Kim Thompson of the great comics publisher Fantagraphics pays homage to George A. Romero’s great zombie movie Dawn of the Dead in one of those “two great tastes that taste great together” deals.

These days I tend to find black T-shirts with a huge visual that was originally designed for a movie poster or album cover or some other mode of presentation a bit too clumsy looking, but there are some exceptions, usually particularly striking horror imagery. My prize Hellraiser T-shirt, the only shirt I’ve ever re-bought after wearing one out, is one of them; this one’s pretty great too, in large part because of that no-nonsense font on that amazing tagline.

Via Flog!

In Colombia, the motion-sickness drug scopolamine is being used by criminals as a “zombie drug,” robbing its victims of free will. It gets blown in their faces and prevents the target from resisting rape, robbery, and murder. More here.

Christopher Eccleston, who co-stars as the villainous character called the Rider in the upcoming fantasy film The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, told SCI FI Wire that the film is considerably different from its source material….”I think there are many, many departures from the book to the film,” Eccleston said in an interview….”The novel has been hugely Americanized in the film.”

–Ian Spelling, “Dark Differs from Books,” SciFi Wire

Sounds like a recipe for success to me!

The trailer for Midnight Meat Train (note the absence of the definite article) is out, and I am very, very pleased with it. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

I know you’ve already seen this. I just wanted to use that line. Carry on.

PS: HUCK FARVARD

Longtime readers of this blog are no doubt aware that I am a pretty big fan of Dionaea House, Eric Heisserer’s mockumentary-style multi-site webfiction project about–well, google “dionaea” and clue yourself in. For a while a film adaptation was in the works with a major studio, but after many delays and a title change, the project was dropped by the studio. In May of 2006 Heisserer told his Yahoo group that the prospect of the film receiving funding from some other source seemed promising, but no other updates have been forthcoming.

Just for kicks I started hanging around one of the sites that comprise the story, and in the comments I discovered this recently created blog, which appears to be incorporating the failure of the film version and the “death” of Heisserer himself into the fiction. Is this an official continuation, or the work of an enthusiastic fan? Does it even matter?

Snake Eyes from You Can’t Do That On Television here would like to inform you that comments have been switched off in the face of a truly colossal amount of spam, until the crack ATF tech team can get registration up and running. My email’s to the left if you really wanna sound off, though.

“Daybreak shirt”

RILEY: Had a little brother, bit. Took less than an hour before he turned.

SLACK: And then what happened?

RILEY: I shot him.

SLACK: You said nothing bad ever happened to you.

RILEY: That happened to my brother.

–George A. Romero, Land of the Dead

I don’t recall I how I stumbled across this, but here’s a chilling piece on a family cursed with hereditary fatal insomnia.

And get your Croatoan on with amateur hunters for the lost colony of Roanoke.

The other day I said that any modern-day action movie that tried to out-batshit crazy Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A. was doomed to failure. I said that because of scenes like these:

(SPOILER ALERT on this next one…)

But the more I watch these two Internet-only John Rambo trailers, the more I feel like I may have to eat my words.

It’s hard to judge based on trailers alone, but it seems to me that the reason that John Rambo stands to be far more successful at being viscerally exciting than the self-aware (read: “self-conscious”) approach of Shoot ‘Em Up is that it’s not setting out to be crazy. It’s setting out to be extremely violent, which is has some venn-diagram overlap with crazy but is not entirely contiguous with it, and thus far it’s really good at what it’s setting out to do.

Monster Brains presents a gallery of 16th-century Hieronymus Bosch knock-offs.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories presents a three–part gallery of Berni Wrightson’s totally-wrong-for-the-book illustrations from Stephen King’s The Stand.

I am such a sucker for water monsters that I find this screencap from So Bad It’s Good’s review of The New Swiss Family Robinson totally fascinating and frightening.

Finally, the New York Times and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum present a gallery of Auschwitz SS members at play near the death camp.

How much money have you spent on a single horror-related item? That’s this week’s Horror Roundtable subject. Made me feel like a cheapskate.

1) How great is it that David Cronenberg is making crime movies?

2) How great is it that Viggo Mortensen is a movie star?

Loch Ness, Scotland, summer 2001

Back then I was an editor at Abercrombie & Fitch’s A&F Quarterly. I did a lot of great interviews for them, many of which can be found in that sidebar to your left, from Chuck Palahniuk to Underworld to Bettie Page to a TON of comics people, which is really how I became involved in comics in the first place. A travel story assignment for A&F was the reason I was in Scotland, in fact. While I was at A&F I had an employee discount to A&F stores, and one of the few times I used it was to purchase this little gem. It reads “I’m Easy” in baseball-jersey lettering. I don’t know what it says about me that my first thought upon seeing it was that it was a reference to the song Keith Carradine sings in Robert Altman’s Nashville, and that my second thought was that it was a reference to the Commodores song, and that my third thought was that maybe some hip person had actually intended it to be a reference to Faith No More’s cover of the Commodores song, and that only several weeks after I purchased and first wore it did it finally occur to me that it was most likely intended to proclaim that I was readily available sexually.

I bring all this up because, in the words of Stephen King…

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.

And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

…and I am in the way of knowing that Abercrombie & Fitch will be relaunching the A&F Quarterly in the U.K. with a Spring Break 2008 issue, and that I will be involved. That’s all I can say at the moment, but stay tuned.

Jon Hastings has begun exploring what he’s termed the Golden Age of American Action Movies. He’s starting by stating the films’ defining characteristics. Besides being action movies (duh), meaning that they’re driven by action scenes in terms of plot and character development, he says

They share two major stylistic/formal elements: (1) a commitment to surface realism and (2) spatial integrity is the cohering idea behind their action sequences.

By #1 he means that “no-nonsense spectacles” without the fancy (artsy?) camerawork of genre stylists like Sergio Leone. I like what he’s getting at here as it articulates something I’ve noticed in my hobby of watching ’80s action movies: they exist to show you the action. You know how most comedies are utilitarian, from a filmic perspective? Shots, lighting, sound, mise en scène are all designed so as to distract as little as possible from the jokes. This is why you can probably count the number of great comedies you’ve seen that also function as beautiful or striking movies on one hand if you remove the ones by Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers first. Well, I think the same is true of the action movies Jon’s talking about. They’re there to wow you with the “action” half of “action movie,” not the “movie half.” Because of this even slight, largely failed deviations from the norm become very noticeable; I was really struck by Sylvester Stallone’s strange freeze-and-dissolve cuts and almost comical overuse of montage sequences in Rocky IV, for example.

Jon’s second point is, he admits, kind of just a way of restating point one in the context of action scenes themselves, especially when he formulated point one thusly:

despite the craziness of the situation, despite the often superhuman feats, despite the frequent fudging of the laws of physics, Golden Age Action Movies present everything with a straight face. There’s no stylization or attempt to put quotation marks around any of the action.

In fact the two points are so blended together that I hope he tries to distinguish them a bit more in the futur, or else just mash ’em together. Anyway, regarding point #2 again, in terms of direct comparisons, he says that rather than Bourne Supremacy-style hand-held cameras and choppy editing (an “impressionistic” approach to shooting action) or John Woo-style operatic slow-mo and lighting (an “expressionistic” approach),

these movies aim for scenes that make sense spatially in terms of how everything is happening. Not that there isn’t fudging and not that the integrity isn’t really an illusion.

Of course. But I think where this criterion needs a little tightening is in the idea of the spacial integrity itself. Thinking of scenes from movies that obviously don’t fit in this category of action film–the House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill Vol. 1, the subway fight from The Matrix, the three-way lightsaber duel from The Phantom Menace, the treetop chase in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon–it’s clear that a sense of the spatial relationships between the characters themselves and between the characters and the objects in their environment is absolutely key. As a matter of fact I would assert that this is a necessary ingredient to any great action sequence. This is actually something I realized while reviewing countless superhero and genre comics every week for Wizard–a sense of place, a sense of space, a sense of where the characters are in relation to one another and to their surroundings, is the difference between, say, a memorable fight in Miller or Maleev or Lark Daredevil and some generic lasers-shooting-in-all-directions pose-fest from early-90s X-Men.

What I think differentiates the films of the Golden Age of American Action Movies from other great action movies isn’t so much the spatial integrity, which is always important, but how the bodies (or vehicles, which in these films are extensions of bodies) of the characters act within a space. Simply put, I’m saying that in these action movies, the actions and abilities of the combatants may strain credulity, but never do so in an openly obvious way. When John McClane ties a firehose around his waist, jumps from a rooftop, rappels against a glass window, shoots it out in midair and swings through it to safety, it’s something that’s unlikely to happen in real life to say the least, but it’s presented–in the performance, in the filming, in the special effects–as something a human being could conceivably do with his or her body given the right combination of strength, canniness, and luck. Compare that to bullet time, wire-fu, CGI Jedi powers–while when done right there’s still a palpable physicality to it all, it’s obviously intended to call attention to the superhumanness. The reaction from the audience there is “wow!” The reaction from the audience in the case of Golden Age Action is “whoa!” or more bluntly, “holy shit!”

It’s a really fascinating post and you should read it. I look forward to reading what else he has to say on the subject.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman defends the (in)famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage–the one of the big ape walking through a clearing in the forest that you’ve seen a million times–as its 40th anniversary approaches next month. Actually, his list of points in its favor is more a defense of the entire sighting than just the film itself, which has me a bit puzzled since if the film is fake, we can assume that accounts of the creature’s effect on the expedition’s horses or its aroma are also bogus. This is all interesting to me because Coleman is extremely hostile to pranks and forgeries, yet still feels that this frequently analyzed, frequently alleged-to-be-phony-by-John-Landis film is the real deal. Then again, since it’s one of the few remaining non-debunked blockbuster bits of evidence for a major cryptid out there (Surgeon’s Photograph, anyone?), its importance to the field, and therefore to the field’s practitioners, may have an effect on analyses thereof.

I try it again. It is a bit like touching a red-hot wire, but there is no heat, only the sensation of heat. There is no burn mark or blister.

Its makers claim this infernal machine is the modern face of warfare. It has a nice, friendly sounding name, Silent Guardian.

I am told not to call it a ray-gun, though that is precisely what it is (the term “pain gun” is maybe better, but I suppose they would like that even less).

And, to be fair, the machine is not designed to vaporise, shred, atomise, dismember or otherwise cause permanent harm.

But it is a horrible device nonetheless, and you are forced to wonder what the world has come to when human ingenuity is pressed into service to make a thing like this.

[…]

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation – similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker – that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury.

But anyone in the beam’s path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I’ve just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn’t bear thinking about.

“I have been in front of the full-sized system and, believe me, you just run. You don’t have time to think about it – you just run,” says George Svitak, a Raytheon executive.

–Michael Hanlon, “Run away the ray-gun is coming : We test US army’s new secret weapon,” the Daily Mail

What happens when it’s used on someone unable to run? It won’t be long before we find out, will it?

Shoot ‘Em Up is a shitty movie. I mean that literally: At least two scenes involve the feces of an infant being smeared across someone or something in all its brownish-green, Vertigo Comics color palette glory. The ostensible reason for this is because the movie involves a gunsel and a prostitute attempting to save a baby from assassins, and hence the baby shit. But the real reason is for the filmmakers to show us that that’s how far out they’ll go! That’s if you didn’t catch the part where they jammed a carrot through a guy’s throat, or through a guy’s eye. Or where a john looks up from Monica Bellucci’s awe-inspiring breasts with her milk dribbling down his chin. Or where another john moans and groans up against a dumpster as Bellucci sucks his cock off frame. Or where a woman who’s just given birth is shot in the head and left in a stairway by the hero with one breast exposed, with said exposed breast of a dead woman getting a close-up as our hero leaves, and another as the bad guy takes a look at her, and a third and final one a while later as the bad guy checks it out, lasciviously fondles it, then sniffs his hand after the fact.

In other words, Shoot ‘Em Up is an icky movie in which the shit-smearing is all too appropriate, because yes it’s far out, but it’s also unpleasant and who wants to see that? The fact that it’s knowingly far out–it is called Shoot ‘Em Up, after all–only makes things worse. Why should Paul Giamatti engage in necrophiliac groping in a movie whose ostensible goal is to be Kung Fu Hustle with shooting instead of kicking?

Maybe that tonal inconsistency will hook fans of stuff like The Host, but for me the laughs (well, “laughs,” because nothing in this is terribly funny except for one bit about drivers who don’t signal while changing lanes, a bit that’s immediately undone by a bout of wanton property destruction that is a lot more inconsiderate than our hero’s pet peeve about signaling), anyway for me the “laughs” don’t leaven the icky stuff at all–they make me feel like I’m being either pandered to or condescended to or both by that icky stuff by filmmakers who know better. I got the same vibe from the gun-control message that pops up rather incongruously in the fourth act. I totally get the point–there’s nothing about enjoying gun violence in the movies that makes gun violence okay in real life–but first of all that’s a truism, and second of all, again, there might as well be a subtitle reading “we’re slumming” running across the bottom of the screen every time Clive Owen shoots someone in the torso.

Thanks to the periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas that my friends and I get together for every few months–in which we gather at someone’s house, eat junk food, get drunk, and enjoy a triple bill of extremely macho movies–I’ve seen quite a few action films of ’80s vintage in the recent past. At last I understand why Reagan-era culture warriors thought movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. This is because movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. Rambo, Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Tango & Cash, Road House–it’s almost difficult to describe how gratuitously violent these films are, how much these films are unimaginable without violence, how much the violence is woven unthinkingly into what makes them work so goddamn well, unless you’ve seen them. They make Shoot ‘Em Up look like a Noel Coward comedy of manners. How? Allow me to demonstrate with this scene involving Mikhail, the bad guy from the 1985 Chuck Norris vs. invading Communists actioner Invasion U.S.A.. (Originally found at the wonderful So Bad It’s Good.)

Don’t bother trying to out-batshit-crazy a movie that contains a scene like that. You can’t! It isn’t knowing, it isn’t camp, it isn’t funny, it isn’t pretty, it isn’t prettified with in-jokes, irony, or Looney Tunes references. It’s approximately 90 minutes of people being shot to death with machine guns–cops, bystanders, women in shopping malls, office workers, Cubans, fucking everybody. It’s insane, a gleeful kind of crazy you can only get from the movies. I love it. I’m sure it was made as a cheap cash-in that no one thought twice about, but that too is part of its magic. It is what it is, like Yahweh. You go po-faced or you don’t go at all. The second you add wink-wink nudge-nudge you confront the audience with idea that on some level you know better. And to hell with that.

I don’t know, part of my principled defense of those indefensible action flicks may just be blog bullshitting. I think those ’80s action movies are extraordinary films for how guilelessly manipulative they are, is mainly what I’m saying–today, in the post-Bay/Bruckheimer world, the popcorn explosion flicks are so much slicker about it, or they put it in quotes like Shoot ‘Em Up does. And maybe I’m inventing a principled objection to Shoot ‘Em Up where none exists. I think that ultimately my real beefs with the movie are simple. The jokes aren’t funny (late-period Pierce Brosnan Bond wordplay, mostly). Worse, the action isn’t really innovative or well-choreographed or even particularly bloody. For every memorably sanguine offing, there’s like forty miscellaneous goons getting popped in their black leather jackets in medium shot. It’s like the squib shipment got sent to the wrong set, and maybe if I go see that movie where the Rock has to take care of a little girl, all of a sudden her ballet class will erupt in a Wild Bunch orgy of bloodletting. There’s certainly nothing that’ll push boundaries or stick in your head like Sin City or 300 or Kill Bill, to use three idiosyncratic American action films to which this one will inevitably be compared. (I’d compare it to the John Woo Hong Kong action flicks that have been cited as inspiration, but I don’t think much of those either, to be honest. End already, Hard Boiled!) If there were, that’d go a long way to replicating the gonzo thrill you get from watching Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren punch each other in the face for ten minutes at the end of Rocky IV, but you don’t get anything like that. You don’t even see Monica Bellucci’s tits or Clive Owen’s ass. Instead, you get Paul Giamatti groping the exposed nipple of a mother who was shot in the head minutes after getting birth, and a baby’s shit smeared on a henchman’s face. The Bugs Bunny riffs can’t help you.

Ain’t It Cool News’s Moriarty is the site’s man in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s much-beloved novella. He’s seen an early cut and, unsurprisingly, is in total fucking love with it and wants to marry it and have a million of its tentacled babies. As good as this movie could be, it could also be really, really bad–slick and hamfisted and predictable and bad–and I’m reserving judgment.