The Rewind Movie Podcast

“Forget it. I don't work Toontown.” We’re delighted to welcome back one of our favourite podcasters, the incredibly talented Em from Verbal Diorama, who has brought us Robert Zemeckis’ madcap 1988 live action/animated hybrid noirtoon Who Framed Roger Rabbit.Boozed-up, embittered gumshoe Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is hired to catch Maroon Cartoons star turn Roger Rabbit’s impossibly glamorous, equally two-dimensional wife, Jessica (voiced by Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner, respectively) playing promiscuous patty cake with gag king, and owner of Toontown, Marvin Acme. When Acme turns up dead with a safe dropped on his head, our toon-hating, hard-boiled antihero Valiant is drawn into a classic mystery of murder, greed, blackmail, and public transportation, literally shackled to the zany Rabbit who has been tagged as the prime suspect.A technical marvel and smash hit on its release, the film’s powerhouse production team combined Steven Spielberg’s Midas-touch family film factory Amblin Entertainment with the then-struggling but still mighty cultural clout of Walt Disney Studios to splash out on the best animators and technicians in the industry – and license a jaw-dropping cast of mid-Century America’s most famous cartoon icons from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, through to Betty Boop and the Big Bad Wolf to fill out the dazzling frames. Joining Em on the Merry-Go-Round (Broke Down) are Gali, Devlin and Patrick, as we swoon over Bob Hoskins, discuss the film’s use of genre and period trappings, its importance in the Disney renaissance in the years that followed, and recall our trauma at seeing that little squeaky shoe get dipped.You can find Em’s 200-episode-strong treasure trove of the history and legacy of movies you know (and movies you don’t) at verbaldiorama.com, where you’ll find links to all major platforms, and give her a follow @verbaldiorama. Check out her Roger Rabbit episode here!Head over to our Teemill store for merchandise, movie shirts, art prints, stickers, totes and more, including a poster based on today's cover image. You can also find an exclusive Terminator shirt at our Redbubble shop.If you’d like to support the podcast, a review or a quick rating on your platform of choice is the best way you can help us get the word out and keep the conversations flowing. Get in touch with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and if you'd like to submit a request, correct our constant mispronunciations, or have a chat about whatever is on your mind, you can email rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

“Mother? What's wrong with me?” Captain Howdy has told us to revisit William Friedkin’s indelible, near-mythical 1973 horror landmark The Exorcist.Successful actor Chris MacNeil is living in a grand Georgetown apartment with her cherubic 12-year-old daughter Regan while she stars in a movie, but their idyll is short lived as Regan starts to exhibit some frightening behaviour - shocking insults barked in raspy, disturbing voices, lashing out in violent rages, and self-harming. Subjected to a battery of tests that fail to reveal the cause, a now-desperate Chris turns to the world-weary, skeptical priest Father Damien Karras about an exorcism. A film whose legend precedes it as one of the scariest ever made, a ‘cursed’ production which allegedly claimed the lives of multiple people around the production, and the scene of some at-best-controversial, dangerous directorial techniques from the exacting Friedkin, we examine the story’s roots in the novel by the avowedly Catholic William Peter Blatty, who also wrote and produced, and discuss how that viewpoint was interpreted by the agnostic director in the film’s depiction of faith, good, and evil. We delve into the effectiveness of the horror, chat about Friedkin’s use of pacing and sound in building suspense, the unusual structure of the story, and recount our personal experiences with a movie whose inaccessibility in our youth only made this a more intriguing object to finally devour upon its eventual 1999 UK home video re-release.Head over to our Teemill store for merchandise, movie shirts, art prints, stickers, totes and more, including a poster based on today's cover image. You can also find an exclusive Terminator shirt at our Redbubble shop.If you’d like to support the podcast, a review or a quick rating on your platform of choice is the best way you can help us get the word out and keep the conversations flowing. Get in touch with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and if you'd like to submit a request, correct our constant mispronunciations, or have a chat about whatever is on your mind, you can email rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

We're the monsters of our own world. In the latest entry in our LV-RMP series, we continue our chronological journey through the Alien and Predator universes with Nimród Antal’s 2010 back-to-basics jungle-set pursuit thriller Predators.Waking up mid-plummet, black ops mercenary Royce (Adrian Brody) is chaotically parachuted into a dense, mysterious forest, surrounded by an equally armed and angry collection of strangers including an IDF sniper (Alice Braga), a Russian commando (Oleg Taktarov), a Yakuza enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a Sierra Leonean death squad soldier (Mahershala Ali), a Mexican cartel killer (Danny Trejo), a convicted murderer (Walton Goggins) and, curiously, a callow, nerdy doctor (Topher Grace). The motley assortment quickly realises that there’s something very wrong with the terrain - suspicions that are confirmed when they reach a clearing to see an alien sky looming over them. Finding themselves the quarry of three Yautja hunters, the makeshift unit must rely on their killer instincts to survive.We find ourselves in almost as unfamiliar territory as the characters in the film, with only Matt having seen this film after its theatrical run. A curious case, as the film, while a modest financial success upon release, has received no follow up, and very little reappraisal in the years since. Did we find an action gem hiding out on this far-flung hunters’ moon? Or were we baited into the bear trap of another misbegotten franchise entry?Head over to our Teemill store for merchandise, movie shirts, art prints, stickers, totes and more, including our Schwarzenegger Bingo Trope Tote. You can also find an exclusive Terminator shirt at our Redbubble shop.If you’d like to support the podcast, a review or a quick rating on your platform of choice is the best way you can help us get the word out and keep the conversations flowing. Get in touch with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and if you'd like to submit a request, correct our constant mispronunciations, or have a chat about whatever is on your mind, you can email rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!