Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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Early Hammer 11 October 2025

Nick and Roger look at the three films that made Hammer's reputation as a horror studio: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy.

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Tags: horror

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 02:50pm on 11 October 2025

    The motive of Frankenstein isn't totally clear in the book either. There's a lot of maundering about his delving into alchemical works and then being shocked when he discovers 'modern' science.

    I find the framing/final scene in the book in which Frankenstein explains his sins to the captain of the exploratory ship totally inadequate mostly because it does indeed say "There are some things that man was not meant to know..."

    And after that the captain of the ship decides to turn about and not go exploring any more.

    Was Nick thinking of DRACULA 1972 AD? An attempt to bring the saga into 'the modern day' which included (if my increasingly unrealiable memory is working on this) a bunch of The Yoof having an unwise drugfuelled party in the church where Dracula was last buried. I seem to recall watching it while doing my A-Levels.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 02:53pm on 11 October 2025

    I can't speak for Nick, but I was thinking of Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. And not just because of Caroline Munro and Wanda Ventham.

  3. Posted by Nick Marsh at 01:01am on 12 October 2025

    I was actually thinking of The Satanic Rites of Dracula… originally called ‘Dracula Is Dead... and Well and Living in London’… but Christopher Lee was unimpressed with the title. Can’t imagine why.

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