Big Daddy Dispatch: April 2023 (Patreon)

Dispatch Seventy Four April 3rd, 2023




Greetings WHM Family!

OOK OOK! Get ready friends for what could quite possibly be the dumbest theme month we've ever done. Here comes APE-RIL! That's right! A month of nothing but monkey movies, and we do want to get ahead of you here on one point: If we mix up Ape, Monkey, Chimp and Orangutan this month, we can promise you we do not care to get it right. It's gonna happen a lot, so strap in. 

This all comes on the heels of a truly outrageous Listener Request month (Renny Harlin Request month?) and as you'll see below a very BUSY Spring from a live show standpoint. This is all to say WHM is firing on all cylinders and giving you some very stupid and very fun content all month long and beyond!

Banner Credit: We Hate Movies The Big Daddy Dispatch by Felipe Sobreiro

Image Credit: King Kong Virtual Live Show Image by Felipe Sobreiro

NEW DATES FOR THE WHM SPRING TOUR (IN PERSON AND VIRTUAL)!



If you've ever wanted to see WHM Live this spring we are giving you NO excuses! That's right, we're doing live shows on both coasts and doing what is bound to be a kick-ass virtual live show for anybody that lives to far too make the in-person shows. It's a busy-ass month!

It all starts on Thursday, APE-RIL 20th, when we suit up from our home studios and to talk about penis-shaped insects as we revisit Peter Jackson's King Kong! This is a Virtual Live show via Moment House that will be available for replay a week after it airs! Also, if you're really jonesing for more WHM content, you should stick around for the After Party, wherein we answer silly questions and run off at the mouth for another hour. 

Then, we rest our bones for about a month and get ready for our West Coast tour! 

On Thursday, May 18th, we'll be at Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco talking about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home! Don't be a green-blooded Vulcan spoilsport, come on out and see us talk Trek in person, for the very first time!

The following Monday, May 22nd, we'll be at the Hollywood Improv in Los Angeles to talk about, Twins (1988)! We love this room, we love L.A. and we love how absolutely weird this Arnold and Danny collaboration gets. You need to see this one!

Then just a month later we are going to be in beautiful New Brunswick, New Jersey doing a LIVE WLM episode on The Birdcage! This is tied into New Jersey Pride and all proceeds will be going to back to the theater, who does amazing outreach for LGBTQ youth in the community. We are stoked to talk this movie and give something back!

These are all going to be incredible shows and the tickets WILL GO FAST! So you want to get all your tickets at WHMPODCAST.COM/TOUR  GET THEM NOW, NOW NOOOOOWWWWWWW!*


*please get them now.
LAST MONTH ON WHM

Episode 662 – The Man Who Would Be King (PATRONS ONLY)



To kick off Listener Request Month on Patreon, the boys head off into the desert with two very white conmen, played by show favorites Sean Connery and Michael Caine, in search of a kingdom to call their own in Afghanistan. Things do not go well! Is Christopher Plummer’s Rudyard Kipling a fanboy for conmen? What would you look for in a private kingdom? Will the impressions be able to hold up for the entire episode? The answer is a very hesitant yes.

Episode 663 – Driven (2001)

Listener Request Month gets off to a speedy start on the main feed, as Andrew, Eric, and Chris follow a season on the international Indie racing circuit with Sylvester Stallone, Renny Harlin, and a cast of forgotten young actors whose high point was getting full-page spreads in the final issues of Premiere magazine. Is this move about racing or dating? Are there any bad guys in this movie? What would that even look like? Why did Renny Harlin, expert in bullet deaths and explosions, take on a racing melodrama? Also, extensive coverage of Gina Gershon’s insane wardrobe.

Episode 664– Equilibrium 

The gang rolls on with LRM and ends up in a world where emotions are illegal and punishable by death from super-assassins called clerics, played by the likes of Christian Bale, Sean Bean, and Taye Diggs. And what if one of those clerics rebelled against the system? Huh? WHAT THEN?! Why is it only poetry and not soft drinks that cause emotional breakthroughs? What’s with the great and powerful Oz B.S. in this movie? Can we get a better way of capital punishment than being flash-grilled? Also, a lengthy discussion about Diggs’ character’s remarkable demise.

Episode 665 – Hard Rain

Decades before The Hurricane Heist, there was Hard Rain, in which Christian Slater and Minnie Driver must protect a town (and a small fortune) from several thieves that come out during a flooding rainstorm. Is there good shorthand for this era of Morgan Freeman movie? Did Ed Asner tell Christian Slater the truth about the CIA and Panama while lounging around on set? Does this qualify as good boat action? Also, Randy Quaid not looking like the world’s number one squirrel-meat connoisseur.

Episode 666 – The Covenant (2006)



To close out a very fruitful Listener Request Month, Andrew, Steve, Eric, and Chris head to the spooky environs of…suburban Massachusetts…to talk about a league of super-beings that aren’t witches, aren’t warlocks, but a secret special third thing with unspecified but very useful powers. What the fuck, Sebastian Stan is in this? What exactly are these water-energy blasts we’re calling powers here? Why didn’t they just give Taylor Kitsch the lead role? You know, because he’s the really, really hot one.

WHAT ARE WE WATCHING?

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: This month I really dove into the "Michelle Yeoh Kicks Ass!" collection on Criterion, and a few other things. Here are some highlights:

Yes, Madam! (1985) - Michelle Yeoh, with a stunningly bad haircut in this movie, partners with Cynthia Rothrock to take on some baddies. Excellent fight choreography throughout of course. 

Royal Warriors (1986) - The airplane sequence in this movie is absolutely bonkers. Also features the great Hiroyuki Sanada. I think my Letterboxd review says it all: “The amount of times I yelled ‘Holy Shit!’ watching this movie…” 

Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) - Last time I saw this before Criterion Channel, it was on a busted ass VHS tape in like 1998/9. Needless to say, I was blown away all over again. Michelle landing the motorcycle on the train is amazing. Jackie’s character is introduced riding a hilarious weekend warrior dad motorcycle and wearing one of the shittiest jackets I've ever seen. It's incredible.

The Stunt Woman (1996) - A fabulous film, more of a drama, set in the world of movie stunt teams. Michelle plays an up-and-coming stunt woman who joins a production company stunt team and also kinda gets involved with the film’s director, played by the always incredible Sammo Hung. 

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968) - Real bonkers movie here. Kinda reminded me of that Treehouse of Horror where Bart’s twin brother is locked in the attic eating fish heads. Caught it on Shudder TV recently—give it a whirl! 

Chris: 
John Wick: Chapter 4 – Hot damn, now that’s a movie! Chad Stahelski finally delivers on all the restrained promise of the first three Wick films. Don’t get me wrong – they’re all good, but none felt as fully satisfying as this one, even the compact fury and low-stakes bombast of the first one. I hate to say it, but the problem with at least the first and third volume is that they’re too small in scope. A world in which a group of highly trained assassins, run by an all-powerful cabal of  elites from across the globe, goes into swarm-mode over the titular hitman-witch’s bloody return cannot be contained by New York City or even the Italian environs of the second film. It needs a Bond-esque freedom to go globetrotting to not only convincingly depict the ultraviolent and intensely paranoid world Stahelski has fashioned, but also to give the time, space, and action required to call on several decades of uniquely physical blockbuster filmmaking to summarize your character and their final statements (hopefully). Stahelski’s confidence as a stylist and as a world-builder feels at full-bloom here, which is needed for a film that takes so much time to show just how unrelenting the forces of The Table are. Most films like this feel like they took the last decade of action movies, high and low brow, and put all the best scenes in a blender, but that’s only a bad thing if you can’t handle the size of such a creation, if you are just looking for easy visual/narrative solutions to finish a movie. John Wick: Chapter 4 often feels familiar in big scenes, but Stahelski crafts all these humongous scenes and set-pieces with genuine care and an expert’s sense of pacing, both in the editing and the active bodies constantly cycling in and out of his frame in crazed contortions. Suddenly, I am much more excited about the prospect of a new Stahelski feature, though I would far prefer him to do the Highlander remake than ::vomit noise:: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Regardless of what he goes in on, I will be there.

Full Time – It would figure that Jean-Luc Godard would shuffle off this mortal coil right as his home country was having a particular hot streak of international releases. Two of the best movies of the young year – Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning – are from major French filmmakers, and then there are two more upcoming releases – Serge Bozon’s Don Juan and Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero – that are more than worthy of your time. On top of all that, there’s the delayed stateside release of Eric Gravel’s Full Time, which has suitably been described as a Safdie Bros. movie if it were focused on the quotidian panic of a divorced single mother barely making ends meet at her fancy upscale-hotel job. The score and camerawork are very much in step with the kind of panic-inducing marathons that the Safdies have honed over the last decade, but Gravel’s aims are more directly political, to the film’s benefit. Laure Calamy’s exquisite central performance is all eyes and inflections, bodily gestures and swift, sobering sounds, strung together as a stirring portrait of a workforce whose struts are just about to give way. Most startling is the way Gravel, working from his own script, not only depicts the small, everyday stresses and misunderstandings that lead to such immense personal, professional, and financial tension, but also how reluctant even its most strained citizens are to change the fundamental idea of what a work-life balance would be. The tragedy of the film is that Calamy’s mother-of-two would be from stability, even if that stability came at the cost of romance, friends, sex, labor unity, and anything resembling inner peace. It’s 87 minutes, and it’s very worth it.

Eric: Here's a big mixed bag of recent viewings.

The Hitman (1991) Chuck Norris in a big ole Cannon Films outing. Not too shabby mostly because Michael Parks plays the villain. It's not great, but Parks delivers in this and the climax is truly insane. It's also the movie that Sidekicks spoofs when Norris and Jonathan Brandis get dusters or trench coats or whatever and have shotguns and mullets. 

Mister Frost (1990) Ever wanted to see a young Jeff Goldblum play a mysterious Hannibal Lecter-type guy that may or may not be the Dey-veel? No, you don't because it is the most boring movie ever made, but I guess I should've expected that considering it's a film production outta Dusty Old Europe.

Kill Me Again (1989) Had no idea the neo-noir western king John Dahl did this, but it features a 1989 Val Kilmer vs a 1989 Michael Madsen. Plus hefty spoonfuls of Jon Greis! It's a decent time. 

Night School (1981) Check this out if you like giallo-type movies and heck, it even manages to make Boston look nice! (If you think Boston is nice, I agree. If you think it's not nice, I agree too. I am you, remember that.)

Alone in the Dark (1982) - Had a lot of fun watching Martin Landau, Jack Palance, and the heavy-set guy who played "Dynamo" in The Running Man as a group of escaped mental patients who wreak havoc during a city-wide blackout. Their doctor? You guessed it, Loose Loomis (Donald Pleasence).

Here's some decent kung fu type stuff I saw recently: Royal Warriors, The Mystery of Chess Boxing, The 7 Grandmasters, The Swordsman of All Swordsmen, King of Kings. 

Steve: Busy, crazy month, but I did watch stuff that wasn't explicitly for the show. Here's a few:

Dracula (1931) - Finally saw this one for the first time, in 35mm and on the big screen! Not bragging or anything, because I should've watched it sooner. Moody, atmospheric, chillingly quiet at times, and you can just smell the invention oozing off the screen. Gorgeous through and through and Bela, sweet Bela, is the creepiest fuck to ever do it. 

Repo Jake - A movie firmly set in Stupid City (but really Los Angeles), we meet Jake a big, burly sweetheart who reposseses cars and helicopters, while he takes care of his friends and tries to bed a young actress. It's a raucous and fun streamer (on Freevee!) that is best watched late into the night when the lack of a plot won't bother you so much. 

Hell or High Water - This was a re-watch for me and man did it hold up. It was one of the rare re-watches that far surpassed the original viewing. Originally, I thought it was just a solid bank robbery joint with a really killer ending. However, watching it again, knowing how it ends and why it ends the way it does really paints the whole movie expressing how difficult it is to be lower middle class in this country (and having been that myself, it's easy to relate!). The bank robbery stuff is still exciting and Bridges gives an unlikable, mumbly and moving performance but the star here this time was Chris Pine. Poor Chris Pine whose film career really deserves better. It's a shame, he's twitchy, empathetic, and unpredictable here, and I would love to see more of that.

Succession - We're only one episode through the final season and hot damn if this isn't one of my favorite shows of all time. It wasn't, but then my wife and I rewatched the whole thing in the lead up for this new season, and yep, it made the list. And as excited I am for it to be back and to learn all of the things that "The Disgusting Brothers" have been up to, I'm really grateful that it's ending. You could easily see a version of this that putters around for three to four more seasons, while we watch these characters back bite and jockey for position over and over again. But finding this ending now, before it wears out its welcome makes this whole thing feel deliberate, alive, and exciting. More shows should do this!

PATREON MAILBAG LIGHTNING ROUND

Here's a fun space where folks on Patreon get to ask us Questions directly. This month's entry comes from 

Jim from Wilmington, OH, who asks: 

Now that WHM is canon in the Scream universe, what would your dream franchise or movie be that you would want to appear in to expand the WHMiverse?

Andrew: I think we gotta get in on the next Hellraiser installment. Can you imagine how hilarious it would be to watch us be tortured by demons?? 

Chris: My favorite franchises are Magic Mike, Alien, and Mission: Impossible, so any of those would make my day, but I am not entirely sure that fits the tone of the show. Honestly, if Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy snuck in a fourth Before film and Hawke had to listen and comment on an episode his son or some other young person made him listen to, that would send me out beaming for sure and would make more organic sense, seeing as Linklater has a real appetite for believable cultural discussions even in completely imagined worlds. If we’re talking most likely to feature us prominently, however, I think the answer is obviously Diary of a Wimpy Kid.


Eric:  I think we could be "fat suited" hitmen/podcasters in the world of John Wick. No, I swear, it's a fat suit! It's for a movie! In a more serious answer, why haven't my dear friends at Star Wars reached out yet? The Star Wars universe is so vast and wide and we do not know enough about the world of entertainment within it. Seems to be entirely strippers or opera houses. No TVs? No podcasts? Why not have Carson Teva crank some podcasts while cruising around in that X-Wing? We can take calls, give advice, and wax politics. See? It doesn't have to be movie related! Call me, Favs.

Steve: I'd have to go with the Alien franchise? We're slobbish enough to be working on the pipes with Harry Dean Stanton, maybe we have some kind of a ship wide podcast nobody seems to like. Then as retaliation for one cum joke too many somebody pranks us with a face hugger in our studio, to hilarious results.

APRIL SCHEDULE 

Say what? The Schedule in advance?! It's the least we could do! By subscribing to this newsletter you get a sneak peak at what we're putting out the first (and quite possibly last) APE-RIL! 

Episode 667 — Dunston Checks In

Episode 668 —  Monkey Shines

Episode 669 — Any Which Way You Can

Episode 670  —  Rampage (2018)

Patreon Episodes:

Patreon Exclusive We Love Movies — Planet of the Apes (1968)

Animation Damnation — Donkey Kong Country: "Vote of Kong-Fidence" (s2, e8)

The Nexus: TOS: "Elaan of Troyious" (s3 e13) TNG: "The Most Toys" (s3, e22)

Gleep Glossary: Wicket W. Warrick

Melr0210: 90210: "Things to do on a Rainy Day" (s2, e26),  Melrose Place: "Duet for One"  (s2, e13)

The Mandalorian Half Hour: Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24

Once in a Lifetime: Spymate (2003)*

*we know, technically not a Lifetime movie, but it fits well with Ape-Ril and it's absolutely not a REAL movie either. You'll love it!

Find all this crap and enjoy it legally, just like we do! Now!

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



Our Youtube Channel continues to kick-ass folks! That's where you can catch all the new WHM On-Screen Live episodes where in we break down Box Office news, react live to trailers, and talk about stuff we're watching, all on a weekly basis! it is MUST SEE viewing for the WHM fan.

We also have all officially sanctioned VHS Trailer Game episodes up to this point. Eric has also put out great clip packages like 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 Witchboard episode! 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 like Expendables 2, City Slickers, Eternals, Saw III, and Resident Evil (2002). 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! 




It's back in stock, baby! You can get a KICK ASS edition of the super fun B-Movie Scanner Cop, which includes our commentary track, which isn't available anywhere else! Get yours here! 

Eric and Ben are back in the the blue and they've got FIVE STARS and the helicopter is swooping in, as they talk about "Grand Theft Auto" with our good friend Andrew Jupin! Listen here!  



Did you know that Andrew has a website? No, it's not an OnlyFans (yet), it's a cool blog for some musings and Jupin-centric goings on. Lookit that fancy graphic from Raphael Sarmento! Check it out at andrewjupin.com

If you're a fan of the show and a fan of looking sharp, you should check out our merch on our TeePublic store! Our newest design is the very risque design by Felipe Sobreiro  fo "The Dilf Den"! Also we have the new "Crispy Critters" design from friend of the show, Nathan Hamill!  We also have a ton of great designs like The VHS Trailer Game Logo, 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! 


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