Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

The Burning Plain was the directorial debut of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who took cues from his screenplays for Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel to weave the intergenerational story of two families, one white and one Mexican, colliding and seeking redemption. The film stars Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, and Joaquim de Almeida. Dan and Vicky discuss the little seen drama...

When it came time make the film of Arthur Laurents successful play The Time of the Cuckoo, the natural casting choice was Shirley Booth, who won a Tony for the Broadway production and had an Oscar for the 1952 film Come Back Little Sheba.  But producers felt she was too old and not enough of a box office draw.  Director David Lean was determined to get Katherine Hepburn and the star needed little...

We've reached our next Top Ten episode (something we do here at Hot Date when we reach every tenth show) and this time we're picking our favorite mysteries and whodunnits.  From Poirot to Parker, giallo to slasher, we're choosing the films that kept us guessing, made us gasp and even gave us some chuckles. Along with our main topic, you'll hear about plenty of recently seen including new takes on...

Dan and Vicky offer a special Halloween episode of Hot Date covering the 1982 Canadian slasher Humongous.  It was Vicky's idea to find a horror film from the 80's that she hadn't seen and Dan had.   They were almost successful - after all Vicky's seen ALOT of movies.  Humongous, directed by Prom Night's Paul Lynch and written by The Changeling's William Gray, has been a mostly forgotten slasher on...

Director Stuart Gordon, known for creating the body horror classics Reanimator and From Beyond, reunited with writer David Mamet to direct the film adaptation of the controversial playwright's one act play Edmond.  Gordon and Mamet were colleagues in the Chicago theater scene and first collaborated on the original staging of the writer's Sexual Perversity in Chicago.  In Edmond, William H. Macy pl...

1951's Three Husbands and 1949's A Letter To Three Wives share screenwriter Vera Caspary but also similar storylines.  In Three Husbands, the title characters receive letters about their wives' possible infidelity and in Three Wives the ladies recieve missives from a woman announcing she is running away with one of their husbands.  Caspary specilaized in stories about strong women, having also pen...

With Shakespeare's King Lear as it's source material, both the book by Jane Smiley and the film adaptation directed by Jocelyn Moorehouse of A Thousand Acres sets the action on an Iowa farm.  In the 1997 film,  Jason Robards plays the raging patrirach of the Cook family, whose bequest of his land to his three daughters, played by Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, raises t...

Tigon British Film Productions, founded in 1966 as counter programming to the more well known Hammer Studios, nonetheless took a page from the Hammer playbook by making horror and exploitation films.  Tigon films, however, are often marked by a low budget mean streak and grittiness.  Successes for the company included 1967's The Sorcerers, 1968's The Witchfinder General, and 1971's Blood on Satan'...

Director/screenwriter Bill Condon has since become an Oscar winning filmmaker with credits ranging from writing 2002's Chicago to directing two films in the Twilight series.  But his directorial debut came with 1987's Sister, Sister, a Gothic thriller set in Louisiana and starring Judith Ivey, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Eric Stoltz. Dan and Vicky discuss the film, which mixes horror and the superna...

In response to the success Univeral was having with it's monster series, 20th Century Fox endeavored to bring their own monster movies to the big screen. Taking cues from the mix of horror and comedy Universal had begun to explore, The Undying Monster has a scary castle, a family curse, a pair of funny Scotland investigators and visual style to spare.  It's directed by John Brahm and stars Heather...

Robert Altman's Chicago set A Wedding from 1978 tells the story of two families and the lavish and chaotic day they marry off young Dino (Desi Arnaz Jr.) and Muffin (Amy Stryker).  An all star cast of 70's luminaries,  including Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Mia Farrow, Lillian Gish, Dina Merrill, Vittorio Gassman and Geraldine Chaplin, is joined by some background players who would later become sta...

The Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted twice for the screen - most recently in 1995 in a star studded version by director Anthony Minghella.  But the novel's first filmed version came in 1960 from two time Oscar winning director Rene Clement.  Called Purple Noon in an ode to the vibrant Italian sky over Sicily where the story was set and shot, Clement's version casts...

For our milestone 150th show, we offer our Top Ten lists of our favorite Best Picture Winners of all time.  From ribald comedies to dark thrillers to ripped from the headlines dramas, Dan and Vicky honor those honored with the most prestigious film award in the world.   But our hosts don't stop there!  They talk about some recently seen including Nic Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,...

Off of the critical success of his 2010 film Buried (which trapped star Ryan Reynolds inside a coffin for 90 minutes) director Rodrigo Cortes had the clout to attract Sigourney Weaver, Robert DeNiro, Cillian Murphy, Toby Jones and Elizabeth Olsen to his next project.  2012's Red Lights is the story of a duo of supernatural debunkers who meet their match in a celebrity psychic with a dangerous past...

Filmmaker Frank Agrama, mostly known today as the producer of family friendly fare like the Robotech TV and video game series and a Heidi miniseries, got his start with more adult material like the 1981 horror film Dawn of the Mummy.  Taking over direction from fired original director, Armand Weston, Agrama shot the grisly feature in his home country of Egypt with mostly American actors and an Ita...

1956's Picnic, adapted from the Pulitzer and Tony award winning stage play by William Inge, gave director Joshua Logan the chance to realize the grand picnic of the title on actual locations in Kansas.  But the filming was not without it's headaches.  With two insecure lead actors, tornadoes that threatened to shut production down, and thousands of extras to corrall, Picnic could have been mess. ...

With the powerhouse producing team of Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron behind it, 2004's Ecuadorean drama Cronicas had an easy time being chosen as that country's submission for the Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards.  It didn't get that honor but still had the star power to guide it to international acclaim.  John Leguizamo, performing fully in Spanish for the first time in his...

1965's Who Killed Teddy Bear mixes spasmodic dance sequences, lewd phone calls, predatory lesbians, incest, and Sal Mineo in short shorts to create one of the strangest films to come out of the swingin' sixties.  It's directed by Joseph Cates and stars Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, and Elaine Stritch. Dan and Vicky discuss this odd film along with lots of recently seen like 2022's Death on the...

The unique 1946 film noir So Dark The Night gave actor Steven Geray his first and only chance to play the lead in a film.  Up until then, and for years after, he was a reliable and memorable supporting player in films like Spellbound, Gilda and All About Eve.  Geray had fled his homeland of Hungary after his pointed impersonations of Hitler and Mussolini on the European theatre circuit drew the th...

In the early 70's Hammer Studios, Britain's premier production house for horror and fantasy films, was at a crossroads.  The Hammer name connoted class, style and a certain elegance but the new wave of horror was grittier and more explicit.  Playing against The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hammer films could almost appear quaint.  So Hammer pivoted and started making films like 1972's Dr....

1991's The Commitments was a departure for filmmaker Alan Parker.  Traditionally an explorer of the darker reaches of human interaction (Angel Heart, Mississippi Burning), the film was instead a serio-comic look at the making of a band in working class Dublin.  Based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, Parker and his casting team scoured Ireland for actors who could convince as musicians or musicians who...

For our final Hot Date of 2021, we chose Putney Swope, written and directed by Robert Downey Sr.  As an indictment of corporate greed, the advertising business and race, the film was Downey's reaction to working for years in a production company whose main client was a powerful ad agency.  There were no takers for the movie from the major studios so Downey turned to independent producer and distri...

We're back again with another of our famous Top Ten List episodes.  This time we're looking at our favorite movie villains.  Those despicable, pathetic, misguided, attractive movie characters - some based on real people - we love to hate from films spanning the last century.   Dan and Vicky also check in on some recently seen like The Eternals, Nobody, The Deep House, Antlers, tick...tick...Boom,...

A negative pickup for Universal Pictures to cash in on the 3D trend partially initiated by the company's own Jaws 3, low budget sci fi epic Metalstorm failed to spark at the box office.  Of the many quirky elements of the film, it's bombastic orchestral score sticks out as belonging to a different movie.  Composed by Band's brother Richard, the music gives the film a gravitas that the chintzy spec...

1948's Brighton Rock, based on the novel by Graham Greene, was a controversial hit in England where critics felt it reached new levels of depravity and on screen violence.  It also met the ire of novelist Greene himself, who was denied the opportunity to adapt his own book - that task fell to playwright Terrence Rattigan - and given zero influence in casting decisions.  Greene was vocal about his...