This week on Alcohollywood, Nick Ostrem joins us once more to talk the surprising cult film Samurai Cop, the recently-unearthed 1991 action-comedy starring Robert Z’Dar and Matt Hannon! The film tells the incomprehensible tale of bug-eyed karate cop Joe Samurai (Matt Hannon), his aloof partner (Mark Frazer), and their attempts to break down the evil Japanese Katana gang. Samurai Cop is a whirlwind of laughable acting, stilted dialogue, stunningly bad cinematography and more untouched boobs than you can shake a stick at. Still, we’ve got you covered with our custom cocktail and drinking rules!
(If you need more information on just what the hell Samurai Cop is, the Red Letter Media interviews with Matt Hannonhimself provide some desperately required context for the film’s unique madness.)
ANNOUNCEMENT: We’ve got a Twitter contest coming up too! Tweet @alcohollywood or email clint@alcohollywood.comwith the subject line ‘HORRIBLE BOSSES 2 CONTEST’ and tell us your favorite ‘boss’ in film history, and you may be chosen to win a prize pack of swag and promotional passes to see Horrible Bosses 2! Entries are restricted to within the United States, and the contest ends Tuesday, December 2nd, so hurry up and send us your picks!
“A dingo took my baby!” is one of the most famous lines in film history, but how does the movie itself hold up? Theo joins us as we head to the Australian outback for the Meryl Streep/Sam Neill true crime drama A Cry in the Dark (Evil Angels in Australia)!
The film follows the infamous Azaria Chamberlain case, in which a months-old baby girl was tragically lost and killed out in the outback, and their parents, Lindy (Meryl Streep, in one of her many Academy Award-nominated performances) and Michael Chamberlain (Sam Neill) are put on trial for murder. The film’s surprisingly great, with two strong performances centering a sensitive and complex drama about the way media affects public perception of events, the willingness of a discriminatory public to think the worst of grieving parents, the coding of women’s behavior in the public eye, and more. We can’t honestly recommend the film enough, along with our custom cocktail and drinking game!
Special guest Nathan Rabin of The Dissolve grabs his golden ticket, jumps through the movie screen, and joins us to talk 1993’s meta-action flick Last Action Hero! In this ballsy, flawed, filmed-by-committee action-comedy, precocious movie buff Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) gets Houdini’s magic ticket and jumps into the movie world of clichéd 80s action movie cop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Though the film’s ambitions are high, Last Action Hero is definitely not without its flaws, including its tenuous grasp of exactly what it’s parodying and other such issues discuss in detail in the podcast. Take a listen, and be sure to check out our custom cocktail and drinking rules below!
(Nathan Rabin’s written about Last Action Hero before in his book My Year in Flops, which you can get here!)
This week on Alcohollywood, we uncover a lost, forgotten cult gem with My Favorite Year! Based loosely on the early writing career of Mel Brooks and his encounter with Errol Flynn on the variety show My Show of Shows, the film swaps those two for Mark-Linn Baker (Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers) and Peter O’Toole as the hammy lothario Alan Swann. While this film is one of the few films to have a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, we had a bit more of a complicated time with it, as Jared and Clint (and guest Derek) get into a lively discussion of what works and what doesn’t work in this highly divisive comedy. Check out the debate on the episode below, along with our drinking rules and custom cocktail!
(Don't forget to check out our alternate intro below, in which an improv bit goes horribly wrong/right, and we keep it for posterity!)