Expelled Grey Matter

In the wake of Netflix fumbling the ball with programming and, as of the date I'm writing this, dumping movies they paid to have made, it's a good thing they did one thing right.  Glass Onion , the sequel to Rian Johnson's hit mystery film Knives Out ,  got a week in the theater.  In usual Netflix style, however, they were so anxious to get the movie on their streaming platform that they ignored the fact that, if left to run, it would have earned back much more than its modest budget. This is despite the fact that, other than Daniel Craig returning as detective Benoit Blanc, this is not related at all to the what happened in Knives Out , nor does it feature any of the cast other than Noah Segan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Segan plays a completely different character - a hippy house guest named Derol - while Levitt voices the "Hourly Dong", a timekeeping device supposedly created for billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) by avant-garde composer Philip Glass. ...

Writer Truman Capote was one of the larger-than-life characters of the 20th century.  He was openly gay at a time when it was dangerous, both physically and career-wise, and he had a voracious appetite for alcohol and mind-altering substances.  It was the latter two that ultimately brought him down, but what exhausted him creatively, at least for a good part of the second half of his life, was what would be the novel he was best known for.  Rather than being a book of fiction, In Cold Blood presented a profile of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, a pair of petty criminals who murdered an entire family when a home invasion robbery went wrong.  Though non-fiction, it was written in novel form, letting the reader get to know not only the killers but those who were tasked with bringing them to justice. Writer and director Richard Brooks brought Capote's novel to the big screen in 1967, filming a good portion of it in locations where the killers went, including the actual hou...

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were a pair of serial killers that operated in the early 1980s.  Both met in prison, with Toole serving time for petty crimes and Lucas for the murder of his mother in 1960.  Famously, Lucas would go on to claim responsibility for over 300 murders, though he was convicted on only 11, and may have been responsible for only three of those.  Still, he quickly discovered the fame he received from inflating the number, as well as special privileges he could get by laying claim to nearly every unsolved case he heard about.  Lucas died in 2001 of heart failure, Toole years before of cirrhosis of the liver.   Though not at the top of the list of serial killers one hears about outside of true crime documentaries, Lucas's case was still fresh in 1986 when first-time director John McNaughton was asked by producers Malik and Waleed Ali to make a horror film after a documentary on the early wrestling scene in Chicago fell through.  A...

Both director Wes Craven and New Line Cinema were at a turning point in the early 1980s.  While The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes solidified Craven's reputation as a horror director it did not exactly result in receiving further work the way he hoped.  The movies made a decent profit off their low budgets, but, particularly with Last House , they did nothing for Craven's reputation.  Famously that movie put both he and producer Sean S. Cunningham on the outside of mainstream Hollywood for most of the 1970s.  Craven started doing television work and earned a bit of a cult hit with his adaptation of Swamp Thing , but the big score kept eluding him.  That is, until he finally got funding for a story he had been shopping around for years about a child molester, murdered by the angry citizens of the town, haunting the dreams of their children.  The villain was changed to a child murderer, the makeup Craven had in mind brought in line with the ...

Back when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made Grindhouse  they held a competition.  Famously, the movie itself had a number of fake trailers, but for its premiere at 2007's SXSW festival a number of homemade previews of exploitation and horror films were made for a contest run by director Robert Rodriguez.  One of my favorites was The Dead Won't Die , which featured a topless woman mowing down zombies with submachine guns.  Another favorite, and the eventual winner, was Jason Eisener's Hobo with a Shotgun. The original featured David Brunt in the title role, cleaning up a city full of criminals and perverts.  It was well-made and a lot of fun, and it earned Eisener a little bit of prize money as well as the inclusion of Hobo with a Shotgun as one of the trailers in Canadian showings of Grindhouse .  Although both Planet Terror and Death Proof are good in their own right, the shorts were what really made the movie, and it was hoped that a few of them...

There must be something about living in a seemingly polite society that just makes creative types want to run with the most absurd, violent and offensive ideas possible.  I have seen this with stuff that comes out of Utah and, in general, the Mormon community.  The founders of the entire death rock sound, Theatre of Ice, were all brothers from an LDS family in the middle of nowhere in eastern Nevada, while a number of the best independent horror authors I know come from Salt Lake City and surrounding areas.  There is also Japan, where many of the sickest, most violent films represent a Japan that doesn't exist outside of a few directors' imaginations.  Canada should be no surprise at all, since it already spawned David Cronenberg, one of the most well-known horror directors and renowned for many of his movies that feature bizarre and disturbing scenes of body horror.  Lowell Dean, who had already independently made the film Eerie 13 , got the million dollars to ...

Somehow I don't remember John Wick being released.  I can't recall any advertisements or previews.  Then again, it was released in 2014, and most of what I remember from that year is film after film of terrible CGI starring whatever new action hero was being forced on the public. It would be understandable if John Wick would pass under the radar. What I do remember is hearing about it a few years after it came out, since the film slowly became a cult favorite as well as a cultural phenomenon.  It was heavily referenced in one of the most famous Rick & Morty episodes, and writer Derek Kolstad scored a sleeper hit with the similar Bob Odenkirk vehicle, Nobody .  Keanu Reeves has never really fallen out of the public eye, but John Wick did a lot to boost him in the later part of his career.  It's also been one of those rare original properties that has been allowed to grow its audience. John Wick (Reeves) is a man who is quite well off.  He has met the wom...

It is hard to fathom what a major impact Psycho had on the movie industry.  The film will be turning 63 in the year that I write this, and it has been picked over by cinephiles and critics and the like for every single one of those years, to the point where parts of the shower scene are freeze-framed to see what techniques were used and what errors made it into the shots.  The structure of the film was unlike most at the time, many of the scenes pushed the boundaries of the already withering Hays Code and it even went so far as to begin changing how the public viewed movies.   In reality Psycho was just as much about making money as it was making a good film.  Screenwriter Joseph Stefano adapted Robert Bloch's novel, working hand-in-hand with Hitchcock to get the story he wanted, and what he did want was a good film.  He also wanted it made cheap, realizing that a lot of poorly made low-budget movies were easily turning a profit.  Although Paramount wa...

The House of the Devil made Ti West one of the best most talked about newcomers when it came to horror directors in the late 2000s.  At the time horror cinema was marred by bad self-referential Scream knockoffs and dreary remakes of Asian horror films and American classics.  Like most things from that decade it was loud and annoying, like having Fred Durst scream in one's ear for 10 years.  West's approach as much different.  The House of the Devil was a tense buildup to a shock ending, like many older films like The Innocents or The Changeling .  It took place in the 1980s to add a sense of place and time to the throwback style and managed to largely get everything right.  Happily he did not feel he had to go down the same road for his next original film, The Innkeepers.  Although technically he followed up The House of the Devil with Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever , a sequel to Eli Roth's hit debut, he disowned that film due to it being taken away by t...

The fact that Jared Leto actually said to director Daniel Espinosa something along the lines of, "No practical effects!  Make it all digital!" should be a clue as to how in touch anyone involved in the making of this movie is with reality.  Leto seems under the impression he made a good movie and Sony was fooled by a bunch of internet trolls into re-releasing this back into theaters so it could fail a second time.   What confuses me is that, after the finished product was plopped down on some Sony executive's lap, they thought they had anything worth redeeming.  The movie had been through numerous reshoots, was two years delayed in release due to difficulties and the Pandemic, and after his infamous turn as the Joker in Suicide Squad no one was really clamoring for Jared Leto to show up in another superhero film.  In fact, for all his method acting and generally abrasive behavior, he never has anything to show for it.  He was the worst part of Blade Ru...

I had originally watched Evil Dead as part of the usual 31 Days of Horror marathon I do every October.  I didn't make 31 films that particular year and, despite watching it, never got a review written.  Over the years I intended to.  The major problem is that I forgot almost all the movie within a month or so after seeing it.  I figured much of it would come back to me once I saw it again, but I realized while watching it that I didn't remember a single thing about it; not so much as a scene.  Strange, because there are movies that I haven't seen in 30 to 40 years where something, for better or worse, has stuck with me.   Evil Dead came out toward the end of a long line of remakes, most of them made in the late 2000s and pretty much all of them pale imitations of the originals.  The difference was that, even though this has some plot similarities, it was not a remake of The Evil Dead , but instead a completely different story taking place in the s...

The problem with small video companies finding and restoring forgotten movies is that a lot of those movies deserved to be buried next to all those Atari E.T. cartridges in the middle of the desert.  Occasionally Shout Factory or Vinegar Syndrome will dredge up something that falls just short of a masterpiece due to budget or too much ambition, but more often than not these movies aren't even fun to watch just to enjoy how bad they are.  So many movies, especially through the 1980s and 1990s, have an interesting enough concept to get someone to rent the video, but no real care when it came to trying to execute the concept.  Demon Wind is no exception.  There may be demons, but definitely no wind, and the title unfortunately lends itself to a quick flatulence joke.  Writer and director Charles Philip Moore was working on a film called Twisted Nightmare for director Paul Hunt and convinced the production company to let him do his own film.  What he came up wi...

After the strangeness that was Godzilla vs. Hedorah Toho wanted the Godzilla films to get back on track.  By getting back on track they meant more movies that could appeal to kids, while a good portion of the Japanese public probably wanted it to get back to what it was before Toho decided that Godzilla was to be a hero to children everywhere.  The first scripts for this movie did just that.  While still a hero, the movie as originally planned would have taken things at least back to Invasion of the Astro-Monster , with Godzilla and two allies (one which eventually evolved into King Shizu) battling a returning King Ghidorah and two new space monsters, Gigan and the one that would later become Megalon.   Problem is, as much as Toho wanted to keep making money from the series, they didn't want to actually spend any money on it.  The monsters were trimmed down to Godzilla and Anguirus, with King Ghidorah and Gigan being monsters controlled, once again, by al...