Expelled Grey Matter

The Old Dark House is an older example of why keeping copies of physical media is important.  Although it was not a big hit when it was released and also fell flat with critics this movie, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff between the making Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein , is one of the earliest examples of a horror comedy.  Based on the novel Benighted by J.B. Priestley it has a largely English cast and was an example of how quickly sound film was developing in its first few years.  Even more important is that it is pre-Code, which meant Whale and screenwriters Benn W. Levy and R.C. Sheriff could get away with a bit more. The problem came in 1963.  Universal lost the rights to the novel and they eventually went to producer and director William Castle who decided to remake the film as more of a straight comedy.  In the process the original movie was withdrawn from distribution and Universal, not making any money off of it, destroyed mo...

Two opposing things have been happening in recent years.  One is that streaming, once considered a godsend that would free movie fans from physical media, has been driving many fans back to physical media.  That is because even well-known films, such as Dawn of the Dead , are more and more being removed from streaming due to rights issues or people involved just getting upset and pulling the movies off the market.  This means physical copies as well as movies go out of print due to rights disputes and the whims of producers or writers.  That leaves those who previously purchased the movie at an advantage while making the film impossible to see for most. This is unfortunate as many obscure films, both good and bad, are starting to resurface.  Some are due to word of mouth, like with Quentin Tarantino's praise of Next of Kin .  YouTube, though it also serves as Google's rental space and sometimes legitimately has movies that can't be found elsewhere, also man...

Rare Exports is a simple little film from Finland, but it got me going down a rabbit hole when it came to the background behind the story.  Christmas in the United States is quite sanitized.  There is Santa Claus, there is his wife, there are the flying reindeer and a bunch of little elves that help him make toys up at the North Pole.  For Americans that means Santa lives somewhere up in Alaska - we're certainly not going to let Canada have him - with some sort of Not My Problem field surrounding his village. It should not be a surprise that this is not the same everywhere else in the world.  The elves are a sanitized version of the various demons that traditionally follow Father Christmas on his rounds or show up to take care of naughty and nice kids throughout December.  These include Krampus, Belsnickel and Zwarte Piet, to name a few, with Krampus undergoing a bit of a revival and Piet getting a necessary makeover as the Netherlands have figured out blackface...

Charles Band, though known for his b-movies and having about the same attitude toward cinema as Roger Corman and other famous exploitation producers and directors, has always had some ambition.  That ambition often outweighs budget or the talent, either his own or those who make the movies for him, but he tries.  In this case he wanted to bring the Marvel character Doctor Strange to the big screen.  For a time, he and Full Moon had the rights to the property, which had previously been made into a television movie back in 1978.  He wanted to update it for the 1990s and, at least initially, he wanted to do it right.  That meant a good story, sets and effects, beyond what many of his films normally featured.  This took time and, in this case, too much time, as the rights expired before his movie could be made.  However, there was still the script sitting around and, not one to waste an opportunity, he enlisted his father Albert Band to co-direct Doctor Mo...

The golden age of the direct-to-video movies was long passed by the time Beyond Re-Animator , the second sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic Lovecraftian horror film Re-Animator , came out.  The reason it did, like Bride of Re-Animator over a decade before, is because someone gave director and producer Brian Yuzna some money to do another film in the series.  This time it was Fantastic Factory, a Spanish production company that had previously backed Stuart Gordon on his adaptation of Lovecraft's Dagon .  Due to this all film locations were in Spain and a good portion of the cast were Spanish actors. Unlike the first two films this one never was intended for theatrical release - though it did get a brief one- and, being just before everyone had widescreen televisions, was filmed for DVD release in the old pan-and-scan format.  Something like this now would have a bit of a bigger budget and would have gone direct to streaming, and even for its time it seems like a throw...

It is not a new phenomenon but in recent years the success or failure of a movie hinges on much more than if the movie is any good.  The production process, and the people behind it, once obscure and relegated to trivia for those who cared, has become a victim of our 24-hour news cycle and social media pundits.  Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm, has come under fire in recent years for both falling under the Disney spell of turning out lowest-common-denominator product with little to no variation or imagination, as well as shoehorning social messages into popular movie franchises and encouraging that male protagonists be downplayed, even emasculated, in favor or replacing them with women. Much of this anger stems from the third Star Wars trilogy, in which Rey danced on the edge of being a Mary Sue where other well-loved characters, such as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, were killed off or drastically altered.  I still stand behind my review of The Last Jedi  that...

We live in a time where many of our science fiction classics were supposed to take place.  That is always the danger of being specific about the setting for a film or story.  At one point the year 2000 was some mythical turning point where we would all have flying cars and take weekend trips to the moon.   By the 1980s that optimism was starting to fade.  There was a serious concern that, rather than flying cars, we would be fighting biker gangs over the last few remaining cockroaches that were safe enough to eat.  Merge that with a fear that has been around ever since computers first started using vacuum tubes - that AI would try to replace humanity - and one gets The Terminator.  A military robot from 2029 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) transports back to 1984.  On its heels comes a soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn).  The world they come from was devastated by a nuclear war in the 1990s initiated not by Cold War animosities but by an intell...

Class of 1984 is one of my favorite exploitation films.  It was researched and written in response to director Mark L. Lester's concerns about unruliness and gang problems in America's high schools.  Instead of doing a normal troubled youth movie, or something realistic like Fast Times at Ridgemont High , he opted instead to do a violent revenge film that felt like The Blackboard Jungle meets Death Wish, with a punk aesthetic thrown in.  It was financially successful for Lester and allowed him to pursue other projects.  It also got him the job of directing an adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter , perhaps his most well-known mainstream film next to Commando .  It was obvious at some point that his interests would return to the worsening problem of gangs in our schools and, when he did, he produced one of the most outlandish sci-fi b-movies of all time.  Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg) is a member of a Seattle gang called the Blackhearts.  He has just be...

Silver Bullet is a strange outlier in Stephen King films.  Based on the novella Cycle of the Werewolf , which itself isn't one of the more well-known works by King, it features a pre-fame Cory Haim, a pre-accident Gary Busey and a director, Daniel Attias, whose sole feature credit is this film.   The story is told from the point of view of Jane Coslaw (Megan Follows), a young girl saddled with looking after her disabled brother Marty (Haim).  She recounts the story of a series of murders that happened in the small town of Tarker's Mills in 1976, beginning with the beheading of a railroad worker.  As the killings escalate the local sheriff Joe Haller (Terry O'Quinn) comes under siege from the locals to do something about the random killings plaguing the town.  Marty, always big on imagination, posits that it might be a werewolf.  This is something his uncle Red (Busey) shrugs off and Marty only half believes.  That is until Marty sneaks off to ligh...

The early 2000s were the heyday of Asian horror.  Between the originals and the Hollywood remakes it was guaranteed that there was some film with a little girl with long hair covering her face.  It became a common trope worldwide, adding a belated new monster to the menagerie.  Takashi Miike, despite having a reputation for horror movies, is in many ways Japan's Jesus Franco.  He has a better track record, and his truly outstanding films eclipse pretty much everything Franco did, but he is also someone who constantly grinds out new movies on the regular.  They are of varying quality and alternate between video, cinema and television.  He does not see fit to stick within a specific genre despite his willingness to pretend to do so for his fans at conventions.  He is also quite opportunistic, so he had no problem hopping on the new horror trend when the chance came along. Yumi Nakamura (Kô Shibasaki) is a college student enjoying time with her group of f...

Audition has a plot that could only happen in a Japanese movie.  No matter how sympathetic the main male character is I cannot see, even in 1999, a situation where Hollywood would greenlight a movie where a man uses a fake movie audition in order to try to find a new wife.  It does sound like something from a Lifetime or Hallmark movie, but it also sounds like something that would also lead to the revelation that our "hero" had a secret past and that the heroine was in grave danger. For a good part of its time director Takashi Miike makes Audition feel like it's a romantic drama.  Based on a book by Ryû Murukama, who supposedly had tried something similar to find a woman, this entire idea of finding a date backfires.  Only, it is not our protagonist that has the dark side. Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is the owner of a small film company.  When his wife Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda) passes away he is left to raise their son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) on his own....

At this point everyone is familiar with what happened to the D.C. Cinematic Universe.  Marvel may be in the process of fizzling out by boring its audience with too many movies that are interchangeable other than the heroes and by pushing a plastic diversity that is a transparent ploy to try to get more people to watch by riling up their audience.  Still, before the MCU turned on its core fanbase, it had still released a number of good movies, and even a few exceptional ones. D.C. seems to have had problems all along.  Warner Bros. has a habit of messing with their superhero films and habitually making things worse.  This isn't a new thing.  With  Superman II, way back in 1980, they messed with director Richard Donner's vision, so much so that decades later a special "Donner cut" was released.  Despite that sounding like a piece of meat that one should definitely pass on the director's cut improved on what was not a bad film to begin with, and the best ...

Italian crime thrillers from the late 1960s to the middle to late 1970s earned the name giallo because it was the term for cheap crime novels from the 1920s.  Often issued with a yellow cover they featured murders that led to a number of strange twists and turns before getting to a surprise ending when the killer was revealed.  Not to be confused with the actual police procedurals of the 1970s, gialli became a genre all their own despite various influences, such as the 1960s German krimi films, American film noir and the works of Alfred Hitchcock. A number of Italian directors made movies in the genre during its heyday, but except for a few one-offs that were exceptional examples director Federico Caddeo concentrates on the most well-known filmmakers in his documentary, All the Colors of Giallo .  These include Dario Argent, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino.  He also takes the time to give the movies some context through film historian Fabio Melelli as w...

In the early 1970s a new genre called giallo became popular in Italy, and eventually with international audiences.  Influenced by some of the works of Mario Bava as well as cheap crime novels, the films were typically full of nudity, plot twists and violence.  Along with Bava's influence there was also that of directors like Alfred Hitchcock.  Lucio Fulci, an established director who had been making a variety of films - largely comedies and a few westerns - naturally jumped on board when he saw how popular the films were.  He wanted to be the Italian version of Hitchcock. Problem was, a young upstart named Dario Argento had already claimed that title with his debut movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage , in 1970.  Argento's film was a well-done, but rather tame, representation of the genre, and Fulci was already familiar with moving into sleazier territory with copious amounts of nudity, already evidenced in his Hitchcock-inspired movie One on Top of the Othe...