Expelled Grey Matter

Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell get a lot of the credit, but, besides Raimi's brothers Ivan and Ted, there was another person responsible for bringing us the Evil Dead franchise.  That was writer, director and producer Scott Spiegel, a friend of Raimi's who helped him with his early short films and has appeared in some form in most of his movies.  He was also the one who may or may not have taken a few plot films from the rarely (at the time) seen movie Equinox and inserted them into The Evil Dead .  With Sam and Ted in tow, along with a quick cameo by Campbell - all of which are overplayed on the current box art - Spiegel made his own feature directorial debut with the 1989 slasher Intruder. Jennifer (Liz Kern) is working the night shift at Walnut Creek Grocery Store with her friends Linda (Renée Estevez) and Dave (Billy Marti).  Around closing time her ex-boyfriend Craig (David Byrnes) comes in and starts a violent altercation, leading to the store's staff forcing hi...

Nobody was one of the more surprising movies I've seen.  It does owe a lot to John Wick , something I noticed once I had a chance to go through that whole series, which shouldn't be surprising as some of the same people were involved.  It has similar worldbuilding, many of the same types of stunts as well as the feeling that, with all the punishment the lead character takes, this is in some alternate dimension filled with superhumans. What separated Nobody from John Wick  is that the former has a goofy sense of humor.  It also took the time to introduced characters besides the guy on the poster and framed everything within a family dynamic.  That made it more than just a modern action retread, especially seeing Christopher Lloyd show up as the father and reveal that the whole assassination thing is akin to a family business.  It's not the first time this has been a central plot to an action film but it was handled in a way that kept the audience guessing a...

Creepshow was a resounding success for George A. Romero and Stephen King, so much so that a second movie was made in 1987.  It wasn't as good as the first and part of the reason for the delay was getting everything arranged to make it happen.  There were conflicts with producers on where to go with the series, ultimately resulting in Tales from the Dark Side and Monsters being late night anthology shows inspired by Creepshow .  There was also the desire to have a either an anthology movie or a television program featuring a number of horror greats. What became Two Evil Eyes started with Romero wanting to recruit Dario Argento, Wes Craven and John Carpenter to each direct a segment based on Edgar Allen Poe along with himself.  Craven and Carpenter eventually backed out and at point Michele Soavi was also attached.  Eventually this whittled down to just two stories, one by Romero and the other with Argento, both filmed around the Pittsburgh area. The first is "Th...

By 1993 Dario Argento was becoming well-known enough internationally for American film companies to have interest in backing his movies.  He had made features based, and sometimes partially filmed in, New York in the past, and he filmed his segment of Two Evil Eyes in George A. Romero's stomping ground of Pittsburgh. Lucio Fulci and numerous other giallo and horror directors frequently made movies that involved a small amount of filming in the United States combined with the use of Italian studios for the interiors or unspecified locations.  They would often go by English pseudonyms and the distributors would advertise the movies as if they were from Hollywood, with audiences realizing from the dubbing and production values where they came from. Trauma was a break from that.  The majority of the cast was English or American while the crew was still largely Italian.  It has many of Argento's typical camera movements and the convoluted storytelling, but in many ways it...

Stephen King often did gimmicks in the late 1990s and early 2000s to sell his books.  Some, like the multi-volume release of The Green Mile , worked.  Others seemed to just gloss over the fact that he was on cruise control, both before and after almost getting killed by a redneck in a van.  Desperation, published in 1996, is a solid Stephen King work with ties to his grander Dark Tower universe.  It's not great, but it works.   The gimmick was that at the same time he released a "mirror" novel written by his late pseudonym Richard Bachman called The Regulators .  It features the same characters, only in a different setting, fighting a manifestation of the same creature from Desperation .  It is also not bad but, where I remember a good deal of Desperation 30 years after reading it, I had to look up the plot of The Regulators to remind me what it is about.  After being reminded of the story I don't find it surprising that ABC never had any pla...

Despite sharing a title with the 1928 movie starring Lon Chaney, While the City Sleeps is based on a novel called The Bloody Spur  by Charles Einstein, published in 1953 and loosely based on a series of murders that occurred in 1946.  The original murder is even referenced in the movie, where the killer wrote "Catch me if you can" on a mirror in lipstick at the second murder scene.  William Heirens, the true lipstick killer, only made it to three victims before being captured. What makes this movie a bit different is the perspective.  While it does contain some references to forensic research at the time the story is told not from the perspective of the police pursuing the killer but rather from a group of newspaper men working for the fictional Kyne Media company, which includes broadcast television, radio and a paper called the New York Sentinel.  While it has several homages to Citizen Kane  it also is one of the first movies to establish tropes in moder...