Expelled Grey Matter

It may be hard to understand now, since Australia (at least to those of us in the United States) seems almost as liberal as Europe when it comes to movies.  There are still a number of countries in Europe - Germany, for instance - where films are heavily cut for violence, and Australia is still known to occasionally get nervous depending on what kind of violence the movies actually contain, but before 1971 the number of homegrown films was low due to heavy censorship, and many of the films from Europe and the U.S. faced being seized by customs and banned all together.  In the early 1970s the Australian Censorship Board began using its own classification system much as the MPAA had started instituting in the late 1960s.  The result was that suddenly Australian directors had a lot more freedom, resulting in what is known as the Australian New Wave.  It also resulted in what was later renamed ozsploitation, which encompassed a number of sex comedies as well as action fi...

Stephen King and George A. Romero had worked together for quite awhile, and they had worked together well.  Creepshow managed to combine both the shock and the camp of the old EC Comics, while Tales from the Dark Side, which was co-produced by Romero, featured adaptations of King's short stories "The Word Processor of the Gods" and "Sorry, Right Number".  The two remained good friends, so it was only a matter of time before Romero took a swing at adapting a Stephen King novel. I read The Dark Half a few years after it came out and it introduced me to a word I didn't know at the time but that I've seen come up in interesting ways since: psychopomp .  The idea of birds or other animals carrying souls back and forth between the realms of the living and dead is an intriguing concept, as is the idea of our own minds helping to bring things into existence that never existed before.  The inspiration for The Dark Half came from King's own career, touching o...

While there aren't too many tales of studio interference when it come to Ghost , it was an unlikely mix.  Director Jerry Zucker was one of the team responsible for Airplane!  and The Naked Gun , while Patrick Swayze was a bankable action star.  Demi Moore was an up-and-coming young actress who had starred in some romance and drama films, while Whoopi Goldberg was a comedian who had shown promise as a dramatic actor in The Color Purple before starring in a number of flops.   To add a bit of strangeness Zucker was working directly with writer Bruce Joel Rubin.  Prior to Ghost he had been responsible for Brainstorm , which, though interesting, was known more for being Natalie Wood's last film.  The film he did after that was Deadly Friend , directed by Wes Craven and best known for Kristy Swanson smashing Anne Ramsey's head with a basketball.  While nothing in this disparate amalgamation of talents really speaks of disaster it also doesn't foretell a...

In the 1940s one of the biggest comedy duos was Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.  The two had success in radio early on, but soon hit their stride performing on stage and on film.  Toward the late 1940s they were famous for briefly breathing some new life into the old Universal monsters, particularly with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , but their first foray into supernatural comedy was 1941's Hold That Ghost .  Like a number of their films over the next decade it was a hit, and just the light-hearted fare the nation needed during wartime.  Whenever a successful formula pops up it is inevitable it will be copied, and a number of other studios tried.  There were the Ritz Brothers, who worked for both 20th Century Fox and MGM, and then there was Wally Brown and Alan Carney at RKO.  Where the Ritzes typically did their own thing (although compared somewhat to the Marx Brothers), Brown and Carney were fishing from the same well as Abbott and Costello. ...

Bram Stoker is most known for his novel Dracula , but he had a career as a popular novelist that stretched close to 40 years.  He wrote in numerous genres, from romance to mystery, but his stories of the macabre are the ones he is most known for.  Besides Dracula , there is also his unfinished The Lair of the White Worm, which was adapted into a film in 1988 by Ken Russell, and Jewel of the Seven Stars .   The latter ended up spawning two films within a decade, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and The Awakening .  Other versions pop up every now and then, while plot elements have shown up here and there in a number of mummy films.  The early 20th century saw ancient Egypt gain massive popularity with the public as new discoveries were made almost constantly.  Many popular novelists jumped on the bandwagon, and Stoker was a major name.  It is strange that the story took almost 70 years go make the jump to a movie.  Margaret Fuchs (Valerie Leon) is ...

When I first saw the description of this I was sure I was going to see a movie where Charlton Heston fought a mummy.  That still is a lost opportunity, as it would have been entertaining to see a mummy come to life, take one look at him and say, "Moses?"   Unfortunately, we don't get a mummy trying to get his damn dirty hands on Mr. Heston.  Instead what we get is an adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of the Seven Stars , which had only been adapted 9 years before in the Hammer film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb .  We have Charlton Heston in his first and, as far as I know, only horror film alongside a young Stephanie Zimbalist and a lot of gorgeous on-location filming in Egypt.  Unfortunately what we also get is Stoker's novel translated into a dull attempt to cash in on The Omen.  Matthew Corbeck (Heston) is an archaeologist looking for the tomb of a legendary nameless queen.  Following the directions of a 19th century Dutch explorer named Va...

The first Sinister featured an interesting twist on found footage, following the person watching the footage instead of just sitting through it ourselves.  It was low budget, but the fact that everything took place within one dark house where a murder took place added to the tension.  Unfortunately, toward the end, it went from subtle scares to jump scares, with a number of the children that Bughuul had captured running about and the creature itself saying, "Hi there!" at the end.  Despite the fact that the last attempt at a scare was more stupid than frightening the rest of the movie was pretty good.  The music added to the tension and the way it revealed certain things while hiding others helped to leave a lot to the imagination.  It made enough so that Blumhouse thought there might be a sequel, so Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill whipped one up, only this time with Ciarán Foy directing.   The Deputy (James Ransone) is no longer a deputy, but ...