Expelled Grey Matter

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...

Sylvester Stallone was a rising star in the early 1980s thanks to Rocky and First Blood .  Pretty much he could get any movie he wanted and get everyone on that set to do what he wanted.  So, what ended up happening with Nighthawks , is he got the original director, Gary Nelson, canned and Bruce Malmuth hired.  Stallone himself directed the train sequence and Billy Dee Williams, fresh off of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back , plays his partner.  It was the first time Stallone played a cop and he was hoping this would be his big comeback after a string of box office bombs. What he didn't count on was Rutger Hauer pretty much stealing the entire movie. Deke DaSilva (Stallone) and Matthew Fox (Williams) are a pair of New York police officers on the Decoy Unit, trying to lure muggers and drug dealers out in the open to arrest them.  They enjoy their jobs although the late hours and constant danger destroyed DaSilva's marriage to fashion designer Irene (Lindsay Wag...

After watching Amsterdamned I had to look up director Dick Maas for some idea of how this movie, and a Dutch director who obviously took his cues from Hollywood rather than Europe, flew under my radar.  Turns out he didn't, but I just never knew that he was behind two of my favorite rock videos of all time, both by Golden Earring: "Twilight Zone" and "When the Lady Smiles".  The latter caused a lot of controversy at the time with an edited version being featured on MTV, pretty much avoiding Barry Hay trying to get busy with a nun on the subway. Amsterdamned doesn't shy away from controversy itself.  It's a rather violent thriller in the style of both Italian police procedurals and American action films like The French Connection .  It also, even in its dubbed form, doesn't even pretend to be an American film despite its influences.  The Netherlands is a country that itself flies under the radar when it comes to cinema, but I'm definitely curious ...

House and House II: The Second Story  weren't big blockbusters, but they earned their reputation as cult films due to repeated showings on cable and through video rentals.  Other than taking places in haunted houses the two didn't really have much of a connection.  Still, they were ambitious movies, filled with interesting special effects and off-the-wall stories that, like many of the horror films in the second part of the '80s, sought to thrill more than scare.  They were always a welcome respite from the endless slew of repetitive slashers. The series was successful enough that United Artists wanted to keep making them, but they also wanted a fresh start.  While The Horror Show was always meant to be House III it was decided, at least in the U.S., not to connect it with the rest of the series.  This was a wise choice as, other than some creative effects, this has even less of a connection to the first two movies, other than the main characters happen to...

Piranha was one of the better Jaws ripoffs, even if the sequel was nothing to write home about.  The two movies launched the careers of Joe Dante and James Cameron, respectively, although the latter pretty much got fired from Piranha II: The Spawning early on.  The first movie became a cult hit, with its tale of mutated killer fish and a decent massacre sequence.  Still, there wasn't really much call for further sequels. Piranha 3D  isn't as much a sequel as it is a riff on the first two movies.  Other than killer fish it has no connection with the other films, even when it comes to plot, and although there are tongue-in-cheek references to the other films we get others to Jaws and Orca as well.  The two biggest surprises are that Piranha 3D made it to theaters without the MPAA skeletonizing it and that the movie is, despite all expectations, quite good.  Jake Forester (Steven R. McQueen) is the son of the local sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Sh...

I really hate it when a movie is purposely made as a bad film.  Whether it be for irony or cult status, it never fails that a bad movie is just a bad movie.  One of the few things I agree with Roger Ebert on is that for a bad movie to be entertaining it has to have at least some attempt behind it to make it a good movie.  Whether it fails to reach that goal through lack of budget, overambition or simple incompetence, there is still plenty to enjoy.   Asylum is a film company known for making mockbusters.  Many of their movies have titles similar to big budget releases in an effort to trick people into buying the DVDs or Blu-Rays if they are not paying enough attention.  Often found in drug or dollar stores they are a particularly noxious part of the film industry.  They also have a habit of making a lot of movies for SyFy, and almost all of those have a reputation for being unwatchable dreck.  Quite a bit of them involve having sharks or some...

It wasn't a surprise that by the late 1990s Hollywood was running low on Stephen King stories to adapt.  While they had done well in the theaters in the 1980s by this time it became apparent that many of his longer novels worked better as television miniseries, even if they had to be heavily rewritten to get around network censorship.  By 1997 there was only one theatrical release of his stories, and even that technically didn't see theaters until 1998, since it was released prior to that on HBO.  That was The Night Flier , an adaptation of a short story from his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes . Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) is a writer and photographer for the tabloid Inside View.  He is one of their most famous contributors, providing gory photographs and sensationalized articles for his boss Merton Morrison (Dan Monahan).  Upset that his latest photograph didn't make the front page he refuses the story of a supposed vampire flying into rural airports in...

Jacob's Ladder frustrated me the first time I saw it.  I expected a straightforward film about demons coming after the protagonist and instead got a strange drama about government conspiracies and neglected Vietnam vets with some hints of demons here and about, but, in my opinion at the time, no solid horror story.  I thought the ending clever, but it wasn't the type of movie I had wanted it to be, and I was still at an age that I didn't understand there were times when one just has to sit down and watch a film with no distractions. That is what I suggest for a movie like Jacob's Ladder .  For a surreal film it is still pretty honest about the story it is telling, but to get the full impact one has to pay attention to who the characters are, what they say and various events that happen.  It also helps to ask oneself if they make sense in the context of how someone would really act in a situation.  There is not a lot of subtext, but it is interesting to unravel t...

Not all good movies are a comfortable watch.  For that matter, not all good movies come out as good movies.  Possession had the unfortunate luck to lose a good chunk of the movie upon release in the United States in 1981, with a good number of the scenes being reordered, a new soundtrack added and a theatrical release that was nowhere near what writer and director Andrzej Zulawski intended.  It was an incomprehensible mess and it failed at the box office. That doesn't mean the real version of the movie is any less difficult.  What begins as a family drama about divorce evolves into a combination of a serial killer film and Lovecraftian horror before becoming decidedly more surreal as it spirals toward its ending.  It's one of those films that is exhausting to watch, both from the performances and from the constant camera motion, and it is also one of those films where the narrative can't be trusted after passing a certain point.  Nominally a horror film, an...

Aquaman was one of the few major hits the D.C Cinematic Universe had after Zach Snyder left.  It wasn't that good and had about every usual problem of the DCCU, but it found its audience and they went to go see it.  A sequel was planned almost immediately and Jason Momoa, the star of the film, along with director James Wan and screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick began forming an idea of what it would be.  They just never planned for it to be the last movie ever released before the whole mess got rebooted once again. Arthur (Momoa), aka Aquaman, is raising a child with his wife Mera (Amber Heard) on land while also ruling Atlantis, a job that he soon finds quite tedious.  During this time Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has been working with Dr. Shin (Randall Park) to find Atlantean technology to fix his power suit.  What he finds instead is an object called the Black Trident, a weapon that was wielded by King Atlan's (Vincent Regan) brother Kordax ...