Expelled Grey Matter

While I am a fan of most his novels it was Stephen King's shorter work that caught my interest early on. I had often wondered why some of it wasn't adapted into an anthology and, over the years, I've learned to be careful what I wish for.  This especially became true once I realized how badly Mick Garris, despite King being friends with him, can ruin his work.  He and others, especially in short-run televisions series, have rendered some of my favorite King stories into corny, poorly directed and acted drivel.  This was especially true after I saw what a great job a low budget production like Tales from the Dark Side could do with his material.  Despite his penchant for churning out low budget features, Dino De Laurentiis somehow managed to be on the same wavelength as King and his fans for a number of his '80s films.  Though his decision to let the author direct Maximum Overdrive was somewhat questionable, letting King adapt his material wasn't.  This had ...

I love cats.  If one had asked me over 25 years ago if this was so I would have said I tolerated them, while before that I didn't care for them much because I was kind of brought up not to.  I have nothing against dogs or any other animal, but ever since my future wife moved in with me and brought her cat Jonnie they have been my animal of choice.  Part of that is because they often come across as mysterious creatures, able to teleport whenever they know there is food being prepared or a bed being made.  Although they can look at one with quite a bit of love in their eyes, even that seems to be somewhat combined with disapproval, encouraging a person to continue to do better - or at least make sure the little pincushions are fed on time. Because our relationship with cats seems to blur the line between who is in charge there has always been a question of whether felines just figured out how to use the loud, clumsy things with opposable thumbs to do stuff for them jus...

The success of movies like   Deadpool and John Wick has led to a number of similar films in recent years.  It's not surprising to find that they are pretty much coming from the same group of people.  David Leitch, who directed Deadpool 2 , co-directed John Wick with Chad Stahelski, who has gone on to have commercial and cult success with the Bob Odenkirk vehicle Nobody   as well as the John Wick  sequels.  All the movies in varying degree feature over-the-top violence and wisecracking assassins - other than John Wick, who is a man of few words.  It is no surprise that, after Deadpool 2 , Leitch got a healthy amount of money to make Bullet Train , based on a novel by Kôtarô Isaka.  A good portion of the money went to pay Brad Pitt's salary, but a large chunk also undoubtedly was spent on the various sets and the awful CGI to try to convince viewers this was taking place in Japan on a train running from Tokyo to Kyoto.  Where Stahelski has op...

I have seen many attempts to celebrate the influence different decades and genres have had modern movies.  There have been successful - or at least semi-successful - attempts at bringing back exploitation films, slashers and even '40s film noire .  The one thing current filmmakers have not been able to do is bring back anything like the action films of the 1980s and first half of the '90s.  There was a brave attempt with The Expendables , but even though it and its sequels brought back the stars of the time and were full of great action set-pieces, they still felt like modern movies with an older cast.  This is because action movies of that time are the complete antithesis of what the younger demographic, the main target of Hollywood, wants.  They had ridiculous plots, scenes in which the hero would have been dead in seconds, cheesy music and women in roles that ranged from damsel in distress to sexpot.  They were loud, silly, often sexist and absolutely re...

Despite being Bruce Lee's son Brandon Lee had to work his way up to being a star.  His first lead role in a feature film was his one and only Hong Kong film, Legacy of Rage , after which Lee found himself playing bit parts and television roles before again being featured in the 1989 low budget  Laser Mission .  It was a supporting role in Showdown in Little Tokyo and another starring turn in this movie that finally set him up for his inevitable breakthrough role in The Crow . Unfortunately, it is well known what happened at that point, but Brandon had a number of advantages that his father didn't when breaking into Hollywood.  While it had in no way disappeared, the anti-Asian bias of the late 1960s had faded, and studios preferred hiring Asians for roles (although they couldn't figure out that it's silly to hire a Chinese person to play a Japanese role) rather than putting a white guy in makeup.  It was also in the middle of the classic '80s action movie boom, ...

Through the last couple of years or so I have watched every episode of Star Trek , except for Prodigy , from the original series through the current season of Star Trek: Picard .  That includes the 1970s animated series as well as all the movies, including the J. J. Abrams ones.  I had always been a casual fan, but decided to go through everything again because many of the episodes I hadn't seen in 20 to 30 years.  Although I can't, and never will be able to, quote exact lines and identify specific episodes that certain things happened in, I'm about as versed in Star Trek lore as I will ever be.  When I first saw Galaxy Quest that was a different story.  At that time I had abandoned both Deep Space 9 and Voyager for various reasons, most of them being a lack of time.  The original series and The Next Generation may still have been relatively fresh in my mind, and I knew Galaxy Quest was supposed to be a Trek parody, but beyond that I'm sure I missed a lot....

There are not a lot of the old grocery stores from the 1960s and 1970s left.  For the longest time they had a specific design, usually an arched or triangular awning over a front made of plate glass and aluminum, with doors that opened with a "swish" like in Star Trek .  It was the first thing a little kid noticed when going into the place, and definitely hard to keep them out of the way of everyone else as they figured out how the doors worked.   Years later when I read The Mist in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew collection it was one of the immediate, most memorable stories by him.  These grocery stores were still quite common in the 1980s, and everything he wrote about in the story I could imagine happening in my local Lucky's.  King himself got the idea while visiting a store in Maine during an electrical storm, wondering what it would be like if insects and prehistoric creatures suddenly attacked.  It was one of the best novellas he had written, and ...

After the surprise success of Halloween one would have thought John Carpenter would be able to do about anything he wanted, and that it would have been followed quickly by another blockbuster.  Instead, Carpenter made two made-for-television movies, Someone's Watching Me! and Elvis.  While not exactly the independent films he would have wanted to do, it did allow him to work with two actors that would feature in two of his well-known movies, Kurt Russell and Adrienne Barbeau.  By the time The Fog was made, Debra Hill and John Carpenter still continued a professional relationship, but he had gone on to marry Barbeau.  He wasn't interested so much in doing a sequel to Halloween - he remained a producer on those movies, but expected them to be an anthology series featuring other directors - but in directing a story he and Hill had written, inspired by a real 19th century incident in Goleta, California and by a foggy visit to Stonehenge.  Wisely bringing Jamie Lee ...

One of the few complaints I have heard about the John Wick series is that much of it doesn't make logical sense.  That's quite false.  The movies make perfect sense, just not in our world.  The moment the Continental showed up in John Wick I understood that this was not based in our world at all, and in John Wick Chapter 2 it turned out almost everyone, at least in New York, was part of a vast network of assassins all beholden to a mysterious High Table that controls all the organized crime on the planet.  It's a world in which the police are mainly there to pick up the pieces and where the few citizens that aren't part of the bigger organization turn a blind eye to the stylized violence going on around them.  They are just careful to keep out of the way.  The first movie was a self-contained story, but did well enough at the box office to produce a sequel with a larger budget which allowed director Chad Stahelski to film abroad and to introduce new charac...

The first time I saw Road Games I was a bit confused, since the two leads, Stacey Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, are American.  When watching Ozsploitation films I'm used to the closest thing to an American being Mel Gibson.  As the movie went on it made much more sense why these two ex-pats would be about as far from the United States as one can get without learning to speak penguin.  I also realized what a strangely enjoyable movie this is.  Pat Quid (Keach) is a truck driver that has had little sleep, and when he finally does get a chance to stop for the night he notices a man (Grant Page) with a hitchhiker he passed up earlier on the road.  They take the room he was going to rent, so he spends the night in his truck with his dog Boswell (Killer).  In the morning when Boswell goes to do his business he is overly interested in some trash bags outside the motel and the man is overly interested in Boswell.  While curious, Quid doesn't pay it any mind as h...

Halloween cemented Jamie Lee Curtis's reputation as a scream queen, so it's no surprise that her early films just saw her go along with it.  Prom Night saw her returning again as a teenager, this time lending her talents to what otherwise is a paint-by-numbers horror film that tried to jump in on the nascent slasher craze.  Like many early entries it still feels stuck in the 1970s, and that is even without the disco music that permeates the last third of the movie when the killings finally do start.  In 1974 a quartet of children playing in an abandoned convent end up scaring a girl named Robin (Tammy Bourne) to the point where she falls out of a window and dies.  Rather than report it to the police, their leader Wendy (Leslie Scott) convinces the others to keep silent.  As a result a local suspected sex offender is arrested and institutionalized for the murder.  In 1980 he escapes, and the perpetrators, now teenagers, start receiving threatening phone cal...

Although I would never want to return to a time without it there were advantages of not having the internet.  One was that, except when it made headlines, a person had to dig for information on movies that were in production.  If it wasn't in a magazine or other publication, good luck on confirming rumors until official announcements were made.  Even without it the outcry over casting Michael Keaton, a decidedly not square-jawed actor known mainly for comedic roles, reached a fever pitch.  So did stories of Tim Burton's live-action version of Batman , the first such since the series starring Adam West in the 1960s, running overbudget and having disaster after disaster.  Although quite aware of what was going on with the movie Burton, filming at Pinewood Studios in England, he was literally hearing none of it, since all this scuttlebutt was in the American press.  He was just busy trying to make his first big-budget film. It was a bit of a risk.  Burton...

There have frequently been local filmmakers who churn out movies for the drive-in circuit, making a decent profit for themselves along the way.  While drive-ins have given way to direct-to-video and now, in some ways, to going direct to streaming, many directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Roger Corman didn't get the appreciation they deserved during their lifetime.  After all, they were making movies for money, not art, although someone like Corman had the ability to do both, even if he was loathe to admit it.  Bill Rebane is one of those, and though he pretty much worked and filmed in the northern Wisconsin town of Gleason he managed to get his films out there.  Like most directors of his type he tried to get what actors he could, often big names on the down slope of their careers mixed with amateurs he could get locally.  Like the others his recipe was successful, and, even if his movies were not good by any stretch of the imagination, they were at least ...