Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Pugsley Crew Reviews, where we talk about all manner of films. Some good, some bad, some middling. We'll watch them tell you what we think.
Today we have joining us Q9000. How you doing, dude?
[00:00:22] Speaker A: I'm doing great. How you doing, man?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Just chilling out. Just got myself a glass of cherry Pepsi Max because I like cherry Pepsi Max.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: I do, to be honest. It's. It's a nice drink.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: It is.
I prefer Pepsi Max to cork. So, hey, I'm a messy person, but
[00:00:43] Speaker A: my missus is coke, so
[00:00:47] Speaker B: I don't like cork. I don't know why.
It's weird. I used to like coke when I was younger, but then as I grew up, I found this, like, had a salty taste to it. It's really strange. I can't. I don't understand why.
Maybe they've put coriander in there or something.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: They do say as you grow older, your taste buds mature and differ, don't they?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: They do, actually, yes.
Which is why I tell the kids, oh, you might like it now because, you know, you have taste buds changes, you're growing up and they're like, no, I don't. Fair enough.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: It's worth a dream.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Bloody kids nuisances.
So the film to talk about today, there's a film called Salem's Lot.
This is the 2024 version. I believe there was a different version before.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think this is the third or fourth version.
There was the original, which I think could be the 80s, and then there's been like a TV version and it's Stephen King into it. So there's money to be made in it.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Getting, you know, in 10 years time, I bet there's another one, more than likely.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: So for those who don't know what Salem's Lot is, it's a film about a place called Jerusalem's Lot.
For some reason, the film's called Salem's Lot. I don't understand that. But back to not understanding things, just like the last film.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it's because it's a shortening of Jerusalem, isn't it?
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Jerusalem's Lot. Yeah. Makes sense.
That's what we go with.
And yeah, it's. It's a film that starts off like any other film, Normal.
It's. It basically it shows a guy returning to the town that he hadn't been to since he was 9.
He's a writer and he wants to basically look into his own life and things from when he was there.
That's one of the main characters.
It shows a woman he speaks to who becomes really friendly with. And I think they get it on and stuff.
I didn't write any names down for this film, unfortunately, I did for the last one. I took a lot more notes.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah. The writers, Ben and the lady. Susan.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Ben and Susan.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Ben.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Susan.
Right, there you go.
So Ben and Susan meet and she's like, oh, you look familiar. And he's like, oh, how you enjoying the book? And she's like, oh, I'm at that point where a woman decides whether she wants to keep reading it or not. And it's his book.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah. I quite like that scene because of the fact we can see his face on the book with him and she's clearly holding the book the other way. It's. Yeah, it's like, joke, isn't it?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah. I. When Mrs. You were like, is she just taking the piss or she serious? And she is deadly serious, like, saying that to him. Because she also, like, you look familiar. I've seen you somewhere before.
And it's not until he tells the other person in the building at the time his name that she clicks on that the book that she's reading is by him.
And as he walks off, he says, I hope you enjoyed the book.
And she's like, oh, cringe.
But basically the top and bottom of this film is right to spoil it a little bit. It's a vampire film.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: I don't believe I've seen any version of Salem's Lot apart from this one. And I don't if it's. If it's based on a book by Stephen King, because sometimes he's made films without there being a book.
I've not read the book either.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: From the 70s.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: I haven't read the book either.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: I read it when I was about 18, so that's a lifetime ago.
And I know I saw the first film when I was a similar sort of age, but obviously I think I saw it the once and I've never bothered with it since.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, this is the thing. I don't know how true to the source material this film is, or at all.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: I couldn't tell you because my memory's not that great.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: No, neither is mine.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: But I like vampire. I suggested this because I like vampires. I watch anything with vampires in it.
And me and the missus had just watched the Amazon Prime Harry series.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Oh, nice.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Which is like eight episodes long. And I thought, I can't tell you to watch that to review because you've not got Eight hours to spare. And that could probably make an entire podcast itself, let alone an episode. So it was like a Stephen King High. And I was like, you said, let's watch something neither of us have watched. And I've watched like probably 90 of the films based off King. So I was like, oh, what one haven't I seen? What haven't I seen? And this was the first one that sort of came to mind.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Nice. I'm not complaining.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Convenient way of forcing myself to watch it by going, oh, and I've got a reason why I've got to.
Yeah, get on and watch it.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: That's why I decided to do podcasts, to force myself to watch films and play more games. It's not. I just want to do it because I enjoy doing it.
I enjoy talking to people about stuff. And I thought, why not turn into a podcast? Simple.
That was it. Like.
So, yeah, I, like I said, I don't know much about Salem's Law, but I actually quite enjoyed this film. I thought it was pretty good.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I enjoyed it.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: My favorite character in the film is the kid whose name I forgot to say that. Mark. Yeah, Mark Petrie.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: That's it. He's an absolute awesome little badass, isn't he?
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah, he is. Yeah. This is a film where there's adults in there and all together, there's an adult, he kills the Ben. Right. Spoiler to the end. He kills the main vampire in the rest of the film and he also kills one of the other vampires, actually. So two vampires. Every other vampire that's killed or fucked up is done by Mark the kid. He's 11 and 3/4, but he kicks so much ass.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Vampire killing machine who can drive a car, make awesome looking steaks out of baseball bats, gets all his vampire knowledge from a comic book. He looks at
[00:07:57] Speaker B: genuinely the best character in the film.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Yeah, there's. There's two parts in this where I thought they were, I won't say scary as in they didn't scare me, but I thought they were tense and if I'd watch this at a young age, that would have scared me. And one was when he was in the tree house and it was surrounded by all the vampires. Yeah, it just put you in it. You just thought, what would it be like to be in a crappy wooden house up a tree with like every vampire there is like knocking on the tree, ass going, can I come in?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: It was generally like finger biting.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a pretty intense moment. What about the other one? You said there was two when you
[00:08:44] Speaker A: finally realize that all the trunks in the. Again, this is skipping to the end. But all the trunks in the parking lot are essentially makeshift coffins.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Because they suddenly think, fuck, if it gets dark and all these lids pop at once, you know you're going to get teared to pieces.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Which spoilers it does start going dark and they do start popping open.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: And this is where Ben. You. Ben. So where Mark uses is insane genius to take out the cinema screen which then lets the sunlight back through and kills all of them. More or less. All the vampires.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: And then he runs over Susan's mother with the car, which is great.
She was a. Anyway, Yeah, sorry, we all over the place. This one, the, the.
It starts off, like I said, quite normal. Then all of a sudden this guy, I can't remember his name, Barlow was the vampire.
And then another guy, stalker or striker or something. A striker?
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that'll be it.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Straker is like his human companion.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: He's the Renfield to this Dracula, isn't he, really?
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
And he then abducts a child, which is one of three children. At the beginning there's Mark and then there's his two friends that he meets on his first day there in school. Danny. Yeah.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: And yet cuz Danny's the one who to me it looks like Danny's going to be a sort of hero character. And it's his brother who's the sort of wimpy one. But I can't think of the brother's name. Not like it really, because we might as well call him Dead Meat.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Basically Dead Meat ends up dead. First he's used as a sacrifice tool for Barlow.
For Ken Barlow.
Not many people are gonna understand that.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: No, that's very British. Hum.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: And so Barlow then decides to start making vampires after the sacrifice is made and Danny is the first person he becomes a vampire.
Then it's some guy. I think his name was Mike.
And then it's just like.
It's just. Yeah, Mike the Gravedigger. He becomes the next vampire and then it kind of just spreads through the town and literally by the end of the film, the only humans left are
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Mark,
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Susan, Ben, the doctor.
Dr. Cody, is it?
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And very briefly the Sheriff.
And the priest.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: And the priest.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: So I do love the Sheriff because it's William Sadler who has been in at least four different Stephen King adaptions and he was the Grim Reaper in Bill and Ted's bogus journey.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: So yeah, Grim Reaper is one of the best characters ever. I don't care what anyone Says, yeah, it's awesome.
So basically it ends up being those few left. The sheriff is like, yeah, I'm. I'm fucking out of here. I'm not helping at all. He ends up dead. You don't even see him get killed. You see his corpse get thrown through a window of a church, I believe.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: The priest is like, I'm a priest holding the cross up to Barlow. And then. And then the vampire Barlow goes, are you?
And then the golden light coming off the cross fades.
So I'm like, the other people weren't priests and they. Of crosses didn't go out.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Well, it reminded me of an old.
I think it was one of the Christopher Lee Dracula films where apparently the law was that crosses only worked if you actually believed in God and the power of them and stuff.
So I was figuring the others, even though they weren't priests, must have believed in God. He was like a drunkard priest. Dude lost his way.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: I mean, you won't call him a bad person because he was trying to save people and stuff. So.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, but obviously he didn't
[00:13:48] Speaker A: have belief to hold vampires at bay.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah.
He just. He didn't believe enough then shame for him because he ended up dead.
And then Susan gets bitten in her house when she goes to speak to her mother to get her mother to leave. And her mother's now Barlow's Renfield because they killed Straker or Straker.
And funnily enough, Mark was the one who done that.
Smashed him around the head with a metal pole.
That was brilliant. And then killed him.
Yeah.
So you have all this happening and then Ben is alright, Mark is all right, but he's trapped in a treehouse. And Dr. Cody's all right.
Then they go looking for Mark, find Mark. They all then go to.
I can't remember where they go.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Eventually they're driving, but yeah, they drive
[00:15:06] Speaker B: in for a bit. But when with daughter Corey, she ends up dead and. And literally the only people parking lot,
[00:15:14] Speaker A: isn't it, for the outdoor movie theater? Because it's. The mother shoots her with the shotgun.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what happens. The mother shoots with a shotgun.
She's about to kill Susan. Yeah.
But obviously, literally the end of the film, there's two people alive, Ben and Mark. That is it.
Everyone else is dead.
And every single car in that place as a vampire in it. And there's a lot of cars.
Yeah, it's really cool, actually.
I think there was a fun. A fun film. Not a scary film or anything, but it was Fun. Then again, the last film he watched wasn't scary film, it was just a weird film.
But this, this was entertaining and I, I like. I don't know if it's held in high regard, low regard or whatever, but, but I enjoyed it. I wouldn't say it's amazing, but it was, it was a good film.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: I think it's held in reasonably low regard because I think people were very excited for it originally and then it had to have like additional photography and got delayed a load of times. And then it was going to be in the cinema in America, but I think it went straight on to streaming.
But I think could be wrong. I'm pretty sure this was a victim of COVID because I think it was announced in 2019 but not shot till 2021 and didn't come out until 2024. And I'm sure when you like line it all up, there's like connections to lockdowns and things with that.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's disappointing. I, I thought it was all right though. Like, I thought it was pretty good. It was, it was a fun film.
I wasn't a big fan of the CGI vampire Barlow in the sense of. I thought it looked a bit ropey. The CGI did, but I think they were going for the Nosferatu kind of vampire look for him, weren't they?
[00:17:20] Speaker A: That's the weird thing, isn't it? Because he's the original and he looks like Nosferatu style and all the other vampires are more like Lost boys.
So whether in this universe you just look like an old bold, long fingered thing when you've lived for millennium, but if you've just turned, you look like a pale person.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: This is something where I think this is a good introduction horror film for younger people.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd agree with her.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: It's tense without being terrifying.
There's bits of blood without it being a bloodbath.
You know, if you've got a kid that's 12, you want to let them watch something a bit beyond their years, but not stick. Friday the 13th on. I think this would be like the right film.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: Yeah, this is kind of okay. Like, you know, as you said, it's not too, it's not too over the top with the violence and the gore and what have you was not too bad. It was, it's, it's an enjoyable romp.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean with a kid being this sort of all star hero that knows more than anyone and I think if you were young and you saw this, you'd relate to it through his eyes.
Because the ultimate aim of this is. I mean, it's like parents die and stuff. It's like the kid knows everything.
People die because they wouldn't listen to him.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, you are right. His parents died because they wouldn't listen to him. And the priest, he's leaving the priest telling them, no, you need to listen. And they're like, nah, no chance.
And then obviously he backfired.
One thing though is they go speak. When Dr. Cody goes to speak to the sheriff, he's like, no, no, no, I don't want to hear any of it. And she. Any of what? Anything about vampires. I'm. I'm off. And it's like, well, why are you. How does he know about that already?
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm assuming there must have been somebody else saying something to him at some point, the town drunk or something. And he's like kind of look off. It's a low.
But obviously we didn't see anything that would directly say that.
Yeah, it does feel like there's a missing scene or something.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not that. It's. It's not a problem really. It just makes you think like, oh, oh, well, you've seen something in the night himself because he starts pissing off during the day, doesn't he?
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
Although some of it felt like a comment on current America where the sheriff's like, this town's dead. It's been dead for a long time.
So with this vampire thing, I'm going to off soon. The whole of America will be dead. So I'm just going to stay and survive ahead of the curve. I felt a little bit political to me then, but I know King doesn't like keto face and obviously he gets consulted with when films are made of his stuff, so there could be something thrown in.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I have no idea but about that sort of, that, that aspect. But it could very well be a bit political in. In that scene specifically. Yeah, definitely. It seems it.
I think I'm. Well, I'm pretty much done on this in the sense if I don't know what else to say because.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's a good popcorn flick. Yeah, I think it's really enjoyable vampire film to put on, but I don't think it's very deep. You're not going to get mean in the life from this.
And it's not weird enough to talk about for as long as our last film.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah, just. It's just an enjoyable film where you have a kid who's a badass and then some. Some humans, some adults helping him along the way.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: I do think the. The main guy, I mean, he's obviously. Because he's a right drawback. A lot of Stephen King stuff. There's a character in there that's Stephen King.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: So he is just Stephen King to me. Looks like Julian Lennon, John Lennon's son. All right. I thought that about 12 times while watching this. It's like, oh, Julian Lennon and some young kid kill vampires.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: That's.
Is there anything you'd like to add about this film before we end?
[00:22:10] Speaker A: No, just that if. If you've been sitting on the fence about it because it didn't get all the rave reviews some films get, just watch it. A film doesn't have to be the next Casablanca to be watched. It is fine to watch a good popcorn 7 out of 10 film that you can smile all the way through, even if you forget about it two days later. Who you enjoyed the hour and a half, two hours, whatever it's on. That's enough.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm in agreement with you. I enjoyed the film.
I think it's worth a watch because it's actually enjoyable and you know what's going on and you don't have to try and deconstruct the law or ever.
It's just an enjoyable film. It's just an enjoyable film. It is like, like Kerr said, it's, you know, it's not exactly deep or anything. It's just a fun vampire flick. And if that's. If you fancy something, taking something on, just chilling out and watching a film, this isn't gonna do you any wrong.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: There is too much attention, isn't there, on stuff having to be massively inspirational or life changing. It's got to be the next Truman show or can just be cinema.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah, just. Just something you can enjoy. That's. That's what it's there for. It's there to entertain you. It's not. It's not. Not. That's what films are like, you know, like. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. That film. Some films come out and they do something new and something interesting that you haven't really thought about, that isn't a problem. I'm just saying you don't expect that from everything. And if you get something like this where it's just an enjoyable ride, then just enjoy the ride.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah. There you go.
The incur an agreement.
Well, there you go.
I think that is going to be us and we'll be back soon. This episode should be going out this week of recording.
Not sure if it's going out today, tomorrow. Sorry. Or Halloween. But you're not gonna know when tomorrow is because I'm recording on the Tuesday and I usually release on a Wednesday. So there you go.
People don't need to know any of that information. But I. I'm open. I'm happy. Anyway, thank you very much, K, for taking part. It's been a pleasure, as always.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: No worries at all. And with that, I will say goodbye by.
Yeah, I didn't think it would be this full. I haven't been here since I was a kid. Yeah.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Find the whole town here most nights it's open.
