Expelled Grey Matter

There was a time when the big concern wasn't climate change or manmade global warming, but overpopulation.  The concern was that the human race would grow so large that it would deplete most of the world of its resources, leading to the wealthiest people hoarding what is left and leaving a large portion of humanity to near starvation and systemic poverty.  With nowhere to house people and too few jobs available society would cease to function. Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! predicted this happening in the year 1999 with a worldwide population of seven billion and New York holding 35 million of those souls.  It posited an idea of how life might be at that point.  His novel was published in 1966 and a more scientific look at the problem, The Population Bomb , was published in 1968, predicting worldwide famine once the world reached a tipping point.  Questions of population control and how it may affect what appeared to be dwindling resources (one of ...

Chances are audiences have seen J. Michael Muro's work in many mainstream films.  That is because he is one of the most highly sought after Steadicam operators in Hollywood.  He may not be a household name, but for many movies over the last 30 years, if there is a great tracking shot and it's not a Sam Raimi film, good chance Muro is behind it.  Still, everyone needs a place to start and, with a new Steadicam and some help raising funds from his film professor, Roy Frumkes, who helped flesh out what had originally been a short film into a feature, Muro made his one and only feature film, Street Trash , in 1985. Fred (Mike Lackey) is a homeless man in the Greenpoint neighborhood of New York.  After an attempt to grab some liquor and a bit of money for a sort of beggar king named Bronson (Vic Noto) goes wrong, he goes to a liquor store known to cater to the homeless.  The proprietor, Ed (M. D'Jango Krunch) has just discovered a 60-year-old stash of booze called Te...

Scream was the little movie that could at the end of 1996.  Dimension decided to release it right around Christmas which, unless it's Christmas-themed, is pretty much the kiss of death for a horror film.  Predictably, it opened behind other movies at the time, but week after week it increased its takings and ended up remaining in the theater for months afterward.  It was a movie director Wes Craven didn't want to make due to no longer wishing to be associated with horror, but it ended up revitalizing his career for a third time and singlehandedly brought back the slasher genre. It also was responsible for the worst horror films of the later 1990s, and especially those of the 2000s.  Between blatant rip-offs of Scream and similar movies featuring impossibly good-looking casts plucked from young adult television shows, every new horror film - and that even includes the Final Destination movies to an extent - wanted to be Scream, throwing in references to older films, n...

 Typically when it comes to genre films there comes a point where the movies enter the "Son of..." and "She-" realm.  If it's a series it's typically at three or four movies when the writers can't figure out what to do with the male protagonist anymore, even though there are the rare times, like with Dracula's Daughter or Bride of Frankenstein ,   that the female version is introduced in the second film.  In this case it wasn't a sequel film, but the desire to make blaxploitation films with a female protagonist.  American International, Roger Corman's studio, sought to do just that with Cleopatra Jones .  Problem is they lost out on getting the script.  The role went to a statuesque fashion model named Tamara Dobson, who wore sexy clothes, drove cool cars and worked as a special agent to help fight against those pushing heroin.  What AIP decided they needed was their own to compete and, since the money had been set aside, frequent Corman col...

Although he had already starred in a couple of early low-budget blaxploitation films, Fred Williamson had his big break in Black Caesar .  It was also Larry Cohen's second feature film.  Cohen had extensive experience in writing and directing for television prior to his debut film, Bone.  Williamson, meanwhile, had been a professional football star before turning to acting, also getting his start on television.  The combination of the two, and the fact that Cohen had a script ready to take advantage of popular films like Shaft and Super Fly   helped give both the career kick they needed. The roots of Tommy Gibbs's (Williamson) empire begin as a young man (Omer Jeffrey) in Harlem in 1953.  After successfully assisting in a hit, he is given a job as a bag-runner, only to run afoul of a racist beat cop named McKinney (Art Lund) who is on the mob's payroll.  Sent away for a number of years, he encourages his best friend Joe (Philip Roye) to get an educati...

John Wick may not have been the most creative movie but it was a lot of fun and it played to Keanu Reeves's strengths.  Little dialogue, lots of physical action and stylized violence, all set in a hyperviolent alternate world where Wick is a member of an underground society of hitpeople, the movie, written by Derek Kolstad and directed by Chad Stahelski at least established one of the few original properties to grace the big screen in a long time.   Stahelski and Kolstad wisely made the choice to make the first movie a contained story, with Wick taking revenge against a Russian mob boss after the boss's son steals his car and kills his dog.  In a rare turn of events Wick's main targets were not overpowered experts in military tactics or martial arts, but weak men who used waves of henchmen to try to keep Wick, whose reputation is that of a legendary Boogeyman, at bay.  They fail miserably and, though beaten and bloodied at the end, Wick finds a new canine compa...

Nothing is more tried and true - and, at this point, many would say tired - than vampires in horror films.  Pretty much anything that can be done with vampires has been, from bloodthirsty walking corpses to tragic anti-heroes to shiny emo kids.  The rules and lore around them are solid, although occasionally the sillier parts are modified or done away with all together.  Still, vampires are vampires, and there is only so much one can do with them. That is why Let the Right One In, using a screenplay adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the original novel, seems to be different even if there is nothing new added to vampires themselves.  A good deal of the reason it seems different is because of director Tomas Alfredson, who manages to create an entire world out of an isolated suburb of Stockholm, Sweden.  It's a combination of rural and expanding suburbia, with the vampire living in a pretty much empty apartment - and being a kid to boot - that change...

There were two things I didn't expect coming into this film.  One, I did not know ahead of time who the director was, but I knew that the story takes place in Iran.  Since a number of years ago the few film imports we could get from Iran won a bunch of praise and recognition, I thought this horror film was actually made there.  I was wondering how much of a typical horror film could be made in Iran when a good percentage of what is in a typical film I watch would land a person in jail, or worse, for making it in that country, even if it only showed on the international market.  The other is I didn't know the director, Ana Lily Amirpour, was responsible for one of the worst films I have ever seen: The Bad Batch .  Once I saw her name come up in the credits I knew I recognized it, but not from where. Even if I had known that ahead of time I was bound to see this eventually.  It was all the rage when it came out, although I have no idea why I didn't see it....

I will not even pretend that anyone had any plans for the "phases" of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.   Iron Man   made a ton of money, and so did some of the films after that, and Loki was a good villain.  At some point there was a push to incorporate elements of the actual comics, and it shook out that behind Loki was Thanos, and that made two nuanced bad guys.  Not every movie worked, and it's obvious the story was developed as it went along, but in the end sticking with the series was worth it. Then came Phase Four.   Black Widow ,  which should have been part of phase two or three, finally showed up and did nothing for the character or the story.  The television series  WandaVision , like  Black Widow,  served to tie up loose ends from Phase Three, but ultimately set up the events of  Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , while Loki got his own series dealing with multiverses as well.  The two truly good f...

The idea of an alien invasion led to one of the biggest blockbusters in history in 1996.  Despite its flaws the movie performed above all expectations and managed make its leading actor one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.  Plot points have been debated ever since it came out, but its brilliant mixture of practical and digital effects, done on a budget, helped hide many of the plot holes. That movie, of course, was Independence Day , directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and many others.  It had a wonderful ad campaign behind it, tied in with a major American holiday and was pretty much guaranteed success when released.  However, another alien invasion film, one with an arguably more realistic plot and on an even smaller budget, beat Independence Day to the theaters by little over a month.  That movie was David Twohy's The Arrival .  Zane Zaminsky (Charlie Sheen) is part of NASA's program to search for extraterre...

Don't be fooled when seeing a director name like Lewis Coates.  Italian directors, and to a lesser degree Spanish ones, often adopted American-sounding names to slap on the versions of their films that would be released in theaters and drive-ins in the United States.  A major reason is that, toward the end of the 1970s, Italian cinema more and more was known for making virtual copies and unsanctioned sequels to hit Hollywood films.  One big example was Lucio Fulci's  Zombi 2 , supposedly a sequel to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which itself was renamed Zombi when recut for the Italian market by Dario Argento. Luigi Cozzi is the real name of Lewis Coates, and before making Contamination he had made the weird, almost incomprehensible sci-fi film Starcrash with Caroline Munro in the lead, Christopher Plummer as the Emperor of the Galaxy and David Hasselhoff in an early role.  Nominally it played as a cheap rip-off of Star Wars , although Cozzi has maintain...