The Cult of Matt and Mark

Once again Matt and Mark have a lot to say about current affairs (it's 2020... so, it's like every week these days), and less to say about the Star Wars coattails outing "Star Crash", a movie poorly engineered in order to capitalize on the Lucas pop culture phenomena. A bad move, of course, it's major sin is that it's boring. If you're going to bad, please be entertaining. We try to do our best to inject a little MST3K into the mix, but it is what it is... However, we are treated to a worthy Hoff' in an early role, noting his potential for future cheesy Sci-Fi outings like Knight Rider with a glint of Euro-trash..
Download: 323 Star Crash

For the 40th Anniversary Matt and Mark review the best of the Star Wars "ennealogy" Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back, as we should. Why is this one the better? A host of reasons one could say, but it's really the scenes and production of TESB that makes it what it is. Care is taken with each scene to frame the acting and gravitas of each situation. Unlike the latter films, we're not fire-hosed with undigested CGI and stiff inconsequential acting. The sets and scenes of TESB are unique and atmospheric and pause accordingly to allow the viewer to take a virtual tour of the Galaxy Far Far Away.
Download: 322 The Empire Strikes Back

Matt and Mark enter Hitler's bunker this go 'round as we review Downfall, the intimate depiction of the Third Reich's final hours as it finds itself ruling over a dramatically smaller and smaller piece of Germany. While this is Hitler's story, it's also the story of the evaporation of national socialism into nothing. Like all imagined ideology, when there's no one left to believe in it, it becomes not only irrelevant but absurd. This is more the story of the knowing citizens of Germany during Nazi rule, here from the viewpoint of Hitler's personal secretary, and the creeping compromises and guilty admissions that are self-excused in a disingenuous way. Morality was not mutated into the grotesque during Hitler's Germany, it was merely suppressed. Download: 321 Downfall

This go 'round Matt and Mark review the 1978 speculative fiction film The Boys from Brazil. Loaded with actual science, we get to see the acting powerhouses of Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier mix it up with the acclaimed Police Academy actor Steve Gutenberg! A nature versus nurture debate tied in with cloning ethics, a film that offers up important questions even today. Could fertilizing the Earth with 92 Hitler Clones get us anything more than your standard shitty sociopath-type CEOs or could you actually hatch the 4th Reich? I suppose that question remains to be answered.
Download: 320 The Boys from Brazil

Matt and Mark go cult arcana this week with the 1980 PBS production of the Ursala Le Quin classic The Lathe of Heaven (Watch it on YouTube for free!). Hidden away for more than 20 years due to a broadcast rights issue, it stuck in our collective cinematic consciousness. A pioneering film in contrast to the more bombastic space opera fair, it delves into the purity of true Science Fiction, laying the ground work for such 21st Century film makers as Alex Garland and Shane Carruth. A "monkey's paw" story, we enter the mind of the main character Orr's "effective dreams." A type of reality-amnesia that reforms out of the sub-conscious, we see the scene change from dream-to-dream in a composite state of simultaneous utopia and dystopia. Filmed on a shoestring, we forgive it its production faults as its "big ideas" seethe with an intensity rarely awarded to greater films.
Download: 319 The Lathe of Heaven