Expelled Grey Matter

There are so many red flags just on the poster of this movie.  One is actually admitting that David Arquette is the star and putting his mug clear and up front.  Another is making the poster look like it is still in the development stage and some secretary misunderstood that it was a mock-up and sent it out to be printed.  Third, of course, is that it is from the producer of Independence Day and Godzilla .  Although the latter made money it's not something to be too proud of.  Also, putting "from the producer" on anything is like telling a cop that your brother-in-law is the mayor. Despite all that Eight Legged Freaks , directed by Ellory Elkayem and based on his short film Larger Than Life , manages to deliver some old-school sci-fi thrills.  Giant insects, usually due to nuclear testing, were all the rage in the 1950s, and Elkayem set out to due both an homage to the genre as well as a satire.  It intermittently works as both, but is a light, fun wa...

Oliver Stone may be a unique film maker but he has never been one that I've cared for much.  It is probably the topics of most of his movies.  Often he is championing some conspiracy theory, reminding us about how much he really hates Republicans or reveling in ancient Boomer icons and causes.  The two things he has going for him is that when he truly wants to he knows how to use both the audio and visual mediums of cinema in an amazing fashion and, despite all his pretentions, he knows how to make a b-movie.  He did write the script for Scarface , after all.  The problem is that he began to revel in much of the praise that was made of his movies in the late 1980s.  Some of it was deserved - Platoon did its best to put viewers in the boots of the soldiers the movie portrayed, while Wall Street managed to balance a number of his worst tendencies to come up with a memorable film that defined what, for a lot of the ex-hippies that had fought the establishment,...

I remember little of the advertising for The Prophecy  other than it tried to sell it as being directed by one of the writers of Highlander .  That wasn't exactly a major recommendation, because by this point Highlander II: The Quickening  had come and gone from theaters, but unfortunately not from the memories of those of us who enjoyed the original so much.  Other than that no one really knew who Gregory Widen was.  He is largely a screenwriter, and remains so, with The Prophecy being his only directing credit for a feature film. Knowing little of the story when I saw it in the theater I found myself enraptured by the film.  One of the biggest surprises was that the town where a lot of the action takes place, Chimney Rock.  It's a fictional town, but was filmed in a place I had photographed the year before: Superior, Arizona.  In fact, most of the movie was filmed in Arizona, with Phoenix standing in for Los Angeles in a number of scenes.  ...

One thing a director often learned when working with Roger Corman was how to make a film quickly, within budget and turn a profit.  Corman famously filmed The Terror in four days, with leftover film stock from one of his Poe films, and to take advantage of sets that were already built.  So, it only stands that David DeCoteau, who got his start with Corman, might try to do the same thing.  It was actually a challenge made to him to do a film in such a short time, and Brinke Stevens thought that a four-day shooting schedule meant she would be making a cameo rather than co-starring.  In the end DeCoteau pulled it off, working 12-hour days over a long weekend, and partially was able to do so because his leading ladies, including Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer, were able to get many of their line readings done in one take.  Though that is impressive, it must be noted that Nightmare Sisters  is obviously not filled with Tarantinoesque dialogue; quite a bit of ...

David DeCoteau is a director that I would describe, generously, as almost competent.  He has directed over 120 movies - a good number of them pornographic - and learned how to make his mainstream films quickly and on a shoestring budget from his time working with Roger Corman.  He found a willing enabler in producer and Full Moon owner Charles Band for whom he has created quite a number of films.   Full Moon, while some of their movies occasionally made it to theaters, concentrated largely on the direct-to-video horror market.  DeCoteau had some previous success with cheap action films like Lady Avenger and Ghetto Blaster , but it was clear that the video market is where he could shine.  Because of U.S.A. Up All Night,  which showed heavily edited versions of many such b-movies in the 1980s, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama became one of his more well-known creations.  Keith (John Stuart Wildman) is bored with sitting around with his do...

Like a lot of people who write movie reviews I complain quite a lot about CGI.  Truth is I like it when it is done right, and I find myself quite amazed by how well a number of films from the 1990s and 2000s have stood up.  There are some problems here and there, but the first three X-Men films (yes, even Last Stand )  have managed to still look good.  So, when Wolverine's adamantine claws come out in X-Men Origins: Wolverine , there was no excuse for a movie made three years after the last one to have them look like an outtake from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It's not just his claws, but pretty much every effect, and there are so many of them in this movie.  Though Hugh Jackman was hoping the writers and director Gavin Hood would humanize Wolverine and make this movie more of a "character piece," it is wall-to-wall special effects and action sequences, and all of them either look like the effects team gave up halfway through or just forgot they were making a live...

While slasher films get a lot of reverence these days they were absolutely hated by critics and parent organizations when they first came out.  It was one of the reasons they became such a high-profile target of the MPAA, with draconian demands for cuts in the violence to the point where it was the few brief scenes of nudity and extra f-bombs that generated an R-rating.  Otherwise, there were PG films with much more violence than most slashers.  These days directors, knowing that the theatrical release of the movie is going to get cut, often preserve their original version for home release.  Many times the early slasher films didn't have this option.  My Bloody Valentine , for instance, had to remove a majority of the kill scenes and it was years before the full footage was found again and, when it was, it was in terrible resolution in comparison to the restored cuts of the film.  Even as late as Event Horizon a good portion of the movie was lost and only r...