Secret Movie Club Podcast

October is Halloween season. And Halloween season is always a good time to discover (or re-discover) some of the more hidden yet just as brilliant horror gems in the genre. From Carl Theodor Dryer's 1932 dreamlike VAMPYR to Lucio Fulci's 1971 blunt yet Hitchcockian LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN to Zach Cregger's 2022 breakthrough comedy-horror freakout BARBARIAN to Don Siegel's & Clint Eastwood's 1...

In the final part of our three part 2025 series, Is This Cinema?, we look at the 2010 boundary pushing shocking controversial A SERBIAN FILM co-wri & directed by Srdjan Spasojevic which has its advocates like moviemaker Eli Roth and its detractors (many many others). Actor, moviemaker, musician Andras Jones (who did NOT see the movie) and Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (who...

One of the greatest American movie trilogies has been right under our eyes for decades. Francis Ford Coppola's & team's The Godfather Parts 1, 2, and 3 form one of the most impressive three part movie projects ever attempted. It's easy to overlook this since The Godfather 3 came out 16 years after The Godfather 2 and is not considered at the same level as the first two movies. And yet, despite...

Sometimes you have to go see a movie in a theater no matter what. That's a great thing. Auteur moviemaker Paul Thomas Anderson's just released One Battle After Another, shot on the 35mm Vistavision format, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn about a stoner Dad ex-revolutionary trying to save his daughter is just such a movie. What's illuminating, for better and worse, is realizing even with...

It's one thing to be scared by a ghost story, vampires, or masked killers menacing horny teens in summer camps. It's another thing when you see a movie that forces you to confront horrors that happen everyday around the world. Movies like Hector Babenco's 1981 Brazillian neorealist Pixote about a 10 year old juvenile delinquent struggling in the corrupt reform schools and even more brutal streets....

A movie star has "it". You can't learn it. You can't fake it. The camera loves you. The audience wants you. Great actors may never be movie stars but they often have long, rewarding careers filled with powerful work even if they never get that huge paycheck. What's interesting though is how often big stars are determined to be recognized as great actors or vice versa.  And it's that grain of sand...

One of the fascinating ironies about Los Angeles is that it is often movies in heightened genres like noir that best capture what the city really feels like to those born and raised in it (like this podcaster). Movies like Billy Wilder's acidic Hollywood takedown classic Sunset Boulevard and Roman Polanski's & Robert Towne's 70's new cinema classic Chinatown show sides of the city with a deniz...

The Impressario is an archetype the movie industry sorely needs right now. Lorne Michaels, co-creator and longtime producer of Saturday Night Live offers a template and some surprising subtle lessons in what characteristics are needed to thrive in the long game. Michaels is one of the last of a breed that started at the very beginning with boy genius MGM studio head Irving Thalberg and includes fo...

1920's German expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did more than inspire a whole kind of cinema-it also became the great-grandparent of a genre. The mind-bending dive into the psyche genre that saw three of its greatest examples all influence each other: Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona which begat in many ways Robert Altman's 1977 3 Women. And all those movies consciously or unconsciously begat...

RKO needed money fast in 1943 and they brought on David O Selznick protege Val Lewton to head a unit devoted to cheapie horror movies. The rules-use their titles like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man-then figure out the rest. Lewton miraculously created a cycle of incredible atmospheric literate horror movies, several masterfully directed by genre master Jacques Tourneur, that h...

The Western genre is a home grown art form like jazz and rock and roll. And it occasionally produces really strange and wild movies.  Marlon Brando's incredible 1961 One Eyed Jacks is a western that takes place on California beaches with a psycho-sexual Oedipal focus on a rebel, a father figure, and a step-daughter. Other eccentric westerns like Budd Boetticher's minimalist 1956 Seven Men From Now...

On any given day, you could pick 20 American movies that would show a different cross section of the complex contradictory conflicting aspects of the American character. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill picks 20 including 1928's King Vidor directed The Crowd, the biting 50's satire Ace in the Hole, 70's masterworks like Husbands, Girlfriends, Nashville, Killer of Sheep, Bl...

Thematic trilogies are fascinating and exciting. Though characters may reappear, they are really trilogies around a theme or fascination or concern. Italian master Roberto Rossellini rose to the top of world cinema in the 1940's with his trilogy of movies focused on World War II and its immediate after effects: Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).  The first two mov...

As everyone and their cousin is telling you these days, it's the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's classic monster movie blockbuster Jaws (1975). Directed by wunderkind Spielberg when he was only 28 years old (yet had already been a professional director in the TV & movie game at least 8 years), Jaws set the template Hollywood is still chasing: promising young director, huge recognition w...

That's a mouthful! Today, Secret Movie Club programmer talks about the wonders and possibilities of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres and how those wonders/possibilities are beautifully realized in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. To narrow it down, Craig explores 1939's The Wizard of Oz (fantasy), 1972's Solaris (sci-fi), and 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then Craig takes an...

Every now and then, you have to deep dive an amazing movie to celebrate it. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill sings the praises of journalist turned moviemaker Francesco Rosi's 1962 Italian masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano. It tells the story of famed Sicilian outlaw Giuliano not from his POV but from the POV's of everyone around him-townspeople, police, the Italian governmen...

Blake Winston Rice @blakewrice had his life turned inside out when he found out his short film Tea had been accepted for competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Suddenly after years of shorts submissions and rejections, he had less than a month to get ready for the biggest opportunity of his life. Blake talks with Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill about the crazy ride he had...

Recent movies like the Latvian animated instant masterpiece Flow, the hilarious and well thought out parody.satire.personal journey indie The People's Joker, the formally daring subjective POV two-hander Nickel Boys, the Romanian dark comedy of the moment Do Not Expect Too Much From the End Of the World, and the musical political horror of the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat among many oth...

A movie podcast so expansive, so intense, it took several weeks to edit!  Actor.musician.cinephile Andras Jones (Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama, https://previouslyyours.com ) and Secret Movie Club founder Craig Hammill have part 2 of their conversation about what exactly defines cinema? Andras challenges Craig on Craig's definitions of simulation, artifice,...

We return to our Is this Cinema series to look at one of the 2000's most divisive horror movies: Tom Six's The Human Centipede (2009). The concept was so shocking (three humans sewed together by a mad doctor to make a...well you guessed it...) it became a pop culture phenomenon. Comedy shows like South Park devoted whole episodes to it. But was it cinema or just an edgelord eyeball grab for money?...

The strange and still not fully understood deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife of 30+ years Betsy Arakawa may unsettle us for awhile or for always. But Gene Hackman's contribution to cinema is undeniable. From 1967's Depression-era gangster movie Bonnie & Clyde through Wes Anderson's 2001 comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, Gene Hackman captivated audiences with his always truthful electric per...

The one and only Edwin Cesar Gomez of @physicalmediasociety returns to the Secret Movie Club podcast fold to discuss American cinema producing legend Roger Corman. When SMC did its first Corman tribute a few months back, Edwin said "Hey! I shoulda been on that pod!" And he was right. Very few folks have seen as many Corman pictures as the ECG.  Today, Edwin and SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill...

It's fascinating to see how the adaptation of a single novel, here Shirley Jackson's 1958 haunted house masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House, can have such a profound impact on sixty years of moviemaking. First adapted by master Hollywood director Robert Wise in 1963 as The Haunting, Shirley Jackson's novel would then inspire Stephen King to write The Shining and Stanley Kubrick to adapt The Shi...

Adaptation from one storytelling medium to another is key to cinema. Be it a novel, a play, a TV show, an opera, or beloved legend, the work adapted MUST be molded and changed to suit the strengths of cinema.  Ironically, faithful adaptations are often the least successful. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the classic 1818 romantic Gothic horror novel Frankenstein...

Today, we look at some of the great "pure cinema" movies with little to no dialogue. Now listen-dialogue is great. Dialogue is cinematic. But to scale the heights, a moviemaker needs to know how to communicate cinematically (image + sound) without using dialogue as a crutch to convey information. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at F.W. Murnau's 1924 masterpiece The Last La...