We rented Apollo 18 last night…

I’d wanted to see it in the theater, but we never got around to it.  I didn’t feel like I’d missed-out on much since the ratings weren’t terribly impressive…  But I still wanted to see it, and I finally got my chance last night.

Downright creepy movie.

Vaguely reminiscent of Paranormal Activity, in the way subtle things happen and it isn’t entirely clear whether the characters are imagining them, or actually experiencing something unusual.

Definitely an entertaining couple of hours.

The Thing from Another World was on TV last week…  We DVR’ed it and watched it a couple days later.  Decent movie…  Dated, but still fun.  And it’s great to see where what the original looked like, before Carpenter got his hands on it.

What was even more interesting was listening to John Carpenter talk about the movie…  Apparently it is one of his favorites.  I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be able to re-make it.  Must’ve been a lot of fun.

Then we watched The Thing a few days later.  This remains one of my favorite horror movies – right up there with Alien.  I love the isolation and the paranoia.  You can’t just run away and escape, you can’t just wait it out, and you don’t know who is still human.  Great fun.

The new Thing comes out next week, and we’ll be going to see it.

I’ve really gone back and forth on this movie…  Carpenter’s film is one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see the story sullied by a bad prequel (like Star Wars).  And the early teasers and trailers didn’t look terribly impressive.

But the more recent trailers look far better.  And it’s being done by the same folks who did the Dawn of the Dead remake, which was terrific.  I think the thing that makes me most hopeful for a decent movie is this bit from Wikipedia:

After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter’s film would be like “paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa” Eric Newman explained; “I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake The Exorcist… And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie – they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

Looks like they’re making a prequel to The Thing:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller “The Thing,” paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up.

When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.

Looks promising…  I’ve always wondered what happened at that Norwegian camp…  And it’s good to see them doing a prequel instead of just another remake/reboot.

I have to say, though, that I’m a little worried with the trailer.  Looks like some cheezy digital effects and some quick grabs.

I’m really hoping that they can capture the tension and paranoia of the original.  And that they’re able to equal the awesome practical effects of the original.

I guess we’ll find out…

I first heard about the movie Pontypool about a year ago.  Sounded kind of odd…  Some sort of zombie movie, but it spreads through language.  Folks were speaking very highly of it.  Sounded like something I needed to see.

Unfortunately, seeing it proved to be difficult.

I’ve checked with our local Block Buster several times over the last year or so…  And they don’t have it.

It never showed up in any of the Redbox kiosks around here.

And Netflix doesn’t have it either.

Eventually, Terri got tired of my whining and just bought the thing from Amazon.  Only $10 – and certainly worth it, now that I’ve watched the movie.

Very low-key movie…  The entire film takes place in and around the sound booth of a radio station.  And, for the most part, it’s just people talking.  You only see a few zombies towards the end.  Very little blood and guts.  The special effects are good, when they show up, but they’re few and far-between.

What you’ve basically got is a small group of people trying to do a radio show as chaos descends around them.

It feels very claustrophobic.  Even before it all goes to hell…  You’ve got three people working out of the basement of a church, in the dead of winter.  There’s no sunlight.  There’s no freedom.  You can feel the weight of the world bearing down on you.  It feels like something is going to happen…  Something better happen, because the oppression just can’t continue.

Then you’ve got confusion and denial as the reports start trickling in.  This can’t actually be happening, can it?  It must be a trick, a hoax, something like that…  It can’t be real…

And then, finally, they come face-to-face with the enemy.  Some kind of virus that’s attached itself to the English language.  That spreads through understanding of spoken words.  That turns people into violent, mindless zombies.

Absolutely amazing movie.  Very gripping, very interesting, very creepy.  I genuinely wanted them to shut up towards the end there…  Somebody would start repeating something, and I wanted to shake them until they stopped, for fear that it would rub off on me.  And, after the movie, I felt vaguely uncomfortable speaking.  Like my own words might betray me.  Might turn viral and spread a plague of zombies across my town.

Definitely worth the $10 we spent to purchase it.  And I’ll definitely be watching it again.

Now I just need to track down a copy of the book…

Slashdot | Blade Runner Sequels and Prequels Happening

The iconic science fiction film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s book and directed by Ridley Scott, will be followed up with sequels and prequels soon. Alcon Entertainment is in final discussions to secure film, TV and franchise rights. They are in the early stages of sorting out how to proceed and were not sure if Ridley Scott would be involved.

Just what I always wanted – crappy prequels and sequels to one of the most awesome movies of all time.  I can’t wait to see this classic get destroyed.  I bet we’re gonna have explosions and high-speed chases and stuff all over the place.  I wonder who they’ll get to direct it?  If Michael Bay is busy, maybe they can get Uwe Boll.

Been reading Shadows Over Baker Street lately – great book.

It’s a collection of Lovecraftian stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.  The two settings fit together just fine, and the character of Holmes makes perfect sense as he delves into the dark corners of the world.  Very interesting stories, very entertaining.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

But all these stories of squamous horrors and deductive detective work are putting me in the mood for something similar in my gaming.  I don’t want to just run around blasting badguys…  I want to solve mysteries.  And I don’t just want to play through a normal adventure game, I want shoggoths and eldritch horrors.

So, when I discovered that Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened was an adventure game featuring Holmes in a Lovecraftian setting…  And that we actually had a copy of it…  I was thrilled!

I installed it and tried it out last night…  And was very disappointed.

We don’t have the new “remastered” version – just the old version.  And even with the newest patches it’s still barely playable on my computer.  Movement is jerky and halting.  Mouse responsiveness is nearly nonexistent.  It’s horrible.

The basic gameplay is great.  I was investigating a missing person…  And I had to measure footprints and note that one shoe was missing a nail and collect fibers and analyze things under a microscope…  Very cool stuff.

But the game engine was getting in my way the whole time.  Really ruined the experience.

They’ve got the “remastered” version over on Steam.  It’s supposed to have a new engine – better graphics, more responsive, etc.  But I don’t really want to spend $20 on a game that we already own.

Slashdot | H.R. Giger Returns To The Alien Franchise

Great news for Alien franchise purists, as conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the ‘xenomorph’ design, Giger was left out of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new ‘Alien queen’ design, and had come up with that himself. This article features the Swiss TV broadcast where Giger’s wife broke the news, and a full gallery of Giger’s conceptual work for Alien.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.

They’ve got Ridley Scott directing, and now H.R. Giger on board.  This might actually shape up to be something decent.

Sunday was the last episode of The Walking Dead, at least for now.  I certainly hope they make another season of the show.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I wanted to see more, but I can really appreciate what the small number of episodes did for the show.  It kept the story on-track.  Kept things moving along.  You couldn’t just waste time on things that didn’t move the plot along.  A finite number of episodes made it more important to actually do things with the screen-time they had.  And this was a good thing.

You look at some series, like Lost or Heroes and it seems like they just sort of wander along…  There’s no real impetus to get the story told.  To wrap things up.  To move forward.

I’d like to see more of Rick and the rest of the survivors.  I’d like to know what happens to them.  I’d love to have something bad happen to Shane…  And I’d like to know what happened to Merle…  But, at the same time, I’d almost rather follow a different group around next season.  Get a snapshot of a different part of the world.  Maybe see how things are out in California, or Alaska, or New York, or overseas.

In talking with Terri about Splice yesterday, I eventually figured out what I disliked so much about the movie.

The trailers made it look like some kind of sci-fi monster movie.  Lots of running, lots of screaming, Dren looking very frightening and aggressive.  I was expecting something more-or-less along the lines of Species – a monster movie featuring a monster that was the product of genetic tinkering.

But that is not what Splice is.

Splice is actually a movie about a couple who make a bad (immoral?) decision, and slowly slide down the slope to ruin.  Their relationship suffers.  Their jobs are in jeopardy.  They can’t trust anyone anymore.  Elsa’s mental health declines, and she starts acting like her abusive mother used to.  There’s tension between Clive and his brother as they try to keep the secret buried.  There’s incest, of a sort…  And child abuse, of a sort…  And rape, of a sort…

Splice, it seems to me, belongs on Lifetime more than on SyFy.

Just like Signs wasn’t actually about aliens, Splice isn’t actually about genetic tampering.  It doesn’t matter that Dren is a genetic chimera until the last 10 minutes of the movie.  Until that point Dren is treated basically like a human child.  It could easily have been a story about child abuse, rather than genetic tampering.  But it isn’t even really about Dren being abused…  It could have been virtually any deep, dark secret they were trying to keep.

It could have been a movie about infidelity of some sort.  Or alcoholism.  Or drug addiction.

The movie was about a couple playing for their mistakes – not the mistake itself.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of movie.  I know there are plenty of people out there who enjoy that kind of thing.  And that’s fine.

But I’m not one of them.  I don’t watch Lifetime.  I don’t like V. C. Andrews.  If I had known what Splice was actually about, I wouldn’t have gone to see it.

And I think that deception was intentional.  I think they intentionally crafted the trailers and commercials to make the movie look like something it wasn’t.  To draw in folks who wouldn’t go watch it otherwise – folks like me.