Expelled Grey Matter

By now the Japanese ghost with the stringy hair drawn over her face has become a staple of horror.  It certainly was the go-to for a lot of Asian horror in the late '90s and early 2000s, and it soon caught on in the United States as well when Hollywood decided to put out The Ring , which was largely a remake of this 1998 version of the story.  Ringu itself was the second adaptation of Koji Suzuki's novel, the first being a television movie from 1995.  This, however, is the one that really made Sadako an international phenomenon. It also proves that the United States doesn't have a monopoly on series creep when it comes to horror films.  This has had American and Korean adaptations, two direct sequels, another kind-of sequel with Spiral  and then a whole set of remakes and knockoffs.  It is a non-stop barrage that I am rather reluctant to get into - worse than Ju-On , in fact.  But, after seeing the American version a long time ago, and this being one o...

I have never understood hitchhiking.  I know my dad did it in the 1950s when on leave from the Navy to get back to Arizona - but he also took on a bunch of Canadian marines at one point and did some pool hustling.  Do as I say, not as I do, was a pretty good bit of advice from him, and he always drove home the point not to pick up hitchhikers no matter what.  As far back as Flannery O'Connor there were warnings about what would happen when hitchhiking, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made it clear what can happen when you pick the wrong one up.  It had certainly lost its romanticism by the time The Hitcher made it to the screen, and afterward it was pretty clear that this was a bad idea.  Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is transporting a Cadillac from Illinois to California.  While crossing Texas on a rainy night, and trying hard to stay awake, he picks up a hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer). He soon realizes his mistake when the man outright voices his intent to k...

One of the most interesting things for me is when a movie I saw at some point, and largely forgot about, starts being discussed as an underrated classic.  I saw a lot of movies in the early 1990s, often seeing most of what came out each week if it was feasible to do so.  My poor girlfriend at the time got dragged to many of them, and I'm sure that, like me, she's forgotten a majority of what we saw.   Stay Tuned had an interesting premise, and it had John Ritter and Pam Dawber.  If a movie is being made about people getting sucked into the television, that's a perfect pairing.  John Ritter played Jack Tripper on Three's Company , while Pam Dawber played the second half of Mork and Mindy .  Stay Tuned , which becomes quite clear when watching it now, was aimed at 20- and 30-somethings that had grown up with the shows.  It counted on us being able to chuckle in our ironic way that two people known largely for TV were being sucked into a TV.  Th...

The Fly   was one of those undeniable 1950s horror classics.  Starring David Hedison and Vincent Price, The Fly was about a man named Andre Delambre who invents a teleportation device, but things go wrong when he tries it on himself and a housefly gets into the machine.  The results may look a bit goofy now, but at the time the reveal of Delambre with the head and arm of a fly while the rest remained human was rather shocking - as was the ending, when we saw what happened to the housefly.   During the 1980s Charles Edward Pogue was asked to write a treatment for a remake of the '50s classic, and the script remained in development hell until none other than Mel Brooks agreed to produce it.  Eventually David Cronenberg, who had recently proved his ability to make a mainstream Hollywood horror film with his adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone , was brought in to direct.  Cronenberg rewrote Pogue's script to fit his style and ideas. Seth Brundl...

I was a bit nervous going into As Above, So Below .  It wasn't the plot or the fact that it's a found footage film, but because I couldn't remember if I had seen it.  It turns out I had not, but I had confused it with a movie called Catacombs , which I don't remember much about other than I really didn't like it. I was really hoping I didn't accidentally sit down to rewatch a movie I didn't like the first time around. Even though it shares the same location I was relieved it was not the same movie.  The idea of being trapped in the dark and lost underground is an effective one, especially since the Paris catacombs do offer a sense of mystery, so I'm not surprised that this isn't the first movie to use that premise.  There is nothing really supernatural there, but that doesn't matter.  People have legitimately lost their lives due to getting lost in the dark, getting injured or just being stupid enough to go into areas that are not stable.  If one...

The Underworld series has gone the usual horror movie route of semi-famous director to guy who helped out on the films to guys hoping to make their big Hollywood break and, with Blood Wars , to general unknown that usually works on television shows.  By now I should be screaming my head off about a decent series stomped into the ground through too many sequels and neglect, with the intent to wring out every last cent from its good name, and wondering who this stuff is still being made for.  But, then, I keep expecting the next Underworld movie to be the one that puts the nail in the coffin, and I keep getting a surprise. While the humans are now quite aware that Vampires and Lycans exist, it seems that most are satisfied that they are pretty much wiped out or at least not a threat any longer.  Antigen, the big company behind the Cleansing, turned out to be overrun by Lycans.  While Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is able to rescue Eve, Michael mysteriously disappears from t...

A major complaint I have about 1950s science fiction is that, once one gets beyond the obvious classics, there are hundreds if not thousands of films that were thrown together for no other reason than to have something to put on the Saturday matinee to entertain the kids while their parents shopped or got a little bit of alone time.  I have seen many that were little more than about 15 minutes of an actual directed and filmed movie stretched out to just over an hour by stock footage and narration. The Magnetic Monster is unfortunately one of those.  Although Curt Siodmak is credited as director, most of the movie was assembled by Herbert L. Strock, and he didn't direct as much as he spliced the scenes Siodmak directed with military and police footage.  A good portion of the finale, supposedly a large atom collider called a Deltatron built under the ocean in Nova Scotia, is lifted from a German science fiction film from the 1930s.  It is as if Strock was hired to be t...

In the summer of 1973 a young film maker took his crew and a group of actors to an old farm house in rural Texas to make a PG-rated horror film.  Despite the lack of sex, blood and general profanity, the movie would become infamous as one of the most frightening movies of all time, banned in numerous countries and spoken of in hushed whispers in movie theaters and video store aisles everywhere.  This is the true story of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .  Well, about as true as the movie itself - probably a bit more.  The story of the movie has been told in numerous horror film documentaries and books over the years, as it went from being a gritty thriller denounced as the ultimate in violent trash to a spot on the list of the 100 films to see before you die - and hopefully not at the hands of Leatherface or his kin.  The strange thing was that it was supposed to be PG, and in all honesty the lack of much blood or full-on shots of death or dismemberment in this mov...

H. P. Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors, but as much as I love his work I understand why there have rarely been faithful adaptations of his material.  The closest was a modern silent short film of The Call of Cthulhu , which managed to do the story justice in about 25 minutes.  But therein lies the problem; like Edgar Allen Poe, Lovecraft's short fiction was meant to be read in one setting, had a simple set up and all led quickly to a conclusion that typically involves the protagonist going mad after seeing something indescribable.  When it comes to telling a visual story, indescribable is kind of difficult to represent.  When his work is adapted there is usually quite a bit added that Lovecraft generally would ignore, such as love interests and other subplots.  These are elements needed to keep a movie going beyond a half hour, and some directors have been better than others in bringing the stories to life.  Stuart Gordon was better than most, but ev...

Ishiro Honda began working with famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, but his 1954 film Gojira largely sealed his fate as the father of kaiju films, and one of the best known directors in the genre.  He directed most of the sequels up to 1965's Invasion of Astro-Monster , as well as a number of other films ranging from science fiction like  The Mysterians to the social dramas that defined his early career.  Jun Fukuda took over on 1966's Ebirah, Horror of the Deep , but by then the Godzilla franchise was starting to see a loss of interest in Japan and in the United States.  Destroy All Monsters was supposed to be a grand finale, bringing back Godzilla and his adopted son Minilla (from Son of Godzilla ) as well as a variety of monsters from previous films.  Honda was also back, along with special effects from Eiji Tsuburaya and music from Akira Ifukube, the man responsible for the original Gojira soundtrack. The other monsters along for the ride were Rodan, the...

Ari Aster's first feature-length film, Hereditary , was nominally about grief and suffering and how different people work through it.  It showed a disintegrating family wracked by tragedy combined with a supernatural element intent on destroying them.  While the exploration of tragedy often worked, and so did the supernatural, it was hampered by the latter since the ending seemed like it was manipulated in a way to make sure it and everything that came before it did not remain ambiguous to the viewer.  Although Hereditary is an excellent movie I felt somewhat betrayed, not because of how it ended but because I felt trusted to be able to handle the rest of the story but not trusted to understand the conclusion. Part of the problem is that the supernatural part of Hereditary was something that was added on later.  The family and the various tragedies that befell them were the most important part, and they remained so.  Although the stories are in no way related, a...

I really did not expect the Underworld series to continue after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans .  The main story was pretty much wrapped up after the first two movies, and the third was both a prequel and a coda.  There weren't any loose ends left, and it wasn't a blockbuster hit like the first two.  Sure, there was no guarantee of Selene and Michael living happily ever after, but the Vampire elders of their coven were gone and the remaining Lycans didn't seem to care one way or the other about what happened to the two of them.  They were both outcasts, but Selene also wasn't stuck worrying about scurrying home before sunrise, so living among humans was probably going to be best for both of them. Someone, however, thought that there might be a few more dollars to squeeze out of the series.  Len Wiseman obviously had other stuff he'd rather be doing, so he and John Hlavin banged out a screenplay and about 20 or so other people, including J. Michael Straczynski, ...

Those who truly hate the Underworld series seem to do it with an unbridled passion.  This, not surprisingly, incudes many critics, to whom it seems the very existence of these films is a personal affront.  Len Wiseman, admittedly, is a commercial film maker.  He produces, writes and directs properties that will turn a profit despite their artistic merits and, if they happen to have the latter, all the better.  In some ways he reminds me of Roger Corman, who suffered similarly with critics, but lacked an attractive wife to use as a lead actress.  Those of us who like these movies are certainly not fanatical about them.  Even the first one is silly, the plots rehashed from a number of previous films and stripped down to their base elements.  Still, Kate Beckinsale does more than just look good in leather; she adds an element of cool.  In addition, we get actors like Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy giving the movies some gravitas.  Wiseman wrapped...

Somewhere in the multiverse there is a world where every old science fiction movie looks like its poster.  It doesn't matter if the movie has a great plot, wonderful acting or anything else, but has at least a scene where a giant underwater snake thing thing decides to snack on a scuba diver in a bikini.  Needless to say this does not happen at any time; in fact, there is more skin shown in the poster than the movie, and I wish the creature looked like that.  Given the budget of this 1950s science fiction thriller it is probably a good thing we got as much as we did. Bodies are washing up on a beach in California, and locals are concerned that it has something to do with the Pacific College of Oceanography and its head scientist, Professor King (Michael Whalen).  As word gets around about the strange goings-on, noted scientist Dr. Ted Stevens (Kent Taylor) and government investigator George Thomas (Phillip Pine) show up to see what King might be up to, while the form...