Expelled Grey Matter

The 1950s didn't have hipsters.  Instead, it had beatniks.  They were just as full of themselves as the modern hipster, but it was improvised poetry and jazz rather than indie bands and Pabst Blue Ribbon.  The beards have pretty much stayed the same, as has the condescending attitude that many have toward those, especially fellow creative types, they consider below them.  Thus, it was a scene ripe for satire, and the best movie to do it was Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood . Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is the busboy at the Yellow Door, a hip L.A. coffee shop owned by Leonard de Santis (Antony Carbone).  Walter is enamored with his fellow employee Carla (Barboura Morris) and aspires to be an artist of some type, despite receiving derision from the shop's patrons.  He buys some clay and attempts to sculpt a bust of Carla to no avail but gets an idea once he accidentally kills his landlady's cat.  He covers the body in plaster - with the knife still in i...

Most people would know Little Shop of Horrors from the stage musical and subsequent movie starring Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene.  Long before that it was a movie directed by low-budget maven Roger Corman, who rushed it into production, got principle filming done in two days and made sure it was out in theaters early the next year.  There are several stories about why there was such a quick film schedule, but it helped already having sets that had been made for other films and a willing accomplice in screenwriter Charles Griffith.  Seymour Krelborn (Jonathan Haze) works in a skid row flower shop owned by Gravis Mushnik (Mel Welles).  After Seymour makes one mistake too many Mushnik decides to fire him over the objections of his cashier Audrey (Jackie Joseph), who has a crush on Seymour.  Desperate to keep his job so he can care for his hypochondriac mother (Myrtle Vail) he tells Mushnik of a plant he created and has named Audrey, Jr.  The plant, though int...

Gareth Edwards has taken his sweet time between movies.  He can afford to since he got scooped up by Disney to make Rogue One: A Star Wars Story  after the success of his own independent film, Monsters and a financially successful kickoff to Legendary's Monsterverse with Godzilla .  He was one of the few success stories as the record for independent directors going immediately into large-budget Hollywood films is not good.  Most of them have the project taken away from them at some point and the whole thing reshot and re-edited with their name left on it so that their career suffers the consequences.  It's almost as if there is an organized effort to quell independent filmmakers before they get popular. Edwards bucked this trend, although everything after Monsters had been an pre-existing property.  The Creator is the first original work of Edwards since his debut and he opted to film it similarly to how he did Monsters , which was going to locations and d...

A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...

One of the whackier new age ideas of the 1990s was the "Bible Code".  Supposedly discovered by an Israeli scholar, it was supposed to be a cryptographic and mathematic code hidden within the Torah, the idea being that if it could be properly deciphered then it would lead to revelations about life, the universe and everything.  It gained quite a bit of popularity before falling out favor, both because math is not that interesting to most people, and to figure it out one needed to speak ancient Hebrew or at least have some familiarity with how the letters of their alphabet combined to work out the code.  Otherwise, it was just another prophet saying that we should trust them because they know what they're doing.  This wasn't the first time the idea of a hidden code in the Bible had come up.  Johannes Trithemius, who is referenced in The Day of the Beast , is considered the father of modern cryptography, but in the 16th century was suspected of practicing magic and...

It is faint praise when, after watching a movie, the first thing I think is, "That wasn't as racist as I thought it was going to be."  Keep in mind the whole plot of this sounds like a rejected Fu Manchu movie and, of course, the main villains are British guys with horribly applied makeup.  They don't have the glasses, bucked teeth or do the "r for l" thing so much - in fact, their accents almost sound German - but it is the usual that one would expect from the time period.  It is perhaps why it is treated more like a cultural relic than one of those terrible movies played on Saturday afternoons that, despite the quality, get a pass because of good memories.  I can't even say there is that going for it, since as a kid Battle Beneath the Earth would have had me bored stiff.  Arnold Kramer (Peter Arne) is a seismologist that has a breakdown on the Las Vegas strip, claiming he can hear things tunneling under the surface.  When his sister (Sarah Brackett) a...

After Child's Play 2 it was obvious that Universal had another franchise on its hands.  There had already been some drift in that movie from the psychotic killer Chucky was in the first to the wisecracking murderous doll he would become, but the second movie did a good job of continuing Andy's story from the original.  So good that, after its success, Universal wanted another Chucky movie out as soon as possible.  Don Mancini, who had written both of the first movies, was not expecting that and had not really given much thought on how the story would continue.  He did want to have multiple versions of Chucky, but the budget just wasn't there, so instead we have him catch up with Andy eight years later.  Thinking that the public has forgotten about the killer doll the Good Guys factory is reopened and production resumes.  Problem is when cleaning up the place some of Chucky's (Brad Dourif) blood gets into the mix, leading to his rebirth.  His first ord...

A large selection of Boomers still think that computers are conduits to Satan.  I don't think Evilspeak had much to do with that, as I am sure they weren't rushing out to see it when it came out in 1981 unless they really wanted to see what adorable little Clint Howard was up to after leaving Mayberry.  They would have been in for a shock, much like the first time their grandson figured out his name was their password and racked up a few thousand dollars in online games or adult websites.  In this particular case, however, the computer is how our main character summons the Devil or, technically, one of his servants.  He manages to do so on an Apple II which, for context, it was the IIe that most of us played Oregon Trail  on.  The graphics on that game were probably a bit much for the Apple II but, unlike other computers at the time, it did have color capability.  I doubt it had the ability to do some of the graphics we see, which look like an arcade g...

Pet Sematary was the first novel I read from Stephen King.  The first of anything tends to stick, but since I started reading his other books soon after I discovered that he had much more to offer.  Pet Sematary  was written at a time when King still had major substance abuse problems, but it was a decent pulp novel nonetheless.  It wasn't a patch on most of his others at the time, but it's an easy read and has a number of great King moments. After the debacle of Maximum Overdrive King began to get himself cleaned up.  Although I find many of his books from the 1980s to the early 1990s to be overlong (except It , which earns its length), his writing improved.  Also his judgment did as well.  When it came time to make a movie based on Pet Sematary he wrote the script and demanded that it be made in Maine, but that was about it.  He knew to stay out from behind the camera and, at first, George A. Romero was set to direct.  Once he bowed out du...

I first experienced Manos: The Hands of Fate the same way anyone who wasn't packed into the 1966 premier in El Paso did.  It was through Mystery Science Theater 3000 , the little Minneapolis late night show that made fun of bad movies by talking back to them.  The show blew up in the early 1990s and is still popular today.  Manos was one of the movies that that it is most famous for lampooning.  The first time I didn't get through it.  The group of people I was watching it with decided they had enough - it was at about the part where one of the Mads is apologizing for even showing the movie - and we put on an MST3K underground parody video that riffed on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier .  It was years before I gave the episode a full go, since the idea of watching the movie without their commentary was a frightening one.  What I discovered, though not a hidden gem of any sort - Manos: The Hands of Fate deserves its reputation - was a somewhat enjoyable...

Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...

Superman was bloated and often times too silly for its own good, but it was a major hit.  Superman II was better and, despite all the drama behind the scenes, was also well-received.  It was also viewed by many, including myself, to be a vast improvement on the original movie.  That means another sequel was inevitable. However, the off-screen drama didn't end once the second movie was made.  Margot Kidder was outspoken about Alexander and Ilya Sakind's decision to fire Richard Donner when he had already directed a good portion of Superman II , while Christopher Reeve flat out refused to return until director Richard Lester begged him after the Salkinds considered Tony Danza as a replacement.  Tom Mankiewicz, who along with Mario Puzo had helped write the original two movies, was also out, which means a third film featuring Brainiac and Mr. Mxyzptlk was out.  Instead, the Salkinds hired David and Leslie Newman to come up with a whole new script.  Clar...