Expelled Grey Matter

Scream and Scream 2 brought slashers back after a long absence, taking a cue from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Live s and adding self-referential humor into the mix.  I didn't love the first one and, though I've reassessed it a bit, I still can't say it's one of my favorite horror films.  Both movies have complicated denouements and think they are more clever than they actually are, which seems to be a hallmark of Kevin Williamson's scripts.  Still, the second one was better, and it was obvious there was going to be a third.  It just didn't show up right away.  After enduring a second round of stalking from college friend Mickey and Nancy Loomis, the mother of the original killer.  They are both killed but, in fear of more copycats, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) goes into hiding just outside of Los Angeles.  Stab 3 , the third movie in a trilogy based on the Woodsboro Murders, is underway, with Dewey (David Arquette) providing technical advice wh...

A pattern I have seen in horror franchises is that the first two or three movies will be pretty good but, after that, they just start to repeat themselves.  That's a major problem with slashers as they seem not only to be repeating the movies in their own series but every other slasher that came before them.  There is not a lot of variety.  It's kind of like an AC/DC album.  When a song suddenly breaks away from the established formula it tends to stick out.  Such was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives .  The first two movies were good and the fourth okay, but by killing off Jason things took a nosedive.  The writers just couldn't figure out what to do without Jason even though he was never the central figure in the original.  Tom McLoughlin did figure it out by throwing in references to James Bond and Hammer Horror, bringing Jason back as an unstoppable zombie and making a Friday the 13th movie with some lead characters the audience gave a damn...

Roger Corman was infamous for a number of things, but one that gets overlooked is his tendency to take foreign films that did not have a copyright, dub them and recut them, and make a completely new movie from them.  Such is the case of his 1965 television movie Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet , which features brief roles by Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue interspersed with a story about a journey to Venus that has special effects that look a lot better than a 1960s television budget.   This wasn't Corman's first go-round, as he had Francis Ford Coppola re-edit the 1959 Soviet film The Heavens Beckon into the 1962 release Battle Beyond the Sun .  Curtis Harrington would be the American director credited for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and the later Queen of Blood, which also used footage from The Heavens Beckon, Planet of Storms and another film, A Dream Come True .  These were meant to either be cheap drive-in or movie-of-the-week fare the American vers...

During the 1980s I enjoyed the Nightmare on Elm Street series above that of other slasher franchises.  I wasn't a big Jason or Michael Meyers fan, so Freddy Krueger was something else entirely.  He was a monster that haunted dreams and, if there is one thing I have been obsessed with all my life, it is dreams.  Dreamscape is an obscure film now but it was one of my favorites back at the time, and I remember making up an entire fantasy dream world in which I was fighting some evil mastermind named Zimberman long before Freddy ever began haunting Springwood.  There is also H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which remains one of my favorite books.  I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street at a function where I had to remain awake for the night to earn money for a traveling performance I was involved in and saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors at another function where I got together with a bunch of people with whom I had attended summer camp....

It may not seem like it at this point but  Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was, indeed, supposed to be the final chapter.  Jason Voorhees was, without a doubt, dead.  There was a hint that Tommy Jarvis, whose family was murdered by the masked killer, might take up the mantle and continue killing, but that is typical with most franchises.  Even when putting the final touches on a story movie studios appreciate a possible escape hatch. The problem is that because it was the last one, happened to have a number of up-and-coming stars in it and featured Tom Savini returning to do the effects work the movie made quite a bit of money.  That meant that Jason still had life in him.  The problem was, Jason Voorhees literally didn't have life in him.  Instead of going the logical, if predictable and tired, route of having Jarvis become the next Jason, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning instead put him in a group camp with a number of damaged kids where a new s...

Writer and director Mick Garris began his association with Stephen King with Sleepwalkers , a script that King wrote but, wisely, decided he wasn't going to direct.  This would lead to Garris directing numerous King adaptations, from the miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining  to anthologies based on King's short stories and numerous other movies based on his source material.   Obviously, King likes him and there is some ongoing friendship between them.  That is the only way to explain how someone who has consistently showed little visual skill as a director and no true feel for adapting the author's material despite often being faithful to the source material.  Seeing Mick Garris's name attached to any of these properties is always a disappointment as one knows that the resulting movie is going to be mediocre at best, and just barely rise above a direct-to-video or television production.  Riding the Bullet is no exception. Alan Parker (Jonat...

    Cronos , Guillermo del Toro's feature debut, received international acclaim.  One of those who praised it was Spanish director Pedro Almadóvar.  He liked it so much that he offered to produce del Toro's next movie.  However, due to the success of Cronos on the art film circuit and on video, Hollywood came calling.  Thus, instead of making the movie he wrote in college about an isolated boys' school during the Mexican Revolution that happened to have some supernatural goings on, he made a movie about cockroaches in the New York subway.   It was an interesting story about a genetically created breed that eventually mutated and turned on those that created them.  The movie bombed but has since become a cult classic.  Unfortunately for del Toro his first Hollywood foray was for the now-disgraced Weinstein brothers and their company Miramax.  They had no faith in the young director and hounded him throughout the production, later lay...