When critics and "educated" audience members find themselves enjoying something that is disreputable (nihilistic black comedy, backwards foreigner ethnic jokes, horror movies), they need to rationalize it by attributing to the movie some kind of redeeming social message....I think this is also why Eli Roth talked about Hostel in terms of its anti-American message. The movie paints a pretty dismal picture of Eastern Europe (which, admittedly, many critics pointed out), so it's probably better for the American filmmaker to go out of his way to show that the movie is really a criticism of America.

--The great Jon Hastings, free-associating a recent viewing of Borat, critical reaction to the same and to Pulp Fiction, and my reactions to The Host and Hostel to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory for Mainstream Appreciation of Outre Art and a sort of halfway point between the "Eli Roth made a movie better than himself" and "Eli Roth is a legitimately great filmmaker but a piss-poor interpreter of his own work" schools of thought regarding Roth's hamfisted political pontifications vis a vis his film.

Glamour magazine, that publication beloved of George Costanza, has posted a list of their Sexiest Love Scenes of All Time. (Swayze count: two!) I'm actually pretty impressed. The scenes they cite from Cruel Intentions, The Departed, Titanic, and The 40 Year Old Virgin (that's right) are all pretty hot stuff. They don't go too far afield, of course--no Anna Falchi fucking Rupert Everett in a graveyard, I'm afraid, and everything's hetero and fairly vanilla at that--but still, good for them, and good for your Netflix queue. (Via Cinematical.)

Let's start murdering off the cast already, for goodness sake.

--Jeffrey Goldberg, half-jokingly (I think? I hope?) encapsulating everything I hate about the Sopranos criticism I hate, at Slate's Sopranos dialogue.

Behold, the cover art for the sure-to-be-radical Monster Squad DVD release.

Details at Dread Central. (Via the far too critical Rue Morgue Abattoir blog.)

Robert Rodriguez stopped by the office yesterday and showed me what may become the teaser for 'SIN CITY 2' and HOLY SH*T is it something. I don't want to let any cats out of any bags, so all I can say is there's not a hetero male moviegoer alive that's not going to deeply DIG that spot. Remember, he's doing 'A Dame To Kill For' and brother has he got it.

--from the blog of Smokin' Aces director Joe Carnahan.

(Via Cinematical)

I'm pretty sure this isn't news per se, since I've heard of all these projects already, but Clive Barker's Seraphim Films has confirmed plans to keep on rolling out movies based on stories from Barker's Books of Blood. After the upcoming The Midnight Meat Train, plans are underway for The Book of Blood and Pig Blood Blues. Details here. (Via Cinematical, again)

...but this is maybe the funniest movie review I've ever read, and from what I'm hearing, one of the most accurate, too.

Jog reviews Josh Simmons's very dark graphic novel House. I didn't see this one coming at all; it's kind of like Teratoid Heights with people instead of weird little critters that look like teeth.

Jon Hastings compares Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes to Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, focusing on the divergent ways the two films portray "normal" people. Money quote:

...despite the horrible things [the killers] do, they're obviously the movie's heroes: we're meant to root for them to escape the forces of law and order, who are presented as bigger monsters than the outlaws. They're also presented as hypocrites, which, by the movie's values is a lot worse than being a monster.

Kristin Thompson tracks the rise of fantasy and the fall of sci-fi in the cinema. Coincidence? She thinks not.

Finally, some guy named Sean T. Collins reviews the latest issues of Incredible Hulk, 52, Hellboy: Darkness Calls, Astonishing X-Men, Detective Comics, Dominion, The Exterminators, Green Lantern, Midnighter, and Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil in the latest Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.

Underwater videographer Jay Garbose has discovered what appears to be a new species of 7-10 foot undersea worm. Holy crap.

Details here. (Via Carnacki at Haunted Vampire.)

Fangoria has complete specs for the 2-Disc 20th Anniversary Monster Squad DVD set. The words "a five-part retrospective" are involved. Woo!

Meanwhile, Michael Felsher, the fellow responsible for bringing the Squad back, is also working on a 20th anniversary edition Hellraiser DVD for Anchor Bay, which actually kind of irritates me because the existing Anchor Bay edition I have is already pretty badass. Regardless, again, Fango has the specs.

(Via Movieweb, via AICN.)

This week's Horror Roundtable is about low-budget horror movies. My fave is one of my favorite horror movies period, budget or no.

Despite its cheesy indulgence in gangster patois--"The Uvas got whacked on Christmas Eve 1992"--this article on the murders at the heart of Gambino captain Skinny Dom Pizzonia's trial is a captivating read thanks to the Jackie Aprile Jr. level of idiocy the murder victims reached: They robbed Mafia social clubs.

I may have been lukewarm about the movie itself, but my love of the grindhouse aesthetic continues unabated. The latest object of my affection is this balls-out fantastic SomethingAwful.com Photoshop Phriday in which participants take decidedly un-grindhouse movies and give them the sleazy, seedy, hard-sell poster treatment. The results had me cracking up pretty much every third poster (the Beetlejuice one referenced in the title for this post and the Barry Lyndon one above in particular). (Via Cinematical.)

Regarding the announcement that Lost will end in 2010 after three more 16-episode seasons, I want to point out that I honestly thought to myself "Oh great, now I have to make sure to live until May of 2010 so that I can see how it ends." I've previously thought this with the Star Wars prequels, the Lord of the Rings movies, and The Sopranos. Now it's a race between Lost and Battlestar Galactica as to when the earliest point at which I'll be comfortable dying will arrive.

I think it's indicative of the ways that Las Vegas has changed for the better and the world has changed for the worse that a bomb can blow someone up in a casino parking lot and the first culprit people think of isn't the mafia.

It's sadly unlikely that anyone will do "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You."

A while back, Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door linked to an essay on Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now by Sheila O'Malley, in which she said the following:

So when that sex scene comes ... it's not like a gymnastics soft-lit scene , the way you so often see in Hollywood movies. Where when people take off their clothes, they cease being human beings - or characters - and just become People Having Sex. As though everyone has sex the same way - married couples, one-night stands, whatever, and everyone is good and graceful at it, and nobody has body issues, and there's always a soundtrack ... We all know scenes like that. This scene, which comes in the first half of the movie - is, indeed, striking - and there's a reason why it is referred to all the time. They're both buck naked - the scene goes on forever - but watching it, I felt ... Let's see. First of all - as the scene goes on and on, there are intercut scenes, glimpses of them getting dressed afterwards because they're going out to dinner. So we get a close-up of her buttoning her blouse, him zipping his trousers ... interspersed with the love-making. Fascinating. This is a real relationship. Couples behave this way all the time. You are naked, then an hour later you're clothed and you're at a dinner party. The world doesn't STOP for sex. Sex is just ONE part of a relationship, and the way the scene was edited really hit that home. I thought it was a great choice.

"The world doesn't STOP for sex"? To paraphrase the Woodman, it does if you're doing it right!

The praise heaped on this scene has baffled me ever since I first saw the film years ago. Simply put, this really isn't how sex works. (In my experience, of course. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything--it's just, who else's experience would I be basing this on?) From your diminished pain response on down, sex is an immediate, all-consuming enterprise. Roeg's cross-cutting to Julie Christine and Donald Sutherland getting dressed afterwards appears sexy because of the way it acknowledges the everyday intimacy of a married couple, but it's actually emotionally, and more importantly erotically, false. It would work if we were to interpret the getting-dressed as "right now" and the sex as a flashback, but if I recall correctly the scene is framed so that the getting-dressed is a flash-forward from the in-the-now sex. There have been a lot of times where I've fondly recalled sex after the fact, but literally never have I drifted away during the act to ruminate about putting my pants back on.

Jon Hastings is absolutely right when he says (and says and says) that the "messiness" and lack of closure offered by The Sopranos is what makes it such a great show. I mean, as I've been saying for a LONG time, totally, right? I'm completely baffled by the proclamations (including some from writers who've stuck with the show as it moved away from its comparatively good-natured goombah roots and therefore one might expect to know better) that unless we get some tidy climax the show will have failed or cheated the audience or something. Why? It would be completely within the spirit of the series to end without one, and I've enjoyed the series so far, so simple arithmetic would seem to dictate I'd like it that way.

I also think it's astute of him to point out the way the serialized (read: relatively open-ended) nature of the show allowed "improvisation" with the storylines and characters. One of my very favorite moments in the history of the show was when Johnny Sack--at first a throwaway face at Vesuvio's, and then a fairly straightforward villain--stumbled across his (eating-disordered, though we didn't know it until that moment) wife binge-eating and reacted with genuine devastation. They took a minor character and played with him and bang, one of the show's strongest characters emerged. I doubt that was part of some everything-mapped-out game plan that's now apparently de rigeur for a show for a lot of viewers and writers.

Finally, I agree with Ross Douthat: Critics need to shut up about the goddamn Russian already.

That's all, really.

Riot police have been sent to a remote mountainous village in Papua New Guinea after a gun battle between police and members of a cult involved in human sacrifices, local media reported Wednesday.

--"PNG police in gun battle with human sacrifice cult," Reuters

(Hat tip: Kennyb.)

Invincible, Countdown, Marvel Zombies: Dead Days, The Immortal Iron Fist, The New Avengers, Stormwatch: P.H.D., Thunderbolts, and Wolverine: Origins get the Sean T. Collins treatment over in this week's Thursday Morning Quarterback review column at Wizard.

Eli Roth has announced plans for a movie called Trailer Trash, consisting solely of fake trailers for nonexistent fi