Regarding the announcement that Lost will end in 2010 after three more 16-episode seasons, I want to point out that I honestly thought to myself “Oh great, now I have to make sure to live until May of 2010 so that I can see how it ends.” I’ve previously thought this with the Star Wars prequels, the Lord of the Rings movies, and The Sopranos. Now it’s a race between Lost and Battlestar Galactica as to when the earliest point at which I’ll be comfortable dying will arrive.

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.

My favorite comic book creator ever, Frank Miller, takes on the Hollywood establishment, squeamish DC and WB executives, critics of his recent balls-to-the-wall Batman books, black ice, and, of course, The Terrorists in this really rather awesome profile in the L.A. Times. It’s refreshing to read an article about someone from comics in a mainstream publication that can intelligently articulate the differences between the work of the creator in question and that of comparable contemporaries–in this case, Miller’s use of space is contrasted with that of John Byrne and George Perez, believe it or not. I’m so impressed that I’ll forgive them for comparing The Dark Knight Returns to that graphic novel masterpiece The Watchman. (Hat tip: Cookie Jill at The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.)

With Hulk, Lee brings what has been churning in his oeuvre for a decade to a boil. In the commercial American film industry, it takes guts, after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to let a man of color (albeit green) take on the United States military in the desert and survive. Given Hollywood’s bottom line of profitability, the fact that Lee would let an out of control non-white “alien” rip army helicopters out of the sky and escape into the camouflage of a Third World jungle needs to be given credit. The A-bomb be damned–the Hulk condenses the Viet Cong and Osama Bin Laden/Saddam Hussein into one gargantuan challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

–Gina Marchetti, “Hollywood/Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk,'” FilmInt

Um, okay.

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz, who by the way is killing the game with his Sopranos recaps.)

I had a conversation with a buddy of mine this week that really made something click for me. After hearing how much I liked Hostel, he warned me that Saw, a movie I haven’t seen but to which Hostel is frequently compared, actually really sucks. He then worried that because of its success it’d cast a long shadow over horror movies. Suddenly I realized that while this may be true in terms of the horror movies that the studios get made, it doesn’t have any long-term effects on the health of the genre itself, because horror aficionados ignore the crap and concentrate only on what they like. So sure, you saw a million Scream knock-offs in the 90s. Then you saw a bunch of Sixth Sense clones. Then a bunch of Ring rip-offs. Now, I suppose, we’re on to Saw and Hostel wannabes. But in each case, while commercial product was cranked out, people who really cared about the genre focused on what worked, eschewed putting out ripoffs, and continued to help the genre develop and grow. And this will always be the case, no matter how many bad torture movies get thrown at high-schoolers.

Sean: What do you think of Lost this season, anyway? We haven’t really talked about it before. Do you think it’s lost momentum? That’s what people are saying.

Sean’s Missus: …I think it’s different than it used to be. I don’t think it’s lost momentum.

Sean: Do you think it’s better? Do you think it’s worse?

Sean’s Missus: I just think it’s changed. It’s not better or worse, just different.

Sean: A lot of people have complained about that this season.

Sean’s Missus: But shows have to change as they go on.

Sean: You’re right–it’d just be treading the same territory over and over if it was the same as it used to be. Still, people think it’s too Others-centric now…

Sean’s Missus: I’m sure The Sopranos has changed, hasn’t it?

Sean: Absolutely, and people complain about that, too.

Sean’s Missus: Okay, but look at The X-Files. That show didn’t change, and look how that turned out.

The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle, bless him, was very patient with me during the months I’d bust Hostel‘s chops without actually having seen it. Now that I have, and changed my tune accordingly, he writes regarding my earlier reticence:

I can completely understand people not wanting to see it because of the gore, or even the context of the gore. I find many slasher and giallo films to be far worse in depicting brutality and demeaning acts against human beings, but the idea of someone being tied down and having things happen to them as opposed to, I don’t know, running through the woods and being impaled on a tree by a machete really freaks some people out. And that’s fine. I don’t think anyone should expose themselves to something they can’t handle (I know I do). I just couldn’t get over the idea that most people criticizing Hostel hadn’t seen it! I mean, House of Wax was probably more cringe-worthy in its violence then Hostel, for me at least. Hostel is a long movie with little flashes of violence, not a non-stop parade of carnage. And it plays out like a straight-up suspense story, as if Hitchcock decided to throw in some splatter. That whole final segment, where Paxton is trying to escape with very little dialogue and that fantastic score, had me at the edge of my seat, and not because I wanted to see someone’s head smashed in.

As for Roth’s comments on the movie, I understand where you’re coming from. I find that happens quite often, in that the creator either accidentally made something that was better then him, or, more likely, he or she just isn’t a very good orator. I lean more towards the second cause mainly because I’m a very visual person, and I find communicating my thoughts through words to be extremely difficult. If Roth, or Tarantino, or most of those guys could shoot a small film whenever they wanted to make a statement to the press they’d probably come off a whole lot better.

His point about the context of the gore in a torture film is a really good one. Without the element of a chase or an ambush or the other usual settings for violence in a horror movie, the brutality is kind of in its purest form, and it’s off-putting in a way that even really over-the-top violence in other contexts just isn’t.

The final sequence to which Steven refers reminded me a lot of similar sequences from Children of Men. Now THERE’S a double feature.

Finally, which is it: Did Roth make a movie that was better than him, or is he just kind of an inarticulate doofus when it comes to talking about his work? I’m really not sure.

Long-time reader Josh, noticing my love of all things wet and frightening, alerted me to Peter Watts’s undersea, online sci-fi mythos, Rifters.com. Surprisingly, I’m not much of a science fiction fan when it comes to reading–unless you count 1984, I don’t think I own a single science fiction novel–so I’m not sure this very hard SF is my cup of meat. Still, I do love me some water monsters, and I’m always interested in ways the Internet can be used to tell scary stories, so I’ll be digging around. Perhaps you might want to do so too.