Expelled Grey Matter

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...

Danny and Michael Philippou are twin brothers from Adelaide, South Australia who began making YouTube videos together with a channel called RackaRacka .  They had been crew on The Babadook , and used what they had learned as well as other skills they were developing in directing and special effects to make a series of short films, but much of what they did were stunts.  Their videos were paid for by odd jobs and volunteering for medical trials prior to their channel being monetized.  While often it sounds like they were an overnight success, going from YouTube to directing their first movie, it was in fact 9 years from the start of their channel to their first feature, Talk to Me , being released.   Mia (Sophie Wilde) is an introverted teenager still reeling from her mother's suicide.  She is estranged from her dad (Marcus Johnson) and spends most of her time at the home of her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) as well as taking care of Jade's younger bro...

Unicorns are one of those fanciful creatures that seem to pop up in every young girl's room.  There is something beautiful about a perfectly formed equine with a majestic horn that can be entranced by a young maiden.  There are many theories as to how the creatures came to be part of our legends, whether from mistaking another animal in the distance or finding narwhal tusks on a beach and just letting the imagination go from there.  Whatever the case may be they are a staple of our collective fantasy world, just like dragons.  The thing about unicorns, however, is that majestic as they may be they have never been portrayed as particularly docile creatures.  If one is not said young maiden there is a good chance that the person trying to catch a unicorn is going to experience the business end of that horn.  Also, if one is to hit a unicorn with their car and then abscond with its body, bad things may happen as well.  Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter ...

The Bat was adapted from a 1920 play of the same name by Avery Hopwood, itself an adaptation of a 1908 novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart called The Circular Staircase .  It has been filmed a number of times, most notably a 1926 silent version.  Vincent Price saw the play as a child and it had quite the effect on him.  When he was offered a role in a new adaptation in 1959 he jumped at it.  Cornelia van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) is a popular mystery writer who often retires to a small town every year to relax and get some work done.  This year she has rented a mansion called The Oaks, owned by local banker John Fleming (Harvey Stephens).  He is on a hunting trip with his friend Dr. Malcolm Wells (Price), so his nephew Mark (John Bryant) thought it was the perfect time to get some extra money.  Unfortunately, all of Cornelia's servants except her maid Lizzie (Lenita Lane) and chauffeur Warner (John Sutton) flee due to rumors about rabid bats as well as a man...

There are legendary movies that have destroyed directors' careers.  Freaks  took down Tod Browning, while Heaven's Gate managed to not only destroy Michael Cimino's career but nearly take down United Artists with it.  Many times that damage is permanent.  Even though those movies reevaluated over the years it was too late for the directors.  Browning was long dead by the time Freaks became a cult hit and Michael Cimino continued to make high budget epics fueled by his ego, resulting in the public and critics ignoring Heaven's Gate for decades despite the fact that, despite everything, he actually made a good movie.   Michael Powell, who along with Emeric Pressburger made a number of popular and acclaimed movies throughout the 1950s, is one of those to have their career ended by just one film.  Psycho  had pushed boundaries of the Hays Code and even began to redefine how movies were presented in the U.S.  It was not without controversy bu...

The Slumber Party Massacre is held in some regard as the first feminist slasher film.  I would hazard that a good number of them, through copying a formula rather than intentionally trying to make a statement, would quality.  Often it is a "final girl" that puts paid to the killer in the end.  There is usually a bunch of gratuitous nudity on the way to that, save for the virtuous female that survives, but there was in Amy Holden Jones's film as well.  It was written as a joke by Rita Mae Brown but, since these movies were selling, Roger Corman went ahead and produced it.  The only difference is that the exploitation and nudity in the film was from the female gaze rather than the male, and I couldn't really tell the difference, other than the killer used a drill as a blunt allegory for a penis.  Since the first film received praise and made a good amount of money, despite being as generic a slasher as possible, Corman decided to continue the series by makin...

Danny and Michael Philippou appeared on the scene in 2022 with Talk to Me , an original supernatural story that gained a bit of critical acclaim.  For their sophomore effort they were able to get a recognizable supporting actress with Sally Hawkins and, if anything, eclipse what they did before.   Step siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are sent to a foster home run by Laura (Hawkins) after their father (Stephen Phillips) dies suddenly.  Piper is blind to the point where she can only see light and shapes, so at first she appears to be a good fit for Laura as her late daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood) was blind as well.  From the start, however, Laura doesn't take to Andy, as she was hoping to foster Piper on her own.  However, Andy is just shy of his 18th birthday and is hoping to take over Piper's guardianship when the time comes. At first Laura seems like the cool mom, but soon she begins behaving erratically and doing what she can to drive...

I have enjoyed Timo Tjahjanto's contributions to the V/H/S series, the first of which was "Safe Haven" in V/H/S/2   and made in partnership with Gareth Huw Evans, who was responsible for the two Raid movies.  This made me curious to check out a full feature film of Tjahjanto's if it existed and, to my delight, he's done a few, including the recent Nobody 2.  He even has his own small horror franchise beginning with May the Devil Take You .  Lesmana (Ray Sahetapy) is a man obsessed with wealth.  To obtain it he makes a deal with a Dark Priestess (Ruth Marini) in which he sells his soul to the Devil.  Years later he is dying and his biological daughter Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is asked by her stepbrother Ruben (Samo Rafael) to come to the hospital to try to make amends.  Also present is her stepsister Maya (Pevita Pearce) and stepmother Laksmi (Karina Suwandhi) and Laksmi's youngest daughter Nara (Hadijah Shahab).  Since Lesmana went bankrupt befo...

Phenomena is Dario Argento's first conscious attempt to break into the mainstream horror market in the United States.  It is still set in Europe - this time in and around Zurich, Switzerland - but it stars Jennifer Connelly, has known heavy metal and goth bands on the soundtrack along with Claudio Simonetti and Goblin and is paced a bit more like a Hollywood film rather than an Italian production.  The movie was made in English and dubbed for the Italian market and it was even released in a heavily-edited U.S.-friendly version under the title Creepers .  Despite all that it is still recognizably Argento at a time when he was pretty consistent with putting out quality films.  Jennifer Corvino (Connelly) is the daughter of a famous movie star.  While he is away she is sent to an all-girls school in Switzerland.  Unfortunately, she arrives just as there is a series of disappearances of young women, including an assistant of noted entomologist John McGregor (Do...

V/H/S was an interesting concept, although the PC police had some major issues with it.  So did a lot of horror fans and, when I checked it out for a second time, I understood the reason for the latter.  There were some good segments but a lot of it was annoying, and a good amount just didn't hold up even a few years later.  V/H/S/2   managed to redeem the series by cutting the number of segments down and focusing on quality, but V/H/S: Viral fell rather flat.  Bloody Disgusting, who was behind the series, wisely ended it at that point.  Still, the series had been popular, so seven years later the streaming service Shudder decided to bring it back.  A SWAT team enters a warehouse full of bodies and television screens, finding that the majority of deaths were self-inflicted, often with the victims pulling their eyes out.  As they separate and explore the carnage they begin to see certain programs playing on the screens.  The first is a news ...