Expelled Grey Matter

I became obsessed with liminal spaces a long time ago.  There was a Stephen King novella called The Langoliers , which unfortunately is better known for an awful television miniseries adaptation from the 1990s.  It tells the story of a group of people on a private plane that lands at an empty airport.  they discover that they have somehow slipped a moment into the past.  The world is empty, everything has an aura of age about it and, worst of all, there are creatures coming that devour that world in order to clean up the remains of the past.  This simple premise has lead to dreams as well as some influence over my photography and storytelling.  I'm sure for many others the disquieting feeling of being stuck in a bland service corridor in a mall or some other place that is in stark contrast to the world around it has had an impression.  A large part of the appeal of the original Dawn of the Dead is that the main characters are forced to live in these s...

Toho didn't have big plans on what to with Godzilla going into the 2000s so the majority of the Millennium Series of Godzilla was dedicated to letting different directors share their vision of what a Godzilla film should be.  This ranged from the silly to the family-friendly to a return to serious kaiju filmmaking with Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack .  Where that film had been successful in taking the whole Godzilla legend in a different direction Toho still preferred a tried-and-true story, so writer Wataru Mimura delivered  Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and with a human plot that was almost a carbon copy of Godzilla vs. Megaguirus , which he previously wrote.    Godzilla (Tsutomu Kitagawa) attacked Tokyo in 1954 and was killed by the oxygen destroyer.  However, Tokyo was soon visited by other monsters.  As a result, a special task force was established in 1966 to defend Japan.  In most cases the mobile MASER v...

We have all fantasized about being able to make a wish and how it would change our lives if they really did come true.  Besides the obvious of trying to find loopholes by wishing for infinite wishes I am sure that, as in most things, the wishes would come down to love or money.  However, despite being willing to talk about almost anything to a million strangers on the internet, most people today won't sit down and have simple conversations with the people close to them.  It's a recipe for disaster and, when a poorly worded wish is thrown in the mix, it makes for one of the more creative horror movies in recent memory. Bear (Michael Johnston) works in a music store and is in love with his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette).  Problem is he is afraid to reveal his feelings for her as she has never indicated specifically that she likes him.  After rejecting a litany of bad advice from his best friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) Bear decides to keep quiet as usua...

Director Anthony Waller, if famous for anything, is known for directing one of the most worthless and embarrassing sequels ever: An American Werewolf in Paris .  In some ways it's a shot-by-shot retelling of John Landis's classic horror comedy An American Werewolf in London , only changing it to Paris and using crappy CGI rather than state-of-the-art practical effects.   What got him the chance to direct what a major studio mistakenly thought was a sequel people were asking for - despite the original movie not ever calling for one - was a low-budget film he made in Moscow not long after the fall of the Soviet Union.  This was during the time of Boris Yeltsin and a period of extreme social upheaval in Russia where the country was almost lawless and, in some respects, run by organized crime.  It was also a brief time period when the country was becoming more open and welcoming to the West and, like a number of other former Eastern Bloc countries, presented cheaper...

Pet Sematary was the first novel I read by Stephen King.  I did re-read it later in life and realized just how pulpy it was compared to many of his previous stories and definitely the later dark fantasy and straight literary efforts.  It put my initial dislike of 1989's film adaptation   in perspective.  After seeing it again within the last couple of years I still don't find it to be a great film, but I can't fault it for being a campy b-movie when I take the source material into consideration. Pet Sematary did take some liberties with the original story, but it managed to make an effort to present the story as it was written.  That was what I expected the 2019 movie would do, possibly integrating some things that were left out while giving us a bland, color-washed, CGI-filled bore fest that would make me appreciate the original even more.  In some ways that is what it delivered but, to their detriment, directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, along wit...

For all the franchises like Hellraiser or Leprechaun that overstayed their welcome there are those that never got a fair shake.  The original Hellboy  was an okay movie.  It had a lot of imagination and heart, in large part due to Guillermo del Toro's involvement and Ron Pearlman's love of the source material, but it was far from del Toro's best film.  It also didn't do as well at the box office as the studio had intended so, even though a sequel had been greenlit, it took four years for Hellboy II: The Golden Army to reach theaters.   During that time Universal picked it up and CGI got better, although this still used plenty of practical effects.  Also, like many great superhero sequels, the second movie is not burdened with an origin story.  That was taken care of in the original which allows for Hellboy II to concentrate on worldbuilding and an interesting story.  It also allowed del Toro a bit more freedom to do the film his way even if t...