Expelled Grey Matter

While the PG-13 rating being added to assuage parents who thought the PG envelope was being pushed too far there was another rating controversy in the 1980s.  The X rating, which was originally supposed to classify movies as having subjects that were for adults only and thus should only be viewed by those over 18, was never copyrighted by the MPAA.  Regional ratings boards had to come up with their own for movies that weren't passed through the MPAA, as G, PG and R were all the property of the private censorship organization.  X slipped through somehow and, after films like Deep Throat managed to become mainstream, it was soon associated with pornographic material. That meant in most places in the United States a mainstream theater was not going to touch something with an X rating, especially once local lawmakers got involved.  There was a huge difference between a film like Midnight Cowboy and Pink Flamingos , but by the end of the 1970s it would have been illegal t...

The early 1990s was a thrilling time to be watching movies.  Granted, out of boredom and not wanting to sit around looking at four walls all day I spent way too much time going to movies every weekend and saw lots of trash.  Happily, that trash usually only cost me $3.00 a pop, since I largely stuck to matinees and midnight showings.  Even adjusting for inflation, where discount showings today are ridiculous amounts, this was a bargain.  It wasn't the price that made the difference, however; it was that the indie movie was king. There were blockbusters, and they were often lots of fun, but these were a handful of films meant for a certain time of year and was generally where the studio did blow a good portion of their money.  This left a lot of room throughout that time period for smaller films which typically were the ones that made the profit or could end up being the big surprise that broke a new director to the public.  It got to be where many of these ...

Films like Frogs and Squirm quickly went from the big screen to the small one, populating late night movies and Saturday morning science fiction programs - in heavily edited versions, of course - during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.  It was guaranteed along with Godzilla and Universal monster films that all the various knockoffs of The Birds would get some play, especially if The Birds was out of the budget for a lot of independent stations.  It wasn't too hard to cut out an extra bit of gore, language and sex to get these films - which didn't always rely on all that any way - to a state where parents wouldn't scream about their kids watching them.  In most cases, due to environmental disasters of the time dealing with the fact that everyone just seemed to be dumping their waste products, both organic and inorganic, in every river, lake and forest they pleased, many of these films had an environmental cause of their premise.  Other times it was just becau...

The nature gone wild films never changed much since The Birds.  They just took the Jaws route, which means, same plot, different creature.  Some event, often triggered by man's hubris, causes nature to turn en masse against humanity.  Day of the Animals just went for it, since by the 1970s it didn't make much sense just to stick with the birds and the bees, especially after Night of the Lepus, but most of these features focused on one group of animals, often affected by toxic waste or radiation if they bothered to explain it at all.    As the genre dragged on it got sillier.  More and more it got to either creatures that aren't too frightening, or ones that are easy to flee from.  Squirm , to its credit, had so many worms coming out the ground and attacking that it made some kind of sense, but slugs are really not something someone needs to worry about unless they're stupid enough to eat one raw.  Even in mutant carnivorous form there is the...

We may now know Kurt Russell as an action hero - or often anti-hero -  largely from such movies as Big Trouble in Little China and Death Proof .  Before Escape from New York , however, Russell had worked on a number of Disney comedies and had starred in another John Carpenter film:  Elvis, a television movie about the then-recently-deceased rock and roll singer.  The studios didn't really see Russell as a good fit for the role of Snake Plissken, although Carpenter and Russell sure did, and audiences had no problem with it.  Though Carpenter's highest budget film to date it was still quite a bit less than the average action blockbuster of the time, but  Escape from New York continued the trend of Carpenter's movies turning a major profit. By 1988 the crime rate in the United States has risen to such a level that the island of Manhattan, at the time one of the most crime-ridden parts of the U.S., is turned into a maximum security prison.  Bridges and wa...

We may not have had drive-ins in the 1990s like previous generations did, but we certainly had video stores.  Often many of the direct-to-video movies that popped up from the mid-1980s onward was mediocre sequel material, soft-core comedies and suspense films and horror films that barely had enough budget to go out and buy Halloween masks for the monsters.  Still, there were those movies that were heirs to the drive-in, and even some that should have had their chance to play on a the big screen. Highway to Hell was written by Brian Helgeland, who has a decent history of writing credits as well as some director credits - which unfortunately tend to be stuff like A Knight's Tale  and The Order , which is not necessarily what one looks for on a resumé.  The former does have some of the quirky style one would expect after watching Highway to Hell , but this particular movie is unique out of everything that Helgeland has done.  It's also unique for Dutch director Ate...

Authors can often become rather protective of their stories.  Some, like Stephen King, have learned (at least after the can of worms he opened with Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining ) to just let it go.  Some, like Michael Crichton, just had a knack for doing both books and movies.  Others, however, got frustrated enough that they just decided to handle things themselves. This was the case with Clive Barker, who had seen two of his stories, Rawhead Rex and Underworld , turned into films that he personally did not like.  Besides writing Barker also worked in theater, but knew nothing about how to make a film.  Still, he decided to adapt his novella The Hellbound Heart for the screen, using friends and crew he worked with on stage, and hoping that something satisfactory came of it.  Thus, we have Barker's cinematic debut, Hellraiser.  Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Claire Higgins) come into possession of his mother's home.  Despi...

The X-Men franchise is one series of movies that amazingly survived what seemed like a concerted effort to destroy it.  Between sabotaging the goodwill built up by the first two movies with the mess that was X-Men: The Last Stand and following it up with an even worse film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine , there seemed to be little to no reason to even continue paying attention and, I'll admit, I didn't.  When X-Men: First Class  dropped I had long since tapped out.  I didn't even initially stick around for Origins, and didn't see another X-Men film until X-Men: Days of Future Passed . It was a shame, since First Class was actually good, but underperformed due to how bad the preceding movies were and terrible advertising.  In all honesty, though The Wolverine  cost $120 million to make, I don't even remember trailers for it.  I know it didn't do well in the U.S., but made most of its money back on the overseas market.  The only reason I later found out...

It is probably not much of stretch to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis, despite his success as a low-budget exploitation film maker, would have been largely forgotten by the 1980s if not for director Frank Henenlotter and film buff Jimmy Maslon.  The two of them began pretty much a campaign to save Lewis's work, making sure that such movies and Blood Feast , 2000 Maniacs! , She-Devils on Wheels and much, much more didn't rot away like so much cinematic history has. As for Lewis, he had quit making films in 1972 after The Gore-Gore Girls .    He knew how to make drive-in fair for the 1960s and make a profit off of it, but times were changing and Lewis was getting older.  Over the years he sold his interest in the movies he made and, always being an advertising man at heart, made a career in direct mail marketing - largely in being paid by large companies to show them how to do it.  So, while watching any of his films, just remember he is pretty much responsib...

Fouke, Arkansas had just over 500 residents in the early 1970s.  Largely a farming community, it is in an area of the state not far from the borders with Texas and Louisiana.  One of the reasons it is prime farm land is because a good deal of the area is made up of creeks and other wetlands that ultimately drain into the Sulphur River, which itself is part of the larger system of rivers that contributes to the Mississippi.  It's a long-occupied region of the United States, first by the native Caddo tribes and later by European families.  It is similar to many other rural communities in that part of the country.  Its position on Highway 71 does not lend to it being a major destination, but, as it says in The Legend of Boggy Creek , one of those places that one most likely doesn't even know they ever drove through.  It would have remained that way if not for Charles B. Pierce, a television producer, children's show host and weatherman who heard about a bigfoo...

It seems that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having become the monster it is, has slowly become a Lovecraftian nightmare.  Its tentacles are reaching out and grabbing every Marvel property that came before it - suspiciously ignoring Roger Corman's version of The Fantastic 4  - but still reaching further and further back.  So far both pre-MCU Spider-Man franchises have been annexed as well, at least in an alternate universe, the original X-Men series.  Though he didn't show his face Blade has also recently popped up, and a new movie featuring the character is planned for release in 2023.  It is almost guaranteed that the original trilogy of Blade movies will not be canon to the MCU.  In a weird way they are canon to the television show What We Do in the Shadows , but the problem with the original Blade films is two-fold: Wesley Snipes's often erratic behavior on set - as well as his age at this point - and the fact that the MCU is still scared to just go for...

Lamberto Bava may have had a famous father, but he still came up through the ranks of Italian cinema doing work on scripts and as part of the crew.  He also helped direct films, even though that didn't necessarily mean his name would be on them.  He worked not only his father's films but also with other directors such as Ruggero Deodato and Dario Argento in the late 1970s.   By 1980 he was ready to fly the nest.  Fly he did, all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana, inspired by a newspaper clipping of a strange murder case.  Producer Pupi Avati offered Bava the privilege of making his first solo film and, although I typically find a lot of Lamberto Bava's films sloppy and poorly paced, Macabre is a good early effort where he concentrated on the story as well as on developing his own style rather than trying to imitate Argento.  Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is a New Orleans housewife who has been renting a room in a boarding house for the purpose of having...

Lamberto Bava had some big shoes to fill and, honestly, never had quite the talent his father did.  He did manage one cult horror masterpiece with Demons , which featured a theater, and then an entire city, being possessed by the minions of hell.  It had inventive kill scenes, lots of blood and a great heavy metal soundtrack.  It was the type of movie that really can only be done once.  Unfortunately, Bava and co-writer and producer Dario Argento decided to give it a second try.  This time a number of people are going about their business in a high-rise apartment building.  Sally Day (Carolina Cataldi-Tassoni) is celebrating her birthday by treating her guests like garbage and moping in her room.  George (David Edwin Knight) and his pregnant wife Hannah (Nancy Brilli) are settling in for the night before George takes his physics exam.  Mary (Virginia Bryant) is servicing a client (Michele Mirabella), and Tommy (Marco Vivio) has been left at home w...