Expelled Grey Matter

John Landis had become known as a comedy director by the time An American Werewolf in London hit the screen.  He had dipped his tow into horror with his 1973 feature debut Schlock .  However, by the time this came out, he had The Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers to his credit.  All at least became cult hits, and so he decided to finally film the script he had sitting around since 1968. It just so happened that, even though slashers were becoming a popular genre, the typical movie monsters were nowhere to be seen.  Dracula was really the only real throwback, and it was no surprise that even with the success of his previous films that it was touch and go for getting the budget for a werewolf film.  By strange coincidence, however, the man he wanted to do the effects, Rick Baker, was tied up with another werewolf film - The Howling .  After some cajoling Baker left that movie in the hands of his protegee Rick Bottin...

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later brought Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode and rebooted the series so nothing that happened after Halloween II counted.  This was refreshing, since over the course of time the series had managed to just get worse and worse as attempts were made to explain Michael.  Unfortunately, where it took the original series at least up to the fourth direct sequel to start truly getting bad, Halloween: Resurrection decided to bypass circling the drain and just dive right in.  Where it appeared at the end of the last movie that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had finally killed Michael Myers (Brad Loree), it turns out that it wasn't so.  Instead of Michael, it was a random EMT whom Michael had switched clothes with.  Killing an innocent man supposedly drove Laurie into a catatonic state for three years.  This changes when Michael decides to show up at the mental hospital after visiting hours on Halloween of 2001. A year later an i...

First, let's talk about this title.  Someone came up with the idea of abbreviating the seventh Halloween film to make it sound cool and hip, without thinking that maybe the title didn't make sense unless Michael Myers decided that he was going to take a cruise instead of stalking his extended family.  Thus, we get a subtitle of "Twenty Years Later" to explain.  Though it looks like the chemical sign for water, it's supposed to be "H" followed by the number 20.  There should be no reason to try to explain the title of a film in the title of a film.  Then again there was no reason to make Michael the result of a pagan cult or, honestly, to have ever made Laurie Strode his sister.  For whatever reason everyone kept thinking Michael needed a back story, something proven very wrong by 2007 remake of the original Halloween by Rob Zombie.  The more motivation and story Michael is given the dumber and less scary the whole thing becomes.  As far as was k...

I have never been the biggest fan of creepy kid movies. I guess they have their place, but I usually don't find them creepy, but rather just annoyed that I have to watch a movie with kids in it that isn't The Goonies .  The only reason that I even slightly enjoyed Bloody Birthday was because of Julie Brown in her birthday suit.  The other thing I can say about Bloody Birthday is that it promised killer children and we truly got killer children.  Three of them in fact.  Devil Times Five promises two more, but for some reason forgets that the creepy kids are supposed to do something.  That is, until near the end of the film, when a different director took over and tried to save the whole mess.   Rick (Taylor Lacher) and his wife Julie (Joan McCall) head up to a house owned by Julie's father, and Rick's boss, Papa Doc (Gene Evans).  Along with them is Harvey Beckman (Sorrell Booke) and his wife Ruth (Shelley Morrison).  Harvey is hoping for a p...

By now the Japanese ghost with the stringy hair drawn over her face has become a staple of horror.  It certainly was the go-to for a lot of Asian horror in the late '90s and early 2000s, and it soon caught on in the United States as well when Hollywood decided to put out The Ring , which was largely a remake of this 1998 version of the story.  Ringu itself was the second adaptation of Koji Suzuki's novel, the first being a television movie from 1995.  This, however, is the one that really made Sadako an international phenomenon. It also proves that the United States doesn't have a monopoly on series creep when it comes to horror films.  This has had American and Korean adaptations, two direct sequels, another kind-of sequel with Spiral  and then a whole set of remakes and knockoffs.  It is a non-stop barrage that I am rather reluctant to get into - worse than Ju-On , in fact.  But, after seeing the American version a long time ago, and this being one o...

I have never understood hitchhiking.  I know my dad did it in the 1950s when on leave from the Navy to get back to Arizona - but he also took on a bunch of Canadian marines at one point and did some pool hustling.  Do as I say, not as I do, was a pretty good bit of advice from him, and he always drove home the point not to pick up hitchhikers no matter what.  As far back as Flannery O'Connor there were warnings about what would happen when hitchhiking, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made it clear what can happen when you pick the wrong one up.  It had certainly lost its romanticism by the time The Hitcher made it to the screen, and afterward it was pretty clear that this was a bad idea.  Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is transporting a Cadillac from Illinois to California.  While crossing Texas on a rainy night, and trying hard to stay awake, he picks up a hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer). He soon realizes his mistake when the man outright voices his intent to k...

One of the most interesting things for me is when a movie I saw at some point, and largely forgot about, starts being discussed as an underrated classic.  I saw a lot of movies in the early 1990s, often seeing most of what came out each week if it was feasible to do so.  My poor girlfriend at the time got dragged to many of them, and I'm sure that, like me, she's forgotten a majority of what we saw.   Stay Tuned had an interesting premise, and it had John Ritter and Pam Dawber.  If a movie is being made about people getting sucked into the television, that's a perfect pairing.  John Ritter played Jack Tripper on Three's Company , while Pam Dawber played the second half of Mork and Mindy .  Stay Tuned , which becomes quite clear when watching it now, was aimed at 20- and 30-somethings that had grown up with the shows.  It counted on us being able to chuckle in our ironic way that two people known largely for TV were being sucked into a TV.  Th...