Expelled Grey Matter

The original Creepshow was a love letter from George A. Romero and Stephen King to the E.C. comic books that inspired them as kids.  The comics, which the Creepshow comic in both films is based on, were controversial at the time for their depiction of lurid scenes violence, monsters and hints of sexuality.  As usual with any moral panic the loss was to the company that made them and to the fans that treasured them.  The win - well, there really was no win, as there never is with censorship. Romero had meant to keep Creepshow going as a movie series, but there were rights issues with other producers and the movie studio, leading ultimately to the creation of Tales from the Darkside , a syndicated anthology series produced by him and Richard Rubinstein that also resulted in a movie which is considered the spiritual successor to these first two films.  The second still featured a script written by Romero and stories from King - this time one from his Skeleton Crew coll...

I am one of the few people that liked The Nun , though I approached it for what it was: a cynical cash grab and a way to keep the Conjuring universe relevant until the next main movie in the series came out.  Annabelle had pretty much been played out so Valak, a demon who takes the form of a monstrous nun, was introduced in The Conjuring 2 as the next big threat and a nemesis to Lorraine Warren.  Since Valak's first appearance the demon's personal attacks on Lorraine have not been explored much, with Ed falling victim to a demonic curse in the third film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It .  Whether the set-up of The Conjuring 2 will have a payoff rather than being a paycheck remains to be seen, but The Nun , despite horrible reviews, managed to still make enough to warrant a sequel.  In 1956 Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is now in a convent school where her involvement in the incidents in Romania are not known by most of the staff.  However, she is called...

The latter part of the 20th century came up with some interesting ways in which people tried to get away with murder.  One was that God told them to do it, which was a late '70s legal attempt to get obviously guilty clients found insane or incompetent to avoid a death penalty.  The other, made popular with the case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson in 1981, has been derisively referred to as the "Flip Wilson" defense: "The Devil made me do it."   On February 16, 1981, Arne Johnson had an altercation of some sort with his landlord, Alan Bono, which led to Johnson stabbing Bono 22 times.  He was found a few miles away by police with Bono's blood on him stating that he didn't mean to hurt anyone.  When asked why he did it Johnson claimed to have been possessed by a demon that he had invited to exit from his girlfriend Debbie Glatzel's youngest brother David and come into him.  His lawyer initially pled not guilty due to demonic possession but, when disallowed by...

The partnership between Larry Cohen and William Lustig produced Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2 , a pair of wonderful b-movies with plenty of action mixed with horror elements.  Lustig's gritty, low-budget directing mixed with Cohen's wild ideas meshed well, with the second movie being even better than the first.  While not big box office hits in the United States the movies did well elsewhere, with the second becoming rather popular in Japan. Cohen wrote a script for a third movie, this one with a black protagonist and, as Cohen had written for characters of color before, a good portion of the script would have hinged on the lead's background.  Problem is the financing was coming from a company in Japan that didn't want a black lead, but instead wanted Robert Davi, who starred in the second movie, to return as Det. Sean McKinney.  The investors wouldn't budge, Cohen wasn't going to rewrite the script for free, so Lustig filmed what there was that didn't involv...

By the end of the 1980s Freddy Krueger had become a sad parody of what he had once been.  The son of a nun raped by a thousand maniacs who murdered children, got off on a technicality and died at the hands of vigilantes, only to come back and kill his killers' children in their dreams had becomes little more than a cartoon.  Slashers had gone about the same way with the more "anything goes" horror films like The Lost Boys gaining in popularity.   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was well known, even if it wasn't too easy to find it at video stores due to rights issues.  The second movie had stirred up some controversy when it was released unrated to theaters and had a bit of that gonzo attitude of the time.  New World, looking for a new property to exploit, was able to buy the rights to the franchise and hoped to turn Leatherface into the next Jason.  Problem is they really didn't think things through. Michelle (Kate Hodge) and her boyfriend Ryan (Willia...

I have stated before that going to the movies was one of my biggest past times in the early 1990s.  I wasn't always concerned about quality, but rather about consuming what came out that particular weekend.  In all honesty I was not a big fan of Children of the Corn at the time and, upon a recent rewatch, I'm still not.  It has certain fun b-movie qualities, but it did signal a certain desperation to get out as much Stephen King product as possible.  However, when the sequel came out in 1992, it was a movie, and I watched it.  The original had practically no budget - supposedly a good portion of what would have gone to effects went up King's nose due to a high price of using his name - and had a pretty abrupt ending.  Isaac and Malachai both die, He Who Walks Behind the Rows is destroyed by fire and, after surviving one last attack, our heroes and their two new wards appear to be stuck walking out of town.  It seemed like no one making the film cared ...

Dario Argento has had a long and storied career, but he hasn't done so by cashing in on a specific franchise.  His first three giallo films are often grouped as the "Animal Trilogy", but it was never an intent of his to have them linked, but rather the strange naming conventions of the genre in the early 1970s.  He never truly did a sequel to any of his movies until 1980's Inferno , which is the spiritual successor to Suspiria .  Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) lives in an old apartment building in New York City and has become obsessed with a book called The Three Mothers that she has purchased from an antique dealer named Kazanian (Sacha Pitoëff) which was written by an alchemist-turned-architect.  It tells of three buildings built in New York, Rome and Freiburg, Germany, where dwell three sorceresses: Mater Tenebrarum, Mater Lacrymonium and Mater Suspirium, respectively.  Rose believes her building is one of those and sends a letter to her brother Mark (Leigh McCl...