There’s a burst of laughter and confusion, and Joz Vammer, laughing, corrects her game master: “You said we take your favorite movies and turn them into movies, but this is a podcast!”
“…We’re a podcast,” Paulo Quiros explains patiently over giggles from his players.
“What if they didn’t know until you said that?” Kara Strait asks.
“‘Ah, shit!’” She mimics the hypothetical viewer. “‘I thought this was a tandem bike! Goddammit!’”
This is how the podcast The Film Reroll‘s twentieth episode, “Jumanji,” begins. The conceit of the show is rather simple: “play[ing] through your favorite movies as RPGs and totally ruin[ing] them.” Every episode, the players are cast in the roles of various movie characters, from everything from “Memento” to “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” to ”Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter,” and using the mechanics of the tabletop roleplaying game system GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) play through these movies as games, rolling dice to see if they succeed or fail and, as Quiros says, “thus the story changes.”
Most of the players in The Film Reroll are New York-based theater actors, but the podcast is nominally unconcerned with emotionally deep stories or utilizing their acting skills and more interested in the wackiest ways that they can change these stories into something different. It’s a bit like having a GM who has a rail roaded plot that they are actively rooting for you to sabotage. Without giving too much away from any particular episode, this can mean that a main character from the film never gets introduced, the universe could get destroyed, or that the main villain falls in love with the hero.
The most common collaborators with Quiros on the podcast are Kara Strait, Joz Vammer, Andy Hoover, and Jon Miller. Tim Nolan, an infrequent on-mic member, normally helps Quiros with behind-the-scenes prep work, with Scott Aiello, Carolyn Faye Kramer, and Lisa Kopitsky filling out the cast. Not everyone is featured in every episode, but there is a healthy rotation between who is on mic and who is sitting the session out.
Jon Miller…. actually bothered to read the rules of a role playing game, once, and everyone else has decided to keep up the pretense that we aren’t just making this all up as we go along.
“Meet the Team” – The Film Reroll
Each of the main cast add a different flavor to each episode. Strait is a class clown with a ready joke at every opportunity, while Vammer is well-known to always go for the most violent option at any opportunity (a memorable moment was, as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Vammer asking if she could attempt to “sever the spinal column” of a combatant). Miller brings a dry wit and straight man personality (Sheriff Brody from “Jaws” becomes a hard ass who will arrest a teenager for mouthing off to him as soon as look at him) and Hoover falls comfortably into a warm, quippy persona with a quick tongue.
The other recurring cast members have their shining moments, though there are far too many episodes to review every episode. So, to give credit to where it’s due, here are some of my favorite performances:
- Tim Nolan – Scott Fuller, “From Dusk Till Dawn”
- Scott Aiello – Chunk, “Goonies” and Vern Tessio, “Stand by Me”
- Carolyn Faye Kramer – Sarah Sanderson, “Hocus Pocus”
- Lisa Kopitsky – Snoopy, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”
I suppose it’s no surprise by this far into this review that I’m a huge fan of this show (in some years on Spotify Wrapped, I’m in the top 1% of listeners!). In college, I had the opportunity to interview Quiros for a school essay, and I am very grateful that he was willing to take the time out of his day to speak with me. It’s perhaps the only comedy-first show that I enjoy and watch regularly, and it’s hard to say why.
Maybe it’s the chemistry between the players, or as a lover of film, but I genuinely enjoy seeing the way not only that movie characters are translated into TTRPG characters (I’ve had many a conversation about which D&D classes the different MCU heroes would be), but also how constructing a story based on an element of chance instead of the director’s hand ensuring success for the main characters can change the direction of a story.
Inspired by this show, I’ve actually run a FATE Core version of a film reroll twice before, and it was a lot of fun! I’ve done both “Avengers” and “Krampus,” with interesting results each time: Thor was knocked unconscious and into a coma, with the player taking over the role of Loki for the rest of the campaign and almost succeeding in the Invasion of New York, and Beth Engel was the first one taken in “Krampus,” with me then giving her player the stats for Krampus and his minions and allowing her to control the enemy combatants. Mike Engel managed to pull off an explosion, killing most of the dark elves attacking him on the staircase.
Speaking of FATE vs. GURPS, the one thing I have thought for a while that I would love to see from The Film Reroll is a departure from GURPS to another system for a few films. I actually asked Quiros about this, but he said that GURPS is just a system that works best, as it’s very crunchy (which allows the elements of chance that I spoke about earlier to shine through), and everyone knows how the system works already. However, at the same time I would love to see something like, say, “Crimson Peak” played on the Call of Cthulhu system. It’s a wish though, not a detractor from the actual podcast.
In my personal opinion, however, you will find the best episodes a few years ago. The episodes that I revisit over and over again are mostly from 2017 – 2018, but because each movie is a self-contained campaign you can really pick up anywhere and enjoy it (though the first few movies are a bit rough and I don’t recommend them). With that being said, here are a few movies I do recommend:
- “Jaws,” Eps. 9-10
- “Stand by Me,” Eps. 18-19
- “Jumanji,” Ep. 20
- “Home Alone,” Eps. 34-35
- “From Dusk Till Dawn,” Eps. 39-40
- “Jurassic Park,” Eps. 43-45
- “Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter,” Eps. 46-47
- “John Wick,” Eps. 51-52
- “Goonies,” Eps. 53-57
- “The Mighty Ducks,” Eps. 118-122
I started on “Friday the 13th,” which is unique in that the players did not know coming into the game which movie they were playing – the Game Master lied to the cast and gave them the name of a fake teen summer sex comedy that they would be running (because who remembers the plot or characters of a slasher movie, particularly the fourth installment?), which means that the players are, actually, meta-ing in the opposite direction. That is, they are deliberately ignoring signs of the genre and playing into the sex comedy tropes (at one point, one of the players even exclaims something to the effect of “why do I care about the murders at the hospital?! I’m trying to sleep with Sarah!”), which makes the sudden reveal halfway through the campaign that much more impactful. But “Jumanji” is probably one of the funniest campaigns and is only one episode in length, so there’s a minimal commitment.
But I’m rambling now. I hope that you all try out The Film Reroll and let me know what your favorite campaigns are!
Asterinomous 