Sound On Sight / Sordid Cinema

Kate, Rick and Simon sit down and stay extremely positive this week for a change. Listen to our second last Walking Dead podcast of the year.

Mars. The Red Planet. It hasn't inspired as many memorable movies as you might assume, but it is the indirect inspiration for Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's first live-action feature John Carter, which sort of tanked at the box office this past weekend amidst much discussion of its questionable marketing and supposedly insane budget. Ricky D, Julian Carrington and Simon Howell are here to parse the space junk, as well as dredge up Paul Verhoeven's awesomely sleazy Total Recall, which everyone is more or less required to agree is the best Mars-set movie ever made.

Ricky D had the pleasure of interviewing the director and co-writer of Snowtown (or The Snowtown Murders, as it's now known in North America), Justin Kurzel, who happened to mention that 1971's Wake In Fright as a standout Australian cult movie - so we thought, why not finally take it on? Along with the interview and our review of Ted Kotcheff's offbeat classic, take a listen back to our review from late last year of The Snowtown Murders.

"Judge, Jury, and Executioner" finally sees The Walking Dead addresses one of our long-standing reservations and axes a major character - but does it work to kick up the intensity level? We say goodbye to Dale, ponder his evolution over the course of the show, debate the fate and future of the mysterious Randall, and continue to ponder the Adult Education Center Of Doom from last week.

The “Sound On Sight” radio show has also been consistently shortlisted one of the best film podcasts 2007-2010. It is marketed principally towards students and genre enthusiasts, and typically features in-depth discussion and debate on contemporary film.

After years of us promising to get off our asses and get it done, we've finally gotten our long-awaited Hitchcock episode done! Special guest and all-around movie knowledge hound Bill Mesce joins Ricky D and Justine Smith to chat up three of the maestro's most famous chillers: Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho and The Birds.

Following the events of last week, the bluntly titled "Triggerfinger" has a lot to work with: fresh corpses over at Hershel's old stomping grounds; the promise of a new set of enemies in the friends of those corpses; Lori's deadly-looking spill as a result of an ill-advised solo venture; and, of course, ever-simmering tensions in the camp. But did things come to a satisfying pitch, or...not so much? Ricky D, Kate Kulzick and Simon Howell are on hannd to duke it out as ever.

The Academy Awards are just two weekends away, and we've been itching to talk about a pair of films that wound up getting nods in the Foreign Film category, so we've brought in a pair of guests to help us out. Zero Pretention co-host and real-life teacher is on hand to talk with us about widely acclaimed Quebec export Monsieur Lazhar, and SOS contributor Louis _______ joins us as we finally tackle Asghar Farhadi's A Saparation.

The latest episode of AMC's The Walking Dead, "Nebraska," picks up where the midseason finale left off, moments after Rick's decisive gunshot. Where does the group stand now? For that matter, where do Ricky D, Kate, and Simon stand on this pivotal installment? As per usual, expect bickering, pedantry, and at least one highly questionable opinion. Yeah, we're back.

Two notable new releases go on the SOS chopping block today: first up is James Watkins's follow-up to the truly vicious killer-kids flick Eden Lake, the Daneil Radcliffe vehicle The Woman In Black; after that, we assess the worth of the well-received found-footage / superhero origin story / teen-angst thriller Chronicle, which gets loosely broken into both non-spoiler and spoiler editions. Here's another spoiler for you: we argue quite a bit about one of these.

Long after its world premiere last July at the Fantasia International film Festival here in Montreal sharply divided viewers, Robin Hardy's long-in-the-works sorta-sequel to his famed cult classic The Wicker Man is finally making its way to theaters. Justine, Ricky and Simon offer their takes on the new flick, as well as taking a look back at the 1973 original.

Joe Carnahan has been oscillating between smaller genre movies and big-budget blowouts for the last decade, but in this hour we opt out of Smokin' Aces and The A-Team in order to focus mostly on the first half of that equation. First up is the man-vs-wolf survivalist saga The Grey, new in theaters this past weekend, which we've paired up with Carnahan's gritty 2002 drugs n' cops thriller Narc.

We have a long and storied history of feting David Cronenberg over here at SOS - hell, the first iteration of our podcast was called The Naked Lunch. Our Cronenberg fanboyism gets seriously tested this week, though, with the opening here in Montreal of perhaps Cronenberg's most well-behaved films - on the surface, anyway - the period drama A Dangerous Method. All hands - Ricky, Justine, Julian, and Simon - are on deck to have it out over the flick, as well as touching on Croney's then-controversial psychosexual 1996 dramaa Crash.

No year is complete without at least one new Soderbergh vehicle, and despite his proclaimed status of sorta-retirement, 2012 will bring two of them; the first is the Gina Carano-powered actioner Haywire, which reteams him with Limey / Kafka scribe Lem Dobbs. (We'll have to wait a little longer for his "Channing Tatum, Male Stripper" flick Magic Mike.) The whole gang is here to dissect the surprisingly divisive thriller, along with one that slipped through the SOS cracks last year, Contagion.

With 2012 underway and our collective imminent demise now closer than ever, it seemed as good a time as any to tackle Ben Wheatley's apocalyptic, genre-defying Kill List, which we'll talk about in both non-spoiler and spoiler flavors. In between, all four SOS regulars (Ricky D, Justine, Julian and Simon) are on hand for a look ahead at their respective most anticipated flicks of 2012. Yeah, it's gonna be a stacked year.