So what if the rats of NIMH got a taste for human flesh? Or, not flesh, exactly, but I don’t want to give anything away. In the way of hints, though, how about: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark doesn’t not have something to do with Darkness Falls. Where it separates itself, though, is quality. No, this isn’t quite The Orphanage, and it’s a different genre than Pan’s Labyrinth, and we’ve all seen the 1973 original, know that The Gate might have borrowed a thing or two from it (in the best poss…

In Kyle Reese’s bleak future there’s those Heinlein kind of bugs from space but no Ender to xenocide them away, and, I mean, they walk around in Robocop get-up already and look like Super 8 without it and act like first cousins to the aliens in Titan A.E., chasing a ragtag, Walking Dead band of survivors through an Octavia Butler trek of a story, where the family unit is, like Stitch says, little and broken, but still good. All of which is to say I dig it. More, please.

…

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 …