Expelled Grey Matter

This is a strange title for an even stranger movie.  It doesn't make much sense in the context of the plot, but that just adds to the general mess that this movie is.  It was re-released in 1983 as Night Warning , which sounds like it should be a nautical horror film, while the original title sounds like there should be some sort of supernatural angle.  It is neither, and while it is a movie that a number of people like - it was nominated for a Saturn award in 1982 - for me it was like watching a car wreck.   Billy (Jimmy McNichol) is a 17-year-old living with his single aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrell).  His parents died in a car accident when he was three years old and she has raised him.  He is a talented basketball player and enamored with his girlfriend Julie (Julia Duffy).  Tension develops when Billy lets his aunt know that he intends to go to the University of Denver along with Julie, and that his coach, Tom Landers (Steve Eastin), has informed ...

After Ghostbusters: Afterlife turned out to be halfway decent, as well as box office hit, it was inevitable that another sequel would show up at some point.  To be honest that wasn't something that I waited for with any sort of anticipation.  While Afterlife was good it took the plot of Ghostbusters ,  placed it in rural Oklahoma, added some family drama and heaped on the nostalgia with Egon Spengler's ghost showing up to help fight the big bad guy at the end.   I have always been behind Bill Murray when it came to making sequels to the original.  Ghostbusters II was okay, but nowhere near as fun as the original.  He refused to cooperate despite scripts being written over the years, and the 2016 reboot pretty much justified his attitude.  In time he softened, and I understand why, but my fear was that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was going to repeat the problems of Ghostbusters II , bringing the cast back once again but not doing anything new wit...

Friday the 13th Part 2 may have been the better movie but it existed for one reason: the original Friday the 13th made a lot of money, and Paramount saw the usefulness of making cheap horror sequels and raking in the returns.  They weren't wrong, and throughout the 1980s it became a tradition to dish out another movie featuring a bunch of kids getting killed by Jason Voorhees.  The problem was that, creatively, the story was done after the first two movies.   That meant gimmicks to keep the audience coming back.  Director Steve Miner returns for the second sequel but, instead of making a decent suspense film, spent his time thinking of ways to poke stuff at the camera.  Even the cast while making it realized that the whole point was to get people in the theater to watch a 3-D movie.  Though forgotten today, Comin' at Ya, a 3-D western made in Spain, was a bit of a hit and kicked off a revival of the 3-D fad that had been popular nearly 30 years prior...

Slaughterhouse is one of many low budget horror films made in the 1980s by a writer/director who managed to scrape the money together to make one film and then never did anything again.  In the case of Rick Roessler it appears it wasn't for lack of trying as he did intend for Slaughterhouse to have a sequel, and I'm sure it made money.  It just never happened. This is one of the many slashers that fell between the cracks.  In this case a big part of the problem is that this film is about five years too late to cash in on the genre.  It also feels like something that is older than it appears, as if the movie had sat on a shelf since the early 1980s.  It also has too much in common with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , using many of the same set design choices of animal bones as decoration outside the slaughterhouse of the title as well as an opening line claiming that the events are based on a true story.  Slaughterhouse is also more comedic than the normal sl...

Terry Gilliam had directed one movie - Jabberwocky  - outside of working with Monty Python prior to making Time Bandits .  His comic art, and his set design, were aspects that helped both Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian stand out as comedy films, but it was no surprise that major studios had their doubts about producing his script for Time Bandits after the uneven comedy fantasy of Jabberwocky .   Nominally a children's movie, it was to feature a cast of dwarf actors and go to some dark places in its fantasy setting.  Lucky for Gilliam there was George Harrison.  Harrison had come to the Pythons' rescue with funding to make Life of Brian  and he did so again for Time Bandits .  The result was not only a unique fantasy film but a movie that would set Gilliam apart as a director, having both a certain aesthetic as well as subversive undertone to stories that would become more pronounced in his later movies.   Kevin (Craig Warn...

Aguirre, the Wrath of God was the first movie in which Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as the lead.  He had previously had some contact with the actor when he had rented a room from Herzog's family and, after writing the script, thought he would be perfect for the lead role.  Kinski thought so as well and a long, contentious partnership between the two was begun. I don't know if Herzog was aware of Kinski's difficulties, but in his usual fashion he decided to make a movie about an ill-fated journey down the Amazon River from Peru to find the fabled city of El Dorado by taking his crew to Peru and floating down the Amazon River.  I have often wondered who was crazier, Herzog or Kinski, when it came to the two as collaborators and rivals.  Whatever the answer may be to that their partnership resulted in some of the best movies to grace the screen. Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés), governor of the Spanish colony of Peru, sets out with an army and a large party of In...

Werner Herzog considers F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror to be the greatest German film ever made.  It's not a surprise that he set before himself the task of remaking the classic silent adaptation of Dracula in his own manner.  To make things even more difficult he cast his favorite fiend, Klaus Kinski, in the lead role that Max Schreck had played in the original.  The result is an interesting take on both the original film and the novel with an altered ending that has caused a bit of controversy. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is tasked by Renfield (Roland Topor) to travel to Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula, who is interested in purchasing a house near Harker's in the town of Wismar.  Harker's wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) has had frightening dreams and begs Harker not to go, but he does as he is bid and, despite the warnings of the local Gypsies, makes his way to Dracula's castle.  Once there he finds himself prisoner in the castle and ill ...