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Podcast #50: Wrong Side of Town (2010)

In Podcasts on March 28, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Of course, every bad guy in this movie looks like a wrestling fan and/or Kevin Federline.

Of course, every bad guy in this movie looks like a wrestling fan and/or Kevin Federline.

When trying to find a movie that would fit in with my guest’s sensibilities this week, I came up with pretty simple criteria: it needed to have a rapper or a pro wrestler in it. Surprising, Wrong Side of Town does one better: it has both. Unfortunately, this does not make it better; evidently, the number of wrestlers and rappers is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie. Sentient ponytail Rob van Dam stars as an ex-Navy Seal who accidentally kills a non-threatening crimelord’s brother and finds himself running all over town, protecting his family from bad guys (including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Ja Rule) with the help of tiny-machine-gun-toting military buddy David Bautista.

A whole bunch of jumping and confusing car chases ensue in this limp Taken-ish action movie for which I am joined by Navid, host of the Apartment 6 podcast and member of STK. Navid is all over the Internet in various permutations, so follow him.

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The featured song this week is STK’s ‘We Good’ featuring Sius Clay off their album Status Update. You can purchase it through iTunes here. Keep an eye out for the upcoming video!

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Podcast #49: Picking Up The Pieces (2000)

In Podcasts on March 15, 2013 at 7:01 pm
It's impossible to understand exactly how bad the lighting situation is in this movie, but here's a taste.

It’s impossible to understand exactly how bad the lighting situation is in this movie, but here’s a taste.

There are only a dozen movies that Woody Allen appears in as an actor without having any creative input behind the scenes; of that dozen, almost half are throwaway cameos and supporting roles. Picking Up the Pieces breathes pretty rarefied air, being one of a handful of movies that The Bespectacled One appears in a leading role in; too bad it happens to be an enormous sack of crap, a Day-Glo hallucination of a dark comedy filled with recognizable faces and very few recognizable jokes.

David Schwimmer in various states of undress! Sacrilegious jokes! Elliott Gould doing a weird German-Mexican accent! Legendary DP Vittorio Storaro FUCKING LOSING IT! You can’t go wrong. Or you can go very wrong, depending on the way you look at this. Film critic / boy wonder / Fantasia programmer Ariel Esteban Cayer returns for a rootin’, tootin’ good time! Ariel’s fabled presentation on Joseph Gordon-Levitt (appearing here as a pimply kid with no real purpoe) is this Sunday at Katacombes.

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Music this week by We Were Not The Savages. You can find the track Let’s Talk About Me and You at their Bandcamp page and catch them when they launch their self-titled EP at L’Esco in Montreal on April 6th.

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Podcast #48: Malone (1987)

In Podcasts on February 24, 2013 at 5:44 pm
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This is what drew us to Malone in the first place. Note the puffy, Lego-like hair.

A half-assed attempt to put Burt Reynolds in another iconic franchise role, Malone has The Mustachioed One traipsing around the Pacific Northwest with his shirt half-buttoned while attempting to take down a vaguely Mitt Romney-esque villain (played by Uncle Ben from the first Spider-Man movie, Cliff Robertson) with vague nefarious plans. He drives to and fro, sometimes getting into altercations. Suffice to say that this was not enough to make Malone a household name. Comedian and journalist Walter Lyng (of Go Plug Yourself) joins me for a short and sweet  analysis of a movie with very little plot, lots of hair and at least one gross underage kiss from Burt.

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Music this week provided by Dany Laj & The Looks. The song Take It Away off their EP Telepathic Voices can be found here. You can catch them tonight at Barfly in Montreal and at 3030 Dundas St. W in Toronto on March 29th, 2013.

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Podcast #47: Crazy Six (1997)

In Podcasts on February 7, 2013 at 1:59 pm
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Reminder that this is a sci-fi thriller, not a dusty Western.

The hallowed tradition of FeBURTuary seems as good as time as any to return from the will-they-won’t-they hiatus of the last few months. We are back with a rig that doesn’t sound like a lawnmower and a bevy of Burt movies for your listening pleasure. First up is Crazy Six, a post-apocalyptic (in name only) science-fiction (in name only) thriller in which a shabby junkie (played by Rob Lowe at a very confusing time in his life) is pitted between a couple of European monarch gangsters (played by Ice T and a flamboyantly pimped out Mario van Peebles, who speaks most of his lines in French).

Burt appears throughout as a good-ol’-boy cowboy/cop who’s somehow found his way to a job in bombed-out Eastern Europe. It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Well, if you were thinking ‘I really wish that a boring junkie movie like Candy was set in a vague science-fiction dystopia’, have I got a movie for you.

Returning as a guest this week is Cult MTL’s screen editor, Malcolm Fraser.

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Music this week courtesy of Karneef. The track ‘Space’ off the album In Error can be found on Karneef’s Bandcamp page. Many apologies to Karneef for taking a hiatus in the middle of saying I would play the song.

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Podcast #46: The Chaperone (2011)

In Podcasts on December 13, 2012 at 10:29 am
the-chaperone-0

The voice of Lisa Simpson and the voice of the people, together at last. Viva la revolution.

You had almost given up on me, hadn’t you? After a couple of bungled attempts, the hiatus finally ends today with The Chaperone, a not-really-comedy that finds WWE superstar Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque as an ex-con also serving as a chaperone for his daughter’s (Ariel Winter from Modern Family) school trip while his former partners (led by scumbag character actor extraordinaire Kevin Corrigan) try to retrieve a bag of money that also made its way on the bus. Lessons are learned and brows are furrowed almost perpetually.

Joining me this week are Walter and Keith from 9to5.cc’s Go Plug Yourself, Montreal’s premium interview podcast that often devolves into wrestling talk, making them perfect guests for an ostensible kids’ movie starring a wrestler that talks way more than he beats people up. We discuss Fraggles, wrestling injuries in great detail, the Montreal podcast scene and various other delights. Please note that recording a podcast is not like riding a bike and I seem to have forgotten how to make this sound optimal – it is, however, listenable. And hilarious. And sexy.

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Music this week by The World Provider. The song ‘Tough Signal’ off the album History of Pain can be found here.

You can catch Walter doing standup comedy around town – he’s also putting on the third annual edition of The Hilarious Holiday Hoedown at the Wheel Club in NDG.

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Podcast #45: Campfire Stories (2001)

In Podcasts on October 30, 2012 at 6:29 pm

Just a good ol’ fashioned CGI snake strangulation while tripping balls in the woods.

October draws to a close with a viewing of the truly disturbing Campfire Stories, a lame-ass horror anthology based on an imaginary comic book by the CEO of Felix the Cat Enterprises that gave early credits to actors like Charlie Day, Abigail Spencer, Rob McElhenney, Jamie Lynn Sigler, John ‘Eyebrows McAnimeFace’ Hensley and a young Perez Hilton as well as capturing the shitty early 2000s incarnation of The Misfits in its ICP-like glory. Told by The New York Dolls’ David Johansen in full Tom Waits mode (I assure you that the multiple musical references end here), Campfire Stories is public-access-level horror in its most delightfully embarrassing form.

Here to brave the terrifying tales with me is Ariel Esteban Cayer, boy wonder of the film writing world (Fangoria, Panorama Cinema, Spectacular Optical). Ariel and I discuss the generally dicey subgenre of horror anthologies, the film’s deep-running moral core (or not), a show narrated by a blue cockroach that we can’t remember the name of and other GHOULISH DELIGHTS in this last episode of October.

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Music this week by Play Audio. The track ‘When the Bomb Drops’ can be found at their Bandcamp.

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Episode #44: Busted (1997)

In Podcasts on October 22, 2012 at 7:54 pm

Whether or not this is an actual boner joke is really beside the point here.

Finally! After about a month of messing around, here is the not-really-lost Lost Episode recorded in sunny Toronto, Canada with the increasingly elusive, hobo-like Dan Weir!  Having recently acquired a phat stack of crap from reliable crap merchant Honest Ed’s, I gave Dan first dibs on the movies and he picked Busted, an unassuming-looking sex comedy that also doubles as Corey Feldman’s sole directorial effort to this day. It is, as you can assume, super shitty. In what I can only assume will come across as a historic event, we discuss the general grossness of sex in the 90’s, that one Ginetto Reno record that might be OK, Tom Jones in all of his variable permutations, the movie in some regards and Dan’s newfound bohemian existence in some depth.

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Music this week provided by Eagle Tears. The track The Shovel can be found on their Bandcamp.  You can catch them live at Piranha Bar in Montreal on November 17th.

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Podcast #43: Venom (1981)

In Podcasts on October 11, 2012 at 11:17 am

It’s probably too much to ask that the eventual Oliver Reed biopic star Nick Offerman, right?

All-horror October (all of the good October puns have already been taken by other podcasts) keeps chugging on with Venom, an impossibly boring movie that manages to make the concept of Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed being terrorized by a deadly Black Mamba snake dull as dishwater. They (along with Susan George, reteaming with Reed for another Why Does It Exist? film) play a group of would-be kidnappers who get more than they bargained for when they get trapped in with the aforementioned snake. Everyone seems drunk and bored as shit, except maybe Kinski who seems to hold the secrets of the universe.

My guest this week is writer/filmmaker/musician Malcolm Fraser of Cult MTL, Lion Farm and The World Provider. We discuss the Hulk Hogan sex tape, the essential nature of Kinski’s autobiography, I heap a bit more blame on Dan for the missing episode and we wax poetic about the 90-minute pile of dung that is Venom.

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Music this week provided by Sick Friend. The track ‘Nothing Tragic’ can be found on their album The Draft Dodger, available on their Bandcamp. They will be playing at Casa del Popolo on October 30th, 2012.

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Podcast #42: The Dead One (2007)

In Podcasts on October 3, 2012 at 11:29 pm

NO, FUCK YOU, DAD!

Of the main cast of That 70’s Show, Wilmer Valderrama has probably been the most elusive since the end of the show. He’s been here and there, he’s still roughly as famous as he’s ever been, but his film career never took off. Chances are that movies like El Muerto: The Dead One are mostly responsible for that. A remarkably ill-advised low-budget attempt to turn an obscure comic book into a Latino The Crow franchise, The Dead One is a limp, uninteresting anti-Aztec (!) diatribe that features a cross-dressing Billy Drago, Fez shooting himself in the stomach with a shotgun, a lot of chest touching (not as hot as it sounds) and more shitty CGI storms than your local news affiliate.

Joining me this week is Brian Hastie, host of CJLO 1690 AM’s Countdown to Armageddon and fellow Cult MTL writer. Brian trades in the blasting riffs and corpse paint for plinky-plonky GarageBand music and Wilmer Valderrama furiously applying makeup while kneeling in a cemetery. We discuss Lil’ Wayne’s dalliances with TMZ, our comfort levels at the idea of being driven around by various celebrities and our mutual MP Tyrone Benskin’s crowning moment in 300. You can follow Brian on Twitter @brianhastie.

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Music this week provided by The Bawdy Electric. The track A Modern Frontier can be found here. The Bawdy Electric will be performing at Casa del Popolo on Friday, October 26th. They are currently working on their first EP with fellow Montreal podcast Edge of the City for release in 2013.

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Podcast #41: Play Dead (2009)

In Podcasts on September 17, 2012 at 9:15 am

That’s when Clark Duke realized he had made a terrible mistake.

A staple of the straight-to-DVD / Why Does It Exist? diet, the post-Tarantino, Fargo-esque black comedy has been pretty underrepresented on the site so far, for the sole reason that its existence is easily justified by the critical and financial success of the movies it apes. We know why those exist – but up until now, none of them starred the irresistible combo of Chris Klein and Fred Durst (y’know, from Limp Bizkit).

Play Dead is a pretty terrible boilerplate crime comedy (think U-Turn meets Galaxy Quest meets a dentist’s waiting room) with Klein in fetal Nic Cage mode and Durst actually doing a pretty good job of playing a murder-for-hire simpleton. Joining me for this episode is yet another former video store crony, Arnaud Audette. We awkwardly dance around the fact that we never speak English to each other, discuss rap metal supergroup Methods of Mayhem, take a shit on the new Resident Evil movie and completely forget to wrap up with the titular question. You can check out his musical projet, Morning Breath, here.

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Music this week by Michael Mooney. The track Transmission X can be found here.