Expelled Grey Matter

We all have to start somewhere and, before Art the Clown became a modern horror phenomenon, director, writer and makeup artist Damien Leone was just trying to get some notice.  He made two short films, 2008's The 9th Circle and 2011's Terrifier.  A producer, putting together a horror anthology, was anxious to combine the two with some work from others, but Leone decided to add his own wraparound story as well as a new third segment.  In 2013, using these elements, Leone made his feature debut with All Hallow's Eve.  Sarah (Katie Maguire) is babysitting Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson).  When emptying out their Halloween haul Timmy finds that he has been gifted a videotape.  Curious, he demands to watch it, but Sarah wants to make sure of what it is first.  At first it appears to be a typical horror film, starting with a woman (Kayla Lian) in a train station that is drugged and kidnaped by Art the Clown (Mike Giannelli) and made part of...

In the '80s and early '90s we had the action movies that are now considered the classic formula.  Usually, a musclebound lead character plows his way through an army or faceless minions to take out the bad guy at the top, with that guy being anything from a ruthless warlord to a corrupt politician using the local thugs to do his dirty work.  They were all of the type and, although we just considered them action films at the time, the pattern is noticeable since they pretty much disappeared by the end of the 1990s.  Before that, and quite noticeable for a particular style, were the action movies of the 1970s, often featuring some sort of major vehicle chase - or two or three - at some point in the film. The first decade of the 21st century was not known for action movies and, when Hollywood did churn them out, they were noisy, empty, CGI-filled spectacles that were not even fun to watch as popcorn movies.  The feeling one gets when watching a Fast and Furious film or ...

There are a number of big, important directors that just do not click with me.  Michelangelo Antonioni is one.  No matter how much people try to convince me that Blow-Up is a major groundbreaking film, I don't see it.  It's an overlong boring fable about perception of reality versus reality, and it's not subtle about it.  What should be a good murder mystery is lost in a sea of pretention.  I often feel the same way about Nicolas Roeg films.  The Witches aside, most of his movies feature him working with his favorite rock stars and spinning some surrealistic tale where a good part of it is him getting in his own way.  He can shoot, he can shoot art but rarely does he seem able to shoot a comprehensible movie.  His adaptation of Walter Trevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth is no exception.  Thomas Newton (David Bowie) appears one day in the office of patent lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry).  Together they form World Enterprises, a comp...

Despite John Carpenter's current reputation at this point in the 1980s he was running into big trouble,  getting into creative conflicts with the major studios and looking at an uncertain future.  The Thing   had widely been panned by critics for what they considered excessive violence and became a box office failure.  Christine  did better financially, but didn't win him any new fans among the press.   Feeling his ability to make movies was in jeopardy he decided to do a mainstream film and, in this case, it was one produced by Michael Douglas that had already seen a number of directors come and go.  Douglas had been attempting to get the movie made since 1979 and, though it says the script was by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, truth was it had been doctored quite a bit even up to Carpenter directing.  Under his guidance the movie was pared down to a road movie and a love story with Carpenter aiming to show some of the beauty of the Unit...

I will always have a soft spot for stop motion effects.  Despite the fact the method does show its age, often with the herky-jerky motions of the creatures prior to Phil Tippett's advances in Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi  and the difficulties of blending live actors and backgrounds into the scene in a realistic manner, just the feeling that there is a person behind the movements makes it better than running a computer program.  Those who are best at it have always brought their own personality to the effects. David Allen was one of those people.  He was friends with producer and director Charles Band, the man behind Empire Pictures and Full Moon.  While Allen worked on major Hollywood fare such as Willow  and Ghostbusters II  he is known largely for his work with Band, providing what Ray Harryhausen and Tippett often provided, but on a more modest budget.  Most people would have seen his work on the first five Puppet Master films, with Allen ...

The Return of the Living Dead turned out to be a surprising cult hit.  Written and directed by Dan O'Bannon and based on a story by John A. Russo, one of the original collaborators on Night of the Living Dead , it became one of the most renowned horror comedies of the '80s.  Its punk style, outlandish characters and imaginative gore put it ahead of much of the competition.   There would end up being five movies in total, but the first follow-up is pretty much a remake with less gore, no nudity and quite a bit more comedy.  That is why there are no references to Louisville, Kentucky getting blown up by a nuclear bomb at the end of the first film.  Instead, we are now in a fictional town called Westvale, somewhere in the Midwest, when that darn old Trioxin starts doing its thing again. It turns out there are plenty of old barrels of Trioxin 245 around the country and the Army is rounding it up.  Unfortunately, they're about as competent as before, and a ...