Expelled Grey Matter

While his career featured a number of films in different genres - although he often returned to horror - Stuart Gordon is known for his H. P. Lovecraft adaptions.  It's almost the opposite of Roger Corman, known for his series of Edgar Allen Poe films in the 1960s.  In 1964 Corman made The Haunted Castle , a version of Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", and it was his only deviation between the two writers.  Gordon never made as many Lovecraft films as Corman did Poe, but he did something similar to change it up a bit. "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a rather simple story, like most of Poe's, involving a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition experiencing a number of tortures, leading to the titular device of a pendulum blade that slowly lowers towards its victim until they are sliced in half.  It's brief, and is in any case one of Poe's minor works, but it was adapted by Corman in 1961 with Vincent Price, John Kerr and Barbara Steele.  It...

For the longest time H. P. Lovecraft was treated as an also-ran to Edgar Allen Poe.  Since he was American, wrote horror stories and largely stuck with the short story format, the comparison was often made, although their stories and the men themselves couldn't be more different.  Poe dealt with tangible fear, often with narrators who were already unstable or who were suffering a great loss.  Lovecraft, on the other hand, often wrote about more intangible ideas, largely that of a universe indifferent to the beings that live in it, and horrors that could drive man mad at a glimpse. Understandably Poe was the better choice for translating to cinema.  While his stories were short and to the point directors like Roger Corman famously fleshed them out when adapting them.  Lovecraft often dealt with monsters, something that, outside of science fiction stories, often translated clumsily, and his monsters were barely even described in his own stories.  There was al...

It seemed for the longest time that Beavis and Butt-Head were best confined to '90s nostalgia.  While Mike Judge himself barely starts nudging into Generation X territory the show resonated most with my generation as most of us were not too far out of high school when it first appeared on MTV.  I admit I hated the idea of it at first until I actually watched it and realized that Judge's humor went way beyond to idiots laughing every time they heard something slightly risqué.  Instead there were so many subversive elements, and so much satire of the 1990s, that it went beyond crudely-drawn teenagers playing frog baseball.  Judge eventually went onto bigger things - the cult movies Office Space and Idiocracy , as well as the long-running Fox animated show King of the Hill  - but it was inevitable at some point the boys would be back.  In 2011 they returned for a season and, even though the magic was still there and the episodes were great, they were stuck wat...

Frank Henenlotter has never been the most prolific filmmaker.  I honestly don't know if that come down to budget or a habit of not using all his ideas at once.  I'm thinking it's a bit of both, since a good portion of his non-documentary career involves Basket Case and its sequels.  Still, there are some other movies that he has done that have had a pretty decent cult status as well. I had heard of Brain Damage for a long time, as it had been mentioned as being one of those disgusting little nasties with some scenes that took things too far.  Unfortunately, I confused it with Brain Dead , a movie starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton that, despite its two stars, is just plain horrible.  It's meant to be a comedy and, while watching it, I was waiting for something truly outrageous or gross to happen.  I figured out about halfway through that I had watched the wrong film, which is a reaction I would have had no matter what my intentions.  Brain Damage ,...

Basket Case is one of those movies that transcended everything the director wanted it to be.  We have it in the form that it is due being preserved by the Museum of Modern Art, although it is one of the grungiest horror films one will see.  Writer and director Frank Henenlotter really never thought anyone would see it, and never intended it to find a wide audience, as he was still learning his craft at the time and largely made it as an exploitation gore film along the lines of something Herschell Gordon Lewis would have done.  Despite this, Basket Case ended up up with two sequels and, when people finally did get to see it thanks to the video rental boom of the 1980s, a huge cult following.  It was made for grindhouse and drive-in theaters, but it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival of all places, where Rex Reed famously said the movie was sick - a tagline Henenlotter was happy to hang on it.   Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryk) checks into a grungy hotel...

Alfonso Cuarón is a director and writer that I can appreciate. It's not a new problem with movies; in fact, going all the way back into the 1950s there was always a character - more often than not female, but it could also be a teenage male - whose sole purpose to be there so the main character could explain everything.  Since that type of trope is considered rather sexist now an even worse method has come along: having one of the characters pretty much lay everything out in a speech, sometimes even bafflingly spoken directly to the camera. This type of exposition is never needed.   Night of the Living Dead is famous for providing some speculation and background through its newscasts, but a probe bringing back a virus that brings the dead to life was always speculation, not fact.  It's completely abandoned as a reason from Dawn of the Dead forward.  The reason is because the why isn't important, but rather the action that's on screen.  What often doesn't n...

While Herschell Gordon Lewis was never an amazingly skilled director he did evolve beyond the crude style of Blood Feast and the handful of "nudie cuties" he did prior.  The improvement is quite evident in Two Thousand Maniacs! , one of two gore films he did after Blood Feast  became a drive-in hit.  With money from an Illinois theater owner he had a larger budget, the chance to actually scout a place to film and the ability to get willing extras other than just shocked bystanders wondering what was happening outside the hotel.  What also became apparent is that Lewis was willing to step in and do almost anything.  He had made the signature music of Blood Feast , and again did so with Two Thousand Maniacs! .  There was more of his strange organ music, but this time combined with a number of bluegrass songs ("Robert E. Lee Broke His Musket on His Knee", the movie's theme song, being the most memorable), performed by a band dubbed the Pleasant Valley Boys wi...

When approaching a Herschell Gordon Lewis film it is important to remember that, unlike other bad film makers like Ed Wood Jr. or Coleman Francis, Lewis had no pretentions or self-delusion about what he was doing.  He and his producer David Friedman were making trash films for the very reason that trash, if marketed well, could make a bigger profit than a big-budget Hollywood film.  Not just in the short term, either.  Blood Feast was still making the rounds of drive-in theaters long after Lewis had made his bundle, sold the rights and completely abandoned cinema to go into the business of mass marketing through the mail. Better directors than Gordon felt the same way about their product, selling it off and forgetting about it once times changed.  And, in fact, Blood Feast came about because times changed.  Lewis and Friedman made their first profits off of "nudie cuties," basically slapstick comedies that featured naked women or thinly-plotted features that too...

There are movies that I should be inclined to hate.  The entire Resident Evil series comes to mind.  Six movies, barely a plot line or any substance to any, but for some reason the majority of them work as empty entertainment.  Rarely are video game movies successful and, while we're not talking high-class cinema, somehow they work.   The first Venom   was the same way.  Critics hated it, audiences were lukewarm and I only watched it since I'm at the point where I'm watching the extraneous Marvel films and doing whatever I can to put off seeing Morbius .  But a strange thing happened; I liked it.  It was a big-budget b-movie, but Tom Hardy did a great job as Eddie Brock, the effects were good (so much better than Venom was in Spider-Man 3 ) and it worked as a good origin story.  Venom itself didn't appear until about halfway through the movie giving the audience time to get to know and care about Brock, something I didn't expect in what ...

Strange as it may seem the lesbian vampire genre has been with us since the dawn of modern vampire fiction itself  Though not stated in any outright way Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla , which heavily influenced Bram Stoker's later novel Dracula , had an unmistakable subtext.  Two females bonding in such a way, and the intimate manner in which sustenance is taken, did not go unnoticed by a number of writers and directors that wanted to push the envelope.  By the early 1970s most of those envelopes were little more than confetti, particularly by the time Hammer got in on it. Hammer, as usual, went for the exploitation aspects, as did Jess Franco in the still quite artsy Vampyros Lesbos .  Harry Kümel, on the other hand, decided to do away with the more lurid and prurient parts of the genre for Daughters of Darkness .  Rather than blood and nudity - even though there is a decent amount - he sought to make a film about abusive relationships that just happen to have les...

How a film is promoted is always just as important as the movie itself.  X-Men: First Class is a prime example.  The movie, directed by Matthew Vaughn, came out after two disappointing X-Men films: X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine .  The former had been the third chapter of the original trilogy and had failed to meet audience expectations, while the latter was a disaster on the scale that both Wolverine and Deadpool, a minor character in the movie, were soon rebooted. Part of that rebooting began with this movie.  Unfortunately, no one would be able to tell from the adds, which at the time showed a bunch of pretty young people taking on new and former roles, with promised younger versions of Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto.  Audiences would have had no idea this was initially an origin story for Magneto that evolved into an origin story for the X-Men as well, and that the bright, fresh young faces - shown walking around aimlessly on one o...

One of the major reasons I don't read comic books is because I really don't know where to start.  When there are only a few volumes that tell a story, like Watchmen , I am fine.  Long running sagas from the 1940s until the present with major and minor characters, numerous universes and multiple reboots are another thing.  I know that there are some major storylines that pop up, but I have no idea how one follows who is who and who did what without at some point just giving up.  Then again, my brain is full of deadwax matrices, catalog numbers and label variations for a century and a half of sound recording; it may be it just doesn't have room to shove more in. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is getting about as complicated as the comic books.  It's not just a movie series evolving directly from Iron Man  anymore.  Rather, it has grown to annex two different Spider-Man series and, in a roundabout way, the X-Men movies.  To make matters even more conf...