This week's Horror Roundtable asks its participants to name undiscovered horror classics that deserve wider release. My suggestions bridges two of my all-time favorite things...

Here's cool news I helped break in the latest issue of Wizard, now on the website: Goonies director Richard Donner and his one-time-assistant, current-comics-big-shot Geoff Johns will be creating a sequel, Goonies: The Search for Sloth, as a comics miniseries. Booby traps!

There were two things I really enjoyed about my viewing of the Korean monster movie The Host on Saturday at the Landmark Sunshine on East Houston Street:

1) That magnificent shot toward the beginning of the film, just after the monster has leapt out of the river, where he slowly rampages his way from the background of the shot to the foreground as our oblivious protagonist stares off the left of the screen. This is a shot that's been in my head for years and years as the coolest possible rampaging-monster shot possible, and seeing it was an absolute joy, even if it's a publish-or-perish situation for yours truly.

2) Lou Reed was there too. He looked shorter and older and more fashionable and wealthier than I imagined him, but mostly it was cool that Lou likes to go to monster movies on a Saturday afternoon.

And that was about it.

The Host suffers from a vast, er, host of problems that interfere with its supposed effectiveness as a top-drawer monster movie. For starters, there's the monster itself, which is goofy-looking and not scary at all to behold. The visual effects used to bring it to life are excellent, and held up well to director Joon-ho Bong's decision to keep the thing well lit and in our face rather than hiding in the water or the shadows. But that doesn't compensate for a design that's silly rather than scary and calls for the creature to move in ways that make no physical sense given its size and primary method of movement. (Why would a giant river monster flip around bridges like a trapeze artist, anyway?)

Then there's the fact that the film, to me at least, was quite frankly boring. Its profligate use of slow motion made even 300's look judicious, and nearly every shot and sequence involving the put-upon dysfunctional family at the film's heart lasted twice as long as it needed to. Thematically the film was very similar to the parental trauma of last year's Great Monster-Movie Hope, The Descent. Unlike Neil Marshall, Bong seemed to believe that showy bloat would better convey this than no-frills relentlessness, a mistake that sinks the film.

Interestingly, the tonal inconsistency didn't bother me--to a point. One of my all-time favorite movie-watching experiences was viewing Arthur Penn's all-over-the-map Little Big Man while cataclysmically stoned, so I'm open to radical shifts in mood and even genre within the confines of one film. (I am a big fan of Kill Bill, after all.) It helped that for the most part, the funny stuff here--Gang-du's Kafka/Brazil-esque attempts to get someone, anyone to listen to him; that hilarious shot where he breaks out of that medical trailer and shocks a parking-lot full of American soldiers away from their barbeques--was actually pretty funny. But where it did bother me--indeed, where it pretty much lost me for the rest of the movie--was when it played the ostentatious grief of the family over the death ("death") of their little girl for laughs. Killing a child, especially one with whom we've spent time and for whom grown to share an affinity, is extremely dangerous ground for any movie; this goes double for horror, a genre that essentially presupposes that the audience, on some level at least, enjoys watching people get killed, and therefore has its work cut out for it if it's going to depict the killing of a child, the least enjoyable killing possible. At first I was impressed by just how raw and unfiltered that scene in the crisis center was getting with its sobbing, screaming, inconsolable, mind-shattering grief--so imagine my dismay and disgust as it devolved into slapstick. Call me crazy, but I don't think the death of a little girl is funny. And unkilling her later in the film doesn't get you off the hook--especially if you're going to re-kill her during the climax and want that to be the emotional lynchpin of the film.

I've written about enough movies I don't like to realize that I tend to give them the business for plot holes and logical flaws to which, were they to appear in a movie I did like, I wouldn't give a second thought. There were plenty of them here--the fact that the monster was able to grow to enormous size without ever having appeared at the surface and devoured countless human beings before this particular day; the fact that the filmmakers couldn't seem to decide what, if any, effects "Agent Yellow" actually had on anything other than the monster; Gang-du's ability to recover from some sort of trepanation and escape from a heavily guarded military installation filled with armed soldiers who honestly believed him to be the carrier of a deadly contagion--but none of them, obviously, were deal-breakers in and of themselves. The bizarrely bad fire effects at during the climax might have been deal-breakers considering the pivotal moments they mar, but again, I could probably look the other way if the rest of the movie demanded it. But its distasteful mockery of grief, lugubrious pacing, and fundamentally unfrightening creature left me in less than a charitable mood. Indeed, if it weren't for mainstream critics' erroneous belief that adding some melodramatic pathos and unsubtle (though funny) political allegory to a genre picture makes it A Great Film, I very much doubt whether we'd even be talking about it. As it stands, I'll remember it as kind of like a Jaws remake that replaced Robert Shaw with tedium.

I hope Lou liked it, though.

--from "Quint spends his final day on the set of STEPHEN KING'S THE MIST watching spiders run amuck!!", Ain't It Cool News.

So far, so good.

A 300 poster for sale in Hot Topic, featuring a picture of Queen Gorgo and the words "YOU WILL NOT ENJOY THIS!" So the line used during both her rape and the murder, by her, of her rapist, is an advertising slogan. Go figure!

Eli Roth's Thanksgiving trailer from Grindhouse is pretty agoddamnedmazing.

It's so gleefully, joyously violent and sleazy and exploitative and poorly made that I've been in awe ever since I saw first saw it. Maybe it's that announcer voice: "WHITE MEAT. DARK MEAT. ALL WILL BE CARVED." It's enough to make me reconsider my (ill-informed, but no less passionate for that) anti-Roth stance. And (the ostensible goal, of course) it's also overcome my From Dusk Till Dawn-diminished expectations of Grindhouse.

In related news, Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson are sexy and Rolling Stone is awful.

(Via Cinematical.)

The day job's on the beat: Wizard interviews stars Rosario Dawson and Naveen Andrews. I like Andrews more and more with each interview of his I read:

Well, Quentin [Tarantino] and Robert are beloved in England. I remember after “Reservoir Dogs” came out there were so many copycat British films with swearing and violence that were rubbish. It’s like rock ’n’ roll. Remember Elvis? They had Cliff Richard. That is what is going to happen. F---ing English.

Okay, one more:

That is the thing: I am a snob. Coming from England, we sort of think art and cinema should be Pasolini or something with an “i” on the end. Obviously Quentin and Robert saw some kind of aesthetic in these films. For the life of me I was trying to grasp what it was, they were laughing like maniacs at these films and I didn’t find it funny for more than like a minute. I was embarrassed: I thought, “What am I not getting here?” It took awhile.

I'd been looking forward to Slate.com film critic Dana Stevens's review of Tarantino & Rodriguez's Grindhouse, assuming it'd be just as humorless, myopic and all but parodically p.c. as her reviews of every other genre movie ever. Imagine my disappointment when her take on the flick didn't even register on the joyless-scoldometer. She actually kind of liked it!

But don't worry. In an essay straight from the log of Captain Obvious, Stevens's Slate-mate Grady Hendrix is bringing killjoy back, telling us all that grindhouse movies weren't actually very good. (No, really?) While he's at it he attacks Tarantino for being a closet bourgeois (an oldie but goodie) and works in a factual error about Mariah Carey's movie career to boot.

Have fun, suckers!

Holy smokes, I'm blogging a lot about this movie that I haven't yet seen and probably won't this whole weekend, aren't I?

My beloved Wizard talks to Marley Shelton, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Poitier, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rose McGowan, and Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez. Add that to yesterday's Q&As with Naveen Andrews and Rosario Dawson, and that's some wall-to-wall shit right there.

Here's one juicy exchange with QT and RR, debunking a big bit of horror blogosphere CW:

WIZARD: Did you guys have a problem with the ratings board?

RODRIGUEZ: No.

TARANTINO: No, not at all. That is a complete rumor. [The MPAA] hadn’t even seen it when all this stuff [about a hard R rating] was coming out.

RODRIGUEZ: It was such a great rumor that we were actually disappointed when we didn’t get problems. Maybe we weren’t good enough… [Laughs]

Read 'em all, folks!

It's an interesting day from a psychological perspective, as my depression that every one of my traditional movie-going companions will have seen Grindhouse already by the time I get a chance to go duels with my anxiety that I won't make it through the Sopranos season premiere (let alone the finale) spoiler-free. Agita!

An unusual bit of breaking news at the day job: Wizard reports that Batman Begins and Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer will be penning a "Green Arrow vs. DC Comics supervillains in prison" film called Super Max. Hey, stranger things have happened...

To tire of The Sopranos is to tire of life.

--Timothy Noah, "The Sopranos: Final season, Week 1," Slate

Amen!

For more Sopranos reading, I'll simply point you to the blogs of Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, who collectively offer the most insightful and comprehensive coverage of the show on the web. Read their reviews, follow their links to other sites, do it all.

Oh dear.

Well, I suppose we could have seen this coming. It's a massively long movie, meaning most theatres I checked could fit in no more than four screenings a day even for the people who'd want to sit for a three-plus-hour movie, and that's a comparatively rare breed these days. And it's not like they're gonna put it on multiple screens to offset that--this isn't The Return of the King we're talking about here. Even as a horror film, it's kind of been marketed to a niche within a niche. All the horror buffs I know were stoked as hell about it, but based on the ad campaign, would the hoi polloi even know if it's supposed to be scary? Hell, is it supposed to be scary?

That being said, it's inspired some hella fun posts around the horror and film blogospheres, my favorite being the bitchin' Horror Roundtable for last week, which asked participants to name their ideal grindhouse programming line-ups. I kinda cheated...

Stacie Ponder at Final Girl talks The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants talks Children of Men.

Jon Hastings at The Forager talks The Sopranos.

That thing scared the bejesus out of me, and it was painted by Jesse Peper.

(Hat tip: the amazing horror-art site Monster Brains, which you should be visiting regularly already.)

"...I made a general announcement to my guys at Seraphim and Joe, and to my agent - obviously first off to David - that I was going to severely cut back on what I did for movies and television. I would never pitch a project again, I decided. I would never go to a studio to pitch a project - if they wanted to come to talk to me about something then of course, I would listen, but my pitching days, with all the anxiety attached to them, and then often the sense that it wasn’t really worth the effort you put in anyway, or else the idea you find is stolen from you and used somewhere later - which has happened to me countless times - I’m just over that."

--So says Clive Barker in a new interview at the official Barker site, Revelations. Look for updates on the status of all his upcoming projects in film, literature, video games, television, and visual arts, plus details about his "October surprise" novel Mister B. Gone and a brief but meaty fan Q&A regarding spirituality in his work.

(Hat tip: Antipax's Hellraiser Galler, your source for all things Clive.)

God, how depressing and awful. I've listened to Imus for years, and my dad listened to him for years before that while I was a kid. So I feel like I speak with some authority when I say that he's OBVIOUSLY not a racist. He flipped out at the race-baiting ads that the Republicans ran against Harold Ford, he ranted for weeks about how Harold Ford lost because people were racist, he flipped out at the racist push-polls that the Bushies ran against John McCain, he's done tons of charity work for sickle cell anemia, he and his wife work with inner-city kids with cancer, he and his wife help green inner-city facilities, every MLK Day he plays the entire "I Have a Dream" speech even though the station tells him not to because people tune out, he listens to and plays and has on black preachers, and on and on and on.

He's also OBVIOUSLY an equal opportunity offender. He makes fun of old people ("time to head out to the dog track"), fat people ("tubbo"), bald people ("bald-headed stooge"), gay people ("half a fruit salad"), Catholics ("stop hosing little children"), Jews ("boner-nosed beanie-wearing Jew-boy"), born-agains ("religious whack-jobs"), liberals ("Commies"), conservatives ("Nazis"), Dick Cheney ("lying war criminal"), Hillary Clinton ("Satan"), Ray Nagin, George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Rosie O'Donnell, Joy Behar, Cardinal Egan, Dan Rather, Larry King, Katie Couric, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Clinton, Don Rumsfeld, and on and on and on. And he hates the Iraq War, for whatever that's worth.

And he's done a ton of good work, for pediatric cancer, adult cancer, SIDS, sickle cell, autism, wounded veterans, slain veterans' families, the environment, and on and on and on.

Plus his show is funny! And he has good guests. And it has good country music if you like that sort of thing.

His ouster is being presided over by professional greivance-mongering hucksters like Sharpton and Jackson, but mostly by the countless powerful people he's pissed off. Fox News and CNN and CBS and Stern and the Daily News and rival jocks and politicians he's gone after and pundits he's gone after smell blood in the water. Looks like they'll get him.

Sucks.

Regardless, I have one about the latest issues of Nova, 52, New Avengers, All Star Superman, B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls, Cold Heat, Optic Nerve, Thunderbolts, and Wonder Woman at this week's Thursday Morning Quarterback.

And that's that.

I don't want to talk about this too much, but I did want to link to Jon Hasting's thoughts about the situation--nutshell: It's a crabs in a pot deal, and it's shitty--and to Jim Treacher's--nutshell: These cases are never just about this particular case, but about the next one and the next one and the next one after that, and it's shitty.

This week's Horror Roundtable is about favorite horror websites. It took me way, way back, and way, way down.

Hey kids - this is Kennyb, Seans web-monkey (I say that to be nice, of course. Sean is actually my blog-monkey). We're going through some upgrades around here, to make life a little easier for Sean to manage the site, and to bring it more in line with the latest in blogging technology. For you the reader, it'll mean better searching and support for trackbacks. The changes for Sean will be many and varied, but I imagine you'll see more of skip in his proverbial blogging step. There might be an hour or so of downtime, which since it's the weekend, hopefully no one will notice.

Horror - it's not just for virgins.

--Mick Garris of Showtime's Masters of Horror series, interviewed at Wizard.

the way in which the Nazis stage-managed and presented themselves, my gentlemen! I'm talking about Leni Riefenstahl films and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass rallies and the flags - simply fantastic. Really lovely.

--Bryan Ferry, as quoted in "Is Bryan Ferry's career about to Riefenstahl?", Paul MacInnes, the Guardian

A gunman who killed at least 30 people at one of two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech Monday was dressed "almost like a Boy Scout," said a woman who survived by pretending to lie dead on a classroom floor.

--"Witness survives by pretending to be dead," CNN.com

I posted about this film thrice Monday on the Tori Amos message board I frequent.

Short version:

Saw it last night.

Eh.

Horror movies should be scary.

Slightly less short version:

Not scary!

The one scary moment was that first car crash. And the finale was, unsettling, I guess? But mostly the whole thing was either just funny or just gross.

I don't want a rollercoaster ride from my horror movies. I want a car wreck. And with the exception (fittingly enough) of the car wreck, I got a rollercoaster ride. With 30 minutes of chit-chat in the middle.

The trailers were great though, and so was Kurt Russell. And Rose McGowan, hubba hubba.

Chronological order version:

Fun trailer.

Rodriguez's movie was fun, but it was just a bunch of different junk slapped together. Why did Sayid cut off and collect people's balls? Why did Marley Shelton have a gun that shoots syringes? How did Rose McGowan shoot her machine-gun leg? Why did the kid kill himself? Why did Quentin Tarantino's character not mind his dick falling off? Etc etc etc. "Because that's AWESOME!!!!11!!!!11!!!" is an unacceptable answer. John Fucking Carpenter SHITS on "Because that's AWESOME."

More fun trailers. In the space of 15 seconds, Nic Cage almost redeems himself.

Death Proof's whole opening segment was really interesting--it really conjured the feeling of that setting, with the hot rainy night and whatnot, and these characters and that environment, yadda yadda. Kurt Russell is great. The car crash was brilliant. And then boom, it's the "I really loved Uma's stunt double so here's 30 minutes of her talking to Rosario Dawson" show. Goes nowhere, boring. QT forgets the whole "grindhouse" project and doesn't age or degrade the final couple of reels. Long-ass semi-entertaining car chase, a gunshot that kicks Kurt's performance into Brilliant territory, a completely un-buyable decision by three fun girls to track down and murder the guy, more car chase, a great ending. THE END.

Also, speaking of "if you don't do it you're chickenshit," Jungle Julia, BOTH films use the "missing reel" gag to skip sex? WTF? Some grindhouse this is! Man up, QT and RR.

Blog version:

Despite some initial, From Dusk Till Dawn-derived misgivings, Grindhouse was a film I really wanted to like. I'm an enthusiasm enthusiast--I like the things that I like, and from He-Man to David Bowie to Fort Thunder to (of course) Quentin Tarantino, I like art that's about the things the artists like. The project of Grindhouse, this notion of meticulously recreating a period cinema experience right down to the film stock and the trailers, is extremely appealing to me.

Unsurprisingly, the parts of Grindhouse that speak most directly to that project are among the parts I enjoyed the most. I really, really loved those trailers, for example. And yes, even the Rob Zombie one, despite it feeling the least authentically "grindhouse--as opposed to grindhouse as filtered through the mind of Rob Zombie, a man who creates album art featuring demons flipping the bird and yelling "GET DOWN, MUTHAFUCKA!" and suchlike. Sure, he overplayed his hand by proclaiming "Hey look, it's Udo Kier and Tom Towles and Bill Moseley and Sybil Danning!" instead of just letting us discover and enjoy ourselves, but hearing the words "and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu" more than made up for that (and, if you catch me in a particularly generous mood, for everything he's recorded since breaking up White Zombie). Indeed, of the four trailers my least favorite was seemingly everyone else's darling, Don't, since it felt the least genuinely, enthusiastically vile and the most like a parody of genuine, enthusiastic vileness; the least like a film its creator might actually go ahead and make, in other words.

I also loved the use of degraded, aged film stock--the pops and scratches and splices and so on. I'm not even sure I can articulate why, because I'm not a fetishist for authenticity in the slightest; I don't give a damn about vinyl, and while I love seeing movies in theatres it's for the theatre experience, not because the movie came from a film canister. I do kind of dig parametric filmmaking, and maybe that's what I'm latching on to here: The film stock stuff is the pervading signal of the parameters Rodriguez and Tarantino have set for themselves. Every time half a sentence disappears into the ether or the color suddenly goes red, it's a little loveletter to limitation.

And so (as astute readers will have already gleaned) the parts where the pair deviate from the project are among my least favorite aspects of Grindhouse. On an intellectual level I can grasp all the reasons why Tarantino abandoned the aged film stock schtick for the second half of Death Proof--to differentiate it from the more-of-a-downer first half, to indicate that now we're watching a real movie, simply to showcase the bitchin' cars--and I still don't care: Finish what you started! I found the transition to clarity far more distracting than any missing reel would have been.

And then there's the missing reel thing itself. Both RR and QT made a big deal of how much fun they had, narratively speaking, thanks to the freedom the missing reels gave them--how they could cut to the chase (so to speak), cut boring exposition, throw the audience in a new situation with new relationships and a new status quo and let them figure it out, and so on. Little did I expect that they'd both use it to avoid showing sex! I'm certainly not the first person to point out how decidedly un-raunchy these two movies were; sure, there's a lot of Maxim-y T&A (literally, since the film's starlets appeared in that very magazine), but to be blunt, there are more tits in about six combined seconds of the trailers from Machete, Werewolf Women of the SS, and Thanksgiving than in both of Our Feature Presentations. Quentin couldn't even bring himself to put the bump-and-grind in "grindhouse" and film a lapdance, for pete's sake. (Isn't it odd that this lover of outré cinema has a grand total of one (nudity-free, if I'm not mistaken) consensual sex scene in his entire ouevre?)

Perhaps these lapses of grindhousian purity could be forgiven if the movies were, well, better. But as I said, Planet Terror is just a bunch of cool, unconnected ideas and images slapped together. I know that's kind of par for the course for both of these guys, and I know normally it doesn't bother me, but in this case the Grindhouse project precluded the "fuck irony" stance that normally gives (say) Tarantino's exercises in "I like this and this and this and this and this so let's put them together and BAM we've got ourselves a picture" the no-bullshit emotional hook that pulls the audience through. When they work, which most definitely isn't always and in some cases even often, the self-conscious genre-revivification exercises of Tarantino and Rodriguez and Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and Bryan Singer and Zack Snyder and the entire geek-director pantheon depend, like that gag about the escaped insane-asylum inmates from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, on a gut-level belief that you can walk from rooftop to rooftop on the beam of a flashlight. But Planet Terror is a film about that belief, not a film that embodies that belief, if you follow me. Hence, splat.

Which is not to say that it's a complete failure. It is a fun movie, as you might expect any movie in which Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn play brothers and Sayid from Lost has a special testicle-removal weapon to be. In his review of the film, Jon Hastings is right to point out that the better performances here capture that "I just work here" anti-brio unique to a certain strata of '70s and '80s B-movie; ditto the film's lackadaisacal follow-through with key plot points and careening sine-wave narrative structure (though I think the obvious point of reference for both is John Carpenter and not, as Jon suggests, George Romero). And I'm always a little surprised to find myself appreciating really crazily over-the-top splatter like a Fango-subscribing gorehound, but hey, if the shoe fits. (In all seriousness, I think gore has a transgressive value as spectacle--a holdover from my film school days, during which one could routinely hear Sam Pekinpah compared to Busby Berkeley.) I even liked the way the ending set up a potentially much more epic mythos, sort of like how Mad Max begat The Road Warrior. Only not really, because "just kidding" hangs over the whole affair and is impossible to shake off.

Death Proof has its strengths, too, and they pretty much all fall in the first half of the film. Like I said on the Tori board, the opening section does a crackerjack job of evoking its Austin setting, or at least Tarantino and Rodriguez's idealized vision of same. It felt like I place I'd love to hang out in, get drunk in, get stoned in, get laid in, which when you think about it is a pretty neat way of making you dread the intrusion of a slasher. How dare he interrupt these ladies from being sultry (very) and clever (rather) and enjoying T. Rex and Shiner Bock! Like Psycho--which was obviously a point of reference though I'm sure similar tricks were played by some obscure giallo or women-in-prison picture with which I'm unfamiliar--Tarantino creates attractive, sympathetic, complex female characters whose deaths are genuinely shocking. No, seriously--I for one didn't expect all four to be killed, and certainly not all at once. After they died, I missed them.

And how they died! The one moment of truly great horror in the entire 3-hour-plus magilla, the car crash does an awful lot in its brief time span. Coming as it does on the heels of earlier intentionally unintentional "repeats" of brief segments of film (ostensibly owing to the whole beat-up spliced-together reels thing), it disorients the viewer by tricking them into thinking it's another glitch, only to show it again, and again. It makes nasty little points, like severing from Jungle Julia one of the legs we'd been enjoying for the past half an hour. It proves that a car can be a good and frightening slasher weapon, something I wasn't sold on until just about the point where a battered Rose McGowan started telling Stuntman Mike that ha ha, she got the joke. It elevates Stuntman Mike, heretofore just a goofy guy in an Icy Hot jacket who assumes that everyone's familiar with old cowboy shows (kind of like a better-looking version of Walter Sobchak), to a somewhat awe-inspiringly implacable monster. And most importantly for me, it plays off the very real fear of car accidents, showing the impact of an impact in driver's-ed detail. (Gave me plenty to think about during my 62-mile drive to work the next day, that's for damn sure.)

And then, and then, jibber-jabber for 40 minutes. Why? I know QT loves Zoe Bell, and I know he loves dialogue, but he's used both of them a LOT more effectively before. I can only remember a couple of bits from the seemingly endless chatter--the thing about how what happens to people with knives is "they get shot," and the cheerleader girl saying her on-set romance likes to watch her pee. Perhaps that's because the conversations are so divorced from their setting: While the randy, stoned, booze-soaked dialogue of the women from the first half of the scene fit perfectly with their randy, stoned, booze-soaked environs (a lived-in feel echoed by the film stock), Zoe and Rosario and friends exist in a brightly lit, clearly shot non-environment. Even the farm of the redneck we're supposed to see as capable of giving the cheerleader the Deliverance treatment looked like something out of a prescription allergy medication commercial. I don't get it.

I do get the denouement: The maniac-movie script gets flipped so that instead of bringing senseless, out-of-nowhere slaughter to innocent victims, Stuntman Mike's would-be victims bring senseless, out-of-nowhere slaughter to not-so-innocent him. And I like that; it's clever and cool. (Hell, I appreciate most of Death Proof--Tarantino's formal tomfoolery makes it an interesting failure when it fails.) But here's the thing: Have we seen anything at all from these three women--two of whom are professional thrillseekers, to be sure, but c'mon--that makes their choice to track down their attacker and kill him believable in any way? There's a big, BIG difference between enjoying stuntwork and enjoying retributive murder; and between carrying a pistol for self-defense and deciding to execute a guy. I know that the presence of the Michael Parks sheriff character indicates that Death Proof takes place in the "heightened reality" world of From Dusk Till Dawn and Kill Bill and Planet Terror, but if you're going to spend so long studying the personalities of these characters through dialogue, their subsequent behavior has to follow from what you've already established. I dunno, maybe their unrealistic transformation into gleeful killers is some sort of commentary on the ridiculousness of Stuntman Mike's slasher archetype? But that would appear to be undercut by the closing-credits montage of photos of women who are presumably Stuntman Mike's previous victims. Again, I appreciate the role reversal, and I quite frankly loved the climactic beatdown and Russell's unforgettable breakdown and the closing-credits montage and music (though I wish the car chase that led up to it had been a lot more interesting)--I just wish it worked, and it doesn't.

If I'm avoiding what appeared to be my fundamental objection to the two movies--they're not scary--that's for two reasons: 1) You can't really elaborate on that; 2) Maybe I'm being unfair and they're not supposed to be scary--maybe they're supposed to be mostly an action movie and mostly a whacked-out car flick respectively. But Tarantino himself called them "a horror film" and "a terror film," so I guess I'm being fair after all. I wasn't really horrified or terrified.

Overall, I feel like Grindhouse is a movie I could definitely mellow out about over time. Both films have their strengths, and they were both kind of fun despite their weaknesses, and I loved the idea behind them and the trailers were awesome and so on. I could certainly see us renting this for one of our Manly Movie Mamajamas and getting good and fucked up and enjoying the hell out of it. But Tarantino and Rodriguez said that unlike the grindhouse flicks of old, their movies would be every bit as good as their trailers and posters. Well, I left the theatre let down--so maybe they were true to the grindhouse experience after all.

PS: Read Jon Hastings and Jog on this film, too.

PPS: Comments welcome. (Web 2.0 and all that.)

Continuity, gratuitous superhero references, and boobies. Yep, he's a comic book writer, all right!

Holy smokes, it's a smorgasbord.

Rickey Purdin interviews Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright. The Monster Squad and Point Break are discussed.

T.J. Dietsch interviews An American Werewolf in London and Animal House director John Landis. Landis provides a list of who he'd classify as a "Master of Horror."

T.J. Dietsch interviews Re-Animator creators Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli. The pair name their two favorite horror films of recent years.

The whole staff, led by Ben Morse, bring you the oral history of Captain America, as told by nearly every major living creator to work on the character. Some of 'em wander off the reservation in offering their opinions, so keep an eye out for that.

Last but not least (okay, maybe least), my opinions on the latest issues of 52, World War III, The Mighty Avengers, Justice League of America, Love & Rockets, The Pirates of Coney Island, Squadron Supreme: Hyperion vs. Nighthawk, and Ultimate Spider-Man can be found at this week's Thursday Morning Quarterback.

Bam!

I just finished watching Hostel for the first time. Looks like I owe someone an apology, and that someone's name is Mr. Eli Roth.

Simply put, this was a remarkable and powerful horror movie, and I feel bad that I let the patness of Roth's political read of the movie--and, if I'm being honest, just plain being scared to watch it--keep me from experiencing it until now. With everything so fresh in my mind it's tough to describe why it connected with me the way that it did, except through a laundry list, but I'll try to avoid that anyway...

For starters, it was actually quite sophisticated, politically or philosophically or however you want to put it. Horror movies have a tendency to beat you over the head with their deep thoughts, or what passes for their deep thoughts, or what they can get mainstream film critics to think are deep thoughts. But for all the ugly Americanism going on here on the part of the two lead characters, and for all the anti-Americanism on the part of anyone else, I actually thought it was played with a fairly light and deft hand. You never saw Paxton or Josh proudly proclaim their American-ness while beating someone up or sexually harassing someone or making wildly racist or xenophobic comments, which would have been easy (too easy) to have them do. Instead, it's just kind of there--their distance from home, an air of privilege that they didn't ask for and yet also take for granted, and all the values and prejudices they've inherited from their country and class and era and gender.

Obviously the latter category is enormously important. I can't remember the last horror movie I saw that linked misogyny, pornography, and sadistic violence together this relentlessly and astutely, without seeming like an example of that link itself. And I don't even mean the gorgeous, topless women they run into at seemingly every turn, but little moments like the revelation that their horndog traveling companion has a daughter, as does the slightly too friendly Dutch businessman they encounter on their way to the titular hostel. Watching the four men ooh and aww--sincerely, I don't doubt--over the cuteness of the adorable little girls, then mentally contrasting that with their enthusiastic to the point of pathological quest for Pussy--which they discuss in the same acquisitive manner as one might a hot car or a cool new video game console, when they're not busy pejoratively referring to one another as one...I was impressed, mightily so.

I know the movie has gotten a rap as homophobic, but I can't see it at all. The characters are homophobic, again almost pathologically so, but that's a critique, not an endorsement. (I certainly realize that the movie could be read by your average meathead opening-night horror-audience dude as FUCKING AWESOME, AND IF YOU DON'T THINK SO YOU'RE A FAGGOT, but in a weird way that's a strength--it's mocking these people to their faces and is smart enough to get away with it.) Again, it's not just the constant "that's gay, this is gay, you're gay" bullshitting that makes the point: There's that brilliant scene where the Dutch businessman tells Josh that making the decision to have a family was the right one for him, but that Josh should make his own decision. If one were to surgically remove (if you'll pardon the image) that scene from this movie and plop it into some suburban-ennui indie flick, you'd have one of the most sensitive explorations of the closet and its lure I've ever seen on screen.

And then there's the horror stuff itself, which is as strong as you've heard. It scared me, which is saying something. But it's the stuff that surrounds each really graphic shot that gives the film its impact. Take, Paxton's encounter with the German, for example: the German's literally breathless excitement at getting to torture an American; Paxton's use of German to beg the man not to hurt him (un-subtitled--a callback to an earlier display of idiocy by Paxton himself); the German's subsequent, seeming reluctance to do so, only to be revealed as a pause to grab a ball gag; and, especially uncomfortable and uncompromising, (to quote Radiohead) the panic, the vomit.

Certainly that scene and many others are simply The Texas Chain Saw Massacre turned to eleven. Indeed, the whole movie could be read as a what-if: What if they actually showed all the violence you didn't actually see in TCSM? The meathook going through the back, the chainsaw going through the bodies, and so on. Hell, the German even slips and drops his chainsaw on his leg--but in this case, instead of a gnarly but shallow wound, it chops his whole leg off. It's in your face.

But back to the stuff around the gore. I think my favorite moment of the film was when Paxton, on the verge of escaping in a stolen car, hears the screams of a girl from inside the charnel house. He ends up turning around and going back inside, of course, as we expected given his earlier story about being haunted by the screams of a mother whose young daughter he'd seen drown when he was a kid. But there's no bravery, no grim-faced resolution in his face, courtesy of a masterful performance by Jay Hernandez--there's just an almost physical need not to bear the guilt of the girl's suffering. He rushes to save her in almost the same way a nauseous person rushes to the bathroom to get sick.

But he's a decent guy, which is the trick of the film. I'm not saying he's a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. I see him like a cast member of The Real World. These young Americans aren't murderers or animal abusers or corporate criminals--they're simply "moral morons," to borrow Flannery O'Connor's term, people who can justify countless minor abuses of other people's dignity and trust with a "hey, that's just who I am" or an "I'm finding myself" or an "I deserve to be happy." Paxton is a homophobe and a hedonist and a philistine and a misogynist pig, to be sure; but he likes children, he cares about his friends, he reaches out to a stranger when he sees she's distraught, and he really does wish he could have saved that little girl. That decency beneath all the bullshit gets one final despairing expression when he rescues Kana, in two heartbreaking sentences: "What do you want me to do, honey? I don't understand what you're saying!"

And there's more. The pressured-speech macho-asshole American businessman's "Who wants this motherfucker!" The mirroring of the Amsterdam cathouse with the torture factory. The shots--of Kana's face, of the multiple hit-and-run victims, of the two middle-aged ladies getting sprayed with blood on the train station--that prove Roth has a Troma Diploma hanging on his wall somewhere. Takeshi Miike's cameo, and his one line of dialogue. The killer children. The fact that the professional killers' one apparent remaining taboo--they're not going to run over a dozen kids--is their undoing. Paxton's quixotic attempts to hang on to his severed fingers. The electronica version of "Willow's Song" from The Wicker Man during the sex scene. The most sympathetic, most thoroughly developed character not ending up being the main character. Even the very ending, by far the least convincing part of the film, works because of Hernandez's and Jan Vlasák's performances and its antiseptic savagery.

It's a great horror film.

What the fuck?

In the wake of Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

--"Weapons to go offstage; Trachtenberg cites Virginia Tech attack," Courtney Long, Yale Daily News

My alma mater, ladies and gentlemen.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

Oddweek.com brings you 10 horrible deep-sea creatures. (Via Rue Morgue.)

CNN reports that the remains of a missing Chinese child were found inside a slain crocodile.

MSNBC reports that Florida fisherman have landed a half-ton mako shark.

Kiel Phegley interviews Kevin Huizenga, the most compelling new alternative cartoonist of the decade.

Keith Giffen offers 52 closing thoughts on 52, one of the most interesting mainstream comics of the past year.

If I learned anything this past weekend, it's that I should probably shut my mouth about movies until I've actually seen them. That being said, Reihan Salam's complaint about Mike White's Year of the Dog--namely that what it presents as liberating is actually just kinda fucked up--reminded me an awful lot of my own beef with Steven Shainberg's Secretary. Beats me whether this is a legit crit of White's flick, but given the usual blind spots of mainstream film critics, I wouldn't be surprised. Okay, shutting mouth now.

I was reminded, in some ways, of Planet Terror, a outbreak flick (zombies, not madness, but still--) which has been reproached in similar terms by a lot of clueless critics. But Rodriguez artfully foregrounds those "flaws," and transmutes such dross into the solid gold of an awesome, exhilirating movie experience. Here, they're just annoying. There's a difference between gonzo intensity that never lets little things like character or plot get in the way, and simply poor writing.

So says Curt of The Groovy Age of Horror about the book Panic O'Clock, the latest in the neverending stream of vintage trashy horror pulp to grace his blog. I like the way Curt gets right to the heart of good trash, pointing out its almost alchemical nature, though as one of those "clueless critics" I'll have to disagree about whether Planet Terror pulled it off.

Mostly, however, I wanted to show off the truly badass cover for Panic O'Clock that Curt scanned, and encourage you to visit Groovy Age if you're interested in loads more where that came from...

PS: Does anyone else who's experienced Hostel's blend of sex, violence, fetishism, and Eurotrash think it would actually be right up Curt's alley, despite his arguments to the contrary?

Two theories that involve slightly spoilery information about Lost and The Sopranos, so if you're not all caught up with both, you might want to tune out now:

1) In the Slate.com dialogue for the latest Sopranos ep, Jeffrey Goldberg airs a suggestion from his friend David Segal that Paulie is a rat. Anything's possible. What grabbed me here is that in the dream Paulie has, he asks slain snitch Big Pussy, "When my time comes, will I stand up?" People have been assuming this to mean that he wonders if he's got what it takes not to be a rat if the offer is presented to him. But Pussy's last words before Tony, Paulie, and Silvio killed him were to ask if he could sit down.

2) Since he finally got back from the Others' compound and got a change of clothes, Jack from Lost has been wearing...a red shirt. Given the fact that the show's writers are giant nerds who indeed have referenced the redshirt phenomenon during this very season, are we to interpret this as coincidence, fate, or fake-out?

My New Plaid Pants blogger and longtime ADDTF chum Jason Adams insists that Mike White's Year of the Dog is a tragedy rather than a feel-good film. But like Reihan Salam (and as opposed to my uninformed concern, derived from what in retrospect was a misreading of Salam), he thinks White is fully aware of this, and that the critics who are getting it wrong are doing so all on their own.

Rue Morgue's blog, the Abbatoir, has a pretty bitchin' mini-interview with Hostel director Eli Roth on how he got his fake trailer for Grindhouse, Thanksgiving, to look so awesomely decrepit. Am I the only one who didn't realize it was shot in Prague, by the way?

Matt Zoller Seitz's weekly Sopranos recaps/reviews/analyses remain second to none. I was particularly taken with two passages from this week's post:

[Tony's] back to being beat-up-'em, bed-'em-down Tony, except more of an automaton, a bad boy reverting to type but not really reveling in it.

I think that might be overselling his return to his old self a bit, but the part about not reveling in it is astute. Even better:

...was [this week's episode] "Remember When" really that muddled, or have the show's writers just gotten more confident, more inclined to let scenes and lines of dialogue complement each other obliquely, without the Playwriting 101 symmetry that many TV series (even The Sopranos) equate, often speciously, with Art?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This is what makes The Sopranos brilliant--and, incidentally, why I've always enjoyed but never loved that "College" episode from Season One wherein Tony balances taking Meadow on a tour of prospective colleges with murdering a rat he happens across; it always seemed a little easy for me.

I'll tell you, I wish I had this passage to hand a few weeks ago when I was trying to explain to a coworker why my appreciation for the work of Alan Moore has dimmed somewhat over time. If one were in an uncharitable mood, "Playwriting 101 symmetry" would feel like an appropriate way to refer to an awful lot of his ostentatiously writerly and artifice-ial work, wouldn't it?

My thoughts on the latest issues of Justice Society of America, 52, Daredevil, Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two, Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, Powers, and The Walking Dead may be found at this week's Thursday Morning Quarterback.

(One spoilery note about 52, by the way: I can sort of see where Dirk's coming from, but in terms of dreariness, there's kind of a world of difference between, say, Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny and an evil alien intelligence trapped in a nearsighted worm's body transforming into a Cthulhoid butterfly that eats universes, isn't there?)

One of my all-time favorite weird factoids is that Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan and the world's greatest living cartoonist, and Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City and El Mariachi, were friends and fellow student-newspaper comic-strip artists at UT Austin. That wonderful bit of information and loads more--including updates on Sin City 2 and the Madman movie--can be found in a very comics-centric interview with Rodriguez over at Wizard.

It's getting to the point where scientists finding giant squid specimens is no big deal. Finding them in the Atlantic Ocean--where they've never before been reported--is a cephalopod of a different color. The Winston-Salem Journal has the scoop.

(Hat tip: Craig Woolheater at Cryptomundo, the blog where those of us who love water monsters go to find 'em.)

This week's Horror Roundtable asks us to name some bit of horror-related ephemera we couldn't bear to part with. I came up with a pair of items from the same source...

It's been a full week for the ol' ADDTF mailbag. First, one of my favorite (and all too infrequent) horror bloggers, Joakim Ziegler of Mexploitation, writes:

Not to toot my own horn here (ok, yes it is to toot my own horn), but if you liked that Panic O' Clock book cover, you're going to love the two mexploitation posters from my collection that I've posted on my blog.

First the hippie one...

...And then, the illegal alien sex one.

I don't think it gets much trashier than that.

He's not wrong!

Long-time reader Josh, noticing my love of all things wet and frightening, alerted me to Peter Watts's undersea, online sci-fi mythos, Rifters.com. Surprisingly, I'm not much of a science fiction fan when it comes to reading--unless you count 1984, I don't think I own a single science fiction novel--so I'm not sure this very hard SF is my cup of meat. Still, I do love me some water monsters, and I'm always interested in ways the Internet can be used to tell scary stories, so I'll be digging around. Perhaps you might want to do so too.

The Horror Blog's Steven Wintle, bless him, was very patient with me during the months I'd bust Hostel's chops without actually having seen it. Now that I have, and changed my tune accordingly, he writes regarding my earlier reticence:

I can completely understand people not wanting to see it because of the gore, or even the context of the gore. I find many slasher and giallo films to be far worse in depicting brutality and demeaning acts against human beings, but the idea of someone being tied down and having things happen to them as opposed to, I don't know, running through the woods and being impaled on a tree by a machete really freaks some people out. And that's fine. I don't think anyone should expose themselves to something they can't handle (I know I do). I just couldn't get over the idea that most people criticizing Hostel hadn't seen it! I mean, House of Wax was probably more cringe-worthy in its violence then Hostel, for me at least. Hostel is a long movie with little flashes of violence, not a non-stop parade of carnage. And it plays out like a straight-up suspense story, as if Hitchcock decided to throw in some splatter. That whole final segment, where Paxton is trying to escape with very little dialogue and that fantastic score, had me at the edge of my seat, and not because I wanted to see someone's head smashed in.

As for Roth's comments on the movie, I understand where you're coming from. I find that happens quite often, in that the creator either accidentally made something that was better then him, or, more likely, he or she just isn't a very good orator. I lean more towards the second cause mainly because I'm a very visual person, and I find communicating my thoughts through words to be extremely difficult. If Roth, or Tarantino, or most of those guys could shoot a small film whenever they wanted to make a statement to the press they'd probably come off a whole lot better.

His point about the context of the gore in a torture film is a really good one. Without the element of a chase or an ambush or the other usual settings for violence in a horror movie, the brutality is kind of in its purest form, and it's off-putting in a way that even really over-the-top violence in other contexts just isn't.

The final sequence to which Steven refers reminded me a lot of similar sequences from Children of Men. Now THERE'S a double feature.

Finally, which is it: Did Roth make a movie that was better than him, or is he just kind of an inarticulate doofus when it comes to talking about his work? I'm really not sure.

Sean: What do you think of Lost this season, anyway? We haven't really talked about it before. Do you think it's lost momentum? That's what people are saying.

Sean's Missus: ...I think it's different than it used to be. I don't think it's lost momentum.

Sean: Do you think it's better? Do you think it's worse?

Sean's Missus: I just think it's changed. It's not better or worse, just different.

Sean: A lot of people have complained about that this season.

Sean's Missus: But shows have to change as they go on.

Sean: You're right--it'd just be treading the same territory over and over if it was the same as it used to be. Still, people think it's too Others-centric now...

Sean's Missus: I'm sure The Sopranos has changed, hasn't it?

Sean: Absolutely, and people complain about that, too.

Sean's Missus: Okay, but look at The X-Files. That show didn't change, and look how that turned out.

I had a conversation with a buddy of mine this week that really made something click for me. After hearing how much I liked Hostel, he warned me that Saw, a movie I haven't seen but to which Hostel is frequently compared, actually really sucks. He then worried that because of its success it'd cast a long shadow over horror movies. Suddenly I realized that while this may be true in terms of the horror movies that the studios get made, it doesn't have any long-term effects on the health of the genre itself, because horror aficionados ignore the crap and concentrate only on what they like. So sure, you saw a million Scream knock-offs in the 90s. Then you saw a bunch of Sixth Sense clones. Then a bunch of Ring rip-offs. Now, I suppose, we're on to Saw and Hostel wannabes. But in each case, while commercial product was cranked out, people who really cared about the genre focused on what worked, eschewed putting out ripoffs, and continued to help the genre develop and grow. And this will always be the case, no matter how many bad torture movies get thrown at high-schoolers.

With Hulk, Lee brings what has been churning in his oeuvre for a decade to a boil. In the commercial American film industry, it takes guts, after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to let a man of color (albeit green) take on the United States military in the desert and survive. Given Hollywood's bottom line of profitability, the fact that Lee would let an out of control non-white "alien" rip army helicopters out of the sky and escape into the camouflage of a Third World jungle needs to be given credit. The A-bomb be damned--the Hulk condenses the Viet Cong and Osama Bin Laden/Saddam Hussein into one gargantuan challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

--Gina Marchetti, "Hollywood/Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee's 'Hulk,'" FilmInt

Um, okay.

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz, who by the way is killing the game with his Sopranos recaps.)

My favorite comic book creator ever, Frank Miller, takes on the Hollywood establishment, squeamish DC and WB executives, critics of his recent balls-to-the-wall Batman books, black ice, and, of course, The Terrorists in this really rather awesome profile in the L.A. Times. It's refreshing to read an article about someone from comics in a mainstream publication that can intelligently articulate the differences between the work of the creator in question and that of comparable contemporaries--in this case, Miller's use of space is contrasted with that of John Byrne and George Perez, believe it or not. I'm so impressed that I'll forgive them for comparing The Dark Knight Returns to that graphic novel masterpiece The Watchman. (Hat tip: Cookie Jill at The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.)