Shoot The Hostage

We have returned from the ashes for season 17 and to kick off Sarah’s “After Death” theme, we’re covering Danny and Michael Phillippou’s 2022 breakout hit, Talk to Me. Forget about boring old films with a séance where people quietly hold hands around a candlelit table, this movie flips the genre on its head by turning supernatural contact into a viral party game. We give a massive hand to director...

Before the new season begins next week, we’re excavating a prehistoric relic straight from our Patreon archive to keep your ears fed between seasons. We chose to dig up this bonus review for the main feed because it fits seamlessly alongside our last season, “Size Doesn’t Matter” and what’s bigger or more needlessly oversized than a Jurassic Park movie. In this episode, we take a giant bite out of...

In this season roundup, we dive headfirst into all things scale-related for the last time as we revisit some of our favourite moments from Dan’s “Size Doesn’t Matter” season. In this roundup, we shrink our expectation and scale up the chaos: We dissect Hank Pym’s fake science in Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man, celebrating Corey Stoll’s massive floating face in Quantumania and Judy Greer’s three-scene mothe...

Open up a cold can of Cherryade and join us for a look back the season. What started as a theme dedicated to films about size and exploring size in movies ended up expanding into a bloody long shortlist covering everything from pint-sized slasher icons to scaled-up creature features. Across the 8 episodes, we weighed up small things in movies, from Hary Oldman in Tiptoes and Chucky in Child’s Play...

For the eighth and final episode of our Size Doesn’t Matter season, Dan and Sarah look at director Joe Dante’s 1987 sci-fi comedy, Innerspace. Anchored in the wild experimentation of 1980s cinema, the movie tackles an absurdist concept with Dennis Quaid playing an arrogant pilot who is miniaturized and accidentally injected into a hypochondriac played by Martin Short. We dig into why this blend of...

It’s time to shrink your expectations and doll out some pocket-sized justice because Shoot the Hostage is back for the penultimate episode in Dan’s carefully curated “Size Doesn’t Matter” season. This week, Dan and Sarah take a short journey into the 1991 sci-fi action absurdity Dollman, directed by cult b-movie maestro Albert Pyun and produced by the legendary Charles Band of Full Moon Pictures....

Welcome back to Shoot the Hostage for the sixth instalment of our “Size Doesn’t Matter” season where this week, Dan has dragged us to the high-tech non-functioning corridors of Clamp Tower. Yes, we’re tackling the pinnacle of chaotic movie sequels: Joe Dante’s 1990 live-action cartoon, Gremlins 2: The New Batch. What to expect in this episode: Sarah explains why her maternal instincts are triggere...

Welcome back to Shoot the Hostage, the movie podcast where we tackle your favourite films one themed season at a time. We are officially five episodes deep into Dan’s “Size Doesn’t Matter” season and we’ve hit the apex of early 2000s studio chaos. This week we’re talking about Jurassic Park 3 (2001) – the shortest, weirdest and most script-deficient entry in the pantheon of dinosaur movies. To say...

This week we’re slicing into the 1988 classic Child’s Play, the slasher film that proved sometimes “an annoying little s***” in dungarees is all you need to launch one of the most resilient horror icons in cinema. We dive into how creator Don Mancini managed to maintain incredible consistency and longevity by never retconning the crazy logic of the series. We discuss the creative clashes between M...

We are reaching new heights in the third instalment of Dan’s “Size Doesn’t Matter” theme, and Sarah’s jaw is quite literally still on the floor. This week, we are unpacking the 2002 cult curiosity Tiptoes, a misguided movie so notorious that is has sat on YouTube for eight years without a single copyright claim. We dive into the troubled production of director Matthew Bright, exploring how a suppo...

Don’t be a bad host – grab some stolen squid legs and pull up a chair for the second instalment of our Size Doesn’t Matter season! This week, we’re hitting the Bong Joon-ho hard to discuss his 2006 South Korean movie masterpiece, The Host. Is it a monster movie? A family drama? A fearless satire on bureaucratic incompetence? It’s all the above, plus a healthy dose of anarchic slapstick and a very...

We’re back for a brand-new season of Shoot the Hostage, and Dan has officially established a theme that Sarah finds entirely hypocritical: “Size Doesn’t Matter.” To kick things off, we’re looking at a cinema entry where scale is quite literally the only thing that matters, Ant-Man (2015). This episode marks our first full-length dive into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically during the era...

We managed to find time to wander aimlessly through the fluorescent lit yellow wallpapered nightmare of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Join Dan and a moderately functional Sarah as she recounts the joy of following a horror movie with a 3am trip to a real-life liminal hospital corridor for a CT scan. In this episode we dive into: The rise of Kane Parsons and how a 20-year-old turned a creepy pasta inspi...

Welcome to this bonus episode of Shoot the Hostage, where we are lingering in the hallways of our favourite moments from our Liminal Spaces season. If you’ve ever felt like you’re trapped in a dreamlike transitory space between a swimming pool and a never-ending warehouse, you’ve come to the right place for some Liminal Space cinema chat. We’re crossing over from the uncanny to the absurd as we re...

Do you feel like you are in a transitory place where things are familiar but not quite right? Is your sense of reality feeling a little unstable? Don’t worry, you haven’t wandered into the Backrooms, you’ve just reached the threshold of the Shoot the Hostage Season 15 wrap show. Come out from under those flickering fluorescent lights, put the kettle on and we’ll help you escape the void. That’s ri...

Join us one last time in Liminal Spaces as we peer into the green swirling abyss for another visit to John Carpenter town. It’s time to talk about Prince of Darkness (1987), a film that proves that when it comes to 80s horror, nobody does it like the master of horror himself. In this episode, we dive into cosmic horror, subatomic evil and the ultimate showdown between religion vs science. We discu...

We’re entering the Shimmer for the penultimate episode of the season! Or as Dan insists on calling it, (much to Sarah’s annoyance) the “penny”. Join us as we discuss Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi weirdness, Annihilation. As the 7th entry in our Liminal Spaces season, Sarah explains why this dreamlike and ethereal landscape is the ultimate subversion of the genre, moving away from empty car parks and...

Don’t Wake in Fright because you’ve got a massive hangover; wake up and join us in The Yabba for a cold midi! This week on Shoot the Hostage, we are continuing Sarah’s Liminal Spaces season with a journey into the sun-drenched beer-soaked nightmare of Australian cinema: Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film, Wake in Fright. In our 6th episode of the season, we follow Gary Bond as John Grant, a bonded schooltea...

It Follows that we should probably talk about this movie before Dan stages a coup. We’re five episodes deep into our Liminal Spaces season, and Sarah has chosen David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014). While Sarah has watched this enough times to be legally haunted, Dan is still convinced that a Detroit setting should automatically involve more OCP interference or at least a robot that can’t cli...

We hope you don’t get lost on the highway to this episode because we’re taking a detour into the obtuse, dreamlike world of 90s cinema with David Lynch’s 1997 head-scratcher, Lost Highway. As the fourth entry in our Liminal Spaces season, we’re trying to figure out if we’re on a road to nowhere or just stuck in a psychogenic fugue state. To help us navigate this noir nightmare. We’ve bought back J...

We’re climbing back into the void for the third instalment of our Liminal Space season. After the chaotic vibes of last week, Sarah has led us into the hazy sun-drenched mystery of Peter Weir’s 1975 masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s a film that defines Australian cinema and remains one of the most haunting pop-culture touchstones of the 1970s, even if Dan is convinced the titular landmark...

Welcome back to the second stop on Sarah’s tour of liminal space movies, and this week we’re descending into the 1973 cult cinema classic, Messiah of Evil. It’s the film that sparked this entire season, and while it might have sat on a shelf for years, it’s currently having a bit of a second coming on the pod. We’re breaking down the dreamlike logic of Point Dune (formerly new Bethlehem) and explo...

Don’t be a square, it’s time to get an acute perspective on our latest pick as we sail into a brand-new season! Dan is convinced we’re kicking off a “season of shapes” having already prepared notes for The Circle, Hex the Hexagon and the Secret Life of Rectangles but Sarah is here to steer the ship back towards her actual theme: Liminal Space Movies. And we’re launching with Christopher Smith’s Tr...

Apologies in advance if this one stings a little. Yes, it’s a bee pun. What else! While we’re currently between seasons, we’re keeping the hive alive by raiding the Patreon archive to bring you this bonus discussion. Today we’re talking about another entry in the Statham vocation cinematic universe, The Beekeeper (2024). In this outing, directed by David Ayer, Statham plays a man who literalises h...

Come in and make yourself at home. Feel free to lie down on the couch and tell us about your mother. If not, why not check in for one last session in our season of films exploring identity. Before we move on to Liminal Spaces in season fifteen, it’s time to revisit some of our favourite chats from the last eight episodes. We dived into the cinematic identity of everyone from Gotham’s elite to ball...