Expelled Grey Matter

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

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a movie of should-have-beens.  It was a financial success, much more so than Friday the 13th , which tanked after a huge opening weekend.  In fact, this remake of the 1984 film is one of the most profitable horror films of all time.  Jackie Earle Haley, who replaces Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, did so with Englund's blessing.  Director Samuel Bayer was talked into doing the film by Michael Bay after holding off on doing any of the horror remakes with the promise that his feature debut was going to be the beginning of many good things.  It even had Rooney Mara, a young up-and-coming star at the time, in the lead role of Nancy. What it didn't have was the backing of fans of the original.  Platinum Dunes was becoming known as the studio that did horror remakes.  Horror films were not doing too well in the 2000s and the constant reboots and retreads didn't do them any favors and, by the time A Nightmare on Elm Street made it to the theaters, ma

Most of the time I'm going into comic book films pretty much blind or with vague recollections of childhood.  With Constantine , however, it is with both having seen the movie within a year or two of it being in the theater and later reading at least one of the graphic novels at a later date, which I believe was when the television show was on.  Both of the latter were enjoyable, especially the show, since even though he was part of the DC universe it didn't feel like the usual timeworn superhero antics.   What I remembered of the movie, though, did.  Constantine came out before the DC Cinematic Universe got going, but when I first saw it I felt it was like a number of other big budget films at the time: hollow, forgettable and without much story.  So many of the movies of the 2000s foretold how things are today, and rarely do I find myself revamping my opinion of movies from that time period.  This is one of those exceptions because, although it deviates far from the comic, Co