Reel Deep Dive

Rock & Rule was the first animated feature produced by Nelvana, a Canadian studio that created a great deal of content that younger Gen X and older millennials have substantial regard for. While it was first pitched as a children's movie, three years of development resulted in Rock & Rule becoming an adult-skewing, post-apocalyptic parable centering on a rock band using their harmonies to...

This episode centers upon a film about the seedy underbelly of children's entertainment. A scummy kid's TV host (Robin Williams) loses his gig after getting caught up in a bribery scandal. His replacement (Edward Norton) is a wholesome, guileless entertainer who has to contend with the sabotage attempts made by his predecessor, but his true test comes when his well-defined ethical code is tested b...

It's often said that movies are magic, but that's another way of saying that movies are a trick. Movies are made when a director stages and/or captures an assortment of scenarios and then, through careful editing, a pile of raw footage is pared down and spliced together to form a narrative. This process is filled with deliberate artifice and its goal is to manipulate its audience in some way. The...

One of the defining films of the screwball comedy genre, His Girl Friday was released to an indifferent audience in 1940. However, because Columbia failed to renew its copyright, the film lapsed into the public domain and steadily grew an appreciative cult audience due to constant broadcasts on TV stations in need of cheap timeslot filler. It's now considered one of the strongest films produced du...

Shot by Richard Linklater and meticulously rotoscoped under a tight budget, Waking Life centers upon an unnamed protagonist who gradually realizes that he's roving through a seemingly-endless dream world. When not subjecting the viewer to surreal and psychedelic imagery, Waking Life spends most of its running time on a series of conversations and monologues about existentialism, Buddhism, the natu...

Following the conclusion of long-running X-Men and Spider-Man programs that dominated Saturday morning TV ratings during the early-to-mid 1990's, the Fox network commissioned Saban to adapt other Marvel properties to replace them. Among them was The Silver Surfer, starring a spacefaring wanderer with a psychedelic aesthetic, thematic ties to medieval folklore, and an enduring cult audience. The sh...

Ryan picked a still image of Cesare for Reel Deep Dive's thumbnail, so it was only a matter of time before The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari was the subject of an episode. The first German Expressionist film and one of the most influential works in the history of cinema, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is noteworthy for the psychological allegories in its set dressing, the story's antiauthoritarian bent, an...

Megamind was a moderately successful film, but it was buried during an especially competitive year for family-friendly animated films. Tangled, Toy Story 3, How To Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, The Secret World Of Arriety, and Despicable Me also came out in 2010; so yeah, Megamind isn't even the only family-friendly animated film of 2010 to feature a supervillain as its protagonist. Even...

Fed up with the studio executives at Disney, Don Bluth struck out on his own with this 1982 feature, a loose adaptation of Robert C. O'Brien's 1971 children's book 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH'. While a financial disappointment upon its initial release, The Secret Of NIMH found a growing cult audience on home video and is now considered one of the finest animated films of its period. It is no...

One of the quintessential romantic comedies, When Harry Met Sally follows its titular characters through a twelve year period where their prickly acquaintance gradually evolves into a close friendship and ultimately a marriage. This film either established or popularized a great number of tropes that are associated with romcoms; it's not an overstatement to label When Harry Met Sally as one of the...

Widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, Robot Monster is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that centers upon a small family straining to evade an alien invader driven to exterminate the last vestiges of the human race. Shot over a few days with a shoestring budget, Robot Monster is notable for its hacky editing, sloppy use of dinosaur stock footage, amateurish acting, an "alien...

Following the success of 1979's The Muppet Movie (and the final season of the television show), Jim Henson and his team dialed up their ambitions for the next installment in the franchise. Just about every aspect of The Muppet Movie that people liked was brought back, except bigger and bolder. Did you enjoy the numerous celebrity cameos? Well, here are even more of those. Did you like all the runn...

Reel Deep Dive returns to the world of Batman with the character's first feature film (if you don't count the awful 1940's serials, which get a passing mention). Ryan is joined by Cheryl as they discuss the Dynamic Duo's efforts to foil a wicked plot by Joker, Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman to dehydrate ambassadors of the (not quite) United Nations into colorful powder and then ransom them for a b...

Often considered one of the few bright spots during a particularly inauspicious creative rut in Disney's history, The Rescuers marked a key transitional phase of the company's evolution. The Rescuers is the last Disney animated film to feature significant contributions from any of the Nine Old Men, the core animators from the studio's golden era. The Rescuers is also the first Disney animated film...

Reel Deep Dive returns to the filmography of John Carpenter and Debra Hill with this supernatural horror film. Set in a sleepy coastal city in the midst of its centennial festivities, The Fog's action centers upon a group of vengeful ghosts who sweep into the community under the cover of a glowing fog and exact vengeance for the deliberate shipwreck that killed them upon the city's founding. It fe...

Reel Deep Dive makes its first foray into the world of short films by doing a study of the first three Wallace & Gromit outings. 1989's A Grand Day Out began life as a student film by animator Nick Park and, after a laborious six year creative process, became an unexpected smash hit. Its two follow-ups, 1993's The Wrong Trousers and 1995's A Close Shave, solidified the starring duo's status as...

Winchester, alternatively known as Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, is a 2018 horror film that had been in some form of development since 2009. It's an anachronistic take on the infamous Winchester Mystery House, a building erected by the wealthy rifle heiress Sarah Winchester. This woman was convinced that she was being haunted by the vindictive ghosts of those killed by the Winchester re...

Closely adapted from the classic manga series, Lone Wolf And Cub: Sword of Vengeance is the first of a film series that ran for six installments between 1972 and 1974. It stars Tomisaburo Wakayama as Ogami Itto, a disgraced former executioner to the shogun. He is forced to travel the Japanese countryside with his young son in a heavily-armed baby carriage. Together, the two take on dirty jobs in t...

Godzilla Vs. Kong is a deliberately silly movie that accidentally got swept up in a number of larger forces. It's the first major studio film to make a big splash in American theaters during the pandemic, meaning that cultural historians of later generations may examine it as a signpost of how society reacted to the specter of Covid-19. Did audiences show up to Godzilla Vs. Kong for its promises o...

In order to boost their engagement, many film podcasts will schedule episodes relevant to the current discourse in the cinema landscape. Reel Deep Dive is hesitant to chase after trending topics, but Ryan just happened to record a discussion about this direct-to-DVD Mortal Kombat animated film. So, he's scheduling it a week before a new Mortal Kombat film is debuting in theaters and HBO Max. Maybe...

Blood Quantum is a Canadian zombie film written, produced, directed, and starring First Nations people. It centers on an Indigenous Reservation that becomes a refuge during an archetypical zombie apocalypse. In this film's universe, indigenous people are immune to infection from zombie bites. This puts them in a precarious position when white refugees arrive at their compound and beg for sanctuary...

Reel Deep Dive continues its breakdown of the Fast & The Furious franchise with its second installment, often argued as the worst installment in the series. Vin Diesel declined to participate, meaning that Paul Walker's street racing foil is now played by Tyreese Gibson. They've been conscripted to infiltrate a Floridian drug cartel and take down its kingpin by being really, really good at stu...

The plot of Loving Vincent takes place a year after the death of its titular character and centers upon a young man obsessively seeking the truth behind the artist's suspicious suicide. That being said, the core appeal of the film lies not in its story but rather in its storytelling. Loving Vincent was famously animated through hundreds of oil paintings that were painstakingly retouched by hand be...

Reel Deep Dive hasn't really covered an old fashioned "dad movie" yet, so Rachel suggested that we talk about director David Lean's first foray into epic cinematic storytelling. Set during World War II, Bridge On The River Kwai concerns a group of British POWs tasked with building a strategically-valuable bridge on a path between Rangoon and Siam. Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) is in...

We're wrapping up our coverage of WandaVision with this episode. Ryan is joined by Sarah and Nicole to discuss Wanda processing her trauma, reckoning with inflicting her grief upon the citizens of Westview, coping with the loss of her family, confronting the story's main antagonists, and (since this is an MCU product) providing some teasers about what's coming next. Discussion topics for this segm...