You thought we forgot about you again. You thought we weren’t going to have a new episode of The Flickcast and that we’d skipped a week. Well, you were wrong. Again. We’re just late … again.

On this week’s show Chris and Joe talk about the new Ghostbusters movie and trailer, Saturday Night Live, the current state of movie and TV comedy, J.K. Simmons’ new gig, Agent Carter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a whole lot more.

Picks this week include Chris’ pick of the Netflix series House of Cards (now back for Season 4) and and Joe’s pick of the classic movie Highlander, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Damn.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship, or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook, Google+ or via email.

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When I heard this week was a double episode I was surprised, and even more surprised to find it was the season finale.  It seems rare to have just a 13-episode season, especially for a network show.  And throwing the two episodes together seemed a little haphazard, but it actually worked really well. 

The first half was a basic episode, but left enough to want to watch one more.  And the ending of this season was so good and so unexpected, I was floored.  It’s not too often that my jaw drops during a TV show, but it did twice during the last few minutes.  Please keep in mind that this review covers two episodes, so it will be fairly lengthy.  But, enough preemptive reacting, let’s get to the meat and potatoes.

Brooks finds his way into Abbie’s house and tells her that Washington’s bible contains instructions on finding a map that can lead them to a way to stop Moloch.  Moloch cannot use the map, but wants to get it so they cannot use it.  If Abbie gives Brooks the bible, she will be spared and given a spot in Moloch’s clan.

This week’s episode is brought to you by the Denzel Washington suspense film Fallen. It centers around a demon called Ancitif that is harassing Captain Irving and his family. The demon can pass from person to person through touch, just like the demon in the above-mentioned film.  It was a great movie by the way, with a great supporting role played by John Goodman.

 Captain Irving is trying to get answers out of the vendor that spoke to him as a demon in the park. Irving finally realizes that the demon passed from him to an older woman that the man bumped into at the park. The woman is coming in to speak to police when she touches one of the officers, passing the demon to the cop.

 Irving receives a call from within the department from the demon, demanding George Washington’s bible in return for the safety of his daughter Macey.  Irving finds the possessed officer and attacks him, but the demon had already passed to someone new by the time he got to him.

 Irving calls his priest, who urges him to find a safe house.  Irving brings his daughter and wife to a safe house, not realizing that the demon is in one of the two officers helping him lock down the house.  The unidentified officer (to me at least) harboring the demon passes the demon to Morales, who then kills the first officer and enters the safe house.

Among Jason Statham movies, Homefront is right above the middle: It does what you’d expect, but it does it a bit better than what’s been done before.

Statham is Statham, so he’s the secretive outsider with his own code of ethics, and everyone around him is obsessed with violating that code. It’s not much different from The Transporter series or Parker, which came and went without struggle earlier this year in that it provides a venue for Statham to whollop, whomp, blow up, and canoodle with the film’s other residents. He still has his accent. He still kicks ass. He still has that weird charisma that really has yet to be explored.

Specifically, here he has a hit put on him by the drug-lord father of a kid who died in a DEA raid on a meth lab. Even though Statham was clearly trying to keep the kid alive, and the father watched as everyone but Statham gunned his son down, Statham has the rotten luck of being the one marked for death. Go figure.

Do you have a friend who picks apart every movie they see? Or maybe that friend is you? Well, let it be known that you aren’t the only one. And let it be known, you can go somewhere doing it.

If you have heard of a little site by the name of YouTube, you may want to check out the channel CinemaSins. In about six months, CinemaSins has gained close to 400,000 subscribers and over thirty million views just by being “that guy” who decides to tear apart the hard work of so many creative people. (I kind of want his job.)

In this week’s installment, CinemaSins takes a look at what some could consider “low hanging fruit.” Let’s face it, Green Lantern was not a great movie. In fact, it was a pretty bad movie by all stretches of the imagination. And not just for the poor story, poor acting and poor effects…. Actually those are all the reasons it was bad. But CinemaSins helps articulate just what those problems are unlike most of us who are all just so appalled by it that our only response is “It sucks.”

This week’s Monday Pick is the 1984 multi genre classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Director/screenwriter W.D. Richter (Dracula (1979), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Big Trouble in Little China) created one of the weirdest and most beloved cult classics of the 1980s.

Peter Weller (Robocop) stars as the multi talented neurosurgeon, physicist, rock musician and comic book hero Buckaroo Banzai who battles aliens know as Red Lectroids from the Planet 10 who plot to take over the Earth. Buckaroo Banzai’s character was influenced by the 1930s pulp novels of Doc Savage, much like Lucas and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones that was influenced after the literary adventure character of Allan Quatermain.

Buckaroo Banzai has always been a favorite of mine since I first saw it in theaters in the summer of 1984. It’s a very interesting/hard film to describe to anyone who has never scene it. The premise is beyond absurd but that’s what makes the film so lovable. Banzai and his team of do-gooders known as The Hong Kong Cavaliers (a version of Doc Savage’s Fabulous Five) battle the evil Red Lectroids under the command of Lord John Whorfin (yes an alien leader named John) played to psychotic perfection by John Lithgow, who is actually an Italian physicist known as Dr. Emilio Lizardo. Yeah, it’s a little confusing but when you watch the film it all comes together.

Before you read on, you should know we’re big fans of Don Coscarelli here at The Flickcast. If you’ve never seen his films like Bubba Ho-Tep or anything from his Phantasm series, you should really consider going out right now and finding them. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Now that you have a better appreciation for Coscarelli’s brand of horror, you’re in for a treat. Turns out Magnet Releasing has picked up the rights to his latest horror opus called John Dies at the End. Described as a “phantasmagoric new sci-fi/horror film,” John Dies at the End stars Paul Giamatti, Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Clancy Brown, Glynn Turman and Doug Jones.

The film centers around Giamatti’s character and his investigation into a street drug known as Soy Sauce, which promises an out-of-body experience with each hit, causing users to drift across time and dimensions. Unfortunately, when some return, they are no longer human.

Check out more info from the official press release after the break. Look for John Dies at the End to hit VOD (and hopefully a few theaters) in December.

Zombies are hot right now. Hell, they’ve been hot for the past year, since AMC blew the lid off of their ratings roof with the first season of The Walking Dead last October. Now, things are kicking back into scary gear as we ramp up for the Halloween season, and people are coming out of the woodwork to show us their killer zombie franchises.

Creator Eric Powell has been trying to get the animated adaptation of his zombie-killing comic The Goon off the ground for quite some time. The film’s already got voice master Clancy Brown and Paul Giamatti signed on, they just need to work on animating the film itself. Here’s the synopsis from the book, to keep you up to speed.

Bones will be broken and heads will roll! The Goon is a laugh-out-loud action-packed romp through the streets of a town infested with zombies. An insane priest is building himself an army of the undead, and there’s only one man who can put them is their place: the man they call Goon.

Recently, Powell tweeted out this awesome PSA featuring Clancy portraying The Goon in some very rough test footage. You can check out that footage after the jump, and we can hopefully see The Goon in theaters sometime in the next few years.

It has cowboys. It has aliens. It has cowboys and aliens. It’s not a bad film. It’s not a good film. It is a movie. That’s a pretty lackluster opener, but, walking out of the screening, I felt almost completely neutral about Cowboys and Aliens–it was like the things I liked and the things I disliked were in perfect balance.

The film doesn’t fail to deliver on anything the title promises, and you can lose count of the standard tropes from either genre that it hits, but it’s tough to maintain the toothy grin I expected all throughout. Though I’m getting ahead of myself.

Daniel Craig plays Jake Lonergan (one of many last names I suspect are puns but am not entirely sure), a notorious outlaw who awakes one morning with a heavy case of amnesia and one hell of a bracelet on his left arm. He makes his way to the nearest town, controlled by the gruff cattle rancher Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and his uppity son Percy (Paul Dano), whose favorite pastime is terrifying the community at large and in particular the local bartender (Sam Rockwell) and his wife (Ana de la Reguera).

It’s not long before Jake endears himself to the locals, among them the soused preacher (Clancy Brown), the woman with a secret (Olivia Wilde), and, naturally, the sheriff (Keith Carradine) by punching out Percy, and not long after that that his identity is revealed, and he’s locked up. Still less longer, the aliens arrive, capture a handful of significant townsfolk, and everyone’s differences are set aside as they form a posse to recover the abductees. ‘round about this time, Jake discovers that his bracelet is able to sense the aliens and, better yet, can blow ‘em up real good.

Green Lantern is a comic-book movie that’s ripped straight from the comic book. To some people, that will be a plus, to others a minus; more specifically, those who enjoyed the cartoonyness of The Fantastic Four movies can appreciate it; those who didn’t and want a half-hearted “message” to justify their camp will not.

The premise is ridiculous: The Green Lanterns are a gang of buff aliens sworn to protect the 3,600 sectors of the universe. One day a nasty alien called a “Parallax” shows up and starts bumping off the Lanterns, including one Abin Sur, apparently the protector of earth’s sector, who escapes to our planet, mortally wounded.

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot and “man without fear” (fearlessness being a big plus to the Lanterns) who’s chosen by Abin Sur to take up his mantle, or ring, or lantern, or whatever. Soon after Hal’s traveling through the galaxy to the planet Oa, where fish men and talking brick shit-houses explain the origins of the Lanterns.

There’s the obligatory scenes of Hal’s cross-training, which introduces us to the power of the Lanterns—basically anything goes so long as it’s green and comes from the ring all Lanterns wear; they can fly, construct objects of any size and shape, and, presumably, whip up some dynamite green eggs and ham.

When Platinum Dunes announced plans to remake the original Nightmare on Elm Street, I had mixed feelings. I was a fan of the original series, and watched all seven movies. I even watched that dreadful Friday night program Freddy’s Nightmares. I guess you could say I have a soft spot for the film series.

However, when Jackie Earle Haley was announced as the new Freddy Krueger, he was fresh off an electrifying performance as Rorschach in Watchmen, and I was officially on board with the remake. I couldn’t think of anyone better to step into the role previously played by Robert Englund.

So while watching the remake, I was surprised at how odd it was to see someone else play the role. I didn’t dislike Jackie Earle Haley’s performance (though I do wish he hadn’t sounded exactly like Rorshach), but I guess I didn’t realize that Robert Englund had become synonymous with Freddy Krueger in my mind.

Here’s a list of some of the new movie and TV shows coming to DVD and Blu-ray this week that we’re looking forward to seeing. Also, there’s some classic, and not-so-classic, movies hitting Blu-ray for the first time this week as well.

Of all the new releases, we’re particularly interested in the Blu-ray versions of movies and TV shows like The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Monsters vs. Aliens, The Guild Seasons 1 & 2, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and Life on Mars: The Complete Series. There’s also a new DVD box set that made us laugh out loud in its awesomeness: Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years. Yes, that’s real.

Check them out.

Movies

Away We Go ~ John Krasinski (DVD and Blu-ray)

The Dark Crystal ~ Jim Henson (Blu-ray)

The Girlfriend Experience ~ Sasha Grey (DVD and Blu-ray)