Expelled Grey Matter

The Friday the 13th series, popular as it is, was never a hit with critics.  For many horror fans it is questionable, as few of the movies justify how long the series lasted.  The original is still a solid early slasher, while Friday the 13th Part 2 will always be my favorite because it is the one movie out of the series that made Jason somewhat scary.   There is only so far one can push an idea like this and the second movie, suddenly introducing a character that was supposed to be dead just to cash in on the success of the first, was already walking on thin ice.  Other than adding 3-D effects, Friday the 13th: Part 3 proved that the series was already running on fumes.  Since that was the case producer Frank Mancuso Jr. decided it was time to wrap it up with the fourth installment.  It was that temptation that brought Tom Savini back, as he looked forward to closing the door on his involvement.  We begin at the site of the murders in Part 3 , ...

The story behind The Mutilator is quite familiar.  Someone becomes interested in movies and, upon doing research, finds out that the most profitable films are horror films.  This is the early 1980s, so specifically slashers.  They somehow pull together the funds and, with family, friends and a whole lot of chutzpah, manage to make the movie.  It doesn't do gangbusters but turns a profit due to the initial low budget, and eventually becomes a cult classic.  In this case our budding filmmaker is Buddy Cooper, who wrote, produced and directed a movie that was originally to be called Fall Break .  Current prints, though marketed as The Mutilator , have that title, and the corresponding theme song gets played over the beginning and end.  John Douglass provided some additional help with the directing.  Costs were cut as Cooper's family owned a nearby motel where cast and crew stayed, and he even managed to get some amateur actors that would occasionally...

Smile was a bit of a surprise when it came out in 2022.  Based on a short film by writer and director Parker Finn, and similar in style to many of the modern horror films that hinge more on atmosphere and tension than on a series of jump scares, it introduced us to a creature called the Entity.  The rules are simple: it latches on to a host like a parasite and feeds on their fears and negative energy for up to a week.  During that time the person is driven mad and the Entity gains more and more control until that person commits suicide in front of the next host, all the while with a rictus smile on their face.  Because of the political climate at the time I thought it was going to have some underlying feminist message, along the lines of not telling women to smile or not smiling at them, reinforced by a female lead.  Instead, it took a concept that wasn't brand new and did something interesting with it, leaving the protagonist dead at the end and her friend Joe...

A major contention I hear about new movies is that they are too "woke".  Woke, of course, originally meant just being aware of the way things were and conscious of racism and double standards.  It was never even meant for white people to be woke since it was specific to the experience of black people in the United States.   Still, the word comes up whenever a movie is made today where the protagonist is not a straight, white male.  There are problems with modern storytelling, with too many writers wanting to race-swap characters or add characters who have no arc outside of being a skin color, a sexual orientation, a gender or a stereotypical white racist.  It is more accurate to call it lazy than woke. The Defiant Ones, on the other hand, comes from a time where certain racial attitudes were not only accepted but, in many parts of the country, backed by the power of law.  There is an entire speech about it in the film as Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) ca...

Pretty much a good chunk of Pam Grier's early 1970s career, before breaking out in a starring role in Coffy , was spent making cheap women-in-prison movies for American International in the Philippines.  At the time Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino president, encouraged foreign filmmakers to come to the country to film as well as developing its own homegrown industry that wasn't too dissimilar from what the Australians, Americans and Italians were making.  While many of Grier's movies were made for Jack Hill, who would go on to direct her in Coffy and Foxy Brown , one of her biggest titles in 1973 was made for Filipino director Eddie Romero.  Lee Daniels (Grier) is a prostitute who finds herself sentenced to a women's prison in the Philippines.  Along with her is a white revolutionary named Karen Brent (Margaret Markov) who is using her funds to help a guerilla organization.  Although they don't get along they are forced to cooperate when, while being transported ...

After the critical success and cult status of El Topo and The Holy Mountain director Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to do an adaptation of Dune.  This was in the mid-1970s and was supposed to feature music by Pink Floyd, sets designed by H.R. Giger and Salvadore Dali making an appearance as the Emperor.  With a script by Dan O'Bannon, who had worked with John Carpenter on his own cult hit Dark Star , this had about anything anyone who was a fan of the Frank Herbert novel could want, and then some.  Except funding.  Jodorowsky wasn't that far out a choice, considering he had often written for the science fiction comic magazine Heavy Metal .  Still, the budget never materialized.  O'Bannon and Giger still ended up contributing to Alien , while Dune itself made it to theaters in 1984 with an adaptation directed by David Lynch.  As for Jodorowsky he ended up making a children's movie called Tusk, about a British girl in India befriending an elephant....

By the late 1960s John Wayne was getting older and finding fewer and fewer times where he would be cast as anything except John Wayne.  True Grit was a chance to play a character again, not just a caricature.  This also came after one of his lesser-known films, The Hellfighters , and not long after the tone-deaf Vietnam War movie The Green Berets .  Despite the chance to play Rooster Cogburn in the movie with a script by Marguerite Roberts based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, and despite winning his only Best Actor Oscar for his performance, he didn't care for the movie too much.  Henry Hathaway was a difficult director to get along with, Wayne was unhappy that his daughter wasn't cast in the role of Mattie Ross and he felt that he didn't do the character justice.  Still, almost everyone disagreed with him on that, and  True Grit is  looked at as one of his last great films. Frank Ross (John Pickard) is the owner of a large tract of land in Arkan...

Jennifer Kent contributed one of the best modern horror films with The Babadook in 2014.  Nominally a movie about a monster terrorizing a single mother and her child, the movie slyly wove in a plot about child abuse and growing up with someone who is mentally ill.  It is quite unique and still is despite a number of directors attempting to copy the pacing and style.  Instead of returning to do more horror pictures Kent decided to make a movie about the colonization of Australia, particularly the island of Tasmania.  That island saw most of its indigenous population wiped out, with the language and culture being driven to near extinction by English settlers that saw them as less than human.  The story told is through the eyes of a young Irish woman, with the Irish being barely above the aborigines in the eyes of the British Empire.   Clare (Aisling Franciosi) is an Irish convict transported to Van Dieman's Land in the early 19th century.  She is m...

Although the movie adaptation of  The Dark Half , like the novel, dealt with the outing of Stephen King as Richard Bachman, few of the Bachman novels themselves have been adapted.  So far it's been The Running Man , which barely resembled the novel, and an upcoming adaptation that is supposed to be closer to the source material.  The Long Run has had its own long run through development hell and still has never surfaced.  Then there is Thinner, the 1984 novel that effectively ended the career of Bachman, although King has occasionally written self-consciously pulpier novels under that name every now and then. Although the novel contains a comment that this is "starting to seem like a Stephen King book," the author himself purposely tried to separate some of his earlier work from his more refined and popular material.  His writing, however, had too many tells, and by the time he wrote Thinner his early search for a specific style was pretty much over.  It is...

It is a shame that Mexican horror films have the reputation of silliness that they do.  In a lot of cases one thinks of the black and white films featuring knockoffs of the Universal menagerie battling lucha libre heroes.  Basically, cheap movies cashing in on characters that have cross-border appeal, particularly with ex-pats and immigrants.  The truth is that Mexico has a long, rich history of cinema, and not just in the horror genre.  One of my favorite films, Macario , is a grand example, as are the movies that Alejandro Jodorowski and Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, the latter when unable to do so further under Francisco Franco's regime in Spain.  However, more and more I find myself interested in the movies made by directors who grew up and were part of the culture, and what they bring to their films.  One of those that I will need to explore further is Carlos Enrique Taboada, the director of the slow-burn horror film Darker Than Night .  Ofelia (Cla...

The legend of La Huesera isn't the most frightening tale from Mexico, but it is one of the strangest.  It is of a female spirit of the desert that gathers the bones of wolves and other animals and, when the skeleton is complete, sings life back into them so that they may once again roam the wilderness.  It's kind of a beautiful tale of the cycles of nature and kind of a unique take on motherhood.   Although bones and the cracking of such come into play in Huesera: The Bone Woman , the connection with the legend is more allegorical.  Like a number of modern horror films the actual demon or spirit is not to be taken at face value, as it represents more worldly concerns, in this case trying to fit into societal norms due to pressure from family and tradition.   Valeria (Natalia Solián) and her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) are living a happy, middle-class life and decide to have a child.  Their efforts are rewarded and Valeria becomes pregnant.  ...

I am one of those weirdos that always kind of liked Aquaman.  Probably it was because Batman and Superman were the obvious go-to heroes from the Justice League and I have always liked going for the odd man out.  I haven't really watched any of the cartoons or read the comics since I was a kid so pretty much anything other than Aquaman talking to fish I had forgotten.  I pretty much even forgot he was supposed to have a secret identity, at least in the comics.  All I pretty much knew was that he came from Atlantis.  Since Atlantis and ancient aliens and such were all the rage at the time it gave Aquaman a few extra cool points.  I am not surprised that it took a long time for the character to get a movie.  For what it's worth, it took almost the same time for the entire Justice League to get their own film despite Superman and Batman both having successful franchises before petering out with worse and worse movies.  Although the theatrical version ...