Stuff: Bloody good beer.

The Shmaltz Brewing Company - the folks who bring you He-Brew, the Chosen Beer - have expanded their small Coney Island line with the Coney Island Freaktoberfest. This tasty Halloween brew is a nice little IPA with a twist: it has "zombie blood," a tasteless red color dye used in stage blood, that turns the beer a thick red color. In your average pint glass, the beer is an opaque red with a light red-to-pink foam on top.

It is available on tap, so you've got a reason to go out on Halloween. Yeah, I'm talking to you, you couch potato.

For folks in New York, you can find the beer at the following bars. If you're one of those lonely solo drunks, it is also available in a growler at Bierkraft in Brooklyn.

Happy Halloween!

Movies: Q and A session.

Back in June I reviewed the Larry Cohen creature feature Q.

Last Friday, actually for-reals pro film critic Roger Ebert got around to reviewing Grindhouse (he missed it due to illness). The review is what it is – I reckon, by now, that either you know where you stand on said pick or don't care – but his review does have a wonderful little anecdote about Q. From Ebert:

I recall a luncheon at Cannes thrown by the beloved schlockmeister Sam Arkoff of American-International Pictures. "Sam!" said Rex Reed, after seeing Arkoff's new film "Q," about a Quetzlcoatl that swooped down on Wall Street to gobble up stockbrokers. "What a surprise! Right in the middle of all that schlock, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!" Arkoff blushed modestly. "The schlock was my idea," he said.

Movies: Good night.

I think one can say, without fear of overstatement, that Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's vampire horror mini-series 30 Days of Night is the single title most responsible for jump starting the revival of horror comics. Go into some comic book specialty store and, on any given month, you'll find a short stack of new horror titles, from Eisner-winning continuing series to re-launched anthology series to gore-splattered one shots and collections. Though this is a relatively recent phenomenon. When IDW, then a new publisher on the comic scene, ran with 30 Days of Night, there were so few horror titles out that you could be forgiven if you thought the entire genre had gone the way of the dodo.

Its place of the comic in genre history threatens to overshadow its genuine merits. Unlike other comic milestones, such as Contract with God or The Watchmen, 30 Days f Night isn't a revolutionary work. The slim (under 90 pages) but attractive book relied on straight-forward and tradition narrative techniques; featured a cast of characters that were fairly stock types; didn't push the boundaries of comic content; and had a phantasmagoric painted art style that is not the norm, but clearly owes much to pioneers like Dave McKean. But the value of 30 Days didn't rest on its revolutionary potential. Instead, what it did was show readers and the industry that well-done horror comics could still kick ass. It didn't need to be a great work of literature. It didn't need to fundamentally shift the way in which we thought of sequential art. It just needed to prove that the supposedly moribund horror genre still had some unlife in it.

And that's exactly what it did.

The premise of the comic was brilliantly simple: in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun vanishes for an entire month in winter, a group a vampires, no longer checked by the regular coming of the dawn, come to ravage the town. It's high concept perfection. Even on hearing it, you think, "Of freakin' course, why didn't anybody think of that before?" The plot is about as lean and mean as you can make. There is a slight detour involving the efforts of ancient vampires to keep the existence of vamps a secret and the efforts of a crew of folks from the Big Easy trying to blow the lid off the undead cover-up. But that's a slight intrusion on what is otherwise a straight out story of survival against impossible odds. Basically, it did what the writers of zombie tales quickly discovered was the key to crossover success: it was vampy story as disaster story.

David Slade's new adaptation, the film 30 Days of Night, is, I think, the best adaptation the comic could have hoped for. The protagonists of the comics were a husband and wife team of police officers in Barrow. The other residents of Barrow were basically there to get eaten or get saved. Slade's adaptation complicates the relationship of the central couple (played adequately by the wooden Josh Hartnett and the creepily skinny Melissa George – Melissa, sweetie, I thought it was a special effect or something; we're all worried about you) and adds a handful of fleshed out residents to serve as the holdout crew we'll follow through the assault. The adaptation also wisely cuts out the subplot involving ancient vamps and the vampire hunters. These subplots went nowhere in the original comic and aren't missed here. Trading them off for more time to flesh out the other victims of the assault is a smart choice.

Slade also works from a screenplay, partially created by Steve Niles, that decompresses the action. The original comic – partially due to the limitations of space, partially due to the artistic style of Templesmith (which is better at mood than action) – had a dream-like logic that didn't lend itself to action or suspense. Instead, it was like looking into a nightmare. The film expands on the conflict between the vamps and the humans, with several excellent action/horror set pieces, and manages to build up an entertaining amount of tension with regards to who will and will not make it at the end of the flick.

The film also expands on the role of the Renfield-like "Stranger": the human thrall of the vamps who heads into Barrow prior to the long night, prepping the town for invasion. The flick also more closely associates him with Renfield, making the ties between him and the character of the ur-vamp tale more explicit. In the comic, the Stranger shows up out of nowhere, makes some threats, and that's about it. Here, we see him arrive via ship (with the vamps, just like Renfield and Drac) and he makes his servile relationship clear.

Finally, though the film has some genuine shots of beauty, Slade is selective in his efforts to capture the look of Templesmith's art. He avoids the slavish visual loyalty one sees in many current comic adaptations. The vampires look very much like Templesmith's monsters. These are not suave, seducers. They have shark-like mouths, never bother to clean the gore of their animalistic feeding off of themselves, and dress like homeless Euro-trash. In one scene, the lead vamp actually slicks back his hair with the blood of a victim his ripped open. That's the sort weird rawness Templesmith brought to his vamps and it is captured here. But, for the most part, Slade eschews the dream-like surrealism of Templesmith's art. People will argue about this, but I think it is a smart move. What film can give us that comics can't is the sense of bodies moving through space. In film, a sense of space is crucial to creating tension and action. Recreating the look of the comics would have hobbled the film.

The chief problem with 30 Days of Night is that the film does not share the relationship to film horror that the original comic shared to the genre of horror comics. The original comic simply had to be good to instantly become the best horror comic on the market. The comic just had to prove that horror comics were still viable. But the film comes out on what might be the tail end of a long and remarkably creative horror flick boom. There's a way in which the film can't just be "good." To stick out, the film would have to be brilliant. Unfortunately, it isn't brilliant. 30 Days is a well-made, solid flick. It doesn't drag, it doesn't make you feel stupid for paying 10 smackers for your ticket, and you'll feel a couple of "holy moley" moments. That's nothing to sneeze at. That may be a modest success, but it is undeniably a success. But it can't recapture the eye-opening excitement of the original comic. That feeling was a product of the unique moment the comic was released. Even the comic, picked up now, can't recreate that experience.

Stuff: Some quality time with junior.

The New York Times has a nice article on trying to get a new generation of filmmakers to appreciate the artistry of classic horror films, specifically the nine nourish and mood-soaked productions of RKO's horror-unit head Val Lewton (whose works I've reviewed with great pleasure in this very blog).

From the article:

I was all of 5, and I had stumbled on the original “King Kong” on television. I didn’t switch it off. Instead I turned down the volume and hid behind the couch. Every time I peeked, things only got worse: Now Kong was chewing on a native like a toothpick; now he was squashing another into the mud with his giant foot.

My dad tells the story of how he got home, found the television on, silently, and then noticed the top of my cowering head. On screen Kong ran amok. My dad asked if I was O.K. “I’m fine,” I reportedly said.

Then — and I remember this distinctly — he leaned over and switched off the set, and Kong was gone, and waves of relief rolled through me.

Fast-forward about 36 years. My own son, Dean, is about to turn 8. He was completely unfazed a few years ago when I first played the original “King Kong” for him. “Look, look — this is scary,” I said as the Skull Island climax began, eyeing him but getting nervous myself. I felt a little of that old hide-behind-the-couch instinct coming on.

“What?” Dean shot back as Kong rampaged. “He looks so fake.”

The article includes links to clips from the original King Kong, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Lodger.

Movies: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the host of our show . . .

The Host, the 2006 Korean creature-feature from director Joon-ho Bong, came with some out-sized expectations. There was the collective cooing of the blogging classes, with folks throwing about term of praise like "brilliant" and "best of the year" and "the greatest thing out of Korea since pickled squid in a can." You can expect a certain level of hyperventilation out of the bloggers. Horror bloggers, unlike many all-pro film reviewer types, see loads of horror films. This rarely makes us highly discerning critics of the genre. Instead, it means we're often up to our nips in crappy films. We spend an inordinate amount of time doggedly plodding after absurdly half-assed storylines, suffering abysmal acting, and forgiving lame direction and effects. The cumulative result of this collective cinematic masochism is that, when we find a movie with even a passable amount of talent, skill, and polish, we tend to hail it as something like the second coming. But The Host was actually getting good notices from the slumming mainstream types. The NY Times and other respectable rags were giving the pic high marks for the stylishly retro monster approach and the smart integration of current environmental and political themes.

What's the official ANTSS position: The Host doesn't completely live up to the hype, but what it can deliver is worth checking out.

The central story of The Host is wonderfully simple. One sunny day, for no particular reason, a big monster slumps out of Seoul's Han River and goes ape in a nearby park. After the monster's apatite for destruction is sated, it snags a young girl and returns to the river, specifically a series of sewer tunnels our beastie calls home. As the authorities do not believe the girl is still alive and wish to quarantine all those who came in contact with the monster, it is up to the mildly dysfunctional members of the girl's family to come and save her.

The monster is wonderfully designed, looking something like an angry black train engine constructed out of random fish parts. It's confusion of fins and tentacles, claws and gills makes for a delightfully freakish beast. The nasty's mouth is made of many distinct toothy, grindy, sucky parts that it alone ranks as one of the most wonderfully bizarre bits of creature design in recent memory. Whenever this nameless monster is trashing its way through the picture, the film is firing on all cylinders. The filmmaker has a real feel for beast-driven mayhem and the joy with which he uses his monstrous star comes across.

What prevents the film being the out and out classic it is occasionally billed as is a long, dreary middle in which the monster fades into the background (making only a few fan pleasing cameos) and a somewhat nonsensical subplot about a supposed disease spread by the beast takes center stage. Here, the actors, who were sufficient to acting opposite a neato special effect, are pushed beyond their capacities in a failed bid to add gravitas and create a strong sense of backstory. Furthermore the disease subplot, which is what ushers in all the geo-political blah blah, is such a dramatic and narrative dead-end that whatever political points the director and screenwriter wished to make are lost to unnecessary complications and viewer indifference.

In fact, this whole middle act, and the somewhat puzzling fallout from these scenes that flows through the rest of the flick, seems to me to be the unfortunate manifestation of a common wrongheaded conceit of horror film criticism: movies "about something" are smarter and better than movies that aren't overtly "about something." This powerful bit of hogwash has become so entrenched in the critical community that I think filmmakers are actually influenced by it. They go out of their way to load their films with overt political and ethical commentary because they erroneously assume that such content guards them from making crap. Sadly, only talent, skill, and taste can safeguard against making crap. Shoving your political opinion into a garbage flick doesn't save it. It only makes your crap more tiresome.

Let's look at a specific and glaring case. George Romero has steadily increased the ideological load each of his flicks must drag along. Would you say that this increased political spin has resulted in better and better films? Was Land of the Dead really better than Night of the Living Dead? If anything, the increasingly overt political content has weakened his films and confused the basic premises of his entire series. For example, using the zombies as some sort of symbol of imperialist backlash in Land confuses the fact that zombies are after humans for reasons more dietary than ideological. It’s a lousy metaphor and a muddled plot point.

For years, horror fans and filmmakers have understood that the most charmingly laughable scenes of the classic horror flicks from the Universal Big Bang to the 1950s revival was the scene where some square-jawed and absurdly earnest scientist stepped forward to explain to the moral and social significance of the plot to the other characters. More often then not it was a fairly standard lecture on keeping science within the bounds of reason. Sometimes, in your less square flicks, it was a bid for sympathy for the creature: "But is it really that different from us? Sure, it feeds off human blood, emits a deadly radiation that melts the skin off our bones, and hunts with a savage and unreasoning thirst for death. But, don't we humans do the same thing? When we fight wars or play hockey or shop for intriguing undergarments, aren't we doing the very same things we condemn this monster for? Who are the real monsters here?"

The "about something" content in most contemporary horror films is as subtle, deep, and meaningful as the "et tu, monstro" speeches of the old flicks.

Possibly worse than the intentional inclusion of political pap is the moralistic whitewashing of flicks otherwise free of this sort of junk in a bid to make interest in them more palatable. No filmmaker reveled more in this post-production accumulation of social significance than Roth with his torture-porn revival flick Hostel. In an effort to make that flick's repellent allure less tawdry, critics happily provided a supposed subtext of a critique of American hubris. Really? Everywhere these jackasses go they encounter a post-EU Europe that can't drop to it knees fast enough to supply people with whatever they want provided the Euros are right. They've walked into a distinctly Euro-flavored free-market nightmare were human slaughter for entertainment needs no more justification than it is profitable and the film is supposedly about American hubris?

This isn't to say that horror can't or shouldn't be "about something." One could argue that simply by virtue of presenting concrete manifestations of our own collective nightmares all good horror films always contain a socially significant subject. What scares us is important by the very fact it scares us. If that's too abstract, there are subtle ways to integrate social themes and messages. A good horror movie riffs on the social anxieties we feel without giving away the game or leaving us with a "and knowing is half the battle" style take home message. There is, I think, a curious anti-media message in The Ring which is all the more interesting for never having some character step forward and say "Do we really want to be the sort of society were a tape people know will kill them would still be a threat?" In fact, it is this oblique approach to the social issues raised by the film that made Rings, the filler short the studios created to bridge the first remake and its sequel, so much better than Ring II, with its overt bits about child abuse.

Enough ranting – see what ranting can do to any endeavor? – back to film at hand. The Host is a brilliant creature feature that gets bogged down in the middle by an unnecessary and self-important "issues" subplot. But never fear. In their infinite benevolence, the consumer electronics industry has given us the ultimate weapon against this sort of thing: the skip chapter button. Use it judiciously and you can keep The Host brilliant.

Movies: A bad day fighting kill-happy commandos is still better than a good day at the office.

In my review of his debut effort, Creep, I wondered if writer/director Christopher Smith's second feature would rocket him into the a list much the way Descent rocketed its director, whose Dog Soldiers was a good but not spectacular first feature, into horror fame.

I've finally got around to seeing Severance and, unfortunately, it isn't the break-out flick I'd hoped it would be. It is a competent, solidly made film. It expands the number of characters the director must juggle, takes him out of the easily controlled confines of the tube sets of his first flick, and generally shows a director that is getting better with each film. But, sadly, what it won't do is blow you away.

Severance follows a group of British and American arms dealers. These aren't badass Lord of War types, but white-collar office drones: the kind of folks who file the Lord of War types' expense account requisitions. These cube dwellers are sent of into Hungarian forests as part of a paid retreat/team building exercise. Their bus stalls out and they end up hiking to what is supposed to be luxury lodge. Instead, they end up at an abandoned structure that is, sadly, next to a mental hospital used by Eastern European powers to contain war criminal types. Apparently, the various nasty wars caused by the disintegration of the Soviet Union left Eastern Europe with enough psycho war criminals that a special facility was called for.

Before we can get to deep into the characterization of any of our office drones, we subject them to the predations of a small cadre of kill-happy ex-genocidal troops and the blood starts flowing in earnest.

Now there absolutely nothing wrong with Severance. It looks good, the characterizations are well handled, the comedic touches are welcome and not overbearing (except in one instance were an utterly unnecessary joke tips too far into the realm of farce – you'll know the one I'm talking about the second you see it), and the blend of black humor and gore occasionally reaches the level of brilliance. For example, there's one scene involving one of the office workers getting his leg mauled in a bear trap. The repeated and ineffective efforts to get him free are both cringe inducing and sickly comical. There are also so some wonderfully creative grace notes. The most notable of these is a scene in which three of the employees relate three different legends they've heard about the lodge they're staying in. Each story is shot in a radically different style: the first is shot as a silent film and borrows details from Nosferatu; the second tells the story about the war criminals interned nearby and is shot in a hand-cam verité style; and the last story, a goofy sex fantasy, is shot in the soft-focus cheese style that '70s era pornographers thought looked classy.

Unfortunately, the end result is something less than the sum of its parts. I feel kinda bad about this, 'cause my last review sorta damned Chris Smith with faint praise and this review turned out the same way. Smith seems to me to be a creative, talented, and smart filmmaker with a surprisingly broad knowledge of film behind what he does. Yet, his works remain more promising than fulfilling. Severance isn't a bad flick. If you're looking for a rough little bit of horror action with a touch of humor, then you could do a lot worse then to check out Severance. I end this review as I ended the last one, wondering whether Smith's next movie will be the one that puts him on the A-list.

Stuff: Yum yum.

Halloween is about ghost and goblins. It is a time when we get make faces at the devils of our worse nature and play at evil. Its roots date back to ancient folk rituals of . . . blah blah blah.

Halloween is, first and foremost, about candy. You knew this as a child. And, admit it, you know it now as an adult.

Epicurious, the cooking web site, has laid out a spread of tasty articles on Halloween grub, decorations, and entertaining – and they've got a fantastic slideshow of some of this Halloween's neatest treats.

Above is a coffin featuring the bones of a white chocolate skeleton that you can assemble before devouring. Other notable sweets include chocolate cockroaches (crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside) and chocolate Day of the Dead skulls "available in Venezuelan white chocolate, milk chocolate with gray sea salt and hickory-smoked almonds, and spicy dark chocolate with Mexican ancho and chipotle chiles and cinnamon."

Dig in, Screamers and Screamettes.

Meta: Now for something completely different.

Though it wouldn't classify as "horror" in any traditional way, I thought I'd use the blog to shamelessly promote my first-ever published work of fiction. That's right, baby, I've gone from copy slut to copy whore – CRwM's getting paid for it now!

The story, titled Abstract, was commissioned by – of all places – Forbes as part of a special report on the future and scenario planning. Warren Ellis, Cory Doctorow, and Max Barry were among the others commissioned for work.