The Punching Up Movie Podcast

Episode 26-Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

What do you get if you cross a posh public school boy who wants to be a Cockney geezer, an actual football playing geezer who want to be an actor, and a future action movie star who come from Derbyshire but talks like a geezer for a bit and then talks like an American who sounds a bit like a geezer, or a geezer who sounds a bit like American?

It’s all very confusing. You get Lock Stock...

Episode 25-The Holy Mountain It’s been a while. Did you miss us?  Did you even notice we had been away? Well, after a longer than normal hiatus the Punching Up Movie Podcast is back. And this episode is magic. I mean literally. The Punching Up duo discuss Alejandro Jodorowski’s cult sensation, shamanistic cinematic odyssey, The Holy Mountain. Magic, horror, nudity, spirituality, political commentary, freaky production design, ...

Episode 24-Moulin Rouge

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! The moment is here. The hour is now. The time has arrived. It’s our long threatened, much delayed musical theatre episode where Damian unleashes his full fury on Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 cinematic juke box musical Moulin Rouge. It’s been brewing for a while and Damian doesn’t hold back on Nicole Kidman’s acting and dancing, Ewan McGregor’s singing and acting, and, most of all ...

Episode 23-January 2025-Some New Movies

Happy 2025 Movie Lovers and Punching up listeners 

Did you miss us? 

Well, have no fear, we have a proper, actual, honest to goodness full-length episode hovering in the wings (next week). 

But for those of you who simply can’t wait to hear our Punching Up thoughts on….Moulin Rouge (which will be next week), here’s a bonus episode of some chit chat about some of the movies released this Janua...

Episode 22-The Best of 2024

It’s still the Season of Good Will and so the Punching Up Team are going to use their powers for good this time and wax lyrical about which films they loved in this year of 2024. It’s a long one as there is a lot of affection to go around in this atypical end of the year love fest. And lest we forget that this is still the Puncing Up Podcast, there is still enough room left over to hate on a few movies ...

Episode 21-The Shape of Water

Wanna see a movie where the Creature From the Black Lagoon gets it on with Mrs Brown from the first two Paddington movies? I don’t. But Adam (who doesn’t seem to mind a bit of interspecies fantasy love action) has forced me to watch The Shape of Water again. I find Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Oscar winning modern fairy tale, unoriginal, twee, borderline plagiaristic, largely miscast and a little bit q...

Episode 20-The Terrifier Franchise

Damian and Adam

Art we a pair?

I live in Nottingham, England

He lives somewhere over there 

Sydney, Australia

But Damian doesn’t like Art the Clown

But I like Art the Clown

Will it be over?

We can’t agree

On the obvious future cult classic status

Of Terrifier 1, 2 and 3 Cause Damian doesn’t like Art the Clown

But I like Art the Clowwwwwwnnnnnnn

Get in touch :O) by sending us an email @

Episode 19- A Nightmare on Elm Street Are you ready for Freddy?

No, not really. I’m a big horror fan but not a massive lover of Wes Craven’s 1980s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Razor fingered demons with stripy shirts who kill you in your dreams, a telephone that comes alive and licks your face and Freddy Krueger’s elongated Big Bird arms don’t really do it for me. I’d much rather watch Art the Clown kill people with his big...

Episode 18-RRR

Flying tigers, Indian freedom fighters and evil English scumbags. Bloody battles, numerous songs, one spectacular dance routine and a very brutal flogging.   What’s not to love in S.S Rajamouli’s Tolly (not Bolly) Wood breakout international action hit? Nothing, if your Adam (despite repeatedly mispronouncing the director’s name in the podcast). Plenty, if you are Damian (who only made it through the first twenty m...

Episode 17-Gladiator

Episode 16-Dr Strangelove

What could possibly be worse than Peter Sellers? Peter Sellers times 3. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, England’s greatest comic actor plays three separate characters and Damian Asher doesn’t like it. Does three times the Sellers = three times the hate from the normally benign Stanley Kubrick uber fan Damian? Combine that with the usual radioactive malice of myself,...

Episode 15-Bram Stoker's Dracula Who is the best Dracula? Is it Bela Lugosi’s suave count, Christopher Lee’s aristocratic Prince of Darkness, Max Shrek’s rat faced Nosferatu… or Gary Oldman’s lovelorn immortal who has crossed oceans of time to romance Winona Rider in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Well, if you're Adam Nightingale it is most definitely not Gary Oldman, as the Lord of the Undead goes twelve rounds wit...

Episode 14-Kill Bill Vol 2

In the second part of our first two-parter, Punching Up punches up at its first sequel, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 2. Damian perpetuates his beef with QT’s roaring, raging, rampage of revenging but narrows his focus to the eponymous Bill himself. Damian doesn’t like David Carradine’s performance. Adam tries manfully to defend the late martial artist movie star who can’t do martial arts, who once a...

Episode 13-Kill Bill Volume 1

In this episode Damian and Adam don’t so much punch up but chop down, with a katana sword (or to be more precise, a Hattori Hanzo sword), as it is time to kill Kill Bill, or kill Kill Bill Volume 1 (to be even more precise), Quention Tarantino’s martial arts masterpiece of retribution and revenge. So, expect 450 gallons of blood, a million cult movie references, a hundred million needle drops, multip...

Episode 12-Bande a Part

In the immortal words of Thin Lizzy (or that blues band that played in 48 Hours), The Boys Are Back In Town.

That's right, Punching Up The Movie Podcast is back. This week we take shots at one of the pioneers of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema, Maoist essayist and intellectual contrarian, Jean Luc Godard and his supposedly most accessible film Bande a Part. Will Godard’s fourth-wall breaking tale of tw...

Episode 11-EASY RIDER (1969)

Two men went looking for a podcast and couldn’t find it anywhere.

On this episode Adam takes a swing at the biker movie, road movie, hippytastic gamechanger that singlehandedly launched the New Hollywood, 1969’s Easy Rider, not realizing that it is one of Damian’s favourite movies. 

Will their friendship survive, or will they (in the paraphrased words of the immortal Peter Fonda) Blow It? 

Why does Dami...

Episode 10-THE DEPARTED (2006)

What has poor Martin Scorsese done to annoy the Punching Up team? Our series hasn’t been going that long and this is the third time around for America’s greatest living director. It’s beginning to look like a lot like bullying. This time it’s the turn of The Departed, Scorsese’s Boston-based Irish-American remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs starring Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and...

Episode 8-ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (2017)

What happens when the weight of expectations ruins an experience?

Find out in the latest Punching Up episode when Adam and Damian discuss the cult fave from a few years ago, Japanese film One Cut of the Dead directed by Shin'ichirō Ueda. Who liked it? Who didn't? Did the old geezers agree, disagree or fall somewhere in the middle. Most likely they just fell down. In a ditch somewhere. Drunk.

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