Recovered

Dan, Keith, and guest Emma Gallaher are back to Transylvania for the 21st century Nosferatus! In 2024, horror auteur Robert Eggers decided to take another spin at Count Orlok... and perhaps because of this some amateur filmmakers Kickstarted their own version in 2023, with almost three recognizable stars in the mix. We tackle this low-budget retread first, which makes some odd choices with the cen...

Dan, Keith, and returning guest Emma travel as far back in film history as we've ever been to discuss the cinematic attempt at to file the serial numbers off Dracula with Nosferatu! In this first installment, it's heute auf Deutsch time as our hosts break down 1922's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, one of the earliest and most groundbreaking surviving horror movies of the silent er...

People always say "You couldn't make a [insert Mel Brooks classic] today." But were there movies Mel Brooks shouldn't have remade? That's the question facing Dan and Keith, presented by guest Olav Rokne of the Hugo Book Club, as we tackle To Be Or Not To Be. In 1942, Jack Benny starred in a farcical comedy about a theatre troupe rallying to save the Polish resistance from...

Dan and Keith head all the way back to the time to that brief overlap between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the dying days of vaudeville with comedy legends the Marx Brothers. In A Night at the Opera, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx were said to hit a new height by blending their signature antics with a more grounded emotional arc (outsourced to supporting characters), but how do those antics hol...

Dan and Keith head to ancient Greece and classic hero Perseus to weigh old-school stop motion against modern CG in the Clashes of the Titans! Back in 1981, legendary animator Ray Harryhausen wrapped a storied career with Clash of the Titans, in which Harry Hamlin's Perseus fights his way through stop-motion monsters to win the girl and claim a throne. Nearly three decades later, an all star c...

Turns out Rollerball was not the first instance of a Norman Jewison classic being remade by John McTiernan, so Dan and Keith strap in for round two, the Affairs of the Thomases Crown. In 1968, last days of the Hays Code, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway squared off as bored millionaire turned bank robbery mastermind Thomas Crown and the insurance investigator who gets pulled into his orbit while try...

Lllllllllet's get ready to ROLLERBALL! Dan and Keith dig into the 1975 cult classic dystopic sports flick Rollerball, in which James Caan must rise up against the world's corporate overlords by playing the best darn game of Rollerball he can, after about an hour of worldbuilding that only partially builds the world. In the early 2000s, legendary action director John McTiernan attempted t...

Beloved friend of the podcast and Video Vulture John Tebbutt is back, and he's got a doozy for Dan and Keith. Schlock king Roger Corman unites Mission: Impossible's Peter Graves, iconic western villain Lee Van Cleef, and B-movie queen Beverly Garland for the sci-fi thriller, question mark, It Conquered the World, in which a Venusian alien lures an Earth scientist into helping it seize co...

John Woo's The Killer: one of the most iconic 80s Hong Kong action flicks, with Chow Yun-Fat leaping through dove-invested areas to fire two pistols in slow-motion. Who would dare to remake it? John Woo. Dan and Keith dig into the original (and how dubbed and subtitled versions differ), the choices excellent and confusing, then jump forward to 2024 to unpack the Straight-to-Streaming remake,...

Hit the big city streets and get ready to look for vengeance, kind of, as Dan and Keith take on the Death Wishes. Back in 1994, Charles Bronson found his most iconic role as an architect who lashes out at random street criminals in the wake of an attack on his family. Dan and Keith break it down, how much it differs from the sequels that followed, and why that's Reagan's fault. Forty-fou...

Dan and Keith head to Mega-City One to look into two Judges Dredd! First, back in the 90s, Sylvester Stallone brought Britain's favourite satirical comic Judge to Hollywood, but perhaps put a little too much of him on the screen. Dystopic future, overly aggressive protagonist, Rob Schneider is here for some reason, it's a blend of a Judge Dredd adaptation and a Demolition Man follow-up t...

As the MCU returns from hiatus, Dan and Keith look back at the film that set up Captain America: Brave New World... that being 2008's The Incredible Hulk. First, in 2003, Ang Lee and a young producer named Kevin Feige attempted a deep, psychological Hulk, with comic-book-style editing, examinations of trauma and repressed memories, and a bit of a whackadoo climax, that may have been all theme...

Grab your shovel and prepare to make bad choices as Dan and Keith unearth the Pet Semataries! Way way back in the 1980s, during the heyday of Stephen King adaptations, a former star of Star Trek: TNG and a future star of Time Trax took on an adaptation of Pet Sematary, the one Stephen King book that scared Stephen King. Three decades later, another attempt was made, which didn't start changin...

Dan and Keith take a deep sigh, say "This may as well happen," and get into two takes on The Crow. First, the extremely 90s original with Brandon Lee and a bunch of cool character actors. How does it hold up? How does the tragedy at the core of the movie affect the viewing? Breaking down the unsafe production that cost us a rising star in Brandon Lee and imagining what might have been ha...

It's a new year, and Hollywood is still allergic to new ideas, so we have a new crop of remakes on the Horizon! Hooray, question mark? Dan and Keith dig into all the remakes and reboots on the horizon, from Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman to new takes on Stephen King, Saturday morning cartoons, a weirdly unconnected trio of Universal Movie Monsters, and deep cut remakes you'd ne...

Ho ho holiday greetings, as Dan and Keith celebrate the season the Recovered way: unpacking movies with the same premise! First up, what else but the internet's favourite non-Muppet Christmas movie, Die Hard! John McClane is trying to save his marriage and Christmas, and we love him for it enough that it spawned a sub-genre. But of all the Die Hard clones out there, only one dared to be EVEN...

Grab your parka, light a flamethrower, and trust no one as we take on Things from Other Worlds! First, Dan, Keith, and special guest Emma head back to the 1950s for The Thing From Another World, based on the story Who Goes There, as an arctic base is beset by a plant-based invader out to steal their blood, and science and military find themselves at odds. Then jump to 1982 for another attempt to a...

Dan and Keith go storm chasing with Twister and Twisters! Back in the 90s, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chased tornadoes for non-specific Science while staying ahead of their rival who was out for vague Profit in a simple storm flick that became one of the top hits of 1996. A whopping 28 years later, Hollywood took another crack at it with Twisters, which despite its title has the approximate same n...

Dan and Keith head back to the old west for two takes on the gritty western 3:10 to Yuma. Both versions see a desperate rancher agree to escort an outlaw bandit to the train to a prison in Yuma, something his gang is very willing to kill to prevent. In 1957, the conflict comes from the growing connection between Dan the rancher and Ben the bandit, and Ben probes and tests Dan's resolve throug...

It's another 80s classic (question mark) with a largely overlooked remake as Dan and Keith take on the Red Dawns! Back in Reagan's America, Hollywood wove a tale of America being invaded by a Russian/Cuban alliance, which took a very elaborate amount of set-up to justify, held at bay by rising stars Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey, and Lea Thompson. The fierce Soviet allianc...

Jump back, listeners, as it's time for another 80s classic and its 2010s remake as Dan and Keith cut loose, Footloose. In 1984, Kevin Bacon comes to the town of Bomont to redeem it from frenzied Satanic Panic oppression through the power of dance, with excellent supporting performances from Chris Penn, John Lithgow, and the great Diane Wiest. Then in the 2010s, the story is retold with few up...

The Kaiju Saga reaches its conclusion in the cinematic smackdowns of Godzilla Vs. Kong, the Scaly Boi vs. the Big Monke. But it's not cinema made it to the Monsterverse before someone thought "Maybe these two could fight," so we start back in the Showa Era with King Kong Vs Godzilla from 1962 (or '63 depending on country), in which Big Pharma orchestrates a fight between monste...

Dan and Keith are back into the Kings Kong, starting with Peter Jackson's 2005 remake. Fresh off Lord of the Rings, the future Sir Peter goes back to the 1930s in a lavish remake that references and homages the original while still adding a contemporary sensibility. Dan has some flowers for the filmmaking, while Keith thinks maybe Jackson put too much mustard on it. Then we return to the Mons...

We are back into the Kaiju Saga, trading Japan's scaly king for the USA's Big Monke! Dan and Keith cover two takes on King Kong: the original 1933 classic, and the 1976 remake that tries to be as different as it can while still being functionally identical. Two different Kongs of very different quality, but only one got a sequel: 1986's King Kong Lives, in which the producer and dir...

Throw on a suit, grab your neuralizer, and bounce with us, just bounce with us as we dig into the Men in Black! Back in 1997 an obscure comic became a classic sci-fi buddy-cop action-comedy teaming Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, then after two kinda samey sequels and a long gap an attempt was made to soft-reboot the franchise with Thor: Ragnarok's Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson. Special...