Expelled Grey Matter

Just looking at the poster is enough to prepare one for this movie.  The font is the same as Guardians of the Galaxy , so there was an obvious attempt at tricking nearsighted grandmas or someone not paying attention into purchasing this film instead of what they intended.  This is the type of title that shows up in the DVD bin at Family Dollar.  7 Guardians of the Tomb  is a sub-par adventure movie with killer spiders to add a horror element.  There are also character actors thrust into lead positions just to have American and Australian actors in a movie that, despite the attempt at being a mockbuster, was made for a Chinese market, both in mainland and for ex-pats.  It's got the same bland storytelling, corny jokes and emphasis on digital effects and spectacle as any film starring the Rock, meaning that it is something one can watch and follow the basic plot without having to pay attention to the subtitles.   Jia (Bingbing Lee) and Luke (Chun Wu...

The Terror is more well-known as an example of Roger Corman's ability to churn out movies than for anything else.  While famous for the fact that it was made in four days, the truth was that it was only principle photography, which Corman directed, so that the sets from The Raven could be used as well as Boris Karloff in a main role.  In truth the movie took closer to six months to make, much longer than most Corman productions, as the rest was shot by second unit directors such as Jack Hill, Francis Ford Coppola and even star Jack Nicholson himself. Lieutenant Andre Duvalier (Nicholson) is separated from his unit in 1806.  Exhausted and nearly dying of thirst, he happens upon a woman named Helene (Sandra Knight) who shows him where to get water and then, mysteriously, walks off into the sea.  Duvalier tries to follow her, but his exhaustion gets the best of him.  He wakes up in the home of a woman named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) and her servant Gustaf (Jonathan...

A Quiet Place was a bit of a surprise.  It wasn't perfect, but it was an entertaining throwback to the 1950s sci-fi horror films where, as it looks like humanity is on the brink of extinction, a solution is found to the problem.  The first film had a perfect ending, cutting off just as the deaf girl Regan discovered that the creatures were sensitive to certain high frequencies.  Playing it caused them pain, sometimes stunning them for a time, but usually forcing them to open up the armored plating around their faces and exposing the only sensitive part of their body, allowing them to be killed. Despite the original movie being good on its own John Krasinski returned as director for A Quiet Place Part II , wisely keeping his character deceased, although we do see him briefly in the opening as it shows what happened the day the meteors fell to Earth and unleased the hibernating aliens on our planet.  That presents a problem for a movie like A Quiet Place: Day One ....

José Mojica Marins was the director that brought horror movies to Brazil.  His first picture, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul , introduced the world to Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe as he is known to English speakers.  His real name is Josefel Zantanas, and he is a gravedigger in a rural Brazilian town who despises all that is holy and seeks to cement his immortality by having a child with a "superior" woman.  Between giving speeches against the church, God and Satan, Zé do Caixão collects various women for his purposes. The immediate sequel to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul was the 1967 film This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse , which saw the gravedigger descend into hell and eventually get his just desserts, shot by a policeman and accepting God as he sinks into a pond where he placed his victims.  However, that is not the whole story. Zé do Caixão (Raymond Castile), rather than drowning, resurfaced and soon refuted his redemption, attacking the priest and poking...

When Hammer decided to do horror films it pretty much went for a formula of boobs and blood from the outset.  By the 1970s the amount one could show of both had increased.  Even so, by the dawn of that decade, the films made by the famous British studio had started to become a bit old fashioned.  Even adding some lipstick lesbianism and the occasional full-frontal shot felt a bit odd and stodgy in a climate where independent filmmaking was constantly pushing the envelope and even pornographic films were becoming mainstream. That doesn't mean the movies they were making were bad.  Many were just out of step with the time and, over 50 years later, it doesn't matter as much.  While the classic Hammer movies will always be the ones from the 1950s and 1960s, the studio's desperation to find acceptance in a decade that offered much more artistic freedom led to some great b-movies, including Twins of Evil , the conclusion of the Karnstein trilogy. After the death of th...

Alligators in the sewer is among the most famous of urban legends.  This was supposed to have happened in New York, with the creatures flushed down the toilet and growing large feasting on rats, pets and the occasional member of the homeless population.  While occasionally smaller juvenile versions have been found in urban areas outside their natural habitat few have been found in the sewers and, when they have, they were temporary shelters.  Quite a bit of what humans put into a sewer makes the environment quite unhealthy for even a large reptile.   The stories began in the 1920s and flourished ever since.  With the rash of animal attack films in the 1970s, many copying the plot of Jaws and substituting another animal, it was inevitable that these scaly critters would get their day.  In this case it is courtesy of John Sayles, who also wrote another famous Jaws knockoff,  Piranha , and director Lewis Teague.  The good thing is Sayles and Te...

Paul Wegener is credited with creating one of the first film franchises.  What we know as The Golem is the third movie, The Golem: How He Came into the World.  The original film, made in 1914, is now lost, although there are rumors that a print survived World War II in a private collection.  Despite that the only bit that has surfaced is about four minutes, mostly of the finale.  We do know that it took place in what was at the time the modern day, with the Golem (Wegener) being found in an antique shop and going on a rampage when reanimated and rejected by a woman he falls for.  There was a comedy sequel, The Golem and the Dancing Girl , made in 1917 and which is also lost.  The movie we have, which has been pieced together from various prints and negatives from Europe and the U.S., is a prequel to the first.  While The Golem takes place in modern Prague, The Golem: How He Came into the World tells of the story of the creature's creation and its role ...

Demián Rugna is a director I knew was going to do great things.  Terrified may have been low on actual plot but the images and ideas presented made up for that.  With When Evil Lurks Rugna returns to the horror genre, something that he is obviously quite good at.  What he has come up with this time is one of the best horror films in recent years.  That doesn't mean I'll want to see it more than once. Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimi (Demián Salomón) are brothers living in a rural part of Argentina outside of a small town.  One night they hear gun shots and the next morning, upon investigating, they find a man cut in half.  It turns out he was a cleaner, a person sent from the Ministry of Health to deal with a possessed person, or "rotten".  This happens to be Uriel (Pablo and Gonzalo Galarza), the oldest boy of a woman living on a neighboring farm belonging to a man named Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski).  Because a rotten can't be killed by firearms w...

I didn't get to watch much of Johnny Carson in the 1970s.  I probably would not have understood most of it anyway.  VCRs were not yet a thing so, unless a kid could get away with watching TV without drawing the attention of their parents, it just wasn't happening.   I was, on the other hand, able to catch Merv Griffin quite often.  That was one of the first thoughts that came to mind when seeing the set of  Night Owls with Jack Delroy, the fictional late-night television show that Late Night with the Devil purports to be a lost episode of.  Co-directors and writers Cameron and Colin Cairnes spent quite a lot of time trying to make the show look as authentic as possible, not going for the comic exaggerations of '70s fashions and color tones but instead going for something one would recognize if they grew up at the time.  It's a great concept for a horror film, but it's too bad that it unravels at the end. Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is a late-...

It should probably come as no surprise that I am somewhat familiar with Kay Kyser.  It is true that this is my grandparents' music, but one can thank that swing revival from the late 1990s for introducing me to something other than Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye when it came to the big band era.  There were so many talented musicians at the time, many of them great showmen as well. Throughout a good part of the 20th century, if there was even the slightest possibility of a musician being an actor, or vice-versa, it was encouraged.  It was part of the entire entertainment machine and is why so many comedies in the 1930s and 1940s featured musical performances.  Unless the band was on tour or a person lived in a major city where they had a club residence, this was the only way for many people to see them. Kyser had a radio show called The College of Musical Knowledge  which integrated comedy, music and a quiz show.  It was popular for over a decade, so it was no ...

I appreciate that this movie, produced by Robert Zemeckis, comes from a place of love.  Zemeckis is a big fan of William Castle, the producer and director of a number of films in the 1950s through the 1970s that were often quite fun to watch even if the selling point was often a corny gimmick.  House on Haunted Hill, released in 1959 and starring Vincent Price as a millionaire offering ten thousand dollars apiece to a group of strangers to spend the night in a supposed haunted house, was one of his best. A selling point on the original, other than to see a plastic skeleton fly over the audience toward the end when it emerges from a vat of acid on screen, was that the haunted house and the ghosts were a background story.  There are never any ghosts seen nor do any of the characters interact with any.  There are frightening looking servants and people pretending to be spirits, but despite the owner's insistence that they exist, that part of the movie is left up to the ...

Producer and director William Castle is much more known for his gimmicks than he is for the actual movies he made.  House on Haunted Hill , for example, had a gag called "Emergo", in which at a certain point in the movie a plastic skeleton would emerge from above the screen and float over the audience before being reigned back in. It was one of his more famous tricks, but the reason House on Haunted Hill has remained a Halloween classic all these years, other than the fact it is in the public domain, is that Castle managed to come up with a fun movie to go along with it. A millionaire names Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) rents a house owned by Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.) for a party suggested by his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).  The house Pritchard owns is his family residence and is reputed to be haunted.  Loren offers his guests - pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), secretary Norah Manning (Carolyn Craig), psychologist Dr. David Trent (Alan Marshal) and colu...

Let Me In is an American remake of the Swedish movie Let the Right One In , itself an adaptation of the novel of the same name.  That it is yet another remake during a time known for recycling horror movie ideas did make me apprehensive as the Swedish film is a unique take on vampire legends as well as quite a realistic look at the bullying that many children experience in school.  There were also some aspects of it that Europe is often a bit more adult about than we are the United States.  Tomas Alfredson, the director of the original, was also not too happy to hear his movie was being remade. Matt Reeves, who wrote and directed this version, decided to remain respectful to the original, and in some ways a bit too much.  He couldn't take too many detours without getting criticism for altering the story in the book, but in many ways he apes the way Alfredson shot his film.  Despite this he still managed to catch the feeling of the original even if he did pull a ...

Ju-On: The Grudge was a hit horror film for writer and director Takashi Shimizu in 2002.  It was the third in a series of movies about a house in a Tokyo suburb haunted by the spirits of a wife, child, father and cat, all of whom had died on one murder-filled night.  The third film was the first to receive wide cinematic release and it came to the attention of a number of horror fans worldwide, including producer and director Sam Raimi. What Raimi did was something unique for Asian horror remakes.  He set Takashi Shimizu up to direct, a chance he took since there were improvements and changes he wanted to make to Ju-On .  Stephen Susco rewrote some parts of the story that included elements from the earlier two films, but it was still based in Japan although the main actors were Americans.  The remake ended up being a big enough hit to spawn two sequels despite not getting the best reviews. Karen (Sarah Michelle Geller) is a nursing student taking classes in Japa...

Although made popular in the U.S. after a 2004 remake starring Sarah Michelle Geller, Ju-On: The Grudge was the third movie in a series that began in 2000 with two movies, Ju-On: The Curse and Ju-On: The Curse 2 .  The latter got a limited theatrical release and, because the earlier low-budget films were successful, The Grudge received a wide release and eventually caught the eye of Sam Raimi.  It was this movie and Ringu which led to a sudden popularity of Asian horror films and a spate of American remakes.  Social worker Rika (Megumi Okina) is sent to check up on an older lady named Sachie (Chikako Isomura) who is under the care of her daughter Kazumi (Shuri Matsuda) and son-in-law Katsuya (Kanji Tsuda).  While cleaning the home Rika opens a taped-up closet to find a black cat and a young boy named Toshio (Yuya Ozeki).  Curious, she tries to find out more, but faints from fright when she sees Sachie being attacked by a ghost. The ghost turns out to be Kayako ...

To hear tell the origin of The Ghost Ship  was like most of Val Lewton's movies where he was tasked with developing it around titles or sets.  In this case it was the latter, as RKO still had a ship set left over from their 1939 romantic action film  Pacific Liner .  Lewton came up with the idea of a sadistic, homicidal captain and had writers Donald Henderson Clarke and Leo Mittler flesh out the details.  As always he was handed a tight budget, but he once again managed to pull off an exciting, noirish film with the help of director Mark Robson. Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) is the new third officer on the U.S.S. Altair , a merchant ship traveling from the U.S. to Mexico.  At first he is impressed by Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), who puts a lot of pride on running a tight and clean ship, though he is warned to not get too wrapped up in the captain's cult of personality by radio operator Sparks (Edmund Glover).  However, a number of events begin to ca...