Expelled Grey Matter

I may have said it before, but it is worth saying again.  You really never know what you are getting into when you sit down to watch a Jess Franco film.  What can usually be expected is a non-linear narrative and a fair amount of sleaze.  During his heyday he, along with Jean Rollin, was treated as a hack, someone who churned out films just to cash in on trends and make a quick buck - something that was largely anathema to the industries in which they worked.  If Jess Franco had been working largely in the British or Italian film industry, he would probably get much more respect. I think it is a sense of disillusionment that led him (and other directors) to just turn out about anything they could and see if it stuck.  It's a pity, since if we look back on Franco's early films, we clearly see that he was a budding talent that could have gone much further during his lifetime.  At least he did live long enough to see public perception of many of his films ...

Godzilla, after 21 years, had come full circle from an angry force of nature awakened from the deep by nuclear bomb tests to a defender of the earth.  Aliens, supervillains, corrupt government officials and a virtual menagerie of monsters had attempted to bring him down.  They all failed, although Mechagodzilla came pretty close. After the events of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla , those pesky aliens from the third planet of the black hole are back again.  Scientists pilot a mysterious submarine to find the remains of Mechagodzilla, only to be attacked by Titanosaurus, an aquatic reptile that had been theorized by Dr. Shinzo Mafune (Akihiko Hirata).  His theories about the monster, and attempts to control it, got him thrown out of the institute in which he worked.  Biologist Akira Ichinose (Kastuhiko Sasaki) and Interpol Agent Jiro Murakoshi (Katsumasa Uchida) attempt to find the doctor, only to be told by the doctor's daughter Katsura (Tomoko Ai) that the doc...

When I saw that one of the actresses in this movie was named Joy Bang, I got concerned that this movie was going to end up with me spending a night on the couch.  While it does have some nudity and sexual themes, I found out that falling asleep on the couch was a much more likely scenario.  Lena Aruza (Marlene Clark) is a nurse in the Philippines during World War II.  She is out exploring with a friend when she finds a cave, which contains a cobra with a particular diamond shape on its throat.  She is bitten by the cobra, and instead of dying, transforms into a creature of immortal beauty.  She is also able to use the venom to save her friend's life after she is raped and shot by a Japanese soldier. 30-some years later Joanna (Bang) is a UNICEF worker in Manila, assisting Dr. Tezon (Vic Silayan) with his venom research.  She hears about the firebrand cobra, a species thought to be extinct, but that a mysterious woman in a small village might know wher...

"I not give you crap."  So said producer Dino De Laurentiis when promoting his 1976 remake of King Kong .  The original had become a classic, not just in horror and science fiction, but film-making in general.  When you watch the 1933 original today, it is just as exciting as when it came out 83 years ago.  Although Peter Jackson's version is nowhere near as good as the original, he had the vision of placing it in the same time period, and making Kong both vicious and sentimental. De Laurentiis's Kong is practically a suave lady's man, and the sentimentality is slathered on like frosting.  No subtlety, no trust that the audience may get the subtext.  It is almost as if the script was written by a giant ape with a couple head wounds. Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin) is an oil executive for a company called Petrox.  Along with his scientist sidekick Bagley (Rene Auberjonois), he sets sail for a mysterious fog-enshrouded island that he is sure is rich w...

I think I could go on forever about how much I hate Twilight and anything to do with it.  There were many things that tainted horror in the 2000s, and that movie was one of the worst.  Suddenly sad-eyed emo boys were filling the screen, trying to fulfill 16-year-old girls' bad boy cravings - cravings they would inevitably regret a few years later, just like the albums by the boy band they liked when they were 13. It is too bad that From Within falls within this category, as it did try to so something original. Lindsay (Elizabeth Rice) is a good Christian girl in Grovetown, Maryland.  She is dating Dylan (Kelly Blatz), the son of the local pastor of their megachurch (Steven Culp).  In fact, the entire town revolves around the church, and outsiders that do not want to participate are not welcome.  One of these outsiders is Paul (David Arniello), who is secretly off with his girlfriend Natalie (Rumer Willis).  Paul commits suicide in front of her....

I sometimes have to wonder what happened to Roger Corman in the '80s and '90s.  By his own admission, he really never looked at movies as art, but as opportunities to make money.  He would seize on any trend, often making thinly-veiled remakes of more popular movies just to turn a buck.  More often than not throughout his career it worked.  So, why even bother with The Terror Within , a horrible clone of Alien that didn't even make back its production costs?  Never mind that it was 10 years after the fact.  Honestly, it was three years after the sequel, but Corman didn't even bother to rip off the sequel.  After a release of a biological warfare agent kills or mutates 99 per cent of the population, only scattered survivors roam the land, with most holed up in government labs.  There is a vaccine, but really nobody to administer it to.  Those who do remain above ground fall victim to "gargoyles," virtually unstoppable mutants that do no...

I am quite aware of the memes involving confusion between Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton.  Long before the internet was a thing, there was a strange movie that actually starred both of them.  Rex Martin (Pullman) is a respected neurosurgeon that has an office full of brains.  He hooks the brains up to a face to see what responses he gets, and so far he has had some success, specifically in figuring out what part of the brain causes paranoia. The studies are funded by a grant from a large corporation called Eunice, of which his best friend Jim Reston (Paxton) is a board member.  Eunice has a problem: a mathematician named Jack Halsey (Bud Cort) has suffered a psychological breakdown.  He killed his entire family and was committed to a mental institution, where he believes Ramsen (Nicholas Pryor), the doctor in charge, is his boss Conklin from a mattress store at which he is an accountant.  He also believes that Conklin is a man in a bloody white suit tha...