Expelled Grey Matter

Re-Animator and From Beyond have become cult classics, but they were a means to an end for director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna.  While they certainly enjoyed making them and were in no way embarrassed by them - Re-Animator was something Gordon had been trying to get made for a long time - they were meant, like many independent films, to get the notice of larger studios.  Their gambit worked, and no less than Disney hired them to make a blockbuster family film, which turned out to be Honey, I Shrunk the Kids .  Gordon and Yuzna wrote the script, and Gordon was set to direct.  Unfortunately, while scouting locations in Mexico, Gordon took ill.  With Gordon unable to fulfill his directing role Yuzna was fired as well. This was Brian Yuzna's first, and only, attempt at working for a big studio.  Disgusted with the treatment he continued to work on another project he had been developing called The Men , in which women suddenly realize that every ma...

The name of the movie is the least expensive, and possibly most important, part of the marketing process.  Take John Carter , for instance.  The movie should have been called A Princess of Mars , a title that is not that well-known outside of science fiction circles, but one that a lot of casual readers would know even if they never delved into Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series.  However, some executive decided that guys - keep in mind, the demographic most likely to have read and be familiar with the series - would not see a movie with the world "princess" in it, especially from Disney.  Therefore, the movie was going to be John Carter of Mars , a confusing title due to that being the last book in the series that Burroughs wrote (and more of a coda than an actual novel).  However, no one has apparently ever heard of women being science fiction fans, so the next thing was to get rid of the "of Mars" part so it wouldn't alienate the female demographic and...

One of the most difficult things to do is to come up with anything new with the old-school monsters, particularly vampires.  Every few decades someone does, whether it be sexually ambiguous depressed bloodsuckers from Anne Rice, action films like  Blade   or  Underworld   or even another attempt to update  Dracula .  Whenever something new does come out just about everyone tries to copy it.  Vampires always seem to come back because they often represent something both alluring and frightening for everyone.  For women it's a kind of forbidden romance, for men it's a dream of the power one would have with immortal life. Though it has developed its own cult following  Subspecies  has long been an outlier, even though Ted Nicolaou's tale of the evil vampire Radu (Anders Hove) and the efforts to do away with him has endured to the point where a prequel is scheduled for release in 2023.  They have all been directed, and many written,...

Finally, after 36 years, the Phantasm series came to an end.  This is the point where everything is finally explained, from the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) to the dwarfs to the gravediggers, and why Earth of all places.  Why did Michael (A. Michael Baldwin) have a gold sphere in his head and why did the Tall Man try to make him one of his kind?  Is Jody (Bill Thornbury) good or evil, or neither - just a tool of the Tall Man?  Will Reggie (Reggie Bannister) ever get laid?  Well, all will now be revealed. Just kidding.  It is a Phantasm film, after all. At the end of Phantasm IV: Oblivion , Reggie and Michael blow up a hearse, taking the Tall Man with it.  However, another iteration appears through the transport forks and, with Jody's help, cuts the sphere from Michael's head, leaving him to die.  Some time later Reggie is wandering the desert and, after retrieving his Hemi Cuda from a thief, finds himself pursued by two of the sentinel spheres.  J...

A Quiet Place  was both a great modern take on the alien invasion genre as well as an interesting variation on survival horror.  Alien creatures - animals, not intelligent beings - are brought to Earth on asteroid fragments and hunt by sound.  The few human survivors must live in absolute silence in order to survive.  One family does the dumbest thing they can think of: they have a baby, quite possibly one of the loudest and most uncontrollable things on the planet.  A lot of people questioned this part of the plot but I am quite aware that people are truly this stupid. The difference between A Quiet Place and the movies that influenced it is that it stopped right at the point that ushers in the big finale.  Regan Abbott (Millicent Simmonds) experiences pain in her cochlear implant whenever the creatures make sounds and figures out that running the signal from her transmission device through an amplifier stuns the creatures and causes them to scream, thus m...

Fangoria was pretty much the place to go to prior to the internet to find out what was going on in the world of horror.  It had behind-the-scenes photos, interviews, previews of upcoming movies and just about anything fans of horror films could want.  It is no surprise that at some point they decided that maybe they could try their hand at making movies themselves and formed a movie studio. It's also not surprising that they only made three films.  While all three movies had various horror luminaries playing roles there was only one movie that truly stood out, and that was Mindwarp .  The big selling point was they got both Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm.  While it was definitely not Ash vs. the Tall Man, and the two really didn't share much screen time, just seeing those names on a videotape box was enough to pique most fans' curiosity.  In 2037 the surface of the Earth is supposedly unlivable due to both manmade and natural disasters.  Judy (Marta M...

After Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead , Don Coscarelli made it clear if there was ever another Phantasm film then it would be strictly to earn money.  To his credit he never pretended there was some great story arc behind the films.  The first was made as a make-or-break film to determine if he would continue pursuing his dreams of making movies, second was funded by Universal and the third was to take advantage of the Angeles Abbey in Compton, California as a shooting location.  The fourth was no different, in this case getting everyone back together after the discovery of lost footage from the original Phantasm .   Being a fan of the series I had rented this when it first came out.  Unlike the previous sequel it didn't even get a limited theatrical or roadshow release, but went straight to video.  I expected it to be quite low budget, but my memories of the film were little current story and a lot of flashbacks using the footage from Phantasm .  ...

The Dark Phoenix story was supposed to be the center of the conclusion of the original X-Men trilogy.  Famously, X-Men: The Last Stand turned out to be a grand mess, with Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two X-Men films, leaving the third movie to direct Superman Returns .  Ultimately it was directed by Brett Ratner, after Matthew Vaughn had to bow out for personal reasons.  While there were some redeeming partsthe movie spent a good portion of its time killing off characters that had not been properly developed in the first two movies for dramatic effect, while having Jean Grey just walk around and cause general mayhem for Magneto until she was stopped by Wolverine.  The entire timeline was reset by X-Men: Days of Future Past when Singer returned to direct after Vaughn's X-Men: First Class helped revitalize the series.  Despite being one of the best films in the series, it lead into the disappointing X-Men: Apocalypse , in which we are introduced to ...

For a long while I had finally found a humor site that I actually enjoyed.  It originally got my attention because, as a kid, I often read issues of Cracked while my parents went grocery shopping.  Never asked them to buy me a copy of Cracked or Mad  because of the adult content, but definitely enjoyed the rebelliousness of looking at it.  So, when Cracked.com showed up I took to it immediately.  There were Photoshop contests (of which I am completely unskilled and never entered), but also a lot of articles and interesting top 10 lists with something that's missing from the current version of the site: research. The reason it was so good at the time was because of the writers, one of whom was Jason Pargin, aka David Wong.  Another was John Cheese, and if some of his articles are still up about how he grew up they are definitely worth reading, especially to help get one's mind out of making bad money decisions.  I liked all the other writers as well as ...

Don Coscarelli has never been the most prolific director, even when it comes to his big franchise.  Phantasm was released in 1978 while its sequel, which existed largely because Universal wanted to make some money off of the modern horror craze, made it to the screen 10 years later.  Phantasm II , though it successfully continued the story as well as proved what Coscarelli could do when given the right budget, wasn't the hit they were hoping for.  Still, Universal did keep the door open, letting Coscarelli know that if he was to ever make another Phantasm film that they would distribute it.  For that matter the first film was never supposed to have a sequel.  What happened in it happened, whether audiences (or even the director or actors) understood it or not.  It did its job which was to make Don Coscarelli a decent amount of money after two failed comedies and justify him continuing in the movie business.  It also paid for The Beastmaster , which he...

The first Blade , directed by Stephen Norrington, has become a minor cult hit despite the fact it is a rather mediocre film with terrible special effects.  Blade II , on the other, actually gave the series a reason to exist, with Guillermo del Toro's direction overcoming David S. Goyer's questionable writing and plotting.  Wesley Snipes loved playing the character, Blade was now a bona fide superhero franchise and, with X-Men and Spider-Man joining in, it looked like things were just going to continue to get better as Marvel began to dominate the flashy new superhero trend.  Goyer wanted del Toro to direct the third installment, but his work on the second got him a project he really wanted: Hellboy .  Norrington took one look at Goyer's script for Blade: Trinity  and decided he wasn't going to return either.  That left Goyer, whose only previous directing credit had been the small 2002 drama Zig Zag , to suddenly helm the new movie.  Unfortunately, thi...

There is a misconception that, because of his appearance and many of the dark subjects in his movies, Tim Burton was promoting goth culture.  While it is true that he contributed to it, sometimes unwittingly, when it comes to the '80s subculture that sprang from dressing in black and listening to Bauhaus, he often openly mocked it.  Beetlejuice is a prime example because, although Winona Ryder's character is one of the heroes, she is also overly dressed even for most goth kids at the time and cartoonishly depressed.  Often the goths were just outsiders that thought the music as the aesthetic were cool, which in some ways I'm sure Burton did at a younger age before he got stuck being expected to make a certain kind of movie over and over again. Rather than following a trend the aesthetic, and this was true for a lot of goths I knew, was less Vampira and more Dr. Caligari or, even more often, an update of '30s Universal and '60s Hammer styles.  There were dark theme...

Nicholas Cage always has something he has to pay off so it's guaranteed that he's going to show up in another movie at some point.  Whether there is any quality to that movie is usually the question, since he has done almost as many paycheck films as Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer.  Some of those have been great despite themselves, even if I may be one of the few fans of Drive Angry .   He's still a good actor so he is able to at least bring something to even the most trite film he contributes to.  I wouldn't say Mandy  is trite, but Cage does bring some emotional heft that is needed.  After he loses the titular Mandy his breakdown scene is amazingly realistic.  To some it may be typical crazy Cage acting - and, in fact, there is plenty of that in Mandy  - but here one can really experience how the character, Red, feels about losing the love of his life.  At that point director Panos Cosmatos stops using all his little color trick...