Expelled Grey Matter

M3GAN was a phenomena that happened organically.  It was pretty much a retelling of Child's Play  with an AI-powered machine (something the Child's Play reboot had already done in 2019) and some sci-fi trappings.  It was also a James Wan script handed to New Zealand director Gerard Johnstone, who had a minor cult hit with Housebound   in 2014.  Despite being written by Wan much of Johnstone's quirky sense of humor bled through.  Also, although Blumhouse did put a fair amount of promotion behind M3GAN it benefited from becoming a set of memes that were shared on TikTok.  Blumhouse was expecting the same to happen for M3GAN 2.0 .  The marketing on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere was ubiquitous.  Leading up to summer blockbuster season the killer doll seemed to be everywhere.  That is, until a week after the movie came out.  Despite all the advertising, which made it clear this was not a rote retread of the first movie and wo...

Dario Argento is considered to be one of the masters of horror.  He is one of the most well-known Italian directors and is almost as celebrated as Mario Bava.  His giallo films and later horror films helped define how both genres are known in Italy and helped put a modern dressing on the frame that Bava had built.  His use of color, camera movements and excess gore constantly pushed his movies into new territory. That is, until he got into the 1990s.  Trauma  received mixed reviews and pretty much everything after that is widely dismissed despite attempts to return to form and to finish off the series of movies that began with  Suspiria .  The decline was so rapid as to be as shocking as one of his kill scenes.  Opera stands as his last great horror film, and to me it has always been one of his best movies in general.  When a famous, but cantankerous opera star is hit by a car and forced to sit out the role of Lady Macbeth in a strange produc...

Michele Soavi was one of the last Italian directors of note when it came to the traditional gialli and off-the-wall horror films that his home country was known for throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  Often working with Dario Argento and others, he carved his own niche, including the strange artsy zombie comedy cult classic, Cemetery Man .  Long before that he made his feature debut with a surprisingly straightforward slasher film called Deliria , also known as StageFright , among several other names, in the U.S. Peter (David Brandon) is a tyrannical stage director putting on a musical he wrote involving a killer wearing an owl's head.  One of his actresses, Alicia (Barbara Cupisti), hurts her ankle during a routine.  Since Peter won't let anyone leave during rehearsal she gets her friend Betty (Ulrike Schwerk) to sneak her out to the hospital.  However, the only one nearby is an insane asylum, where they happen to be housing an insane actor named Irving Wallace (C...

In the Year 2889  is a remake of the 1955 Roger Corman movie The Day the World Ended .  This comes from American International - their television branch, in particular - so it's no surprise that Corman is trying to make an extra buck off the same plot which, to be clear, does not take place in the year 2889.  The title was that of a Jules Verne book and, since American International had it sitting around since Master of the World , they decided to finally use it.   Capt. John Ramsey (Neil Fletcher) and his daughter Joanna (Charla Doherty) have survived a nuclear holocaust because their home lies in a valley whose climate has resisted the nuclear fallout.  However, that may not last, as if rains come too soon it might contaminate their water supply.  This fact, and a dwindling food supply, means the survivors that flock to the house put some may compromise their survival. Among these survivors are Steve Morrow (Paul Peterson) and his contaminated brothe...

The Strangers came out a time when horror was at a low point.  One of the biggest criticisms was that a number of the movies, like later Saw films or Hostel, were just excuses to show scenes of people getting tortured.  Also, creepy masks on killers seems like a cheap way of causing discomfort.  Therefore, for the longest time, I had no desire to see this movie.  Still, it got some good reviews, and circumstances led me to checking it out.  It is no masterpiece of horror, but it is also not another rote millennial horror film. James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) go to a remote summer home owned by James's father after his proposal to Kristen goes wrong.  Thinking this is the end of their relationship James calls his friend Mike (Glenn Howerton) to come pick him up once he gets sober.  Though it's late they receive a knock on the door from a strange woman (Gemma Ward) asking if someone is home.  They tell her she has the wrong...

Death Game was a movie no one was happy with.  It was made in 1974 but not released until 1977, and the only reason for that was because Sondra Locke had a starring role in The Outlaw Josey Wales and this low budget exploitation film just happened to be sitting around.  The stars of it were a bit surprised when it did surface as director Peter S. Traynor had made some questionable deals to get it made and clashed with both the cast and crew throughout.  Still, the movie, a remake of a 1973 film called Teenage Innocence , managed to have enough surreal scenes and decent performances to gather a cult following. George Manning (Seymour Cassel) is a well-off businessman with a loving wife (Beth Brickell) and children.  While he and his wife are enjoying some time together with the kids at their grandparents' Karen Manning has to suddenly leave as one of the kids has appendicitis.  Manning is enjoying some time alone when two girls, Donna (Colleen Camp) and Jackson ...

Carrie was a difficult novel to film.  It's early Stephen King, so the book is a bit more on the pulp side.  It is quite engaging, but it is a slow build to the explosive end.  Also, a good deal of the story is told through interviews and newspaper clippings.  Brian De Palma, in adapting it, did not have the budget to represent the level of destruction that Carrie White does to her town, so he didn't try.  He came up with an inventive way of presenting the massacre at the prom, using split screens and all number of camera tricks.  Always the fan of Alfred Hitchcock, he took many cues from the famous auteur director while still keeping King's story intact. There was a misadvised sequel to Carrie in 1999 and, for that reason, King backed off having anything to do with this made-for-television remake.  Written by Bryan Fuller, this version of Carrie attempts to be more accurate with the book while pretty much being a beat-for-beat remake of De Palma's fi...

The Others is one of the most memorable horror films of the 2000s.  That isn't hard as that first decade and a half of the new century was not exactly teeming with frightening gems, but The Others stood out not just because of the twist ending - which one can see coming, as writer and director Alejandro Amenábar doesn't take pains to hide it - but because of the atmosphere and the quiet, intense performances from everyone involved.  It was a throwback to movies like The Innocents and The Changeling , heavily influenced like the former was by the William James novel The Turn of the Screw .  Amenábar puts his own spin on it, but it proved that a horror film could still be effective even at that point even without a blaring nu-metal soundtrack and frequent jump scares. Grace (Nicole Kidman) lives in an old mansion on the island of Jersey, the only part of the UK that was occupied by Germany.  It is 1945, the war has just ended, and her husband Charles (Christopher Eccle...

There are many directors who make a classic film and then follow it up with a career that, in retrospect, results in critics having to rethink if that one movie was truly great to begin with.  M. Night Shyamalan is one of those.  The Sixth Sense  was not his first film, with his first two being unspectacular coming-of-age films.  The Sixth Sense was something different for both Shyamalan and audiences at the time it came out but, since its success, he has tried to make a career out of making movies with a twist to the point where it has become ridiculous.  After Unbreakable , the movie that followed this one, things rapidly began to go downhill to the point where Shyamalan's name is a punchline rather than being remembered for one of the highest grossing and well-regarded movies in history.  Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a successful child psychologist who has just won an award for his practice.  However, not everyone is happy with him.  Vincent...

Suicide Squad , looking back, was the beginning of the end for the DC Cinematic Universe.  It was a much-anticipated film featuring a number of the Batman bad guys that are assembled to handle threats to the U.S. and, by extension, the world.  It heavily advertised a methed-out version of the Joker played by Jared Leto as well as a comic-accurate portrayal of Harley Quinn by Margot Robbie.  Unfortunately, when it came out, the Joker was hardly there and Quinn was a supporting role.  The movie was PG-13, the villain was dull and the whole affair just felt way too familiar, which is that Warner Bros. and, by extension, Zach Snyder and everyone else running the show had no clue about what to do with the DC properties or what direction to go.  What should have been a dark-humored R-rated film instead arrived as a neutered mess that took itself way too seriously.  Cathy Yan, when directing the sequel, at least tried to fix many of those problems, but with mixed ...

A large portion of the world likes being scared.  This seems to be one thing we all share.  At some point when there were just a few homo sapiens gathered around a fire I am sure they told stories of old Gak who had his arm replaced with a mammoth tusk and terrorized some teenagers making outside of camp when they should have been hunting and gathering.  Everyone enjoys a good scare. Except, apparently, for the French.  Eyes Without a Face came out square in the middle of the French New Wave, a series of films that guys in the late 1950s and early 1960s pretended to understand to impress their girlfriends.  In contrast Georges Franju's film was pretty straightforward.  Although he nominally was more interested in exploring depression and loss, the framework was that of a typical mad scientist film.  However, Franju's surrealist touches set it aside from normal b-movie fare.   Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a brilliant surgeon working in t...

I may have seen Dr. Giggles back in the 1990s, but it's another case of seeing so many horror films that they all blend together.  If I did see it I was left with at least the impression that I didn't like it.  Not surprising as this movie mainly serves to give Larry Drake, who made the leap to the big screen as Durant, one of the two villains in Darkman , a film in which to cash in his new-found fame.  Still, I noticed this is from Largo, which is Larry Cohen's production company, and had Graeme Whifler as a cowriter with director Manny Coto.  Whifler directed early videos for the Residents and Renaldo and the Loaf and has a certain surreal style that he lends to the few feature films he made.   Dr. Evan Rendell (Drake) escapes from an insane asylum where he is known as Dr. Giggles, a brilliant schizophrenic who thinks he's a doctor.  Rendell returns to his childhood home in the town of Moorehigh.  The reason for his return is that his father was...

After Toho released Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1995 they decided it was time to give the big guy a break, even though they had left that movie open for possible sequels as Godzilla's meltdown at the end was absorbed by Baby Godzilla, leading to the offspring to become full grown.  Regardless, that path was not explored, and Toho decided to let Hollywood have a go at the property. Despite Godzilla   being influenced by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and King Kong , it had been a long time since America had a giant monster destroying its cities.  Giant irradiated creatures were a thing in the 1950s but, as the understanding of what radiation did and the actual fear of finding out firsthand grew, the joy of seeing big bugs and dinosaurs wreak havoc faded.  The Godzilla films themselves had become a bit of humorous nostalgia and, other than The Return of Godzilla  being released as Godzilla 1985  with Raymond Burr edited in, the giant lizard had pretty much di...