School of Movies

Beetlejuice

[School of Movies 2024]

A perennial Halloween favourite for our family, this was Tim Burton's Sophomore effort, after his debut with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure but before he became a Hollywood Titan with Batman (starring Beetlejuice). And I know we give him a hard time a lot, as a purveyor of populist Goth chic to the masses, but when he hits right you get this movie.

And it really does hold up after three and a half decades. Possibly because it's so much fun and so child-friendly that new generations can embrace this ghostly monster party every few years, giving it an evergreen quality. Certainly Willow has loved it since they were tiny, and goes into why on this episode with us. Each member of the cast and crew are firing on all cylinders. It's visually stunning, wickedly gruesome, wildly quotable and utterly hilarious.

And this weekend we get to visit the messy but enjoyable 2024 sequel for the Patreon bonus podcast feed.

Horror is a Spice

[School of Everything Else 2024]

This is a special episode I've been planning for many years, ever since the notion that 'Horror' as we know it is largely a marketing construct, and that stories that deliberately jab at our Fear-response can be found pretty much everywhere.

This is why I decided to go with my favourite metaphor; food) and hone in on the precept that Horror is not a story type, but a spice (or indeed a series of differently flavoured spices with differing properties) that can be sprinkled in lightly or ladled in heavily to produce wildly varying results.

This would be why de facto Horror film series' like Friday the 13th don't frighten me in the slightest, but Shallow Grave, which would be classified as a Thriller in cinematic terms, chilled me to my core, and why the most frightening film I ever saw isn't in the Horror genre at all!

We and our guests work our way up the scary Scoville Scale (the Screamville scale) to establish some genuinely thought-provoking new, fresh and flavourful perspectives, accompanied by some of the greatest and most spine-tingling movie music of all time!

SOM Winter Commissions Season

The window for our Winter Commissions season is now open.

Coming up this October we have shows on the first two Psycho films, (as well as touching on the ill-advised Gus Van Sant 1998 remake of the Hitchcock original.) Then a long-planned episode discussing the Horror genre in a new light. And finally on Halloween, we got us a hot, steaming bowl of Beetlejuice.

Following that we have Nolan-Vember, from the makers of Cloon-June. Sharon and I will be talking about four of his films on the Main Event feed: Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, and on the Patreon bonus feed we will have After School Clubs on Tenet, Insomnia, Following and Dunkirk.

Then in December we are going back to the animated X-Men with shows about ‘97 and maybe more.

So that leaves January open for four episodes chosen by four of you. Again, the standard fee is $150 for a movie, more for TV, comics or video games because of the increased time and energy investment. And as always, it’s not first come, first served, it’s the four we think will make for the best shows.

These places tend to fill up very fast, usually within a few days, so get in touch via email, Patreon messaging, Discord, or even twitter, if anybody still uses that hellsite. And we can negotiate these shows into reality.  

Psycho II

[School of Movies 2024]

This was a commissioned episode for Dean R who was very keen for us to examine this 1983 follow-up to the 1960 classic. This film brings back Anthony Perkins after Norman has served his time and behaved well in crazy-jail, with the 'Mother' persona seemingly dormant.

But now we, as the audience may find ourselves strangely onside with the mild-mannered, respectful man, seemingly genuinely trying to go straight, and surrounded by people who want to give this multiple-murderer a piece of their mind (knock it off, idiots, it's crowded enough in there!).

Meg Tilly (sister of Chucky's bride, Jennifer) plays Mary, a down-on-her-luck waitress whom Norman really seems to want to help back onto her feet, as this torrid story circles into an operatic and tragic conclusion. We close out with a synopsis of the entirely unrelated book "Psycho 2" by Robert Bloch; a novel so hated by the studio that they made their own sequel here.

Psycho

[School of Movies 2024]

For this rather special episode, we firstly welcome to the show for the first time, director Alfred Hitchcock, as we examine his most famous and most revisited film, Psycho (1960). This became the wellspring from which modern-day detective thrillers emerged. But it also has tangled roots in Horror and the grubby stepchild of its sub-genres, the slasher. While other films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) and John Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962) -both weirdly starring Robert Mitchum- were also hugely important, Psycho was less about the stalking killer as it was a torrid dive into the swampy waters of their mind.

Deriving from a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, who lived down the road from Ed Gein as he was being arrested for trying to make a woman-suit, this story, along with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs (1988) assisted greatly in the lurid, pulp sensationalism of the twisted deviant killer-man-in-a-dress mythology. Despite quiet, clear, firm, researched and experienced protestations from trans folk and their allies who keep having to remind the world at large that they aren't toilet-lurking monsters.

We also look at the stunningly ill-advised shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock film, directed in 1998 by Gus Van Sant. Superficially, these are exactly the same film, but the devil is in the details. Next week we will be returning to Bates Motel with the far less well-known, but actually pretty good Psycho II, which more pronouncedly paints Norman as a victim.

Godzilla Minus One

[School of Movies 2024]

If New Empire is the best Kong film, this one qualifies for us as the best Japanese Godzilla film. Kaiju fans are being blessed with an embarrassment of riches in this era (check out the charming and dazzling animated Ultraman Rising for even more of this) and there has never been a better time to wrap your head around why this enormous nuclear lizard is such an enduring icon in his home country.

Journeying back to the 1954 original Gojira, this film re-stages those events in different ways that even more deeply parallel a nation reeling from the mass-traumatic aftermath of World War II. Right now these people are at zero in terms of ability to cope, and Godzilla is set to slam them back even further to minus one (I didn't come up with that, some YouTube channel obsessing over his toughness stats did, but it's rather good).

And yet, while this could be another funerial and mournful lamentation of death and destruction, and abandonment by our leaders, the disgraced kamikaze pilot at the centre doesn't so much have to regain his honour as recognise the value of his own continued existence. This film is life-affirming and helmed by my favourite Japanese director who isn't Hayao Miyazaki; the magnificently gifted and humane Takashi Yamazaki (Lupin III: The First, Stand by Me, Doraemon 1 & 2, Dragon Quest: Your Story)

Guest:

Dan Hoeppner  @MightyMegatron0  of Leftover Army Monsters

Kong X Godzilla: The New Empire

[School of Movies 2024]

Fixed the title on this one, to both distinguish it from 2021s Godzilla vs. Kong, AND to give the rightful prominence to the Great Ape whose movie this most definitely is. Willow suggested the original title would be as misleading as "Loki x Thor: Ragnarok".

This is my favourite of the new MonsterVerse films, by a narrow margin, considering Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is still absolutely magnificent. Just like that 2019 entry, it's also one of my favourite films of the year, for reasons I will elaborate upon in depth here.

Rejoining us for this Hollow-Earth saga of deposing one of several gorilla dictators we've seen on the big screen this year is the chap who knows more about kaiju films than I know about not treading upon the sensitive tootsies of Godzilla fans, who will hopefully be happy to hear we will be back next week for the incredible new Japanese film, 'Minus One'!

Guest:

Dan Hoeppner  @MightyMegatron0  of Leftover Army Monsters

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

[School of Movies 2024]

The initial and glowingly positive reviews are coming in for Transformers One this week. It's the first entirely-animated Transformers movie since the infamous Optimus-Prime-slaughtering 'The Transformers: The Movie' in 1986, and I am happy and hopeful for the future in that regard.

But what of the state of the live action films? The fifth and final Michael Bay-directed mess was The Last Knight in 2017, which did almost HALF the box office of the obscenely successful Age of Extinction in 2014. Then came Bumblebee in 2018, very purposefully different in tone from the leery MacGuffin hunts of the Bay films. It made less again, despite being the only one with heart and soul.

Then in 2023, this seventh entry sought to split the difference with a return to the MacGuffin hunt and big, noisy robot battles of the earlier entries, but with an injection of the humanity and spark of Bumblebee.

This episode contains a bonus; the previously Patreon-exclusive exploration of my re-edits of the five Bayformers. What, if anything can be saved from that towering mountain of extremely lucrative scrap!?

Deadpool & Wolverine

[School of Movies 2024]

One of the biggest films of the year, and the greatest success for the MCU... which weirdly seems to avoid going anywhere near Earth 616, instead acting as either a swansong for the X-Men series, begun in the year 2000, or possibly a phoenix-cry. It really depends on how Marvel handles the Mutants in the next few years.

However, as a focused distillation of some of the greatest strengths of those 13 movies this one succeeds where so many others fail, not by being eye-rollingly insincere, as many publications have asserted disapprovingly, but by balancing (not always magnificently) the snarcasm and fourth-wall assault and battery of the irrepressible Deadpool, once again using humour to mask his pain and anxiety, and the impeccably serious and authentic Hugh Jackman, playing the ruin this Wolverine's life has become entirely straight.

It's a grower and  a shower. In a year otherwise mercifully cape-free, it straps on the spandex in the most form-fitting of ways.

Guests:

Jesse Ferguson of Recorded Tomorrow @TheDapperDM 

Chris Finik @finmonster09

Almost Famous

[School of Movies 2024]

This one is special on a level I am going to find challenging to articulate in a medium as clumsy as the written word. It is a show that has been promised for well over a decade, it took me four recording sessions and a protracted edit over the month of August. It is so densely and richly layered that I would put it in the same category as our shows on Guillermo del Toro and the Lord of the Rings (ironic, since that was the book the writer/director used to convince his mother Alice Crowe that rock music wasn't all just sex and drugs).

This is the fourth film from Cameron Crowe, after Say Anything, Singles and Jerry Maguire, and you will hear in this show just how much his autobiographical experiences and outlook on the world influenced and resonated with me in the late 90s and early 2000s, in a way that has absolutely informed upon not only my character, personality, writing, editing and philosophy, but the way I engage with music itself. Put simply, this movie goes beyond masterpiece and becomes an experience like no other.

Grab your biggest clamshell headphones, get away from the hustle and bustle of the modern world, and immerse yourself in a time period most of us were not present for. A time between the late 60s and early 70s when art and commercialism were engaged in war for our collective attention. One would nourish our spirit, the other would fixate upon our money. This is the story of a 15 year old boy who somehow convinced Rolling Stone Magazine he was a credible music journalist and went on tour with some of the greatest rock bands who have ever mounted the stage.

And it is, on so many levels... True.