Watchast Poll for May 2023

Greetings, Nextlanders! Hope you're all enjoying April's Watchcast slate. We're nearly at the conclusion of Video Game Movie Month, and now it's time for us to select a new theme. However, it's been a while since we last polled the electorate to see what our Mission Control and Mysterious Benefactor patrons might want to have us watch and chat about, so we're doing a poll! We've got four categories of five movies each for you to consider. Here's what we've got.

'70s Crime Classics

Our first category is wall-to-wall bangers. Brad had mentioned recently about having a desire to watch The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and that spiraled out into a conversation about other great crime flicks of the '70s. So along side Pelham, I've included Robert Altman's spin on Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the fantastic New York mob war thriller Across 110th Street, the first installment in Alan Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" in klute, and William Friedkin's The French Connection.

Early David Lynch

A while back we announced that in June we'll be checking out the first season of Twin Peaks, so as a primer for that, I was thinking it might be cool to dig into Lynch's film catalog, specifically the movies he made prior to, and during, his stint on the original run of Twin Peaks. So we've got his deeply disturbing first feature work Eraserhead, his very well-regarded biopic of Joseph Merrick The Elephant Man, his unsuccessful but utterly fascinating attempt at adapting Dune, the neo-noir thriller Blue Velvet, and his sweaty, utterly bonkers love story Wild at Heart (which gives me an excuse to finally slide some Nic Cage into the mix).

Sci-Fi Jude Law

I forget exactly how we came to this category, but I know there was a conversation about Jude Law and how he was in a bunch of weird, interesting sci-fi throughout the '90s and '00s. And while I definitely wouldn't call all of these movies "good", even the worst ones are at least oddball enough to inspire some conversation. For this slate we've got Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, David Cronenberg's freaky VR action-horror flick ExistenZ, the Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman clone thriller Gattaca (Jude Law is in this too, just not top billing), the 2010 body-part repossession nightmare Repo Men (not to be confused with 1984's Repo Man, which we'll do someday), and the retro-futuristic Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Some Guys Are Coming to Kill Us

Well I think this category more or less speaks for itself. These are all movies where the protagonists find themselves trapped somewhere or another, and are inundated with people who want them dead. For this terrifying group, we've got another Carpenter flick in Assault on Precinct 13, the underrated '90s heist thriller Trespass, the correctly rated "took a wrong turn in the wrong part of town" thriller Judgment Night, the all-time classic of Indonesian action cinema The Raid, and the similar, but distinctively stylish spin on The Raid's concept in 2012's Dredd. 

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And those are the slates! As always, do not fret if your category doesn't win for May. Any movie or theme not picked in a poll can always be done later. You've got until Monday morning to make your selection, so have at it!