Expelled Grey Matter

  One thing Stephen King did to both help upcoming filmmakers and encourage many of his stories to be made into movies is sell the rights to a good number of them for a dollar.  For someone making a short student film this meant a starting point to adapt the story to their own needs without breaking the budget and, for King, it meant a steady stream of his movies available in the theaters and cable as well as on video and, later, DVD.  While much of that output is low budget, amateurish and sometimes outright horrid, it meant that studios with money to put behind many of the professional adaptations were more willing to do so. Dolan's Cadillac was a novella first printed in Castle Rock magazine in 1985 and later released in the collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993.  It is a crime story rather than his usual horror although it does pay homage to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", something the film emphasizes more than the story.  It is quite...

Blue Beetle had everything going against it.  The DC Cinematic Universe was on its last legs and everyone knew it, from audiences to the Warner Bros. executives.  By the time the movie was wrapping up I'm sure even director Angel Manuel Soto knew it.  At this point movies like Batgirl , which was pretty much completed, were being scrapped and used as tax write-offs.  Blue Beetle , which had originally been meant to stream on HBO Max, somehow scampered into theaters and, except for those who revel in seeing things fail, it was largely ignored.  Though critics gave it decent reviews it didn't catch on with audiences. Part of the problem is that by this time most people only wanted to watch these movies to mock them.  So many of the DC films had been hollow spectacles with little to no entertainment value, so it was expected that the movie also wouldn't be any good.  It's a minor character, the plot is way too similar to Shazam! , and it came on the heels...

I work hard to support local artists and the community around them.  The problem is that, as a critic, it is important to be honest in an assessment.  It's a bit hard to do so when it is obvious that a person is amiable and is trying to make something for others to enjoy while calling attention to a community that they love.  Part of criticism is to help someone improve and, hopefully, reach the goals they are hoping to achieve.  I that spirit I dive into  The Inheritance.  James Mills (James Mills) inherits a property near the Arizona town of Globe from his father.  It is significantly off the beaten path and covered in trash.  However, not being in the best financial straits, he decides to see if there is anything worth doing with the property.  His uncle's attorney also wishes him to check it out and let her know if he intends on doing anything with it.  However, as he approaches, he starts getting strange vibes, including sudden...

Eric Red is known more as a writer than a director.  He is the one behind two classic horror films, The Hitcher and Near Dark .  His own output has been hit or miss.  He is technically skilled and often provides some good visuals, but it seems he gave his best material to other directors.  Although I'm not necessarily a big fan of most of his films he did manage to produce one of the few decent werewolf movies of the 1990s. Ted (Michael Paré) is bitten by a werewolf while in the Amazon.  When his girlfriend is killed he narrowly escapes and kills the monster, making his way back to the United States.  A few months after returning he calls his sister Janet (Mariel Hemingway), who with her son Brett (Mason Gamble) visits him at his campsite near the lake.  It is also near where a number of recent animal killings have been reported.  As the police investigate Ted takes Janet up on her offer to stay on her property. The problem is the family dog Thor...

I knew it was just a matter of time before I got around to Indian cinema.  The reason it has taken so long is I know their movies, even when they are dramas, action, science fiction or horror, often have musical numbers.  That is a bigger barrier for me to get over than the cultural differences, especially since it must be obvious at this point that subtitles don't bother me like it does some Americans.  I'd rather read what they are saying than have an Indian guy dubbed with a Brooklyn accent.  The reason I finally took a dive is because No Smoking is based on a Stephen King short story called "Quitters, Inc.".  This isn't the first time it has been adapted for a feature film, as it is the first segment of the 1985 anthology film Cat's Eye .  It is a story about a guy who decides to quit smoking and signs up with a company that is guaranteed to cure anyone of the habit.  It just so happens their methods include constant surveillance, torture of loved ...

Sword and sandal movies have not been popular since the 1950s despite the anomaly that was Gladiator .  However, everyone loves a good mystery, and 1900 years later there is still some question about what happened to the Ninth Legion.  Whether they were slaughtered in an ill-fated incursion into northern Britain or eventually disbanded or moved to mainland Europe is up for debate and may never be answered.  However, Rosemary Sutcliff gave us a fictional account of what may have happened to them in her 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth .  Adapted by Jeremy Brock and directed by Kevin Macdonald, The Eagle is a mostly forgotten low-budget version of the book, but it manages to outshine some of its contemporaries. Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) is the son of a commander of the Ninth Legion who requests a post in Britain 20 years after their disappearance in order to help redeem the family name.  He quickly earns the respect of his fellow soldiers in battle but is wo...

Time for a bit of a history legend despite the fact that Centurion , like most movies set during the Roman Empire, plays fast and loose with the events that happened.  As the opening crawl lets us know Rome once spanned from part of western Asia through the majority of Europe and northern Africa, with its furthest frontier being England.  Though they made some forays to capture what is now Ireland and Scotland a series of events, similar to what prevented their further expansion into Germany, held them at bay. The Ninth Legion has become a legend as it was sent northward to deal with the Picts, in reality a name given to a number of Celtic tribes that lived in the norther part of the island at the time, most likely related to the modern-day Welsh.  It was rough, cold terrain, and the Romans had a tendency in Britain to anger the locals through violent shows of force which included rape, torture and mutilation of women and, though history doesn't play it up much, men as we...

As the DC Cinematic Universe circled the drain Warner Bros. desperately tried to get audiences to come back.  As they did it became more and more obvious that their strategy was to copy Marvel.  This wasn't hard as every key Marvel character had some sort of doppelganger in the D.C. universe.  For instance, instead of Dr. Strange, there was Dr. Fate.  Instead of Black Panther we have Black Adam. To be fair, T'Challa was always a good guy and a positive force for the fictional country of Wakanda, which managed to become an advanced civilization due to a steady supply of vibranium.  Kahndaq, the ancient kingdom in which Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson) lived, had something called eternium and, because of it, became the target of international mercenaries that were in control of the country.  In the comics, Black Adam was a supervillain and a main rival of Captain Marvel.  Here he is an antihero who becomes the reluctant protector of his homeland 5000 years lat...

I don't think it's easy for an audience not familiar with exactly what a big deal masked wrestler El Santo was to understand why he could be such a phenomenon.  A hero in the ring and known for never removing his mask until he retired shortly before his death, Santo became a bit of a folk hero.  He was famous outside of being a luchador, making a series of movies that often featured his rival in the ring - Blue Demon - and Santo teaming up to fight crime, monsters and seven Satan himself.  The movies became popular in Mexican cinema and gained a cult following in the U.S., largely in urban areas close to the border that had Spanish cinemas.  As can be expected these movies did not have the biggest budgets, most complicated plots or great special effects.  Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, the man behind the mask, obviously had fun making them, as did everyone else.  And, truth be told, neither he nor Blue Demon removing the masks, something that was key to they public...

I am not a professional wrestling fan.  Nor am I fan of wrestling in any form.  I understand it's silly entertainment for many, and it's not snobbery on my part.  It just never clicked with me.  Thus, seeing that the Canadian film Dark Match was a horror film about wrestling, I was a bit reluctant to see it as it's completely out of my wheelhouse.  However, what Shudder forgot to do was to include a little note saying that this was from the guy who did Wolfcop , a frenetic horror comedy that is exactly what the title implies.  While quite a bit less of an assault on the senses as that film it would have at least allayed many of my fears.  Rusty (Jonathan Cherry) is a small-time wrestling promoter whose organization S.A.W. employs a number of minor performers that do a regional circuit.  One of this is Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa), who though still young is slowly watching her career slip away, especially as a new addition named Kate the Great (Sara C...

What sets the Millennium Era of Godzilla films apart from the preceding ones is that there was no set story.  Godzilla 2000: Millennium had one major goal and that was for Toho to redeem their property after the disastrous Godzilla that American audiences were given courtesy of Roland Emmerich.  It served its purpose, although it ended with Godzilla, having defeated the alien Orga, proceeding to lay waste to Japan as the credits rolled.  Despite having a fair bit of humor throughout it was a downer of an ending. Instead of following on from that Godzilla vs. Megaguiras takes us to an alternate universe.  In this one Godzilla attacked and destroyed Tokyo in 1954.  Despite a massive rebuilding effort the decision was made to relocate the capital to Osaka.  However, the big guy attacked again in 1966, destroying the country's first nuclear plant.  Looking for some other source of clean energy, by 1996 the country developed plasma energy, but that again ...

Most people know about the 1955 creature feature Tarantula from the line in "Science Fiction/Double Feature" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show .  Indeed, along with Them! , this is one of the more recognizable big bug movies of the 1950s.  It's a genre known for laughable effects and general silliness but, when done right it provided some thrills, especially for the younger crowd it was aimed toward.   After a man is found wandering in the Arizona desert with acromegaly, a rare pituitary condition he appears to have developed within days, Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar) tries to figure out why.  It turns out that it is due to experiments Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll), who is doing experiments with growth hormones.  While successful on animals the results on humans have been questionable at best and fatal at worst.  When his other assistant injects him and burns down his lab a tarantula that has been injected with the serum escapes. Stephanie "Ste...

Along with such directors as William Castle and Roger Corman there was Bert I. Gordon.  Castle loved his gimmicks, Corman loved making money and Gordon liked everything big.  Big bugs, big animals, big men.  Just not big budgets.  While some have dismissed Gordon as being along the lines of Ed Wood that is unfair.  Gordon's movies were not spectacular, definitely not classics, but they were at least passable entertainment, where only a handful of Wood's movies were watchable.   Gordon not only directed his films but did most of the special effects for them as well.  That is where issues pop up, and it was an issue that followed American International Pictures into the 1970s.  Where Ray Harryhausen was a master of stop motion and Toho had guys in suits stomping around miniature cities, Gordon often used forced perspective or set a small creature loose among his models.  Sometimes this worked better than could be expected but often resulte...

There are too many films that become a major sensation that I watch in hope that I get the thrill I used to get when it felt like every major blockbuster film was something new and exciting.  The problem is that unique experience of seeing something unexpected and knowing that one is getting in on the ground floor of a new popular culture sensation is now something that rarely happens.  Sequels and remakes have always been the cash cows of Hollywood, but it still seems that movies like Weapons were peppered in there more often in the past.  I may not have been on board from the beginning on this one, but I can definitely see why this caught the public's attention.  One day every child except Alex (Cary Christopher) vanishes from a fifth-grade class taught by Justine Candy (Julia Garner).  For an unexplained reason they all leave their houses at 2:17 in the morning and not return.  While grieving parents try to figure out what happened Justine is blamed for ...

Most people are aware of Ring 2 , the rather disappointing sequel to 1998's Ringu .  It was a bit of a mess, going off in numerous directions and relegating Sadako to a mere afterthought throughout the majority of the film.  Those expecting her to continue claiming victims by crawling out a television set were quite disappointed. However, Ring 2 had been made with a purpose.  When Ringu was in production it was decided to begin making the sequel, Spiral , at the same time.  Also based on a book by Kôji Suzuki, this was the movie he spent a lot of time on, cowriting the film adaptation with director Jôji Iida.  However, where Ringu became a major box office smash and, elsewhere, a cult hit, Spiral failed so badly that Ring 2 was rushed into production to make up for it.  The truth is that neither sequel does much to carry on the original story.  Mitsuo Andô (Kôichi Satô) is a pathologist on the brink of suicide who blames himself for his son's death....

Ring 2 is the official sequel to Ringu , the 1998 adaptation of Kôji Suzuki's novel of the same name.  It wasn't the first, with the original version being a Japanese television movie and, to make things even more confusing, Ring 2 isn't the first sequel to the feature film version.  That was a movie called Spiral .  Released at the same time as Ringu , it failed at the box office, resulting in writer Hiroshi Takahashi and director Hideo Nakata, who made the first film, being tapped to make a quick sequel.  Shortly after Sadako's (Rie Ino'o) body is found in the well her father Takashi (Yôichi Numata) is brought in to identify the body.  It is soon confirmed through facial reconstruction.  The only thing is that the police are baffled by the fact that it appears she had been alive in the well for 30 years.  Meanwhile, they are continuing to investigate the death of Ryûji Takamara (Hiroyuki Sanada) and disappearance of Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) ...