326 Twilight Zone: The Movie

What's better than a Richard Matheson screenplay directed by mastermind George Miller? F#$kin' nothin! That's right... the finale of the oddball Twilight Zone: The Movie is the ridiculously amazing remake of the original Shatner episode "Terror at 20,000 ft". Is it worth the milquetoast offing's by Spielberg and Landis? Perhaps. But like a series of shoe gazing and boring opening acts at the beginning, the penultimate "It's a Good Life" offers up some Rob Botin FX that make it both memorable and creepy. But in the end, it's Lithgow's Xanax deprived flyer that reigns supreme. Want to see something scary?

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325 E.T. the exxtra-terrestrial

Matt and Mark review another kids mid-80's sci-fi film with the indelible E.T. the extra-terrestrial. Spielberg pioneered the mythic utopia of 80's California sub-urban life, a virtual "Oz" ripe for the visitation of a wayward space farer. There's very little for adults here, which is perhaps the reason it has lost staying power with the Gen-X'ers who dragged their parents to the film for almost a solid year's run in the cinemas back in 1982. Withe "cute" puppetry of the alien itself, to the overwhelming purple score of John Williams, E.T. remains...

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324 Explorers

Matt and Mark review the Spielberg-ian mid-80's kid's adventure film Explorers. The film stars the pre-teen Ethan Hawke and River Pheonix in what can only be described as an Elon Musk ferry tale, from inventing your own spaceships to scoring chicks and coming up with an underground boring system powered by nothing more than a 9 volt battery. A clever film, it offers up a first contact story more pragmatic (strangely) from an alien standpoint, by keeping us a**hole humans and arms length with a proper filter. Oddly similar to Carl Sagan's plotline from Contact, including t.v. waves from space and "radioed" spaceship plans, we won't suggest the Cornell astrophysicist cribbed the film's idea. But for the record Explorers came out the same year as the novel Contact, so...

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323 Star Crash

Once again Matt and Mark have a lot to say about current affairs (it's 2020... so, it's like every week these days), and less to say about the Star Wars coattails outing "Star Crash", a movie poorly engineered in order to capitalize on the Lucas pop culture phenomena. A bad move, of course, it's major sin is that it's boring. If you're going to bad, please be entertaining. We try to do our best to inject a little MST3K into the mix, but it is what it is... However, we are treated to a worthy Hoff' in an early role, noting his potential for future cheesy Sci-Fi outings like Knight Rider with a glint of Euro-trash..

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322 The Empire Strikes Back

For the 40th Anniversary Matt and Mark review the best of the Star Wars "ennealogy" Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back, as we should. Why is this one the better? A host of reasons one could say, but it's really the scenes and production of TESB that makes it what it is. Care is taken with each scene to frame the acting and gravitas of each situation. Unlike the latter films, we're not fire-hosed with undigested CGI and stiff inconsequential acting. The sets and scenes of TESB are unique and atmospheric and pause accordingly to allow the viewer to take a virtual tour of the Galaxy Far Far Away.

Download: 322 The Empire Strikes Back

321 Downfall

Matt and Mark enter Hitler's bunker this go 'round as we review Downfall, the intimate depiction of the Third Reich's final hours as it finds itself ruling over a  dramatically smaller and smaller piece of Germany. While this is Hitler's story, it's also the story of the evaporation of national socialism into nothing. Like all imagined ideology, when there's no one left to believe in it, it becomes not only irrelevant but absurd. This is more the story of the knowing citizens of Germany during Nazi rule, here from the viewpoint of Hitler's personal secretary, and the creeping compromises and guilty admissions that are self-excused in a disingenuous way. Morality was not mutated into the grotesque during Hitler's Germany, it was merely suppressed. 

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320 The Boys from Brazil

This go 'round Matt and Mark review the 1978 speculative fiction film The Boys from Brazil. Loaded with actual science, we get to see the acting powerhouses of Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier mix it up with the acclaimed Police Academy actor Steve Gutenberg! A nature versus nurture debate tied in with cloning ethics, a film that offers up important questions even today. Could fertilizing the Earth with 92 Hitler Clones get us anything more than your standard shitty sociopath-type CEOs or could you actually hatch the 4th Reich? I suppose that question remains to be answered.

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