Gerrystorm

Trying to stay a day ahead of the devil, this time we’re delving into Gerard Butler’s latest release, the funny, bloody and bullet-strewn B-movie delight that is Copshop. 

Butler plays “legendary” Bob Viddick, a hired and highly skilled assassin, though he’s not very Wick-like. Smelling “like the devil's a*****e”, Bob doesn’t see killing as an art. Wick was known for killing three men in a bar with a pencil, Bob Viddick once beat a man to death with the victim’s own severed leg. Effective? Yes. Classy? Not really.

Bob is after a small time crook with big crime aspirations called Teddy (Frank Grillo), as is crazed fellow killer Tony Lamb (Toby Huss) — they meet their match in rookie cop Valerie Young (Alexis Louder) though, over one blood-soaked night in the isolated Nevada desert police precinct.

Joining me to talk about the film is writer and critic Nicola Austin, and we cover a lot in a mere half an hour: our favourite Copshop criminal. My near-miss when it came to Copshop PR gifts. How I found out that Space Dust now means something entirely different to in my youth (do not google. You googled, didn’t you). And, most importantly, the brilliance that is Alexis Louder. 

My usual warning: this episode is very spoilery (with a synopsis at the start if you need to recap)

So good they name it twice — Dracula 2000, then a few months later in 2001, Dracula 2001 — this phenomenal (pheromonal?) Butler bloodfest positions Dracula as Judas Escariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Woken from  his enforced slumbers, the undead hottie hits New Orleans, tracking down Mary Van Helsing (Justine Waddell) and her friend Lucy (Colleen Fitzpatrick, otherwise known as Vitamin C).

Joining me to talk about the film, and much else besides, is critic, screenwriter and pre-code expert Sarah Cook, who really knows her stuff: as well as Dracula(s) we look into the joys of two-star fantasy movies and we go DEEP into the genius of 1931 horror Jekyll and Hyde, and how they achieved those special effects 90 years ago. Plus — of course — Gerard Butler's tight pants.

My research for this episode involved two genre classics that I'm ashamed to say I had never dived into before: FW Murnau's terrifying black and white 1922 film Nosferatu, and Vitamin C's no1 hit Smile.

My usual warning: this episode is very spoilery (with a synopsis at the start if you need to recap)

Horribly violent. Morally bankrupt. Batshit from the first minutes. And I say that as someone that liked Law Abiding Citizen. 

This time I chatted to the delightful Harris Dang, all the way from Australia, about this B-movie thriller from 2009. Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton, a mysterious man seeking revenge a decade after his wife and child were brutally murdered in a home invasion. His target isn’t just Ames and Darby, the two killers; he’s also after Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the prosecuting attorney who cut a deal with the most sadistic of the two.

We discuss our own personal jump-the-shark moments in a movie Rotten Tomatoes rather unfairly called “unflinchingly absurd”; the bizarre Duxiana beds prison product placement; and — in a film crammed with gruesome and very different killings — which death is the best death.

Plus: put Paddington in the next Has Fallen movie, you cowards!

My usual warning: this episode is very spoilery (with a synopsis at the start if you need to recap)

This time I'm discussing the first movie outing of Secret Service agent Mike Banning, a man who attracts president-related disasters like I attract dog hair from my cream retriever when I've just put on new black trousers for a job interview. 

He's on a boring desk job at the US Treasury (Mike, not my dog), having failed to save the First Lady from an icy, watery grave. But when a North Korean terrorist overwhelms the White House and takes President Asher hostage, it's left to Mike to save the day. 

My partner in crime is film writer, Jame Bond aficionado and former primetime actor Ben Peyton from the For Your Films Only website, who knows a thing of two about fictional law enforcement having played PC Ben Hayward in the  long-running British TV show "The Bill" for two years. 

We answer THE most important Olympus Has Fallen questions: how long before Mike stabs someone in the head? How many people in total does Mike stab in the head? How do your type a hashtag under pressure? Would Gerard Butler have made a good Bond? And why did Ben's helmet explode?  

Plus my usual warning: this podcast is very spoilery. 

Coriolanus in the streets, Aufidius in the sheets...
That's our decision, and we're sticking to it.
Fascinating, cultured, and sometimes a little too scratchy — me, and also my Gerrystorm podcast episode on CORIOLANUS.  This is episode 5, and while my guest Paula and I have gone all Shakespearean I can assure you there isn't a hey nonny nonny, thigh slap or 17th century fart joke in sight.
Coriolanus came out in 2011, and stars Gerard Butler as General Tullus Aufidius, and Ralph Fiennes (who also directed) as his prickly foe General Caius Martius Coriolanus. It's a tragedy, which means it can only end in... tragedy.
But we have some fun along the way. Find out which Doctor Who alien Caius Martius Coriolanus most looks like! Ponder with us at clever, thoughtful, seen-everything General Aufidius seemingly unable to identify his greatest foe because he's grown a beard! And discover what Paula was describing when she talked about "chasms of agony, torment and despair" (no, not the phone messages to reopening hair salons from desperate women). 
In fact there are a few hair mentions, a subject close to my own heart as I prepare to emerge from UK Lockdown 3.0 looking like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.
Apologies for the audio, which at my end isn't as sharp as I'd like - hopefully you still enjoy it though.
Plus my usual warning: very spoilery, though there's quite a comprehensive synopsis at the start if you've never seen the film/play or can't remember what happens in it.

Next episode should be Olympus Has Fallen...

Cancel culture! Rip-off sequels! God! And what actually happens when you're swallowed by a whale! 

Just some of the insights my guest - 9 year old Cassian - offered up when we explored Nim's Island. 

I am pretty good at knowing the limits of my own knowledge, so it was only right that I get an expert in. Amazingly I also managed to shock him back with some Tales From The Olden Days, otherwise known as my '70s and '80s childhood. 

In this 2008 fantasy family adventure Gerard Butler plays Jack Rusoe (geddit), a widowed marine biologist living with his daughter Nim on a volcanic island in the South Pacific. Jodie Foster plays Alexandra Rover, the author of Nim's favourite adventure novels featuring the grubby-yet-brave Alex Rover, also played by Gerard Butler.  

Warning: as usual, very spoilery.

Talking Sarah through the glories and disasters of their favourite post-millennial, post-mortem romcom is PS I Love You expert and all-round Gerard Butler fan Kate Hudson – a woman who, if Oxford University actually knew anything at all, would instantly be made a GB PhD.

And they find that while PS I Love You is often trite, it's also occasionally touched by genius*, both deliberate and accidental.

*Not Gerard Butler's Irish accent.

Kate brings to the wake a deep love for the "Dead Husbands" entertainment genre, and a masterclass in how to play Snaps; Sarah wonders why Gerry's urn looks like a box for sex toys.
And Kate's cat pod-bombs them!

Warning: very spoilery...

Gerrystorm host Sarah and Tim Costa from the First Time Watchers movie podcast take on GEOSTORM – Gerard Butler's sci-fi epic which certainly set the international climate space station, if not the box office, alight when it was released in 2017.
We examine the good (Jake's romance in space), the bad (Max's terrible haircut) and the ugly (Max's terrible haircut). 
Plus: Tim on Roland Emmerich and pets-in-peril, the strange-but-true reason Sarah likes Gerard Butler, and what did happen to the Queen in The Day After Tomorrow?
Warning: very spoilery!

Gerrystorm host Sarah and Get Your Comic On's Neil Vagg chat through Gerard Butler's latest movie, Greenland – a disaster film about the Garrity family's attempt to survive a comet that's on a collision course with Earth. 

We go deep into Greenland's bleak vs hopeful outlook, discuss who stole the show, and ask why grandparents in disaster movies are just so... stubborn. But even at the end of the world we also want to know all the gossip – who exactly was John Garrity playing away with when his wife kicked him out?

Plus: would we be on a Government shelter list if a comet came calling? Would Neil save both cats or just one? And what lengths would Sarah actually go to for a seat on that plane out (it's bad and she's sorry).

Warning: very spoilery!