Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

When director Peter Medak (The Changeling, Romeo Is Bleeding) cast twins brothers Martin and Gary Kemp to play the infamous British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray he had no idea that the Kemps already had a strong fan base as the musical duo Spandau Ballet, one of the biggest British new wave bands of all time!  The real life Krays twins, still alive at the time but serving long prison s...

After the success of his 1958 film The Defiant Ones, which confronted issues of racial division, director Stanley Kramer continued on a path of making films that were socially relevant and examined the issues of the time.  1959's On The Beach was no exception.  Based on the very successful novel by Australian Nevil Shute, which imagined his home country as the only place left on earth not yet suff...

Director Dick Maas can be arguably credited for putting The Netherlands on the horror map with his 1983 film Der Lift.  The film, about a high rise plagued with strange elevator accidents and deaths, was a reportedly difficult low budget shoot with a novice director, cast shakes ups and endless producer interference.  But when it premiered at Cannes, it was snapped up quickly by Warner Bros. and h...

For episode 85 of Hot Date, Dan and Vicky take us to Scandinavia for the comedy Elling, starring Per Christian Ellefsen as the title character and Sven Nordin as his best frenemy Kjell.  Initially wary about their choice, our hosts found a lot to like in this gentle comedy from the performances of the two leads to the portrayal of the Norwegian social welfare system.   Dan and Vicky also discuss t...

The plot of 1939's Lady of the Tropics strangely mirrored the life of it's star Hedy Lamarr.  In the film Lamarr is a woman of mixed race living in pre-war Saigon trying to flee the advances of an oily, corrupt rubber tycoon.  She is half French and yearns to escape to France in search of her father.  In real life, the Czech born Lamarr fled her home country for Paris after marrying a domineering...

1991's Defending Your Life is the fourth film Albert Brooks' wrote, directed and starred in.  He would eventually serve in those capacities on a total of seven films, all bearing his distinctive gentle but incisive examination of love, death and relationships.  Brooks hoped to challenge the popular and Hollywood version of heaven and the afterlife as a fanciful, peaceful Utopia.  He imagines in De...

To get an authentic pool hall feel for his second to last feature The Hustler (he would only make 1964's Lilith before passing away in 1966), director Robert Rossen shot in two actual pool halls in New York City.  New York also stood in for other parts of the country --everything from a Pittsburgh bar to a Kentucky mansion was shot in the city.  And when his lead Paul Newman couldn't master certai...

A documentary film gets the Hot Date treatment for the first time in the show's history.  And not just any documentary.  Dan and Vicky take a look at director Barry Shils' chronicle of the NY drag celebration Wigstock with 1995's Wigstock: The Movie.  Culled from footage taken at the 1993 and 1994 gatherings, Shils creates a portrait of the event and the incredible drag performers that bring it to...

Dan and Vicky have reached their 80th Hot Date episode and that means more top tens!  This time your hosts discuss their favorite on- screen pairings.  Those movie couples you love, love to hate, or hate to love.  Films from Peter Bogdonavich, David Cronenberg, Robert Aldrich, Gus Meins, Billy Wilder, Ang Lee and Alan Pakula, to name a few, make the cut.  And since ten can never be enough, you'll...

Karel Reisz had never directed a feature before and was committed to capturing the gritty reality of living in working class Nottingham, England.  Not only did he shoot the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in actual Nottingham locations but he arrived several weeks before shooting with a small film crew to become acquainted with the town and it's denizens.  When famed cinematographer Freddie...

1945's Scarlet Street reunited director Fritz Lang with stars Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, and Dan Duryea and cinematographer Milton Krasner from the previous year's The Woman in the Window. Unlike that film however Scarlet Street ran afoul of censor board's across the country that objected to it's "obscenity," "indecency," "profanity," and "sordidness."  Despite that, the film did well at th...

Coming off the success of 2010's Lionsgate thriller The Last Exorcism, director Daniel Stamm brought his script for 13 Sins, a remake of a Thai film, to the producers at Blumhouse.  The 4 million dollar film had the bad fortune, however, to be released by the Weinstein Bros. controlled Radius-TWC, which dumped the film in limited release and only made about $10,000 at the box office.  It stars Mar...

For the first time in Hot Date history, an episode was lost to the computer gods as our original 76th show became a casualty of Dan's misguided efforts to clean off his desktop.  That film would have been 2014's indie B-extravaganza The Guest but instead Dan and Vicky cover a B movie from a different era, 1954's Killers From Space starring Peter Graves and directed by W. Lee Wilder, brother of Bil...

Director Taylor Hackford's (An Officer And A Gentleman, Dolores Clairborne) first cut of his Chicano epic Blood In Blood Out was nearly five hours long but distributor Disney, already skittish about the box office prospects of a hard hitting drama about Mexican gang culture with no stars, forced him to cut it down to three.  Disney also insisted on a title change.  Blood In Blood Out refers to the...

After a three month recording hiatus, Dan and Vicky are back to sink their teeth into the Hammer horror entry Scars of Dracula.  The 1970 British production was the sixth entry in the studio's Dracula films and noted for being the first R rated movie in the company's history.  The movie didn't get a warm reception in the States.  Warner Bros., the American studio responsible for bringing most of t...

Essentially an immigrant story set in the 1950's New York music scene, The Mambo Kings is also one of the few mainstream Hollywood films to highlight the Cuban/American experience, albeit without actual Cubans in the cast.  Leads Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas are Italian/Irish and Spanish respectively.  The female leads,  Cathy Moriarity and Maruschka Detmers, are American and Dutch.  The on...

Director Russ Meyer was a World War II newsreel cameraman and Playboy photographer before writing, producing and directing his own feature films. But his early work directly influenced the way he approached his exploitation film career.  He ran his Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! set like a military operation, demanding efficiency and professionalism from all his creative partners.  And he drew on h...

Gene Kelly, on loan to Columbia from MGM for 1944's Cover Girl, was finally able to put his talents to full use as the main choreographer for the film.  With assist from dancer friend Stanley Donen, Val Raset and Seymour Felix, Kelly was able to stage some thrilling sequences including the famous "Alter Ego" scene for himself and "Make Way For Tomorrow" for himself, Rita Hayworth, and Phil Silver....

Hot Date has reached 70 and you know what that means:  A Top Ten episode!  For this one, we take a shocking trip around the world for our favorite foreign horror films.  We'll make stops in France, Japan, Spain and Norway to name a few and play clips that'll make your skin crawl.  Get a dose of international zombies, slashers, monsters and ghosts and discover the film that Vicky chose that Dan has...

In the late 80's, Pierce Brosnan was approached to assume the mantle of legendary British movie spy James Bond from Roger Moore.  But his contract with NBC and the TV show Remington Steele prohibited him from doing so.  When the part came available again in 1994, Brosnan was Eon Productions' and producer Albert Broccoli's first choice.  His run would be four films over seven years and Tomorrow Nev...

Star Warwick Davis was only eighteen when he was cast as the lead in the Ron Howard directed, George Lucas produced fantasy epic Willow. He gamely and charismatically carries the film, often stealing the heroic spotlight from his more classically handsome costar, Hollywood It boy Val Kilmer.  Davis also met the woman who would become his wife on the set of Willow -- she was an extra in the Nelwyn...

The 1977 infection-on-a-train movie The Cassandra Crossing was an international affair fraught with potential pitfalls.  Funded with British, Italian, and West German money, the movie shot in Italy, France and Switzerland and managed to avoid attempts to shut it down by vandals and the Italian government.  Also in the mix was that producer Carlo Ponti was married to the film's leading lady Sophia...

Inspired by the theatrical Noh dramas he loved so much, Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress became a cultural and financial touchstone in 1958.  Despite being dismissed in Japan as a lesser Kurosawa effort, it nonetheless became a top moneymaker and made a successful transition to US shores in late 1960.  It stars the incomparable Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mufine and a great supporting cast includ...

The Velocity of Gary was only director Dan Ireland's second directing assignment.  He was primarily a film producer before that, co-founding the Seattle International Film Festival and producing movies for John Huston, Ken Russell and Bernard Rose, many through his role as head of acquisitions at 80's indie house Vestron Pictures.  The film marked his second collaboration with star and producer Vi...

Director Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs, Slumdog Millionaire) has said his inspiration for Millions, the only PG rated film in the filmmaker's oeuvre, was to take a complete left turn from his previous film, the violent infection thriller 28 Days Later, and challenge himself to paint with a different tonal brush.  Essentially a fantasy for children with real adult themes at the center, Millions stars the...