Expelled Grey Matter

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...

Roger Corman was infamous for a number of things, but one that gets overlooked is his tendency to take foreign films that did not have a copyright, dub them and recut them, and make a completely new movie from them.  Such is the case of his 1965 television movie Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet , which features brief roles by Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue interspersed with a story about a journey to Venus that has special effects that look a lot better than a 1960s television budget.   This wasn't Corman's first go-round, as he had Francis Ford Coppola re-edit the 1959 Soviet film The Heavens Beckon into the 1962 release Battle Beyond the Sun .  Curtis Harrington would be the American director credited for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and the later Queen of Blood, which also used footage from The Heavens Beckon, Planet of Storms and another film, A Dream Come True .  These were meant to either be cheap drive-in or movie-of-the-week fare the American vers...

During the 1980s I enjoyed the Nightmare on Elm Street series above that of other slasher franchises.  I wasn't a big Jason or Michael Meyers fan, so Freddy Krueger was something else entirely.  He was a monster that haunted dreams and, if there is one thing I have been obsessed with all my life, it is dreams.  Dreamscape is an obscure film now but it was one of my favorites back at the time, and I remember making up an entire fantasy dream world in which I was fighting some evil mastermind named Zimberman long before Freddy ever began haunting Springwood.  There is also H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which remains one of my favorite books.  I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street at a function where I had to remain awake for the night to earn money for a traveling performance I was involved in and saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors at another function where I got together with a bunch of people with whom I had attended summer camp....

It may not seem like it at this point but  Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was, indeed, supposed to be the final chapter.  Jason Voorhees was, without a doubt, dead.  There was a hint that Tommy Jarvis, whose family was murdered by the masked killer, might take up the mantle and continue killing, but that is typical with most franchises.  Even when putting the final touches on a story movie studios appreciate a possible escape hatch. The problem is that because it was the last one, happened to have a number of up-and-coming stars in it and featured Tom Savini returning to do the effects work the movie made quite a bit of money.  That meant that Jason still had life in him.  The problem was, Jason Voorhees literally didn't have life in him.  Instead of going the logical, if predictable and tired, route of having Jarvis become the next Jason, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning instead put him in a group camp with a number of damaged kids where a new s...

Writer and director Mick Garris began his association with Stephen King with Sleepwalkers , a script that King wrote but, wisely, decided he wasn't going to direct.  This would lead to Garris directing numerous King adaptations, from the miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining  to anthologies based on King's short stories and numerous other movies based on his source material.   Obviously, King likes him and there is some ongoing friendship between them.  That is the only way to explain how someone who has consistently showed little visual skill as a director and no true feel for adapting the author's material despite often being faithful to the source material.  Seeing Mick Garris's name attached to any of these properties is always a disappointment as one knows that the resulting movie is going to be mediocre at best, and just barely rise above a direct-to-video or television production.  Riding the Bullet is no exception. Alan Parker (Jonat...

    Cronos , Guillermo del Toro's feature debut, received international acclaim.  One of those who praised it was Spanish director Pedro Almadóvar.  He liked it so much that he offered to produce del Toro's next movie.  However, due to the success of Cronos on the art film circuit and on video, Hollywood came calling.  Thus, instead of making the movie he wrote in college about an isolated boys' school during the Mexican Revolution that happened to have some supernatural goings on, he made a movie about cockroaches in the New York subway.   It was an interesting story about a genetically created breed that eventually mutated and turned on those that created them.  The movie bombed but has since become a cult classic.  Unfortunately for del Toro his first Hollywood foray was for the now-disgraced Weinstein brothers and their company Miramax.  They had no faith in the young director and hounded him throughout the production, later lay...

It is a good chunk of the world - an even bigger chunk of the western hemisphere - but Latin America tends to be ignored by the non-Spanish-speaking world.  Culturally, and ethnically, Mexico on down is just as diverse as the United States or Canada.  Each country has its own endemic music industry, and the larger ones significant film industries.  Granted, horror films often were not a staple of most of these countries, but it is where I concentrate a lot of my viewing.  It has been interesting to finally see a surge of movies from a previously marginalized creative pool. The police arrest a man that calls himself El Viajero, or The Traveler (Efren Ramirez).  Detectives Arden (Greg Grunberg) and Gibbons (Sonya Eddy) try to find out who he is and what happened at a drug house where he was the lone survivor.  He warns them that they need to let him go or they will die.  They don't believe him, so he proceeds to tell them a series of stories to prove who...

Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe has been going through some hard times.  However, without question, it deserves it.  Avengers: Endgame may have been an epic and emotional ending to the first major story line, but since that time it seems like there has been some confusion on which way to go.  Through most of the recent phases it's been "multiverse something-or-other," with little to no cohesion.  A decent movie has popped out now and then, but mostly it has been dull fare like  Captain America: Brave New World .   This has left Disney and Marvel thinking of ways of getting their audience back, particularly since James Gunn, responsible for the popular  Guardians of the Galaxy films, jumped over to Warner Bros. to reboot their flagging DC Cinematic Universe.  Faced with inflated budgets and having to revamp plans due to off-screen antics by actors and a heavy reliance on streaming series to keep things moving along, things do not look prom...

After the success of The Fall of the House of Usher Roger Corman did what any smart producer would do, especially given that his source was in the public domain.  The Pit and the Pendulum is partially based on the short story of the same name with quite a bit borrowed from another short story called 'The Premature Burial".  Add in a liberal dose of original scripting from Richard Matheson and once again Corman comes up with an engaging gothic horror film on practically no budget.  Francis (John Kerr) travels to Spain to find out what happened to his sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele).  Elizabeth had married a Spanish nobleman named Nicholas (Vincent Price) who lives alone in a foreboding castle, attended to by his sister Catherine (Luana Anders) and Doctor Leon (Antony Carbone).  As a kid Nicholas saw his father wall his mother up alive and has a fear of the same happening to him.  He is also afraid this may have happened to Elizabeth despite Doctor Leon rea...