Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

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...

A star studded cast highlights the crime drama Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, director Gary Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg's entry in the 1990's spate of talky neo noir thrillers.  This is has Andy Garcia, Treat Williams, Christopher Walken, Fairuza Balk, Christopher Lloyd, Bill Nunn, William Forsythe, Josh Charles, Jack Warden, Steve Buscemi, and Gabrielle Anwar. Dan and Vicky...

1958's Blood of the Vampire had all the earmarks of a Hammer film without actually being one.  Hammer regular Jimmy Sangster was brought in to write the script.  The film very much echoed the style and flair of a Hammer film.  And Hammer actress Barbara Shelley (Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Rasputin, Quatermass and the Pit) plays the female lead.  It didn't fool British movie goers however where t...

Dan and Vicky chose the random Hot Date of August 21, 1965 and decided on the film Darling starring Julie Christie, in her Oscar winning lead performance, and Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey as the two men vying for her attention.  Directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, Sunday, Bloody Sunday), it's a first time watch for our hosts. Along with the main feature, Dan and Vicky talk about som...

A passion project for star Christopher Reeve, 1987's Street Smart became instead the auspicious introduction of film audiences to Morgan Freeman and Kathy Baker.  Freeman, mostly known for his four years on PBS's Electric Company and a successful theater career, stepped into the spotlight and received an Oscar nomination for his work as vicious pimp Fast Black.  Baker, also a renowned theater actr...

Two years after having the biggest blockbuster to date with Jaws and three years after the successful disaster pick Earthquake , Universal Studios pulled out all the stops with Rollercoaster,  hoping to duplicate the earlier films' box office.  They doubled down on Sensurround, the innovative sound system  that immersed audiences in every creak, rumble and woosh of the titular ride and hired 70's...

Director Josef von Sternberg was lured back to Eastern Europe from Hollywood in 1930 by producer Erich Pommer to direct a film about mad Russian monk and con man Rasputin.  Sternberg set his sights instead on an adaptation of the novel Professor Unrath by Heinrich Mann.  He cast Oscar winner Emil Jannings in the title role and discovered his leading lady, Marlene Dietrich, singing in a local Berli...

Producer Samuel Goldwyn wanted to populate his film of Elmer Rice's play Street Scene with a mix of actors from the hit Broadway production and Hollywood.  To play the lead Rose, Goldwyn had Nancy Carroll in mind.  Signed to Paramount, the studio's managing director Bud Schulberg, would not give Carroll up for the film, instead suggesting Sylvia Sidney for the part.  Sidney, also Schulberg's mistr...

Murder, kidnapping, revenge, sex and love gone wrong.  All the subjects, and more, of some of the greatest films based on true crime events.  And all getting a Spotlight, wink, on Hot Date's latest Top Ten episode.  We cover some of our favorite films based on and inspired by true events.  You'll hear about some classic titles but also ones that you may be new to you.  So check the alarm system, g...

Oscar winning actress Regina King directs One Night in Miami, a fictionalized account of the meeting in 1964, post the Clay/Liston fight, between Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X.  It is adapted by Kemp Power from his own play of the same name.  Kemp made history himself as the first African-American to co-write and direct a Disney animated feature with 2018's Soul.  Dan and Vicky...

1994 was a very busy time for 25 year old future Oscar winner Renee Zellweger.  She found work in six films that year - everything from a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel to grunge classics Reality Bites and Dazed and Confused.  But it was Love And A .45 that gave her the opportunity to play her first lead role.  The lovers on the lam film also boasted the varied talents of Ally McBeal heartthrob Gi...

The 1951 noir No Questions Asked was a rarity for MGM.  The studio, mainly know for epics and musicals, steered clear of edgier material.  But when producer Dore Schary became head of production he had a clear goal of reproducing the success he had at RKO and rushed several noirs into production, the first being the New York set No Questions Asked.  The film stars Barry Sullivan, Arlene Dahl, Jean...

Juzo Itami's 1985 film Tampopo, about one woman's search for the perfect ramen recipe, has become so popular over the years that the restaurant industry around the world adopted it's name for many of it's own ramen and Japanese establishments.  The film teams the director with his real life wife Nobuko Miyamoto, along with Kurosawa regular Tsutomu Yamazaki and Ken Watanabe, who would go on to be o...

Based on the popular folk song of the same name by Mississippi born singer Bobbie Gentry, Ode to Billy Joe was a huge hit when released in the summer of 1976.  The film was the brainchild of Max Baer Jr., best known for playing Jethro Bodine in the popular 60's sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.  When acting jobs became scarce after the cancellation of the show Baer put his focus on film production a...

The obscure 1962 film What A Carve Up!, retitled No Place Like Homicide! for it's American release, brings British comedians Sidney James and Kenneth Connor together in a comedy thriller with touches of vaudeville revue and murder mystery.  James was UK comedy royalty having been the star of the successful Carry On series of films while Connor first found success in radio and later joined James in...

Renowned French director Claire Denis was shooting her dour  thriller High Life while nursing her dying mother. She credits the real life tragedy in her life for the somber, sometimes oppressive feeling that pervades the film. It stars Robert Pattinson and an international cast including Juliette Binoche (a Denis regular), Mia Goth, Andre (3000) Benjamin, and Lars Eidinger and was Denis's first En...

Shot in 6 days for the super stingy price tag of $69,000, Kurt Neumann's Secret of the Blue Room, a remake itself of a German film, was enough of a success for Universal Pictures that they remade it twice in the span of eleven years.  Once in 1938 as a semi-comedy called The Missing Guest and again in 1944 as a musical called Murder in the Blue Room.  Dan and Vicky discuss this often forgotten thr...

2014's The Last Passenger was the feature directorial debut of British filmmaker Omid Nooshin and tragically his last.  After a long battle with depression, the ambitious and talented director, who was rumored to have snuck his way onto the sets of Eyes Wide Shut and Star Wars: Phantom Menace to observe filming, committed suicide in early 2018, leaving a wife and young child.  National Suicide Pre...

Hot Date has reached another Top Ten episode - just what we do here every tenth podcast - and this time Dan and Vicky discuss their favorite all time male comedic film performances.  Spanning movies from the 20's to the 2000's, we hope you'll have a chuckle recalling these very funny men.  No names revealed here.  You'll have to listen to Hot Date 120! Your hosts will also get into lots of recentl...

Here we are at the end of 2020 taking stock of the strange and intense year that was.  There's lots of introspection, reflection, and depression happening.  So does Hot Date have the movie for you!  1973's Under Milk Wood, starring Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole,  Elizabeth Taylor, Glynis Johns, and a bevy of wonderful British character actors, is a film adaptation of Welsh writer Dylan Thomas's to...