Expelled Grey Matter

This is one of my top candidates for the all-time worst title of a movie.  It shouldn't be surprising that writer David Coggeshall had no intention of making this a sequel to The Haunting in Connecticut .  The only tenuous tie the two stories had was that A Haunting in Connecticut , a 2002 documentary on the Discovery channel, was followed up by A Haunting in Georgia for the same Halloween season.  Obviously Connecticut and Georgia also have nothing in common other than they are part of the United States, and all along this was meant to be a film based on the experiences of the Wyrick family in the late 1980s and not a continuation of the previous movie. The two haunting cases couldn't be more different.  The Haunting in Connecticut is based on a book by Ray Garton, which itself is based on one of the cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren.  The very fact they were involved throws plenty of doubt on both their claims and those of the Snedeker family regarding a haunted...

There was a documentary, A Haunting in Connecticut , that was on the Discovery channel in October 2002.  I say documentary lightly, as it was based on Ray Garton's novel, In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting .  That book, that Garton has since dismissed as being a work of pure fiction, was based on the "investigations" of known paranormal fraudsters Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Although this comes before the current Conjuring universe, it is not the first movie based on the Warrens' supernatural hucksterism; that was, of course, The Amityville Horror .   For a documentary A Haunting in Connecticut followed a pretty clear-cut narrative, as many of the Warrens' cases conveniently do.  It's why, true or not, they often lend themselves making halfway decent movies.  The documentary itself, while of questionable scientific value (the Discovery channel was well on its way to giving up any pretense of having to do with education or science by this point)...

Sadako, who became Samara in the American version of The Ring , kicked off an international wave of Asian horror films and remakes.  Most of the ghosts were modeled after her in some way and it became just one more part of the great horror pantheon that included masked killers, vampires, werewolves and the like.  It helped that the American version was also pretty good and became an international hit just like the 1998 version of the story, Ringu .    But then came The Ring Two .  Directed by Hideo Sakata, who made the first two Japanese films, the movie suffered from both severe studio interference and the abandonment of the original method of Samara's killing and turned into just another film about a woman trying to keep her child from being possessed.  Much of what happened was treading the same ground, although Rachel, played by Naomi Watts, was finally able to put an end to Samara by entering her realm and properly placing the cap on the well so she co...

The Ring was one of the few examples of a well-done American remake of a Japanese horror film.  Directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Ehren Kruger the movie was an atmospheric film that owed a lot to both David Lynch's slow-burn style as well as old-fashioned horror.  It was different than 1998's Ringu , the adaptation of Kôji Suzuki's novel on which it was based, but contained the major elements of the story and set them in the Pacific Northwest instead of coastal Japan.  Hideo Nakata, who directed Ringu , also directed its sequel in 1999.  Though not as highly regarded as the original it was still a hit and continued the story of the ghost Sadako and the haunted video tape that caused people to die in seven days.  Since Verbinski had gone on to other projects and The Ring had made a decent amount on a modest budget Paramount decided, after a number of other directors passed on it, to bring Nakata over from Japan to do the sequel to the American version....

Holiday slashers became a thing for a while in the 1980s, all hoping to benefit off the success of Halloween .  It was largely a snowball effect, with Sean Cunningham's goal being, "Hey, it worked for John Carpenter," and putting out Friday the 13th two years later.  The major difference is that it contained more nudity and even more graphic violence.  From there came My Bloody Valentine , New Years Evil   and an entire bevy of Christmas-related horror flicks.  Halloween , though, would not have existed without Black Christmas .  For the longest time director Bob Clark (who is also the uncredited cowriter and reviser of Roy Moore's script) was known for the first two Porky's movies as well as another film, A Christmas Story , that has become a holiday classic.  However, his early films were horror, exploitation and suspense films.  His first dip into the genre was Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things , directed under an alias, but followe...

Ringu  was an international phenomenon pretty much from the beginning.  Based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki and already made once as a television movie, the 1998 theatrical version migrated over to the United States in the early 2000s.  By 2002 an American version, written by Ehren Kruger and directed by Gore Verbinski, was in the theaters.  Though a number of versions were made of this movie it seems like the U.S. and Japanese versions are the ones that stand out.  The Ring , and the American version of The Grudge, both popularized the ônryu, a type of vengeful ghost whose spirit suffered a long, drawn-out death.  In movies they typically take the form of a young girl or woman with hair covering her decaying face.  For a number of years this became the go-to design for a number of Asia horror films even outside of Japan, and became the design that the American remakes typically used as well.  It got to the point of almost self parody, especially sinc...

Independence Day was the biggest movie of 1996, and one of the biggest movies of the 1990s.  If adjusted for inflation its total worldwide box office take would be over a billion, rivaling many of the Marvel films of today.  It was not well-received by critics, but audiences loved it.  It made Will Smith a star and included great ensemble acting from Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch and others.  It was big, cheesy, loud and one of the most entertaining films Hollywood ever produced.  It is certainly the best film Roland Emmerich ever made.  Dean Devlin, Emmerich's cowriter on the movie, was given a huge amount of money to the write a sequel - a sum that he returned after neither he nor Emmerich could come up with anything satisfactory.  Audiences never really talked about a sequel; Independence Day had a solid ending.  Aliens were dead, Earth was saved, the end.  It was obvious that neither Devlin nor Emmerich had considered one befo...

Star Trek: Nemesis   has the dubious honor of being the movie that killed Star Trek as a cinematic experience.  At least for a while, that is.  Neither William Shatner nor Leonard Nimoy thought there would be a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture , and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier came close to bringing the original cast movies to a screeching halt.  In both cases the series recovered and came back with some of its strongest entries.  However, none of them had as much money dumped into them as Nemesis with such a massive lack of return. Looking back, Nemesis isn't that terrible, at least when compared with The Final Frontier .  Unfortunately, it made for a rocky farewell to the Next Generation cast, as there were plans to do something similar to what Star Trek: Generations did and hand the series over to the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager.  Nemesis pretty much made sure this didn't happen, as did the lackluster reception of the televisio...

Although I was a fan of the long-running television show, even after most of the original cast were gone, I was not a big fan of Roland Emmerich's movie Stargate .  I think it was because my hopes were raised by the whole silly idea of it, including ancient astronauts and the Pyramids being used as spaceship landing pads.  I'd long outgrown that type of thing when I started realizing that all these "unanswered questions" had been answered.  Still, I was expecting an entertaining film, and I got something that fell quite short.  That would be hallmark of Emmerich's films going forward, but that didn't mean I was going to pass up what looked like it was going to be a decent alien invasion movie with Independence Day .  The early trailers didn't leave much to the imagination - aliens show up, blow things up and humanity must fight back.  Simple as that, and hopefully not trying to give what would inevitably be thinly drawn characters too many subplots.  I...

Although I did have some problems with the logic of the script there was one thing I couldn't fault M. Night Shyamalan for in The Village : the direction and cinematography.  The adding of a twist ending for a fourth time (or more; I have never seen the films he made prior to The Sixth Sense ) may have been getting old, but the movie as a whole was not that much of a step down from The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable , and at least I found it to be not as contrived or cloying as Signs .  But then came The Lady in the Water , followed by The Happening .   I have not seen The Lady in the Water , but I have always understood it to be the point at which Shyamalan face-planted.  Not so badly that his career was almost brought to a halt - The Last Airbender and After Earth are what briefly did that - but something changed, and not for the better.  I was expecting that even if I found the plot of The Happening to be silly that at least the movie would still l...

Although I have watched them all and enjoy quite a few I have had a major complain about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  That complaint is that so many of them are the same, particularly when a new character is added.  Even if we are far down the road in narrative at some point we have to hold off getting to the part where the Avengers fight a universe-swallowing bad guy in order to show how some kid was bitten by a magical wombat and discovered how to be a truly good and unselfish person by beating a cosmic villain that pops up, does some naughty things, and is sent packing to another dimension in the last 20 minutes of the movie.  With Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings  Marvel, and by extension Disney, does something I could not have believed they would do, especially after watching the bland bundle of video game cut scenes that Black Widow turned out to be.  It takes chances at not being strictly a superhero film, and takes even more chances by not kissi...

In the 1980s there were a number of huge action movie stars and everyone still has their favorites.  My two were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, although I also found some of Claude Van Damme and Stephen Segall's movies fun as well.  One actor I always thought was a bit of a joke, however, was Sylvester Stallone.  That is something I have re-evaluated over the years.  Now it's more just frustration how his ego could get in the way of talent.  The man could act; one just needs to see the first Rocky film or First Blood to figure that out.  Somewhere along the line, however, Stallone let his fantasies of being an action hero cloud his judgement.  It's like he started believing his own myth.  At least after Rocky it seemed he could not let himself be vulnerable like Bruce Willis, and though he had a decent physique until he ruined it with steroids later in his career he was never an athletic fighter like Chuck Norris or Van Damme.  It al...