Expelled Grey Matter

By 1993 Dario Argento was becoming well-known enough internationally for American film companies to have interest in backing his movies.  He had made features based, and sometimes partially filmed in, New York in the past, and he filmed his segment of Two Evil Eyes in George A. Romero's stomping ground of Pittsburgh. Lucio Fulci and numerous other giallo and horror directors frequently made movies that involved a small amount of filming in the United States combined with the use of Italian studios for the interiors or unspecified locations.  They would often go by English pseudonyms and the distributors would advertise the movies as if they were from Hollywood, with audiences realizing from the dubbing and production values where they came from. Trauma was a break from that.  The majority of the cast was English or American while the crew was still largely Italian.  It has many of Argento's typical camera movements and the convoluted storytelling, but in many ways it...

Stephen King often did gimmicks in the late 1990s and early 2000s to sell his books.  Some, like the multi-volume release of The Green Mile , worked.  Others seemed to just gloss over the fact that he was on cruise control, both before and after almost getting killed by a redneck in a van.  Desperation, published in 1996, is a solid Stephen King work with ties to his grander Dark Tower universe.  It's not great, but it works.   The gimmick was that at the same time he released a "mirror" novel written by his late pseudonym Richard Bachman called The Regulators .  It features the same characters, only in a different setting, fighting a manifestation of the same creature from Desperation .  It is also not bad but, where I remember a good deal of Desperation 30 years after reading it, I had to look up the plot of The Regulators to remind me what it is about.  After being reminded of the story I don't find it surprising that ABC never had any pla...

Despite sharing a title with the 1928 movie starring Lon Chaney, While the City Sleeps is based on a novel called The Bloody Spur  by Charles Einstein, published in 1953 and loosely based on a series of murders that occurred in 1946.  The original murder is even referenced in the movie, where the killer wrote "Catch me if you can" on a mirror in lipstick at the second murder scene.  William Heirens, the true lipstick killer, only made it to three victims before being captured. What makes this movie a bit different is the perspective.  While it does contain some references to forensic research at the time the story is told not from the perspective of the police pursuing the killer but rather from a group of newspaper men working for the fictional Kyne Media company, which includes broadcast television, radio and a paper called the New York Sentinel.  While it has several homages to Citizen Kane  it also is one of the first movies to establish tropes in moder...

Lon Chaney was known, even while alive, for his creative and often painful makeup work he did on such films as The Phantom of the Opera and London After Midnight .  What many forget is that Chaney was a talented stage and movie actor.  As with many movies from the early days of Hollywood much of what he did has been lost or, in the case of While the City Sleeps , is not in great condition.  Although the original music score is lost to time it would be wonderful to find a decent negative to restore as this is a great early crime thriller. Dan Coghlan (Chaney) is a plainclothes police officer in New York.  After a patrolman is killed he is sure it was at the behest of small-time crook Eddie "Mile-Away" Skeeter Carlson (Wheeler Oakman).  Problem is, as his nickname states, he always has an alibi putting him a mile away from any crime he is accused of committing.  Even worse a kid named Marty (Carroll Nye) who associates with Mile-Away is putting the moves on ...

I wonder if at some point Damien Leone is going to have Art the Clown appear for all the major holidays.  He started off on Halloween and, for the second official sequel, decides to bring his own twisted version of Christmas cheer.  Some time in the future Art may ruin Labor Day by oppressing the proletariat with a pair of garden shears but, at least until the next one comes out, he's more than happy to be the worst mall Santa ever.  Shortly after Art (David Howard Thornton) is killed by avenging angel Sienna (Lauren LaVera), his headless corpse makes its way to the hospital where Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) is incarcerated.  After regrowing his head they escape together and find an abandoned house to hibernate in for the next five years.  At that point Art returns to Miles County on Christmas just as Sienna, newly released from the mental hospital, comes to live with her aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence), uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson) and niece Gabbie (Antonella...

When Christmas comes around so does It's a Wonderful Life , the Jimmy Stewart film in which things start going downhill and he wishes he had never been born.  He is shown by an angel what would happen if this was the case and realizes that things aren't so bad after all.  It's become a Christmas classic and a go-to for '80s sitcoms looking to make a quick Christmas episode, although Married... with Children did it best.   Writer Michael Kennedy decided to see what he could do to turn the concept into a horror story.  Of course, this being the modern day, It's a Wonderful Life exists in the movie's universe, and it is referenced.  However, so is the style of the maligned Hallmark Christmas films, which It's a Wonderful Knife resembles a bit too closely.  It is satire as well as homage, but it never gets as clever or entertaining as it wants to be.  Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) lives in Angel Falls with her father David (Joel McHale), mother Judy...

Warner Bros., after failed movie after failed movie, decided it was time to cut their losses and completely reinvent the DC Cinematic Universe.  To do this they poached James Gunn, who had directed the Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel before being briefly given the boot for some immature stuff he said on Twitter in its early years.  It was at a time when everyone was looking for any excuse to cancel someone and studios were on edge.  However, fans were not having it and rallied go Gunn's defense, getting Disney and Marvel to let him back in and complete his trilogy.  Good thing as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was one of the few latter-day MCU films to deliver thrills, humor and emotion like some of the first batch did.   What Gunn had done during his issues with Marvel is slip on over to DC and make The Suicide Squad , the third film featuring Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, this time with a completely new cast of ne'er-do-wells tasked with being ...

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah finished off the 1990s "Hesei" period for the giant radioactive dinosaur in a grand way.  It was not only one of the best movies of that era, but one of the best Godzilla films period.  It still had some corniness but, in many ways, brought back some of the horror that had been missing since Toho decided to make the big guy more family friendly. It was good enough that Toho was happy to give Tri-Star Pictures a chance to make their own trilogy of American Godzilla films, with the plan being that the next Japanese one would show up in 2004 for the 50th anniversary of the original   Godzilla .  The problem was, instead of hiring someone who was a fan of the Japanese films and had grown up watching them on Saturday mornings, they hired Roland Emmerich.  Emmerich is German, and Godzilla films were not something he was too familiar with, nor did it turn out to be something he particularly liked.  He had ideas, not all of them bad, but he...

  Just Before Dawn is often considered to be one of the more obscure slashers.  It's kind of unfair to lump it in with that genre.  Though there may be some comparisons to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes , writer and director Jeff Lieberman had never seen those particular horror movies.  Instead, he was influenced by Deliverance in his effort to serve up his version of backwoods horror.   Warren (Gregg Henry) has inherited a plot of isolated land in Oregon and takes his girlfriend Constance (Deborah Benson), brothers Daniel (Ralph Seymour) and Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and Jonathan's girlfriend Megan (Jamie Rose) to go camping in the location.  They are warned off by forest ranger Roy McLean (George Kennedy) and even encounter a hunter (Mike Kellin) that is being pursued by some unknown person, but they continue on anyway. At first it seems everything is fine.  However, the spot Warren inherited is occupied by the Logan family,...

Satan's Little Helper is, to date, the last feature film from cult director Jeff Lieberman.  If the name doesn't sound familiar, then movies like the Just Before Dawn , Remote Control and that Saturday morning staple Squirm should jog the memory.  His movies may not be masterpieces but they have a weird, sometimes sick, quirkiness and dark sense of humor to them.  This one is no exception. Douglas Whooly (Alexander Brickel) is a young boy obsessed with the video game Satan's Little Helper , in which the title character goes around killing people in the name of Satan and sending them to hell for his master while trying to avoid getting in trouble with God.  His mother Merrill (Amanda Plummer) indulges his obsession.  He is looking forward to his sister Jenna (Katheryn Winnick) coming home to spend Halloween, but is upset when she brings along her new boyfriend Alex (Stephen Graham).  To bond, Alex decides to go trick-or-treating with Douglas as Satan. Probl...

It seems a simple horror concept: a haunted house event held in a real haunted house.  It is almost as if it writes itself.  I wouldn't be surprised if the concept had not been visited before Hell House LLC , but it was a concept that worked well for found footage horror.  Not something like The Blair Witch Project , but more the fake documentary that was released at the time to promote it.  16 years into found footage and many filmmakers had discovered this was the way to go rather than just have a bunch of people wander around the woods and yell at each other. Alex (Danny Bellini) is the owner of Hell House, a haunted house attraction that opens in a different location every year.  His crew consists of his girlfriend Sarah (Ryan Jennifer Jones), cameraman Paul (Gore Abrams), electrician Tony (Jared Hacker) and co-director Andrew "Mac" McNamera (Adam Schneider).  In 2009 they rent the abandoned Hotel Abaddon in the small town of Abaddon, New York to do the...

If one is a filmmaker with a paycheck's worth of a budget there is always a way.  In the case of director Chris LaMartina that way was to recreated a television broadcast from 1987.  Taking a cue from independent UHF stations at the time, particularly Baltimore station WNUV, he and his crew sought to recreate the feel of a low-budget broadcast from the time.  Along the way there is a healthy dose of Satanic panic as well as satire on smarmy exploitative journalists and the misplaced nostalgia many have for the 1980s.  We begin with an episode of the WNUF Channel 28 evening news, with anchors Gavin Gordon (Richard Cutting) and Deborah Merritt (Leanna Chamish) all decked out in costumes with a chintzy Halloween set behind them.  After the usual news events (sans sports), along with commercials, we are informed of the upcoming WNUF Halloween Special  hosted by Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf).  With the husband and wife paranormal investigation team of Dr....

To be honest I don't think I would have had anything more than an academic interest in a new Frankenstein movie if it was not being directed by Guillermo del Toro.  The last major attempt at the story was Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein back in 1994, which was made to ride on the coattails of the Francis Ford Coppola's  Bram Stoker's Dracula .  Even the presence of Robert De Niro as the monster couldn't elevate that film from merely okay. The one thing it did right, however, was the creature.  In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein;  or, the New Prometheus the creature was articulate and not the violent, lumbering hulk with a criminal's brain as portrayed by Boris Karloff in James Whale's 1931 adaptation.  From the Hammer movies onward there has been a trend to present Victor Frankenstein as the bad guy and the creature (or, in the Hammer series, creatures) as sympathetic.  It wasn't until 1994 that an actual attempt to adapt the nove...

Scream and Scream 2 brought slashers back after a long absence, taking a cue from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Live s and adding self-referential humor into the mix.  I didn't love the first one and, though I've reassessed it a bit, I still can't say it's one of my favorite horror films.  Both movies have complicated denouements and think they are more clever than they actually are, which seems to be a hallmark of Kevin Williamson's scripts.  Still, the second one was better, and it was obvious there was going to be a third.  It just didn't show up right away.  After enduring a second round of stalking from college friend Mickey and Nancy Loomis, the mother of the original killer.  They are both killed but, in fear of more copycats, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) goes into hiding just outside of Los Angeles.  Stab 3 , the third movie in a trilogy based on the Woodsboro Murders, is underway, with Dewey (David Arquette) providing technical advice wh...

A pattern I have seen in horror franchises is that the first two or three movies will be pretty good but, after that, they just start to repeat themselves.  That's a major problem with slashers as they seem not only to be repeating the movies in their own series but every other slasher that came before them.  There is not a lot of variety.  It's kind of like an AC/DC album.  When a song suddenly breaks away from the established formula it tends to stick out.  Such was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives .  The first two movies were good and the fourth okay, but by killing off Jason things took a nosedive.  The writers just couldn't figure out what to do without Jason even though he was never the central figure in the original.  Tom McLoughlin did figure it out by throwing in references to James Bond and Hammer Horror, bringing Jason back as an unstoppable zombie and making a Friday the 13th movie with some lead characters the audience gave a damn...