Month: January 2022

126 – The Keep

Gabriel Byrne confronts Michael Carter's Molasar in THE KEEP (1983)

Jen and Tim are joined by Darren “Sebebe” Herczeg to reassess Michael Mann’s profoundly flawed fantasy/horror film, The Keep! Hear the whole episode at our Patreon and get access to more than 50+ bonus episodes!

Kit Rae’s exhaustive fansite may be the definitive document on The Keep at this point, but there’s also a documentary more than ten years in the making on the same subject. You can follow the filmmakers for updates on Twitter! 

Read Michael Mann’s original screenplay for The Keep!

Watch the ending cut from the theatrical release and inexplicably appended to TV versions of the film.

And after you’ve done that, watch Mann’s wonderful telefilm The Jericho Mile so Jen will finally shut up about it.

When you’re sick of The Keep, join Sebebe for the online I Swing, You Swing game.

125 – House

Miki Jinbo as the newly-dead Kung Fu in House (1977)

Tim and Jen are overwhelmed by the raw charisma of Jacques from the Seeking Derangements podcast in a truly chaotic episode nominally about the chaotic 1977 film House!

Hear the whole episode at our Patreon and get access to more than 50+ bonus episodes!

Via Senses of Cinema, read a retrospective on Nobuhiko Obayashi’s career that also serves as a defense of his filmmaking style.

You can see a sampling of Obayashi’s commercial work on YouTube. Don’t miss the MANDOM spot starring Charles Bronson.

124 – Outland

Lobby card featuring Sean Connery in a scene from Outland, 1981

Jen and Tim revisit an old favorite, Peter Hyams’s “High Noon in Space,” aka Outland!

Jen is incorrect when she asserts that John Wayne was considered for the part of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon; Kramer and screenwriter Carl Foreman wanted a hot young star like Brando or Gregory Peck. Wayne, along with other Hollywood reactionaries including Hedda Hopper, did pressure Gary Cooper into withdrawing from a proposed production company headed by High Noon screenwriter and HUAC target Carl Foreman.

The story of High Noon and Carl Foreman is told at length in Glenn Frankel’s book High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. You can read an excerpt on the Vanity Fair website.

By the way, you can browse the Outland press kit!

For more sci-western fun, try our episode on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.!