Carnival of souls

Yikes:

From Turkey comes news of five inbred Kurdish siblings who walk on all fours due to a genetic condition which scientists say may replicate the movement patterns of early Man. The subject of a BBC2 documentary that aired this past Friday, the siblings are theorized by some scientists to be a case of “backward evolution.” (Hat tip: the Missus.)

Eve Tushnet has got to be one of the least-frequent comicsbloggers around (I’m also looking at you, Jim Henley), but when she does write about the medium, she writes quite well. Witness her discussion of Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s masterfully unsettling horror comic Daredevil: Decalogue, one of the overlooked comics pleasures (hell, treasures) of 2005.

Remake fever: Catch it! It appears that with Asian horror and ’70s indie horror all but exhausted, at least one studio is turning back to the classics. According to Bloody Disgusting, classic horror hotbed Universal has added a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon to what I imagine will be a slate of updated versions of its seminal black-and-white monster movies, a slate which already includes the Benicio Del Toro-starring revamp of The Wolf Man I mentioned the other day. Needless to say the success of these remakes is dependent on the budget and talent the studio is willing to commit, and like as not they’re simply an attempt to goose amusement-park revenues a la The Pirates of the Carribean (which I understand is pretty good) or The Haunted Mansion and The Country Bears (which I understand aren’t). Still, I feel like these stories, or perhaps more accurately these creatures, have a great deal of potential that a smart movie could easily tap into for a modern audience. King Kong did an excellent job of showing that there’s life in the “monster run amok” genre, a fact that decades of slashers and Satan and torture and rednecks and haunted appliances and dead girls with long black hair might have obscured.

Finally, in honor of The Sopranos 6.2 tonight, here’s an article by Dan Ackman at Slate about Burton Kaplan, the star stoolpigeon at the trial of “mob cops” Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. As far as illustrations of the workaday sociopathy of the common gangster go, it’s tough to beat.