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 to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here with Tasha Robinson. And Scott Tobias. Our regular co-host, Jennifer Yukoski, is absent this week on a mysterious mission of revenge. But we sent word to the organization whose center replacement in the form of our special and returning guest, Fultures, Alison, Wilmore.

Hello, Allison. How are you doing?

I'm good. I'm ready to just gum up the works, though, by telling you, you know, we're cashless now.

And I can only confront bureaucracy. There's no revenge happening here.

Are we a stabless economy yet?

Like this, there's just, there's a lot of stabbing here.

So like if you're, if you're social distancing, it's very difficult to get the stab in.

So I was thinking with this, if we were recording this podcast in the 80s, we could have paired

it with better off dead that I want my $2 kid. Yeah. This is like a higher. He wants more money here. It's basically the same story. Yeah. I mean, he's obsessed with getting it. That's all he wants this kid. It's tireless. A machine. And he stabs so many people. I mean, the trail of blood he leaves behind him is really pretty dramatic. Do people still watch better off that? It feels like that may be one that our generation kind of kept to ourselves. It wasn't really passed down to the other generations. But that's subject for another podcast. We're not going to talk about one crazy summer or anything else of the Savage Steve Holland. The Savage Steve Hollandography or whatever. No, I don't, some other time.

You know what?

Let's put a pen in that and come back to that for future pairing. For now, we are talking about revenge, which has been providing motivation for fiction since before Homer composed the Elliott. And the theme is found fertile ground in the world of film. It's a tricky subject, however. Tales of Revenge often ask that we share in their protagonist's bloodlust and take pleasure in the harm they do to others, while also depicting the psychic toll revenge exacts on those who seek it. Heroes pursue it, but put their souls in peril in the process, if they even have souls. For our next few episodes, we'll be discussing films built around one-man killing machines. Tasha, why don't you tell us about

them? Well, first off, we'll be talking about point blank, John Borman's 1967 adaptation of The Hunter,

a hard-boiled novel written by Donald E. Westlake under the name Richard Stark. Lee Marvin stars as

Walker, a career criminal who's double-crossed by his partner and wife in the midst of hijacking

a big score at Alcatraz. Left for dead, he nonetheless returns to carve his way through the

California underworld in search of the $93,000 that Will, in his mind, said things right again.

We were reminded of point-blank by the arrival of John Wick Chapter 4, the latest entry in a series

that began as the simple story of a top

assassin seeking revenge for his murdered puppy, and has since developed into a Baroque mythology

...