Recovered

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...

Dan, Keith, and guest Emma Gallaher are back to Transylvania for the 21st century Nosferatus! In 2024, horror auteur Robert Eggers decided to take another spin at Count Orlok... and perhaps because of this some amateur filmmakers Kickstarted their own version in 2023, with almost three recognizable stars in the mix. We tackle this low-budget retread first, which makes some odd choices with the cen...

Dan, Keith, and returning guest Emma travel as far back in film history as we've ever been to discuss the cinematic attempt at to file the serial numbers off Dracula with Nosferatu! In this first installment, it's heute auf Deutsch time as our hosts break down 1922's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, one of the earliest and most groundbreaking surviving horror movies of the silent er...

People always say "You couldn't make a [insert Mel Brooks classic] today." But were there movies Mel Brooks shouldn't have remade? That's the question facing Dan and Keith, presented by guest Olav Rokne of the Hugo Book Club, as we tackle To Be Or Not To Be. In 1942, Jack Benny starred in a farcical comedy about a theatre troupe rallying to save the Polish resistance from...

Dan and Keith head all the way back to the time to that brief overlap between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the dying days of vaudeville with comedy legends the Marx Brothers. In A Night at the Opera, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx were said to hit a new height by blending their signature antics with a more grounded emotional arc (outsourced to supporting characters), but how do those antics hol...

Dan and Keith head to ancient Greece and classic hero Perseus to weigh old-school stop motion against modern CG in the Clashes of the Titans! Back in 1981, legendary animator Ray Harryhausen wrapped a storied career with Clash of the Titans, in which Harry Hamlin's Perseus fights his way through stop-motion monsters to win the girl and claim a throne. Nearly three decades later, an all star c...

Turns out Rollerball was not the first instance of a Norman Jewison classic being remade by John McTiernan, so Dan and Keith strap in for round two, the Affairs of the Thomases Crown. In 1968, last days of the Hays Code, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway squared off as bored millionaire turned bank robbery mastermind Thomas Crown and the insurance investigator who gets pulled into his orbit while try...

Lllllllllet's get ready to ROLLERBALL! Dan and Keith dig into the 1975 cult classic dystopic sports flick Rollerball, in which James Caan must rise up against the world's corporate overlords by playing the best darn game of Rollerball he can, after about an hour of worldbuilding that only partially builds the world. In the early 2000s, legendary action director John McTiernan attempted t...

Beloved friend of the podcast and Video Vulture John Tebbutt is back, and he's got a doozy for Dan and Keith. Schlock king Roger Corman unites Mission: Impossible's Peter Graves, iconic western villain Lee Van Cleef, and B-movie queen Beverly Garland for the sci-fi thriller, question mark, It Conquered the World, in which a Venusian alien lures an Earth scientist into helping it seize co...

John Woo's The Killer: one of the most iconic 80s Hong Kong action flicks, with Chow Yun-Fat leaping through dove-invested areas to fire two pistols in slow-motion. Who would dare to remake it? John Woo. Dan and Keith dig into the original (and how dubbed and subtitled versions differ), the choices excellent and confusing, then jump forward to 2024 to unpack the Straight-to-Streaming remake,...

Hit the big city streets and get ready to look for vengeance, kind of, as Dan and Keith take on the Death Wishes. Back in 1994, Charles Bronson found his most iconic role as an architect who lashes out at random street criminals in the wake of an attack on his family. Dan and Keith break it down, how much it differs from the sequels that followed, and why that's Reagan's fault. Forty-fou...

Dan and Keith head to Mega-City One to look into two Judges Dredd! First, back in the 90s, Sylvester Stallone brought Britain's favourite satirical comic Judge to Hollywood, but perhaps put a little too much of him on the screen. Dystopic future, overly aggressive protagonist, Rob Schneider is here for some reason, it's a blend of a Judge Dredd adaptation and a Demolition Man follow-up t...

As the MCU returns from hiatus, Dan and Keith look back at the film that set up Captain America: Brave New World... that being 2008's The Incredible Hulk. First, in 2003, Ang Lee and a young producer named Kevin Feige attempted a deep, psychological Hulk, with comic-book-style editing, examinations of trauma and repressed memories, and a bit of a whackadoo climax, that may have been all theme...

Grab your shovel and prepare to make bad choices as Dan and Keith unearth the Pet Semataries! Way way back in the 1980s, during the heyday of Stephen King adaptations, a former star of Star Trek: TNG and a future star of Time Trax took on an adaptation of Pet Sematary, the one Stephen King book that scared Stephen King. Three decades later, another attempt was made, which didn't start changin...

Dan and Keith take a deep sigh, say "This may as well happen," and get into two takes on The Crow. First, the extremely 90s original with Brandon Lee and a bunch of cool character actors. How does it hold up? How does the tragedy at the core of the movie affect the viewing? Breaking down the unsafe production that cost us a rising star in Brandon Lee and imagining what might have been ha...

It's a new year, and Hollywood is still allergic to new ideas, so we have a new crop of remakes on the Horizon! Hooray, question mark? Dan and Keith dig into all the remakes and reboots on the horizon, from Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman to new takes on Stephen King, Saturday morning cartoons, a weirdly unconnected trio of Universal Movie Monsters, and deep cut remakes you'd ne...

Ho ho holiday greetings, as Dan and Keith celebrate the season the Recovered way: unpacking movies with the same premise! First up, what else but the internet's favourite non-Muppet Christmas movie, Die Hard! John McClane is trying to save his marriage and Christmas, and we love him for it enough that it spawned a sub-genre. But of all the Die Hard clones out there, only one dared to be EVEN...

Grab your parka, light a flamethrower, and trust no one as we take on Things from Other Worlds! First, Dan, Keith, and special guest Emma head back to the 1950s for The Thing From Another World, based on the story Who Goes There, as an arctic base is beset by a plant-based invader out to steal their blood, and science and military find themselves at odds. Then jump to 1982 for another attempt to a...