Expelled Grey Matter

There is no question that Sony has done everything they can to destroy the Spider-Man legacy.  Every complaint against Disney for how they handle franchises, including their own, is valid.  However, when looked at objectively, many of Disney's decisions on where to take the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been valid.  It was just in recent years that they have run out of ideas and started spinning their wheels. Sony should have had plenty of ideas, having three different Spider-Man franchises and a jump on the whole multiverse concept.  While Venom was nothing phenomenal it was at least fun and it used the character better than Spider-Man 3 .  Venom: Let There Be Carnage was still enjoyable despite being a lot lighter in plot than the first so, despite the mess that Sony made with all the other movies in the Spider-Man universe, I was hoping for something good from Venom: The Last Dance . We join Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who has been brought into the regular Mar...

When someone makes a rip-off of a popular film there are number of rules they should follow.  One, which Beyond the Door and its contemporary Abby forgot, is to make the movie different enough that the studio that made the original (in this case The Exorcist ) doesn't sue.  Warner Bros. did and producer/director Ovidio G. Assonitis had to pony up a settlement to keep his movie in the theaters.  It happened to be a worthy investment because Beyond the Door , thanks to a slick ad campaign and the use of similar sound equipment to Earthquake in choice theaters, turned quite the profit. However, although I'm sure Assonitis saw differently, profit is not the only thing.  To have staying power the knockoff has to be shorter, faster and nastier.  Beyond the Door is shorter than The Exorcist , but somehow feels twice as long and, except for a couple of scenes that feel a bit uneasy, it is quite a bit tamer.  It also features bad dubbing, lots of dialog to go along ...

Sometimes it is possible to see the same movie over and over again, especially when it comes to horror or exploitation.  This is not my experience with Beyond the Door III , but I have run into it with others, and I'm sure some viewers first encountered this movie as Amok Train or Death Train , both of which are better titles.  Just to be clear, this movie has nothing to do with Beyond the Door or Beyond the Door II , the latter of which is actually the Mario Bava film Shock retitled for distribution in the U.S. The reason this was given such a strange title when it hit American video stores is because of executive producer Ovidio G. Assonitis was the director on the original 1974 film.  This movie has some similar plot points, mainly Satan trying to have a bride and some offspring, but it ends there.  Rather, this movie was a low-budget splatter film from exploitation director Jeff Kwitny, largely taking advantage of the fact that Yugoslavia was beginning to open u...

The Heisei Godzilla series of the 1990s did something that the preceding Showa series did not.  It created a continuous timeline rather than a tenuous connection of stories.  That doesn't mean that anything was done with the characters.  In fact, one of the few continuing throughout is Miki Saegusa, played by former child star and pop artist Megumi Odaka.  She was introduced in Godzilla vs. Biollante as a psychic who was supposed to have some connection to the various kaiju.  Despite her supposed importance to the study of the monsters and later to G-Force, the UN-sponsored group set up to fight Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II , she never really did anything.  She would show up, give some exposition, close her eyes and act like she was doing some sort of mind-meld with Godzilla.  She later becomes a caretaker of LittleGodzilla and has a connection to Mothra's Fairies, but she usually pops up when necessary for the plot.  Godzilla vs. Sp...

The problem with slashers is that there wasn't much to do with them.  The early ones - Halloween , Friday the 13th and The Burning - had differences and followed tried and true horror and exploitation trends.  They in fact followed on the heels of the Italian giallo films and cult British horror movies like The Abominable Dr. Phibes .   By the mid-1980s, however, they had become their own sub-genre, and pretty much every movie followed the same pattern.  Some sort of wrong was done in the past and the person who was dealt dirty came back, in the flesh or in spirit, to take revenge.  That revenge just happened to be on a bunch of rowdy teenagers, all stereotypes that were there to get naked and party.  A final girl would emerge at the end to take on the killer, only for the whole thing to start back over in the sequel if the previous movie turned a profit.  The critics hated them, audiences loved them, but because they were pretty much the same t...

Dark Night of the Scarecrow came out just as slashers were becoming popular.  It was one of those rare television movies that stuck with the generation that saw it.  It remained rather elusive for a long while, living in Generation X's memories, but it got restored and resurfaced a few years ago thanks to popular demand.  It's in no way a perfect horror film but, watching it again, I understand why it stuck in my memory.  It was a bit bloodier than most movies on television at the time (even with the parental advisory at the beginning) and the story was different enough from the average horror fare to make it memorable. With the movie finally able to be rediscovered writer J.D. Feigelson decided that it was time for a sequel.  The problem is he was about the only one.  Most fans were happy to have the original film, with its story and atmosphere, stand on its own.  However, Feigelson was able to crowdsource enough money, allowing him to produce and di...