Review Episodes

This week's notes were written before all the technical flummoxing that occurred, scuppering our collaboration. They are however too good to delete so please enjoy, whilst pretending there's finally someone interesting on this show to listen to! __________________________________________________________________ Charlie Bingham, host of the Mountain Conversations podcast and archaeologist with a specialist interest in the common ancestor between humans, chimps and bonobos may well see her work co...

Just three Bad Dads this week and since that's three for the price of none, only you can judge whether that represents value for money. With all of us having equine obsessed daughters it seems suprising that it has taken us this long to discuss the Top 5 Horses, especially as reviewing our back catalog demonstrates that we've held a stable interest in them. We’ve reviewed a couple of Steven Soderbergh movies on the pod already – MAGIC MIKE, BEHIND THE CANDELABRA - but after the latter's release ...

Of course, it seems obvious now to reimagine the iconic video game characters for 1993's SUPER MARIO BROS. movie as being captives in an alternate dimension steampunk police state where people evolved from dinosaurs, which has been infected by a sentient testicle fungus and opponents of the fascist regime are de-evolved into barely conscious lumbering abominations but it took the largely untried husband and wife team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, writers for MAX HEADROOM, to bring this creati...

It's never easy writing the show notes when you weren't present for the podcast itself and consequently don't have the overall tone of the discussion to guide you. For instance, the guys talked about the Top 5 Hacking or Computers Scenes, but was any of it interesting? Almost certainly not. And what will special guest Rupert have to say about it all? And who is Rupert anyway? THE HISTORY OF FUTURE FOLK (2012) has sat unwatched in my Netflix queue since I first joined the service, so I was deligh...

In the spirit of the movie we are reviewing I thought it would be humorous to make the show notes excessively long so that it would take you three hours to read them but it turns out that a) no one reads the show notes anyway and b) that would take me an extremely long time so instead you can recreate that experience by simply looping over these next sections a few thousand times. Frank Darabont had already directed the Stephen King adaptation THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, initially a box office dis...

FALLING DOWN (1993) begins innocuously enough when an unnamed white male in his 50's abandons his car in the blazing heat of downtown Los Angeles traffic with the simple and relatable enough desire to get home to his family. Meanwhile Martin Prendergast (Robert Duvall) is having a sh*tty last day on the job, stuck in that same congestion and heading towards a retirement he doesn't want from a police force that doesn't respect him, in order to become a carer for his unstable wife. As reports emer...

We have been subjecting ourselves to THE PENTAVERATE for reasons it is hard to explain so when Johnny Utah responded to our call for suggestions of movies that listeners think are worth revisiting, Mike Myers 1993 follow up to the pop culture smash hit WAYNE'S WORLD seemed like a good fit with our viewing trends. It was a surprise to me though that this week’s movie, SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER, would reference the recent Netflix's series central conceit, proving the Canadian has had the idea i...

This weeks show was masterminded by Bad Dad Sidey who would have pleased the many protective headgear enthusiasts in our audience by nominating the Top 5 Helmets for us to discuss. Will we manage to talk about this subject without a lot of puerility and giggling? I wouldn't have thought so. THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) was director Robert Egger's sophomore effort after debut THE VVITCH polarised the horror community with its emphasis on tone and atmosphere at the expense of shocks and sees Willem Dafoe...

Sidey enthusiastically nominated the 2010 cult favourite, SCOTT PILGRIM Vs THE WORLD. This could possibly be the most Edgar Wright movie of all the Edgar Wright movies. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but something to do with sharp, quick editing, great soundtrack and fantastic casting. Whilst we know at least one of the Dads loves this movie, the movie was not a global smash. This one sadly lost out at the box office, and the audience's lukewarm response to the movie was reflected in the...

When you think about scenes in movies, boiling water never is too far from the screen. Tropes such as demanding that someone grabs hot water and towels when babies are born or directors using the whistling effect of a boiling kettle to signify tension seem ubiquitous and there's always the numerous horror movies where some poor victim receives a splash of the hot stuff to relate. Not to mention FATAL ATTRACTION of course. With that said when we came to discuss the Top 5 Scenes with Boiling Water...

Mark Steven Johnson's GHOST RIDER (2007) sees daredevil stuntman - see what I did there because the same director also did the Ben Affleck superhero caper about a blind gimp lawyer called DAREDEVIL - Johnny Blaze make a Faustian pact with Mephistopheles which ends up in him becoming a flame-skulled bounty hunter. You know how those Faustian pacts can be. With steampunk Neo-clone villain Blackheart and his band of easily dispatched elemental douchebro's desperately seeking the maguffin which will...

This week’s show sees us discussing The Razzies, the annual award ceremony dedicated to celebrating the very worst that Hollywood has to offer. Publicist John J.B. Wilson held a reverse Oscars party at his house in 1981 in which Stanley Kubrick and Brian De Palma were nominated for Worst Director, Shelley Duvall was proposed for Worst Actress and FRIDAY THE 13TH was on the shortlist for Worst Picture which neatly sums up just how credible the awards have been since their inception. Harmless fun ...

We begin this week’s show with a chat about the Top 5 Pre or Post Kill or Injury one-liners, a topic which baffled poor Dan with its complexity and caused one Bad Dad to lament that an interesting looking topic on paper does not always correspond to an interesting topic to talk about. Still, if terrible puns and worse impressions are your jam you might get a kick out of this week’s chat. Our main feature is the 2017 Luca Guadagnino film CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, a coming-of-age story following 17-ye...

Reegs selected the 1986 Disney sci-fi classic FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR for our viewing entertainment. Joey Cramer stars as David Freeman, a 12-year old boy who falls into a ravine in 1978 rendering himself briefly unconscious and presumably sustaining terrible brain injuries, explaining the events of the rest of the movie which involves time travel, an initially hostile sentient machine from the planet Phaelon named Max (Paul Reubens) and the villainous NASA agency headed up by Dr Faraday (Howard...

When it comes to onscreen violence there's nothing quite like a beheading to get the blood pumping. Whether it be in service of the story or the audiences blood lust, screenwriters have chosen time after time to lop off a character’s head, so this week sees us discussing the Top 5 Decapitations. Perhaps we missed one out, if so head on over to Twitter or any one of our channels to let us know. BABY DRIVER (2017) is Edgar Wright's thrilling heist caper, set to a propulsive soundtrack which weaves...

THE THING is John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece, combining a simple but sensational premise with some of the most incredible special effects ever devised from legendary prosthetic makeup designer Rob Bottin. Crash landing on earth over 100,000 years ago, an unknowable alien entity has lain dormant in Antarctica until unfrozen by a doomed scientific team. It's unique ability is to precisely mimic any life it comes in contact with and this ingeniously paranoid idea sees the audience in the s...

Sidey is famed for his sartorial elegance so it should come as no surprise that he picked the Top 5 Suits for us to discuss. By the end of this week’s show, you'll know your two-piece from your three-piece, your tuxedo from your dinner jacket and your shell suit from your tracksuit. SOUND OF METAL is director Darius Marder's 2019 story about Ruben, a drummer in the experimental heavy metal band Blackgammon and the impact of his devastating and sudden hearing loss on his ongoing issues with sobri...

The first thing we needed to get straight is whether it's pronounced "plaid" or "plaid" and then with that debate settled we move on to discuss the 1982 Steve Martin parody of and homage to Film Noir DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID. When physicist and part time cheese enthusiast John Hay Forrest dies in a suspicious car accident, his daughter Juliet (Rachel Ward) hires private eye Rigby Reardon to investigate his death, unwittingly setting them both on a path towards cheese obsessed nazis hell bent on...

As impossible as it is to imagine if all you ever do is listen to his razor sharp mental gymnastics and displays of intellectual acuity on the podcast, but Bad Dad Dan can from time to time be forgetful so it wasn't completely clear to me at first whether this week’s Top 5 Ice was chosen despite having the similarly themed Snow selection by Dan himself only a few weeks back. And hopefully whilst you ruminate on that shock revelation about the reliability or otherwise of Dan's memory, it will dis...

This weeks Midweek Mention was chosen by Dan and sees his love affair with sports movies continuing with 1999's MYSTERY, ALASKA. Rusell Crowe stars as Justin Beiber (near enough) : sheriff and captain of the local ice hockey team in the tiny fictional town that gives the film its name. When a Sports Illustrated article is published about the towns open pond style skating it attracts the interests of the NHL and an exhibition game between the New York Rangers and the local community is arranged, ...

The Dads are on holiday but will be back as usual from 20th April. In the meantime enjoy this special rereleased episode where we discuss LARS AND THE REAL GIRL... Original show notes below. ______________ “The lack of women directors in the industry is no joke. The top 100 films of 2019 were helmed by a total of 113 directors, 89.4 percent of whom were male and 10.6 percent of whom were female.” So said Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein after the 2020 Golden Globes once again featured a...

A few months back Sidey, Dan and Reegs sat down to talk about PAUL (2011), the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost comedy in which two sci-fi fans tour of the USA's UFO heartland crosses paths with an extraterresterrial named Paul. It really was a great episode, probably one of our strongest ever, but unfotunately none of us bothered to press the record button that night so several weeks later we attempted to review it again, occassionally misremembering things and being less confident in our take etc. Ha...

Before your phone rendered the entire idea of literature redundant as it continues to deepen its inexorable grip on your soul, you may well remember reading something called a book. They aren’t novel to noted bibliophile Howie; well he can at least recall seeing a movie which had books in it as he picked the Top 5 Books in Movies for us to discuss, presumably in an ill-fated attempt to convince us he isn't the knuckle dragging simpleton we know he is. We watched BOILING POINT, the astonishing N...

THE MAGICIAN (2005) is an Australian mockumentary written, directed by and starring Scott Ryan as Ray Shoesmith, an amoral hitman who allows film student Max to document his life. Across three disparate stories we come to understand but never sympathise with the calculating, violent and dangerous Ray, but what puts this film head and shoulders above movies treading a similar path is a truly memorable performance from our charismatic lead as well as a 'so black even light can't escape' style sens...