To the '90s and Beyond! Film Podcast

Vince takes a detour from the MATRIX films to go into a deep dive into JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH (2025) — exploring the film’s core ideas, how it was made and released, and offering a frank review packed with trivia and production anecdotes. Plot synopsis: Set five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) follows a specialist team hired by a pharmaceutical company to trav...

Tl;dr: Vince started a funk-based internet radio station called Funk the Planet. Check it out at https://funkthepla.net

Film writer Vince Leo explores the nine-episode animated short film anthology, *The Animatrix*, released in 2003. Each short expands the lore of *The Matrix* universe. Produced by the Wachowskis, the creators of *The Matrix* trilogy, the anthology features contributions from various anime directors. *The Animatrix* offers a unique perspective on the *Matrix* world, delving deeper into its themes a...

It’s several months after the events of the first film, and the last remaining human city, the underground bunker called Zion, is building its forces to take back the planet from the artificial intelligence that now dominates it. This same artificial intelligence has begun to dig to destroy Zion, and the resistance seems overwhelmed by the potential onslaught. The plan is now hatched to send...

Keanu Reeves stars as Thomas Anderson, aka Neo.  Neo works for a large software company, but is a computer hacker on the side, and quite a good one at that, selling off information for a price to anyone who might want it.  That is until one day his world is rocked when he is shown that the world of 1999 isn’t reality, but actually a computer simulation designed to lull humans into a feeling...

Rufus Sewell stars as John Murdoch, who wakes up one day with amnesia in an non-descript hotel room with a butchered woman, immediately having to go on the run as the prime suspect in a series of murders of prostitutes around the city — but he can’t remember if he did it.  In addition to the police force, Murdoch is also hotly pursued by a shifty psychologist named Dr. Shreber (Kiefer...

This Japanese remake of the 1997 Canadian thriller depicts several strangers awakening in a prison of cubic cells, some of them booby-trapped, not knowing how they got there or why. The prisoners must use their combined skills if they are to escape alive.

A group of strangers awakens with very little memory of who they are and finds that they have been involuntarily placed in a maze containing deadly traps. Meanwhile, a young technician watching over the Cube grows appalled at what he sees and endeavors to rescue a woman he finds a connection to who is trapped within.

In this follow-up to the 1997 futuristic cult thriller, Cube, another group of strangers find themselves transported into a maze of cube rooms for unknown reasons as they try to make their escape.

Without knowing how they got there or why they were there, several strangers awaken in a maze of cube-like rooms, some of them containing deadly booby traps. There’s tough cop Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), doctor Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), young math whiz Leaven (Nicole de Boer), escape artist Rennes (Wayne Robson), autistic savant Kazan (Andrew Miller) and architect Worth (David Hewlett). Th...

The remains of a crashed spaceship, over three centuries old, is found on the ocean floor somewhere in the South Pacific, and a psychologist and his crew of scientists are selected to investigate. On board the ship, they encounter a strange spherical object, and after one of them enters the sphere, strange and not-too-pleasant things begin happening to them.

In the year 2047, a crew of American astronauts is sent to Neptune to try to save the crew and ship called the Event Horizon, which had mysteriously disappeared several years before. They find the Event Horizon but what they find inside is something more than they expected. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill star in this Paul W.S. Anderson sci-fi/horror mesh.

Jodie Foster stars as scientist Ellie Arroway, who has dedicated her life to searching for possible intelligent lifeforms outside of Earth and our solar system.  An orphan from an early age, her faith in God has wavered since the days of trying to futilely contact her mother in heaven through the radio, replaced by a firm belief in science and facts as the pinnacle of what’s true and right....

During a burial dig early in the 20th century, a stargate is found but the technology didn’t exist to understand the complicated mechanism. Fast forward to the 1990s, and experiments have begun again, this time enlisting the services of Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader), a professor of Ancient Egypt who believes that man could not possibly have been responsible for the civilization which exi...

A series of nuclear explosions in the South Pacific creates a titanic lizard monster that’s born pregnant and destroys Manhattan. With over 200 eggs laid, the human race faces extinction if a biologist (Matthew Broderick), a couple of reporters, the French CIA, and the military can’t kill them all before they all lay eggs of their own.

Activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard_ is still leading the Dinosaur Protection Group to break up illegal breeding operations. Claire’s partner, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), captures and relocates stray dinos before they’re slaughtered by poachers. They live in a cabin in the Sierra Nevadas with 14-year-old experimental human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), raised as their...

This 5th entry in the Jurassic franchise sets the story following the closure of Jurassic World, where its dormant volcano, Mt. Sibo, has become active, threatening all life on Isla Nublar. Humankind debates whether the clone dinosaurs should be saved or return to extinction. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has become a conservationist advocate for the Dinosaur Protection Group, feeling an ov...

Siblings Gray (Ty Simpkins)   and Zach (Nick Robinson)   are sent on vacation to visit their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is the manager of operations at the Costa Rica island resort known as Jurassic World, a tourist attraction funded by mega-billionaire named Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan)   that takes its basic idea from the original Jurassic Park but seeks to do the formula right (i.e.,...

Jurassic Park III starts off with a man and a young boy that go paragliding only to have a forced crash landing on the island of Isla Sorna, the infamous second Jurassic Park island.  The boy’s parents, played by William H. Macy and Tea Leoni, travel to the island in hopes of rescuing their son, dragging along Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill, from the first film), who is none too happy about being...

It’s four years later, and the chief creator of Jurassic Park sends an expedition of four people to check on “Site B”, a secret place where the dinosaurs were developed and which now sports dinosaurs roaming free. The quartet is supposed to document the goings-on, but soon discover they will not be alone on the island, as the creator’s nephew envisions Jurassic Parks across...

Vince goes in-depth on all of the history, trivia, and behind-the-scenes action of 1993’s JURASSIC PARK, directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the best-selling book by Michael Crichton. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Attenborough star in this thrilling adventure of an eccentric billionaire who builds a theme park attraction full of cloned dinosaurs that doesn’t go a...

Super Mario Bros. features the emergence of an alternate dimension caused by (what is now known as) Brooklyn being struck by a meteorite millions of years ago.  In this alternate dimension, humans evolved from lizards, rather than monkeys, as believed in our own realm.  There is also only one city, Dinohattan, surrounded by endless desert, and currently presided over by the evil Koopa (Hopper,   R...

Set in the futuristic year of 2007, in a city dubbed New Angeles, after having been reconstructed after a giant earthquake that happened a decade before in Southern California, where gangs and criminals mostly have their run of the city streets at night. Outside of the ineffective New Angeles Police Department, a vigilante group called the Power Corps, with direction from a teenage girl named Mari...

In this animated adventure expanded from the video game, M. Bison is a megalomaniacal warlord from Thailand with dreams of world domination. Bison runs a super-secret organization of drug smugglers, weapons runners, and an international terror and crime syndicate called “Shadowlaw”. Fueling Shadowlaw is a massive drug-running operation and a diabolical plan to become the most military...

In the Southeast Asian country of Shadaloo, where General M. Bison (Raul Julia) has been waging a war with the A.N. (the Allied Nations — a U.N.-like military force) after he has taken several dozen A.N. hostages, putting them up for a ransom of $20 billion dollars.  Leading the A.N. counterattack is United States Colonel William F. Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a headstrong and gifted figh...