The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2026 and ‘Clayface.’ Plus, ‘Street Fighter’ With Shea Serrano!

I'm Sean Fennessy, and this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about the horror. It's late October on the show, and so it must be time for our annual tradition. CR is here, and we are going to share our 10 favorite horror films in what has turned out to be another booming year for the genre. We'll also dig into Clayface, the weekend's big horror comic book movie crossover from DC Studios. Later in this episode, I dig into Street Fighter with my old pal and fellow 90s kid, Shea Serrano. We talked about what worked and mostly what did not work about this video game adaptation. And then Shea shares his frankly fantastic list of the best movie fight scenes of all time. Shea is the man and a perfect guest for this chat, so stick around for that. But first, some movie news with CR right after this. This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. 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Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tramphyaradio.com. Okay, bud, what's up? I'm so honored to be sharing the stage with Shea. To the goats. I've been actually trying to channel Shea on some of my more recent draft appearances. Going a little left when you should go right. Yeah, like I'm like, we can, the three of us can keep trying to win or, you know, fireworks. And how has that been going for you? I mean, we don't know because we don't vote anymore. Right. Yeah, we've taken over the board of elections. We just returned from San Francisco for a live event and we did vote. Well, those are just like Amanda conventions. They are Amanda conventions, yeah. How do you feel about that? That's great. You received a hearty applause. I did, yeah, it was lovely. I love the Bay Area. Fans, it's awesome. How do you feel about some of the, like, work that's been happening in the tech world there? Is it going well? For me, sure. For you, great. James Bond, you're an Englishman. Yeah. It's a lot of news. Well, I, it's complicated, you know what I mean? Like, my dad, my family is Irish, but my father was raised in England. Just like John Lennon. For sure. Isn't that the same story? Yeah, when's somebody going to shoot me dead? A Liverpudlian. Yeah. No one will ever shoot you. We'll protect you, I promise. I actually think I have a pretty high chance of being assassinated. Excuse me? At some point. By whom? Just like a guy who's like, Heat 3, let's go. I'm going to shoot you in your honor? I really hope that doesn't happen. Let's reenact the end of Heat. Hold your hand. Heat 3. You think Heat 3 will ever happen? No, I just, they just delayed Heat 2. I know. I was going to ask you about it, but I didn't want to hurt your feelings. I've heard some things. It's okay. Do tell. It's just fiscal. It's fiscal. Yeah, we're working on some budget items. Heat 2, a Skydance production? Is it? It's not, though. Well, sure it is. No, it's Amazon, isn't it? I thought Heat 2 was Warner Brothers. No, Heat 2 is Amazon, United Artists. Can we get a fact check on that? It's Bruckheimer and the gang working on it with Stuber over at Amazon, isn't it? I think that's correct. Yeah, man. Heat 2 is Amazon? Did Warner Brothers have it and they passed on it? They passed. Pam and Mike. They were like, we need the bride. Yes, it is. Right. It is an Amazon movie. It's Amazon? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting. So why would Amazon delay it? They're not having any money troubles? No, but I think they're just like nitpicking over whether or not he can like stage a large scale truck fight in like Panama or something. Who got the part that Indy Navarrete was up for? I don't know that I know that. I don't know that. Okay. Yeah. It's exciting. James Bond, let's go back to that. Speaking of Amazon. Yeah, I just want to say something up top about this. So what we're going to talk about is the rampant speculation about the Final Four Apparently, we're down to four. Okay. So we've got Jack O'Connell. Nope. Jack Loudon. Jack Loudon. Callum Turner. Yep. Jacob Elordi. Nope. Let me do the news, please. The final four candidates. This has just been handed to me. You're trying to go full Cronkite. I'm like, let me host the fucking news, bro. This is the only thing I have. According to Deadline, there are four remaining potential. James Bond's in the running. There's going to be a screen test apparently next week. Those candidates are Jack Loudon from your beloved Slow Horses, Callum Turner, Josh O'Connor, a surprising re-entry for Josh O'Connor, and a fourth mystery man whose identity we don't know. But it is not Jack O'Connell or Jacob Elordi or whoever, right? It is. Well, we don't know. We are assuming that that's like the unknown actor that there had been rumored that Denis Villeneuve was like, I want to have an unknown. Right. It's been reported that Elordi is no longer in. He's running, whether or not he took himself out or he was denied. We don't really know what check out there. He's like, dog stars. We got to pursue some work. Dog stars too. I think there's some meat on that bone. I think dog stars actually could be dope if you didn't have to spend a lot of time setting up dog stars. So what you want to do is be with that Amish community at the end of the film? Yeah, the Mennonites. That's right. That would be interesting. Would you just watch like a plaintive drama starring Jacob Elordi about living amongst the Mennonites? Kind of witness to actually at the same time? Something there. Amanda, her barn just got razed. You know what I mean? Let me just say this up top about this process. We've now reached Peyton Manning's pre-snap action point of this. Sure. Where I'm like, snap the fucking ball. Yeah. We're at Omaha, Omaha, Omaha. Yeah, like Mike, he's the Mike. And it's like, I got it. These are the guys you want. We've done however many reports about screen tests. Everybody thinks they have the inside dope on this. I just, I'm ready to meet the baby. I feel like. For the last three months, you and I have been in agreement, whether we've said it on the show or not, that Jack Loudon makes the most sense here. We, yeah, we have, more or less. I was interested in Jack O'Connell when that was kind of being kicked around because his darkness suggests like almost a return to some of the edgier portrayals of him by Connery. Although I, you know, obviously I don't want him like domestically abusing his secretary and stuff. You want him to be a racist Southern vampire? No, but I think it brings a different quality to him, you know, maybe back to like Pierce Brosnan or something like that. Right, right, right. I feel like Jack O'Connell is going down more of like a Nicolas Cage path here. It seems like he is. With Loudon, it's funny. I do think he should do it and would be great. And if Saoirse Ronan became like a Bond girl, that would be hilarious. That would be fun. But it's weird after watching the season of Slow Horses and being like, so you would play the good version of this spy, you know? Like in Slow Horses, his whole thing is like, he's never living up to potential and he's always stepping in it and he's always falling off the roof. So it would be funny to see the same actor be like, oh, and now I throw no hitters. Well, one of the things I like about that is it is an echo of the Pierce Brosnan run where he is Remington Steele and then he is James Bond. So it's almost like we've gotten comfortable with him. Sure. In this kind of a world. Whereas with Callum Turner, like, you know, I've seen a few Callum Turner movies this year. You know, I'm not sure he has the sauce. Like the one night only thing. Did you get a chance? What did you think of that? I think everybody in that movie had one hand tied behind their back because the premise is the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. But every actor, every performer is just like, naturally, it's the sex purge. I would say, yeah, I would say I probably would go, if not O'Connell, I would go Loudon, O'Connor, and then Turner in my rankings there. I think O'Connor. People are a little down on the idea of O'Connor because he seems a little bit more cerebral, a little bit more mannered and polite. You know, an actor who's very interested in gardening and not as much in swilling martinis and, you know, womanizing. Throwing guys out of skyscrapers in Macau. Yeah. Do you think, don't you have an interesting cat? Like, not a lot of, like, sexiness in his movies. No. That's not really something he pursues. So, like, I think that's dependent on this as well. I think Eddie has some sexiness. Uh, yeah. If you like spider fucking, for sure. I was gonna say, there's something funny about Villeneuve starting this, rebooting this franchise. I can't imagine him being, like, Sam Mendes-ing this and hanging around for three out of four or whatever. So, how much power does he have to choose the bond? I mean, this is Amy Pascal and David Heyman are now making this call, not the Broccoli's. I think he has a voice, but probably is not close to the decider. I mean, honestly, I'm sure this needs, like, literally Jeff Bezos' sign-off. Sure. It's that important to Amazon. because this is. paid so much money for MGM just to have this essentially so I don't know it's interesting and then the mystery man maybe it is the mystery man maybe it is an unknown maybe it is a person we don't have a huge relationship to it'll be interesting to see how that plays out I feel like that's actually kind of related to the clay face conversation sure in a way and we can get to that in a moment before we do um I did want to mention that Tom Skerritt passed away I had no idea that Tom Skerritt was 93 years old I felt very young when I heard that news um obviously a staple of some of our favorite movies a guy who like lived from 50 to 65 for 30 years yes it seemed like he was like he looked that old in MASH and in Alien and then he also looked only two years older in Top Gun you know 100% yeah yeah and I think MASH Alien and Top Gun are three movies that just we saw many many times as kids and so he became this kind of rugged American paternal figure in our world but also a little tough but also a little sensitive you think about the way they're goofy yeah he was definitely a little goofy in the 70s you know when he was a little bit younger and you know a staple of Altman movies um I think Steel Magnolias is a big uh movie for Skerritt heads as well uh so sad that he passed away a lot so so many of these folks have been dying in the last five years a lot of Hall of Fames coming yeah Skerritt Hall of Fame is a tricky one he was very rarely a leading man and I read a quote from him in the Times-O-Bit he may have been the first guy who got the character actor and leading man's body denotation did he yeah he talked about that in an interview in the 90s that that was kind of his lot in life and he he received it as a compliment and then you know that's something we say about people like Brad Pitt all the time now or like I think Austin Butler is a little bit like that there are certain actors who are just like really yeah you know beautiful but they're most at home playing a different kind of a figure yeah he's also somebody I wouldn't say he gets I I look at it as as a humility and a selflessness but he is a couple basically steps aside for someone else to rocket ahead as like the actual lead of the movie like midway through M.A.S.H. he kind of steps aside and Gould and Sutherland are are like he's also one of the surgeons yeah they're all the surgeons and then obviously in Alien you like we've talked about if you were like completely shut off from society and I sat you down to watch Alien and you didn't know anything about any of the franchise you would be like this is a movie about Dallas right yep because that that's how it presents itself and that's how it presents itself and that's how it presents itself in the first half it's true all of his movies I think are like that in some ways like in the in Thieves Like Us he plays a kind of a supporting part like that in the Dead Zone he plays a supporting part like that watched Dead Zone recently did you yeah for what we just did last week we did yeah I did yeah what'd you think of it um really enjoyable actually excellent film yeah a little underrated at this point I know they've tried to remake it or they think they did like a mini series TV series I think with Anthony Michael Hall but it's like it feels very resonant absolutely yeah a political conspiracy thriller yeah um about people who are convinced that they have foresight and an insight into like the way things are just like you did you watch Picket Fences I think I watched like a few episodes but it wasn't like a big obsession of mine yeah that's another scarlet project that I didn't watch as a kid but was in 1992 seemed like it was an incredibly big deal like in my household um okay I wanted to ask you something quickly about what's going on with the movie world before we dig into Clayface which is you know you can see everything has come along I know you haven't had a chance to see it yet we won't spoil any of that stuff but that movie is really in big competition this weekend with the film that we're going to focus on Clayface and there's a bunch of other movies that have been dated for a very long time there's Clara and the Sun the new Taika Waititi movie that I think was finished like three years ago there's um Ali G Who Is I which I know you've seen a few times already and really excited about um and those movies ostensibly are wide release films one from Amazon one from Sony yeah now like they're theater count is being dramatically reduced there's speculation that you can see everything might actually beat Clayface at the box office which is utterly fascinating to me and I'm sure we'll get into next week on the show I predict it will I I have been predicting it will as well because uh I I just didn't get a chance to see you can see everything because I was traveling and also the few times I checked to see if I could go see it it was sold out so the expansion of it I think will bring in a second wave of looky-loos who are going to be in the movie world for a long time like all right I'm tired of hearing about this at the office or online or whatever I guess I'll go check it out yeah it has broken containment it is a pop culture object now and so I think you're right I think it's likely that it's going to get past it and some of that is related to our Clayface conversation but I thought that was interesting just like the sort of like reduction in distribution of a certain kind of movie when it becomes clear that like no one's going to go see this movie no one's going to go see the Jenna Ortega Amy Adams robot movie because we have the Elizabeth Holmes documentary yeah I don't know what do you make of it okay my first initial reaction to this is that this is a little bit of a sign of technology companies or the learnings of technology companies being involved in the movie industry because this feels like almost like dynamic pricing but it's dynamic releasing and it's like hey our data is so sophisticated it's not going to happen for Clara so we're going to get this satisfy some sort of contractual obligations about how many screens we said we were going to put it on for Jenna Ortega and then it's going to VOD and maybe we're going to put it on for Jenna Ortega and then it's going to VOD and maybe we can make a little bit of money off of it you know like it just seems like this might be the future now I wanted to ask you how does that and how does this new era affect older philosophies of like slow rolling out movies like Fjord or whatever where it's like this is at like AMC Burbank for two days and then it's back in a month but then it's only at three theaters but then it's at a hundred theaters it's a great question I mean platform releasing is a tried and true strategy especially for awards films this year it has failed a number of movies probably most significantly Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother which attempted to try an old school platform release and it didn't work and so the movie ultimately never really expanded because we're in a little bit of a bubble where even just driving around I'm like oh yeah your mother your mother mother is playing here like at the Vista or wherever but that's not the case for 98 percent of the country that's like I think if you live in Minnesota maybe it played in a couple of theaters in the whole state yeah and I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know but they're like I see Mahershala Ali in in video interviews everywhere so like what's going on doing a ton of press I know and that is also an Amazon film and a film that will be on Amazon probably certainly before the year is out it's a really good question that there there's a flip side to that coin which is one of the most successful documentaries of the year but until you can see everything came along was the history of concrete John Wilson's film which made I think more than two and a half million dollars in theaters which in this day and age for a regular doc so to speak is really really good and it did do an old school platform release where they played on one screen and then five screens and then a hundred screens and it did pretty good business so like for a particular kind of specialty programming I think that can work but I think for a movie with a movie star that is expected to make 60 million dollars or something that's not really that's not the game but I loved your dynamic pricing conceit because I do think that is where things are going which is you're taking shots all the time and especially as now Amazon is fully in the game theatrical yeah it seems all but inevitable that by the end of 2027 Netflix is going to be in the theatrical game and that way maybe maybe it's only four to eight releases a year but I do think that they're going to go there and then how long before Apple fully commits to doing that and then every studio is back to putting movies in theaters but they're doing it in a way that is a little bit more coherent what the temperature is and what does that do to the chains because the AMC probably is like but we're counting on Clara and the Sun being like picking up like a like basically skimming the top of a Jenna Ortega fandom and whatever nascent like you know like whatever remaining Taika Waititi interest there is and like we expect there to be three weekends of that four weekends I think it's a totally different model now and I think if you look at what you can see everything and movies like Iron Lung have done is you can't fully strategize for the 12 month execution of your theatrical programming that there are going to be more things than ever that come seemingly out of nowhere and so I think that's some of those things are for lack of a better phrase more creator driven there's a really interesting conversation with an executive from Fathom on the town this week because Fathom is distributing Wildwood the new Laika movie from Travis Knight that movie is not being distributed by a major studio it's being distributed by this consortium that usually does events programming and that group is owned by the theater chains yeah so the three major theater chains own Fathom and they are the ones that are putting Wildwood out in the world Iron Lung only went into thousands of theaters because they're not going to be able to do it they're going to have to do it because Markiplier's fan base was like we want to see this movie so I think it's interesting that like Clara and the Sun which is adapted from a you know beloved novel and has legitimate famous people in it and is directed by an academy award-winning person um he's a filmmaker yeah I was trying to decide whether I should say writer director actor right cultural figure yeah he's done so many things uh I think the idea that like you can just kind of get moved off the ball at the last minute if it's not there is so interesting here's what I want my only wish for this is that if it's going to if this is the new reality and that um we're we're putting to bed the era of um Top Gun played in a movie theater for a year you know and people could go see these things four or five six times if it was a real sensation or it actually could build up audience um obsession I guess would be the one story this from this year of like oh my God the second weekend but I would like to see a uh equal opportunity porousness of movies coming back into theaters yeah um which I know is against a lot of contracts when it comes to once it goes to vod it's on vod for a while and then it will go to streaming eventually and like you don't want to go up against your partners and stuff like that but um to also invoke los angeles privilege we get to see so many older films back in theaters i would love to see like hey in six weeks if it seems like your mother your mother your mother is doing well on amazon put it back in theaters for a little while you know like i wish we could have it go kind of like baseball like put it in the minors and then bring it back up and get to the majors kind of thing i mean that's just not something the streamers want at all especially especially if there's all this consolidation and they're like hey man we all everybody owns everything i know speaking of travis knight i mean that was the story of masters of the universe nobody went to go see it in the theater and then it did gangbusters on streaming because that was a movie that people were like and this is a streaming movie to me sure um we do have that every year it's only just one or two titles like this is that's what the odyssey is the odyssey doesn't exist was in theaters for a very long time it left theaters for like a month and then they just put it back in theaters i also think it was obsession yeah exactly people were like going on dates to obsession or something you know like groups of friends were going back to see obsession yeah i am it's been a huge year of transition for this stuff and i was looking at the number of new movies that i saw last year and i think the total was 271 and i'm at 283 right now and you have been to more festivals i've been to more festivals this year and so more of the things that i would have you know waited to see i've already seen but it's october 23rd and some of that is carry over from films i saw in 2025 that didn't get released till 2026 whatever we can negotiate the math but it just means that there's more movies than ever and the ways in which they're reaching us i think they're like straight to streaming model only works now for a very particular kind of genre for war machine on netflix and for the love hypothesis on amazon those make complete sense everything else is on the table everything else is up for debate which is very exciting that takes us to clay face which is a very interesting object yes of modern movie making uh it's directed by james watkins it is uh the screenplay is by mike flanagan and hossein amini the story is by mike flanagan it stars tom reese harry's who i'd never seen before i don't think i had either although i think i've seen a little bit of this tv work um naomi aki is also in this film max mingala and eddie marsan the story is this is a dc studios adaptation after being brutally disfigured by a local mob boss rising movie star matt hagan volunteers as a test subject to restore his original face but experiences a series of horrifying psychological and physical side effects that transform his body into living clay clay face of course a well-known villain in the batman universe this is dc's first attempt to do something that you and i have been asking for for 10 years which is shrink down your ambition try to use genre as a portal and redefine what a comic book movie can be yes did you think it was successful i thought the first half of this movie was awful and then i thought the second half of this movie held so much maybe unrealized but promise and when it started to get into the body horror and the weird flights of fancy and some of the really like kind of just fuck it we're not making sequels to this this doesn't have to tie into batman this doesn't have to tie into man of tomorrow it started to delight me a little bit more um i would say that i was i was probably turned off mostly by the look of this movie which i'd probably describe as uh the creative team behind reacher trying to make the fly like it really lacked the visual panache that i think a story like this and a body horror movie like this really needed but if you stick with it i think it has some strange delights in the back nine we're on the exact same page i think there are a couple of cool things to recommend about it i think the movie failed to make a decision to go in a specific direction hard enough and i think there were a couple of directions that it could have gone in yeah it could have taken a probably much less commercial david cronenbergian dark city shadowed quiet character study and then when you get to the big payoff it's very disgusting and there are some very disgusting components of this movie or it could have been a similarly dark but brighter period piece like the mask or something the mask or dick tracy it seemed you know clay face and and the batman tradition is really out of this like colored noir feeling and it chooses neither lane it tries to be a modern gotham with noir components yeah and old hollywood components but also if old hollywood existed inside the city of gotham where there is apparently a thriving film production business sure yeah it's like silver cups out there yeah and also there is like an active mafioso yeah who's a public figure so did you see the series the penguin did you watch any of that two episodes okay so the penguin for me suffered from the same uh same sickness which is like everybody's named carmine and there are like fake drugs that they're selling and that you can run roughshod over the institutions of the city but it is contemporary and you're texting but like i don't there was there's a lot of like somebody needs to come in and be like i'm the mob czar of dc uh-huh and just say like either it's this or it's that but it can't be like bits of both it doesn't work yeah i think this was a very similar kind of tonal clash that beleaguered supergirl i don't know if you got a chance to see supergirl no but i did know with interest in the movie that it was a very similar kind of interest that the same cinematographer worked on both but what what's weird is that cinematographer rob hardy also shot ex machina and fallout the mission impossible movie so he's good yeah this to me this movie in particular i think supergirl was sort of like a post-production like we have to make this work kind of scenario yeah um this is like they did make a choice but the choice is about a lack of choice and it was trying to do multiple things at the same time the choice was like lens flare yeah yeah yeah and so i think the the look feel and vibe of supergirl was the movie feels a bit off what i wrote down is that you know it's an origin story with way too much origin and not enough not enough story like it's about a guy who you know it has this beautiful face he's on the precipice of his career blowing up he's just been nominated for essentially an academy award and because of a one-night stand that he has with a hot woman who is connected to a mob boss mia torres yes she's doing fine work in this film um he loses random nudity in this movie you like that not i just thought i noted it you know i was just like like where because like it's i just watched crystal lake and the guy who made crystal lake was bemoaning the fact that he wasn't allowed to have a lot of uh hot and heavy in it yeah but he is allowed to have people's faces get chopped off right and i was surprised to see in clay face i always welcome it you know as i know as you know i wish we could have gotten full clay face dong you know what was going on down there you wanted to whip it out yeah well he could stretch it out i mean don't forget he's clay face after all clay cock um i don't make that a social i bring it out of you that's a screen grab please don't please don't do that um i'm a father god damn it um i think it's really interesting that it's like this is a universal horror movie too you know it's trying to play on some of the tropes of like this anti-hero who is beset by this physical malady and he needs to transcend it and he's really a good guy underneath but he keeps you know he's really a good guy underneath but he keeps turning into the wolf man or turning into a vampire or turning into clay face but so much of the film is spent with him learning to cope with his clayification falling in love with the doctor who heals him in naomi aki which is a you know real call back to the fly as you mentioned and him kind of reckoning with what hasn't has not been done to him and who's responsible for it whether or not there's a conspiracy surrounding what has happened to him and when i think of clay man the animated series and i think of him being a big old like yeah big pile of clay yeah who's fucking with batman you know and having a lot of fun cracking jokes yeah and you know he's a he's also like lon chaney where he's a master of disguise and he can transform into any person and confuse you when the movie does that it's pretty fun that stuff is great that's 22 minutes of the movie like and and some of the kills in this movie are excellent i really can't speak to the production of this film i know that the development process has been kind of fascinating and sean and i'll probably talk about it in the next few minutes but i think it's a really good touch on on some of the what-ifs in a minute but uh you know i don't know if anybody if this even bothers people but like i noticed in the beginning of the film that there was a lot of adr and that there was a lot of like uh it was it was just something that i spotted early on about the first 20 minutes of the film where i realized i hadn't sometimes i would hear dialogue and i was like wait nobody's face is on screen that usually suggests we have to go back in and somebody has told us that this guy's like what's going on and i'm like i don't know what's going on and i'm like is not clear enough or something because when you get to the second half of the film it's actually quite cool because the protagonist has become a monster essentially and is giving into his demons whereas like everybody around him is trying or one person specifically is trying to help him and everybody else around him is sort of like marveling at his his comeback and then there's like this cool love triangle between the doctor naomi aki's doctor natalie um max mcgillis cop who's her fiance and and clayface yes and max mcgillis cop is is investigating the crimes that are surrounding it. That's good shit. Like, it's a good idea. The idea of this guy being like, I can use all the, you know, Meisler stuff that I learned in acting school to inhabit these different people. It's very creative, but yeah, I thought that the first half of it just felt like almost like soap opera-y or something. I agree with you. I wonder if part of that is because maybe we don't have a strong relationship with Tom Reese Harry's, and so I don't know, and I understand the intention here to cast an unknown, and I think that that's cool that they cast an unknown because what you don't want to do is bring, you know, Austin Butler's previous CV into the movie when you're thinking of him as a movie star, but I actually would argue that that might have helped more. Yeah. It probably kept the cost very low on this movie to not have a known face, but it's very hard to figure out what is going on. Like, as I was thinking through the movie, I was like, so, you know, he's a tortured guy, who comes from the wrong side of the tracks in Gotham. Yeah, the Narrows. The Narrows, which is not the hiking trail in Zion National Park that I talked about on this show a week ago. I really love, like, the kind of West Side Story-esque, like, toughness of Gotham, where it's just like, hey, I'm from the Narrows. Where, what state is Gotham in? Is Gotham New York City? Yeah, it's New York City, and I think the Narrows is like Staten Island. But why is it called Gotham? Let's get to the bottom of this. You'd have to ask somebody who knows more about DC than me. Okay. I don't want to upset the apple cart, because I'm in the best place with DC. How so? I have, like. How come you like lanterns? Well, I have broad familiarity with, like, larger strokes of, like, ah, yeah, Superman. But I'm not, like. I'm completely corrupted by Marvel. Like, I know too much about the X-Men. I know too much about these things, where I'm like, I can't believe, like, this isn't executing against what I saw in my head, kind of. But DC, I'm like, you guys have, like, 10 yards of space to work with, with me. I had a little bit of it, though, because I really loved Batman the Animated Series growing up. And I do think that this was a fun opportunity. But the Matt Hagen character, like, is he, like, supposed to be a pretty boy airhead actor? Is he, like, a real true artist? Well, he got nominated for an Oscar. Yeah, but what does that mean? I don't know. You're the expert. Let's do his comp. Plenty of people. Who is he? Do you think he's, like, Charles Melton in May, December? Excellent. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure. Honestly, if this was Charles Melton, wouldn't this movie, like, be better? Here's what it would be great, is did you happen to see the Austin Abrams-Skyler Gazzando interview with each other? The A24 podcast. I did. And, like, them talking about how all they did was, like, they've been up for the same roles for, like, the last 10 years? Mm-hmm. Don't you think it would be amazing if those two were Matt and Corey in this movie? Yes. I mean, the movie would be better because they're two more exciting actors. No disrespect to the guys who did this, yeah. Yeah, no, I, of course. And I know that if you do that, probably this movie costs $30 million. The more people who you start bringing in like that, the closer you get to 50. Yeah. And it has to have. It's a gamble. It's a gamble. And I, you know, Tom Harris has incredible bone structure. Yes. And so that's. It helps in the story to have such a beautiful person who is so, you know, cut, then becomes soft. So the idea all makes sense. And it does help as we go through the story to have this, as you say, like a guy using his acting skills to transform into people. What do you think of the body horror in this movie? I thought it was surprisingly gross. Yeah. For a mainstream comic book film. And I admired that part of it. I wasn't shocked because James Watkins is a real horror director. It was pretty confrontational. It's like usually. I find that it's like quick cutting. It's happening in the shadows. It's like, you know, there's places to throw your eye on the frame if you don't want to watch like the literal thing that's happening. That was not the case here. I like watched it yesterday. Watching this yesterday, I was like, boy, this is pretty like a scalpel going into it. Going into this guy's face over and over again and like his nose is being taken off. Like, you have to watch it or look down. Yeah. I mean, the scene that people have seen in the trailer of the clay closing his eyes and him cutting them in a turbulent airport bathroom or airplane bathroom is old school discomfort, physical discomfort. And then there are some like actual kills, sort of violent set pieces set in a criminal underworld that are also very intense and explicit. I enjoyed all that stuff. The movie doesn't totally hold the thread on that. But it's interesting because, you know, Mike Flanagan originally wrote this screenplay and he's having success with the Carrie TV series right now, which I have not seen yet and what was just renewed for a second season, which I find to be interesting. Bound to happen. He had always talked about it as a trilogy, as a three season run. Makes my head hurt to think about watching 24 hours of Carrie, but maybe that will happen. Do you want me to tell you like why he's doing that? Sure. I think that he is going to be connecting many of the young psychics in the Stephen King fictional universe. A fire starter will meet a Carrie. Perhaps a Danny. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I'm not sure how I feel about that. We already tried that, didn't we? What was that series called? Well, he did Dr. Sleep. I mean, Mike made Dr. Sleep. But what was the Stephen King series that included all of the figures from his world? Castle Rock. Oh, Castle Rock. Castle Rock. And now Derry is on HBO. Right. Welcome to Derry. It's hard to not wonder what this movie would have been if it were directed by Mike Flanagan. And his grasp of the material versus a director for hire who then brings in a screenwriter, presumably, who's rewriting what Mike Flanagan is doing. I mean, it's Hossein Amini who I have a lot like I loved McMafia. Watkins and Hossein Amini did that. It's a series with James Norton from a couple years ago. And your boy wrote Drive. Yeah. He's written some not great stuff. Okay. Where do you stand on the two faces of January? I mean, I prefer the three faces of January, but that's a different film. Did you ever watch Our Kind of Traitor? Isn't that a look? The John le Carré adaptation? Yeah. I must have. Is that Ewan McGregor? Yeah, I've seen that. What'd you think? Books better. I am I would rather Mike's to see Mike's version. I mean, this is my whole thing with Mike Flanagan is I'm like you can be Wes Craven if you just put your your knees into it. But you keep making TV shows and I like some of those TV shows. I've watched most of the Netflix series. But I just I just want him to go full movie and this feels like a situation where he chose Carrie instead of this. Do you think he's doing that because he had a bad experience on Dr. Sleep? I mean, do you know anything about why? I don't know, but he's coming back for Exorcist Martyrs, of course. So, you know, he's making Dark Tower for TV. I don't know. How do you feel? What do you think? You're a TV expert. I feel like television is getting a little bit of a you know, it's become a pejorative on this show a little bit more than it used to be. But I'm also not like TV's Lancelot. Like, it can be good or bad. Like, I don't look at it the way I think you look at movies and you're like, this is an American art form that needs to be preserved and adored. And I look at TV as like it's functional and if it's good, it's good. And if it's bad, it doesn't need to be watched. That's right. I think we are in a little bit of a crisis with television storytelling. And I don't think and I don't necessarily think it's the best place for Mike Flanagan, but clearly he does. You know, it's like he's created like a production line and has decided that he can do a lot within like the IP demands of contemporary television. So I like Dr. Sleep and I like Hush and I like his movies and Gerald's Game and the stuff he made, but this is what he wants to do. He wants to make really long kind of ponderous horror shows. Do you think Martyrs will be fine, good, or great? Good. I think so too. It's yeah. I am very appreciative of the fact that Flanagan has been like this script scared me because I'm like, good, let's go. And it's been a minute since I've been like truly rocked by a perverted fucking demented serial killer demon. Yeah. But fool me five times, you know. Is there anybody else you would have liked to have seen direct Clayface? So the two names that had been in the mix for this were Damian Runya and Jay Bayona. Did I pronounce that? Yeah. Both of whom are fucked up and I think probably would have made a different kind of movie. And ultimately, you know, this film has a wonderful sequence laid on. I mean, it's wonderfully staged. You will either like it or not like it depending on what you wanted from Clayface set in a nightclub. Which features briefly a full-on dance routine. Which comes out of nowhere, has no like bearing on his character. You know, you're not like, oh, this guy's like a song and dance guy. And there's like another movie in there of like, I mentioned The Mask, but like kind of almost comic. And then it turns into like a big physical comedy set piece of him inhabiting a bunch of different people in the nightclub. It's the most entertaining part of the movie. I don't know if Damian Runya would have excelled at that. No. But I guess I, I guess, I would have liked to have seen something like that more from Watkins. You know? Yeah. I think there's also another kind of downstream effect of this, which is that James Watkins is British. Tom Rhys-Harris is British. Eddie Marsan is British. Naomi Ackie is British, right? Naomi Ackie is British. Rob Brydon plays a popular television host. Vic Chisler? Yeah, sure. Chisler? And he's British. And this is Staten Island? As you say? -He's from Staten Island, I think, because he's on the ferry. -But that's what I'm saying. Like, this world is meant to be a version of New York and it feels very British like not because of the accents per se it feels very British guy watches Serpico and is like that's how people in New York talk yeah and I don't I don't need it to be Al Pacino is Clayface but though I'm not opposed to that either my face is made of clay okay I think we should that's the best place to end actually no future of DC films so Man of Tomorrow is coming out Al Pacino will return as Clayface in Justice League Man of Tomorrow is coming out yes Man of Tomorrow is coming out next summer it's a new Superman movie I think it's going to be more like a DC Avengers movie than a Superman movie personally I don't know if that's true or not it's just my sense of things there are no other DC movies planned I don't think maybe there's an animated film but nothing beyond that I'm sure some of it is there's an evaluation time about the gun saffron regime as they become part of Skydance it sounds like they were told like we'd love for you guys to keep doing what you're doing right but let me start out by saying I think that they're in a much healthier place than Marvel I think that even the release of Clayface is an ingenious iteration on how to make these things by using lesser known actors probably cutting down on exteriors and CGI or I mean like they use them they use CGI obviously but I think judiciously in this film saving it for the end I thought that like Blumhousing a superhero movie is a really really good idea agreed you know you could also read the production or the development of this story as like gun meddling a little bit or gun saying like not this but that and you know I know that he wants to make movies with finished scripts that feel very like writer focused but the last two releases maybe don't completely sing to that to that principle like Supergirl and this both feel like chopped up a little bit they do that being said I just think that they have a much more modern and compelling attitude about franchise storytelling I don't think we'll ever get another 20 film chapter by chapter tale of phases I think we should just be like there can be two Batmans there can be horror movies and comedies and family friendly superhero films all under the same tent and we can use these characters but I do think it's kind of fascinating to watch like everything that's been successful about what they've been doing is because they're doing something different than the last thing they did so Lanterns is different than you know the first Superman film and the gun stuff that he did for HBO Max is kind of different than Lanterns and I like that I think that's healthy I think that's good I think that's smart I think it brings more people into superhero movies whereas Marvel's like everything has to look the same everything has to feel the same and everything has to tell the same story yeah it's so tricky though because you could say that DC's relationship to storytelling is healthier and more interesting to guys like us but the ceiling is much lower I think whereas Marvel has built a machine to eventize and so even though they've just endured a five year period of consistently disappointing output they're still about to have the two biggest movies of the year yeah but they had to give Downey like a hundred million dollars to do it that's true yeah I think it'll be an interesting question to look back on one year from now which is what is DC what have they had greenlit by their parent company and then also what is Marvel doing in the aftermath of Doomsday and Secret Wars and are they able to generate anything that isn't in a major event yeah obviously X-Men is like looming as like that will be the thing that hopefully for them takes them into the next era I think probably if like they could redo it they would like to have more Batman movies by now but obviously like circumstances beyond anyone's control is affected Matt Reeves' production I wouldn't be surprised given the new corporate ownership and probably the need to service the debt if they're like we need to we need to have more Batman like this needs to be we need to have a Batman movie every three years the second most reliable character in all of movie storytelling and you know and Gunn has a Batman movie that he has been talking about The Brave and the Bold or something like that yes and it was Andy Muschietti who was attached to it forever but I don't think that's going to happen yeah yeah we'll keep an eye on DC although there won't be another DC movie now for another eight months horror this year yeah credit to Clayface for being an actual horror movie sure I was unsure until I got a chance to see it and it did at least live up to that billing but I would not say that it feels specifically like a horror movie related to other horror movies this year like what do you let's talk about the state of the art as we always do at this time it's that it's what's a horror movie and horror's popularity as a genre I think has either by the intention of the film studios or the filmmakers or perhaps just like a kind of tacit agreement on the part of everybody including the audience to be like yeah it's kind of horror because horror's so big right now I think a lot of stuff is being pulled into the genre for the for the benefit of everybody but not necessarily like honoring the genre which is totally fine but a lot of the horror from this year that I've responded to and I think a lot of people have responded to is only kind of kind of horror you know I was watching Hope recently which had been kind of sold to me as like a monster horror movie and it is sort of but it's more like of a chase movie and it's more of an action movie and then it's a little more James Cameron than it is you know John Carpenter and that's kind of the same thing I would say for something like Onslaught or you know there's like lots of movies from this year where I think it has elements of horror or elements of like sub-horror genres mhm but I wouldn't describe it as like yeah that's like insidious or that's like that's like Nightmare on Elm Street or something I think that that extends to some other titles too I mean I think the way that Send Help was marketed is in that vein I mean Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about horror yeah but it's not really a horror film it's really more of a comedy romance coming of age story and even Back Rooms which is a smash sensation and at times unnerving yeah kind of sci-fi kind of a sci-fi psychological thriller yeah so you're right about that and that is fascinating that I think it's just because it's the easiest genre to sell right now sure and so everything is kind of getting absorbed into it sort of like if a man were made of clay and if he were able to absorb anything in his path yeah you know what I mean by that I kind of understand it but it's maybe I need to see a movie about a clay face yeah that would be interesting um we usually get like this big rush of of these films at the end of at the end of spooky season you know we have like yeah and there have been but it doesn't feel like I wrote about this in the newsletter a couple weeks ago but what every month is horror movie month except for this month I have felt it in my own viewing yeah it's felt a little bit more like work getting through the last of this stuff yes um not in a bad way but just sort of like I've been thinking about horror so much for this for the whole entirety of the year yes and because horror movies often will have uh strange release cycles where it'll be like a beyond fest or fantastic fest one year and then finally get distro but then the distro gets even more amplified when it gets to some sort of VOD situation like it can feel like a horror movie has been released three times by the time you get to Halloween very true and uh yeah I feel like I've been watching like a horror a couple of horror movies a month all year new ones again I think that's probably good business for the movie world and Shudder is immune to this because they just every single Friday in October they release a new horror movie but this thing happened this year where you know Clayface is a comic book movie but a horror movie coming out on the 23rd Whalefall is a kind of a body horror movie but really like a sci-fi coming of age drama as well um that came out on the 16th we had Resident Evil came out on September 25th that now feels like a long time ago sure does um and so the month is kind of defined by catching up on the stuff from this year or seeking out slightly more off the beaten path things there's one other component that has happened at movies which is exciting and it's happening for a second consecutive weekend and I encourage people to check it out which is that The Devils is still in theaters the Ken Russell movie yeah which is 55 years old and um I spoke about it a little bit on the Ken episode but I think people should check it out it's uh Ken Russell's Lost Masterpiece this new restoration has a few minutes restored into the film a particularly abrasive you haven't seen this yet? I've seen Devils but I haven't seen the new version it's not dramatically different but it is amazing to see it on the big screen it's also uh just when I was growing up um and and discovering human sexuality my father had a bunch of like weird books like Hammer horror film like picture books and he had a films of Ken Russell oh yeah picture book sure and I I remember that being very formative Oliver Reed and Alan Bates naked wrestling and women in love did you watch did you check that out? as a photo of it yeah it's a great scene um the Devils is in a kind of limited release but it's doing crazy business it made two million dollars last weekend it's probably gonna make another two million dollars this weekend it's a great story it's doing history of concrete numbers it truly is uh this is another release I think that is related to that conversation that we were having um and it is kind of a horror movie although it is also just kind of a religious freak out film and about censorship and about and about the way that faith intersects with desire and all these great ideas. There's a really funny thing happening online where. Kind of like The Nun. Yeah, not really. A lot of horny people are discovering Oliver Reed. Yeah. And just like how smoking hot Oliver Reed is. Which I've really enjoyed. You know, Vanessa Redgrave is still with us and she was present in a BFI screening of the movie with Mark Kermode and she came out and talked about her experience. Her performance is unbelievable in that movie. If people can see it, I think it's only in like 300 theaters, there will be a beautiful glistening 4K at some point in 2027. I haven't announced it yet, but it'll be next year. Who's putting that out? Is that Criterion? I don't know because it's Warner Brothers. Oh, it's Clockwork. Paramount, Skydance, and Clockwork. And this is the first thing that Clockwork is distributing this new imprint, which I think is going to mostly focus on new productions. But nice little entry for them. They've gotten some nice success off of this. Did you see The Cycle yet? No, I haven't. And this is coming out this weekend, right? It's coming out this weekend in theaters. Okay. And. It's Debra Ann Wohl, right? I want to strongly recommend this movie without spoiling it. Looks good. This is probably the best one for me of the batch that we're going to go through. And some of it will be some older titles that we've already talked about a little bit. But this is about a forensic anthropologist, naturally, Debra Ann Wohl, whose long-missing father's body mysteriously surfaces at a crime scene, forcing her to confront her family's history. That's an awesome setup. Very dark. Very slow burn. Very quiet. Kind of medical examiner style movie, I would say. A lot of sequences of corpses on large panels and examining what's happened to those corpses. Your boy Jeffrey Donovan is in this movie as a police officer, naturally. He's a local sheriff. He had a. I saw an interview during this Cycle promo where they were asking him about coming back for Sicario 3 and he was talking about it like he was going to be in the sequel to Field of Dreams. He was like, it would be so meaningful for me to get back into that movie. Well, I mean, he's one of the very best things in Sicario. It's so awesome. This movie is slow. I want to prepare people for that. It's very slow. But it is leading towards a very explosive and practical, practically executed final 30 minutes that I didn't see on the big screen and I wish I had. Who made it? It's a guy named Jordan Downey who's made a bunch of horror movies. But nothing quite like this. You know, independent filmmaker. But. This sounds like what if Whisper Man was awesome or something. Well, I don't want to spoil what it is. What it is is not some radically unconventional thing. It's actually quite a traditional thing. But it's a very good version of that thing and one that we don't see very often. So I will encourage people to check that out. I mean, I'm sure it will eventually be on Shudder, but it's in theaters this weekend. You mentioned Hope. I did. So I, of course, saw Hope at the Cannes Film Festival where you see all your. your monster bug hunt movies. No big deal. What did you think of it? Wasn't Colony also at Cannes? It was. I saw Colony at Cannes as well. We can talk about them together as two South Korean exports. Hope is Na Hong-jin's film about a post-apocalyptic South Korean city that is battling with some unknown invaders, some monster figures. And Colony is. Is it Jung Seo who made Train to Busan? Yeah. Um. And it's his new film about zombies. Yep. He's made multiple films about zombies. What did you prefer between the two? I think I preferred Hope, but that is very, like, tactile for me where I'm like, I like those Hyundai police cars and I like the horses and I loved 40-minute chase scenes even though, like, they would go from. It's like the Austin Powers joke of, like, I'm still down here! Where you're like, it was funny and then it wasn't funny and now it's come back around and it's really funny. And that's how I felt about the chases in Hope where I was like, man, this guy's still riding this horse. And then I was like, wait, this is fucking awesome again! Yeah. Anytime that character is on that horse, the movie is fucking rocks. The, you know, people have talked a lot about the visual effects in Hope and whether or not they ruin the film or not. I admire commitment to a bit. And while. That was not the scariest alien I've ever seen in this movie, I thought that it was well thought out. Yeah. And while there was a choice made in the last few moments to centralize their story, I thought, for the most part, I really enjoyed the world building and I enjoyed the characters and, like, their bickering and I thought it was, like, just. You just don't really see a lot of. You just don't see a lot of. actual practical car chase movies anymore. And this was that. But it was not really a horror. Not exactly. I think it sets it up to be a horror Godzilla kind of film. You know, you think it's gonna be, like. A little bit more like War of the Worlds if it's a horror. Exactly. And it has some components of that through the first hour and then it changes. It has a very funny, quite scatological sense of humor. Yeah. The guy's long story about pooping. Yeah, that part is entertaining. I think the ending pissed me off. Pissed a lot of people off. Yeah. And I wonder if. And part of that is the sense that maybe this was an attempt to launch a new franchise. And maybe it will because it did do really good business in South Korea and in Asia. But I don't think it did terribly well here in the United States. But I liked it. I had fun with it. It's flawed. It's flawed, but I really. It was so fun to see it wearing a tuxedo. That was just absurd. Were people like, what the fuck is happening? The people at the Palais were like, what the fuck? Now, there's a midnight fest. Like, is there a midnight classification? No, this movie was in competition. No, but I mean, Colony was like a midnight movie, right? Oh, it wasn't a midnight. No, I saw it at 9 o'clock in the morning at a press screening. What a dude. And I was pretty excited for it. Yang Sang-ho, I like his movies. And I don't. He's never gotten back to the greatness of Train to Busan. But this one, I think this movie is not very good, but it has an incredible idea. Which is, I guess, maybe not the first time I've seen it, but it was the first one I could really think of. Which is that in this movie, the zombies are a proper hive. Collective consciousness. They move together. They think together. And so it creates a tremendous amount of opportunity for really cool choreography. Yes. In the way that the scare sequences are set up. They're all moving in unison. Yeah. And that stuff, I thought pretty much worth the price of admission. I thought it was way too long and some of the storytelling and character development was very poor. Yeah. But another movie that I was like, ah, this is a little bit of a letdown because of what I know this filmmaker's ceiling is. But he hit on an idea that I just really hadn't seen before. And when you've watched 12,000 horror films like you and I have, when you do something new, you're like, well, points for that. Yeah. I credit you for that. What else did you think about it? I agree with you largely. Like, I don't think this guy, I don't think the filmmakers really hit the heights of Busan. I thought, I thought some of the dynamics of the zombies, I mean, this is, we are grown men, but like I thought some of the physical, physicality of the zombies was, was new to me. If it's been done before, I haven't seen it. Obviously, like Last of Us is doing similar stuff with like, there's something like, there's something connected about all these beings. But I thought it was, I thought it was definitely worth checking out. And way more conventional zombie horror than like Hope is Monster movie. Truly. I never, I did not see Never After Dark. Has this just been released? No, it came out in September. At the end of September. It's directed by a guy named Dave Boyle, who's an American filmmaker, but who makes movies almost exclusively in Japanese with Japanese actors. Okay. I haven't seen many of his films, but this movie kind of surprised me. And I like, I liked it for one particular reason, which is I think it's about a psychic who helps lost souls cross over to, you know, the other land. And the movie takes place almost entirely at this remote house. And it's just a ghost story. It's just an old fashioned Japanese ghost story. But like beautifully crafted and very elegantly designed. And it's a little bit spooky, but it's mostly just, you know what something is, it's just like you're holding a beautifully constructed sandwich and you're like, this is just a perfect object. Like, and it's just enjoyable and it's going to take me 18 minutes to eat it. And nobody overstuffed this. Yeah, it just, it fits. It's geometric in a beautiful way. And I felt that way about this movie. And like, I didn't really have a big relationship with any of these actors or this filmmaker, but I was a little surprised by this movie and would recommend people check it out. You did watch Buddy? Yeah. Okay. So I haven't had a chance to really talk about this at length. I mentioned it briefly with Amanda. This is secretly the like breakout horror movie of the year that nobody really saw coming. Like at least an obsession played at TIFF and blew the doors off. Markiplier's got a huge following. Backroom's of course, a viral sensation. But Buddy kind of, kind of, got a lot of buzz and not, but nobody ever like was able to define what it was. Yes. And it was like, hey, it's the Too Many Cooks guys made a horror movie. Yes. And it is Casper Kelly, the Too Many Cooks director. And it did play at Sundance and I, maybe it was not like the right place to play it at Sundance. And like, as I understand it, any studio could have had a bite at the apple of this. Blumhouse could have put this movie out. Shudder could have put this movie out. Warner Brothers could have came in and bought this movie. Like, and nobody did. And it's being distributed by, roadside and yet it's still going to make like 30 million dollars amazing it's a crazy story i mean it's you know i think people probably know what it is by now but it's a riff on a kind of barney the dinosaur-esque children's tv host giant puppet um real 90s centric approach to storytelling and it very quickly becomes a surreal slasher in the world of this tv character so you liked it i did and there's this is a way to talk about how broad how big the church is the church of satan um because you've got things like buddy to some extent buffet infinity wnuf we can talk about which is from from a few years ago but it's it's like now become a bit of like a halloween classic yep that are mixing up media are borrowing from memory and nostalgia are a little bit more like the dust point of the universe brothers of of horror and i like that a lot i think it's cool that we can have all these different you know there can be kane parsons here and there can be casper over here and like they're they're all kind of like riffing on some sort of the same sheet music but they all sound so different so i would say one of the problems with this is i watched this on streaming and i i fell asleep during it uh at one point and had really fucked up dreams and honestly like for i had to go back and re-watch a little bit of it before we did the pod but like for a minute i was like i don't know what i dreamed versus what was in the movie that's what the movie is like credit to the movie yeah absolutely i think that's really well put and i i think to me its flaws are also its successes which is that it feels very long it is 90 minutes but it feels very long because it is i think it's maybe a filmmaker who's not totally sure yet how to pace a feature film he's made too many cooks which is of course this kind of durational extended opening sequence of a 1980s sitcom that is very funny and very at times very uh vile and you know hysterical and he made these those great yule log um slasher films for adult swim which are also like one hour and 22 minutes and they feel like they're seven hours but they're also really effective and you should talk to we'll get there uh but buddy has some really great scenes and an incredible vibe and it's enough to sustain it and the other thing is like this movie was marketed to super young people and they don't even really know what barney the dinosaur is or teletubbies is and it still worked and still got them in and that's really cool because i think that the more movies like this or the more movies that challenge some of the conventions of like what people usually expect when they go to a movie theater whether it's you can see everything or devils or buddy or whatever it just makes for a healthier film going public that like you know christine miladio's and show up for like 45 minutes in this movie right and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna watch this movie and i'm gonna watch it and then it's essentially the star for the second act and then not you know like it's uh it's challenging in some ways so i i really i really like the fact that this has become a bit of a sensation i'm glad you like that um would you like to talk about nicholas winning ref and yeah would you define her private hell as a horror film i think it's a little bit of it's a giallo right yeah i think so so yet another film i saw at the can film festival i think you could make the case that i went to the can film festival to see this film how could you make that case well it's the movie that i was most excited to see customs why are you here here i'm here to see ivana roselou bark yeah i'm here for my danish god yeah um there were a number of movies that i was interested in but this was the movie i was most interested in because nicholas winning ref and um to our earlier discussion about mike flanagan hasn't made a feature film in a very very long time he had made a copenhagen cowboy uh he made too old to die young yes uh he had made him film feature film since neon demon right 10 years ago yeah so this was his big return movie of course uh has an incredible cast of young and up-and-coming stars sophie thatcher charles milton havana roselou um i spoke about it when i saw it at can i know you were quite rude uh and you you say what i've been holding my tongue for a long time and i'm here to tell you he's still he's still got it he's still hell yes brother hell yes what the fuck were you watching no this is terrible this is a fucking awesome movie the leather man movie right but why is the movie not really about that why is the movie a perfume commercial it's not a perfume commercial it's about female friendships you know like it's about the complicated dynamics that's not what he does well and we know it sophie thatcher is awesome in this movie she is so funny yeah it's okay okay i i i i support you and i i knew this was coming there will be a a cliff's for me like there will be something that he does he's gone really far i know but that's the cool thing is i'm like what could nicholas wending ref and do to turn me off yeah i found this i found this on a just like visceral like looking at it listening to it um like incredibly satisfying the extended 32 minute plan nine from outer space conclusion you were into it i i was fine with that yeah i mean what the fuck what are we doing here you know like i i i expect nothing less from you i i knew this was coming i in the the circumstances under which i saw like the melton sequences it's a similar story where i felt like he couldn't figure out which strand of the story he was most interested in and he kind of combined two movie ideas and put them together like a lot of nesting i mean i i wonder whether or not that's that's bad tv brain stuff happening where he's like i need an a plot and a b plot and we're just even like you know it's okay five episodes in to just change my mind i mean obviously like nicholas wending ref and has benefited greatly from like the cash influx of technology into the world of storytelling because he's made some of the most fucking fucking indescribable entertainments over the last 10 years yeah this one felt like a very self-conscious riff on a couple of different kinds of movies to me and also it felt the most graphic novel you know i think one of the reasons why i loved gosling and his work is that gosling brought such a humanity while also having an iconography and you put those two things together and melton is so beautiful yeah he almost looks fake and sophie thatcher and havana rose lou they're so like in this movie and controlled and yeah i mean there's no edge he's obviously like posing the actresses in every shot and is probably going like there's a shot of christine forsyth that she's like lying on the floor telling a story and you can tell that the center of the frame is her clavicle going up and down as she's breathing and it's like it whether you find that like kinky or not or whether you're interested in that kind of level of like control over every element of visual space that's there i just found it like deeply amusing and i actually don't usually say that about like a serious genre film i'm not like looking to laugh during uh i think he's trying to get you to laugh at this for sure yeah there's lots of moments where like somebody says something and then then and they don't cut to sophie thatcher and she's just like what you know like yeah i just think it's both an exercising composition and an exercise in genre but neither of those choices were really very compelling to me but i'm not i'm not selling my stock i i i need him to make another film but i this i really didn't sadly i do think that his movies benefit from being able to hit pause and go grab a pretzel from the kitchen kind of thing and reset a little bit like i don't know that experientially it would have been the same in the movie theater but like i was i was happy to be but i remember sitting in the theater i don't know if we were together for only god forgives and just being like more more yeah more keep pouring on the syrup i need i needed to yes keep going deeper and deeper into your Freudian trauma yes uh okay do you want to speak about it ends well i was almost going to use this as a way to talk about if you wanted to put together a collective best of the year list so we can talk about it there we can talk about this is another fascinating uh modern filmmaking development story i guess where this is uh the debut feature from a filmmaker named alexander ulm right uh and it is this essentially um uh an awesome coming of age road trip movie stuck inside of a twilight zone slash zombie kind of movie sort of sort of uh and it has like that um i mean it's a very awesome premise of of like the four four friends driving or i believe for driving along a road uh they're they're all at like different places in their life the group dynamic is a little bit off it's tense they are trying to get off this road and they can't and uh that is um and then they find out that this wooded this you know this road in the woods that they're on um there's something else out there in the woods and they're trying to figure that out and they are sort of stuck in a in a loop of sorts which is a always a really like cool conceit to me i rarely am like i hate this um a lot of energy in the filmmaking and also one thing that you you know sorely miss in a lot of horror movies is an attention to performance and a uh platform for people to do interesting work as actors and to feel like real people ever um and i i just thought this this showed so much promise and it's an interesting story just because made this film it was on letterboxd like their v8 their their video store this is how i saw it i saw in the letterboxd video store last year and then neon bought it it came out and now it's just on regular vod correct correct so uh an interesting trajectory for this um but i hope a lot of people check it out yeah i mean i think you can expect alexander to make a bigger and probably interesting film next um i liked it i think one of the reasons why i liked it is one of the same reasons i liked um backrooms and obsession and all these other films which is like it's about young people this is a gen z movie yeah this is a movie about young people who were like fuck my life's about to begin and we had our time for those movies you know like our time is over for those movies like it's actually now somebody a new generation's time to make movies about but this actually felt like it was being made by somebody of that generation rather than like a 55 year old trying to do kevin williamson yes and also like independently made and handheld in a lot of ways like really handmade in a lot of ways and um yeah i liked it too i'm glad you shouted it out uh we gotta talk about vhs mixtape because we always talk about the vhs entry definitely a lesser entry this year this idea was i think maybe to bring music more into the frame for the um theme of this and omnibus movie um some filmmakers i really like ernest dickerson has i think probably the best um rizza has a film in here um the band guar figures prominently i thought that was an interesting choice it's abrasive i'm not against guar yeah they have some jams um i got it though we got it we got it they've been doing it for 40 years yeah um what happened here i this is it's hard to make one of these a year i think um i thought alex ross perry's edition of it when he the one he made kid print for which was is that vhs last year vhs halloween halloween was among my favorite of the of the series fantastic i will say up front that my roots with this project go back to its kind of mumble horror kind of origins of like ty west and joe swanberg and some of those filmmakers working on those early editions um but i've appreciated almost every every place is explored and even down to viral which is also like a sort of reviled entry into this i have some time for that uh i didn't really like mixtape very much unfortunately yeah um part of it might have been the guar wraparound stuff part of it might have just been like i never i i don't know it just didn't it didn't sound is not something that i find like that compelling as like a a unifying it didn't thematically cohere yeah yeah it didn't thematically cohere very well but on to the next one yeah go to vhs again next year yeah so they're bad episodes of black mirror they just keep cranking them out then they get good ones it's it's okay um there's another uh shutter movie coming out this weekend called breeder um that i think is pretty successful semi-successful more of a comedy actually than a horror did you see this one i have not seen breeder i have seen hallow warrior but i have not seen breeder oh interesting okay so breeder is uh it's about a a guy who's trying to develop research around potential healing technologies through the act of breeding much like um naomi aki's character and that's exactly right clayface nanotechnology there yeah and he stumbles upon an eccentric poodle breeder who wants to help fund some of his research played very very humorously by dot marie jones and a great performance and she's got several young daughters i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know you know age 16 to 26 who may also may be breeders of a kind action going on yeah she's working on a project yeah um and things get a little bit crazy and some of it is very entertaining and some of it doesn't totally come together but um that one is also worth checking out uh hallow warrior what did you make of this i thought it was good yeah pretty quick and easy uh mostly one-hander uh on on shutter right now that has that pretty reliable now um throwback 80s vibe of like you know in terms of its design i think this one um stars i sorry i forgot the actress's name off the top of my head it's millie shapiro remember from hereditary hereditary who's playing uh kind of like a lone survivor um in a post apocalyptic wasteland and then turns out not that lone um but well done i thought you know so nice to see you shannon's awesome and yeah just what a relief 48 years old 48 years young yeah still got it is she still in war paint i don't know if that band is still active oh i think so are they yeah you'd be surprised bands that are just like we can just play like 10 festivals a year and and that's that's what we do past members include shannon so she stepped away from war paint tough one uh she married let's find out this is healthy not seeing a spouse here interesting i'm married as am i it's good to put that on the record uh i made you watch insidious out of the further yeah yeah which is the sixth insidious movie great set pieces yeah what are we doing with the story now like uh i will admit now i'll say insidious is probably the modern franchise that's going to be the most popular movie in the future i would say i'm probably way more conversant in especially paranormal activity um and conjuring um the conjuring extended universe much to my own chagrin because i only like like 50 yeah but insidious they keep cranking them out pat wilson's also in and around this franchise yes but not in this movie not in this movie although he's directed one right yes um i thought this was the set like i said set pieces amazing when lynn shay shows up and is like find me but find me in another person's body and we're going to talk about being couriers to the further and the backstory of the further and all the astral projection we're going to have to do i it kind of lost me a little bit so the first half of the movie has i think some of the best scares slash gross out stuff of the year the dental hygienist the dental hygienist stuff and the pillow for couch that stuff is awesome uh to me that's like that's like a tier studio horror filmmaking where i'm like you've designed a great idea other stuff you should do a big movie i mean i guess this is a big movie and it did very well and we didn't talk about it on the show up until this point it came out over the summer um do you do you mind like the amount of exposition in this movie and like they're all like that they're all kind of like that because that's what lynn shay's character does in all of these movies i've seen all these movies in theaters i like them generally the world of the further taking the final hour of the movie was a choice you know what it did remind me of a little bit because of the presence of the older man was it was like some combination of phantasm and poltergeist 2 yeah and i do i think that's maybe like one of my kinks of like the really creepy old guy oh yeah i was like i'm gonna take you away yeah um and so it's good it's good yeah yeah yeah and so and there's a lot of there's maybe too much time spent on the like the true big movie of the insidious universe and his power and his ability to pull people in and like the generational trauma from a mentally ill mother who passed down a thing you know there's just a lot of that going on a lot of uh you know like tokens that make their way from and from the dream world into you know what every horror film seems to tell you just don't have kids uh yeah i wonder whether that has something to do with my my child free existence and that's why you keep digging in no a bit like i wonder if i'd watch like a hundred fewer horror movies i would be like i'd have three sons what would they be named nicholas wending and reffin no wending come over here uh did you you did see fall to dead point yeah is this a horror movie no no wait is this a movie i don't know what is this movie so we're probably the only two men in america who are talking about fall to dead point but fall one which is just called fall right yeah fall is awesome really fun and it's kind of a horror movie because it's about like two women who go up to the highest tower in the world yeah of course you do and it's just like a little platform but they're like content creators and they're doing it to capture it on instagram shiloh who's like kind of like a like live free or die kind of instagram influencer not live free or die like politically like i think she's just like a big not like you no yeah um and watch that movie the whole point is two people or one person incredibly high up in the sky how do they get down that's the movie yep this movie presupposes what if the two people up on the tower or the person up on the tower had like a huge long backstory that we needed to explore and his sister so most of fall to dead point is in fact flashbacks and interpersonal trauma discussions between two people who i believe are uh is it max and loose we were the two women up on the thai mountain that sounds right i wasn't really clocking their names there's a lot of direct address in this in this film that's true there is little to no indication it's jacks jacks jacks and loose there is little to no indication that these people are outdoors much less four thousand feet up on a mountain in thailand where they've been abandoned by their uh their guide and it's now pouring rain for multiple days characters never bother to eat or drink water they just sit on a plank and talk about this dead sister sorry Sorry for spoilers for Fall 1. And it's so bad. And then it triples down on it at the end where you think the movie is over. And there's like a whole plot line about fentanyl in this film. And then at the end of the movie, they bring back one of the survivors from Fall 1. And she gets a fucking card from the sister. And it's like, see you on this fucking gondola, bitch. Like in Fall 3, we fight. And I'm like, this is misunderstanding the menu, guys. I just don't understand why they just didn't bring Grace Carolyn Curry back for Fall 2. Like, who are these people? I'm just like, Shiloh's sister? Who's signed off on this? Like, Shiloh's sister's trauma with her mean best friend? But it's not because she was like, I don't want to be in the movie. It's because she was like, no, save me for the credit sequence. Right, it's a trilogy. The trilogy of Fall? Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I don't blame them. But watching the movie, I was like, who are they? Who are these people? Why are you here? Why did you go to Thailand? And it's like, no offense to this guy, but like, we couldn't get Jai Courtney. Oh, yeah. So we've got this guy who kind of looks like. Bob's standard Jai Courtney. Yeah. This movie is directed by the Spirig brothers who made Predestination and Daybreakers. It looks like shit. Yeah. The mountain is the worst CGI I've ever seen. Well, it's all. But there's no attention to detail. It's like, if you're going to put people 4,000 feet up in the sky, you have to have the wind blow a little bit. It's like, they're just sitting there in dead silence. I know. The first film was a success because it only cost like $3 million. They made $20 million and it was a big Netflix streaming movie. And it's fun. It's really fun. It gives you vertigo. You're like, this is actually scary. Because it's up. Yeah. It's just up. This is like along a cliff. We've seen dozens of cliff movies. I would say that the barrier for entry, because I've gone on a big mountain climbing jag this last couple months in movies. You've been watching movies. You actually haven't been mountain climbing. I don't do anything but watch movies. I have no cool hobbies. Zach got shoulder surgery. We stopped golfing. All I do is watch shit. We're the same. Yeah. I'm shedding hobbies the older I get. It's supposed to be the opposite. I'm supposed to be bringing on new stuff. I know. You're supposed to be like, look, I've gotten into World War II. Yeah, basket weaving. Why not? But this, like, I've actually like watched a lot. I can't wait for Other Side of Everest. You know, like. Oh, it's so crazy. And I'm. You have to see it on a big screen. Fuck yeah. You have to. Of course. I'm X, baby. But like, I watched K2. I watched Everest again. I watched all the, like, the docs. Like, you know, like, I'm well versed in it. And then to have two people sitting on a plank of wood on the side of death's elbow in Thailand, but they're just chatting about, like, another woman for an hour. Yeah. Can I make a suggestion? I think the Spirig brothers and Nicholas Winning-Ruffin should have traded movies. And they should have made Her Private Hell and he should have made Fall 2 Deadpoint. I think they would have worked out. Yeah. What is he, what is NWR doing next? I think he said he's making another movie. But I don't. Her Private Hell did not succeed. I don't know if you heard about that. It succeeded for key tastemakers and liked it. Okay, let's try to do the actual best of the year. Yeah, I figured we could do this as a collective because this is one where, unlike a lot of horror years where maybe, you know, you've seen this Shudder movie and I've seen some deranged indie that we need to include. You kind of can't get around, like, the big six here, right? I agree with you. I would say that, and we've talked to these movies kind of to death. Yes. So Obsession, Backrooms, Resident Evil to me, and The Bone Temple are unmistakable. I mean, these are among the, for me, my favorite movies of the year. Same. Those four movies are in my top 25 right now. That's my top five plus Christopher's. That should be a good list this year. Let's talk Teenage Sex and Death quickly because we haven't talked about it on the show. I think you were on vacation when I did that episode. So Adam and I did that episode together. I thought it was similar to my reaction to TV Glow and World's Fair. Like, I'm very, very locked in on this film. On the Jane Project? On the Jane Project. Yeah. I, not dissimilarly from NWR, just like being in the cinematic feels that they create. It's a similar situation. So texturally and music, the sound of music, the way that they film actors, I'm just like kind of, I'm just really a fan. I don't think I went into this movie thinking it was going to be scary at all. And so I, I was not let down the way I think maybe some people thought this was going to be a slasher. And I thought the kind of like dollhouse-esque production of like the camp and the way that, you know, God's eye is looking down on it and the way it sort of observed it was just great. So I'm a fan. Does it make sense to put it on this list? Yeah, because I think it's so engaged. What would you call it? You know, it's obviously a film that is born out of it. It's born out of like a very deep relationship to sex and death, obviously. Yeah. It's sort of like the player inside of Friday the 13th 4. Yeah. Yeah, okay. I think it's an essential text to have to understand like why horror is so goddamn popular right now. It's true. And what it has done to the psyches of so many people that are our age, you know, and the way that it has totally infiltrated our understanding of story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's also been funny like talking to Amanda and she'll talk about this on the next episode because she's catching, she's watching a lot of these totemic objects in her forties. Yeah. Instead of when she was nine. And I do think that that there's a differentiation there in terms of what kind of relationship you can build to the art form. If you aren't, if you don't have your sensibilities, your scare sensibilities, your honestly like sexual sensibilities informed by these movies. I think that's a big part. I think Amanda's story is actually probably way more common than, than Luna. I think that's a big part of it. I mean, I still get texts from friends of mine that I haven't seen in a while or whatever. And they'll be like, okay, I saw back rooms. Cool. Yeah. And I'm like, yes, like if you're not in the matrix of like, Kane is iterating off of things he's been doing on YouTube and obviously liminal space has become like a huge part. And it's like, no, it's on max. They finally got around to seeing it. They thought it was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. I think there should, there, there should be two different tracks. I do think that this year has brought way more general curiosity film goers into our, our den. And I welcome them. And I welcome Amanda to watch exorcist three when martyrs comes out, which is going to have to. Yes. The rest of the list is kind of interesting. I love to send help. I thought it was really, really fun. And I love Sam Raimi. It is the least horror. Of his horror films. It is really more of like a survival thriller. Yes. Then it is a proper horror movie though. It does have some stabby stabby and some violence. Yeah. It kind of feels like a cat and mouse and, and it's unclear who the cat is sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I wasn't again, like, I'm not totally sure how to characterize that. Just like, I'm not totally sure how to characterize whale fall, you know, like whale fall has some things in it that are just purely like agonizing, gross, right. Horror, but it's just a survival, but it's, it's a survival movie. And so that speaks to the point that you're making, which is sort of like, where's the line? The line has completely eroded now between what goes in and what goes out. There's a few more of these. I put at the bottom that we talked about in our first episode back in April, including faces of death, exit eight, Hocum, Leviticus. You know, I liked all those movies, some more than others. I wasn't like blown away by any of those four. Like, is there other, other titles that you want to include? I liked passenger as like a, just, just something that I like. It's been a throw on kind of thing. Um, I, I don't think it's been a banner year for indie VOD stuff. And the one thing that I would note that is more or less absent from our list is any, uh, skin, skin of Marink core, like truly experimental, independent. Uh, would you call Rose of Nevada a horror movie? Like not really, not really. I mean, it's, it's similar to it ends in so far as it's a little Twilight, Sony. Um, and the same, the same goes for end of Oak street. Like that's not really a horror movie per se, but it has a horror component. I guess it's as horror as hope is. Yeah. Um, there is a, um, Robbie Banfitch has Tinsman road, which also seemingly premiered on the letterbox video store. But now I think it's going to shutter in November. Um, and that's about, it's another found footage, more, uh, horror movie. Uh, Robbie and I think his mother are the stars of the movie. Um, and it's about these, they're coping with the disappearance of his sister. Yeah. Um, and so that was to me, one of the few of those that really fits the bill there. You know, primate was this year, which I thought was a lot of fun. Um, you didn't see primate. I did see primate. You're not a fan. I've always had a weird relationship to primate films. Monkeys. I don't know. I don't, we've never explored this with a professional, but like not super into, um, I think honestly watching project X as a child turned me off to the, to the entire thing. It's a big monkey. Yeah. We'll just. like i just i hate to see him go through it you know wow well that this primate was very violent in primate yeah but like who made him that way you know it was man what are we doing to our culture right our culture of primates uh there were some disappointments ready or not to yeah i thought it was a disappointment i thought they will kill you as a disappointment um it's kind of like the dregs of of john wick core there right it is uh have we gotten past that yet or are we about to get another wave of like ordinary and violent he's making highlander that's where he's going next so i don't know what the follow-up i mean violent night two is coming out you're right about that for me personally i would put the bride on my list of horror i liked it i know it is i understand it's flaws i understand it's been chopped up there's some things about it that don't work i like a swing i kind of like it in the same way that i like digger i'm like i really really happy they tried really happy they tried some of this i wouldn't have done some of this i don't really understand but the extravagance the design of it the commitment and the performances i think is really great oh wait i i briefly mentioned this when we were talking about buddy but we should shout out buffet infinity yeah yeah i guess i haven't talked about it on the show i wrote about it a little bit in the newsletter yeah uh is essentially a pastiche of it's not unlike wnuf and i suppose if you if you enjoyed or watched late night with the devil this is like another way somewhat similar yeah but it's essentially like uh a barrage of imagery scraped from a television and when what era would you describe this like a television that's somewhere between 1987 and 2026 you know and it's like it feels like local uh local tv yeah and then on a kind of almost subterranean level you start to understand this like underlying plot about a cult right um yeah it's a series of commercials and uh news broadcasts on one local channel that cuts like a hundred times to various different iterations of those commercials it's about two kind of competing restaurants yeah one restaurant is just kind of like your local sandwich shop that has a local tv commercial and has been in the town forever and then the other restaurant is this new kind of ominous corporate power called buffet infinity and it is coming in to kind of dominate this new town and slowly but surely you realize it's more than just a restaurant um it it makes her private hell feel like raiders of the lost ark in terms of its durational quality um it is very very like punishingly specifically steeped in the slowness pitch of like the sound in it also is like a little bit more um it's like psychotronic rather than like where i think wnuf is like it feels more like you're watching tv for an hour and a half totally yeah there's this is a sort of like wearing you down with its uh struggle it's also like pure satire right about commercial consumerism and commercialism and um the way that we're fed things literally and figuratively i'm sure we're going to talk about chrono visor at the end of the year like it when we certainly will wrapping up so will i would you consider it in any way horror i think so i think maybe the horror of obsession yeah um and the way that you can get lost inside of something the last act has elements of it no question about it um and i haven't really spoken about that movie very much i wrote about it as well but i would highly encourage people to check that movie out if they can is it on vod yet no i just saw it in the theater a couple weeks ago so i don't think it's on vod yet i can check um i can i can briefly explain it to people um it's about a film about a an academic a philosophy professor um who is exploring either for a research project or ultimately her own personal interests uh a the alleged true object called the chrono visor which is a device that can reproduce visuals from history yeah things like the crucifixion of jesus christ if you engage this device properly it is based on a real device that by the benedictine priest uh pellegrino ernetti yes part of what makes the movie so interesting is that it is a movie of text it's a movie about reading it's a movie about sitting inside a library and reading books and microfiche and newspapers and trying to learn as much as you can in various languages that are translated for you and the a great deal of the film is just text on screen and it's also like a thrilling mystery yeah yeah i mean it has elements of um i mean there's there's elements that remind me of like cronenberg in terms of some of the tactile like visuals that you see um it's lynchian in places but it also it feels deeply experimental and also about like magnificent obsession that will take you across the world but the last sort of sequence of it it has elements of of horror i think yeah shot and some found footage there are some found footage and shot beautifully on 16 millimeter in the dark in a movie like this shot on digital would just be so much less effective want to be the one who's always in the know about the game the scores the plays here's a tip the apple sports app just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules and when your team scores it shows up right on your iphone lock screen making it easy to check in anytime so rule the group chat and download apple sports for free on your iphone lock screen and download apple sports for free on your iphone lock screen on the app store or find it on your new iphone this episode is brought to you by boar's head what if we told you the taste of deep fried turkey is now available at your local deli well boar's head just did that bursting with flavor perfectly seasoned with that indulgent taste that usually means planning your whole day around it presenting the fryer's turkey breast only from boar's head backyard tradition now available behind the 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the pack you've got paramount now has paramount primal and they have a horror movie coming next year called mole people you've got what i still don't understand why netflix is not in on this i don't understand it to me this is the easiest i would actually say when you look at netflix's horror stuff it's like it's stunning that they aren't picking up it ends or they're not picking up some of this stuff like it's crazy it's really bare bones there a lot of international stuff i guess on their horror like carousel but yes but like what's the biggest scary movie they made this year like the last house thrash i mean last house that's we can do better um obviously we mentioned clockwork they're going to be in the mix here um sony is still cranking them out like there's maybe not as much of an arms race as i had expected though it does seem like there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of 17 year olds with five youtube videos and we're probably going to see a lot of that next year i would imagine but i also think that if in the next two years we get anything but ghosts it sounds like kane parsons is making back rooms too i think that makes sense and then the flood maybe we get peel back at some point like i think that we're going to continue to have like the home run swing horrors for a couple years now but it's not gonna it's not gonna feel like and you know i people have already spoken glowingly about uh the new curry barker next curry barker movie seth rogan said it's even better than obsession yeah but um it'll be fascinating to see a bunch of these movies come with filmmakers with even greater expectations cr you're the man you're the man how you doing you good yeah yeah i feel like this is a worthwhile exercise when you get to november 1st is it like closed tabs on horror do you need a break do you ever feel like you need a reset no alice and i are gonna watch um coco okay on dia de los muertos so no i i mean the great work continues there's another there's another horror movie coming i mean werewolf is coming out in december yeah so i'm in werewolf season i watched the beast must die for the first time never seen that before gotta watch all my werewolf movies i need you and rob back in the chair is so we can do amanda will not be in the chair for where one this is the nosferatu team is that because she disrespected the mythological origins of werewolves she doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about she doesn't she doesn't know anything how can you be on a werewolf episode you know even know what a werewolf is. Well, I mean, she could be the man in the street. No, that's not what this is about. Jane Public. Jane Public. The werewolf episode is for the real werewolf ones. Yeah. You know? That's for the wolf knowers. Is that the monster you relate to the most? We have some things in common. I'm a big Drac guy. You think you're sensual enough to be Dracula? Well, you don't know me. You know? I know you better than almost anyone alive. Obviously not. Because you thought I would watch her private hell and be like, eh, I'm out. I 100% knew what you were going to do when I put her private hell on the board. And you did exactly what I thought you would do. And I don't begrudge you for it. CR, thank you. Where can we find you? On The Watch podcast. Yeah. Where we talk about television and popular culture. No kidding. That's a show? I'm doing Press Box today, so I think that comes out next week. Very cool. Doing some spooky movies on Rewatchables. Yeah. Amazing. What else? I think that's it. Out in the streets. I'll be in England soon. No kidding. What address? Okay, let's go now to my conversation about Street Fighter with Shea Serrano. The homie Shea Serrano is here. Writer of good movies. Writer of, what's the new basketball project called? It's called After Review. After Review. We just launched it. You just launched it. So now you've got two sub stacks. Two sub stacks. Good movie, which is all about movies. After Review, which is all about basketball. Incredible. I don't know how you do it. I, I assumed that you would be going to see Street Fighter even if I hadn't asked you to come on to this episode. I was hoping we could start this conversation by hearing from you a little bit about your personal experience with Street Fighter the video game. Oh, I love Street Fighter the video game. Look, if I turn my camera a little bit, I've got a Street Fighter arcade machine. Nice. Right over, right over here. Is it two? Which one is it? Street Fighter 2. Of course. The classic. And, yeah, you know, we are both right around the same age. We grew up, at the same time, we both got hit with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Boom, boom, back to back. The two greatest fighting games that have ever existed. We were alive during their heyday, much like the rap heyday of the 90s. We were like in the middle of everything. It was, it was awesome. So I have a profound affinity for Street Fighter. It has been in my life for the last three decades. And you're right. As soon as the, as soon as the stills came out for Street Fighter, I was like, this is going to be real bad. And then the, and then the trailer came out and I was like, oh shit, this is going to be real good. And then I went and watched it and I was like, oh no, I got trailer duped. I got trailer duped. Wow. This will be an interesting conversation because we had the exact same experience. I saw the stills and I was like, I don't know about this. This looks really silly. And then I watched the trailer and I similarly, I at least tricked myself into thinking I was, I was right there. That this could tap a vein, you know, that we have not yet had tapped, especially because I've had a real struggle with the two Mortal Kombat movies we've gotten in the last 10 years. I'm not a big fan of those movies and I, I totally agree with your assessment about the best fighting games. I'd put Tekken in there too, even though that wasn't an arcade game. Tekken's a, it's a podium finisher. Yeah. But it's never going to be one or two. It's not. Street Fighter, I'll give you a very brief snapshot of my relationship to it. When I was 10 years old, I was on a bowling team at Melville Bowl on Melville, Long Island. And, me and three friends, and we bowled every Tuesday night and my mom would drop us off and I felt like a really big kid. Yeah. And we would bowl and, you know, I'd bowl like an 88 or whatever and think I was amazing. And, the most exciting part of that 90 minutes where I had my bowling match was the final 10 minutes before my mom came to pick me up when we went to the arcade. The arcade was not even, it wasn't even a proper arcade. It looked actually just like your office where it was just four cabinets against a wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the three cabinets, were just completely ignored. And then the fourth cabinet was Street Fighter 2. Mm-hmm. And it was always pandemonium. You know, this is what, 1992? And, yeah, we played as long as we possibly could. We always brought quarters in a Ziploc bag and begged our parents for any spare change that we ever had. Wait, why a Ziploc bag? Your pants didn't have pockets? Uh, that seemed unsafe with bowling. You know, there's a lot, especially like 10-year-old bowlers where there's a lot of gyrations. The counterweight. Yeah, exactly. Throw off your phone. Form. Honestly, there's probably something to that. But, yeah, we had him in a Ziploc. I had him in a Ziploc bag. I'm a very neat guy, as you know, Shay. I do know that, yes. So, yeah, I'm just pumping quarters into that machine and having the time of my life. And, you know, the movie adaptation from the 90s with your boy Jean-Claude and Raul Julia and Ming-Na Wen is not good. No, it's real bad. And, you know, I think you and I are the kind, the kinds of people who, even if it was bad, but we found something lovable about it, we would say that. But it's really just pretty forgettable. So, there was a lot of open territory here for this new one. I'll tell the listeners at home some details about this new movie and we can dig into the details of maybe why it doesn't totally work. So, it's directed by Katao Sakurai. It's written by T.J. Fixman and Sakurai. It stars Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Kalyana Long, Joe Roman Reigns, NOI, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Eric Ondra, Andrew Schultz, Orville Peck, Don Lee, Curtis 50 Cent Jackson, and Jason Momoa. The story, Shay, is estranged street fighters Ryu and Ken Masters get thrown back into combat when the mysterious Chun-Li recruits them for the next World Warrior Tournament, a brutal clash of fists, fate, and fury. However, behind the battle royale lies a deadly conspiracy that forces them to face off against each other and the demons from their past. So, you said you didn't think this was good. What do you, what were the issues of it? I had a few different issues. If we go through like an order, the main guy, Ryu, who's the best fighter of all of the, like if you line up all of the actors, that's the number one fighter. Guy doesn't fight until the last 10 minutes of the movie. What are we doing? Insane. Why are you not passing the ball to Steph Curry? Give him the ball and let him go to work. I gotta watch a cartoon version of this guy fight. I wanna see him fight. That's why I, that's why I showed up. Yeah. So I was, I was slightly frustrated by that. I was slightly frustrated by the moments that, where they would nail the tone and you go like, that, just do that. Do, do that thing right there. Just do that for the whole movie. What's an example of that? What was a moment where you really felt like it tapped in? Okay. So at the, at the very end of the movie, well, can we spoil it? I don't know if we're, can we talk about it? Yeah, it will have been out for a week by the time we're doing this. So at the very end of the movie, after the, the big fight has taken place and, and Bison has, has escaped and he's on the run and now, uh, Ryu and Ken and Chun-Li are, are like hitchhiking on the side of the road and then a car pulls up and it's Guile and Dalsim and they're like, Hey, do you want to come? We're going bison hunting or whatever. Sure. Sure. Cody Rhodes. Uh, but they're like, yeah, we're going to go. We're going to hop in the car. But Ryu is like, says something very philosophical about the, the sun is still in the sky. I'm going to walk. And they're like, cool, great. Everybody else piles in the car and then it cuts to him like walking off and he's barefoot, which is hilarious because his character in the video game is barefoot. But a lot of movies would have ended right there. That would have been the scene. But then they cut to the inside of the car and they're like, look at this shoeless schmuck as he's walking away and then he stops and they're like, yeah, that's, he figured out it's too far to walk with no shoes on and he gets in the back of the car and they're like, what happened? Why didn't you go on the walk? And, and that is a very straight like Andrew way that he does. He just goes, the distance was too great. And it's like, that's what we're supposed to be doing in this movie. You have one serious guy who's going to be like philosophical fighter guy, let everybody else make jokes and be ridiculous. And if you do that, the whole movie is so much fun. But then they all wanted to be a little bit serious at some points and they, you know what I mean? Like, I do. I do. We don't need that part. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're pointing out something that is really interesting about the story in general, which is I don't read the comic books for Street Fighter. Like, I don't know the deep lore, but in Street Fighter, Street Fighter 2, even in some of the expanded Capcom games, they're not narrative based, you know, they're character based. So you pick your favorite character and you fight with that character and you know some things about that character's background, but you are not like, well, this is this person's journey and quest. And the decision that Street Fighter makes and that you alluded to is that it has a series of anime sequences at the beginning and in the middle of the film that, that fill in some of the flashback gaps of Ryu and Ken's story and the sort of the battle that they're in with Gouken and the big bad played by Akuma, played by Roman Reigns. And so it's really trying to do what a lot of these video game movies try to do, which is they try to give you like an added layer of narrative when in fact, what you just described was like, that was the vibe of the game was the like sullen philosophical Ryu being, being a loner and then them capturing that and then everything else being a little bit more pop and humorous. And because Ryu is like kind of a lost man who is kind of out of the frame of the first 40 to 45 minutes of the movie, you don't even really get to set that agenda. Like we don't even, we're not, we're not in like an adventure story with Ryu. We're waiting for him to come back for the movie to actually start. So it's a very strange choice in general. Yeah. And that part, when that happens, just do that. When they show 50 cent, walking into the club with the music playing, just do that. That's cool. The whole movie could have just been slow motion characters walking into places and I would have stood up and applauded. Like, that's what I was looking for in the movie. Like, just commit to the thing. Like, don't try to be all of the, all of this stuff. I thought the Mortal Kombat, the second Mortal Kombat movie was much more successful than the first Mortal Kombat movie because they committed to the idea. We're going to have this, like, we're going to be a gory tournament movie. That's what we're going to do. And there was, and I had a great time watching it. Another thing that's, that stood out to me with all of the story stuff, like number one, the reason that Bison was, is such a great bad guy in the video game is because he's fucking impossible to beat. He's so hard to beat. Let him be big. Let him be intimidating. Let him be the big bad guy in the movie. Don't make him like a little weaselly weirdo who's trying to turn himself into, to something. Because what ends up happening then is the very end, like the end credit scene, we get one final, as you mentioned, anime sequence and the big reveal in that one is Bison and the other bads, Kami. And whoever they go meet up with, with Sagat, Sagat. And it's like, why, why am I supposed to be scared of this guy? You're going to get the guy that we already saw get beat up at the start of the movie. I don't understand what we're, it'd have been like if the, if the Cleveland Cavaliers were like, guess what? New York Knicks, we got CJ McCollum. Like we, we, we beat all of those guys. You beat all of those guys already. We're not afraid. Why are we, why am I supposed to be afraid of? So God, I don't, I don't like, it was just a bunch of weird choices like that. Yeah, I agree. I, you, you mentioned the part about, um, characters arriving in slow motion. And I will say, I thought that that was the movie's superpower and also its curse, which is that there's a decision that is made to set the movie in 1993, which is when we were playing this game aggressively and we're probably obsessed with it. And it was an amazing time for music and the movie goes out of its way to license. At least 12 incredibly memorable nineties kind of alternative and hip hop classics and even pop classics and when them into the movie and the way that they're used kind of gives you that video game experience of what each character has their own theme song and it conveys something about them. And some of the sequences, for example, there's one very memorable arrival scene where Chun Lee is kind of being delivered to Interpol, uh, by Kyle Mooney. Yeah. And Elastica is the, the connection hits and she just starts kicking the shit out of a bunch of Interpol agents. That was another scene in the movie where I was like, this is what the movie is like, right? This is do that. This just do that. Um, it's exciting. It's funny. It gives you that just like electric pop culture feeling. It did give me this kind of emotional pause because I'm like, I'm 44 and this is not my, this is, this is a movie that is for teenagers, but it's pop culture that is 30 plus years old. And we keep seeing this over and over again. I'll ask you. We'll talk about this in a little bit, but, um, you know, this comes up over and over again for non-blondes. What's up is sort of the theme song of the movie and it's the connective tissue between Ryu and Ken. Um, we hear good vibrations by Marky Mark and the funky bunch. I know that's one of your favorite groups. Um, you know what? It was a really welcome needle drop to me. What's that? Was too legit to quit by great hammer. Great. Great. That's like, that's a song that is a bit forgotten, but in the moment was an absolute pop culture revolution. Yeah. Like, do you, I feel like that video debuted on Fox in prime time. Do you remember this? It was a huge, gigantic thing. Yeah. There was a, I remember because David Robinson was in the video. My beloved David Robinson. He had all of these like cameos of famous people doing the too legit to quit hand sign. It was great. It was so much fun. Yes. So the movie keeps it like knows what, how to scratch some of those itches pretty consistently. The final fight, which becomes a fight between two demons and not two people is white zombies more human. And then human, you know, like the keep them separated needle drop where there's a fight between bison and then Chun-Li and some of his minions and Vega, all that stuff is, is fun, but it all feels like a series of music videos strung together instead of an actual movie with a story. And they never really crack the story. Right. And, and I think if you, if you do that, you have to do that and then it can work because like, if you look at the furious, which. Came out this year. I don't, what was the story about? I don't know. And I don't care. There's a dad and a daughter and sure. Who cares? But they committed to being like, we're going to put on the greatest fights you've ever seen ever. That's going to be our thing. You don't even, you could turn the rest of the movie off. It's fine. You're going to love this thing. And I loved it so good because they committed to a thing. If they would have done what you're saying, just committed to just do that. Do that the whole movie. We're going to love it. Cause then we're fired up the whole time. This is, this is the major issue. I'm so glad you brought up the furious. I intended to do the same. The one thing that the furious does that this movie refuses to do for reasons I don't fully understand is the furious gives you a fight from start to finish the fight starts and you go all the way through. Maybe it takes two minutes, maybe it takes five minutes, whatever, or an action set piece or something this movie, because it has so many characters. And because it has this very weird decision that the tournament itself is a false front for what is really going on behind the scenes of the story, the fights don't really have any. Gravity or weight. And so we're not spending any time inside of them. Like at one point early in the movie, I think one of the fights starts in round two and I'm like, well, where was round one? Yeah. Why did we not see Guile and Vega fight? We just see Guile lost. We missed two of the main characters, a fight, a whole fight, but it's called street fighter. We're supposed to watch all the fights. This is not, you know, I remember years ago, you and I did a pod with Jason C about a blood sport, you know, blood sport. They're like, here's the fight. Yeah. This is the whole fight. What's the fight? What's the fight? Here's a bunch of fights with characters. We don't even give them names. And you're like, yeah, great. I'm going to watch it. Why are we cutting away in the middle of a fight to like catch up on what Chun-Li is doing, like investigating a story about M. Bison's quest for power? That is that I thought that was particularly odd. Any sense of like why they even did did that? It felt a lot like you see movies do this a bunch now where they're trying to set up the next movie before they've finished this movie. Like, just do this movie and it'll be good enough that we're going to want to know what happens after that. Yeah, I think you're right. And you're right that that final anime sequence also is kind of like the AHA Avengers, you know, stingers moment. But I'm like, what? You just we saw the characters and then there was a big story and there was a big fight and then it ended. You know, it didn't to me. I'm not like I can't wait to see what happens next in the Street Fighter universe. The other thing I wanted to point out to you is, you know, the film's called Street Fighter based on the game Street Fighter. Not very much street fighting. None. Very little. There's like a couple of hooligans fighting on top of a car at one point. Yeah. And that's that's about it. That's all you get. I thought that was very odd. What do you make of Noah Centineo? I thought he did better than I was expecting in this movie. I thought he you could tell he spent like two weeks practicing the Ken bobble, the Ken bounce. I'm like, oh, he he nailed it. That's great. I think let him be all the way dumb. They made him like halfway dumb, but also like. Kind of emotionally smart and just let him be all the way dumb. And it's going to be funny. But he did. He did better than I was than I was expecting. I was I was proud of him. I was proud of 50 Cent just showed up, got a couple of lines off, threw a couple of punches. He looked great. Blanca, horrible, miserable, the worst, the worst seven minutes of the movie. What are we what are we doing? Why are we jamming this in here? We don't need this. This part. I completely agree. It was like the rancor scene from Star Wars, but with Blanca making like Brazilian jokes. That was very odd. Jason Momoa, once again, part of an absolutely terrible movie experience. This keeps happening. He seems great, but I don't know. He keeps showing up in the worst movies of all time. I think. Is there anybody who you thought like they really nailed that? Like that is the character to me. I thought Ryu was wonderful. Yeah, I thought he was. I thought he was. Let him be the star. Again, I thought Noah did really, really well. Chun-Li was great when they let her just be like a. Like a fighter. Great, great fight confidence. She looks like she's able to do all of the moves where we don't need all of the backstory and the psycho, the psycho power investigations and the whatever. Like, oh, what's his name was pretty good, too. I was very surprised. Schultz. Andrew Schultz. Yeah, I was like, I was expecting him to be awful. And he was pretty good. Yeah, I think he's generally kind of an awful person, but he he I don't know. I didn't know that character because I stopped. I didn't either. Playing the game by the time Dan came along. And I know Dan is a canonical character in the Street Fighter games and like Street Fighter three. And when they move on a little bit, but I didn't know him very well. But I did think that the pink key moment near the end was very funny. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of who else really like crushed it. They did a smart thing by focusing primarily on actors who look like the characters. You know, the guy who's playing Olivier Richter's who played. Zangief. He looked like Zangief. That was. It looked like that was Zangief. You know, he's you mentioned 50 and Balrog. Like he looked 50 is like 53 years old and he looks incredible. Incredible. Dalsim was really good. He was doing all of the got some good shoulder action going. He did. He did. They were very pointed about that. What did you think of Cody Rhodes as Guile? This is a very WWE movie in a lot of ways. That's a miss. Yeah, he's not. He's just not good. I wish you I wish he was good. He looks cool. until he starts talking about it. And then you're like, all right, get me out of here. Very, very early, like, John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin acting level of, you know what I mean? Like, that's what he's, that's what we're getting from him right now. There had to have been somebody better to play that role. Well, I always think of, you know, all of the characters in Street Fighter are archetypes from other movies, right? Like, Ryu is Bruce Lee in a lot of ways, right? Like, Ken, in some ways, is almost like Chuck Norris. Guile kind of reminds me of Iceman in Top Gun. All right. I'll go with that. He's a blonde military guy. And Cody Rhodes is not giving the coolness of Iceman at all. Not at all. Yeah. Yeah. This was a, this was a, this was a disappointment. I wanted more from this movie. I wanted more from it. It was, it was better than the first one. So I was like happy about that. But I genuinely went into it expecting it to be like a solid seven, maybe eight out of 10. And it was closer to like a four and a half. I think I'm with you on that. 4.5 for me. I know. That's disappointing. Where are you at in just in terms of video games being adapted into movies? Do you think this is going well right now? It's obviously very important to Hollywood. I think when they nail it, they nail it. Resident Evil, so much fun. It was so incredibly fun. I only, I only played the first Resident Evil game. And still I sat in the movie just like having the time of my life. It was great. So I think it can be done. I think it can be done really well. But when it's not done really well, you feel it. You like, you know, 85 minutes into the movie, I was like, looking at my watch like, okay, let's, let's get to the end here. Let's get to the end. It's always the worst sign when you're feeling that way. I also, I felt like. The movie kind of sort of gave you the pop feeling of the finishers for the characters, but like not enough. Like I actually would have been fine with even more of the game sound effects being incorporated into the game. Yeah, that would have been cool. Look, we're just like, we're just pressing this part of your cerebral cortex that just makes you happy that this is happening. Yeah. Anything where it's trying to be its own story and trying to, you know, as you said, Chun-Li, like being an Interpol agent, I'm just like, I don't give a fuck about this. Don't care. Did you bring the boys to see it? I went by myself. I had a very busy weekend at the movies. I went back to back to back to see, you could see everything, Whale Fall and this one, Street Fighter. And they opted to go see Whale Fall. I was like, does anybody want to go see any of these movies? Everybody wanted to see Whale Fall. The other ones were a no-go. That's interesting that they wanted to, I'm not surprised they didn't want to see You Can See Everything, but Whale Fall over Street Fighter kind of tells you a little something. What did they think of Whale Fall? They really enjoyed it. I thought, did you see it? I did. I did. I'm like so 50-50 on it because I thought the drama stuff from it was not that effective, but anything in the whale, I was like, this is the best movie I've ever seen. That's what I'm saying. It's great for like 75 minutes. And in the end, I was like, I don't want to spoil it for everybody else. But at the end, I was like, is this what we're doing? We're really going to do, just be in the whale. Let Austin Abrams, who I have been arguing is the greatest mumble actor we've gotten of his generation. It's awesome. Put him in the whale, let him do that. When he's just in the whale trying to figure out how to get out. Great. We get to the end and we try to pull everything together. Nah, I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. I know. That stuff didn't work for me either. Did the boys like it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody else had a great time. It was like rated. We always do this thing where we go as like a group. It's usually me, Laramie, the twins, the baby. And then two of my nieces, we all go together. We just pick them up. And then afterward, we do the thing when you stand in the lobby and you're like, what do you think? How do you like it? We all give it scores. And everybody else had it like eight out of 10, nine out of 10. And I was like, five, five out of 10. You're weighing down the average. I really was. Yeah. Did you like You Can See Everything? I loved it. I thought that that's the best movie I've seen all year. Me too. When I walked out of it, I was like, I can't believe what I just watched. I totally agree. I'm going again on Thursday with Laramie. Oh, nice. You gotta see this. She didn't see it yet? You gotta see this one. No, no. I went to that one by myself. Yeah. I was telling Amanda on the previous episode that Eileen saw it last Thursday. And then we just had a date night on Saturday just so we could talk about it for three hours. It's just that kind of movie. Unbelievable. I started watching. As soon as I got home, I put on the dropout. I'm like, I gotta see it. Oh, yeah. Had you not seen it before? I didn't see it before then. Oh, interesting. Okay. Before we go too far afield in the world of movies. I want to ask you about fights in movies because I feel like this movie doesn't really give you. It doesn't. The fight. Is there even one fight where you're like, okay, this was great. I loved what I got here. We get the edges of it with Ken and Dalsian. The edges of it. Yes. Because that's the most time we get to spend in a fight. Yes. If they just would have given us that for the whole time, I think it could have. You've got Ryu. He can do it. But there was no moment. There was no moment that I walked out of it going, I can't wait to rewatch that on YouTube as soon as it gets to YouTube. You know what's weird about that one too is like, we like Dalsian and he's not like a villain. So you don't even get that kind of primal good versus bad, you know, you don't get that bloodsport feeling of like, I'm rooting for a good guy versus a bad guy. Yeah. In the one good fight that you get in the movie, which is such a simple way of thinking about it. But it's something that you find in a lot of fight movies is it's not about the ambiguity between two men doing battle. It's like you've been set up in a story to root with your heart for Ralph Macchio. Nobody is going in rooting for not Ralph Macchio in the Karate Kid. It should have been so easy. It should have been number one. Don't go away from the tournament. Let's fix Street Fighter very quickly. Number one, don't go away from the tournament. If you're going to have a tournament, make the tournament important. Can't have it be, you know, a psych out. Have that be the tournament. Have Bison do a bunch of horrible, horrible shit leading up to it. And then let him fight Ryu at the end. Done. We win. We're all going to have so much fun. Let Bison be Chong Li and let Ryu be Frank Dukes. And now this movie will live forever. But we didn't do that. So now we got to talk about other fights from other movies. Yeah. So, I mean, I genuinely, when I was preparing for this episode, I was like, I really want to know what Shea's top fights are in the history of movies. I mean, and I want to know how you thought about it, too, because there's multiple ways you could have considered it. And I give you no parameters. It could have been one guy versus many. It could have been one-on-one fights. It could have been more extravagant kind of setups. It could have been your simple Bruce Lee versus Chuck Norris kind of showdown. Like, what were you, how did you think about it? I did exactly what you're saying right there. I said, okay, if I'm putting together a list of the best fights in movies, I'm going to do that. I want to, let me get the best 1v1 fight. Let me get the best 1vX fight. Let me get the best 2-1, whatever. Like, let me get a fight that's important. Because it's cool, but maybe it's not, you know, technically as proficient as some other ones. Let me get a fight that is just, you watch it and you realize these are masters of fighting. I'm putting it together like that. That's what I was doing. Yeah, I'm glad you thought of it that way. Because there's a long history, especially in Asian cinema, of incredibly technically proficient, impressive stuff, which I'm sure we'll talk about here. But then there's also just a kind of cinema of cool. Where the vibe is right. And so even if the punches aren't landing in the same way, or it's not as acrobatic, there's something incredibly memorable and moving about it in a way. Did you rank these guys? I didn't rank them, but I have them loosely in a, I mean, we can put them in order if we need to. Okay. But I have them, I wasn't sure how many you were going to ask for. So I said, let me put them in order by the ones I would, I most want to talk about. And I would most regret not being able to talk about if we didn't cover them. Okay. Is the one that you most want to talk about the one that came to your mind first? Uh, no, the one that came to my mind first, we're just going to go through it. Let's go through it. Let's do it. The one that came to my mind first is, was the greatest fight that's ever been put to film. The best guy to ever do it against one of the best bad guys to ever do it with the best, one of the best directors to ever do it. The kitchen fight from the raid too, is I think as good as it gets, it's so visceral and violent. And personally, my favorite kind of fight is the one when you can just put the camera on the guys and let them go. Yes. Like I, we'll talk about some other ones that aren't that, but if we're talking about the best ever, the greatest, it's got to be one of those. I got to be able to just put the camera on you and let you go to work. And Iko Uwais is the number one guy to ever do that ever in the history of movies. And it's him versus Sessip Arif Rahman. And those two guys just. Beating the shit out of each other for seven straight minutes in a kitchen. Nobody, no other interruptions, no cutaways. No, let's go see what's happening with the other part of the story. No, here are our two guys. Enjoy. Perfect. It's so good. I love that pick. Obviously there had to be a, one of the raid fights on any list of this. I, um, I completely agree with what you're saying. And it's kind of that war with my feeling of what makes great cinema, which is that some of the best films in the history of movies are, you know, it's, it's, it's like, it's like, it's, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, for example, in some fight sequences, you'll see like in a kitchen fight sequence, there's plenty of them in the history of movies, the cutaway to the insert shot of the knife that no one is holding, but someone's holding it. is about to pick up. That's a very exciting moment in a movie. We're like, who's going to get it? And how will they wield it? And will the other guy have a hammer that he's going to bash somebody over the head before the knife goes in their body? But I agree with you that it's a special effect to watch a choreographed fight between two people with no cuts. We never see that anymore. Movies don't do that anymore. It's so hard to do. You've got to have the people who can do it. And there aren't a lot of those actors in the world. It's true. There's like 10 of them. Yeah, Ico is in a class of his own, obviously. Okay. Is that your number one favorite fight sequence in the history of cinema? Yes. That's my personal favorite. I think that I would also argue that's the best that we've ever gotten. Incredible pick. Okay. What comes after that? Okay, let's bounce around a little bit then. Let's go from something that's that to something that's cool for the other reason, which is it's a couple of guys who, one of them at least, isn't that great of a fighter. It's very clear when you're watching it. But you don't care because he's cool. The guy he's fighting is cool. The vibe is cool. Everything was exactly perfect. Give me Johnny Cage versus Scorpion in the Mortal Kombat movie from 1995. Yeah, sure. Give me that one. That's just all. I was 14 years old when that movie came out. That was my favorite video game. I couldn't believe what I was watching. To see. Again, if you watch the movie, it does not make any sense at all. Johnny Cage is just wandering through a forest by himself for no reason. None. And then stepping out from the trees is Scorpion. Oh, he does a cartwheel. Not even a step. He does a cartwheel out and they're like, I guess we're going to fight now. There's nobody to say this is part of the tournament. There's no anything. They just. One guy sees the other guy and they're like, fuck it, let's go. And they just start fighting. They end up in hell for some reason. Scorpion teleports him there. We don't know how Johnny Cage gets back after he kills Scorpion. A hundred things you could pick apart in the scene and none of it matters because it's just cool. It's just like everybody who went to go watch the Mortal Kombat movie at a theater wanted that exact thing and they gave you that exact thing. Here you go. That's a hilarious pull for a variety of reasons. I'm not a huge fan of that movie, but it actually does a better job of delivering on the Mortal Kombat experience than the new Street Fighter movie does. Definitely. And. Definitely. It's silliness is like kind of a feature and not a. bug. Also, just the absolute banger theme song that, you know, will live forever. Johnny Cage, though. Real bad. Yeah, and I feel like they did this with Mortal Kombat 2 where they're like, he's our point-of-view character. We're going to spend the whole movie with Johnny Cage. And I was like, I never played with Johnny Cage. Johnny Cage sucks. Like, he's not a good character. You play the game and play with Scorpion or Sub-Zero or maybe he was Raiden or something, but Johnny Cage, he's like, he's a boring white guy. We don't play with that guy. Yeah. He's much more fun in this one, in part two. What's his name? Was it Carl Urban? Carl Urban, yeah. He's fun. But this is like my Johnny Cage. Gotcha. This is the guy. He's never thrown a punch in his life. And I'm like, I'll take it. Yeah, the actor's name is Lyndon Ashby. He was on Melrose Place. Is this the only action film he's ever made? It's gotta be. I really don't remember him very much at all. It's gotta be. Okay. Incredible pivot away from the Raid 2 to Mortal Kombat. Thank you. What's next? Let's get. Let's get some royalty in here. Let's get some actual royalty. Yimmy Tang versus Colt in The Way of the Dragon. Yes. Yes. Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris. I think just like. Okay, we talked about the kitchen fight from Raid 2 is the most like brilliantly executed fight we've ever gotten in a movie. I think this is like the most fun fight to watch. The most tension of a movie because it starts. There's like over two minutes of them just. Just looking at each other. No words. No anything. They're just. We're gonna fight. Take my shirt off. I'm stretching. You're stretching. I'm shadowboxing. You're shadowboxing. We're getting cutaways to a stray cat who's just like watching. They go to the cat for reaction shots during it. When the fight happens, they do like a bunch of really smart stuff in there, but there's like a big music cue the first time that Chuck Norris' character steps toward Bruce Lee. Like that sort of. There's sort of little stuff in there that's like just brilliant. And this is Bruce Lee's first. Like his only. The only movie ever directed. Like a full directorial feature, but you get this big like boom when he steps toward him. They do the same thing when Bruce steps toward him. You get the like first person views during the fight where it feels like you're getting hit. The shot of Lee kicking into the camera in that fight is unbelievable. It's like a mind-blowing. It's like a movie breaking experience. And you feel it. It's like a. It's like the 1970s version of 4DX theaters. You're just like, oh, oh. Like he's hitting me. They do the great slow motion shots in the wide of them. This is Bruce Lee who is the coolest, most stylish, most influential movie martial artist we've ever gotten. And it's him at his coolest and at his most stylish and at his most influential. Like this is probably. This has probably got to be the number one, number one. I think it is. I was thinking about this this morning too. I didn't make like a full list, but I just wrote down a few that I like. And this was the first thing I wrote down because it's just like the blueprint for so many of these things. You know, like so many of the. Jackie Chan is responding to all of this. Jet Li is responding to all of this. The Matrix is responding to this. Like so many. Even the Bourne identity in some ways is responding to this by trying to subvert it because it's so beautiful. And you pointed out that the slow motion stuff where you're really letting Chuck show off his athleticism. Like he really is so gifted in this scene. It's amazing. And when you watch this as a kid, you and I probably both watched this somewhere in the 80s. But it's real. This is like. This is not. This is not Tang versus Colt. This is Bruce Lee versus Chuck Norris. This is their best guy versus our best guy. And you feel it like you're rooting for. We have. We probably felt the way like little Russian kids felt watching Rocky IV when you got to watch your guy get the shit beat out of him. Well, there's that incredible moment in that fight where he grabs the chest hair and he pulls the chest hair off and he kind of blows it off and there's still something stuck on his hand. But it's such a perfect little storytelling device with no dialogue. It's like. Yeah. This is the hairy white man come to dance with the most, you know, balletic and gifted martial artist that we've ever seen. And I love the setting of it too with like the hollowed out brick wall and. It's all incredible. Yeah, that scene is so great. Just aim the camera at him. Let him go. There's just so much charisma. Yeah. I love the phrase, martial artist, because the two of them really at that time were just total artists. Yes. Yes, they were. Yes, they were. All right, next one. This is. This is. This has got to be the like, how did they do this? This is in that category of them. And this is from The Protector, 2005. The stairs fight. Tony Jaa going up and up and up the flight of stairs. It's like a four-minute-long tracking shot of him fighting 35, 40 guys and unreal. That's one of those ones the first time you see it, where you're like, what am I watching right now? What am I looking at? How do they do this? I was wondering what Tony Jaa pick you were going to make. The one that I wrote down was just the training sequence in Ong Bak 2. Yeah. And he has many of those in his career. But yeah, I had forgotten about The Protector. That's a great one. What is it about him that makes him special? He is in the eco-wise class of like, you know, I'm an actual genius of a fighter. I can do every single thing you want me to do. You want me to do a jump-spinning back kick into a flip into a triple combo. Like, whatever. Tell me what to do and I can do those things. You don't have to bring somebody else in. And some of the other ones I'll cut to a wide and it's clearly somebody else in other movies. In a Tony Jaa movie, you're getting Tony Jaa. You're getting as much Tony Jaa as you can handle. Ong Bak, you're getting them knees. Everybody's getting a fucking knee to the face. Everybody's getting a knee to the chest from Tony and that's what makes him special. Yeah, is Tony, is he still, he must still be fighting in movies, right? I feel like his body has taken such extraordinary abuse. He's only 50 years old, you know? He's not that, but I don't know, I just feel like he's getting his ass kicked for 25 years in the movies. You know, the other thing that makes him great is that he makes everybody else look awesome. Eco is so good that you can't put him with like somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. Tony is so good that you can't put him with, you can put Tony with, he's in one of the Fast and the Furious movies. He has to fight with Paul Walker and Paul Walker looks like the greatest fighter who's ever lived because he's got Tony Jaa doing all of the stuff secretly for him. Like, he's just a really special actor. He is. He was in Furious 7 and that's his first Hollywood movie. I just learned just now that he is filming Ongbok 4, which is coming out next year. Come on, baby. Ongbok 3 is like, it's got to be almost 20 years ago the last Ongbok movie. Feed him to me. Unbelievable. Feed him. Great shout. Tony Jaa, obviously a legend. Okay, who's next? You're going to pivot away from this style of fight? I'm going to pivot away from this style of fight and I'm going to go homage. You and I were one time hanging out in Austin and you used a phrase that I'd never heard before that I instantly loved. You said, we were talking about whatever, you said, we were talking about how movies talk to other movies. And I was like, that's really, that's a very Sean Finnessy thing to say because I understood it immediately and I wanted to apply it to every single thing. So I wanted a Sean Finnessy moving, talking movies, talking to movies. Pick here. So of all of the John Wick movies, which have an endless amount of incredible fights in them, give me John Wick 3, 2 versus 1, John Wick versus Ya-Yan, Ru-Yan, and Sess-Up-R-Riff, Ramen. Because this is very much the John Wick franchise going, we saw what y'all did with the raid. We did our version of it. We want to pay homage to you by having you come to our thing and letting you beat up our main guy. Because they beat the hell out of him. They could have killed him like three separate times and they back off to be like, oh, nice to meet you, Mr. John Wick. It's an honor to fight with you. And then they beat him up again. It's so incredibly done as just an homage, just a hat tip. I was delighted watching it in the theater. Yeah. So this is the one that is in front of what looks like a big screen that's kind of flashing a lot of stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like all these glass walls that they're kicking each other through. Yes. And this is after John has endured a huge, fight through that space, right? It's almost like a museum space up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember this well. Yeah, Wick is so tricky because there's a lot of hand-to-hand, but the guns are so critical to the fighting. And I was wondering whether or not the guns would be applicable, but this is an entirely hand-to-hand fight, right? Yeah, this is all hand-to-hand. The only weapon he uses is his belt. He takes it off at one point because he's like, all right, these guys are, are beating the hell out of me. But yeah, you can't put like a, like the nightclub shootout in here or, or even the, maybe you can go with the knife fight that they have in the store. But I, I, I know I needed John Wick on here somewhere and I wanted, I wanted him talking to the movies that they ate so much of their stuff from. And I thought it was just, just such a really classy way to do it is to let them beat up your guy, beat up our unkillable assassin. Oh, these guys could kill him if they wanted to. Great, great touch. Yeah. What about, in four, when he fights, is he, is it Scott Adkins who he fights? He fights Scott Adkins. He also fights Donnie Yen. He fights, like he's hitting all of the main, like they're doing it after that. But the Scott Adkins in the fat suit is the one that I'm like, that's like one of the few that's fully hand-to-hand in four. Yeah. Did you think at all about Morpheus versus Neo? Because I was thinking about Keanu and like what Keanu's legacy is in this world. Yeah. Because he's obviously made a number of martial arts movies in his time. And even some of the bad movies. What's the, what is the name of the movie he directed that is like bad but great? Oh, wait, the 47 Ronin? Was that it? No, it's, isn't it the one where he's like, you owe me a life? Oh my God. What is the name of that movie, Shay? I'm going to figure it out. Anyway. All right, you figure it out. Morpheus versus Neo, I just remember being incredibly exciting. Though, there are a lot of cutaways and there's obviously a lot of wire work and, and Wu-Ping doing all his stuff in that movie. But that one crossed my mind a little bit because you get sold in real time on Keanu as a martial artist. You know, you've got literally got Morpheus telling him, you know, don't think you are, know you are. Yeah. It's great. That's a great one. Yeah. That is an, an absolutely great one. Okay. What's next? All right. How about this one for you? You want some, you want some wire work? Can I give you Jin versus Shu Lin in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? A must. Yeah. Can, can I give you Zhang Zi and Michelle Yeoh with some swords and some weapons going after each other? Incredible. So artistic. Also like very violent. And just like, I'm trying to cut your head off this whole time. You're trying to cut my head off. I, I just watched that clip every four weeks, pull it up on YouTube. I got to see these two get after it. Seeing, seeing them do it and then seeing Zhang at the, at the very end, just like sort of fly away. Just like, I'll see you later. Jumps 40 feet in the air. Hell yes. Yeah. This is, this is such an interesting one because it's obviously an homage to all the Shaw Brothers movies and all the Showdown movies and some Bruce Lee is in there. But you've also got this kind of like elevated style, this wuxia style that makes it seem a little bit more high-minded and makes it more of a, you know, is it, is it the, is it the best picture nominee with the, with the best fight scenes of all time? You know, like that's something I was thinking about. Like how many, how many best picture nominees are as, as violent and, and balletically psychotic as this movie? It's very rare. That's a great one though. Okay. Do you have two more for me? I've got 10 more for you if you want them. Well, keep going. Okay. Here, here, we'll go the opposite direction here. You mentioned, you mentioned Scott. We got to get Scott Atkins in here. Gimme Chambers versus Yuri Boyka in Undead. Undisputed 2, Last Man Standing. Incredible pull. Oh my God. So we have Undisputed, which was like an actual big Hollywood movie. Wesley Snipes being Reims. Prison, like a prison boxing thing. Yeah. Directed by Walter Hill. Yeah. All of the, all of the B-movie directors, all of the B-movie writers were like, that's a great setup. We'll take it from here guys. And then they just made it as goofy as possible. And you've got mixed martial arts happening inside of prison. Scott Atkins plays Yuri Boyka, this like, this, this villain who was so unbelievably great that they just gave him the franchise after that. They're like, Michael Jai White, you're out of here. This is Yuri's franchise now. But those two guys, actual brilliant fighters. This is Scott Atkins' best role. This is Michael Jai White's best role. It's ultra violent. It's big muscle men somehow moving at light speed. They're so incredibly fast. So incredibly athletic. They look like they shouldn't be able to move that way. Every time you see a big guy in a, in a fight, they move slow and these two guys were not that. And it's just, it's unbelievable to watch. It's so good. Have you, I don't think I've seen Undisputed 3. Oh my God, I've seen all of them. I probably own all of them. Yeah, I got to check out 3. Yeah, Yuri Boyka is an interesting figure. It's also like, it's, it is mixed martial arts because isn't Michael Jai White's character a boxer? And then he's thrown, he's thrown in the ring with like a psychopathic Russian martial artist. And he wins the fight with a, with a leg lock. He breaks Yuri Boyka's leg. That's right. You watch him break it. Snap. Atkins is unbelievable. He's so good. It's cool that he's kind of been like elevated to Hollywood class now and like a little out of the B-movie sphere because so many people respect him so much. But it's at the same time, it's kind of like, it's like Satchel Paige coming to the major leagues. You know, it's like he's a little past his prime in terms of what he could really accomplish. You know, like in the days of Undisputed 2, what could he have really done to Keanu Reeves? When he popped up in the rip. Oh yeah. I mean, I'm in. I'm in. Dead giveaway that he's not, he's not a good guy. Yeah. Okay. Hit me with another one. All right. How about this one? How about, I got it. We can't have this conversation and not mention Jackie Chan. Great. Okay. What did you go with? I had a couple of contenders here. Oh, I was fighting with Ken Lowe in Drunken Master 2. That's the one. That is the, that's the first, that's the second thing I wrote down after Bruce Lee Chuck Norris. There are so many Jackie Chan fights to choose from. You know, you've got the Wheels on Meals against, Benyar Kaidas. Yep. The mall fight from Police Story. Yep. That fight in First Strike when he used, when he turns a weapon, a ladder into a, into a weapon. But if you just want to see him at his absolute best, at his fastest, at his sharpest, at his most precise, you got to have him against somebody who can do all the stuff he can do. Incredible leg, leg, leg work. We mentioned the Furious earlier. There's like a direct line from Ken Lowe to Joey. He went, Naga in the Furious who's doing all of the leg stuff here. It's like, that fight is unreal. Just as good as it gets. It's a perfect showcase for two things that are, I think are really important in some of these movies. One, it's a, it is still a showcase for Jackie Chan's comic chops where he's still doing his kind of Charlie Chaplin faces. Obviously he's getting drunk and throwing up in that sequence. And so all that stuff is kind of wended into the movie. But also, Ken Lowe is such a good, what I'll say is like the victim. You know, there's always like a guy who doesn't really have the upper hand and he's got to receive a lot of the blows. And he just takes, when Chan like really powers up and he just starts taking over in that fight, Ken Lowe is, is a willing participant and able to like sell the way that you would sell in professional wrestling. So I agree. That's a great one. Drunken Master 2, one of the best fight movies ever made. So good. So incredibly good. All right. Let me give you the opposite direction. Okay. This was just, we mentioned this movie not too long ago, but give me Frank Dukes versus Chong Li in Bloodsport. Just pure, visceral, as a kid watching it. That's a guy who, I don't understand anything about movies, but I understand that's a guy on screen who will beat the hell out of me if he were to wander into my sphere of existence. And I'm watching Jean-Claude Van Damme's Frank Dukes take that guy down. So good. This is a good guy. This is a bad guy. He cheats during the match. And our good guy still wins. And he shows mercy at the end. It's all of the stuff that you want to check off as a nine-year-old watching a fight movie. It's perfect kind of remedial storytelling. You know? There's just like, you don't need to understand anything to know. This guy's bad. This guy's good. The bad guy is really big and scary. Underdog dynamic. And, you know, Jean-Claude, you know, not my favorite actor. I know you're a fan. But, uh. This is. I think this is probably him at his best. Yeah. You can see it right back here. This is a Bloodsport framed movie poster. Nice. Back here. I love it. Sit next to Primo. Wow, that's a key spot. Primo, Desperado, Blood In, Blood Out. I got it. Wow, Desperado. Did I tell you about my Robert Rodriguez experience this year? No, you didn't. Well, I didn't meet him or anything. I actually have never met him, even though he's been such a huge dude for me. But I went to go see him from Dusk Till Dawn at the Academy Museum, which is an all-time favorite. And he introduced the movie. And actually, they used it as an opportunity to announce that they were building a new Latino movie history exhibit in the Academy Museum that they were doing, like a big six-month thing where they were doing the whole history of it. And then at the end of the movie, when it ended, he came out and he was like, Hey, guys, my band is here, and I thought we could play a concert for you guys. And he played for like 90 minutes, and every song that he played, they had the screen going, so it was all the songs that he's written for his movies and all set to like action scenes from Desperado and all the Banderas playing guitar sequences and El Mariachi and everything, all the Sin City movies. It was fucking amazing. It was really, really cool. Anyway, that's a sidetrack. I don't know if there's any Robert Rodriguez fight scenes that are worth mentioning. You want to do one more fight scene? I want to do 10 more fight scenes. But if I can only do one. Yeah. Ooh. Okay, let me tell you what I still had on my list, and then I'll pick one we can talk about. I still had The Bride versus The Crazy 88. So that's not one-on-one, right? That's not one-on-one. I wrote that one down too, and to me, that's as excited as I've ever been during a fight scene in a movie. Mm-hmm. But it's an orgy of violence, right? Yes, it is. I had the bathroom fight from Mission Impossible Fallout. Oh, yeah. Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill. Yes. Ying Yang. Of course. So good. John Lark. I had, yeah. I had, I wanted to have Jet Li on here, and I was like, what's the most Jet Li I can have in a movie? Oh, the one where he fights himself at the end of the movie. Oh. You know the one? Yeah, the one. The one. The one, yeah. The one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where he's like, there's a whole string of Jet Lis, and they all, they're getting killed by one Jet Li, and it ends with two left, and they're both super powerful, or whatever. I love, I love that one. But if I could, if we can only have one more conversation, you know what? I just love this movie so much. I love the guy. I love the history. I love that it's based on a real person. I love the 10 black belts fight in Ip Man. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, you had to get Donnie in there. Yeah. Donnie Yen, a biographical film based on like the real life Ip Man, the martial arts grandmaster, famous for, he taught Bruce Lee. His movie takes place in the 30s and 40s. It sounds great. It looks great. It's him standing, in front of like this army of bad guys, all in black, with their black belts and their geese. And he's like, I want to fight 10 of them. And 10 of them get up and they fight. He does his Gatling gun punch. It's like signature move. Just breaking arms and legs. And oh my God, it's so incredibly good. It's like Bruce Lee obviously had, you know, he fights in the dojo in Fist of Fury. This was that, but better. Like actually, better. I don't know. One of the things I don't understand in that scene, how they do this, because my brain is soft and weak, is when he's got four guys standing in front of him and they're all punching him. And he's like blocking all of them at the same time. Yes. Yes. I don't know. Just the choreography of those sequences is great. There's a lot of cutting in those scenes. They're a little different from, you know, some of your like single stage, just like set the camera stationary kind of thing that you were describing with the raid too. But Donnie Yen is also just a great face actor. Like when he's like, he's like peaceful, peaceful, peaceful, peaceful, angry, you know, like just like he just turns it on. Yes. Yeah. He never looks stressed or beleaguered. He's in, again, he's in the middle of fighting 10 guys and he looks like he's eating a sandwich in the park. And it's, it's unbelievable how you can do that. Just go. If you're not familiar with Donnie Yen, just go watch Donnie Yen fights on YouTube. Oh yeah. There's 150 of these videos and every single one of them that you're like, how did he, how does he do that? How does he move that? How does he move that fast? I've never seen anybody be that fast before. I know. I feel like, um, the American film industry has kind of lost sight of what they were able to accomplish with Jackie Chan and, and with Jet Li and with, with Bruce Lee, where they grabbed them at still vital times in their careers. I say that cause like Donnie Yen, you know, Donnie Yen popped up in a Star Wars movie. He popped up in John Wick, but it was kind of like after his prime, you know, he's still great. And I still love seeing him in those films. But this was something that like, honestly, this is something like Miramax and dimension did pretty well where they would start licensing movies like Hong Kong films and then dubbing them and bringing them over and kind of releasing them in 2000 theaters. And that's how you get to know you'd see rumble in the Bronx and you'd be like, Oh, Jackie Chan, you know, like this is how you can see Jackie Chan in a movie theater. Um, unless you, you know, you could rent his movies from the video store when in the eighties and nineties when we were kids. But then there was a huge stretch of movies that were, you know, made overseas, but were made to seem like they were, were made in America. Um, and the furious is a really good example. Cause like that was a nice breakout hit when it came out. Um, in like an idle weekend in, in may or April, I want to say, but I saw it with a packed house movie theater. And it's one of my favorite movie going experiences of the year. Mine too. That final fight where it's five guys, two V two, and then a freelancer, a free, you, you introduce a free safety, the, the part in the, in the fight when he shows up and then they go, and they close up on all of the eyes. The theater that I was in, we did like a viewing for it in San Antonio, like applause erupted in applause. Exact same thing for me. Exact same thing in my screen. I was just at a regular ass screening on a Friday afternoon and people just applauding. That might be my favorite single moment at the movies this year. There are a couple of others from, you know, there's like a, you can see everything moment. There's a couple of other movies, but that is something that only a fight movie can do where you're like, it's fucking on. And that guy also, the bowling ball guy who basically is into, he's indestructible in that scene is he's a, he's a movie legend. Just throwing his weight around. Yeah. Just him. And then the, the other guy, the, the mute guy who just is like doing human scaffolding with everybody while he's fighting. Like the furious can stand with any movie that we've mentioned here today. It belongs. It belongs in that category because they just show you so much stuff you've never seen before. And it's, it's just, man, come on. I want to go. As soon as we get off. I know. I know. Well, fortunately I have it on 4k, so I'll watch it again very, very soon. It's really fucking good. Uh, Shay, what, what, what do you got to plug? What else do you want to say to the world? You did great work for us here today. Oh, thank you. I just want to say that this is, this is a, it's always a tremendous street talking to you. I'm sorry that Amanda wasn't here to say hello to, to Amanda. She would have been a little out of her depth on this chat. I think she would have been great. I think she would have had a wonderful time. You think she's seen Angbok too? I think she has, I think her favorite one is Angbok three. Could be. I'm almost certain that she would say that. Do you think she's seen Undisputed three? Yeah, I think she was in Undisputed three. It feels that way sometimes, I must say. No, this is super fun. Thank you for having me on. Thanks to CR. Thank you to Shay. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support. Next week, we have a draft, a Halloween movie draft. See you then. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Fall is here and Whole Foods Market has everything you need for cozy meals, seasonal treats, and easy entertaining. Elevate your hearty dishes with tasty, bone-in beef short ribs or New York strip steaks with no added growth hormones or antibiotics. And as the fall evenings draw in, why not get ahead of cold season with immunity shots, herbal teas, lozenges, and supplements. Make sure you look for sales throughout the month. 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