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.)

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.

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

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.)

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.)

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.

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

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)

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)

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.)

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.

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.)

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.