Expelled Grey Matter

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 ...

One thing I regret from my short time I spent in the Soviet Union was not getting to see any movies.  Granted, the time I was there was in the waning days of the USSR when Western films were beginning to be screened and filmmakers were experiencing the most freedom they had since the 1920s.  The reason I am disappointed is because, over the years, I have found that one way to learn about another culture is through its cinema, just as much as through its literature.  While both often present idealized versions, and this was quite true of the state-controlled movie industry of the USSR, there are still cultural touchpoints that shine through despite censorship and propaganda.  Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) is a young seminary student at a monastery in Kiev.  While out causing mischief during a break with his friends Gorobets (Vladimir Salnikov) and Khalyava (Vadim Zakharchenko) the trio get lost and separated returning to the monastery.  Khoma finds shelter for th...

The Wraith is a movie I was introduced to by a friend of mine shortly after it hit video shelves back in the '80s.  It did moderately well in the theater as it was pretty much a low-budget film with a good soundtrack and cool-looking cars.  That was all it needed, but writer and director Mike Marvin, along with being influenced by such movies as High Plains Drifter and Mad Max 2 , also had a thing for David Lynch and Eraserhead in particular.  That meant a combination teen flick and supernatural revenge film with a bit of surrealism thrown in.  Jake Kesey (Charlie Sheen) is a new arrival in the small town of Brooks, Arizona.  The town is terrorized by a gang of street racers led by Packard (Nick Cassavetes).  They corner people on the rural roads and force them to participate in races against their will with their cars on the line.  However, the gang also has a bit of a secret.  Packard murdered a man named Jamie (Christopher Bradley) when he cau...

Alien provided some ripe material for low-budget film studios to rip off, as copying the Star Wars formula was beginning to wear thin.  Roger Corman's New World Pictures was, to no one's surprise, doing both.  Battle Beyond the Stars was a latecomer in the latter, but it was campy and made a decent amount of money off of people wanting more sci-fi fantasy.  For those who wanted a bit more horror mixed in with their space opera there was Galaxy of Terror .   A spaceship called Remus crashes on the planet Organthus.  Another ship called Quest is sent to rescue them by the mysterious Master, a mystical being that controls the galaxy.  Among the crew is Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie), the sole survivor of a massacre, the psychic Alluma (Erin Moran), warrior Quuhod (Sid Haig) and regular soldiers Baelon (Zalman King) and Cabren (Edward Albert), who are constantly at each other's throats.   The Quest also crash lands and, while exploring the w...

Many of the movies that producer Val Lewton made for RKO in the 1940s are considered horror.  They were done on low budgets, often with many of the same actors and with directors that shared similar ideas with Lewton on how the movies should be made.  However, unlike the Universal horror films, Lewton relied more on atmosphere rather than makeup effects and monsters.  As a result, other than Cat People and The Leopard Man, many of these movies walk a line between psychological drama and mystery.  It is almost as if they are horror not because that is what is intended, but because people want them to be.  Such is the case with The Seventh Victim .  Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is a young girl at a private religious institution that is suddenly informed that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has stopped paying her tuition.  In fact, Jacqueline seems to have gone missing.  Mary decides to return to New York City to find her.  What she discovers i...

There are two movies with the title Trilogy of Terror .  The first was from 1968 and is a Brazilian horror anthology, with Jose Mojica Marins contributing a story, and the other is an American television movie that played on ABC in 1975.  While I have fond memories of a number of made-for-TV horror films - many of which get dashed when I see them again - this one is a bit too far back for me.  I would have been three years old at the time, and I guarantee the last segment, which is what everyone remembers from this, would have stuck with me.  Unlike most anthologies there is no wraparound story, so we are immediately introduced to "Julie" (Karen Black), an English teacher at an unnamed university.  One day she catches the eye of a student named Chad (Robert Burton) who, not having any previous attraction to her, suddenly becomes obsessed.  When he is finally able to get her to go on a date he drugs her, takes photos and has his way with her, using the pictu...

Although I wouldn't say that the Kharis films were the greatest series in Universal history, at least the first one was quite fun and the last was a bit poignant.  Both The Mummy's Hand and The Mummy's Tomb have similar patterns, with Kharis knocking people off and whatever priest of Karnak or Arkan (depending on the film) suddenly letting his little pharaoh get the best of him instead of fulfilling his duty.  That duty often involves getting revenge on those who violated the tomb of Princess Ananka and, somehow, this all takes place in a 1970s that looks very much like the early 1940s.  The thing that set The Mummy's Ghost apart from the rest is a theme that was heavily repeated in the 1990s film, which was the princess being reincarnated in modern times.  In this case it was an Egyptian woman named Amina who worked at the Scripps Museum in the fictional New England town of Mapleton.  She was marked and, when Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) and Yousef Bey find the b...

The Mummy's Tomb was a bit of a disappointment.  It wasn't terrible, but it spent about a quarter of its runtime playing clips from The Mummy's Hand before getting into what little story there was.  There was also a 30-year time jump, but either the expedition to find Ananka's tomb suddenly happened in 1910 or someone - most likely Griffin Jay, who wrote the script - didn't consider that there was never going to be enough money to make this happen in 1970, much less 1975, which is when this movie is taking place.    After killing Stephen Banning, Babe Hanson and others associated with the original expedition, Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) is destroyed in a fire.  Or, at least, that's what everyone thinks.  Yousef Bey (John Carradine) is tasked by an aging Andoheb (George Zucco), the High Priest of Arkan, to go to America and bring back the still living Kharis as well as the body of Ananka so that she may return to her resting place.  He does so, but Profes...

Although not on the same level as The Mummy Universal managed to breathe some life into the old concept of bandaged corpses coming back to life to punish those who disturb their resting place.  It was done on the cheap and was more of a comic adventure film than a horror movie, but it made money.  It did take a couple years, but it's no surprise that they went back to the well again, with Griffin Jay again heading up the scriptwriting.  It is 30 years after the expedition to find the tomb of Princess Ananka resulted in Prof. Stephen A. Banning (Dick Foran) and his partner Babe Hanson (Wallace Ford) in not only the find of a lifetime but a battle with the undead Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) and the High Priest of Karnak, Andoheb (George Zucco).  Andoheb survived being shot by Hanson but, like his predecessor, his time has come and the mantle is passed to Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey).  It turns out Kharis survived as well, and Mehemet brings the mummy to the America....

The Mummy was a major hit for Universal when it came out in 1932.  Unlike Frankenstein and Dracula  it didn't spawn a number of sequels.  The story of Imhotep ended with the one film, but Universal kept the rights to the character.  It was just a matter of time before the Mummy rose once again but, second time around, he was a disgraced royal guard named Kharis. As the High Priest of Karnak (Eduardo Ciannelli) is dying he reveals the secrets of their order to his successor Andoheb (George Zucco).  A living mummy named Kharis (Tom Tyler) is entombed nearby, forever guarding the resting place of the princess he loved and once tried to bring back to life.  He is given specific instructions of what to do and what not to do, with a warning that Kharis could pose a threat to the entire world. Archaeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his partner Babe Hanson (Wallace Ford) are about to give up on finding anything worthwhile in Egypt when Banning finds a vase ...

I am obviously a movie fan.  I spend a good amount of time watching them, even though more and more it seems like it's specifically for review purposes rather than outright enjoyment.  That's a shame, but I seem to approach music the same way.  I enjoy it but the sheer volume of which I consume it may lead one to think it is a bit excessive.   Despite this I will argue against anyone who attempts to say movies influence real-life behavior.  Someone already has to be pretty far gone to not be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.  Not to say that movies don't breed misconceptions about how real things are.  Still, that should not blur things to the point that someone becomes homicidal over something as silly as movie trivia.   Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher) is a movie fanatic who lives with his overbearing Aunt Stella (Eve Brent), who does not share his obsession.  In fact, she loathes it and loathes him, a feeling he returns....