Expelled Grey Matter

Producer and director William Castle is much more known for his gimmicks than he is for the actual movies he made.  House on Haunted Hill , for example, had a gag called "Emergo", in which at a certain point in the movie a plastic skeleton would emerge from above the screen and float over the audience before being reigned back in. It was one of his more famous tricks, but the reason House on Haunted Hill has remained a Halloween classic all these years, other than the fact it is in the public domain, is that Castle managed to come up with a fun movie to go along with it. A millionaire names Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) rents a house owned by Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.) for a party suggested by his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).  The house Pritchard owns is his family residence and is reputed to be haunted.  Loren offers his guests - pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), secretary Norah Manning (Carolyn Craig), psychologist Dr. David Trent (Alan Marshal) and columnis

Let Me In is an American remake of the Swedish movie Let the Right One In , itself an adaptation of the novel of the same name.  That it is yet another remake during a time known for recycling horror movie ideas did make me apprehensive as the Swedish film is a unique take on vampire legends as well as quite a realistic look at the bullying that many children experience in school.  There were also some aspects of it that Europe is often a bit more adult about than we are the United States.  Tomas Alfredson, the director of the original, was also not too happy to hear his movie was being remade. Matt Reeves, who wrote and directed this version, decided to remain respectful to the original, and in some ways a bit too much.  He couldn't take too many detours without getting criticism for altering the story in the book, but in many ways he apes the way Alfredson shot his film.  Despite this he still managed to catch the feeling of the original even if he did pull a few punches. Owen (K

Ju-On: The Grudge was a hit horror film for writer and director Takashi Shimizu in 2002.  It was the third in a series of movies about a house in a Tokyo suburb haunted by the spirits of a wife, child, father and cat, all of whom had died on one murder-filled night.  The third film was the first to receive wide cinematic release and it came to the attention of a number of horror fans worldwide, including producer and director Sam Raimi. What Raimi did was something unique for Asian horror remakes.  He set Takashi Shimizu up to direct, a chance he took since there were improvements and changes he wanted to make to Ju-On .  Stephen Susco rewrote some parts of the story that included elements from the earlier two films, but it was still based in Japan although the main actors were Americans.  The remake ended up being a big enough hit to spawn two sequels despite not getting the best reviews. Karen (Sarah Michelle Geller) is a nursing student taking classes in Japan and volunteering at a

Although made popular in the U.S. after a 2004 remake starring Sarah Michelle Geller, Ju-On: The Grudge was the third movie in a series that began in 2000 with two movies, Ju-On: The Curse and Ju-On: The Curse 2 .  The latter got a limited theatrical release and, because the earlier low-budget films were successful, The Grudge received a wide release and eventually caught the eye of Sam Raimi.  It was this movie and Ringu which led to a sudden popularity of Asian horror films and a spate of American remakes.  Social worker Rika (Megumi Okina) is sent to check up on an older lady named Sachie (Chikako Isomura) who is under the care of her daughter Kazumi (Shuri Matsuda) and son-in-law Katsuya (Kanji Tsuda).  While cleaning the home Rika opens a taped-up closet to find a black cat and a young boy named Toshio (Yuya Ozeki).  Curious, she tries to find out more, but faints from fright when she sees Sachie being attacked by a ghost. The ghost turns out to be Kayako (Takako Fuji), a woman w

To hear tell the origin of The Ghost Ship  was like most of Val Lewton's movies where he was tasked with developing it around titles or sets.  In this case it was the latter, as RKO still had a ship set left over from their 1939 romantic action film  Pacific Liner .  Lewton came up with the idea of a sadistic, homicidal captain and had writers Donald Henderson Clarke and Leo Mittler flesh out the details.  As always he was handed a tight budget, but he once again managed to pull off an exciting, noirish film with the help of director Mark Robson. Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) is the new third officer on the U.S.S. Altair , a merchant ship traveling from the U.S. to Mexico.  At first he is impressed by Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), who puts a lot of pride on running a tight and clean ship, though he is warned to not get too wrapped up in the captain's cult of personality by radio operator Sparks (Edmund Glover).  However, a number of events begin to cause Merriam to question Di

It is rare when a movie is better than the book it is based on.  Normally whittling the story down to fit in a two-hour format means consolidating characters, removing subplots and excising entire scenes.  Often with Stephen King it also means removing content that would result in the movie never finding distribution.   I don't remember much of the latter in Needful Things since it has been a long time since I read it, but it was never one of my favorite books by King.  He went through a long period where editors seemed afraid to say no to him and, though many of his books maintained a level of quality and even improved in style once he kicked his bad habits, much of his '90s output is quite bloated.  This story takes the "strange curio shop" trope to an extreme, and what screenwriter W. D. Richter did is remove a good bit of that extra fat to concentrate on the main story within. A new resident of Castle Rock, Maine named Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) opens a shop cal

It's important to note that there is a reason that The Whisperer in the Darkness is made in the style of a late 1930s or early 1940s horror film.  This is because it follows a 25-minute silent version of The Call of Cthulhu in 2005, also made by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, produced to look like what a film version of the story may have looked like around the time it was published.  It was an underground hit and sold enough DVDs to encourage funding for a feature-length film.  For that they chose one of the more difficult Lovecraft stories to adapt for cinema, The Whisperer in Darkness . Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) is a folklore professor at Miskatonic University.  He has been receiving letters from a farmer in Vermont named Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch) informing him of crablike creatures surrounding and attacking his home.  After debating a sensationalist journalist named Charles Fort (Andrew Leman) about their existence, Wilmarth is confronted by Henry's son George

The original Cat People was a surprise hit, staying in theaters so long that a number of critics that hated it ended up getting to see it again and revising their views on the movie.  It helped prop up the ailing RKO Pictures and made a name Val Lewton when it came to horror films despite the fact that he was the producer, not the director, behind it and a number of other hits for RKO.  It is also made Simone Simon famous as an early scream queen.   What it didn't have was much of a budget, so there was some vagueness on whether Irena, the cat person of the title, was transforming or if it was mental illness.  It was pretty clear at the end that she was a supernatural creature, but the mixture of sounds and shadows is what helped sell the film.  Come the late 1970s even some of the lower budget films could provide decent effects and the idea of remaking the movie was tossed about, with one of those scripts being a loose retelling of the original by Alan Ormsby.  This was picked up

RKO Pictures was a studio that often went from success to failure.  It was one of the biggest, releasing movies such as King Kong , Citizen Kane and Notorious .  It weathered a number of ups and downs, mismanagement under Howard Hughes and a final demise in 1957 when the company was sold to Universal.  Along the way, and often because the studio was desperate to make money, a number of interesting movies were made. Cat People was the first produced by Val Lewton.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur, the movie was produced in the way of many b-movies where the title came first and the writer, in this case DeWitt Bodeen, was tasked with coming up with an actual story once the picture was given the green light.  Lewton was new so he suffered studio interference while being given a small budget, but he and Tourneur managed to overcome all that and create one of the most popular classic horror films. Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is a Serbian immigrant living alone in a Brownstone in New York.  O

My usual problem with remakes of classic movies is the same as when I hear a cover of a song.  There are two ways of doing it.  One is to copy everything to the letter, hoping to get a hit from what someone else did before.  The other is to take the original words, or some of them, and rearrange things so that it is different enough that the artist has put their own stamp on it.  The Vanilla Fudge and their version of "You Keep Me Hanging On" is one that always comes to mind.  So, in a world of bland horror remakes, the 2019 version of Child's Play might be considered the Vanilla Fudge version of the film.  Andy (Gabriel Bateman) and his mother Karen (Aubrey Plaza) have just moved into a new apartment.  Andy doesn't have any friends and doesn't try to make any, although he kind of connects with a police officer named Mike (Brian Tyree Henry) lives down the hall.  Things are made worse by Karen's boyfriend Shane (David James Lewis), whom Andy has no liking towa

I was not too excited when I heard that there was going to be a remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .  It wasn't for the normal reasons I have, which is the fact that too many movies that I grew up with got remade in the 2000s.  This was at the beginning of that trend and, down the road, they started remaking things that came out when I was a kid.  I still wasn't that old at the time - barely in my 30s - so it was weird to have a remake of a movie I could buy on DVD quite easily and it be even better quality than when I originally saw it.   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , though, was an outlier.  It came out when I was two years old so, other than as a horror fan later in life, it was not a big influence on me growing up.  In fact, it was quite difficult to find, and it took me a bit of time in the early 1990s to find a copy to watch.  That has changed as it has gone through a number of quality re-releases, but there were some shady things that went on with its original distr

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a movie of should-have-beens.  It was a financial success, much more so than Friday the 13th , which tanked after a huge opening weekend.  In fact, this remake of the 1984 film is one of the most profitable horror films of all time.  Jackie Earle Haley, who replaces Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, did so with Englund's blessing.  Director Samuel Bayer was talked into doing the film by Michael Bay after holding off on doing any of the horror remakes with the promise that his feature debut was going to be the beginning of many good things.  It even had Rooney Mara, a young up-and-coming star at the time, in the lead role of Nancy. What it didn't have was the backing of fans of the original.  Platinum Dunes was becoming known as the studio that did horror remakes.  Horror films were not doing too well in the 2000s and the constant reboots and retreads didn't do them any favors and, by the time A Nightmare on Elm Street made it to the theaters, ma

Most of the time I'm going into comic book films pretty much blind or with vague recollections of childhood.  With Constantine , however, it is with both having seen the movie within a year or two of it being in the theater and later reading at least one of the graphic novels at a later date, which I believe was when the television show was on.  Both of the latter were enjoyable, especially the show, since even though he was part of the DC universe it didn't feel like the usual timeworn superhero antics.   What I remembered of the movie, though, did.  Constantine came out before the DC Cinematic Universe got going, but when I first saw it I felt it was like a number of other big budget films at the time: hollow, forgettable and without much story.  So many of the movies of the 2000s foretold how things are today, and rarely do I find myself revamping my opinion of movies from that time period.  This is one of those exceptions because, although it deviates far from the comic, Co

The 2000s are a decade I don't look back on with fondness.  The music was awful and most of the movies, particularly in the horror genre, were terrible as well.  Often the two made an unholy combination, meaning that because horror films were supposed to be scary, they needed a nu-metal or industrial soundtrack so it would feel dark and foreboding.  It was also a time when Hollywood decided pretty much everything needed to be remade despite the fact that, since physical media still dominated when it came to movies, almost everyone had the originals to watch anytime they wanted.   Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes was one of the worst at this, bringing us unwanted versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street ,  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and, of course, Friday the 13th .  The remakes, like many of the original horror films of the time, featured unlikable characters, unimaginative scripts and production values that managed to be even less impressive than some of the straight-to-video mate

The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of those films where the stories of its conception and filming are much more interesting than what made it to the screen.  The original script was by Richard Stanley, known at the time for the cult films Hardware and Dust Devil , and was the culmination of a number of years of effort to bring to life his version of the 1896 novel by H. G. Wells.  Stanley was able to secure funding, get Stan Winston's company to do the effects and secure Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in lead roles.  After all of his effort he was fired less than a week into filming. The director that took over was John Frankenheimer, a director most famous for The Manchurian Candidate over 30 years prior.  Where Stanley was often known for his unique vision in the films and videos he made, Frankenheimer was one of the remaining old-school Hollywood directors whose focus was on getting through the project rather than making an statement.  His traditional approach to making movies and la

1977 was a strange year for movies.  On one hand, there was Star Wars , which along with Jaws a couple years earlier helped pave the way for the movies of the 1980s and beyond.  There was also Smokey and the Bandit which, if it wasn't for Star Wars, would have been the biggest hit of the year.  Although it is of its time it is still considered a classic comedy. Then there were films like The Island of Dr. Moreau .  Despite a number of great horror and exploitation films floating on cinematic fringes many of the big-budget films had not changed much since the late 1960s other than one was more likely to see some nudity here and there.  While something like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is still lots of fun in a throwback kind of way many movies were more like The Island of Dr. Moreau , one of a number of H. G. Wells adaptations from American International Pictures in the mid-1970s and, while it is nowhere near as good as Island of Lost Souls , one of the better ones. Andrew Brad