Expelled Grey Matter

At one point it looked like Troma Studios, the film company founded in 1974 by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, was going to play with the big boys.  The Toxic Avenger was a major cult hit and they followed it up with the Class of Nuke 'Em High franchise, which did well on video.  Unfortunately, Kaufman's attempts to get on the big screen and have major distribution failed, most spectacularly with Troma's War , which was released in severely butchered form in the studios to appease the MPAA and promptly flopped. Financially strapped and hoping to get another hit in theaters Kaufman and Herz made two sequels to The Toxic Avenger and attempted to start another mock superhero franchise with Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.   It barely received any release and remained one of the company's more obscure offerings until 1996 when Tromeo and Juliet lifted car chase footage from the film.  Since then it has become a minor cult film, but nowhere near the success that Troma was hoping ...

Before The Toxic Avenger Troma was doing okay.  While it did produce some of its own films - many of them raunchy comedies - they made most of their money distributing other people's movies.  The Toxic Avenger changed all that.  Suddenly, Troma was a major independent studio and, while not rolling in cash, Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz suddenly had a lot more money than they ever thought they would.  The movie itself was violent, cheap and featured a hyperactive acting style that would become a key element of the studio's features going forward.   While Kaufman and company released new movies on the regular, gaining a reputation for a certain style and aesthetic as they expanded the Tromaville universe, it made financial sense that at some point Toxie would have to return.  What Kaufman didn't expect was to suddenly have a four-hour epic on his hands that, at his wife's suggestion, he split into two parts.  The first, not coincidentally, was The...

Herbert J. Leder set out to do what any good producer and director should do, which is copy a winning formula and hope to make money off of it.  The winning formula in this case was Hammer's brand of horror films.  Hammer had not only cornered the market in England - although Amicus and Tygon had a bit of success riding their coattails - but had done so in the U.S. as well, despite heavy competition from American International.  The blend of blood and sex was just the thing for a generation that was starting to come into its own and a film industry that was leaving its old ways behind. It! also owes quite a bit to something much older that Hammer.  Paul Wegener was an early film director and makeup artist who had a hit in 1915 with his horror film Der Golem .  Now lost except for some scenes of the ending, it told of the modern-day rediscovery of a creature that had been created to protect the Jewish ghetto in Prague against a pogrom.  In Wegener's movie it...

The 1970s saw a revival of a '50s staple: giant animals attacking.  Unlike earlier, they decided they didn't need to build models or put guys in rubber suits.  There was a new way of doing things: take a real animal, dress it up a bit and film it walking around miniatures.  No muss and no fuss.  Well, except for the fuss that animal rights activists threw about the obvious mistreatment of the animals, including gluing things on to them and doing stuff to force them to perform. As far as I know that didn't happen in Night of the Lepus , as all the "blood" on the big, hulking, frightening creatures is ketchup.  There are a few scenes where I questioned what was happening to the bloodthirsty beasts they filmed, galumphing their way through the Sonoran Desert to reek havoc among our dusty backroads communities.  Even the posters show strange eyes looking out of the darkness, huge fangs and Janet Leigh fleeing what must the most terrifying creatures on the face ...

Director Brian Skiba is from my neck of the woods or, more appropriately, desert.  I got to looking him up when his fictional town of Easter Falls was shown as being about 40 miles from Lake Pleasant and 125 miles from Payson.  Since I don't know exactly which direction from those towns it is,  I would put it somewhere in Yavapai County, north of Wickenburg, but not too far.  Probably up around an isolated youth counseling center that I used to deliver to when I worked with a pharmacy 25 years ago or so.   The reason I would be thinking all of this, and getting distracted enough to try and figure out where a town that doesn't even exist would be is that trying to figure out where the town is seemed more interesting than the movie.  As much as I love supporting anyone creative coming from Phoenix and the surrounding areas, Skiba is a filmmaker more along the lines of Jess Franco or Jean Rolin.  He just hasn't done anything truly brilliant yet....

Hearts in Atlantis made me concerned when it came out in 2001.  The book is a collection of stories loosely revolving the Vietnam experience.  Three stories - the title story, "Blind Willy" and "Why We're in Vietnam" - deal with it directly.  Two others, "Low Men in Yellow Coats" and "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", serve as the basis for the movie, and revolve around a young boy named Bobby and his recollection of a turning point in his childhood. While the majority of the stories in the book do not have supernatural elements and are some of the best examples of Stephen King's general fiction writing, the main story the movie was based on does.  Even more concerning for me when I heard about a movie adaptation was who the low men were.  In King's expanded Dark Tower universe they are called Can-Toi, and are the offspring of humans and a race of humanoid creatures with animal features called Taheen.  They pretty much serve as a...

The '90s may not have been a prime decade for horror but they were a second golden age of independent filmmaking.  One of the central figures was Quentin Tarantino, who got noticed with Reservoir Dogs and managed to keep the train running with Pulp Fiction and two other films that he wrote but did not direct: True Romance and Natural Born Killers .  He was suddenly everywhere and he was not afraid to bring his friends along with him. One of those was Robert Rodriguez.  Rodriguez had an underground hit with his self-financed action film El Mariachi , which translated into actual box office success with its sequel, Desperado .  Tarantino had written a script called From Dusk Till Dawn , but he had written it in hopes to have Robert Kurtzman, who had already begun making a name for himself as a makeup and effects artist, to direct.  For whatever reasons Kurtzman was not able to so Rodriguez was tapped to do the job.  What resulted is one of the best twists in ...

The more I dig the more I find obscure movies from the 1980s.  Finding them from the 1960s and 1970s doesn't surprise me as I was either not alive yet or was too young to care about anything that wasn't Godzilla, Harryhausen or Star Wars .  The 1980s, however, are still pretty clear, and most video stores were pretty lax on what they would rent to a teenager.  As long as it didn't look like porn I was good. In truth, I think I remember seeing Vamp in the store at some point.  I certainly remember some photo, either promoting the movie or just promoting Grace Jones, with her dressed as Katrina with all the Keith Haring body paint and metal bikini.  It's a striking image.  However, there is a reason many of these movies remain obscure, and a major one is that just like exploitation films from the decades proceeding the actual film doesn't live up to the poster or box cover. Keith (Chris Makepeace) and AJ (Robert Rusler) are trying to pledge to a fraternity to...

There is a skeleton in the closet of the DC Cinematic Universe.  That should come as a surprise as so many of the movies they did release over the years were of questionable quality.  There is one, though, that that was such a failure that even the star of it had never seen it in its entirety until just a few years ago.  That is Green Lantern . Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot for Ferris Aviation.  He followed in his father's footsteps and is haunted by his dad's (Jon Tenney) death in a crash.  His flying partner, and off-and-on romantic interest, is Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), who is set to take over the company from her father.  Hal has a habit of taking too many risks, and one of them ruins the company's chance for a government contract.  However, Hal's life is about to change.  When a wounded alien (Temuera Morrison) lands on Earth, the ring he carries chooses Hal to take his place.  He soon finds himself part of the Green Lant...

Natural Born Killers was one of many early scripts written by video store clerk Quentin Tarantino.  Influenced by Bonnie and Clyde  and Badlands , Tarantino repeatedly tried to get the movie made.  He never intended to direct it himself but rather to have his friend Rand Vossler do so.  After failing to get the project off the ground it was shelved and Tarantino eventually made his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs .  However, Oliver Stone took a liking to the story and bought it.  Much to Tarantino's chagrin he completely rewrote it with some help from others.  Where the original focused on journalist Wayne Gale, Stone made mass murderers Mickey and Mallory Knox the focus and presented the movie as an ultraviolent satire on how the mainstream media turns serial killers into folk heroes.  Despite its creator's dislike for what the story became, and controversy over whether or not Stone was celebrating violence rather than condemning it, Natura...

Little Red Riding Hood, in all its iterations, is a warning to young girls about going out on their own.  It is one of the most famous fairy tales long before Jacob Grimm started compiling his versions of the stories.  Although often used as an easy Halloween costume or sexy cosplay gag the relevance of the tale remains. Despite literal wolves posing a threat in medieval Europe there was always the metaphorical wolf hanging about hoping to do with what he, or in some cases she, will with a defenseless young girl when no one else is around. As with most modern retellings of such stories the girl is not as defenseless as she looks.  Grimm, who usually kept the cautionary endings intact, added the part where Red is rescued after cutting open the wolf's stomach as he swallowed her whole, while in the original things don't end so well for her.  In the 1990s it should be no surprise that things wouldn't end up so well for the wolf. Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon) is a bar...

The idea of dying repeatedly and coming back is a well-worn trope in science fiction.  Usually the way its handled is with a time loop, where everything resets at the end of the day and the person lives their life over and over until either they discover what is causing the loop or satisfy some mystical part of the universe that allows them to then continue.  Often these are quite interesting despite the proliferation of similar stories and movies.  Mickey 17 looks at a different type of situation where the person is labeled an "Expendable", meaning that they are able to be used in dangerous situations or experiments with the understanding that they will have a new body printed and their memories restored after each death.  While it sounds in some ways enticing, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) soon learns the gravity of what he signed up form. Mickey and his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) make a bad business investment using money from loan shark Darius Blank (Ian Hanmor...