Archive for August 31, 2006

All Star DSM IV

August 31, 2006

I think Morrison is treating Luthor as a manic-depressive who’s stuck on manic. Endless talking, constant moving, restlessness, euphoria, racing from one idea to another, grandiose thinking, irritability, belief in his own infallibility, aggression, provocative behavior–they’re all symptoms of the ‘high’ periods of bipolar people I’ve known, and Lex displays them all.

That’s yours truly on Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman #5, “The Gospel According to Lex Luthor.” For more where that came from, check out this week’s installment of Thursday Morning Quarterback, WizardUniverse.com’s weekly comics review roundtable discussion, in which I am a regular participant. Hope you enjoy them!

Evil for thee, not me–the continuing series

August 30, 2006

Offered without comment:

“There’s nothing more terrifying than Dick Cheney…I think he’s a sick monster who’s power hungry. I think that George Bush is terrifying. These people that are so out of touch with society, they kill people for real, and they try and go after guys like me. That’s the irony that it’s the filmmakers and the horror filmmakers that they try and shut up. No one ever died from a horror movie but people die all the time because of them and war.”

–Eli Roth, from “Eli Roth’s Hostel: Empty exploitation or sign of the times?”, by Stephen Applebaum, netribution.co.uk, August 5, 2006

Food for thought.

Don’t quit your day job

August 29, 2006

Posting that link to my Lord of the Rings Limited Edition DVD review yesterday reminded me that I frequently have work up on Wizard’s website.

Several of the trade paperback and graphic novel reviews I’ve written for the print magazine have made their way online:

Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek Vol. 1

Marvel Zombies

Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt

Absolute Dark Knight

More day-job stuff to come…

The Lord of the Rings Limited Edition DVDs: Precious, or not so much?

August 28, 2006

Over at my day job, I’ve reviewed the new Lord of the Rings Limited Edition double-disc sets (not to be confused with the Theatrical Widescreen, Theatrical Full Screen, or Extended Edition versions you may already own, having purchased them individually or in two- or three-packs). Check it out here.

Carnival of souls

August 27, 2006

In Horror Blog Steven’s latest Horror Roundtable, I sing the praises of David Jacobson’s excellent film Dahmer.

Does YouTube have a first-person horror mockumentary phenomenon on its hands? This post on the celebfotainment LiveJournal community Oh No They Didn’t indicates that it does, in the form of a series of video blogs by a homeschooled 16-year-old girl named Bree whose parents are slowly being revealed to be followers of…well, I’ll let you discover for yourself. As I’ve mentioned before (and hopefully demonstrated), it’s fascinating to watch the various media available on the Internet be put to use for horror storytelling.

Speaking of first-person horror mockumentaries, they’ve been much in the news lately. George Romero has revealed that the next film in his Dead series, Diary of the Dead, will be made in that style. Meanwhile, several pundits, notably Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly, have brought up you-are-there fright flick and proto-viral marketing phenomenon The Blair Witch Project in their attempts to explain the relative failure of Internet-beloved Snakes on a Plane at the box office. (SoaP was great, incidentally, box office or no.) Could Sam Jackson’s Folly (along with such “yeah, I said it” critical praise as the oft-linked Seven Best Horror Movies of the Past 7 Years at Cinematical) be the unlikely catalyst for putting Blair Witch back in the horror pantheon where it belongs?

Finally, this past weekend my coworkers and I got liquored up and watched Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A., and Rambo: First Blood Part II in the latest of our periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas. I rememeber hearing when I was a kid that action movies were destroying the moral fabric of our nation with their mindless, gratuitous violence, and wondering what they were talking about because the only action movies I was really watching at the time involved George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Now I know exactly what they mean. Awesome.

The Outbreak, broken down

August 14, 2006

I’m really happy to say that there’s an interview with me about my “autobiographical horror” blog The Outbreak over at Dark But Shining. Sam Costello, one of my favorite horror bloggers since way back when he was the only one I knew of, conducted the interview, and it was really rewarding to participate in. Added bonus: It’s DBS’s 666th post.

I hope you enjoy it–go check it out!

Coupla things

August 11, 2006

There’s a new horror roundtable up at Steven’s Horror Blog. The topic is “favorite horror weapon,” and my answer probably won’t come as much of a surprise.

Meanwhile, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl has come up with the best idea for a series of posts EVER.

Horror makes you famous

August 3, 2006

Kinda sorta.

Blogger Matt Maxwell recently wrote to inform me that in Max Brooks’s most recent zombie-survival mockumentary book, World War Z, there’s a mercenary character named “T. Sean Collins.” I certainly don’t mind interpreting this as a tip of the hat to my little autobiographical zombie fiction blog The Outbreak, and nor should you!

Meanwhile, Steven of the Horror Blog has posted his latest Horror Roundtable, this time asking what factors can get the roundtable’s participants to watch a horror movie they know is going to be bad. My answer won’t surprise long-time readers of this blog, that’s for sure…