Learn the identity of my favorite horror sub-genre at this week’s Horror Roundtable.

Learn my opinions on this week’s issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, Green Lantern, 52, Battlestar Galactica, Conan and the Midnight God, Girls, Marvel Adventures Avengers, and Ultimate X-Men at the latest installment of Thursday Morning Quarterback.

Don’t you feel smarter already?

Go read Bill Sherman’s great review of Ross Campbell’s frightening, bloody, erotic, queer-friendly zombie graphic novel The Abandoned.

I remember babysitting about 15 years ago for a couple of younger kids and watching some of the early animation and in the middle of it one of the kids standing up and holding his hands up like Jackie Mason and proclaiming to heaven, “Why, oh why can’t somebody be his friend?”

Tom Spurgeon on Casper the Friendly Ghost

“The reign of terror has ended. The quest for justice has just begun,” prosecutor Andrew Thomas said.

—“Suspected ‘Baseline Killer’ indicted on 74 charges,” AP, CNN.com

Curt at Groovy Age takes The Descent and other films to task for copping out when it comes to the scary stuff and revealing that the supernatural or monstrous aspects of the movie were really all figments of a character’s psychological disturbance. The only problem I have with that (besides the old “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” routine)? The Descent suggests no such thing, of course! Not sure where the Groovy One got that idea–I didn’t detect it in the movie at all, and it’s also not supported by any statements made by the cast or crew in the making-of documentaries…

Loren Coleman has the scoop on a 1922 search for a plesiosaur in South America. I want to go on one of these one day.

Scrubs will be back for a seventh season!

(Hat tip: Whitney Matheson.)

Now They’re Just Throwing Darts at a Board: Motel Hell is Being Remade

–Scott Weinberg, Cinematical

Related:

Lost Boys 2: When Vampires Surf

–Scott Weinberg, Cinematical

The day job breaks the news from within the Lost camp that the 13 promised two-minute mobile-phone “mobisodes” that were to bridge the gap between the two halves of Season Three (the conceit being that character Hurley would find a video camera and shoot some goings-on with his fellow castaways) are on a more-or-less permanent hold due to ongoing negotiations between Touchstone and the actors involved.

I certainly sympathize with the desire to hew out an alternative to the witches’ brew of leaden, self-serious pretentiousness, after-school-special stabs at socio-psychological commentary, and hard-R, creepily sexualized grim’n’gritty violence that passes for “maturity” in a fair amount of genre entertainment today. The problem is that when, in a search for such an alternative, people fetishize (in a confrontationally funfunfun way) a sort of carefree, willfully silly return to some simpler, more innocent age –a borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Silver Age, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem–they find themselves making arguments that are untenable from a factual perspective as well as an aesthetic one. For example, they conjure up straw-man adherents to a grimmer, grittier version of a character with no such history; or they insist that an artifact from a particular character’s earlier era would drive that character’s current fans and shepherds into a rage despite that artifact’s actual presence in a film helmed by the current shepherd to great acclaim by the current fans; or (to quit beating around the bush) they imply that the original Battlestar Galactica is superior to the current one. This last bit is not only a point of view that is all but definitionally unserious, it also ignores the fact that niche BSG fandom has basically taken an opposite trajectory to most comparable fandoms in that its purist factions defend the silly version against the Very Serious version. It’s Earlier, Funnier Stuffitis in a slightly less virulent form, is what my diagnosis would be.

A rival strain of genre-based argument is aimed not at genre works that are deemed insufficiently fun, but at non-genre works whose supposed deficiency stems from two faults: 1) their view (as detected by their detractors) that their status as non-genre works alone makes them superior–a view that, even if it were present in the text (which is, to put it mildly, debatable), would still be a remarkably minor facet of the work itself; 2) their detractor’s detection of a kinship to a mode of storytelling the definition of which he has stretched to encompass virtually any mode of storytelling he doesn’t care for–that definition therefore failing to define much of anything anymore.

Insofar as both these views of genre either fail or refuse to acknowledge the many different ways one can skin a cat, they have more in common than their proponents would (I’d imagine) care to admit.

I saw it yesterday. It was okay.

The ending was really powerful–I teared up–which made up for a lot of its shortcomings. But it did indeed have a lot of shortcomings.

Part of the problem was that the fantasy stuff was by far the least compelling aspect of the film. I know Guillermo Del Toro has accumulated a lot of genre-fan goodwill with Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone; all I’ve seen of his work is this and Hellboy, and in both cases I was struck mostly by the paucity of his imaginary bestiary. (Seriously, you have access to every creature Mike Mignola’s ever drawn and you just stick with frog monsters the entire time?) In this case, for all the comparisons Pan’s Labyrinth has garnered to dark fantasy classics of both page and screen, you basically have a grand total of four fantastical creatures: the faun, the fairies, the giant toad, and that (admittedly creepy) eyeballs-in-his-hands creature. That’s kind of a poor showing even if you’re generous enough to add in the wiggly weepy mandrake root. And even the best of the monsters, the eyeball guy, behaves in a way that doesn’t make a whole lot of internal sense; just because his eyes are in his hands doesn’t mean they can’t look up.

Moreover, I’m never very big on children’s fantasies wherein the main character’s journey begins out of simple curiosity rather than some actual motivating factor. Whatever the psychological underpinnings of her fantasy world might be, little Ofelia isn’t chased or driven or lured into the labyrinth–she gets embroiled in this whole netherworld thing just ‘cuz. I’ve never found it realistic that a kid’s curiosity would overcome their fear of something that would naturally be quite terrifying, unless there was a damn good reason for them to need to overcome that fear. Contrary to popular fictional opinion, I don’t think children just “accept” weirdness (especially of the monstrous variety), since real-world evidence shows that children freak the hell out over weird shadows cast by their crumpled-up clothes in the light of a nightlight. That faun would send me running screaming in the other direction, sick mother and fascist stepfather or no. Point being, I was much more interested in the Spanish post-Civil War intrigue than I was in any of the ooh-wow-magic stuff. (The Captain was a magnificent villain in that regard, far more fun even on the good-vs.-evil level than anything the faun introduced Ofelia to.)

But the main problem (and I’ve seen this articulated elsewhere but I can’t remember where) was that at several different points, characters chose to do the absolute stupidest/least realistic thing possible, which not coincidentally ended up being the exact thing that would move the plot along. The little girl finds a big giant bug cute rather than disgusting; she eats grapes off the monster’s table even though she has no reason to do so and it’s not like she’s going hungry in real life and she’s been explicitly warned NOT to do that exact thing; the guerillas launch this huge attack on the captain’s compound but rather than shoot or detonate the lock on the storehouse, they use the key, thus making it crystal clear that they have a mole on the inside of the Captain’s household; Mercedes stabs the shit out of the Captain and has the chance to finish him off, but instead she just calls him a motherfucker and leaves him alive so that he can stumble out after her and sound the alarm; the faun makes a big thing about yelling at the little girl and telling her she’s shit outta luck after she breaks the rules and eats the grapes, but then just changes his mind; etc. And what was the point of centering so much of the early business between the guerillas, the doctor, and Mercedes around leg-wounded Frenchie, only never to show the guy again after the doctor finally operates on him? Enchanting Journeys and Fairy Tales For Adults become a lot less enchanting and adult when you can see so many seams in their construction.

Stacie Ponder brings back Ridiculous Faces of Death.

Nobody can see themselves in Annie — not for one second — and that makes Misery, for all its violence, a very safe film. Norman Bates in Psycho, Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, hell, even Hannibal Lecter were granted more humanity. Yes, [Kathy] Bates was just giving her boss what he wanted — but since when is that a defense against complaints that you’ve abetted something despicable?

–Matt Zoller Seitz, “Worst Best Actress, and Best”

The post is on the most and least deserving recipients of the Best Actress Oscar, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

At this week’s Horror Roundtable, I give big ups to the high-school buddy who helped make me the gorehound I am today.

…are apparently on my mind quite a bit as I discuss this week’s issues of Justice Society of America, Thunderbolts, Runaways, Batman Confidential, Mythos: Ghost Rider, Squadron Supreme: Hyperion vs. Nighthawk, and Tales of the Unexpected over at Thursday Morning Quarterback. But not in a creepy way, honest.

Robert Anton Wilson: January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007

A suspect in the gruesome murders of 17 people, mostly children, near the Indian capital has told investigators he had sex with the dead bodies and ate their organs, a report said on Thursday.

—“Serial killer admits to sex with dead bodies”, Sapa/AFP

(Hat tip: The Daily Gut.)

If the combined praise of the assembled horror-blog cognoscenti didn’t convince you that The Descent would be a must-own DVD upon its post-Christmas release, allow me to add one more element in its favor: the accompanying making-of documentary. It’s every bit as comprehensive and well-edited as one might hope, but the most exciting thing about it for me–besides the fact that everyone, from writer/director Neil Marshall on down, seemed so nice–is that the filmmakers (and actors) were just as steeped in the horror canon as I thought they were. They all seem so unpretentiously in love with horror and with making horror movies, which is delightful. All the references/influences get called out–Alien, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, An American Werewolf in London, Deliverance, The Thing, Nosferatu, The Lord of the Rings…everything I saw and loved in the film was indeed intended to be there. Plus, there’s a whole separate mini-doc on the film’s two different endings, in which Marshall compares the two approaches, explains why the ending was changed for the U.S. release, reveals which was the original intention and which he ultimately prefers, and touches on a fascinating distinction between a hopeless ending and a cruelly hopeless ending. Of course that really revved my engine, and I’d imagine that if you’re reading this blog, it’ll rev yours too.

Somewhere, Edward Woodward is smiling.

Jesus, that was what the wicker man was in this movie? What the HELL was the point?

(Hat tip: Jim Treacher.)