Category Archives: Movies
Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
The Traumatic Cinematic Podcast – Hitchcocktober Episode IV – A New Terror
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
A Podcast From the After Movie Diner’s Strikes Again
To honor of this most horrorderful time of the year, I revisit friend of the show(s) Jon Cross’ After Movie Diner to discuss The Evil Dead, Evil Clergyman, Lords of Salem, The Thing, Tremors, Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Ju-On, Audition, Zaat, The Howling, Howling 2 Your Sister is a Werewolf/Striba, Werewolf Bitch “and” as he aptly puts it, “MANY more.” With extra special guest: Jon’s wife, Theodora, whose blog you should visit often.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
GoldenEye (1995)
The Traumatic Cinematic Podcast: Hitchcocktober Episode II – Attack of the Knowledge
Once again, the Traumatic Cinematic Show plumbs the depths of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography, discussing 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much…which inevitably brings up 1934’s Man Who Knew Too Much, and how remakes in general don’t have to suck. This, as you might imagine, gets terribly serious. So we’ve counterbalanced it with a discussion of Bill Murray’s 1997’s vehicle, The Man Who Knew Too Little. And then I go a little crazy, but I hope you’ll all understand. I’ve done my best to document my problems with 1997 and we’ll have another opportunity to go over them very soon. Until then, visit Traumatic Cinematic on Facebook, follow Traumatic Cinematic on Twitter, send your hate mail to TraumaticCinematic [at] gmail [dot] com and tell all your friends about me and my friends, and how we get together once a week to talk about movies.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Licence to Kill (1989)
By now, EON Productions had these Bond films running on a rock-solid two year schedule. Writers Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson seemed to have hit upon a winning formula: fuse the few remaining pieces of Fleming’s short stories together with plot elements “torn straight from the headlines of today’s newspapers.” This served the twin purpose of keeping James Bond “relevant” to a changing movie landscape and shaking up the stale formulas that had constrained the series for two decades.
Inevitably, the loudest criticisms of The Living Daylights and its sequel come from Bond fans who felt (and still feel) this series grand quest for “relevance” was a whole lot of tilting at windmills. The Dalton Era gets a lot of flack for a lot of things, but nothing more so than its lack of “fun”; that “campy” “charm” which supposedly made the Moore Era so much more “enjoyable” and the Connery films “instant classics.” Gods forbid anyone treat those like “serious” spy-fi action pictures…even if that’s exactly what they were intended to be.
They succeed on their own merits with no “camp,” required, save the kind the audience brings with it via the expectations in their heads. If you want real “camp,” I’ve got a version of Casino Royale you should check out (no, not that one)…me, I think Bond should’ve gone “darker” decades before he actually did. He might’ve stayed ahead of the trends instead of constantly playing catch-up. Licence to Kill almost does this and, on the strength of that almost, becomes my favorite Bond film of its decade…and the preceding one. Continue reading Licence to Kill (1989)