Expelled Grey Matter

s The first few minutes of Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge - after the first killing, that is -   threw me for a loop.  I swore I was looking at an outtake from Chopping Mall , as this movie was filmed in the same place and also opens with a press conference.  Director Richard Friedman uses the same angles, same location and even the same chairs.  I was surprised that Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov didn't pop up.   Despite the fact that malls were all the rage in the 1980s, as were slasher films, it is surprising the two don't cross over as much.  In fact, this is the only one I can say that fits that location into the genre, as Chopping Mall  was about killer robots rather than a take on Phantom of the Opera .  Also, while not traditionally a good movie, Chopping Mall is still a bit of dark humored fun.  I think Phantom of the Mall attempts that as well but falls far short.  Melody (Kari Whitman) has just got a job at the new mal...

I loved Deadpool   and liked Deadpool 2 .  There was only a two-year gap between the two and it seemed that, although they were made by two different directors, there was consistency in the humor.  The second didn't surprise like the first did, but it was still willing to play around with superhero tropes and, like its predecessor, was allowed to be as raunchy as possible. The next gap was six years.  During that time 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney and all the Marvel franchises that studio had reverted to Marvel Studios.  For the most part their new owner proceeded to do nothing with them, promising that maybe the characters would come back at some point, using the current multiverse concept in order to do so.  Thus, after a span of time, Deadpool is back, and so is Wolverine, along with a number of other Marvel heroes that came before the MCU.  Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is brought in by the TVA to meet with a man called Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macf...

Jaws was one of the first big blockbusters and a number of studios spent the rest of the 1970s making cheap knockoffs of it.  However, there are only so many times that one can have an oversized predator (or swarm of them) attacking tourists and locals as a major event comes up before people get bored.  However, it seems they never got bored of seeing animals get their own against humans, whether those creatures be normal or supersized.  The "nature attacks" films pretty much were their own subgenre and, as in any, they were of varying quality, from amazing to amazingly bad.  Kingdom of the Spiders falls somewhere in the middle. When Walter Colby's (Woody Strode) prize calf suddenly dies local veterinarian 'Rack' Hansen (William Shatner) sends samples of the animal's blood to a lab in Flagstaff to have it examined.  The results are sent to Arizona State University, where an expert in entomology named Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) travels to the town of Camp ...

The world doesn't need more Christmas horror films.  What it needs is more good horror movies for the holidays.  The problem is for every Rare Exports   or Krampus  a number of hack directors turn out stuff like Jack Frost .  Producer Steven Hoban realized this and decided to rush out a Christmas anthology that he believed would be a cross between Creepshow and Pulp Fiction , weaving four different stories together with tenuous connections to each other rather than the normal anthology format.  Santa Claus (George Buza) is preparing for Christmas at the North Pole when suddenly his Elves begin to turn on him, becoming zombies that he must fight in order to save Christmas and his wife Marta (Debra McCabe).  Meanwhile, in the Canadian town of Bailey Downs, aspiring journalist Molly (Zoé De Grand Maison) and her friends Ben (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) and Dylan (Shannon Cook) sneak into the local high school to investigate a murder that happened a year prior....

The Mangler is a horror film about a possessed laundry machine.  That is the thing to understand about it before deciding if this is something that one wants to watch.  Not that it was directed by Tobe Hooper, not that it is adapted from a short story by Stephen King and also not the fact that Robert Englund plays a major villain role.  It is about a possessed laundry machine, although a possessed refrigerator also comes into play. That is what often makes reviewing certain movies hard.  Some critics have despaired at having to review certain things, like Godzilla or James Bond films, but in the end those are easy as they have been around so long that they can be reviewed against others in the same series.  When reviewing something about Satanic industrial equipment one has to pull back and realize that, unless an extreme case of serendipity hit the production to make everything work, there is no way the movie is going to live up to the expectation of being eith...

Edgar Wright definitely has a style.  He likes combining sci-fi, horror and comedy in unexpected ways, resulting in a quirky form of filmmaking that has had its ups and downs.  He is similar to Sam Raimi where some of the more recognizable trademarks of his style have slowly leached out to where he is becoming more and more another mainstream director.  I wouldn't say Hollywood, since with a few exceptions and a delightful detour in making a documentary about Sparks, he generally sticks to England for his films. Still, I can't help but feel, though it is still quite a good movie, that Wright has moved far into the mainstream with Last Night in Soho .  It has its moments and it is still quite creative in its storytelling, but it feels different than what has come before.  Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is a young girl from Cornwall hoping to achieve her dream of becoming a fashion designer.  Her mom (Aimee Cassettari) is dead and she was raised by her grandmothe...