ThunderamaDome

The hottest movie ticket in Fullerton, CA is for a film that's not even playing on a screen - it's being performed LIVE on stage in a small speakeasy-type of theater called The Maverick. Owner and play director, Brian Newell, has adapted the 1933 version of "King Kong" and blends live theater elements with classic camera tricks and special effects from two different stages into one monster of a pr...

ThunderamaDome explodes back on the scene with John Stamos as an apple-loving gymnast/action star and Kiss rockstar Gene Simmons as an evil hermaphrodite trying to take over the world in 1986's "Never Too Young To Die." One of us read Stamos' autobiography (the library copy!) and we come to the mic jampacked with info on the Stamosverse. Plus - Is nostalgia the key ingredient for the theme songs f...

What is non-exploitative exploitation? Malibu Bay Films Producer Arlene Sidaris, film partner and widow to legendary "B-movie" writer and director, Andy Sidaris, joins ThunderamaDome to explain what their attitudes were towards nudity and violence and what it was like working on films such as "Hard Ticket To Hawaii" with Andy. Find out how their type of filmmaking both embraced the action movie st...

Over-the-top action B-movies occupy a unique space in the mid 80's - and in our hearts! With the advent of VHS, video stores and cable channels, kids were introduced to cheaper movies that added two scoops of their own exploitation formula: blood, explosions and…gasp…nudity!   In this episode, we punch our ticket with Andy Sidaris's "Hard Ticket to Hawaii." Was this an exploitation film? Or did it...

Meet Judy Kim, owner and operator of the Gardena Cinema - the last single-screen movie theater in Los Angeles that's run by a family. Or at least, what's left of her family. It's really just Judy now and despite her love and commitment, the cost of keeping a single-screen theater alive is not without its challenges. Covid. Strikes. Decreasing movie audiences. Most people would have given up by now...

The world punched a gift horse in the mouth when Quentin Tarantino's and Robert Rodriguez's double-feature release of GRINDHOUSE sadly flopped at the box office in 2007. But it really was a gift to cinema fans since the release was just as much about the theatrical experience as it was about the actual movies. Why the heck did it fail? And why the heck does Tarantino's slowburn DEATH PROOF still s...

We face our fears as we examine Frank Marshall's "Arachnophobia" - eek! But what does athazagoraphobia mean?  It's the fear of being forgotten!  We jabber on about how not-talked-about-films can still matter. Along the way, we throw in the fear of pooping in public, past fears of dying before the Star Wars prequels finished, Peter Cushing Cornflakes boxes, the digital hologram tour of Dio, and sav...

The loving deconstruction of genres continues with Rian Johnson's hardboiled high-school booster shot of a debut, "Brick." We discuss how Rian Johnson's entire filmography challenges the preconceptions of whatever genre he chooses to tackle and how he's always artfully subverted those tropes in a new and interesting way. Then we gumshoe our way through "Brick" and find out why it always ranks in t...

What does it take to "reinvent" yourself to find the job that makes you fulfilled? That's the question I asked three ex-colleagues from my nine-season run on the TV series, "Suits." I interview composer Christopher Tyng, editor Peter Forslund, and the main man himself - creator, writer, showrunner and eventually director, Aaron Korsh. They all give me their backstories and how they made the jump t...

Can it be that Gore Verbinski's "Rango" is Johnny Depp's best film? That's the text Hollywood Nate received one day back in 2011 from And It's Me, Joel and we put it to the test here. This episode discusses how "Rango" pumped some much-needed blood back into Westerns with its unique blend of humor and action and how it pushed the conventions of the genre, while also, remaining loyal to them. 

As we set out to do battle with Peter Yates's "Krull," we examine the Arthurian legend of Excalibur and how both "Krull" and "The Last Starfighter" rely on setting up their stories with their own versions of this myth. We discuss John Boorman's "Excalibur" and Disney's "Sword and the Stone" being the best adaptations and then use the sword in the stone analogy when picking movies out - the times w...

In 2020, my 64 year old Russian-born step-mother-in-law, Valentina, had been an American citizen for 15 years, but she didn't have any idea what a drive-in was. And since the only way to watch movies with an audience during the pandemic was at the drive-in, my family and I decided to take Valentina on her very first experience. Beyond ThunderamaDome gets its own spotlight with this segment: a 2020...

For our 2nd episode, we rev the engines on our nostalgia meter by talking about which arcade games from our youth we wished were magic tickets into secret videogame lands. We recount how Covid helped America's dwindling drive-ins regain their significance during the pandemic and then we time-travel with our audio segment back to 2020 for the Drive-in Edition of Beyond Fest that we attended.  Then...

Enter the 'Dome with us on our first episode as we tackle the 1970's Italian film genre of Eurocrime, what it is and why it's so cool! We also compare movie deaths of characters that scarred us over the years and then we scar you with our Most Haunting Film Deaths segment for Beyond ThunderamaDome - where Hollywood Nate asks some of his co-workers from his "Suits" days about which film deaths alwa...