Tara and Andrew Versus The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide

(or: "Way to spoil a pivotal point in your movie-- you don't see them calling `Star Wars' `The Boy Who Blew Up the Death Star', do you? DO YOU?")

Continuing in the trend set in recent episodes of getting the two of us to watch movies in genres that we otherwise might not choose to watch, in this week's episode we watch Sergio Corbucci's 1967 spaghetti western, The Hellbenders. It's about a family of post-Civil War Southerners trying to get a coffin full of money back to the south so that it can rise again and get its revenge on the North. A lot of people get brutally killed along the way, but you know what? They experience a lot of laughs, and a lot of love along the way as well.

. . .

nah, just kidding! There's little to none of either of those things, just a lot of people being serious pieces of trash. As you'll hear, we had some initial misgivings about the movie early on, based on fears that we were going to be watching an hour and a half of pro-Confederacy horseshit, but that isn't what this movie is setting out to do. It's a rare movie that gets us to nod approvingly when one of the main characters is killed, and at the risk of spoiling the outcome of the movie, let's just say that our necks were sore from all of the nodding that we had done by the time the credits rolled. So much nodding!

NEXT TIME: A spaghettiless Western.

(or: "Tara and Andrew Versus Upper Respiratory Infections")

So, The Junkman is the follow-up to the original Gone in 60 Seconds, both of which were produced by, written, directed and starring this guy H.B. Halicki. He's an interesting guy who died pretty tragically during a stunt scene he was shooting for his sequel to Gone in 60 Seconds. Conceptually, this is an interesting movie-- it's quasi-autobiographical, in that it's about the director of Gone in 60 Seconds, who for some reason is being hunted down by a group of assassins who have been hired by an unknown party for unknown reasons. There's a scene in the movie where his character in the movie is directing a stunt scene that would later appear in the movie he made after The Junkman. Hoyt Axton is in it, and aside from his obligatory singing scene, we learn that he is apparently a good guy to know if you need clothes, a gun, and a car on short notice. How could any of this possibly go wrong, you wonder? Weeellllll... let's just say that the end credits sequence was our favorite part of the movie, and not just because it's weird and kind of unsettling-- seriously, check out the video below.

Also, as some housekeeping-- for the next few months we're going to be releasing episodes every other week rather than on a weekly basis, mostly because Andrew is a big baby and is all like, "boo hoo hoo, i'm in grad school and I don't want to mess up working on my big final project". Can you believe that guy? 

NEXT TIME: Samurais! Wait, is the plural of samurais just samurai? If only there were some resource readily available at our fingertips that we could reference. Alas!

We had the post for this episode nearly completely written and then our computer crashed, so here's the Cliff Notes version: movie by martin scorsese about jesus made people angry we not religious we don't mind too much.

It's worth noting that David Bowie is in this, and even though his part is slight, it still gives the movie an edge on all of the other Bowieless movies out there. Take that, A Trip to the Moon!

also:

NEXT TIME: Cars smash into each other a whole bunch. 

(or: "Irrefutable Evidence That We're in the Pocket of Big Ginger Ale")

Cleopatra Jones is a Blaxploitation movie from the early 1970's that features Tamara Dobson as a secret agent of some sort, we think? It's never made entirely clear who she works for-- the first scene shows her riding a helicopter into Turkey to briefly assess some poppy fields before having them bombed by fighter planes, which seems kind of excessive. Our tax dollars theoretically paid for that?! Anyway, this gets her on the bad side of a drug kingpin named Mommy, played by Shelley Winters, and car chases, martial arts, dirt bike racing, and people getting chopped by junkyard machinery ensues. Oh, and there's a mid-tier bad guy named Doodlebug in it, which is quite possibly the least intimidating nickname we've heard of in a while. Lil' Archie sounds tougher than that-- it at least has the potential to be an ironic nickname for some hulking, thick-skulled, short-tempered lout. In case you hadn't figured it out yet, this is basically our sales pitch for our new villain nicknaming service. Send us an email-- you'll find our rates quite reasonable!

NEXT TIME: A homage to 1960's sex comedies that nearly made Andrew fling the disc across the room. Was it out of anger or because it was just that good? You'll have to listen to find out! 

Wherein we learn about the incredibly romantic world of barge living!

Wherein we watch a surprisingly violent comedy about everyone's favorite sport, iced canes!

So, in this episode we watch 1993's The Remains of the Day, a Merchant-Ivory movie based off of the book of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro. Look, we try to go into these movies with as few preconceived notions as we can, but it's difficult sometimes. It's the kind of movie whose title conjures mental images of a person sitting stiffly drinking tea from an ornate cup. Is that fair? Not particularly. Is it far off the mark? Not particularly. It's a movie about butlers and repressed emotions and (tangentially) Nazis. If we were going for accuracy it would have been more relevant to select an image of Anthony Hopkins being a butthole to Emma Thompson for the trailer thumbnail, but that's the kind of thing that doesn't translate to still images very well, so we instead opted to go for an image from a scene with a bunch of dogs in it, which is almost as good in terms of conveying the themes of the movie. 

NEXT TIME: BLOOD ON THE ICE!