Redshirt Cinema Club

It's the concluding chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy this week, as we tackle Return of the Jedi. If you're over 35 this was probably your favourite Star Wars movie as a kid - an action-filled romp across a forest moon, Tatooine and a brand new Death Star. It's got speeder bike chases, Leia in that outfit, and Luke facing off against Darth Vader and the Emperor. What's not to like? The ewo...

Welcome to an end of year mailbag special looking back over Redshirt Cinema Club's 2025. What a year it's been! David Lynch, The Matrix, Jurassic Park, 1991, Indiana Jones, [Alien Earth I guess], John CarpeNNter - we have been on a cinematic tour and you have kept us company on the way. Now we go through the best of your emails and take a moment to reflect before breaking up for the Christmas peri...

This week we're all enjoying The Empire Strikes Back - Dave's favourite Star Wars film. Rob's favourite Star Wars film. Not Nath's though, but he does still like it. You could describe Empire as the beginning of Star Wars as a 'franchise' - it's a film brimming with confidence, with characters hitting their stride (Darth Vader is definitely evil now and C3PO is a bit nicer) and with ships and set-...

A long time ago in an office in Bath... we said we'd do a series on Star Wars. Finally, here it is. We start where it all began, with 1977's A New Hope (or simply 'Star Wars' as it was known back then). An un-assuming sci-fi adventure with a cast full of unknowns that director George Lucas thought was going to bomb - so much so that he went on holiday to avoid the noise around its release. What fo...

It's happening - we're about to watch Star Wars on Redshirt Cinema Club, and there will be no-one to stop us this time. Before we rewatch and discuss the first movie, we take a moment to discuss our personal histories with Star Wars, and read about some of yours. Are the three of us Star Wars fans? Which parts of the Star Wars world have we seen, and do we like the best? And exactly how fucking co...

We conclude our 1985 season with Nath's pick, Terry Gilliam's absurdist dark comedy Brazil, a disturbing vision of what the world might be like if capitalism squeezed every last shred of humanity out of society. Brazil tells us that world would have lots of ducts, and heroic vigilante plumbers played by Robert DeNiro. A wonderfully unique, hilarious and harrowing film with a stacked cast, Brazil i...

We're continuing our 1985 season this week with Walt Disney oddity, The Black Cauldron. Caught between the classic early decades of Disney animation and the studio's 1990s resurgence, The Black Cauldron is an unusually dark (and unusually British) adventure, with moments of dread and horror mixed in with the odd and unfathomable (magic pigs, hairy little thieves, gruesome self-sacrifice). Clearly,...

Back To The Future! Our 1985 season begins in earnest this week with Dave's pick of the year, Robert Zemeckis' layered, heartfelt time-travelling adventure (although do go and listen to our Goonies bonus episode if you can...) BTTF is a perfect fit with several films the pod has already absorbed, a "Spielberg-ing" of early 1980s life that like ET (and The Goonies) presents a world beset by adult p...

We're taking a long overdue look inside the Redshirt Cinema Club mailbag this week (please keep emailing us, we do read them, promise) before kicking off our new mini season by each selecting our favourite movie of 1985, in celebration of the year Dave was born. This has caused alarm for a couple of reasons: firstly it's made us realise a number of our favourite movies are now, like Dave, 40 years...

Man is the warmest place to hide this week, as our John Carpenter mini-season comes to a spectacular, gushing climax with 1982’s The Thing. Is Jed the dog the best dog actor ever? Could speaking Norwegian have solved this whole business in 5 minutes? And who - if anyone - is human by the end? Let’s find out Let us know what you think of this episode by emailing us at redshirtcinemaclub@gmail.com a...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a weekly podcast about smoking, apparently.   In the distant future of the year 1997, Manhattan has become a super prison, the president of the USA has crash landed inside, and only one man has tight enough trousers and good enough arms to break him out again. This is John Carpenter’s Escape From New York… Let us know what you think of this epis...

Halloween has come early, which is only fair as two of us are coming very late to Halloween, John Carpenter's genre-setting 1978 teen slasher classic. The adults are all busy at boring grown-up parties, the teens are constantly on the phone and swapping houses, and Michael Myers - inscrutable killer, embodiment of evil, and provider of cheap Halloween costume options for several generations - has...

Welcome to Los Angeles in 1976, setting for John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, a tale of bad gangs, good guys, and a tragically mishandled ice cream order. This is America and Hollywood as we remember it growing up - a scary, magnetic clash of morals and modernity. And also lots of shooting. Yes, this week we're watching John Carpenter's second film, where a criminal gang lays siege to a han...

A new dawn! A new day! A new Dark Star! Welcome to a brand new series on Redshirt Cinema Club, as we embark upon a vaguely Halloween-timed viewing of the early films of John Carpenter. There are so many reasons this run of films fits with what we've watched on the pod so far, not least the fact that several of these films are very good. We're starting this week with Carpenter's first film, Dark St...

We've reached the finale of Alien: Earth! This week we discuss episode 8, 'The Real Monsters'. The journey has ended, and have we been walking in a circle this whole time? The hybrid kids use soft(ware) power to launch a coup, we finally get to see that Morrow vs Kirsh showdown, the orchid escapes, and Johnny Eyeball finds a new home. Are we happy? Nearly. How are you doing? Let us know what you t...

This week - episode 7 of Alien: Earth, 'Emergence'. Things are happening, Fletch - many of them bad, especially for any humans remaining on the Neverland island complex in possession of a moral compass. Slightly and Smee become body smugglers, Wendy and Nibs feel their humanity slipping away, and Morrow does an actual invasion. Oh, and the alien got out. It's all a bit much for us, as our the firs...

After the brilliant episode 5 we return to Neverland for Alien: Earth episode 6 as events ramp up for the season finale. Wendy is transfixed by a now-adolescent Xenomorph, Slightly is desperate for a human to get face-hugged and that sheep with an alien eye ball is definitely planning something. Meanwhile Kirsh continues his observations while Boy Kavalier and Yutani enjoy an amicable business mee...

Episode 5 of Alien: Earth takes us back to the beginning. We wondered when we'd see the crew of the Maginot again and here they are, revealed in all their flawed, incompetent glory. An episode that details how we got from the first 10 minutes of episode 1 (everyone wakes up and banters over breakfast) to 20 minutes later in episode 1 (everyone dies). It's classic Alien basically - a crew of increa...

It's time for episode four of Alien: Earth, 'Observations'. Which is apt because there's a lot of observing going on: Wendy in the lab, Boy Kavalier watching Joe, Dame Cynthia watching Nibs (...fly across the room), and the eyeball squid monster watching everyone at once, from inside a sheep. We also observe that the show is turning out to be less interested in aliens and more interested in transh...

It's time for episode three of Alien: Earth, and the title of the episode is 'Metamorphosis'. Which is a reference to our showgirl, of course, but also the Lost Boys, Morrow, and humanity itself in this show about making machines, becoming machines, putting children into machines ("this is fine" - the ethics board, distractedly), and sometimes thinking about machines when an alien comes along and...

This week we're beginning our series on Alien: Earth. Having watched the Alien film series in its entirety at the end of last year, we are perfectly prepared, poised like an apex predator, and above all really bloody excited to embark upon a full, week-by-week viewing of the new FX series, Alien: Earth. Alien: Earth has been created and overseen by Noah Hawley, the creator of TV shows Legion and F...

This week we’re watching 2014’s Edge Of Tomorrow. Welcome to our final episode in this mini-series about genre movie that we love from an era - of Marvel dominance - that we don’t. Our film this week is Nath's pick and he's gone for Edge Of Tomorrow, a criminally under-appreciated time-loop sci-fi packed with action, humour, and nasty aliens. Altogether now… "Battle is the great redeemer…" Let us...

Continuing our journey through excellent genre movies of the Marvel era, this week we're watching Dave's pick - Dredd (2012). Directed by Peter Travis, written by Alex Garland and starring Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby and Lena Heady, this no-nonsense sci-fi romp is all action, one-liners and impossible chins - a brutal if uncomplicated look at what the world might be like if everything became a mass...

This week we're watching Hereditary (2018). Inspired by a recent listener comment, we're pausing our negativity around Marvel-era filmmaking and instead focusing on the positives. We've each picked one (1) genre from the broadly defined Marvel Era (roughly 2010 onwards) to celebrate smart, commercial movies. We're starting with Rob's pick, Ari Aster's horror debut, Hereditary. Poor Dave, poor that...

We've run out of adventures to have with Indiana Jones, which just leaves our official (scientific, archaeological) ranking of the five Indy movies, and a deep dive - an excavation , if you will - of our Redshirt mailbag to hear your thoughts and answer your questions about Mr Jones (Jr). Topics covered include how Temple Of Doom was actually received in India, embarrassing bits of films to watch...