Expelled Grey Matter

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) ...

M is one of the most influential movies ever made.  Released in Germany in 1931 as the Nazis were slowly gaining more and more control, it is probably the one most film students know by director Fritz Lang other than Metropolis .  It was one of the transitional films from silent to sound and a milestone in German cinema, so much so that it became a cult film in the U.S., facilitating both Lang and its star, Peter Lorre, to get out of a worsening situation at home and come work in Hollywood. Of course, Hollywood wouldn't let such an intriguing story go without a remake, and an American version was made in 1951, although not directed by Lang.  Two years later a second remake was made, not in Germany or the U.S., but in another country that had a burgeoning cinema movement that unfortunately was cut short by domestic strife.  El vampiro negro, or The Black Vampire , was an adaptation of the story by renowned Uruguayan/Argentinian director Román Viñoly Barreto. ...

Unfortunately, when one mentions The Wicker Man , many think of the viral clip of Nicholas Cage yelling about bees in the remake rather than the small budget treatise on blindly following religion that the original film is.  Part police procedural, part horror film and part musical, The Wicker Man is unique in both its jarring unevenness and its ability to create a sense of unease with little going on through most of the movie, climaxing in a heart wrenching manner.  Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) is a Scottish police officer who travels to the isolated community of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan (Gerry Cowper).  Upon arrival he finds that no one on the island will admit to ever having seen the girl, including her mother May (Irene Sunters).  Blocked at every turn, the devoutly Catholic Sgt. Howie finds himself pursued by Willow (Britt Ekland), the daughter of the local innkeeper, and perplexed by the fact that the community app...

The City of the Dead , also known by its more lurid U.S. title Horror Hotel , was the first production for the British Studio Vulcan Pictures.  That may not sound like much but Vulcan would soon become Amicus, a low-budget but successful competitor to Hammer, the studio that produced the most famous British horror films for nearly two decades.  While Hammer had all the big names from Universal, Amicus produced a number of popular anthology series as well as feature films based on two stories from the BBC series Doctor Who .  Though made a bit over a decade earlier The City of the Dead shares some plot elements with The Wicker Man , with the main character leaving modern society to go to an isolated community ruled by ancient ways.  The two films are quite different in tone, but many of the elements are there, as is Christopher Lee.  This, however, doesn't contain the vague respect for paganism like the later film.  Professor Allan Driscoll (Lee) teaches a c...

Not all movies hit the same for all people.  1408 , for instance, was a much-talked-about film when it came out in 2007, right in the middle of one of the worst decades for horror films.  Another in a long line of PG-13 fright flicks, this one was adapted from a Stephen King short story that had started out as an exercise on writing drafts as part of King's non-fiction book, On Writing , published in 2000.  The story came out as an audio file before that and eventually the written version appeared in the collection Everything's Eventual in 2002.  Keeping in mind that the story itself was an afterthought is key to approaching the movie.  Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a writer that specializes in paranormal travel guides.  A failed serious novelist with family issues, his books are successful but bring him no joy.  In fact, despite staying in numerous places purported to be haunted, Mike does not believe in the paranormal.  While writing a new book o...

Luis Buñuel is a director pretty much everyone has some familiarity with.  For students of surreal cinema (and fans of Pixies) there is Un chien andalou , a short film from the 1920s made in partnership with Salvador Dali.  For the serious film student there is Simon of the Desert , another short movie that explores the fine line between devotion and hubris.  For most, especially the art film crowd, there is Belle du jour , his stab at the French New Wave.  The latter is probably his most well-known, although I like it the least of his works, largely because of my frustration and dislike for that particular film movement.   He had different phases of his career with one being a long stint beginning in 1946 making films in Mexico.  Buñuel enjoyed the freedom he had there as well as working internationally.  Although he spent a good deal of the 1950s making movies outside of Mexico, Simon of the Desert and The Exterminating Angel, two of the final f...

In a Violent Nature is inspired by the classic slasher films but comes at the genre from a literally different angle.  The only movie I can really think that it is similar to in concept, but much different in style and execution, is Tucker & Dale vs. Evil .  In that we see a couple of actual nice guys that are mistaken for psychopathic killers, thus seeing things from their side rather than the random teenagers that get mutilated in creative ways, albeit in that case it is comedy.  Here it is mostly serious, although some of the kills have some dark humor, but writer and director Chris Nash has given us a unique perspective of a slasher film from the killer himself.  When a group of kids take a locket from a grave near an old fire tower they unwittingly release Johnny (Ry Barrett).  Johnny was killed in an accident 70 years prior after a prank went wrong.  When his dad came for revenge, he was murdered by the inhabitants of a logging camp.  They we...

If any attempt to bring a comic book franchise to the big screen was cursed it has to be The Fantastic Four .  Jack Kirby's tale of a Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny and their friend Ben Grimm being given superpowers by a cosmic storm and defending the Earth first appeared in 1961 and has endured ever since.  The problem is that the movies so far have featured a hackneyed scheme to hold on to the franchise, a pair of goofy attempts at emulating the comics and one grimdark version that may or may not have been ruined by studio interference.  Regardless, none of them are really worth seeing, despite Michael Chiklis going above and beyond as The Thing in 2005's Fantastic Four .  Like with most Marvel properties, these heroes and their menagerie of villains are now firmly in the grasp of Disney, having inherited the movie rights from their purchase of Fox.  That also means that they, in their infinite search for more money, must find a way to j...

There are rare times when a movie is better than the book.  So rare that I am going to be one of the minority on this as there are quite a few people who love this 1993 by Scott B. Smith.  I specifically got it because I liked Sam Raimi's film so much, which Smith also wrote the screenplay for.  Unfortunately, where the movie gives a realistic portrayal of how greed can tear apart families as well as how thin the veneer of respectability is the novel tried to do the same but put the protagonists in unbelievable situations and gave them ridiculous plot armor.  It is hard to believe they were written by the same person.  Because of the book I was nervous about seeing the movie again, hoping that somehow I didn't misremember this being one of Raimi's best films. Hank (Bill Paxton) and his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) drive out to visit their father's grave with Jacob's friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) on New Year's Eve.  On the way back Jacob swerves to avoid ...