Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - We Bury the Dead (2026), The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Welcome back, midnight viewers to Father Malone's weekly round up. I'm Father alone and with me surveying the future of horror and a lot of Terry Jones flicks. Is my partner in crime, Miss Ripley Jean, you can't stop eating the microphone lately. Get down? Okay, there you go, So what's the HAPs cats and kittens?

Hope you had a good week? Stay strong, winter storm. People use all that burning democracy to keep you warm. Hb. And I recently recorded an episode about Jim Henson's fantasy film Labyrinth that's up on the Patreon channel if you'd like.

To hear it. I had such a good time revisiting that film that it reignited my interest in its author, my favorite member of Monty Python, Terry Jones, so much so that I'm working on. A limited series about the. Man himself that'll be on the Patreon channel starting next month. As such, I am neck deep in Terry Jones material.

I have been working my way backwards reading his history books, The Barbarians, the Crusades, medieval lives, and at the same time, I've been watching his earliest television stuff. All of this is online, by the way, in the years leading up to Python, he did a show that he wrote and performed alongside Michael Palin and Eric Idelin called Do Not Adjust Your Set. That's actually still very funny and it's good to see them and the Bonzo Dooda Dog Band doing their thing while under the constraint that this was supposed to be a children's show. I guess the big thing I watched, The most rewarding thing I watched was Picard. I know, I know, it's Star Trek, and that's why I'm mentioning it and not going whole hog on the show.

When it first came on, I got halfway through the first season and then I just quit. It felt like Star Trek from a bunch of people that never really watched Star Trek. The way dumb Star Wars fans felt about Luke's portrayal in The Last Jedi is how I felt about the portrayal of latter day Picard on that series. But because I'm a fucking monomaniac and Star Trek is my latest obsession and I have to experience it all. I finally finished the first season.

It was garbage. Then I finished the second season high level garbage. Actually it is a vast improvement over the first season, but it felt ultimately like they could have told the whole story in two hours, not ten. Now Season three, on the other hand, fuck man, this is everything I've been looking for from the Next Generation. Look, they didn't need another finale.

Next Generation had a perfect end to the series, But then they had those movies which ended with Nemesis, which is kind of like if the original cast had stopped after Part five, the Final Frontier. So if we got the crew back, even for a poker game that lasted twenty minutes, that would have been welcome. What we got here. This isn't hyperbole. It's one of the best seasons of trek I've ever seen.

Obviously, there will be a trek Fest away mission about it in the future. Now the end of trek Fest is actually in sight as far as the theatrical features, but there's always a new Fest on the horizon. The theme has been chosen, and that's the other thing I've been doing all this week, gathering our primary materials, collecting the films to be exhibited, and trying to win them down between manageable and thoughtful group of films. The overall theme is fantasy, but we're doing a rather narrow focus. So right now I'm watching twenty four different fantasy movies from around say, nineteen seventy to around nineteen ninety.

Yeah, nineteen eighty nine. Look at that. Maybe I should throw the potential list out as a poll and take the twelve most popular. Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in participating in. Dear listeners, here's one that's probably not going to make the show.

I just watched it. Fairy Tales from nineteen seventy eight. I thought, hey, sy Richardson from Repoman is in this and linea quickly from Return of Living Dead in It's a seventies interpretation of fairy tales. Cool. It's porn, and not a very good one.

The jokes are bad and the songs are worse, and I don't know if HP would be down to talk about all that wild seventies pubic hair. If you want to see a good fairy tale porn, yes, I just said those words. Check out Alice in Wonderland, starring wholesome goddess Christine de Belle, from whom I once received a birthday cameo video where she wished me well and congratulated me on something I will not announce on the air, but it was very gratifying. Anyway, that movie is funny and the songs are funny and the sex is hot. What else?

Oh, it's February. I mentioned last month that December was our most downloaded month and it was a big old fluke. Well, January beat it. Buy a hair, but that is four months of straight growth. So thank you everybody.

Ripley, thanks you too. In fact, hit it. Hp an that's ship J because. It's thank you, HB. You know the number nine etiquette tip from a subway punk don't be selfish, share your radio music with everyone else in the car.

I was going to cover Dracula, the new Luke Bisson version, but two things struck me. Another fucking version of Dracula in Transylvania in carfex abbey and blah blah blah blah. What's the fucking innovation here? Is it? Because the director had a childhood wish to make this one too fuck off into the sun.

Also, this particular director, it was doing a little reading on him. Sex pest, sex creep, sex predator. I don't know. He was dating, dating, and impregnated a fifteen year old girl in nineteen ninety one had no idea, and then he made Leon the professional anyway, fuck him. I don't care what the age of consent is in frog Town.

That was a child. So instead I thought Rip and I would head underground for the greatest subway heist movie of all time from nineteen seventy four, The Taking of Pelham one two three. No units standby on a double. What's up, ze, The train's been hijacked. Nothing will happen a long as you obay my orders.

The city of New York is given one hour to come up with a million dollar ransom. You are right, yes, Scott, we'll kill one hostage. Ever Eminante to go late. We agree to paid the ransom. Tell your clock off.

The money has to be cab at stack tight, transported up town. It's just not gonna make it. Pellam one two threes in motion. They're taking a Pellam one two three. Oh wait, no we're not.

We're not doing that one. Actually, that movie is a fucking masterpiece. Everyone should see it. Based on the novel by John Gotti, who also wrote the novel that inspired Walter Hill's Johnny Hansome. It's the tale of a group of mercenaries who commandeer a New York subway train and demand one million dollars in exchange for the hostages.

The film is tense and exciting and gritty as fuck. Filmed on location in and around New York in the height of its collapse, it is an amazing piece of work, with Walter Mathow as the transit forced to negotiate with the lead Mannie played by Robert Shaw, with Eerie Calm notable as the film Tarantino ripped off for the character naming structure in Reservoir Dogs. The criminals in Pelm one two three are mister Blue, mister Green, mister Gray, and mister Brown. Young Hector Alizondo. He's that ingratiating fellow from Pretty Woman.

He is a loose cannon and sexual predator, mister Gray, and he's really scary. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the film's score by David Schier, which is jazzy and frenetic and fun. If you were to ask me to hand over a perfect example of seventies urban crime music, this is the one. It is a perfect movie and you should see it right now. Unfortunately, we're talking about the remake.

Unlocked the door to it now our clear control center hearing me? Who is his Helmie Ryder with a y as in train rider? I will trade you for all these passengers. I'm just a civil service employee. You are exactly the guy I want to run.

June twelve. They want me to take the money down to the tonnel at. What is really happening, guys, is fourteen. I didn't have anything to. Do with this fun Pellam one two three.

A cup of your screen. You see what I've done it on. The dayn Internet, This wasn't planned in the last three weeks. Everything doesn't appear like what it is. Pellam one two three ratedar oh no, wait wrong again?

And I'm glad we're not doing this fucking Tony Scott directed horrible piece of shit. I love when a screenwriter decides they know better than the original author what the story was really about. No, we're not talking about the two thousand and nine John Travolta. Can you fucking imagine? Remake?

That was garbage and bullshit and garbage. No. Nestled in between those two films, twenty five years after the original and only ten before the Remake Boy, that's a pretty nifty summation of Hollywood these days. Put out a fantastic four again. Now remake it shit, that was a misfire, Make it again.

In nineteen ninety eight we got a television version. Fourteen Hostages, one Train, No Escape six. World Television proder for taking a pellam one two three NC. Sunday like Freaky Friday. Virtually no one remembers the original one now, but some of you out there remember Barbara Harris and Jody Foster's original film from the seventies.

And then, of course there's the Lindsay Lowan Jamie Lee Curtis mess, where Lindsay Lowan does a credible job as Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jamie Lee Curtis acts like a toddler who drank a bunch of espresso. There was a Shelley Long Gabby Hoffman TV version in nineteen ninety five. I hadn't heard of this TV movie, and when I discovered it, my instinct was to leave it unseen. But then two intriguing facets become apparent. The Walter Mathow role was being played by Edward James Almost Now we've seen almost play Stern and crotchety.

But this character is Lucy goosey, even gregarious at times, so I wanted to see that, and more importantly, in the Robert Shaw role is young lithe dangerous. Vincent Donofrio, who was on a fucking hell of a role at this point. Between nineteen ninety three and two thousand, Donaffrio made no less. Than three movies a year. It's like he signed himself up as a contract player back in the golden age of the studio system.

In the year he made this, he also made The Newton Boys, Claire Dolan, and The Velocity of Gary. This film was directed by Felix Enriquez al Kala, a journeyman TV director, having made hundreds of hours of TV, some of my favorite TV. Actually, he did two episodes of Space Above and Beyond that one year it lasted, and if you name a show since he'll likely have directed at least one episode Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, The Adventures of Briscoe County, Junior Lois, and Clark Castle Brimstone, Remember Brimstone, John Glover is the Devil Good Show, and most recently, i'll call it directed two episodes of the latest iteration of Goosebumps, which I'm going to check out later today. I covered that Jack Black movie recently over on the Year in Horror podcast Spoilers.

I loved the movie, and then I watched the director video Seguel, and I loved that too, So I will be diving further into the adventures of the Goosebumps universe later. As is the nature of most television work, it's kind of hard to discern a director's actual style unless you created the for a show, in which case the rest of the four hire directors follow your lead and we can maybe get an idea of it. But I'll calla with rare exceptions is an episodic TV guy. So all I have to go on are this and the dreadful ecological action film Fired Down Below, starring master of the art of lazy boy rolling Cherkata Stephen Segal. So I'll just say that this movie feels very, very, very very nineteen ninety eight.

Lots of unmotivated cutaways to b roll close ups of random shit, lots of in and out of focus for no reason. Basically the end of the nineties TV wise seem to be about chaos for its own sake, which can be fun unless you're making a tout thriller that depends on precision and not random bullshit. What do I know? As suspected the performances save what it can of the rest of the movie. It's not helped by clearly being filmed in Canada.

I don't know how it was so obvious it was filmed north of the border, considering the majority of the film takes place into train cars, but there it is too clean. Maybe I don't know. Actually it's the appearance of Kenneth Welsh. If Welsh is around your ninety nine percent sure that the movie was filmed in Canada. Nor has it helped in any way by casting the psychopath role of mister Gray with Donnie Wahlberg.

Donnie seems like a good sort. I like him way more than his fucking goon of a brother, that dickhead. Mark Wahlberg showed up here in Vegas a couple of years ago, bent on making Vegas Hollywood two point zero, which is a great idea and I encourage it, but not from that subletter at Moron made a big show like he was bringing it, when in reality he had heard about Sony and Warner Brothers both eyeing a move here, and apparently that was going to happen. Las Vegas was going to be the home of Warner Brothers, and then the local government shot it down because why bring money here into Las Vegas. You know, when I first came here, I put a quarter in a slot machine and I played for an hour, and I got drunk, and then I wandered into a buffet after enjoying a free excellent, by the way, excellent lounge act, and then I ate till I burst for like five bucks.

Now you have to pay for parking, So good on you, Las Vegas government keeping it dumb. Anyway, as soon as the studios pulled out, suddenly mister say hi to Imafamy pulled up stakes fuck him. I once saw him in some stupid video quiz where they were asking him the meaning of Boston slang and they said Jimmy's and he said, oh, rubbers, condoms, excuse me, check his papers. This isn't New York's sun around the hub. Jimmy's are chocolate sprinkles that you put on ice cream.

He's a fucking phony all day and all night. Come on, come on, damn Anyway, I like Donnie, but he's fucking terrible here, completely miscast. There's something genuinely unhinged in Hector Alizondo. In the original, you see him as a tiny guy who's got something to prove, and he's willing to prove it. It makes sense that he pushes back as hard as he can against the steely reserve of Robert Shaw.

This guy seems like a posturing teenager. Actually, you know what it's like. It's like when Donnie Wahlberg decided to become the bad boy of New Kids on the Block, same outcome. I don't think it's worth a watch. The changes from the book are superfluous and just based on updating technology, which was true of the recent remake as well.

But if you had to watch a Taking of Pelamon two three, definitely watch the original. But if you had to watch a remake, we'll seek this one out. It works so much better and is more charming than the bloated piece of ip they gave us back in two thousand and nine. Actually, if you had to watch a remake, don't just don't watch it, just watch the original. Half of the charm of Taking of Pelamon two three is its time and its place.

You know, I sometimes wonder about the other factors that are swaying the movie going public when they step out to see a particular film. Historical context is one thing. You can find out that the day that they released the amazing Colossal Man was also the day that Albert Anastasia, a fucking giant in organized crime, was murdered under Lucky Luciano. He was the head of Murder Incorporated, a fucking trade union of hitman and assassins which has only ever gotten one movie, and that's Murder Incorporated, with a perilously young Peter Falk as abe Kid twist Rales and Howard Smith as Anastasia. It's a low budget snooze fest, but it does have some real life on the street charm thanks to shooting in and around New York.

Just like taking Pelm one two three, his murder might set the table for where you are in time and place when that movie was released, though, it would also help to know that those drive in attendees while watching Glenn Langan grow larger and angrier might also be pondering the release of a cloud of radioactive material after a fire at the Windscale Nuclear reactor in Northern England that had just recently occurred, or maybe while watching Glenn a reek havoc on poor old Vegas, VIC the giant Cowboy sign hung outside the Pioneer Club here in Las Vegas, that the month had begun with the first successful placement of a man made object in orbit, and it was Soviet Spotneck's clockwork appearance in the night skies signaled not only the start of the space age, but the space race, and let the US know that they were woefully behind.

And what had been a simple and inevitably won Cold War, that fear of and hope in science that was spinning out of control all around, you might have run a little more import to the tail of a man caught in a radioactive blast after a nuclear explosion. And yet it's the silliest goddamn thing, a cheap ripoff of Richard Matheson's a brilliant novel, The Incredible Shrinking Man. The effects are fund performances are solid mid fifties c to de grade. And it works overall. But I wonder if it worked even more with all of those other factors swirling in your head.

It would have to like that radioactive cloud at the windscale reactor. Nearly twenty years later, a cloud of nerve gas was released accidentally by a facility in Colorado, which, luckily the winds blew out into an unpopulated area. The event would be one of the inspirations for Stephen King's apocalyptic epic The Stand. I was thinking of both of those things. The stand for the sequences that take place after our heroes have gathered in Denver and are attempting to restore some civilization piece by piece, including the crews tasked with going around and collecting and disposing with the dead.

Couple that with how a film's time and place of release can impact its overall effectiveness. You get we buried the dead. How nice? Its well? Please during the storm time.

Hey, this is Mitch. Please like message and I'll get right back here. Come here, Okay, I need you. I love you. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Wake up, Wake d. I'll keep trying. I keep trying. If you find your husband, I hope you understand what that could mean. The old ones that do come back online at DOSA, I can assure you you have nothing to.

Remember. That sound, that fucking grinding sound. Okay, We're gonna get there. We Bury the Dead would be a great title if it didn't immediately conjure the nineteen fifty eight fright flick I Bury the Living. Admittedly, that sensation returned throughout We Bury the Dead, the sensation that I'd seen this before, and we'll get there too.

Because for a while the film really works. The entirety of the first act is solid, minus a bit of the old news broadcast as exposition that seems to be proliferating nowadays in lieu of subtlety or trust in the audience to pick up on subtlety. Nevertheless, here's some of that real world time and place context, the same kind that lent equally unearned weight to alex Garland's civil War. The US accidentally detonates an experimental warhead off the coast of Tasmania, reducing the city of Hobart to cinders and killing every living thing on the island. As clumsy as the exposition might be, the sequences of the destruction are horrifying.

I will say unreservedly that the film is shot spectacularly well. In particular, director Zach Hilditch may be the best director currently at incorporating drone shots into a narrative flow, rather than as some weird chapter heading. Hey, let's stop here and stare straight down for thirty seconds. It's now a week later and the Australian government is allowing volunteers onto the island north of Hobart, which is still on fire, to collect the dead bodies to be catalogued and disposed of. This hastily thrown together military group is completely untrained, They are wildly under educated, and they are given no essential tools to get the job done.

See how the real world just keeps on echoing here. That's where we meet Ava, played by once and future Skywalker Daisy. If Daisy Ridley didn't exist, Kennedy Tarkovsky would have had to have drawn her. Ava is an American volunteer whose ulterior motive is finding her husband, who was on a company retreat at a resort south of Hobart when the bomb went off. Just another reason it never works Somewhere that forces you into a retreat.

We're disguised as relaxation is a fucking scam. That first act, as Ava meets with other volunteers and we're given the breadth of the devastation, is really affecting. It's deliberate, with a general sense of despair in some of the glimmers of hope that appear in those moments. And then Ava meets a romance novel cover character, and all that goodwill is gone, and we're into a standard road movie, which even that is fine. Corpse retrieval volunteers going rogue and breaking quarantine to wander this surreal landscape and encounter bizarre situations on the way to discover whether or not the Leeds husband is dead.

Ain't a bad log line for a feature, but that's the thing. The mission to determine if her husband is dead or alive is kind of an open question, because even though the entire island is dead, some of them don't stay that way. That's right. This is another fucking zombie movie. They speak about it in Whispers in that first act, the good part of the movie.

Each of the characters are given smoke flares to attract the military. If they find a corpse that's different, set it off, they'll come running. Well, what are they like? Don't worry about it? Are they violent?

Just use the flare? That mystery of what these revivified corpses are, What the chemical agent that caused them, whether or not they're conscious. None of that will be answered. I'm sure you've heard me say nine times out of ten, I don't want to know. I'm fine not knowing, particularly if you're not telling a large scale story.

Donna the Dead is a huge scale story, and it gives zero explanation, and even that works in this film. What I took for intrigue with those early vague descriptions of the undead are in fact as confused as they are because the film is confused about what it wants from them. Their behavior varies from corpse to corpse wildly stand quietly confused, others go full attack mode, and some others continue with their unfinished business. There's no standard other than what the plot needs from them at that moment, i e. What lesson does Eva need to learn from each encounter.

This could have been a Heart of Darkness meets Night of the Living Dead. Instead, this is Easy Rider meets twenty eight Days Later. Actually, no, those are all really good movies with strong points of view. We Bury the Dead is a bad movie with a weak point of view. What could have been interesting the undead as unfinished business.

We know that's the metaphor, because characters keep saying the phrase out and loud just doesn't play because the movie doesn't trust it to or more specifically, it doesn't trust us that we can appreciate it and be horrified by what's happening without our lead being chased through a crowded bus of corpses by a raging ghoule that's snapping and spitting in an attempt to harm her. On last week's episode about Send Help, I mentioned that a good horror movie would stand up if you strip the horror elements away. Let's apply that pressure. Take away the zombies, take away the ominous, again unearned gravity of a chemical or biological bomb exploding, and what you have is a script you couldn't sell to the Lifetime network.

This is a movie about a wife who cheated on her husband and wasn't given the opportunity to make amends. That's it. That's it. You can do emotional stuff in a zombie apocalypse. By the way, I know, Sean of the Dead is the wackiest of comedies, but it has the biggest heart pumping in its decaying body, not just the sweet relationship between Shawn and Ed, but the overall conquering of Sean's prolonged adolescence and accepting of a mature relationship.

And the zombie stuff works because it knows what the zombies are. It set rules and it follows them. Rules are the most fucking important in horror movies. But we bury the dead can't get basic shit down. It's two hundred miles to the resort where her husband's body is located.

Our leads make one hundred and eighty of those miles up ligety split, and then it's a slow grind down those twenty as Ava without a vehicle has to walk. True, there's an abandoned vehicle every twenty feet and they're all still gassed up. But she's walking. Why Because it's the third act. Man, it's time for your lead to walk.

Dude, don't spend your money see this, but if you must, do it when it streams. I usually don't do spoilers, but this fucking movie. I know I've said this a few times, but ordinarily I just wouldn't have reviewed this film. About halfway through, I knew it wasn't getting any better, and I had already decided I needed to find something else to showcase here something worth recommending. But in the end, this movie pissed me off so fucking much.

If you don't want to know anything, thank you for joining us. Monday is a big one at Trekfest. HP and I are getting assimilated. We are the board. We'll see you there.

Everybody else still here. This fucking movie is cobbled together from a dozen or so superior zombie flicks and TV shows. There's not one fucking innovation here. We've got a barn full of dead that a living character is hoping will get better. We've got the pregnant corpse with a zombie baby still kicking inside.

We've got a madman and who kidnaps our heroine to replace his wife. This is all in the same scene, by the way, a twenty minute, useless, fucking interlude to demonstrate that man is the real monster because we didn't know that thanks to twenty eight days later or twenty eight years later or Dawn of the Dead or the Walking Dead or Evil Dead all the dead. And then she tops the scene off so wonderful by fooling the guy by pretending she is his wife by dressing like her, echoing that other great movie zombie Jason Vorhees when he was fooled at the end of part two by Amy Steele pretending to be his mom. Why why are people still making zombie movies? That's a blanket question to an entire generation of filmmakers.

When I sat down to record this, the question on my mind was what what was the movie that turned your head around and made you need to make a zombie movie of your own? But that question is irrelevant. As it turns out, the question really is, after a quarter century onslaught, what's left to be said? Sincerely? You know what I misspoke?

The zombie innovation here you've already heard. They grind their teeth loudly, painfully, and for what seems like fucking ever, like it nails on a chalkboard. Every scene with the Dead involves the constant, maddening sound of slow chipping, pulverizing, and cracking. It's the fucking cheapest trick in the book add unease with physiological reaction. William Castle's seat buzzers for the Tingler were more refined, but that's not unexpected from this film, because through and through it's just pieces of superior entertainment slapped onto a bad relationship flick.

I'm done. I'm going home. I am home. Good for me. That is going to do it for me this week.

Thank you all you midnight viewers. WHOA Okay, I already kind of said goodbye. Anyway, Well for Ripley Gene and for me, I'm follow alone. Try to enjoy the daylight, everybody. I mean that, get out there and fucking enjoy it.

Tell them one, two, three to come on center. You read me? Did you take down our list of demands? Now I'm listening to your animal. What do you want?

Do you have your pen? Oh? On? For Pete's sake. To begin with, it's important that you understand three things.

One pan on one two three is completely within our control. Two we're all armed with automatic weapons free. We have no scruples whatsoever about killing. Do you understand me so far? Oh?

I understand. You'll fine you lunatic and let me get away with this. You know. Please inform the mayor that we demand one million dollars cash for the release of the car and all the hostages. Right, that'll be the day.

The time is now two thirteen. The money must be in our hands not later than three thirteen, one hour from now now, if the money is not in our hands, we'll kill one hostage for every minute you're late. Keep dreaming, maniac And