Simon, Adam

The American Nightmare - A Celebration of Films from Hollywood's Golden Age of Fright

The explosion of gruesome horror cinema in the wake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is explored in this serious documentary, which has a welcome respect for an easily derided genre. A few academics make piquant observations (no film critics, although Robin Wood pioneered this line of thinking years ago), but mostly we hear from the filmmakers themselves: Romero, John Carpenter (on Halloween), Wes Craven (Last House on the Left), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and David Cronenberg (Shivers). The directors focus on those films, not their entire careers, which limits the scope of the movie. Juxtapositioning newsreel horrors with movie scenes introduces provocative ideas about where horror comes from, but also feels a little facile. Unexpected bonus: the enthusiasm of John Landis, in describing the out-of-kilter experience of watching these affronts to good taste, and suggesting why they thrill as well as scare us. --Robert Horton

Disfigured knife-wielding murderers. Buxom teens fleeing for their lives through dark woods. Hordes of the undead limping along deserted streets. These images, now synonymous with horror movies, were born in the groundbreaking films of horror masters su

Brain Dead

Adam Simon (Carnosaur) made his directoral debut with this mind game of a movie. Based on a decades-old screenplay by former Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont, Simon dusted off and updated the script about an experimental brain researcher (Bill Pullman) who agrees to dig into the gray matter of a schizophrenic scientist (Bud Cort), only to fall prey to his patient's psychosis. Or maybe he's just plain nuts. Spiced with a bizarre sense of humor (Pullman wrestles over a brain specimen in a jar with a homeless man who tries to grab it: "That's my brain!"), Pullman's ordeal takes one hairpin turn after another as he becomes lost in a maze of alternate realities, no longer able to sort fantasy from reality or paranoia from persecution. This clever puzzle of a film overcomes low-budget restrictions with a deviously inventive story that echoes Brazil and quotes from The Manchurian Candidate and North by Northwest. Bill Paxton costars as a smarmy corporate manipulator with slicked back hair and a get-rich-quick scheme for a chain of brain surgery boutiques ("The New You, by Eunice!"), and George Kennedy is his bottom-line boss. Director Simon may be most famous for playing himself in a jokey cameo in Robert Altman's The Player. --Sean Axmaker

Carnosaur

Call it Jurassic Apocalypse. King of B movies Roger Corman beat Steven Spielberg's dinosaur monster mash to the theater by weeks with this nasty preemptive knock-off. Diane Ladd (yes, the mother of the star of Jurassic Park) plays a chilly genetics scientist who gives up a career in biological warfare to build a better chicken and emerges with a giant meat-eating lizard bred from ancient DNA and poultry embryos. Think of her as a misanthropic Earth mother, spreading her genetic virus across the country through supermarket chicken eggs, and hatching her scaly brood in unsuspecting women (the birth scenes echo the earlier Corman sleaze classic Humanoids from the Deep). Director Adam Simon, who adapts John Brosnan's novel, bounces between self-consciously serious scenes of scientists and government officials huddled in impossibly dark control rooms and hilariously phony foam-rubber monsters hunting the high desert for food on the hoof. The highlight is a veritable meat market of human flesh featuring protesting hippie environmentalists chained to construction equipment ("Greetings, green brother." Chomp!). Behind the buckets of blood and gore is a sinister, cynical "end of the world" thriller with sharp references to Dr. Strangelove and Night of the Living Dead. It's far more subversive and sinister than your average rampaging dinosaur movie, and, in its own perverse way, more fun than Spielberg's infinitely more polished classic. --Sean Axmaker

Brain Dead

Adam Simon (Carnosaur) made his directoral debut with this mind game of a movie. Based on a decades-old screenplay by former Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont, Simon dusted off and updated the script about an experimental brain researcher (Bill Pullman) who agrees to dig into the gray matter of a schizophrenic scientist (Bud Cort), only to fall prey to his patient's psychosis. Or maybe he's just plain nuts. Spiced with a bizarre sense of humor (Pullman wrestles over a brain specimen in a jar with a homeless man who tries to grab it: "That's my brain!"), Pullman's ordeal takes one hairpin turn after another as he becomes lost in a maze of alternate realities, no longer able to sort fantasy from reality or paranoia from persecution. This clever puzzle of a film overcomes low-budget restrictions with a deviously inventive story that echoes Brazil and quotes from The Manchurian Candidate and North by Northwest. Bill Paxton costars as a smarmy corporate manipulator with slicked back hair and a get-rich-quick scheme for a chain of brain surgery boutiques ("The New You, by Eunice!"), and George Kennedy is his bottom-line boss. Director Simon may be most famous for playing himself in a jokey cameo in Robert Altman's The Player. --Sean Axmaker

"A brilliant puzzle-film with a chillingly good story that offers the same kind of pleasure as THE SIXTH SENSE, which it predated. Riveting intense performances by Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton pull you into a harrowing and haunting world." -- Roger Corman ~~The Eunice Corporation is on the ground floor of an exciting growth industry, utilizing a memory resculpting technique bioneered by eccentric neurosurgeon Rex Martin. It envisions nationwide clinics where anyone can lose their hang-ups of an unhappy childhood, a failed romance, or a botched career. At Eunice's "New You" outlets, a simple operation will give customers peace of mind. Or it might leave them brain dead. But when Martin refuses to cooperate, he soon finds himself plunged into a surreal existence that intertwines dreams and reality. Has Martin slipped over the edge into madness? Or have corporate profit mongers given him a push, making him the guinea pig in his own experiment? To know the answer is to know the terror!~

Body Chemistry/Body Chemistry 2: Voice of a Stranger

Body Chemistry 2 - The Voice of a Stranger

Carnosaur

Call it Jurassic Apocalypse. King of B movies Roger Corman beat Steven Spielberg's dinosaur monster mash to the theater by weeks with this nasty preemptive knock-off. Diane Ladd (yes, the mother of the star of Jurassic Park) plays a chilly genetics scientist who gives up a career in biological warfare to build a better chicken and emerges with a giant meat-eating lizard bred from ancient DNA and poultry embryos. Think of her as a misanthropic Earth mother, spreading her genetic virus across the country through supermarket chicken eggs, and hatching her scaly brood in unsuspecting women (the birth scenes echo the earlier Corman sleaze classic Humanoids from the Deep). Director Adam Simon, who adapts John Brosnan's novel, bounces between self-consciously serious scenes of scientists and government officials huddled in impossibly dark control rooms and hilariously phony foam-rubber monsters hunting the high desert for food on the hoof. The highlight is a veritable meat market of human flesh featuring protesting hippie environmentalists chained to construction equipment ("Greetings, green brother." Chomp!). Behind the buckets of blood and gore is a sinister, cynical "end of the world" thriller with sharp references to Dr. Strangelove and Night of the Living Dead. It's far more subversive and sinister than your average rampaging dinosaur movie, and, in its own perverse way, more fun than Spielberg's infinitely more polished classic. --Sean Axmaker

Carnosaur/Carnosaur 2

Paranoia [Region 2]

Adam Simon (Carnosaur) made his directoral debut with this mind game of a movie. Based on a decades-old screenplay by former Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont, Simon dusted off and updated the script about an experimental brain researcher (Bill Pullman) who agrees to dig into the gray matter of a schizophrenic scientist (Bud Cort), only to fall prey to his patient's psychosis. Or maybe he's just plain nuts. Spiced with a bizarre sense of humor (Pullman wrestles over a brain specimen in a jar with a homeless man who tries to grab it: "That's my brain!"), Pullman's ordeal takes one hairpin turn after another as he becomes lost in a maze of alternate realities, no longer able to sort fantasy from reality or paranoia from persecution. This clever puzzle of a film overcomes low-budget restrictions with a deviously inventive story that echoes Brazil and quotes from The Manchurian Candidate and North by Northwest. Bill Paxton costars as a smarmy corporate manipulator with slicked back hair and a get-rich-quick scheme for a chain of brain surgery boutiques ("The New You, by Eunice!"), and George Kennedy is his bottom-line boss. Director Simon may be most famous for playing himself in a jokey cameo in Robert Altman's The Player. --Sean Axmaker