Verbal Diorama

We'll tear your soul apart.... From the depths of hell comes body horror, an exploration of sexual desire, lust and gratification, and the pleasure pain theory, as hedonistic Frank Cotton solves the Lament Configuration and receives a gruesome demise, only to be accidentally resurrected. Hellraiser is unlike any other horror movie of its time, not just for its content, but for the risk New World t...

Shaun of the Dead is remembered now as a genre landmark; the film that made "rom zom com" a real category and launched the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, but its road to the big screen was anything but assured. Fresh from Spaced ; a landmark cult British TV comedy about young people living, working and partying in North London (when that was something young people could afford to do!), Spaced wa...

Waaassssssuuuuupppppppppppppp!! In July 2000, a $19 million parody film outgrossed most of the slasher movies it was mocking, and in doing so, quietly ended the very genre it fed off. The late-90s teen horror boom, which included Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer had built its appeal on self-aware, meta-textual cleverness, characters who knew the rules of horror movies and still couldn't...

The Empire Strikes Back is often called the best film in the Star Wars saga, and it started with a decision that seems almost unthinkable in retrospect. George Lucas, creatively burnt out after directing the first film, chose not to direct the sequel at all. Instead he handed the reins to his old USC film professor Irvin Kershner, hired veteran pulp sci-fi writer Leigh Brackett to draft the screen...

The original Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) wasn't a huge hit at cinemas. It found its real audience on home video and cable, building into a genuine phenomenon almost after the fact. That success put New Line in an unusual position for the sequel: expectations had shifted from "will this work" to "this will work and let's make it bigger and crazier". It meant Mike Myers going...

Back to the Future Part II wasn't really supposed to exist as its own film. The original Back to the Future 's "TO BE CONTINUED" tag was actually a post-hoc addition for home video, not a plan, after studio head Sid Sheinberg demanded a sequel. The pitch that eventually became two movies went from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, through Spielberg, to Sid Sheinberg, who greenlit the whole thing on th...

Long before Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly had names, they had mugshots. In 1924, Chicago tabloids were consumed by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two unrelated women tried for murder and both acquitted; largely because all-male juries of the era were reluctant to convict an attractive woman. Covering both trials was Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose ironic dispatches later beca...

In 2008, Ben Stiller made a war movie about people making a war movie, and in doing so, accidentally made one of the more prescient satires of 21st-century Hollywood ego, method acting, and the studio system's addiction to spectacle. Tropic Thunder arrived as a big, dumb action-comedy on the surface and a razor-sharp industry roast underneath, skewering everything from Vietnam war epics to blockbu...

In 1994, a former video store clerk turned indie provocateur rearranged the crime film and, in the process, rearranged Hollywood itself. Pulp Fiction , Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary's take on hardboiled detective novels from pulp magazines in the 1920s and 30s, stemmed from the success of his first feature, Reservoir Dogs. It would lead to him becoming acquainted with Danny DeVito; a man who...

The Shawshank Redemption is now the highest-rated film on IMDb's Top 250, a fixture of cable rotation, and shorthand for cinematic hope itself. But in 1994, it was a box office failure; a $25 million adaptation of a Stephen King novella. It opened on just 33 screens, and despite fantastic test screenings, got buried under Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump . A movie that was destined to be a huge succe...

Empire Records is like that one friend who everyone loves but didn't quite fit in with the popular crowd. It captured the essence of 90s youth culture, from the angst of its characters to their rebellious spirit against the big bad corporations trying to take over. Casting choices were influenced by real-life experiences, with characters reflecting the writer's time working at Tower Records. Unfol...

Star Wars opened on May 25th, 1977, in 32 American cinemas. The first cut had been a disaster. The director of photography and director were barely speaking. The ILM crew, working in a Van Nuys warehouse in temperatures of up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, had burned through most of their budget on shots the director deemed unusable. The Tunisian shoot had led to cast injuries and a potential war with...

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America! 250 years ago, you became independent from us Brits. We're the King George III in this relationship, and we know it. Alexander Hamilton . You know the name, but you probably didn't before the musical debuted in 2016. On 3rd July 2020, as America protested the murder of George Floyd, and locked itself indoors simultaneously, Disney+ dropped some...

In the spring of 1954, a Japanese fishing vessel called the Lucky Dragon No. 5 sailed into the fallout zone of an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Its crew came home irradiated, and Japan, a nation still raw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier, found itself confronting nuclear terror all over again. Within months, Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, with a collapsed co-pr...

King Kong (1933) was the creation of Merian C. Cooper, one of Hollywood's most extraordinary and least remembered figures, and it arrived at a precise and loaded moment: during the Great Migration, a time of mass unemployment, and racial tensions on American streets. It was, depending on who was watching and from where, either the ultimate escapist spectacle or something far more pointed; and quit...

Two decades in the making, The Meg showcases the sheer absurdity of a 75-foot prehistoric shark lurking in the ocean, and this Kaijune we acknowledge that bigger is just always better when it comes to monster movies. Loosely adapted from the novel by Steve Alten, The Meg knows exactly what it is: a fun summer popcorn flick that doesn’t take itself too seriously, delivering PG-13 thrills as the tit...

When Three Men and a Baby opened on 25th November 1987, few could have predicted that a low-budget remake of a French comedy, shot in Toronto, starring two television actors, a comedy star and a baby girl, would become the highest-grossing film of the year in the US and a genuine turning point in Hollywood history. Yet that is precisely what it did. The film arrived at a specific cultural inflecti...

Few films have done more to reimagine a fairy tale than Ever After: A Cinderella Story , Andy Tennant's 1998 period drama that stripped the magical elements from one of the world's oldest stories and replaced it with real historical characters, and a heroine who rescues herself. Set in Renaissance-era France and shot entirely on location across the Dordogne, the film marked a quiet revolution in t...

In the summer of 1998, Hollywood delivered two versions of the apocalypse within eight weeks of each other, and the story of how that happened is almost as dramatic as either film. Deep Impact , directed by Mimi Leder and released on 8th May, had been in development since the late 1970s, tracing its origins to producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown's desire to remake the 1951 sci-fi film When Wo...

In 1997, two movies decided to erupt onto cinema screens at the same time, literally and figuratively. The chaotic rivalry between Dante's Peak and Volcano is one of the biggest examples of Hollywood's twin movies phenomenon, and while both were created organically, their rivalry would lead to condensed timelines and moved release dates, and a lasting legacy of "which 1997 volcanic eruption movie...

The final episode of AIpril, M3GAN arrived in January 2023 as a modest Blumhouse horror release, and promptly became one of the most talked-about horror comedies of the year. On a budget of $12 million, it grossed over $180 million worldwide, spawned a franchise, and put a ten-second hallway dance sequence into the permanent vocabulary of internet culture. Director Gerard Johnstone insisted from t...

This AIpril, what is love, if not AI persevering? Spike Jonze's Her asks that question with such sincerity and precision that it never feels like a provocation; it feels like it's holding up a mirror to today's society. Her has become of one of the most quietly radical and prophetic films of the 21st century: a love story with no villain, no third act betrayal, just the aching reality of two being...

In 1992, a little-known Philip K. Dick short story was optioned as a sequel to Total Recall , with Arnold Schwarzenegger set to reprise his role. After a decade of Hollywood turbulence, involving a studio bankruptcy, a directorial hand-off, and two blockbusters that kept getting in the way, Steven Spielberg was finally behind the camera on what would become one of the most visually inventive scien...

In 1986, a clunky, tank-treaded robot, hungry for input, stole the hearts of cinema audiences worldwide. Short Circuit , the sci-fi comedy that gave us one of cinema's most beloved mechanical characters, might not be your first choice when you think of AI in cinema, but it is this podcast's first choice in AIpril. Director John Badham convinced a room full of designers, including legendary visual...

It started with a late-night channel surf. Author Suzanne Collins, flipping between reality TV competitions and news footage from the Iraq War, watched the two blur into something deeply unsettling, and from that collision of entertainment and violence, The Hunger Games volunteered as tribute. Published by Scholastic in September 2008, the novel didn't just become a bestseller; it became a cultura...