#67: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse / Teen Titans GO! To the Movies (with Alonso Duralde)
Release Date: 10/05/2023
#75: Trading Paint/Running with the Devil
Travolta/Cage
Nathan and Clint return after another short hiatus to break down another two-fer of VOD dreck -- first with Travolta's slow-moving racing drama Trading Paint, then with Cage's gonzo Tarantino/Guy Ritchie drug-biz knockoff Running with the Devil! Pledge to our Patreon at Follow us on Twitter Email us questions at Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro
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#74: Speed Kills/A Score to Settle
Travolta/Cage
This week, Nathan and Clint dig back into the classic mold of Travolta/Cage double features -- unfortunately, it's for more late-aughts VOD dreck. First up is Speed Kills, a Dollar Tree Casino riff starring John Travolta as a fictionalized version of speedboat manufacturer and mobbed-up multimillionaire Donald Aronow (here "Ben Aronoff"). It looks and feels cheap, and thrums with all the speed of a rowboat down the ol' Mississipp' -- probably because it was initially conceived as a chintzy VR-cinema experiment. Then, we get a slight reprieve with A Score to Settle, which...
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#73: Color Out of Space
Travolta/Cage
This week, Nathan and Clint stare into some glowy rocks for a single serving of Cage in Richard Stanley's Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space! Serving as a spiritual followup to Mandy (with its cosmic-horror stylings and full-on Rage Cage moments), Color Out of Space puts Cage in another tale of rural tranquility disrupted by neon-tinted ravings from the beyond. This time, he's the patriarch of a broken yet resilient family who retreats to the woods to repair long-festering emotional wounds, only to find themselves torn apart by a fuschia glow that emanates from a...
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#72: Inconceivable/Looking Glass
Travolta/Cage
This week, Cage plays two flavors of bad husband in a pair of VOD-ready erotic thrillers! First, we cover the Gina Gershon-starring Inconceivable, an overamped Lifetime movie about a crazy mommy (Nicky Whelan) who cozies up to a well-to-do couple (Gershon, Nicolas Cage) whose IVF-born child just so happens to be from her egg. Hitchcockian antics ensue, by which we mean Whelan's wacko MILF (falling far short of the post-breakdown Lindsay Lohan the original casting promised us) kills female wrestlers with dumbbells in shallow ponds, gaslights Gershon into restarting her pill...
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#71: 211/Between Worlds
Travolta/Cage
This week, we're back to the unfortunate Nic Cage double features -- this time with our boy Nicolas on either side of the law! First, there's the staggeringly sloppy cop thriller 211, in which Cage plays an aging cop who teams up with his fresh-faced rookie son-in-law and a teenage ridealong to thwart a four-man bank robbery in Massachusetts. It's got the politics and aesthetics of a well-meaning anti-drug PSA, a bloated, poorly staged shootout even at a sparse 80-some minutes. Then, we get real weird with it with Between Worlds, a wild supernatural dirtbag romance with...
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#70: Mandy/Gotti (with Jordan Morris)
Travolta/Cage
This week, (Jordan Jesse Go!) returns to the pod for a seminal moment for both our boys -- a 2018 that saw Nic Cage rise from the VOD ashes to enter a new era of cult acclaim, and John Travolta take his biggest swing-and-a-miss yet! First, there's Panos Cosmatos' Mandy, a trippy bit of horror-fantasy psychedelia in which a logger (Cage) exacts revenge on the drug-fueled doomsday hippies who kill his love (Andrea Riseborough). Cue the neon lights, the screaming, and more Cheddar Goblin than you can swing an oversized chainsaw at! From there, we earn the respect of all five boroughs of New...
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#69: American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson
Travolta/Cage
Happy new year, boys and ghouls! Our first episode of 2024 (and the first after a bit of a hiatus) finally puts the spotlight back on Travolta after a string of Cage double-features and Johnny T failures. Blessedly, the television gods granted him the kind of role his 2010s VOD output could not: His mannered, theatrical turn as OJ Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro in Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Among a crowded field of stars (Cuba Gooding Jr. Nathan Lane, Courtney B. Vance, Sarah Paulson), Travolta stands out as OJ's calculating,...
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#68: Mom and Dad/The Humanity Bureau
Travolta/Cage
Nic Cage plays sad dad figures of children (or child figures) facing the threat of violence this week! First up is The Humanity Bureau, another piping hot cup of Redbox dreck with Cage as a renegade agent for a dystopian future agency meant to track the populace's productivity on a dying Earth. Unfortunately, that mostly takes the shape of shoddy green-screen effects, a meandering road trip in a chintzy station wagon, and a cast of Canada's finest day players to play off. Fortunately, things get better in Brian Taylor's zombie-parent horror-thriller Mom and Dad, as Cage (along with...
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#67: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse / Teen Titans GO! To the Movies (with Alonso Duralde)
Travolta/Cage
This week, we take a break from the DTV dreck to get a little more...animated, let's say, with a pair of charming animated Nic Cage jaunts into the world of superheroes! And we've got our trusty sidekick, Alonso Duralde (Linoleum Knife), to join us on this crime-fighting crusade! First up is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, and Rodney Rothman's dizzying animated epic about Miles Morales' (Shameik Moore) initiation into the jam-packed multiverse of Spider-Man! It's still one of the freshest takes on the web-slinger we've ever seen, and its unique blend of...
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#66: I Am Wrath / Vengeance: A Love Story
Travolta/Cage
This week, Travolta and Cage go down the revenge rabbit hole (again) in two Cage-produced schlockfests centered on middle-aged men with bad wigs and leather jackets shooting people in the face. Go figure! First is I AM WRATH, a low-budget JOHN WICK riff that was originally meant to pair Cage with director William Friedkin! Instead, we drew the short end of the stick in this timeline, so we've got a constipated-looking John Travolta in a shock-black party wig and the director of The Mask (Chuck Russell). Here, Travolta avenges his wife's death in a seemingly-petty murder, only to go back...
info_outlineThis week, we take a break from the DTV dreck to get a little more...animated, let's say, with a pair of charming animated Nic Cage jaunts into the world of superheroes! And we've got our trusty sidekick, Alonso Duralde (Linoleum Knife), to join us on this crime-fighting crusade!
First up is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, and Rodney Rothman's dizzying animated epic about Miles Morales' (Shameik Moore) initiation into the jam-packed multiverse of Spider-Man! It's still one of the freshest takes on the web-slinger we've ever seen, and its unique blend of animation styles has left an indelible mark on the moviemaking landscape. But more importantly for our interests, it has Nic Cage as a hardbitten, noir-tinged Spidey that gives the actor a change to break out his James Cagney impression.
Then we zap into another meta-charmer, Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, following the cherubic team of sidekicks and their desperate efforts to get a superhero movie like every other character under the sun. It's a delightful winner with plenty of great gags for kids and adults, but we're just thrilled Cage finally got to play his childhood hero, Superman (albeit one more Christopher Reeve-inflected than his swoopy-haired turn in the abortive Tim Burton Superman Lives).