If you’re a regular reader of this site, you might have noticed that Alan Sepinwall and Brian Grubb recently launched a podcast called TV Avalanche. (And if you haven’t noticed that, please check it out. It’s pretty great, and it’s now available on iTunes and Stitcher.) We’ll be rolling out more podcasts in the coming weeks including one that Uproxx senior entertainment writer Mike Ryan and I have been working on: Random Movie Night. (But you probably knew the name already if you clicked on this page.)
The premise is simple, and all credit for the idea should go to Mike. We wanted to create a movie podcast that left what we watched in the hands of fate, up to a point. So each episode we’ll be using a random number generator to give us two numbers between one and 35. The first will determine the number of years back we go from 2017, and the second will correlate to that year’s end box-office ranking of the movie we watch. This should give us a relatively popular movie within relatively recent memory. (We landed on the number 35 because the box office records we have access to via Box Office Mojo get a little sketchy before 1982.)
To illustrate, let’s try one right now.
First number… 32… That lands us in 1985.
Second number… 20… That gives us… Brewster’s Millions, a Walter Hill-directed comedy starring Richard Pryor and John Candy.
Well, that would have been fun. Maybe we’ll get those numbers again in the future. [Note from Mike: Ha.] But for the first episode we recorded we hit the numbers 32 (fate must want us to revisit 1985) and 30. Which means we watched A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
The first sequel to the 1984 hit A Nightmare On Elm Street, A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 is notable for a few things:
• Confirming that Freddy Krueger, the razor-gloved dream invader of Wes Craven’s original, would be a continued box office draw.
• Being rushed into production.
• For containing a lot of homoerotic subtext that seemed to fly over the heads of most viewers, and at least some of the people making the movie, at the time but has since become one of its defining features.
We hope you enjoy this first episode. The technical aspects are still a little rough. We’re learning on the job when it comes to editing and recording podcasts, so bear with us. And we hope you’ll be back again next week for another episode. The podcast is now available on iTunes and we’ll be adding it to Stitcher and Google Play soon.
Some links to items referenced in the episode:
“The Nightmare Behind The Gayest Horror Movie Ever Made” by Louis Peitzman: A very good 2015 Buzzfeed piece that talks to NOES2 star Mark Patton about his experiences making the movie and its aftermath.
Scream, Queen: The homepage for the documentary project Patton made from his experiences.
Never Sleep Again: If you’ve got four hours and a Netflix subscription, this 2010 documentary about the Elm Street series is very much worth your time.
But, wait: There’s more. We’ve got a second episode recorded already and the sound quality is much better. (I bought a new microphone, as mentioned with some excitement in the show.) We’ll be doing a fuller post on this next week, but here it is now if you want to give it a listen.
