Expelled Grey Matter

2001: A Space Odyssey evolved from Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel".  It was fleshed out quite a bit in partnership with director Stanley Kubrick to bring the classic movie to the screen.  There were some changes along the way, largely the fact that the novel takes place with Discovery going to Saturn and the Monolith that Dave Bowman enters being located on the moon of Iapetus.  It was 1968, so as grand as 2001 's effects were, animating the ringed planet was going to be far beyond the abilities of Kubrick's effects crew.  So, instead, the Monolith is found to be orbiting Jupiter.  In 1982 Clarke published a sequel to the original novel called 2010: Odyssey Two and, to fit the more famous narrative of the movie, relocated Discovery 's location to between Jupiter and Io, with the Monolith still orbiting further out.  While it sought to explain a bit about what happened to Bowman, last seen as a giant fetus looking down upon the Earth after being

Occasionally something from the dark recesses of my memories will bubble up when I watch an old film.  With Tourist Trap it is the opening, where a metal pipe impales a guy and blood starts dripping out the back.  I never saw the rest of the movie past that point and couldn't remember if it was Tourist Trap or Funhouse .  So, since I'm reviewing this film, that mystery is finally solved. The bigger mystery with Tourist Trap  is what exactly is going on the entire movie.  The killer has telekinetic powers and an obsession with mannequins and wax sculptures, and unfortunately it isn't too hard to figure out the reveal, but writer and director David Schmoeller obviously took a page from his time with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Luis Buñuel and often comes up with scenes that, though they look good, simply don't make much sense.  It is pretty much a template for the modern slasher - closer to Friday the 13th than it is to Halloween  - but leaves one to wonder what type of ergo

The same year The Mutations  came out, 1974, was also the year that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit the theaters.  The latter was a prime example of inventive indie film making, marking a change in how horror films were made and helping to open up a whole new era.  Though not made by any of the big British studios, such as Hammer or Amicus, The Mutations represented the same type of b-level horror film the British had been churning out since the 1950s.  At first quite innovative itself, even Hammer was fighting to get people interested in their movies at the time. 1974 was also the year that Doctor Who transitioned from the Third Doctor, played by John Pertwee, to the Fourth.  Tom Baker, who would play the new incarnation as well as be the longest tenured actor in the role, had some roles that he could be proud of prior to his most famous.  Chiefly that would be the evil wizard Koura in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad , doing the seemingly impossible and being as memorable as Ray Harryha

While his Tarzan novels are more well-known - and have even fallen into favor with scholars as actual literature rather than the pulp adventure stories they were meant to be - when I think of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I think of Barsoom.  Sure, it may be the epitome of silliness to many modern readers: a musclebound protagonist, the beautiful princess he must rescue and the savage green alien our hero befriends.  The novels may have been quite progressive for their time - Dejah Thoris, though John Carter had to rescue her repeatedly, could definitely hold her own in a fight - but A Princess of Mars is over a century old.  Except for material published posthumously the series largely came to a close prior to World War II.  As can be expected with a series of stories that old, especially one taking place on Mars, it doesn't translate well today.  In fact, despite the fact that the Barsoom series (of which John Carter was only the protagonist in a handful) influenced everything from Flash

Stuart Gordon's early movies were adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft stories, with a lot of help from scriptwriter Dennis Paoli.  The Re-Animator and From Beyond featured amazing special effects when considering how low the budgets were, and both made Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton into cult superstars.  The same happened eventually happened to Gordon himself.  If there was one thing his first two feature films made clear it was that Gordon and Paoli weren't afraid to push boundaries.  The Re-Animator was one of the early movies to get an unrated director's cut released on video, as the cinematic version had to be cut down significantly before it hit the theaters, much of it involving infamous scenes involving a naked Crampton and lecherous severed head.  From Beyond upped the gooey effects as well as the sex and, despite a limited cinematic release, became a cult hit on video.  Thus Gordon's eventual work for producer Charles Band, and Band's Full Moon Studios, wa

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is one of the most telling examples of Robert Browning's quote about best laid plans.  After Spider-Man 3 underperformed with both critics and audiences Sam Raimi wanted to produce a fourth movie that would make up for it.  What Sony wanted, unfortunately, was to stick their noses into his business and pretty much end up messing Spider-Man 4 up as bad, or maybe even worse.  Their solution when Raimi left was to reboot the whole thing using a different Spiderverse, and so Tobey Maguire was out and Andrew Garfield was in for The Amazing Spider-Man .  While the movie did a good job despite going over well-worn territory it did have some problems.  A good portion of The Amazing Spider-Man was about Peter Parker accepting his powers and learning to live with them.  The romance with Gwen Stacey was there, but unlike the original trilogy it wasn't to make her a damsel in distress or cause dramatic tension outside of Parker being concerned about his lifestyle

One would think Don Coscarelli would have had a bigger, more recognizable career.  He is, after all, the man behind Phantasm , one of the most recognizable horror films of the 1970s.  While kind of losing its way in the fourth installment - due to the usual budget issues preventing Coscarelli from pursuing the story like he wanted - it produced two successful sequels.  The original also led to The Beastmaster  which, although hated by André Norton fans for taking the rights to her book and then making the movie something totally different, became a big hit on cable in the early 1980s.  It's cheap, b-rate sword and sorcery, but it's still better than a lot of other contemporary movies of its type.   Despite all this and a history of good movies (many of which, unfortunately, are difficult to find either streaming or on physical media), Coscarelli often found himself struggling to get the  Phantasm movies made.  So, when he decided to make a screen adaptation of Joe R. Lansdales

Often the best type of horror and science fiction reflects the fears of the people at the time it was made.  It's something one quickly realizes when watching the original The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Darkside .  In the former there are many stories about humans becoming obsolete, education and free thought being abolished and the hidden agendas of those who seem to be here to help us.  The show did come at a time when computers were becoming slowly integrated into society, but also at a time when the seemingly faceless minions of communism seemed to be poised to take over the world.  The latter had many episodes dealing with fears of modern technology and quite a number where people who were not well-regarded - like debt collectors or arrogant corporate executives - received their comeuppance.  This is not surprising from a decade where most of the first half suffered one of the worst recessions of all time, but which also experienced a technological boom. C.H.U.D. was made

X-Men pioneered the modern superhero film.  Unfortunately, it also pioneered something that has come up way too many times in the genre: the disappointing third installment.  Writers change, directors change, actors start getting full of themselves and make demands that sabotage the third outing, or sometimes everything should work.  Should being the big word, as studio interference or the inability to say no to a director can throw things off track rather quickly. While X-Men  didn't have to deal with any of the diva issues - Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry are all professionals, after all - it did have to deal with Bryan Singer, who did have a direction in which he wanted the whole Dark Phoenix storyline to go, being given the chance to direct Superman Returns , which was supposed to revitalize that series by giving audiences a true sequel to Superman 2.  It didn't, and it pretty much killed off Superman as a movie franchise until Man of Steel . 

The 'Burbs is kind of a strange film in Tom Hanks's career.  This came out at a time when he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the comedy Big , and he was leaving his more juvenile films such as Bachelor Party behind and quickly becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.  The 'Burbs ,  hammered out during a writers' strike, finds Hanks almost regressing to playing the sarcastic character he had in many of his previous comedies.  Though presented as another Tom Hanks comedy this one was directed by Joe Dante, who at that point was most well-known for Gremlins .  Many of his past movies, whether horror or science fiction, had an element of dark comedy, but this was the first time Dante decided to go with a script that flipped that around.  Written by Dana Olsen and heavily improvised by members of the cast, the movie was a box office hit but was hated by critics when it first arrived in theaters.   Ray Peterson (Hanks) is on vacation from his job.  His wife

It seems like Ryan Reynolds has found a favorite director in Shawn Levy.  It has recently been announced that there will finally be a Deadpool 3 , and that Levy, who directed Reynolds in Free Guy as well as this movie, will be behind the camera.  It's good news because the two seem to work well together, but it also seems like they may work a bit too well together in some cases.  Reynolds has taken to approaching many of his recent roles as if he was playing Wade Wilson, thinking that what his audiences want to see are varying degrees of the Merc with a Mouth.  Perhaps it was because Free Guy kind of forced Reynolds a bit out of the mold that it seemed fresh, but with The Adam Project Levy seems to have given his star freer reign and the writers seem to have indulged him as well. What they also seem to have done is tried, as hard as possible, to add a whole lot of family drama to the proceedings.  Strange thing is, even though the emotional manipulation is obvious from the beginni

Let a series go on long enough and, chances are, we'll get an "adorable" tyke added to the cast to liven things up.  Sometimes it's just an inevitability due to the show or movie series itself, while other times it is just the fact that the writer has run out of ideas of what else to do.  The latter was the case of Shin'ichi Sekizawa, who had written, or co-written, almost all of the Godzilla films of the 1960s.  He had contributed his talent to other Toho monster films as well, but as Godzilla became more kid-friendly Sekizawa felt it was time to move on to other things.  Direct Jun Fukuda agreed with him.  Unfortunately, Toho did not, so Sekizawa gave Godzilla a family and then quickly went about trying to get out of his contract by violating it.    In  Son of Godzilla , we get just what the title suggests in the form of Minira ("Little Man" Machan), a pint-sized version of Godzilla that tries hard to live up to Dad's example.  Unsurprisingly Minir