Wes Craven could be argued but Elm Street is still his Apex Mountain; his amazing career spans the three stages of late-century horror, from Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left to creating Freddy and reinventing the genre in the nineties, and he is underrated, on a Mount Rushmore with Tobey Hooper (as transcribed), George Romero and John Carpenter; the movie still moves today.
The coming Halloween remake with Jamie Lee Curtis is asking audiences to forget some sequels, like Rocky Balboa waving off Rocky V, which is what 48 Hours should have done.
A confession that Nightmare on Elm Street was a shitty movie meets a fan of the first two and Dream Warriors; Heather Langenkamp is dismissed, and Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the meta Freddy movie, failed just before this, leaving Scream as a bit of a last gasp for his career.
Neve Campbell's nominees are this or the intervention scene with Bailey in Party of Five.
Another feels the same way about the intervention, called the saddest hour in television history with Bailey as the rock of the family, and it stands even against Scream's $290 million.
Skeet Ulrich is clearly at his Apex, with nothing else competing; he was in As Good as It Gets, went a couple of rounds with Jericho, and is now known to kids as Riverdale's Skeet Ulrich.
A tangent on Skeet Ulrich's first name becoming slang, popularized by Dave Chappelle, and whether his stage name was a bad choice slides into a crude callback to the Silence of the Lambs episode's Migs discussion.
Reader Howard from Calgary writes that Stuart Rudin, who played Migs, was in Sticky Fingers and has an IMDb of homeless men, winos and patients; Migs was his Apex Mountain, and listeners are invited to the mailbag.
Matthew Lillard: it has got to be, with SLC Punk raised; considering how good he is in Scream, this is his Apex.
Jamie Kennedy was forced on the culture with an MTV show after this and never took; his Apex Mountain is definitively dating Jennifer Love Hewitt, an achievement rather than a performance, which leads to a tangent on why women disliked her.
For David Arquette the reminder is that he held the WCW heavyweight title, a movie tie-in, the belt once held by Ric Flair.
Eight Legged Freaks is also raised for Arquette; Rose McGowan is a no, her later weirdness and dating Marilyn Manson jokingly called her apex, though she had a cool indie career, the Rodriguez Grindhouse movie with the gun leg, and is now a filmmaker and activist.
Courtney Cox is first a no, since it has got to be Friends and you cannot get higher; one voice later counters, unresolved, that the combination is her apex, since this came out during Friends season three when Monica was dismissed as having no personality and showed she could be the bitch too; her later characters are more Gail Weathers than Monica.
She reportedly pursued the role to play someone not traditionally nice and to get punched in the face; her later sitcoms were Dirt and the Bill Lawrence show about people in LA drinking wine, whose title nobody can remember.
Henry Winkler is joked to have been the mountain itself.
Earlier, while praising the cast, Drew Barrymore is followed by the garbled phrase 'I'd heard, like, Mad Love Apex' (as transcribed).
The Christian storyline, though the hosts move it toward aged pretty well; Christian's over-stylized retro persona; how the teenagers interact, such as Elton keeping Cher's photo in his locker; Murray and Elton sharing a popular crew; Cher and Ty doing a home workout video; the fashion computer's monitor
Cher's date with Christian is called the most problematic part of a problematic fave; asked whether falling for a gay man is a rom-com trope, the hosts can only think of the Rupert Everett and Madonna film and agree it is not really a rom-com thing, while finding it funny that the straight guys, Paul Rudd seeing Christian dance with a man and Murray, pick up on it before the ostensibly perceptive Cher and Dion.
Murray's reveal, played as a clip, uses 'friend of Dorothy', an old-school gay self-identifying marker from The Wizard of Oz, plus 'cake boy' and the Oscar Wilde, disco-dancing, Streisand-ticket-holding string; the hosts find it hilarious in a good way that Amy Heckerling put those words in Murray's mouth, call the Streisand line remarkable and Pulitzer-worthy, and the 'cake boy' line unfortunate.
Christian's analog in Emma, read from Wikipedia in a way Cher would endorse since she loves Cliff's Notes, is Frank Churchill, who courts Emma while secretly engaged to someone else and waiting on an aunt's inheritance, so the storylines are not really the same; the host prefers him being gay to that.
GLAAD ('Glad' as transcribed) gave Amy Heckerling an award for the storyline, which was very progressive at the time; Murray pointing out that Christian is gay is not malicious, the joke is that Cher is totally clueless, which one host says has happened to teenage girls and, going by the friends that host still counsels through it, women of all ages, so the item is moved to somewhere between aged best and aged pretty well.
What still annoys is Christian's style: the over-stylized guy obsessed with the twenties and thirties, who deserves Cher not knowing who Billie Holiday is, though Billie Holiday deserves better.
Discussing a possible remake, the hosts find the way these kids interact foreign to teenagers now; Elton keeping a photo Cher took in his locker is quaint, silly and confusing, which is part of why Elton gets kicked out of the picture because he sucks, and the 'social director of the crew' line is loved.
Murray and Elton being in the same crew of popular guys confuses one host, whose high school popular set was uniform in style rather than race; another went to a weird school with a wide range, and a third had a clearly defined cool tier with pressure to look the same, so the kids with sagging jeans and the Eltons would have mutually rejected each other.
Cher and Ty doing a home workout video instead of a class has aged badly, though it is set in the nineties when everyone had workout videos; the hosts recall sneaking a mother's 'Tybo' tape (as transcribed), a Paula Abdul video with a routine still remembered, and the Barbie workout video starring Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Earlier, during the opening-minutes discussion, the fashion computer's actual monitor is said to look like trash now and not to have aged well, even though the idea was forward thinking.
Helen Hunt and a candidate rendered by the transcript as ‘Elizabeth’s true’ are proposed and rejected.
Sandra Bullock is strongly endorsed, with Speed and While You Were Sleeping cited as making the timing feel natural.
An objection says Dorothy is too small a role for an established movie star and uses Julia Roberts as an example of someone who would not have taken it.
