Legends Podcast

We're kicking off 2023 with a month dedicated to hunting the most dangerous game: man! And we're beginning The Most Dangerous Month by reviewing the film that started it all, the 1932 adaptation of the O.Henry award-winning Richard Connell short story. Produced alongside King Kong, the Pre-Code classic features a big-game hunter played by Joel McCrea and a castaway played by Kong heroine Fay Wray...

Twenty Twenty-Two was a milestone year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It completed "Phase Four" with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, boasted the return of Sam Raimi to Marvel with Doctor Strange and Mulitverse of Madness, and saw one of its first core characters receive an unprecedented fourth film with Thor: Love and Thunder. Meanwhile, the television side continued to expand with the moody M...

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been remade countless times, from Patrick Stewart to Bill Murray to the Muppets. The latest version, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, incorporates both a meta-take on the source material and musical numbers - because the afterlife is a musical, for some reason. After a one-week theatrical run, this Apple Original Film was released on the tech giant's...

Here come the holidays, and if you've ever felt trapped in a house with insufferable relatives fighting like terrorists or dodging Grandma's fruitcake like bullets, might relate to director John McTiernan's 1988 action movie. Released in July, this Bruce Willis-led shoot-'em-up launched the actor's movie career and its title became shorthand for a high-concept thriller, "It's Die Hard on a [blank]...

The second film of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy hit movie screens twenty years ago this month. While the first was a major hit for New Line Cinema the year before, the success of the second installment was no sure thing. Star Trek: Nemesis was opening the week before, and the Christmas frame included new films from Spike Lee, Martin Scorcese, and Steven Spielberg. There was also the i...

Christopher Nolan has been playing with time in past films like Memento, Inception, and Interstellar and nuclear bombs in his future film Oppenheimer. For his 2020 film, Nolan plays with both big ideas in a story about a temporal cold war with protagonists and antagonists moving forwards and backwards in time to prevent/cause the end of the world. Starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson,...

South Korean director Lee Chung-hyun adapted the 2011 English-language film The Caller into a 2020 Korean-language thriller starring two of his country's biggest actresses. The film, written and directed by the then-thrity-year-old former advertising agent, earned multiple awards and nominations despite its pandemic-forced streaming-only release. Focusing on two young women connected across time b...

Director Duncan Jones followed up his breakout hit Moon by developing a time-loop script from The Black List about a solider trying to prevent a terrorist attack. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright, the movie was mainstream hit, eclipsing Moon's box office with $147 million. Now we're charging the drivers and starting the sequence to see Source Code.   Fo...

Six hundred episodes ago, Legends Podcast reviewed Predator, the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger-led jungle actioner directed by John McTiernan, for our very first episode. To celebrate our anniversary, we're revisiting the franchise with its latest installment, the Amber Midthunder-led period-piece actioner directed by Dan Trachtenberg. With some special guests along for the ride, we talk about our...

Earlier this year, director Shawn Levy re-teamed with his Free Guy star Ryan Reynolds for a Netflix original film about a young boy who meets his time-traveling-test-pilot older self. Also starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldaña, Catherine Keener, and introducing Walker Scobell as a spot-on version of the young Deadpool actor, the film was a hit for Netflix with an estimated 3 million...

In 1975, Tim Curry led a cast of misfits, including Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, in a big-screen version of a modest musical hit from the London theater scene. Although the Broadway version closed after just fifty performances, the film version is still in limited release today, making it is the longest-running theatrical release in film history. Especially popular around Halloween, many sho...

Twenty-five years ago, director Paul W. S. Anderson followed up his video game adaptation Mortal Kombat with an R-rated hard sci-fi scary movie. Starring Sam Neill after Jurassic Park and Laurence Fishburne before The Matrix, this cosmic horror was rushed to release in order to fill a Paramount slot in theaters vacated by James Cameron's Titanic after the latter film ran overtime in production. Wh...

Director Edgar Wright followed his work on the TV series Spaced with his 2004 "Zom-Rom-Com" movie, which would retroactively become the first installment of the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. Reuniting Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two slacker housemates faces with a zombie apocalypse, the film was cult hit and launched the careers of international Wright, Pegg, Frost. As Legends of...

Anne Rice had enormous success in the 70's with her best selling novel, which launched a series of books.  Its gothic and romantic tale of two men and their adopted daughter was consumed by readers of the occult all over the world.  Film rights to the book sold for $150,000, before it was even published.  But it took over 10 years for everything to fall into place, before fans got to see the visua...

1974 saw the release of such treasured hits like The Godfather Part 2, Death Wish, The Longest Yard, Zardoz and Get Christy Love.  But the one film that set audiences rolling in the floor with laughter, was set in 1874, with a star studded cast of comedy gold.  This week we round up the horses, suffer gastral disasters, wooden horses, penis jokes and the N-Word more times than I care to count.  We...

Released this February, Venom director Ruben Fleisher's take on Sony's hit puzzle platformer video game series was a thing that happened. Starring Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as his mentor Victor Sullivan, the film also includes Antonio Banderas as the bad guy, along with actresses Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle. As the first film put out by Sony's new division Playstation Product...

Ten years ago, Gareth Evan's fists-and-fury action thriller busted out of Indonesian theaters and took the world by storm. Showcasing the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat, the film garnered international recognition for its stars Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim, praise for its frenetic, claustrophobic style, and imitation from films like 2015's Dredd. Retitled The Raid: Redemption for American cine...

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome… to the 1972 film adaptation of the 1966 Broadway musical set in the last days of Weimar Germany. Starring Liza Minelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey, the film version was directed by choreographer Bob Fosse and won eight Oscars - more than The Godfather. Most people forget that Bob Fosse beat Francis Ford Coppola for Best Director. In fact, the movie won the most Osc...

This week, we're wrapping up the month with the direct-to-video sequel to one of our first Aug-Heist movies. Spike Lee's 2006 film Inside Man was his most financially successful film, but a follow-up was stuck in development hell for over a decade, despite strong interest from all parties. However, in 2019, a sequel starring Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn and Sense8's Aml Ameen was released on st...

This week, we're getting wetter with Mikael Salomon's natural disaster movie meets heist thriller from 1998. When a group of robbers led by Morgan Freeman try to steal the payout from an armored car in a town evacuated due to flooding, it's up to rookie driver Christian Slater to stop them. Dumped into theaters in January, this film never got its head above water and bellyflopped at less than $20...

  This week, we're hitting the beach and hanging ten with Kathryn Bigelow's bank robbery-slash-bromance film from 1991. Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah, an ex-college football quarterback-turned-rookie FBI agent tasked with taking down a gang of thieves led by Patrick Swayze's Bodhi, the cast also includes Lori Petty, Gary Busey, and John C. McGinley. The movie made bank at the summer box office...

This week, we're going abroad with a bunch of bumbling burglars in Britain in Charles Chricton;s 1988 caper. Starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin, this comedy won big at the box office and scored multiple awards, including a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Kline. Following the aftermath of diamond robbery, the film tracks the multiple double-crosses, triple-crosse...

This week, we're paying tribute to James Caan, who passed away last month at age 82, with his starring role in Michael Mann's 1981 directorial debut. Co-starring Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson and Robert Prosky, the film also features the big screen debuts of Dennis Farina, William Petersen and James Belushi. Mann brought in real-life professional thieves to consult on the film, which was co-produced...

In 2013, director Edgar Wright concluded his Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, all co-written with Simon Pegg, produced by Nira Park, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost. Alternatively called the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, the first two films, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, riffed on  zombie movies and the buddy cop genre. For the final entry in the trilogy, Wright and Pegg tackled sci-fi alien inv...

Seventy years ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's famed producer Arthur Freed, the force behind hits like The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, released one of the most adored movie musicals of all time. Starring Gene Kelly (who co-choreograhped the film's extensive tap numbers), Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds, the film is set at the dawn of "talkie" films and follows the trio through the reinve...