Expelled Grey Matter

Dario Argento is known now primarily as a horror director, thanks to Suspiria and a string of supernatural and slasher features from his peak creative period from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s.  Highly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and his own mentor Mario Bava, Argento himself became an influence on Brian De Palma, George Romero, John Carpenter and a number of classic American suspense and horror directors.

Before turning to horror, Argento was one of the most noted directors of giallo films, a genre of Italian crime films that often featured a combination of complex whodunit plots and brutal murder scenes.  Though he would return to the genre later in his career, Deep Red (originally titled Profondo rosso) was one of the last he would do for quite a while.

During a conference on parapsychology, psychic Helga Ulmann (Mach Méril) suddenly has a vision of the murderous thoughts of someone in the audience.  The experience causes her great concern, largely because the thoughts d…

Attempts at censoring art, ultimately, result in failure.  Take the Hays Code.  It may surprise you when you dig into silent films, and even the sound films of the early 1930s, the adult content many had, including violence and nudity.  Nothing like today, because they did have to deal with regional censors literally taking scissors to films; also, it is hard to make some things look realistic on screen today, much less nearly a century ago.

In response to this supposed threat to American morals Hollywood agreed to the Hays Code, which limited the amount of violence that could be seen on screen, made nudity and sex strictly taboo as well as some other stranger elements (no blasphemy, bad guys always lose at the end, etc.).  Many mainstream films managed to slip things by the censors, but the code was largely hard and fast.

That is, unless you were making an educational film.  If you are talking about a moral threat, what use is warning your audience unless you can show that threat in…

While Godzilla has had numerous reboots, going from good to bad to just a force of nature to, even at one point, being the embodiment of the souls of Japan's war dead, King Kong hasn't had the same fortunes.  Sure, he never had to suffer a little ape blowing smoke rings, but his reputation has mainly rested on how good the 1933 film was, and still is.

The original movie got a mediocre sequel, then got to fight Godzilla in that monster's fourth movie in 1962 - a movie that got its own sequel, King Kong Escapes, in 1967.  We then got our own monster back for a 1976 remake, which then got its own sequel 10 years later - neither of which did the monster justice.  So, keeping with that two-sequel pattern, when I saw the advertisements to this, I thought that someone decided to rush out a sequel to Peter Jackson's 2005 version.

Instead, this is more of a sequel to (or prequel, really) to 2014's Godzilla.  While Toho is again working on building its own Godzilla universe…

I was a bit confused when I heard that Westworld had become a television show.  Like many older films I remember watching this on Saturday mornings after the cartoons were over, and Yul Brynner's black-clad Gunslinger was always one of the most memorable villains of '70s sci-fi. 

So, how in the world were they going to turn Michael Crichton's rather simple tale of a park full of robots suddenly turning on its guests?  A completely new movie would not have surprised me, since Westworld, directed and written by Michael Crichton, in many ways feels like a Jurassic Park dry-run.  But stretching it out in 10 to 13 episode seasons? 

Happily the show decided to go on its own path while borrowing a few elements from the movie itself.  But, in the course of watching the show, I realized it was time to check out the film again.

After being introduced through a series of public relations interviews to the happy patrons of Delos, an amusement park featuring "accurate" repre…

Final Destinationtried to add something new to the slasher genre, as it had suddenly become a thing again due to the Scream series.  In some ways it succeeded, with the invincible stalker becoming the unseen force of Death Itself.  Sure, occasionally there was a black cloud in a reflection or something, but mainly it was just some force causing a string of events to happen in order to make sure you died like you were supposed to.  Its intended victims were a group of teenagers that avoided an airline disaster due to the sudden vision of one of their classmate Alex (Devon Sawa, who does not appear in this sequel).

The original movie, ambitious in its plotting as it was (not a surprise since X-Files and American Horror Story writers Glen Morgan and James Wong were involved, with the latter directing), the execution left a lot to be desired.  Sawa spent most of the time looking like a dreamy-eyed puppy dog, while the entire movie took its plot way too seriously.  It also ended with one o…

The early 2000s, thanks to Scream, saw a brief resurgence in slasher films.  Like their heyday in the 1980s, they largely followed the same formula over and over again, and most (including the reboots of the '80s films) were horrible.  I'm not talking about laughably horrible, but just plain unwatchable.  They were cheap, there was nostalgia, and that was about it. 

The worst thing, and this was also because of Scream (which is actually a good slasher flick, in case you are wondering why I may be ragging on it), was many of the films became self-aware.  While there may be a fair amount of gore, the emphasis was on the genre rather than trying to actually make a good film within said genre. 

Perhaps that is why, in the end, the Final Destination movies still stand out after many of the others have been forgotten, and after the genre has been put to bed once again over a decade previous.

Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) is in his senior year at Mt. Abraham High School in New York.  H…