Courtesy of Loren Coleman comes a report that a “very fast and aggressive” eight-foot American Crocodile has been captured in the Cayman Islands. The only problem? Crocs have been extinct in the Caymans for two centuries.
Real-life water monsters RULE.
I’ve been hostile to Hostel‘s (and similar films’) attempts to dress up their splatter in the clothing of social critique–I’ve been doing this without having seen them, granted, but it just seems to me like anyone could watch The American Nightmare
These photos by Clinton Fein, on the other hand, are another story.
I still feel there’s a certain narcissim posing as bravery in only speaking to evil when it’s going on in your own backyard, but regardless, another story entirely.
(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)
I recently interviewed Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, who shared all sorts of juicy info on the remainder of Season 3. Go read it!
If you enjoy weird, weird comics, have I got a treat for you: The day job has posted an article I edited on Fletcher Hanks, the Golden Age comic-book writer/artist whose work is basically the most bizarrely violent and violently bizarre stuff you’ve ever seen. It’s in honor of the forthcoming collection from Fantagraphics and editor Paul Karasik, I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Fantastic Comics of Fletcher Hanks.
Good Lord.
First of all, the blogroll (to the left; scroll down) has been updated after a prolonged period of benign neglect. Click around and see where the day takes you.
Second, you can learn my horror-related New Year’s Resolution at this week’s Horror Roundtable.
Third, to expand a bit on my reaction to Travis Mackenzie Hooper’s Pan’s Labyrinth review, I felt like I should point out that I’m on his wavelength in terms of not digging the sort of cheesily calculated return to childhood “magic” that “grown-up fairy tales” traffic in, but not in his aversion to clear-cut depictions of good and evil. While I think it’s a sign of true adult storytelling (and adulthood generally) to acknowledge that things can be more complicated than that, I also think it’s a sign of true adult storytelling (and adulthood generally) to acknowledge that sometimes, things can be just that simple.
Well, this was definitely a thrill: Over at the day job, my interview with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof is now online. A major theory about the Others is debunked and (SPOILER) the real reason for the death of Eko is revealed therein, among lots of other juicy info. Even Nikki and Paulo get a moment in the sun!
A pair of links from Matt Zoller Seitz’s daily link round-up caught my eye today.
The first is a post by Drew Morton of the intriguingly titled group blog Dr. Mabuse’s Kaleido-Scope on “The State of the Horror Film in 2006.” Unfortunately, its coherence and insight can be best summed up by quoting one sentence: “Thanks to films like ‘The Descent’ and ’28 Days Later,’ I believe that over the course of the next year horror films will be coming into a renaissance not seen since the days of ‘Scream.'” Huh? The thrust of the pieces is that “recent” horror films have been adding elements of comedy or social criticism to further engage audiences–which is obviously something horror films have in fact been doing, well, forever (and moreover is giving a lot more poli-crit credit to the “When she gets her eyeball ripped out, that’s about Iraq! Yeah, that’s the ticket!” school of horror filmmaking than I’m willing to hand over). Still, it’s worth a read if you’re interested in how the genre looks to uninitiated types who nonetheless are up for thinking about how the genre works, which I’d imagine describes most professional critics and a goodly chunk of the academy.
More intriguing to me was a lengthy post from film studies god David Bordwell (he has a blog! how did I not know this?) on the self-conscious artifice of many recent film’s narratives, and the healthy role that genre–“science fiction, mystery, fantasy, horror, and comic-book movies…[and] indie cinema”–played in creating this state of affairs. I’ve always found it startling, if not depressing, how few fans of high-falutin’ art (not critics, but the kinds of people who read a lot and post on message boards and such) pick up on the ways that genre tropes frequently constitute violations of traditional formal narrative or visual structure. When a film stops in its tracks to watch a shape-shifting alien annihilate a pack of sled dogs, there’s something interesting going on there beyond the fact that a shape-shifting alien is annihilating a pack of sled dogs.
[…]movies like this get made, remakes of perfectly good films with cult followings, remakes done up
Now go buy this and remind yourself of just how awesome JB could be.
I may have given Dana Stevens the business yesterday, but this line from her review of Dreamgirls is pretty terrific:
It’s a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?)
Man, no kiddin’! I pointed this out in my senior essay way back in, geez, 1999 I guess it was, but what started in movies like Pulp Fiction and continued through Saving Private Ryan has really grown to become the norm: the violent content and technique of horror has been well and truly mainstreamed.
The same Japanese team that took the first photographs of a live giant squid has now taken the first film of a live giant squid (a 21-footer), which they subsequently captured.
HOLY CRAP.
(Hat tip: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo. More here.)
ToyFare Magazine has posted what may be my favorite article of any kind ever: The 10 Greatest Christmas Gifts of All Time (or at least the 1980s). If this rundown of the biggest, most eight-year-old-mind-blowing big-ticket toys ever (Castle Grayskull! All five Voltron lions! The Defiant! The AT-AT! The freaking USS Flagg G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier!!!!) doesn’t send you into an immediate nostalgia coma, I don’t know what will.
Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel by P.D. James, is the movie of the millennium because it’s about our millennium, with its fractured, fearful politics and random bursts of violence and terror. Though it’s set in the London of 2027, Cuar
The Comics Journal’s Dirk Deppey reveals what you may have already noticed: Any sites (such as Where the Monsters Go) that use blo.gs as the basis for their content aggregation have gone belly-up thanks to blo.gs’s deadbeat corporate dad, Yahoo. Brighter technological minds than mine are striving to solve this problem for WtMG as we speak. They promised. You hear me, brighter technological minds?
Here’s every on-screen death from the Friday the 13th series, back to back.
