(upbeat music) - Welcome to Rise Smile Films, the film review podcast that mixes cinema with fine spirits. Journey with us as we encounter new, old, and strange films with the occasional dabble into sports and music. Proceed with caution as these podcasts feature spoilers and some mature language. This is Matt and this is Jesse. - Today on Tap, we have Dark Man, starring Liam Neeson, Francis McDormand, Colin Freels, and Larry Drake. Story by Sam Raimi. Get ready for this. Screenplay by Chuck Ferrer, Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, Daniel Golden, and Joshua Golden. I got a whole story about all of that too, so. And directed by Mr. Sam Raimi. Welcome back to Rise Smile Films. It's time to wrap up our not quite ready-for-prime-time superhero vigilante, Cask, and we're going to the year 1990 this week with a review breakdown of Dark Man. Matt, when's the last time you've seen Dark Man? (laughs) - You know, through the time, I don't think I've ever seen this all the way through now. - Really? - Yeah. - Never stuff. - You know what channel? - So never. - You know what channel? This was always on like Saturday afternoon, on like USA Network or sci-fi, like Dark Man always seemed to be on TV and I would always catch, you know, kind of little spots of it. And I think a lot of the sequel, Dark Man 2, The Return of Durand, which, you know, Liam Neeson did not. No one came back for that other than Larry Drake. (laughs) And by the time they get to Dark Man 3, I mean, they're in Jeff Fahey territory. (laughs) But an interesting little film, I think of it's this Cask very well. And we get to talk about, I think, I'm going to call it a Rise Smile Favorite. Mr. Sam Raimi, I mean, we have such deep-rooted ties with this guy all the way back to our Spider-Man days. I mean, this guy's very instrumental in getting that guy. - Sure. - To the big sets of monumental film moment for you. And just his style, his roots in horror and all the little kind of steps along the way. This is going to be a lot of fun to talk about. I don't even know if we've done a Liam Neeson movie on this podcast, so I think that's the first, I think Frances McDormand's the first. I mean, some new territory this week. - Fargo, we did Fargo. - Mm-hmm. - And not quite simple? - No, no, no, we did. Remember we did Millers Crossing, very forgettable. - The one Cohen's we've done. Yeah, yeah, those would be the two to do. And I'm a big Lebowski fan, so that could be a fun cast one day, right? - Yeah. - There's some good Cohen. - Millers Crossing, I think, is one of the rise smile, like, wow, this movie wasn't as good as I remembered it being kind of like the Conjuring movies were a little more flawed than I think we gave them credit for. - Oh, very eye-opening. - Sadly. - Yeah. There's some relief, there can be some fun eye-opening. I think E.T. was another eye-opening movie for us on the opposite side where... - We thought we were gonna kill that film and we ended up walking away saying this was all right. - Yeah, very good. Kind of heartfelt, but it kind of got me teary-eyed. - Yeah, oh, yeah. Let's see where we come in on Dark Man, but this week we got a new bottle. This is the Clyde Mays, five-year single barrel. 105 proof, been a while since we've had Mr. Clyde. - Yeah, get vanilla and almond right off the tip. - You know what I remember about Clyde Mays was that cask that we did, I think it was the gun and the girl into the alien when I got like sick halfway through basic instinct into alien, but I think we were doing Clyde Mays rye. And I don't even think I could taste what was going on there. That's shame, absolutely. But hey, we got a ton to talk about today. Let's get to our flight question. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) - Mr. Danny Elfman, we'll talk a little bit about his pretty awesome run here in the late '80s, early '90s. I mean, in 1990 alone, he did this Dick Tracy and Edward Scissorhands, I mean, it's a pretty good year. - Yeah, now I go bongo still rolling at that time too. - Yeah, and it's right before Christmas. He had just done Batman '89 and '89, did Beetlejuice in '88. I mean, he's really kind of emerging in the composer space. But I thought a fun question this week. The one character that's always really stuck out to me in this film is Robert G Durand played by Larry Drake. I don't know if it's his presence. Kind of a hulking stature of a guy. He kind of towers over everyone. And I know Larry Drake from a few other Dr. Giggles, Dark Knight of the Scarecrow from a few other movies. But he's kind of almost overshadows the main villain of this movie 'cause he's collecting fingers in this thing. We'll get to it. But I kind of thought a fun question. We've never done this one before. Your top three favorite secondary villains in superhero movies. So can be the muscle, the tech guy, the femme fatale, just can't be the big bad. So let's start with number three's. You hit it on the head. The femme fatale to start for me goes all the way back to days of future past. And although we've trashed her a bit on the show, I have to tell you that I really do enjoy the character of Emma Frost. She's a little underperforming in that film and so far as what her skill set is actually, but I think it's a really nice ambitious choice that they chose to bring her in. You know, they burned her on the '60s. So I don't know if she plays in the later X-Men films. So the character had sort of been taken off the table. But I think despite January Jones's, I think limited repertoire when it comes to what she can play or not play. I love that she's included and I love that she is the femme fatale, if you will, of Magneto. That's not all that accurate, really. I mean, there's a whole Hellfire Club thing and I don't mean a Stranger Things way, like when it was first done, that plays in that space far more prevalently than Magneto. They certainly have a relationship. But I love that she's in there. I love that they tried to outfit her in the way that she's outfitted and of all of my Marvel villains/heroes. And she does kind of become good later. Emma's in the top five. So I'm a huge Emma Frost fan and I love that she showed up in there. I wish she'd done a bit more with her, but she's still pretty damn cool. - Yeah, it's almost, X-Men Days of Future Past wouldn't change a lot in that movie, it's maybe my favorite of the X-Men movies. - This is a really solid film. - Hey, let's do it one day. We'll talk for three hours on Days of Future. - Okay. - But it's almost a shame 'cause first class ends with them breaking Eric out of prison and they kind of assembled this interesting team that you don't really get to see what they were gonna get up to, right? - And I was kind of ready for that, but great choice. - She makes two appearances in the series too. - Yeah. - She's also in Wolverine Origin. - Yeah, briefly. - Yeah, she's like one of the-- - One of the kidnapped mutants, right? - Yeah, so Emma Frost for me at three. - Great choice. - Thank you. - Number three for me, I'm going with Mr. Max Shrek from Batman Returns. This is Christopher Walken. And it's interesting, I mean, you know, Catwoman and the Penguin, you know, or certainly your big bads in that one, but Shrek's kind of the puppet master, kind of a steering, you know, the Penguin along and trying to like, he gets blackmailed into trying to re-emerge that guy into society with this mayoral campaign. And he's completely ridiculous. It's, as Walken, as Walken can get with like blown out, like gray hair. But there's something I've always really liked about him and that's seen too when him and Selena Kyle are like going for tip for tap and he just pushes her out the window. Like, yeah, kind of villainous and he kind of doesn't care, right? He kind of just looks the other way. I dealt with the secretary. I tried to think, I was like, did Tim Burton, seems like a missed opportunity? If he never worked with him ever again, but then I remembered and I was like, no, he was the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow, so. - Oh yeah. - That's my number three, Mr. Max Shrek. - Good choice, Christopher Walken, making an appearance. Big episode this week so far. - Two for me also standing in the X-Men space actually. And although I didn't see this character, supposedly was in Deadpool Wolverine, but I didn't see her, and it's Lady Death Strike from X2. - I guess she was floating around back there, but I didn't. - Okay, so. - Not played by the original person, right? - Yeah, I love that character again. I think the battle that she has with Logan is fantastic and the way that they do away with her by filling her with Adam Antium is fantastic. The claws, what she represents. You know, that's a bit of a stretch and so far as the secondary villain, 'cause I think there's a few you could kind of choose in that film, but I'm going with her anyway. - It's William Stryker's muscle. - Gotta go with it. Lady Death Strike in those claws. - And what's nice about her character too is it's almost like Stryker has now perfected the Weapon X experiment. I mean, at least claw advantage. I mean, she beats Wolverine, she'd tend to six, right? - Yeah, right. - Exactly. - So there's that kind of almost jab at, you know, Logan in that film of the failed experiment with Stryker, great choice. - Thank you. - I didn't even consider either of those X-Men ones. My space went towards Gotham for this one. - Yeah, oh my hope we don't have the same one. - I don't think we do. My number two, I'm actually gonna go to Infinity War and, you know, there's a lot that you can pull from, but I think the one that got the most screen time in, I think was the most interesting to me was Ebony Mom. - Oh my God, I almost chose him. - Yeah. - I thought he was really cool and he was maybe the only one that spoke too, almost like Thanos' like evil doctor. And that's seen when he's like torturing strange for information, and then they kind of give him the Xenomorph treatment, right? - Yeah, they do. - I've been waiting for, you know, the Black Order to show up in Marvel and as I think they're used really perfectly in Infinity War is just kind of the four horsemen of Thanos. So that's my number two. - Yeah, Horvus Glaves, fine, but he doesn't really speak and I don't think anyone else could really, so I'm going with the Ma this week. - I love it, Ebony Mom almost made my list too. - Plus he just looks cool. And like the natural rival to Strange. - Yeah. - Good choice, man. - Does that get lost Squidward? - That's right. - Love it. - Number one for me from the halls of Gotham or the streets of Gotham. - My favorite of the three Batman Begins is Mr. Killian Murphy as the Scarecrow. - Good choice. - I love that character. And I think sometimes he can sort of fall into a Mysterio category if you're not careful with him 'cause it really is just illusions. I think the Scarecrow's intentions or Stephen Crane's intentions are far more sinister than Mysterios are. - Yeah. - And they've come at a tremendous expense whereas Mysterio is literally smoke and mirrors. This is more toxins to change the way your brain processes things. - And there's a nice space in there. Mentally challenging or attacking someone to turn on themselves as cool. He looks great. He's not gonna beat anybody with his ability to punch you in the face. It's all cerebral and Killian Murphy could not be more perfect. And don't we like that Christopher Nolan figured that out early? 'Cause I think they might work a gun with each other later on and something really big. - Yeah. - Really explosive. - Yeah, exactly. It was a French friendship that started right then and there. And you don't really like it. You know, in the animated series, the comics, I mean, when you see the Scarecrow, he's usually like a Scarecrow. - Yeah. - Like from the Wizard of Oz. And I really like the look that they gave him where he's like still a guy in a suit but he puts this mask on. It's just kind of like, it's still rooted in some sort of realism with like bastardization and psychiatry. - Yeah. - Yeah, he's perfect. I mean, I think, you know, when we do Batman Begins one day which we will tell the story of how, you know, Killian Murphy's screen tested for Bruce Wayne Batman and, you know, came to the conclusion you're, we're not gonna go that's not the direction we're going with but I still really like you and I want you in this movie. So that's the decision that was paid off big time. - Sometimes it just works out, doesn't it? - Exactly. You gotta just wait for your chance. - You're gonna pass on Bruce Wayne and we're gonna pass on you for Bruce Wayne but we're not gonna pass on you for Robert Oppenheimer. - Yep. - What do you say? - It's gonna take about 20 years but-- - We're gonna get there. - It'll be worth it. - Boy won't it. Staying in the same trilogy this week, you might say I'm cheating but dare I remind you that the twist reveal of "The Dark Knight Rises" reveals that Talia Al Ghul is the puppet master. So now I'm going Bane as my secondary villain, hulking brute strength. I mean, what's nice about all three of those movies is there's so many different villains from Raz Al Ghul to the Joker and Bane and they all, Batman has to fight them all in various different ways. Brain, intellect, you know, wits, brawn and Bane, there's paralysis. Yeah, there's moments in that movie when I realize it's like, he can't beat this guy. He just has to elude him enough 'cause he's way far outmatched. I loved Tom Hardy in that movie. I think everyone really knocked the voice that it was hard to hear. Man, I love the voice. I love the mask is so rooted in Nolan's realism but I really buy it when he just locks down Gotham as the terrorists have got them and he blows up Hindsfield in that big trench. So that's my number one. That's a pretty big secondary villain. I got a couple honorable mentions. I gave some consideration to Armin Zola, particularly I think the Winter Soldier computer version just because of how ominously, you know, relevant that seemed in that movie, right? Like the fear of technology, AI mixed with like government kind of makes for a formidable opponent. And then, you know, I got some special up for Bob the Goon in Batman '89 Tracy Walter, but what about you, any honorable mentions? You took one of them, Ebony Ma was gonna make the list. The other one, and I think it's just enough in a hint to be used properly with what this villain could pull off. It's the shocker in Spider-Man Homecoming. You wouldn't even know it's the shock. I don't even think they like mention him by name. Maybe they do, but that's kind of, it's a hard pool, right? Yeah, it is. But that's about what I would think he could pull off. 'Cause I know the guy in the lab too is supposed to be the tinkerer. Right, but it's just a bunch of villains in that movie. Adrian Toombs is assembling his own little version of the secondary sinister six. God, and whatever happened with all that. That didn't know where. Oh man, maybe. Do you remember the end of Morbius when the vulture met him in the desert and he was like, we're gonna assemble a team and I'm like, whatever. Yeah, they're still trying though. Yeah, well, don't you think Crave is gonna play into that too? Well, yeah, that's December, right? So we gotta kind of see what's waiting for us there. But yeah, maybe we'll still see it. They're gonna make another Spider-Man. And I guess we kind of got that in No Way Home, right? It was as good of a version of the sinister five that I could have asked for, which was people I was already familiar with. Sure, yeah. Great choices. Yours too. I didn't even consider, I mean, we spend so much time in the X space that I guess I just, I didn't even consider that. There's a lot of great secondary. I mean, the first one alone, I mean, you have Toad, Saber Tooth, and Mystique. So pick one. No Loki for you? I thought Loki, but then it's Loki. Then you thought about a show and you threw up over yourself and decided it would not be good podcasting? I could have done, you know, Loki Thor one, 'cause I guess your main villains, the Frost Giant Endor, the Destroyer. First Avengers? Yeah, yeah, he's kind of more, yeah, I guess he is. Yeah, yeah, I'd have to think about that. But no, I didn't go the Loki, right? No Ronan the Accuser. No Ronan, I didn't consider Whiplash either. No. I almost threw in here just for shits and giddles. Fucking Whiplash, what? I almost threw in, if you would allow me to have an entry to be the first half of Iron Man 3 where Trevor Slattery was the Mandarin I thought he was. 'Cause if you think about it, he's not, he's the secondary villain to the real Guy Pierce Mandarin. And I did like that first half of the movies. Okay. But that's just a joke. It was just that whole thing was a mess. That whole movie was. That whole thing was just a disaster line, yeah. Well, great. Well, hey. Fun choice is good question this week. That was all you, good job. Thank you, thank you. Well, we got a ton to talk about with Dark Man, so let's get to our review breakdown. Huh? Time. 99. 100 minutes. What, what? The sales, the whole thing. Their stable. Or Dr. Westlake. Why now? The dark. Oh, of course. The dark. I think this synthetic cells are fully sensitive. This is unbelievable. What is it about the dark? What secret does it hold? They're still stable. Time, you can do it on time. 101 minutes. Finally, we can replace damaged skin tissue. No, you can do it on time. Not quite my friend, not yet. But we've got us a piece of the puzzle. There's still a bit of question. How do you keep the cell stable past 99 minutes in the light? But at least now we know it's all about light. I'll get it. Let's start at the beginning here with this kind of like, it almost seems like a drug handoff, but it's really kind of an intimidation meeting between, you know, one person's, you know, kind of real stating, and Robert G. Durant and his cadre of interesting people. But I think it does something that I've always appreciated in these superhero movies, which was let's establish a villain with some unique traits and a formidable opponent. And this kind of almost, Durant and his cronies, almost kind of take the Clarence Bodger kind of approach where they're all fairly despicable, but they all kind of bring like a unique thing. Like what one of his guys has like a bum leg, but it's like a Tommy gun inside this leg. You got Sam Raimi's brother's kind of this like doofus one who I think they allude to Robert Durant has taken a liking to this guy, maybe more than just friendly. You got the token Hispanic. And then you had the big guy who already talked about Larry Drake, but like right from the get-go, if it wasn't Danny Elfman's, you know, music that like really cues you in, I think you're really cued in by Sam Raimi's quick style of flashpans, zoomins, Dutch angles to really show dominance with between characters and to really open up the comic book aesthetic that this film is really gonna fit into. I mean, many times throughout our watching, I mean, we drew a lot of parallels to the Spider-Man movies, both in scene and shots. But what do you think of this opening? The runtime on this thing's an hour and 30. I mean, we clocked it when it ended. It was an hour 29. So this is our opening scene. This is a real quick moving movie. I think two things happen with Larry Drake right away as we see how disposable mortality is to him. And then we give him a pretty cool calling card to boot. So when this interaction takes place between what I think is a drug kingpin and whatever entity we think at the time, Larry Drake is representing himself, we see a cageiness to Durant that I think becomes imperative 'cause he's going to carry, as you said, most of the villainy in this film. The reveal later on is almost a little disappointing 'cause the guy that's the big bad isn't as cool as Durant, but necessary. So you're essentially Dick Jones, if you will. Yeah, exactly. You're essentially taken hostage for this meeting with the person that you are going to, we think, present some land grab or business proposal to that's not going to go well and that's been alluded to by the, I'm assuming gangster that they're going to meet with. And they are completely outmaned, outgunned, out everything. The whole contingency of Drake's, I'm sorry, Drake or Durant's plan is his, to the right, frankly, right-legged man. Yeah. And that's his left leg, but he's on the right side. Yeah. Machine gun, the odds on that are not good because it's one machine gun against 40 guns that are on you. So I think you get from that right away that my men, speaking as Durant, are disposable as long as we eventually get to this guy that stands in our way. So we get through all that and I have to say that his men are fairly successful in surviving this onslaught of 65 guns to one, a little bit unbelievable. And they take down a couple of cars and we have a nice action bit, but the crowning achievement of maybe, I have the first act. Did I say the first act? I don't know 'cause we're going to get the death of, of Neeson here in a little bit, but the violent punctuation on Drake's character is the cigar cutter. Yeah. That's brutal. And what a great, there are some really sloppy and knobby one liners in this. The fact that he pulls out the cigar cutter and begins removing the fingers, point one, boom, point two, point three, I have seven more points to make. Oh yeah. Is awesome 'cause that dude is going to be definger. Yeah, he's going to have nubs fists. And actually that plays into some of the rest of the film when we start talking about the usability or viability of the hands. Yeah, of the hands. So I love it. It's a great opening for him. Yeah, real nice and quick. Do you buy him? Does he have the look for you to be? Absolutely. I think what it is that almost kind of turns me off to him is like his haircut is like oddly trimmed symmetrically, but it looks like almost like a toddler's haircut. And it's slightly receding. So it almost appears ridiculous, but when this guy starts talking and starts chopping fingers, I mean, you're like, whoa, I don't want to mess with this guy. Much like Clarence Bodiger, I mean, balding Kurt Wood Smith with his octagonal spectacles, I'm like, what a ridiculous bad guy. But when he starts killing people, I'm like, oh man, I would not want to screw around with this guy. So I think there's something to that and to both of those actors in this film in particular, I think they really sell the kind of nastiness that these muscles need to be, right? Yeah. So we cut to Liam Neeson as Peyton Westlake and his lab assistant as they're deep into trying to figure out the conundrum of this new project they're working on, which is a skin synthesis, how to grow kind of usable skin for burn victims. But they've kind of hit a snag that it's all well and good and they can talk about 3D printing before there was even a consideration, I think. They get it, it's usable, but the skin cells die out after 99 minutes. So what's the missing ingredient? What's the key component to get us past that? Because that's no good if you have to keep putting on a new nose after every hour and a half, right? So I think that's kind of the interesting conundrum that's gonna play into the rest of the movie and the kind of disguising element. But I think the big kind of elephant in the room here is Liam Neeson. I mean, this is 1990, this is before Schindler's List, which I think was his big, I'm a movie star now, '93. And then yeah, Rob Roy and Take In, Take In. And then like, then he's in the Phantom Menace and now he's in big stuff, right? - Why not in Jin, yeah. - Yeah, and now he's, you know. Kind of still doing the action thing, right? Yeah, just popping up in those rando action movies, which he's found kind of a nice niche doing that, but Manny's young here. I'd wanna say like early, late 20s, maybe early 30s in that. - I think he's a nice presence here. It's a couple other actors in consideration. I will never say no to these two actors 'cause I love Bill Paxton and I love Gary Oldman. But I like Neeson's presence here. And I think he plays into that torture doctor monster role really well, the apathetic Peyton Westlake and the monstrous dark man, right? We'll talk a little bit later about all the interesting parallels to the Universal Monsters. Maybe all of them save creature from the Black Lagoon. But there's a real sadness that this character's gonna go through. But I kind of like his experimenting. And I mean, maybe we could talk about it here now, but we drew a lot of, if you wanna speak on the interesting parallels between these science scenes and like, this may well be Norman Osborn, right? - Yeah, that's the first thing that it struck with that hit a chord with me on was it felt like Raimi's Spiderman and our introduction to Oscorp and the process of becoming the Green Goblin. It had the same kind of tight on gizmos that is the machinery that allows the process to commence. It is the influx or combination of human DNA with chemicals. It is the importance of horror as it shapes what the rebirth is going to be. - And the Elfman music, right? - And then yeah, the Elfman music with it leaves an undeniable or unmistakable fingerprints all around what is a Raimi film. So we talked, this is a film for him. Evil Dead One, Evil Dead Two, the thing you mentioned that I didn't know, and then this one. - Crime with it, yeah. - And this is the first big budget that he actually had to do studio-wise. The question I think that is important is as important as the look is for this film, like how it looks. And Raimi is going to certainly have a look, right? Do the characters in the film have enough of an aesthetic to play into that or lean away from that? So give me just a minute, let's talk about that for just a second. So I know we're talking about the Oscorp, Frankenstein's Lab sort of thing. Take like Larry Drake, take, you would know this guy's name, the guy that plays Jaws. - Oh, Richard Kiel, yeah. - Michael Berryman, actors like that that have a distinct look to them. - Sure. - And do they highlight an interesting aesthetic that Raimi is going for? I would say yes, like is this sort of the color on the tapestry that he's woven? - Yeah. - So then if you're gonna do that, you're up against it because the Dark Man has to be better than the Lab, has to be better than Larry Drake, has to be better than all of these really, and it's Drake's hair, it's Berryman's head, it's Jaws is, what Richard, what's his name? - Richard Kiel. - Richard Kiel's mouth, even though it's in his, it's not real. And I think when all of that is added up and the equation is completed, I don't know how you come up with an answer other than all of that worked. And so you asked me about the universal piece and the Ozcorp piece, which is Frankenstein and Osborne and obviously a relationship that he is acknowledging with universal and the classic monsters. Do you think at this time when this movie came out and they saw what it looked like? - As in universal or the public? - Producing Land Incorporated for what's next for Raimi. And it was this weird combination of superhero and dare I say horror? That they ever thought he would master it in a way that led to the amazing Spider-Man. - Oh, no way. - So run with that. - If anything, they were probably like, oh my God, what is this movie? This is a little too weird, right? Because that's the thing with Raimi is he leans into the uncanny, the comedic, the slapstick. In a way that almost perfectly fits a comic book movie. I will stand by this until my dying days but Sam Raimi was put on earth to direct a Spider-Man movie. He just gets it. Not only did he read it much like you, like the actual comic books. He understood the character, but he has the style and tenacity to actually bring those pages to life in a not kind of angly panel way, but in a way that's visually comic book-y. I don't know how better to explain that, but when you see those movies, you get it 'cause it is colorful. It is, you play with the opticals, you play with the fastness of it all, the ridiculous of it all. And I like that he doesn't shy away from, look, I got this like burn character who doesn't feel pain. I'm gonna have a little fun with it, right? 'Cause it is kind of completely ridiculous. As of elements of Spider-Man are completely ridiculous. A guy floating around in a goblin glider who's dressed like a goblin. Let's lean into it, people. So no, but in 1990, someone, Avia Rod, sitting there going, that's the guy that's gonna make my Spider-Man movie. Absolutely not. I think it was a long, interesting road to get from 1990 to 2000. And there's gonna be a lot of hidden misses there for Mr. Raimi. He's gonna team up again with Universal for Army of Darkness. And then he kind of goes down kind of an interesting, let me try and be legit, period, which I don't care for, which I, there's parts of "The Quick and the Dead", I really enjoy. - Oh, wow. - But then you have "For the Love of the Game" and "A Simple Plan", good movie, but it's not like a Raimi movie. And then "The Gift" with Kate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves. And those movies are fine, but they're lacking the personality that is all over "Dark Man", all over the evil dead stuff, and all over the Spider-Man movies. - Yeah, "For Love of the Game" is an interesting film. That's the "Costner Picture" movie. - That's almost like Wes Craven doing music from "The Heart", right? - Yes, exactly. - I mean, it's like you're denootering the strengths of those filmmakers with, and maybe that's just a, maybe he's just like, I just need a gig. I got bills to pay, right? And I need to stay relevant. I can't just be so picky with what they're offering me. - I think at this time, there's two contemporary directors that are essentially in the same space. And it's not so, what I mean by the same space is I want to exclude that, which is so graphic or so hard that it's off-putting to the audience. So, and Craven might be in consideration, except Craven only plays in one space. I'm talking about Tim Burton and Sam Raimi. And I think to a certain extent, they both made a similar genre-filled film, stylistically also you can tell when you're in the place of those two guys movies. So take like this and compare it with Edward Scissorhands. Take Beetlejuice and compare it to- - Army of darkness. - Army of darkness, right? So we have some similarities in the corollary between those two is better than just, well, this guy made one movie, this horror and this other guy made this one movie. So like the comparison is undeniable. I think that with some missteps that both of them have had, and that's only gonna happen with a career in Hollywood, how could it not? You're gonna get some projects that just don't pan. Mark Webb. - Everyone missed that. - And some people never learn how to dance again. - Sure. - Right? - Josh Trink. - Josh Trink. - Right? I think that Raimi, gosh, am I about to say this? I think I am, I think in that space, I find Raimi's films far more palatable than I do Tim Burton's films by a lot. - Didn't no argument for me there. When in the Tim Burton space, I like Peewee's big adventure. I like Beetlejuice, I like Batman '89. Of course, I love Batman Returns. Ed Wood, pretty good movie. But, you know, Big Fish, Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland, his fucking Planet of the Apes movie. - A lot of the pirate stuff. - Yeah, well, he didn't, that's Johnny Depp, but. - Oh, okay, so there's, okay, there's another problem. - Yeah, exactly, it's the Depp connection, right? - Yeah, you're right, that isn't him, that is just Depp. - Oh, yeah, when you take, yeah, Raimi's stuff, and you have his Spider-Man run, now he's doing stuff with Strange, Drag Me to Hell, the Evil Dead stuff, which is, you know, I'm like a huge top shelf for me. - Right, right, yeah, how could I not? And, you know, Dark Man almost seems like this weird experiment kind of stuck in the middle. This is, oh my God, I got a big studio gig. Let's do it, but I still want it to be me, but the you is wiggin' out the big suits, right? They really wanna tone you down a bit. And remember, as I alluded to last week, this started in the genesis of the Shadow's Shadow. - Yeah. - He came to Universal and was like, hey, I would really like to make feature adaptation of the Shadow. I know you have the rights, and they didn't, you know, are just like, yeah, we're doin' our own thing with that. We don't really want the Evil Dead guy touchin' the Shadow, but we like you, what if you developed a thing, so he took a couple of years to develop a treatment. I think he delivered it in 1987, which was this story about a guy who uses different disguises to become and infiltrate different people, very, you know, elements of Jekyll and Hyde, kind of feels invisible, manny. And then it kind of gestated and became, evolved along the way into this other story. - Such a strange combination off the Tim Burton thing and just with the Ramey now. To watch him play in a space that I think you and I particularly love, which would be horror and monster horror and superheroes, and see what that looks like early on. And there are moments in this film that I think, for me, were a bit troubling. But none of it is the ambitious-ness of this specked idea that is... - You're absolutely right, specked. - Brilliantly, badly genius in some ways. And you can see as with this young director is cutting his teeth with finally what looks like a studio budget, see John Carpenter and the thing. And we're trying to navigate a studio system with deadlines and big money and palletability and tentpole and blah, blah, blah, blah, like how can I stick to my roots and still keep the suits happy? And I'm sure in the offices of Production Incorporated, this film was widely discussed. I'm sure there were plenty of battles that ensued. - They're like, how do we market this movie? - Yeah, and I bet you, we didn't get what his full vision of this film was. - Oh, you want a bet? Is it just him? They didn't get in his way at all? - No. - Of course they did. - Yeah, I have stories. - Isn't this a summer release on top of it? - Yeah, I think August. - See, so I mean, it's not even a December or October release that might fit in that sleepier, January, February, even March time, but Liam Neeson has made a career out of, frankly. - Yeah, yeah. - Let me mention one thing and then I'll do the script part of the production here. When we were watching it, I was like, if you took Dick Tracy and the way it looks, the colors, the costumes, the same story and just get warm baby the hell out of there and put Sam Raimi in that. Oh my God, Keith, how cool would Dick Tracy look with big boy capris and prune face and all those people would just look so much more exaggerated, but that's almost the movie they're trying to make in Dick Tracy, right? And there's just other things that get in the way of making that movie as good as that movie could be, right? - Did you even rhyme with Madonna? - Yeah, it could be. Okay, let me do this 'cause I know you appreciate this type of stuff, so. As I mentioned, Raimi wanted to make the shadow, but Universal wouldn't give him those rights, so he decided to spec his own superhero and drew a lot of influence from the Universal Monsters. Sold that in 1987, so just a treatment, so essentially a rough outline of, this is what it looks like, enough for people to say yes, which could you be so lucky, right? - You're kidding. - So the script was difficult, so the people that first helped Raimi with just the initial structure were Joel and Ethan Cohen were like, well, if people don't know this out there, these guys were buds. Like, I think Raimi did show up in Miller's Crossing. I think the Ethan Cohen maybe did some sort of editing on Eiffel Dead 2. I think the Coens did right crime wave, so they were kind of partners at the, and I think Raimi did right. Hudsucker proxy, so buds, right? Lots of different ties there, so they helped set him up with the structure. Then Raimi hired Chuck Ferrer to help him with the script. Chuck Ferrer was an ex-Navy seal. He had written the movie Navy Sills with Charlie Sheen and Michael Beam. - I know him. - Really? - He used to come to the conference all the time. - Really? - Okay. - Yes. - Hey, dark man. - We sat down and had many, many drinks. He either Chuck is an R-I dude. - Okay, awesome. - Okay, to that, to that, yes. - Love those little ties here, but yeah, so he took kind of initial duty and from what they've said about the production, he was really good at writing the villain, so I think a lot of the Durant aspects came from his parts of the screenplay. So after his version, then Raimi and his brother Ivan took a stab at it, and then Raimi and his long time producing "When to Michigan State" with him, Rob Tapper, who, if you don't know about Raimi and them, helped bring Zino Warrior Princess to life. Rob Tapper is married to Lucy Lawless, wow. So there's a lot of hands already. And then Universal's like, "We wanna get our guys in on there." So they hired Daniel and Joshua Golden, and then brought the Raimi's for a fifth and final draft. So man, you got a lot of hands in the script pie, and I think a lot of that is due to just an experience, right? This is Universal saying, "Look, we're throwing some money at you, but we still wanna be very cautious." It almost feels like a little David Fincher, Alien 3, where we like you, but we don't love you. We don't love you yet, yeah, we don't trust you yet. So you can kinda see, I mean, I think the story for the most part is fairly simple, and there's a lot of good elements there, but it does feel a little choppy in places. And yeah, when you got 12 drafts and five people with a fork in the pie, man, I mean, Jesus. - It brings that question up. I found that Liam Neeson, after he becomes Dark Man, has little to no dialogue. And I wonder if that's because the script went through so many hands, and there were so many different versions of what our hero should be. The default was let's go with mostly nothing or a few punchy one liners, which you can kind of expect, 'cause that's how we do action films, because the translation of character from beginning, to middle, to end, to very end didn't play. If five or six or seven different people are all writing what he looks like, it's highly suspect that they sat in a room together and said, well, we wanted this angle on the internal and external motivations. And so it shows up this way in the dialogue. So you just get silence. And frankly, it probably worked. I think if this theory of mine is correct, and who the hell knows, by dumb luck, because I see Dark Man being a mostly inaudible character for one reason only, when he finally escapes and we're getting way ahead of our story on this, but that's fine. When he finally escapes the attack and the hospital and that weird spinning thing that he's on, and we are Frankenstein's monitoring it through the alleys of New York, and he comes upon Francis McDormand. He can't utter anything that is audible to her. And so-- - It's me. - Yeah. - Help me. - If you're scorned by the one that you love and has given you the motivation to escape, and that's the first thing you wanna get back to, shoot you down, why would you say anything else? - Except for learning how to mimic the speech patterns of the people that you are playing as later on in the masquerade, there's no room left for him to give us an internal look at him because he doesn't say anything, and I think I'm okay with that. - Yeah, it kind of works. - Yeah. - And if, like, messed up, not done on purpose, there's no way that ended up being on purpose. - Yeah. - Chuck Feffer said, "You should be this way." This guy said, "We should be this way." There's no way that all lined up. - I know, it has to be so difficult to just, like, "Well, where's the story now?" Like, and at least, you know, Raimi is still directing it and has a sense of an idea of what this is supposed to be, but this thing's shuffling through a lot of hands and they're telling you, "Don't make it too weird." - I don't know, like, did you see the movie? - Did you read the script? - Yeah. - Part of this, you didn't think was weird. - This is a weird guy. - But, yeah, that's what. - Yeah, let's mention the other element. So, I guess it would be sort of our inciting incident, A, and then inciting incident, and B would probably be the Death of Dark Man. - You weren't supposed to know about it. That file was not supposed to circulate. However, I am asking you to understand. Take a look at that model, Julie. That's the dream. Acres of riverfront reclaimed from decay. Thousands of jobs created a building block. A very large building block laid for the future. Not such a bad dream as dreams go. And if the price of realizing that dream is the occasional, distasteful chore, well, I don't run away. I say so, do you. So, when a book me? - The fact remains that I'm in possession of evidence, of the commission of a crime. - Well, let me suggest this. You excuse yourself for a few minutes. Go to the ladies room, leaving your briefcase here. Now, what happens to that memorandum while it's in my custody is my responsibility? - I wish you were that simple. But first of all, I don't have the memo with me. - I'm trying to protect you. Does the name Robert Durant mean anything to you? - Drugs, racketeering. - And real estate. Robert Durant is a competitor for the riverfront. He's a very dangerous man, Julie. And I fully believe he'd do anything to get his hands on that document. - So, Lewis Streck Jr. is this kind of real estate developer, kind of like, again, it's an ego thing of like, I'm gonna be so good and great, I'm gonna create this sprawling new development so I can prop myself up on that. But he's bribing a lot of the zoning commissioners, however that works, because they won't sell the land and he needs the land to build the development. So that's what we kind of saw, I think in the opening bits there is Robert Durant is the muscle going and getting the money from all these different developers. But Francis McDormand, this accountant or claims investigator finds this memorandum that kind of shows the bribing and the kind of the racketeering and the extortion that's at place here. And he's like, yeah, you can do something about it, but I'll just stick my goon on you and that's it, which is what he does anyway. So I get the gold, this is almost kind of like, I wanted a little bit more from Michael Wincott in the crow of like, what's this guy really up to? It's kind of something like this, I would imagine. Trying to like, it's a real estate, it's a power move, right? I think zoning rights, build it to that too. - On the commercial and zoning rights to this development, which looks good by the way, but as the tycoon of it, he's, yeah, it's a real estate. - Yeah, again, like Robocop, it's a little Delta City, the old man OCP, like we gotta like get the old crap out so we can build the new stuff here. And he's like, oh, but that memorandum, where's it gonna be cut to Peyton Westlake's lab? He has that development we played in the first clip where that if it's in the dark, it survives longer, which will play out. But man, Durant and his goons. And I do have to say, I think Robocop still takes the cake. That's an insanely vicious, brutal scene that still makes my skin crawl to this day, the execution of Alex Murphy. This is close, but what makes it palatable to me is the zeniness of Raimi, right? It's the quick zooms, it's the stop motion animation on his hands as they burn away. It's the shots, the close-up shots. It does feel fairly cartoonish, but when you take a step back and realize, no, this one guy just got executed with a fucking plastic bag over his head, just smashed his face through three panes of glass. - Yeah, yeah. - And he's getting drowned out, burned already, and that was gonna blow up. At the end of the day, this is a pretty horrific scene. - Yeah, for sure. - But I think handled really well and setting up the heavy. - So, think of all three heroes that we've done in this cast. So we have Lamont Cranston, the Shadow. We have Eric Draven, the Crow. In a way, they all kind of go through some sort of a death rebirth phase, right? - Right, of course. - As most heroes do. I think this one's handled really well. I mean, if you really wanna build some sympathy, I mean, now you're turning him into this burn victim, freak that is so self-conscious on his own body image now. You feel bad for the guy 'cause you're like, how could this guy ever have a normal life after this unless he perfects his thing, right? - Blown out of his own lab, after his face has been smashed and shredded, his assistant has been head-shotted, his hands have been burned off, his face has been submerged in what might as well amount to a vat of oil or acid. And the only thing that saves him is the unlucky appearance of someone seaside on the shore to find whatever's left of this semi-recognizable corpse. And I guess the immediacy I'd call of an ambulance and the rescue at a hospital. You're at that place where he might as well be dead. So then when we resurrect him, how do we resurrect him? And with a nod to all superheroes, whether it's Super Soldier serum or whatever, I think it's done pretty well with the science. - He's got burns covering over 40% of his body. The hands and face are the most severe. 10 years ago, pain from the burns would have been intolerable. This man would have spent the rest of his life screaming. Now we use the rank of error, it's technique. Quite simply, we sever the nerves within the spina thalamic tract there, which is you know transmits neural impulses of pain and vibratory sense to the brain. No longer receiving impulses of pain. You stick him with a pin and he can't even feel it. As in many radical procedures, there are serious side effects to this operation. When the body ceases to feel, when so much sensory input is lost, the mind grows hungry. Starved of its regular diet of input, it takes the only remaining stimulation it has for the emotions and amplifies them. Giving rise to alienation, loneliness, uncontrolled rage is not uncommon. Now surges of adrenaline flow unchecked through the body and brain, giving him augmented strength, hence the restraint. Naturally, we give them every chance of recovery, remain optimistic, inspire confidence, talk to him about rehabilitation potential. - I love all of that. That's all somehow so, it's word dumpy for sure. But I'd rather see it a person tell me that than like see it on a bunch of computer screens. So essentially what happened, they did a little snip snip. And so now due to his fourth degree burns that this man has, doesn't feel anything. He won't feel the pain because those people are just in pain, the burn units. I mean, they're in pain forever, it seems like. And now, but it comes with side effects, now that he doesn't feel, now the synapses and the hormones are flowing different through his body. Now he has increased adrenaline, it'll make him stronger, it'll make him more angry because he can't feel. I mean, now you've created the super soldier, but at a huge, huge cost. I mean, this guy gets set off in an instant if you talk to him the wrong way, or if you piss him off, or if he has, you know, memories of his, you know, past self or of the people that did him wrong. And he goes into full on rage mode. I love all the science there. I think it makes for a pretty interesting character. When we walk through the lab and that doctor is explaining the process they're going through, it's hard not to recognize Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, because these people are essentially spread out in a cartwheel kind of look, and they're spinning on these discs, and there is in that a rather graphic horror that's being expressed to the audience in so far as, that sucks. These poor people, those are still living entities. And then you get, I think what's the crowning moment in this whole scene. And that's when she stabs him with the pin. With the pin, I guess, assuming that he can't feel it, and then won't be able to communicate it, but nonetheless is ridiculously cruel, Jesse, because it's like, here's this test subject, watch how right my science is. And she stabs this poor bastard with this pin and kind of twist it a bit. - Doesn't really care about her subjects, right? - And yeah, I mean, and that's who your God is. That's who your resurrecting element is? This plays in for me later on the film, because if that's what resurrects you, if we're created in the image, or designed in the image of our creator, and we are talking about the rebirth as hero, and this character that is helping bring him back with the aid of science has so little regard for just the sanctity of the body, and the good naturedness that you would never do to someone if they were audible. What does that mean if you make it all the way back, and then frankly, Sam or Amy handles it really well, 'cause he doesn't care that much about life. And we see, this one I love about these not quite ready for primetime heroes versus Marvel in DC. No one in Marvel in DC ever kills the bad guy. That's the Batman Joker thing, 50 times over. We need each other, the Joker says, and Batman's like, well, that writers need you, so I can't kill you, 'cause I hate you. We keep doing this, this stupid dance. We can't really kill Norman Osborn. Fuck, this is a one-off, man, so I'm gonna drop you from the 58th story, head first into a pot of tigers, or blava, or what-- - Michael Wincott's gonna get Mortal Kombat at the end of the show, right? - I like that. - Me too. - I mean, there's not a, they're unapologetic in how they tell their origin stories, and what I've liked about all three of these movies, even the Shadow for the Shadow's faults, man, we just get right to it, right? I mean, it's like boom, origin, get into the costume, and let's start figuring stuff out. I mean, I think the crow still beats it per runtime, but in a Marvel or DC film, I mean, even as a masterpiece as Batman begins in, I mean, it's a while before we get Batman, right? It's about an hour before we get the Batman. I get it, I just like the efficiency of like, let's get into the story, let's make it simple, we'll throw some fun science at you, and we'll still kind of make you really care about this character who's in a lot of pain, he just can't feel it. - In the Dark Knight, Nolan handles that line that Batman toes at the end of the film between good and bad and what delineates those two really, really well, and you see a very perplexed and troubled Batman with, I have to be the protector of Gotham, but in order to do that, I can't go so far as to become the bad guy myself, and that means this is never going to end for me. - A moral compass. - Perfect, the moral compass in this is completely disregarded because the doctors that are morally compromised in the name of science just don't give a damn. And if you are taking a tour of, I think, medical students through this horrific unit of burn spinning whatever the hell these bodies are, and you just nonchalantly, flippantly, stab this poor bastard in the leg and like, look, he doesn't even feel it, what then are you setting that character for at the height of its powers? I think more of the same. And that to me is very, very refreshing. No matter what happens in most Spider-Man films, most Batman films, most Marvel DC proper, larger, probably not dead. And then if they are, there's another version and another reality that we can just bring them back from anyway, so it doesn't really matter. - Yeah, now there's no rules. - And now, so there's just, there's no parachute here. And I like that. - Me too, yeah, John Land is getting a tour of this burn unit here, I love that. I want to know how that works out and what the Raimi tie is. Jenny Ogater from American World from London, so there's another tie there. But then as soon as he wakes up there, right where I cut the audio, it's like boom, boom, zoom, zoom, zoom, and we do interior synapses day. We've seen that before, Spider-Man, right? - Right. - It's the Spider-DNA coming together. - I think that's what it is, it has to be. - Beautiful. We've had a lot of those last week, it was interior, interior-- - They'll shoot, the shadow's mail system day. - But again, it's another great thing Raimi's doing is these little interludes. And we're going to see it a little bit later when he sees Ted Raimi at that party and just the anger of seeing that guy shoot my lab assistant and it's just completely chaotic, but man, I get it. I just, I totally understand it. It reminds me of the iron side bit from Kill Bill. (imitating beeping) And then you see that person that did you so dirty and you're like, that bitch is gonna pay, yeah. So man, poor Peyton, I mean, he breaks out of here and much like the crow wandering down alleyways, gets a jacket, looks like some sort of like a homeless person and he's got nowhere to go other than his old home, which is burn beyond recognition. So let me take what I can, I'll go find a new home, some sort of abandoned boiler facility. And let me start to put some of this wife back together. Let's talk about the universal monster aspect 'cause it's like one of our most favorite things, right? The trials and tribulations of the dark universe, talking about the old films, you and I are in ample anticipation of epic universe at Universal Studios so we can go dine with the monsters. That's really what we wanna do. We just wanna have a beer with Dracula. - Yeah. - But I think we really like those characters because of A, how simple they are, B, how tragic they are and see how awesome they look, right? And for whatever reason, Raimi took like six of those guys and was like, dark man. So let's talk about, I mean, the science, I mean, I get a lot of, I get Frankenstein, I get Claude Raines, Invisible Man here, especially with the bandages. I get Invisible Man, you get Mummy and Frankenstein's Boris Karloff monster. You get kind of some of that with the body dysmorphia. I think the hat and the cape or Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. I think the cape is very Dracula. I mean, he leaves scenes going like this. And then I think the kind of tragic love story angle is very Phantom of the Opera. Well, his face is missing the same place that the Phantoms is, missing that his face is missing the same skin the Phantoms is on the right side. - Right. Kind of awesome. - That's kind of really cool that like, you see a lot of the monsters in that and they all kind of play into that. And especially the rage element. Why can't I remember the Invisible Man's name? I'll look it up here, but how angry he is and he becomes essentially a borderline domestic terrorist in that movie because he can't see himself anymore. He goes mad and we see that here. And the doctor warned us this would happen because he can't regulate his emotions 'cause he can't feel he's gonna get more angry about certain things. But he starts to try and put it together. He has a, you wanna talk about a Chantaté of a lab. I mean, here it is. And I really, just the tragicness of Peyton Westlake, I'm gonna put my skin machine together, but I need to do a scan in my face. Well, shit, the only photo I have, the part that I need fixing is the part of the photo that's damaged. So I was gonna take him about a couple of weeks to render those parts of his face to have a usable Liam Neeson skin. Yeah. And so there's a taking timeline there and the in-between, he goes and visits, or stock in Julia again. So here's the Phantom at play. I'm looking through greats at auditoriums. She's dancing with another guy. What the hell? But there's one of the guys that took me down. I'm gonna take him down. Little shrimpy Ted Raimi, man. I love that his brother. And I think he's the baby of the family, the little Ted. Just uses him and abuses him. And in the Spider-Man movies, he plays Hoffman, which is, he's essentially the joke of the Daily Bugle. Yeah. Some food got poisoned? How about Dr. Strange? How about Dr. Octopus? Ah, it's crap. And even in the evil dead stuff, I mean, Raimi, Ted Raimi was dressed up in all these disgusting things that his brother would just put him through the ringer. And here, I mean, Dark Man grabs him by the throat, water boards him and then sticks him into oncoming traffic. Okay, let's talk about that for a minute. Okay, okay. What a great, hard death to watch. So head and shoulders up through the bottom of the manhole into the middle of New York, high traffic time. And it is cars swerving out of the way, swerving out of the way. And that was a bit of a white knuckler for me. And about the time they let me off the hook because enough cars had missed him to our thoughts sooner or later, we've got to get out of the scene 'cause the movie's only 95 minutes long. Nope, the semi comes. Welch. Not a Subaru or a Toyota, an 18-wheeler comes, and boy, that tire doesn't miss at all. Yeah, there's nothing left, nothing. Oh my gosh, so, all right, let's talk about that 'cause that goes back to what we talked about in the lab. Okay. Darkman knows what he's doing. This is not a veiled threat. This is, I'm sticking your ass up through this or your head up through this and let the fates have their way with you. Absolutely. Boy, and don't they? Because not only is he tortured and probably scared to death as these cars are just swerving out of the way and missing him by inches. I mean, I don't know, it would all suck, but I think I'd probably not like to see myself go down under the wheels of an 18-wheeler. No way. (whooshing) And I think that scene is handled masterfully well. If that's what Darkman's willing to do, holy shit, look out. Yeah, watch out. And I like that he starts to kind of toy and have some fun with these guys 'cause the next mark is Paulie, this kind of bald doofus, curly looking guy, who has, we were trying to figure out this mouth crusty on, but he's gonna impersonate him because it looks like Paulie's the money guy and he transfers the money from probably to Shrek to these different kind of extortion attempts from these people. So Darkman gets him, knocks him out, and he's like, okay, I got 99 minutes to go, set him up again, grab some money, make off with it, and I'll leave these plane tickets to make it look like he's absconding with the money to much to the dismay of Mr. Robert Duran. Paulie, we've been very concerned about you. Hey, Mr. Duran, I must overslept. I'm sorry, I guess I missed something, huh? Where's the money, Paulie? What money? I didn't make the pick up. Rhea, in first class, how delightful. And another one for Rick? Well, that explains his disappearance. Hey, I don't even know nothing about that. Where is the money, Paulie? What money? I swear to God, Mr. Duran, I didn't make the pick up. I've been right, you were sleeping. Jesus, I swear to God. But, I don't even know how I got threats. Well, Paulie. Have a nice flight. Dark Man's a little stinker. Yeah. What do you think of, I love that scene, by the way, and it just took a word to somebody, Paulie, and this guy's so confused. I'm like, I've just been asleep here. What do you think of this ticking time element with the photosensitive skin? You know, we love clocks in movies. It's just like, alien Romulus, like this thing's crashing in 40 minutes, great, get us out of here. It adds a lot of nice tension, but, I mean, we even get the visual with the stopwatch of like, he has finite amount of time to be these people, so he can't just masquerade all day as Duran, or Paulie, or even Payton, it has its limitations. I love that, because then we are in a Hitchcockian way with a bomb underneath the table, as aware, so maybe not quite as Hitchcockian as I might be referencing, to the limited amount of time that the character has to make these decisions before the conflict gets to the breaking point, and then all hell breaks loose. The other thing too about that is for the pacing of a script, it's really important. We've talked about off mic and in the writing lab several times about how much easier it is to get through the latter part of the first act, and most of the second act, if you have a list to follow, C7, see any move of base like our on the 10 Commandments. - Or quests, yeah, like. - So if you are following an established ABCDE, and then the quest is complete, that makes the writing so much easier, because you can paste the script to the next seven labors of Hercules. We can go on and on with important lists that have become part of our lives. This isn't quite that powerful in the script, but if you have a ticking clock element, and in this case, it's, my skin is dissolving because the sun is melting it, it gives you a really reasonable and quick way to get in and out of scenes and move the story down the road rapidly. - Yeah, I really tried to pay attention to it too, 'cause there's that scene that we'll get to, we'll get to it right now, where are they gonna make kind of another money exchange in Chinatown at a Hong Kong restaurant? And when he gets out of the car to go to the restaurant, he looks at his watch and it's 99 minutes, like, oh shit, we know this thing's gonna go tits up in about a minute, but he goes inside under the cover of darkness out of the sunlight. So he's able to kind of masquerade as to rant for another three to four minutes, but the second he steps outside, he starts bubbling, it starts going haywire. So they really paid attention to that, and then later, I was like, well, he's not printing in the moment mask, he made masks of all these guys already, and that one guy opens up the thing, and he's like, oh my God, look at these skins. They're in the dark, they're undercovers, I mean, they're not to get deteriorated, so. To patent science ingenuity, he's figured it out, but that missing element is still, I think, an interesting plot device that is used fairly effectively in the movie. - Amen, I don't discreet consider myself that's perfect. - I do like the scenes there where he's okay, Durant's the next mark, and he's like, trying to listen. So now it's the voice mimicry, it's like, I can become them, but I need to talk like, can't just mumble. And I love that scene where he's listening to Durant saying, very nice, and he just goes very nice, and he goes, ha, ha, ha, he just starts laughing, dude, this jaw is like hanging on by a threat, and he looks grotesque, you said mummy-like, he has a moment kind of around here too, where he just loses it, and he's dancing like the Tin Man, and he's like, the cat thinks he's a freak, and he just starts trashing his lab, but he gets that kind of, why, at the end of the tunnel, but his mask rendering of Liam Neeson is complete. So even that taking time has been taking place behind the scenes. Now I can maybe put this on and go talk to Julie, we can reenact this Phantom of the Opera plot line now. I really like that, and what I really like about Liam Neeson's performance here, I mean, we had some fun, his Irish was peeking out a little bit, but the way he talks is, Peyton Westlake with the dark man skin underneath, was completely different than the beginning of the movie, which was the Liam Neeson I know very well, right? There was like a troubling, trembling, the way he delivered lines, it was this very quiet monster underneath all of that fake skin, and I really like that, it's just kind of a subtle, just kind of not of being uncomfortable, and he even asks her, it's like, what if I look different, Julie, what if I look, what if I had scars in this? She's like, you look pretty good to me, right? I mean, what do you have to hide? And we know what he looks like underneath, he looks like a nightmare. Right. I think he's pretty good, what about Frances McDormand? We haven't done a Frances movie, primarily because we haven't done any Cohen films, but I think this is a nice presence in this movie. It's a different type of role for her, for sure, but I think her and Neeson are pretty good together. I do too, and with all due respect to Frances McDormand, she can look, I think sometimes a little hard, 'cause I think she has hard features. Yeah. But I think they do a good job in this movie of softening her up enough that I can buy that she's the soft element to the harden, driven element of Dark Man/Liam Neeson prior to transformation. Yeah, Frances McDormand is gonna deliver in whatever role she's in. She's immensely talented, got a lot of hardware to prove it, a lot of nominations, and the woman is ridiculously talented. Can there be any more talent in the Cohen Brothers house? My God. Seriously. Seriously. What are those Christmases like? My Lord. I always want to know, this is just me on the side. This is a Jesse aside. I always want to know, 'cause we know how our holidays go. They're all fairly interesting, right? But what are, I want to know, what is the Baldwin things giving? Oh my God. Because you got Alec there, you got Steven, and his son-in-law is Justin Bieber. I mean, what is going on at those holidays? Much like Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, Wyatt Russell. I want to know, what's the banter? They watching football, are they arguing about petty shit? What is the conversation? That would be fun. And the Cohen household. I mean, my God. Yeah, talented. Stacked with talent. Absolutely. Window to door. Yeah, Frances McDormand's gonna give you a great performance. Have you ever seen anything? There's movies she's made that I don't love. Three best actress wins, I think. Yes. Yeah, you're right. The hardware to boot. Yeah, I mean, even something crappy that she made, like Laurel Canyon, she's still really good in it. Oh my God. Laurel. Have you ever seen it? Christian Bell and Kate Beckins, too, right? Kind of a weird, sleepy sort of, but not a great film. Early odds sting, right? Yeah. Yeah. Remind me to say, tell me orange after the show, because I was going to tell you. Okay. Okay. Orange will trigger it. Yeah, Frances McDormand is going to kill whatever you give her. She's not bad in anything. Can she do comedy? Yes. Or, yeah. Can she do film noir? Shockingly? Yes, because she's not the femme fatale, but she is. Blood simple. Blood simple. Awesome. Yeah. I buy it. I totally buy it. They're good. I mean, it's just, I really like niece. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one, right? I mean, that's the role for her. Marge Gunderson. That kind of affect, uh, medicine and, uh, long owes. That's so good. And she's pregnant the whole, I mean, and the whole non-heist kidnapping thing is so preposterous in that thing. I think it's handled really well as much as comedy and horror can, right? Um, that's a top tier Cohen for me, for sure. Yeah, that we haven't done that film. I know, right? As William H. Macy. Are you sure we haven't done blood simple? We haven't done blood simple either. No, we haven't. What is the matter with you? I know. What's the matter with you? We could put that together. This is the problem, right? Is any time we talk about these things, it's just like, oh, there's another cast, there's another cast. And then we just got to find the right time to do it, right? Yeah. But, um, all right, I'm going to write that one down because, because we talked about that and we talked about another one last week. Yeah, those ones are going in the hopper. Mm hmm. But we do get to one of my favorite scenes because if you want the evil dead scene of the movie, it's this one right here. Uh, the pink elephant, please. I'm sorry about it, don't count unless you're behind the line. Well, I was behind the line. Not hard. I was standing right here with my girlfriend. Now, the pink elephant, if you please. No way. It doesn't matter, Pete. It matters. I won the pink elephant, or my girlfriend. No way. No way. No way. It doesn't matter, Pete. It doesn't matter, Pete. It matters. Oh, my girlfriend. What are you just, uh, getting lost? How? That was it. What's that? Didn't hear me. Weirdo. No way. No way. Take it down. Take it. Take it. Take the fucking elephant. You look at her. Please, no. Forgive me. What a crazy scene. First of all, they go to this, like, I'm always suspicious of just pop-up carnivals. I wouldn't get on any of these rides, or do any of these things, or interact with any of these carnies. But you know, he's still really self-conscious. He's got to get back because his skin's about to fall off, and he's like, "I got to get back to rehab." Like, "No, I'm going to stay with you all night." And he's like, "Oh, God, how's that going to work?" And he's like, he deflects, and he was instead talking about his body, he's like, "Was there someone else?" And he's like, "Yes, I'm, and she's kind of seeing track, right?" And he's like, "But it doesn't matter. I'm with you. I've always wanted you." And he's like, "Oh, great." And I'm like, "I'm going to win you this stuffed animal in this carnie game." And he's really set off when, I mean, he sees, you know, freak shows, weirdo, freak. These are trigger words for him. And okay, what is it? Interior, circus, freakout day. Right. Yeah. I don't know. We go into his eye. It's going crazy. He's fragmenting. He's breaking apart. Comes back. Breaks his guy's fingers. Ooh. And I love that line. Take the fucking hell of it. Take the fucking hell of it. Okay. So we're starting now to see his inability to control that dangerous part of dark man that was spoken about by the doctor in a place where he's not dark man. He's looking like himself. He's got his woman back. And all things seem to be right in the world. And the littlest thing. Imagine a carnie trying to screw you. I mean, gee. Okay. No, right. It's so petty. Yeah. And so on point for what carnies are supposed to do, he can't control it. And then not only is it just this anger, but it's the psychological piece that triggers it that you can control your anger. Just don't say anything or count to 10 or breathe or whatever your little technique is. But if your brain is flashing back to all of these things, we're admitting in a really kind of cool way with his, with the woman, like the person he's been dying to get back to, he can't control this anymore. And so we've got another ticking time bomb. Not only is his face melting in sunlight, which dramatically compromises your ability to go to the state fair or a football game or anything, we can only see each other in the evenings. Why do you have this umbrella? Exactly. More sunscreen, please. Yeah. Is I need SPF dark man. Yeah. Exactly. Is that copper town? No, it's dark man. So we've got that working against him. And then we've also got the deterioration of the filters mentally at the same time. How do you win her back? And she's already been on top of it. She's already kind of been one over and she admits to you, "I kind of have a boyfriend on the side. Got a side piece. It's not you." Yeah. He's kind and he has into him, but now that you're back, I'm just not in, does it work like that? Yeah. Don't push it. I don't know if it works like that. So it might be the villain we'll find out later and, you know, probably 10 minutes. Yeah, troubling. But at least, and then on top of it, she doesn't even get the elephant. He uses the elephant to hide his face as he's running away. He takes it. That is cool though watching the skin bubble underneath the mask as it's starting to decompose. A lot of cool effects there. And the other one I really liked was like when he's running away and there's like smoke coming from like there. I was like, how did they do that? That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. But yeah, that evil betting of into the eye, out of the eye, we're seeing a bunch of weird stuff here. Like I guess this is supposed to be his brain, just completely combusting right now. So he's going to flip. I love that little those jelly fingers there. Yeah. That works for me. That's stuff. I just, I mean, I eat that up and when you watch Spider-Man, I mean, there's with Norman Osborne specifically, the zoom-ins on his face, you know, his like cragly eyes. I mean, the guy already kind of looks like a goblin, but you get a lot of that. But it's not until the second one when I think he was really like, okay, I made the first one is a big one of the biggest movies ever made. I'm going to have a little fun with this second one because you really see his personality come out in part two with especially the Oc hospital attack. Oh yeah. It's full like this type of stuff, just like crazy, the mix of horror and comedy is hard to do. Yeah. It's the same line we've talked about it often, which scares and laughter moments are released kind of the same way. It's like it's the punch line of a joke or the jump scare in horror. So when they're both side by side, walking that same path, like very few people can really pull that off and your Ramey figured that out a real long time ago. So she chases him back to his, you know, makeshift lab and this is like, I think the first time we get to see the full dark man face and it's, it's not pretty hideous. And he's kind of oozing and like wet, what was the, you told me you thought it looked kind of evil dead like of the Deadites. Yeah. I keep going back to the VHS cover and I think it's one of the movie posters too of that skeletal evil dead, Deadites number one. And it looked, it's, it's the mouth, man. It's really obtrusive protruding obtuse protruding eyes. But I think the thing, I was just thinking about this a little while ago, what's the scariest part of the facial body dysmorphia for me? And I think it's the bastardization of the mouth. You think about that's where you're going to consume sustenance to stay alive and that's how you're going to communicate. Yeah. You can say you communicate with your eyes, but this isn't that kind of a show. Sure. Yeah. Taking the mouth and twisting it and making it so hideous just taints everything that comes in and goes out and the mouth for this. And they do a good job of teasing it out because when he's bandaged up, you can see his little scraggly teeth just kind of poking through there and you're like, why the fuck is his mouth like that? A little at a time. A little revealed at a time. Yeah. Okay. You want another cast? Sure. Mummy 1932, which is a film I do not love. Carloaf. Yeah. And then a Frasier, a film I do love. And then a film I know you love. Oh, the Tom Cruise one. The Tom Cruise. So it's just a mummy cast. Oh my God. Let's go. And you want to talk about three very different movies. That could be a lot of fun, right? That could be great. Yeah. So yeah. I thought a little. I don't love the original mummy either. Yeah. That's kind of. There's about seven minutes I like in that film. Yeah. The beginning. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's over. Super overrated movie, but important. And anything away from the importance of the mummy and Carloaf's horror stature because that's important to me. But man, you want to talk about kind of a snooze. So can I ask you a question? Yeah. Not about that. But thinking in this space about the ugliness of the visage of the face and how good Sammy Raimi is with this and you just set me up a little while ago perfectly. Okay. Let's just for one second talk about one piece of Spider-Man. Okay. Next one. Let's do it. And that silly ass green suit in a movie that I think is almost perfect. Yeah. A miss. A mistake. For sure. It should just be his face goblinized because Defoe looks like either an imp or a goblin anyway. Right. That's a question that I'm making you answer in a certain way, aren't I? That's not. That's not. Do you agree? No, you're not going to get any. I've grown to love the goblin armor because, I mean, it makes me think back to 2002 and I was but a wee lad. And I got to see it again in no way home, but I've shown you the original green goblin makeup. How this got. Did Avia Rod step in and was like, no, that's too weird. Because this was that's that was what they were going to do. Should have been. Should have been somewhere somewhere down the line and I did it. It couldn't have been Raimi was like, this doesn't work. There's no way. Raimi said that. Yeah. Someone at Sony. Oh yeah. You see that. I have to put this on the socials this week. Yeah. I think I've put this on before. Yeah. Man. Come on. Yeah. That rules. That rules. Yeah. It's essentially the goblin face from the comic books. And then you put him and I guess you could still put him in the armor. I don't know. Put him in a purple cloak. Yeah. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Was it a missed to not show I kind of like how they handled it in no way home, which was after Norman shows back up at in Earth to whatever. Can't even keep track of it anymore, Matt. He just is, he's just a foe and then he puts like a purple cloak on. Enough. Better. Enough for me, right? Yeah. He's got the mouth and the horror to pull that off just naturally. That's one of the reasons why Molina's Doc Ock works. I think even a little bit better because it looks like him. It looks like him. It's more tragic in a way. And then again, you want to know my weird theories and I think I'm setting you up for something here around December, but my long-running theory that Sam Raimi self-sabotage Spider-Man 3 on purpose because he did not want Venom in that movie because the stuff he does with Thomas Hayden Church of Salmon is actually pretty good. That stuff with like the daughter in the sand with the lock it like a lot of that works for me and Venom does not work for me at all, right? And I think there's a lot of like I'll give you, I'll give you Venom. Here's a middle finger. There's enough poison for you. Here you go, Avi. Right? Yeah. But yeah, to indulge, I'll indulge you Spider-Man whenever you want to do it because you know I love that character too. I just think we're making a really solid case for the aesthetic and it's the makeup. So Raimi's not in the makeup studio doing that, but he's the one that's saying, yeah, that's good. Go with it. He obviously, I mean, trying to tell me you didn't watch Evil Dead and say, oh, he could make a good Goblin, didn't watch Dark Man and say, man, the best part of that film was the way that Liam Neeson looks. And then you decided to go, man, I don't buy it. No way. No way at all. There's no way they said, yeah, screw all that. Go with armor. If anything they probably said, this is supposed to be a family movie and that's too scary. Right? That's where I was going to go. Right? Yeah. Dude, to Christopher Nolan and stick him in like, this is what the Joker's going to look like and deal with it, people, because, I mean, Heath Ledger's a horror show. I mean, and that's not selling toys, but he was like, this is the movie I'm making. Dude, that's power. I mean, and Spider-Man 2002 for Raimi is another kind of studio-proof-it moment. And it's almost like a don't screw this up. So stay in your lane and then you'll get your chance. And that chance is Spider-Man 2. And guess what? Top three comic book movie ever made. Bango. Yeah. Flight from the, I don't mean flight in the show, but a flight from the carnival in this film back to the Shantate Lab of Dark Man. We get, I think, what's a nice moment, which is an acceptance of I don't care how you look. I don't care what troubles you have. We can work through it together. And that lasts all of about five seconds because as she arrives and sees him peering through a window, which in a weird reverse Romeo and Juliet kind of way is brought to an abrupt halt with the arrival of Durant, many, many goons. So at this point, we know we're in the third act and let's get it on. So let's go. Let's talk about the action. Go ahead. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It was just, I love Leonie since I got a little one later because it's my favorite moment line in the movie. Jory! I just, it's very phantom-like from the bowels of the recesses of the vestibule. I'm shouting for the, the one I love, right? But yeah, this, I think I've mentioned this on podcast pass, but like I really dig scenes in boiler rooms, like action bits. I just, it's a, it's a great location to blow stuff and shoot them up. Sea Robocop. I think we were even in a boiler, yeah, Terminator 2 in a boiler room in Friday the third or Nightmare in Elm Street to Freddy's Revenge, but he goes to the roof and Durant in a helicopter. And I think they do some, for whatever the but, I think the budget was 14 million. There's some good helicopter action here. I mean, chasing him with like a, a grenade launcher, he, Peyton goes back into the recesses of his lab, has some fun with two of these guys, big cat and mouse, disguising, but dispatches these two people that were also part there on assault night. But we finally get into the surface, we get onto the helicopter with Durant and in a moment I told you, if I were a stuntman, you couldn't pay me enough to swing through this skyline of Los Angeles on a helicopter. No, thank you. No, thank you. But I think it looks pretty cool. Dark man swinging through this and the police get involved and they have a little fun with it too. I mean, he blows into an office meeting and he's like, sorry, he's almost, almost like a caricature at certain moments, but he gets on that highway there and it's fast. It's crazy. And he attaches that helicopter to a semi truck that hits an overpass and bye bye Durant. What do you think of all of that? Does it, does it jump the shark too much? Does it stay in its lane? I mean, I just anytime you get me an actual actor and no CGI actually doing the stunt, I mean, that goes a long way for me and that's a real guy swinging from that helicopter. Yeah. Guess what? It's not Liam Neeson. No, it's not. That they action bit may go a little long, a little long from go on a little long for me. Easy for me to say, huh? But the idea in it, and we've had some nice helicopter chases in recent weeks, haven't we? Beverly Hills cop? Yeah. We've had some cool helicopter stuff recently. Yeah. It's a unique way. And again, to Durant's modus operandi, I'm going to shoot these large gauged grenades at whatever the hell else is in the way. Be damned. I'm going to get this guy. Just the lack of genuine concern for anybody else or collateral damage, and that's been set up and played out really, really well because I'm going to go down there and take their fingers, but he doesn't give a damn. So yeah, get to each car. That guy, that guy we're not going to put in jail, like something really bad has to happen to that guy. So they give him something really bad. I think that maybe goes on about one sequence too long because if you remember, it starts on the top of his lab as he's running from rooftop to rooftop, dodging, jumping, fire explosions and all that. It has to be like that. You don't want to just, you know, watch him run away in the helicopter chase and let's give us some action. The one thing that I think would be a bit better, and I don't know how you do it swinging from a line toad on the bottom of a helicopter, is do we see any of the skill set that Doug Darkman has been provided with this? And again, I don't know how you can't punch out a car as you're going by, but he's certainly nimble. I think that's fair. He's agile. There's not a lot of pain that he's willing to succumb to because he can't feel it and a little stronger. Yeah. A little stronger. I like all that. I just, and I'm not going to sour mash it because I don't want to even think about how to do that. There's a way but, you know, action bits are tricky. I think that's fair. I think the doctor scene set up the rules and the skill set of what this character's capable of, won't feel pain, slightly augmented in strength, increased adrenaline, and I think you can play into that. But yeah, some of those are a little Captain America and it's like, how do you show that visually? Yes. So perfect to that. It's a way to describe it. Yeah. So I think there is a bit of an issue there, but still fun to watch. Absolutely fun to watch. And I like it. It's in daylight. So he knows the rules. I mean, he's in full, dark man bandages at this point because the rest of the stuff isn't going to cut it. Kills Durant until the sequel. If you can pal it going to see the director, I never did see that. It's all, it's whatever. Speaking of emotep from the 99 Mummy, Arnold Boslu plays Peyton Westlake in those, in those latter two sequels. And then I guess just anytime Jeff Fey, he shows up in a movie, it's like, what are we doing here? I like the guy, but have you ever seen a movie? Okay. He did speaking of body dysmorphia. Yeah. I know we're going body parts. Yep. That's kind of a crazy movie. I think Brad Durrif is in that thing where he gets in a car accident, loses his arm and they put like a serial killer's arm on him. Yeah. Isn't there a movie where he has his eyes replaced with somebody else's eyes? Isn't that Jeff Fey? That does sound familiar. And then I also know he's also in the lawnmower. Yep. Interesting career. Psycho three. Yeah. That's right. You want to do a Jeff Fey? He does. That'd be fun. Francis McDormand gets top billing over him though. Okay. That's absolutely fair. We come up with like five casts this week. We got a lot to do. I love it. Let's what we get to the construction site. And again, you want to just bring these parallels to Spider-Man. It's almost like, Sam Rayman was like, I got this dark man conclusion. And I'm doing it to the best of my abilities, slightly compromised due to the suits interfering. I'm going to do this again in Spider-Man three. I think the guy likes construction sets, right? Because I was really thinking of, I was like, well, this just reminds you of Sandman and Venom here with the end of that movie, which I do like the conclusion of that. I mean, how we got there is crazy, but I do like how that movie ultimately wraps up. So you got, you know, Dark Man with the Rant's face on, you know, Shrek's able to kind of figure it out. And he's waxing poetically about all the great things he's going to do with this pneumatropolis. And he's dancing on the things because he's to do this as a kid jumping from beam to beam. What I like about it is it's completely ridiculous. And it's almost bordering on cartoonish for me. But I do like it's just it's Peyton, this guy, Francis McDormand, and one other dude. It's four people up here. It's not like we have an army of people on the scaffolding that we got to deal with. So it's fairly simple. It's dispatch that guy, take down the bad guy, save the girl. Let's go home. Yeah. Right. And I think the Fisty cuffs and the obstacles and the effects are pretty good and that line where the guy Francis McDormand, she's tied up and she hits that one guy and the guy's pretty pissed off and he's like, you bitch, he throws her off the thing and she catches onto some, like, onto some, what do you call that, the, the, the rod iron? Right. Yeah. The steel rods. Yeah. So she's hanging. Rebar. Rebar. Yeah, rebar. Yeah. And then you get this a little bit. My favorite line from the movies. I've gotten to know Julie quite intimately. Retasants are very, but I can tell you this. He doesn't date freaks. And like the Phantom of the Opera swings in on a chandelier and saves his girl. Rescuser. Mm hmm. You know, for all of the helicopter and grenade launchers and large set pieces that you can use, there's a real simple action bit that I don't think is used enough and that's depths of falling. Yeah. All the way back from north to northwest, right? Just don't fall. You create limited range of movement. You're battling against balance. Once it starts to go, it's pretty hard to get it back. Yeah. And again, if you are lucky enough to catch yourself as you're falling, you can only hang on for so long because your fingers are going to give up. Think about how you used to play with your action figures as a kid. Oh, yeah. You would have them fighting up here, I'm on the mic mountain right now, and then they would make it to down here, and then they're fighting on this thing, and then they're fighting over here. Yeah. And yeah, the layers of a construction site are perfect for that. You want another great construction finale, I guide the right audience to baby's day out. There you go. Yeah. But yeah, I really like all of this. Yeah, saves the girl, grabs the guy. I was half waiting for this guy for dark men to say, I lied, but, you know, Shrek's trying to plead for him. Like this death will be on your conscience. You can't live with that. And I'm learning to live with a lot of things just drops this guy, Cole Turkey. And again, one of the things you're right about the DC Marvel morality compass of I need to save this guy so he can be in the sequel, or he needs to go to prison or whatever. Let's just kill these guys. It's just like, they're not coming back. I mean, like, let's just end it because you know what, you burned me. You're going down. Isn't it refreshing to not have to be the city's protector? Sure. Just be simply the element of vengeance. Another reason why I love Robocop, there's no sympathy paid to any of those goons. Yeah, man. When you went to a bout of toxic waste, I'm not going to protect the cesspool of a city that once upon a time was maybe good when my dad was alive. Fuck it. I'm just going to kill everybody that's bad and go live my life. There's a freedom in that that corporatized superhero dumb doesn't allow. And so it's refreshing that I can just drop you, not feet first, head first, into the pavement. And it's the family friendliness of it all. But even in Batman '89, just one year prior, the Joker's just going down to the ground. It's just Batman killing the Joker and it's just whatever. Right. Yeah. We were okay with it because Joker's a terrible person. Yeah, he's awful. And then so saves the girl. They go down in the elevator. They have a really interesting scene. I'm going to play the dialogue, but I'm going to mention what I noticed and how Raimi shot it. This guy knows some, a thing or two. Okay. Don't you think I told myself that night after sleepless night, it's just a burn skin deep. It doesn't matter. And if I covered it, hid behind a mask, you could love me for who I was inside without pity. But a funny thing happened, as I worked in the mask, I found a man inside was changing. He became wrong, a monster. I can live with it now, but I don't think anyone else can. I want to live back. So in that scene, they're taking an elevator and this is a scene. If Frankenstein could talk in that first movie, you'd say something like this, right? Yeah. I'm the monster in the mirror, right? He's saying, Julie, like, I thought I was like, it's just skin deep. I could deal with it. This scene, the way it shot is, you know, there's light up top. And then that line goes, but I realized I started to realize the darkness hidden within me and all the white gets vanquished from that elevator shaft. So the light to the dark, I mean, he's become the dark man, right? And morality, right? I mean, there's the painting you knew and here's the person I am. This is the real me. It's kind of genius the way he did it. The last shred of goodness that I have before I go all the way is to have you removed from my life because I don't know what's going to come to you. Now, that's a common superhero trope. Sure. I have so many enemies that put you in harm, blah, blah, blah. I can't tell you who I am, Mary Jane. After 600 episodes, you haven't figured it out yet. Right. Sure. It's a painting light from shot to shot in control of what you want your audience to see. That's high praise. Yeah, absolutely. So he gets down to ground level, takes off, Peyton is no more, runs off into the crowd, but grabs, he's putting a new face on as soon as he runs out and she chases after him and she's grabbing bystander after bystander and in one of my favorite moments, it's just you get this voice over, it was like, Peyton is no more. He will walk the streets. He will be the thing. He will be dark man. He turned his Bruce Campbell. What a cameo. So awesome. That's great. Hey, bud. Come on. I got a part for you. Get over here. Like, it's a great little reveal. Those two guys, their storied history together to kind of pay that off in a wink, wink way to the people that know and in 1990, I think there's less people that know now so much more, I think. I think that's a great little moment, right? I mean, how do you not like that? I love that. Yeah. So he scamps off to tonight and I will be dark man. I will be a vigilante when it sees fit, but I still need to figure out how to grow skin in the light. So there's still work to be done, but man, we get out hour and 29 minutes. There's a beauty to that. And some of it was in the editing, which I'm going to I'm going to do here in just a second, but I mean, the crow, hour 44. No, the crow is an hour 35. I think the shadow was an hour 40. This is an hour 29 man. Can we get back to this somehow to the efficiency of storytelling? Let's get in three act structure. Guess what? Each act is 30 minutes. And then we're done. Let's not. We need to stay here for two hours and 45 minutes. I mean, what are we doing? We don't have to build the universe in every movie. Well, Con does cool. It's not 45 minutes. Cool. Exactly, but some movies, I mean, I'll sit in an Oppenheimer board room for sure. Absolutely hypocritical. You can get it, but like, but most movies, I mean, especially these type of genre movies, horror, action, comedy, yeah, I don't need comedies to be an hour and 50 minutes comedies are an hour 30. Horror movies are an hour 30. I mean, my biggest gripe with the first stream movie, love it. I will give that movie probably a top shelf to single barrel rating. I think it's an hour 52. It's just a little too long for us. 10 minutes too long. A slasher movie, right? Yes. You need to know what your lane is and, you know, a Batman or a Superman, I think warrants a two hour runtime, but a dark man, the crow, yeah, how are 30? I'm good. I'm good. I won't complain at all. In fact, I'll be happier. Yeah. I did promise this because if, okay, if the script writing wasn't an issue, oh my God, I wrote here the editing was a nightmare. So the first editor on the film, his name was David Stiven. His cuts performed poorly with screenings and the top brass and straight up, it just had a nervous breakdown. He just couldn't handle the criticism, I guess. So according to Universal, it was some of the worst scoring numbers in the entire studio's history. All that works is they bring people, critics, members of the general public to a screening on the lot, they show they don't know what they're watching and then they watch it and then they just like on a number scale, I think score it on what they liked, what they didn't like. And then there's enough time between the release where they can go fix some things, edit some things and tweak it so it's more palatable. According to Universal, this is one of the worst scoring movies in their history, which is surprising to me. So they brought in another editor, his name was Bud Smith and he came in at the behest of Universal, no input from Raimi or Rob Tapper at the producer and he cut down two hours to 85. Now, two hours does seem a bit much for me, 85 almost seems like too light, right, we're cutting a little too much. And then, okay, this is, so the studio approved that cut, released the 85 minute dark man cut. Rob Tapper, the producer, Raimi's buddy, college buddy, went back in with another editor and added nine more minutes, no input from Raimi, no input from Universal and somehow snuck this in as the movie we watched and Universal was beside themselves. They were outraged by the deception because, you know, back in the old days, you cut film negatives. So there they delivered their 95 minute cut of dark man, cut it up, film reels off it goes to the critics, off it goes to the theaters. And by the time Universal figured it out, it was nothing they could do about it. So they were beside themselves, yeah, about this was not what we, and it was nine minutes of like, essentially, the weird and crazy stuff. So probably the elephant bit, the interior synapses, like the body whore, the, the whore elements, probably got really tapered down a lot. Man, if enough people weren't writing the script, enough people were editing this movie. I mean, had it, what I want to know is how was Universal not so upset with Raimi that they still did army of darkness with him, like, and maybe, I mean, the grosses, I think were decent. I think it was a 40 million gross to a 14 million dollar budget, which, yeah, not terrible. But I think a trouble production, I don't want to say, well, they were filming. That sounds like that went pretty well. But we're getting the story and then putting it together in the editing bay. Sounds like a mess, right? I mean, any just, these are the stories you never hear about. I mean, you go see a movie in the theater and you just accept it as gospel, like this is what they wanted. But sometimes you hear about, no, this isn't the cut that the director approved Josh Trank. Right. Sometimes the studio does their version of the movie and then you get a producers cut or a director's cut. I know you would like this or appreciate this wink wink, Napoleon, they distributed a Napoleon director's cut on Apple Plus, which is 50 minutes longer. Can you imagine? Oh, my God. I still haven't even seen the regular version. Oh. What's 50 minutes gonna do to that movie? You won't. Yeah. I don't know. A 50 minute longer nap. Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. Wow, really? Yeah. 50 more minutes? Yeah. Jesus. I know. I wonder, back to the Rob Tapper bit, did he look at the runtime and say, "Oh, my God. This movie's only 85 minutes." It's not a credible film if it's not at least 90 minutes. Possibly, yeah. Because if you think about when we got out at 129 and some change, it's almost like we got to get it to 130. And I have to admit, I do raise an eyebrow if you don't even have enough to make a mint like a 90 minutes. We can do the 220 and bag on that all we want and that's fair. But if I rent something and it's 85 minutes, I'm be like, "What? Is this a movie or a show?" And it decreases the viability of it just for me naturally. So let me ask you that. I get that. Let me ask you this. So we went from two hours to 85 problematic in both directions. We get it to 95. Do you see some scenes or character things or that could use some expanding for you? No. Sure. If I want to watch him fight a couple more baddies or something like that, maybe. Yeah. No. Any more with him and Julie, you think you got enough or? Yeah. Actually, I think it's fine. I really do. Me too, oddly. I mean, I even tried to look on the, because we watched the 4K, it looked pretty good. It did look good. There's not a director's cut. So I don't know if that's ever been assembled and Marimi's, I guess, fine with it. Yeah, the director's cut was the one they snuck into the theaters. Yeah. But some producers cut the producers cut. Yeah. Somewhere on the universal lots, there's just 40 minutes dark man footage waiting to be discovered. Hey, I'd watch that in my own, you know, completionist ways. That's such a high concept, heist movie. Yeah. A team that goes in to get the footage from eight or nine films or whatever, however many we want to have in our list, the footage that didn't make it to the silver screen. Yeah. That's, that is a movie. That's a heist movie. Yeah. Your little team to break into the vault and get that, oh my God, that could be, and then what do you want to steal? The big thing with that kind of idea is how many of these studios could foresee, or do you could even use the footage from the real movies in that movie? For sure. Yeah. That would sell tomorrow. Absolutely. Don't any of you fuckers take that and read it. Yeah. Yeah. And all it's, it's on the record here. But the thing with that, just like from a historical perspective is a lot of that footage probably did get thrown out destroyed because I don't think like Paramount or Universal were really thinking of DVD or special features where that could be included as a thing or an alternative cut could be done. And unfortunately, I think for a lot of movies, a lot of that's just, it's gone unless someone has a raw negative of an original in some shed in Silver Lake, California. Right. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that. And sometimes that'll happen. We're like, someone in Venezuela will have like a cut of metropolis from like the 20s somehow. I like stuff like that, like that, that historian aspect of film is awesome of if that gets destroyed, it's gone forever. So no, I like that. But yeah. Where's the dark man footage? I honestly thought when I opened the disc, I was like, disc two is definitely dark man director's cut. No, no, nowhere, weird, very weird. And maybe Raimi's just not one for director's cuts. He's just okay with as is. It is puzzling if we're in the space about it being too weird, then at what point did the studio executives not look at this film? And it's 1990. So we're not even a comfortable, in a comfortable superhero space really anyway. No, we're still figuring it out. When did they not say, okay, yeah, this is naturally just weird anyway, it is weird. So superheroes are weird. Yeah. And this one is particularly so because he's a monster. Yeah. Classically driven, classically inspired, might I say? Yeah. We've had this conversation a million times, but to be a fly on the wall and hear some of those conversations and just to know how much of it is just driven by commerce is 90% of it, I would love to know how coherent a lot of those people are and or how many of them actually watch movies to know the pulse of what people actually want and what they might actually be interested in because and in the back corner of that meeting in the boardroom is an intern by the name of Amy Pascal. Yeah. You know it. Yeah. Let me ask you this or I have a couple questions for you before some other questions for you. If unbreakable and dark man, give me the crow, we'll leave the shadow in 94, but give me Brandon Lee's the crow. If those come out today, I think those movies, all of them I think are hits just because of how different they are from the norm, right? Yes. I just, you're offering me, you know, a wagyu filet mignon when, you know, I'm normally getting just like Applebee's steak, yeah, carbon copy, Applebee's steak, and I can go get kind of a unique thing that's holy someone's vision. I think all three of those movies are gigantic hits today. So do I. I think there's such still an appetite for superheroes, but done differently. See Dr. Strange and Ant-Man. Yeah. You take dark man or unbreakable and or the shadow and made contemporarily with contemporary actors day and contemporary directors, oh my gosh, yes, this movie dark man is dying for an unapologetic or rated remake. Okay. That was my second question. Okay. Sorry. Sorry thunder. Universal is just like, what could we do this summer? Oh, they offer Sam Raimi the chance to come back to remake dark man with a new actor and or wrinkly of Neeson back, I don't care, bring Danielle from him back, pick Bruce Campbell, the play whoever you want. You take that movie opening night. Yeah, wouldn't you? That sounds. I mean, Raimi with the knowledge he has, sans 1990 with a bigger budget. Oh man, dark man, that movie would slay. It would slay. And it would be, I think it would be pretty unique too. It would be even more innovative and unique than this movie is. I think that this movie, if I was looking this up on different lists and like say, I googled a list that was bad movies that were actually pretty good, I think this would be in there. Because I think this movie was generally pretty panned when it came down. It made some money, but I don't think this is critics choice, you know, not Razzie's bad, but not widely loved. Take that so then you give it a cult following. Naturally, that's how that works. So you take that cult following and you cast it with, you know, Joseph Gordon Lovett and you give it, I don't know who do you want? I mean, you can bring Liam Neeson to play Durant at that point. That could be kind of cool. And who do you want to direct? Somebody kind of young. Do any via no wave? Oh, that'd be a huge film. Yeah. Okay. Let's just say that. Let's just let's stay that space for a minute. Okay. Are you trying to tell me that that with the hype train and the money around it and the names? Actually, you know what? Because Fettie Alvarez and Sam Raimi are buds already. Let's go. Sure. Fettie Alvarez is dark, man. I'll watch that. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think the audience would be more prepared to handle a different take in a genre they had already known. I think there's enough fruit left on the vine. I mean, whatever with dark men two and three, but like, I want to know a little bit more of how is Peyton going to perfect his skin synthesis to 100% completion? What kind of vigilante is he going to do for the derelicts of whatever city this is? I think it's LA, but it could be wherever. I'm down for more dark men adventures. Sure. I mean, he's already shunned the girl away, so she's not going to bother anymore. Right. We have to worry about that. Yeah. This thing shows up again as I perfect my science. Yeah. There's there's more story there or remake this and make it more intense. Mm hmm. I'm with you on that. That could be a lot of fun. But what's your favorite Tasty note scene moment sequence of dark man? The youngest Raimi's head up through the manhole cover dodging traffic with nowhere to go. He basically just twisting from right to left forward and back. He did like that. Yeah. I really like that. Raimi looks genuinely terrified. Yeah. Which, pardon me, wonders, did his brother have actual cars on the road with him? You know, I don't have brothers, but you do. But I don't know. Maybe you do put your brothers through the ringer a little bit. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Leaning into my relationship, if it's like my brotherhood relationship with his, the answer is probably just we'll make sure they dodge you. Trust me. Yeah. It's nice. It's nice ribbon, right? Trust me. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. You know, my buddies and friends were as close as brothers as I had. And one friend of mine, Steve, and I convinced him somehow. I was like, Stephen, if you get in this laundry basket, I think you'll go all the way down the stairs to the, to the, the foyer there. And so, he did go wrong. He did it. He got in and I set him off and it hit like the first step and flipped and he like grabbed the railing and the basket tumbled to the foyer. And his sister came out and I was like, Stephen, what are you doing? And I was just like, I mean, this is the stuff I would do. If I had, you know, a brother, I was like, you can, you can go down those stairs in the basket. I think it'll work. You know what? The sciences sound. Oh, wow. My favorite tasting note is the pink elephant, circus, evil bed moment. I mean, when those scenes show up in the rainy films and Spider-Man has a couple, even Dr. Strange and the multiverse of madness had some evil bed-isms in them. God I love it. It's just this guy comes from horror, horror and slapstick. I mean, the two things that I think Remy really liked is he liked old horror films and he loved the three stujas. And man, you want to talk about a match made in heaven for me. That's it right there for sure. And he had Liam Neeson freaking out and having a synapse vision and breaking jelly fingers. I mean, that's that that's my bread and butter right there. Love that. Oh my god moment of dark man. I was pretty troubled when he went headlong into the first pane of glass that held the beakers and the Bunsen burners. You did. You did. Look at me. Made it worse as it happened two more times, giving it three. I'm sort of surprised into Raimi's credit to not make this too horrific. When we come out of those pains, his face isn't torn to ribbons and it would have been with all that glass, but nonetheless, the effect of what they have done to this poor man by running him headlong forehead first into window one, window two, window three, just for good measure, was brutal, brutal. If Paul Verhoeven had directed this, I probably couldn't watch this scene. It would probably be too much for me to handle. Yeah. And we've covered a couple of these on the podcast like the murder, the execution of Alex Murphy is incredibly troubling for me. The beatdown of Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the roof is exceptionally troubling for me. This is kind of there, but again, handled with the grace of Raimi and the comic book side of him that it's still kind of light in a very horrific way. I think that's my oh my god too is just the whole scene, not just the window panes, but him getting dunked and burnt and blown up is the worst death you could ask for and he doesn't even die. Right? He has hell waiting for him on the other side. Wouldn't that be so fun to write on the page like he's dunked, he's burned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ass period, kicked period, fate. Oh god. Yeah. Exclamation point. Yeah. Oh yeah. I love it. Yeah. What would the what? How would you write it is like he blows up a sense to heaven and then falls to hell into the water. Ooh. Yeah. Right. Here's your hospital day. Yeah. Love it. Very troubling scene, but somehow I can still I can still stomach it, but in another director, I mean, do a Rob Zombie's direct in that scene, I just I'll I'll walk out. I'll walk out. Yeah. Yeah. Who's the master distiller on Dark Man? How can it not be Liam Neeson? He's good. Yeah. That's so yeah. Liam Neeson. Yeah. I can't give it to Raimi, but it does feel like a compromised vision, not by his fault bug through various interfering elements. But Neeson's good here. I mean, I mean, if this is I mean enough people didn't see this to kind of see the talents he had as an actor because he's sympathetic, tragic, can do the action and he's he's in a way kind of Boris Karloff in in this movie and I think it is a really good performance. I will mention Larry Drake, second honorable mention. I do really like this Danny Elfman score. Good choices. If you had me bound and tied and you know, my life came down to listening to a few bars and determining who it was and I heard a few bars of Dark Man, I'm getting out of there. It's Danny Elfman. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You can figure it out from the word go. How are you going to rate in great Dark Man? We have rock up well, call single barrel and tippy top shelf. We didn't get into much of it because I think we had more interesting conversations than the sour mash or or complain. There are some for me pretty call pretty well moments dialogue wise in this film. For sure. Yeah. Someone like when the bad guy is coming in the helicopter and says something as ridiculous as no more Mr. Nice Guy like I'm out, that's just so bad. And there are a few moments like that that this movie is troubled by. I'm glad that we didn't get into that space today because I think we did a lot of that last week with the shadow and it was a bit refreshing to just sort of appreciate and enjoy a movie. But there and there and I cannot also, I observe that as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So acknowledging that but then the ambitious nature of it and sort of beginning what will become a monumental marathon that Raimi is going to run culminating in lots and lots and lots of really great might I say spectacular moments. I think this is a call really solid call movie. Really enjoyable. If it's on, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to find it but I certainly would watch it again. I can appreciate it. It made me smile. Yeah. I had some think piece conversations about it which is a good sign so it did tap into something I think cerebrally which usually kind of matters to you and I. Yeah. But even if none of that happened, I think you just sit down and just watch it and like it. Hour 29 and you're out. And there's that too. So call for me. Solid call. Yeah. I think I'm in call plus slight single barrel, single barrel in terms of the vision and I mean you're specking a superhero. I mean that's rare, right? Yeah. I mean we tried. We tried. I mean unbreakable. I mean episode one you've seen that and saw that crash and burn, right? But I mean there's a genius to trying that and all the types of universal monsters, the the Ramy-isms of it all. It is still kind of a call movie in its basis but like with some really grandiose things it's playing around with. And I just know it's on the precipice and I know what came before this and I know there's just like secret genius in this movie, in pockets and I love Liam Neeson, I love Larry Drake. But yeah, I'll go call plus single barrel minus. We're kind of like teetering within both sides. We're doing a little jig. Let me ask you this. Just kind of wrap it up. I mean you asked me, did someone watch this and say, oh that guy's Spider-Man. Let me ask you this. And the same Ramy doesn't make this movie. Does he get a shot at Spider-Man? Does Dark Man have a little bit to play with this guy can kind of do comic booky? I don't know how it couldn't. And for no other reason than we talked about this, there are moments in that film that feel like the panels in a comic book like hard shot of crowd, hard shot of material on the laboratory equipment, hard shot of like cut, cut, cut, cut, like panels in the comic book. It's shot that way. This is far, far, far more horrific than the Spider-Man story. And we just talked about the Green Goblin thing, so it didn't need to be, but it is. Spider-Man is in all of his transformation, nothing close to ugly. Yeah. Right? It's beautiful. So, I don't know if that part translated, but I think and the way that that first movie is shot with from time to time the turning of the pages in the movie, how could it not? It is a monumentally important film for what has driven the last decade plus of large tent pole movie going, action slash science fiction superhero fare. I think you need to read, I gave you that book for Christmas with great power. It's like Spider-Man, the road to the silver screen. Yeah. I think you need to read it to find out. I need to sit down and read that. Yeah. Well, how did, how did Avia Rod come to Raimi? How was Raimi the choice? Yeah. That's what I, that's the question. Okay. That's the notion that I want to know. And there was a moment in the, in dark man that really did the scene where dark man's going through petri dish after petri dish and it's this montage and there's beakers floating across the screen and equations and, you know, pieces of paper floating like 80, 180 to like 360. And it really reminded me of that scene in Spider-Man when he's drawing his suit for the first time. Oh, yeah. And he's like, oh, I'm going to get the car to get MJ, but I got to go get money for the wrestling. What is my costume going to look like? And he somehow comes to the Spider-Man design and it, it's verbatim that exact same scene right there. Like Raimi is really great at montage, filling the space with visual interest to pass the time. Well said. So, oh, yeah. I think it's a unique feel. Yeah. I mean, and it's slightly horror. You can watch this this spooky season. Sure. It kind of fits the bill, but yeah, this is fun doing. As we talked about, I think last week, I think we can do this cask again. I mean, we can do mystery men Billy Zane's the Phantom. You mentioned Flash Gordon now. I think we have Sam Jones's Flash Gordon. That could be a lot of fun. I mean, I mean, there's a lot of non DC Marvel that we can dabble into. Sure. Blank man. Can we do like that? We could. But hey, let's wrap up with our nightcap. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] So our nightcap, there's a reason there's a new bottle here. And so it's just kind of a two for one. It's like we needed new whiskey for this episode, but also, I think you did lose the contest this week. But I did tell it up. I wanted to do justice. And then we could talk about it, create a little dialogue around it. OK. Our top five box office predictions for the summer 2024. And I think we said we're going to do a new thing this year, which was just total up the totals of our top five versus the other person's top five, which is essentially the same as figuring out a top five, right? Yeah. So to reiterate, my top five was Deadpool Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, Twisters and Furiosa. Your top five was Deadpool Wolverine, Inside Out 2, Furiosa, Quiet Place Day 1, and the Crow. Mm-hmm. There's the marker. I don't mean to laugh. I just-- Oh, it's fine. I'll own it. No, I know you will. So my total equated to $1,942,691,310. Wow. So almost $2 billion. And we're just domestic numbers. I'm not going to toy around with worldwide numbers. Yeah. So just in the US. And then your numbers were $1,472,674-- or $4 and $2,604,682. So a difference of $470-ish million. Yeah, a lot. So you could catch up, but the Crow needs to make $470 domestically to catch up. You don't think it's going to happen? I don't think it's going to happen. Nor do I. I think it's opening weekend was $9 million. Yeah. And I mean, there was a lot of swings and misses there. I do have to applaud you on-- and let's talk about just kind of-- I mean, we had some similarities and some differences. Let's talk about those. So we both had Deadpool, Wolverine. Sure. How could we not? Right. Inside out too. Pics are needed a winner. Guess what? They got a winner. And then Furiosa on both of our lists, but man, $69 million domestically, that one did just kind of crashed and burned. You've seen it. I still haven't seen it yet. I don't know what I'm waiting for, but you said it was pretty good. It is good. Yeah. You'll like it. I promise you'll like it. So why not? I mean, are we missing Tom Hardy? I mean, is it not enough like Fury Road? I mean-- I don't know. I mean, I would really like Anya Taylor-Joy. And I know you do too. So do I, yeah. So I don't have a good reason as to why that didn't appear on your radar to go sooner. At this point, just wait till you can stream it or wherever it is. Was it a bad-- was Memorial Day a bad time for Furiosa? Kind of seemed perfect. I don't know. Like, there's really nothing wrong with that film. It's not as good as its predecessor. Think about the cast, Chris Hemsworth. I don't know. You should see it. You should just-- Oh, I'm going to see it. Yeah. It's all the things that we liked from the previous installment of Mad Max and Fury Road. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to, for sure. But it was just something I was like, I was traveling when the weekend it came out and then I came back and I was like, I'll get to it and then blink August. Boom, gone. I know. You know, the one that I got to give you credit on that I didn't see. And then when we were at Universal this summer, I'm like, fuck, despicable me for. I didn't think there was enough tread left on those tires to do another one. Boy, was I wrong. Don't count out the minions, man. I know, man. It's just because my old brain is like, I just don't think they're that cool because they're not for me. I think animation still plays really well in the summer. It's just picking the right one. I almost put Garfield in my top five, which was, I guess, all right for Sony, but despicable me is 352 domestically. Holy shit. Well, they're building so much franchise around that out there. When we were out in Universal, I told Denise, I said, yeah, I missed that one. I still haven't seen it. And even Denise actually said that they didn't love it as much as he did the third one, but family friendly around the time of like Deadpool and Wolverine. I mean, that's going to get butts in the seats. The perth had a huge miss though, which one apes? Oh, yeah. How do we miss it? Like, how do we miss that? Well, the last one was terrible. Yeah. I wasn't big on the Matt Reeves Apes films and I think I liked Rise of the Apes. But guess what people people still have a palette for the ace. Shockingly so. I didn't see that one. Did you? Yes. No. Don't go see that. Go see Furiosa. Let's talk about another kind of difference. I didn't have it on mine, but you had it on yours. Quiet Place day one, still some tread, I guess interest in that franchise, but you didn't have some. I think you're about done. I am, you know, when I think back to the Quiet Place, the scene that sticks out of my mind is the birthing scene and the first one. Fantastic. There's some problem with the monster being in the water. Like it can't go in there or it can go in there in Quiet Place. Did you see it? No. In Quiet Place day one, that's all done away with. And there doesn't seem to be any problem. Not sticking to some of the rules that you'd created with that. It's not bad. I just think we're ready to move on from that story, that story. It's been told really well. Right. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Another miss we had, who would have thought bad boys for? Yeah. Nearly 200 million domestically. I would never have put it in my top five, but people still have a palette for the bad boys movies. I haven't seen it. I think you said you'd never even seen the first one. No, I don't want any part of that. Yeah. But man, people are playing. People came out for that. I mean, that one really shocked me. I just have a hard time buying and I'm wrong that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence have any play in 2024 in that space, but I'm clearly wrong. Something's still there, right? And then one I had that you didn't have, I'm going to talk about the Glen Powell effect. Twisters almost creeping up on 300 million domestically, kind of a fun movie in a way summer movie should be fun, right? And I'm surprised. Let me tell you, capital S shocked that you actually liked that movie. Me too. Yeah. I don't like the first one. You know what's different about this one, though? Yeah. Is they found a way in that film with Glen Powell to fight mother nature to find a weapon to fight mother nature? Yeah. That's that literally was it like the spectacle and the hanging on for dear life as this wind tries to suck you away, all that's whatever. But it gave them a fighting chance that we've gone over it ad nauseam. I'm not going to say again, me in the space where it's man versus mother nature, I could care less. Hard. Yeah. It's over before it even starts. But this film, I enjoyed it. I will admit, I enjoyed it. And so there is, I guess, a little bit of space in that for me. Not for sentience. Still not going to do that. Yeah. But we have some ground to make up on the sentience. But I do do that until you like, not in quite the top gun Maverick space because I was a much bigger film, but or OG Twister has its fans on one of its fans. And I think those people came out in curiosity and I got to tell you, Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar Jones had a fantastic press run and lead up to that film. They were great together in the movie, but off side of the movie, every hot ones, every interview they did, they were great together. And that gets people to go see your movie is the star power with your film. And Glen Powell's got a lot of charisma. He's won you over. I know. Do you know what his next movie is? No. Edgar Wright. Oh, Mr. Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright's remake of The Running Man. Oh, no. Really? With Glen Powell. Okay. Let's go. I know where we'll be opening night. Let's go. Heck yeah. So I think that one was like, I took it, I think I took a chance on that because I could have seen that movie being like a bomb. And I could have also seen like this movie might have some legs and he did have some legs too with anyone but you right earlier in the year and great year for Glen Powell, right? Yeah. Great year for Glen Powell. And then the other, the crow, I mean, I think I haven't even seen it yet. Me either. And I think the, the, the, the writings on the wall, but I think the writing was on the wall when we did our crow episode and I realized OG crow is a pretty good movie and a unique movie in its time, 1994 with that soundtrack with Brandon Lee with that aesthetic and how do you duplicate that in 2012, 30 years later, nearly impossible. And I know that was a divo held to get a remake of the crow, Jason Momoa, Bradley Cooper. I love Bill Scarsgard, but I mean, our review of the crow made it super evident of that movie has some tough shoes to fill. Yes, it does. And Bill Scarsgard is in a really interesting spot right now because we can call that a huge miss. Salem's lot is going to max not even being released theatrically. What does that say about Nosferatu? I'm hopeful. No, no, I am too. Yeah. And I think that with who directed it and the hype around it and what they've already said, Christmas day release, figure that one out. Yeah. I think it's got some play, but Scarsgard was good in John Wick chapter four, but we did. We both didn't love him and it and that wasn't that he was bad, it's just it was too much of Pennywise. Oh, that's a story problem, right? So maybe Salem's lot is a story problem. Maybe the crow is a story problem. Maybe Grunge Noir is actually finally dead now, so no one cares. Who knows? I'm probably not. I'll watch it at some point, but it's not in any immediacy. For sure. I'm really, really, of all the things that I am so interested in film wise in the last couple of years, I have to tell you that Nosferatu, I think might top that list. I can't wait. There's two big things in December, right? What happened with Craven? I can't wait to see it and not because of Craven. Like I love him, but what happened with that film? Like I want to see what it looks like and we sort of hinted with the sinister six stuff earlier. And then what about this film on Christmas Day? I can tell you, I said Christmas Day, we're seeing this and my family's like, the hell we are. I'm like, no, we're going. Like we are. That's a Christmas present. We're going. Yeah. But yeah, I think an interesting summer box office next summer 2025 is going to be wild as well because I think Fantastic Four, I think is still in July. You have James Gunn, Superman, which you want to talk about Twister, the guy with Daisy Edgar Jones, the blacker guy. That's your soups. And you know what? Anytime I see that guy and he's in Pearl showed up in the, oh, I think, I think the guy's going to be a good Superman. I do. I just need James Gunn to execute on the other levels. Man, are we going to get a Superman movie to, you know, get us on board with that character again? I'm kind of excited for that. I think there's some Nicholas Holt, his Lex Luthor. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a few other surprises along the way, but let's see where our predictions lie next. I'm curious a year from now when we look back at where Holt's career is versus Scarsgard's career, because we both have some big things that we've just mentioned with them coming up pretty, pretty soon. Yeah. And I'm really curious to see how that goes. Nicholas Holt's been pretty close for a while. He can't quite land. Well, he just that and Renfield was a disaster. I liked it though. Not financially. It was a disaster. And he was through no fault of his though, and it was down to him in Pattinson for the Batman, right? Yeah. So, I mean, he's been so close. And I mean, I've been a Holt fan for a while. So I'm down with most for out tube, haring up with Eggers is a great move. But then you're playing what you're stepping into the Hackman shoes in a movie that needs to work, right? And in order for DC to get right, that film has to, that film's got to win. There's a lot riding on that film shoulders that a lot of people are not willing to admit. And hey, do you want to do Superman cast ground there? We could do new Superman, which I think is just called Superman, which is a problem, you know, titling wise. Talk about Singer. And then we could do Superman Returns, a film, I kind of like, but a film that's problematic. Yeah. And Man of Steel. A film that I can't despise. Yeah. That'd be fun. Three Superman. Like, what soups are we getting? So that could be a lot of fun. But hey, it's been fun talking Dark Man with you, the superhero cast we've talked about at Nauseam for. Yeah. We'll come back to you. I'm going to hold you to the blank man because that you want to talk about another rental staple of my childhood. It was Damon Waynes and David Allen Greer. Like what a combo. Yeah. But it's September, the weather's changing. It's getting a little colder. Guess what? It's week one NFL season. It's arguably my favorite time of the year. If I still has a lot of hope. A lot of hope. Yeah. In the NFL space. And you know what? Things are getting a little more spooky around here. And what better way than, you know what? We had a lot of fun talking to Raimi this week, but I think it's a cast and a film that I've been dying to do since week one. And you know, I think a lot of film school lessons, you know, you look at Tarantino and working in a video store, you look at Spielberg going to make in films, George Lucas going to USC, John Carpenter going to USC, Francis Ford Cobela going to USC. And there's certain routes you can tame in film, you can take in filmmaking, but I don't think enough attention is paid to Mr. Raimi. And Michigan State get whatever film education I can, which is, I guess, mixed at best in Michigan. Sure. And let me just go out into the middle of nowhere with my buddies and a few people that we tagged along. Let's see if we can make a movie. And guess what? You make a movie that like is your calling card for the rest of your career, the calling card that leads you to Spiderman. Yeah. We're going to do the evil bed from 1981. Number one, in a cast that I think we've called heavy hitters, we've somehow missed. Yeah. And a lot of films that didn't make the cut that will show up eventually, but like I've been dying to do the evil dead because I've taken even in my own film school space, my own filmmaking space, I've taken so many lessons from Raimi's bootstraps, filmmaking school of just strap a camera to a two by four and run through the woods with it and see what it looks like. And your friends in Bruce Campbell and a demon movie that and I think last week's flight was top three rental stories and I gave you a top three. This is the number one and I can't wait to tell you the story of how I came to this movie, how I showed this movie and like a plague. I showed this movie to my friends and it's a part of me until my dying breaths, right? This is the last time you've seen the evil bed 81, it's probably about six or seven years ago. Yeah. Are we doing this together? We're doing it separate. I think we should watch it together and just, you know, now that we have the dark man vision, the spider man vision, let's see what we see in 10 years before that, like a little 21 year old in the woods, like what was he able to muster up? And I have an audio clip, I gotta find it next week, but it's my favorite bill hater quote of evil bed, which was he says, I love evil bed because it's a group of people that went into a movie and by the time they finished it, they realized how to make a good movie. Yeah. And you get to kind of see that journey along the way within the confines of the movie. Cool. Because it took them about a year to make because they ran out of money and they went away and people grew different hair and they just had to wait and come back and brutalize their best friend love that. So this will be a lot of fun. Absolutely. Okay. A lot of evil dead space and then maybe the universal monsters will make an appearance and then we're into October and some slashers going to come crawling back to this podcast. That's right. To you. To you. Hey, I got to get going. I'm going to go to Universal Studios and I'm going to make a plead. Hey, can we get a dark man costume actor walking around the Universal theme parks? Like, come on. Especially around Halloween. House. They're not a dark man running around. They have the gear. Yeah. Just use the costumes from all the other guys you'd have put out there. Yeah. Use your shadow costume that's just sitting in storage, wrap them up in bandages. I'd walk around as the dark man at Universal Studios. How awesome that would be. That would be so cool. I don't even usually have tried to equip you at the end, but that's just so awesome that you have me in Fanville. You could go to Universal Studios. You could take a picture with, you know, Shrek, Dominion, a Velociraptor. And Dark Man. And then I could go take a picture with Dark Man. Oh my God. Dude. My day made. Yeah. Life made. We'll see you next week, everybody. Have a good week, everybody. We'll see you in the dark man. Thank you for listening to RySmile Films. Be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts. Spotify, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn, or if you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave us a rating and a review while you're there. It really helps out the show. And for RySmile Films merchandise, go to teapublic.com. Dark Man is property of Universal Pictures, Renaissance Pictures, and Dark Man Productions. And no copyright infringement is intended. Until next time. Cheers. I'm everyone, and no one, everywhere, nowhere, go dark man. [MUSIC PLAYING] (dramatic music)
