Expelled Grey Matter

Many movies get a terrible reputation when, in retrospect, it was less the quality of the movie and more the circumstances under which it was made or the box office reception giving the impression that it was worse than it was.  Heaven's Gate is a perfect example of this.  The movie itself is a well-made film when seen in proper ratio and with the full run-time, and it is as entertaining and thrilling as any epic of the time.  However, westerns were not popular when it was made, and no one was clamoring for a three-plus hour film about a 19th century range war in Wyoming.  There are also a lot of other things that proved the movie's undoing, not the least being director Michael Cimino's arrogance, but when it comes down to it he delivered a quality film. Even Howard the Duck isn't anywhere near as bad as it is said to be.  It's annoying at times, rarely funny and saddled with a mediocre story clothed in ILM effects, but it is still far from even being one of the wo

For many Americans Lucio Fulci's career begins with Zombie and ends sometime in the late 1980s.  It is his horror films, with their lurid box art screaming from video store shelves, their intense gore and often incomprehensible plots, that most fans outside of Italy know him for.  The horror films, however, came late in his career, and largely because Zombie was such a major hit.  He did heist films, comedies, early '60s rock and roll cash-in movies and westerns, to name a few of the genres he had worked in since the 1950s.  By the 1970s he had also began working in the giallo field.  Don't Torture a Duckling isn't the typical film with a black-gloved killer going after scantily clad women, with a plot that curves back and forth and takes several meandering paths.  Rather, it is a straight mystery film set in a small Italian town where superstition and suspicion of outsiders, and even their own neighbors, is rife.  For a man known for horror films that tend to just tur

It is strange the way that Dario Argento's giallo films are given a bit higher regard than those of other directors, save Mario Bava.  Argento was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, to the point where he was once called "Italy's Hitchcock" before almost exclusively working in the horror genre, and he most certainly never set out to make an "animal" trilogy, as his first three films have come to be called.  Gialli just have weird, incomprehensible titles in many cases, so Argento just kept up the trend. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage had been a goal of mine to see for years, both because it is his most Hitchcock-like and also because it was hard to find in the United States.  It wasn't really until Deep Red that Argento started to go for exaggerated blood sprays that would become trademarks of his horror films, but it seemed that the same issues with getting the uncut versions of some of his films arose.  The only "Animal Trilogy" film

Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe kind of ended with a whimper instead of a bang.  Sure, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was an important movie for a number of reasons, but most of those had to do with circumstances outside of the MCU rather than pushing the story forward.  Namor the Mariner may figure in to the main plot - whatever that is at this point - in the future, but the important thing was to make a movie that served as a decent tribute to Chadwick Boseman, and by and large it succeeded.  In many ways it was better than the original Black Panther .  Whatever the current Avengers plot may be building up to it probably as little to do with Wakanda or Namor except for another background for a grand Avengers battle.  Instead it appears to be shaping up to involve Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a character introduced at the end of the first season of Loki as being behind the entire agency responsible for keeping time on track and preventing incursions between universe

Sometimes I question whether a movie like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers really needs a review.  It's a Fred Olen Ray film, which means expectations are quite low even if this happens to be the best Fred Olen Ray film in his long career.  A title like this is going to get watched by the people it is intended for., and i      t's not something that is going to be set up for viewing during an overnighter with the church youth group.   Ray can't help but do some cinematic mugging in about every shot in the movie.  At the heart it's a comedy, making fun of both outrageous horror and exploitation films while also riffing on 1940s film noire.  It works occasionally, but the ultra-cheap production values and the disappointment when it comes to showing the actual chainsaws in action - save for Linnea Quigley's dance toward the end - is quite palpable.  Jack Chandler (John Henry Richardson) is a private eye in Los Angeles, and he is currently on a case to find a missing teenager

Frank Henenlotter has tried to make it clear that he is not a maker of horror movies, but rather of exploitation films.  He is one of the few filmmakers that are proud to admit this, as exploitation films are usually thought of as artless attempts to earn a few bucks by promising lurid thrills and, more often than not, not providing what was promised.  To give Henenlotter his due he at least offers what it says on the box, whether it be a monster in a basket, a brain-eating parasite or, in this case, a woman made out of hooker parts.  Jeff Franken (James Lorinz) is an inventor and a bit of a mad scientist.  His fiancé Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) loves him despite his eccentricities.  When he builds a remote-controlled lawnmower for  Elizabeth is eager to show it off and unfortunately ends up getting in its way.  She is killed and Jeff picks up what he can find, storing her head and a few other parts in a freezer filled with an estrogen-enhanced blood solution until he can figure out how t