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...