Expelled Grey Matter

The V/H/S series is spotty in quality from segment to segment in the best of times, and the best was definitely V/H/S/2 .  While V/H/S did have some good segments from known or up-and-coming directors, the second pared things down to just three segments and a wraparound.  The contributions were of fairly high quality as well.   Then came V/H/S: Viral .  Just the name seems to disappoint, hinting at the idea of viral videos instead of old video tapes, the latter of which seemed to add a bit of a creep factor to the first two films.  While it still tries to maintain some of the feel of old-school recording it does go beyond that in numerous segments and, unlike the first two, the wraparound doesn't add much to the proceedings.  It is a significant drop in quality, although it's not all a waste. Kev (Patrick Lawrie) is obsessed with taping about everything, something his girlfriend Iris (Emilia Ares) initially is fine with but later comes to find quite a...

We all have to start somewhere and, before Art the Clown became a modern horror phenomenon, director, writer and makeup artist Damien Leone was just trying to get some notice.  He made two short films, 2008's The 9th Circle and 2011's Terrifier.  A producer, putting together a horror anthology, was anxious to combine the two with some work from others, but Leone decided to add his own wraparound story as well as a new third segment.  In 2013, using these elements, Leone made his feature debut with All Hallow's Eve.  Sarah (Katie Maguire) is babysitting Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson).  When emptying out their Halloween haul Timmy finds that he has been gifted a videotape.  Curious, he demands to watch it, but Sarah wants to make sure of what it is first.  At first it appears to be a typical horror film, starting with a woman (Kayla Lian) in a train station that is drugged and kidnaped by Art the Clown (Mike Giannelli) and made part of...

In the '80s and early '90s we had the action movies that are now considered the classic formula.  Usually, a musclebound lead character plows his way through an army or faceless minions to take out the bad guy at the top, with that guy being anything from a ruthless warlord to a corrupt politician using the local thugs to do his dirty work.  They were all of the type and, although we just considered them action films at the time, the pattern is noticeable since they pretty much disappeared by the end of the 1990s.  Before that, and quite noticeable for a particular style, were the action movies of the 1970s, often featuring some sort of major vehicle chase - or two or three - at some point in the film. The first decade of the 21st century was not known for action movies and, when Hollywood did churn them out, they were noisy, empty, CGI-filled spectacles that were not even fun to watch as popcorn movies.  The feeling one gets when watching a Fast and Furious film or ...

There are a number of big, important directors that just do not click with me.  Michelangelo Antonioni is one.  No matter how much people try to convince me that Blow-Up is a major groundbreaking film, I don't see it.  It's an overlong boring fable about perception of reality versus reality, and it's not subtle about it.  What should be a good murder mystery is lost in a sea of pretention.  I often feel the same way about Nicolas Roeg films.  The Witches aside, most of his movies feature him working with his favorite rock stars and spinning some surrealistic tale where a good part of it is him getting in his own way.  He can shoot, he can shoot art but rarely does he seem able to shoot a comprehensible movie.  His adaptation of Walter Trevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth is no exception.  Thomas Newton (David Bowie) appears one day in the office of patent lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry).  Together they form World Enterprises, a comp...

Despite John Carpenter's current reputation at this point in the 1980s he was running into big trouble,  getting into creative conflicts with the major studios and looking at an uncertain future.  The Thing   had widely been panned by critics for what they considered excessive violence and became a box office failure.  Christine  did better financially, but didn't win him any new fans among the press.   Feeling his ability to make movies was in jeopardy he decided to do a mainstream film and, in this case, it was one produced by Michael Douglas that had already seen a number of directors come and go.  Douglas had been attempting to get the movie made since 1979 and, though it says the script was by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, truth was it had been doctored quite a bit even up to Carpenter directing.  Under his guidance the movie was pared down to a road movie and a love story with Carpenter aiming to show some of the beauty of the Unit...

I will always have a soft spot for stop motion effects.  Despite the fact the method does show its age, often with the herky-jerky motions of the creatures prior to Phil Tippett's advances in Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi  and the difficulties of blending live actors and backgrounds into the scene in a realistic manner, just the feeling that there is a person behind the movements makes it better than running a computer program.  Those who are best at it have always brought their own personality to the effects. David Allen was one of those people.  He was friends with producer and director Charles Band, the man behind Empire Pictures and Full Moon.  While Allen worked on major Hollywood fare such as Willow  and Ghostbusters II  he is known largely for his work with Band, providing what Ray Harryhausen and Tippett often provided, but on a more modest budget.  Most people would have seen his work on the first five Puppet Master films, with Allen ...

The Return of the Living Dead turned out to be a surprising cult hit.  Written and directed by Dan O'Bannon and based on a story by John A. Russo, one of the original collaborators on Night of the Living Dead , it became one of the most renowned horror comedies of the '80s.  Its punk style, outlandish characters and imaginative gore put it ahead of much of the competition.   There would end up being five movies in total, but the first follow-up is pretty much a remake with less gore, no nudity and quite a bit more comedy.  That is why there are no references to Louisville, Kentucky getting blown up by a nuclear bomb at the end of the first film.  Instead, we are now in a fictional town called Westvale, somewhere in the Midwest, when that darn old Trioxin starts doing its thing again. It turns out there are plenty of old barrels of Trioxin 245 around the country and the Army is rounding it up.  Unfortunately, they're about as competent as before, and a ...

Land of the Dead was the first new entry in George A. Romero's series of influential apocalyptic zombie films since 1985's Day of the Dead .  Instead of an isolated military base we got to see what society had become years after the dead had begun to rise, both for humans and the zombies, who had shown signs of growing intelligence in the previous movies.  By Land of the Dead some consciousness was returning to the creatures as they began rediscovering certain things rather than going through the motions of their past lives. Some, like Big Daddy, had even overcome most of the urge to snack on humans, as it was made clear in Day of the Dead that the hunger was instinctual rather than that for the nutritional needs. The thing is that Land of the Dead re-used some ideas that Romero didn't have the budget for in Day of the Dead , and was a bit of a stop-gap movie as the series lumbered to its conclusion.  I was eager to see that now that it appeared that the dead and the liv...

Different Seasons was the Stephen King collection that just kept on giving.  It was an anomaly for King at the time it came out, containing four novellas, three of which were not horror stories.  It was the point where he began to go beyond just doing genre fiction and, in some ways, maturing.  This side of king had always been there and bits had popped through in The Dead Zone  and The Shining , but this is where he just went all in without using the supernatural as a crutch.   The result was a collection of well-regarded stories that resulted in two of the most influential movies of their time, Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption .  The Breathing Method , the last story in the collection and the only horror entry, was never going to be made into a full movie, and if it ever does get produced will be lucky to be part of an anthology or television miniseries.  However, Apt Pupil  was still there for the taking, and understandably had be...

Imagine me sitting in an empty cinema in Scottsdale in 1994.  I figure that Cemetery Man is probably the safer bet than  Spanking the Monkey , largely because I don't have to say Spanking the Monkey out loud to a stranger and I figure if I'm going to watch a movie about incest it would probably be better to wait for video.  All I know about Cemetery Man is that there are zombies involved, and I'm game.  Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite films, and I love horror, having seen quite a bit of mainstream and slightly off-kilter American horror.  I also like a bit of comedy with my horror, being a fan of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.  Also, this movie promises some nudity. However, I have no idea who Michele Soavi is.  It will be almost two decades before I see The Church .  In fact, at this point, I really have not seen a full Dario Argento or Mario Bava film.  I pretty much have no idea what Italian horror is like.  I don't even know g...

There was a time in the past when zombie movies had not overstayed their welcome.  At the time The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue was made pretty much the only film that that was using George Romero's particular type of zombie was Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things .  Despite Night of the Living Dead becoming a big hit it was really Dawn of the Dead that kicked off the whole genre.   Thus, the Spanish-Italian production The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue , also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie amongst a variety of other titles, was a bit of an anomaly.  It also meant that, though it owed a lot to Romero, it still had room to make up its own rules.  The result is a movie that has been rediscovered and appreciated in recent years as its take on the genre seems a bit fresh after the same plots repeated ad infinitum. George (Ray Lovelock) is on his way to visit some friends in Windemere when Edna (Cristina Galbó) backs into his motorbike. He demands...

I would make a reference to the Sony Spider-Man Universe dying with a whimper rather than a bang, but it didn't really even do that.  It died more with the underwhelming sound of a punctured whoopy cushion.  The cast and crew behind  Venom: The Last Dance wasn't really informed of what Sony's plans were, and it seems like neither was director J.C. Chandor, more known for doing mid-budget dramas than big-budget superhero films.  It's another case of someone getting their big chance and the studio either interfering with or just ignoring what they do. In this case it wasn't just the studio.  Audiences did as well, with buzz about the movie being as bad or worse than Morbius and announcements ahead of the release, which had been delayed for over a year, that this was it with Sony's attempts to keep Disney from being able to use characters from the Spider-Man comics.  That any of these movies were watchable is the true miracle.  If there had been any dri...

A recent internet discussion has been whether or not a woman should choose a man or a bear to be alone with in the forst.  There is a scene in Day of the Animals that makes that choice rather obvious, although it's pretty atypical as the animals seem to be attacking indiscriminately.  William Girdler, hot off of the big success of Grizzly the year before, gathered some of the stars - and the bear - from that movie for another film about animals attacking, one that has garnered a bit of a cult status by being weird, campy, ridiculous and somewhat effective all at the same time. Steve Buckner (Christoper George) is about to take a group of hikers up a mountain for a two-week hike back to the town of Murphy.  Along with him is a Native American guide named Daniel Santee (Michael Ansara), a reporter named Terry (Lynda Day George) and a number of others.  Both Buckner and Santee feel that something is off, and it turns out they are right.  A weakening in the Earth's...

I can almost hear the pitch for a number of movies in the mid-1970s.  "It's like Jaws , but with..."  As in, with piranha, a killer whale, a pack of dogs, a giant squid, killer bees or, in this case, a bear.  Not just any bear, but one waying over a ton and standing 18 feet in height, said by one character to be a throwback to the bears that roamed during the ice age.   The reason all these and more got made?  They made money.  Grizzly , despite a number of dull sequences and a not-so-convincing mechanical bear standing in whenever the real one couldn't be used, was the highest grossing independent movie until Halloween came around two years later.  It also has some interesting tales of theft, deceit and general wrongdoing behind it that are more interesting than the movie or its spiritual sequel, Day of the Animals .  The tourist season is wrapping up, but there are still a number of backpackers in a stretch of national forest land that for...

When one sees a tagline that a movie is "absolutely insane," whether or not it includes modification from the universal adjective, one has to take it with a grain of salt.  What mainstream critics and studios consider insane is usually something that those of us who enjoy the fringes of cinema are familiar with.  It is familiar territory for writer and director Coralie Fargeat who has an unquestionable knowledge of horror.  This was obvious in Revenge , which took inspiration from past exploitation films such as I Spit on Your Grave , but put an angry feminist spin on it.  The Substance finds Fargeat doing the same for body horror.  The obvious go-to on this is David Cronenberg, and the influence is there, particularly from The Fly .  What The Substance most resembles, however, is Brian Yuzna's cult favorite Society .  Her movie   is full of practical effects that recall those of Screaming Mad George.  It also has that same satire of a specif...