Rotten Rewind

"It's never goodbye" - Dominic Toretto Our Fast Saga comes to an end this week as we look back at the final rotten installments in the series: 2009's soft reboot "Fast & Furious" and the most recent "F9." Is "Fast & Furious" still the most forgettable, but necessary installment in the franchise? Is "F9" a return to form after the disappointing "Fate of the Furious" ? What disturbing haircu...

Everybody thought "2 Fast 2 Furious" sank the "Fast" franchise for good in 2003. Vin Diesel turned down $25 million to return to the series so he could go off and make another franchise ( "xXx" ) with director Rob Cohen . Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster were out. Even Ja Rule turned down half a million dollars to reprise his role. One thing the sequel did have though: Academy Award nominat...

If "2 Fast 2 Furious" was a disappointing, but still financially successful sequel, "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" was the death rattle of a franchise dying young. Or so that's what so many thought when Justin Lin's high school/fish out of water spin on the series was released in 2006. In what might be the most 2006 movie ever made, Lin transported audiences to Tokyo and subbed out the an...

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since we were first introduced to Dominic Toretto and his family, but this week on the podcast we're kicking off our month long retrospective of one of the most successful film franchises of all time: "The Fast and the Furious." What began as "Point Break" with cars has now become a lucrative nine-film franchise that has seen names like Dwayne Johnson, Charl...

After four weeks, we’re saying goodbye to our Queer & Rotten series by paying tribute to one of queer cinema’s most beloved filmmakers, Todd Haynes . We’re excited to be joined once again by Kae Whalen to discuss Haynes’ ambitious third feature, “Velvet Goldmine” starring Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Toni Collette and Ewan McGregor (along with his penis *and* asshole!) We look back at...

For our second installment of Queer & Rotten, we're heading back to 1980 to dissect one of the most controversial movies of the last 40 years: William Friedkin's queer-panic serial killer thriller "Cruising," featuring one of last truly restrained Al Pacino performances. A film that was mired in controversy from the moment it was announced, Friedkin's film became the first studio-funded thrill...

The day has finally come that Rotten Rewind puts some fucking respect on Gerard Butler's name. The Scottish actor has played Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera, he's headlined apocalyptic thrillers and gone toe to toe doing Shakespeare with Ralph Fiennes . Today on the podcast though, we're looking at two very different periods in Butler's career: his late 2000s rom-com phase and his current sta...

We're celebrating big budget body horror this week on the podcast by revisiting two of the most bonkers movies that ever slipped through the cracks of some of Hollywood's biggest studios. Actress and designer Mariko Enkoji-Busch joins us to discuss the 2000 Jennifer Lopez thriller "The Cell" and the more recent studio bomb "A Cure for Wellness" from "The Ring" director Gore Verbinski. Are we just...

Can you believe it's been 20 years since Heath Ledger and Shannyn Sossamon donned 14th century attire for a David Bowie dance sequence in Brian Helgeland's jousting action comedy "A Knight's Tale" ? Or that it's been 15 years since Sofia Coppola followed up her Oscar win with an 80s New Wave-scored take on "Marie Antoinette" with Kirsten Dunst and fellow Coppola, Jason Schwartzman ? We feel old. F...

This week on the podcast, we're looking back on two of the most polarizing films of the 2000s: Jonathan Glazer's mostly forgotten oddity "Birth" and Lars Von Trier's Criterion approved "Antichrist." Both genre-defying tales of grief with fully committed lead female performances from Nicole Kidman and Charlotte Gainsbourg , these controversial dramas divided critics and alienated audiences, but onl...

We're celebrating Oscar weekend on the podcast by discussing two gritty youth dramas with a prestige bent that failed to resonate with the Academy and critics. First up, it's Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio's 1995 breakout indie drama "The Basketball Diaries" where we get to see a young Leo shoot up and get public restroom blowjobs from old men. After that, we're rewinding to the not-so-distant pas...

We're back and we're kicking off this brand spankin' new season of Rotten Rewind with perhaps the most infamous rotten movie of all time: Paul Verhoeven's seminal camp masterpiece "Showgirls." Featuring a career-ending turn by Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan with a body double, Gina Gershon with a Southern accent, and Robert Davi sincerely delivering the line "What's it like not havin' guys cum...

We can't believe it's here but today marks our first ever season finale. We're going out with a bang - or a Spark - by discussing two of the most iconic millennial romances, written by multi-millionaire Nicholas Sparks. First up, it's the Shane West/Mandy Moore leukemia love story "A Walk to Remember" featuring a score by Moore and emo Christian rockstars Switchfoot. After that, we're going all in...

The 90s and 2000s might be the most ubiquitous time for romantic comedies, but they also gave us some of the most truly unhinged entries the genre had to offer. This week, we're discussing a pair of malicious magazine themed rom-coms that pair a couple of successful sociopaths and unemployed losers as they search for love in the big city (and Boston)! Is the 2003 box office smash "How to Lose a Gu...

TW: This episode does contain discussion of rape, abuse and domestic violence. This week, we're taking a look back at a pair of divisive teen true crime dramas: the sweaty, lurid Florida-set thriller "Bully" from provocateur Larry Clark and Nick Cassavetes' San Fernando Valley-based drama  "Alpha Dog." Both films were met with their own set of controversy upon release in the 2000s and both feature...

In our most personal episode to date, we're serving up our thoughts on a pair of rotten restaurant industry movies: the 2005 gross-out comedy "Waiting" with a pre-Deadpool era Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris and Justin Long, and the 2015 bad boy chef drama, "Burnt" starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller and Matthew Rhys. Is it possible to make a good restaurant movie, or is "Party Down" still the closes...

Since the holidays are over, we're back to our regularly scheduled programming. This week, we're evaluating two feminist themed rehabilitation dramas: the 1999 cult favorite "Girl, Interrupted" starring 90s royalty Winona Ryder, podcast favorite Brittany Murphy and an Academy Award winning performance by Angelina Jolie, as well as the underseen Mary Harron-directed take on the Manson murders, "Cha...

As we put the nail in the coffin of 2020 and step into a new coffin a.k.a. 2021, we're celebrating two New Years cult classics: the 1980 ball dropper slasher "New Year's Evil" featuring an unhinged white dude embarking on a festive killing spree through Van Nuys, and the Gen-X 80s nostalgia fest "200 Cigarettes" starring a cast so stacked it can only be described as "The Thin Red Line" of broad st...

For our final Rotten Holidays episode of the season, we'll be taking a look at a pair of dark holiday comedies that have no idea how dark they really are, featuring two undiagnosed psychopaths. First up, we're jumping back to 1996 when brand mania was taking over pop culture and Hollywood still thought Arnold Schwarzenegger could pass as a regular mid-western dad, to discuss the accidentally anti-...

We've gotten to the holiday horror portion of our Rotten Holidays series and we're looking at two seasonal slashers: the 1984 cult classic "Silent Night, Deadly Night" and the 2006 remake of "Black Christmas." If you watched the original "Black Christmas" and thought to yourself, "why isn't there any incest in this movie???" then Glen Morgan's eye-popping, severely jaundiced remake is the holiday...

It's gonna be a White Christmas this week because we're cozying up to a pair of mid-2000s star-studded holiday affairs: the familial dramedy "The Family Stone" featuring Sarah Jessica Parker as an uptight, homophobic working woman who is forced to spend the holidays with her boyfriend's toxic liberal family (Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson, Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams) and the Nancy Meyers house swa...

We're kicking off our five week Rotten Holidays series with two forgotten 2000s holiday heist thrillers that are *extremely* early 2000s. First up, it's  John Frankhenheimer's swan song, "Reindeer Games," starring Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise in nu-metal cosplay as members of what might be the dumbest fucking crew to ever grace the big screen. After that, we're turning the thermost...

Fall in love with two seasonal rotten romances on this week's episode featuring filmmaker and musician William Breen.  Join us as we look back on  "Autumn in New York" starring Winona Ryder and Richard Gere, and "Sweet November" with Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves, a pair of films that remind us that behind every mediocre man is a beautiful, dead woman who helped revive the .25  percent of his p...

For our second and final installment in our 1995 techno thriller series, we'll be plunging into the depths of VR Hell with the infamous Keanu Reeves bomb "Johnny Mnemonic" and the more obscure Denzel Washington/Russell Crowe serial killer thriller "Virtuosity." Would another actor have salvaged the bizarre humor of "Johnny Mnemonic?" Does the little known "Virtuosity" feature one of Crowe's best p...

Five years before Y2K, internet paranoia was all the rage in Hollywood. For the next two weeks, we'll be looking back at four critically maligned techno thrillers that failed to reboot the cyberpunk sub-genre. For part one, we're joined by writer Kelsey Holmes to examine the cult classic "Hackers" starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard and Jesse Bradford, as well as the Sandra...