Reel Deep Dive

Zardoz lingers in the public imagination as an unintentionally hilarious creative misfire. It was written, directed, and produced by a supremely confident John Boorman, fresh off a succession of creative and commercial triumphs. It features Sean Connery skulking about in both a red diaper and a wedding dress. This first ten minutes of the film showcases a floating stone head that lectures people a...

This is the second of three Reel Deep Dive episodes covering WandaVision. Feel free to scroll down and click on the preceding installment if you'd like to listen to us cover episodes 1-3. For this installment, Ryan is joined by Sarah and Nicole as he deconstructs the middle segment of Wanda and Vision's story-arc. This covers the period where Wanda's sitcom reality warp are being monitored by gove...

Plenty of fun things on the internet lose their appeal once their creators begin tracing trends. A sense of joy is lost when one stops writing about what they care about and focus instead upon what they think will drive clicks. Conversely, anyone who produces a podcast, video essay, or blog post is doing so for an audience. Even the most iconoclastic maverick has to be at least a little bit consci...

This episode kicks off a series of features centering on The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling's classic anthology show of sci-fi, twist endings, and socio-political allegories. We're going to be dividing them up based on writers. Ryan had too much trepidation about tackling Serling or Richard Matheson for the initial outing, so we're talking about the three episodes that Jerry Sohl ghostwrote on behalf...

It's fairly common knowledge that the first Godzilla film was a thinly-veiled allegory for nuclear devastation. However, while parables about ecological ruin and government fallibility never quite left the series, Godzilla's growing appeal among small children meant that his sequels would get progressively more colorful and silly as the years went on. Terror of Mechagodzilla, the subject for this...

A common complaint about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that its films often come off as the homogenous product of an anonymous assembly line. The superhero comics that they're derived from are often the formulaic result of journeymen frantically scrambling to meet deadlines for an audience of undiscerning eight year olds, but the longevity of certain characters have meant that creative teams ha...

The Fast And The Furious was a successful movie, but it's unlikely that anyone in 2001 could predict that it would be the starting point for a massively-successful and influential franchise that's beloved the world over, has begrudgingly won critical accolades, and is still going strong after two decades. A teenaged Ryan certainly didn't think so when a high school friend dragged him in to see the...

Ryan definitely wouldn't have picked this topic if left to his own devices; he's not a big Selena listener and he's not usually fond of biopics for iconic musicians (he later had to cut a lot of ranting on the latter subject out of the episode because it veered too far away from relevancy). Sylvan, on the other hand, had an adolescent obsession with the charismatic Tejano vocalist profiled in this...

Stagecoach is a film that revived the Western as a film genre, solidified John Ford as one of the iconic Western directors, and made John Wayne into a star. It's also a strong ensemble feature that boasts gripping action scenes, gorgeous shots of Monument Valley, tight editing, layered characterization, and defining performances from Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, and Thomas Mitchell. Ryan is joined...

This adaptation of Dante Alighieri's narrative poem, one of the earliest feature-length films, finds the poet braving the terrors of hell with Virgil as a guide. Drawing from Gustave Doré's famed engravings and employing many of the trick photography techniques pioneered by Georges Méliès, The Inferno caused an instant sensation upon its 1911 debut and has yet to lose its ability to strike audienc...

The 1989 Batman film was one of the most successful films ever released up to that point, so director Tim Burton was given a staggering budget and a great deal of creative autonomy when he was lured back in to direct its sequel. The resulting film remains one of the most idiosyncratic blockbusters ever released by a major American studio. Batman Returns was a major tentpole release that was consci...

The surprise success of A Charlie Brown Christmas has led to a deluge of sequels, spin-offs, imitations, parodies, and merchandising tie-ins over the course of the seven decades since its premiere. Despite that, this film remains unique among holiday specials for its sincere, forthright, and unpretentious approach to the seasonal depression, social anxiety, and endless commodification that bears d...

There are numerous screen versions of Charles Dickens' 1843 holiday fable 'A Christmas Carol', but to many millennials (Ryan included) the definitive take is the 1992 Brian Henson film. The first major Muppet project to be undertaken after the untimely death of Jim Henson, Muppet Christmas Carol stars Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge with Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, and various other Muppets filli...

One of the formative slasher movies, Black Christmas concerns a sorority house accosted by an unknown killer who slaughters young college students from his base in the building's attic. It features an eerie score from Carl Zittrer, grounded direction from Bob Clark, and strong performances from Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder. While only a modest success in its day, Black Christmas gained an endur...

Reel Deep Dive has previously held discussions about how adolescent male power fantasies are transferred to celluloid, but Heavy Metal ranks among the most transparent and shameless attempts to graft a 14-year-old-boy's desires to a feature film. An animated sci-fi/fantasy anthology film based on the popular comics magazine, Heavy Metal is crammed to the gills with superfluous nudity, buckets of g...

Some of the episodes for this podcast center on big milestones that are significant to the history of cinema. Others, such as this episode, focus on films that Ryan watched an awful lot as a child. Addams Family Values was one of those movies that Ryan put on at least a couple times a year. His family still plays it on every Thanksgiving, hence the decision to post this episode a few days before t...

A sleepy English village is beset by a strange, alien phenomenon that impregnates every person with a functioning uterus. The resulting children are cold, distant brood parasites with a collective hive mind and terrifying psychic abilities. They soon begin terrorizing the community while British intelligence studies other areas of the world suffering from comparable situations. Many, including the...

When a person in the modern day is asked to picture the aesthetic of retro sci-fi, they'll probably conjure imagery rooted in 1956's Forbidden Planet. Loosely based upon Shakespeare's The Tempest, Forbidden Planet was a bold and ambitious attempt to apply MGM's penchant for colorful spectacle to science fiction. Its success affected much of what followed in the genre, including Star Trek, The Twil...

Ryan hosts a movie dork podcast in his spare time. Also, he's the type of guy who writes about himself in the third person while composing its episode descriptions. With those things in mind, it's not shocking to state that he can be an insufferable geek on occasion. However, the apex of his insufferable geekiness lies with the X-Men, a franchise he's been obsessed with since the age of six. Once...

There must have been a time when the very existence of Little Shop of Horrors seemed like an oddity. It is, after all, a campy musical about a killer plant whose songbook cribs liberally from mid-20th century R&B music. However, after several decades worth of amateur productions and a steady presence on both cable TV and streaming services, Little Shop of Horrors has established itself as a pe...

One could plausibly argue that Halloween is one of the most imitated movies ever made. It was hardly the first horror film whose plot points drive it to what is now known as the slasher subgenre, but it created or calcified most of the tropes that define the idiom. Its impressive feat of reaping massive returns on its tiny investment guaranteed an onslaught of sequels, reboots, remakes, rip-offs,...

Found footage is a film genre where some (or all) of the work is presented as if it were discovered film or video recordings. The events on the screen are shown through the perspective of one of the characters, often with commentary presented in real time. This approach is often used in horror movies. Rachel is a big fan of found footage; Ryan considers it a storytelling crutch frequently used by...

Being an aficionado of schlocky horror movies from the 80's, Cheryl picked Waxwork when it was her turn to select the subject for an installment of Reel Deep Dive. While digging up background info on the film for his notes, Ryan stumbled across the fact that Waxwork is supposedly a remake of Waxworks, a German Expressionist film from 1924. He asked Cheryl if it'd be cool if they compared and contr...

At the apex of 1980's action excess, Jean-Claude Van Damme carved out a niche for himself in this low budget martial arts film. Bloodsport was a moderate success at the box office, but grew a much bigger following through home video and basic cable broadcasts. Its most prominent features include amateurishly hammy acting, choppy cinematography, and Van Damme's penchant for silly gesticulations, hu...

The titular character of Matilda is a precocious little girl who contends against corrupt, neglectful parents and a tyrannical school principal. Directed by Danny DeVito and based on the 1988 book by beloved children's author Roald Dahl, Matilda was a box office disappointment that gradually became a cult classic through home video and TV broadcasts (a popular subject for this podcast). Ryan is jo...