Snatch

To listen/download, click here!

Once in a while, it is still possible to surprise one of the guys with a movie that not only meets the expectations that the others establish, but actually exceeds them. This new episode's film is one of those.

Snatch is a 2000 film by Guy Ritchie, starring an amazing cast, including Jason Statham, Brad Bitt, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Alan Ford, Jason Flemyng, Robbie Gee, Stephen Graham, Lennie James, Vinnie Jones, Rade Šerbedžija, and Ade, among others.

You know it's going to be something when Brad Pitt's is a secondary character.

After an 86-carat diamond is stolen during a heist in Antwerp, one of the robbers, Frankie Four-Fingers (Del Toro), travels to London to sell the stone to Doug "The Head" (Mike Reid) for a New York jeweler called Cousin Avi (Farina). On the way to Doug, Frankie stops and acquires a gun from ex-KGB agent Boris "The Blade" (Šerbedžija). He shows the diamond to Boris, who decides that he should be the guy who owns it, and makes a plan to steal it.

At the same time, an unlicensed boxing promoter called Turkish (Statham) tries to convince a mobster called Brick-Top to put Turkish's boxer, Gorgeous George (Adam Fogerty), into a match with one of Brick-Top's guys. Brick-Top agrees, and Turkish sends his partner Tommy (Graham) to go buy a new caravan for them to use as an office. Stephen goes to a local Pikey (Irish gypsy) camp, taking George with him, where, after an intentionally incoherent-sounding man named Mickey (Pitt) sells them a caravan whose wheels fall off, George challenges Mickey to a fight, only to get knocked out and have his jaw broken with one punch. Turkish convinces Mickey to replace George in his upcoming fight, but when they go back to Brick-Top, he tells them that he will only allow the fight if Mickey takes a dive in the fourth round. Mickey agrees after Turkish promises to buy Mickey's mother (Sorcha Cusack) a new caravan for herself.

Want to feel old? This is Hanson now!

Boris tells Frankie he can have a gun if he places a bet for him at Brick-Top's bookie. When Avi finds out, he flies to London,with his bodyguard Rosebud (Sam Douglas), because he is worried Frankie, who has a gambling addiction despite not being very good at it (hence the name "Four-Fingers"), will do something stupid. This seems a definite possibility because Boris hires Vinny (Gee) and Sol (James) to rob Frankie at the bookies.

Vinnie and Sol hire a friend Tyrone (Ade) as their getaway driver,despite his inability to park properly. He runs their car into the van Frankie is in, knocking him out. Vinnie and Sol go into the bookies and fail miserably to rob the place, getting away only with a bag of pennies, as well as showing their faces directly to a security camera. Tyrone "rescues" them, however, and spots Frankie crawling out of the van with a briefcase cuffed to his wrist, and even manages to kidnap him so he can be taken back to Vinnie's shop to be interrogated as to the whereabouts of the diamond.

Not the best criminals around, but somehow they manage.

Mickey's fight takes place, but he doesn't dive in the fourth round; instead, he knocks out his opponent with his first punch,pissing-off Brick-Top, who takes all of Turkish's money and insists on another fight from Mickey, but this time he had better lose like he's supposed to.

At the same time, Boris finds Vinnie, Sol and Tyrone at their place, shoots Frankie in the face and saws off his hand, taking the briefcase with the diamond in it. He pays the guys $10,000 and leaves. Meanwhile, Brick-Top and his guys are hunting for Vinnie and Sol, and they find them a short time later, trying to dispose of Frankie's body. Brick-Top tells his guys to kill them,but Vinnie offers to find the diamond for Brick-Top. He reluctantly agrees, giving them forty-eight hours to find it.

Avi is pissed (largely because he is in London), and Doug hires a guy named "Bullet Tooth" Tony (Jones) to find Frankie, whom they are not yet aware has been killed.

Suddenly, in the middle of the movie, Dennis Farina lashes out at Jake!

Avi, Rosebud and Bullet Tooth find their way to the flat of Boris and stuff him in the trunk of their car. Vinnie, Sol and Tyrone pull up, hoping they find Boris before anybody else does. And finally, Turkish and Tommy come cruising down the street in a van, on their way to see about getting another gun from Boris and arguing about whether humans should consume dairy products. Tommy throws Turkish's milk out the window, causing Bullet Tooth to hit someone crash, accidentally killing Rosebud and popping the car's trunk, allowing Boris to get out. As Vinnie and Sol argue about the replica guns Sol brought, he fires it off, blowing out the car's windows and distracting Tyrone, who hits Boris.

Turkish and Tommy walk up to speak to Boris, only to have him shove past them and re-emerge from his house with a rocket launcher, ready to fuck somebody up.

Not a happy guy.

Vinnie, Sol and Tyrone follow Tony to a pub, where they try to get information about where the diamond is, but Tony notices that they only have replica guns, and promises his gun is very real. The three wisely retreat to the hallway, where they catch Avi coming out of the bathroom with the briefcase in his hands. But as they confront him, Boris comes in with his much bigger gun, demanding the diamond. Tony hears the conversation and fires his gun through the wall, hitting Boris and Tyrone. Vinnie and Sol escape with the diamond, and Tony empties two clips into Boris, but can't kill Tyrone because he is out of bullets. He gathers up Avi, and they leave, heading for Vinnie and Sol's place.

When they get there, Vinnie swears the diamond is at their shop, but when Tony threatens to just shoot them, Vinnie pulls the diamond out of his pants, only for it to be swallowed by a small dog that Sol got from the Pikeys. Avi grabs Tony's gun and starts shooting blindly, accidentally killing Tony. That's when he decides he's had enough and goes back to New York.

Turkish and Tommy talk to Mickey, who says he won't fight again unless they buy his mother an even nicer caravan. Turkish, who is now broke because Brick-Top took all his money, can't do it, and when he tells Brick-Top, Turkish's gambling arcade is destroyed, and the Pikey camp is burned to the ground, killing Mickey's mother. That can't be good.

But will Mickey fight? Will Brick-Top consider switching to contacts? Will Vinnie and Sol get the dog back? Will that dog experience the most painful poop ever? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Jake loves this movie, claiming he has watched it dozens of times, despite the fact that he only just learned Rosebud's name, as well as believing Mickey had three fights for Turkish, even though there were only two, Jake. Say it. SAY IT.

Derek loved it, too. It felt like a Tarantino movie was violently molested by an Elmore Leonard novel. Maybe with Carl Hiassen watching. He likes the editing, giving the film a real seventies vibe. And he was able to discern in one try how many fights Mickey had for Turkish. SAY IT, JAKE.

So avoid dairy, pick a silly nickname for yourself, and listen to the latest episode!

The Blob (1958)

To listen/download, click here!

Bullitt. The Great Escape. The Towering Inferno. The Magnificent Seven. What do they all have in common, aside from being straight-up awesome and, because of that, they will most likely never be discussed on this podcast? They all starred Steve goddamn McQueen, that's what.

McQueen had a helluva career. He started out as a television actor, but eventually felt it was time to step up and hit the big screen with a two-fer in 1958: the forgettable Never Love a Stranger and the spectacularly weird movie we watched for this episode, The Blob.

JOIN USSSSSSS...

"Young" Steven Andrews (McQueen, who was 27 at the time) is on a date with his best girl, a cardboard cutout named Janie (Aneta Corsaut), and he is putting the moves on her hard (which, by 1958 Pennsylvania standards, means "gently holding hands and gazing wistfully into each other's eyes") when they see and hear something fall from the sky. They decide to investigate, and they drive off toward where they think it landed.

At the same time, an old man who looks like mid-eighties Lloyd Bridges (Olin Howland) also hears the noise and, since it landed only a few feet from his Evil Dead cabin, does what any of us would do: He goes and pokes it with a stick. It turns out to be a small meteorite, but poking it causes it to break open, revealing its gooey center. He collects the goo on the end of his stick, and it oozes down onto his arm, causing him immense pain.

His joy at discovering an extraterrestrial money shot is short-lived.

Steve and Janie are still driving toward the site when the old man lunges out of the woods, right in front of Steve's car. They stop to help the man, discover the goo attached to his arm, and throw him in the back of Steve's car to take him to the town's doctor, Dr. Hallen (Stephen Chase).

They catch the doctor just as he's leaving for the day, and he quickly ushers them inside his office. He takes a look at what's going on under the coat Steve wrapped the old man in and immediately calls his nurse/assistant, then tells Steve and Janie to go find the impact site because he has this covered.

They leave, only to find a group of middle-aged teenagers hanging all over Steve's car, demanding a drag race.(Because it's the fifties!) Steve agrees, but only if they do the race backwards. The "teens" agree, and Steve beats them easily, only to get busted by Lieutenant Dave (Earl Rowe), the town's "good cop" who can "relate" to the "teenagers" because they are the "same age" as he is, which is to say, in their "early" thirties.

Lieutenant Dave is not "hep"to Steve's "jive".

Dr. Hallen decides the old guy's arm has to go, and his nurse arrives. He tells her to go have a look at the old guy, but when she enters the examination room, the table is empty. As she looks around, the one lamp in the room falls over, causing the one fuse the office's entire electrical system apparently runs on, causing the entire building to go dark. Dr. Hallen goes to the basement to fix it, and when the lights come back on, the nurse finds herself face-to-...er...amorphous globule with an angry murder snot, which attacks and kills her, and then the doctor, just as Steve and Janie show up outside the office to see how things are going.

Cold-and-flu season in rural Pennsylvania is hell.

Steve and Janie go to the police station to tell them what happened, and Lieutenant Dave sort of believes them. His partner, Officer Bert (John Benson) doesn't buy it, though, insisting it's all a prank to mock him personally because of his war record. Seriously; he actually says that. However, the "kids" persist, and they all go to Dr. Hallen's office to check on him.

When they get there, there is nothing; no doctor,no nurse, no victim, and no blob. There is, however, an elderly woman who says Dr. Hallen is supposed to be out of town, so there is no reason for him to be there. Vindicated, Officer Bert drags Steve and Janie back to the station and calls their fathers (Hugh Graham and Elbert Smith), who make stern faces and take the kids home.Minutes later, both Steve and Janie sneak out of their respective houses and go looking for the other retirement-age teenagers to hunt down whatever Steve claims he saw eating Dr. Hallen.

Steve and Janie eventually end up at the local grocery store, which has been inexplicably left unlocked, even though it is well past closing time. Also, Janie finds the old guy's tiny dog, which she scoops up to bribe her brother from telling their parents where she went. When the blob shows up. Janie throws the dog at it, and then he and Steve hide in the walk-in cooler, but the blob doesn't follow them. Instead, it oozes down the street to the movie theater.

"Blob" is short for "Blobert".

Steve and Janie grab their friends and start honking horns and setting off air raid alarms to get the people in town to listen to them so they can fight the blob. It works, for the most part, but a bitter and spiteful Bert refuses to buy it until the crowd that was in the theater comes running around the corner, screaming in terror. But they still need a plan...

Will that plan, which involves giving Bert a weapon around a bunch of the teenagers he so hates, work? Or will it get derailed by Janie's idiot little brother? How close to retirement age are the teens? What happened to the dog? And what's up with the cop playing chess over the radio back at the station? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Derek unabashedly loves this movie, despite the terrible acting that everybody is doing. Or perhaps because of it. He is, however, upset by Janie's lack of emotion. Even worse, when she tries, it looks like she's having all the emotions at once, and they hurt.

Jake liked it, too. He is pretty upset about just how old the "teens" look. Especially McQueen. It's like they didn't even try to hide it. Also, he questions McQueen's acting chops, as it appears the guy has only scanned his copy of the script.

So put on your most neat-o slacks and cardigan, gather your pensioner-teenage friends together, take some antihistamines, and tune in to the latest episode!