Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

It took three William Faulkner stories to make the sultry, southern classic film The Long, Hot Summer and one difficult movie icon to almost unmake it. Although Orson Welles was director Martin Ritt's one and only choice to play burly land baron Will Varner, the two clashed continually on the sticky Louisiana set.  They would eventually make up after the movie was finished but Ritt seems to have d...

2008's Zack and Miri Make A Porno was Kevin Smith's most expensive, most high profile film at the time so a lot was riding on it's success.  Could Seth Rogen prove his star turn in the prior year's Knocked Up wasn't a fluke?  Could Elizabeth Banks (replacing the previously announced Rosario Dawson) hold her own in her first headlining vehicle?  Could a hard R movie with the word "Porno" in it's ti...

Melissa Sue Anderson was eager to break out of the house that Michael Landon built when she signed on for 1981's slasher Happy Birthday to Me .  She was still screaming and crying but this time it was from trying to avoid being shish kebabbed by a mysterious killer and not from the trials of prairie life.  She was joined by tough guy film legend Glenn Ford as her psychiatrist, Canadian stalwart La...

Hot Date is in celebration mode!  Dan and Vicky have reached episode ten and want to shake things up and do something special for our loyal listeners.  Instead of bantering about one film, our hosts pull out all the stops and pick their ten favorite films from ten randomly chosen directors!  As a bonus, they'll also choose runners-up.   There's a filmmaker for ever taste -- horror, comedy, action,...

After the success of the The Thin Man in 1934, MGM was eager to get stars William Powell and Myrna Loy back in front of the cameras for a sequel.  It took two years and, if film lore is to be believed, some financial courting of Loy but, with a new story from Dashiell Hammett, the country's favorite sleuthing couple was at it again in the 1936 follow-up, After The Thin Man. Returning to San Franci...

Before he became the official film adapter of all things J.R.R Tolkein, Peter Jackson was a young monster movie enthusiast and animator creating kitschy, violent, over the top gore-fests in his home country of New Zealand.  When Dead Alive , his third feature, appeared in 1992, it had one of the biggest opening weekends of any film in New Zealand history, beating the latest Warner Bros. Batman fil...

Impact:  The force with which two lives come together.  Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. Dan and Vicky come together and it's ALL for the good as they look at the little remembered B-movie from 1949, Impact.  The movie that asks: If your wife's lover botches a hit on you and accidentally kills himself AND the world mistakes his charred body for yours, could you let your wife hang for a murd...

Barbra Streisand is a force to be reckoned with.  Two time Oscar winner, multi Grammy, Golden Globe and Emmy winner.  The woman even has several Peabodys!    So when she decided to tackle her grittiest role to date -- as a prostitute indicted for murder fighting to prove her sanity in a competency hearing -- who was going to say no?  Well...actually...someone did.  In 1982 when Streisand expressed...

Producer Robert Evans resisted the efforts of horror schlockmeister William Castle to direct the film adaptation of Ira Levin's novel, Rosemary's Baby , and the film world is all the better for it. Polish wunderkind Roman Polanski took the reigns and created a horror classic; a movie Levin called the best EVER film adaptation of a novel. Self-congratulation aside, he's not too far off.    In an ep...

Heads you win, Tails you die!   When late director Tony Scott read the story of Domino Harvey in an article in The Daily Mail, he was eager to translate her life to film.  Working with her and screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales), Scott ended up with less a biopic and more a bombastic love letter to the style in which Harvey lived her life -- fast, furious and on the edge. A...

French director Roger Vadim made his US filmmaking debut in 1971 with Pretty Maids All In A Row, based on the scandalously prurient novel of the same title.  It was an inauspicious and largely forgotten film and was one of the last movies to come out of MGM before they almost entirely ceased film production.   It stars Rock Hudson, Telly Savalas, John David Carson and the very sexy Angie Dickinson...

Based on Peter Schaffer's hit play, the movie version of Amadeus won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actor and Director.  Dan and Vicky watched the Director's  Cut, which has about 30 minutes of footage not included in the original release version. They discuss the historical, political and personal climate around the time the movie came out on September 19, 1984 and also talk about...

On the premiere episode, Dan and Vicky choose July 27, 1972 as their Hot Date.   The classic survival thriller "Deliverance" was released on July 30th and went on to become one of the highest grossing films of the year, pick up three Oscar nominations and forever change the discussion of rural versus urban class dynamics. Dan and Vicky discuss their impressions of the film and address the controve...