Expelled Grey Matter

It is rare when a movie is better than the book it is based on.  Normally whittling the story down to fit in a two-hour format means consolidating characters, removing subplots and excising entire scenes.  Often with Stephen King it also means removing content that would result in the movie never finding distribution.   I don't remember much of the latter in Needful Things since it has been a long time since I read it, but it was never one of my favorite books by King.  He went through a long period where editors seemed afraid to say no to him and, though many of his books maintained a level of quality and even improved in style once he kicked his bad habits, much of his '90s output is quite bloated.  This story takes the "strange curio shop" trope to an extreme, and what screenwriter W. D. Richter did is remove a good bit of that extra fat to concentrate on the main story within. A new resident of Castle Rock, Maine named Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) opens a shop cal

It's important to note that there is a reason that The Whisperer in the Darkness is made in the style of a late 1930s or early 1940s horror film.  This is because it follows a 25-minute silent version of The Call of Cthulhu in 2005, also made by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, produced to look like what a film version of the story may have looked like around the time it was published.  It was an underground hit and sold enough DVDs to encourage funding for a feature-length film.  For that they chose one of the more difficult Lovecraft stories to adapt for cinema, The Whisperer in Darkness . Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) is a folklore professor at Miskatonic University.  He has been receiving letters from a farmer in Vermont named Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch) informing him of crablike creatures surrounding and attacking his home.  After debating a sensationalist journalist named Charles Fort (Andrew Leman) about their existence, Wilmarth is confronted by Henry's son George

The original Cat People was a surprise hit, staying in theaters so long that a number of critics that hated it ended up getting to see it again and revising their views on the movie.  It helped prop up the ailing RKO Pictures and made a name Val Lewton when it came to horror films despite the fact that he was the producer, not the director, behind it and a number of other hits for RKO.  It is also made Simone Simon famous as an early scream queen.   What it didn't have was much of a budget, so there was some vagueness on whether Irena, the cat person of the title, was transforming or if it was mental illness.  It was pretty clear at the end that she was a supernatural creature, but the mixture of sounds and shadows is what helped sell the film.  Come the late 1970s even some of the lower budget films could provide decent effects and the idea of remaking the movie was tossed about, with one of those scripts being a loose retelling of the original by Alan Ormsby.  This was picked up

RKO Pictures was a studio that often went from success to failure.  It was one of the biggest, releasing movies such as King Kong , Citizen Kane and Notorious .  It weathered a number of ups and downs, mismanagement under Howard Hughes and a final demise in 1957 when the company was sold to Universal.  Along the way, and often because the studio was desperate to make money, a number of interesting movies were made. Cat People was the first produced by Val Lewton.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur, the movie was produced in the way of many b-movies where the title came first and the writer, in this case DeWitt Bodeen, was tasked with coming up with an actual story once the picture was given the green light.  Lewton was new so he suffered studio interference while being given a small budget, but he and Tourneur managed to overcome all that and create one of the most popular classic horror films. Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is a Serbian immigrant living alone in a Brownstone in New York.  O

My usual problem with remakes of classic movies is the same as when I hear a cover of a song.  There are two ways of doing it.  One is to copy everything to the letter, hoping to get a hit from what someone else did before.  The other is to take the original words, or some of them, and rearrange things so that it is different enough that the artist has put their own stamp on it.  The Vanilla Fudge and their version of "You Keep Me Hanging On" is one that always comes to mind.  So, in a world of bland horror remakes, the 2019 version of Child's Play might be considered the Vanilla Fudge version of the film.  Andy (Gabriel Bateman) and his mother Karen (Aubrey Plaza) have just moved into a new apartment.  Andy doesn't have any friends and doesn't try to make any, although he kind of connects with a police officer named Mike (Brian Tyree Henry) lives down the hall.  Things are made worse by Karen's boyfriend Shane (David James Lewis), whom Andy has no liking towa

I was not too excited when I heard that there was going to be a remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .  It wasn't for the normal reasons I have, which is the fact that too many movies that I grew up with got remade in the 2000s.  This was at the beginning of that trend and, down the road, they started remaking things that came out when I was a kid.  I still wasn't that old at the time - barely in my 30s - so it was weird to have a remake of a movie I could buy on DVD quite easily and it be even better quality than when I originally saw it.   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , though, was an outlier.  It came out when I was two years old so, other than as a horror fan later in life, it was not a big influence on me growing up.  In fact, it was quite difficult to find, and it took me a bit of time in the early 1990s to find a copy to watch.  That has changed as it has gone through a number of quality re-releases, but there were some shady things that went on with its original distr