Expelled Grey Matter

The 1990s saw a spate of vampire movies focused around New York, including The Addiction , Habit and even Vampire in Brooklyn.  Save for the last they dealt with non-vampiric subjects in the background, such as drug abuse and loneliness.  Meanwhile, another low-budget feature set in the Big Apple, Nadja , attempted to update the most famous vampire story of all. Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is a Romanian vampire and the illegitimate daughter of Dracula (Peter Fonda).  She roams the streets of New York at night looking for young men to feed upon while spending her days bathing in blood under the careful watch of her slave Renfield (Karl Geary).  Things change when she senses her father's death and starts realizing that she suddenly has a freedom she hasn't had in her entire life.  This leads her to pursue a mortal woman named Lucy (Galaxy Craze) who happens to be married to Jim (Martin Donovan).  Jim, in turn, is the nephew of Van Helsing (Fonda), the man who killed Dracula. Jim gets

Habit began life as writer, director and star Larry Fessenden's student film project which was released as a short film in 1982.  Fessenden expanded the script into a feature and began working on it in the mid-1990s, finishing in 1995 and self-releasing in 1997 after failing to find an actual distributor.  Despite the difficulties in getting it seen Habit fell perfectly into the indie film scene of the 1990s even if Abel Ferrara's more well-known The Addiction beat it to theaters by a couple of years.  It's too bad it got ignored at the time as Habit is the much more interesting and engaging film. Sam (Fessenden) is an alcoholic artist dealing with the death of his father.  His girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury) is leaving him, and his best friends Nick (Aaron Beall) and Rae (Patricia Coleman) are having their own issues.  As things are looking their worst he meets a strange woman named Anna (Meredith Snaider) at a Halloween party and they hit it off.  Only problem, she di

When one considers that John Schlesinger directed The Believers it is no surprise that this movie feels like a bit of a throwback.  It didn't get the best reviews when it came out in 1987 but that may have been that the film style was more 1973.  It also deals with the well-worn topic of modern society colliding with traditional beliefs, with the supernatural having an actual influence.  Factor in that this is about Santeria and "dark" African magic and I can understand how this did not fit in with the 1980s and even less today.   Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) is a police psychologist raising his son Chris (Harley Cross) on his own after the death of his wife (Janet-Laine Green).  He has moved back to New York, renting an apartment from a woman named Jessica (Helen Shaver) and getting back in touch with old friends Dennis (Lee Richardson) and Kate Maslow (Elizabeth Wilson).  His relative peace is short-lived when he is asked to help with a police officer (Jimmy Smits) that h

I don't know what it is about movies that feature disembodied heads or brains.  The idea has a certain prurient attraction, but only  Re-Animator seemed to get it right.  Otherwise, the fear of being a helpless head - or the fear of that head not being so helpless - results in some rather dull films.  The Brain That Wouldn't Die  almost got it right, but writer/director Joseph Green still managed to fumble in the end. Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is a brilliant doctor obsessed with prolonging human life.  He hopes to make transplants universally viable.  His father (Bruce Brighton) is concerned that he is going in directions he shouldn't, especially since amputated limbs keep coming up missing at the hospital.  It turns out that Cortner is using them for experiments at his family's country house.  When he gets an urgent call from his assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna) he borrows his fiancé  Jan's  (Virginia Leith) car and takes her with him to see what is wrong. 

Charles Band's Full Moon Pictures had its heyday in the early 1990s.  By the middle of the decade I had stopped watching many of the films because they became an endless stream of one property versus another.  While many of them sound interesting the good ideas didn't go further than the titles.  Still, occasionally something intriguing popped up, even if it still wasn't very good. Lance (Blake Adams) has a major problem.  Local gangster Howard Oates (Gordon Jennison Noice) is married to Lance's girlfriend, Loretta (Jacqueline Lovell).  The lovers are afraid of what may happen if Howard finds out, so Loretta convinces Lance to kill him.  He is reluctant because he is sure everything will lead back to them but comes up with an idea when he sees a strange local family abduct a man and decides to use that as blackmail.   The family is the Stackpooles, consisting of four siblings: the super-strong Otis (Bob Schott), the hypersensitive Wheeler (James Jones), the irresistible

Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst

The Day of the Triffids, a 1951 novel by John Wyndham,   is considered one of the cornerstones of British science fiction as well as one of the most influential books in the genre.  It has inspired a number of post-apocalyptic stories, from 28 Days Later to The Walking Dead , with the central idea of a group of humans overcoming a worldwide disaster to work together and survive being a central idea in many of them. It was inevitable that it would become a movie and, with eight-foot-tall carnivorous walking plants, the triffids themselves fit in perfectly with the giant monsters of the 1950s.  Despite this, the movie didn't get made until 1963 and, while held in some regard, it took many liberties with the novel.  Despite that it still manages to be much more than just another creature feature.  During a spectacular meteor shower a specimen of plant called a triffid, carried to Earth aboard a meteor and kept in the Royal Botanical Gardens in London, comes to life.  Soon the plants,

The reason so many science fiction films from the 1950s are fondly remembered is because in most there was a black and white divide between good and evil.  Even in something like The Day the Earth Stood Still where the plot is not the usual invasion scenario there are clear ideas of what is good and what is bad.  World War II was one of the few wars with a defined evil enemy which most of the world could agree needed to be defeated and this left an impression on Hollywood storytelling for a long time. We didn't much like the Soviet Union before the war but, as our goals were similar, we tolerated them during.  Winston Churchill knew that Josef Stalin had ideas beyond his borders but, exhausted from fighting both the Germans and the Japanese, the United States was more than willing to let the growing tensions fall into a Cold War, especially as the specter of mutually assured destruction began to loom.  Underneath the seeming placidity of the post-war United States was a sense of p

Fantastic Four was a successful movie at the box office.  This was long before superhero fatigue and before the movies became so expensive and bloated that it was difficult for even the best of them to earn their money back.  This didn't mean it was a good movie.  Julian McMahon was good as Dr. Doom and Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm, but the rest of the cast ranged from just there to insufferable.  The story was also quite hollow, even for an origin story. Still, financial success, regardless of quality, pretty much guarantees a sequel.  In this case the decision was made to add one of the more popular antagonists, the Silver Surfer, and the ultimate boss villain in the world-eating Galactus.  By all accounts this should have made up for the problems with the first, as usually a second movie of this type sees the ensemble cast gel, and including a villain fans want to see helps.  However, this was the 2000s, which meant everyone involved would find a way to mess it up. Reed Richard

I don't think about it much, and I don't think a lot of people do which is why this type of movie isn't as popular now, but the early 1990s had a lot of suspense thrillers.  Not psychological horror, not slashers, but somewhat neo-noir or neo-Hitchcockian films.  These would have the killer known from the beginning, things would escalate, and along the way any aid that the protagonist would get would be rendered moot or just whittled down to where they had to defend themselves against overwhelming odds.  I've never looked into where or why this was so popular at the time, other than it provided a simple plot device for "erotic thrillers" on cable to string along a series of softcore sex scenes. Sleeping with the Enemy is definitely not that despite the fact that an early scene in the movie had to be toned down to get the movie an R rating.  It is more like a big budget Lifetime movie and was based on the 1987 novel by Nancy Price.  It was the movie that dethro

I found out at an early age that horror movies were not that frightening.  My father didn't like many of them because he had seen some of the stuff in them actually happen, albeit accidentally, in the course of working in the steel industry.  I cannot remember at any point thinking any of it was real and perhaps that helped me not to be desensitized to the real thing, of which I have unfortunately had my share of encounters as well.  Thus, slasher films like Friday the 13th are fun to watch, as even Tom Savini often pulls some punches as his war experience reminds him that no one wants to see effects that are too realistic.  That is the reason  The Stepfather was effective when I first saw it.  I had no details about the actual case - no internet at the time, so it was difficult to research without going to a library - but knew it was somewhat based on real events.  It was also not done in the style of a normal slasher where a masked killer is going around picking people off.  Alth

Ever since the late 1960s Toho has had it in their heads that Godzilla films were for kids.  Sure, there is something about a giant monster stomping through a city that is going to get a kid excited, but Ishirô Honda's original film was a dire anti-war analogy, not a movie about kaiju bringing peace and happiness to the world.  Although Godzilla was once again the villain in the Heisei Era it didn't keep Toho from trying to again dumb down the series to appeal to children.  In this case, through their marketing research, they also tried to appeal to women, who make up a majority of the movie audience in Japan, by polling them and finding out that their favorite monster was Mothra.  When an asteroid hits Earth near the Philippines it not only wakes up Godzilla (Kenpachirô Satsuma) but also exposes a giant egg on Infant Island, near Indonesia.  A corporation called Marutomo, led by CEO Takeshi Tomokane (Makoto Ôtake), has been working on developing the island and the deforestatio