Expelled Grey Matter

It seems a simple horror concept: a haunted house event held in a real haunted house.  It is almost as if it writes itself.  I wouldn't be surprised if the concept had not been visited before Hell House LLC , but it was a concept that worked well for found footage horror.  Not something like The Blair Witch Project , but more the fake documentary that was released at the time to promote it.  16 years into found footage and many filmmakers had discovered this was the way to go rather than just have a bunch of people wander around the woods and yell at each other. Alex (Danny Bellini) is the owner of Hell House, a haunted house attraction that opens in a different location every year.  His crew consists of his girlfriend Sarah (Ryan Jennifer Jones), cameraman Paul (Gore Abrams), electrician Tony (Jared Hacker) and co-director Andrew "Mac" McNamera (Adam Schneider).  In 2009 they rent the abandoned Hotel Abaddon in the small town of Abaddon, New York to do the...

If one is a filmmaker with a paycheck's worth of a budget there is always a way.  In the case of director Chris LaMartina that way was to recreated a television broadcast from 1987.  Taking a cue from independent UHF stations at the time, particularly Baltimore station WNUV, he and his crew sought to recreate the feel of a low-budget broadcast from the time.  Along the way there is a healthy dose of Satanic panic as well as satire on smarmy exploitative journalists and the misplaced nostalgia many have for the 1980s.  We begin with an episode of the WNUF Channel 28 evening news, with anchors Gavin Gordon (Richard Cutting) and Deborah Merritt (Leanna Chamish) all decked out in costumes with a chintzy Halloween set behind them.  After the usual news events (sans sports), along with commercials, we are informed of the upcoming WNUF Halloween Special  hosted by Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf).  With the husband and wife paranormal investigation team of Dr....

To be honest I don't think I would have had anything more than an academic interest in a new Frankenstein movie if it was not being directed by Guillermo del Toro.  The last major attempt at the story was Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein back in 1994, which was made to ride on the coattails of the Francis Ford Coppola's  Bram Stoker's Dracula .  Even the presence of Robert De Niro as the monster couldn't elevate that film from merely okay. The one thing it did right, however, was the creature.  In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein;  or, the New Prometheus the creature was articulate and not the violent, lumbering hulk with a criminal's brain as portrayed by Boris Karloff in James Whale's 1931 adaptation.  From the Hammer movies onward there has been a trend to present Victor Frankenstein as the bad guy and the creature (or, in the Hammer series, creatures) as sympathetic.  It wasn't until 1994 that an actual attempt to adapt the nove...

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....