* I don’t have any D&D related puns to deploy, but regardless, rest in peace, Gary Gygax. I didn’t play D&D as a kid, but I have very fond memories of jumping completely cold into a campaign some buddies of mine had going the summer after my freshman year in college and learning on the job, drinking Sam Adams and listening to the Braveheart soundtrack. My DM cooked up an amazing twist ending that had us all completely flabbergasted. For those memories, and for your role in paving the aesthetic road for synthesizing a variety of nerd traditions into a stew based solely on what happens to be awesome about them, god bless you, Gary Gygax. (Via Brian Hibbs.)

* The cast of Lost asks the creators of Lost their burning questions. I like this feature a lot because a) it shows that the actors have as little idea of what’s really going on as we do; b) the formatting makes it really easy to skip past questions you don’t wanna know the answers to; c) some of the answers are genuinely informative. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Bruce Baugh considers the critical consensus on Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend…and agrees with it!

* Eve Tushnet takes a cue from last week’s Horror Roundtable and picks five filmmakers for her dream horror anthology movie. Let’s just say she gets a little more adventurous than John Carpenter.

* Star Wars, Saul Bass-style. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* Finally, a press release about an art opening for the great Teratoid Heights cartoonist and Fort Thunder alum Mat Brinkman:

MAT BRINKMAN

SOLO EXHIBITION: RV AND TRAILER DRAWINGS

March 7 – April 6, 2008

OPENING RECEPTION with the artist: Friday, March 7, 6-9 pm

At certain times in history something unexpected, groundbreaking, and ahead of its time arises. From the eternal dark rivers of Providence, RI came Fort Thunder. Under its pure and unrestricted banner founders Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, together with the legions of unbridled creativity, fought against the quietness of modern mediocrity throughout the dark age of the 1990’s. Despite its demolition in 2002, the legacy of Fort Thunder continues to inspire a generation of artists who keep the true and hallowed flame of the underground in art alive.

LOYAL is proud to present this highly anticipated solo exhibition of new drawings by Mat Brinkman. Darkness will descend upon the opening night when the true defender of black metal, E from Watain, will bring holy damnation from the vinyl players. Pure hellish superiority!

Brinkman crushes predictability and creates a new order of storytelling. With his rough yet highly sophisticated lines, Brinkman’s stripped-down, ink-on-paper drawings use little and tell much. Demon-ghouls with razor claws and cloud-shaped entities bound through an unearthly labyrinthine darkness made up of cell-like squirming lines, revealing primordial undertones in our contemporary world.

In the year 2002, the four person outfit Forcefield (Fort Thunder residents Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg and Ara Peterson) was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2006 a retrospective of Providence artists in the exhibition Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present was held at the RISD Museum. The exhibition included 1000’s of posters made for events at Fort Thunder and at places like Hilarious Attic and Dirt Palace.

Teratoid Heights, the first collection of Brinkman’s work was published in the summer of 2003 by Highwater Books. A classic of dark and heavy energy, Teratoid Heights is oblivious to the passing of time in its epic, monolithic spirit. New work by Brinkman will be featured in the forthcoming volume of LOYAL Magazine.

LOYAL

Torsgatan 53 & 59

113 37 Stockholm

Sweden

phone +46 (0)8 32 44 91

cell +46 (0)73 322 9289

info@galleriloyal.com

http://www.galleriloyal.com

If I were in Stockholm, I’d go to this, as the saying goes.

Part survival horror, part historical fiction, part training manual for arctic naval expeditions, part Jaws on Ice, Dan Simmons’s The Terror is a peculiar book. The story (though I didn’t know this until after I finished it) is a heavily fictionalized account of the voyage of two real ships from the British Navy, the Erebus and the Terror, to seek the Northwest Passage amid the frozen arctic seas above Canada during the mid-1840s. Bouncing from character to character to present a spectrum of viewpoints, primarily from officers and petty officers, its main narrative thrust is provided by a rigorous accounting of the logistics of such an expedition, and an equally meticulous cataloguing of the myriad paths it takes to disaster: subzero temperatures, treacherous ice, frightening storms and blizzards, food poisoning, scurvy, fire, starvation, murder, and most importantly, alpha predators. I don’t want to tip the book’s hand any more than that, but suffice it to say that the men come to believe–indeed have already come to believe, given the book’s initial in medias res set-up–that a “thing on the ice” is stalking them, with intentions more malevolent than mere predation and abilities more deadly than (literally) the average bear.

The book is very, very long, probably way longer than it needed to be; all those technical terms about ice conditions and parts of the ship and who answers to whom on board eat up page after page. Yet I don’t recall ever feeling bored, or coming to a point where I felt “that right there–that could have been cut.” I couldn’t imagine writing a book stuffed with that much technical detail, let alone making an entertaining genre effort out of it, but Simmons makes it feel so smooth that you hardly notice how stuffed to the gills it is with the fruits of his research, even if you don’t know a serac from a fo’c’sle. But maybe that’s the problem with it: It’s constructed in such a way that every detail seems equally vital, meaning that nothing ultimately is vital. I suppose the slow avalanche of detail is in its way evocative of the day-by-day grind the arctic conditions, natural and otherwise, take on the men and their ships, but compared to something like The Ruins or the Barker and King short stories of which that book is reminiscent, that palpable panicked breakdown momentum is missing; here it’s more a resigned despair. Which is valid, I suppose, but to me less compelling.

Certain elements do stand out against that blinding white background. For one thing, Simmons has a refreshing tendency to zig when you expect him to zag with his characters. A racist stuffed shirt turns out to have risked his career to help abused prisoners; a stereotypical evil homosexual is offset by the introduction of two lovers who are among both the noblest, smartest, and most psychologically complicated members of the crew; a cynical drunk turns out to be a stoic mensch; a squaresville naif delivers the most memorable and cutting rebuff to the book’s bad guys in the whole novel. While the book is never scary in the keep-you-up-at-night sense, the thought of wrestling with the notion that you are most likely going to freeze or starve or rot to death over slow months and years on the ice if you don’t get eaten first can certainly give you something to stew about as you drift off to sleep. And there are memorable horror visuals both operatic (the Carnivale) and insidiously subtle (what the sledge party sees off in the distance throughout their trek). Finally, like those characters, the whole book takes a wild trip off into left field for its final act, something hinted at only slightly by a pair of feints in that direction much earlier on (the first of which, now that I think of it, would have been much better left unrevealed until this final act). To me, this was the book’s best, most unique, and ballsiest section, beating out even the cat-and-mouse suspense of its long-running mutiny subplot. The only problem is that it rather completely undercuts the book’s menace, and that is a very big problem. After all, whether you’re referring to the thing on the ice or the fear of oblivion, you’re talking about the title character here.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about assembling directors for the ultimate horror anthology film. Frankly I wouldn’t care what kind of movies my crew made.

* Here’s the Iron Man trailer that ran during last night’s Lost episode. It’s pretty much as note-perfect for the character and concept as everything else we’ve seen from this movie so far. The likes of Mark Millar and J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada should be thoroughly chastened by this. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Millar, while I’m sure the dialogue in his Kick-Ass #1 is just as wooden and devoid of insight into actual human behavior and popular culture as Ian Brill says, I think Ian’s really overreaching when he keeps heaping scorn on the notion that high school kids don’t read superhero comics. Um, I did. It’s certainly a hip notion to suggest that they don’t, but not one that is borne out by reality if pretty much any trip I’ve ever taken to any comic store ever is any indication.

* Finally:

In the confession, Underwood said he lured the girl, his upstairs neighbor, into his apartment in Purcell, hit her with a cutting board, smothered her with his hands, sexually assaulted the body and nearly cut her head off as part of a fantasy involving cannibalism.

“I wanted to know what it tasted like, and just the thought of eating someone was appealing to me,” Underwood said in the confession.

[…]

Underwood told FBI he hit the girl her over the head with a wooden cutting board while she was watching television and playing with his pet rat.

Agents asked Underwood what the girl said after he hit her.

“That’s something that’s haunted me forever since it happened,” he said. “She started yelling, I’m sorry,’ which I’m like, What is she sorry for? She didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. I’m the one that should be sorry.”‘

—“Jury takes minutes to convict cannibal killer,” AP, CNN.com

* Water monsters on the march! Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a 50-foot prehistoric carnivorous aquatic reptile called a pliosaur, the biggest such creature ever found. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* Ain’t It Cool News reports that banes of Peter Jackson’s existence (and the existence of Lord of the Rings fans everywhere) Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne have jumped/been pushed from New Line, which is now a full sub-unit of Warner Bros.

* Here’s yet another striking poster for The Ruins. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Here’s a nifty eight-minute recap video to bring everyone up to speed on Battlestar Galactica in time for Season Four. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Heidi MacDonald points out the irony inherent in a comic about the Holocaust, an atrocity perpetrated by people who believed other people were inferior to them by virtue of their Jewishness, by Dave Sim, a person who believes other people are inferior to him by virtue of their femaleness. Tom Spurgeon points out the foolishness of the position that one should separate evaluations of Sim’s work from evaluations of Sim’s ideas since the former is so thoroughly informed by the latter. And I point out that his work is ugly these days anyway.

* I liked this World War II poster that Andrew Sullivan dug up:

* Finally, no Lost links tonight, for some reason!

* This is what heaven looks like:

A staircase made of bookshelves. I am a person who longs for shelf space like Gollum pined for his Precious, so this practically moved me to tears. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Details are emerging about The De2scent, the idiotically titled, Neil Marshall-less sequel to Neil Marshall’s truly terrific horror movie The Descent, most notably that it will star the main character from the first movie, which is…interesting, given the events of that film.

* This deeply, deeply unnerving video from Swedish dance act The Knife beats even Jack Palance doing one-armed push-ups in terms of being the best award-acceptance speech I’ve ever seen. (Via Pitchfork, who translate it from the Swedish.)

* Life imitates art: Two people were stabbed during a screening of the regular-people-run-amok horror film The Signal in Fullerton, California. (*) It doesn’t say so in the article, but the caption for the video report says it happened during a stabbing scene.

* Here is the only positive review of George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead I’ve seen so far, by B-Sol at Vault of Horror.

* Dark Horse will be publishing hard-copy collections of Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood. I must confess that I learned a long time ago I don’t have the ability to follow a daily comic of any kind, but I’ve been holding out hope that maybe the complete strip would be published in book form one day, and I guess we’re one step closer to that. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Speaking of Spurge, here’s a thought of the day from him that I’m still mulling over:

Does all horror stem from a betrayal of intimacy?

I would say that some of it does, but not all. Indeed I’d say that a lot of horror comes from forced intimacy, which I guess is in itself a form of betrayal.

* While this New York Post article on Lost bears the obvious scars of an editor who doesn’t know the show very well, it nevertheless has an interesting broad-strokes breakdown of what Seasons Four, Five, and Six are “about” from showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. (Via The Tail Section.)

* Katherine Follet at Not Coming to a Theater Near You has posted an evocative review of Robert Frank’s legendary lost Rolling Stones tour documentary Cocksucker Blues. It’s a pan, not just of the movie but of the conduct of its subjects, all of which makes me want to see it more.

* Comparing Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to Daredevil villain Mr. Fear is about as close to comicsblogging as Jim Henley comes these days, but hey, I’ll take it.

(*) Perhaps they wanted to know where they could go to get their jeans embroidered.

If you’d like to see my first published joke at the Onion’s video site, please click here and keep your eye on the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen for an item about a sixth grader.

Last night the Missus and I spent a lovely evening courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, watching Psycho, The Birds, and Poltergeist in a row. As a marathon, it was not flattering to its concluding film. Granted, Hitch is a tough act to follow, especially with those movies–she and I were astonished anew at Anthony Perkins’s heartbreakingly naturalistic performance, the still-shocking violence of the shower scene, Martin Balsam’s oh-crap-I’m-in-the-wrong-movie private dick, the sheer relentlessness of bird attacks on children, the proto-Night of the Living Dead house under siege, and on and on and on. By comparison, Poltergeist is pretty freaking stupid.

I’m honestly kind of baffled as to why that movie has the scary reputation it does. Maybe it’s “the curse” and the tragic fates of Dominique Dunne and Heather O’Rourke? I guess it’s the nature of the film’s scariest images–simply put, they’re tailor-made to scare the living shit out of any little kid who saw the movie while still in grade school. Evil clowns, evil toys, evil backyard trees, getting sucked into the closet, eerie TVs left on in the dark, parents who can’t save you…that’s all straight outta Spielberg’s eight-year-old id, from what I understand. But for grown-ups, it’s really rather weak.

And it’s not just the goofy and boring nature of the fright images the filmmakers deploy–it’s how haphazardly they deploy them, with seemingly no regard to a crescendo of escalating horror. Once you’ve seen lasers shoot out of the wall, who cares that the chairs are rearranging themselves? How do you expect the audience to process a sudden leap from slip-sliding across the kitchen floor like a cool carnival ride to a man-eating tree and a haunting with the power to trap a kid in another dimension–in the space of a few hours?

By the time the paranormal investigators show up, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are treating the disappearance of their daughter following their son’s near-murder by an evil Ent and an ongoing paranormal riot in the kids’ bedroom like a particularly unpleasant bedbug infestation. So long, high stakes. No one’s reaction to what’s going on seems commensurate with the magnitude of the supernatural occurrences they’re witnessing, even though the script goes out of its way to downplay the investigators’ most notable prior experiences. And again, it bounces super-rapidly between novelty-act stuff like old jewelry dropping from the ceiling and a Hulk action figure flying around, to grand-guignol horror like a maggot-infested chicken wing and a guy tearing his own face off, back to Spielbergian “wow!” moments like a ghost parade down the staircase. I don’t know if this is a product of the uneasy collaborative dynamic between nominal director Tobe “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Hooper and screenwriter/producer/de facto director Steven Spielberg or what, but it plays havoc with the film’s pacing and leeches the pizzazz out of the scares. And once Zelda Rubenstein shows up and they go through that absurd physical business with the tennis balls and the rope and the bathwater, I was yawning and ready to change the channel. (For a far more effective combination of the supernatural with physically-verifiable science-fiction trappings, see Ghostbusters.) Also, if you can figure out why they go through all that trouble to establish that she’s the real deal only to have her erroneously pronounce the house free of hauntings anymore, please fill me in.

But you know what is compelling about the movie? All that gloriously weird suburbia subtext! I’m not even sure the filmmakers realized what a bizarre beneath-the-surface look at three-kids-and-a-dog middle-classness they were providing. You obviously don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what they were getting at with building developments on top of graveyards–in terms of metaphorical subtlety it’s up their with Dawn of the Dead‘s zombies in a shopping mall–or by opening with the Star Spangled Banner. But what about the fact that JoBeth Williams’s extravangly MILFtastic mother is 32 and her oldest daughter is 16? What about the pot-smoking scene, or the alcoholic desperation of Craig T. Nelson’s football-watching buddy’s beer run? What about the oldest daughter showing up at the very end with two huge, unexplained hickeys? What about Mom getting a kick out of the construction workers hitting on her daughter? What about Williams spending much of the climactic sequence with her panties on display? What about the seemingly endless amount of conspicuously consumed stuff in the kids’ bedroom? What about that vagina tunnel into the afterworld? I don’t think it’s at all surprising that the sequence that’s the most effectively scary, the climax, is the one where this stuff all comes to the fore most directly. I almost feel like when people remember Poltergeist, they’re transferring their impressions of that strange, and therefore frightening, final sequence onto the rest of the movie.

I’ve just been informed that all the WizardUniverse.com pieces of mine linked over in the sidebar–interviews with Damon Lindelof, Eric Reynolds, Johnny Ryan, Jordan Crane, and so on–have disappeared, along with, it seems, everything up on the site prior to the redesign they did a few weeks ago. I’ll try to dig them up and repost them here, I guess.

* There’s a third poster for The Ruins out there, an alternate take on one of the two earlier posters–which prompts this utterly baffling statement from Bloody Disgusting:

What makes this one sheet different (and better) than the one posted earlier is that the woman on the poster has her mouth open.

Um, okay.

* According to Variety, the U.K. theater chain Odeon is refusing to show Rambo for undisclosed “commercial reasons.” The Variety article does not seem to suggest that this has anything to do with Rambo‘s totally awesome violence.

* Zachary Wigon at The House Next Door bemoans what he feels is a lack of critical focus on content (as opposed to formal technique) in No Country for Old Men. In my experience, beyond a half-hearted sentence about how pretty it is or, perhaps, the dopey argument that its technical proficiency makes it a bad movie, just the opposite has been true, and everyone sits around trying to figure out what it all meeeeeeeans based on who was in what hotel room or whether Chigurh was carrying a weapon in such and such scene or whether the words “dog collar” are an Abu Ghraib reference and on and on. I’ve found the vast majority of writing on this film useless in its tendency toward “decoding” the story, which I think is why I haven’t done any myself despite the fact that it was my favorite movie of the year. Sometimes a Chigurh is just a Chigurh.

* And sometimes Chigurh goes to Arby’s.

* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is about the best and worst characters in horror. We have such sights to show you…

* Lost link number one: An enlightening Jeff Jensen interview with show honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse at Entertainment Weekly that clarifies some unintentionally ambiguous points from last week’s episode regarding the chronological order of flashbacks, a certain notable bracelet, and lots more. Quote of the day:

The only true canon is the show itself.

Then explain the goddamn numbers in the goddamn show instead of the stupid ARG! Okay, venting over.

* Lost link number two: The Tail Section clears up some erroneous reporting regarding Lost‘s scheduling–they are airing the eight pre-strike episodes all in a row, and the second batch will all be airing at 10pm.

* The Ruins link number one: new trailer!

* The Ruins link number two: New posters!

Trailer and one-sheets via Bloody Disgusting.

* Comics Bulletin’s Robert Murray talks to writer Simon Oliver and editor Jonathan Vankin of the canceled-before-its-time Vertigo series The Exterminators. To me this series, rough edges and all, is the most interesting thing going on at Vertigo today, and the fact that it has to call it a day 20 issues earlier than its planned 50-issue run is a real downer. I guess they can’t all be Y: The Last Man or Lost. However, it does at least give you a better financial impetus to invest in the trade paperbacks. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* The mostly not-so-good Gawker Media “sci-fi” blog io9 has a coup of an interview with Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page. The three-decades-old legacy of H.R. Giger’s Alien design lingers on. (Via Whitney Matheson.

* Stacie Ponder calls out the genre-nerd internet for its weirdly negative sight-unseen reaction to Neil Marshall’s retro-apocalyptic thriller Doomsday. To me this kneejerk reaction is just part and parcel of other dopey horror-fanboy shibboleths: gore is good, PG-13 and M. Night Shyamalan and any trend that doesn’t involve constant on-screen dismemberment are bad, we must support Our Genre, etc.

* The new Meathaus anthology, featuring Jim Rugg, Ross Campbell, Dave Kiersh, Brandom Graham, Farel Dalrymple, James Jean, the Hanuka Bros., Dash Shaw, and Ralph Bakshi (!), looks pretty pretty. I will however admit some reticence, because in the post-Kramers Ergot and Mome world, the content bar has really been raised–there’s more to anthologies than pretty drawings. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

David “Fight Club” Fincher is directing the film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole, the best horror comic of all time. And the project has migrated from MTV Films to its parent company, Paramount itself. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* NBC is abandoning the traditional September-May TV season next year in favor of the 52-week rollout that’s been the de facto model for the past few years anyway. In terms of the few shows I care about I think this is good, as arbitrary scheduling decisions should have less of an impact on storytelling decisions, although I guess none of it really matters until Nielsen rejiggers sweeps.

* Stacie “Final Girl” Ponder rather hilariously interviews American Psycho screenwriter Guinevere Turner. Definitely check out the photo captions.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror rightfully praises Robert Carlyle’s jaw-droppingly powerful performance in 28 Weeks Later as Oscar-worthy in an alternate universe where such performances get noticed by anyone who doesn’t also happen to have a zombie escape plan committed to memory.

* Man, someone give this guy a self-published comic about women and fashion! (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Ken Lowery tries to explain why he doesn’t like “torture porn,” but in lumping together and subsequently dismissing a whole slew of movies including the Saw series, the two Hostel movies, Turistas, The Devil’s Rejects, Chaos, and so on, he disregards separating the wheat from the chaff in any meaningful way, and moreover discusses only one of those films in any kind of detail, so even if his argument is that there is no wheat, that’s not at all clear. I think one day we’ll be as unlikely to hear these kinds of arguments from genre buffs as we currently are to hear them say “slasher movies are no good” as though there’s no difference between Halloween and Jason Takes Manhattan.

* Finally, nightmare fuel: A deep-sea video camera captures images of dozens of giant sea spiders.