Watchcast Schedule for May 2023: Some Guys Are Coming to Kill Us

Greetings, Nextlanders! Boy, April just kinda flew by, didn't it? But then it always feels that way when you're watching CLASSICS OF CINEMA like we did last month. Well don't you worry, we've got another slate of popcorn classics here for the month of May, and this time YOU, THE VIEWER, chose what we're watching. Out of the four possible themes we had up for vote, Some Guys Are Coming to Kill Us won by a narrow margin. What does that theme entail? It's pretty self-explanatory. We have five films in which our protagonists are stalked, overwhelmed, or generally menaced by groups of bad guys while they are somewhere they probably should not be. Here's what we'll be watching this month:

Monday, May 1st: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Our first flick is another Carpenter classic in his second feature film, Assault on Precinct 13. Odds are that if you were watching movies in the mid-aughts you caught the remake starring Ethan Hawke and Larry Fishburne at some point, but the original is really where it's at. This is some straight up grindhouse action cinema, featuring a small cast of cops and crooks fending off an overwhelming force of silent street gang members hellbent on killing everyone in the titular near-abandoned precinct. This movie rules, and we had a lot of fun chatting about its spartan production and jarring violence.

Where to Watch 

Monday, May 8th: Trespass (1992)

This is one of those movies I have weirdly fond memories of seeing when I was a kid, and while I haven't seen it in ages, I'm hopeful that it'll live up to my memories of it. Bill Paxton and William Sadler (shout out to all-time character actor Sadler actually getting top-of-the-poster billing here) play a pair of Arkansas firefighters who catch wind of a possible stolen treasure hidden in an abandoned complex in St. Louis. Unfortunately, they run afoul of the gang that runs the area, headed up by Ice-T and Ice Cube. Director Walter Hill gives this one some good, tense punch, and it's always fun to see hip-hops biggest Ices acting together.

Where to Watch 

Monday, May 15th: Judgment Night (1993)

Ah, Judgment Night. I'll be completely up front here and say this is more an excuse for me to talk about this movie's legendary soundtrack than anything else. The movie itself is a not particularly good Emilio Estevez and Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle where they (alongside Stephen Dorff and Jeremey Piven) get chased around a bunch by an evil Denis Leary, but the soundtrack is an all-timer of both buckwild rap-rock team-ups and licensed soundtracks in general. Yes, we'll discuss the movie, but mostly I want to talk about Biohazard and Onyx and the like. 

Where to Watch 

Monday, May 22nd: The Raid (2011)

Oh baby, now we're getting to the really good stuff. If you've never seen this banger of Indonesian action cinema, buckle up. This is an all-timer of dudes getting brutally fucked up in every way you can imagine. The plot, about a raid gone wrong in a Jakarta apartment tower heavily fortified by bad guys, mostly just exists to get you from one brutal fight to the next, but those fights are SOMETHING ELSE. I will strongly caution that this one is not for the squeamish. There's a lot of close-up bludgeoning and stabbing going on here.

The version we will be watching is the unrated cut in the original Indonesian (the dub will just be used for podcast editing), but if you end up watching the original theatrical version it's no big deal. It's like a minute and change of extra violence and not much else different.

Where to Watch 

Monday, May 29th: Dredd (2012)

Continuing my personal mission to watch every movie we had a poster up for in one of our various offices, we are finally making good on watching the shockingly great 2012 adaptation of Dredd. I say shockingly because, well, there's that Stallone movie, which sucks ass. This movie extremely does not suck ass. Karl Urban is damn near perfect as the title character, and Lena Headey does some of her best villain work (yes, right up there with Cercei) as a drug matron who commands a massive tower block, and traps Urban and his partner (Olivia Thirlby) inside. Despite being built for 3D, the movie looks fantastic in a regular two-dimensional presentation, and it's got a couple of my favorite action scenes from the last decade or so. A terrific closer for the month, if I do say so myself.

Where to Watch 

---

And that's our month! This is a fun theme, and I think y'all will have a good time with both the movies and the discussions. As always, thank you for watching and listening along with us. We'll see you at the movies!