Expelled Grey Matter

Tremors is truly an odd duck of a movie.  Made on a low budget with a reluctant Kevin Bacon, who thought the movie was going to kill his career, it initially had a tepid box office run despite some good reviews from critics.  Where it flourished was on the rental market as audiences soon discovered that director and writer Ron Underwood had delivered a fun tongue-in-cheek monster movie with some impressive-looking creatures.  Despite Bacon's reluctance it also has one of his best performances. What is most surprising is that this movie that pretty much no one expected much of has spawned numerous sequels and a television show without the usual sinking quality of other franchises.  Not that the movies it has spawned are fantastic.  It is just that they are not the usual abysmal fare that something like the Hellraiser franchise has become.  At the heart of it, of course, is this film. Val (Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are a pair of ne'er-do-well friends living...

I know that the reason there aren't more giant monster movies these days is that most of them aren't that good.  In fact, Lake Placid itself had a series of made-for-television sequels that just got worse and worse, to the point that the crocodile was starting to get "versus" movies.  That's Asylum territory, and that's never a good thing.   Still, the original movie, despite being panned by critics, managed to become a hit.  Although it doesn't show up much until the end the crocodile, an animatronic occasionally enhanced by CGI when needed, was designed by Stan Winston and is pretty good looking.  The movie also features a number of name actors as well as Steve Miner, a veteran horror director, behind the camera.  It's not a serious film, but there is no reason it has to be.  When a diver with the Maine Game and Fish is bitten in half by something in a lake, Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson) teams up with game warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman...

It seems like the more creative and experimental the band the more likely they are to want to expand beyond doing music.  The big issue is budget.  While KISS or Spice Girls may have the chart success for someone to ask them to make a movie, someone like the Flaming Lips, despite having a hardcore fan base, is not exactly bleeding money.   Still, director and Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne persisted over a period eight years, creating sets in his back yard, filming when he could around touring and recording new material.  If anything that is probably what finally gave the movie its push.  Over two decades into the band's existence they finally had that one big hit, "Do You Realize??", from their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots .  It helped sell quite a number of copies of the album and the song was used in at least two advertising campaigns that I can think of, which probably made Coyne more coin than CD sales at the time.   ...

Only Darren Aronofsky could get me watching a movie about ballet.  It's not specifically about ballet, although it does take Swan Lake, the production in which our protagonist wins the lead role as Swan Queen, as inspiration, but also the Japanese animated thriller Perfect Blue .  It introduces us to the crumbling mental state of a frightened and abused woman trying to reach in her mind what she sees as perfection.   Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is one of the most popular performers in a New York ballet company run by Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel).  He wants to do a new version of Swan Lake where the dancer who plays the Swan Queen also plays her rival, the Black Swan, and while he is confident in Nina's ability to play the traditional lead he thinks that she is too restrained to play her opposite.  His views change after she violently revokes a sexual advance, but the going is rough as he can't seem to get her to show the emotion and sexuality needed for ...

I am not a big anime fan so it should never come as a surprise that I am unaware of certain animated movies, particularly from Japan, that are influential on Western films.  Perfect Blue is one of those, and it seems that director Darren Aronofsky is a big fan, with references popping up in  Requiem for a Dream and a good number of plot similarities to  Black Swan.  For me, I went into it not knowing too much of what to expect and got an interesting take on the giallo as reimagined through Japanese eyes. Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao) is a pop singer who decides to give up her music career to go into acting.  She is a bit unsure, but her manager Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji) helps her get an expanded role in a television show called Double Bind .  Her mentor, Rumi (Rica Matsumoto) is not so sure of the move, particularly of the sleazier aspects of the business, but soon Mima appears up to the task. Problem is Mima has attracted a stalker that, though at first willi...

Maximum Overdrive is certainly not a grand piece of cinema but, despite the ineptness of Stephen King as a director, the movie turned out to be quite fun despite dragging a bit as it got toward the end.  Even through his haze of alcohol and cocaine King knew the whole idea behind his short story "Trucks" was ridiculous and to take it serious would be a mistake.  Unfortunately, just over a decade later, someone made that mistake. Ray (Timothy Busfield) has moved with his son Logan (Brendan Fletcher) to a rural town in Nevada after Logan's mother was killed in Detroit.  His neighbor Hope (Brenda Bakke) has returned to the area to open up a motel and offer guided hiking tours of the area, and her current customers are couple June (Sharon Bajer) and George Yeager (Victor Cowie) as well as Thad (Roman Podhora), his daughter Abby (Amy Stewart) and her uncle Jack (Jay Brazeau).  Hope, Abby, Thad and Jack soon become stranded when attacked by a refrigerator truck which, it ...

Although Tim Burton gets all the credit Henry Selick was the actual director behind The Nightmare Before Christmas .  While he may not be as immediately known as many other stop-motion animators I had been familiar with him due to his short film Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions , which had a soundtrack and voicework done by the Residents.  Since Nightmare he has worked on numerous stop-motion animated films and was a natural choice for Coraline once it was decided to not make it live action.  While CGI was used in a couple sequences and to remove some lines on the models this, like his previous films, was a painstaking years-long process that was more than worth the effort. Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) moves with her mom (Teri Hatcher) and father (John Hodgman) into an old house called the Pink Palace that has been divided up into apartments.  They share the property with Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French), a pair of retired burlesque a...

If one sees stop motion animation in a big-budget feature post Ray Harryhausen chances are Phil Tippett is behind it.  He and David Allen were the main animators that carried on that legacy, with Allen usually working for lower budget productions and Tippett getting the tentpole projects.  Tippett was also the inventor of "Go-Motion", an innovation in the style that got rid of some of the jerkiness of traditional stop-motion.  He debuted that method in 1983 with Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi .   Beginning in 1987 Tippett began working on his own movie called Mad God .  Mostly on his own and with students or volunteers he slowly created it, giving up as CGI became more the norm when he worked on Jurassic Park .  However, in the late 2010s, there was some interest in completing it and, after 34 years and a few Kickstarter campaigns, Mad God saw the light of day in 2021. An assassin descends into the underworld in an armored cage.  When he arrive...

There is no question that Sony has done everything they can to destroy the Spider-Man legacy.  Every complaint against Disney for how they handle franchises, including their own, is valid.  However, when looked at objectively, many of Disney's decisions on where to take the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been valid.  It was just in recent years that they have run out of ideas and started spinning their wheels. Sony should have had plenty of ideas, having three different Spider-Man franchises and a jump on the whole multiverse concept.  While Venom was nothing phenomenal it was at least fun and it used the character better than Spider-Man 3 .  Venom: Let There Be Carnage was still enjoyable despite being a lot lighter in plot than the first so, despite the mess that Sony made with all the other movies in the Spider-Man universe, I was hoping for something good from Venom: The Last Dance . We join Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who has been brought into the regular Mar...

When someone makes a rip-off of a popular film there are number of rules they should follow.  One, which Beyond the Door and its contemporary Abby forgot, is to make the movie different enough that the studio that made the original (in this case The Exorcist ) doesn't sue.  Warner Bros. did and producer/director Ovidio G. Assonitis had to pony up a settlement to keep his movie in the theaters.  It happened to be a worthy investment because Beyond the Door , thanks to a slick ad campaign and the use of similar sound equipment to Earthquake in choice theaters, turned quite the profit. However, although I'm sure Assonitis saw differently, profit is not the only thing.  To have staying power the knockoff has to be shorter, faster and nastier.  Beyond the Door is shorter than The Exorcist , but somehow feels twice as long and, except for a couple of scenes that feel a bit uneasy, it is quite a bit tamer.  It also features bad dubbing, lots of dialog to go along ...

Sometimes it is possible to see the same movie over and over again, especially when it comes to horror or exploitation.  This is not my experience with Beyond the Door III , but I have run into it with others, and I'm sure some viewers first encountered this movie as Amok Train or Death Train , both of which are better titles.  Just to be clear, this movie has nothing to do with Beyond the Door or Beyond the Door II , the latter of which is actually the Mario Bava film Shock retitled for distribution in the U.S. The reason this was given such a strange title when it hit American video stores is because of executive producer Ovidio G. Assonitis was the director on the original 1974 film.  This movie has some similar plot points, mainly Satan trying to have a bride and some offspring, but it ends there.  Rather, this movie was a low-budget splatter film from exploitation director Jeff Kwitny, largely taking advantage of the fact that Yugoslavia was beginning to open u...

The Heisei Godzilla series of the 1990s did something that the preceding Showa series did not.  It created a continuous timeline rather than a tenuous connection of stories.  That doesn't mean that anything was done with the characters.  In fact, one of the few continuing throughout is Miki Saegusa, played by former child star and pop artist Megumi Odaka.  She was introduced in Godzilla vs. Biollante as a psychic who was supposed to have some connection to the various kaiju.  Despite her supposed importance to the study of the monsters and later to G-Force, the UN-sponsored group set up to fight Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II , she never really did anything.  She would show up, give some exposition, close her eyes and act like she was doing some sort of mind-meld with Godzilla.  She later becomes a caretaker of LittleGodzilla and has a connection to Mothra's Fairies, but she usually pops up when necessary for the plot.  Godzilla vs. Sp...

The problem with slashers is that there wasn't much to do with them.  The early ones - Halloween , Friday the 13th and The Burning - had differences and followed tried and true horror and exploitation trends.  They in fact followed on the heels of the Italian giallo films and cult British horror movies like The Abominable Dr. Phibes .   By the mid-1980s, however, they had become their own sub-genre, and pretty much every movie followed the same pattern.  Some sort of wrong was done in the past and the person who was dealt dirty came back, in the flesh or in spirit, to take revenge.  That revenge just happened to be on a bunch of rowdy teenagers, all stereotypes that were there to get naked and party.  A final girl would emerge at the end to take on the killer, only for the whole thing to start back over in the sequel if the previous movie turned a profit.  The critics hated them, audiences loved them, but because they were pretty much the same t...

Dark Night of the Scarecrow came out just as slashers were becoming popular.  It was one of those rare television movies that stuck with the generation that saw it.  It remained rather elusive for a long while, living in Generation X's memories, but it got restored and resurfaced a few years ago thanks to popular demand.  It's in no way a perfect horror film but, watching it again, I understand why it stuck in my memory.  It was a bit bloodier than most movies on television at the time (even with the parental advisory at the beginning) and the story was different enough from the average horror fare to make it memorable. With the movie finally able to be rediscovered writer J.D. Feigelson decided that it was time for a sequel.  The problem is he was about the only one.  Most fans were happy to have the original film, with its story and atmosphere, stand on its own.  However, Feigelson was able to crowdsource enough money, allowing him to produce and di...

Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror had already been remade twice before 2024, and that's not counting Shadow of the Vampire .  There was Nosferatu the Vampyre , from Werner Herzog in 1979 and in 2023 a little-seen crowdfunded version with Doug Jones playing Count Orlok.  I was really not excited over another remake until I saw that the director was Robert Eggers who, like Herzog, has a certain style and vision.  Eggers took inspiration both from Herzog and F. W. Murnau to create his own version of the classic 1922 film, meanwhile further separating it from Bram Stoker's original story. Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is in line for a promotion at his firm, and in order to seal the deal he accepts a task from his boss Knock (Simon McBurney) to travel to a remote village in Romania to obtain the signature of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) who is purchasing a ruined property in Hutter's town of Wisburg.  Thomas's wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is not wanting him to go as she ha...