Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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To those of you not primarily devoted to sleaze, I apologize for the recent gunk-bath we've been taking here at MNPP these past two episodes of Thursday's Ways Not To Die. I'm just going through a little bit of a Frank Henenlotter phase right now and to be in a Frank Henenlotter phase is to be submerged past your eyeballs in filth. This too shall pass. Next week I'll show a cute little pony getting petted to death or something equally adorable. But for the time being, you really gotta see this shit!

Last time around we witnessed deadly blowjobbery in 1988's Brain Damage - well two year's later with nobody's-classic Frankenhooker director Frank Henenlotter would quite possibly top himself.

Frankenhooker tells the story of a boy's love for a girl and how when the girl runs herself over with a giant lawnmower he goes a little mad. OK? OK. This involves the single greatest news report ever:
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"In a blaze of blood, bones, and body parts, the vivacious young girl was instantly reduced to a tossed human salad... a salad that police are still trying to gather up... a salad that was once named... Elizabeth."

I mean, if you don't immediately fall in love right then and there, we can't be friends.

So anyway from there the heartbroken young man decides he'll piece his beloved bride-to-be back together, but unfortunately all that's left of her is the head. So he does what any heartbroken young man with just the head of his fiance left would do - he turns to science.


Namely, he invents a super-strong form of crack cocaine that he calls "Super Crack," which he then will trick some prostitutes into smoking and once they've died from this Super Crack - he reasons this will be their own fault, because he didn't force them to smoke the Super Crack, the filthy drug addicts - he'll reassemble his love from their parts. Naturally. (I think this was one of the Canterbury Tales?)

Shockingly, this rock-solid plan - crack rock solid, har! - doesn't quite work out like he expects it to, and... well see what happens once the ladies smoke the Super Crack after the jump. (Surprisingly, all this isn't safe for work! Whoda thunk.)
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So now we ask ourselves the most obvious query:

Where the hell's Frank Henenlotter's honorary Oscar?

That muscle man you see getting bonked in the head with a head in that last one is the same muscle man you saw getting checked out in the shower in Brain Damage - apparently Henenlotter just loved his style. He plays the girl's pimp here and what happens to him later on in the film will have to be its own Way Not To Die sometime in the future because it too is fairly glorious.

But in summation, Nancy Reagan and
Whitney Houston were right! Crack is whack!

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Previous Ways Not To Die: Brains Blown -- Fur For The Boogens -- White Hot Bunny Rabbit Rage -- Dragged To Hell -- The TV Van That Dripped Blood -- Don't Mess With Mama -- Heads Ahoy -- Martyred For Sheep -- Heads Nor Tails -- He Loves Me Knot -- The Great Bouncing Brad -- Miss Kitty's 8 Mishaps -- Boat Smoosh -- Meeting the French-Tipped Menace -- A Magic Trick -- Slick Suck -- We Who Walk Here Walk Alone -- Raptor Bait -- Kneegasm'd -- Dare to Dream in Fincher -- Reach Out and Throttle Someone -- De-Faced -- Voluntary Drowning -- Cross Borne -- Pulled Up Hell's Sphincter -- An Arrow Up The Ass - The Numerous Violent Unbecomings of Olive Oyl -- Ack! Ack! Zap! -- Baby's First Acid Splash -- Chop, Drop and Sashimi Roll -- Forever Rafter -- Can't You Hear Me Now? -- Daisies Ways #5 - Harpoony Side Up -- Acid Dip -- On a Wing and a Prey -- For Standing in the Way of Sappho -- Busting Rule Number Three (For The Purpose of Number Two) -- Daisies #4 - Window Dressed To Killed -- Hands Off the Haas Orb -- Bullet Ballet -- A Single Vacancy at the Roach Motel -- A School Bus Slipped Thru The Ice -- Trache-AAHHHH!!!-tomy'd - For Mel Gibson's Sins -- A Wide Stanced Slashing --- Daisies Ways #3 - Scratch n' Snuffed -- The Victim of a Viscous Hit & Run -- Curled -- Kabobbed -- Daisies Ways #2 - Aggravated Cementia -- Boo! Nun! -- 2009's Ways Not To Die -- Bug Scratch Fever -- Daisies Ways #1 - Deep Fat Fried in My Own Unique Blend of 500 Herbs & Spices -- By the Yard End of the Stick -- Screwed From A Very Great Distance -- A Righteous Bear-Jew Beatdown -- Fisted By Hugo Sitglitz -- Xeno Morphed -- Fuck-Stuck -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 4 -- Lava Bombed -- The Cradle Will Rock... Your Face Off!!! -- The Food of the Nilbog Goblins -- The Slugs Is Gonna Gitcha -- Phone Shark -- Hide The Carrot -- Sarlacc Snacked -- Avada Kedavra!!! -- Hooked, Lined and Sinkered -- "The Libyans!" -- Axe Me No Questions -- Pin the Chainsaw on the Prostitute -- The Wrath of the Crystal Unicorn -- The Ultimate Extreme Make-Over -- Drown In A Sink Before The Opening Credits Even Roll -- The Dog Who Knew Too Much -- Don't Die Over Spilled Milk -- Inviting the Wrath of Aguirre -- An Inconceivable Outwitting -- The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique -- Nipple Injected Blue Junk -- Your Pick Of The Deadly Six -- Thing Hungry -- Don't Fuck With The Serial Killer's Daughter -- DO Forget To Add The Fabric Softener -- Any Of The Ways Depicted In This Masterpiece Of Lost Cinema -- Rode Down In The Friscalating Dusklight -- Good Morning, Sunshine! -- Mornin' Cuppa Drano -- The Cylon-Engineered Apocalypse -- Tender-Eye-zed -- Martian Atmospheric Asphyxiation -- Maimed By A Mystical Person-Cat -- The Sheets Are Not To Be Trusted -- Handicapable Face-Hacked -- I Did It For You, Faramir -- Summertime In The Park... Of A Pedophile's Mind -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 3 -- Strung Up With Festive Holiday Bulbs By Santa Claus Himself -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 2 -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 1 -- Decapitated Plucked Broiled & Sliced -- Head On A Stick! -- A Trip To The Ol' Wood-Chipper -- Pointed By The T-1000 -- Sucking Face With Freddy Krueger -- A Pen-Full Of Home-Brewed Speed to The Eye -- Motivational Speech, Interrupted -- A Freak Ephemera Storm -- When Ya Gotta Go... Ya Gotta Go -- Hoisted By Your Own Hand Grenade -- Having The Years Suction-Cupped Away -- Criss-Cross -- Turned Into A Person-Cocoon By The Touch Of A Little Girl's Mirror Doppleganger -- Satisfying Society's "Pop Princess" Blood-Lust -- Done In By The Doggie Door -- Tuned Out -- Taking the 107th Step -- Rescuing Gretchen -- Incinerated By Lousy Dialogue -- Starred & Striped Forever -- Vivisection Via Vaginally-Minded Barbed-Wire -- Chompers (Down There) -- Run Down By M. Night Shyamalan -- Everything Up To And Including The Kitchen Toaster -- Sacrificed To Kali -- Via The Gargantuan Venom Of The Black Mamba Snake -- Turned Into An Evil Robot -- The Out-Of-Nowhere Careening Vehicle Splat -- "Oh My God... It's Dip!!!" -- Critter Balled -- Stuff'd -- A Hot-Air Balloon Ride... Straight To Hell!!! -- Puppy Betrayal -- High-Heeled By A Girlfriend Impersonator -- Flip-Top Beheaded -- Because I'm Too Goddamned Beautiful To Live -- By Choosing... Poorly... -- Fried Alive Due To Baby Ingenuity -- A Good Old-Fashioned Tentacle Smothering -- Eepa! Eepa! -- Gremlins Ate My Stairlift -- An Icicle Thru The Eye -- Face Carved Off By Ghost Doctor After Lesbian Tryst With Zombie Women -- Electrocuted By Fallen Power-Lines -- A Mouthful Of Flare -- Taken By The TV Lady -- Bitten By A Zombie -- Eaten By Your Mattress -- Stuffed To Splitting -- Face Stuck In Liquid Nitrogen -- Crushed By Crumbling Church Debris -- Bitten By The Jaws Of Life -- A Machete To The Crotch -- Showering With A Chain-Saw -- In A Room Filled With Razor Wire -- Pod People'd With Your Dog -- Force-Fed Art -- Skinned By A Witch -- Beaten With An Oar -- Curbed -- Cape Malfunction -- In The Corner -- Cooked In A Tanning Bed -- Diced -- Punched Through The Head -- Bugs Sucking On Your Head

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I Am Link

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--- Here & Back Again - EW has our first look at The Hobbit, y'all! Three pictures, including Tim I mean Martin Freeman as Young Bilbo. I wish some friendly lady hobbit down the way was being played by Lucy Davis, I must say. Tim and Dawn forever!

--- And speaking of Office-flavored things, as well as small-sized folk, the teaser trailer for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new BBC2 series called Life's Too Short - about the "life" of Warwick Davis, famed little person - can be seen over at Twitch! The show's only begun filming and won't air til next year, but this tide us over til then I suppose.

--- Roll In The Hay - I just want to take this opportunity to thank Entertainment Weekly with all my "heart" for using this week's trilogy of covers to gift me with the fantasy of Joe Manganiello as a rugged, dumb farmhand wearing nothing but loose overalls. This will come in handy several times in the future, of this I have no doubt.

--- Crazy States - Glenn's review of Ken Russell's Altered States over at Stale Popcorn is quite possibly the most spot-on, "Yup, that about sums it all up!" review of Altered States ever written. God I love that movie.

--- Bush Whackers - BD has a few more details on the third flick from Oren Peli, director of Paranormal Activity, which is about Nature getting its revenge in the wake of a radioactive disaster. Or something. Sounds kind Long Weekend-y to me?

--- The Owls Are Not What They Seem - If you heard about that JK Rowling website Pottermore the other day and are curious still what the hell it is, watch this video at PopWrap where Rowling comes clean. Sounds fun, says the nerd!

--- New Statham Joint - A trailer for a Jason Statham movie without a shot of a shirtless Jason Statham in it is like a unicorn with its legs sawed off bleating for the bullet to end its pathetic life. Just sad! That said, in the trailer for his latest movie called Killer Elite (so 1994 straight-to-video) that murky underwater shot seen there to the left could be Jason, I suppose, the trailer implies it to be him, so we'll give it a pass until we inevitably watch the movie while folding laundry one future Saturday afternoon and find out if so. But what we will never forgive is the fact that Statham and Clive Owen are in a movie together and it's not a love story full of sweaty torrid liaisons.

--- Stone's Pride - Rumors abound that Emma Stone might be taking the lead in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which for a long while was a role that lay in Natalie Portman's delicate fingertips. I like it, but then I like the idea of Emma Stone taking any part. Every part! (Well except Mrs. Andrew Garfield. Lay off, lady! He's mine!)

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The Moment I Fell For... Bruce Campbell

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"That's right... who's laughing now?

WHO'S LAUGHING NOW????"

Wow, have I really never done this one before? For shame, me. Happy birthday, Bruce! Evil Dead II was the first one I saw and there's never been no looking back. You are and always will be The Man. Now let's watch the whole scene that moment's from because why wouldn't we watch the whole scene that moment's from?

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Your Face There

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You're welcome.

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I Am Link

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--- An Impressive Phallus - Back in May I posted a couple of pictures of James Franco from his movie about the gay poet Hart Crane, as well as the news that there'd be "a love scene" between him and Michael Shannon in it - well I guess the film screened in LA and word on it (via K212) is even more explicit:

"It features graphic sex scenes of "Franco-as-Hart ebulliently performing fellatio on what appears to be an impressive phallus" and "ecstatic as he is topped during anal sex,"

Indeed! James Franco is dedicated. (To being awesome.) There's an interview about the film with James at that second link. The film will supposedly come out next year. 

 

--- Kill Bots - Steven Spielberg's supposedly going to make a movie out of it, but the new book Robopocalypse hadn't even been seen by the general public yet. Til now - it's out, and io9 says it is awesome. I just finished a book and need something to pick up and this sounds awfully perfect for June reading. Killer robots ho!

--- Mars Needs Men - JJ has a couple of shots of Colin Farrell looking like Colin Farrell (aka hot) in jeans and a t-shirt on the Canadian set of the Total Recall remake, which I guess means that movie's finally shooting. Huh.

--- Little Person - Ian McShane is playing the head dwarf in Snow White and the Huntsman (that's the one with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron, not the Julia Roberts one). The head dwarf is named Caesar, snooze - make him act all tough and regal and shit while pulling off a Dopey, dammit. That's acting.

--- Speaking of our current revisionist fairy tale craze, Guillermo Del Toro would love to make Maleficent, he says. He even busts out some dorky knowledge about the dragon's wings! God I love him. But the basic point stands that Guillermo Del Toro would love to make a million movies, but there is only one of him. So I won't hold my breath on that.

--- No Strangers 2 Strange - Bryan Bertino's successful 2008 horror film The Strangers has come up in my home a couple times these past weeks so I'm feeling inclined to hear what's up with its sequel; thankfully STYD got some news from Liv Tyler herself. Unfortunately it's not good news:

"It's strange. I've read the script. It's been around the whole time, but I don't know how real it is," she said. "Bryan isn't directing it, I don't know what's happened with it. I didn't love the idea personally, but Bryan's such a good writer. He had another project that I was obsessed with and fell I love with and kept trying to convince them to not do 'The Strangers 2' but 'Let's go straight into this thing and it can be 'From the Makers of...' 'cause it was such a great, also simple story but absolutely terrifying. Someone else has that now and they've actually changed it quite a bit. Who knows? Hollywood is so confusing."

Indeed it is, Liv. Bertino's got nothing else lined up on IMDb either. WTF.

--- Tara Burns - PopWrap chatted with everybody's favorite True Blood doormat Rutina Wesley aka Tara and she says Tara will not be victimized this year, dammit! Everybody seems to think the rumor of a character going gay this season will be her, but god do I have my fingers crossed that it's Ryan Kwanten. That ass needs to be appreciated! Publicly. And what happened to all that homo-vibe between Bill and Sam anyway? Explore that some more dammit!

--- O Khaleesi - I still haven't gotten around to the Game of Thrones finale - tonight, tonight! - but you should check out Sean's recap of the episode alongside his friend Megan - Sena's read the books, she hasn't - to see a take on the first season from both perspectives. But only if you've seen the finale already!

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Skin Crawler

We saw a clip from Almodovar's The Skin I Live In back in May that creeped me out pretty ferociously, and now we've got a teaser trailer to do that double-time. The film's out in the US in November. (via)

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I Am Link

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--- Hot For Hobbitses - There's been some filling out of the Shire lately with Peter Jackson's The Hobbit currently filming - 100% Heterosexual Actor Luke Evans joined the cast as Bard the Grim (he's a human archer that'll have more of a role in the second film, apparently); meanwhile Lost's Evangaline Lilly will be playing a woodland elf, Benedict Cumberbatch, who is apparently really named that, will be voicing the dragon Smaug, and Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna, will be playing the Goblin King (in mo-cap a la Gollum).

--- Snow Falling - A single bit of promo art's made its way online, plus a couple of desciptions of others, for Tarsem's next project, his Snow White movie with Julia Roberts as the Witch and Armie Hammer as the prince.

--- Queen Carla - MNPP loves Carla Gugino so we love this week's Take Three in appreciation of three of her performances over at The Film Experience.

 

--- Bedevilled Dom - The quad version of the poster for The Devil's Double has been released and they smartly kept their focus squared on Dominic Cooper's bulky golden crotch for it.

--- Goodbye Hellboy - According to Mike Mignola, Hellboy's creator, things ain't looking good for the time being for a third Hellboy movie from Guillermo Del Toro.

--- Join The PTA - A couple new young actors have joined the cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, which has officially been titled The Master, a title that was up in the air for a bit there. 

--- A Clash of Kings - Having ended their first season last evening - I haven't watched the episode yet, will do so tonight - HBO's A Game of Thrones will begin filming its second season in July. People seem pleased with how the first season's gone? I am.

--- Fresh Meats - When I went to Austin last year it was either go and visit the graveyard where the opening scene of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre film was shot, or go an hour outside of the city to visit the house where the film was shot which's been moved from its original location and turned into a restaurant. I chose the former - see my pics here! - but now there's a look at the latter going around that's worth checking out for sure.

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Happy Father's Day

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Here's to all those mad creators of life.

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We Only Hire Charlies

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I had every intention of creating a picture for this post that had both Charlie Hunnam and Charlie Day in it, since Charlie Day just got a gig in Guillermo Del Toro's next movie Pacific Rim, which already has Hunnam in the lead, and going on to make a joke about them both having the same first name, hardy har, so clever. 

But then I stumbled upon the above picture of Charlie Hunnam which I've somehow never seen before and I started to add Charlie Day into it but sorry Charlie (Day), as adorable as you be you were distracting me from all of that, and that is not to be distracted from. Goodness.

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Today's Mood

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Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Misery

"Oh Mrs. Malenger, here is one big bastard of a check,
now give me some of your Christ-ing money!"

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I Am Link

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--- Dino Might - Seems like it's every six months or so that we get some fresh Jurassic Park rumor-mongering - June of 2011 has Spielberg meeting with a writer to discuss possibilities or whatever. Seems to me this shouldn't be so damned hard - put some dinosaurs on an island, have humans visit said island, and go. Instant movie. As long as there's no strapping laser guns to dinosaur heads we're fine.

--- Cue The Freaks - The Last Circus, the new horror film from Alex de la Iglesia - see a "Ways Not To Die" ode to his 1995 bizzaro movie The Day of the Beast here - has got a trailer and you can watch it at Twitch Hopefully we'll get to see it here in the US somehow.
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--- Easy Being Green - Ryan Reynolds looks pretty darn adorable on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly, eh? Too bad his movie's being savaged by the critics. Well not really "too bad," I mean I think the pretty boy can take it since he cashed his check awhile ago, no doubt. Probably in between his 485th and 486th sit-up of the day.

--- Labor Pains - Kate Winslet's signed on for Jason Reitman's next movie, opposite Josh Brolin - it's called Labor Day and the basic plot description is so generic, so been-there, it makes me anxious:

"Winslet will play a single mother of an awkward and isolated young son who takes in a stranger. He turns out to be an escaped convict and ends up teaches the boy life lessons, while she falls in love with him over the course of Labor Day Weekend."

It has to be more interesting that that sounds, right? Anyone read the book? Hey if it's got Kate I'll watch it, I just want good things for her, is all.
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--- War's The Pitts - STYD has got some shots from the set of World War Z, the adaptation of Max Brooks' zombie-apocalypse book that's finally getting made after a few years of yap. There's nothing much to see yet, but that nice look at the length of Brad Pitt there demands I at least link.

--- Vaguely Barsoomian - The LAT got to talk to John Carter (I'm really missing the "Of Mars" in this movie's title) director Andrew Stanton about how things are going with that film, which we saw the first (nippleless) poster from yesterday. They also got a couple pieces of concept art, which aren't altogether that thrilling but I'm sharing anyway. The top one's reminding me of the rainbow bridge from Thor, kinda?

Leslie's Papa Makes Some Truth

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Just a couple of weeks ago we had a wee bit of news regarding a sequel to 2006's wonderful meta-horror flick Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon - namely that everybody behind that film is keen to get a sequel going (actually some kind of prequel, apparently) and there's a Facebook page up and running devoted to the cause. The page has actually been pretty active, I see updates coming from it all the time, so fingers crossed!

But this doesn't really have to do with Leslie - rather it has to do with Leslie's director, Scott Glosserman. He's only had one film come out since Leslie, and that was a non-horror documentary about Wikipedia called Truth in Numbers, but that changes tomorrow night apparently, when an original horror film by him airs on MTV! Via TFC:

"MTV treats viewers to extreme suspense in its upcoming original TV movie "The Truth Below," premiering Thursday, June 16th at 10pm ET/PT.

In "The Truth Below," a Spring Break snowboarding vacation becomes a terrifying journey for college friends. Their road trip home from the mountain soon turns deadly when a freak accident forces them off the road and buries their car under an avalanche. Trapped with no choice but to wait for rescue and face an unknown fate, the group plays a game in which they reveal secrets they would never otherwise share. They soon discover they not only have to survive the accident, but also each other. The moments dwindle and they are forced to ask themselves "how well do you really know your friends" as their game builds to a shocking conclusion."

Anything airing on MTV these days instantly makes me skeptical (yes, I'm old) but Glosserman's talents go a good distance at combating that. Plus the last original horror movie of MTV's that I saw contained a scene where a girl on roller-skates got beheaded and then her headless body rolled into a giant cake made out of sushi, so we're all good. Here's the trailer:

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It Only Takes A Modicum Of Effort...

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... to turn the Larry Crowne poster into a horror show. Really, it's there already. I'm disappointed in all the people who draw on the posters on the subway platforms that nobody's done this yet, at least that I've seen. I pass this terrifying poster every single night and it sits there willfully un-defaced, taunting me with that monstrous gaping maw. Come on, world! Must I do everything? It'd be just my luck to get arrested for drawing fangs on a Julia Roberts poster.
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Quote of the Day

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Inspired by the tepid creature at the heart of JJ Abrams Super 8 - read my unsatisfied opinion upon it here - Vulture wrote up a wonderful piece on the state of movie monsters that you oughta read. Choice bit:

"Verisimilitude is a terrible guiding factor for crafting a movie alien.

Throw out the playbook, filmmakers! If you're going to withhold your alien for the majority of the film, make sure that when we finally see it, it comes as an actual surprise. At this point, giant space bugs are the furthest thing from alien, since we've seen them in so many other films and they're essentially grasshoppers on steroids. Why not think totally outside the box and give us character designs that are practically beyond our comprehension?"

It's partially why I think we need to keep clanging the bells for some HP Lovecraft film adaptations to come about - the entire point of his work is to summon up the uncanny. Oh to have gotten to see Guillermo Del Toro take on the shoggoths!

Anyway this reminds me of my list of favorite recent movie monsters that I wrote up a couple of years ago. All so simple yet unsettling still! When I was watching The Rite last night I had a similar thought process - there's this series of photographs shown in the film of people possessed by demons and they all looked like something you'd see if a class of first-year photography students were told to ape Diane Arbus. Black and white and arty all over!

Ugh. It reminded me of why I prefer Ringu's video imagery ten times over the American remake's - the remake's is too clean, too purposefully art-directed. Too sterile. There's so much more horror to be reamed from banality, from it popping up in an unexpected place where you're not quite prepared for it.

I actually have an example of this to share from just this morning - I was jogging down the street and noticed a man walking towards me on the opposite side of the street. There wasn't anything noticeable about him at first, it was just early and we were the only two people on the street is why I noticed him. So I didn't pay him much mind until I was passing him and he caught my eye again as we crossed - I think it was just the fact that I was half-awake but he did have some kind of limp and somehow out of the corner of my eye this translated into the herky-jerky movement of someone who's been shot on film moving backwards and then the film's run forwards to give it that unreal quality (does that have a name?), and so I turned to look at him to make sure I was just being seeing things and he had this giant crazy person grin on his face. Now that is unsettling. That you remember. It's the things that don't fit in no matter how hard you try, they were never meant to fit in, they were never meant period, that'll getcha.

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The Rite in 150 Words or Less

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It feels cruel to single out The Rite's pretty-boy priest Colin O'Donoghue as being the biggest problem with the film - he's very pleasant to look upon, especially when fully collared up, and since this was his first starring role to lay the blame upon him feels like it could limit our future opportunities to look upon him. And yet... yet... god does he give a lifeless performance. One flat note from start to finish, while Anthony Hopkins grows broader and bigger filling up every frame screaming out words like "Kissylips!" with abandon, and O'Donoghue just bats his gorgeous blue eyes blankly. It's not entirely his fault - one gets the feeling Hopkins sucks the air right out of every room he enters these days - but whether his drab performance is a symptom or the cause of the film's deathly dullness it don't matter, it's DOA.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Dead Ringers (1988)

Beverly Mantle: Separation can be a... terrifying thing.

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Middling Monster Does Not A Super Movie Make

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Taking my time to post some thoughts has bitten me in the ass once again - amongst other places, if you go read what Nathaniel wrote on Super 8 at The Film Experience you're gonna have approximately 98.75% of my opinion summed up for you there. Or familiarize yourself with this paragraph from Roger Ebert's review:

"During the first hour of Super 8 I was elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic. Then something started to slip. The key relationship of Alice and her troubled father Louis (Ron Eldard) went through an arbitrary U-turn. Joe's own father seemed to sway with the requirements of the plot. The presentation of the threat was done with obscure and unconvincing special effects. We want the human stories and the danger to mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another."

It should be noted that somehow even after expressing all that Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars, which seems a bit off. I had way too many problems with the final 45 minutes of the film to feel that good about the experience once the lights came up. The beats of the adventure swallowed whole the entirely lovely character beats that'd been set up - if somebody can explain to me precisely what big lesson Kyle Chandler's character learned and at what point that drove him to reevaluate his relationship towards his son I'd be much obliged. He hardly has reason to know the sort of danger his son's been in at any point. Their conciliatory hug at the end was as forced as the reappearance of the son at the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, if you ask me. And what of the fractured friendship between Joe and his directing friend Charles, that was so much of the film's story before Hell breaks loose? I can't even remember if they see each other again once they split up. The adventure should spin out from the complications in these relationships, and should somehow feel intertwined. Instead the monster just eats it all up. 

And as for that monster, I did not like that monster. It's an inexplicable tangle of limbs punching out of the blackness for far too long - at some point you need to lay your cards on the table, JJ, or we come to believe your holding a blank deck. Even if Spielberg kept the shark hidden from us for most of Jaws, we still knew it was a shark. We knew it'd have a couple of fins and a big ass mouth. Even once Super 8 was finished I still didn't have a good understanding of what this alien-insect-monster was supposed to be. There were too many legs and perhaps it was made out of bark? And it had a face of some sort? I don't know, and it never did anything nifty enough to make me care to figure it out. A lousy, unmemorable cap to too long a campaign of mystery. Even though I find the 2006 Korean monster movie The Host to be entirely overrated, one thing it got right was how it flung it's monster right into the daylight right at the start. JJ had how much more money to spend? And there was nothing even one tenth as thrilling as that creature's first attack.

But the kids were all terrific - Joel Courtney is a great find, and I'm nursing my Somewhere crush on Elle Fanning even worse after this. I just wish the film had seen fit to care about them in the end as much as it had made me care about them at the beginning.

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