Expelled Grey Matter

Terrified is a hard movie to describe.  I can describe what's in it, the things that happen, but it's kind of difficult to fathom how everything is supposed to fit together, or if it is supposed to at all.  Writer/director Demián Rugna seems content to throw a bunch of frightening images at the screen and see what sticks without paying too much attention to any underlying story, other than everything taking place in the same neighborhood.  After his wife Clara (Natalia Señorales) hears voices in her kitchen saying they are going to kill her, Juan (Augustín Rittano) at first writes it off.  Later that night, however, Clara is brutally murdered by an unseen force.  Juan is accused of the murder, but former police officer Jano (Norberto Gonzalo) and psychic investigators Dr. Albreck (Elvira Onetto) and Dr. Rosentock (George L. Lewis) visit him in prison to get his permission to investigate his house. Juan's house is not the only one involved.  Juan's neighbor ...

In contrast the old days of Spanish horror, these day the industry is inhabited by one giant fish: Guillermo del Toro.  He's not necessarily just a Spanish phenomenon, having produced quite a number of Hollywood hits and acclaimed films, but mention del Torro and many times the first thing that comes to mind is Pan's Labyrinth .  It managed to gain international fame, much more so than a lot of his blockbusters did.  It, along with The Devil's Backbone , helped to move Spanish horror away from its exploitation history and to something much more stylish.  Thus, I was willing to break one of my big rules due to word of mouth on The Orphanage .  Usually I steer away from anything that says "presented by" or "produced by so-in-so that made such-and-such."  It's usually the desperate ploy of a movie studio that knows it has a dud but hopes to get a few people gullible enough to think a famous director, or at least one with some popular indie cred at the t...

Tombs of the Blind Dead is an early '70s horror film from Spain that is starting, in its unaltered form, to get a bit more attention.  Amando de Ossorio's tale of Satanic knights rising from the grave in rural Portugal sparked a number of official sequels by him, unofficial sequels down the years and, by extension, an entire Spanish horror industry.  Paul Naschy and Jesus Franco had already established their own reputations, but this movie helped broaden the scope away from traditional monsters and Franco's sleazy arthouse films.  Until recently I have always felt that Spanish horror films took a back seat to Italy.  While they are similar in a lot of ways it often seemed that Spanish directors envied the Italian industry and felt that they had to push things just a little further, but didn't have as much access to the pool of American actors that would fly over to Rome for a few days to earn some extra cash on the side.  Spain - and Portugal, where this movie i...

Stephanie Rothman was one of Roger Corman's protegés and, while one would expect more of a female gaze from her films, they were often the usual list of exploitation films, from women in prison to softcore comedy to horror.  Probably her most well-known film was 1973's Terminal Island , one of many films about American girls getting in trouble and being sentenced to tropical prison camps.  Before that, however, she did try to get a little bit more artsy with The Velvet Vampire. Lee (Michael Blodgett) and his wife Susan (Sherry E. DeBoer) meet a mysterious woman named Diane (Celeste Yarnall) at an art exhibition.  Much to Susan's chagrin Lee is automatically attracted to Diane and accepts an invite to her home in the middle of the California desert.  Susan, though not exactly happy about the situation, decides to come along.   Once at Diane's home Susan is ill at ease, having a number of strange dreams that are shared with Lee.  It soon turns out that D...

I tend to just expect Tim Burton to release something "quirky" on a regular basis these days, often with Johnny Depp or Helen Bonham Carter, or both if he can get away with it.  Back in the 1980s he was one of the hottest new directors, owing largely to the success of Pee Wee's Big Adventure , which starred Paul Reubens in his famous children's character role before an adventure of his own in a seedy New York theater brought his career to a screeching halt.  It took a lot more to do that with Burton, namely a bunch of terribly unfunny and uninteresting movies - often starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, or both.  Pee Wee's Big Adventure was a surprise hit, and it earned Burton a choice of what project he would do next.  Although he was set on Batman at some point, the next movie he chose was a story by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, which would be worked into a screenplay by Warren Skaaren.  The concept was simple: what if a couple of nice, rural ghos...

One would wonder what type of movie would inspire a mid-west avant-punk band's name.  I do realize that the band Killdozer, though not exactly a household name, is a bit more known than the movie that inspired them.  The truth is, for all the noise and racket of the band, the movie itself is typical of a lot of 1970s films where the name both says all one needs to know about the film, but also conjures up in the imagination a better film than what it actually is. Killdozer is a made-for-television film based on a short story by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, and he adapted his story for the screenplay.  When a meteor falls to Earth on a remote island off the coast of Africa, an intelligence hitching a ride transfers itself into a bulldozer that tries to remove the rock.  The title machine belongs to a work crew headed by Lloyd Kelly (Clint Walker) that is tasked with building a base camp and an access road for an oil drilling company.   The initi...

I know it's now common to slam any Hellraiser film that came out after the first two, but I always liked Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth .  Sure, it's silly and turns Pinhead into more of a Freddy Krueger type killer, but it is a lot of fun.  It's the fourth one that kills it for me, although I know some revisionists are trying to convince themselves that Hellraiser: Inferno is a good movie.  I consider that delusion arising from the hope that things could get better.  It wasn't even meant to be a Hellraiser  film, and just had Pinhead slipped in to make a buck. This series has gone on forever, each film getting further and further away from the mythology of the Clive Barker original.  Out of 10 movies only three were worth watching, making Hellraiser even less successful that Friday the 13th , which is dismissed by many critics as being cynical bloodletting for money.  On top of that a remake has been threatened for years, going through various writers ...