Missing Real with Mike D'Arrigo

Imagine the hit musical Grease, except that everyone dropped out of Rydell High School and became biker gangs or losers.  Now reduce the number of catchy, memorable hit songs for your drunken karaoke fests and set it entirely at night in a crime-infested city with not a trace of Batman.  Sounds like a blast, don't it?  Well, it's actually a pretty cool film by the director of The Warriors and 48 Hours, featuring some notable cast members like a young Willem Dafoe doing his creepy bad guy thing.  The music's not that bad after all, a weird but appealing blend of cheesy 80's rock and doo-wop.  Top it all off with a really awesome sledgehammer battle, and we have Streets of Fire!  Y'know what?  I like this movie a hell of a lot more than Grease!  "Tell me more, tell me more", you say?  Listen to this episode.  It's electrifying!  

The year was 1984, and while Big Brother may have been watching you, in his spare time he might have also watched this excellent movie adapted from a Stephen King novel, starring a cute 8-year-old Drew Barrymore.  No ordinary kid, of course.  She's got the pyrokinesis thing going, so any time she throws a tantrum, things burn down.  She can generate the greatest balls of fire Jerry Lee Lewis could ever dream of.  Goodness, gracious!  This has been a longtime favorite of mine, thanks to the stacked cast of great actors, lots of shit blowing up, and a magnificent score by German electronic music marvels Tangerine Dream.  Our hot topic for this podcast is Firestarter!  Can you take the heat?  

Know what an event horizon is?  Hint: it is NOT a sunset at a destination wedding.  As far as I know, it's some fancy science slang for a thing black holes do.  In this case, it's a lost space vessel and the doomed mission to recover it.  This 1997 movie, starring Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus!) and Sam Neill (Damien! OK, you might need to have been born in the 70's to get that reference) is a visually stunning and intestinally purging experience that will haunt you long after you carefully return the Collector’s Edition blu-ray disc to its case and file it back among all your other sci-fi horror classics.  You do, right?  And hey, I'm not the only one who really loves this flick.  Listen to what Quan Ngo has to say about it.  This podcast will take you to hell and back.  (No guarantees on the "back" part).

Sound...the final frontier.  Because, really, once you've heard this podcast, what more is there to experience?  In this galaxy-spanning comedy supernova, we will explore the classic Kirk/Spock/McCoy era of the Star Trek movies, spanning over a decade of cinema in just under an hour.  Relive all your favorite moments, encounter all the intergalactic villains, learn some surprising trivia, chug some Romulan ale, it's gonna be fun!  To miss this episode would be highly illogical.  So kick in those engines, Mr. Scott.  Ahead warp factor nine!  (That was the fastest gear, right?  Bet the Millennium Falcon could dust their asses...)

Long movies with short characters.  We must be back in Middle Earth again!  After 8 years, Peter Jackson brought more Tolkien tales to the big screen and another epic trilogy arrived.  These Hobbit adventures were almost as awesome at the previous Lord of the Rings movies, and some of our old familiar characters show up here, but it's all top-notch action and CGI beasts done properly.  Sweeping music, slashing swordplay and a bad-ass, fire-breathing, trash-talkin' dragon make this a thrilling ride!  Let me guide you (and save you about 8 hours of your time) through all the fun and treasures of the Hobbit trilogy with the high quality dorkiness you've come to expect from Missing Real.  Pretty confident, ain't I?  Maybe my dragon name should be "Smug".  

The title of this classic sci-fi thriller might be a bit misleading.  It's not about kidnappers or grave robbers.  Get this: strange plants from space land on Earth and begin copy-pasting humans!  That means there are two YOUs!  Only the original you doesn't get to survive!  The duplicate you isn't really "you", it's an alien intelligence with a secret agenda to take over our society.  And they get you when you sleep!  This is years before Freddy Krueger got everyone downing coffee like their lives depended on it.  Sounds terrifying, don't it?  Maybe I can lighten things up a little and share my insights on this superb 1978 remake starring Donald Sutherland and the OG Spock, Leonard Nimoy!  Things are about to get highly illogical, but stay awake at all costs!  

This 1995 serial killer thriller never gets old.  Moody, dark, menacing...and intelligent!  You could learn a lot from it, including how to count.  David Fincher's gruesome masterpiece takes two detectives (Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) and pits them against a creep who commits a series of murders inspired by the "seven deadly sins".  (Personally, I only commit the safe sins.  Might as well live it up and just repent at the very end).  It's dreary and depressing all the way to the perfect shock of an ending.  But fun, too!  Just like this podcast, with the multi-talented Dave Chan giving an inside view of forensic science and what it's like to work with dead bodies in the morgue!  Eeeeeew...  Curious, aren't ya?  And one other burning question will be answered:  "What's in the BOX????"        

Movie buffs everywhere should remember the great Tobe Hooper, who terrified audiences everywhere from Texas to Salem's Lot.  Even a television set became spooky if it wasn't tuned into a channel.  This underappreciated 1985 flick I'm talking about this time features some more vampires, but they suck in a different way.  They're from space!  And one of them is a beautiful and quite often naked young lass.  They want to drain humankind of its collective energy, so if you're feeling tired, lazy, lethargic...this podcast will spark some life back into you!  Did I mention it also features Patrick Stewart?  A couple of years before he took the Captain's chair as Jean-Luc Picard, he was in this.  Don't tell Starfleet Command.  So, if you love mid-1980's special effects, zombie vampire chaos and boobs, this is your ticket to cinematic paradise, my friends!  

What seemed like a pretty goofy premise somehow became a worldwide blockbuster in 2009: a big-budget movie about tall blue cat people riding pterodactyls through floating mountains and speaking some made-up tree-huggy language.  WTF???  But we loved it, huh?  Avatar was a hit!  Finally James Cameron could go back to making entertaining movies again and snap out of his lunatic Jacques Cousteau underwater wet dream documentary phase.  He's even been hard at work for the last decade making a whole bunch of sequels, but thankfully I work a little faster and I've recorded this fascinating audio adventure that will bring back all your fond memories of Pandora...oh, right...you don't remember what Pandora is.  A streaming radio station, some jewelry shop, that chick with the box...something like that?  Well, just have a listen and it'll all come rushing back to you.  By the way, it's all in English.  My Na'vi is a little rusty. 

Ever have unwelcome guests that just won't leave?  Well, there was once a house that would actually order you to "Get out!!"  Not with Alexa or some A.I. butler, the house itself!  Of course, it was haunted, so that's worth mentioning.  Back in 1979, we had this extremely popular (and supposedly true) story of a haunted house, and The Amityville Horror swept the cinemas!  I was too busy recovering from the trauma of watching Alien as a kid to really see this movie until it was on TV sometime after, but it still conjured some fear in my youthful soul.  OK, maybe toilets that flush black tar ain't exactly terrifying, but this is a suitably eerie experience for its time.  There's a very excitable priest who's no match for the evil spirits, no matter how loudly he prays, and a typically dumb family that just can't take a hint that murder and malevolent entities inhabit their home.  Pack your bags and go stay at a hotel!  I hear the Overlook is lovely this time of year...