The Punching Up Movie Podcast

Punching Up-Episode 31-Highlander Here we are, born to be kings, we are princes of the podcast-verse. And to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the head lopping, Queen scored, Sean Connery featuring, 1980s cult classic that made an unlikely star of Christophe Lambert, the Punching Up crew will be putting Highlander to sword. On the chopping block this episode will be wayward Scottish accents, w...

Punching Up-Episode 30-Deep Red Look at the stars Look how they shine for you And everything you do Yeah, they were all…..GIALLO…As in lurid, yet somehow tastefully composed, extremely violent, yet oddly beautiful to look at, Italian horror murder mysteries that make little or no actual logical sense even after everything has been explained. And no giallo holds these contradictions in perfect tens...

Punching Up-Episode 29-The Best of 2025 Better late than never, the Punching Up boys present their best of 2025. Fashionably late as usual, hear Damian and Adam go against their usual grain and talk about the films they actually…. what’s the word?...oh yeah.....liked… that’s the word, all the way back in the year Twenty Hundred and Fifty Five. So, join them for a surprisingly relaxed, largely hate...

Punching Up-Episode 28-The Goonies A first for the punching up team. Damian and Adam have somehow acquired a special guest, Matthew Chernov, the estimable LA film journalist, screenwriter and presenter of the magnificent How The West Was Cast podcast. Matthew is an enormous fan of The Goonies, that beloved 1985 family friendly (if you discount that bit where the federal agent gets murdered and his...

Episode 27-The Way of the Dragon In 1972 martial arts legend Bruce Lee wrote and directed The Way of the Dragon. On the surface, a simple tale of a Hong Kong kung fu prodigy sent to Rome to protect his uncle’s restaurant from gangsters, culminating in an epic fight to the death in the Roman Colosseum with seven-time world karate champion Chuck Norris. The Way of the Dragon is regarded as one of th...

Episode 26-Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels What do you get if you cross a posh public school boy who wants to be a Cockney geezer, an actual football playing geezer who want to be an actor, and a future action movie star who come from Derbyshire but talks like a geezer for a bit and then talks like an American who sounds a bit like a geezer, or a geezer who sounds a bit like American? It’s all...

Episode 25-The Holy Mountain It’s been a while. Did you miss us?  Did you even notice we had been away? Well, after a longer than normal hiatus the Punching Up Movie Podcast is back. And this episode is magic. I mean literally. The Punching Up duo discuss Alejandro Jodorowski’s cult sensation, shamanistic cinematic odyssey, The Holy Mountain. Magic, horror, nudity, spirituality, political commenta...

Episode 24-Moulin Rouge Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! The moment is here. The hour is now. The time has arrived. It’s our long threatened, much delayed musical theatre episode where Damian unleashes his full fury on Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 cinematic juke box musical Moulin Rouge. It’s been brewing for a while and Damian doesn’t hold back on Nicole Kidman’s acting and dancing, Ewan McGregor’s singing...

Episode 23-January 2025-Some New Movies Happy 2025 Movie Lovers and Punching up listeners  Did you miss us?  Well, have no fear, we have a proper, actual, honest to goodness full-length episode hovering in the wings (next week).  But for those of you who simply can’t wait to hear our Punching Up thoughts on….Moulin Rouge (which will be next week), here’s a bonus episode of some chit chat about som...

Episode 22-The Best of 2024 It’s still the Season of Good Will and so the Punching Up Team are going to use their powers for good this time and wax lyrical about which films they loved in this year of 2024. It’s a long one as there is a lot of affection to go around in this atypical end of the year love fest. And lest we forget that this is still the Puncing Up Podcast, there is still enough room...

Episode 21-The Shape of Water Wanna see a movie where the Creature From the Black Lagoon gets it on with Mrs Brown from the first two Paddington movies? I don’t. But Adam (who doesn’t seem to mind a bit of interspecies fantasy love action) has forced me to watch The Shape of Water again. I find Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Oscar winning modern fairy tale, unoriginal, twee, borderline plagiaristic, la...

Episode 20-The Terrifier Franchise Damian and Adam Art we a pair? I live in Nottingham, England He lives somewhere over there  Sydney, Australia But Damian doesn’t like Art the Clown But I like Art the Clown Will it be over? We can’t agree On the obvious future cult classic status Of Terrifier 1, 2 and 3 Cause Damian doesn’t like Art the Clown But I like Art the Clowwwwwwnnnnnnn Get in touch :O) b...

Episode 19- A Nightmare on Elm Street Are you ready for Freddy? No, not really. I’m a big horror fan but not a massive lover of Wes Craven’s 1980s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Razor fingered demons with stripy shirts who kill you in your dreams, a telephone that comes alive and licks your face and Freddy Krueger’s elongated Big Bird arms don’t really do it for me. I’d much rather watch Art t...

Episode 18-RRR Flying tigers, Indian freedom fighters and evil English scumbags. Bloody battles, numerous songs, one spectacular dance routine and a very brutal flogging.   What’s not to love in S.S Rajamouli’s Tolly (not Bolly) Wood breakout international action hit? Nothing, if your Adam (despite repeatedly mispronouncing the director’s name in the podcast). Plenty, if you are Damian (who only m...

Episode 17-Gladiator For those about to listen, we salute you. In this epic episode of the Punching Up Movie Podcast Adam unleashes hell (and a couple of hungry man-eating tigers) on Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s tale of Roman revenge and arena combat. Adam quite likes Scott but really doesn’t like Gladiator. Damian likes Gladiator but has an axe to grind with Sir Ridley. Let battle commence. Will eit...

Episode 16-Dr Strangelove What could possibly be worse than Peter Sellers? Peter Sellers times 3. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, England’s greatest comic actor plays three separate characters and Damian Asher doesn’t like it. Does three times the Sellers = three times the hate from the normally benign Stanley Kubrick uber fan Damian? Combine that with the usual...

Episode 15-Bram Stoker's Dracula Who is the best Dracula? Is it Bela Lugosi’s suave count, Christopher Lee’s aristocratic Prince of Darkness, Max Shrek’s rat faced Nosferatu… or Gary Oldman’s lovelorn immortal who has crossed oceans of time to romance Winona Rider in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Well, if you're Adam Nightingale it is most definitely not Gary Oldman, as the Lord of...

Episode 14-Kill Bill Vol 2 In the second part of our first two-parter, Punching Up punches up at its first sequel, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 2. Damian perpetuates his beef with QT’s roaring, raging, rampage of revenging but narrows his focus to the eponymous Bill himself. Damian doesn’t like David Carradine’s performance. Adam tries manfully to defend the late martial artist movie star who...

Episode 13-Kill Bill Volume 1 In this episode Damian and Adam don’t so much punch up but chop down, with a katana sword (or to be more precise, a Hattori Hanzo sword), as it is time to kill Kill Bill, or kill Kill Bill Volume 1 (to be even more precise), Quention Tarantino’s martial arts masterpiece of retribution and revenge. So, expect 450 gallons of blood, a million cult movie references, a hun...

Episode 12-Bande a Part In the immortal words of Thin Lizzy (or that blues band that played in 48 Hours), The Boys Are Back In Town. That's right, Punching Up The Movie Podcast is back. This week we take shots at one of the pioneers of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema, Maoist essayist and intellectual contrarian, Jean Luc Godard and his supposedly most accessible film Bande a Part. Will Godard’s f...

Episode 11-EASY RIDER (1969) Two men went looking for a podcast and couldn’t find it anywhere. On this episode Adam takes a swing at the biker movie, road movie, hippytastic gamechanger that singlehandedly launched the New Hollywood, 1969’s Easy Rider, not realizing that it is one of Damian’s favourite movies.  Will their friendship survive, or will they (in the paraphrased words of the immortal P...

Episode 10-THE DEPARTED (2006) What has poor Martin Scorsese done to annoy the Punching Up team? Our series hasn’t been going that long and this is the third time around for America’s greatest living director. It’s beginning to look like a lot like bullying. This time it’s the turn of The Departed, Scorsese’s Boston-based Irish-American remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs starring Le...

Episode 9-HARD BOILED (1992) Can an action movie have too much action? Punching Up’s Adam thinks so.   Is John Woo’s cop vs triads cult classic, Hard Boiled really better than a dozen Die Hards, or does it suffer from a terminal case of the try-hards?  Adam thinks it does.  Is John Woo really the Mozart of Mayhem, or is he actually the Andre Rieu of Chinese Gun fu?   Adam reckons he might be Rieu,...

Episode 8-ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (2017) What happens when the weight of expectations ruins an experience? Find out in the latest Punching Up episode when Adam and Damian discuss the cult fave from a few years ago, Japanese film One Cut of the Dead directed by Shin'ichirō Ueda. Who liked it? Who didn't? Did the old geezers agree, disagree or fall somewhere in the middle. Most likely they just fell dow...

Episode 7-SHAFT (1971)  According to the legendary Isaac Hayes, John Shaft is a “Bad Mutha” as well as being a “sex machine to all the chicks,” whilst also being a “complicated man… who will risk his neck for his brother man.” But is the 1971 Blaxploitation classic that bears his name any good? While fully and freely conceding Shaft’s status as a cinematic cultural landmark, Adam suspects that the...