Horror in the 90s: Brain Dead

Brain Dead (1990) 

Directed by Adam Simon 

Written by Adam Simon, Charles Beaumont 

Starring Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, George Kennedy, Bud Cort, Patricia Charbonneau 

Release Date January 19th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $1.6 million dollars 

One image. Brain Dead is remembered for one, singular image. The fact that this one image has nothing to do with the movie that contains it, does not matter. There is only one thing that anyone remembers about Brain Dead and it is just one memorable, awful, brutal image. You see it in all of the marketing materials about the movie when it was released. To those who've never seen Brain Dead, this image is the star of the film. It's a very compelling image, one worthy of building a bizarre cult movie marketing campaign around. 

In a college science lab there is an unnamed student toying with a human brain. The student shoves an electrode into the ooey gooey brain situated in a petri dish. The brain is connected to something, a metal apparatus. Upon this apparatus is a complete abomination. Stretched like horrifying silly putty across an empty expanse, connecting to a circular metal apparatus is a human face. This face has eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It seems to have facial muscles somehow, hidden behind a weathered expanse of skin. 

The facial muscles are implied in the film by the way the face twitches in pain when the brain in the pan is electrocuted back to life. Depending on where the student stabs his electrode into this brain in a pan, the face twitches its eyes, wrinkles its nose, or turns the mouth in a pained expression, a wince. From the manner in which the student playfully stabs away at this brain, this is a normal day in the lab. We don't know how long the student and the face have been in this dynamic, but it is not the first time this student has engaged in this twisted game. 

You would be forgiven if you thought that this detached face were that of a main character, that of Bill Pullman, or Bill Paxton, or Bud Cort. It's not. In fact, we have no idea where this face came from or how this face ended up attached to a brain in a pan being painfully stimulated by electrodes. We get only a vague sense of why this is even being done. It's being done to prove that the human brain is capable of being stimulated after death. 

That's part of the crazed, doomed experiments being conducted by Bill Pullman's monstrous, genius brain scientist. Dr. Rex Martin believes he can cure all manner of neurological disorders by using the brains of the dead as guinea pigs. Dr. Martin's particular specialty is paranoia and he is convinced he can cure paranoia via brain surgery. This brings his research in line with the awful, amoral aims of Bill Paxton's corporate shark. Paxton wants Pullman to cure the paranoia of a genius mathematician, Bud Cort, so that said genius will reveal an equation that could be worth billions. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review What's Love Got to Do With It

What's Love Got to Do With It (2023) 

Directed by Shekhar Kapur 

Written by Jemima Khan 

Starring Lily James, Shazad Latif, Emma Thompson, Sajal Aly 

Release Date May 5th, 2023

Published May 4th, 2023 

What's Love Got to Do With It has some hard work to do to overcome a rote, predictable outcome. The film follows a documentary filmmaker, played by Lily Collins whose new documentary is about her Pakistani friend, played by Shazad Latif, going through the motions of an arranged marriage. She's supposed to document his marriage to a stranger arranged by a matchmaker but since this is a movie and both Collins and Latif are young and attractive, we know that the movie is arranging for them to be married. 

Knowing that, the movie needs to find a way to be charming while also being insanely predictable. The film has an uphill battle to try and build tension into a movie story that has no tension whatsoever. It can be done, most romantic comedies are built on a highly predictable conceit. The key to a modern rom-com is scribbling in the margins, creating laughs and charm amid the highly predictable machinations of a pre-destined ending. 

Zoe (Collins) doesn't believe in love. She's not a romantic, she's a pragmatist. When she tells fairy tales to her best friends daughters, her cracked fairy tales invariably find the female protagonist rejecting the Prince in favor of independence and adventure. Her retelling of The Princess and the Frog has the hero failing to kiss the frog, preferring to take her new talking frog on the road to show off for audiences. Hey, how cool would it be to have a talking frog, right? 

Zoe's conceptions of love and marriage are put to the test when her long time neighbor and friend, Kaz Khan tells her that he's agreed to see a matchmaker for an arranged marriage to a Pakistani woman, one approved of by his mother. His choice is fraught with backstory, Kaz's sister has been cast out of the family after she married a white man and had a child. Kaz's desire to be a good son to his traditional mother and grandmother drives his actions but it's clear his heart is not in this idea. 

Zoe is compelled to capture the wedding process on film after she finds out that her latest documentary idea, something dreary about war or famine or some such thing, has been rejected for being too bleak. Needing a pitch in a pinch, she pitches Kaz's arranged marriage process as a documentary and receives a greenlight from her producers. Getting Kaz's green light however, is a little harder, he's not exactly thrilled about this idea. He reluctantly agrees and the documentary becomes the bomb under the table, that McGuffin that threatens the status quo of Kaz's plans for his arranged marriage. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Horror in the 90s Tales from the Darkside

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) 

Directed by John Harrison

Written by Michael McDowell, George A. Romero 

Starring Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Christian Slater, James Remar, Rae Dawn Chong

Release Date May 4th, 1990 

Box Office Gross $16.3 million

Why don't more people talk about how great Tales from the Darkside The Movie is? I've seen Tales from the Darkside The Movie a few times but somehow, it wasn't until this viewing that it really clicked for me. This anthology of three horror movies, and one wraparound segment, combines the talents of Stephen King, George Romero and a powerhouse cast, across four stories, to deliver one of the most consistently entertaining horror movies of the 1990s. 

Let's begin with our wrap-around story. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie opens on a peaceful suburban milieu. A lovely looking woman has purchased groceries and is returning home to start dinner for a dinner party. This is classic horror movie stuff as perverting the pristine perfection of suburban life is a classic trope. The first signs of such perversions of norms only arrives once we are inside the home of that plain Jane woman and her groceries. 

We arrive in the home of Betty, played by rock icon Debbie Harry, before she does. While she's getting her groceries, the camera takes us into her home and a strange looking broom is propped against a wall. While we puzzle over the broom, which brings to mind a witches broom, we begin to hear a noise. The camera slowly reveals a door in the kitchen and someone struggling to open the door before fearfully retreating when Betty comes inside. The skillful visual filmmaking tells us everything we need to know, Betty is a witch and whoever is in that locked pantry, is her prisoner. 

Perverting things even further, Betty soon reveals her victim, tiny moppet with floppy hair and a crooked grin. This is Timmy (Matthew Lawrence) and we soon learn that Timmy is set to be that night's main course as Betty is bringing her witch friends over for a Timmy casserole. In a desperate attempt to keep himself alive, Timmy grabs a story book called Tales from the Darkside and offers to tell Betty a scary story as a reason to keep him alive. She agrees and we proceed with our first terrific story. 

The most star-studded of our three stories was not quite so star-studded at the time of release. Lot 249 stars a pair of stars before they became big stars. Steve Buscemi and Julianne Moore were at the beginning of what would be lengthy and critically acclaimed careers when they played academic rivals in Lot 249, the story of a man and his mummy. Christian Slater, already having become a leading man by 1990, is the best known of the cast which is rounded out by lesser known character actor Robert Sedgwick. 

Lot 249 is a tale of revenge as Edward Bellingham (Buscemi) is convinced that a rich idiot, Lee (Robert Sedgwick), has used his influence, and his equally rich and duplicitous girlfriend, Susan (Moore), to steal a lucrative scholarship from him. The loss may force Bellingham to have to leave school just as he is on the verge of an astonishing breakthrough in his research on ancient Egypt. Through nefarious circumstance, Bellingham has secured Lot 249, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus that could be worth millions, depending on what he finds inside. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Documentary Review It's Quieter in the Twilight

It's Quieter in the Twilight (2023) 

Directed by Billy Miossi 

Written by Documentary

Release Date May 19th, 2023 

Published May 18th, 2023 

I was vaguely aware of the Voyager Spacecrafts. The Voyager mission launched one year after I was born. It would then bubble back up into the culture every couple of years when the mission reached a new milestone, traveling and providing the first up close images and data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. What most people don't realize is that the Voyager mission never ended. Though Voyager surpassed Neptune in 1989, the mission continued and continues as we speak. 

The new documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight takes us through the history of Voyager via the people who have been with Voyager for the past 46 years. Many scientists and engineers have come and gone from the Voyager project over the years but a core of around 10 to 12 people have kept watch over this urgently important space mission for nearly 50 years. Director Billy Miossi brings those remarkable people into the spotlight in It's Quieter in the Twilight and they have a remarkable story to tell. 

The launch of Voyager was improbable. By 1977, going to space had already become something that Americans were used to. For years, each space launch and moon landing was broadcast live. The news led with stories of space travel and interviews with NASA scientists about how incredible space travel was. Voyager was one of the last times that many Americans gathered around their television to watch a launch and hear about what incredible discoveries we were going to make. 

Then, every few years, Voyager re-emerged and changed the way we saw the solar system. After launching in 1977, Voyager reached Jupiter in 1979. The following year, 1980, we saw the rings of Saturn for the very first time thanks to Voyager 2. Voyager 1 would bring us back to Saturn the following year. 1986, 9 years into its mission, Voyager captured the first up close images of Uranus and once again reshaped how we saw the universe. Three years, later, for many, Voyager's mission ended with Neptune and another historic moment in our unending attempts to understand our universe. 

But the mission did not end. Voyager continued on. Year after year a small but vital team kept collecting data from Voyager and, though most people were unaware, they kept making history. In 2012 Voyager became the first man-made object in interstellar space. It's hard for most, myself included, to fathom just how incredible that is. To its credit, It's Quieter in the Twilight captures the quiet awe of this achievement and the people whose life simply goes on revolving around Voyager and data points that Voyager is still capturing today. 

Find my full length review at Futurism.Media 

Movie Review The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (2023) 

Directed by Rob Marshall 

Written by David Magee 

Starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 26th, 2023 

I can't sit here and tell you I was a big of The Little Mermaid. I am not a fan of director Rob Marshall's bombastic, somewhat chaotic, and often wonky vision of this Disney classic. I was all set to write a mostly negative review of The Little Mermaid. Then, when the movie ended, I stood outside of the theater and watched the crowd making their way out of the theater and I was struck by the reaction of others. Specifically, I saw a uniformly joyous response from young girls leaving the theater. More than one said they wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. They were singing the songs, the choruses anyway. 

It was the best possible review anyone could give to The Little Mermaid. The young girls from 4 years old to 12 years were in universal praise of The Little Mermaid. And listening to that broke through my cynicism. Their joy reframed my context of The Little Mermaid. This movie is not to my taste at all, but it's not meant to be. If a movie can inspire this much joy in the audience intended to enjoy it, who am I as a middle aged dude to say that's bad. 

Halle Bailey stars in The Little Mermaid as Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem). Ariel is an endlessly curious young woman, her eyes filled with wonder, she explores the seas searching for human treasures that fall into the ocean. With her pal Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she also finds trouble. While searching for treasure in one of the many sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, she and Flounder narrowly and daringly escape a very hungry and determined shark. For Ariel, this is just another day of adventure. 

However, this is not just another day in her kingdom. This is the day that her sisters from around the world are visiting to meet with the King and when Ariel fails to show up on time, the rift between Father and Daughter is further exposed. King Triton wants his youngest daughter to be more careful. He especially wants Ariel to shake off her fascination with humans. According to Triton, it was human who murdered his wife, Ariel's mother and his grief has curdled into anger and suspicion of all humans. 

This does not curb Ariel's curiosity however, and when she spots a ship caught in a storm and dashed on some rocks, she leaps in to help the ship's captain, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer King). Saving his life, Ariel doesn't fully reveal herself to him but her voice is burned into his memory. He vows to search for the mysterious young woman who saved his life. Meanwhile, the scheming Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), has witnessed all of this and sees Ariel's desire to be a human as her chance to upend her brother, King Triton, as the ruler of the seas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review The Machine

The Machine (2023) 

Directed by Peter Atencio 

Written by Kevin Biegel, Scotty Landes 

Starring Bert Kreischer, Mark Hamill, Iva Babic 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 30th, 2023 

The Machine is a labored but amusing extrapolation of comedian Bert Kreischer's most beloved routine. According to Kreischer, as a college student, he traveled to Russia on a school trip. While there, he found himself partying with the Russian mob, first at his dorm and then on an ill-fated train ride. The winding and wild party story eventually finds Kreischer being called 'The Machine' for his prodigious ability to put away high proof alcohol without passing out, and finds 'The Machine' being enlisted by the gangsters to help rob everyone on the train. 

It's a classic piece of stand-up comedy but is it enough to stretch out to a feature length film? The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. The movie version of The Machine finds comedian Bert Kreischer, playing himself, struggling with his persona as a hard-partying, drug and alcohol imbibing comic and his real life as a husband and father of two young girls. Bert cannot seem to balance these two parts of his life and as we join the story, he's hit rock bottom. 

After a drunken episode of his podcast, Bert had his 15 year old daughter, Sasha (Jessica Gabor), drive him home. When she gets pulled over by Police and is subsequently arrested, the drunken Kreischer decides to livestream the debacle on social media, doing grave harm to his already strained relationship with his oldest daughter. This rock bottom moment causes Bert to go into therapy and quit drinking and partying entirely. Unfortunately, Bert's past is about to come back and haunt him as a Russian gangster has finally seen his stand-up routine and wants revenge for something Bert doesn't remember doing. 

Kidnapped during Sasha's 16th birthday party, Bert, along with his disapproving father, Albert (National Treasure Mark Hamill) are trundled off to Russia. Their kidnapper, Irina (Iva Babic), is the daughter of a Russian mobster and is at the heart of a struggle for control of crime in Russia. She needs The Machine to lead her to a watch that he stole while drunk on a train in college. Not the easiest thing to find, especially through the blurry haze of alcohol, drugs, and time. Nevertheless, if Bert and his dad cannot find the watch, a hitman is set to murder Bert's daughter. 

That's the premise for The Machine and it sounds a lot funnier than it really is. Sadly, stretched thinly over a feature film, Kreischer's funny, lively, and irreverent story takes on a highly conventional narrative that features many repeated jokes and more than a little dead time as exposition and needed stakes are set up. In fairness, the conventional plot and the stakes set, are relatively well executed. It's a standard bit of movie comedy. But that's also a bit of a problem as audiences might expect more from a performer with Kreischer's reputation for energetic and off-color humor. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Horror in the 90s Shakma

Shakma (1990) 

Directed by Hugh Parks, Tom Logan 

Written by Roger Engle

Starring Christopher Atkins, Amanda Wyss, Roddy McDowell 

Release Date October 5th, 1990 

Box Office Unknown 

Shakma has no right to be as entertaining as it is. This animal rampage horror movie, from the f*** around and find out tradition of horror films about man screwing with nature, manages to be wildly entertaining and modestly incompetent all at once. It's a weirdly delightful combination of low budget weirdness and inventive low budget filmmaking that manages to make a relatively unthreatening baboon into a mass murdering psycho beast through a combination of camera work, editing and terrible special effects. 

Shaka stars the King of Bland handsomeness, Christopher Atkins, as Sam, a medical student and researcher. Sam has spent the past year training a baboon named Shakma to follow commands and not be as aggressive as his species tends to be. Unfortunately for Sam, his Professor, Professor Sorensen (Roddy McDowell), doesn't have the patience to see if aggressiveness can be trained out of a Baboon. Professor Sorensen instead proceeds with an experimental brain surgery. It's a 50/50 bet that either Shakma will become a docile, friendly pet Baboon or a wild-eyed, aggressive killer. If that seems like a bad bet, congratulations, that's what the movie is about. 

No surprise, the surgery goes poorly and Shakma goes crazy, nearly killing a fellow student and rival of Sam, Richard (Greg Flowers). Sam is told to put Shakma down but he can't do it. Instead, he sedates his primate pal while expecting that Richard will throw his friend into the incinerator. Unfortunately for everyone, Richard is stopped by Professor Sorensen who wants to examine the corpse and instructs Richard not to cremate Shakma. This becomes important because the Med students are sticking around the school on this night to play a role playing game. 

In a wildly elaborate game, Sam, Richard, Professor Sorensen, are joined by Bradley (Tre Laughlin), Gary (Rob Edward Morris), and Sam's love interest, Tracy (Amanda Wyss), in this fantasy game that has the students solving clues and following a path to the top floor where a Princess, Richard's younger sister, Kim (Amanda Myers), waits to be rescued. As the game gets underway, and the players go off on their quest, Shakma wakes up and goes on a bloody killing spree. 

I'm almost embarrassed by how much I enjoyed Shakma. Most critics hated this film and they aren't wrong about its many, many flaws. Nevertheless, as the Baboon went about its rampage, I was having an absolute blast laughing at the foolish humans who keep wandering obliviously into danger. There is a wonderfully rich tradition of horror movies where man faces off with nature but most of those happen in nature. The medical school setting of Shakma is both a cover for a low budget shoot and a weirdly refreshing setting for a man vs nature horror story. 

Full review at Horror.Media