Tag podcast

Episode 2 – Slacksjacking

pcharbonneau Leave a comment

sobadcast-wordpress

Have you ever had the desire to take your slacks and hike them up so high, you nearly started a small fire? Well you, my friend are a slacksjacker.

Slacksjacking has been around since the ancient Romans, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any information about it online. Once the lifestyle choice and fashion statement for such entertainment heavyweights such as Ed Wood, Michael Landon, the Bay City Rollers, TV’s Webster and Norman Fell, slacksjacking is now derided and snickered at while searching 1970s male slacks catalogues online.

The Bay City Rollers rode the slacksjacking wave of the 70s.

The Bay City Rollers rode the slacksjacking wave of the 70s.

For our special 6th annual second episode, we dive deep into the history of slacksjacking, shining a light on incredible-but-true Hollywood stories that show the ugly side of this fashion phenomenon.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, where we always keep our pants up to our armpits.

Episode 1 – Gamera Super Monster

pcharbonneau Leave a comment

sobadcast-wordpress

Gamera: Super Monster should be so bad it’s mind-blowing. The pieces are there: rubber-suited monsters, bad dubbing, blatant Star Wars and Superman ripoffs, an endless supply of plot holes, ‘special’ effects, space women and a kid running around in brown shorts playing the Gamera theme on an organ whenever convenient.

Does it deliver? That’s what we discuss in the first episode of our new podcast, So Bad It’s… (@sobadcast on Twitter), which you can listen to above. Gamera: Super Monster is a bit of a greatest hits mash-up in that the big green, fire-spewing turtle battles all the enemies of his previous films in a series of shoe-horned stock footage clips. They’re sent forth by Zanon, a faceless villain who basically hangs out in space for the entirety of the movie in his Mazda™ Star Destroyer.

Everybody! It's fun to stay at the...

Everybody! It’s fun to stay at the…

This movie was apparently an attempt by studio Daiei to forestall bankruptcy (surprise! it didn’t work), hence the massive use of stock footage. According to Wikipedia, only about two minutes of new Gamera footage appears in this thing.

What do you think of Gamera: Super Monster, or Gamera movies in general? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to follow us on Twitter.

If you want to know more about Gamera and other kaiju films, don’t ask us! You can, however, follow Kyle Yount’s very excellent Kaijucast, where Kyle and his friends tackle a different Gamera and Godzilla-style movie and offer the latest news each month. It’s worth checking out even if you’re a casual fan like us.

Making the Grade Episode 1 – Steele Justice

pcharbonneau Leave a comment

makingthegrade003As a children of the 1980s, my buddy Jon and I have far too much useless pop culture in our head. In an attempt to let some of it out, we’ve started a podcast called Making the Grade where we’ll discuss all the things that shaped who we are today. We’ll tackle topics like horror movies, video games, discovering music, discovering girls, mix tapes, and movies so bad they’re good.

That leads us to our very first episode, the 1987 cheese-tacular Steele Justice, starring Sensei Kreese (Martin Kove) and a boatload of B-C- and D-movie actors that are probably still too good for this movie. The producers threw in pretty much every 80s action movie stereotype – terrible one-liners, supercheese Frank Stallone-esque anthem, emotionally stunted lead character who cares for a pet snake, a spandex-clad music video, cocaine, uzis, beach workout montage with pink sweater and a mop handle, uncomfortable sexual tension between Steele and his best friend’s teenage daughter – it’s a veritable stew of batshit crazy and it fails spectacularly.

Jon and I could talk about this movie for weeks, if not months straight. Each scene is a perfectly realized helping of insanity, served with a sweaty (literally) side of Martin Kove. The original 35mm print of this needs to be preserved in the Smithsonian. But what did Jon and I really think? Does Steele Justice make the grade? Listen and find out!

Bob(cast)’s Yer Uncle

pcharbonneau Leave a comment

About two weeks back I had a conversation with a friend of mine back in Boston, the elusive rapscallion known as Bob Danger. It went something like this:

BD: “Hey Pete, I came up with an idea and was wondering if you would -”

Me: “I’m in.”

It may or may not have happened exactly that way. Regardless, this Monday we proudly introduced the world to episode 1 of The Bobcast, our shiny new weekly podcast discussion of movies, pop culture and whatever topics that happen to strike our fancy. And we do like our fancies struck.

Continue reading “Bob(cast)’s Yer Uncle” →