Got this in my inbox today. Sometimes I love checking my email…

ZOMBIECON 2006

This mass street manifestation is in the tradition of

SantaCon with a Halloween twist:

On Saturday, October 21, Zombiecon will commence in Midtown, with

hundreds of people dressed as brains-hungry zombies terrorizing

innocent tourists, children and the rich as they search for Bloody Marys,

brains, and braaaands. All horror and zombie enthusiasts are invited to

join in on this ghoulish spree of shopping, bar-hopping, and street theatrics.

Spectators will be eaten–all are encouraged to dress and make-up in

their bloody, oozing, putrid, undead best. Any interested zombies MUST

RSVP to zombiecon@gmail.com for secret updates and locations. You can

also check out the website www.zombiecon.com.

The other day my mild-mannered mother informed me that she’d rented the remake of The Hills Have Eyes from her cable’s video on demand service. This isn’t at all the type of movie you’d think she’d go near, but she was sitting around and decided she wanted to watch a scary movie, thought the title sounded good and creepy, rented it and watched it and had a a scary time. (Although she did say that she didn’t know it was going to be that scary. “They ate people!”)

I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy. When was the last time I watched a horror movie just because I was in the mood, just because it’s fun to watch horror movies? Let alone a movie from the current brutal-horror wave! To watch something like Hostel without going back and forth about whether doing so constitues an endorsement, to watch it just because it might be scary without fretting about whether it would be too much (as though I couldn’t just turn off the movie if it were)…

Over at the day job, the “TVQB” roundtable review of last night’s episode of Lost is up. Reference points include “Hot for Teacher,” Popeye, and Cool Hand Luke. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, “TMQB,” our weekly comics roundtable review, is up as well. I help take a crack at Ultimate Power, Civil War: Front Line, Gen 13, Annihilation, The Pirates of Coney Island, Powers, Stan Lee Meets Doctor Strange, Ultimate X-Men, Wolverine: Origins, and X Isle.

I was disappointed. Very, actually. Now that I’ve seen the film I’ve finally been able to read Matt Zoller Seitz’s review and comment thread about it, which make the case that this is DePalma’s masterpiece, his reexamination of his entire career to date–his Vertigo, in other words. I guess I can see that, but I disagree on the masterpiece part. Simply put, the deadly serious rumination on the effects of violence and oppression just doesn’t fit with a film that in large part is moved forward by all the usual DePalma mechanics: the hideously ugly killer, the slow-motion staircase shooting, the double- and triple- and quadruple-crosses, the unnoticed actions upon which the entire plot is eventually revealed to hinge, and so forth. You’ll find few greater admirers of DePalma’s thrillers than me, and I don’t believe those movies are all style/no substance, all violence/no thought as to the consequences of violence as his detractors argue. But the arch, angry way he approaches and examines violence within that context works within that context. Here his tone is sadness–Silence of the Lambs style sadness–and watching him try to paint with that palette while still using his old brushes is an incongruous and unsatisfying experience akin to listening to someone play Joy Division on a tuba. I wish it worked as well as Seitz says it does, I truly do. (Josh Hartnett and Hilary Swank are marvelous, though.)

This is horrible of me to just be mentioning now, but I’ve got a pair of pretty-damn-cool-if-I-say-so-my-damn-self horror-related pieces in magazines currently on the stands:

Wizard #181 (it has two covers: one with Brande Roderick, one with an Ed McGuinness drawing of the Astonishing X-Men) contains a countdown of the 25 Scariest Moments in comics that I co-wrote, edited and helped compile. The subject of whether or not comics can truly be scary in the way we take for granted with film or literature has been discussed on this blog for a long time, and I think we did a solid job of making an argument for the affirmative. Pick one up and check it out.

Meanwhile, ToyFare #111 (it has an US Weekly-style parody cover featuring Brangelina toys, god help us) contains a fake ad I came up with for a little something I like to call Hellrazors. I’m particularly proud of the tagline: “They’ll tear your beard apart.” What’s your pleasure?

To my endless delight, Lost started up again this week, and all this season I’ll be running a roundtable review session of each episode over at WizardUniverse.com. Check out our review of the Season 3 premiere.

Meanwhile, I participated in our comics review roundtable, Thursday Morning Quarterback, again this week. Click for my take on the new issues of 52, Criminal, Jonah Hex, OMAC, X-Men: Phoenix – Warsong, and more.

Finally, Twisted ToyFare Theater, the action figure-based parody comic that runs in our sister magazine ToyFare and to which I contribute the occasional Serpentor gag, has a new trade paperback collection out, and PopMatters’ Stefan Robak gives it a pretty darn good review here. It’s Miller time!

Robert Anton Wilson needs your help. The co-author of the conspiracy-theory classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy and all around mind-expanding genius completely changed my life and the lives of many others. But post-polio complications and a terrible fall this summer have apparently left him bedridden and in need of 24-hour care. While he’s apparently no longer at dire risk, this great author and thinker still needs financial support to help meet his medical needs.

Please consider donating whatever you can to a PayPal account set up for this express purpose by the Friends of Robert Anton Wilson Fund at olgaceline@gmail.com .

You can also mail a check payable to Robert Anton Wilson to the following address:

Dennis Berry c/o Futique Trust

P.O. Box 3561

Santa Cruz, CA 95063

For more information, go to RAW’s site (more here) or Douglas Rushkoff’s blog.

Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

My New Plaid Pants’s Jason Adams takes on Brian DePalma’s comparatively lackluster Obsession. I have to say that when I first heard (from Clive Barker, in fact!) that this filmmaker made a movie with that title, I expected a lot better than what I got when I saw it.

Paul Gravett reviews Charles Burns’s masterpiece, Black Hole. If you’ve never come across this graphic novel before, Gravett’s piece comes equipped with tons of gorgeous images from it, so prepare to be enthralled (Link courtesy of Dirk Deppey.)

Matt Zoller Seitz conducts a critical round-up on Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, and on DePalma in general. Yes, I’m seeing this movie this week, I promise.

Aside from a misguided slap at Body Double, which is one of the most fascinating films I’ve ever seen even without its diegetic Frankie Goes to Hollywood production number, this LA Times analysis of the work of Brian DePalma is really worth a read. Jeez, I really have to see The Black Dahlia. (Hat tip: the inimitable Jason Adams.)

Ladies and gentlemen…

The State is now on iTunes.

Aw yeah.

(Hat tip: Whitney Matheson.)

Say say my playmate

Won’t you lay hands on me

Mirror my lady

Transfer my tragedy

Got a curse I cannot lift

Shines when the sunset shifts

When the moon is round and full

Gotta bust that box gotta gut that fish

(My mind’s aflame)

We could jet in a stolen car

But I bet we wouldn’t get too far

Before the transformation takes

And bloodlust tanks and crave gets slaked

My mind has changed

My body’s frame but God I like it

My heart’s aflame

My body’s strained but God I like it

My mind has changed

My body’s frame but God I like it

My heart’s aflame

My body’s strained but God I like it

Charge me your day rate

I’ll turn you out in kind

When the moon is round and full

Gonna teach you tricks that’ll blow your mongrel mind

Baby doll I recognize

You’re a hideous thing inside

If ever there were a lucky kind it’s you you you you

I know it’s strange another way to get to know you

You’ll never know unless we go so let me show you

I know it’s strange another way to get to know you

We’ve got till noon here comes the moon so let it show you

Show you now

Dream me oh dreamer

Down to the floor

Open my hands and let them

Weave onto yours

Feel me, completer

Down to my core

Open my heart and let it

Bleed onto yours

Feeding on fever

Down all fours

Show you what all that

Howl is for

Hey hey my playmate

Let me lay waste to thee

Burned down their hanging trees

It’s hot here hot here hot here hot here

(We’re howling forever, oh, oh)

Got a curse we cannot lift

Shines when the sunset shifts

(We’re howling forever, oh, oh)

There’s a curse comes with a kiss

The bite that binds the gift that gives

(We’re howling forever, oh, oh)

Now that we got gone for good

Writhing under your riding hood

(We’re howling forever, oh, oh)

Tell your gra’ma and your mama too

It’s true true true true

We’re howling forever, oh, oh

We’re howling forever, oh, oh

We’re howling forever, oh, oh

We’re howling forever, oh, oh

We’re howling forever, oh, oh

–TV on the Radio, “Wolf Like Me”

Paging Bryan Alexander: Dahlia Lithwick has a piece up at Slate and the Washington Post about murderers who blog.

The article is interesting when it uses the web presences of some recent killers as a window on their personalities; patricidal school shooter Alvaro Castillo, for example, listed among the people he’d like to meet one day Tom Hanks, Michael Moore, and John Hinckley Jr. It’s much more dubious when it asserts that networking sites like MySpace or Facebook make criminals’ jobs easier (funny, they seem to have managed just fine before), or that the people killers interact with online via these services are no more real to them than characters in a video-game shoot-’em-up. That may be true, but that’s because, to a violent sociopath, all people are no more real than characters in a video-game shoot-’em-up. In terms of both their development as killers and their view of their victims, the chicken/egg question is an easy one to answer: As the sine qua non of crimebloggers, Steve Huff, once said of wannabe mass murderer Kimveer Gill, “Of course, since he was probably a psychopath and therefore by definition a narcissist, he had to have an online presence.”

Never let it be said that Venezuelan Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez is good for nothing: His recent rant at the United Nations prompted Slate.com to explain how Satan came to be associated with the odor of sulfur. Devilishly informative.

The new Horror Roundtable is up chez Horror Blog, and this week’s topic is a choose-your-own “King Kong vs. Godzilla”-style horror-character mash-up. You’ve probably guessed half of mine already.

Matt Zoller Seitz returns to the Brian DePalma beat by reprinting and critiquing David Thomson’s condemnatory entry on DePalma from The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Meanwhile, the comment thread at Seitz’s post leads me to the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jim Emerson, who takes a look at what seems like a pretty whacked-out examination of Nicole Kidman’s career (and naked body) by Thomson. In a weird way I wish more film writing was like this, and in another way I really, really don’t.

If you’ve got yourself an Aaron Sorkin-hating skittle, prepare to have it diddled but good by Jason Adams and Jim Treacher.

Finally, the trailer for Zack Snyder’s film of Frank Miller’s 300 has leaked. Holy smokes.

So there I was, happily watching the season premiere of America’s Next Top Model Cycle 7 (what, you weren’t?), when a strange commercial featuring disembodied lips straight out of “Science Fiction/Double Feature” appeared, telling me to go to a YouTube page for something called Miss Horrorfest 2006. How could I resist?

Ultimate Spider-Man has been one of the most consistently entertaining superhero comics around throughout its entire 100-or-so issue run thus far. Over at my day job, Dylan Brucie has an absurdly in-depth “director’s commentary”-style interview with series creators Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley, running down every storyline in the comic’s history. Highly recommended.

I haven’t seen Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia yet, but I had to chuckle at Dana Stevens’s pan of the flick at Slate, which kicks off by decrying the film’s lack of “moral weight.” An amoral DePalma film? You don’t say! This is like complaining about the shocking presence of dick jokes in a Mel Brooks movie.

Anyway, the great Matt Zoller Seitz has his own review of the movie up at The House Next Door, and while I only got about four sentences into it before a SPOILER WARNING scared me away, the sense I get is that he had a more positive take on the film. As a great admirer of pretty much any DePalma film in which a blonde figures prominently (Body Double, Femme Fatale, Scarface) my hunch is I’ll be on Seitz’s side, but we’ll see.

Apologies for the lack of update yesterday. As you might have noticed over the past few weeks, I’ve kinda quietly adopted a daily-posting schedule that I’ve had no problem maintaining, and my only reason for not posting yesterday is, well, I forgot. But in general you can expect an update a day, until I get tired of it, at which point they’ll cease without notice because I hate these meta-blogging posts as much as you probably do!

But anyways, Matt at Black Lagoon reviews Scream, the film that, whether we like it or not, revived horror as a viable genre. (Of course, things stalled out at a certain point until The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project opened up some other avenues of exploration in ’99, but yeah, Scream started it.) It’s not necessarily a film I’m interested in revisiting, but I remember finding it scary at the time, and at any rate it’s probably as unfair to blame Scream for its shitty imitators as it is to blame Star Wars for Independence Day or Seinfeld for Caroline in the City, so Matt’s considered praise is worth your time.

Or gray, as the case may be: Brian at Giant Monster Blog has posted an in-depth review of the recent deluxe DVD release of Gojira, which includes a subtitled version of the original Japanese film as well as the Americanized Godzilla, King of the Monsters. If Steven’s Horror Roundtable question had been what my favorite afternoon horror-TV experience was, it would have been Godzilla movies on WPIX Channel 11, hands down.