It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here with Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Kosky. In the first half of this conversation, we talked about Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, and how it shocked the straits, delighted the box office, and helped change how we look at war on film. Now we're going to look at the DC Extended Universe movie Suicide Squad, which writer-director David Eyre, also the writer of Training Day and Harsh Times, has said is openly a modern riff on the Dirty Dozen. The funny thing is, the origins of Suicide Squad actually predate Dirty Dozen by nearly a decade. The first version of the Suicide Squad hit comics in 1959 in DC's title The Brave and the Bold. It didn't involve supervillains back then, but it was a similar concept. John Osterner revamped it in the 1980s, bringing in a mostly different roster of villains than the ones we know from the film, and then the squad has come back in various incarnations over the years in comics, and on the DC TV show Arrow.

Being on the Suicide Squad used to be a lot less amped up and a lot more fatal than

it is in this movie, which is a kind of candy-coded concoction that brags about how good

it is to be bad.

But like Dirty Dozen, it's ultimately more interested in how the people behind the villain

conscript team are as bad as the villains themselves,

and how being on the front lines changes people and teaches them respect for each other,

if not respect for anything else.

We'll get into Suicide Squad and how it is and is not like 30 Dozen in a moment,

but first, this word from our sponsor.

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