Oh, Doghouse, where have you been my whole life? I’m not saying I haven’t been into the other zombie comedies, the Shaun of the Deads, the Dead & Breakfasts, all the way back to Hysterical! and the splatter comedy Romero was kickstarting in Dawn of the Dead, and all the way up to Ahh!! Zombies! But Doghouse, it’s got the male-bonding (in stupidity) thing going on that Hot-Tub Time Machine had, that The Hangover was kind of predicated on, but it’s got the serious kind of gore we k…

I mean — I don’t know. But look:

• Tin Man was 2007, Fringe debuted 2008
• each features someone who grew up in a parallel world (Peter, DG)
• each features someone who has had ‘knowledge’ surgically removed from their brain (Walter, Glitch)
• each has a ‘mystic man’ (each played by someone with starpower, too: Nimoy, Dreyfuss)
• each has automatons (DG’s ‘parents,’ Walternate’s shapeshifters)
• each has a doomsda

Sex & Nudity

A woman is seen naked, from behind, but it’s through two doors, and in the point-of-view of a killer tire, so it’s not really anything you can do much with.

Profanity

Not excessive, and what’s there’s mostly from the ‘spectators’—the embedded horror-movie audience meant to offer the same objections we would, or already are, thereby anticipating and perhaps deflating those objections (think the pirate contingent in the theater watching Spongebob, or the W…

Or: The subject line that comes to mind now that I just finished up the Deadwood series. Or: just to write dialogue like that once, ever. I mean, yeah, it’s all kinds of fakey and staged and overblown, but it’s that kind of fakey and staged and overblown and David Mamet-y that feels like playwrights had a pen involved. The lines Swearengen and Bullock and Tolliver and the rest would deliver every episode, they always had this cool Elizabethan kind of vibe to them, though always und…

Some movies just make you happy. Feast was this was for me. And Severance. And Leslie Vernon. And, though it’s more over-the-top, Club Dread. Horror comedy’s where it’s at, I think, though there’s a line, yeah; while I’ll sign up any day of the week for a Decampitated viewing, I don’t do so well at the Scary Movie series. I get all the references and jokes, sure, but it’s always a very painful kind of humor, as what they’re lampooning up there, it’s what I love, it’s the horror I hold s…

Adolescence and lycanthropy are the chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. All this strange body hair, an insatiable appetite, late hours,  sleeping at all the wrong times, nights you can’t really remember, can only piece together flashes of. A pretty sincere distrust of what are seeming to be your instincts, and everybody looking at you like they know, so that you feel pressured to only hang out with your pack, with who you can trust, those who share your afflictio…

“Based on a melody once whistled by Garth Marenghi.”

• Another movie
• A book
• A true story
• Real events
• An amusement park ride
• A video game
• A television show
• A toy
• A real idea
• A comic book
• A comic strip
• A song

Sucker Punch has problems, yes. Usually, though, you can squint just right, only watch the parts of the movie that the trailer sold you on, and you’re good. Not this time. Which, this is a hyperkinetic, Scott Pilgrim-kind of fantasy fight movie involving steam-powered zombies, with some pretty cool updates of standard songs going on in the background (and foreground), such that the whole thing feels like an Evanescence video, I guess. Any one of which should be enough …

These are, I don’t know, between fifty and ninety movie-type reviews I wrote back in 1999 or so. Pretty much the exact same few months I was first writing DEMON THEORY, yeah. Anyway, I only messed up on a couple. Stigmata‘s one of them, I think. But I got a couple right as well, maybe: Fight Club, American Beauty, and Unbreakable and American Pie 3 made me happy with what I’d written for American Pie and Sixth Sense, respectively. Anyway, I’d still be doi…

almost missed it, but my Green Hornet review‘s up.…