Manhunter (1986)

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Welcome back to Clear and Present Dudes Season 2 Episode 2. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to talk about the 1986 crime thriller movie Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann. Written screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon. I am Michael Barn. I'm joined by Rory O'Toole. Hello. And Sonia Bjorkson, who has come back to us. Yes, he's back. I apologise for being absent without leave. I I I request a gun and one bullet. 5 minutes alone that a muffled gunshot is heard all the way from Germany.

And once again, he hit the floor. We don't talk about that. Negligent discharge has never happened. Surely got low, low, low, right? Gentlemen, we are. This is the second and final of Michael Mannry 2026. Guys, we selected these movies by doing a vote in our in our WhatsApp group and just a peep behind the curtain there. What made you choose Manhunt Dead Royo 2? I know you're very passionate about this film. What didn't make me choose my The visuals alone are incredibly striking. This is one of those films you could like, just stick on while listening to just the duppest, weedenest, greenest kind of music and have a cinematic experience.

The performance of of Francis Dollarhyde is iconic. He he, he, he is truly one of the greatest movie killers. I think in in in this film. There's just something about the character Dolla Hyde and how he's shown this film is amazing. The way in this film skates so close to being an American jello film and sometimes does indeed. And that kind of like in in its own way. That's not like a straight up Jello film, much like it's also not a straight up detective thrower at neatly. Dodge has passed a lot of the tropes he'd expect to sing in it.

It's got so much on Michael Mann's pared down yet also full when it needs to be. Rich 1 needs to be storytelling and has his driving sense of immediacy and it's just fucking weird. That's my kind of film. Thank you Rory. It is weird. That is probably the the one word I would use to describe this movie and I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like to be cinema Go in 1986. Who the the the book was a sensation. So the book Red Dragon is the first Thomas Harris novel that features Hannibal Lecter.

Obviously he would get much more success and fame and infamy and all that kind of good stuff from 91's The Silence of the Lambs, where the role of Lecter would be like immortalised by Anthony Hopkins. It was going to win like 5 Oscars and the Hopkins got an Oscar himself for being in like 14 minutes of the film, you know, crazy. So yeah, like in terms of like iconic performances and that. But this movie, 1986 Red Dragon didn't get to be called Red Dragon. They changed the name of the movie A-Team to Orientis.

The producer changed the name of the the movie because he thought it was a bad woman, because another movie from the air prior called The Air of the Dragon did really badly. And then, spoiler alert, this also did really badly in the box office. So weird. It didn't didn't work. Didn't try that. Yeah. But yeah, like you say, man, this movie is so strange. And when I was watching it, I watched it again yesterday in preparation for this. And I thought, like, man, this movie is cooked out. I think a big bit of context for this is that this movie came out and was presumably shot and probably written by man around the same sort of time period as Miami Vice was just taken off.

So what you get is like a grittier kind of like more fluorescent, like less cool. There's no like MTV Sheen about it. There's no like, like the music in it isn't even apart from like one song at the end, which was in my movie Vice, like the rest of the whole movie is just like this grimier, more horrible, gross, degenerate version of like what Mommy Vice was doing. Sonia, what was your like initial impressions of? I think weird is probably the word to go with really. So visually very very calm. Sometimes, though in a in a rather anxiety inducing whey, it was not quite as grim as I had expected it to be going off off the description I'd read beforehand.

But in other places it was way weirder than I had anticipated as well. Felt felt a bit weird and didn't really have a sense of of time while watching it as well. So I just just was casually watching the film and then I paused for a minute and noticed that it's already been like it had already been going for over an hour and didn't feel like that. I was like, wow, when did that happen? So yeah, you could you, it felt like something you could could lose yourself in. And, and what really weirded me out was that sort of shift in between when it suddenly takes the the killer's perspective and then it suddenly turns into not into a thriller, but like into a sort of bit of an action film from his perspective.

I was a bit weird. I was sort of really, really big change of pace, I felt like. That's a really interesting point actually. Yeah, I think that's AI. Hadn't really thought about it too much myself until you said it. That's just got into the Tenant and the nitty gritty of the movie. Just to tell all our listeners, all our new listeners, Hopefully you'll get more new listeners every episode that this is a spoiler cast. So we are going to, so we are going to ruin this film for you. If you've not seen it, there's no time to watch it.

We'll be here in two hours time. We'll go nowhere. Right. So the movie opens with Will Graham, who is a former FBI criminal profiler and who's retired, and he spends his time now at a lovely house on the beach somewhere in Florida with his young family, raising turtles and. And wearing really, really slutty shorts. Yeah, yeah. And it's all nice and tan and he's living the high life and he's got this awesome, like 5:00 shadow going on. And then he sees the last thing he wanted to see in the world probably, which is Dennis Farina in a fall suit on the beach bearing down on him.

It's. Going to be a good fucking weekend, dude. Dennis Farina turns up and he's like, hey, I'm going to tell you some cop stories from when I was a literal detective for fucking 18 years, and then I'm going to be an actor. What a guy. What a dude. A match, a night out with Dennis Farina, man. Incredible scenes. Yeah. I love Dennis Farina. Perfectly cast. So that Dennis Farina is Jack Crawford, his FBI superior who worked with him on the previous cases. And he's here to do the whole we've got you for one last job, we need to get you one more job at that classic scene and it starts to straight into it.

So it's great. So Will Grimm is the sitting on a log on, looking out at the Sea, and Jack Crawford explains to him that there's been two families that have been brutally murdered in different cities around America. But the MO is the same. And this guy is on a lunar cycle. So they've got about a month until the guy's expected to hit again. Will Graham is needed. He's the best FBI profiler in the game. But it's implied very much that the last case that Will Graham was on kind of broke him. And it is true.

So the last case he had was capturing a man called Hannibal Lecter. I don't know why, but in the credits of this movie, they spell it with AK in TUR like Lecter, which is weird. But anyway. But this case could because he gets so deeply into the minds of of his quarry, he comes a little bit crazy himself. And at the end of the Lecter case, he was not only physically assaulted at the time in the hospital, he also had some PTSD going off the back of that. And he's been in therapy and stuff since and trying to get his life back on track.

And then here comes Dennis Runa going to drag you back in and get yourself into the mind of yet another crazy guy because you're the only guy who can do it. He kind of plays like a guilt card, hands on hands on these photographs of the families. Yeah, and grammes like go do it because I've got a young family and this is a young family. He's like, he has some shock images. It's like, welcome, welcome, welcome to browsing R slash combat footage in the year 2026. Basically, it's like, check me out.

I'm your offline version of liveleak.com. Indeed. Well, Graham goes to speak to his wife Kim, Greased or griced as the actress. I haven't seen her in much stuff. She's the only things I've seen her in apart from this is the movie Brazil she killed the year before, where she plays in that opposite Jonathan Pryce. And also a 1 episode, 1 episode of Miami Vice. Then we'll talk about that one episode of Miami Vice later. But yeah, so he goes to speak to her. She's obviously like, quite reasonably quite wary about this whole thing.

Like, all right, isn't this exactly what fucked you up last time kind of thing. And then off, off, off he goes to the most recent crime scene, which is in Atlanta. And then you kind of start to see his initial process. So the next scene, I guess, is where he's he's in the car with like one of the other cops and they put up to the house and he's like, do you want me to go in with you? And he's like, no. And enhancement the envelope of like pictures and notes and stuff from when the scene was initially found.

And he just sets himself up in there and he's like walking around the place. And you see him have this really long sequence which like putting it all together. Yeah, he's kind of nervating it to himself kind of thing. Yeah. So obviously I'll I'll watch this with with, with my wife Emma, who got me into the Hannibal TV show. And I don't know if you guys have seen Hannibal, but there's this the kind of show Will Graham's ability to kind of like recreate scenes in his head by he walks into a room and then like the screen kind of like cross fades over how it happened at the time.

And like, he sees like all, all, all like the dead bodies and stuff and he sees a collector and it's incredibly and it's incredibly lurid and graphic and it's really fucking cool. And I'm pretty sure I heard I quietly say this is my design as he was like looking at stuff because that's his big kind of tagline from the show when he starts like tripping balls and saying stuff. It's really good how it's handled in both that show and this film's handled in very different ways, I think. And again, it's just this very kind of slow paced, methodical work by him that seems a cross between insight and insanity.

Like, you know what I mean? Like the film doesn't do a lot of storytelling and how we kind of has this massive insight into the mains, but it already feels like it's a burden on them. And I think that's really cool. Yeah, it doesn't. I think because of the narrative economy of it, it doesn't really seem considering lots of different versions of what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. Like, it isn't it isn't brainstorm possible reasons for like why the the tooth theory is what everyone's calling the murderer has staged the scenes the way he has.

He's just immediately like hones in on what it turns out to be completely the right answer. He's like, he just like immediately gets it. Yeah. Which is crazy. But also shows that that Will Graham. Yeah, maybe, maybe it's showing that Will Graham's got this critical insight, or maybe it's showing that Will Graham is also a little bit like Touched as well. It's almost like you've got to be a bit of a be a bit of a killer to catch the killer kind of thing. You look around the scene, the key, the key bit of information that you've gained from the scene is that by spotting some traces of talcum powder near the bodies and noticing there's no other talcum powder in the house, he realises the talcum powder has come from inside the gloves the girl he's wearing, which means he's taking his gloves off while he's at the scene.

And he believes that so he can pull people's eyes open, so they can the dead bodies can watch what he's doing. Yeah. Which means just give them the breakthrough of, like, dust the eyes for fingerprints. Yeah, and then they get a fingerprint from the eye. And this, this, this sorry, sorry to talk over there. This moment in the film is one of its deviations, like the kind of like piercing and tropes of detective thriller or serial killer film. Because when you think about this is the kind of this is a kind of break in the case that would come much later in in other sort of films.

This is this is like third act, right? This is, this is like a third act break in the case kind of thing when it's like, Oh my God, the call is coming from inside the house kind of thing, you know? Yeah, they have a third act break in the case as well. Yeah. Oh yeah, Yeah, they do. But it's. But you're right. Yeah, with the person. It's level of it because it shows that the resources that they're bringing to bear on this on on this case are like at the maximum from the very beginning. Because I guess Wimbledon stepped into it 22 entire family murders into it already.

So he's been brought in kind of late in the game as kind of like their their ringer and he is delivering straight away, I guess. But yeah, you're right. If this has been like a more standard kind of police procedural movie, if this had been the first like scene, they wouldn't have found anything necessarily of anything of any great import, or they would have found a good redheading that leaves them down like a rabbit hole. Yeah, and then some random other guy. And then I said no, no, it's not me.

I've just got a totally different interest in breaking into people's houses, you know? Yeah, yeah, something that's like that and then this, this insight, this kind of like immediate psychological insight into the into the guy and it being right and then finding a result on getting that evidence. Yeah, you're right. That would have happened a bit later in the movie. Yeah, Yeah. But yeah, you're absolutely right. So yeah, this happens pretty early on. You see, like the forensic teams kick into action.

I think what it does do is it sets out its stall pretty early. If like, this is a movie that's going to take the the forensic evidence stuff really seriously, you're going to see it with a type of rigour that you don't normally see in a Hollywood movie. You know, you're going to see them talking about things like handwriting analysis and like, like fingerprinting techniques and blood splatter, like. Yeah. The. Analysis and that kind of stuff. The the microscopy, the use to see what was written in ballpoint under the redacted part of the toilet paper that was redacted and felt tippers like that's great.

It's so granular. I've I've I've seen this one referred to in more than one review as being or having aspects of competency porn. And I agree with that. I agree with that. It's probably not a coincidence that the ultimate criminal competency porn porn TV show CSI we then have like Will Pearson, he plays a game in this as as it's kind of like figurehead. Very fairpoint one that I. Didn't even. Would you say that counts as an OPS room? Yes, I would. It's like there's bazillion screens in there where we're not sure whether they have any actual purpose apart from making it look more technical and interesting, which is usually what what OPS rooms tend to do in thrillers as well.

Is this our first? This is our first OPS room of 2026. It is our first option in 2026. Mark it down, Opstrom counter running at 1:00.

So I favourite Opstrom, My favourite Opstrom is still the unstoppable Opstrom. Yeah, that's a good one.

Cool, right? So we now meet a young a very young Stephen Lang as hacked reporter from the left wing media. God, God, am liberals coming? Out here, I'm joking because of region events. No, but we see Stephen Lang, a really young Stephen Lang avatars Stephen Lang as as Freddie Lowndes, the the tabloid reporter who's trying to trying to goad Will Graham into a story and a quote. And he gets power bombed onto onto the body of a car, smashing its windscreen. Such a, such a, such a good scene. And it's really funny because obviously Freddie Lowndes appears.

Emma was like Oh my God it's Freddie Lowndes beat He gets power bombed into a car beat Emma. Not as sexy as in the TV show though. Oh. Gosh, who played in the TV show? I didn't. I didn't measure the role in there. I've never watched Hannibal and I probably should do. So cool, dude. Like I said, I mean, I keep banging the drum, but like, Season 3 are so many jello elements, it's just fucking unreal. So it's woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gender swap role. It's Laura Jean Shorosteki. That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did have a quick look on this and, and there was that Doctor Bloom was gender bent as well. Yeah, yeah. In in in the TV show. Yeah, so good, man, So good. Cool. Yeah. So Lang, right. Is is great. Lang is incredibly good at playing, like, really hateable characters. I mean, as you see, do you remember him in? He's almost unrecognisable as Ike Clanson in Tombstone. Yeah. Man I've never wanted a character to get like shot in the head more then I can't sit in Tombstone. What a fucking weasel he is for that whole movie.

Come back. Absolute dirtbag. Absolute peace. And he's it's no different here. I feel a bit bad, but eventually. But yeah, God, he's so irritating in this. And that's that's that's a compliment to to steal the line for how we also smell this, I find really irritated. The moment is he has and this is probably just fashion at the time because the mid 80s, but he has these fucking ties, these like really thin ties that I've got like I've got like a flat cut at the bottom of them. And he looks like I was like fucking one of the bullies from like Back to the Future Part 2.

Hey, McFly, I'm going to run a hit piece on you. McFly. I'm going to blog about this so hard. McFly. He really fucking does. I fucking hate a stupid little number plate on his car. You didn't catch that? It's got you. So his number plate's got you. It's like, yeah. Golfa fucking golfa TCH uniform. Oh, got me. Because you're a because you're, because you're a crusading reporter. You melt. Brilliant. So immediately after this he goes to Graham goes to see humble Lecter time out nerd moment here. So the location of the psychiatric hospital strict prison that lecture is in is the Atlanta Museum of high Art external and internal stuff filmed there and to anyone's who are fans of the medical drama the Resident, which is set in Atlanta that is the same location that is used for Chastain Hospital external and internal as well.

There's a yeah, so the the that big sort of long spiral circle staircase that he's running down or rampway that he's running down when he when he flees out of elective sound and kind of has a wobbler and runs through the building and gets outside. Like all of that is that big atrium. There is is inside the the the art gallery as well or museum. And then I think I think one of the main characters from the Resident gets like fatally stabbed in that same area. Wild. Anyway, spoilers for the Resident.

Spoil us for everything. It's unreal. We're we're out here. Australia, the interior of that hospital by the way, was that scene was running out of there. That felt weird as fuck. Yeah. Really did right? That was so so weird. Like because it generally make made you feel like he was trying to escape from a never ending labyrinth. Which he is of the mind of the man at. Some point I was wondering whether they were really going to make this poor man run down the entire thing and make us watch it as well.

It's like, OK, we we've got the point now. There's a lot of stares. Yeah, OK, right. We'll do it in backwards order because we we'll hit it. So, so he's run out of the, of the office and then you, you have that bit where he's like on that run to walkway, still the same location and he's leaning with it. And we get that one shot of just the grass, which is like been chromatically separated. So you see like the red, blue-green on the light of the Jew being split across to show that his vision has gone blurry because he is so worked up.

And then it cuts and then it cuts back to him and it and he's calmed down and it comes back to the grass and we just see the Jew on the grass. How weird is that? Oh not. It's crazy. Yeah, very strange. The film's just like strange use of like surrealistic, kind of like colour schemes and like stuff like that and like colour grading. It's a one of the ticks in there. Is it a giallo or isn't it kind of box? It definitely uses colour to it's like it's a one to one for different like mental states of of different characters throughout it.

I did see it did do a little bit of resistance. Dante Espinati is the DP on this who worked with man a bunch of times. He did heat previously. He's done a whole bunch of different stuff including weirdly Ant Man of the Wasp. But we'll skip, skip, skip that. Weird, weird earth. I actually did some, did some research on myself the other night as well. I was like looking so obviously Italian, Italian film that I started like, well, sorry, Italian DT. He started mainly working in Italy and he doesn't appear to have done like Jello films.

He's done a few kind of weird films that don't sound like they're like they're jello genre, yet he seems to have a deft hand for this kind of thing. If you like later on once run categories I can talk about some interesting things I found about some of his work in Italian cinema, which I think is pretty funny and pretty interesting. I look forward to that. So Spilotti has said himself an interview and stuff that that he used different colours to have different emotional states. So whenever the screen is completely like drenched in the blue, it's meant to indicate like a safe space.

So you have that in like Graham's house next to the sea at the beginning and you have it when they're doing some of the forensic work in the, in the police stations and there's like nice blue tones there. You, you kind of get like a mixture of purples and greens for when things are getting off kilter, which is like shown to its maximum when we get to the climax. And you look at like Dollar Hyde's house, which is like beards and like purple and green and every other colour seems to be like saturated out, really strange.

It looks so weird. And when you talk about the film being weird, it's that colour scheme that that makes it really weird for me. And and also the the changes in like frame rate and stuff that happened. There's a few of there's a few of those that are really strange that put you off kilter. That's subtle, subtle little bit of slow motion just before Graham jumps through the window. Yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's there's that the star hide emerging through his weird giant poster. Anyway, we're having an hour, our first meeting between Graham and Hannibal Lecter.

Brian Cox is playing him here. This is the first actor to play it. He hasn't got a lot of time in the movie. And Michael Mann himself said he wanted people to feel like they didn't get enough Hannibal Lecter when they watch this movie, which I get because you want to, you want to leave people wanting more. But it works because I've so many questions about Hannibal Lecter after watching this film. Like what was he doing there? Yeah, he was, he was told like business character on like a kind of British private schoolboy, wasn't he?

Like, he was, he was taught like base the performance on like a private schoolboy and it's like my son's going to private school, I'll base Hannibal fucking Lecter on him. Dad of the year, dad of the year, man, honestly, what a guy. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting. The second mean what's what's what's what's Brit doing working in America? I guess making better money than the NHS would pay him. Yeah, yeah. With better access to weapons to killers. Killers. Yeah, what I like about this film is it doesn't go into any detail whatsoever about the nature of Lectors crimes, just how he there's a little bit about how he was caught and Graham is a kind of like rubbing his belly a little bit here.

He's kind of feeling his ego a little bit. Yeah. So there's the whole back and forth of like Will Graham, you, you get the feeling that he's he's holding his own for a little bit and then he gets kind of chiselled away and he definitely loses that that confrontation. It's his first step back into this grimy in the world since he kind of tried to get himself away from it. And it's just too much. He's just, he's just he stood too close to the bonfire and he's getting himself a bit burned. And as soon as he shows that bit of weakness, like he lectors on him straight away, like you, you came back here to get the scent.

You came back here to get a smell of it to, to to get your head back in the game. So has it worked? Did you get my smell smell yourself? Oh man, brilliant. Brian Cox has some opinions as well. I've I liked researchers films, but I may have done a bit more research on this film than previous ones because I locked in a little bit on this bad boy. Brian Cox has some opinions on Anthony Hopkins performances as Lecter. By the way, that that's probably a good time, but mentioned so I found I found a quote.

So on IMDb, someone wrote that. In a 2025 interview, Brian Cox reflected on his performance Hannibal quote. I think I'm the best Hannibal Lecter there ever was beat because I play it internally. I don't do any funny Chianti shit. I don't do any of that. End Quote, Cox quipped, referring to the famous Silence of Lam scene, in which Hopkins Lecter recalls eating a victim's liver with some fava beans and ice Chianti before making it before making a dramatic slurping noise, Cox continued. Quote I play at the guys.

I think he really is. God bless Hopkins. He did it very well. He got a lot of money out of that. He also got an Oscar for Best actor. What can he argue about that? But at the same time, to me, Hannibal Lecter is a much more internal guy than he is externally. He's somebody who works from the interior out, not from the exterior in, and I think that's the difference. That's interesting. I think it's a good point. I think if you look at have you seen, have you seen the movie Hannibal 2003? And it's just a bit like it's just a bit over the top and it's just a bit like becomes a bit a little bit silly.

I kind of, whereas I think I do understand like where Brian Cox is coming from. And I haven't seen the TV show Hannibal, but how does Matt Nicholson do it? Him and Will agree I'm a super fucking gay for each other and it's wild. The one at the one at the one have sex with. They don't have sex with each other so much it's embarrassing for both them he's after. I think it's really good Hannibal, he's he seems to have a bit more of like the kind like he's, he's not as flamboyant as Hopkins when he's being more like kind of kind of intellectual and like in incisive, I guess, and analytical.

But he does have the kind of flamboyant thing when he's holding these like ridiculous cannibal dinner parties and stuff like that. It's it's a really interesting performance. Does seem to kind of take a little bit. No, no, I'm I'm I'm I'm not going to do some bads Middleson by saying he's taken from other actors performances because he might come in my house and kill us. But he seems to kind of show both the both sides of like the kind of Lecter spectrum, I guess Electrum, if you will, because he's got like that increased sense of menace that that that Brian Cox has.

Plus like a bit more like the intellectual flamboyance and stuff that Anthony Hopkins provides. Plus also you seem like physically stab people and kill people quite a bit. So he's like, so he's like a physical Lecter as well. Like he's a Lecter who can breaks off you. It's All in all a good show. Cool. No, I need to. I need to check. That's a big black cultural blind spot for me. So I haven't watched any of that. Gillian Anderson's in it. It's like, yeah, it's. Like I need to watch it. It's like a Gordon performance by Gillian Anderson, honestly.

Yeah, I need to get into that big time. 100%. Yeah, it's a good point. It's interesting. I like Brian Cox a lot as an actor. Yeah, he's in many great, great things, not up to and including Sharp, but but you do get the sense from this Lecter, from what we see of him, which is only a small amount, that you can see him operating in the real world. He's very charming. He tricks people. He's very easy to manipulate people on the phone. And the way he gets to goes around Will Grimm's head is is masterful.

There's some kind of playful and weird about him as well, like the way he, like, lies on his little who hospital, not hospital prison bed with his little feet up in his feet in those big thick socks. Just like there's something kind of funny about that. Whereas, yeah, there's something a bit like Panto's probably putting it a bit harshly. But like, the thing about Anthony Hopkins is, is later. And we'll do this on set Lounge at some point, I'm sure. And we can talk about it in more detail, but I feel like I can't see his Hannibal actor, like going to the shops and getting his groceries in.

I can't see him taking a patient as a psychiatrist. I can't see him like, you know, going to the DMV and getting his licence. Like it just doesn't seem like of this Earth, you know? An interesting thing to consider is who went in on the fact that Brian Cox said he he kind of based his performance on his son who was like a private schoolboy. Brian Cox is like that is like a really precautious, how to cover for his own good and absolutely insane student, whereas Anthony Hopkins's Lecter is like a far too far too clever for his own good and in C private school drama teacher.

Yeah, I don't know why, but I thought of Mr G from Summer Heights either. No, I'm afraid that's I'm afraid that's a cultural blind spot for me. But where you been bitch? Where you bloody been? Watching watching Bosch last night is where I've been there. I watched Bosch last night. I had to. I had to get Bosch filled off you dude. Obviously a throwback to the last episode when Mike had Bosch mentioned Counter. So I've watched like 6 episodes of the first season of Bosch. Last night went a lot in.

Yes. All right. OK. Maybe we'll do a Bosch bonus suit at some point. A Bosch sword, if you will. That's great news mate. I'm so happy for you. You're going to really enjoy that. How good is J Edgar? Don't, don't answer me now. He's great though. Fantastic, right? OK, so where are we at now? Lecter agrees to look at the case file, and Lecter immediately obtains Graham's home address through deceit. Meanwhile, because they've got hits on the fingerprinting stuff, a Graham goes to the crime scene in Birmingham, AL, which is when we get the flight across, which is an interesting scene we should talk about because they didn't have a set for a plane to film this.

So they filmed on a real flight. But it's proper gorilla gonzo filmmaking because they, they didn't tell anyone they were going to do it. Obviously. What they didn't just said is they bought like 100 seats on the plane of like the cast and crew and just took over the cab doing it too much as the chagrin of the pilot, The the, the, the stewards and Sue Des's flight attendants. They they did the the the filming which they brought all their kit on on board like in their hand luggage playing mental.

You can tell this is like pre 911. I was gonna say you could you? You could not do that today. This truly is one of those films. I'm going to say legally you could not make aspects of this film today. Yeah, and to mollify the aircrew and other nearby passengers who obviously like were sitting next to it as it was happening. Good stuff. They just they just give a bunch of like Manhunter like crew jackets away to people, which which is fantastic. Just like so they obviously plants. We'll just bring a lot of swag on it.

We'll just private everyone with swag. I just imagined like the film comes out like what, probably 6-7 months months later or some oh. 6. And.

When I was young, 69 used to be the funny number. I thought, I thought I would have pulled something out to make Sonia angry. But, yeah, like, however many months later, after the film's wrapped and gone through pause, you know, half this air crew in the cinema is going. I know what fucking happens now watch this. And like, they're sitting there in, like, the manhunt. That crew jacket's like, yeah, this thing's never leaving my side. And then they walk out the cinema and like half the people are on the going what the fuck was that?

That was that sucked. Yeah, a full, a full, a full third of the people who watch the film walk off with Ina Gada de Vida stuck in the head for the rest of the lives. God, yeah, that's absolutely ridiculous. So Graham goes to this house. One of the things he was talking about with Lexer was that all the houses they've been looking at have had really large back gardens. And because there's a lunar cycle element to it, he thinks that probably he wants to stand outside and look at the moon after as he's doing his crimes and it's possibly in the nude.

So he wants a bit privacy, which is why he thinks there's there's large gardens. So Wilgram goes to this house and sees that, yeah, has got a massive garden. He walks back from the house like down a hill and like looks at the sight lines. And when he runs out with like the sight line from like the, the house and stuff, and he looks around and he finds a tree and he climbs up a tree and he sits in a tree looking at the house and kind of pieces together like what the killer must have done. And it's another bit of like Will Graham, like narrating to himself.

And you get this like really bit. I, I think William Peterson's really good in this film. But the only bits where I don't like it is when he has these moments of like these UK moments when he's on his own and he has to say what he's thinking out loud and he's like, that's it, You son of a bitch. This is you. You stayed here all day. You watch them all day. That's why they're large yards. You son of a bitch. It was just like, who are you yelling at, man? This this scene is somewhat is somewhat ruined for me.

Not ruined, but tarnished, I guess, by a South Park episode in which Cotton has been some kind of a detective and he's like, this is the is a tree where the where the killer stayed up all night, probably cutting himself for the large knife. That was a terrible Cartman impression. I'm so sorry. I mean, that sounded more like a certain fucking current president and leader of the free world impression, which is even even even worse. It was middle of those. But yeah, of of obviously the other thing that's ruined by South Park is when is the whole do you see?

Do you see? Yeah. You see, because I've just caught and go Oh my God, I'm so fucking bored. It's like cartoon's rotted my brain. Crawford rings him to tell him that Lecter's warden at the prison has found a note in his personal effects which they think is from the killer, written on toilet paper. So then they go and read the note and kind of hatch a plan. So. But what it is, is they realise that the killer, who they don't know, they don't know yet, the tooth theory is a professional admiration for Lecter.

And then they hatch a plan, having read the notes, to write their own fake response to him and publish it in. They figure out it's the National Tatler, which is the newspaper that Lowndes writes for, Freddie Lowndes. So they plan to write to try and get him to go to a certain place at a time so they can, like, basically do a sting attack on him, Right? Yeah, right. This is a weird thing. Lecter is writing these notes to the tooth fairy, but he's writing them in a code. The FBI haven't cracked the code yet, but they've got a decision to make about whether they put in their own fake one without the coded elements in, or they let Lecture write his own one, but then no progress was made because Lectures was writing to his guys as he wants to.

They decide to run their one anyway, in the hope that maybe the code hasn't been recognised by it's all, but not this. That's crazy. It's like, it's like, because it shows like the kind of like intelligence and misdirectional powers of, of lecta how the code, the the code is essentially so like you meant to think that like the safer for it is like the Bible, right, Because it's like Bible verses. But and the this realisation, it's not clear how this realisation because the Bible verses don't match.

Like there's only this certain amount of verses in in in in this book and it's and it's exceeding the number. Then they're like also, this is actually just like reference to some random criminal codes and like laws and stuff of like the area, like the like county criminal codes, which somehow translates into letters. And it's I like how the film doesn't dive too deep into that because again, it's Michael Mann's kind of yeah, would would we don't need to know, but don't need to have a scene when like someone like spends spends ages looking at a Bible and then looking at a big book of criminal statutes and going son of a bitch.

You know, it's it's again, it's the thing that much like in Collateral, Michael Mann's able to cut these things out of his films the run necessary. And he still has this vibrant, exciting, rapidly development storyline without having the scene when a bunch of cryptographers lock in and sit around with the Bibles and the Criminal Code books and. Probably some statues. It's misery. State yeah, yeah, like, like, yeah, like and they've got like the, the Bibles in front of them. They've got like the state statutes, they've got some some third red herring book like, I don't know, the players guide to Animal Crossing or something in front.

Like I can't be this one. This has no relevance to the plot, but you're going to waste 5 minutes on it because this isn't a Michael Mann film, you know? Yeah, So, yeah, because it serves no additional purpose, I think, I think we get the gist of it pretty much as soon as it starts. So So what they do is they get free lands, who we've already seen is a fucking scumbag. But they sit down with him and Will Grimm offers him the opportunity to be like, right, we're going to catch this killer by you're going to do a profile on me, which considering he's already written some tabloid hit pieces on him already, he's like, brilliant, great, I'll do that.

And then they're going to start talking about the case in this profile. And he starts just like saying like, right, The tooth fairy's impotent. He can't achieve an erection around a woman. Maybe maybe he was had, maybe he had fantasises about his mother, like all this sort of stuff. So just it's really, it's mean like, OK, like. So it's rage bait, isn't that? I mean like it's. Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like this this guy wants to have sex with his mom and he's also gay. It's it is incredibly middle school.

Really. It's like, it's like, hey, man, hey, man, you know, homo says what you know, like it's like, it's just he falls for this like rage bait. It's. Proper juvenile. Yeah, but like, not in the way you expect it because obviously they think they're going to rage bait him in making a move on Will Graham, but in fact he sees through it and falls in what controlled way for the rage bait and absolutely fucks Freddie Lounge up. Yeah, yeah, Grimm. Yeah, you get, you got like the sting operation all set up with Graham, Graham as the tart at the bait.

And they do that kind of big fake out. They they see a guy running in a hoodie, they tack him to the ground. It's just a guy out for a run and all the places like there and and meanwhile Freddy Lounge is like complete unprotected walking to his car and just gets gets gets abducted and you get like so you get like the do you see, do you see scene where Freddy Lounge is sat down and made to watch like all the all the slideshows of photos of all the families that he's brutal. Freddy Lounge is crying and screaming to run up having a bad time.

And I love that you don't see what he does to Freddy. All we see is him returns to the parking lot and you've got the guy in the little booth, the little tool booth. And you see this brilliant shot of like the bend of the ramp that goes up and around the corner. And you see like the light, the fire, like rounding the corner, you see the light coming. And he's like looking at that. And he's like, what is this? And the guy gets out the tool and starts like backing away and then runs away. And then you get this one really short shot of like the wheelchair with like the burning free lounge, like piling down the run toward right at the camera.

And it's like, what is this is sick? It's a proper jump scar and it's and honestly 11 out of 10, no notes, absolute perfection. That scene when there's when there's just this kind of like gradual building up of like, again, this film plays with light and stuff so much and that's this building up of like the kind of light from from the burning body that's inside the wheelchair. I just think obviously looking at it with contextual knowledge and having like seen the film before and seeing there's like a similar philtre.

I mean, it's not going to be a spoil that say there's a similar scene in the Hannibal TV series, but it's like imagine seeing that in the cinema for the first time with preparation. I don't know if that scenes in the book Red Dragon because I've because because I've not read it yet. I really should shout out to Stephen from Cromiton. If if you're listening after recommending on social media that the books even better in the film Sonia, check that out. Thanks man, got a shout out to listeners. I'll tell you what I really enjoyed after the sequence and also hello to Stephen, is the absolute lack of emotion that Wilcrim has about the death of Freddie Lyons.

Like he's going fuck, he's go fuck. He's like he's like, did he like he's he's talking to like the is like the EMT or the doctor or something? He's like, did he say anything else before he did? He he's like, you know, he's never getting consciousness. Oh, OK, right. That's a bust. Yeah. Well, he says anyway. He's gonna fuck. He's gonna fuck. She, read. Doesn't care. It's fantastic. And then Jack Crawford's like, we've we cracked the codes. It was like Missouri State statues or something like that.

And we found out what the code of message was to the tooth theory. It's your home address. Yeah. So he's like, fuck. And then they, he books it back to his home. And we get like the police swarming the residents. It's all fine. Like, you know, they get they get, they get evacuated out. It's all good. No drama. I feel, I do feel bad for the one guy. There's a shit tonne of black guys in this movie, but there's also a shit tonne of people that we've never anything else and don't have photographs on IMDb who this is their only acting credit kind of thing.

And there's one guy who plays the cop with a shotgun who comes to the door, who's clearly been given the one line to say please come back, please come back inside. But he has to say it like 3 times because like Kim Grish keeps running out the door and he's like come back inside. No, come back inside. No, please come back inside. It's like you're not giving this guy anything else to say. He's not, he's not, he's not going to, he's not going to get in on the the improv with you. But yes. And I'm trying to go outside.

You know what? No, but go back inside. I'm not about to badging like both about it get poorly lit stage now and someone's like I heard nightclub in San Diego and everyone's Catholic St No but. Yeah, Saint Christopher, these beats are really banging. Since you thank you so much, it goeth hard God grief. We've got a really nice scene after this. So it cuts to them going to a safe house and Will Grim goes out shopping with his son. And this is like he only has like a handful of scenes in the movie.

The son is shown to have quite a high EQ, like he's out of his sight of his mum and dad. He goes, I'm just in the kitchen. Like he, he knows, like people don't be worried about him. He's obviously like, it kind of implies that this kid has had to like, this isn't his first row day with people being worried about him. Yeah. Anyway, he goes, he goes, he goes grocery shopping with his dad and his dad. I think this is probably Will Peterson's maybe kind of best scene in the movie is him explaining like, what happened to him after the last case and the nature of his PTSD to his, like, really young son.

He's like talking to him at his level kind of thing. Doesn't doesn't talk down to him. He kind of just says, like, quite a matter of factly, like, yeah. And after my body got better, my mind wasn't all better. So I had to go and speak to somebody else, and they had to. And I had to ask them for help. And because I got really in because I had to understand, like, why these people did these horrible things, you know? Yeah. He kind of lays out flat for us, like, what the movie's about, which is his struggle with going into the minds of these killers.

But that was a really nice scene. I thought it was really well done. I love like the mundane Saturn of a supermarket as well. He got like all the serial behind him and all the coffee behind his son. Yeah, it's the breakfast style. It's not directors, lesser men, pussies would have shot this film on a bench next to a lake or something. Not on the scene on a bench next to a lake. Come on, son, let's feed the ducks and I'll talk on the PTSD. But it's like it's just this off, killed up. We are kind of seen because it works so well you.

Don't know when these moments are going to happen in real life. Kids don't have like the whilst he has like the EQ to like to take all this information in, he doesn't have like the the tactical. Well, let's wait until we're out of public before we talk about this. Yeah, I'll, I'll. Ask you about it right in the middle of the fucking Whole Foods. Yeah. And it's more realistic that way, I think. Yeah. You don't know when these deep, meaningful chats are going to happen. Yeah, it's like fucking family story.

When my mom was a kid, she went to see some some musical. I think it was Oklahoma at the cinema with her mom and they like a sister, obviously. I think I think it's Oklahoma. There's there's like a line in a song. I think it'll be kissing. We'll be drinking. We'll be fornicating either and either my mom or her sister whose name I want. So yeah, somewhat documentary family, but said said to them I may grandma quite loud. Mom, what's fornicating in the middle of a cinema? It's like. So yeah, kids, kids in general, from what I've seen and heard and experience as a kid as well, don't have that kind of like awareness of right place, right time sometimes.

So it's really a really bit of honest storytelling, filmmaking that this conversation has to happen in a supermarket in front of the breakfast cereals. You know it's good. Yeah, I'll tell you what reminds me of it reminds me of that bit and when Harry Met Sally where they have a good deep meaningful chat when they bump into when Harry and Sally bump into Harry's now ex-wife and his new partner while they're like in a gift shop and they're doing the karaoke. 2 Oklahomas, Jigson ducks and geese Spiller scurry when?

Yeah. And then you have like and then like just yeah. Out in public they have like that singing. Yeah. Oklahoma in front of IRA. Yeah. We're getting dangerously close to becoming a musical theatre episodes. No big deal, no drama with that. I don't mind that. Man Hunt and the Musical imagine that Run Lockdown will work out how Manhunt and the Musical would play out. No, we're not. Anyway, this is the midpoint of the movie where we do the switch from police procedural following the evidence to now we are with the tooth fairy.

So we so the Rubicon has passed when we finally meet Francis Dolehyde as he's kind of torturing lands, right? That's the first time we Yeah. And the first time we see him he's got like that pantyhose over his head, over his eyes, over the top off says creepy as creepy AF. Yeah, again, this was like the whole like jello thing of like a masked killer kind of thing. Like it's it's it's they have a quite Nos, you know, like it's not quite it's not quite following the full jello playbook, much as it doesn't follow fully the thriller slash serial clan detective movie playbook.

Brilliant, brilliant. Really menacing, really weird, really offsetting little touches that make it off putting. Things like the colour on his shirt is like folded up. Yeah, weirdly. Like he's he's taking all this care to like stage this kidnap and the torture and the slideshow, but the guy is so unhinged. He doesn't know how to put his shirt on properly. The movie, the rest of the movie kind of drip feeds details to us. But our first impressions of us, we've got this guy who's like got the the surgery scar on his palate because he's obviously had a himself a pep palate as a child that's been been surgically fixed.

Extremely tall big guy. They tell us later in the movie he's 34, but he's like, but he's got this kind of wiry, struggly balding head of hair, which just looks like he's taking a lot of care with it. He's got this weird apartment that he lives in. It's just like the whole thing is just like, who is this guy? But then the movie answers it for us by putting us in his shoes for like the next the the next sort of 30-40 minutes. And it kind of speed runs us through like his, his kind of kind of fall falling in love with, with, with, with, with that Lady whose name I've just forgotten.

I'm so sorry. Reba Reba McClain played by John Allen. Like it kind of like speedruns us through that, that like romance and how he he like takes that to see that tiger that's been like sedated and stuff like that. That's. A wild first date. That's a. Wild, wild first date. And it's, and it's, and it's obviously, it's like it's, it's unsurprising because it's Michael Mann, a real tiger, you know, with a real vet as well. That's like an actual real vet standing by it. And it's like Michael Mann, you didn't have to go for this realism, and yet you did.

That's cool, though, because that would be cool. It shows that like, this guy has got like a one. He's interesting. Yeah. It's not your standard, like, go for a drink for coffee, have a safe day. No, he's like I, I know a guy who will drink a tiger for us. Yeah. Like what The Who is his vet? I I just happened to have a friend who's not just a vet. He's not just like a regular domestic animals vet, right? He's a guy who's a vet for a zoo who just happens to have A tag that he needs to sedate like right now or very, very soon for a procedure.

That's like, The thing is, it's like so many serial classes portrayed as like he's like sad losers and he is a sad loser on his own right. But he also has the potential to be a cool dude. He's a fucking really cool house. You know, he's he's obviously able to build up like working relationships with people within seeing the cool jobs. Like I I I do work on tigers for a zoo. That's fucking awesome. I think the apex what vets want to do right. And yet, I guess, well, I mean, like the film in first is schizophrenic with a with with with with with much of the plot, I guess.

And and also, I guess it's the fact that once again, this is what 0 pussy does to a motherfucker, you know? Yeah. Yeah, but there's something, there's something it's frustrating because there's something like quite empathetic about about him doing that because like, he's obviously this woman is blind. Yeah. She experiences the will through touch. You're never going to see a tiger, but you could run your hands through the the fur of a tiger. Exactly. And see with your see with your hands. That's incredible.

Like what? What what a gift that is like in in theory. And this is a guy who fucking annihilates women. He annihilates him, he eradicates him. I mean, families are kind of like the families have to die, but the women, it's, it's his main thing. This is guy who's a destroyer of women. Yet for a first date, he takes a woman who'll never be able to touch the tiger without dying to see one of one of God's most amazing murder machines with our hands. It is a complex performance and a complex characterization.

I've I've got to read the book, man. Yeah, I'd like to know a lot more about reader as well, Like what what her, what's going through her mind because she's she's obviously drawn to this as well. So you get the impression that maybe her background isn't straightforward either. This is so distracting as well. When you're watching the film, This, this, this relationship that's that's building up. It's so distracting that, I mean, you notice it, but I don't. I didn't, I didn't pay a lot of thought to.

It was like how they're going to catch him is that he works in the film processing labs that processed all the home footage for all the murders. So that's how he's it's a bit like one hour photo. This is how he's picking his victims. He's he's developing their film and seeing their lives. And it's something that Grim obviously realises later on. It's like the big kind of Eureka movement. But yeah, mad so he has that. He has that one nice date with Reba, drops her off. Have a nice normal time Reba then.

So as I understand it in the book what what she's doing is breaking off like an off again on again thing with another guy. Yeah. And the guy asks her that would be a shot from Dollarhide. I feel like one final kiss and she kisses him by one last time on the doorstep kind of thing. And then he leaves. In the movie, that's not not been there. I think it would have been confusing, yeah, to have that much back story for such a short interaction. But in the movie, it's it's just like a colleague who's just saying bye.

And he notices something on her cheek. So he brushes her hand into the cheek, and it looks really intimate. And this is like what sends him over the edge. Yeah, and dolla height. Like he, like, he like, he goes kind of full schizo at this point and he sees it. He rips upholstery in his car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, he sees it as like a passionate clinch kind of thing when it's not, you know? Yeah, I love why I love when they're shooting this the way that they they changed the way it shot for the perception from Dolla Hyde.

So we see it from his perspective. She is like backlit by like the porch lights. She has like a bloom around her that both in the centre of the frame. It's like in slow motion. The soundtrack is jacked right up. It looks like this kind of really intimate moment that's happening. And then it cuts away because cuts back to them and it's like really a matter of fact, slightly wider shot slightly off centre. The lighting's calmed down, the bloom effect is gone. And it's just like, yeah, it must have just been like a bit of like pollen or something.

And then and then by like, no, no emotion whatsoever. And he just walks the garden path, but too late. PowerPoint your man Dollar Hyde springs up from behind the hedge, shocks the guy. The guy recognises them, but he just Yanks him into this hedge. Bang, bang, 2IN the heads with a solid pistol and then ditches him in the garden and just walks into the house. Really like bristle fast, like like the ritual stick murder stuff is, is one thing. But when it's just a this shows you like when it's just a an obstacle.

He doesn't care. He's just he's just like obliterates it and moves on without thinking. Yeah. But it's just, it's just at this point he just a racism because it seems to me with the storytelling, he's matter of fact with the way he kills men. Like him killing men is the business thing. Him, him killing the guys is how he is, is what he does, while he's kind of making the women that he kills into something different. The children as well, yeah. Yeah, Graham, Graham says in that initial, that initial crime scene when he's dictating to himself, he says like the children, the men would have died within a minute.

Yeah. And then 5 minutes happens and then the women are killed. What does he do in the intervening time? Yeah, so that kind of obstacles be removed. It's dispassionate the way the way it kills them. There's no kind of like screaming fuck you and like get your hands off my woman and just like slice and slice and slice and kind of thing. There's no kind of cut his eyes out, replace them with with broken mirrors or whatever. He's just erased because it's again, because it's because it's psychosexual with him as as violence as psychosexual and know that taking the jello box and men aren't part of his sexual alignment.

Yeah, So now we get going towards the the end of it now, I guess we get so Donald Hard goes into Reba's home and kidnaps it, I guess because he takes it back to his place, right. And we're getting towards like the 11th hour now. So I think while this is happening, it cuts back to Crawford and Graham, Gemma Colford realise all these inferences that he's making are through the same home footage that he is watching right now. So he's like, like where this what? What labs do these come from? And then it's like a central processing lab.

What's the outfall source lab in the local area that that initially went to before it got brought into the FBI fold? Underneath that label is where it is. So they figure out that, oh, these have all come from the same lab in Saint Louis. Yeah. So we're going to get, we're going to gas up the Learjet and zip over to to Saint Louis. I've got to talk about as use of I can kind of aircraft in this film as well. When was CI mentioned this in the last podcast episode? When was C the scene when they get evidence delivered by helicopter?

I love how it's literally kind of touch and go thing helicopter lands someone handsome, papers out and then flies off again. There's no kind of here comes the cavalry fucking charge of the Rohiram kind of thing. When a bit of a bit of a bit of a exaggerated like reference obviously, but like there's no kind like yeah, here, here, here comes, you know, to save the day kind of thing. A big deal. Helicopter lands, bunch of guys come out shaking hands. We've got your information, man. Thanks, dog kind of thing.

One's your dog, but it's like it's just show us it shows the tempo that the operating at the helicopter lands. It is literally in the air moments, moments later. Then when we get the Learjet scene, you know the the they're not putting them on a domestic flight account after what happened because he fell asleep when some kids saw evidence. Yeah, again that. Complaints Amazed. Complaints amazed he's he's on he's on a new fly list now. I mean, again, that scene alone does kind of just as a kind of a side slide away a bit from the whole detective movie tropes.

That's not something you'd say in in a lot of films. I kind of seen one like maybe maybe maybe not then anyway. But yeah, when when he's on like the Leo chat and stuff and the speed at which that plane taxis towards the hangar, it again at stake. It shows the intensity of these things. It's not sure we've got you a Leah jet because we're cool because we don't have to like delay a commercial fight from Delta or whatever. It doesn't it isn't it isn't a flex have got a Leah jet. They need some. It's going to get them there really quick and you just know that the direction for the plane's crew were get this thing moving on the ground to the stop point as quick as possible because it's not meant to look like a cool badass moment.

It's meant to say this. This is really serious. It isn't like a Hooray thing. It's a oh shit kind of thing. You know that means business. It's. Interesting, actually. So what this movie does do, which I think is interesting, is it dispenses with a lot of the federal manhunt kind of tropes that you that you get in these movies. So or it modifies them in some way. So national manhunt in a movie, what do you normally get? You normally get building press reaction to what's going on, building up like a further.

I'm thinking of things like the TV series Mindhunter, Mindhunter, not Manhunter and other things like US marshals, whatever the fugitive, that kind of thing. What we do have instead is 1 tabloid reporter who becomes a plot element and is in one of the victims. So actually, is it really about the the national reaction to it or is it just the stuff you have to put in place for the one victim to get done? You don't have go on, Sorry, sorry, I'm going to say other stuff you don't have right. So all these guys are working for the FBI, right?

So national, the federal, what do you normally get with a, with a, with a federal investigation in a movie? You normally get federal to local law enforcement, friction over jurisdiction and egos putting heads. Look at any of that in this. Everyone just gets along. And there's an even, there's even a briefing scene with the local cops and the FBI. They're together and it just happens. And then they go off and do their jobs and no one kicks off. Yeah. Another thing is, so this is more of a visual thing, but normally if you see any of the three letter agencies in a movie, they are cutting about and there's windbreakers or, or those badged vests, play vests and stuff all the time.

You don't see any of that. There's nobody wearing an FBI windbreaker in this movie that I can remember. Oh, it's seldom is. Yeah, this, this film is very low on the red on the red jacket count definitely is. And I think the the film at this point through the manhood kind of sequence doesn't throw your red herrings. Oh my God, Someone's seen a guy who matches the description in Colorado or whatever and a SEC turns out it's not him kind of thing. That's like competency porn. Again. It shows people as being really good at the jobs and not in the kind of, it doesn't feel like, I know this is a word that's like being kind of trotted out a lot, but it doesn't feel like copaganda.

It doesn't feel like look at how incredibly amazing and noble our law enforcement are. It just shows how competent they are in the very not not morally sent out kind of way. It's not showing them as like these crusaders who are just going to get the job done for God country in America and apple pie. Just shows them as consummate professionals who don't get in silly. Kind of like local cops versus 3 letter agency shit fights. Because it's a worn out trope and it's something again Michael Mann dodges in this film.

Yeah, in fact, you see them have the opposite in this sequence. So they're in the Learjet, they're making a call to the grounds, to the Saint Louis police. And Frankie Faison is like the on duty sheriff of deputy over there in charge of, of a tiny little small OPS room. And they, and they say like, right, we what we need is I've got a list of names I'm going to give you right now of all the employees of this lab that, that we use this, this, this film processing lab. So they've also got the information.

I'm going to go for all the names. I'm looking for a guy from his profile that he's, he's generated. I'm looking for a guy who's 6 foot to 6 foot 5 something something that between 180 and 220 lbs, Caucasian blonde hair like this. These are all the things I think they are based on my profile. And then they go for all the employees. Alphabetically and then because it's the movie, they get to 123 and the third one happens to be the guy. But you see this OPS room kind of thing in, in the station, I guess in Saint Louis, just doing it just like right, here's the and then here's the guy's ID we're putting in the name.

Here's the thing. Doesn't match. Next doesn't match, next does match. I'm faxing you it now. Boom. And then you see that what you don't get in this movie is the troop that would follow immediately after that, which is call out an APB. And then like we've loaded the airports, we've loaded the ports, we've loaded the and we've got a Roblox set up. But like none of that happens. It's just like, we've got this guy. What's his address? Let's go to his fucking house. Yeah, basically it's like, like, like there's no hard target search of every doghouse, hen house, cut house, and outhouse and A50 mile radius, you know?

Because there's no manhunt yet because because we've got the jump in and finally, and it's hard to get, but there is the pressure that it's happening tonight, which means they they can quite reasonably expect them to be in or or or or out the victims, but they don't know the victim is. So they're going to try and pick him up before he goes out. Yeah. So we get that and it's all coming together and then we cut back to his apartment. And then I mentioned it earlier on, but this is where we get some of the really weird use of light and colour to show things have gone off the rails.

So we have in direct conversation with the earlier scene where he has reader Joan Allen in his apartment on their kind of their date when they have their first kiss and sesh. I guess in that scene his flat is normally colour graded. It's lit in a normal cosy ish ish light. He's doing something incredibly rude by the way, which is he's playing a home movie on a projector that he can see that she can't see. And then he doesn't adequately explain what it is. And then then the sound of the of the video that the tape playing is like overbearing on the soundtrack.

Yeah. It strikes me as incredibly off kilter nevertheless, and This is why I want to know more about Rita, because that's happening. And nevertheless she starts making out with him and it's like he could be playing like hardcore pornography on that. You've got no idea what he's watching. Yeah, he just says, oh, it's something for work. I'm like, oh, so you're going to sit there and do work with your eyes that I can't use while we're like, what the fuck? It's so rude. So weird. Yeah. And like, I mean, it's enough to make a lesser short man.

I mean like I'm aware of my 5 foot 7 stature and I'm fine with that because it's the golden height, but it's enough to make that's a lesser short man who doesn't quite appreciate himself as I do be like women will do anything for a tall guy. If he's 6 foot 6, they'll do fucking anything, you know, and it's like that. It may be, but it's like if if it does fit that incredibly in self fucking trope, they're saying people like, Oh my God, all all you have to be is be yourself, be fit, be rich, be 6 foot 6.

Girls will like you warm. Shut up. But two, yeah, it's like, I think she just comes across as being. She was really captivated by him and she was willing to let a lot of things go because really, sadly for her, she seems to be really, really passionately in her love with her. Yeah, you do see a moment after they first have like Make Love and then they're in bed together afterwards and he's lying in the bed awake and he's weeping to himself. And you, you kind of get the, the, the moment there that to God, if I hadn't crossed the Rubicon and murdered two families a couple of months ago, and this is, and I, if I'd met this woman three months ago, I could, I, I, there might have been a future and I might have been able to suppress my ages and I might be able to live a life for her.

But I've, I've fucked it for myself. And now, now I know what I have to do. I have to kill her next. And this is because this is all part of my becoming. And this is one of the many trials I would face before I became the the red dragon or whatever fucking mental shit you're probably thinking, you know, So you do see him wrestle with it a little bit. Yeah. And then we get to the. So now we're in the his, his house. And now we see it and it's really, it's just really it's lit in like secondary colours.

It's like it's washed out purple and washed out green in composition with each other is the lighting, which is, you know, as we described earlier, as Dante Spinotti said is like part of the colour sequence he had in mind for when things were off kilter, when there was emotional turmoil, when we're getting out, touching into like some of the crazy bits of his sort of psyche. And it just makes the the place look like something from a music video or something. It looks really odd. It doesn't look like a real flat anymore.

Yeah, and, and when in I got a Davina kicks in it just on the lines, the fact that everybody feels like a music video. Yeah, so then she gets really frightened and he's planning to start doing his kill, I guess, but it's interrupted just in time by the police and it just turns into an absolute mess. So he whips out a shotgun that he's had stashed nearby and just dispatches to the local law enforcement. Like I can't believe so that they're, they're on the way there. Ah, I've skipped a bit. So we're on the way there.

We cut back to Jack Crawford and Wolverine, who were in a car racing to the scene. There's like 2 police prowlers racing to the scene with them in and, and, and Jack is saying to, to will like you don't need to load like because he's loading a pistol in the front seat. So you don't need to like, like you don't need to load that. The SWAT team will to get him. The SWAT team will take him out. We don't need to, we'll hang back. You don't need to do that. But like Will's too deep into it now. He has to get involved himself and he's, so he's the one like loading up his pistol like I'm going to, he's going to charge in there.

So SWAT, I meant to be on the way. These guys arrive first start trying to do, and this is really bad. They kind of botched this, but they knew they're against the clock, I guess. So they're trying to raid the house and like all good sense would dictate that they would probably they should wait until the squat are all lined up there ready. But because life is in grave and imminent danger, they've got a they've got a kick in the door, I guess. And that's, that's how those two there's two patrolmen get like get killed because they're not, they're not wearing adequate body protection.

They're not they're not up to storm the entrance or anything. They just knock on the door and just get fucking shot. I mean with with way police equipment looked and like night and 86 wasn't it, the SWAT team likely wouldn't have had much in the way of like protection anyway. Certainly not someone that a 12 gauge would have wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't have mashed through. Yeah, they would have had like a regular player vested, maybe a helmet or something. They wouldn't have been like fully Kevlar.

I mean, I mean, the best bit of, I mean, I don't even think at that time and, and I don't think like even that time, like a lot of SWAT teams were even using like ballistic, ballistic helmets and stuff like that. So yeah, when you look like old school photos of like Elliot Payday SWAT and stuff and he was like Ruga mini fourteens. And they've just got like just got like a kind of like black like tactical vest with like new armour in it. And it's and it's crazy compared to how you say just like the regular police now with like play carriers and all this.

And it's like, but I guess times change. But yeah, it's again, this film Dodgers passed this idea that they mentioned the SWAT team in the film. Therefore the SWAT team is going to go in. It's Chekhov's gun that doesn't really get used the film when it promises the idea of the SWAT team coming in and save the day. They don't appear. And once more, dodging past things that films want you to expect to happen. Yeah, it's really weird. Yeah. But this the sets up that will on his own is going to enter the property and and try and take him out and he he gets in there.

There's a really weird bit where a fridge full of food gets spilt on the floor, like milk and tomatoes and other bits of produce and they get and they get shot with a shotgun and explodes. Yes, very, very cinema. Absolute cinema. Just what is that? Yeah. Graymlin just through a window, is subdued by Dolla Hyde, who retrieved a shotgun, shoots 2 police officers, injuries. Crawford wounded in the firefight. Dolla Hood returns to the kitchen where he's killed by Graham. And then we could to them being outside with Reba, Graham and Crawford or getting tended to by paramedics.

Weirdly, Graham is hugging Reba. Yeah. And then Reba asks who are you? And then he. And then he says. And then instead of saying like what you would say in reality, which is I'm a policeman, I've just rescued you from this guy. I'm, I'm the FBI, you know, kind of thing. He goes, I'm William Graham and like, well, who the fuck is William Graham? The the. Guy with the crackers. I'm the guy, but the crack has bars. Brilliant. Yeah, and obviously he said it for us. So we understand that he's no longer in the mind of Francis Dollar Hydra.

He's no longer in the mind of Hannibal Lecter, and he's found himself again. I get it. He's cured himself with mental illness. No, but like, But yeah, it just comes across as a bit corny. It does come across as corny, but again, this is the film once again, subvert and the tropes and stuff because you expect the feds come to the rescue. Show FBIFBI. It's OK, I'm an FBI agent. Or just like Will Graham, FBI. And he pops out his badge even though she can't see it, but he does anyway because it's like an impulse, second instinct.

And yeah, so again, it's another thing that doesn't feel like a typical serial killer cop thriller, you know? Think of this film we've been made ten years later. I'd be interested in watching The Science of the Lambs and compare the ending of those films. Bear in mind there's a lot of FBI in that film. There's a lot of FBI iconography. There's training sequences. There's an award ceremony at the end of it with the FBI. There's a lot of FBI iconography in that film. There's none of it in this film.

It'd be interesting to see, to compare. This will be made ten years later. This, this crime scene would be crawling with, it'd be like Blues and twos everywhere. It'd be cordoned off. They'd be like a police helicopter with a spotlight hovering over the property. Yeah. Flashing down to it, there'd be food like erectors, there'd be a shit, sort of like you'd see like the tenting put up by the the CSI team. They they'd be doing all that. Yeah, you'd have, you'd have, you'd have an FBIHRT running up and like multiple fucking M raps and stuff.

There'd be people in the background getting interviewed by cops and stuff who are witnesses and that kind of thing, just to show activity in the background. You'd get so much more, yeah, Stuff you'd see the militarised way of like the law enforcement descend on the property, wouldn't you? To like, clean it? Clean it was from Element. Actually I've gone anachronistic because 10, because if this film was made, like I said, 10 years later you have FIHRT turning up and like fucking black painted M113 Apcs or something like that, wouldn't you?

And then if it was made today, the turnip and those M wraps and stuff. There's big mine resistant ambush proof vehicles probably. Probably a director, Kash Patel would turn up himself and give people really cringe challenge codings with skulls on them. Jesus Christ, I watched Slight Side here, but we're at the end of the movie now, so I think we can do it. I watched, I watched the new Drew Carnahan movie The RIP last night, which Joe Carnahan for fans of the podcast directed and wrote Smokiness and he wrote and directed this as well, The RIP.

It's the new movie with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And that movie has, as a major plot point, an MRAP vehicle, yeah, being being used for the latter half of the film. There's a lot of armoured personal transport stuff going on in that film. Not a good movie, by the way. And I'm looking forward to us talking about it because you will have some serious opinions about weapon handling. There's like, there's the DA in it, as well as the free agency that's involved. And yeah, just not good. FBI's in it as well.

So we'll talk about all these tropes. So, like, that has got it all. Everyone's in a windbreaker, you know, everyone's got play protective on, everyone's got like the free letter of thing on there. And there's one guy who's I think is meant to be, oh, Jesus Christ, I think it's might be a good guy who's got the little Duke tread of me. Fucking snake is a patch on his Jesus Christ man. Proceeds to tread on people. Yeah, don't tread on me proceeds to step it's I've got a lot of goodwill for for Mike David and Ben Affleck.

I saw what you did there. Goodwill hunting for it. Yeah, this is not one of the the good ones, unfortunately, but interesting. We should maybe talk about it. I may edit this out. Just just just want to bring that movie up. Cool. And we've got any final points before we get into categories about this, this big Dang movie? You must have a few or we haven't touched on. The kind of get a little bit matter every time we've said lunar cycle. When I hear the phrase lunar cycle, I have this almost pathological impulse to mutter the phrase moon bike because there's a banging thriller from 1995 called Copycat featuring Sigourney Weaver, Holly Honda, great performances in which is going to be my plays this like agoraphobic psychiatrist who was the victim of a serial killer who escaped and there's a new serial killer.

Then I think it's in San Francisco. Who's who's who's hunting people And Holly Hunter said texts were investigating here and she gets a phone call at the station, gets a phone call and someone goes to Holly Hunter. Oh, it's that crazy lady there who shunned the phone again. She says the killers on a moon bike and Holly Hunt say, OK, you say it's on a moon bike. She was like, it's a lunar cycle and a SEC actually goes really hard and we should. Yeah, we should say that I'm a big Holly Hunter fan.

So yeah, definitely, definitely. It's it's just Sigourney, we've and Holly Hunter. It's a double act that you just can't miss. Sonia, you got any observations? You've been fairly quiet for this one, probably because I've been talking a lot. Yeah, that might have something to do with it. Shade.

Oh, it's. Time coming in hot. Yes, no, I was, I was quiet on on the on the whole firearms thing because of things discussed earlier which did not make it into the recording. Thank goodness. I did read up on the the filming bits on the on the Wikipedia article. We we had the bit with the aeroplane earlier where they basically bribed everyone with merge so they could just hijack a commercial fly to to film a scene in it. But like, I have no idea how how. Not really a great idea how practical full effects usually are achieved.

But apparently they did a lot of random stuff for this film. Like apparently in the end they couldn't couldn't pick him off the floor because they left him in the fake blood for so long and it was made with corn syrup and it dried. They were just after basically spending half an hour getting shot again and again it was and and being squirted with ketchup as well. Apparently he just stuck to the floor and couldn't couldn't get him off the floor again. Also apparently everyone on set didn't really said they were all kind of afraid of him and I feel like he might have.

Everyone cited being uncomfortable around him made him avoid everyone even more. I feel like even might have made it worse with that. I'm not sure I would let let that count as a method acting. It probably helped in getting the the vibe across. Tell you what I mean, to me that does sound like a that does sound like good method acting and B it's certainly better than like the dog shit method acting the Jared Leto got infamous for when it was us being a bad Co worker. Oh, I'm going to post some used.

Condoms to you in the mail. That's the that's the fucking. That's terrorism, Jared. Terrorism. Stop it at that sake. The court sentenced you to be shot. The court sentenced you, sentenced you to be freed, but you're career to be executed because that's fearsome and Charlito's career is kind of dunzo at this point. Not even Morbius could save. Yeah, Morbius is one of the the death tolls. Wasn't it Morbius and then everything is open since Tron Aries is is flops. Nobody stop putting him in movies.

Nobody wants to see him. He, he was, he was, he was in Tron Aries, which flopped despite having Gillian Anderson on the big screen in it. You know, that's so much of A box office, like just black cloud. The man is. I think Pedro 2049 succeeded to spite him really, rather than because of him, you know. Yeah, yeah. Good God. Also, apparently they're just. Opinions on them And here go on. Apparently they're just randomly threw around glass jaws to simulate the effect of the gunfire in the house, which which managed to actually injure Peterson.

You see, Apparently he was left with a Shard of glass embedded in his thigh. That would. That be fantastic. So we we don't have enough blank rounds, but we're just going to stick you with a bit of glass. That's a. For. Reasons.

This apparently went a bit bit bit method as well. So he got so into the role of Will Graham, who himself was getting so into the role of Francis Stella Hyde after the movie raps Will Peter, someone who dyed his hair blonde, like shaved his face and just wanted to make himself look different. So we'd have to, like, he tells you, like draw a line between him and this role, you know, holy. Crap, yeah. It's amazing though. Yeah, it's good. Michael, Michael Mann certainly likes having his actors do the hard guards, don't they?

I mean, we of course talked about the the the rigours that he put the two main guys from from collateral through dispatching Tom Cruise to work undercover as a FedEx Courier and having a Jamie Foxx drive in LA cab. So he really does, but he doesn't sound like it's one of these directors who who puts the cast through Hell, he might be. I haven't read enough on him, but he doesn't sound like one of these guys who are horrible to work with. Like, I mean, I've heard Francis Ford couple. I was like, legendarily painful to, you know, work for.

I like stunning Kubrick and stuff as well. Yeah, David Fincher does a lot of takes. So if you get on, if you get on with them, that's great. If you don't get on with that, then you're probably probably not going to enjoy it very much. He, he seemed, he seems to do all this without having these kind of tyrannical qualities that get some directors kind of infamous, you know? He's got the credibility, I think. I think The thing is with man is that you're not. You're not doing it because of some artists.

Unknowable perception of what they think the good bit of art is. They're doing it because he has a very technical mind. He wants to achieve a swimming in a technical manner. And you're going to do the work to make sure the thing gets the the outcome. But it's like something that you can quantify and measure. I think. Yeah, is is what is what the difference is. Yeah, that's competence. That's competence. At the end of the day, it's competence. And it's his his understanding that he's a real competent technician.

He's he's an interesting mix of water and absolute technician. Yeah, that's, I think that's, that's really accurate. Should we take a break here for and then we'll come back into some categories? Welcome back, right? Let's get into the categories for this movie song with casting as we usually do. Normally we kind of skip past the main guys, but I think we'll have a quick counter through these guys because it isn't a star sort of picture, so to speak. William Peterson is plays our guy Will Graham.

He's one of the big hits that I'm aware of to Live and Die in LA. He did the year before. Another really good film that I think we'll probably end up covering this podcast at one point in the future. He had a very small role as a bouncer in 1981's Michael Mann's movie Thief, and then he's Grissom in CSI. That's that seems like big, big credit. Dennis Varina is Jack Crawford. We love Dennis Varina. We talked to him about length, we talked about him a lot during Striking Distance, but he's fantastic.

I didn't realise that he was a real cop for 18 years in the Chicago PD and was a detective before this, but that makes so much more sense. And obviously he was in Miami Vice as well and starting Crime Story, his acting debut also in Thief in 981. And maybe we have to cover in January, January to come. Fantastic. Brian Cox we talked a bit about earlier on is touch the Hannibal Lecter famous to a lot of people now is Logan Roy in succession, I suppose was his big recent comeback. But he's he's a guy who's been acting consistently for decades now and it's just in stuff all the time.

He's just a great character actor, great character player. It would be almost offensive to go through his list of credits. He's been in everything from Troy to Sharp. Yeah, yeah. Great, great actor. Some of the greatest video game acting of all time in. Sons of daughters say it. Sons and daughters of Hellgan, those are my people. Sons and Daughters of Hellgan honestly might as role as a school of Azari in the film's opening cutscenes. It's it, it's, it's, it's a speech that I'm obsessed with, but it's literal chills.

He's he just delivers it so well. My people, sons and daughters of Hell Gun, for many years we have been a broken nation. Shunned, oppressed, and. Conquered by those we sought to escape 10 years ago. I asked for time. And that time was granted by you. You, the strength in my arm, the owners of my dreams. This much? I've. I think he's fantastic. But what I like about Brian Cox is that if you asked him about that film now or that game, he probably wouldn't remember it. Yeah, that. Yeah that probably wouldn't remember it.

Ari Blake. I was the best hell gust character in all of those cutscenes. The other Ragnars who did it were shit. I was the best scholar Vasari in the entire thing. Our enemies at home have been re educated. Fantastic. Smash cut to people getting doomed in the. Back of their head so good. 2024, he was in The Lord of the Rings, the Warth of Raheem. There's helm hammer hand. That's pretty cool, you know, to helm hammer hand. My boy. Helm, Hammer, hand. Over here in Bros up there. Yeah, Great, fantastic actor.

Fantastic. I just looked at these. He's known for IMDb and actually, yeah, Succession Troy adaptation as well. Of course, he plays the famous author and adaptation. Yeah, fantastic, great stuff. Kim Grace, I mentioned earlier on is Molly Graham. She don't even worked with mine before on that one episode of Mommy Vice which I was going to bring up. Classic Miami Vice Thing is your boy Crockett gets gets into a love affair with a woman that lasts for one episode reasons. For whatever reason they can't be together anymore by the end of it.

That pretty much happened on this one. She's also in Brazil I mentioned earlier on as well. Cool thing about this one is that this the Miami Vice we've talked about before. Pretty much every episode of Miami Vice at some point has a protracted long model montage set to a popular bit of music from the time it started in the very first episode within air tonight by Phil Collins. We talked about it last week when we talked about Bruce McGill and his one which was proposed in arms by Dire Straits. Well, Kim Griese's montage is to the song Heartbeat by Red 7.

And wouldn't you know, the song that ends this very movie is Heartbeat by by by Red 7 as well, also with Kim Griese in the frame. So yeah, we'll mention that. Sure, that's maybe a needle drop more than a casting, but considering she did such little else work, it's probably worth mentioning she was in. She was in an episode of The X-Files as well.

June Allen, right? June Allen is a again, another popular American character actor that will see in a lot of stuff. Probably most known to guys watching this podcast for being in the Bourne movies as the handler. He's trying to track down Jason Bourne in those. What else? You know June Allen from Guys, but she was in the 2008 remake of Death Race 2000s, just called Death Race. Holy shit, that's that's neat. That's the Jason Statham one. Right. Yeah, that's Jason Statham. Yeah, didn't see that coming.

Lizzy's story she was in, which is an update. Yet another Stephen King adaptation. Yeah. Wow. She was in The Killing of the Bourne Legacy luck, which I think is a Steven Soderbergh produced thing. Pretty cool. We all may all know her as the voice of Delphine from The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim.

I think her character looks a bit like her as well. Jesus. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What else we got here? Yes, obviously. All those Bourne movies. Pleasantville. Do you remember Pleasantville? She was Eve Archer and Face Off. Yeah, face off. Big one there. Cool. Stephen Lang, we talked, I talked a little bit about earlier on. So Stephen Lang is most famous now at the minute, probably still in the cinemas for the Avatar movies. So obviously our fire now she's the orcas high pool American military bad guy.

Who then? I've not been watching these movies. I watched the first one when it came out. I take it now that he's now also one of the cat people. I don't know. And so maybe it's a voice performance from Stephen Lang now, not sure, but he's making some good money off it. He was in that movie. Too. Well, sorry, he's down this plane, Quartic. And so I guess he's like just right, kind of. Yeah. He played courage in in the way of water. So that that's, that's Colonel coffee cup, right? That's, that's, that's, that's the bad guy from the first one, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So, so he gets yeah. So what happens? I think he gets shot up at the end of the first one, right? Yeah, yes, that's right. And I, and I think the US, this is mental. He I don't even know it's the US Is it the earth, the sky people, military have their own way of making cat people. Obviously that's how they made Jake Sully in that one. They do this so to save his life. They put his consciousness into a Big Blue cat person body, right? Right. Gotcha. Think I spoilers for fucking avatar.

I think that's what's happening and then think think I don't. I've been watching them so don't come up with Jimmy Cams but but James Cameron. But I think I think what's going to be happening in these next two movies is like he's going to be reconciling himself as I'm a giant cat person now, but I'm also like this horrible, terrible racist inside. Do I do I am IA coloniser, am IA white coloniser or my Big Blue cat person. I just don't know anymore. I just don't know is. Is is the galaxy's first self hidden cat person.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a deconstruction of the white saviour archetype, which the film also happens to have because fucking Sam Weatherton is the white saviour archetype. You know he's the he's the left headed fucking Jordan bar of the movie to make it Dances with Walls comparison. How wild is it in hindsight that like, I mean, you've seen the memes about this and what's happened recently in geopolitical news and national security, etcetera, that when when that card I ran avatars and reduces like, oh, I see you're fought in the war in Venezuela.

That was some tough Bush. It's like, wow. Yeah. So like, so like. It suggests that America has been involved. Sorry, Space, America, Earth has been involved in a war in Venezuela for a bit more than a century at that point. Tough Bush indeed. This is an incredible way to do our podcast because the rates, the sheer rates of the news cycle is like we can be talking about Venezuela this week. We could publish this thing. It's going to get published in about a week and 1/2 right By the time this is published, fuck me man.

Like Minnesota could be fucking part of Canada. Like, like I could have been caught up to serve on the Greenland front lines. Like, you know, And then odd, odd secret third thing none of us saw coming. Just just fucking smash cut to a close up of a busted up laptop in an apartment somewhere. We're playing on it camera. Camera pulls out to see that the entirety of the building is destroyed and we're looking down on a ruined St of some nondescript city and there's fucking mushroom clouds off in the in in the fire and.

It's the ink spots. I don't want to set the wall on fire. Yes, as we pull out war. War never changes. Simply fucking intensifies and duplicates. Jesus Christ. So Stephen Lang's top 4 is Avatar, Avatar, The Way of War, Don't Breathe, where he plays the old blind man in our house that's being home invaded, but turns out he's the real threat. I think is the store on that one. I'm not home Centre Manhunter. We talk about Tombstone. He's in Sisu Road to Revenge. I need to watch those movies. Yeah, they look bad.

They look they are very unserious. Yes. On series good. On series bad. Entertaining on series. OK, great, great character actor. I was expecting just scrolling for this. Expecting a lot more westerns from some of him. He has a return. He's right. He's he does one of our famous favourites A clearing present dudes thing here. He plays a president who was known as the president in the cast in a series of movies called Rogue Warfare. He's in Rogue Warfare, Rogue Warfare 2, The Hunt, Rogue Warfare, Death of a Nation, all these movies.

Two of them were made in 2019. One of them was made in 2020. So back-to-back filming as the president. Incredible. .5 stars on letterbox The 2019 Rogue Warfare. This is the one, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A group of the best military personnel from the US, Russia, UK, China and France to enforce us to find underground terrorist networks. So basically a shit version of Rainbow 6. And what the fuck I can't believe, sorry half a star. I can't believe there were two sequels to this. The only way I could imagine this being any worse is if everyone dressed up as Hitler and started doing impressions of people with cerebral palsy.

In what world? God, in what world would an international counterterrorism task force be manned by an entire squad of bumble fucks who don't like each other, have never trained together, Not have, sorry, no, have even ever fucking met the blonde. Monotony makes time slow to an infinite crawl. The plot is so cookie cut out that you can mistake it for a bakery. The villain is so toothless that a newborn is more threatening. I've seen plenty of bad war movies, but even they can be slightly absolved thanks to decent acting, action, or even my eye adherence is the basic military protocol brackets.

Unsurprisingly, they can't even do that. Close brackets. I know I shouldn't be getting bent out of shape over things like that, but it's hard not to harp on it when the rest of the movie is so all caps boring. I couldn't even make it halfway before I felt like a grizzly bear on speed had been Jack fucking my skull. One more time. I couldn't even make it halfway before I felt like a grizzly bear on speed had been Jack fucking my skull. I needed to read that out again. It was a beautiful line. Anyway, this sucks.

Heed my warning. Don't bother with it. Bars. Hold up Aaron's writing Is this fire? Thank you, Aaron. Black box for. People who often zone out during these things. That was the film Rogue Warfare that we are not covering on this board together. Yeah, fucking one star. One star. All I can see is I finished the film without turning it off. Pretty high praise, yeah. Assuming lying. Also just to wrap him up is also in the Michael Mann movie Public Enemies as well which is the the one about John Dillinger which I haven't seen since it came out because it has Johnny Zepp in and he does my head in.

Right. Cool. Should we got some trivia for for this movie? I I just want to do a little bit of crew and rather than casting. Yes, please. Sorry. Yeah, we talked about this. Yeah. Because I looked a little bit into the work of the films. Cinematographer the the director of photography. Who's the name of just fucking? Dante Spinotti. Yes, so my initial wonders looked in at this guy saying did he did he did he work on any jello films that were then like the main Jello guys? It didn't, but his his film work in like the Italian film industry.

He's done some off killed off strange stuff. He's done a lot of comedies and stuff, which I'll find wild, but out of the films he's done that have English language Wikipedia entries. I love how just sparse these descriptions are these super the answer. Disobedience is 1981 Italian drama film directed by Aldo Laro. It's based on a novel of the same name written by Alberto Moravia. We go to its plot, the adventures of Luca Manzi, a teenager living in Northern Italy during wartime. Luca Manzi is a 14 year old boy.

When the fascists govern the Northern Italy Republic of Salo, he becomes a partisan. But when the war ends, he's disappointed because things have not changed as he'd hoped they would, and he decides to let himself die. He is saved by Edith, who tries to introduce him to sex. Tries. Tries. That's the whole of the plot section on the English language wiki. I bet the Italian language wiki has like 17 paragraphs and it's all really who tries to introduce him to sex. She gives it the old college try.

Concerned that she's only 14 minutes happening as well. Yeah, the dark side of love The dark side of love Italian photo Grafando Patrizia. I'm sorry for doing this when I speak Italian by the way, for those who are the main I'm I'm doing Italian pinch finger thing. I'm so fucking sorry. Photo Grafandio Patrizia is a 1984 Italian erotic romantic drama film written and directed by Salvatore Sampere. The film, which has a scabrous main theme, was an incest between a sister and a poor obsessed brother, was a box office success.

It's just. It's just a scripture that comes at you from multiple angles at the same time. I've got the legend of the holy drinker. Italian La Liganda dos Santo Bevitore. I love. Bevitore is drinker. That's me. It's like warrior. You're a piss head. No brother, I'm a hellraiser now. It's no brother, I'm a bevitore. It's a 1988 Italian film written and directed by Amano Almi. A drunken homeless man, Rukahawa in Paris is LED 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repair to a local church where he could afford to.

The film depicts the mods constant frustrations as he attempts to do so. That sounds actually really good. Doesn't it? And just this last one, this crazy thing. Fair game. Italian Mamba is a 19 is a 1988 Italian thriller horror film written directed by Mario Orfini. After being dumped by his girlfriend Eva, who was tired of his unrelentingly negative and sexist attitude, Dean decides to take revenge by killing her with a mamba venomous snake, into which she also injected hormones to increase its aggressiveness.

The film bombed at the Italian box office, crossed a goodly 539.5 million lira. It was distributed in 36 foreign countries. 539,000,000 lira, which is about £20 in the pound period. Yeah, mad mad shit. These these little stories here, these like snippets of these film are just crazy to me and I just found that very entertaining. Can I ask you a question or two? I think I'm doing it. It's devil's advocate for all listeners, but also because I don't really know because I looked at it once and I forgot about it.

When we talk about Jello movies, what what is the what are the hallmarks of a jello movie? And why does the movie about the 14 year olds attempting to have sex with somebody not count? So it sounds to me like more of like a drama kind of post war kind of exploration of like exploration of romance. I guess Jello films have these more kind of like abstract. We had crazy plots. They have they have certain tropes that kind of a bite to like it's about the psychosexual violence against women. You have elements that you have like the idea of like masked killers.

You have tropes like close-ups on gloved hands and shit like that. Extreme violence mixed with weirdly jarring, sometimes fun and playful and jazzy music. One, one comment I read on analysis of the music used in Jello films is that you can watch a film where a woman's being slowly decapitated and there's a jazz piano in the background. The idea that like they use these very stylish leads, There's lots of like, kind of like the film's gears kind of like lands upon like the fashion and the way these characters are dressed.

That's kind of a big thing. It is visual and surface level and there's lots of like storytelling with like pull out schemes and stuff like that so that that that particular boy becomes a partisan. Hopefully he becomes of age when the lady attempts introducing the sex. Doesn't sound like a jello because it sounds a bit deeper. Like a lot of jello is a very Helix surface level kind of thing at times. Yeah, there you go. I think like the most jello sounding 1 is probably that one with the scabrous relationship between the incestuous brother and sister.

Or maybe the one when the when when the guy's porn addicted guna and kills his girlfriend with a mamba. However, the Wikipedia doesn't call them specifically jello films. It might be time for me to do a deep dive. But beyond clear and present jelloists were clear and present dudes. OK, Yeah, right. Should we do some trivia for the movie Manhunter? Please. OK. So this was a box office bomb. We talked about that already. So it was a $15 million budget. It made a box office 8.6 million. So it took a big loss just on its original budget, not even marketing and so on.

This is the first adaptation novel of Red Dragon and it was one of several busts for producer Dino De Laurentiis. So context for him listen on this particular trivia mentions Maximum OverDrive, which is the Stephen King directed and written movie about the trucks that become sentient because of a meteor. And that's insane. Just cocaine. If it was a movie, Stephen.

King, you spoke too hard. You're pitched apart. You're sparked too different. They'll kill you. Stephen King. Yeah, not silver yet. Very really not silver yet. Very. Much form as the movie what's not this is here but definitely comes as June from 984. Those who were part of this this path of teams or low enters, was it him or was it his daughter actually produced that one? But it's a De Lorean to his production anyway. Yeah. So De Laurentiis sold the sequel rights to Orion for like a pittance, practically nothing.

And then putting, you know, five years later, science alarms, freaking humongous success, 5 Oscars, just like ridiculous. So yeah, interesting. We've already mentioned some of the expert castings. So that vet and the tiger scenes are real vet and Dennis Rena is a real cop Incredibly awesome. It's like they might have pulled, sorry, it looks like they might have pulled real cops in to play the SWAT team because they notice it was a bunch of guys just creditors, officer, etcetera. Bunch of dudes with credits whose name included the title officer.

So I wonder if Michael Mann in his kind of quest for quest for realism, just like took on like a bunch of cops to play the play like the SWAT team for like the attempt to capture scene when he when he accidentally mugs a guy. Because again, it seems like Michael Mann realism and attentionally did ill, but I can't see any confirmation of it on the Internet. Which, yes, no, yeah, I just want to spread misinformation. But it's certainly possible, isn't it? Yeah. This movie in France, it's French title translates to The 6th Sense.

So if you are French and you're trying to watch the M Knight Chalaman movie The 6th Sense, you may find yourself watching Manhunter instead, which is quite fun. Parisa backlash Brian Cox has never regretted playing this role but he has expressed disdain to how the characters become idolised and it's true as an anti hero by both fans and the official media. To him, how to look there is very much a monster and remains a monster. That's interesting. Jesus. This one's quite quaint. Tom Noonan began bodybuilding in preparation for his role because he wanted to be a bit buff, because he thought the size of him intimidated people.

And that's how you should be perceived. I think if you were anybody in a movie nowadays, and you're going to have to get your shirt off, you're expected to be like Jack. Yeah, I haven't seen that. I haven't seen a normal shirtless body in film as long as I can remember. Yeah, and the the guy who plays the truth fairy in the Hannibal TV series is Swole Ears, ears, ears ripped. The dude's got some fucking back gains. Dude's backspiration man TomTom Noonan. Like he's the kind of guy who he looks like he doesn't even need lift because he's like right there is there is a phenomenon of men who were tall think in the heart just because the tall know what I mean, and it's obviously not the case because I mean, I once saw this like big like fucking 6 foot four guy on an eye out and two and get dismantled by the sake fucking 5 foot 5 Raji.

But TomTom Newland looks double hard and probably would even even without like having to train, you know? Absolutely. Another Tom Newman, in fact, is into the shooting. Michael Mann initially had Francis Dollahyde have a ginormous tattoo of a red dragon on his chest and back. Yeah. So they filmed a shit tonne of stuff with this ginormous chest and back piece on on Tom Noonan. And then he decided during the shooting that actually I prefer it without because I guess it's like an implies confidence in abilities to operate in public for a man to go off and get like a ginormous chest and back piece, which is a bit cool and edgy.

And I guess this guy is in his own life, a bit of a quiet reserved nerd and is a bit anti social. So they thought it would be weird from to actually have that, so they they removed that from the movie. There's another thing that they didn't do, which is in the book, which is whilst he's struggling with his new found love relationship with Reba, the character tries to get rid of his tendencies by finding the painting he's obsessed with. He's obsessed with Pulliam Blake's painting of the red dragon and the woman bathed in gold.

So not something it's called. And it goes to the the museum where the painting's been displayed and steals it and eats it. Yeah, I think it totally works. He doesn't like to be beheld by people unless it's in his that kind of specific way that he wants to be seen by them. So to like sit through what multiple multiple hours of tattoo work to get like a back and chess piece wouldn't feel within within his within his like kind of characters motivations and the way he thinks and acts. So very good call.

I've got some casting trivia that I didn't go through, but so one of the FBI texts is played by Chris Elliott. Do you know Chris Elliott? Is Cabin Boy You familiar with the movie Cabin Boy? I am not. He is right. What else is he? He was an SNL guy. He was also in He's the cameraman in Groundhog Day. He's annoying Phil Connors all the time. So he's this comedy actor and he he played, he was in this famous flop called Cabin Boy I employ. Chris Elliott, yes, I've, I've just pulled him up and yes, yeah, he is an eternal that guy.

Yeah, so he's he's in it. So that's that's not very weird. There's some other casting what could have been. So Brian Cox was not the first choice for Hannibal Lecter. Brian Denny was in the loop to play Hannibal Lecter, and he was the one who recommended Brian Cox to the production. So Brian Denny and Rambo, first blood, very big imposing guy. Normally plays a big cop or something and stuff. Yeah. So he's he's he was in there. Other people on the list to play Halibut Lecter in this movie. Bruce Stern, Don Lithgow, who was Jonathan Denny's also second choice for the role but didn't get selected.

Monty Patinkin as well. Holy crap. And then also Michael Mann considered and this is my favourite 1. Michael Mann also considered William Friedkin to do the acting as Could you imagine that William Friedkin? Holy crap. So that's William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist and cruising is is the real life, I think is the real life inspiration for Garth Morengi like. No doubt. Fantastic. For the role of Will Graham, the studio really wanted Don Johnson to play him. I don't think that will work, in my personal opinion, but he was obviously on his high from being in the the sensation that is Miami Vice.

And the role of Sonny Crockett is also kind of similar in the sense that he's like an underground, an undercover cop. He's struggling with becoming too undercover and losing track of the the way out. But in that show, it's so light touch. Like they talk about it but then isn't live. He doesn't. You don't see him suffering in it at all. He just has these, like, occasional phone calls where it's like you get yourself so, so far in there, you don't know you're going to come back out again. I don't even know who I am.

And sometimes I remember I'm Sonny Crockett and all this kind of shit. And it's just like, yeah, OK. Yeah, and, and like, I mean, in contrast, this film is just a long, dark night of the soul. Yeah, Don Johnson is like, effortlessly. He's too cool as well, which is not so you know, that's not an insult to to to to your man, just like he's saying he's not cool. But Don Johnson is is just too cool And the box office, I think like the audience would have been expecting something a bit different from Don Johnson, I think if they saw him, you know, like the I think the BI mean, not that this movie succeeded anyway, but like Jesus, people were kicked off, I think, and I might have harmed Don Johnson's.

Yeah, because, because, because, because right here is too cool. I mean, like people would have been like, hold on. He's he's wearing like a pastel coloured T-shirt and a suit jacket with the sleeves rolled up. Why? Because this film's not because, because, because, you know, he would just like slip back and it was mowed and turn up in his own gear from my happy vice. Like, you know what? Totally. To your mind, it's like, Oh no, I've just, I've, I've just become Crockett. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm on an insanely huge amount of cocaine right now.

I can't remember where I am. Jesus Christ. I'm about to go with marry a 15 year old like what the fuck Jesus Christ. No fucking way. Yeah, I'm not fully versed on the story, so I don't want to say anything too dodgy, but but look at the story of look at the story of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and then and then get back to me. Cool, right? Other people suggested for Will Grim, Jeff Bridges, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Carl McLaughlin, which I think is a De Laurentiis production thing, must come from Paul Newman and Mickey Rourke.

Also considered of all those people, I think Mickey Rourke would have done pretty well. I. Think you would have? Also, sorry, one more John Johnson. In fact, also Don Johnson, considered for the role of Francis Dollarhyde, would have absolutely stank that place out. He would have. He would have biffed it. That would have been really fucking bad. Yeah, that would be awful. Yeah, absolutely no chance. Oh, look at me. I'm I'm, I'm Dollar Hyde. I'm played by one of the fucking coolest dudes in 1980s.

I just can't get any pussy, man. I've got to kill people because of it. No, no. You're here to watch this witness might be coming. I'm gonna like what? The No.

Hey, do you like tigers? I'm gonna like what? Well. Yeah. Wild already. I'm just imagining I'm like fucking one handing a shotgun like Tom Noonan doesn't just because he hasn't got the size that just like the recoil is not controllable, it just hits him with the fucking face. Yeah, I like that idea of Don Johnson had been dollarhide and said instead of taking reboot to go and see a tiger, he would have like taken it's like to see it to stroke an alligator. Yeah, he would. This is my pet, Reggie.

He went from Tom Broward to fucking speedboat. Yeah. Which would not be which. I mean, I guess should get the sound of the sensation of the Sierra and stuff, but really she was just bumping around at a rapid pace. Bumping around, yeah. He could, he could, he could do that in like a 4 by 4 just on, on, on a fucking vacant loss, you know, And it's like, come on, man. Amazing. God, you ever tried cocaine? Oh my God, just wow. This. Yeah, man, he wouldn't be the red dragon, he'd be the white dragon, if you get me.

Michael Mann was not the first choice to direct this movie, and David Lynch was an early consideration for the role of director, having because he was still under contract with De Lorentis after Dune. However, David Lynch rejected this role, finding the story to be, quote, violent and completely degenerate. I love favourite Lynch. So good. Violent. It's completely degenerate. Pot, this is kettle gonna check over like this is from the same man who five years later would make fucking Twin Peaks, Fire Walk of Me and Wild at Heart and fucking Blue Velvet.

So show me a film that is more violent and degenerate than Blue Velvet. I think you love that. Fucking love him so much honestly. He's so good. Yeah. He's like, oh, I'll make a review about a killer, but not your killer. Yeah, this, this, this one's degenerate. This I love. This I love, yeah, I love this I do that like. My degeneracy is way more tasteful than yours, Sir. Yeah, like Ray Wise comes in, He's like, you're sweet. And then like Tom Nuni walks in. He's like, hello, human resources, like.

Bloody hell. Woo. Cool, That's that's that's as much trivial as I can stomach. Gentlemen, weapons free. Rory O'Toole. I want you to talk to me about weapons in this movie. You've got you've got opinions. Holy shit. Yeah. And I think most of my opinions are good about this. I'm not going to be like, read the guns are on kind of thing for a start. So this this this film actually stars Jim Zubini, who you may remember Mike from last year when I sent you that video clip of that incredibly rapid Mozambique drill from the episode of Miami Face.

Nice, yeah. Yeah, Jim. Jim Zubien is an American competitive shooter. He's a marksman who's worked with Michael Man a lot. He played an assassin in an episode of the Miami Vice, an incredibly iconic performance by him, leading lots of people on YouTube to see if if you get in a car in Miami and your driver's wearing yellow shooting glasses, get out of the car. Jim Zubien's in the film and provides provides Will Graham with special ammunition to to to take out Francis Tholeheit, which is a real thing he's talking about.

He is talking about a kind of a frangible ammunition. The blue tipped ammo that he provides refers to as Glazer safety slugs. Glazer safety slugs are a real Glazer safety ammunition is a real product. The make the make or made ammunition chamber. I think up from 22 long rifle up to 30 ought 6 basically rounds that were like a regular bullet with a with a kind of a polymer cup behind that polymer cup, a fuck tonne of birdshot. So they're essentially rounds designed flag causing deep penetrate and wounds on people.

Kind of like the design not a ricocheted badly inside inside buildings and close quarters and stuff like that. He makes a big deal that these are flag. These are guaranteed one shots up despite haven't used multiple. I think it's a blank. It's a cool thing. Some of the explanation gives us a bit bit wrong. He tells them to Ela tells them that it's that it's that it's got like I think a Teflon round in it or something. No, no, he says he's he says he's got a Teflon round in it. I believe the what does he say?

Polymer actually can't remember now I'm just double check my notes and shit. Yeah, that's right. He says that the that the suspended and liquid Teflon and the pond impact opens all up in the target. A guaranteed one shot stop. That's not kind of how the work. There was discourse about Teflon coated bullets in the US media at the time in terms of being armour piercing things. But no, there's there's a polymer in in these rounds, whether at this point it was capping the end of it and was full of birdshot or they had it when there was like a polymer ball in it on further iterations with birdshot behind it.

Much like kind of like the old school book and ball loadout that have with with with muskets and stuff. I think that's really fucking cool. It's it's it's really cool to say, to say Tom Noonan one hand in that shotgun, which was Jim Zubinas from home. He brought that in himself. That was his personal weapon. The Jim Zubinas brought in the shotgun for Tom Noonan, who used to thought was incredibly slick resting appearance of the night vision scopes on the police marksman that I couldn't fucking identify or really upset us.

That was painful. But yeah, I love like, just like some like the shots as well, like the fucking appearances of like the kind of I'm looking down at this down the barrel image of, of Will Graham pointing, pointing his pointing his Charter Arms 44 bulldog at the camera. It's it's in focus. He's he's kind of blurry and you can like see like those like special blue tip bullets in it, which I think is really cool. The Charter Arms bulldog was actually the weapon that the Son of Sam Killer used. So this is a book initially written about a serial killer.

He was called the 44 calibre killer wasn't he? Along with the Son of Sam killer. It was written only a few years after I think Son of Sam Killam spree ended and the hero of the book is using the exact same weapon the the Son of Sam the dealer book. Which, yeah, go on. I was going to say I did read that. Tom Harris said it better than with some FBI profilers and stuff and research for the book. Yeah, yeah. So I I found that really cool. And like I said, there's there's just the guns in it realistically picked for the era.

You know, you've got the cool commando of the XM177 assault rifle that SWAT guys are using. There's one one guy with an Uzi because Uzi's a fucking cool. Yeah. I like the guns in this film, like I said, especially like there's an appearance made by him, by him, Jim Zubena. I like, it's interesting. I like, it's interesting kind of granularity about the ammunition and stuff. And it kind of gets most of the explanation of frangible rounds right, without like going in like actually fragile rounds. Here's why they're so good.

Like I just did you see what I'm being? So I was looking at I just, I just did a very bit of quick like look at it fragile rounds and stuff. First of all, I'm going to see are they legal for for civilian use? Several states apparently have banned them in the US and you can't get them in the UK anymore. I think you could be supposed to get them in the Uki was reading some some blog posts here where somebody managed to get some of a former SAS operator who'd been allowed to have them or something for some reason.

They were looking at what would the legal standing be if you even if you did a killing in self defence defence or defence of your property or your home or whatever. But you had these rounds, how to make you appear to a jury or in a court or law because this person is saying like, well I think I'd be reluctant to face a coroner, inquest or a grand jury. Have to explain why I use a non standard pistol round or around designed to cause the maximum damage when I suppose what you're trying to do is deter people from your end and engagement.

You're not necessarily trying to kill them because if you're a civilian doing self defence, you're probably not operating to the same doctrine that you would in the military or in law enforcement, which is to bring somebody down to prevent grave, grave in imminent danger. And there's no way to prevent the danger and shoot to kill, which is, you know, centre of mass kind of thing. I think if you're a if you're civilians, it's a grey area where and obviously, again, if you're in the military, in law enforcement, you are using the ammunition that you're provided with.

So unless you've deviated from it there, in which case that's definitely an indicator that something's the fuck is going on. I think it's a civilian. I think you'd have a hard time explaining why I used a non standard round to affect a kill, which it sounds like, well, why do you have that ammunition in the 1st place? Like why are you using this? Absolutely. You know, I get that, I understand that. And then they said here, what you would probably do is or most, most police departments are using pretty good ammunition that provides more inadequate stopping power and being able to state to a Jew that you use gold dots or whatever because you check to see what the local Police Department is using and choose to use that ammo because you're doing what the experts are doing kind of thing.

That is that probably just easier than saying, oh, I deviated and got and went for something that sounds like cool. Obviously the nearest kind of comparison I could make off the top of my head hearing that is the the process of taking a regular ball ammunition and then scoring the top to make a dum dum bullet to use the bullets casing as part of the projectile. It's inside the bodies to create shrapnel, which is that's not, that's not legal. And obviously you're modifying the rounds then and put them into an unsafe condition.

This sounds like ammunition that's designed to do that by design to affect that effect. And obviously that's that's that's viewed pretty negatively. Yeah. I mean, I think like the main reason why they kind of like had pushed out that was the idea that in in the case of like ricochets, it's not likely a ricochet because it's essentially like a, a smaller projector with a sick fucking difficult amount of like birdshot behind it. Yeah, I think there was a case in Florida that someone defended the the home using this kind of ammunition.

And I think the the the media reported it as using exploding bullets, which doesn't that that that isn't good for you. I just imagine the kind of damage to these things and fucking fit your six would do though, because I mean, like, you know, like it's like full, full, full power rifle round. That would be crazy. Yeah. Like, it's like a lot of what you're referring to. It's like I've like done a lot like reading up on this and just kind of hung around within discourse about the ideas of like, does it speak to premeditation in terms like the ending yourself in court?

So like, for instance, I saw some some discourse about a guy who's the civilian in in the states, obviously, whose whose personal concealed carry weapon was was Sami automatic of some kind. I'm I'm actually not super good like identifying pistols and more like, oh, that's that's ex kind of rifle. But so it was some kind of largely generic semi automatic. They'd had it car recorded with like pictures of the joke. I don't like all the ha ha stuff on on on the grip. So I'd say yeah, if if you use that to defend yourself.

Any jury is going to be like, well, any, any, any lawyer's going to say the jury. This guy went out wanting to shoot someone. He's gussied up his gun, ridiculous degrees. He's got a pitch for the fucking Joker on it. This guy didn't want to deescalate, didn't want to put himself out of the position. He's he's he's he's just killed the dude kind of thing. And like there's there's like just some more sort of things like I've heard about like cops having fucking Bible verses engraved on the guns and like saying like, no, dude, fucking don't because yeah, yeah, you were, you were going to go to gaol forever.

Even if you get involved in like a legitimate officer involved shooting because they're going to fucking pull out. And it's like, oh, John 316. OK, so you wanted to kill this guy. And it's like, it is, it is interesting. So I think that's why you use anything that can be deemed as like special sexy, cool ammunition, you know, is is could be taken. It's like, well, this guy didn't just want to defend himself, right? You wanted to have fun with it, and you wanted to see someone die in a cool, interesting way.

Yeah, I say, isn't it? Yeah, I think, I think you're absolutely right. I think if you use any funk emission like this, you're standing yourself in a date. I mean, fuck me, man, What we're talking about here. Don't shoot people. Imagine like the kind of behaviour of like a responsible mature gun owner who knows the fucking fatal capabilities weapon would be to use like a standard weapon that they're familiar with and trained with to shoot to stop the threat usually mean it to kill. But when you're when you like put in ideas of like I'm using this really cool, like fucking birdshot kind of stuff, which which which does sound cool, is fucking I guess safe for sake.

You'll be if you are going to accidentally get ricochets and stuff, you are going to kind of you're going to open yourself up to someone saying well, well, well, this guy's clearly ladies and gentlemen, the jewellery. This guy went out his way to buy the more expensive animal. It's really cool and gets talked about on the film Manhunter, you know, because not only did he want to stop the threat, he wanted to have fucking fun doing it, and he thinks about it more than he should. Yeah, I think there's a very, very fine line probably on a on a spectrum, a continuum of being a responsible gun owner and doing your research and then tipping into like, oh, you're doing too much research now you're getting too into it.

And now you're and now you're there's, there's the responsible gun owner and then there's like you've, you're a gun nut is what you are. Well, well, well, yeah, that's the thing. That's like I kind of like Seth, like this course I've seen between people talking about like like like in the States. So I was like open carry, concealed carrier, just having self defence weapons in general. That's like the idea is you want to look like, you can see I've done all this training, I've gone to these courses.

I'm not carrying a weapon that's got pictures of the Jared Leto fucking joke around it, you know? And this makes me not a gun nut. The automatic fucking snarl makes us did that when the Javard little joke I was mentioned was fantastic. Just for those of us doing theatre of the main and not watching the video. Yeah, not even the Jack Nicholson fucking joke it right? Like, right, we've talked about guns too much. Wow. Needle drops. OK, so the soundtracks to this movie is by a band called the Reds.

Different pits all of you, because they haven't got a lot of output. A few records, but there's not a lot about them online. I tried to find out about them online and I couldn't find a great deal. Nevertheless, the soundtrack does sound like prior Michael Mann soundtracks. He's used Tangerine Dream before and this doesn't sound 1,000,000 miles away from that big synth heavy stuff. A non diegetic, very in your face soundtrack. And there's a piece of music called Bill Graham's theme, which is I think you can find recreations of on on Spotify and other good streamers.

So it gives you a bit of a flavour for it. But yeah, weird, couldn't find that. And then the other two big Neil drops. I'll I'll mention Heartbeats again, which is the the track that plays over the end by an artist called Red 7A different artist. There's the Reds and Red 7 Jesus Christ from different cities. So not the same artist. The other big one is, which I don't know about you, I don't know about you, but my main form of reference to that is that one episode of The Simpsons where they play on the organ in the church for ages and ages and ages.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's it's, it's such a good song. It's it's always been the most iconic meal drop in the film for me. In general, I think it's just one of the goodest songs ever in in the history of rock music. So out there compared to the rest of the soundtrack, which is very synth synth based and yeah, 80s sounding. It's it's almost a jarring kind of dissonance between that and the rest of the soundtrack, I think, which I think makes it even punchier. Yeah, and it makes it kind of highlights that he's Dollar Hyde's kind of out of step with the rest of the world as well.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's no kind of idea, there's no film that Dollar Hyde is a man out of time or not linked to like the zeitgeist of the era, art from that film part part from that song, which is on from a different decade, from a different generation at this point. And there's no kind of always like a man out of time, out of space kind of thing. But with this song being so generally different, it shows how out of out of society and out of normality he is. The chess and the mess, which is a new category that you you missed Sonya that we just last week so catch you up on it VHS.

And the mess is would this movie play well in the wardroom or the senior rich mess or the junior rich mess on a ship knowing not only is it a good movie, is it like a Bank of a blockbuster movie? Is it the kind of movie that lots of people could sit around and enjoy or is it just a bit too weird? What do you think? I think it's a bit too weird to be honest, like automated kids movies, actually those tend to be very popular because they're light hearted and and break the mood. I don't like, I don't know, I think this this is a bit too much for a relaxed get together with a few drinks or something while you're in port and especially underway.

It's like I haven't seen shit for two weeks. Let me put on this really weird serial killer catching film that gives us all extra anxiety. It's. Not it's not pitch perfect, is it? Not really, no. I mean, maybe in the office's mess because there's always not one weirdo who has to do that. But yeah, but but not like not in the in the senior raids I didn't or anything like that, no. Yeah, somebody like a more standard if there's going to be a crime for a little bit like Fast and Furious or something.

Yeah, yeah. What was the last film you guys both saw in in the mess? Not necessarily watched, just like was aware of and glanced at the screen perhaps from going through. I'm not asking which was the last one you sat down and just. Drunk. I do remember this. The last film I sat down and watched the mess from start to finish was Die Hard. Keno Sanya. I didn't remember because the last time I was four years ago, Last Officer's Mess was too busy hating each other to to spend time watching a film together.

In every moment. Yeah, I think it was actually some animated kids film they were going to watch that was in the the PO's mess three years ago, not 4, but still. I don't, I don't remember the title. I think it was something Disney. Frozen or Moana or something? Yeah, yeah, so, so yeah, so very, very light hearted. If they made a video game of Manhunter, what kind of video game would they make? Very bizarre abstract full motion video RPG released on the Philips video that bombs completely. Wow, that's a very specific answer.

I like that. So like, like, like who are you? Are you playing as Graham? You're playing as Will Graham and you're going through like cutscenes and stuff like phone motion video kind of like stuff as you're seeing things from inside Dollar Hydes kind of mind kind of thing. You're kind of getting getting more in touch with his mindset as you get closer and closer to the end game. You know, I've never played an FMV game all the way to the end, so I don't quite know how these things generally climaxed.

I've got a few actually. Yeah. So there's the original X-Files FMV game. I didn't even know there was 1. Mate, you need to look that up, it is incredible. So they filmed so much footage for it. Moulder and Scully are in it for a short period of time that you can play as. You can choose between who you you play as, but you play as a different agent. Yeah. And Moulder and Scully disappear and you're investigating their disappearance, right? Yeah. Right. But you can go around interviewing people and talking people and like looking at stuff in you go through different rooms, you can click on objects and stuff.

And this man, they spent so much time. It's this is classic where they put like a lot of effort into the front end of the game and it kind of trails off towards the back end. But yeah, you can like click on a stapler in a room and they'll have recorded a footage of a guy going, hey, that's my stapler. Leave it alone. And like, just show you that. It's like they've put too much effort in all the wrong stuff. But yeah, that's fantastic. Good pull. Yeah, definitely. I was going to say, are you familiar with the games of David Cage, such as Rain and Fahrenheit and Beyond?

Two Souls in Detroit? Yeah. OK. Is he French? David Cage? I think he's French for the company Quantic Dream. And before, like Heavy Rain is like the most acceptable kind of popular one that did really well despite the fact that it's got all those cringy memes like Jason, Sean, all that, all that, all that stuff. But David Cage is like, he's one of those films. He's he is French. Yeah. He's one of those film makers who wants to make games that are like movies and look like movies. OK. Which is you're starting in bad faith.

You're you're making a medium to try and make it into a different medium, right. But he did this. He did this game called Fahrenheit where you play this guy and it starts amazingly. You've just committed a murder and a diner because you've been like possessed or something by some kind of evil spirit. And then you immediately have to start covering up the murder straight away and getting out the diner And there's police in the diner just having a meal and you've got to like tidy up the bathroom because it happened in the bathroom.

You've got like hide the body somewhere, include the bathroom and then escape somehow before. And then it has like a split screen thing happens where like a person gets up and he's like, I'm going to the bathroom now and like starts walking towards you. Like starts really starts really strong and then just like it falls off. It does like all these like QuickTime, QuickTime scenes, things that you could like hit the button right in the right order kind of thing to make stuff happen. And there's a whole bit where you have the same character in his apartment and he picks up a guitar and you would like to play the guitar to the same like to some rock music that he's put on.

And it's just like, what is this?

It's very interesting. It's not boring. You start as this guy who's been possessed by Neil Spirit. You end the game as the Internet. Don't ask me how Yes. So that is that's the game. I think this would be like it's French Sonya, but it's set in like Chicago. Well. OK so so my idea would be some so basically not very high resolution click and read horror game. Yeah. Because I can see like yesterday you talked a lot about different scenes, quoting other images and paintings and whatnot. And I could really see that working out as, as slightly pixelated stills in a, in a video horror game where you have either some, some voice over or you've got to do some context reading.

And you don't really get a lot of I have to walk here and it's not very flashy. It's more music and vibes based. Oh. That's cool. Yeah, Big one Vibes is a really big one for for this Sonia. That's a really good pull dude. So you could be like you could be like inspecting all the the packs of the of the previous cases kind. Of thing yeah, something like that. Wait, you just have a top down perspective of a desk with a bunch of different files on it that you can click through? Or you you have it like that scene with Lecter in this cell where you've just have him staring at you with a weird voice over.

Or or you have to to read something in parallel. That's cool. I like that. I like a sort of old Division game. It was a game, the game that came out last year but looks a lot. How's like the vibe of some that came out a lot older, but apparently they're really well called. The root trees are dead and it's like a murder mystery kind of game where you've got all the clues you've got to put together the family trees and it's like you're looking for newspaper clippings and like over bits and bobs to get all that information to put together the mystery.

I kind of like that. Yeah. That's cool. I think it's. Yeah. That sounds really cool. Sorry. Before I forget, would you like to look through the notes from the peanut gallery? Let's see what our friends on Letterbox think about this film. We'll begin with reviews. Just one star for this film. One star. He caught a serial killer using vibes and bad lightning lighting. Sorry, one star. The only thing I take away from this movie is that William Peterson really pulls off wearing shorts. Another one star.

Still the worst thing I've ever watched. So this is a polarising movie man. Man is probably another one. Another one star. Sorry, my least favourite major director. Manhunter. Feels like a long Miami Vice episode. Disagree. The acting is subpar from everyone. There were line deliveries in there where I thought you didn't want to do another take. The blood in the final showdown looked like a ketchup squirting from the bottle. No comment. No comment. I can't stand the leads acting. The first time I watched this, I turned it off after the scene in the tree and people love this movie.

QT that is one of the six good movies of the 80's. The six good movies of the 80s is savage, by the way. That's. Insane. Is is QT Quentin Tarantino? Yeah, and he's a fucking idiot like Bill Way. He's the kind of guy who would say there are only 6 good movies in the whole 80s. They'll all be shit as well. Yeah. Manhunter, which we love, yeah. I don't see the peel. Maybe in 1986. This was groundbreaking for a serial killer movie. Now Manhunter is drowning in broken VHS tapes and nostalgia. 2 star zone.

Now I'm not sure what kind of magical contacts the 1st 10 minutes that I missed of this movie had, but damn was I lost. What the actual hell is going on? Three tomato emojis? What if a serial killer just needs to date a body and he would stop another two star? A film called Manhunter by Mr Mann should never have been allowed a great two star. Yeah what a load of hogwash and poppycock. The fucking view of some Victorian die that's. A hogwash. When I wanted the three star reviews. Three stars Psycho yuppie glam.

In the final scene, Will Graham is wearing the sluttiest, shortest shorts I've ever seen on a man. These older movies are tough for me to get into, but this is pretty solid by the end. That's the epitome of a three star review actually, if you exclude the slutty shorts bit, which is like good for its time. Nothing to rhyme.

Three stars 6 foot 7. My man should have been in the league our our three stars free on Tubi My ass movie had like 12 ads in it. What a laughably dated. This gets an extra half star of a red dragon because Will felt like a real human grappling with some complicated issues instead of just being the perfect detective. Also him jumping through the glass door on the climax and landing nose to nose with Dollar Hyde was sick as fuck and felt very earned. It was another three star reviews. Jump through window.

Very 80s, not as best. Good looking film, good story but a bit silly at points. We have got into the four-star zone now. Four stars from Tianas Papadopoulos. Who opens cool shit? Alfonso Alvarez, 2 stars or pounds? I love you Michael mAh. Dog's breath 25 Will Graham, gun and hand running head 1st through a floor to ceiling window towards the unarmed killer is one of the decisions of all time. Was he planning on just tackling Dollar Hyde? Three question Marks and in slow motion no less. Unmistakably 80s and unmistakably Michael mAh.

The real Raymond Garry 4 stars says I want to lick Will Graham up and down. Drooling emoji. There ain't no way Hannibal didn't be like Dang I want to eat that man. Why did they redo that movie shot for shot when this one delivers pretty well? Says horror Poppins for the four-star review. April in condenser gives 4 stars and says made a girl come while watching this. Good drills with that clutter. The four stars says hunt more, but just hunt more. No, no further guidance to us. Just hunt more. Four stars from Jabui.

It's called Manhunter because the manhunt the man Michael the manhunter man the hunt 4 1/2. Now you're telling me a guy with a house like that gets no bitches? Multiple question Marks and exclamation box at the end of that review in five stars. Happy 2026. I wish it was 1986. The most 80s movie ever. There's a moment where a treat us and crashes through a window in slow motion. The 80s dad rock and it's maybe the most beautiful series of images ever put to the screen. The vibes are slightly are simply unmatched and blue is never blued so blue.

This is aged in all the right ways, says George Webster with a 5 star someone named Stone Medigal says basically the most underrated thriller of all time And and just really great take. I will I'm not going to read the whole review because it's like a really long one from someone called American friend who who's generally written a good review here. But if real and yeah, Brian Cox's Lecter is such a different animal than the Lecter Anthony Hopkins made so famous. You feel like Cox was a working class genius who was intellect came with the weight of insanity, A gormand who worked his way through school as a lion kook.

I like that. I like that bit of head count and someone's done that. It's kind of fucking cool. So yeah, there you go, the fans. The fans love the film and hate the film in equal equal amounts. Polarising, yeah. Polarising. Deeply polarising. It's this movie. CIA pro auntie. Unclear, I'd say I I generally say this movie is not Auntie having access to various swaths of people's data to catch people. Yeah, I'd say it makes the FBI at least look very competent. But not in a kind of heroic fashion, just in the these these, these are good skilled technicians who know how to do a job that involves the apprehension of criminals in the prevention of further crime.

So I think this is possibly a very neutral film towards federal government agencies in so far as it shows the FBI is being good at the job. It doesn't lionise them maybe in a way that The Silence of the Lambs does. It certainly it certainly portrays the the feds more heroically than there's still. If anything, most fatal sacrifice in this film comes from local law enforcement. Yeah, that's true. Oh, OK. So we're going to call that a inconclusive, I'd say inconclusive. Yeah, right. So we're still eight to three against the minute with everyone else being inconclusive.

Out of all the films expected to be marked as largely centrist, it wouldn't be a Michael Mann film. Yeah. There you go. We'll see how that plays out. I guess next January with Michael Mann. Cool final category. Then guys, the Ding Chavez Award for missed opportunity of the movie. What do you guys got for me? I'll let you guys go first for this one. Because I've got it fun, yeah. Well, it's not, it's not really a missed opportunity. I was a bit surprised by by the way they took on the the kidnapping and subsequent killing of that reporter, which it was tied to a chair.

And I sort of expected that scene to become very uncomfortable immediately after that recording. But then it was just a cat. And I was like, OK, what happened? I guess we will never know. And then he's just burning in a wheelchair. And that was while it's not a good way to go, that was way less graphic than I had somehow anticipated. The whole film is less graphic than you. Yeah. You hear a lot about these horrible things that happened. You don't see any of them. And I don't know if that's a deliberate choice by the film makers to turn it down or to have it be more haunting because we're thinking about it more than we're seeing it.

But there's a lot of there's a lot of telling and not showing. I don't know why I see it all. Yeah, I I certainly don't, but it's caught me as a surprise. One of the most graphic things to me in the film. It's probably not what you think and actually, but hear me out. It's that very kind, like psychedelic kind of scene when you've seen the woman and like, her eyes are just like absent and glowing and stuff. And it's like, because, you know, that's like within the killer's mind, that's what he's putting over something really, really fucking horrible.

Yeah. You know, like, that's one of the kind of, it isn't graphic graphic, but it kind of gets under your skin because, you know, that what you're seeing is how the killer, whether it be through hallucinations, because I think the film does, like, suggest that he's schizophrenic or whether it's just his mental way of coping with it. Is that like, he's projecting this over his actual experience of just doing something really fucking awful to this woman's dead body? Yeah. As far as missed opportunities for me, much like Collateral, some Michael Mann film, but doesn't really seem to leave you thinking what else could it have fitted in and still worked well.

So I'm going to go down just the kind of light hearted way and say this film needed more close up and film needed in general. Michael Mann precise close up footage of turtles being hatched because after all, Will Graham's got a little turtle hatchery and at the end of the film he does seem most of them made it so. And I know that's that's that's like, you know, a metaphor for saving people, but not everyone gets saved. I know right as who you subtext in the role cowards. But but yeah, it would nice to see some like Michael Mann, Michael Mann animal footage and Michael Mann wildlife documentary just snuck in there.

Beautiful. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. My only miss opportunity, I think, and I mentioned it earlier on, is I think Reba McClain, June, June Allen's character could have had a little bit more, just a little bit more coverage, just we understand her a little bit more. I think she was a bit sidelined. Yeah, definitely. But yeah, cool, right, Wow, that brings that draws Michael Manuri to an end and also this edition of clear and present dudes. So next we have the sum of all fears. We're getting back on the Saint Tom of Clancy bus and we're going to go and see a nuclear weapon be just.

Well, that's not spoiled, but we haven't seen some of our fears in 2002. But wow, what a film dropped in a dropped in a mad time. Yeah, cool. I've been Mike. I've been joined by Rory O'sulle. He's waves. Yeah, you know, yes. It's not a teams meeting Rory, it's a podcast. Yes, hi. It's been great once again joining my 2 incredibly, incredibly good friends here, Megan, Sonia talking about this amazing film, but so nice to have the team back together with Sonia. Sonia back online. It's been an absolute pleasure.

And Sonya. Who once again apologises for making a mess of his personal schedule the last time and going entirely and unexplainably absent without leave. I don't know what was getting into my head there. I'll make sure to be around the next time as well. I'm. Good. I've said that now. Now I have set myself up for failure. No, thank you all for for joining in and thanks for having me back guys. Excellent. OK, cool. You're. Part of the team man. We would never not have your back, buddy. Brilliant. Thank you everybody for listening.

Please remember to like and subscribe and comments and to any bit of engagement you feel necessary. Comments and emails are also very welcome at [email protected]. Join us on the socials. And all I have to say is that, gentlemen, we have been. Clear and present, dudes.

Manhunter (1986)

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