Kill James Bond! - S4E23.75: Signs [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! Check it out in full on our reasonably-priced patreon! Religion season chugs along still. This week on the KJB Bonus Feed, it's M. Night Shyamalan's thriller about loss of faith against a backdrop of alien invasion! ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

They got these Scandinavian women who can jump clean over me. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello. me how yeah Devin you're you're returned freshly from uh like two and a half years in china right yeah it feels like it i'm i'm so sad to be back i had never got homesick at any point but i've become china sick immediately oh no put me back in china i'm sorry no i landed back in britain it's like

oh christ yeah you're back here and it's like oh god the only the only good thing about britain though is mild beautiful mild no humidity at all fantastic all in the teens temperature wise yeah lovely what did you see what did you do who did you meet conservatively most things we started out in Beijing and did all the classic tourist stuff most of the things that there is is Chinese I saw almost all of China yeah no Beijing we did Ping Yao Shan we saw the the terracotta soldiers we spent a week in Chengdu, which is gorgeous.

I love Chengdu so much. Deadly, humid, though, I will say about Chengdu. And then we were up in the mountains in Lijang for nearly a week, and it was fantastic. It was just beautiful. And then Hong Kong for two days, and back to Britain, where I hear things have been going really well for your party. Being in Britain, being possibly a member of your party, possibly not. I'm still not clear about that one as the winter nights close in.

It's really, it's, it's put me in a kind of state of, of like, seeking meaning, right? Like, I'm looking for something to kind of ground me and to reassure me that things are going to be okay. And on that basis, you know, coming back to sort of like the really like great works of theology and philosophy, one of those, of course, being M. Shiamalan's 2001 movie Signs. Religion season continues obliquely. Yes. The specific subset of religion

slash alien invasion season continues. Well, I mean, religion is about kind of confronting like the future and the unknown and the challenges of life. And you have to say, alien invasion fulfills all of those criteria pretty well.

Yeah. Do you know what else religion is about? Bad CTI. Oh, yeah. And bad. Bad script writing. 2001 CJ. Oh, well, in some ways, yes.

In others, weirdly, weirdly, some parts of this I think cook, but we'll get there. I will say also, just to kind of stake this out on the movies about being transgender, movies about 9-11 sort of spectrum, this is a movie that was intended to start filming on September the 12th, 2001, and they had to delay it, 9-11. badly affected the production of signs. Yeah. In many ways, Al-Qaeda's greatest crime. God, that's crazy.

Regardless of the kind of like global jihad. The whole country just kind of went on lockdown. Right. Like, it wasn't because they were expecting someone to do 9-11-2 to signs. It was just sort of like, maybe we should take a pause for a second. If we do not make signs according to schedule, the terrorists will have won. This podcast is. it's like creating a strange list

of like lesser sung victims of 9-11. It's like the movie signs and Wesley Snipes's apartment Jackie Chan's career for a brief period. Like truly like ripples on ripples. Absolutely. We're engaging in a kind of Madame Webology of

9-11 that is going to we're seeing what's connected by 9-11 and ultimately it's a pretty straight shot. A web connects them all and it's Madame Webology

Yeah So good There may be other terms for this When things are links But it's the one that I gravitate to Because that's how I was raised Madame Web Two things that have in coming

9-11, Madam Webb Everyone involved in doing it Had a horrible time To grievous crimes against America Do you know that 50% of all people Who worked on Madam Webb Have got cancer Just an interesting little factoid

I think that they have to They really have to health care for the Madame Webb first responders. I was kind of a Madame Webb last responder because I still haven't seen it. I was going to say, I know people who worked on that movie. When we do all the Marvel movies. So Valentina V, who directed Jackie's ex-girlfriend, did some behind-the-scenes work on Madam Webb.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you said that everyone involved in the legal cancer, I was like, what? I assumed she did a great job. I don't know. I haven't seen it. I have not seen it either. But anyway, what I have seen is the movie's science. Yes, the movie's science.

I definitely did watch signs. I watched that quite recently. Back when Mel Gibson had a career, which is another kind of pre-9-11 phenomenon. And it's interesting in this movie, he's... Back when he had the first career before he had the one that he's about to get back. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And curiously, he is playing a kind of like mild-mannered, kind of gentle, like, sort of ex-prief.

He's it's sort of like in the Mel Gibson canon this is sort of Mel Gibson's first reformed if you're just going by character and it's very funny when you think about anything else that happens in the movie that it's like yeah this is kind of a more introspective Mel Gibson. I do think this performance like works in some aspects we'll have to get to but anyway we start off we start off with like a very sort of scary sounding title sequence there's a lot of like strings and very present theme music, a lot of wushes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Executive producer Kathleen Kennedy, hey, always good to see, always good to see her, produced Star Wars for a while. Two things to note about the opening sequence. The first thing is that the wushing starts on the editor's credit, which I think is a nice bit of egotism. And the second is that mine didn't start with the credit sequence. Mine started with a little disclaimer informing me that this film has scenes of a smoking nature, that it contains tobacco depictions.

And when I saw that, I'm an ex-smoker. I don't have any love for the tobacco industry, but I did put my head in my hands and decide that in that moment that I had to move to China. They're very pro-smoking in China. I don't remember that. I'll say that for free. Beautiful cigarette packages, too. Gorgeous.

Way better cigarette packages. Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, anyway, Mel Gibson is an ex-priest. We wish our way through it. He's a way to work. After the wishing, we see a photo of him, his wife and his two kids in a priest's uniform.

We immediately deduce this ex-priest-de-wife. He wakes up from a nightmare and goes, What women want! Get you! I had a horrible dream. I was in that movie. He's awoken by the sound of like a child screaming, or like, it might be. It's kind of distant enough that you can't tell.

But also awoken by this is Joaquin Phoenix. Hello to Joaquin Phoenix. He's alarmingly young in this movie. He's playing Mel Gibson's brother, and the movie does not, like, really tell you this. So I assumed, like, I don't know, like grown son, not least because Mel Gibson is like 60 or 70 years old in this movie. He just thought he was flatmates with the Joker. Assumed, like, adult son, Joaquin Phoenix. But apparently, this guy was supposed to be like a sort of on.

age brother. It would have been Mark Ruffalo if the thing hadn't been delayed by 9-11. Really? Yeah, he needed surgery. Mark Ruffalo needed surgery as a result of 9-11? No, I don't think it was connected. This is the real Madame Webology.

The Institute for Advanced Madame Webology Studies. I've seen this a tumor behind his ear. Okay, so he was getting facial feminization surgery and was unable to work on the film. Wow. They they approached Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood for this before they got to Joaquin.

If a tumour excision is facial feminization surgery is a tumor therefore a masculine trait in your head. Are we gendering the tumors? Yes. That was such a fight. I was really thinking about it. Maybe. Okay, great.

Moving on. So basically, they get awoken by this noise and the two normalist adult men in the world to just kind of go stumbling around this rural corn farm. It's like a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields. Stumbling around, responding to this kind of audio stimulus, looking for Mel Gibson's two kids who are lost in the cornfield

because corn grows very tall, like a corn maze. Yeah, their two kids are Bo, who is a little girl, and Morgan, who's a small Culkin. I think it's, is it Culkin number three? Yeah. It's the third. The rarest culkin. Yeah, this is the shiny culkin.

Doing a kind of cultural translation where I identify the colkins as America's Scars Guards, because there's always more of them than you remember. They're making new culcans. There's a certain physiognomy where you can be like, that's a colkin, right? They took over that mantle from the Baldwin's. But yeah, there is a colkin who looks like McCauley, but isn't. This is Rory Culkin, the third child. Oh, sorry, I'm so sorry, Rory.

Your Wikipedia image is so scary. What the road? Hold on, I need to see this. It's just fucking, Whoa! Scared the lights out of me, though. Let me just bing this real quick. Um, okay.

Look. Loading really slowly. Whoa! Oh, okay. You gotta use some, like, fill flash or something. Phil Flash or something. I mean, to be fair, nobody's Wikipedia page looks good because it's all about, like mine looks terrible

because it's all about licensing, so, but yeah, good performance in this, bad photo on Wikipedia. Great performance, great performance, just... It happens, it happens, like, child performance. I will note that Mel Gibson is, is, like, living on a farm and is sleeping into what is clearly the kind of mid-afternoon

because he hates doing any farming and he is waiting for his, like, MAGA handout, his, like, Trump bucks. Well, you know, he was a soybean farmer, but now he has absolutely nothing to do at all. Look, you know the drill, you knew I was going to stop you, and you knew that I was going to say that if you wanted to hear the rest of this episode of Kill James Bond, you're going to have to go to patreon.com slash kill James Bond, or one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month.

You knew this was coming. Hey, how you doing? I hope you're doing okay. It's rare for us to get a chance to check in. Yeah, it's not been super easy. We're just trying our best, aren't we?