Expelled Grey Matter

The last we saw of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was Alice (Lisa Wilcox) sending him back to hell.  A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master  was heavy on effects and light on plot, bringing Krueger back by having a hellhound urinate fire on his grave and then having the souls of his victims take revenge from the inside out.  Many of the sequences looked like music videos, which director Renny Harlin was mainly known for up to that point.  It also no longer was attempting to scare audiences, leaning into the humor from Dream Warriors   and giving Freddy more and more one-liners.  To me A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child was always the last consequential movie in the original trilogy, as it felt like Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was barely a film and Wes Craven's New Nightmare was something unique to itself.  It also felt like a return to form, where there was a conscious effort to try to balance Freddy's quirks with a more frighten...

Rubén Galindo Jr. is a horror director from Mexico City who produced a number of films from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, starting with Cemetery of Terror .  As can be expected his films don't have much of a budget but he does put in some effort to emulate the European and American films that he is a fan of.  One of those is, of course, A Nightmare on Elm Street , and his 1987 movie Don't Panic tries hard to live up to its influence.   Michael (Jon Michael Bischof) has an affluent father (Eduardo Noriega) and an alcoholic mother (Helena Rojo).  He moves back to Mexico City from Beverly Hills right before his 17th birthday and, while celebrating, his friend Tony (Juan Ignacio Aranda) brings with him a Ouija board.  Tony has been in contact with a spirit called Virgil and Michael wants nothing to do with it.  He goes along with the game anyway to impress Alexandra (Gabriela Hassel), a new girl at his school that he has a crush on. Soon Michael's eyes ...

I admit that I am not a big fan of the original Beetlejuice .  It has a lot going for it, like a unique vision of the afterlife, and some memorable performances from Winona Ryder, Geena Davis and Glenn Shaddix.  The problem I had was with the title character himself.  Michael Keaton is not in the movie much, but those times are supposed to be highlights since Beetlejuice is supposed to be the main antagonist.  In his efforts to come across as a whacky ghost, though, the portrayal of the character has always annoyed me. The reason I always came back to it every now and then is because the cartoon did the character justice and concentrated more on building a friendship between him and Lydia rather than being a creepy old ghost trying to marry a teenager.  There was also more emphasis on the afterlife, and it was that cartoon that kept the spirit of the original movie alive.  Tim Burton never really saw a reason for a sequel and it became even less likely as o...

What The Exorcist managed to do was make the Devil quite the celebrity in the 1970s.  There had already been some resurgence of Old Nick with the Church of Satan and some albums by underground psychedelic bands like Coven, but what many were interested in was the same as what they had heard they could get out of Gardnerian Wicca: nude orgies.  Where Wicca didn't quite offer such - dancing around "skyclad" does not an orgy make - Anton La Vey did and, for a while, made some good money off of it. Hollywood followed suit, releasing a number of horror films in the wake of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby , which had pretty much started the Satan trend in the U.S.  Evil devil cults were always a big thing in Hammer films especially as the '70s dawned and a bit more flesh could be shown, but those movies always took place in dark castles and vine-covered estates, lorded over by actual lords.  When it came to the Devil in America we needed something that spoke to us spe...

One thing I was wondering while watching this movie is why anyone would want to worship Satan if they still have to go to church to do it.  Even when I was a Christian church was a rare thing unless there was a pastor who could make the service interesting.  Not a full-on band singing trite worship songs interesting, but at least a sermon with a point.  Like most of the lectures I had to sit through The Devil's Rain has no point and, unfortunately, a tendency to put one to sleep as well.  This should not happen in a movie with both Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner along with Anton La Vey as a consultant.  During a deluge in the desert Emma Preston (Ida Lupino) is afraid something has happened to her husband.  Her son Mark (Shatner) returns home and tries to reassure her, but those assurances fall short when his father shows up, eyeless, and melts like wax in the rain.  While Mark is briefly gone his house is ransacked, their servant John (Woodrow Ch...

Looking back it becomes apparent what a departure Blue Velvet was for David Lynch.  He had suffered from something that too many independent directors are put through these days, which is a studio plopping a big-budget movie in their lap and then pretty much poking their nose in every step of the way to the point that what comes out satisfies neither audiences nor the director.  That is what happened with Lynch's previous movie, an adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune , that attempted to jam the story into a mere two hours and 20 minutes - something that no one who has followed Lynch has attempted.  Despite the weird mess Alejandro Jodorowsky's movie would have been I think he still understood he wasn't getting away with under three.  Messing up a Marvel or Star Wars film these days in such a capacity, whether the director is at fault or not, is pretty much a career killer.  Lynch had been offered Return of the Jedi before turning it down to make Dune, an...

I had only one reason to watch Ouija , and that is because I heard good things about this prequel.  I have also heard that this one could be enjoyed without seeing the first, which is kind of true.  The thing this movie does right is concentrate on the only interesting part of the original movie which was the origin of the board itself.  Some futzing is done to make it a better story, none of the actors who played the ghosts in in Ouija return , but that's not a big deal.  The original movie was not that good, and in fact one of the worst examples of the PG-13 horror trend that stretched from the late '90s into the 2010s.  Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) is a fortune teller and fake psychic who often involves her older daughter Lina (Annalise Basso) in her act.  Her younger daughter Doris (Lulu Wilson) is, like the rest of the family, reeling from the loss of her father, and suffers teasing at school because of her mother's profession.  Lina has begun ...