Recovered

Dan and Keith head beyond the veil for some Jacob's Ladder scenarios! In 1990, a biblical term and also electric desk toy becomes a thriller starring Tim Robbins and a bunch of future stars, as a Vietnam vet named Jacob gradually learns maybe he never actually made it home from the 'Nam after all. Keith has some glowing praise while Dan digs into the layers of the storytelling: what IS r...

With a cry of "Klaatu barada nikto," Hugo Book Club founder Olav Rokne returns to help Dan and Keith break down two takes on The Day The Earth Stood Still. In the 1950s, an alien named Klaatu and his robot pal Gort arrive on Earth with a message for all for mankind... but finds it difficult to get the leaders of mankind in one room to hear it. Then we jump to the 2000s, as an all-star ca...

Dan and Keith hit the Amazon river for not just ANaconda, it's TWOacondas! In 1997, a handful of rising stars and also Eric Stoltz went looking for hidden indigenous tribes, only for Jon Voight, making a big choice with his accent, to hijack the expedition to find giant man-eating snakes. CG carnage ensues! Then we jump to last year, as Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, and comedy assas...

Dan and Keith return to the Coen Brothers for tales of Ladykillers! In 1955, Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers led a gang of thieves making their home base the spare room of a doddering widow. The heist goes well, but the escape proves difficult under their landlady's eye, and dark hijinks ensue! Five decades later, the Coen Brothers took the gig of remaking it and transporting the story from E...

Dan and Keith return to the Hyborian Age for two tales of the iconicly armoured redhead, Red Sonja. Back in 1985, schlock kingpin Dino De Laurentiis attempted to bring Conan the Barbarian ally (via Marvel Comics) Red Sonja to the big screen... without being able to feature or mention Conan himself. Despite talking Conan actor Arnold Schwarzenegger into a cameo that got stretched into a co-lead in...

Dan, Keith, and guest Gina return to dig into the big screen version of Stephen King's It, the prequel spinoff Welcome to Derry, and more from the original novel (yes, there is still weird sex stuff left to unpack). In 2017, Andy Muschietti brought a new version of It to the big screen, one that drifted further from the source material... well, half of it, specifically the kid half, and when...

Dan and Keith head into the sewers of Derry, Maine to confront Stephen King's IT in all ITs current forms. Back in the 90s, IT became a very famous TV show, a two-part miniseries that tried to squeeze 1100+ pages of novel into three hours of movie with network TV standard to uphold, which meant some substantial cuts from the novel. Thankfully, guest Gina Stewart is here to walk Dan and Keith...

Grab your mops and get ready to clean up this town as Dan and Keith take on the Toxic Avenger! Way way back in the 1980s, b-movie titans Troma Films accidentally created a surprisingly mainstream franchise when bullies sent a neurodivergent janitor into a vat of toxic waste, creating mutant superhero the Toxic Avenger, who set out to clean up Tromaville with a mop, a mission statement, and a radar...

At last, the Phantom Saga arrives at the most influential and successful adaptation of Gaston Leroux's doomed romance horror novel... Andrew Lloyd Webber. Dan and Keith are joined by musical theatre aficionado Colleen Bishop to break down Webber's adaptation of the story, and what happened when Joel Schumacher was tasked with bringing it to the big screen. But wait, there's more! De...

Hollywood hasn't stopped remaking and rebooting the same stories over and over since we began this journey, and it was inevitable that at some point past topics would see new versions. Dan and Keith check in on the latest editions of iconic heroes, chocolatiers, or holiday-themed mass murderers. Timothée Chalamet pits whimsy against ruthless capitalism (while Keith questions if music makes yo...

Strap on your sneakers and get ready to bolt as Dan and Keith jog into two very different takes on Stephen King's The Running Man! Way way back in the 1980s, secret government employees frame Arnold Schwarzenegger for a mass murder he'd refused to commit, and he ends up recruited to the police state dystopia's most popular game show, The Running Man. Arnold and his pals must survive...

Dan and Keith head down once more into the lair of the Phantoms and their various operas, if not of the box office. One made-for-TV movie sets Jane Seymour and Michael York against a Phantom whose motives go from sympathetic to sinister on a dime, while another stretched the story to a full miniseries to soft-launch a rival Phantom musical. In between, an animated version tries to speed-run the or...

Dan and Keith head to Germany for two movies on three key things: dance, magic, dance! In 1977, Italian director Dario Argento told the tale of an American ballerina caught up in a German dance academy secretly run by witches... witches that go from zero to murder alarmingly quickly. The visuals were sharp and colourful, but the story seemed thin... then in 2017, Luca Guadagnino went with starker...

And we're back into the Phantoms & Operas sagas, seeing how two distinct film eras take on the Phantom: the auteur era of the 70s, and the slasher horror era of the 80s! In the time when creative vision was king, two Phantoms emerge. Wicked, Wicked attempts a new cinematic technique called DuoVision as a Phantom haunts a mid-range hotel, while Brian De Palma and Paul Williams unite for th...

'Tis the season to embrace, be merry, and hope the rich jerks in your life get haunted, and to celebrate, Dan and Keith take on a Curated Selection of Christmas Carols. Trying to cover every version of Dickens' classic holiday haunting would be an act of madness, so after travelling back to 1901 for the first ever film Scrooge, the boys examine ways Scrooge cinema tried to add elements t...

At last it arrives! In sleep it sang to you, in dreams it came... the Phantoms of the Operas Mega-Saga begins! Dan and Keith head way, way back to the silent era for the first film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's gothic horror novel the Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney as the signature Phantom. Then it's off to China for Chinese cinema's first ever horror movie, the loose Phantom...

It's the big 100th episode, and to celebrate, our hosts (or are they?) dig into our lords and saviours, the RoboCops! In 1987, Paul Verhoeven satirized capitalism through a hero that was part man, part machine, and all cop, and John Tebbutt explains what got lost from the later director's cut, while Emma Gallaher relates her first-time-viewing experience. Then, 27 years, two sequels, a T...

Wrapping up our dissection of Fantastic Four cinema with two polar opposite takes on Marvel's First Family. In 2015, Josh Trank attempted a more grounded, body-horror-infused take that met with severe studio notes and mandated reshoots, leading to a bunch of grey corridors and one action beat before the credits. It did not go over great. This very year, the MCU finally got their crack at the...

The Fantastic Four! Once dubbed "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine," they've struggled to make it on the big screen, split between earnest attempts at blockbusters and quickie attempts to retain the film rights. And Dan and Keith are here to tackle one of each as the road to First Steps begins. Roger Corman produced the first attempt, a low-budget B-movie never intended to se...

Dan drags Keith into his film history brainrot in order to answer a question: do the biggest hits of the 20th century need or warrant a remake? We look at the biggest hit of each year from 1927 until 1999, from the dawn of the silent era to the birth of Jar Jar Binks and ask which of these hit films should be made again, which should stay lost to film history, and which will never stop being remad...

John Carpenter September continues as Dan and Keith crack open 1976's Assault on Precinct 13, and its 2005 remake, the same year as The Fog's remake. Carpenter's version favours simplicity, as the soon-to-close precinct is besieged by a seemingly unending and unstoppable horde of nigh-inhuman gang members on a vendetta, until only a handful remain. 2005, however, takes a different s...

Welcome to Carpenter Summer, where Dan and Keith take on two 2005 remakes of vintage John Carpenter flicks! First up, The Fog, one of three 1980 horror movies starring Jamie Lee Curtis, in which an eerie fog sweeps over a small California town, bringing with it ghost sailors out for revenge! Or their money back. Or both? Twenty-five years later, Early-Smallville Tom Welling and Just-Started-Lost M...

Throw on your special glasses and get ready to get haunted as Dan and Keith dig into 13 Ghosts. Back in 1960, William Castle attempted a new gimmick: a special pair of glasses for audiences that either made ghosts appear, or made the movie utterly incomprehensible, as a family inherits their ghost-hunting uncle's house only find it filled with approximately a dozen ghosts. Forty-one years lat...

Casablanca! Generally regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made, perhaps the most correct the Oscars have ever been, and the last movie you'd ever expect to see on a podcast about remakes! So why is our favourite they-slash-femme comedienne Munsi-Parker Munroe joining Keith to talk about it? It's not like there's a secret 90s Casablanca remake that's also a grim sci-fi c...

While James Gunn's Superman is soaring through theatres, Dan and Keith look back at the first time he wrote a big-screen adaptation of a Warner Bros. franchise: a pup named Scooby-Doo. Digging into the casting, the rewriting of the pitch, we ask: is it over-hated? Is it more clever than it's given credit? Maybe. Then it's time to jump from 2002 to 2020 as WB tries to launch a Hannah...