Expelled Grey Matter

Long before there were superhero universes there were comic books.  Detective Comics featured a tragic figure in the form of Batman, a rich playboy turned vigilante after witnessing the death of his parents.  It was dark and brooding with a host of unforgettable villains that Batman was constantly keeping from destroying Gotham City or, in some cases, the world.  So, when it finally came time to bring him to the small screen, the writers decided to go all-in on the comic aspect.   It worked, at least for the first couple of seasons before budgets were cut and actors started rotating out of their roles.  It made Adam West and Burt Ward instant superstars for a time, although it pretty much typecast them as the Dynamic Duo for the rest of their lives.  The Batmobile became an iconic vehicle.  The sets were perfect for newfangled color televisions, full of bright colors, while the fights were enhanced by comic sound effect balloons.  It was corn...

The Cabin in the Woods was deconstruction of a number of well-worn horror tropes while Scream started an entire trend of self-referential slasher films.  In between those two came a plucky horror comedy called Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.  Somehow this slipped by me.  Horror from the 2000s - in fact, up to about the early 2010s - is some of the worst ever produced.  It was a time filled with bloodless PG-13 fright films and a handful that tried to carry on the legacy of Scream and just ended up being annoying. Behind the Mask is a bit different. Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel) is a budding supernatural killer.  The legend in the town of Glenn Echo is that Vernon was thought possessed by evil and, after killing his parents, was tossed from a cliff into a waterfall.  Since the body was never found it made the story ripe for urban legend.  The difference with Vernon, however, is that he has agreed to let a group of grad students led by Tayl...

It is always nice to see a series redeem itself and the  Predator franchise managed to do so with Prey .  Set in North America during the early years of the colonists' westward expansion it told the tale of a young Comanche woman encountering a Yautja on a hunting expedition to Earth.  It both explained where the gun came from in Predator 2 that was gifted to the cop after defeating the one hunting in Los Angeles as well as dragged the series out of the same quagmire the Alien franchise, which takes place in the same universe, was wallowing in.  There were some hints at where sequels would go at the end of the film, and they may someday be explored, but writer and director Dan Trachtenberg decided to go in a different direction.  Comic books and video games, as well as previous sequels, had explored the Yautja and hinted at their culture.  Up to this point, on film at least, all encounters had been from a human perspective.  This time around we get som...

Jaws must have struck some sort of nerve since low-budget studios kept trying to remake it throughout the 1970s even after ripping off Star Wars became more lucrative.  This trend even made its way to other countries, in this case Thailand.  Well, kind of South Korea as well.  Some scenes were reshot for the American market and, though made before Alligator , Crocodile was released in the U.S. a year later to cash in on that popular Jaws  homage.  Dr. Tony Akom (Nard Poowanai) has a good life with his wife Angela (Ni Tien) and daughter Anne. .  His friend John (Min Oo) is looking forward to getting married himself.  However, the world has different plans.  Atomic testing has led to violent storms and a giant crocodile terrorizing the rivers and lakes of Thailand.  After the crocodile kills his family Tony is distraught, but eventually plots revenge with the help of Tanaka (Kirk Warren), a mercenary type with a boat. Tony, John and Tanaka be...

In 2010 Stephen King released a novella collection called Full Dark, No Stars .  The stories it contained were much darker than most of his contemporary material, being less concerned about the supernatural and more about all the evil that human beings can do.  One of the novellas was called A Good Marriage , a rather memorable tale inspired by Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, who managed to convince everyone that he was just a normal guy involved in his community. Bob (Anthony LaPaglia) and Darcy Anderson (Joan Allen) are a couple that own a rare coin business, while Bob also makes money as an accountant.  They have two children, the oldest Petra (Kristen Connolly) about to get married.  They seem the ideal couple to their neighbors and friends, although Bob is a bit controlling when no one is around.  After they celebrate their 25th anniversary Bob goes off on his usual search for more coins.  This is while a serial killer named Beadie is murdering women in ...

Although technically Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was the last of the pre-James Gunn D.C. Cinematic Universe, The Flash is where things came to an end.  Both films suffered fan apathy as by this point everyone knew that the original DCCU run was finished.  The Snyderverse was dead, none of the myriad plot lines that directors were dreaming up were ever going to take shape and the nearly completed Batgirl was cancelled and used as a tax write-off.  Not to mention Ezra Miller, the star of The Flash , spent a good run up to the release of the film as a wanted fugitive that seemed to be expressing their inner Joker. With actors getting cancelled left and right there was pressure to replace them and the entire movie remade or written off.  Only a few things seemed to prevent that.  The main one is that Warner Bros. definitely didn't want to dump any more money into this project.  Another is that Miller uses "they/them" pronouns, which throws them into the ...

I guess I have been missing out on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, who has become a bit of a popular art film director in recent years.  I remember hearing about The Lobster but never ended up seeing it although it sounds intriguing, as do many of his movies.  I almost gave Bugonia a pass as well.  I'm lukewarm on Emma Stone.  She is one of those celebrities that seems as if she was foisted upon the public by the media, not because of any inherent talent, although she has never been terrible in any role I've seen her in.  Also, I heard early on it was a remake of the Korean film Save the Green Planet! , which I also have not seen.  Hollywood doesn't have a great reputation when remaking foreign films.  Still, the rest of the cast was intriguing and, although I was sure I knew where the movie was going to go and how it was going to end - in many ways something I was quite right about - I thought it might be interesting to see how it got there. ...

In 1995 Showtime got together with b-movie maven Roger Corman to create an ongoing series called Roger Corman Presents .  Although he was finished with directing he still produced tons of movies per year, often going direct to video, and Showtime figured this was a cost-effective way to create original programming.  They were right as Corman did what he could to keep the movies below 1.5 million dollars each, and that meant a lot of cost cutting. The result was that a good number of the films were remakes of earlier Corman movies such as Not of This Earth and, in this case, the 1978 Joe Dante film Piranha .  It was Dante's feature debut as he had been working with Corman, and it featured a script by up-and-coming arthouse favorite John Sayles.  Like many of Dante's films to come it featured some great b-movie horror combined with subversive, tongue-in-cheek sequences.  It was a ripoff of Jaws , but it is remembered for its sly self-reverence as well as some neve...

  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...