I’m kind of in love with this gallery of 20 stills from the upcoming adaptation of The Ruins. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Boy oh boy, did they cast this movie well. Everyone is cute but not in that plastic WB way–in a real, young-looking, vulnerable way, like your friends from college. My hopes get higher.

* I’m kind of interested in this Trinity project by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley: It’s DC’s next weekly comic, the first one starring the cream of DC’s superhero crop–Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman–and the first one whose main story is completely written and drawn by the same team, in this case two solid if not spectacular craftsmen responsible for enjoyable titles like Astro City and Ultimate Spider-Man. I’m curious to see how that kind of release schedule and pacing works with a set creative team and a small, fixed roster of extremely well known stars. Anyway, Doug Wolk interviewed Busiek about it.

* Over at Topless Robot, my buddy Jesse Thompson runs down his 10 favorite horror movie posters from the ’80s. What up, Ghoulies?

* Finally…

Feminism!

Zack Snyder has posted shots of most of the main superhero characters in his adaptation of Watchmen:

In the words of Kirsty from Hellraiser, me like. I guess we nerds are supposed to get all OG about it and be upset that they’re not in tights, but this approach makes sense to me: The comic book version of this story was geared toward comic book readers, so it featured traditional comic-book spandex costumes. The movie version is geared toward moviegoers, so it’s going with movie-style costumes. They look good. Full-sized images at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Over at The House Next Door, the very good TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston debate which show by The Three Davids–Chase’s The Sopranos, Milch’s Deadwood, and Simon’s The Wire–is the best TV drama of all time in a podcast. One day, when I finish going through The Wire and then roll through Deadwood, I plan on listening to this with great interest, but until then I’m steering clear. In the meantime I will say 1) They missed a David; 2) So far (I’m a couple episodes into Season Four), as good as The Wire may be, between it and The Sopranos it’s not even close.

* A terrible week for the cast and the fans of Road House just gets worse: First Jeff Healey dies, and now we learn that Patrick Swayze has (terminal?) pancreatic cancer.

* Apparently Joss Whedon is going to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer have a lesbian fling in her current comic book. Feminism! (This gratuitous bit of browncoat-baiting is brought to you by Jason Adams.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely keeps doing great work; the sad and upsetting comic strip he posted today knocked me to the floor.

* Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle unearths one of the most unnerving stories I’ve heard in a long while, one I’m surprised I hadn’t heard before: the Dyatlov Pass Accident. In 1959, nine Russian cross-country skiers made camp in the Ural Mountains to wait out a storm. The next morning they were all dead–apparently having literally torn their way out of their tents and ran into the -30 degree Celsius night in their underwear, two of them with massive internal trauma to the chest but no external injuries, one with a crushed head, one with a missing tongue, all bearing traces of radiation and all with their hair turned gray literally overnight. More weird details at the link. Given my reading of late, this rolled right down my alley.

UPDATE: A friend did some googling and discovered that virtually all references to this story stem from the past few weeks (there’s some sketchy stuff from 2006 on Wikipedia (where the article is up for deletion) and a Russian-language message board thread purporting to be from 2004 but that’s it), so take it all with a tub of salt.

* Finally, via Bruce Baugh I came across this alternate ending to Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend.

As they say at the link, it’s not perfect–the new coda feels like it needs a separate transitional scene to make sense given the tenor of the revised climax that forms the bulk of the alternate take–but it’s vastly superior to the out-of-nowhere Signs riff imposed on the film in the theaters. It ties directly into emotional themes present throughout the film, it makes more sense out of the viro-vampires’ behavior, and it comes a lot closer to the most provocative aspects of the book’s conclusion in terms of how the vampires think of themselves. There’s even a nice little visual callback to the Central Park Zoo lions that ties it all together.

It’s funny: As I’ve thought about the big apocalyptic monster movie trifecta of the past few months–The Mist, I Am Legend, Cloverfied–I came to terms with the fact that even though the character work in the middle movie is head and shoulders above the by-the-numbers material of the other two movies, I was still more likely to end up owning the other two flicks on DVD because their monsters were better. But if I Am Legend had this ending in the theater, I’d have walked away from it with more or less no reservations, and it’d have been a whole different ballgame.

* 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.