Expelled Grey Matter

I like Rob Zombie's music as well as his movies.  However, he does have a problem.  He never knows when to stop.  In this case it is in doing a second sequel to House of 1000 Corpses .  The Devil's Rejects was a rare sequel that was far ahead of the original.  It was gritty, featured great acting and set pieces, and ended with the remaining members of the Firefly clan perishing in a slow-motion hail of bullets as "Free Bird" played near its entirety.  It was a fitting end to the merry band of psychos. But, instead of just letting things be, Zombie had to revisit them one more time.  Despite being riddled with bullets, Otis Driftwood (Bill Mosely), Baby Firefly (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) manage to survive.  They are put on trial, with Baby given a life sentence and Otis and Spaulding finding themselves on death row.  While Spaulding is executed 10 years after their imprisonment, Otis escapes in 1988 with the help of ...

Director Jack Hill isn't a household name outside the realm of exploitation fans.  His most popular movies were with Pam Grier, such as Coffy and Foxy Brown , though he also did a number of women in prison films as well as horror early on.  His earliest film, Spider Baby, is quite different in style than his later work, but has become a cult favorite none-the-less. Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) is the caretaker of the Merrye House and its inhabitants.  They include sisters Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Virginia (Jill Banner) and their brother Ralph (Sid Haig).  There are also some other unseen inhabitants, all of which Bruno promised the dying patriarch he would take care of.  They have a degenerative disease called Merrye Syndrome, caused by years of inbreeding, which from late childhood through adulthood causes the victims to regress to an almost animal state. Bruno has enough trouble keeping his wards under control, but things get worse when a distant cousin nam...

The Mad Max series is no stranger to long gaps between movies.  No one expected to see director and writer George Miller return to his post-apocalyptic world until Mad Max: Fury Road suddenly was announced and released 30 years after Mad Max Beyond ThunderDome .  During the intervening time the original star of Mad Max , Mel Gibson, had found himself disgraced due to numerous antisemitic and sexist statements, while Miller seemed more interested in movies about talking pigs and dancing penguins. Since Miller's return to the world of Mad Max Fury Road has been praised as one of the best action films ever made.  A big part of that was, though there was CGI added after filming, a majority of the movie was made the way the previous films were.  That meant practical makeup and special effects and actual stunts involving a number of customized vehicles.  It also featured Tom Hardy taking over for Gibson who, even without his issues, was too old to play the part, whic...

One of the '90s fads no one talks about much anymore is Wicca.  Despite being based on ancient traditions the religion itself has only been around since the late 1800s and began being popularized as an alternative to organized religion in the 1960s, despite many covens and divisions of Wicca being quite organized themselves.  Anton La Vey swiped a good deal of Gardnerian Wiccanism wholesale for The Satanic Bible , just omitting the parts about doing no harm, and I'm sure the idea of a bunch of young women leaping around a fire naked appealed to many young men at the time. Truth is, when one gets into it, it is like any other religion.  It has its rules and, if one practices with others, even more rules and schisms and such.  Humans just can't help fighting over whose interpretation of a religion is right and, for those on a spiritual search, it is one more lesson learned.  Still, for a while, it appealed to both women looking for a belief system that empowered t...

I have to admire an entire family that gets together, hops in an RV, and goes out to make movies.  John Adams, a former model, his actress wife Toby Poser and their daughter Zelda Adams all wrote and directed this film, with their older daughter Lulu also helping and playing a role as well.  In addition, since most of the family are musicians, they composed the original songs and the score.  This also is not the first go-'round for them, being the sixth feature film they made and, though still having some rough edges, it is quite polished for a low-budget feature. Izzy (Zelda Adams) is a teenager living in an isolated house with her mother (Poser).  She is not allowed to be around others due to an autoimmune disease, so she spends her time playing music with her mom when not out wandering the woods, taking in nature and drawing.  Things change when she begins to be curious about the nearby town and other people, briefly making friends with a girl named Amber (Lu...

Ray Bradbury was a significant part of my childhood so it was pretty early on that I saw The Illustrated Man  knowing that it was from the collection of short stories of the same name.  I was quite familiar with them having at some point checked out the book, and most of his other collections, from the local library, and of course I would have seen it in edited form as part of some Saturday afternoon presentation on television. I had no idea how much Bradbury himself hated this film and I often forget that the title character, played by Rod Steiger, is not a friendly storyteller like one would find in many anthology movies.  In fact, I had forgotten, or totally missed when I was younger, that all the characters save a couple of the soldiers in the segment "The Long Rain" are the same actors throughout.  I'm sure it helped keep the budget down.  While there is an unfortunate tendency on director Jack Smight's part to indulge in some narrative aspects that would h...

Robert Bloch is best known as the author of Psycho , the novel that Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1960 into one of his best-known movies.  Bloch, however, was a prolific writer, and I don't blame Amicus for getting ahold of some of his stories for one of their many anthologies.   Det. Insp. Holloway (John Bennett) arrives from Scotland Yard to investigate the disappearance of a horror film actor in a small village.  The actor had been renting a home on the outskirts and, it turns out, the house has a history.  Those who have lived in it have not done so long and, many times, their lives have come to an abrupt end.  Holloway, of course, does not believe in the supernatural, despite what Police Sergeant Martin (John Malcolm) and real estate agent A. J. Stoker (John Bryans) have to say about the dwelling.   As Holloway does his investigation we learn about the former occupants.  First, in "Method for Murder", we meet a writer (Denholm Elliott) and...

I hope that no one in the '80s mistook this movie for The Monster Squad .  That would be one heck of a surprise, as well as one major lesson in disappointment.  Even if intentionally watching this film, which sports Vincent Price and John Carradine as well as some other horror luminaries among its cast, that sense of disappointment is going to linger.  One expects to see a few neat short horror segments introduced by these two and almost gets something as bad as Night Train to Terror .  Horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Carradine) is in London perusing a display of his works when he is attacked by a vampire named Eramus (Price).  Eramus doesn't kill him or turn him because he realizes who he is, being one of the author's big fans.  Instead, after taking a quick drink, he invites the author to join him at a place called the Monster Club, a special hang-out for all types of creatures.  While they sit down for a drink Eramus begins educating Chetwynd-Hayes...

"Even Homer slept" is a phrase used to excuse the not-so-great works of great artists.  Homer, whoever he may have been in reality, had some benefits going for him.  One is that a couple millennia have passed since he wrote his great epic poems, meaning that his own creative blunders either burned with the Library of Alexandria or just shuffled out of existence and memory to be overshadowed by the greatness of The Iliad and The Odyssey .  I'm sure if Homer were to get shifted in time and find himself in the present his only objections would be that some other work he is proud of is forgotten and would not be at all embarrassed that certain parts of his bibliography are now dust. It is modern times so, for Stephen King, that luxury does not yet exist despite the fact that he has taken some long creative naps himself, both due to not having enough people around him telling him no when it came to length and content of some of his novels and, in the past, some of the substanc...

We don't think about it now but many of the film noire classics were adapted from novels that were popular at the time.  Most of those writers were alive and producing material when the movies came out and were in many cases not as polite as many writers today are.  Today many of them - even Stephen King - keep quiet either because they have learned it is in their best interest or their lawyers have made it clear to them.  Back in the day many authors didn't hold back, and Cornell Woolrich was not happy with what Universal did to his book  The Black Angel.  It's not one of the more well-known movies of its type, and it was the last movie directed by Roy William Neill, who had been responsible for the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone.  Due to circumstances it became a bit of a second-tier film, with Peter Lorre being the only major name in the film.  It also took the plot of Woolrich's book, pared it down to the barest essentials and made i...

Dario Argento did not invent the giallo , but it could be argued he perfected it.  He made these types of movies at the same time as all the other famous directors of the genre did, abandoning it after his first three movies and moving on to horror after a failed attempt at comedy.  In 1982, after the genre had died down a bit and many others had tried to copy his style, Argento decided to return with Tenebrae, arguably one of the best movies of his career.  Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) is a writer of detective novels.  His literary agent Bullmer (John Saxon) has arranged for him to come to Rome to promote his latest book, Tenebrae , and try to negotiate movie rights.  Problem is, right before he lands, a woman (Mirella Banti) is murdered in a way similar to that of a passage in Neal's book, with pages from it stuffed in her mouth.  The killer takes pictures of the scene and leaves a cryptic note slipped under the door of Neal's Rome apartment. This leads...

The Fantastic Four is one of the few comics I can remember, although I would be pressed to remember any stories from it.  Like a lot of kids it was Ben Grimm, aka the Thing, that originally caught my eye.  There is nothing like an orange rock monster punching the lights out of the bad guys.  Reed Richards wasn't bad either as being able to stretch wouldn't be a horrible superpower, but I will always be on the side of clobberin' time.  The problem is cinema hasn't been so kind.  Roger Corman produced a low-budget version in the 1990s that, despite the rumors, was intended for release as that was part of the deal to keep the rights to the franchise.  It just wasn't a wide release and no one wanted to see it as there was no way even a big-budget version would have been able to pull off the special effects at the time.  With CGI, and with the rights going to 20th Century Fox, there was some hope that a proper Fantastic Four film could finally be made....

There are certain movies I wish that I could experience again for the first time.  Sometimes it feels like I am after the years stretch out and I forget about much of what happens, but then there are those movies like Dead Alive that, although it has been at least a decade or so since I last viewed it, I still remember in vivid detail.   Originally released in New Zealand as Braindead , the title was changed when it was released in the U.S. and Canada because there had just been a movie called Brain Dead released in 1990 and, as Dead Alive was only getting a limited release before heading to video stores, there was some concern the two would get confused.  While waiting to get the movie into the North American festival circuit director Peter Jackson had some time to reconsider the 104 minute cut that was released to the rest of the world, shortening the film to 97 minutes for the unrated version released in the U.S.  This is the version everyone here has seen a...