Expelled Grey Matter

Ouija boards are a readymade plot device in horror films.  There are so many rumors and tales about them despite the fact they are a product of the 1890s spiritist movement and, for over a century, have been marketed as a mere boardgame.  Despite frightening tales of possession and evil spirits the whole idea of moving a planchette around the board to answer questions boils down to either one of the participants pranking the others or involuntary movements giving subconscious answers to the questions. The fact that it is a board game is most important.  This form of "spirit board" was popularized by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard who sold their patented version through the Kennard Novelty Company.  It eventually became the property of Parker Brothers, and later Hasbro when they acquired that company in 1991.  Ouija , the movie, was produced by Hasbro as well as Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes, so rather than being a creative, if flawed, independent horror film lik...

Stephen King released two books in 1992.  One was Gerald's Game , which I didn't care for.  I'm not surprised it didn't get adapted at the time for a couple reasons.  One is that the book is not one of his best and the other is that it takes place almost exclusively in the bedroom of a lady named Jessie whose husband, Gerald, dies during some non-consensual rough sex play.  Mike Flanagan managed to bring it to Netflix in 2017 and proved that he was up to the task of adapting even some of the more difficult King material, with Gerald's Game being much better than its source.  The other book he released that year was Dolores Claiborne .  Neither book dwelt on supernatural elements as, at the time before getting into more bloated epics, King was dwelling more in reality than in his Dark Tower world or any of the usual supernatural tropes.  There is one incidence in the books, which occurs in neither movie, which is the exception.  At one point durin...

I am one of those strange people that prefer Lucio Fulci's gialli to his horror films.  While those movies are well-made and visually appealing they are also quite surreal, whether intended or not.  There is a lot of effort put into making them as similar to Dario Argento's work as possible, while Fulci's earlier films seemed more of an effort by an artist to blaze his own path.   Besides, much of what would be in his later movies is present in his works from the 1970s.  They don't hold back on the blood or the sex - even though The Psychic is devoid of the latter - and they still have some crazy, and controversial, plot twists on occasion.  What I like about them, however, is that unlike most movies in the genre they are straightforward mysteries that are fun to work out while watching them.  Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O'Neill) is a clairvoyant who often has visions of things that have happened or that will happen.  Problem is they aren't consisten...

Although one of my pieces of advice to anyone watching a Lucio Fulci horror film is not to look for much sense or plot, but just to go with what happens, I understand why his movies became increasingly surreal.  Much of his output before the 1980s was pretty straightforward, with even his gialli being logically put together.  Zombie was also pretty much what the title said despite some aspects being a bit muddled.  The Beyond is the second in his "death" trilogy.  Like some other so-called Italian horror trilogies this has more to do with fans connecting similar films than anything Fulci intended.  What he did intend was to try to get away from the zombie films and get more creative control, which he ended up getting for a good part of The Beyond with the trade-off that he had to agree to zombies in the finale.  The result is what should be a standard haunted house story turning into a bizarre series of events that is more of a series of visceral set piece...

By 2023 pretty much everyone knew the DC Cinematic Universe was done.  James Gunn was taking over and rebooting the whole thing which, by that time, was the poster case of superhero fatigue.  Still, as long as it wasn't Batgirl , Warner Bros. had a number of movies that they were desperate to get out, mainly because there was still a glut from when theaters shut down for COVID-19.  One of those stragglers was a sequel to Shazam! , which was one of the few DC films that was any good.  The staff made from the tree of life now sits in a museum at the Acropolis in Athens and, it turns out, by breaking it in half Billy Batson (Zachary Levy, Asher Angel) released the Sisters of Atlas from the realm in which the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) had imprisoned them.  Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachel Zegler) intend to use the staff to take the powers from Batson and his friends, now working as a team of superheroes in Philadelphia. The ultimate goal i...

George A. Romero gets most of the credit for Night of the Living Dead , pretty much because he directed it and carried on the series that everyone knows.  However, there were others involved, and one of them was producer John A. Russo.  When the original movie became a hit he and Romero differed on where the story should go and the two parted ways amicably, with Romero agreeing to left Russo using "Living Dead" for any movies he would do while future Romero ones would be "Dead".  Thus, Dawn of the Dead being the first sequel.   Russo wrote a screenplay for The Return of the Living Dead and adapted it into a novelization that was released in 1979.  Both a sequel to the first movie and to its book tie-in, it featured a world 10 years past the events of the original story and another small town dealing with a resurgence of whatever it was that woke the dead in the first place.  When Dan O'Bannon got involved he thought the story too bleak and decided to ...