* Another lovely one-sheet poster for The Midnight Meat Train (and hey, the definite article is back!) has been released. Note the refreshingly unique presence of a meat tenderizer as the weapon of choice. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Go listen to Tom Spurgeon, Dan Nadel, and Jeet Heer in a must-listen critical roundtable on the comics radio show Inkstuds. (Just make sure to skip past the opening 12 minutes or so of audiocollage.) I particularly enjoyed Heer’s observation that comics’ growth tends to be in fits and starts and dead-ends rather than cumulative. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* BC at Horror Movie a Day’s take on Dragon Wars lines up pretty neatly with mine. He also points out the presence of Chris “Hank Jennings” Mulkey, who between this and Cloverfield is becoming quite the battle-scarred veteran of giant-monster invasions of major U.S. metropolitan areas.

* Rob Humanick disliked Saw II and really effin’ hated Saw III.

* Finally, in perhaps the most horror-inflected of all the major religions’ annual rites, Shiite Muslims royally fuck themselves up in Ashoura processions, some of which have been bloodily attacked by millennialist cults.

It’s difficult to separate an evaluation of Cloverfield the movie from Cloverfield the viral marketing phenomenon, Cloverfield the latest capitalization on Lost‘s ur-absentee father J.J. Abrams’s largely unearned reputation as a genre hitmaker (from where I’m sitting he’s batting 1 for 4–Felicity?

Alias? MI:3?), Cloverfield the source of Harry Knowles’s latest laughably hyperbolic panegryic. But I think it’s worth doing so because Cloverfield the movie, like The Mist and I Am Legend before it, is an example of close-but-no-cigar survival horror worth investigating. Indeed, you could see those three films as sort of a not-quite-successful post-post-9/11 monster-movie trilogy, with this one displaying strengths and weaknesses of both its predecessors.

For example, it shares with The Mist some truly harrowing you-are-there camerawork. It’s easy to dismiss the first-person construction of the film as, well, easy, and indeed this is being done hither and yon, but if it was such an obvious idea why had no one done it on this scale before? The technique works. It’s immediate and intense, and great way to convey the disaster in a relatable fashion, not to mention parcel out the reveal of the monster in a deliciously slow build. And from a pragmatic standpoint, it saves on the CGI end of things.

Speaking of, it also shares with The Mist excellent, frightening, weird creature design. God only knows what that giant monster is supposed to be–it really doesn’t look like anything, which besides being cool also reinforces the unresolved mystery of its origin. Even the little parasite-y critters, frequently the weak point of any genre movie’s digital arsenal, are scary and convincing. (I especially liked their icky gobble-gobble noises.) Moreover there are no egregious moments like The Mist‘s opening tentacle attack to make you feel like you’re watching Jar-Jar Binks on the rampage. And once again, it’s nice to see non-humanoid monsters presented not only as physically frightening in the thriller fashion of Jurassic Park, but existentially frightening in the fashion of all great horror antagonists, from Pazuzu to Leatherface to Pinhead to Godzilla. Finally, unlike The Mist, the movie admirably avoids explanations of the beast from conveniently knowledgeable soldiers.

Meanwhile, Cloverfield shares I Am Legend‘s beautiful and terrible use of ruined New York City as a locus of horror. If anything Cloverfield pushes the 9/11 imagery even harder and further than IAL, and to memorable and disturbing effect. As I’ve mentioned before, quite a few times I think, I’m not one of these people who wants to deny filmmakers access to our era’s defining trauma, and certainly not because they dare to use monsters in the process. In fact the moments that freaked me out the worst in this movie were all from the destruction of New York end of the spectrum rather than the monstrous one–the collapse of (I think?) the Woolworth Building, the wave of dust chasing our heroes into a convenience store, the lingering, disbelieving shot of the Statue of Liberty’s severed head, the panic on the Brooklyn Bridge (I made that walk myself during the big blackout a few years back), the sight of a B-12 bomber dropping a payload on midtown Manhattan. It’s terror, alright.

But also like I Am Legend, Cloverfield ends up unsure of itself, backing away from real horror–the horror of failure, impotence, death–and presenting the audience with a too-flattering portrait of the resilience of the human heart. Unfortunately, unlike the final-five-minutes foul-up that marred the earlier movie, Cloverfield makes this the heart of the whole affair: We follow a twentysomething guy and his friends on his valiant quest to rescue the girl he loves (with whom he had hardly spoken, for reasons unknown, following a magical one night stand and day at Coney Island the month before). The notion that in the face of a monstrous apocalypse we’d drop everything and in a living portrait of competence rescue our beloved is an extremely attractive ideal, but it’s both soporific and sophomoric. (Literally–I’m pretty sure I wrote something that operated along similar lines in college.) It reduces other people to characters in your personal heroic saga, where you’re the knight in shining armor and they’re waiting to be rescued. The filmmakers never challenge our hero’s blandishing view of himself in the slightest.

And in choosing the least challenging (to writer and audience alike) character arc possibly engendered by this genre, the filmmakers end up serving up an emotionally undercooked, flatlined bunch of protagonists, a fault it shares with The Mist and that film’s unchanging archetypes. You don’t get bored with these characters like you do with The Mist, since the action here is comparatively non-stop. (Unless you really just can’t stand these yuppies, but I don’t understand that hostility–these cats and kittens are basically everyone I know in New York, myself included.) But when the facile characterization does stand out, whoo boy, it’s some grade-A government cheese. The cameraman’s wisecracks, the goofy would-be heartstring-tugging reunion scene (when she woke up, a lot of people in the audience I was in laughed, and for good reason–it was laughable!), and most especially the film’s final scene felt like an undergraduate’s view of love amid tragedy, like Celine Dion might start singing “My Heart Will Go On” over the final credits. I’m not insisting on nihilism, mind you–some of the greatest apocalyptic survival-horror movies ever, the original Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later and Aliens among them, largely eschew the “no one learns anything, everybody dies” approach, to spectacular results. I am insisting on characters who don’t confirm their–and our–first emotional impressions of how they will behave.

Did it live up to the hype? No. I don’t know what could, aside from, like, a good Godfather sequel or The Hobbit or something. I feel a little resentful of being coaxed into caring as much about the movie as I did in fact–The Mist and I Am Legend avoided that level of manipulation, and good for them. I guess I’d say I’m glad I saw it, you should probably see it too if you’re interested in the kinds of issues addressed by the movie, and like me you’ll probably end up back at home, patiently waiting for another monster movie to deliver what this one and its predecessors promised.

I drink your milkshake! -Daniel Plainview

I drink your milkshake, even though I opposed drinking your milkshake four years ago. -Mitt Romney

I drink your milkshake, but only if the Bible says it’s allowed. -Mike Huckabee

I may drink your milkshake for another 100 years, if that’s what it takes. -John McCain

I drank a milkshake on 9/11. -Rudy Giuliani

I’ll drink your milkshake a few months after everyone else does. -Fred Thompson

I drink your milkshake, but I’m paying for it with gold. -Ron Paul

I change your milkshake. -Barack Obama

I will fight the corporations so that you can drink your own milkshake. -John Edwards

I have 35 years of milkshake-drinking experience. *sob* -Hillary Clinton

I peacefully drink your milkshake. -Dennis Kucinich

It depends on what your definition of “milkshake” is. -Bill Clinton

I voted for drinking your milkshake before I voted against it. -John Kerry

Global warming is melting your milkshake. -Al Gore

We’re making good progress in the war on milkshakes, and make no mistake: we will prevail. -George W. Bush

Here’s the trailer for The Ruins, which I hadn’t seen before.

I think it’s very well-cast and well-scored. I’m also encouraged that director Carter Smith is a fashion photographer by trade; it should be striking to look at if nothing else. They’re obviously taking some liberties in terms of the relative timing and severity of various events, as well as switching around the roles played by some of the characters, but everything looks basically intact. Fingers crossed!

* Chris Mautner has completed his two-part interview with Cold Heat‘s Frank Santoro.

* Stacie Ponder at Final Girl really liked 28 Weeks Later.

* Seeing the pair of images that cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier pulled to illustrate his post on No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood reminded me just how deeply indebted to horror both movies are.

* Rodents of unusual size? Turns out they exist after all, or at least they did 2-4 million years ago in Uruguay, where rats the size of cars roamed the earth. Loren Coleman has the scoop.

* Aeron at Monster Brains presents a gallery of images depicting the Harrowing of Hell, a fascinating medieval religious concept in which Jesus raided the inferno to rescue the righteous dead during the three days between his crucifixion and resurrection.

* Paul Pope quotes Carlos Clarens about the scare potential of dehumanization/automatonization in sci-fi/horror.

The trailer for Neil Marshall’s Doomsday is out. (Make sure to click on one of the hi-res quicktime links instead of watching the fuzzy streaming version.) Sadly, it’s not very good–over-narrated and edited for maximum blandness. However, you can dimly make out what looks to be a vastly more interesting and entertaining homage to John Carpenter than, say, Planet Terror, with the references to other ’80s post-apocalyptic classics like The Road Warrior, The Running Man, and even Aliens playing just as large a role as Escape from New York. Plus, Bob Hoskins and David O’Hara (the guy who played Frank Costello’s least-comprehensible Irish thug in The Departed). I’ll be there, but they really need to do better with the next trailer. (Via SciFi Wire.)

* Did dozens of people in a Texas town see a UFO?

* Did decades of phantom radio broadcasts with no known origin taunting U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf culminate in the recent confrontation between the American and Iranian navies? (Via Bruce Baugh.)

* Former Nintendo Power subscribers rejoice: The complete Howard & Nester. (Via Gaming Today via Comics Reporter.)

http://idrinkyourmilkshake.ytmnd.com

Jason finds this poster for the film version of Scott Smith’s excellent novel The Ruins boring, but I think it’s pretty great. The figures are so un-posed it’s almost disconcerting, I’ll grant you that, but it’s a bit like a poster for Deliverance using a shot of the four guys on the raft during happier times. I think that’s a terrific idea.

Bruce Baugh drew my attention to this delightful Watchmen remix by Chip Zdarsky in which the end of the book is refashioned into a parody of the Spider-Man comic “One More Day” and the reaction to it. This inspired two thoughts:

1) Watchmen is a really good comic.

2) I’m really curious as to what the critical reception of the movie version will be. On the one hand it’s got the right politics and is sort of the apotheosis of the current pop-culture trend in favor of comics (“the Godfather of comic book movies” will be a hard pullquote to resist delivering; I predict Peter Travers will be the one to pull the trigger), but on the other there’s the Ron Rosenbaum-y “graphic novel” backlash and the fact that thanks to 300, critics feel obligated to hate Zack Snyder HARD. For example, in terms of the story’s politics, I’m guessing that contra 300 they will be correctly attributed to the source material’s creators and temporal context rather than incorrectly attributed to the movie’s, because to do otherwise would be a point in the movie’s favor, and we can’t have that. We shall see.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks which horror-movie character we’d most want to be like, and which ones we think we’re actually the closest to.

In light of the release of the first trailer for George A. Romero’s contribution to the docu-horror genre, Diary of the Dead…

…Matt Maxwell’s post on his childhood experience of the proto-docuhorror flick The Legend of Boggy Creek will provide you with useful context.

(Trailer via Dread Central.)

Here’s a fascinating little post from Siskoid on two of my favorite current superhero comics, Green Lantern and Immortal Iron Fist, and how their writers have created independent “bubble worlds” of their own within the larger shared universes they inhabit. This is certainly part of what has made them so appealing over the past year or so, and one of the reasons why I tend to mention them in the same breath. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

And here’s a post I don’t like at all from Reverse Shot on two of my favorite movies of the past year, 300 and 28 Weeks Later, tagging them as among the year’s worst films in an almost willfully ad hominem- and inaccuracy-laden fashion. Bonus points for the now de rigeur slogging of 300 director Zack Snyder’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, which they sneeringly attack for its proficiency with action in much the same way that previous gatekeepers of good taste sneeringly attacked horror films like the original Dawn for their proficiency with being scary and gross.

* Holy Motime–Dave Fiore, scholarly scourge of the primordial comics blogosphere, is back! Here he is arguing that “the liberation of the secret self” which I spy in the costumes and superpowers of superhero comics isn’t always so liberating. References to the bildungsroman abound, as they are wont to do when Dave’s on the scene.

* Speaking of triumphant returns to the fold, Johnny Bacardi is totally back too.

* Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder pays loving tribute to her VHS horror-movie collection. Normally I’m averse to these kinds of nostalgic attachments to outmoded media, but the thing that’s so endearing about a VHS fetish is that it’s impossible to make the usual pretentious arguments that they sound or look better than that cold newfangled digital stuff–they look and sound awful! It’s pure attachment to the objects and the experiences that surrounded them, which is adorable.

* Rich Juzwiak of FourFour hated The Orphanage. Paging Jason Adams!

* Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot has written a very good review of There Will Be Blood that begins with a description of the film’s final shot so you should by no means read it unless you’ve seen the movie, but if you’ve seen the movie you should read it.

* Famed horror artist Steve Bissette is a big-time Peaks Freak, and in this epic post he outlines the entire release history of Twin Peaks on home video/DVD/laserdisc, explaining just why the Definitive Gold Box Edition is the bee’s knees. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Finally, Glenn Kenny asks: Antonioni or Thunderbirds?

I watched There Will Be Blood last night, and it was excellent. That final scene really blasts it into the ionosphere, like Raging Bull. Which is appropriate, because between this and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Daniel Day-Lewis has somehow become the living incarnation of Robert DeNiro’s squandered talent. I think No Country for Old Men is a better film all things considered, but that’s really neither here nor there. (If I had to guess the subconscious trigger for critics picking this one over the Coens’ effort, it would be Jonny Greenwood’s landmark score, which to use the cliché is like the film’s fifth main character.) If Paul Thomas Anderson ever gives this kind of treatment to a character who’s less sympathetic, he may have the scariest movie ever made in him someplace, and I’m not just saying that because the most memorable shot in this movie is highly reminiscent of the most memorable shot in The Exorcist.

Anyway, the title of this post is a tribute to Jason Adams’ amazing insight into a certain scene in the film. Click here and scroll to the bottom to be flabbergasted.