Expelled Grey Matter

David Fincher, upon completing Fight Club , decided he wanted to make something a little simpler.  David Koepp had a script about a woman and her daughter trapped inside a safe room when their house was invaded.  It's a good set-up, limits the filming locations and allows for a tight focus on both the action and the drama.  It also keeps the budget down, keeps the actors to a minimum and, despite a confined feeling for the audience, provides a number of possibilities for various scenarios.   Problem is things didn't go the way Fincher had planned.  Nicole Kidman, who was supposed to play the lead, was injured early on in filming.  Also, instead of using a real location, Fincher had the complete interior of the brownstone built on a stage, resulting in extra expense.  Still, it resulted in one of the highest grossing films of 2002 even if it did receive mixed reviews at the time and is pretty much forgotten now.  Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is r...

Jodie Foster made a number of movies in 1975, from the family-friendly comedy Freaky Friday to the gangster film Bugsy Malone .  It meant that 1976, when all these movies hit the theaters one after another, Foster was everywhere and pretty much the next teen sensation.  She also did two of her most controversial films during that time, Taxi Driver and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane .  Rynn Jacobs (Foster) is a 13-year-old girl with a poet father who is frequently away from the home.  This situation unfortunately gets attention in the small Massachusetts village where her father has leased a house for the next three years from Cora Hallet (Alexis Smith).  The worst of that attention comes from Cora's son Frank (Martin Sheen), who on Rynn's birthday shows up and tries to get a bit too friendly with her.  She does, however, find a true person to watch over her in Officer Miglioriti (Mort Shuman), who knows all too well Frank's history.  She is o...

It had been a while since the two-part finale to the original Hunger Games series and, though Suzanne Collins's prequel had sold well, it was no guarantee that a movie version would still attract an audience.  After all both the books and the movies were aimed at a young adult audience and, after this long of a gap, none of the original fans were young adults anymore.  Still, Francis Lawrence was back directing once again and, for those of us who got into the series as actual adults, the idea of getting some history and background of Panem, the games and Corialanus Snow was at least enticing.  My expectations were tempered due to the last two movies in the series.  The usual money grab of dividing the last book into two movies was done but it still managed to feel rushed.  While The Hunger Games: Catching Fire felt like a true adaptation of the novel the Mockingjay movies felt rushed despite the unnecessary two-part stretch, and emotionally they didn't hit the ...

It is unfortunate that blaxploitation earned a reputation as being rather silly.  Some of the movies were, to be honest, not that great, and one begins to encounter that after a bit of digging beneath the more famous titles, but there was also a bit of a perception problem caused by the producers and studios.  The poster for Blacula, for instance, makes it look like this is some sort of horror comedy, with the painted-on blood and ridiculous stake coming out of the title character.  It is truly one of the worst movie posters of the time and doesn't do the film justice.  Despite the exploitative title first-time director William Crain took the script by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig and made a serious urban horror film.  It isn't anything that breaks the mold as it is at heart a retelling of Dracula  set in 1972 Los Angeles, but it has enough creativity and a sympathetic villain at the center to set it apart.  Horror fans have long known this and the m...

James Bond III is not an affected name.  It's the director's real name, as evidenced by the dedications at the end of the film to his father and grandfather.  He is also the writer and star of this movie which he had been trying to put together since working on the Spike Lee film School Days .  His association with the most well-known and respected black filmmaker of the 1980s didn't hurt when casting and getting money for the movie. Strange thing is when I heard about it the title stuck in my head because I knew I had heard of it before.  Def by Temptation did moderately well at the box office, and quite well for Bond due to its shoestring budget.  It was only after seeing the real promo poster, and not the current ones that make it apparent the movie is a horror film, that I understood why.  If one looks closely - and be assured at the age of 18 I did not - there are hints this is a horror film.  Otherwise, it looks almost like a poster for a Spike L...

I am unapologetic over my love of bad movies.  Not the bad movies I often complain about where it is 90 minutes of people walking around a forest, driving or just doing nothing, but bad movies that were attempting to be good ones.  Antonio Margheriti is one of my favorite directors for such movies and his Gamma One series is one of my favorite science fiction sagas.  Sure, it is filled with models that look like toys, hilarious line readings - especially when using futuristic slang - and ridiculous plots.  Those are only some of the things that make these movies great.  Commander Michael Halstead (Tony Russell) is being forced to accommodate a corporate scientist named Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato) on Gamma One.  Nurmi is working on skin grafts and genetics in order to build the perfect human being.  He is also cutting in on Halstead's kind-of girlfriend Lt. Connie Gomez (Lisa Gastoni), who he invites to his base on Delphis for her upcoming leave. ...

Baba Yaga  is about a witch, but not about one living in a forest in a mobile house walking on chicken feet.  The movie is based on an erotic comic book series called Valentina by Guido Crepax and Corrado Farina, being a fan, decided to bring it to life.  Unfortunately, what happened is the producers and the studio decided to hack his film to bits and re-edit it, cutting out some of the erotic parts and omitting entire scenes all together. This is the version of the movie I saw, under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me , although Farina has sinced gained control of the film and released the version he made.  Even as a victim to studio tampering it remains and interesting, if flawed, supernatural movie that somehow holds together despite the dreamlike quality of the narrative. Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) is a photographer living in Milan.  One night on her way home she sees a dog in the road and, when a car comes barreling out of nowhere, she rescues the dog.  The...

The Evil Eye is also known by its direct Italian translation, The Girl Who Knew Too Much .  As the name implies Mario Bava was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock when making this film.  There are certainly such touches, but this movie is considered one of the first giallo films.  There isn't as much sex, and no black-gloved killer, but the plot itself lends itself to the genre more than to Hitchcock, with a number of strange twists and turns as we, along with the protagonists, try to figure out what exactly is happening. Nora Davis (Letícia Román) returns to Rome to care for her sick mother.  After reaching her mother's apartment she meets Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) who frequently looks in on her mother.  She starts having fantasies of him, weaving him into her obsession with detective and romance novels.  However, on the first night there, her mother passes away during a major storm that knocks the phones out.  She tries to make her way to the hospital...

Back when I first saw the preview for Misery I had no idea who Kathy Bates was.  She was a theater actress and, if she had any movie roles before this, I'm pretty sure they were small.  The one thing I did know, at first glance, is that I was looking at Annie Wilkes.  Often when books get adapted to movies it's amazing if they get the hair colors right.  But, here I was, looking up at the screen, and it was as if director Rob Reiner had made a trip to rural Colorado and found not an actress to play the part but somehow dragged Wilkes right out of the pages of the novel. I know this is the reason why Stephen King, when agreeing to sell the movie rights to Misery , insisted on Reiner directing or at least producing.  King had been impressed with  Stand by Me , Reiner's adaptation of his novella The Body , and trusted him to treat Misery with the same kind of care.  It was a new direction for Reiner as well as he had never made a horror or suspense film....

Long before Trey Parker and Matt Stone became famous for South Park they were students at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  While there Parker, always a fan of musicals, decided to make one based on Alferd Packer.  For those who don't know, Alferd Packer signed on as a guide to lead a group of miners from Utah to a small gold mining town called Breckenridge in the Colorado territory.  Problem is he wasn't too good at it and, after a series of bad decisions, his group was stranded in the Rocky Mountains as heavy winter storms came in.  One member of the party, Shannon Bell, allegedly killed the other members while Packer was looking for help, and was killed by Packer in self-defense.  When the storms closed in Packer was forced to subsist on the bodies of his fallen companions and, when his version of things came into question, he stood trial for murder. It's not something most people would approach as a musical, but enter Parker with a camera, a script and...

One topic I haven't gone over yet is "video nasties".  These were a series of films that were banned in the UK in the 1980s by the British Board of Film Censorship, or BBFC.  Besides being brave enough to admit to what they were doing, unlike the MPAA, they didn't just put ratings on these movies to keep them out of the hands of children.  Rather, banned meant banned.  They were not allowed within the borders of the UK.  Problem is with banning things is people get curious, so of course bootleg and smuggled VHS copies of these films were everywhere, despite being a crime to even have them.  As with all things that are labeled transgressive there is still an aura of legend and mystery around many of them, although most are far from nasty as well as far from worth watching.  Anthropophagous , however, at least earned some of its notoriety.  Andy (Saverio Vallone) and his group of friends is about to go island hopping.  Julie (Tisa Farrow) overh...

Superman Returns was a brave attempt to resurrect the original Superman series from the 1980s.  It ignored the third and fourth movie, thus making itself an official sequel to  Superman II .  Problem is, where Bryan Singer was normally pretty good at superhero films, this particular movie was weighed down by an underwhelming plot.  Sequels were planned, but ultimately Warner Bros. decided to do a complete reboot. This didn't necessarily mean ignoring the original films.  Instead, writer David Goyer and director Zack Snyder opted to take the first two movies and, instead of a campy comic book film, jam them together into a major science fiction epic.  Thus, we get the true beginning of the DC Cinematic Universe with Man of Steel. Due to a shortsighted plan to gain resources Krypton's core is collapsing, and Jor-El (Russell Crowe) attempts to convince the council of what needs to be done.  In secret, he and his wife Lara (Ayelet Zurer) have had the firs...