Sheenpril logos, as well as A Certain Fat Director enjoying his favorite film filter of all time! We also have "The DILF Den", and a "Crispy Critters" design from friend of the show, Nathan Hamill!  There’s a ton of other great designs like The VHS Trailer Game Logo, Time Runner, Demon-o's Pizza, Egg Lawyer, The Order of the Boop, The Kornkast design and many more, with more to come! 

That's going to do it for this month's Dispatch! See you next month!  

Take it easy,
Andrew, Chris, Eric, and Steve
We Hate Movies