Episodes

Denzel Washington once again collaborates with Antoine Fuqua to bring us THE EQUALIZER. A preboot-remake-aquel of the 1980's tv series, Denzel brings his usual dry wit and charisma to this tale of the OCD suffering Robert McCall who becomes embroiled in a war with Russian gangsters after intervening on behalf of Chloe Grace Moretz's child prostitute Alina. The Mark Twain quote that starts the movie invites us to superimpose some substance on McCall's violence-soaked quest for retribution but all...

Our Disney themed week begins with a review of 1960's SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. After their ship is wrecked on a deserted tropical island, a family is forced to make a new home whilst simultaneously fending off a menagerie of dangerous animals and evading a band of cut-throat pirates. For many, this story will occupy a special nostalgic place in their heart and it's true that the plot and incredible production design still impress, whilst the presence of the great John Mills compensates for the pai...

Stanley Kubrick's cinematic treatise on violence and free will, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), gets the Bad Dads treatment as we tackle the story of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), leading his gang of droogs and getting ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence accompanied by the bliss and heaven of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Controversial, sexually violent and disturbing and that's just our review. We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely d...

Based very loosely on "The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick, NEXT (2007) tells the story of Chris Johnson (Nic Cage), cursed with the ability to see 2 minutes into the future, except for when the plot demands it. Using his gifts to make modest wins in Las Vegas casinos and hiding behind the façade of being a cheap stage magician, Johnson finds himself reluctantly drawn into solving a terrorist plot by FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore). One of the stupidest movies ever made, and I mean that ...

Danny DeVito’s blackly comic THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989) charts the disintegration of a marriage as Barbara and Oliver Rose try anything and everything to drive each other out of the shared marital home during a vicious divorce battle. Capitalising on the obvious chemistry between leads Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as well as their shared cinematic history in 80's romantic comedies ROMANCING THE STONE and THE JEWEL OF THE NILE, director Danny DeVito chooses to frame the story by having hi...

When pseudocidal proto-emo Harold meets his opposite, manic pixie Grandma Maude, at a funeral, both will enrich the others’ lives in Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy metaphor about the circle of life. Harold is obsessed by death, Maude by life and a blink and you'll miss it shot in the final third of the movie adds extra depth and context to its message. Bud Cort's muted, subdued and often monotone Harold is the yin to Ruth Gordon's spirited and energetic yang, and the movies pitch black sense of h...

The last few weeks Top 5 discussions have included Dinner Scenes and Hitchhikers and understandably that's seen us talk about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), one of the most influential horror movies of all time. Director Tobe Hooper together with co-writer Kim Henkel establish fundamental and often repeated conventions of the slasher sub-genre such as the Final Girl trope, the connection of sex with death and physically imposing masked men chasing people wielding blunt instruments in this m...

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004) began life as a straight parody of Bruckheimer style action movie tropes before morphing into something more satirical after the commencement of the Iraq War, and successfully captures the sardonic fury of those who accused the US of pursuing recklessly jingoistic and interventionist foreign policies in the wake of 9/11, whilst simultaneously spearing the hypocrisy and vanity of the narcissistic Hollywood liberal elite and their self-interested and superficial v...

George Clooney explains how to be a Jedi to Ewan McGregor in director Grant Heslov’s debut feature, satirical war movie THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. Reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) investigates the New Earth Army, a branch of the US military tasked with advancing America's interests by exploiting the paranormal and the psychic. A stellar cast and a smart Coen-lite script gives us some funny moments but the tone wavers between screwball and scathing and sometimes misses both targets. Think Fear and...

Garth Jennings's adaptation of THE HITCHHIKERS'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY starts much like the source material, when the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, before veering off on a contrived and underwritten love triangle which makes this 2005 sci-fi comedy only moderately successful. Hapless Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) and his friend, the experienced galactic journalist Ford Prefect (Mos Def), find themselves aboard a stolen spaceship piloted by two-headed Galactic...

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III picks up immediately after the cliff-hanger ending of the second movie, with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) receiving a letter from a stranded but happy Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), after a freak burst of lightning struck the DeLorean. Discovering that Doc was killed a week after writing the letter, Marty travels back to The Old West in 1885 to rescue his eccentric friend... For such a beloved franchise, the BACK TO THE FUTURE series has always carried some ideas tha...

Wouldn't it have been fun to review THE FLY (1986) and also the 1958 original version? I guess we'll never know, having only found time to cast our critical eye at the DAVID CRONENBERG remake. There's no messing about as the movie immediately throws the two main characters together at some kind of nerd convention. I'm a fan immediately getting on with the story and not wasting precious time with wearisome world building. We've got a podcast to make and efficient story telling such as this is a ...

Inspired by this week’s main feature, Reegs took the easy way out and nominated the Top 5 Prisoners for our discussion. As it happens this was pretty fruitful territory as there has been one or two movies made featuring prisoners over the years. With the release of Denis Villeneuve's DUNE imminent we decided to look back at his 2013 English language debut PRISONERS. A kidnapping thriller exploiting parents worst fears, with incredibly intense performances from leads Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllen...

With the Bad Dads reduced to a mere duo through a combination of illness and stupidity on behalf of the rest of the team, it's up to Sidey and Dan to steady the ship and bring us this week’s show. Trees. Bloody magnificent aren't they. You can climb them, put a tree house in them - hell build an entire city in one if you like - marvel at their beauty, rescue a cat from them, eat their fruits or use them as a metaphor for an abusive relationship as in Shel Silverstein's haunting children's book ...

There's a mere trio of Bad Dads for you this week with both Howie and Peter Andre absent for various trivial and unimportant reasons. The Top 5 Movies with a French Connection is quite possibly one of the least well-defined or most open to interpretation topics we've ever had on the podcast and each of us brings something different to the table to chat through, with the conversation steering mercifully, and perhaps surprisingly, clear of berets, baguettes and promiscuous hairy women. PERFUME: T...

10 years ago my wife and I got married in a small, intimate ceremony at a local hotel and today we celebrated a decade married by packing the kids off to school and going to play crazy golf, so yeah, that's a realistic portrayal of what marriage looks like for the uninitiated. I bring this up because it's late and I'm drunk and I don't have an interesting, funny or relevant way to introduce this weeks Top 5, which was the Top 5 Box Office Bombs. Not the explosive kind, more the kind that lose hi...

This week’s show is brought to you from the mind of everyone's favourite sea defecator, Howie. There's been a notable rise in diversity on screen over the last few years as evidenced by the increasing number of LGBTQ+ characters so we thought we would celebrate them with this week’s Top 5. We did our very best not to offend anyone! The McConaissance attempted to continue with 2016's drama GOLD, starring the Texan alongside Edgar Ramirez in director Stephen Gaghan's inspired by true events story...

Just like most of the world’s population I'm hopelessly addicted to my smartphone, whether it be used to avoid talking to my family by playing a pointless grindy mobile game or to earn a small fortune by selling my exclusive Only Fans vegetable videos. But all talk of iPhones and Androids is off the table this week as we look back at the Top 5 Telephones in movies. If you’re a fan of the corded landline telephone like we are you'll enjoy reminiscing about those cabled beauties as they graced the...

Whether it's for planning an ambush, escaping a crime scene, staging an elaborate fight, or simply used to get from point A to point B via some solid rock, the tunnel has been reliable since it was first conceived over 4000 years ago. In movie terms though it's probably best known as a metaphor for sex, as famously used at the climax of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. This week’s Top 5 Movie Tunnels is lower on the sexiness scale than you might usually expect from us but just like an explosives ...

With Reegs having been thrashed by a golf ball wielded by his youngest and Sidey committing avicide earlier in the day, the stage is set for another perfect episode of Bad Dads Film Review. This week’s show sees us shamelessly cashing in on the worlds coronavirus cycling boom as we discuss the Top 5 Movie Bicycles, and as only one of us is a self-confessed MAMIL (Middle Age Man In Lycra) we did actually find this wheelie hard. Bryan Fogel's Oscar winning 2017 movie ICARUS begins life as an expl...

Alternative facts, post truth, yes it really is the age of bullshit as far as reality is concerned but movies that are based on real events have always captured the cinemagoer's imagination. Our Top 5 Movies Based On A True Story includes incredible feats of heroism and villainy, and provides a window to the past to allow us to evaluate people or places in a different context. That extra frisson of truth to a story can elevate the stakes as reality truly can be stranger than fiction. Our main f...

The train was invented by Englishman Dr Glenjamin Train back in the summer of 1997 when he realised what an incredible name he had for a new form of transportation. No of course, I'm being facetious: the truth is that no one knows how the locomotive was invented nor indeed how they work and those things will continue to remain a mystery as you tune in to listen to us discuss the Top 5 Movie Trains. Some incredible railway facts are only moments away courtesy of Peter Andre, a dedicated and enthu...

Sidey pointed out to me this week that our podcast is not for film experts but film enthusiasts which is obvious really because there's little of insight to be had in this weeks show. The distinction that our favourite tattooed and bearded mother-fancier highlighted has never been so clear than when we are discussing a genre for which I self-admittedly have neither expertise nor enthusiasm. This weeks harmoniously themed episode sees the Bad Dads discussing the Top 5 Musical Numbers and with som...

It may not be obvious to our listeners but we do usually put quite a lot of thought into our choices for each weeks podcast, whether it's to link the main feature and kids tv programme thematically or to ensure we have an even distribution of the types and genres of movies we review. That same level of planning is often true of the Top 5 category, although this week I heard Sidey say something in the midweek mention and thought 'that will make a great top 5' so here we are with the Top 5 Title D...