Expelled Grey Matter

There are numerous movies that almost fit the slasher genre way before Halloween hit the theater.  Often Black Christmas   is cited as one of the earliest and most influential, while The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel have many elements of this style of film.  The true granddaddy of all slasher films, though, would be Mario Bava's 1971 A Bay of Blood . Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is murdered one night by her husband (Giovanni Nuvoletti), who tries to make it look like suicide.  However, just as he is putting the finishing touches on his work, he is dispatched by an unknown killer.  With the count's body nowhere to be found and everything looking like suicide the property is set to pass on to an heir, and Renata Donati (Claudine Auger), the daughter of the Count, expects that to be her.  She arrives at the property with her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) and their children to stake their claim. Problem is, they learn from fortune teller A...

Unlike his father Lamberto Bava is not a fan of the giallo films.  While he seems comfortable with the wild, anything goes style of something like Demons  he has admitted to being uncomfortable with movies featuring women getting stabbed.  I think a good part of that is the reason You'll Die at Midnight, the movie he made between the two Demons films, is pretty much forgotten, as despite its lurid poster art it is quite tame and a rote exercise in formula. Nicola (Leonardo Treviglio) is a police officer who finds out his wife (Barbara Scoppa) is cheating on him.  After the two have a violent argument in which he almost kills her an actual murderer enters the house and does the job.  Since Nicola is nowhere to be found he becomes the prime suspect for Inspector Piero Terzi (Paolo Malco).  Where Nicola did go was to his former lover Anna (Valeria D'Obici), a criminal psychologist that assists the police.   Anna believes that Nicola is innocent while...

It used to be that I looked forward to the Captain America films.  The First Avenger was a welcome surprise, while The Winter Soldier was a nice throwback to the old '70s espionage thrillers with Robert Redford, a veteran of those films, showing up in a major role.  It was pretty much a series of movies that couldn't miss. But then the original Captain finished what he had to do and, finally growing old and passing away, gifted his shield to Sam Wilson.  A million fanboys whined about a black Captain America, and the introduction to the character was dragged through the so-so limited series of Captain America and the Falcon .  Still, I head some hope that the movie version would put things to right.  What I forgot is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long overstayed its welcome. Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) has managed to redeem himself in the eyes of the nation and become President.  Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) pretty much toes the line for him, he...

After Conan the Barbarian made it obvious that sword and sorcery films could turn a buck in the United States if taken seriously numerous producers and directors spent the rest of the 1980s churning out bad knockoffs that no one could take seriously.  Most of those came from Roger Corman's New World Pictures, but there were others that popped up here and there.  The Warrior and the Sorceress just happened to have David Carradine, once again earning a paycheck on a low-budget production.  This time around it's yet another knockoff of Yojimbo .  Kain (Carradine) arrives in a town suffering a water crisis.  The one well is disputed by rival warlords, Zeg the Tyrant (Luke Askew) and Bal Caz (Guillermo Marín).  Kain is recognized by the local prelate (Harry Townes) as one of his order, but the world has made the warrior weary to the point to where he now fights only to win coin.  He sees the opportunity in the town of playing both factions against each oth...

I often see these games advertised for cell phones.  I have been around long enough that I didn't have to learn my lesson by downloading one of them.  I just read the comments and find out that, without exception, the interesting game in the advertisement has nothing to do with the actual product.  That bait and switch is one of the oldest in the book and Roger Corman definitely knew how to take advantage of it.  Many producers of low budget films did.  In fact, it was often a regular practice to come up with a title and poster long before there was even a script merely for the purpose of getting someone to invest money in the movie.  Unfortunately, that is most likely what happened with this one.  Boris Vallejo did some amazing artwork on the poster and Corman or someone on his team came up with a great name.  There are plenty of bosoms, there is a musclebound blonde guy in a loincloth, but beyond that this poster is not the movie one will see....

Unlike the Showa era of Godzilla, which kind of petered out at the end of its run, the end of the Heisei era was planned.  Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was meant to bring the latest Toho series to an end as they had given permission for a series of movies to be made in the U.S. starting in 1999.  Although this movie, like most of the ones before it, remained unreleased in the United States, Toho still did not want competing franchises.  What the team of writers did this time was make sure to connect everything with the original Godzilla from 1954, which The Return of Godzilla followed, ignoring all the original sequels.  To sum it up, the original Godzilla that attacked Japan was killed by the oxygen destroyer.  The creature that attacked 30 years later, and which would go on to fight Biollante, was a dinosaur living on an isolated Pacific island that had helped defend a Japanese battalion smf was later mutated by American hydrogen bomb tests.  That creature, ...

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...