Expelled Grey Matter

William Lustig famously followed up Maniac with the similarly titled  Maniac Cop , cementing himself a reputation among cult movie fans.  While he had a specific style, albeit highly influenced by Larry Cohen and other exploitation directors before him, Lustig appeared destined for a mainstream career after Maniac Cop became a bit of a hit on home video.  In this case he was hired to do an action film to help restore the career of Jan-Michael Vincent, who had previously starred in the television series Airwolf.   Detective Tom Mitchum (Charles Napier) is trying to put away mob boss Vic Luca (Rip Torn), but all the witnesses keep having accidents.  Their hopes lie in the testimony of Frank DeSalvo (Leo Rossi), an undertaker who was using his business as a way of trafficking heroine.  Luca, concerned that DeSalvo may talk, sends hitman Caleek (Lance Henriksen) to take care of him.  Due to an unfortunate accident Caleek instead invades the house of Jack Collins (Vincent), killing his bes

The end of the world has been on a lot of people's minds in the last few years.  The war in Ukraine began with Vladimir Putin threatening to use whatever rusty tin cans in his arsenal would still do any damage, things are heating up once again in the Middle East with Iran now antagonizing a nuclear power - Pakistan - who might have less restraint than many of its peers, and there is a mentally unbalanced ex-President that has too much of a chance of returning to power.  With various media outlets using social networking as a place to chum the waters it seems like everyone is more on edge than ever.  One of the more interesting television shows in recent years, Evil , often uses these provocations as plot points in its own end-times scenarios. Leave the World Behind is a 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam detailing the beginning of a worldwide societal breakdown due to the loss of certain modern functions such as electricity and internet.  It doesn't move on with any of the normal pat so

When on a shoestring budget one can either just do everything as cheap as possible or get creative.  In this case Albert Band chose the latter.  I Bury the Living sounds like a serial killer movie and the lurid poster makes it look like a precursor to Night of the Living Dead , but it is a well-done thriller about a rational man suddenly faced with the unknown. Robert Kraft (Richard Boone) is part of a family that owns a successful department store in a midsized town.  The family members traditionally takes turns chairing the committee that runs the local cemetery.  Robert is none-too-pleased, but his uncle George (Howard Smith) is insistent that tradition be kept.  The cemetery is tended to by an old Scottish man named Andy McKee (Theodore Bikel), whom Robert informs needs to find a replacement as it is soon time for his retirement. On his first day there Robert accidentally places two black pins - marking graves that are occupied - on the site of the future grave sites of a newlywed

As the opening credits ran for this movie I was wondering why I had never heard of it.  Dan O'Bannon is listed as one of the writers, while well-known scream queen Lisa Blount has a significant role and Melody Anderson, who would go on to play Dale Arden a few years later in Flash Gordon , has a major part to play as well.  In addition it has Grandpa Joe himself, Jack Albertson, playing an eccentric mortician, and even a pre- V Robert Englund in a small role.  As icing on the cake Stan Winston did most of the effects.  Watching it I soon became aware of why it is not so well known and, upon hearing much of the backstory on how it was made, it was cheated out of its chance.  It's not a rote slasher film of the time and Ronald Shusett, who is the real writer on the movie, had planned for this to be a horror comedy.  Director Gary Sherman was right their with him and that's what they did and, to hear it from them, audiences loved it.  That was before the people backing it bega

The general attitude toward science fiction has often been that it is a lesser form of entertainment.  It didn't help that the magazines that specialized in it featured bug-eyed monsters abducting scantily clad human ladies, leading many people to consider the genre barely above that of children's books and comics.  There were many stories and books that fit the stereotype, but the ones that were most popular with fans were the ones that were based more in science than fantasy.  That's why "speculative fiction" was often a favored description of the genre.   As intelligent as a script or tale may be it still couldn't escape the company it keeps.  The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a short story by Harry Bates called "Farewell to the Master" that also dealt with a first contact situation gone wrong.  It fell on the more thoughtful side of the genre, as does the movie, but alas the poster - as striking as it is - shows the robot Gort with a hal

Nicolas Cage is known for making many films just because he needed the money.  He is also known for taking on challenging roles and, in many cases, taking his acting to outrageous extremes.  In the 1980s he still believed in method acting - something he abandoned while working with David Lynch on Wild at Heart - and that led to some interesting performances.  Perhaps the strangest was in Vampire's Kiss . Peter Loew (Cage) is a literary agent in New York.  He is constantly jumping for one woman to another hoping to find true love.  The stress of this, and his job, has led him to seek psychiatric help from Dr. Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley).  One night after meeting taking home a woman named Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) a bat flies into his apartment which, he admits to Dr. Glaser, turned him on for some reason. At a party not long after he meets a woman named Rachel (Jennifer Beals) who turns out to be a vampire.  She bites him and soon he feels that he is having the usual effects of turning in

One thing most detractors, and even fans, of David Lynch don't understand is that he has a dry sense of humor.  Many of his films are dead serious with some over-the-top comic interludes.  With all the weirdness going on in a movie like Eraserhead it may be easy to miss that Lynch meant it to be both disturbing and comedic, something that has carried over into even later movies like Mulholland Drive .  It is his surrealistic approach to making movies that often results in people taking his films more serious than they are intended. That brings me to Wild at Heart,  one of his more mainstream efforts.  This followed on the surprise box office success of Blue Velvet and benefited from Twin Peaks , which was causing a major stir at the time.  Wild at Heart is strange, violent and almost a softcore porn film, but manages to satirize many of the old romantic road comedies of the 1960s and 1970s while adding in a bit of rebellious attitude.  Sailor (Nicolas Cage) is in love with Lula (L

When the flood of Stephen King movie started coming out in the first half of the 1980s the author himself was not pleased.  It started with Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining .  King didn't like Jack Nicholson's performance, was upset a good portion of his story was stripped away despite the runtime of the movie and thought the concentration on the ghost story itself undercut the true message of his novel.  Critics, on the other hand, thought it was wonderful achievement and one of Kubrick's best films.  His complaining continued on through a number of films despite King having more and more input into the scripts and the making of the movies until Dino De Laurentiis, who was responsible for producing a majority of the films, got fed up and told King to just go ahead and direct a film himself.  He took the challenge and the result is  Maximum Overdrive , an adaptation of his short story "Trucks".  With a largely Italian crew outside of Wilmington, Nor

Under the Skin has received positive reviews for the cinematography as well as the sense of unease throughout, particularly when we realize how the Female feeds.  As stunning as the cinematography and atmosphere in the movie is, and some of the non-traditional approaches director Jonathan Glazer takes in bringing the story to the screen, it would be an almost forgotten film except for one thing. American actress Scarlett Johansson is one of those celebrities it's impossible to avoid.  She has never annoyed me as much as Angelina Jolie or Julia Roberts, but she is still the same kind of Hollywood beautiful that the public is told they have to like.  She is attractive and, unlike many of her peers, quite intelligent and talented in things other than looking good for the camera.  She has also been careful to keep control of how her sex appeal is marketed and, for that reason, Under the Skin is known to most as the movie where Johansson went nude.  Not topless, but full-frontal nudity,

In 2017 Ryan Kruger released a short film featuring a man named Barry (Gary Green) going through various stages of affliction after shooting up heroin in a warehouse.  Enhanced by the music of electronic artist HAEZEN it shows him hallucinating, zoning out and going through withdrawals.  It is shot well, the music enhances the discomfort of watching what Barry goes through and it is a quick bit of surrealistic cinema that highlights Kruger's talents at directing and editing.  There is really no plot to speak of, nor is there meant to be one.  Still, after Kruger took the time to go around promoting the film at festivals and got noticed for it, he was told that what he really needed to do was turn it into a feature. That he did, releasing a full-length version of Fried Barry in 2020.  Green returns and Barry's addiction problems are covered in the first few scenes.  The movie, though still retaining HAEZEN for the soundtrack and continuing to be quite hallucinogenic in its prese

There had been serials, radio and television shows and a whole variety of adaptations of Superman for public consumption for decades before Warner Bros. decided to throw a huge budget, a known director and a number of major stars at the first major superhero film.  Superman had debuted in 1939 in Action Comics  and from early on was a major presence on both the large screen and in radio serials, fighting for truth, justice and the American way.  Richard Donner, unlike directors like Tim Burton, Bryan Singer and many of the others that took over doing the Marvel and DC movies in the 1990s, had no illusions about what he was hired to do.  He was to bring a popular children's comic series to the big screen and compete with the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for the viewing public.  Newcomer Christopher Reeve certainly looked the part, Margot Kidder was an up-and-coming star and the powers that be even managed to wrangle Marlon Brando for the role of Jor-El, Superman's

Hammer earned its horror reputation by breathing life back into many of the old Universal horror monsters.  With the advantage of being made in color and with less fear of censorship than before the movies became quite popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  They also introduced a whole range of British actors that would find popularity worldwide. The one monster that was overlooked - and that seems to be a pattern - is the Wolf Man.  Whether it was a rights issue or just a lack of interest in remaking The Wolf Man , Hammer never brought Larry Talbot back to life.  The studio did, in 1961, attempt to bring their own wolf man to the big screen and, though not a big hit at the time, The Curse of the Werewolf  is now considered one of the studio's classic films. A beggar (Richard Wordsworth) visits a small Spanish town on the wedding day of the Marques Siniestro (Anthony Dawson) and, for the crime of asking the Marques for charity, is imprisoned.  A mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) t

Werewolf of London was not the first time this popular monster appeared on film, but it was the first feature film.  It is also the earliest that can be seen as the 18-minute short from 1913, The Werewolf , was lost when all the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire in the 1920s.   This was also Universal's first attempt to bring the creature to the screen and, although it is not as well-known nor was it as popular as The Wolf Man , it was influential on the later film.  Between the two films we have the establishment of what would be popular werewolf lore, as in the original tales lycanthropy was something one was born or cursed with.  Werewolf of London introduces both the idea of the emergence of the wolf during the full moon and the ability of the curse to be transferred by a bite or scratch.  While The Wolf Man continued those traditions and added some others, it abandoned the McGuffin of the Wolf Lily, a flower that blooms only in the light of the full moon and helps keep

Godzilla started out life as an allegory for the atomic bomb.  Inspired by King Kong   as well as the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms , which featured stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen's first credited work on a feature film, Ishirô Honda put together the story of a dinosaur resurrected by nuclear testing that attacks Tokyo.  Not having the equivalent of Harryhausen available to them Toho hired special effects artists Eiji Tsuburaya, and he came up with the idea of having a man in a monster suit stomping through a miniature version of the Japanese metropolis. The movie was a huge hit in Japan in 1954 and, in re-edited form with footage featuring Raymond Burr as journalist Steve Martin, also did well in the United States two years later as Godzilla: King of the Monsters .  It helped that it was right in the middle of a number of American sci-fi films featuring giant animals and bugs after being enlarged by radioactivity.   Unlike many of the American films, which followed