Expelled Grey Matter

Alien was rare movie where the sequel was the equal of the original.  Aliens was quite different, with the original being a haunted house movie in space and the second being pure action, but being completely different types of movies helped, as well as doubling down on Ripley as a strong female protagonist.  Both movies were successful and influential enough that Predator 2 ended up placing itself in the same universe, thus spawning a number of comics and attempts to make movies showing the two species fighting each other. That, after years in limbo, failed miserably at the hands of Paul W. S. Anderson.  Unfortunately, the main series didn't do so well either.  Alien 3 was filled with production problems to the point where David Fincher was filming without a set script and, despite having renowned French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet for Alien Resurrection, that movie also failed to renew interest in the series.  Original director Ridley Scott returned from the ...

I understand Daniel Radcliffe trying to distance himself as much as possible from the Harry Potter series.  Unlike Robert Pattinson he never seemed embarrassed by the role that made him famous, but it was one he began playing as a kid.  By the time the movies ended he was much older than the character he was playing on screen and eager to take on more challenging roles. That he has done.  Horns   was a strange bit of indie horror and fantasy and, most recently, he has played "Weird Al" Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story .  Still, the strangest role he has played to date is that of a corpse named Manny in Swiss Army Man , the feature film debut from the guys that would bring us Everything Everywhere All at Once .   Hank Thompson (Paul Dano) is a shipwreck survivor reaching his end on a small desert island somewhere in the Pacific.  As he is about to kill himself he sees another person wash up on shore.  He delays his suicide long enough ...

When one moves outside of Italy and Spain it turns out that a lot of mainland European horror films have some sort of subtext.  France, with some exceptions, is the worst, often seeming embarrassed when making any type of genre film.  It just can't be scary; it has to have real meaning and say something about the human condition or make the plot secondary to a commentary on genre cinema itself.  Alexandre Aja and other modern French directors bucked that trend, but for their efforts ended up making Hollywood films at some point. Germany pretty much helped invent the modern horror film with their expressionist movies in the late teens and early 1920s.  Though artfully done they were typically made for two reasons, which was to scare the audience and make money.  The Germans, famous for numerous architectural, artistic, musical and literary movements still know how to entertain.  Unfortunately, a certain little Austrian decided to come along, ruin box moustac...

  One of the debates that pops up every year is whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas film.  I am with the side that says it is.  Not because it takes place in December, since I do not believe that automatically qualifies a movie as being a holiday film, but because Christmas is a central part of the movie.  Christmas music is used, references are made and the whole attack on Nakatomi plaza happens during an office Christmas party.  Every single thing screams Christmas. On the other hand, nobody debates that Home Alone is a Christmas film.  Its connection to the holiday is no less tenuous than Die Hard , but because it has a kid and there is snow on the ground no one has a problem with embracing it as a holiday tradition.  This, despite the fact that the booby traps Kevin uses would leave the Wet Bandits just as dead as John McClane leaves Hans Gruber's band of thieves.  In fact, plot wise, they are not too far from being the same movie, just th...

It was inevitable that Sam Raimi would make the leap to studio filmmaking, although he soon went back to independent movies despite the success of Darkman .  He found out that the big time wasn't all it was cracked up to be as having a major studio behind a movie also means they are looking over the shoulders of everyone involved the whole way.  Still, the independent spirit of Raimi wasn't lost, as this was still during his more creative directing days.   The result is a unique superhero film that combines elements of Universal's classic horror films with the older Batman and Shadow comic books.  He unfortunately did not have the rights to either so came up with is own take, based largely on The Phantom of the Opera .  In the end it showed that Raimi could do a major film and not just backwoods horror. Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on the development of synthetic skin to help burn victims.  The problem is it only lasts 99 minutes before...

s The first few minutes of Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge - after the first killing, that is -   threw me for a loop.  I swore I was looking at an outtake from Chopping Mall , as this movie was filmed in the same place and also opens with a press conference.  Director Richard Friedman uses the same angles, same location and even the same chairs.  I was surprised that Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov didn't pop up.   Despite the fact that malls were all the rage in the 1980s, as were slasher films, it is surprising the two don't cross over as much.  In fact, this is the only one I can say that fits that location into the genre, as Chopping Mall  was about killer robots rather than a take on Phantom of the Opera .  Also, while not traditionally a good movie, Chopping Mall is still a bit of dark humored fun.  I think Phantom of the Mall attempts that as well but falls far short.  Melody (Kari Whitman) has just got a job at the new mal...

I loved Deadpool   and liked Deadpool 2 .  There was only a two-year gap between the two and it seemed that, although they were made by two different directors, there was consistency in the humor.  The second didn't surprise like the first did, but it was still willing to play around with superhero tropes and, like its predecessor, was allowed to be as raunchy as possible. The next gap was six years.  During that time 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney and all the Marvel franchises that studio had reverted to Marvel Studios.  For the most part their new owner proceeded to do nothing with them, promising that maybe the characters would come back at some point, using the current multiverse concept in order to do so.  Thus, after a span of time, Deadpool is back, and so is Wolverine, along with a number of other Marvel heroes that came before the MCU.  Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is brought in by the TVA to meet with a man called Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macf...

Jaws was one of the first big blockbusters and a number of studios spent the rest of the 1970s making cheap knockoffs of it.  However, there are only so many times that one can have an oversized predator (or swarm of them) attacking tourists and locals as a major event comes up before people get bored.  However, it seems they never got bored of seeing animals get their own against humans, whether those creatures be normal or supersized.  The "nature attacks" films pretty much were their own subgenre and, as in any, they were of varying quality, from amazing to amazingly bad.  Kingdom of the Spiders falls somewhere in the middle. When Walter Colby's (Woody Strode) prize calf suddenly dies local veterinarian 'Rack' Hansen (William Shatner) sends samples of the animal's blood to a lab in Flagstaff to have it examined.  The results are sent to Arizona State University, where an expert in entomology named Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) travels to the town of Camp ...

The world doesn't need more Christmas horror films.  What it needs is more good horror movies for the holidays.  The problem is for every Rare Exports   or Krampus  a number of hack directors turn out stuff like Jack Frost .  Producer Steven Hoban realized this and decided to rush out a Christmas anthology that he believed would be a cross between Creepshow and Pulp Fiction , weaving four different stories together with tenuous connections to each other rather than the normal anthology format.  Santa Claus (George Buza) is preparing for Christmas at the North Pole when suddenly his Elves begin to turn on him, becoming zombies that he must fight in order to save Christmas and his wife Marta (Debra McCabe).  Meanwhile, in the Canadian town of Bailey Downs, aspiring journalist Molly (Zoé De Grand Maison) and her friends Ben (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) and Dylan (Shannon Cook) sneak into the local high school to investigate a murder that happened a year prior....

The Mangler is a horror film about a possessed laundry machine.  That is the thing to understand about it before deciding if this is something that one wants to watch.  Not that it was directed by Tobe Hooper, not that it is adapted from a short story by Stephen King and also not the fact that Robert Englund plays a major villain role.  It is about a possessed laundry machine, although a possessed refrigerator also comes into play. That is what often makes reviewing certain movies hard.  Some critics have despaired at having to review certain things, like Godzilla or James Bond films, but in the end those are easy as they have been around so long that they can be reviewed against others in the same series.  When reviewing something about Satanic industrial equipment one has to pull back and realize that, unless an extreme case of serendipity hit the production to make everything work, there is no way the movie is going to live up to the expectation of being eith...

Edgar Wright definitely has a style.  He likes combining sci-fi, horror and comedy in unexpected ways, resulting in a quirky form of filmmaking that has had its ups and downs.  He is similar to Sam Raimi where some of the more recognizable trademarks of his style have slowly leached out to where he is becoming more and more another mainstream director.  I wouldn't say Hollywood, since with a few exceptions and a delightful detour in making a documentary about Sparks, he generally sticks to England for his films. Still, I can't help but feel, though it is still quite a good movie, that Wright has moved far into the mainstream with Last Night in Soho .  It has its moments and it is still quite creative in its storytelling, but it feels different than what has come before.  Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is a young girl from Cornwall hoping to achieve her dream of becoming a fashion designer.  Her mom (Aimee Cassettari) is dead and she was raised by her grandmothe...

Dick Randall was an exploitation producer who is not as well known as Herschell Gordon Lewis or Roger Corman.  The reason is that, although he was often successful and his films made money, he was said to often be one step ahead of either the mafia or the taxman.  Either way, that meant he spent a lot of his career outside the U.S., which is why an American producer ended up making a British film. For Don't Open Till Christmas Randall picked up Edmund Purdom, an actor who had appeared in major productions in the 1950s and since had been making appearances in Italian productions.  Purdom decided he wanted to direct the movie and Randall, happy to have a name attached that might bring the film some prestige, agreed.  The problem was he didn't check to see if Purdom could direct, something that he proved not too competent at.  He also at some point became bored with the film and left during production.  The result is Derek Ford, one of the two screenwriters, w...

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II , despite its U.S. title, is not a sequel to  Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla .  In fact, that one already had a sequel with Terror of Mechagodzill a, the film that officially ended the original run of Godzilla films in 1975.  Instead, like the big lizard's two previous bouts with King Ghidorah and Mothra, this was another reimagining of previous monsters from those movies, but updated to the 1990s.   A new agency, codenamed G-Force, has been created as a joint effort between the United Nations and Japan to defend against giant monsters, specifically Godzilla (Kenpachirô Satsuma), with the hope of defeating him one and for all.  In order to do this engineer Kazuma Aoki (Masahiro Takashima) has been given the task of building Garuda, a flying machine to fight Godzilla.  However, by reverse engineering the technology from the salvaged Mecha-King Ghidorah, G-Force has created Mechagodzilla (Wataru Fukuda), a fighting machine capab...