Expelled Grey Matter

William Lustig famously followed up Maniac with the similarly titled  Maniac Cop , cementing himself a reputation among cult movie fans.  While he had a specific style, albeit highly influenced by Larry Cohen and other exploitation directors before him, Lustig appeared destined for a mainstream career after Maniac Cop became a bit of a hit on home video.  In this case he was hired to do an action film to help restore the career of Jan-Michael Vincent, who had previously starred in the television series Airwolf.   Detective Tom Mitchum (Charles Napier) is trying to put away mob boss Vic Luca (Rip Torn), but all the witnesses keep having accidents.  Their hopes lie in the testimony of Frank DeSalvo (Leo Rossi), an undertaker who was using his business as a way of trafficking heroine.  Luca, concerned that DeSalvo may talk, sends hitman Caleek (Lance Henriksen) to take care of him.  Due to an unfortunate accident Caleek instead invades the house of ...

The end of the world has been on a lot of people's minds in the last few years.  The war in Ukraine began with Vladimir Putin threatening to use whatever rusty tin cans in his arsenal would still do any damage, things are heating up once again in the Middle East with Iran now antagonizing a nuclear power - Pakistan - who might have less restraint than many of its peers, and there is a mentally unbalanced ex-President that has too much of a chance of returning to power.  With various media outlets using social networking as a place to chum the waters it seems like everyone is more on edge than ever.  One of the more interesting television shows in recent years, Evil , often uses these provocations as plot points in its own end-times scenarios. Leave the World Behind is a 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam detailing the beginning of a worldwide societal breakdown due to the loss of certain modern functions such as electricity and internet.  It doesn't move on with any of the no...

When on a shoestring budget one can either just do everything as cheap as possible or get creative.  In this case Albert Band chose the latter.  I Bury the Living sounds like a serial killer movie and the lurid poster makes it look like a precursor to Night of the Living Dead , but it is a well-done thriller about a rational man suddenly faced with the unknown. Robert Kraft (Richard Boone) is part of a family that owns a successful department store in a midsized town.  The family members traditionally takes turns chairing the committee that runs the local cemetery.  Robert is none-too-pleased, but his uncle George (Howard Smith) is insistent that tradition be kept.  The cemetery is tended to by an old Scottish man named Andy McKee (Theodore Bikel), whom Robert informs needs to find a replacement as it is soon time for his retirement. On his first day there Robert accidentally places two black pins - marking graves that are occupied - on the site of the future gr...

As the opening credits ran for this movie I was wondering why I had never heard of it.  Dan O'Bannon is listed as one of the writers, while well-known scream queen Lisa Blount has a significant role and Melody Anderson, who would go on to play Dale Arden a few years later in Flash Gordon , has a major part to play as well.  In addition it has Grandpa Joe himself, Jack Albertson, playing an eccentric mortician, and even a pre- V Robert Englund in a small role.  As icing on the cake Stan Winston did most of the effects.  Watching it I soon became aware of why it is not so well known and, upon hearing much of the backstory on how it was made, it was cheated out of its chance.  It's not a rote slasher film of the time and Ronald Shusett, who is the real writer on the movie, had planned for this to be a horror comedy.  Director Gary Sherman was right their with him and that's what they did and, to hear it from them, audiences loved it.  That was before the ...

The general attitude toward science fiction has often been that it is a lesser form of entertainment.  It didn't help that the magazines that specialized in it featured bug-eyed monsters abducting scantily clad human ladies, leading many people to consider the genre barely above that of children's books and comics.  There were many stories and books that fit the stereotype, but the ones that were most popular with fans were the ones that were based more in science than fantasy.  That's why "speculative fiction" was often a favored description of the genre.   As intelligent as a script or tale may be it still couldn't escape the company it keeps.  The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a short story by Harry Bates called "Farewell to the Master" that also dealt with a first contact situation gone wrong.  It fell on the more thoughtful side of the genre, as does the movie, but alas the poster - as striking as it is - shows the robot Gort with a hal...

Nicolas Cage is known for making many films just because he needed the money.  He is also known for taking on challenging roles and, in many cases, taking his acting to outrageous extremes.  In the 1980s he still believed in method acting - something he abandoned while working with David Lynch on Wild at Heart - and that led to some interesting performances.  Perhaps the strangest was in Vampire's Kiss . Peter Loew (Cage) is a literary agent in New York.  He is constantly jumping for one woman to another hoping to find true love.  The stress of this, and his job, has led him to seek psychiatric help from Dr. Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley).  One night after meeting taking home a woman named Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) a bat flies into his apartment which, he admits to Dr. Glaser, turned him on for some reason. At a party not long after he meets a woman named Rachel (Jennifer Beals) who turns out to be a vampire.  She bites him and soon he feels that he is having t...

One thing most detractors, and even fans, of David Lynch don't understand is that he has a dry sense of humor.  Many of his films are dead serious with some over-the-top comic interludes.  With all the weirdness going on in a movie like Eraserhead it may be easy to miss that Lynch meant it to be both disturbing and comedic, something that has carried over into even later movies like Mulholland Drive .  It is his surrealistic approach to making movies that often results in people taking his films more serious than they are intended. That brings me to Wild at Heart,  one of his more mainstream efforts.  This followed on the surprise box office success of Blue Velvet and benefited from Twin Peaks , which was causing a major stir at the time.  Wild at Heart is strange, violent and almost a softcore porn film, but manages to satirize many of the old romantic road comedies of the 1960s and 1970s while adding in a bit of rebellious attitude.  Sailor (Nicolas...