Expelled Grey Matter

I have been a Stephen King fan for a long time.  However, I discovered him during the 1980s when he was writing epics like The Stand and It .  Of course I knew of the other books before those, and I think I started my King obsession with Pet Sematary , which is still one of my favorite of his earlier, pulp-style horror novels.  I had seen many of the movies based on the older books, but strangely did not dive into most of his '70s output until I was an adult.  An exception to that was The Dead Zone . I don't remember when I first read it, but it has always been one of my favorites of that classic first run of King novels.  Carrie had a certain young rebel style, while 'Salem's Lot was a great horror tale, but The Dead Zone had a complexity to it that foreshadowed many of his later books.  It was as if King had something to prove at this point when it came to writing outside of straight horror.  Director David Cronenberg appears to have approached the m...

Gimmicks have been around as long as movies have.  There was always a fight to get people to come out to see a film, and 3-D was one of the earliest innovations, being developed in the early 1920s.  It was primitive and headache-inducing, but it was an innovation.  Despite that the usual way of getting butts in the seats - showing as much sex and violence as possible - has always won out.  That hasn't stopped studios from trying it again every few years. In the 1950s movie studios began to feel the pinch from a completely new medium: television.  Television had started to make small steps and a bit of an impact, particularly in Germany and the UK, in the 1930s, but it wasn't until the late 1940s that it started to really catch on in the U.S.A.  Early televisions were expensive and not known for great quality, but that changed going into the 1950s and, faced with the idea that more Americans might just want to so save a few bucks and sit at home around the t...

Ever since Christopher Nolan's Dark Night trilogy it seems like every few years we get a new Batman with a new actor in the role.  Typically it's because the previous director screwed it up so badly that, by the time everyone gets around to making the next movie no one involved with the previous movie feels like bothering.  At least that appears to be what happened to Ben Affleck, who was set to reprise his role as the caped crusader and even direct the next Batman film.  He even filmed a new coda to Zach Snyder's Justice League to kind of give a hint to where the story would have gone if Joss Whedon hadn't derailed the series.   A number of factors led to Affleck departing, both as star and director, and Matt Reeves taking over behind the camera.  Though he liked the script that Affleck had planned to film he decided to write his own and completely remove The Batman  from the D.C. Cinematic Universe films before it.  That meant completely avoidi...

Adding sound to movies wasn't the only innovation in the 1930s.  While the majority of movies were in black and white hand-tinting and other methods of providing color to movies had been around almost from the beginning, going all the way back to George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon .  It was something directors and film companies could do if they wanted, but it was a time-consuming process.  That started to change with the advent of two-strip Technicolor.  Unlike three-strip - which would be used in major movie productions starting later in the decade - the two-strip technique involved combining blue/green and orange/red so that it would give the illusion of numerous colors.  It is a bit strange to modern eyes, as even watching a movie as old as Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz had the three-strip method.  In many ways the two-strip process feels barely a step above black and white. This means it does lend a certain style to to the movies it was used i...

Despite having a number of flaws, Pumpkinhead has managed to become a minor cult film.  A lot of it had to do with the great creature design, designed by Stan Winston's effects company, as well as a creepy, atmospheric directing style by Winston himself.  The story may be thin and many of the main characters unmemorable, but the film sticks with the viewer afterward. Winston directed another movie - a disastrous flop called A Gnome Named Gnorm  - before returning to effects work when not occasionally making music videos.  Ed Harley, the character Lance Henriksen played in the first movie, died at the end of Pumpkinhead , having committed suicide in order to stop Pumpkinhead's rampage.  Pretty much Stan Winston made what should have been a one-off film without much room for a sequel, even if there were hints that Harley's soul may be used to power Pumpkinhead the next time it is called upon. That fact never seems to keep studios from figuring out a way of making...

Stan Winston was one of the major special effects artists in Hollywood.  He provided the creature designs and effects work for The Thing , The Terminator, the first two Jurassic Park films and, shortly before his death, Iron Man .  One of the things he most wanted to do at some point in his career was move from just doing the effects to directing, and that opportunity arose with the script for Pumpkinhead .  He was asked to create the creature design, but instead asked to direct it. As a result, and largely due to Winston knowing what effects could be done on a meagre budget, Winston delivered what has since become a cult hit.  A monster film rather than a straight horror film, Pumpkinhead was lambasted by critics at the time but eventually became a bit more revered for being able to successfully bring such a story to the screen under what would be challenging circumstances for most directors.  In this case he also knew the best thing that he could do is step ba...

After releasing what are consider the one of the best and one of the worst superhero films ever made Sam Raimi was ready to take the series in a new direction.  First, he wanted to make up for the problems in Spider-Man 3 , but also introduce new villains and lay out a completely new track for Peter Parker.  After all, by the end of Spider-Man 3 Harry Osborne has been redeemed through self-sacrifice, Mary Jane and Peter are together again and, by letting the Sandman go, Peter has learned to see beyond absolutes of good and evil.  For all its faults it still largely wrapped up the beginning of Peter's journey. Raimi wanted Curt Conners, played by Dylan Baker in a small role as Peter's physics professor, to finally morph into his role as the Lizard, one of the major villains from the comics.  Sony, however, wanted to feature the Vulture, and had plenty of notes for Raimi.  While Raimi's script, and some of the tangents it took, did have a lot to do with why Spider...

Dead Alive, aka Braindead , is a wonderful movie.  Peter Jackson manages to mix horror and humor quite well and ended up making one of the goriest movies ever.  Obviously influenced somewhat by Evil Dead II   as well as Return of the Living Dead  he made something that no one has yet been able to equal. Unfortunately, every few years or so a young filmmaker or screenwriter sees Dead Alive and tries.  Too many of those are Canadian or American, and I say this because Dead Alive is rife with both dry and absurd New Zealand humor.  When it gets to North America it seems too many would-be imitators see some of the gross-out humor and the effects and think that they can do the same thing.  Unfortunately, we live in a time where a good portion of Hollywood has barely any grip on humor. So we get Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse , which tries to do the Dead Alive formula, but adds a  big dollop of Superbad on top.  At its heart it is not a bad ...

Possibly the real Amityville curse is that, after over four decades, no one has figured out how to make a good movie based on the source material.  True or not, one would think that, after years of classic haunted house movies, one of the Amityville films would at least figure out the formula.  The Amityville Horror   had its moments, but was largely and overlong tedious slog, while the less said about the remake the better.  Amityville II: The Possession ruined a perfectly good b-grade horror film by tacking on more tedious nonsense, while the Amityville 3-D undercut a decent haunted house story with a silly gimmick.  That brings us to the early 2010s.  Despite this movie coming out in 2017 it was largely conceived in 2012, which is probably the reason Bella Thorne spends most of it looking like a stoned mime.  The filming was done in 2015, with a ton of reshoots in 2016, but it is obvious that no one thought to check and see if teenagers had change...

Spider-Man 2 is often mentioned when talking about the best superhero film of all time.  I find it hard to disagree that it has its place, but X2: X-Men United is at least its equal, if not its superior.  Both series unfortunately suffered the same fate, but perhaps these days Spider-Man 2 has the edge for most people because of not having to justify praising a movie Bryan Singer directed.  That said, he is just one small part of what makes this movie so good.  To ignore a plethora of fine performances, as well as a story that continues and manages to surpass he original, would be folly. The original X-Men   introduced the Charles Xavier School for the Gifted and the conflict between its namesake (Patrick Stewart) and Eric Lehnsherr (Ian McKellan).  It also introduced us to the world of the X-Men, where Mutants are randomly evolving and different governments around the world are trying to deal with them.  In the United States there have been measures ...

Guillermo del Toro is one of the few recognizable auteur directors in modern cinema.  He constantly straddles the line between art and mainstream with a number of his films being considered genre classics and often achieving cult status even if they don't always do too well in the theater.  In fact, that seems to be part of del Toro's biggest problem.  Movies like Pacific Rim often become highly regarded well after their initial theatrical release, thus making it appear as if a big-budget movie with del Toro is a gamble. Gamble or not, he's an excellent director, managing to win an Oscar with something as strange as The Shape of Water and making one of the best dark fantasy movies of all time with Pan's Labyrinth, despite being in Spanish and taking place in a part of European history few Americans know about.  Of course, the movie was made for a Spanish audience, but the themes of overcoming brutality and childhood trauma by slipping into a fantasy world were univer...