Expelled Grey Matter

Typically almost any series of films takes years to make.  The average time between the main Star Wars entries is three years.  While there are typically two or three Marvel films a year, sequels to the actual individual films are sometimes three to five years apart.  Imagine blowing through an entire trilogy of movies in the space of a year. The Street Fighter series did just that.  Toei studios had a sudden surprise hit, if a controversial one, with The Street Fighter   and the character Takuma Tsurugi, played by Shin'ichi "Sonny" Chiba and directed by Shigehiro Ozawa.  It was quickly followed by Return of the Street Fighter , and then this final entry, The Streetfighter's Last Revenge .  Meanwhile, another companion series, Sister Street Fighter , launched to cash in on the original, starring Etsuko Shihomi in the title role, with Chiba making a cameo.  Shihomi returns the favor in this film as a gangster's bodyguard that decides to switch sides.   The problem

The Street Fighter made Shi'nichi "Sonny" Chiba one of the biggest action stars in Japan.  Toei, the movie studio behind The Street Fighter  and its quick run of sequels, was desperate to get Chiba into any role they could in order to keep the money flowing.  In 1973 rival studio Toho had released Horror of the Wolf, based on the popular manga Wolf Guy by Kazumasa Harai.  Luckily for Toei Harai had written two different series of books, one with Akira Igunami as a teenager and the other as an adult.  Toho had the rights to the former, so Toei quickly grabbed the other. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi had never heard of the manga and had no desire to make a movie based on it.  However, orders were orders and, without even the budget to have Chiba change into a wolf, let alone a wolf guy, he went ahead and made the movie.  Somehow, years later, Wolf Guy became a cult hit in the United States. Akira Inugami (Chiba) is the last surviving member of a village of wolf people that w

Every now and then the trend is to make horror movies palatable to critics and those who, on the regular, like to refer to movies as "cinema".  It rarely works unless there is some other factor involved, like the race or gender of the director or the subtext of the film, which leads those same people who would trash any genre film rushing to promote it like it's some sort of revolutionary piece of art.  And, no, I'm not making any slights against Jordan Peel, since his movie are pretty much worth the praise no matter how much white guilt might be behind some of it.  What I have noticed is that a number of young American horror directors have begun to notice that Europe and Latin America have been generally doing it better than us for close to a decade.  Thankfully, unlike the trend in the 2000s of making inferior versions of Japanese horror movies, current filmmakers have begun latching onto the style while making their own original films.  Still, when it comes to a m

There is one reason, and one reason only, that Friday the 13th exists.  That is because Halloween , on an extremely low budget, made a ton of money.  It also helped further the career of John Carpenter as a director, but producer and director Sean S. Cunningham wasn't worried about that.  He was already a known for turning out cheap knockoffs and exploitation films, and most well-known at the time as the producer and co-writer of Wes Craven's debut film, The Last House on the Left .  Like most people earning money in that area of the industry he was doing just fine making decent profits off of small investments.   Thus, he knew what he was doing when he announced he was making a movie called Friday the 13th .  He had a logo - a three-dimensional title with glass breaking - but no script, no cast, not even a story.  He just had the confidence that if he announced that this movie was being made he would get money to do so, and he was right.  He eventually raised the 500 thousand

In 1981 a group of film students from Staten Island decided to make a movie about the Cropsey legend.  Although largely a story told around New York and New Jersey, it's one of the cornerstones of American urban legends, known to most as the "hook-hand" killer, although it went a lot further than an attack on two teenagers on lovers' lane.  He lived in the tunnels of the Seaview Hospital on Staten Island, New York and would capture children to take back and murder, among other things.  Supposedly an escaped mental patient, the story was partially based on Andre Rand, a janitor at the notorious Willowbrook State School.  He already had done time for sexual crimes against minors before being brought to trial for kidnaping and murder and, although the latter charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, the first has been enough to keep him incarcerated to this day. The more morbid parts of the legend were ripe for filming and, since Friday the 13th had grossed nearly 60

A lot is made now about how everyone is too sensitive and that art and expression are being censored due to the kneejerk reactions of a few people that happen to just shout louder than everyone else.  I see many posts about how things were better back in the 1980s when people weren't so concerned about stepping on toes and everyone was a lot more open.  I personally wonder if anyone who posts this actually ever lived through the 1980s. The first half of the 1980s saw a number of "concerned parents" organizations, supposedly grass roots, calling for censorship of the arts.  Part of this evolved from the "Satanic Panic", as a number of fundamentalist preachers drummed up the idea of Satanic cults existing on the fringes of America, sexually abusing and doing other things to our youth.  As they worked behind the scenes, and somehow controlled all mass media, the story went that they were trying to make Satanism normal in society.  This also extended to things like

Most students encounter Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" while still in high school.  It's got science fiction and horror elements as well as a great allegory about blind conformity and adherence to tradition.  It's also one of the few horror stories, outside the works of Edgar Allen Poe and a couple by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that is Norton Anthology approved and, therefore, fit to present to young minds per our antiquated public school curriculum.  While many of Jackson's stories found horror and discomfort in the everyday world of both urban and rural America in the mid-20th century, it should come as no surprise that she wrote one of the best horror novels of all time: The Haunting of Hill House . If the name sounds familiar it was made into a miniseries in 2018 on Netflix by Mike Flanagan, although there was little resemblance between it and the novel.  There was also a 1999 version called The Haunting  which was filled to the brim with '90s s

The Haunting pretty much proved that a film can be scary without a bunch of special effects and props.  In that movie the ghosts are never seen.  Their presence is felt, and the movie has some of the most intense examples of suspense, but never do we get William Castle-style spooks like in Thirteen Ghosts or the the similarly titled The House on Haunted Hill .  The whole thing comes from experiencing the fear along with the characters involved, something Shirley Jackson understood when she wrote the book it was based on.  Fittingly, Peter Medak worked as one of the crew of The Haunting , and one of his most famous films as a director would be a haunted house movie as well: The Changeling.  Based on an account of supposedly true events written by Russell Hunter and adapted William Gray and Diana Maddox, The Changeling was an outlier at the time when it came to horror films.  This was right at the beginning of the slasher era and horror films were beginning to turn bloodier and more effe

With the second set of X-Men movies winding down 20th Century Fox started looking at adapting other properties from the same universe.  Unlike the original series which was grounded in an alternate reality in which Mutants were often treated with fear and as second-class citizens, The New Mutants series allowed more supernatural and alien invasion storylines.  Thus, Josh Boone intended this to be his first movie in the new trilogy, simply titled The New Mutants , to embrace horror and supernatural elements as well as present a number of popular characters from the comic books. The problem with this became two-fold.  One was Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox and their desire to kill the X-Men franchise ahead of possible integration into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Thus, until Deadpool 3 was officially confirmed for release, that meant that The New Mutants was going to be the last gasp.  No new trilogy, no overarching story, just one and done, and scheduled to come out jus

Jason Howden got lucky with his first film, Deathgasm .  It was made for around $500,000 dollars, half of it from the New Zealand government after his movie was picked out of a number of horror pitches to win the grand prize.  His previous experience had been working with Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit  films, and his frenetic style of direction definitely was influenced by Jackson's earlier independent films.  While not a runaway hit Deathgasm did become a cult favorite.  Unfortunately, what happens these days is that many indie directors are quickly snatched up to do a big budget blockbuster, having their career pretty much destroyed once the studio execs start shaking their heads and hire a faceless army to reshoot and re-edit everything they did, but still leaving the director to take the blame.  Luckily Howden just went on to do a larger budget indie film, although going from half a million to 15 million, and landing a major name like Daniel Radcliffe, had t

It is strange to see a metalhead on the bad end of bullying.  In fact, it is strange to see a movie from 2015 treating high school social tiers as if it was still 1988.  It might be a New Zealand thing, but I know that a lot of things I enjoyed doing when I was in high school would not make me one of the popular people.  At least these days I would just be ignored, which in many cases would have been a blessing through most of my years working my way through the U.S. public school system. The reason I find it surprising that the guy liking real heavy metal, and most of its offshoots, is the target of bullies is because, at least in elementary school in the early '80s, the metalheads were the bullies.  It still didn't keep me from being curious and ultimately loving most of the music, but my early experiences and the fact I loved more music than just metal meant I'd never fit in, just as I didn't fit in with the goths or punks either.  Unfortunately a lot of that is beca

I can definitely understand the frustration of some of the creators behind the Star Wars sequels.  Fans complained that The Force Awakens was way too much like the original Star Wars , and so Rian Johnson decides to give everyone something different with The Last Jedi , only to have the entire fandom turn on him despite the fact he largely did what they wanted.  Rey was taken down a notch and dragged out of Mary Sue territory.  Even some of the minor characters became more well-rounded, even if their arcs weren't where everyone thought they should go.  Unfortunately, the backlash resulted in the dull, jumbled story telling of The Rise of Skywalker , which was devoid of even the more interesting parts that the flawed prequels had. Still, despite Kathleen Kennedy and a number of people involved having made some questionable statements and often trying to pander to (rather than represent) certain sections of society, I have never sensed any real hatred for the fan base.  Even Rian Jo

A little secret about Honey, I Shrunk the Kids  was that it was written by the same guys, Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who did Re-Animator .  Their early ultra-bloody H. P. Lovecraft adaptations got them noticed by Disney and, along with Ed Naha, they came up with a family adventure film.  Gordon was even supposed to direct until he got ill and, with him unable to complete the project, Yuzna was out the door as well, though still listed as co-producer.  Joe Johnston, a former art designer with Industrial Light and Magic, was hired to direct instead and had Naha and Tom Schulman overhaul the script. I really don't know how much of the original script remains, although it is well-known that a death scene for a fifth kid while in the back yard was removed.  I'm sure some of the scarier elements were toned down, but since the duo was going for family fare to begin with and not another grand guignol film, I'm sure most of the general story remains.  I am relieved that it event