Evil Dead II with John Hodgman

[00:00:00] Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check with Griffin and David, don't know what to say or to expect. All you need to know is that the neighbors are shy with Blank Check. I'll podcast your soul. I'll podcast your soul. I'll podcast your soul. Podcast this.

[00:00:29] Okay. Well, I have to do everything basically. I know. It's not a wordy movie. There's not a lot of quotes where you could, you know, slip it in. I also feel like the most infamous quote from this movie is groovy. Of course. One word.

[00:00:44] Am I here or not here? You're here. You're here. You could've done some chainsaw noises, I suppose. Yeah. Or just said podcast. Podcast! We just podcasted our girlfriend. Does that seem okay to you? That's a good one. Yeah, that's actually probably the best. Right. Does that sound fine?

[00:01:04] Sound fine. Yeah. I'm looking at this one. After all, I'm a man and you're a podcast. At least last time I checked. Yeah, there's some pretty good ones, actually. That was his corny. But like now I'm looking at the page and it's like workshed. Right.

[00:01:23] That's a line. Groovy. That's a line. Groovy. That's a very ADRed line. I noticed that again. Producer Ben made a good point right before we started recording.

[00:01:32] We should probably devote the first like 10 to 12 minutes of this episode to redoing our Evil Dead 1 episode, but just like bullet points, like faster speed. But we nailed that episode. Or maybe we blew it. This is the only problem. Ramy nailed Evil Dead.

[00:01:47] But also recasting. Right? We got to recast a little bit. Better recast me. Half the cast. Someone is different. It's not Ellen Sandweiss or whatever her name is. Yes. Yes.

[00:01:59] I think, look, this movie has like such a legendary status in so many different ways. And I think the fact that for so long that was never really explained. That people were like, so is it a remake or is it not? Right.

[00:02:14] And then I feel like in the last five or 10 years, Ramy and Campbell have both been like, we didn't have the rights to the first movie. We want to sort of do a previously on. Right. We couldn't. So we just remade it more quickly with less people.

[00:02:27] Also, they did want to make it. Right. They wanted to make Army of Darkness. Right. But it was De Laurentiis who said, no. Why don't you just make Evil Dead 2? Again. Right. But Evil Undead, right? That was their... or no, no, no. Medieval Dead. Medieval Dead.

[00:02:43] That's it. Sorry. Evil Undead. That's not funny. It's kind of like the Aliens pitch. Evil Dead and then M-E-D. You know, like that's funny. Yeah. Except the aliens with a cash symbol. Right. Dollar sign at the end makes sense to every Craven Hollywood producer.

[00:02:59] Right. That was the De Laurentiis. I see no symbols for money in this thing you wrote there. Medieval Dead is like a very Sam Raimi idea. Right. It's like, how about we take the thing that is recognizable, that everyone knows, and we throw it into a Ren Faire?

[00:03:14] Right. Right. Everyone will be like, ah, it's killing the alien! And it's like, they're not in a cabin at all. I feel like this is going down. Right. Oh, no. I feel like my mic is drifting down. Ben's mic just drooped. Ben, your cranes have real performance anxiety.

[00:03:31] It's been a while since I've done this, but I do feel like there's a new Ben nickname I need to add. I'm not going to run through all of them. I trust this is a nickname of approbation and celebration of Ben, not derision.

[00:03:43] I think it's, look, I think... I don't want to be responsible. I view it as a positive. I think it's an honorific. Say it again. He might take Umbridge. Say it again. The new nickname I want to give him is the Futser.

[00:03:54] Oh, he is a bit of a futser. He's a futson. We're hopefully working towards finally getting a studio, semi-permanent professional home to record our podcast in for the first time since the pandemic. Right.

[00:04:07] But it means that Ben's always constructing and deconstructing a record set up for every episode. He loves to futz. I feel a little bit like my energy is... Who's the dusty boy in Charlie Brown? Pigpen. Pigpen?

[00:04:22] I feel a little bit like my energy is just chaos before we get recording because I'm always just like, I want to set up and get this going. So anyway... I disagree. You're a calming presence from the moment I stepped in. Excellent. Pigpen isn't like a busybody.

[00:04:35] He's just got shit fucking swirling around him. Yeah, you're dirty as shit. That's true. You've got flies. I mean, I've got flies. I've got dust. So I guess that's why my head went there. But that would be more Pigpen, I think. That would be more Pigpen.

[00:04:48] Look, this is a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm the futzer. You're the futzer. Yeah. Is Pigpen the best Charlie Brown character? Hardly. Pigpen's the funniest creation, I think. Obviously, like Linus and Lucy and Charlie are rich, interesting characters.

[00:05:04] But it's sort of like The Simpsons. Take the main cast, the main guys off the board. Side characters. So we're talking like Schroeder and Peppermint Patty and all this. I have an obvious answer. I think Pigpen's deal is the funniest comedic conceit. That he always has.

[00:05:24] He's always dirty, for sure. But just the idea of this kid who's so dirty it creates its own ecosystem. And it is a classic kid thing. There is always that kid who's got jam on his hands or whatever.

[00:05:33] But I have my answer for who the best non-Trinity character. Obviously, Snoopy and Woodstock are out. They're a whole separate universe. But they're out too. Charlie, Linus, Lucy. Are you a Shermey guy? You're a Shermey guy, aren't you? My answer feels so obvious.

[00:05:50] And I feel like it's a Ben guy. But I've always loved him. It is a male identifying character. Spike. Spike? Who's Spike? Spike is Snoopy's cousin who's got real Harry Dean Stanton energy. He's always hanging out by the cactus or whatever. He's got a mustache. The American Southwest.

[00:06:11] There he is. He's that guy. Oh, yeah. This guy rules. I remember him. Are you pro-Shermey? No, I just love characters that just disappear. Don't matter. Like Hutchinson Cunningham's brother. Shermey was the star of the show. Yes, he was. Charlie Brown was a geek that no one liked.

[00:06:32] The great first issue of a panel. How I Hate Him. It's still the perfect joke. It's so good. The whole thing's right there. And such an amazing realization to go like, what if the panel's about this guy that everyone hates inexplicably?

[00:06:50] That the universe is just like, I don't know, something about him. Parents in the neighborhood give him rocks for Halloween. Adults. Right. Everyone's just like, he's not ill-intentioned, but something about this kid bums me out. So now I'm on the Peanuts website. Okay, here we go.

[00:07:06] Peanuts.com I presume? The characters. Peanuts.com. Oh. The characters that they give. That would have been a hell of a one to sit on. I know. 1995, just registering peanuts.com. Whoever wants it. Some peanut farmer. John Kimble down in North Carolina. Planters. Sending his daughter to college.

[00:07:23] The characters that they list, the like 11 characters they list as being worthy of like individual profiles. Can I try to guess them? Let's hear it. Sure. Okay, I mean, obviously, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock, Schroeder. Yep. Does Sally make the cut? She sure does. Peppermint Patty? Yep.

[00:07:43] Marcy? Okay, we're at nine. Franklin's got to be there. Franklin. They have to put Franklin in the 11th character. Human? Yeah, we've named him. We've named him already? Yeah. Shermy? No, Pigpen. Oh, Pigpen. He makes the 11. Of course. But like so not everyone.

[00:07:59] The personality distinction really drifts after the top five. And he's got a great little avatar there. Little avatar, yeah. All his little dirt cloud. I'm into Schroeder. I fuck with Schroeder. I like him. I was going to say Schroeder feels- Schroeder is my favorite.

[00:08:11] Schroeder's got big Hodgman energy. Does Cool Joe not count as his own character? Joe Cool. Oh, I'm sorry. Joe Cool. Wow. I think he counts as his own character. I really fucked up there. But that's an alter ego to Snoopy, right? Right. But like do you count like-

[00:08:24] But Snoopy doesn't remember when he's in that moment. The Red Baron or any of the other- Yeah, the Red Baron. Well, he's fighting the Red Baron. He's always fighting the Red Baron. Dissociative identity disorder. The War Ace or whatever you call it. That's my understanding.

[00:08:33] We're both having conversations at the same time. It's kind of like how Calvin, you know, like Spaceman Smith is sort of a distinct character, but he's also Calvin. I just love that the peak of coolness in the Peanuts universe is this dog putting on sunglasses

[00:08:43] and everyone being like, oh wow. And a sweatshirt that says Joe Cool on it. Right, right. So people know. It does say his name. It's true. Joe Cool. There's nothing cooler than a sweatshirt with your own name on it. This guy's so fucking cool.

[00:08:54] I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud of him. He's so fucking cool. Um, yes. This is a podcast about Peanuts. I mean, I'd be interested.

[00:09:06] One panel per ep? One panel per ep. Or one strip per ep. One strip. Yeah, you gotta get three panels. It's not a one panel comic. I'm surprised that... This isn't some Family Circus shit. No. Well, maybe we could do a Family Circus podcast. No, thank you.

[00:09:17] That's okay. There's a lot to mine there, I'd say. It's disturbing. In the Family Circus? Yeah. Absolutely. There's plenty to look into there. Has someone tried to do the one strip per episode Peanuts podcast that will take 16 minutes or whatever? Jonathan Franzen is doing it in secret.

[00:09:33] Sufjan Stevens announced it, but he's only done like three of them. He did the first two and then he did a random one from the 70s. Right. And then he did a zit. Yeah. He did a week on shoe. No one knows why. Comic strips.

[00:09:50] I do love comic strips. It's actually a sort of... I've got too many obsessions, but it's a quiet one of mine. Side podcast on comic strips. Do you ever read the comics curmudgeon, Josh? Yes. Love it. That's mostly how I keep up with them these days.

[00:10:02] Shout out to Josh. Because finding a newspaper that actually has a comic strips in it is a depressing enterprise. And when I was a kid, I'd be like, give me the daily news, baby. They have like eight pages of them. When Mark Trill changed... It's very strange.

[00:10:20] When Mark Trill changed its art and creative direction, the letters that the Portland Maine Press Herald got were amazing. Mark Trill looks like this now. It used to kind of look like Dick Tracy or any of those sort of classics. Right. It was very illustrative. And very square.

[00:10:39] Now it looks like 2002 webcomic. Yeah, a little bit. Like not even present day webcomic. Do you guys remember the Lockhorns? Of course. They're still going. Single panel. Single panel. And this is the whole thing.

[00:10:52] And Josh at the Commerce Commission has addressed it where it's like, now if the Lockhorns are like a grumpy married couple in their 40s, they're like millennials. Because of the way time just moves. What if there were an update to the Lockhorns? Sure.

[00:11:10] And all of a sudden they're people in their 30s. Right. Who got married a little too young because they were looking for benchmarks of adulthood because they couldn't get jobs. Now they're arguing about soy lattes. They had huge social, huge educational loans. They keep playing their tamagotchis.

[00:11:27] They couldn't rent an apartment, never mind buy a home. There's no way to become an adult other than getting married. Look at this millennial ass Lockhorns caption. Okay, so they're at a marriage counselor. Right? And they both look miserable and the marriage counselor looks like Sigmund Freud.

[00:11:39] I assume 90% of their household expenses are marriage counseling, right? Like in various forms. Right. Kajmen, do you want to read the caption? The main reason Leroy and I stay together is to share the Amazon Prime account. I mean that is like a millennial concern.

[00:11:52] This is what I'm saying. And this speaks to the theme of the movie that we're going to discuss in about two weeks from today. It does. Is that it's destabilizing. That image is destabilizing because that caption is relatively contemporary and something that a millennial couple might say.

[00:12:11] But every visual signifier in that is 1950s, 1960s suburban couple. And his name, of course, is still Leroy. Leroy Lockhorn. They remain rooted in whenever— He's got that one—he's got that bald pate with the one hair sticking out.

[00:12:27] The thing I was going to say about the Lockhorns, the reason I even invoked them, I read aloud the passage from the book of the Lockhorns and brought them into this room.

[00:12:36] I, as a kid, for whatever reason—my dad would make a big ceremony out of like it's Sunday, you know, and that means the comics. Yeah, the funnies. Let's slap open the Daily News, read the Sunday funnies.

[00:12:47] For whatever reason, I got in my head that the Lockhorns were called the comics. So when I would open that page, the first thing I would do is read the Lockhorns and I'd go, not very funny. Let me read these other things.

[00:12:59] Wasn't it that they were at the top and it just said the comics? I don't know. I just thought for some reason they were called the comics. Who would put the Lockhorns at the top? That's not what you want to leave with.

[00:13:08] But I was like, they're the titular comics and then there's some other strips. And I'd be like, why do they get top billing? And my dad would be like, they don't and they're not called the comics.

[00:13:15] Only one entity is going to knock peanuts out of that top slot of the Sunday comics. And that is the lovable fat feline known as Garfield. Well, this guy. I remember Garfield's ascent. You weren't even born yet.

[00:13:31] I remember Garfield hitting the scene, knocking peanuts out of the top of the Boston Globe comics. Look, I don't want to anger him. I was born into a post-Garfield America. I knew nothing but Garfield. I don't want to anger him. Maybe it wasn't peanuts. Maybe it was Doonesbury.

[00:13:45] Do you know what it was? Well, Doonesbury was kind of... Yeah, Massachusetts, of course, Doonesbury at the top of the comics. It is Monday. I don't want to piss Garfield off, but it's his least favorite day. I love Mondays.

[00:13:57] He did tweet this yesterday, which I thought was genuinely funny. For those of you not in the room, it is a tweet from at Garfield, presumably. Sent on Sunday. Tweeted on Sunday, dreading tomorrow. And let's say all lowercase, no punctuation.

[00:14:16] How long have they been sitting on that joke? Do they do it every Sunday? Have they been waiting this whole time? It's 2022. Not to date us. For this will be an episode that shall live forever. People are trying to carbon date. It's a Monday tweet.

[00:14:29] He doesn't do that every Sunday. What did he do last Sunday? Last Sunday would have been the 20th. Anyone excited for Euphoria tonight? Right, exactly. Last Sunday, he just tweeted this. It's kind of a weird tweet. Sent Odie on an errand so we can't talk.

[00:14:46] So we can talk about him. We're going to gossip about Odie now that he's on an errand? Also, he's a dog. What? You're sending me good onions? You know the person who writes the Twitter Garfield account is a listener to Blank Check. You know this.

[00:15:02] We're going to get the message. Just desperately trying to get fired. Every day they're like, surely someone will notice this. I don't know, but hey, person out there, if you're within the sound of my voice,

[00:15:12] my name is John Hodgman, by the way, I'm the guest on the show. John Hodgman, Gentleman John Hodgman, the judge. Get DM me. My DMs are open. I want to know what your life is like. I want to know.

[00:15:22] All off the record, I won't repeat anything, but holy moly. I do feel like this is increasingly a thing where we'll hyperfixate on some very specific, like who's the person who does this? Could you imagine being the IP lawyer for Space Shaman New Legacy?

[00:15:36] And then some guy will slide on our Reddit and he's like, hey, so I quit recently, but I was the IP lawyer on Space Shaman New Legacy. Or we were like ragging on Mill Creek Entertainment cover art.

[00:15:45] And then some guy on our Reddit was like, that's my wife. And he said they played it in the office and everyone liked it. They were like, we like the attention. It's so great when people have jobs. People have jobs.

[00:15:56] And you know, I'm not saying this to make fun. I'm fascinated with the person's job it is to write, and I'm sure they're a blankie. They did a great tweet. Or I'm sure a blankie. They just did a great tweet. They just did a great tweet.

[00:16:07] Tweet of the year as far as I'm concerned. It's early still, but it's up there. But I just want to say, if you don't make yourself known, or if you're a blankie and you know who this is, don't come into my DMs.

[00:16:17] Or if you feel more comfortable, Griffin or Davidson, their podcast. No, go to John. Because I will insist on coming back on this show and modulating my voice and pretending to be the anonymous Garfield tweeter.

[00:16:29] You want this person to reach out to you so you can get their voice down so that you can play. No, because it's going to be my character from now on. Right. No, that's what I'm saying. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you very much.

[00:16:38] I was really happy that you reached out to me. Buffalo Bill running the… This is a podcast about filmographies. Yep. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers, much like Jim Davis, Garfield and Early Breakout. Sure.

[00:16:51] Or Charles Schultz, pretty much hit it on the first time out, right? I guess so. Yeah. He just walked in there and he was like, here's the pitch, they're six years old, but they're miserable. Full body depression. Our only request is you change the name to Peanuts. Yeah.

[00:17:08] Which was their request. I know, he was like, why would I call it Peanuts? And they were like, you got to do it. What were you going to call it, Charles? Sad Fox? Yeah, right. I thought he was going to call it Charlie Brown, right? Misery.

[00:17:18] He was going to call it Lil Folks. Right. That's right. Or he had a thing called Lil Folks. Maybe that's what it was. No, I think you're right though. No, I think you're right. Hey, we should talk about… I met him once. I met him once.

[00:17:29] Did you meet him? Wait, hang on, sorry. You met Charles Schultz? You met Charles Schultz? When I was a little kid, I went on like a tour of his… Museum? Yeah, I guess his studio, I don't know. There's a Schultz museum, right, that I think is… There is.

[00:17:40] That's a good question. Did you… Last thing I'll say about Comic Strips, because Charles Schultz was a big supporter of Kathy Guy's White. Did you listen to Jamie Loftus' Kathy podcast? No. I've been meaning to. Her phenomenon is really good.

[00:17:51] The whole thing with Jamie is she's so intelligent and ambitious that I am so staggered by how good her ideas are, and then I'm like, I can't wait to listen to that. And then I sort of like… I know.

[00:18:01] I put it in my feed, and I'm like, oh, because now she's got the hot dog thing going. I didn't even know about the hot dog thing. That's her next… Is it happening? She's touring with it right now, I think. Oh, wow. Holy moly.

[00:18:11] Or about to tour, maybe. She's been eating hot dogs around the country. I know that. Oh, boy. And I was just texting with her, and she was just briefly… And I was like, this is so good. I wish I had thought of that. I know. Anyway, she's great.

[00:18:22] She's great. We'll never be on the show again. This is a mini-series on the films of Sam Raimi, Samuel Raimi. It is called Podcast Me to Hell. Do you approve? I approve. I didn't even think about this. I want to pod me of Dark Cast. I love that.

[00:18:37] Thank you. Sure. I think… But you suggested this title. You're trying to make a war here. I'm not trying to make a war. I'm just letting people know some of my alts. Some of them, yeah. What were your others? That's tough. Ben had a really good pitch.

[00:18:51] It was clean, which was… Do you want to say Ben? Yeah, Ben. I don't remember it exactly. I believe it was Spider Pod 3 Cast. Yeah, he just… Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The big detail was the three breaking off.

[00:19:03] It sounds like something fell down the stairs, stopped, and then somehow fell down a couple more stairs. You're like, it's done, right? But like, no. No, Cast. Much like Bruce Campbell sitting down in that chair and it collapsing just when you think the sequence is over. Right. That's…

[00:19:19] God. It's such a… That's one of those moments of the entire movie in a microcosm, which is like finally there's a breather moment. Everything quiets down. He sits down in the chair and the chair is like, fuck you. You know that chair is going to collapse. Yeah. Right.

[00:19:33] This guy cannot win. This is his definitive film. Yes. Right? Sam Raimi's definitive film. It's hard to argue. I think so, because I think obviously the Spider-Man movies are his peak of success, but they belong to more than him, right? He's achieved different levels of success.

[00:19:50] Obviously, Simple Plan is probably his most well reviewed, critically respected film, at least at time of release. But this is the Sam Raimi experience. And I would say a super good movie. A wonderful movie. I'm very excited to rewatch. A wonderful motion picture. Yeah.

[00:20:03] One of the reasons we've been eager to do him for so long is you have these two trilogies on either end that are so important in popular American culture. And then in the middle, there's this run where he's like, should I make grown up movies?

[00:20:18] And he does them very well. He does them very well by and large. He does everything good. Yeah. I would agree. And he's always, he got into horror kind of as a practicality. Yeah. Yeah. Because they were making weird- Yes.

[00:20:33] Three Stooge style, goof off Super 8 movies with each other. Yeah. No, no. I mean, obviously that was their plan with this first one. Comedy obviously is a big part of this movie. Well, I think that's what makes this movie so definitive.

[00:20:46] It's like, as you said, out of practicality, Judge John Hodgman, Gentleman John Hodgman, Co-creator and star of Dicktown. Oh, I don't think I was going to let that slip. Oh, okay. Thank you. To back up for a second here, actually, to introduce you more properly.

[00:21:01] Dicktown, a wonderful TV show. Hey, thank you very much. It is. And I'm biased because you have kindly employed me on it. You're in it. You're in it. But I did tell you- And before I leave here today, I am going to break my disclosure agreement.

[00:21:15] I'm going to show you your episode because you're really good at it. And I predict you're going to get an Emmy Award. Wow. Which is kind of the best award in TV. You've got to be intelligent.

[00:21:25] John, I don't want to put pressure on you, but every time someone has predicted that, they have been so wrong. Wait, who's predicted? Who's predicted? When has that happened? On the set of Search Party. That's my big dinner party episode. I mean, it's a very good episode.

[00:21:38] Charles Rogers, friend of the show, past and future guest, was like, I think you're going to win an Emmy for this. And I was like, Charles, come on. The problem with- And question- Wasn't submitted. I think I was not submitted. Were you nominated? I was going to say.

[00:21:49] The issue is- Then they had no choice. You know, I'm a member of the Academy. Yes. I'm on the group thread. Yeah. They were saying, where's Griffin? Where's Griffin? Yes. I'm like, I don't know. We all wanted to vote for you.

[00:22:02] A guest actor in a comedy, it's like half SNL hosts. I know. And then whatever. Well, and that show took a while to break out. That's true. And then Kevin Smith, another person, will never be on this podcast.

[00:22:12] Literally four of the five nominees last year were SNL hosts. And then the other one was Morgan Freeman in the Kaminsky Method. Fuck things up. Because it used to be- They used to be nominated for variety performance or whatever. Right, right. Now it's all fucking hosts.

[00:22:26] I'm telling you, this is my prediction. Take it to the bank. Yeah. Griffin Newman nominated as Lance- I'd love it. In the 11 minute episode known as The Mystery of Lance's Lesson. Wow. Dicktown, season two. I'm in two episodes this season? You are in two episodes. But I- Right.

[00:22:49] One episode. Your big episode. The one you're being considered for. Well, can I tell you who the nominees were for outstanding voiceover performance last year at the Emmys? I'm not going to say voiceover because they're going to change the category.

[00:22:59] I'm just saying because I'm already running for Oracle. I'm afraid of splitting votes. No, you're getting both. You're going to get both. It's so wild, I have to tell you last place. This is your competition. These are not divided by gender. These are just voice performance. Right.

[00:23:12] So Maya Rudolph won for Big Mouth, which is a very fun performance. Sure. Then Stacey Abrams, the politician- Future governor of Georgia. Georgia politician, was nominated for Black-ish. Recently she narrated the election special, I think. Okay. Julie Andrews was nominated for- Bridgerton.

[00:23:31] Bridgerton, which I guess does she do- Being the narrator. Some doon narrating there. Hey. Seth MacFarlane was nominated for Family Guy. Now he voices various characters on that show. That's a little more of a robust performance. Wait, for an old season of Family Guy? No, for a current-

[00:23:44] That show is still on? Of course it is. The 19th season or whatever the hell it is. Wow. And if you need to catch up, check out FXX any hour of any day. Hey. All right.

[00:23:55] Sometimes you just slip a Dicktown in on a commercial break between two episodes of Family Guy. We found out that they were airing us on FXX at 10 PM on Thursdays, and it turns out it's not 10 PM.

[00:24:03] In classic, because we were interrupting a noon to 2 AM Family Guy block. I remember when they launched FXX, they were like, it's perfect. Alternative comedy can go here. Yeah. Oh, look, we couldn't be more thrilled to be joining the Family Guy family on FXX.

[00:24:24] In the tradition of Family Guy on FXX, we're not only on at 10, same episode, 10.30, same episode, 11. We got a threefer. Wow. You just do it over and over. Every Thursday in March. And you're out of cake. And then flew the next day.

[00:24:38] You're not a slice of cake anymore. Not a slice of cake anymore. No, you're not in cake. The cake thing- Solid Dicktown. A little difficult to communicate, I felt. They were our incubator and our home. I like cake. By the way-

[00:24:48] Dicktown would not exist if there were not cake. I love Dicktown, and I liked watching cake as a whole. I would watch the full episodes. Right. But I understand from your position, it was hard to be like, here's my new show. It's part of a different show.

[00:24:57] It's part of a different show. And if you Google the name of that show- Right. You will see a picture of a birthday cake. Right. And if you Google Cake FX, it might be a cake with some sparklers on it. That's true.

[00:25:10] But the cake was very good to us. And now we have our own block in the Family Guy block. Yeah, beautiful. Can I finish the nominees? Yes, sorry. My plug is over. So two of these already, for me, don't count because they're not animation.

[00:25:23] It should be its own live action voiceover category. Let's get Stacey Abrams and Emmy Nam. And then so two actors from Central Park, which is the Lauren Bouchard show. I've never seen it. Okay, Stanley Tucci? Stanley Tucci and Titus Burgess. Okay. But I haven't watched that show.

[00:25:39] That's an Apple TV, right? Yeah. And then Jessica Walter getting a posthumous nomination for Archer. Oh, that's cool. Which I don't think she'd ever gotten before. Yeah, had never gotten before. That was last year? That's last year's voiceover. My Rudolph was the one. They snubbed Jessica Walter.

[00:25:55] And they snubbed Michael K. Williams. Last year's Emmys were pretty fucking rude. Well, you know, it's sort of this thing of like – Because we come from the house of Archer. Big Town comes from – Sure, absolutely. You've got a similar visual style. I didn't know this. That's very upsetting.

[00:26:08] But I mean, like, what happened with Chadwick Boseman where it's like you can want to have your nice moment. I don't want to talk about that. But, like, at the end of the day, it's thousands of voters. It's hard to control.

[00:26:19] I really lost control on Twitter and it was like – Oh, I remember you actually were very upset about it. You were inconsolable about it. Yeah. Not a lot of people were trying to console me. No, but you –

[00:26:30] A lot of people were trying to tell me that I was an a-hole. I did not, but you were texting me and you were like, explain to me how this could possibly happen. You were like, I want your insight into how this could have happened.

[00:26:38] We don't need to talk about this if it proved John DesMorae. I had no idea that people in England in particular would get so mad at me for suggesting that Anthony Hopkins – who were like, you know that it's an acting contest, right?

[00:26:51] I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, there's no technical KO in acting. It's not a point system. It's just objective choice. Judges holding up. But that's the thing. That's the thing about it is it's the same with even the Olivia Colman win or whatever. Yes.

[00:27:10] It's less shocking, but everyone's like, oh, Glenn Close will win. So they're just looking at their ballot and they're like, well, she's winning. I'll just vote for whoever I like. I'll just vote for the person I like. Oh, yeah.

[00:27:19] Everyone knew quote unquote that Chadwick Boseman was going to win. So it was a very interesting thing that happened. Now, look, we've set up many threads here. Here's one I'm going to try to tie back in. Yeah, this right now is real messy yarn. People probably love it.

[00:27:35] These sick fucks. You reach out to me. Yeah, reach out to you. Dick Count Cook with David Rees, the great David Rees, another past feature guest of the show. The great David Rees. Absolutely. And you said like we produced this season.

[00:27:49] We didn't know if it would be part of Cake or FX or when they place us in the lineup. They just told us it's premiering much sooner than we thought. We need to go out and promote things. Can we do anything on the podcast?

[00:27:59] We don't need to do anything. You want to. You want to. You're proud of the show. You want to share the news with the world about the thing that we made and love and features you. Yes, because we like you. And you, David, and you, Lynn, too.

[00:28:12] Your characters were cut. I'll be on the show if you want me. I'm not a very good actor. But you were like, we want to promote it. And I said, you know, we record semi-far in advance. We plan out even further in advance.

[00:28:24] I knew there was no hope. Right. You left a voicemail, which has now been played at this point. Thank you. I said, just in case anything shakes loose, I want to remind you that I was Bruce Campbell's literary agent. I didn't need reminding. I remember that very well.

[00:28:38] I knew this about you, but I had forgotten. I had forgotten. And you went, I got a lot of thoughts. I could talk a lot about.

[00:28:44] From what I told you, from what I remember you telling me, it wasn't just that you had done, that you were the one who pitched him. You were the one who like had the idea kind of.

[00:28:52] And that book was a thing that sort of in a lot of ways changed his career where people were like, he sold those numbers. There's that level of fan base with this guy.

[00:29:01] I don't even know if what we talked about is going to stay in with regard to nerd power. Did we talk about that on Mike? I don't know. The Lord of the Rings. No, that was off. That was off Mike.

[00:29:12] Before we got here, we were talking about the year 2000. Yes. Lord of the Rings was about to come out and I was doing some writing for magazines at that time.

[00:29:23] Having sunsetted from my position as a professional literary agent at Writers House, a major literary agency in New York City. Yeah. Have you heard of Twilight? Yes, I have. Yeah. We know that one. Jody Reamer at Writers House. You're welcome. Saved publishing. Literally saved publishing. Yeah.

[00:29:41] Anyway, when I was doing some write-ups of Lord of the Rings, off camera, off the books, off the record, publicists were saying like, this is going to be terrible. Real humans don't care about hobbits. Like the movies, they'll just go over a lead brick or whatever.

[00:30:00] Like a lead brick or a lead. I don't even know if there's another lead thing that you could even talk about. It felt like- It'd be taking calls to Newcastle. Sure. I had only read The Hobbit at that point. Had friends who loved the books. Right.

[00:30:12] But I felt like the consensus was Die Hard fans largely saying, they're going to fuck this up, right? It's going to suck. Well, Die Hard fans have always hated Tolkien. Of course. I mean, the fact is people who love Die Hard are not Tolkien fans.

[00:30:25] This is very true. The John McClane-ers of the world. It's a huge rivalry. It goes back all the way to 1980. Which is funny because both franchises were defined by barefoot protagonists walking across very difficult terrains. That's true. But then I think Die Hard fans were also like-

[00:30:42] I have a ring now. Ho, ho, ho. Right. Yeah, right. Die Hard fans were like, they're going to fuck up these things we love. And also the normies are going to hate this.

[00:30:50] And then the thing we love is going to be associated with some fucking flop that doesn't even represent what we love. And the fact that it was- There was suspicion on both sides.

[00:30:58] Everyone was just like, this can't work and it's going to be embarrassing and it's going to make it more difficult to make any movies like this ever again. And at the same time, so flashback a few years earlier. Right.

[00:31:10] Young John Hodgman has gotten a promotion from the reception desk to the third floor at Writers House working for Susan Ginsburg, my mentor. Okay. An incredible literary agent.

[00:31:20] One of the most fun places to work except the worst place in the world for me to work because I knew I didn't want to do it for a living. Sure. I was too scared to leave. Right.

[00:31:29] But one way I made it fun for myself was we got the internet, mid-90s. Woo! Sure. The sun came up. And nothing was ever bad again. That's right. In the 1990s, we thought the world got fixed with that internet. Window opened.

[00:31:43] And once we had relatively high speed internet, the first things I AltaVista'd at the time were of course my name, Zero Hits. Went to Lycos, nothing there. Lycos. Excite. Ask Jeeves. Jeeves said no. Jeeves shut the door. Jeeves shut the door on me. Yeah. Not admitted.

[00:32:04] And then I probably searched Blade Runner because that's what it did. GoFetch, was that something? Could have been. Possibly. There was a dog one. Web Crawler. In 1999, someone's like, if it isn't a thing, I'll give you $1 million on the spot for it. Yeah, exactly. GoFetch.org.

[00:32:19] And then I Googled Bruce Campbell because I loved Bruce Campbell. Jonathan Colton and I both loved Bruce Campbell. I was an Evil Dead person. He was a Briscoe County, Adventure of Briscoe County. I was about to say, was it just Evil Dead or was it Briscoe County?

[00:32:31] Or what else would have? And years and years before, my high school friend, Nick McCarthy, who is a movie director whom you should know and have on the podcast at some point, he directed a horror movie called The Pact. Oh, yes, yes. And others.

[00:32:47] He hosted – he would have friends over to his house to stay up all night and watch bad movies and showed us The Evil Dead. This was before Evil Dead 2 came out. Sure.

[00:32:58] And initiated us into the cult of Bruce Campbell and many, many other movies and filmmakers that are really important still to me today. It was like a master class. He felt like a turnkey. It was like a no-dose master class, 3 AM.

[00:33:10] He felt like a turnkey in that period where it's like, do you know Bruce Campbell? Yeah. If you get Bruce Campbell, you're sort of like locked into –

[00:33:18] And what a lot of the internet was at that point was weirdos and oddballs and nerds who had existed on different planets except when they would get together at conventions were now sending pings out into the darkness and finding each other. Right. It's still exciting to. Yeah.

[00:33:34] Like a wise person. So you like Bruce Campbell? I like Bruce Campbell. Right.

[00:33:38] And Bruce Campbell's career at this point is such an interesting place because it's like daytime syndicated genre shows aside, he is primarily a regularly working character actor in big budget movies where you're like that guy. He plays like smug assholes or slicksters or whatever. Right.

[00:33:56] And then to a certain subsection, you're like, do you know that he's like – he's a movie star. He's a leading man. Yeah. That guy showing up in a movie feels like fucking Sean Connery walking onto a submarine or whatever.

[00:34:06] I mean that was essentially what became the pitch for the book. Right. Which I think started as Confessions of a B-Movie Actor. Yes.

[00:34:15] And then due to a fan contest, Bruce chose one of several hundred submitted titles and he chose some fan submitted title which was If Chins Could Kill. Right. Which is a very funny title. Because of his pronounced chin. But the pitch was you don't know who this is.

[00:34:33] Right. I would say you don't know who this is. But if you go to a hotel where there is a horror movie convention or a science fiction movie convention, in the lobby he's a shemp. He's a nobody. He's a nothing. Right. In the convention hall he's Elvis.

[00:34:47] He's the king of the world. And he moves between those two worlds. I was watching this movie last night with someone who had never seen it before and her immediate thing was like, who is this guy? What happened to this guy? Right.

[00:34:59] And I was like first of all, you've seen him in like probably 40 things. You've seen him in stuff. I was saying the same thing with my wife. I remember Spider-Man, he's the theater usher. Come on, you know him. And she was like, I guess so.

[00:35:09] But he is one of those faces that you might not be able to put a name to. He's at the apex of his recognizability now. Yes. And there's still tons of people who would be like, oh sure. This guy is really handsome.

[00:35:20] Every scene she'd go, he's a very good look. He's very charismatic. Sorry Bruce, but never more fucking beautiful than in this movie. He's so beautiful in this movie. The shock of him in the first Evil Dead where he's so baby face and handsome, but this is definitely.

[00:35:34] Oh, it's crystalline. And when they start doing the blood makeup where it's like he goes from being messy to just like only cuts that would accentuate his bone structure. He's got one blood drip down the middle of his forehead. Makes him look hot. On his cheekbone.

[00:35:46] It makes him look angular. So the question asked was, so he didn't really, the career didn't pan out off of this? I'm like, it did in this weird way where it's like he never stops working. He's had a lot of success.

[00:35:58] He's worked with great directors, big projects and whatever. He had a fucking hit TV show several times over. Burn Notice was like fucking humongous for him and all this shit.

[00:36:06] But I was like, the main thing you need to understand is this is the original king of the conventions. This is the original not only guy to be treated like royalty there, but to like own it and not be like, oh, I hate that I'm doing this. Right.

[00:36:21] He was not there. He's a pure enthusiast. Yes. I mean, knowing him a little bit as I do, everything that you see on screen is him. He is totally into the work that he does.

[00:36:31] He's totally got a corny sense of humor that is very genuine and very funny. Right. He is totally dedicated to getting beat up by Sam Raimi and do whatever Sam Raimi tells him to do since they were teenagers together in Michigan. Yeah.

[00:36:48] And to the point that I put Bruce Campbell into the world to see what came back, there were a couple of Bruce Campbell fan sites and then there was Bruce Campbell's site. Yeah. Right. It was early. Yeah.

[00:37:01] And Bruce Campbell was writing like set reports from the set of McHale's Navy with — One of Ben's favorite movies. Ben just lit. Is that Paulie Shore? No, that's Tom Arnold. Yeah, Tom Arnold. Sorry. Tom Arnold. Down in Periscope is Kelsey Grammar. You like both of them, right?

[00:37:17] I was getting there. And stories about like filming McHale's Navy and what it was like to be on set and then like stories about following a fox down the road on his bicycle and working actor stuff. Right.

[00:37:28] You thought the book was going to be — this is for people who are sort of like, oh, I've never thought about what it's like to be this type of actor. He's worked with big movie stars. He has some funny anecdotes.

[00:37:36] I don't need to be a fan of his work. Well, my point of view wasn't that. My point of view was this fucking Bruce Campbell responded to my email. I guess your boss's, that's what you had to pitch them on, right? You understand his power.

[00:37:49] Well, they didn't care. I'm like, I could do whatever. I could go out and humiliate myself trying to sell this to editors. They didn't care. Their job was to support me and boy, did they. Yeah.

[00:37:57] It was no – they lost nothing but my time by encouraging me to do this. And this was at a time where the big – the thing that saved publishing in the mid-'90s before there was a fantasy series that I will not name was the celebrity book. Yeah.

[00:38:21] And huge advances were just being thrown at anyone who had been on a sitcom. Right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Or anyone who had any profile whatsoever. Yeah. I wasn't delusional.

[00:38:32] I knew that Bruce Campbell was – what made Bruce Campbell special was that he had this cadre of people who knew who he was and then a broader world who didn't.

[00:38:39] And what Bruce was very – from the beginning, very open about talking about is what is it like to be a B-movie actor? Right.

[00:38:46] Not just a working actor who's been in a lot of things or a working character actor but someone who's been in a lot of movies that people think very poorly about. Yes. Like Kabuki Cop. Sure. Or Maniac Cop I think he was. Yes, yes, yes.

[00:38:58] I'm not sure if he was a Kabuki Cop. Yeah. Not to be confused with Sergeant Kabuki Man NYPD. Exactly. That's the one I was kind of confused.

[00:39:05] But back when there were still video cassette rental places, straight-to-video movies, a real B-movie enterprise that Bruce was known within because of his connection with the Evil Dead. Yeah. Mind Warp. Mind Warp. That's a good one. Sort of an iconic 90s straight-to-video movie.

[00:39:20] And he was not ashamed to talk about what it was like to be a B-movie actor. And I thought, okay, this is great. This is something of a celebrity. I'm going to hit it big with this.

[00:39:30] And my hero put his faith in me to go and sell this book around town and no one wanted to touch it. Yeah. No one was interested. They didn't know who he was. And when I explained it to them, they vowed to forget what I told them.

[00:39:43] And when I said – This memory leaves this office when you walk out. And when I said my thing about how he's in a horror movie convention or a fan convention, he's a nobody in the lobby but the king of the floor. A great pitch.

[00:40:02] They were like, yeah, but we don't like those people. Right. Those people disturb us and they don't – It was pure distaste for them. I don't recall saying good luck. I don't recall saying good luck. Let me explain this to you.

[00:40:16] What those people do when they go to those conventions is they buy things. And they buy things in the dealer's area and they go and wait for hours for Bruce to sign them, figurines and posters and headshots and whatever.

[00:40:31] And if Bruce had a book for sale in that dealer's area – You will sell copies at conventions alone. It will sell. They're like, we don't like these people. We don't like these people. And these were people who were – There was one round of publishing.

[00:40:47] There was one round of submissions where I went to people who published genre, science fiction and fantasy and other type stuff who I thought would get it. They got it but their perception was these are horrible ogres that we sell stuff to that we have no respect for.

[00:41:01] It almost feels like – Look, in a very different way, like the wedding industry being like, wait a second. If we let gay people get married, you know? It's like, why are we not letting – They're going to spend more, buy more, go bigger. Who ended up buying this book?

[00:41:16] St. Martin's Press. Now Macmillan. That was the weirdness of this moment. There's like a shift over the course of five years where obviously by the time you get to like Spider-Man coming out, right?

[00:41:27] When your post Lord of the Rings of 2002, all these A-legacy media companies are like, we want nerd money. Up until then it was like that money is dirty. Right. I think partially they were like it's not big enough business and secondarily they're like those people – It's tawdry.

[00:41:46] It's tawdry. And so much of the convention association is still like fucking Shatner saying get a life, right? Yeah.

[00:41:53] It's like if you're doing a convention, you're either resentful of the fact that you're there and you have contempt for the fans who care about what you're doing or you're like pathetic. You're sort of like a sad sack washed up has-been.

[00:42:06] That's what they think of and they're like who are these obsessive fans who want to meet whomever? And I was so humiliated and devastated because Bruce said – I was 24 years old or 25 maybe. I met with his manager and his manager is like, who are you?

[00:42:27] And I'm like, well, I'm a fan. He's like, ugh. Even his fans are like, I hate you people. His managers. One of those. He's like, I'm looking out for his client. No, no, 100%.

[00:42:36] You know, Bruce has had an offer to do this major miniseries on HBO and he turned it down because he promised Rob Taper to do an extra episode of Xena. So he generally just does what he wants to do. So good luck to you. And I –

[00:42:52] He did eight episodes of Xena. Oh, no. Jack of all trades? Is that what it was called? Jack of all trades was a spin-off of Xena. Right, right. What was the name of his character in Xena? Don't – I have to remember this. Don't tell me.

[00:43:06] I can tell you that it was a figure of myth. No, no. He was a thief. In Jack of all trades he was. No, no. In Xena he was a thief. Well, according to this, he played – Atochles. Atochles. Atochles. Yeah, on Xena he was Atochles. On Xena, yes.

[00:43:24] He was Atochles, yes. That's right. I've never seen Xena. Worlds colliding. Yeah. My best friend Jonathan Colton's younger sister was an actor at the time and she was on Xena and Bruce and she had a kissing scene. Oh. It was wild. Wow. But Bruce gave it his all.

[00:43:44] He came to New York. He took meetings. We would walk down the street. And that's a guy who can work a room. Like this is why he's built this reputation at conventions. Totally. He makes everyone feel like they're the most special person in the world.

[00:43:55] On every subway car there was one person who was like, mm-hmm. Giving the nod. Mm-hmm. I know. Every now and then someone would just come up to him and go, mm-hmm, I really loved you in this. And he's like, oh, thanks a lot, man.

[00:44:07] And then we were walking down the street and it's New York City and someone's walking in the other direction and he just starts going, Ares. Ares. Ares. And Bruce is kind of like, what's going on? He says, oh, that guy thinks I'm Ares.

[00:44:25] Who's a different character on Xena. He was like, I know you're on Xena. Right. And he goes, ah, that guy thinks I'm Ares. And then like 30 seconds later you could almost hear the guy's brain click in and he just called back, oh, sorry.

[00:44:41] He didn't hear Bruce say that. He just realized, oh, well, fuck. Ares, of course, played by Kevin Smith, not the filmmaker, but the guy who was on Xena and Hercules and all the big New Zealand actors. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:44:56] I forgot Jack of All Trades was doubled with Cleopatra 2025. 2525, sorry. After Xena ended or they built, they were building out that Saturday power block. The power block, yes. Yeah, they had Hercules. They had Xena. Right.

[00:45:13] And then they took another hour and I think they did two half hours. This was Rob Taper, the co-producer of Evil Dead, Ramy's old friend and Bruce's old friend. Yeah. And they did Jack of All Trades. Husband of Lucy Lawless. Husband of Lucy Lawless, true enough.

[00:45:29] And then they did Cleopatra 2025 with the woman who was then in Firefly and Genotaurus. Star of Cleopatra. So incredible. 2525. 2525, a great title. I mean, it's a great title. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. You have to say 25 twice, but it is fun.

[00:45:47] And Jack of All Trades, he was a scoundrel in the West Indies during pirate times. Yes. This is pre-Pirates of the Caribbean. But he was also an American secret agent sent by Thomas Jefferson. There was a lot of... So he's kind of a...

[00:46:02] He's a scoundrel and a double agent. Right. They were pouring a lot of concept into trying to stop Napoleon. How would I describe it? It's like this guy's good at multiple things. Right. Almost countless things. Little this, little that. Right. He's sort of like a master of most.

[00:46:19] But Bruce never got deterred. Yeah. Her Troyer is Napoleon Bonaparte? Fuck. Yeah, right. There you go. Oh my goodness. But yes, he was a guy who had... It always felt like he had immense pride in what he did. Right.

[00:46:31] And I realize now his experience of taking Within the Woods around to try to pitch it to make evil dead, he and Sam had been through this kind of ringer a million times before.

[00:46:43] So was it embarrassing and humiliating to me that he would go into these rooms and wow these people? And then they'd be like, no, we're not going to do this book. Definitely. Was it to him? I don't know.

[00:46:54] But he was like me, my counterpart at St. Martin's was given the okay by his upper, his bosses who did whatever to offer a little bit of money. Yeah. And it was very satisfying because the book did really well. That's the thing. I mean it did really well.

[00:47:08] That's the thing. There you go. I mean and you're tapping into a thing that of course everyone then figured out, which is like, oh, this is a huge passionate audience. You were just figuring out something there. Yeah, that's exactly basically when I quit being a literary agent.

[00:47:21] But I remember, I don't know if it was like a full article or it was a write up as part of some larger piece or whatever it was, but like Entertainment Weekly writing about like Bruce Campbell's the most popular actor on the internet.

[00:47:34] Like sort of this phenomenon of like who do you believe is the most popular, has the most fans on his site or the most search results or whatever. And it's like not Tom Cruise. The guy the internet loves is Bruce Campbell and this book outsold all expectations.

[00:47:49] And everyone had to like sort of step back and reckon with this guy of like his audience is much bigger than we thought it was. And I don't know whether that changed a lot of minds in a global sense.

[00:47:59] I mean I think the success of The Lord of the Rings really brought things around. But these are all building blocks towards this thing as we're talking about this shift from like 98 to 2002 where it just goes from like this is the thing you have to be a little

[00:48:12] embarrassed about to like we are just actively going after this audience. Right. And now entertainment is nothing else. Like there's the exclusion of all else and if we don't make them happy we're going to be murdered in our bits.

[00:48:24] We were talking right before we recorded about the new Batman movie and how like any Batman movie is now beholden to the expectations of what fans wanted of a Batman movie. Right. And they can't like and when Christopher Nolan dropped the photos of Heath Ledger as the

[00:48:40] Joker, the fan community was like no. Furious. Not acceptable. Which is funny considering he had already been in the movie. He had already won them over with Batman Begins. Like that movie had gone over so splendidly. Right.

[00:48:52] And people were so excited about like this guy's going to do the Joker and it's going to be the fucking coolest shit. You'd think they'd give him a little rope. No. Right. And then they were like well wait a second.

[00:49:00] But it was still a time I think when the director and the studio would be like no we'll throw you a curveball. You have to catch it. Yeah. And now. And it turned out to be such an important.

[00:49:10] You know the other thing with the Ledger Joker is like there had only been the Jack Nicholson Joker. There was a little more of the expectation like are you going to come at that? Wow. Erasure of Mark Hamill. Wow. Wowie.

[00:49:23] Wowie zowie as we say on Dicktown Thursdays at 10 on FX. Great show. This is a point though is that like Cesar Romero, Mark Hamill and Jack Nicholson were all in the same orbit. They were. They were all doing theatrical clown prince sort of big energy. Beyond. That's true.

[00:49:40] Right. And obviously the Ledger Joker was being presented as this grungy. Joker the character was very much at that point locked in a mode. Yes. Which was in that. High comedic villainy but scary. But yeah. But now it's like why haven't I gotten a new Joker this year?

[00:49:55] I'm trying to say it's not just that the mindset has changed from like how dare you try and do the Joker. Now it's like I can't believe you're not giving me more. I need a Joker. Joker. I need multiple. I need Joker casting rumors.

[00:50:09] I need the whole engine to be constantly spinning out Joker. But now. Now I think I understand a little bit better. And then they're moving where they all meet. Right. I joke they have sandwiches together and compare Joker-ness. Yeah.

[00:50:20] I mean I understand better now than I did not just then when I was trying to sell the Bruce Campbell book but like for the years later than I would tell the story about the contempt. Yeah. That editors particularly within the genre genre. Sure.

[00:50:33] Science fiction fantasy and comic books and stuff. Had for those fans. Right. Where I was like these are the bad guys. And they were. Yeah. But also I understand a little bit more now like dealing with this fan base routinely and regularly has its challenges. Yes. They are.

[00:50:48] They are. They can embrace something and then they can get really mad. They can get to where I am. And you can be at the. Yeah. You know for sure. You could be standing in their way and feel very uncomfortable.

[00:50:58] But at the time you're talking about there was still that. Do not do not do not get in the way of Anthony Copkin's fans. Oh boy. I mean you know. When he wins his second Academy Award. Do not get in their way. Hopscars. What do they call themselves.

[00:51:10] Ant heads. Ant men. Ant men. Where it was like if they just throw us a bone in the Joel Schumacher movie I'll be. You know what I mean. Right. Like you didn't even want a quote unquote faithful Batman. But you're like just just wink at me please.

[00:51:25] People would flip out. I know you have to make this movie for everybody. It's enough that it's a Batman. Right. Right. Yeah. But if you could just maybe toss in a little reference I'll get you know tickle me. I'll go home now. Okay.

[00:51:36] John Glover's scientist character who gets killed by poison ivy is named Dr. Wood Drew who's the villain in Swamp Thing. And it's like nothing will come of that. But it's like his character. The Floronic Man. Well my friend. Just remembered. A little tickle for me.

[00:51:50] My heart just grew two sizes. And now of course the Bat fans I'm sure there's a cadre there like if if Matt Reeves in the next Batman movie doesn't give us nipples on the Batsuit we're going to burn down Warner Brothers. I'm pro. I'm pro. Okay.

[00:52:06] Get the nips back. His nips must be chafing. Anyway Bruce Campbell. Yeah right sorry. Bruce Campbell. No I think this this movie is in so many ways I think because of that becomes such a defining moment of like this bridge between like nerd culture and popular culture.

[00:52:23] And to speak to what you were saying about his not being embarrassed by his status as a B-movie actor or horror movie. However you want to say it. Cult actor. I went to a convention with him at the New Yorker Hotel.

[00:52:37] Actually I think this is before we even sold the book. I was trying to get video of him at a convention to show to people. And we also recorded a piece for This American Life about him which was I think still on

[00:52:49] their archives if you want to listen to it. Captures a moment in time. And he took the stage. This was in 1999 I guess. And he took the stage and was doing Q&A and loving it up.

[00:53:02] Someone asked about Spider-Man because it was in production or Ramey at least had been announced I don't remember. And he was like, I want you all to know you have nothing to be afraid of. This is your man.

[00:53:12] If you want a great Spider-Man movie Sam Raimi knows Spider-Man. Sam Raimi loves Spider-Man. Bruce vouched for Sam Raimi in that moment and to a degree like yeah this Evil Dead 2 is kind of the definitive Sam Raimi movie. Sam Raimi's making Spider-Man in a Sam Raimi mode.

[00:53:33] It's a kind of an alchemy that changed culture forever. Absolutely. It changed everything. That is the movie that in so many ways Sam Raimi getting Spider-Man and being willing to get Spider-Man. To bring that vision to Spider-Man.

[00:53:45] And doing it in a way that would not have seemed like a obvious traditionally cool approach to that character. Right. You know? Not trying to modernize or whatever. But also him getting that job period was just like you look back on it and you're like it's

[00:54:01] so insane that they hired him. It doesn't feel like, you don't want to give them the credit for that courage. It's a fair point. Matt Tolmach at Sony Pictures. Because he was coming off, well again we will talk about it in the course of this miniseries,

[00:54:16] but yeah he's coming off four grown up movies none of which had quite hit. Like all of which had done fine. None of like Quick and the Dead, Simple Plan, For the Love of the Game, The Gift were all kind of like singles or doubles.

[00:54:32] They were what you call movies. They're movies. They made 40 million bucks. He's a picture maker. It was fine. Movie stars are in them. His earlier Pulp Fiction movies he never had something that had the big breakout crossover. He had things that like built and built and built.

[00:54:40] Like it is weird that at this point he gets hired to Spider-Man it's almost because the fervorancy around the evil side of the movie. It's like he's not even in the movie. He's not even in the movie. He's not even in the movie.

[00:54:45] He's not even in the movie. He's not even in the movie. He's not even in the movie. He's not even in the movie. At this point he gets hired to Spider-Man it's almost because the fervorancy around the Evil Dead trilogy has built over 20 years.

[00:54:59] I think you're probably right. Right? Where they're like we're going to gain so much credibility with the fans if we hire this guy even though his last four films do not feel like the run up to a Spider-Man movie.

[00:55:09] And he had made Darkman which was a superhero movie without a franchise superhero in it. But I mean very much a the DNA of what we call an audition. It's an audition. Right. Exactly.

[00:55:23] It was his revenge movie for not getting to make The Shadow that ends up secretly being an audition movie for Spider-Man. Oh interesting. I didn't know that. We'll do our whole Darkman. So that was his whole fucking thing. That movie is like a jolted breakup movie.

[00:55:34] It's like right. The Shadow with the intensity dialed up. But so much of I think this movie's weird place culturally is just like you want to talk about genre not just in film itself but also Bruce Campbell's performance. This movie is like undefinable.

[00:55:51] That is what makes it so electric. Right. It is so destabilizing. Yes. Because I mean obviously horror and comedy share DNA. It's a cliche to say it on a podcast. But going into this when I saw it just because it had laugh lines I didn't know how to…

[00:56:15] I have been trained to watch bad movies by Nick McCarthy and to laugh at them. Right. You think this is goofy. If I'm laughing it's because this is goofy or not goofy. Evil Dead was not goofy. Like when we watched Evil Dead we were just like bleh. Right.

[00:56:26] It's harrowing. It's like it's harrowing. Yes. Yes. But so many of those other movies that Nick would screen on those cheese-a-thons is what he called them. Right. And they were being played for laughs. And like earnest young actors with half-written characters trying their hardest to like fill

[00:56:42] you know a very shallow bag with feeling and you get these odd line readings that horror fans become obsessed with or whatever. And here's a guy who has this very precise control of tone as an actor.

[00:56:55] A, not the kind of guy usually plays at the center of the horror movies. It's almost always like dumb jock boyfriend who gets killed off early and the woman becomes the sort of steely final girl survivor.

[00:57:06] So here's like the doofus-y guy who is like owning being the doofus and is playing up the comedy and committing pretty earnestly to it but giving you like just enough of a wink not to deflate the thing but to be like I'm having fun.

[00:57:24] The camera loves him too. I mean the camera just loves him. And he looks like… That's the thing that came to me on this rewatch. Yeah. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, he's like that's Matt and the Idol. Like this guy interrupted me all the fucking time.

[00:57:37] No, no, no. I mean he's just gorgeous. And I feel like… I don't mean to sound you know slobbery over here. He's just a handsome man. No, and that Sam Raimi knows his face. They grew up together. Yes, that's true. He knows his face. He loves his face.

[00:57:52] He knows how to shoot Bruce Campbell's face. There are certain like the shot where Bruce Campbell turns to the camera and laughs when the whole room is laughing at him is iconic. There's so many iconic… I mean Groovy is an iconic. Sure. Trying very hard not to say.

[00:58:07] Face shot. What are we looking? Close up. Yes. Yeah. Groovy is a very iconic… Close up. One shot. You know, whatever. Image of like iconic image of Bruce Campbell's face looking like a to quote Jonathan Ames a demented God.

[00:58:27] All of the moments like I was thinking of how Kurosawa loves to cheer on Mifune's face and knows how to shoot it and find things just in the face without even the acting. Well, and then on top of that, Campbell is so expressive, right?

[00:58:41] He doesn't just have this beautifully constructed face. He's so expressive. He's got such a range of what he can communicate on his face. And because he is such a like… He comes at everything with the mind of a filmmaker, not just a performer.

[00:58:55] Not only does Ramey know where to place the camera and how to shoot him, but he knows how to play to a camera so fucking well. He's in such control of being in front of a camera, in front of a lens, being in a movie. You know?

[00:59:09] And yet, like here's the thing. And Bruce, if you're listening to this, I hope you take this the right way. For anonymous tweeter of the Garfield account, if you tell Bruce to listen to this, let him know. He's a cornball. He's a goof.

[00:59:23] That's what makes Bruce so destabilizing too. He is so handsome. He's such a leading man, but he's inside, he's a goofball. And there are moments where, you know, I'm watching this for the first time at the age

[00:59:37] of 16 when it came to theaters, which by the way, I never expected I would see an Evil Dead sequel. Do you know what I mean? It was six years after the first movie. So you had seen Evil Dead 1.

[00:59:45] I'd seen Evil Dead 1 and one day I opened up the Boston Globe and to read what movies were coming out. I was like, Evil Dead 2? That was so, it was such a, I'm trying to think of an analogy.

[00:59:54] Did it have the poster image or were you just seeing? Right. It was the skull with the eyeballs. The skull with the eyeballs. Dead by Dawn. Sorry, your analogy? But it would be like if you opened up the movie pages in a newspaper, none of these

[01:00:07] things exist anymore, which is also weird. Newspapers themselves practically don't exist. Yes. But it was like, if you discovered that they were showing at the part two of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings today. They made it. You didn't know. They never announced it. It just exists.

[01:00:24] There's no Entertainment Weekly yet. There's no one here to keep tabs on what's in production for you. Or the bloody disgusting link that's getting so deleted. I guess you could be reading like Fangoria. Maybe that would be how you would get that news.

[01:00:34] I guess that would be true. That would be it. I was like, and I called Nick and was like, did you know about this? He's like, no. We went to go see it.

[01:00:39] And seeing that movie in a theater for the first time was like, what am I watching? The Evil Dead gave you no hint what was going to happen in Evil Dead 2 in terms of the shift in tone, which is immediate.

[01:00:51] And I'll say this, being trained to watch bad movies for laughs, right? There's a lot of bad movie in this movie. Yes. It's corny. But it's owning. It's like weaponizing it. Oh, it is. Absolutely. You don't necessarily know that if you're coming to it.

[01:01:05] And there's with Bruce, because he's such a good looking guy who's such a cornball, there are times when you're like, is he a bad actor or a good actor? The person I was watching it with turned to me maybe halfway through and said like, this is funny? Right.

[01:01:19] And I was like, yeah. And she was like, I thought I was gonna be like laughing at this. I'm like realizing this knows that it's fun. Like it's funny on purpose. Right.

[01:01:29] When you get to that run, I got to look at my, because this, I was just watching, we were watching this this morning. It's the run. Okay. It's this whole run where it starts with the, he goes, it's the whole insanity run, right?

[01:01:45] He comes out of the mirror and grabs himself and says, we just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. It's that sound fine to you? His reflection, his reflection strangles him, reverse to him strangling himself. Right? That's before the hand starts beating him up.

[01:02:04] Then the hand turns bad. Right. Then- Smashes 87 plates on his head. Which by the way, this archeologist, first of all, is he gonna throw a banquet? He's got all these dishes. He's got all these dirty dishes full of beans. Like this house is gross. World's worst cabin.

[01:02:23] I mean, honestly, when she says to him, the girlfriend says to him, I'm worried about them coming back. Yeah. It's like an archeologist lives here. Don't worry. We'll tell them they're respectable. It's like, this is a dump. Yeah.

[01:02:37] And look, you learn like, oh, I guess this place got roughed up because he had to face what they were facing once before. But even still, I don't think it looked good before. It's not like the deadites came in and ate 15 plates of beans.

[01:02:49] That's the archeologist eating those beans and not cleaning up after himself. So the hand can then hit him on the head. I think the deadites are just mad about all the farts. Like that's why they're just farting.

[01:02:59] We're gonna open up hell dimension to get rid of this guy. That would be an incredible horror movie where it's like farts summoned demons. And it's a summer house full of frat guys. No one is right now doing a line and typing out farts of the dead.

[01:03:15] And they're already on page four. So the hand hits him on the head. It's one of the most incredible alien hand syndrome acting I've ever seen. He's so good at it. He knocks himself out. The hand drags him across the floor to get to the cleaver.

[01:03:28] That thing where you just go like, how did he do this? Right. And then the hand gets stabbed in the back of the hand with a knife by Bruce who then cuts it off with a chainsaw. By the way, I've had chainsaw training.

[01:03:40] Do not operate a chainsaw in any of the ways you see a chainsaw being operated. You will die immediately. I shouldn't like strap a thing onto my shirt so that I can... So you can pull it? Yeah. No, it's bad, bad chainsaw etiquette.

[01:03:52] Then he cuts it off with a chainsaw. Then he puts the wastebasket on top of it. Farewell to arms. It's this total overstimulation of what's going on. All of it is incredible physical comedy. When he goes in and then finally like, sits down on that chair, blang.

[01:04:12] That's when your brain starts going, am I watching a Three Stooges? What's going on? Why am I watching this? This is so overwhelming. And when he hits that final... What's the last part of that? I forgot. Quickly, I'll just add in that sequence you're talking about, John.

[01:04:27] He also flips himself over. Yes. Right. I've seen this movie a handful of times. I never really actually noticed it, but the physicality of that, that is not easy to do. Don O'Connor or whatever. It's crazy. Right. It's crazy.

[01:04:42] Just a few scenes earlier, he'd been strapped to what they called the Sammo cam, which was basically he was crucified on a crane in front of... I even have a picture of the Sammo cam. They just rotated him around as the camera moved forward. The Sammo cam.

[01:04:57] God, it's so crazy. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That was the... He's strapped to an X-shaped strut that rotates. Anyway, and I forgot about... Okay, then he cuts off the hand. Then the hand sneaks away in the background. Yes. Very cute.

[01:05:15] Which is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in my life. And I remember in the audience going, oh my God. And then the hand goes into the mouse hole and he's shooting the mouse hole and the hand

[01:05:24] gives him the bird and goes, son of a bitch. And he goes, son of a bitch. And then he shoots the hand in the hole and the blood spurts out. It's totally like... In the theater, that was so bonkers.

[01:05:34] The blood spurts out, it's too much blood, it's still going on. How is there more blood? Then the blood turns black, then it goes in reverse. Every time there's too much blood, I always love that.

[01:05:46] The trap door sequence too where it's like, it must just be hoses of it. I don't even think... And it looks watery and foamy, you don't care. You're like, this is great. The classic Evil Dead blood was K-Ro syrup. Yes. Which Campbell insisted on using in this movie.

[01:06:02] I think no one else used it, but he was like, I want that stuff on me. That was what he had. Yeah. And you don't get the sense that he's throwing too much at you. It's a lot of stimulation, but it's elegantly doled out.

[01:06:16] And it's still intimate, which is smart. The thought I had watching this last night was, this movie is a symphony. Did you really? Just a symphony of gags. It just feels like you're like, I'm going to just follow the flow of his ideas.

[01:06:33] Whether it's a story idea or a visual idea, or allowing this performer to show off a new skill set or whatever it is. It's not what you would expect. And it is funny, I'll get into it, but yes, De Laurentiis is like, no, I don't want a

[01:06:47] medieval adventure movie. That sounds like bullshit. Do the thing again. But you would think he'd be like, but do the next chapter of him leaving the cabin and not just like, no, just go back to the cabin and just kind of plus everything up.

[01:07:01] Ambit into this dimension where no one really knows what's happening. Because when that chair finally breaks and you finally breathe with that, it's like, this is a different movie than I signed up for. It's so, I mean, it is such...

[01:07:17] The approach to this as a sequel, where you're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to reset the table. We're going to go back. We're going to do in a bridge version of the first movie.

[01:07:27] And let's consolidate it, focus it, pare it down to its basic elements, but also just start to modify the tone a little bit. So it's easier for us to get to this place where just chaos is going to reign.

[01:07:38] And at that point, we're not really interested in this being a horror anymore. It has horror elements, but it is as much a comedy. And then it's going to fully make the transformation into like badass action movie.

[01:07:50] Which is the thing that you kind of believe, because I like Army of Darkness a lot, but I think Army of Darkness is so much more into him being the cocky comedic fool who's going to get one-upped because he has that confidence the whole movie.

[01:08:05] This movie, when you start at the beginning, you go, no way this guy becomes a badass at the end. Everything's flinching at the end. And you're like, and if he gets to that point, I'm not going to buy it. It's going to feel like a joke.

[01:08:16] And when Campbell gets those moments, he like fucking grabs them. Well, yeah. And as much as that whole sequence and including the room laughing at him and him dancing with the lamp. Yes, God. Like it's so funny and it's so beautifully choreographed, but it is also harrowing.

[01:08:36] Like it's not a horror movie. It's upset. The movie is, it remains tense. His portrayal of losing his mind is very convincing. There's constantly imagery that is genuinely disturbing. Yeah. Gross stuff. Right. That's going to haunt you.

[01:08:51] The gore, the merrier, as Sam Raimi used to say when they went to go see drive-in movies to learn how to make a horror movie. David, open up this flesh bound dossier. I've got that. You're right, exactly. I've got this dossier for you.

[01:09:04] We've talked a little bit about this. I mean, we should mention, right, obviously the other thing is they make Crime Wave after Evil Dead and that not doing well increases their desperation. Like now they're like, okay, we need to, and that's when they start dangling an Evil Dead

[01:09:17] sequel because that's what they have to their name. That's the only thing they can tempt people with. But obviously he's pitching this medieval sequel. They took out an ad, his agent Irvin Shapiro just took out an ad for Evil Dead 2.

[01:09:31] And at this point over the years, Evil Dead is growing as a VHS object every year. And that did attract some attention from 20th Century Fox and Universal. Evil Dead is in Nightmare on Elm Street. Right. She's watching it or someone's watching it. Very bizarre to think of.

[01:09:48] Yes, it is. That's right. And Freddy Krueger's hand glove is in Evil Dead 2. Two, right? Yeah. In the basement. That's a nice sort of tip of the cap both directions. Tip of the five bladed glove. Obviously he's trying to get- Tip of the cinch fedora.

[01:10:03] Trying to get the medieval concept funded. Eventually he drops it. He tries to get Embassy who funded Crime Wave to fund it. They string them along for a while and eventually they drop it.

[01:10:12] And he obviously had a very difficult time with Embassy and Crime Wave and the movie getting taken away from him. And yet nonetheless, he actually went to them first. So him and his buddy Scott Spiegel, who he co-wrote this movie with, were living in a

[01:10:24] house in Silver Lake with four cool cats, Joel Cohen, Ethan Cohen, Frances McDormand, and Holly Hunter. Unbelievable. As you do. Pretty cool. It's like unbelievable to consider. What's the TV show that I want to pitch to HBO Max? I cannot tell you-

[01:10:39] The year that those four lived or those six lived together. It does just pop into my head every once in a while, just an image of the four of them sitting around like chairs in a living room at two o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday.

[01:10:50] I mean, just imagining the late night conversations those people have. Spiegel references like Holly Hunter. She's getting off, you know, her career is taking off. She's in sweatpants reading scripts. This is the crazy thing. They wrote the character Bobby Joe in this movie for her. Of course.

[01:11:06] That makes a lot of sense, actually. Rob's the only thing that makes Bobby Joe make sense, honestly. They're like Holly Hunter type. Right. Rob Taper, who JJ, who rarely editorializes in his dossier, calls a rude idiot. What is this dossier you're reading from?

[01:11:22] We have a researcher now, JJ Bursch. Oh, excuse me. Who types up cool little- Cool stuff. Yeah. Cool things. Does volumes and volumes of research and then commits them to a real-to-real recorder. And does he just leave it in a cabin for anyone to find and start playing?

[01:11:37] Yes. By the way, rude, Bruce. Don't play someone else's real-to-real. It's funny that the biggest difference I feel like between the first movie and the second movie is that in the first one when they play the tape recorder, you're like, I buy this.

[01:11:48] There's a slow enough sense of discovery. Nothing in the house seems incredibly creepy. And in this, it's the world's most cursed cabin. They don't know who lives here. It's sitting out on a desk next to this horrifying book.

[01:12:01] And within two minutes of walking in, it's like, I should press play on this. Yeah, probably I should listen to this. Yeah, just do it. Just to ... Rob Taper, rude idiot, said we need a babe for that role and turned down the Holly Hunter suggestion. Boo.

[01:12:15] In the 80s. Rob Taper is an okay guy. Outrageous. He's an okay guy. Sorry, I'm sure. I'm sure he's an okay guy. I mean, look, he admits it. A dumb move. Yeah. He confirms without getting myself in trouble, I thought we should look for somebody else.

[01:12:26] He said that in 2013. So he's like, Holly Hunter is ... Anyway, as you say, that character does talk. It totally makes sense for Holly Hunter. It's funny to think of in the 80s, there was still that mindset like, no, we need a babe. But Holly Hunter is ...

[01:12:38] Right, this white actress with a southern lilt. She's not going to make sense. There's not a thing. I don't think Holly Hunter existed yet is the thing. Because I believe that Raising Arizona and Evil Dead 2 opened the same weekend. In 1987. They're both 1987. And they did. You were correct.

[01:12:55] It's another insane thing to think about. Spoiling the box office game, but ... That these two filmmaking teams are running concurrent, inspiring each other. Yeah, Raimi and the Coens had just made a horrible flop and their recovery pieces are

[01:13:09] two of the most defining or among the most defining movies of their careers. And the Coens talk about so much how much watching Evil Dead 1 was like, we can do that with the camera. We can go this far.

[01:13:22] We don't have to be concerned with good taste or the rules. Right, exactly. And Raising Arizona has so much of that energy where they're just sort of like- Same deal. I didn't know what I was seeing when I went into the theater. Just endless invention.

[01:13:33] The camera just crashing down a supermarket out hallway. And again, destabilizing because that is a comedy that has huge human emotion in it. And then horror too. And that movie moves so fucking fast. The first 10 minutes are four movies and then the opening credits start and you're like,

[01:13:49] what? I still get goosebumps. Charles Diggs and I seeing that at the Harvard Square Theater. Boy oh boy. What a night. What a night. So Spiegel and Raimi start writing their script. Unlike the first movie, they're not writing to a budget.

[01:14:02] They're like, let's just write whatever we think is funny. And so that's one reason they keep writing these ridiculous set pieces. This symphony that you're describing. What if we did this? What if we did this? It's a lot of slapstick ideas. A silly symphony, if I may.

[01:14:14] Oh hey, cartoonish. There you go. But also they know the performer they're writing to, so they know what Bruce can pull off. That's huge. It's true. Campbell's take on the comedy, let's see, is I think when you play something such an extreme you're either horrified or you laugh.

[01:14:31] Sam does not mind punishing the audience, but he does not like to insult them. I like scaring people, but in a friendly way. All of that tracks. It's a perfect encapsulation of everything. But it is, I mean, again, the first movie is quite harrowing. Yes.

[01:14:46] It is funny to think sitting down being like, okay, this is going to be more harrowing. This is the sequel. You're expecting intensity beyond belief. And then in 10 minutes in- You do get intensity.

[01:14:56] You do, but there's also 10 minutes in a stop motion dance sequence with a corpse whose head falls off or whatever. My wife last night was just like, what is this? What is this? It's like the reverse of taking a top hat off and rolling it down your arm.

[01:15:09] It's your head rolling up your arm on your body. But to go, A, we're going to essentially redo the first movie. Literally in the first act, but also we're pretty much going to stay in the same zone, the same concerns, the same locations. And then also-

[01:15:24] Because Evil Dead ends with the monster camera rushing at Bruce. And that's minute 15 in this movie. Right. That's where you're supposedly picking up. That's when he gets thrown onto the Sammo cam and revolved around through the woods until he lands in a puddle.

[01:15:39] And then has his first sort of dead eye run. Evil ash run, I should say. But then to do it in such a different tone. It's one of those things. It's like the amount of comedy in this movie makes it more upsetting where you're like,

[01:15:54] they're being funny about this? Because that's the thing about like, and this is why I think it has, it's not a comedy in horror movie clothes, nor is it a funny horror movie. It's totally unique.

[01:16:06] It's what it's, it's, it's totally unique, but it does exactly what I think really good horror does and really good comedy does, which is keep you on a level of like, I don't know what's happening and I'm not comfortable. Definitely. You don't know what to expect.

[01:16:20] But then 20 minutes at the end where he's like, I'm going to become a superhero and you're going to watch me kick ass and there's no tension. It's just fucking joy ride. Can you imagine what it was like in the theater when he said groovy? I can't.

[01:16:34] When he said groovy, because I don't know that there's a, I mean, I'm really going into superlative mode here, but it's like what that one word does in that moment for that movie, because that's the word where if you had any guesses, is Bruce a good actor or

[01:16:52] a bad actor? Well, who is this guy? Right. Is this a comedy or a horror? Like that lead up to groovy that, that what is now classic, it was a parody of a kind of classic getting literally armed, right? Right.

[01:17:05] You know, strapping on your, your gun belts and new stuff, looking at the camera and going, let's go fuck some shit up. And then you go, Bruce and groovy. It was like, Oh, it's a, they, it's a joke. It's a joke. It's a good take very seriously.

[01:17:19] And all of a sudden this moment is fucking iconic. Like you are so amped for this now. It's like if get away from her, you bitch happened at the end of the first alien and you'd go, well, you can't do that. You need two movies.

[01:17:30] You need this time to pass. You need the experiences, you need the Ripley relation or the new relationship, whatever. And the fact that we pulls it off in like one scene. Yeah. It's like, I mean, it's the second movie, but like he starts off just as goofy.

[01:17:43] Like one of the other things that he could have, he was in the first film. Yeah. Groovy is groovy is goofy. Yeah. It's an incredibly goofy thing to say and it works so well.

[01:17:52] But it's saying to the audience, this guy's cool now you're going to, you're going to buy that for the sake of this narrative, he's cool. It crystallizes everything about the movie and that brings the audience on board in a

[01:18:02] way that they may not have been right for that final act. As I think Bruce was saying in the quote from the dossier, like Sam Raimi doesn't mind punishing the audience. He'll show them gross stuff, but he likes the audience and like he trusted that when

[01:18:20] Bruce Campbell says groovy, they would get it and they did. I think they did. The big thing that gets them funding is a little man named Stephen King who was a huge fan of the first movie obviously and lent it support and helped spread the word about it.

[01:18:37] Had the pull quote on the poster. He's making Maximum Overdrive and he catches wind that Evil Dead 2, there's a script floating around and he gets Dino De Laurentiis who's making Maximum Overdrive and he says, meet this man right away. Like I Stephen King bless this.

[01:18:52] De Laurentiis meets with Raimi and is like, well, I have the rights to a bunch of Stephen King stuff. Do you want to do thinner? I'm trying to get thinner going. Which he eventually does make. Yeah. I don't know what he would have done if he got thinner.

[01:19:02] I believe that's what thinner is about. You're looking to me? Yes. I've not seen that movie nor have I read that script. I believe it's a guy who gets a curse. Anyway, and Raimi's like, I don't want to do that.

[01:19:16] I want to do Evil Dead 2 and De Laurentiis is like, translate the script into Italian for me. And he was like, okay. And then Raimi was asking for $4 million and De Laurentiis came back and said, I can give you 3.6. And Raimi was like, sounds good.

[01:19:32] But it's one of those things when the first movie. Just funny that he knocked a little bit off. Yeah. 4 million. Come on. 3.6? 3.6. The first movie was what meant to be 150 and it ended up being what the numbers on the budget I can't remember.

[01:19:46] So that's one of those movies where everyone overtakes it. Did you say the reason that Stephen King was talking to De Laurentiis at that time? He loved the first one. And yeah, we, yeah, but he was working with De Laurentiis. He was directing Maximum Overdrive. Yes.

[01:19:58] Did you just say that? I did. But yes, but later. Put it back in. No, I'm joking. Yeah. All right. Keep it in. Triple it. He was directing Maximum Overdrive. He was directing Maximum Overdrive. He was directing Maximum Overdrive.

[01:20:12] The first movie was well under half a million dollars, even if you believe the most extreme exaggerations of how much the budget overran. If you say to this guy, you have $3.6 million now, it's like he's been given $200 million.

[01:20:28] If he was able to make that movie for $300,000 to $450,000, the first Evil Dead, where like we're talking about in the first episode, all these sort of young genre filmmakers who see that at a pivotal age are like, this is the first movie where it doesn't feel like

[01:20:42] a guy is writing within the limitations of his resources, where he's figuring out how to execute any fun idea he has. And then this movie, he's like, I can do more? Are you fucking kidding me? Right. Yeah. But that is the thing. He's like, don't overshoot your ambitions.

[01:21:00] Make the first kind of like make a Cabin in the Woods movie again, but with a real budget. That's what you should do. And so they strip out everything in the script that's too insane.

[01:21:10] But the only thing I think you can really equate it to is the Road Warrior. Which we talked about in the Road Warrior. So basically make the first movie again, but up everything. Right.

[01:21:22] And I think their thought is like, just do a fancier version of the first movie. And they're like, I'm going to go so much crazier than the first movie. I'm not just going to make your shiny or more polished version of my original idea.

[01:21:32] But the key is they didn't say that. No. They did that. They're like, thanks for the money. Thank you. We will not be shooting in your studio. Yes. We are going to go several miles away. Right. And in both cases. Into the woods.

[01:21:45] It was guys who made movies with their friends where they had sort of gathered money from independent sources and had like very little oversight and put all their ambition on screen to show like, this is this wild idea I have. This thing I can barely, barely depict.

[01:21:58] And then the second time people were like, here's real money in a real structure. And they went, thank you. And snuck away. All right. I'm going to put my brother in a witch costume. Here's some kids selling.

[01:22:05] Look, a lot of these I think are coming from Bruce's book, by the way. A lot of these factoids I'm getting here are coming from If Gins Could Kill. They shot- Hey, Bruce's book, If Gins Could Kill, is a great book about young people making movies. Yeah. Absolutely.

[01:22:20] And you learn a lot. I highly recommend it. So, they shot in Wadesboro, North Carolina, many hours from Wilmington, which is where Sam Raimi's home base was because they didn't want anyone visiting them. De Laurentiis' home base. De Laurentiis. Sorry, De Laurentiis. Yeah. No, Raimi's up in Michigan.

[01:22:36] Right. But yeah, because he wanted to be far enough away there'd be a pain in the ass to visit the set. Right. Smart. Smart. Apparently, Bruce Campbell, as I'm sure you can ... They talk a lot about how he was really good at quote, the local yokel stuff.

[01:22:48] So, he'd go to town and be like, hey, do you want to do the wiring? Or hey, do you want to build some ... And everyone was just get everyone on board. Really good at scouting locations. Hey, do you know anywhere around here that we could do this?

[01:23:00] That's what you call a people person. They had ... Exactly. Spielberg had shot The Color Purple around there. So, people were used to a movie coming through town. Wilmington's really developing as a hub. I know this is outside of Wilmington. This is right. But I'm saying North Carolina.

[01:23:14] This town. Yes. Yes. That's wild. I think it's a high school in the gym. Yeah. Which is like sort of funny to think that that's all in a high school gym when we're watching the cabin stuff. Yeah, I really couldn't figure out where it was.

[01:23:28] It does not track that it was in a gym. It's funny too that the cabin is so much smaller in this movie. I think that's probably- Is it though? It feels like it is. What about when he's running for three minutes? Well, they can make ... Right.

[01:23:40] There are times where they fuck with the physics of it. That is one wacky cabin. Yeah. Oh, and they will go off road. When you see it from the outside. Do you want to hold on? No, go ahead. I mean, talk about it. I don't care.

[01:23:52] What a weird sequence. That's also destabilizing too, right? Yes. Because now you're in this haunted house that has a million doors. Right. And by the way, whole crawl spaces behind every wall that encircle the entire ... Like

[01:24:04] he's going through five different doors and then goes into some unseen portion of the cabin. Because when they're outside the cabin, it looks like an outhouse. It looks like this is one room. Yeah. One or two rooms. Exactly. This is a tiny home.

[01:24:16] Yeah, but it just goes on forever inside. That was the first time I felt like, is this a horror movie or is this an airplane parody of a horror movie? Right. And then it was showing you we're able to go bigger. Yes.

[01:24:29] We literally are going to expand, but also we're doing something completely weird that you don't know what's happening. Also just this weird level of ... Edgar Wright quote I threw out in our Evil Dead 1 episode

[01:24:41] that he was watching for the first time and realized most horror movies you're watching people get picked off one by one. And then the first Evil Dead almost everyone else gets picked off really quickly and then the rest of the movie is this one guy being picked on.

[01:24:52] Right. Right? Like the evil force has no rules in this movie. Sometimes it can break down doors, sometimes it cannot get through doors. It can do whatever the fuck it wants. It can do whatever the fuck it wants, but its main prerogative is it wants to fuck with

[01:25:04] this guy. It gets pleasure from fucking with this guy. And then the added layer onto this is ... It's top of the brain because Ben and I, the new one came out, Ben and I saw this marathon or whatever, but there is this weird jackass

[01:25:16] element to this movie where you're like, it's Ramey and other childhood friends behind the camera being like, can you believe we're getting Bruce to do this on camera? Oh, they love ... Yeah. Right.

[01:25:26] So it's like there's the cosmic humor of like, it's funny to have a character like this that's being shit on by everyone who can't catch a break. And then they're also like, and remember we wrote this into the script and now he has

[01:25:35] to do it and he has to do it 20 times. Yes. It was very, very honest that Sam Raimi loved to beat up on Bruce Campbell. You can hear them giggling. You can feel it. Talk about revenge of the nerds too. Yeah.

[01:25:46] Like Bruce was the closest friends with these guys, but he's a six foot tall beautiful guy. He's the handsome jock who does theater. And Sam Raimi is not that. Very shy and soft spoken. Yeah. And he's like, I'm going to beat up on this jock. Right.

[01:26:03] It's the movie. He has beaten up on the jock. I'm going to make this jock beat up on himself. I'm going to make this jock punch himself in the face. It's literally why are you hitting yourself? Yes. That old gag. God.

[01:26:14] I want to shout out Peter Deming, who shot this movie. Has one of the most incredibly diverse careers as a cinematographer. I don't know who he is. Who is he? List a couple credits. Well, I will.

[01:26:26] But first I want to point out he was nobody when he got hired. First Raimi hired some guy called Eugene Shuglett and they like fought and he fired him right away. Right. Then he went back to Tom Philo. Who shot the first movie. Shot the first movie.

[01:26:38] One of these things I always love is a phenomenon where it's like a guy who was friends with the guy who made this movie that was so seismically important. This look that's been replicated. He was like, I want to work in film industry my whole career.

[01:26:47] And Evil Dead One is the only movie he DP'd. He did like second unit on this. And then he did something else in his life. He has this quote where he's like, I read the script and he says the script is an amazing document.

[01:26:56] It's impossible to read, but the level of complexity, it just describes all this incredible stuff in it. Like these shots. And he basically was like, I can't do this. Like I won't be able. I'm going to be the fall guy if you hire me. They hire Peter Deming.

[01:27:10] He had shot Hollywood Shuffle. That was like his one credit. He was like a Midwestern. He went to Wisconsin, I think. But another like seismic movie in American independent film. Right. This huge. Yes. And then, but yes, he goes on. I mean, his greatest work is Mulholland Drive.

[01:27:25] He also shot Lost Highway. He was also shot in the Austin Powers. He did the Austin Powers movies. He did all the screams. The range of this guy is all the screams. He's technically not credited on the first scream, but the first scream famously fired

[01:27:35] its cinematographer and brought him in. And he did all the other screams. He did Twin Peaks, The Return. I heard Huckabees. Yeah. Wow. He's, you know, but this is his first. Maybe I should pay attention to who films these movies. No, it's always exciting.

[01:27:47] He's a secret like great. And like, and I feel like he maybe doesn't get cited as much as some other guys because he doesn't have the distinctive house look. Right. He's so adaptable to who he's working with. Yeah. But this is the whole thing with Peter Deming.

[01:28:01] It's like not only are we like he's being brought in and like basically productions happening and every day Sam Raimi will just have breakfast with him. We like, so we're going to put Bruce on this crane and we'll shoot him through the woods or whatever.

[01:28:14] And he's like, okay. You know, like they're just like doing it on the fly. I mean, I showed you some of these rigs, you know, this is the one for that goes through the car.

[01:28:23] The Ram of the coolest shot when it smashes through the windows of the car. Like even Forky was like, well, like, you know, how'd they pull that out? Yeah. Well, what they did in case you can't see, you're listening to a podcast and you can't

[01:28:34] see the result for anyone who that applies to. What do Raimi did was, and this is something he did in Evil Dead one as well, was he had a cart on wheels with a long pole sticking straight forward on it, duct tape the camera

[01:28:48] to the end of the pole so that he could push the cart and the camera could go through the back window of a car and then out the front window of the car. That olds 88 of course is a motif. It shows up in a lot of Raimi movies.

[01:28:59] They called it the classic. Right. Yes. Always showing up. And that's also funny too, because like, Oh yeah, suddenly I've got three and a half, $3.6 million. I can really upgrade the Ramo cam. Right.

[01:29:12] Maybe I'm not using duct tape anymore on the, on the pole that I'm sticking through this Oldsmobile. Look, it's not like he's the first, but in terms of the consistency with which Raimi is constantly approaching the camera as an object and being like, what are things you

[01:29:27] can do with an object? How can you move an object? Right. It's like, it hurt Bruce Campbell. Can I throw it at him? Can I just whip it at his head? What's legal here? Yeah.

[01:29:39] I watched the, I mean there's this like beautiful 4k restoration of this movie, which is how you watch it. I have it too. And it, you know, it's not been like artificially scrubbed. It still has like texture and everything, but especially compared to other movies of

[01:29:51] the genre, it is kind of incredible how clean this movie looks. Like it has such like bright, vibrant colors. Like an easy comic. Yes. Yeah. It has a comic book vibe to it. Right. It has that, the sort of palette of, uh, right.

[01:30:06] Like 50s, 60s, 40s genre comics where they could only use like six colors to print. And horror comics that were gruesome and that started the reason for the comics code. And this movie has, it uses shadows and whatever, but it's not like murky. It's not grainy.

[01:30:20] It's not grimy. It's surprisingly clean for a movie that's so much about viscera. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. It's like janky, I guess. Yeah. Even though it's a janky atmosphere is how to describe. Yeah, a janky atmosphere.

[01:30:37] But like the special effects feel so like cutting edge in a weird kind of a way. You know, like- Using like everything. Right. Every type of technique. It must have been a pain in the ass.

[01:30:49] I mean, which is so much of what is in the, you know, is just like how they did the eyeball shot. You know, how complicated that was. How they did the vine trick where she's being, you know, they would shoot a lot of this stuff

[01:30:58] backwards and then run it forwards. Obviously, that's sort of like a classic way to do that. Bruce's book, Sam would yell at Bruce for being a bad reverse actor. Come on, you don't know how to act backwards? Everyone knows that. That's the worst reverse acting I've ever seen.

[01:31:14] Obviously, this thing has a famous kind of murderer's row of makeup and visual effects guys. Yeah, Greg Nicotero. Greg Nicotero, the famous one. Mark Sjostrom, who had done Nightmare on Elm Street and Videodrome. Cool gooey effects. Yeah. Harold- Yeah.

[01:31:29] And Robert Kurtzman and Tom Sullivan, who'd worked on the first movie. So it's like that's obviously the biggest influence on these movies is the three stooges we talked about in the last episode. But like Ray Harryhausen is obviously coming to the fore here. The dancing headless body.

[01:31:44] The dancing headless body. When the hand is on its own and moving through the mouse holes. Right. And then Army of Darkness is like just primarily a Harryhausen tribute. Right. Exactly. And then it only gets dialed up more. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's what we say.

[01:32:03] It's like they had worked so hard with no money. Yeah. And instead of not working very hard with more money, they worked so hard with a little more money. Right. It produces this like exponential result. Right. That's the best way to describe this. Right.

[01:32:19] But it's the same for me as the Mad Max Road Warrior Jump where it's like they can now afford to have five cars instead of one or two. Right. And be more comfortable.

[01:32:29] And instead they were like, no, we're going to pay for 80 cars and suffer and break our backs to make another one of these. But there are also choices in this movie like the bridge, which is so phony looking. Thank you. I was just about to bring this up.

[01:32:42] I think that's another key like tonal indicator of the world this movie is taking place in. Right. Because it looks phony. And it's like, it looks janky. It looks janky. It's like a weird matte painting, but even the design of it you're like, that damage doesn't make sense.

[01:32:55] Right. How could it look like? Only a dead eye could do it. That's the only explanation. Only a dead eye could do it. Yeah. But I mean, the first time you see the bridge before it's blown up, it's obviously a matte painting.

[01:33:04] It's kind of a beautiful matte painting. Yeah. But it's definitely cluing you in. A, I think it's cluing you into the facts like this is kind of a janky horror movie. Like these are the visual cues that this is not a fancy movie. Yeah.

[01:33:20] This is not a Rosemary's Baby. We're playing in the B movie realm. Yeah, exactly. Right. But then also I kind of feel like Sam Raimi's like, it's just a Sam Raimi thing. Like the thing about the Ramo cam, like yeah, they're working really hard with more money,

[01:33:36] but they also have this kind of Michigan working class, like why would we improve a pole that bashes through an Oldsmobile? Right. Like this is what we do. Like we'll spend the money where we need to spend the money. What technique is better than that?

[01:33:48] I just think the- On stop motion, like a headless dancing and- The bridge looks so like illustrative. Right? Yeah. Right? Like it looks like a weird gnarled Tim Burton tree or some shit. Oh, once it's been busted open. Yeah.

[01:34:02] And you're like, there's so many ways you could just depict the bridge has gone out. Right. And it's also such a weird narrative cul-de-sac because we've been so caught up with this guy in the house. Right. You've watched the first movie, you're like, you never leave the cabin.

[01:34:13] You can't get out. That's the whole point. You're like, you've watched the plane landing, the brother and sister, children of the archeology. You're like, where's this going? So they're going to go to the house. Right. And you're introduced to Bobby Joe and what's the townie's name? Townie. Townie.

[01:34:27] His name is, is it Jake? Jake. Yes. Yes. I think it is Jake. Yes. But there's this weird relief where like these people are not living the same- Jake was like, I can take you up there on a trail. It'll cost you $45. Such a weird number. I mean-

[01:34:42] Bobby Joe says 45. He ups it to 100. Oh, she ups it to 100. She nudges him and he goes, I mean, $100. Right. But like in those first 20 minutes, I guess, maybe especially if you haven't seen Evil

[01:34:55] Dead 1, maybe you're kind of having that thought of like, are we not going to leave this? Like is it just going to be this guy? Is it just going to be- Yeah. And then-

[01:35:04] And I think also if you haven't seen Evil Dead 1, you're watching it so you're like, what was the first movie? What happened before this? But you also, I think that you understand too that like this is showing in movie theaters

[01:35:15] and like kids and stoners and weirdos are just- They're out for a Saturday night. It's what's playing. There's a lot of people who don't care what Evil Dead was. And there are a lot of people who might've even said, let's not even put two on the end

[01:35:29] of this. Absolutely. Right. 100%. But I just feel like them coming to the plane is kind of you getting some water splash in your face and you're like, no, no, right. It's a movie. There'll be characters and a plot. Right. I briefly thought there might not be.

[01:35:42] I briefly thought it was just going to be in this cabin. But that's also sort of telling you- And then someone should take them aside and be like, you like that? Check out Evil Dead 1. Right.

[01:35:49] This movie can ultimately make this jump to action adventure film on this odd small scale because they're going to come in and it's not like they're there to save him. It's like we can infuse new life into the situation and he can sort of transform. Right. Right.

[01:36:05] You have this young couple, one of them wearing shorts all the time. Yes. The other guy destined to be thrown into a fruit cellar as soon as possible. No offense. She's carrying around extra pages to the Book of the Dead in a glass case that can only

[01:36:19] be opened by shattering. Of course. No offense to any of these actors and Cassie DePiva, I think is her name, who plays Bobby Joe, she went on to be on One Life to Live for like 20 years or whatever. She had a rich career.

[01:36:31] But it is funny that in both of these movies, it's Bruce Campbell and then a bunch of people you're like, I couldn't tell you. They don't pop really at all and you're just like, yeah, they're there to turn into monsters. But they are there.

[01:36:47] We need some new bodies. We need some new people to get possessed. It's a little extra life. It's a little faint towards of like, oh, maybe there's a love story here. These young kids. Right.

[01:37:00] No, that guy's going to go down in the basement as so fast as possible. That Fred looking ass. I was so ready for that. That's what I was looking for. That's the Fred looking ass. Let's see.

[01:37:14] I mean, Sam Raimi just, I guess similar to his energy on his energy seems to be he would keep having ideas on set. He would be like, can we do the eyeball? It goes in her mouth. Like, you know, he would add things onto it with the makeup.

[01:37:28] He would famously just say, make it scarier. And they'd be like, OK, like, I don't know what that means. Apparently he's very into giving you percentages. He'll be like 20% scarier here. Like or something like that.

[01:37:41] You know, like he'll speak with a spectrum that you're like, don't know what he's working off of. Obviously, Ted Raimi, his brother, his brother, who is a fake shemp in the last one is Henrietta in this one basically. Right.

[01:37:55] It's like probably to what you were just talking about, the second most noteworthy performance. That's the other performance that kind of jumps out is Henrietta in that state. Yeah, he drew, Raimi had drawn this or someone had drawn this sketch.

[01:38:09] Maybe it wasn't Sam Raimi of like a monster that was a skinny lady with bones coming through. And Sam was like, Ted will do this because Ted's skinny. And then does whatever I tell him. Right. And Ted agrees. I was 20. 20 year olds have no regard for their mortality.

[01:38:24] I was the perfect age to be in that movie. And then they eventually decided, no, we should put him in like a fat monster costume because then whatever he can do more. Like, it'll be easier to build around that. It'll be easier for us, but more torturous.

[01:38:38] That's the thing. Of course. It sounds like living hell. Like when they describe like the 3 a.m. wake up, they would start putting prosthetics all over him, two hours of that.

[01:38:47] Then they put beanbags on him to like girth him up and then they put the face on him. But it's like 100 degrees. You're wearing this thing that is probably not, you know, designed with your comfort in mind. Like now, right.

[01:39:01] They'll put a refrigerator in your suit or whatever. Right now they all have fans going. And also like you're in a harness for some of these shots on top of that. Like you're like on a rake, you know, being whipped around.

[01:39:10] Bruce wrote there's a famous moment where Ted as Henrietta is lifted up and spun around. Yes. And you can see the sweat streaming out of the costume. Truly feels. Because he just had liters of sweat. It wasn't just 100 degrees.

[01:39:25] I mean, it was they were shooting this summer in this high school. So it was naturally 100 degrees. Then inside then with the lights on, it had to have been unbearable. It feels like advanced interrogation tactics. Yeah, exactly.

[01:39:40] And then he had to crouch in this hole because there wasn't a cellar there. Right. Pretend. Ted describes it as the acting version of the Rommel campaign. But yes, basically torture. It just the sweat would fill the latex feet so they would cover him in baby powder.

[01:39:58] He couldn't see anything because he's wearing these white ones. Bruce Campbell, unsurprisingly, kind of the leader of men on this set, kind of the one rallying everyone to try so hard. He also got buff. It looks good. It looks good.

[01:40:14] He dropped the let's see what was he eating? The egg McMuffins, the banana cream pies at lunch. Does he love it? Is he a sweet tooth? Whatever. He worked out. Yeah. He looks good.

[01:40:26] Well, also his trainer would make him work out for two hours after they wrapped each day so they would shoot for 12 hours. And then he'd be working out for two hours after that.

[01:40:37] And then obviously he has to strap on this damn chainsaw that belches smoke in his face. So he's smoking cigarettes basically. I held a chainsaw once. It was very terrifying. I would not want to do that. Unless that's some gimmick chainsaw that is much lighter.

[01:40:52] I think it is lighter. It had been hollowed out so he could put his hand in it. But it still is heavy. Yeah. But also, like, I mean, talking about working with a trainer for two hours after a full

[01:41:01] day of filming on a movie that looks this exhausting where he is the guy. He's in every fucking shot pretty much. When you hear stories like that today, it is people who get paid $20 million a movie

[01:41:13] to be in pre-established franchises where they are guaranteed magazine covers or they get to brag about the diet they went on and whatever. I don't know who you're talking about. Could be anybody. Could be anybody. In fact, there are multiple examples. Yeah, multiple examples.

[01:41:27] But to do that for this movie, I think is unusual. Not just in this time, but still to this day period. He did it for his high school friend. Yeah. I mean, also he wanted work. He wanted to enter. Sure. He loves acting. He loves making movies.

[01:41:42] You know, the way they did the blood pouring out of the wall was they tilted the set, tilted the camera, had Bruce lie down, then emptied like a bathtub's worth of fucking blood on his face.

[01:41:55] And Sam comes over before they shoot and he goes, so if you find that you're drowning, just wave your hands as if you're in terror. And Bruce said, well, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's like what a performance will be doing.

[01:42:07] That's what the performance is going to look like. And Sam was like, yeah, I guess you're right. Okay, roll it. Well now, we'll figure it out. I just feel like putting in that extra work to look like this for this movie is not a career calculation at all.

[01:42:23] It's just who Bruce is. It's what would help this movie. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's what would help this movie. They're making the best high school movie that they've had a chance to make. So what are some sequences we haven't talked about at all yet?

[01:42:36] What else should we talk? I mean, plot wise, obviously it's not a plot heavy movie. No, it's a silly thing. I wanted to say, because we got right up to when the sequence of putting together the chainsaw and his look for that final battle.

[01:42:52] To me, I think that he is one of the coolest designs for a character. And it's like, this is obvious, but man, still even seeing it to this day, that shot when you finally see him in his final form, I guess, or whatever. Right.

[01:43:10] Half his blue shirt ripped off. He's got a leather buckle situation that's somehow connected to the chainsaw. Totally. And the sequence, the way that it's all these closeups showing how everything is going to kind of connect you. You're seeing the pieces all assemble.

[01:43:23] But when you finally see him, I mean, it's something to where it's like he's a superhero, right? Or in that moment. But it's like anyone could be him, basically. He's just a normal guy with now a chainsaw for a hand and a fucking shotgun. He's pissed as hell.

[01:43:36] He gets me so excited. Yeah. It is just so effective and cool. The lines on where the leather straps are, where the shirt is ripped. I feel like this is an off imitated thing of how do you let a character get to badass mode in the final act?

[01:43:52] What's the cool battle damaged world weary form? And it's kind of never better than this in this sort of literally blue collar form where he's still a guy in dockers. And he's just like, fucking, I've had enough, motherfuckers. Right. So I'm trying to remember what the transition is.

[01:44:14] There is a cut where things have hit a fever pitch. And then there's another one of those moments where they let you catch your breath. And I think it's maybe him taking the pages from the book or something like that. That sounds right.

[01:44:26] But there's a cut that's a little bit of a time jump where he's sort of trying to explain everything to the new visitors at the house. And his whole performance has shifted. It's now he's the elder statesman. He's not the guy being fucked with.

[01:44:39] He's the one who understands this better than anyone else. And hidden in that cut, this character is being so much shit piled on them. And it's like blood roughed up green stuff, black stuff, red stuff, mush, sweat, whatever.

[01:44:52] And then that cut happens and he's like the most perfectly handsome he's ever going to be. And the blood is now arranged where it's like his hairline and then these like four or five specific cuts. The great little red lines on his face.

[01:45:05] And he's just now like, I'm the expert. Let me explain this to you. And otherwise his face is clean, like immaculate. You know, the stains he has on the shirt are only cool now. The rips he has are only cool. Right. Yeah.

[01:45:18] He had a little time to clean up in the cabin secret ninth bathroom. Yes. And you believe it too because like it's obviously it's not a continuity error. He's transformed into something else and you believe the transformation because you watched

[01:45:33] what he went through, which was so funny, but also truly harrowing. And he really does know what's happening. Right. And I think the movie is weird, like emotional sincerity to keeping one foot in. This guy's night started with him having to saw the love of his life. Yeah.

[01:45:53] In half. You know? And that necklace is the thing that sort of brings him back. Stupid necklace. This movie does give you at least one minute of them as a happy couple in the car just so you can somewhat feel the impact of him sawing.

[01:46:05] It's off the charts. When he starts singing and she's covering her ears going, oh, please stop. You like champagne? Because obviously he's got a chainsaw head within a few minutes. Right. You know, it's gonna be harder to sell. Like, you can't believe he did this.

[01:46:18] And the necklace thing to have that whole cute exchange in the first movie with her sneaking up on him and him pretending to be sleeping or whatever. And then this one, they get into the house and he's like, remember this necklace I bought you?

[01:46:27] Like, they have to call it out. It obviously becomes more important later, but there are little gags like him going into the work shed and the camera like panning over, seeing the chalk outline of the chainsaw

[01:46:42] and then the camera whips over and here's like headless corpse with the chainsaw. And it's like, why was the chainsaw chalk outline? Because you know it's not there. I know, but it's so funny. Yes, I love that.

[01:46:52] The headless corpse with the chainsaw is maybe the coolest stop motion effect or whatever that is. Right. The coolest puppety effect. It's her using every technique. But she has the chainsaw, it feels like that's a puppet. That's like a rod puppet.

[01:47:05] And when the dance is happening, that's pure stop motion. And Sam Raimi's using every tool in the shed. Yeah, truly. Workshed. Workshed. That was such a dumb add on. I mean, when I rewatched it this morning, there's that moment where he says workshed

[01:47:18] and clearly his mouth isn't moving. Someone's like, well, you need to tell him where he's going. That feels like a De Laurentiis note. How do we know he's going to the workshed? What kind of shed is it? Apparently, De Laurentiis is a vampire. Yay.

[01:47:33] I mean, what does he look like? I've definitely seen pictures. Do you know De Laurentiis? He looks like Kevin Pollak's character in the whole Ten Yards. Ehhhh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I see. I just imagine a total stereotype, which is maybe rude. He was a genuine movie lover.

[01:47:52] That's the thing about him. Yes. As much as he is this parody of a European film producer. He actually did sort of care about this shit. In a way. He also was happy to make stupid stuff. Where was this movie with regard to David Lynch's Dune?

[01:48:07] Well, David Lynch's Dune is 84, I want to say, and this is 87. So this is post-Dune. Which De Laurentiis produced, right? He sure did. As far as Raffaele De Laurentiis. Raffaele is the producer on it, but obviously that was a DEG, right? De Laurentiis still controlling the purse strings.

[01:48:25] But yeah, what else is he working on at this point? Let's see. He's got... So he's done the second King Kong? Well, sure. That's in the 70s, right? No, but the second one's much later, right? The Linda Hamilton King Kong? King Kong Lives? Yes. That's 86.

[01:48:40] So yeah, that's right around. I don't know that movie at all. And that's a big step down movie. Yeah. Because when the 70s one came out, he's like, this would be forever. We make a Kong movie every three years. And then it was seven years later.

[01:48:50] He's like, hey, so another one. Bring out the monkey. What year is it? Bring out the ape. Manhunter, he had made the year before. It's always funny with him because it's like that mix of Red Sonja, Year of the Dragon,

[01:49:09] sort of trash, Maximum Overdrive, and then Blue Velvet. Something where he's obviously putting his head on the block. The commonality is that he... Almost all of these, I don't remember who directed King Kong. John Gehrman? John Gehrman made the one you're talking about. No, he made both.

[01:49:30] He made both. The Twin Towers. He made both of them. All right. So with the exception of this person, there is a commonality, which is he's working with directors who have visions. Yes. Real directors. He clearly kind of respected directors. Yeah. Yeah. And it didn't always work. Yeah.

[01:49:49] Yeah. Right. He's rolling the dice on proper visions from real filmmakers. He made a bunch of Cronenberg movies. Worked with, what's his name? Richard Fleischer, who is sort of a genius weird hack. He made Dr. Dolittle, but he also made Amity 3D. But he made the second Conan?

[01:50:09] He made Red Sonja. And he did make the second Conan. He made Conan the Destroyer. Right. Anyway. Richard Fleischman, one of those guys when you just look at the totality of his career,

[01:50:22] he starts in the 1940s and 50s making those movies where they're like, we got a couple songs, a comedy routine, and a dancer. It's called Make Mine Fun or whatever. And a guy comes out and he's like, thank you for coming to this picture show.

[01:50:35] I went and saw, there was a Richard Fleischer retrospective somewhere. And I was like, what's playing today? I saw this thing and I was like, this can be a movie? It's 45 minutes and a guy comes out and he's like, thank you for putting on your nicest

[01:50:44] clothes for this picture here today. There's a little of that mood in Evil Dead 2 as well. Absolutely. A couple dance numbers. An interesting thing about this movie is that De Laurentiis actually stipulated that it

[01:50:55] had to be rated R. And he saw the film and they were like, this will not be rated R. And for us to get even close to an R, it would be about 60 minutes long.

[01:51:05] We would have to cut out so much of the movie that De Laurentiis was like, okay, don't worry about it. And he created this subsidiary company called Rosebud Releasing, which only released this film. It's quite a striking little fanfare at the beginning, but it looks like uneasy Lynch

[01:51:28] Blue Velvet. But he created this subsidiary company. They claimed at the time, yeah, we had to sell it to Rosebud because we couldn't get an R rating out of it. And it was just him being supportive, him being like, look. So it was released without a rating then?

[01:51:44] Yes, I believe so. And in Britain... I'll tell you, Rosebud will release anything. They don't care. They're wild. In Britain, it was banned for a while. I mean, we talked about the video Nasty's. It was sort of a famous one for a bit.

[01:52:00] I think. Am I making that up? And like a deeply terrifying VHS cover. Like, I feel like that was an image that haunted me as a child. And then later I was getting into nerd shit and Evil Dead 2 would be spoken about in such

[01:52:11] high regard. And I'd be like, that's Evil Dead 2. And then the day I put it together, I was like, that's Evil Dead 2? Right. Because the imagery I knew of it at that time was all Ash stuff. Right. This skull with an eyeball is just...

[01:52:22] Skull with an eyeball never shows up in the movie. Just a striking idea. So when did you first see it? And what was the context? I think I was about 12. Perfect. Right. Scary.

[01:52:34] I mean, I talked about an Evil Dead episode, but I was just like such a comic book store kid. I'm sorry, I didn't listen to that one yet because it hasn't come out. No, I'm not saying this to you. I'm just saying this to our viewers.

[01:52:43] In my timeline. Yes. Such a comic book store kid was going to conventions and stuff with my friend, was reading like Wizard Magazine and shit. Sure. And so these things would just be spoken of in very reverential tones. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:52:56] So I was just like, I think I need to see this. And the very cool people who worked at the local video store kind of did me the mitzvah of my mom walking up and being like, is it okay for him to watch the Evil Dead?

[01:53:08] And they were like, it's like pretty goofy. Yeah. Yeah. It's mostly a comedy. Don't worry, Mom. Right. And then the guy said, like, you know, aside from the tree rape, he did say tree rape to my mom and I was like, this guy's blown it.

[01:53:20] And she was like, yeah, you can rent it. But I was renting Evil Dead one mostly so I could watch Evil Dead two. Like it felt like I know that's the one that everyone talks about.

[01:53:28] Wait, the guy left the video store guy let you rent Evil Dead one? Yes. He vouched for Evil Dead one with your mom? Yes. An incredible thing. I don't like this guy now. And I had a little, I had a little like TV with a built-in VCR. Sure.

[01:53:41] And I watched Evil Dead. It was taped to your head. Yeah, it was taped to my head. Years seven to 20? No, but it was like a 10 inch screen at most. That's meant to be seen. Right.

[01:53:51] And I'd watch movies late at night and I watched that movie and was like, this is much scarier than I thought it would be. This movie's like upsetting. And, but it was also like- He said Evil Dead one was goofy?

[01:54:01] I, he was like, you know, it's like a horror movie. Like it's fine, but it's like- What video store was this? TLA Video, dearly departed. Where, where was it? It was in the West Village. What was this person's name? I don't remember. Jimbo.

[01:54:13] Bobby Moynihan worked at that store. Cool. He was one of the people who would sometimes do me the solid and be like, he can watch this. Was it Moynihan? It wasn't Moynihan. That wasn't Moynihan. I remember the guy's face. I couldn't tell you his name.

[01:54:23] I remember the guy's face. All right. But he- Anonymous Garfield tweeter. I want you to get on the case. You have to figure this out. Get it Moynihan. I know, I know that you can.

[01:54:31] But the point is I watched Evil Dead two, like probably a week after Evil Dead one. Like that was one weekend. And then the whole week at school, I was like grabbing onto the armrest going like, and then on Friday I get to rent Evil Dead two.

[01:54:41] Building up and then watch it. And I had that, like, it could not have been more built up in my mind. No brain is capable of taking that in. No. But I- Within a space of a week? No, no.

[01:54:52] It was truly this, I think it was two consecutive weekends. Did you like it? Loved it. You did? Loved it. This is a real griff horror film. Right. And it has lots of puppets and magic. Sure, sure, sure. First movie I think.

[01:55:03] But I mean, if you were coming off of Evil Dead, I don't care. I don't care whether you're 12. I don't care whether you're nine. I don't care whether you're eight. Yeah. If you just watched Evil Dead one and a week later you watch Evil Dead two, that's

[01:55:13] a real, it's a real whiplash. But you know, Evil Dead two was what I wanted. Like Evil Dead one, I was like, I get this. This is good. This isn't necessarily my kind of movie. Sure, I'm not going to watch it all the time. Right.

[01:55:22] And I was like, Evil Dead two, I was like, here we fucking go. Young Griffin in his smoking jacket with a pipe going, I get this. I get this. This is good. I get this. No, this is not what I'm wanting.

[01:55:30] The thing I equated to was like first Terminator, which I have a lot of respect for now, I think at the first time- Piece of trash. The first time- You think it's a piece of trash?

[01:55:40] But the first time watching it, I was like, this is set up and then I'm going to get to the cool movie where the guy's the metal face and fucking explodes and turns into- Terminator two is the movie that Terminator one wants. It is, you know-

[01:55:51] And the exact movie you want to see as a 12 year old. I would, yeah, sure. Right. So I think I was like, this is the grimy movie where they test out the ideas and

[01:55:58] then I'm going to get to Evil Dead two, which I know is the chainsaw movie. Like I knew- That's the thing. I knew as like an Empire Magazine reader, as like someone who watched like Spaced, not to speak of it, you're right.

[01:56:07] Talks about Bruce Campbell, these hushed tones. He's got a fucking chainsaw for a hand. And he has a chainsaw. I knew all that before I watched the movie. Like the lore had already been told. Where were you when you watched the movie?

[01:56:17] The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yeah. Enjoy my restraint. Um, I mentioned on the first movie how- What? How I think I discovered- I thought you said it was banned. Well, the Video Nasties had all- Been unbanned?

[01:56:31] It's the first one that was a Video Nasty, not the second one. I checked that. It was the first one that was a Video Nasty. So Evil Dead two sailed through. But I mean, as I've talked about on this podcast, I did have that weird thing of

[01:56:42] like Clockwork Orange, Exorcist. These are movies that got unbanned in Britain when I was like a teenager. Yeah. Britain had just thrown them on a ban list and been kind of like, who cares? You know, don't worry about it. And then like later-

[01:56:52] David Simms has come of age. And like we're censoring like- The prophecy has come true. Oscar nominated films. But you know what? It's so crazy. Like those are both Best Picture nominees. And Britain was like, hey, they can't be seen in this country. Right. Yeah. Under no circumstances.

[01:57:06] Right. Like a theater once showed Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick like sued them. Right. And you're like, is this like, is this the most cursed image? Face of death. Right. Yes. Um, but uh, I, I first, I think I first saw Evil Dead as the movie within the

[01:57:19] movie, the movie they're watching in Donnie Darko. I mentioned that last time. Yeah. Donnie Darko, they go see Evil Dead. I've never seen Donnie Darko. So let's watch it. We'll throw it on. Okay. Um, we'll do it right now. In the middle of this episode. Live watch? Yeah.

[01:57:29] Right. But uh- And then we're going to listen to all of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown? Absolutely. Good. Yeah. That's a great, great, great musical. Um, what's it? Uh, the, the Sally song is so good in that. The book report? My New Philosophy. My New Philosophy.

[01:57:44] Well, that's, that's an added, that's a revival. That's in the, that's in the Chris and Shannon with revival I know. But it's so good. Cause Sally was in the show period in the original production, right? Sally was the new character. Right. So it's- Sally was the-

[01:57:56] You want to get in some deep please? Absolutely. You're a good man, Charlie Brown. People thought there's no way they circle back. Sally. And if they do, it's going to be the- After 15 minutes at the top, they're going to let it lie.

[01:58:06] If they circle back, it'll be the end as always. They're not going to open a whole new sidebar. Sally, the Sally character was Patty in the original. Right. Right. Right. Off Broadway. And it wasn't even a full musical. It was basically a workshop for a musical.

[01:58:18] And Gary Berghoff was- Gary Berghoff and Bob Balaban were in the original. Wow. Was Balaban Linus? Or he was Linus. And Berghoff was Charlie Brown. Kristen Chenoweth doing My New Philosophy in the 90s revival, or whatever you want to call it.

[01:58:33] The sort of new songs by Andrew Lippa is one of the great Broadway performances, in my opinion. You can listen to it any time where she's basically having an argument with herself throughout singing a song. Right. It is unbelievable. It was also one of those things-

[01:58:45] So fucking good. I feel like if someone breaks out on Broadway and becomes a crossover name in filmed media, right? To the public at large, it is usually because their show that they're a part of is such a cultural phenomenon. And the Charlie Brown revival did okay,

[01:59:02] didn't run as long as they thought it would. Right. But I just remember that New York Times review coming out and there being like a star. Sure. And she wins the Tony and everyone's like, put her in sitcoms, put her in movies. Like this is obviously-

[01:59:13] Everyone needs to know her name. So much. You know, when I stopped representing Bruce Campbell- I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, go right ahead. I was going to make a joke about how she's short. That's all. Please.

[01:59:23] Her only problem is she's a foot tall. Yeah. It's astonishing though. She's very small. I mean, she's a small person. Martin Short did that joke on the set of Mulaney where he- What was the- He improvised a bit. It was him- I'm sorry to go on the sidebar.

[01:59:36] No. But- I don't even remember what I was going to say. Unaired TV pilots, so I can share jokes because no one will see them ever otherwise. And the bit is that Mulaney wants to quit his job writing for Martin Short, who's this hack comedian

[01:59:48] who has a game show. He's like, I don't need you. I can make up my own bits. Look, I could do physical comedy. And there was nothing written. Right. And his bit he did was he picked up a toothpick and went, look, it's Kristin Chenoweth's walking stick.

[02:00:04] Martin Short- I'll never forget that. Martin Short's very funny. Yeah. Very funny. I think it was only in a rehearsal he did that. So he didn't do it on the show? No, Kristin Chenoweth's walking stick. So yeah, when I stopped representing Bruce Campbell

[02:00:17] and I stopped being a literary agent, I spent some years in the wilderness writing for magazines. And then I wrote a book of fake facts. Yes. Your guarantor. There is my expertise. That's what I am. What's that? The guarantor to your career. The guarantor to my career.

[02:00:34] To use blank text. There is my expertise. I remember sitting in my college apartment watching- What college? Newcastle University. Oh, sure. How do you know that? Watching More For, the British channel that aired The Daily Show. Right. And which was sort of like, not Channel 4. That's regular.

[02:00:51] Not E4. That's for the youth. More For. It's kind of for people who drink some tea. No, not for Geordie. And you being on it. I remember that to clear memory. I promoted that show on The Daily Show, that book on The Daily Show.

[02:01:05] And that's what led me to be on The Daily Show and change my life. But it all happened because of your good man Charlie Brown, the Lucy song, where she tells Linus all these fake facts. You see that? And that was what gave you the idea?

[02:01:15] That was the inspiration. Oh, I listened to that all the time when I was in camp. It is funny. I mean- You see that bird there? It's called an eagle. Christmas and Thanksgiving, we eat them. What a good fucking show. That is such a great show.

[02:01:25] I sing the opening number in the shower a lot. Bring it back. What's that? Oh, you're a good man, Charlie Brown. I mean, it's been 20-ish years. I don't want to get you in trouble with that scab. His solo of like, everybody says to me.

[02:01:36] Also new to the show. Interesting. An add on to the original role, I guess. Or like, he expanded that whole song. Did BD Wong play Linus? Yes. Correct. And did he win at Tony or was just- No, it was Roger Bart and Kristen Chenoweth. Roger Bart-

[02:01:48] This was a very pivotal production for me. I was like obsessed with this Broadway. You went to this band? You went to this? This iteration of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Roger Bart- I'm glad you guys are having fun.

[02:01:58] Roger Bart and Kristen Chenoweth were like the two breakouts. Tony talk. Right. They won the Tony talk with the two friends. Bart won a Tony as well. Right. Right. And he played Schroeder, right? He played Snoopy. He played Snoopy. So sorry. Roger Bart was Snoopy.

[02:02:09] Stan Leeuwin, Mathis was Schroeder. This top of the noggin, Anthony Rapp was Charlie Brown. Right. Is that the- I forget who played Lucy. Ilana Levine is the actress. But yeah, you're right. I mean, it's kind of a loaded cast there. Yeah. And a bunch of-

[02:02:28] Yeah, BD Wong was Linus, right? No Big Ben. No. Tough to do on stage. If you're going to have a sort of cloud- Sam Raimi could figure it out. He would. He would figure it out. I want to see Julie Taymor's Pig Pettin'.

[02:02:40] I want Julie Taymor to loop in Bono and the Edge again. Just give me $45 million, I can give you a Pam Pam musical. But that was 1999. It's high time for another Charlie Brown. It's high time. You going to be in it? Yeah. Who are you going to be?

[02:02:55] A Woodstock. Non-singing part. Non-speaking part? Non-singing, non-speaking, maybe not visible. Maybe not being. Maybe not written into the film. A non-being part. I'm playing Woodstock in that. I'm not in it, but I'm ready anytime they need me. They told me canonically I am Woodstock in this production.

[02:03:12] That's the Norm Macdonald joke, I think I've told it. It's my favorite, where he's like, I'm gaining weight for a role. And they're like, what role? And he's like, I don't know. But they always need fat guys in the movie. Like.

[02:03:22] There's a comedian named Adam Cousins who does a bit where anytime there's a movie that's set in space and they show Earth, he will add it to his IMDb as extra uncredited. Oh boy. What haven't we talked about? Evil Dead 2. The big head thing.

[02:03:42] Big head fills the door. Right, right, right. Goes back in time. Because you have Scary Tree. How late they get to Tree in this movie, considering how the tree is sort of the. Well, I like his reaction to hearing she went out. I was like, oh, she's dead.

[02:03:56] You don't leave the cabin. Right, what'd you do? I should have mentioned that. And she runs out. There's the blackout. The lights go out. And then the next thing you see is her running out of the cabin. They're all like, this fucking idiot. Right. Right.

[02:04:06] Oh, this is the Holly Hunter. Yes, Bobby Joe. And you have this sort of tamer version of the tree attack that mostly builds to her just being dragged out. She's just being dragged. Dragged by the hands. Right. You get the spooky tree.

[02:04:18] And then you start translating the pages. Right. Well, first I have to bash open these incredibly valuable ancient artifacts are kept in a shadow box that cannot be opened by any other means than throwing it on the floor.

[02:04:31] It's funny that this movie opens with the book mythology as well. It does. It's very. More in on the book. Yeah. Right, right. Rather than just, what's this weird object we found? The movie at the beginning is telling you, there was a book. I mean, obviously.

[02:04:44] They called it the book. It repeats the camera is the sort of secret villain thing. Right. Like where the camera's rushing at him and all that. But it is like such an incredible gimmick to make up when you have $0. Exactly. It's so brilliant. Right.

[02:04:57] This movie opening with the book is very logical, like with that little bit of flavor. But the opening of the first movie is transparent. But there's nothing like the opening of the first movie. The camera just whooshing through this swamp and you're just like, I'm unsettled. Like. Right.

[02:05:09] Right. And the moment you realize this isn't a stylistic flourish. This is the visualization of evil. The menace, right. Yeah. By the way, we have a special guest on the podcast. The camera from The Evil Dead is here. It is here in the corner.

[02:05:25] It's whipping around his head. He's zooming over him. Like a fly. We're trying to bat him out of the area. Who would like to work with Sam Raimi? Very professional. It is one of those things that when she breaks open the pages

[02:05:37] and she explains that it's like part one is you have to physicalize it. You have to bound the evil into flesh. Part two is you open a portal that you can send it through. It's the only way to rid this thing. Classic.

[02:05:46] You're sort of like, how was this movie going to visualize this thing? Like clearly they can't have any budget left, any scope left. And then this giant fucking horrible face. Fill up the door with a face. Yeah. That was the moment you finally got to see me.

[02:06:05] Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But then there's also the pages go down into the fruit cellar and Bruce has got to go get the pages. Right. Which is fun. Going down to that cellar is always fun.

[02:06:16] The most horror movie part of this thing. Very much so. And also a reveal of yet a new secret basement within the secret basement. Because right, because there's the Henrietta sequence where it's just so funny.

[02:06:27] So he goes all the way in there and then he opens up the door to the other part of the secret basement. But we haven't followed up on those four. For the pipes wrapped in rags or something. Steamy pipes wrapped in rags. You set up those four.

[02:06:38] You don't see them for a while. You're so caught up in like the Bruce mania. Right. And the next thing you know, this guy jumps through the window and starts punching him in the face. It's like intruder, intruder, lock him in the basement. Right.

[02:06:50] Then once they have a moment to settle, they're like, wait he dismembered, he wouldn't dismember our mother and he wouldn't kill her. Like they start playing the tape and it's now a later part of the tape

[02:07:00] you haven't heard and he's like, anyway what I was supposed to do. But what I did instead. And then that realization of like. That archaeologist really paused the tape at the wrong time. I know. That's you know. But like it's. You talk about just. I play the tape.

[02:07:13] We talked about this on the last. I would play the tape. Is he a tape player? The endless imagination of like, this is the form of Henrietta. This is wild. And then the added thing of like, oh also her face

[02:07:22] can change into this and she has the teeth and the neck goes out. Right. It's just. A snaky head. A snaky head. Yeah. Yeah. The end of this movie. Yeah. We mentioned Jake getting dragged down the cellar and then one million gallons of blood coming out. Right.

[02:07:38] Or the second million gallons of blood. Yeah. So far. Deadite ash getting snapped out of it by the necklace. Right. The power of love. I'm all right now. That necklace is so dumb though. I'm sorry. I agree. It's a little bit of a goofy.

[02:07:52] What do you use that necklace for? Frying ants? That's the problem. It actually. A little magnifying glass? It looks dumb. It's a bad looking necklace. It's a dorky looking necklace. It's a shitty gift. Maybe that's why it pops in my. He's like, oh it's a dorky necklace. Oh.

[02:08:05] I can't believe she came out with me. You need it to wedge in your brain. Yeah. But I just love the like. I mean it makes sense when you know that what they wanted to do was this movie. But it also just watching it could play as like.

[02:08:19] What's the ironic Twilight Zone ending to this movie? Like how do you fuck with this guy further? Right. Because the first one basically has that. With the final jump of him getting crept up on by the camera. Yeah. It gets deaded. Yeah.

[02:08:34] But obviously this one he gets zapped into the past. I mean that's the. I mean don't you think that's. That's pretty Twilight Zone. Twilight Zone-y enough for you? That's what I was saying. No, no, no. I'm saying. I thought you were asking us to punch this movie up.

[02:08:45] No, no, no, no. I'm saying. I'm like I can't do better than that. It very much feels like a Twilight Zone ending of like what's the final indignant. Now he can never even go back to his time. Right. Right. Right.

[02:08:54] And his job is to kill these monsters I guess. Yeah. I do love. I'm just looking at the big monster right now. I think it's pretty cool. He looks like a monster from the game Doom. Looks like the villain or one of the floating like yeah. Heads.

[02:09:08] You're talking about like the game Doom. Yeah. The video game? Correct. Oh. I haven't played that. Doom where you go around like. Oh, Doom. Yeah. Not Doom. Oh, excuse me. Well, Doom was inspired by Evil Dead 2 directly. Is that true? Yes. That makes perfect sense. That makes sense.

[02:09:21] Yeah. Monsters. Right. Yeah. And then just walking around. That's the thing about Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. It's pretty vague. It's like eh. And then of course they're monster thingies. Yeah. And Duke Nukem ripped off tons of lines. Well he's right. From. Yes.

[02:09:33] He's a reskinned Bruce Campbell basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I thought you were talking about Doom the movie, which I tried and failed to bring up earlier. Tried to bring it up in every conversation. But I thought you were talking about the monster

[02:09:46] kind of looked like the third stage guild navigator in David Lynch's Doom, which is not wrong. Sure. It does look like it. It's not wrong. There's a lot of pinky rubbery. It's a cool design. Yeah, exactly. But. Like I'm not a hardcore Doom head. But I.

[02:09:57] You know about the guild navigator, right? I'll show you the guild navigator. I was going to say. No. I was going to say I missed them from the Villeneuve. Well. That's my favorite element of the Lynch movie. We're going to get them next time. OK. Yeah.

[02:10:08] One of the great graces of the Villeneuve movie, which I love, was that they didn't touch the third stage guild navigator. The most important character in my heart. OK. Well, the thing about the Lynch movie is. Because that is exactly what I wanted

[02:10:18] to be when I was 13 years old. And that movie came out. The Lynch movie leads with that. I just wanted to be this sexless creature in a tank. I just love the way they look. Floating in a tank. It's super cool. But the Lynch movie leads with it.

[02:10:27] And you're like, the book doesn't exactly lead with these guys. No. That was David Lynch saying, get ready. Exactly. So Lynch is kind of just like, this is my vibe. Just FYI. Right. Just so you know. I'm going to have a whole deal with this.

[02:10:37] There's going to be a floating penis vagina in a tank. And then any time they. You know how like in Star Wars. We're going to have this floating penis vagina explain the plot to you. Yes. But this is important information. And to Virginia Madsen.

[02:10:50] Try not to get too freaked out that it's a floating penis vagina in a tank. The other thing is Virginia Madsen, where he's like, well, the book is narrated by this character. So Virginia Madsen. And she's like, yeah. So she'll narrate it.

[02:10:58] And then at the last scene, she'll show up and be like, hi, by the way. It's a beautiful dialogue. But no, I feel like in Star Wars, it's like, you know when you jump to hyperspeed? And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this.

[02:11:08] And then you see this big, massive, floating penis looking thing. And it goes, bam. That's cool, right? Well, in Dune, that experience will be the penis vagina floating around for a while. Then I cut to a black hole, maybe. You know, it'll be the opposite of that.

[02:11:22] The opposite vibes. It's the. Yeah. Which I love. Right. It folds space. Speaking of the new Dune. I did it. I got it. I pulled it away from Charlie Brown, pulled away from Pink Pimp, got it back to Dune. Son of a bitch. I think we will see.

[02:11:37] You know, the big boys. The stage threes. Third stage. Because in the Villeneuve movie, we do see these guys. Those are the second stage. But they're amateurs, right? That was the implication I got. Yeah. These guys are rookies. Right, right. That's what I assumed.

[02:11:51] You saw them right at the start. They're fishbowl heads. But they're going to grow. Yeah, they're going to turn. But so Dune II, we see them. We'll meet Faye Routha. There'll be lots of fun harkening stuff. You don't have to convince me. I know. I'm on board.

[02:12:03] I'm just excited. I was just so glad to not have third stage guild navigator erasure with some new idea. Yes. So I could hang on to my guy. You can ease in for a little while longer. The avatar of Hodgman. Evil Dead II, this film.

[02:12:16] I was not here. This never happened. I do not say these things. I was not here. That's what he says. This film did fine. It made $6 million. But once again, it was a video thing. That's where all the money comes from.

[02:12:34] The reviews were positive, but a little baffled. I think they were all sort of like, it runs out of energy. The energy is so intense. That seemed to be- That's an incorrect. I agree with that. But I can also imagine critics being like,

[02:12:50] I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. Of course. This movie's like 84 minutes with credits. Like you're watching, and you're like, how can they sustain this tone? And it's like, they're just going to get in and get out as quickly as they can. Right.

[02:13:00] Ebert's review very much does understand this is a comedy. Whereas I think others were sort of like, it's so slapstick, but it's so violent. What a strange mixing of tones. But yeah. I mean, it depends on whether you accept strange mixings of tones as an artistry or mistake.

[02:13:22] Right. And if you look at this movie, you could read it as a mistake. There are people who go, you can't do both at the same time. You have to pick. You could look at Bruce Campbell and say, he's a good actor.

[02:13:33] Or you could look at him and say, he's a cornball bad actor. But what you have to appreciate is he is the most brilliant actor of bad acting. Yes. And watching him in this, again, for the first time in many years, now on the other side

[02:13:50] of having done my imitation of acting, I realize now how talented he is. Like, every muscle in his face is on it. Right. And he can flip himself over, as Ben mentioned. But then even a movie I adore, Bubba Ho-Tep,

[02:14:06] which is on its face one of the most absurd premises for a movie ever. Do you know this one, Ben? No. Can I tell you what Bubba Ho-Tep's about? Can I give you the gift of telling you what Bubba Ho-Tep is about? Yeah, sure.

[02:14:16] Bubba Ho-Tep is from the director of Phantasm and Beastmaster. Yeah, Donny Cross-Curley. OK. Bruce Campbell plays a man known as Sebastian Half, who people think was an Elvis impersonator and is now in a retirement home. OK? OK. He claims adamantly that he was the real Elvis. Yes.

[02:14:36] He's the real Elvis. Fame got too hot. He needed to cool off, so he went low and remade himself as an Elvis impersonator. And he got too deep in it. No one believes he's the real guy now. And he hired a stand-in to take over for him.

[02:14:49] Right, who became like depressing, fat, paranoid, shit on the toilet by Elvis. Right. So he's at this retirement home where he's trying to come to terms with his sense of self, where no one believes him except for one other person at the retirement home. Ossie Davis. Ossie Davis?

[02:15:04] Who is a man in a wheelchair who swears to God that he is John F. Kennedy, that they didn't shoot him, they kidnapped him, and they dyed him black. He's played by a black actor. Got it. I am JFK. They just did me over. Sure.

[02:15:16] This is me now. Right. And even Bruce Campbell is like, this guy's probably a little crazy. I'm the real Elvis, of course. So that's the setup of the movie. Unfortunately, a redneck mummy gets conjured. A redneck mummy? Yes. Correct. He's a baba hotep, if you will.

[02:15:35] He's a rotting mummy in a cowboy shirt and boots. OK. And he's stealing souls, is that correct? From the retirement home. And how is he stealing the souls? Fuck, does he suck them out of their butts? What's that? Does he suck them out of their butts?

[02:15:50] One more time. He sucks them out of their butts. He sucks their souls out of their butts. He sucks the souls out of their butts. Stealing the souls of the retirees in this retirement community by sucking them out of their anuses.

[02:16:02] And it's unforgiving for Bruce Campbell playing old Elvis, being like, I got to get on my walker and be the last stand against this baba hotep. But he's so good. And it's a very naturalistic performance. It's kind of a lovely performance, from what I remember.

[02:16:17] It's filled with pathos. Yeah. I got to fucking see this. It's great. It was one of those butt-sucking shit. Yeah. I know. Some of the best butt-sucking ever committed. I feel like when it came out, it had been years since Evil Dead and Briscoe County.

[02:16:34] And everyone was just finally like, a round of applause for Bruce Campbell, please. The critics were very kind to that movie. It's a fun, silly movie. But they were also just like, this guy, he takes it seriously.

[02:16:46] He'll be in the silliest thing, and he'll give it his all. It was really like a sort of standing O for Bruce. And Ozzie Davis is really good in it too. The whole movie rolls. It's good fun. That's one of my father's five favorite movies ever.

[02:16:58] He read the review in the newspaper, and he was like, what is this thing? And I was like, that's a Bruce Campbell picture, dad. And he was like, you want to see this? And I went, yeah. And then when I got out of school, he called me.

[02:17:07] And he was like, I bought two tickets to Bubble Hotep. Let's go tonight. Oh, wow. And for years, he would recommend it to anyone he talked to. And he was like, it was kind of a friend test for me.

[02:17:15] I'd be like, you want to see a good movie? Watch Bubble Hotep. And if certain people didn't get it, he'd maybe distance himself a little. It's a great movie. Bruce Campbell's a great actor. But yeah, the critics didn't know what to make of it. It's stable on TV.

[02:17:26] Very much so. And obviously, VHS is where it finds its following, much like the last movie. This is obviously a classic, the sequel is better movie. Like if people, if you're ever reading a list in a magazine in the 90s, it's like, I've got Godfather, Terminator, Aliens.

[02:17:42] These are the ones people might throw out. Do you guys agree? Better than the original. I agree. I certainly. I do too. I have more appreciation for Evil Dead 1 now. A movie I always liked, but re-watching it recently. Because I mean, I re-watched both of these movies

[02:17:57] a lot as a teenager and don't think I had seen either film in about 10 or 15 years. So rediscovering both of them, they both were better than I remembered. I love them even more now. I think one is such an impressive achievement in so many ways.

[02:18:12] But two is just. And it's also fun to see such an elbow greasy movie. But honestly, so is this. Yeah, but Evil Dead is the movie that Sam and Rob and Bruce and the others all made in order to make other movies.

[02:18:27] And it is, I mean, I've not seen it in many, many years. It's great. But Evil Dead 2 is a statement of vision. This is the movie they wanted to make. Absolutely. Not just the Evil Dead movie they wanted to make,

[02:18:41] but the kind of movie they wanted to make. Can we use the tone we want to make? To make the kind of movie. Visually kinetic, unpin-downable, or whatever. And what makes the later Sam Raimi movies so weird is that they are so conventional.

[02:18:54] I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen Simple Plan. Or The Gift. I never saw it for the love of the game. I haven't seen The Gift. Yeah, but I remember going to those movies and not feeling Sam Raimi there. Until I saw Spider-Man.

[02:19:08] We'll get to that episode. My read on it has always been the Coen brothers crossover to legitimacy, combined with him having movies like Dark Man that were liked, would explode on video, and he could never make the movie that crossed over into being a hit at the time.

[02:19:26] He talked about that he felt like when he would go in for things, people would be like, oh, you do the Sam Raimi thing, the kinetic thing? And someone else was supposed to direct Simple Plan right beforehand.

[02:19:35] And he was like, I want to just get a good script and show people that I can place the camera down. It was almost a challenge. Yeah. And Simple Plan is such a Coen-Z pitch. The cast. I just want to work with actors. Crime goes wrong.

[02:19:50] What a tangled web we weave. Which is absolutely right. I was going to say, Dark Man is definitely that Sam Raimi. Mike Nichols was this close to doing Simple Plan. Oh really? Yeah, I was there. I knew there was someone. And I just read Mark Harris's book.

[02:20:07] So I don't know if the timing is the same, because I don't know which came first. Dark Man is obviously Sam Raimi in the terms that we're talking about, very Sam Raimi-y. But then the last place where I felt like I saw Sam Raimi

[02:20:19] before Spider-Man was Hudsucker Proxy, which he wrote. Which he wrote. And it was their reunion. It was his reunion with the Coen brothers. That's after Dark Man and before Crick of the Dead. And also it was just like, boy, you think Sam Raimi's so great

[02:20:34] and the Coen brothers are so great. And when they get together, it's supposed to be heart to heart. They'd be murder. But it's like, it's these weird projects that people either love or hate. I know. Crime Rave just goes away. Hudsucker Proxy was not liked at the time.

[02:20:46] No, no, no. But it's such a great, such a good movie. And we should call this out. Raimi, by all accounts, he was the second unit director in that movie. And his big sequence in that is the hula hoop montage of the sail of the hula hoop.

[02:20:59] Which is just like, that whole fucking sequence is masterful. Yeah, it's so great. I'm gonna watch it again tonight. How about that? One of my favorite movies. Yeah, Durning. Durning. Durning. Not counting the Mazda name. Let's play the box office game. Yeah, sorry. Newman. No, don't be apologizing.

[02:21:14] Paul Newman. Sure, sure. He's in that one. He's in that movie. Bruce Campbell. Bruce Campbell. So funny in that movie. Smitty, I think his character's named Smitty. That gag's got whiskers on it. He only sits in backwards chairs. Yeah. Yeah. In the newsroom where,

[02:21:31] female lead, Jennifer Jason Leigh, right? And here are always gabbing, they're always jawing. There's this big sign in the back of the newsroom that just says, is it interesting? It's so beautiful. Such a beautiful movie. And it's gorgeous, that's the thing, right? It's actually beautiful to look at.

[02:21:49] This film came out on March 13th, 1987, and as you noted, so did Raising Arizona. Maybe I should have not given that enough. Well, Raising Arizona opened on one screen, so it's not in the top five. Oh, that's right, it opened at the Harvard Square

[02:22:02] Movie Theater where I saw it with Charles Diggs. Really? Well, that's where I saw it. That was the screen at Okanagan. But yes, it's on one screen, it made $36,000, which is a lot of money for one screen, actually. But Evil Dead 2 opens number 14,

[02:22:17] so neither of these films are in the top five. Or even in the top 10. Okay, so then something else. But both films, I mean, obviously Blood Simple was a huge thing and it won at Sundance, but this is the entree, true entree for most of these directors.

[02:22:31] Oh, and there's the Blood Simple reference in Evil Dead 2 where he's dragging the person, dragging the body along and says something about Blood Simple. Yeah. Sorry. Number one at the box office is an action film. Number one at the box, is it Canonical Action Star?

[02:22:45] Absolutely, Canonical Action Franchise. Canonical Action Franchise. The first one. It's the first one, is it Predator? No. It's 1986 or 87? This is 1987. So it is The Predator, yeah. The Predator is not to be seen. I know, I'm just trying to ground myself here. But he is of course invisible.

[02:23:00] He is of course invisible. Is it Lethal Weapon? It's Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. They're cops and they've got a lethal weapon, a gun. No, it's Mel Gibson's character. I have never seen a single Lethal Weapon movie.

[02:23:14] You know, the first one is kind of great. I've only seen the first one. It's that guy, Shane Black. Shane Black wrote it. And Richard Donner directed it. And Gibson is really good in it. It is good. It's a lot of fun. It's very 80s.

[02:23:28] I used to enjoy watching Mel Gibson a lot. Indeed, indeed. It's a pretty perfect use of him, that movie. It is, I mean, he's crazy. He's a lethal weapon, all on his own. And then Danny Glover. He does some Three Stooges stuff in that, doesn't he?

[02:23:40] A lot, that's a very Three Stooges. And he watches Three Stooges. And then Danny Glover is getting a little old for this shit. He's like 42. I would argue he's too old. That's one of the, is Danny Glover younger than all three of us? Probably.

[02:23:54] Number two at the box office is a horror sequel. One you love, one I love. In a famed horror franchise, an entry in that. Is it Dream Warriors? It's Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Dream Warriors. Dream Warriors. Really good one. Has a absolutely banging song by, fuck.

[02:24:13] Wanna get this right. Freddy Krueger. Dream Warriors. Patty's Dockin. Dockin. Dockin, yes. Dream Warriors. That's all I remember about that movie. Darabont wrote that one? Other than the, it's a team up, right? Yes. The teens get together and decide to take. Heather Lane came from the first movie.

[02:24:28] Lawrence Fishburne's in it? He is. Yeah, he's the order. Oh, yeah. Patty Arquette, obviously. And John Saxon and a lot of cool people. Ja Ja Gabor's in that movie. They take the fight to Freddy himself. It's a really fun movie. And it looks cool.

[02:24:40] It's directed by Chuck Russell. It was written by Darabont and Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and Chuck Russell. It's a lot of fun. Number three at the box office is the best picture winner of 1986. 1986. I always forget this one. Platoon? Yeah, well you got it.

[02:24:56] Ah, the streak is broken. I feel like Platoon would be one you'd always miss because it's sort of like, not your thing. Yeah, not my thing. I don't like Warbird. You've never seen Platoon? Never seen Platoon. You know, it's one of those movies

[02:25:07] where you're like, I can see how this was different. Now you're like, this has been done so many times. This is what everyone does. But I can see how this felt immediate and new and raw. Yeah, I don't know. It's the same deal with Deer Hunter

[02:25:22] where you watch that and you're like, I can see how this kind of blew people's minds and now it feels a little quiet. It became so iconic so quickly that I felt like they did nothing for me. Deer Hunter's unwieldy, but there were incredible sequences.

[02:25:34] Right, that's the thing. There are sequences in it where you get it. In Platoon, it's like so much of that movie's legacy. When you read the coverage of it at the time was just like, he made the actors go to boot camp.

[02:25:43] Right, and it's like, and he served in Vietnam and it's about his experiences. And it's the 80s, so people are, because Deer Hunter is not a good representation of the war in Vietnam. It's this very operatic movie. This is what it was like.

[02:25:55] They were doing drugs and they were disaffected. And again, now you're like, well, duh, I've seen Vietnam movies. Right, right. Anyway, but it's good. It's well done. It's just funny that, yeah, anyway. Number four at the box office is, I think it's sort of a dark comedy.

[02:26:13] It's from a big director, but it's one of his kind of smaller, he would often make these kind of slice of life movies that he would set in his hometown. So it's a Barry Levinson. It's a Barry Levinson film. Is it Tin Men?

[02:26:27] It's one of his Baltimore films, it's Tin Men with Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss about used car sales. No, no, they sell aluminum side. That's what it is. That's why they're Tin Men. Right, they're Tin Men. I've never seen it. I've always heard that it's good.

[02:26:38] I did see that movie, but I have no memory of it. I would have seen Diner, Avalon, Liberty Heights. I was gonna say Avalon. Avalon's more. That's later, recent. Hey, I'm not playing this game. I'm just an observer. I remember Avalon being kind of the grandest.

[02:26:50] That's the sort of like, sort of godfathery except without crime. Really paid off. Number five at the box office is a horror film from sort of a major director of the time, although I feel like nobody talks about him anymore. 1987. 1987.

[02:27:08] It's got, I mean, this will give it away. It's not a franchise, it's a standalone horror film. Standalone horror film. This will give it away, but it's got a famous twist. It's Jacob's Ladder? It's not Jacob's Ladder, but you're on the right track. Oh, Angel Hearts. Angel Hearts.

[02:27:23] Oh, okay. No one saw that coming. What's the twist? Lewis Cipher. This character called Lewis Cipher, who's played by Robert De Niro. Lewis Cipher, who could he be? He's kind of evil. Wait a second, Lewis Cipher, Lucifer! Oh, shit! He's the devil!

[02:27:40] I didn't see that coming at all. He's the literal devil. And it's Mickey Rourke and Lisa Benet. Lisa Benet, who got fired from the unmentionable sitcom. Yeah. And fired off of a different world for making that movie. Right, right. Yes. So, Lew Cipher. He eats an egg.

[02:28:00] I remember he's got a whole thing with hard-boiled eggs. Hard-boiled eggs and long fingernails. It's an Alan Parker movie. Sounds like the devil to me, eating hard-boiled eggs. Exactly. But you know, like Alan Parker, someone put him in our Reddit. Yeah.

[02:28:11] And I was like, you know, I've always sort of pooh-poohed him because he made movies that I feel like haven't aged that well. It's a crazy list. Because it's Bugsy Malone. Yeah. Kids shooting ice cream guns at each other.

[02:28:22] We could have been anything that we wanted to be. Bum, bum, bum, bum. It's a crazy movie. Midnight Express. Saw that in a theater. Did you enjoy it? Bugsy Malone. It really unnerved me. It's very weird. It's just, I don't like it.

[02:28:36] And all the Model Ts that they drive around in are pedal-powered. They're powered by. That's the thing with him, you know, now that I'm looking at it's like he switches from kind of like, because it's Bugsy Malone and then Midnight Express.

[02:28:46] So serious movie about being in a Turkish prison. Right. Sure. Unlike all those light-hearted comedies about being in a Turkish prison. But I'm saying he would switch from goofy to serious. Like this is serious. Because then it's fame. Back to like, okay, we're singing and dancing.

[02:29:00] We're going to school. Except for the one scene with Coco. No, no, there's some rough stuff in fame. I mean, then Shoot the Moon. And then Pink Floyd, The Wall. Can I say this to Ben? Ben, there's some real shit in fame. Okay. They want to live forever.

[02:29:13] Don't go in there just thinking it's a song and dance movie. It's not, what did you call it? Let's have some fun. Yeah, let's have some fun. If you want fame, you're going to have to work. Birdie. Which I'm sure must be a favorite of yours, right?

[02:29:26] Well, it's got Nick Cage in it. I know, but Shoot the Moon, then Nick Cage, we were confusing that with something else. Shoot the Moon does not, it's like Albert Finney, Diane Keaton, Karen Allen. Oh, okay. I'm thinking of what's it's called, Racing the Moon or something.

[02:29:37] That's Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage. That's a coming of age movie. Angel Heart, Mississippi Burning, which is another serious movie that's maybe a little dated feeling now. Racism is bad. Turns out these guys were bad. Come see the Paradise Center. No, The Commitments, back to lighthearted,

[02:29:55] winning over word of mouth. Now I have seen The Commitments recently. And can I say this to Ben? Yes. Permission to speak directly to Ben? Granted. Have you seen The Commitments? No. It fucking slaps. It really does. It is a great movie.

[02:30:11] It's one of those movies kind of in the vein of. You stared so deeply into Ben's soul. I didn't know what he was going to say. Although I agree with you. But you know what I mean? Like you watch Billy Elliot and you're like, oh, this is good.

[02:30:23] I can see why this was a phenomenon. The Commitments was so good. You're like, this should be cheesy, but it's so winning. The music kind of rules. So hard and the band is so good. And that guy, the big guy who plays the lead singer,

[02:30:38] who's kind of a jerk, that's him singing and he's so good. He still sings, but he's still a jerk. So it doesn't work that often. Every one of those performers, you expect them to go and be huge movie stars. The once guys are the only ones.

[02:30:55] They're so charismatic. Every one of them. Everyone go see The Commitments. Then he does. Ben. Remember what I said about it? Speaking of your. I opened it up. It's a lot of fun. You'd love it. I mean, you'd have a good time.

[02:31:09] It's one of the best opening credits songs of all time. Great opening credits song. He follows it with a total bounce, The Road to Wellville. Kind of a famous 90s bounce. Speaking of Anthony Hopkins. Speaking of Anthony Hopkins. Like, you know, Anthony Hopkins. John Harvey Kellogg.

[02:31:24] You've won an Oscar. You're hot. Do you want to play like the world's most famous incel? Basically. Do you want to make a movie about like milk enemas and people who like, no fap clubs? I can see Anthony that you're resistant.

[02:31:38] It's based on a T. Caragas and Boyle novel. It is? Don't think if you buck teeth and a funny mustache. Just one of those things. It's about the inventor of cornflakes. That was like a Columbia Pictures. Like, who allowed this? They spent oodles of money on that.

[02:31:52] The 90s were a weird time. They were making movies for grownups to see in movie theaters still. With a lot of money. That was a movie. Like talk about like Evil Dead, like some people go. I have nothing against T. Caragas and Boyle.

[02:32:04] Don't you fucking sell me out, anonymous far-field Twitter fans. I'm sure it's a great book, but I mean, you know. Talk about weird tonal movies. That would always play on Comedy Central during the day. If I was homesick, I would watch some random 30 minute stretch

[02:32:22] of Road to Wellville and go like, this feels illegal. You should not be able to make a movie that feels like this. Same, saw it on Comedy Central and I was like, this makes me feel weird. Dana Carvin's like a street urchin with like black teeth. Who is?

[02:32:35] Dana Carvey? Dana Carvey. Give me one of those animals. I've never seen this particular film. It's so bizarre. Who else is in that movie? In the Road to Wellville? Bridget Fonda, Dana Carvey, Anthony Hopkins. Yeah, I'm fond of both of them. You've got.

[02:32:50] It was the age of Bridget Fonda. Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, Michael Lerner. Who doesn't love a Lerner appearance? A drop in from ML. I love a Michael Lerner. Of course, that doesn't work. He's like, fine, I guess I'll just do Evita with Madonna.

[02:33:02] How do you like them apples? He follows Evita up with Angela's ashes, which is like the bestseller upon bestsellers. And then people are like, hmm, it's a little sad. This movie's a little bit of a bummer. Because that movie was rolled out with like,

[02:33:17] I assume the Oscars are coming for this one. That's in 1999. Who was even in it? Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson. Robert Carlyle, the feel-good actor of the century. It's true. I mean, Emily Watson too, God love her. She's in a lot of miserable. And it's just, you know,

[02:33:32] the poster is just a sad looking kid's face and then Hollywood's like, oh wait, no tickets sold? Zero? What year was this? 1999, people are like, Fight Club, Magnolia. You don't wanna see the starving children. Well, right, and what's interesting is like,

[02:33:46] yeah, okay, we were talking at the beginning of this about the turn, 1999 to 2003, how everything shifted and they just stopped making, no one would make a movie based on a novel for adults now. I mean, they make it for Hulu or whatever. Right, exactly.

[02:34:02] They make it for Apple. Memoirs of a Geisha is 2005 and that was one of the, like, that's a movie close to Angela's Ashes where you're like undeniable, inevitable. A book club movie of the year, yeah, of course. Everyone's gonna love this.

[02:34:13] Yeah, I mean, at least Memoirs of a Geisha, it's like, right, they're wearing dresses. There's sex, there's intrigue. Angela's Ashes is like, we didn't have any food. We continue to not have any food. They're like, how long's the movie? Days went on. But you know what's so funny?

[02:34:26] Is you talk about like- The movie's two and a half hours long, good. You talk about people being surprised that the poster of a sad little boy like didn't blow up the fucking box office. Eight trillion people bought the book that had the almost identical cover. Right.

[02:34:39] That cover was so on the present. Yeah, you wanna see this, Ben? Howdy, boy. Sign me up. There's a reason I never saw the movie, The Tindrum. Sure, that's a good movie though. Oh yeah, but that movie, that poster is- And then his final movie, of course,

[02:34:52] was The Life of David Gale. That's his final movie. That's his goodbye. I'm gonna tease something that we need to explain, go into in some later episode. Go back to the Angela Ashes poster. I'm gonna get a big version of it. Yeah. Angela's ashes.

[02:35:07] I'm setting up deep Ben lore that's gonna come in some future episode. Ben, the kid on the Angela's Ashes movie poster looks like you in the Don't Litter poster. He does, yeah. He does. And to our listeners- You'll find out.

[02:35:22] We will tell the tale of the Don't Litter poster someday soon. So that's the box office, some other movies, sorry. Some kind of wonderfulism there. Something called Witch Board, what's that? No idea. Anyone know what Witch Board is? I'm gonna get yelled at.

[02:35:35] That was a Ouija board horror movie. It sure is. Get ready for 18 texts from Alex Ross-Perry. Seriously, you don't know Witch Board? So sorry, but yes, Ouija board. What year, 1987 we're talking about. That's right. Mannequin is in the top 10. Another 80s junkie.

[02:35:54] Also one where the sequel is much better, Mannequin 2. Really? Much better title. On the move? I always get this wrong. Mannequin 2 on the move? Is that the title? I think it is. That sounds right. And also I've never seen any of the mannequins. Mannequin 2. Who's in Mannequin 2?

[02:36:15] In Mannequin 2 you've got Kirstie Swanson, William Ragsdale. It's not a cast that's like- You don't get the lead of Mannequin 2. You don't get Andrew McCarthy back. You don't get Andrew McCarthy. You don't get Meshach Taylor though, I'm sure. Is he in both? I feel like-

[02:36:31] Go back to Mannequin 2. David so confidently exits out of the mannequin tab. Meshach Taylor is back. Meshach Taylor is back. I think that was a logline of Mannequin 2, Meshach Taylor is back. Meshach Taylor is back. Mannequin 2 making $3 million on a 13 budget.

[02:36:45] By the way we're doing Mannequin on Patreon. Well that's fine. The mannequin dip dip. Outrageous Fortune, the Shelley Long movie is up there and Hoosiers, which absolutely is the best. I've never seen any of the Hoosier franchise. Do you want permission to say anything to Ben about Hoosiers?

[02:36:59] Fucking slaps. He wasn't looking at me. He wasn't even looking. What's up? Have you seen Hoosiers? The basketball movie. Oh I thought it was a football movie, no. No it's basketball. Well it fucking slaps. It slaps, why is it slapping so good? Honestly you throw it on.

[02:37:16] It's slapping balls down on the court dribbling. It's one of those movies where you're like, again you're like this movie's been made a million times. But you throw it on and it's set five in the morning in a farmhouse and you can like,

[02:37:27] one of those movies where you can feel that the air is kind of dewy and cold. And it's like Gene Hackman walking into a farmhouse with a basketball and you're like, I've got goosebumps. Like holy shit, nothing's even happened yet. It's that good.

[02:37:40] The last half which is more sports movie-y, like oh they have to make the comeback, is good. But it's the first half when it's just Gene Hackman barking at a bunch of Indiana kids like, fundamentals, passing! You're just like, you bark at him Gene! It's so, it's invigorating.

[02:37:54] It's so good. Bracing, it's a bracing film. Bracing basketball film. It's just what you want. Who else, who were the Hoosiers and Hoosiers? Well I mean Dennis Hopper is the sort of famous supporting character. Yeah but there must have been some young actors. Who are the kids? Yeah.

[02:38:09] I'm gonna look them up. And I mean like, cause the funny thing of course is Hopper is getting this sort of combo Oscar nod that year for that and Blue Velvet. And they gave it to him for the less objectionable movie. Oh right, gotcha.

[02:38:20] But he is really good at it. Sure. Like you can't really, uh, Brad Long. Mike Valanis of course plays Jimmy Chitwood. They're mostly reluctant kids. Did any of them come back for the sequel? Is there a sequel? Yeah, Hoosiers. That's all you wanted.

[02:38:38] You say, he is raising his arms triumphantly like he just won. I couldn't even let it sit. I had to get it out as quickly as possible. The state championship. You couldn't even wait for him to say what was it called? Couldn't, couldn't, I was gonna.

[02:38:50] You were worried I would move on. No I was gonna break, I was gonna break. Hoosiers on the move. The only other movie in the top 10, or top whatever they want to shout out is Heat. The 1986 Heat with Burt Reynolds. Yes. Which is like a sort of ex.

[02:39:04] Is that an Elmore Leonard adaptation? It's William Goldman, it's a novel he wrote and then adapted himself. Isn't that movie. The Stick is an Elmore Leonard adaptation. Right. Yes, yes. Am I wrong that that Heat is later remade as something else? I don't know, is it?

[02:39:21] I don't, that might be a totally false memory I have. Yes, it was remade as a movie called Wild Card starring Jason Statham. Thank you. Directed by Simon West. Yeah. And the poster is in the form of a playing card. Huh, what? I wonder which. The Jack.

[02:39:38] And guess what, he's all in. Oh boy. He's got fists in case you were worried about that. I would not have even noticed that that was a playing card. That's such a small detail on that poster. It's pretty complicated. It's all Statham, no playing card.

[02:39:53] I do not accept. Wild Card, yeah anyway, so that's the box office, The Evil Dead 2, but yeah, it wasn't the theaters, even though you saw it in theaters. I did see it in theaters. It was the home video market that made that movie.

[02:40:05] Yeah, but I only saw it because Nick McCarthy had clued me in. Shout out to Nick McCarthy. Yeah, you should get to know him. Everyone's looking at their phones. Well, I'm looking at my phone. I'm sorry, David, I saw something over the shoulder,

[02:40:20] over your computer that you did not acknowledge. That I was like, clearly I must be imagining things because if this had been the case. On the Wild Card poster? What are you looking at right now? This is the French Wild Card poster

[02:40:33] where the film had a different title. Yeah, I just wanted to move on. I was like, let's wrap it up. How long we been going? Doesn't matter. Too long. In France, Wild Card was- In France, the movie was called Joker. Joker. Joker. It was, I can't deny it.

[02:40:49] It was called Joker. That is a Wild Card, not a Jack. No. That is true. That is actually a fair point, more realistic. Ben, I hope you bleeped all of those out. No, we retired that bit. We retired bit. Yeah, we're back to saying it. Didn't we?

[02:41:01] We're sick of that shit. I don't know. Especially because people would be like, hey, new listener to the pod, what was Griffin talking about where someone got beeped out like eight times? They're like, he was just saying Joker. It's complicated. But no, we've been going for a while.

[02:41:14] We should, I have to eat my bagel. I'm starving. Ben's bagel has been sitting here for a while. And anyway, when's this episode coming out? Well, I won't spoil it. It comes out, I believe, a week after Dicktown. April 3rd, so no.

[02:41:25] Oh no, it comes out a month after Dicktown. So by now, all new episodes of Dicktown have been on FXX. And they are now all available to you on Hulu. Yeah, but I wanna watch some In Between Family Guy episodes,

[02:41:40] so do I have to do FXX for that? Or could I do it myself? You can do it for all I know at this, we're recording this in advance. For all I know. This is not live, to be clear. No, right.

[02:41:50] For all I know, FXX might now be running Dicktown from midnight to 2 a.m. every day. We may have overtaken Family Guy. With the help of the Blank Check listeners, we have become an international phenomenon. About time. And thank you very much for that, because it's tremendous,

[02:42:08] and we hope to be able to make more episodes of Dicktown. It's a wonderful show, and I've said this to you before, but animation takes so goddamn long. And if you're just a voice actor, unlike you and Mr. Reese, who also write

[02:42:20] and run the show and all of that, you do it, and then you walk away from it, and you see the final product so much later that I really do think, as opposed to anything I've ever acted in on camera, I feel very divorced from it.

[02:42:31] Like, I'll know my own performance, but I feel like I can objectively watch animated things, I mean, because I'm like, I was not privy to any of this process of this thing getting made to this point.

[02:42:40] And so I did the record with you guys for the first season, and then it came out much later, in the middle of the pandemic. And it was one of the few things I found to be an actual, in terms of new TV shows,

[02:42:52] that were a real salve for me and an escape at the worst of the doldrums of the lockdown, where I found the show to be a really pleasant, fun distraction from the studio. We hope that it'll be only that. If anything, it'll be a really fun, pleasant distraction.

[02:43:08] Very funny. It is dinky little mysteries in a dinky little town. John Hunchman. John Hunchman, David Purifoy, teaming up in an old Pontiac Fiero to solve really crummy mysteries. It's a broken child genius and his former childhood bully solving mysteries together in a houseboat.

[02:43:25] But then, I mean, spoiler alert. Sure. My character, John Hunchman, and his character, David Purifoy, we have a fight. We go our separate ways, and I have to hire a new driver, and that is Lance. Who would that be? Lance! Lance and his Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle

[02:43:40] that I have to ride on the back of. It's very funny. Very funny. And Griffin is amazing in it. And season one, obviously, is on Hulu for people to watch. Season one is on Hulu, and by now, season two is on Hulu. But like, yeah, exactly.

[02:43:50] Watch them all. They're bite-sized! They are bite-sized. And if I may just say- And you're taking bites. I'm ready to bite, baby. But David's character, vibe-wise- David Reese's character? Correct, correct. It's getting the official Ben stamp of approval. Oh! Because he's a real fucking-

[02:44:10] Is it a big bone? Motherfucker. He's a motherfucker. He rules, and he rules, and I love it. It's so great. I think if we have a season three, if we are so lucky, we'll have to write a character for you. Wow! Like David Purifoy's cousin,

[02:44:24] who's even more of a motherfucker. Yeah. You know what I mean? Oh, I would be honored. Sorry, I was speaking directly to Ben there. I didn't have permission. Is that all right? Yes, yes. Retroactive permission. Thank you. So sorry, so sorry.

[02:44:36] We don't have to cut this out of the episode now. The word- Check our bylaws. It was all about- And David, we have a Belgian boy detective who comes to Dicktown in the season. Tintin type? Is that the idea?

[02:44:52] Because of IP issues, I cannot respond to that question. What a weird connection for you to make. John is vigorously nodding. But we have a Belgian boy detective. I wonder if there is- Is he wearing plus fours? Tintin always wore plus fours. Why would he make that?

[02:45:06] Until the very last collected album, Tintin and the Picaros, when he's finally- He wore slacks. He finally wears flared trousers. Tintin and the Picaros, one of the most incredible masterpieces of literature in my opinion. I agree with you. But we do have a Belgian boy detective

[02:45:20] who shows up in Dicktown this season. If we have a season three, maybe a young man from England. Why would you say that? Would you want me? I don't know. He's not even doing the bit. David's like, I don't have acting to do. A young American from England.

[02:45:34] A young American from England who doesn't shut up about how he grew up in England from the ages of nine to 22. Yeah, exactly. Right. I was curious because we were talking about the line groovy and I was like, for all I've known,

[02:45:48] I've never known the origin of that line. Was it an ad lib? Was it in the script? So I asked Bruce. You texted Bruce? Yes, and he said, Sam wrote it. He wanted something out of it that was cool.

[02:46:02] And in the mid days, Reagan era, groovy was way not cool. Here's the thing about the groovy line, and we're done. Yeah, they're done. Episode's over. The camera holds on him. He says groovy. Hang on, can I talk to Ben for a second? Absolutely.

[02:46:15] Ben, get ready to eat that bagel. Oh, I'm ready. Just hang on, this is it. After groovy, we're done. Thank you, John, I appreciate that. Are you ready to eat it? He's literally holding it in his hand, unwrapped. It's a scallion cream cheese. It's got scallion cream cheese.

[02:46:26] It's got a scowl on it. But the camera holds on him. He says groovy. You punch the air. And then what I love is the camera holds for like two more seconds and you almost see Bruce Campbell start to break. He kind of goes like,

[02:46:37] you can almost see his eyes flicker to like, all right, you know, good. We got it. That's perfect. Probably in real life, Sam held it for five minutes. Right, exactly. Just like, nope, not done yet. Hang on there, Bruce. Hang on. It's so good.

[02:46:49] What a fucking great movie. Very good movie. And Bruce Campbell is Charlie Brown. That's what I was gonna say. Trying to tie it all back together. Someone whose life just beats up on him. I was gonna say Bruce Campbell would be good

[02:46:58] as the tree that eats Charlie Brown's kite. If that tree could talk, I imagine it having like a mocking adult Bruce Campbell voice. Hey kid. Yeah, I agree. Listen here, kid. Wah, wah, wah. Oh, the other thing I wanted to say, I'm sorry. Sorry, Ben. Ben's bagel.

[02:47:13] When you were talking about how you knew that they were writing to him after this movie, and spoiler alert, because I'm only gonna talk about the very first image of Army of Darkness, because I went on to watch a little bit more of it

[02:47:22] and I have some thoughts about it, but I won't share them anymore because Ben's hungry. But the actual title of that movie is not Army of Darkness. According to the opening credits, it is Bruce Campbell versus Army of Darkness. Like, they knew. We'll talk about it.

[02:47:38] They fucking knew. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, John, for being on the show. Thank you very much. Been way too long. One of those things where we were like, wait, has Hodgman not been on since before the pandemic? There was a pandemic.

[02:47:48] I know, but that weird thing where we're like, have we had this person on three times since the pandemic and Hodgman not since? You invited America to come in. Oh, that's true, I did. Yeah. That's right. That was the last one. Come in. Come in.

[02:48:01] We're gonna do a remake. The sequel to that is gonna be amazing. What a difference in A-mix. Master Builder 2, The Apprentice. On the loose. Master Builder 2, The Apprentice. Ben, you may eat that bagel. Go. Ben, eat the bagel as I wrap up the show.

[02:48:13] Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for her social media, JJ Burch, and Nick Loriano for our research, Alex Barron, AJ McKeon for our editing, Leigh Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song.

[02:48:29] You can go to blankcheckpod.com, our shiny new website made by the aforementioned Marie Barty for links to our merch, Discord, Reddit, all the fun things. Thank you all for voting in recently finished March Madness and I'm just gonna call it now, being normal.

[02:48:47] Let's just will that into existence. I'm saying now, the day before March begins, thank you all for a very normal and calm month. I hope you all lived up to my expectations. Tune in next week for Darkman? Am I getting the word wrong here? Darkman.

[02:49:04] We're going dark, baby. Have you ever seen Darkman, Ben? No. I think you're gonna like this guy. You will like Darkman. You're gonna like this guy. We're gonna have a fun guest, classic guest. A classic guest, an old favorite coming back for that. Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson.

[02:49:17] That's right. Yeah. And as always, now I'm just thinking about Liam Neeson doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It's nice to have you. The whole podcast on the phone is what I'm imagining. Oh, yeah. He just calls in. I have a very particular set of skills,

[02:49:31] guesting on podcasts. Who's Liam Neeson in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown? Charlie Brown. Everybody says to me, You're a good man, Charlie Brown.