Expelled Grey Matter

The first part of the 1990s was questionable when it came to horror.  Part of the problem was that the franchises from the 1980s had run out of steam.  Another was, as much as I like many of them, a tendency for horror films to go direct-to-video.  When a studio doesn't have to try hard to get something out there, just making any sort of movie and concentrating on the box art to get stoned college kids to watch, the quality is going to drop.  Because slashers were no longer a thing and viewership had changed many studios didn't know what to do with horror.  There were successes here and there, but many of the beloved horror films of the early 1990s fall more in the category of suspense films that have some horror elements in them. Norman Apstein, aka Paul Norman, certainly had no idea what he was doing with the subject matter when he made Ice Cream Man .  A porn director by trade, this was his only mainstream film, and it happened to be co-written by David ...

Event films were what Hollywood produced before the modern blockbuster cycle set in.  While many movies - even A-list ones - were black and white dramas, westerns and war pictures, there would be those epics that would get the full studio backing.  The best ones have stood the test of time, and most of them are major Stanley Kubrick or David Lean productions spanning hours of story and beautiful locations. Science fiction movies, like the literature that inspired them, seldom received the same treatment.  There would occasionally be a major studio attempt like This Island Earth or Forbidden Planet that would receive a bit more funding than the normal Saturday matinee fare, but in the mind of most critics science fiction was for children.  That is perhaps why George Pal was able to produce some of the most memorable science fiction and fantasy films of the 1950s and 1960s.  He began making children's shorts, but often with complex animation that lent well to spec...

Sir Alfred Hitchcock is such an important figure in cinema that people forget that during his long career he had dry spells.  This wasn't always due to the quality of his movies, although not everything he touched was gold.  One of his failures in the late 1940s was Rope , now considered one of his best films.  By 1951 Hitchcock was feeling the pressure to produce another box office hit.  To that end he acquired the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel Strangers on a Train and hired Raymond Chandler to write the script.  Things didn't go well with Chandler, resulting in Czenzi Ormonde writing the bulk of what we see on the screen, but his name stayed in the credits.  There was also some pressure from Warner Bros. who pushed Ruth Roman on him as the lead actress in the movie, leading to one of Hitchcock's famous patterns of abuse and harassment when he didn't get his way. Despite all this Strangers on a Train did what he and the studio hoped and brought hi...

Writer Daniel Grodnick came up with an idea in 1979 for a horror movie.  He wondered, what if he remade Halloween , but put it on a train?  His wife thought it was a terrible idea, but the story pretty much flowed from his pen.  He found a producer that liked it and, by 1980, it was a reality. The main advantage it had was that Jamie Lee Curtis was cast in one of the main roles and, at the time, she was on her way to becoming a popular scream queen.  Terror Train was filmed in Canada at the same time as Prom Night , allowing her to work on both movies at once.  It also insured that both movies came out one after the other, again increasing her exposure.  But, just like Prom Night , there is not a whole lot memorable other than her being in it, and this time even she is not that outstanding. Doc (Hart Bochner) is the head of a fraternity of pre-med students.  He decides to pull a prank on a pledge named Kenny (Derek McKinnon) with the help of Alana (Cur...

"Graveyard Shift", the short story from the collection of the same name, has long been one of my favorite Stephen King stories.  It is almost a cosmic horror story in the style of Lovecraft, building up until the ultimate horror is revealed and the protagonist realizes that the situation is beyond his understanding or control.  It is a well-done bit of claustrophobic horror and I am sure it is a nightmare for those who do not like rats. The movie version forgets the entire idea of building up the horror and, instead, it is intent on building up a reveal of the practical monster that was created by the effects crew rather than building up any real tension.  Graveyard Shift is one of the King adaptations that was done solely to ride the coattails of Pet Sematary and other recent adaptations and doesn't try to do anything with the material other than set up some creative kills using some excellent practical effects.  Stephen King himself didn't care for it, thinking it...

The 1980s was the golden age of action films in the United States.  There were some interesting ones in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was the 1980s that perfected the framework they established.  Quite popular were gritty police dramas where the lead was bound to be almost as bad as the villain, someone close to him was going to die and eventually he would have a redemption arc after battling an unstoppable or brilliant killer.   Once the pattern gets going and the money starts coming in it isn't long before everyone starts jumping on board.  Sometimes that means surprising, forgotten classics, while other times it means a movie that has been forgotten for a reason.  The Night Stalker is one of the latter.  J. J. Striker (Charles Napier) is an alcoholic police inspector in the robbery division of the Los Angeles Police Department.  He is partnered with Charlie Garrett (Robert Viharo) and is more than a little close to an ex-prostitute named Rene (Mi...

Angel was always a movie I knew about but had never seen.  As a preteen there was no way I was going to ask my parents to rent this for me and, as an adult, it didn't seem the kind of thing I would want to get unless I felt like ending up on an FBI list.  Donna Wilkes, who plays the title character, was 24 when she made the movie, but try explaining that when renting something that appears to be just this side of child pornography.  The last thing I expected of Angel was for it to be a good movie.  I figured it would be sleazy, featuring lots of nudity from 30-year-old actresses playing teenagers and generally be an excuse to show lots of skin.  There is gratuitous nudity sprinkled throughout - none of it Angel - but instead of exploiting child prostitution the film somewhat explores how she gets into it and concentrates on a number of strange characters that she interacts with on regular basis who become her family.  The production values are great, the gr...

Long before the driving need to create cinematic universes Alexander and Ilya Salkind tried to do just that with the Superman series.  With no new movie featuring their main character on the horizon they decided to bring on another Kryptonian, Kara Zor-El, in hopes of starting a parallel series.  The hopes were also that Christopher Reeve and other actors from the main features would pop in every now and then.  Reality quickly struck.  The Salkinds had used up every bit of good grace they had with the firing of Richard Donner after Superman   and, to make things worse, Superman III was a critical and fan flop even if it did make money.  I'm sure with the way Margot Kidder was treated they didn't even bother asking her to make a cameo in this film.  They did ask Reeve and he was able to find other things to do, leaving the only person they could get to come back for this one Mark McClure, reprising his role as Jimmy Olsen.  A creepy Jimmy Olsen at...

Italian cinema is known for a number of things.  The giallo film, strange horror movies that make little sense, spaghetti westerns and hard-boiled police procedurals are just a few.  Occasionally they try to branch out into fantasy or science fiction, but most of those turn out to be Hercules movies or entertaining disasters like Starcrash .  It is as if many of the famous Italian directors from the 1970s wanted to do that huge Hollywood blockbuster, and many of them tried, only to be hamstrung by a big dose of reality.  That seems to have happened with Sergio Martino on Island of the Fishmen , known in the U.S. as both Something Waits in the Dark and Screamers .  Although there are sci-fi and fantasy elements it seems like it was Martino's attempt to make a tribute to the old-fashioned zombie films of the 1940s, where some mad scientist was holed up in his isolated mansion outside the reach of modern society and holding a weird spell over the natives, often to ...

Jaws was such a phenomena that, until Star Wars came along, every cheap studio in existence spent the 1970s imitating the plot line with everything from killer dogs to grizzly bears to piranha.  Roger Corman's New World Pictures was one of those, constantly going back and churning out another watery threat.  Humanoids from the Deep just happened to be one of the most infamous. The small California coastal town of Noyo is approaching its annual Salmon Festival.  Problem is, there are not a lot of salmon, causing problems for the local fishermen.  Tensions are also high due to proposal to build a cannery in the town in order to increase employment, a move that is opposed by a local Native American man named Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena).  His opposition doesn't sit well with Slattery (Vic Morrow), another local facing the reality of a diminished catch.  Jim Hill (Doug McClure) tries to keep the peace between his friends as he can. The town soon faces a bigger...

The Return of Godzilla had been a box office success in Japan, even if its American version, Godzilla 1985 , didn't do so well in the U.S.  Immediately Toho decided they needed a sequel and, to promote it as well as get some good ideas for what to do next, they ran a national competition to write the script for the next version.  The winner was Shinichiro Kobayashi and his script for Godzilla vs. Biollante , based heavily on a script he had written, and had been used, for Ultra-Man back in 1971.   The problem is Toho was still skittish after the poor performance of Godzilla movies in the early 1970s.  The American film, King Kong Lives , which was a sequel to the 1976 remake of King Kong , was a box office failure.  Toho interpreted that as a lack of interest in giant monster films rather than the truth, which was that King Kong Lives was just a bad movie that received little interest in the U.S. as well.  Thus, Godzilla vs. Biollante was delayed unti...