Expelled Grey Matter

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...

In 2007 Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino decided to do a tribute to the movies that inspired them with Grindhouse .  The full presentation featured two movies, Rodriguez's Planet Terror  and Tarantino's Death Proof , both of which have since been released on their own.  The features - especially Planet Terror - were a lot of fun, but for most the best part of the film were the fake trailers.  In fact, they were so popular that many viewers hoped they would become movies of their own. A couple did.  Rodriguez made a full movie out of Machete, incorporating scenes from the fake trailer into the full feature film .  That one actually got a sequel in Machete Kills! while the fake trailer that only ran at Canadian showings, Hobo with a Shotgun , also got a full release.  Rumor had it that Eli Roth might do a full movie based on Thanksgiving  but, as the years passed, it was obvious that memories of Grindhouse had faded and that no one involved wa...

I was in fifth grade when I first heard about I Spit on Your Grave .  Not when I saw it.  I saw plenty of violent movies when I was a kid, but this was one of those whispered about at school.  There were kids with older siblings, or parents who just didn't care, who saw grainy VHS copies of this.  The rape part was never mentioned, but the most memorable kill was often talked about.  Exaggerated, it turns out, but definitely a thing of legend. This wasn't the easiest film to find a rental copy of in the early 1990s, and it certainly resulted in side-eye from some clerks.  However, having heard about it since I was 10, I had to see what all the fuss was about.  What I got at the time was a long production, a good part of it spent with the lead character getting gang raped, followed by her revenge.  That scene, which had been talked up so much, happened, but rather anticlimactic after how it had been described.  It was one of my first introduct...

Though it is distributed by Troma now - in a print that shows some obvious preservation and restoration - Charles Kaufman's Mother's Day was originally released through a company named Saga despite his brother Lloyd having owning what was a growing exploitation film company at the time.  It was released unrated - not because the MPAA was going to give at an X, but rather because getting it rated was outside the budget - and became a cult classic based on the weirdness of the story and the unique pacing.  A movie that is the favorite of director Eli Roth, it was also banned in the UK and West Germany as well as critically eviscerated by the New York Times and the target of the typically prudish Roger Ebert.  Former college roommates Trina (Tiana Price), Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson) and Jackie (Deborah Luce) get together for their annual reunion and travel to a remote area in the woods of New Jersey to spend a weekend camping and fishing.  The area, known as the Deep Barr...

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend had already received a cinematic treatment in 1964 with The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price.  The original novel was set in 1976 after an atomic war had stirred up radioactive dust that kills most people, while turning others into vampires.  Over the course of three years Robert Neville, the hero of the novel, figures out the scientific reasons behind the change while searching for some way of reversing it.   The Last Man on Earth was an Italian production that changed the name of the lead to Robert Morgan and also changed Matheson's writing credits for his assistance in adapting the script since the creatures and ending were heavily altered.  The Omega Man saw even more alterations, although supposedly Matheson at this point wasn't as upset since other than having the last surviving real human fighting creatures that can only come out at night, The Omega Man was pretty much a different story from his original...

After The Night of the Living Dead George A. Romero tried to distance himself from the horror genre.  Now that he had a feature film under his belt, and a successful one, his next project was a romantic comedy called There's Always Vanilla .  It fared about as well as one might think a romantic comedy made by Romero would, complicated by the fact that he didn't write it.  After that a bit of horror began to creep back in for his third movie, originally titled Jack's Wife and released as Hungry Wives in its original form.  Joan (Jan White) is a suburban housewife with a teenage daughter named Nikki (Joedda McClain) and a frequently absent husband named Jack (Bill Thunhurst).  She is still good looking, though getting older, and is feeling trapped by her lifestyle and the obligations that go with it.  It doesn't help that many of the women in her social circle, a few who are older than she is, seem to be just barely surviving day by day.  She is Catholi...

This is a strange, and ultimately frustrating, movie to watch.  Director - and just about everything else except actor - Anna Biller has created a unique aesthetic with The Love Witch , a movie I expected to be a feminist diatribe.  It turned out to be from the female perspective, into which bad treatment by men and society in general is going to form some of the vision, but not overwhelmingly feminist.  Instead Biller sought to explore, often through voiceovers, different perspectives on love and obsession.   Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) is a witch who moves from San Francisco to a small California town after being investigated for death of her ex-husband Jerry (Stephen Wozniak).  She rents a room in a house belonging to her fellow coven member Barbara (Jennifer Ingrum) and quickly makes friends with a real estate lady named Trish (Laura Waddell).  She also sets about finding her perfect man, mixing up a love potion in order to speed things along....

Mark L. Lester ended up as director of Firestarter  due to the fact that John Carpenter, who had originally been hired to direct and was also considering playing the part of John Rainbird, a government assassin, was removed from the project due to the box office failure of The Thing .  That movie would go on to gain a reputation as one of the best science fiction and horror mashups of the 1980s.  Firestarter , on the other hand, is treated as just another Stephen King adaptation from the time, overshadowed by The Shining  and, ironically, Carpenter's own adaptation of Christine .  I have also seen derisive comments about this being given to the director of Roller Boogie .  It would be more accurate to say this was directed by the guy who did Class of 1984 , one of the best Canuxploitation films of the 1980s.  Firestarter , as written, is a pure pulp novel.  Much of King's early work, in retrospect, has literary worth that English professors c...

I have to admit that the one thing I have enjoyed Red Letter Media for is their Best of the Worst episodes.  Sometimes they go over movies I have seen while others that are just the right kind of bad that I know I need to see them.  Then there are movies from directors like Neil Breen.  I don't mean to say The VelociPastor is anywhere near the baffling, narcissistic incompetence of Breen, but sometimes outsider films barely rise to the level of being a true movie.  These days it seems like anyone with a camcorder and a few thousand dollars on a credit card will try to bang out a feature film. The one good thing I can say about The VelociPastor is that director and writer Brendan Steere at least attempted to make a movie.  It is also, to my surprise, a movie that makes sense, and feels like a film.  Not a good one, not a well-done one, but at least there is an attempt to entertain by using what is on hand.  Unfortunately, that boils down to permission t...

There are many movies where reviewing them just seems to be defeating the purpose.  Before I get too far into this I will just say that in every single way possible Tammy and the T-Rex is not a good movie.  Director and co-writer Stewart Raffill can make good movies, as evidenced by The Philadelphia Experiment or, for a decent part of its runtime, The Ice Pirates .   However, many of his movies, like this one and Mac and Me , are known for all the wrong reasons.  I knew going into this that it was not going to be great.  The one saving grace is that Vinegar Syndrome in 2019 was able to unearth the intended version of the movie rather than the one released to theaters in 1994, which included all the acting skills of Denise Richards combined with the nuances of the story minus any of the low-budget gore.  Then again, when reviewing a movie like this, it is important to keep in mind that it was made for a million dollars because some guy who had a prop an...

Warner Bros. would have been happy if Christopher Nolan kept making Batman films for decades to come.  He, however, had different ideas.  Those different ideas, ironically, have often been more critically, if not always commercially, successful than his Batman films, and so far he has stuck to his word.  No more movies featuring Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne have appeared, nor is there any serious talk of producing another one.  The Dark Knight Rises came out in 2012 and, though it wasn't as well received as the first two films, still went out on a high note.  Unlike Disney who, after acquiring most of Marvel's characters, has had to deal with Sony for Spider-Man and had to buy 20th Century Fox to get Deadpool and the X-Men, Warner Bros. has had a lock on DC characters for decades.  So, with Batman done, it was time to see what they could do with Superman after the disappointment of Bryan Singer's Superman Returns .  By a stroke of luck they had anoth...

José Mojica Marins has the distinction of directing, and starring in, Brazil's first ever horror film.  At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul was released in 1964 and was pretty much handmade by Marins in a tiny studio, save for a couple exterior shots.  The movie went on to be a major hit in Brazil and established his villainous protagonist, Zé do Caixão, aka Coffin Joe, as a major icon.  In character Marins would go on to make a number of films that featured the him as an auxiliary character as well as hosting horror films on television. It is surprising that, with all the movies Marins made and that Zé appeared in, there were only two true sequels to the original movie.  The first was This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse , which follows immediately upon the events of the first movie. While Zé do Caixão appeared to have been killed he is instead wounded and blind.  His sight is restored to him by a skilled surgeon while at the same time he is acquitted of the crimes...